A2's hands clenched even harder than they already were at her sides, so hard she could hear the metal of her fingers creaking.
Pascal had just asked her what?
He wanted her to kill him? Or at the very least erase his memories? Because he thought he couldn't handle the pain of losing the people he loved? How dared he to ask her such a thing, when he knew she had just been through the very same thing?
She hadn't forgotten though, she couldn't, she wouldn't forget the people that had been important to her, ever.
She'd gone through that pain twice by now, 2B had gone through that pain even more times, and who knew how many others did too, and yet, here they were with all their memories intact.
Because it was the only thing they had left, and as such it shouldn't be thrown to the wind.
A2's hand rose to grasp the tattered visor she wore around her neck, Robin's old visor that she had kept hoping it'd have a usefulness, and matter of fact it sort of did.
It was a reminder of her existence in this world, when her own one had refused to acknowledge that she was alive and desired for her to be dead and forgotten, as if she had never been born.
"Don't forget me…" she had pleaded in her last moments with those eyes of hers, they'd been as sweet as ever even if she must have been in so much pain, and even if they were glowing of that red color A2 had grown to despise even more.
People died all the time, but people that were remembered lived through, and who was forgotten didn't. That had been what Robin taught her.
As long as she was alive, even if in another world and another being, the legacy she carried and the memories of the cruelty she lived through carried a message, and the people that remembered her carried that same message within them as long as they had memory too.
As long as A2 kept on living, the memory of her comrades that died in the descent, and the deception their Commander put on their shoulders, were still with her, and through her their names and heroic gestures would have been told for as long as she carried on fighting. And Anemone could share her own 200 years worth of experiences on the matter too.
As long as 2B's consciousness was stored within her sword, she would recall each and every single moment her loved ones had been forced to forget to cover everything that was rotten within YoRHa, even though they shouldn't, those memories lived on, and perhaps one day they would come to light again.
They had never forgotten.
So why, even if he was a machine should Pascal be allowed to forget, or even die for this?
Who else would remember the people of the village he worked so hard to build from the ground up, and the children too, if not him?
"Why should I accept your request?" A2 spoke with a colder voice than what she would have wanted, but she had to make sure he understood, and also, she was so damn tired of everything right now.
"Why… why would you leave me to suffer?"
Hearing that question in that same pleading voice, A2 lost all her calm, as she strode over to the kneeling machine, and took him from his shoulders, shaking him.
"Do you think you have the right to forget them!?" she shook him again. "If you forget, who will remember they existed in the first place!?"
Pascal fell over with a resounding clanking sound as she let him go, pushing him down.
"I refuse to forget the woman I loved, even if she's dead. I refuse to forget my comrades, even if they're dead. It doesn't matter how much it hurts me to remember, they don't deserve to be forgotten, because if I don't carry their memory then who else will?"
Motioning to the corpses she added more. "This applies to them too, they don't deserve to be forgotten either, if you cared you wouldn't be asking me to erase your memories, nor to kill you. And even so, I will not do either thing."
It was hard to tell what Pascal was thinking, machine faces didn't move much, except the eyes, but he must have been thinking at something, if he stayed silent so much.
But the lack of response was getting on A2's nerves, that had been tested beyond their limits in the span of just a few hours, so without bothering to wait for a response, she rushed outside of the factory, leaving the machine alone.
She didn't get very far, eyesight blurred from tears she had held at bay until now, and shaking legs, tired from all the fighting and exhausted from everything, she stumbled and fell on her knees just about at the end of the broken bridge in front of the factory.
All the feelings she'd been holding back until now in favor of trying to keep it together for Pascal's sake and the children's returned full force, and ten times as strong.
Gritting her teeth and still sitting on her knees, she reared her head back a little…
And hit it hard against the floor.
Ignoring whatever Pod 042 was blabbering about her potentially damaging herself, she did again, with a little less force this time.
It hurt but not as much as her chest was shattering itself from the inside out.
Hands wound tightly against her head, pulling hair so hard she may have been ripping out a few chunks and tears falling freely from her eyes and onto the marble floor, she let out the loudest scream she could have managed, holding it out for as long as she could, until her voice box gave out.
Machines could have found her, 9S could have found her even, and she wouldn't give a damn about it.
She just wanted to mourn, in the only way she knew.
Crying until she no longer had tears, and screaming her pain out as hard as she could until she had no voice left.
She'd done the same at first for her comrades, once she had acknowledged to be relatively safe, with no machines in sight, she'd killed them all with her hands, and once she took care of the damn bomb implanted in her body, to make sure White didn't get weird ideas to make her blow up all of asudden because she felt like it.
