play.
It was cold, silent. Nothing left but mere echoes of laughter and joy. There she lay, broken. Her balded head still shining, burns marred the surface of metal. What was once flesh now only reflective, a cold steel shell holding a dead heart. Her brittle fingers still curled, and the robotic voicebox still barely flickering. Still whirring.
A name on her lips, a clear monotone devoid of emotion, dead in more sense than one. None of it mattered to him; he only sat in silence, a dim, red light flickering in the reflection of his spectacles- the only sign of life in the dark, damp room.
It lay there on the table, broken. Painful. Wires still hung from her motherboard, spitting and crackling and emitting sparks here and there. He tried to forget the look she gave him from her laser eyes before she hooked them in herself, red lights closing in quiet acceptance, tried to forget how deeply her grief engraved itself into his memory as he tried, and tried again to wipe it all away.
He was the culprit. He did this to her. He took every piece away, one by one, until she was no longer Marie, or even M.A.R.1.E. who had come to life on March 1st, the fifth of its kind and the only one who survived. Who he had started to break apart as he had created her as the perfect replica of his former wife. Too perfect. The hunk of hissing metal and fading light was only a bitter reminder of his failure - his ultimate failure.
No. He refused to accept it. He wasn't the monster - he wasn't the one who stripped away her hands, her emotions, her voice. He didn't peel off the synthetic skin that made it look too much like Marie. He didn't burn off its hair, too dark to be even a shadow of.
And her eyes. Her eyes.
He could never take away her eyes.
And yet he had, for all that was left was flickering red, a sad shallow red that still screamed pain, even if it no longer emoted.
She was dead.
Truly dead.
(And all he could hear was a record: on repeat- and wrongly so, backwards, jittering and jolting as the scratchy voice, for the upteempth time, began yet again…)
…
"Once upon a time, there was a man and his wife.
His wife died, and in his grief, the man made her once more.
An android…"