Or that she could accidentally set the thing off with just her emotions alone just like it did for B Mode.
Only that somehow this time felt so much worse than the first time.
She'd tasted a little of happiness for the first time in years after she lost Number 4 and the others, and just like when she was starting to get settled within the members of Rose's group and have hopes for the future, it had been cruelly stolen from her in just a few moments.
Again, for the second time.
And then the children died in fear…
A2 had hated machines for what they'd done to her and the androids, but she hadn't wanted them to go out this way… it was too much to see, even for her.
Perhaps she had gotten attached to the villagers too, a little, even if she never admitted it.
It wasn't always all black or white, as Robin once told her. It wasn't all good or all evil, and Pascal and his group had shown that there was more to the machines than they had ever imagined.
A2 herself had never bothered to stop and think about machines, she always had known they had no feelings and no will, and always treated them as such, until she met Pascal and the others. He'd proved her wrong on so many levels, but she didn't regret killing his similars through all these years for what they did.
She had sat through various playtime and story reading sessions with the young machines during these past weeks, months even, along with Robin. She'd been good, A2 hadn't, but it felt… okay, to just sit back and experience things without worries like a child would.
Androids never truly experienced childhood, they were born, made, as adults, or at the very least as teens already, and sent into the carnage and despair that war was and brought.
They were just expendable weapons in the end.
So then why the hell would humans even bother giving them the ability to think and feel? Weren't they just made to execute orders?
Why risk a rebellion or worse?
It made no sense.
But humans were cruel, she knew it well from Robin's own backstory. And who knew that this was just a mere experiment, a test, or just something those humans used to entertain themselves with.
What if this was all just some twisted scheme?
For all A2 cared, humans could be damned, even if she didn't hear Robin's story, she already hated them. They made and abandoned androids on Earth to their liking, their lives had no value to them, humans could all go to hell for her.
She'd been the only exception.
She had lived and experienced so much, and had taught so much too through those experiences. It didn't matter whatever she was called or how other humans referred to Robin as, she was kind at heart.
Nico Robin wasn't a ruthless Executioner, nor a child of the devil.
If anyone ever asked, A2 would never tell that Robin had been anything other than a good person. Didn't matter what anyone else said.
Nothing else mattered, she wouldn't betray her like everyone else did in this and her own planet, dead or alive.
"That makes two of us." 2B commented. "Not everyone at YoRHa hated her, in fact, she was very much loved, even after she left us."
The voice of her younger twin got A2 to finally raise her head from where she had repeatedly hit it before, noticing how she made a sizable dent too.
"Say, are you sure of the decision you took with Pascal? He's been in there for a while."
"What? Are you worried?" she frowned, talking again after crying so hard made her voice scratchy.
"I don't regret what I said, you more than anyone else should know how wrong it is to forget."
She felt 2B nod. "I know, and I am not saying that I do not agree with your words, after all I have seen 9S reset so many times that I know well how much damage it can cause not having memories of the past too, along with the pain that came with remembering past moments we experienced I couldn't tell him, it ate me up all the time. I wish I wasn't knowledgeable about this sometimes."
"We didn't choose our role, in the end we're all just pawns. Worthless toys to be sacrificed to our superior's will." A2's words were bitter, once again being reminded how little of use android lives were, and how easily they could be replaced.
"Do you believe he understood your words?"
"I don't know, but I said what I had to say, it is his decision now. At least he has a choice." her comrades and even Robin didn't, when it came to their deaths.
If Pascal wished to join his lost machine friends, then so be it, though A2 inwardly hoped he wouldn't.
Perhaps she was just tired of losing people, and to see so much death.
Now she understood Robin's point of wanting to be done with killing even more, and it had just been three years since she'd been deployed and sent into this madness, she couldn't imagine how her former companion had managed to handle and resist for over twenty.
Maybe it was true that humans were superior, at least in mental capacity.
A2's musing was interrupted from the sound of metallic feet slowly walking to her, however she didn't turn her back to check if it was someone hostile or not. She already had a feeling of who it was.
She just hoped he didn't have more dumb requests, because she would not kill him.
And besides, that was not what Robin would have wanted.
Wordlessly Pascal decided to sit next to her, and A2 wondered what he wanted still, whatever he had to say.
"A2 I… I wanted to thank you…" that got her attention, as she turned towards him. "Thank you for showing me the right way."
"Don't thank me." she replied, he tilted his head at her, his way of showing confusion, she assumed.
"Thank Robin instead, she taught me these things." with a sigh she added. "She would have wanted me to save them…"
"I… I'm sorry, A2." but she just shook her head.
"Isn't it weird, that an Executioner type, that is made to kill, has taught me to have respect for others lives?"
A2 held her gaze in front of her, to the sea and the sky.
"I know this kind of pain, Pascal, and it isn't just because I lost Robin just now. You were right about something… we weren't a couple but… I did love her." she raked a hand through her hair. "And I was too much of a coward to tell her…"
Usually she wouldn't be telling all these things, and not to a machine, but she couldn't care about it, she felt the need to get these things off her chest, and also, for 2B to listen too.
The other android refused to look at her memories, but by now didn't she deserve to know? She had already listened to things she told Anemone and to Robin too, and also she did know her own story, it was only fair.
"I was part of the first squad deployed on Earth, a group of 16 prototype units. We lost 12 of them during the descent, including our captain."
She couldn't see her, but she did feel 2B being very interested in the ordeal.
"With her gone, I was made captain, the most stupid and incapable unit of the group. I tried what I could, I made a deal with the Resistance, in order to be able to carry on our mission… a mission none of us were ever meant to survive…"
Even though they had their own divergences they eventually came around, even someone as cold and loyal as Anemone was. Though A2 had the feeling that Number 21 had a part in it.
"Them and my comrades, they all sacrificed themselves for the sake of our mission and… for me…" still today she could perfectly recall Number 4's sad smile just before she let herself be blown up in her place.
"I spent years and years hating machines for killing them, and hating YoRHa for lying to us and leaving us to die, and if it hadn't been enough, they started sending assassins after me to attempt to tie all the loose ends of the whole ordeal. A dead person couldn't talk after all."
Many came and went, same faces and same stories every time.
"One day they had decided they had enough, so, they sent their shining star, the one soldier that had never failed an execution order before, the YoRHa unit Number 26 type E, the person that I call Robin."
"So that is why 2B warned me she was dangerous." Pascal mused, such a contrast to the woman he'd come to know.
"We fought for hours, she had been the only person that ever defeated me, she could have killed me, took me back to YoRHa to gloat about it with the Commander, and yet… she didn't…" even when they just met, those eyes of her already carried the same sweetness she'd seen.
"We staged a fake death, and she promised me she'd come back, and she did. We met many more times in secret from anyone, I got to know her, she got to know me and our stories were shared between one another. She had enough of YoRHa lying too, so she left to protect me."
And A2 remembered well the shock on White's face, as her dear loyal soldier refused to obey her. Oh how pleasant it had been to witness.
"Ever since we've been together, protecting each other, and well… the rest you know it." she shrugged.
"But the time I spent with her made me realize how wrong I had been about a lot of things. For the longest time, I thought of myself as the only victim, failing to see how much other androids and even machines were suffering as much as me because of this war."
Again, her hands came to clutch the cloth around her neck.
"Being with her has shown me a different side of things. I'd probably never stop hating neither machines nor YoRHa, but I know now that there are exceptions, and perhaps she was correct when she said that we may not be all that different."
"She was a really smart woman. I'm sorry she went this way…" it was Pascal's turn to look away and be ashamed, in the end she died because he had asked to protect his village.
"I'll miss her a lot, just like I still miss my comrades and the people of the Resistance I lost... it will hurt, probably it'll never go away, but you and I both have to keep going."
"I think I understand now, thank you, A2." did he? She hoped so.
They both spend a moment of silence, only broken from the sound of the waves beneath the bridge.
"And now, what will you do?" it had been the machine asking first.
"I don't know, I'll do whatever will come my way I guess." she gave a small shrug. "And you?"
"I'm not sure myself, but I think I will return to the village. I remember reading about a human custom people did to their deceased loved ones, they'd bury them and make graves where they could return to visit and mourn, I think I want to attempt to do so…" turning his head towards her he asked one more question.
"Would you like me to do the same for her too?"
Did she want to? Pascal didn't know Robin had been human, she hadn't wanted to tell, so A2 wouldn't say either, but she deserved to be treated as such, even if just in death.
"If you may… I think she deserves it." she nodded, and he did too.
"You'll be free to visit her anytime, if you want." with one more nod he got up, looking towards the sky.
"I'll be on my way then. Good luck in your journey, A2." may you find peace one day…
"You too, Pascal. Be safe."
With that, she watched him fly away in the distance… alone…