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N was unable to stop himself from shaking as he tried his hardest not to cry. It was a losing battle, however, and he couldn’t prevent the tears from coming out as he sat on the floor, hugging his knees against his chest, with his back against the wall. If he couldn’t stop himself from crying, then he decided that he was at least going to do it silently. However, his body refused to cooperate with him, and a loud sob ended up escaping his mouth.
He had never felt more pathetic in his life, which was really saying something. Did he even have the right to be crying right now? It was his own fault that he had gotten into this situation in the first place. God, he was so useless. Why was he even capable of crying, anyway? How exactly did that function benefit him as a worker drone? These thoughts raced through his mind as he wished that he could just stop sobbing and instead do anything else.
He heard footsteps coming towards him, but he didn’t have the mental or physical energy to acknowledge them or even look up to see who it was. However, he had a feeling that he knew who was coming, judging by the clumsy pattern of the steps that he had grown familiar with hearing.
“Quizzical head tilt. What’s the matter, big brother N?”
N tried to wipe away his tears and compose himself even a little bit before responding, but he was unable to prevent more from flowing down his face, or calm down his shaking voice and body. He didn’t want to take too long to reply, so he decided to finally speak up and hope that he didn’t seem like as big of a crybaby as he was fearing.
“H-H-Hey, C-Cyn…-“
He stopped speaking as soon as those two words left his mouth, as he hated the way that his voice sounded. It was so shaky and quivering, and it just made him seem even weaker. He tried to speak again in a more calm tone, but he ended up just hiccuping instead.
“Sympathetic look,” Cyn walked over to where her brother was sitting and sat down next to him, using the wall to support her body weight as she slumped down against it. She gently placed her hand on his arm in an effort to comfort him. N flinched at the sudden touch, but didn’t pull away, as he did find it reassuring.
“What is the matter?” Cyn repeated. Her tone of voice was as robotic as ever, but N had lived with her long enough to be able to tell that she wasn’t trying to force a response out of him. Still, he thought he’d feel better if he did talk about it. So, after a shaky breath, N finally responded.
“Th-There’s… a lotta p-people over tonight, T-Tessa’s folks are having a huge party, s-so they want us to work extra h-hard today,” N began, glad that he was able to keep his voice mostly steady now.
“I was trying m-my best, but… it w-was so c-crowded… a-and l-loud…” He started shaking again, as his mind replayed the events that had taken place moments prior.
“Th-Th-There w-was s-s-so much go-oing o-on, a-and… I-I-I g-g-got o-overw-whelmed…” He was crying again. He hated it. He wanted it to stop, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t stop crying, or stop talking to Cyn about what had happened. He needed to get it all out, even if he felt as weak and pathetic as he did about it.
Cyn scooted away from N a little bit as he buried his face into his knees, holding his head as he tried his best to finish the story. His voice was quieter now, both because his face was covered, and because he had begun speaking more softly. Cyn leaned in a bit closer in order to hear him better.
“They got mad at me…” He had finally managed to speak in a calmer voice after taking another breath. “They were really mad… They started yelling at me, and I got more overwhelmed, and that made them more mad, and then Tessa got mad at them, and…”
“Comforting pat,” Cyn gently placed her hand on N’s back. “Warm smile.”
N finally looked up at her, relaxing his body a bit. “They sent me down here… didn’t say when I can leave…”
He was finished talking, now. Cyn gave an “understanding nod”, holding his hand as the two of them just sat in silence for a few moments.
It had been far from the first time that James and Louisa had punished N over something like this. He had gotten overwhelmed at pretty much every large gathering that they would have; the huge crowds, the endless noise, the bright lights of their fancy chandeliers, it was way too much for him. He would try his best to ignore it and just do what he was told, but he would get filled with so much anxiety that he would sometimes end up feeling physically sick.
Tessa herself never got mad at N for these breakdowns. She had told him that she understood, because she experienced these types of breakdowns as well - N remembered her calling it “sensory overload”. When she was able to, Tessa would help N out by taking him to her room and staying with him for as long or as little as he wanted her to.
He appreciated that Tessa never held his limitations against him, but N couldn’t help but feel like her parents had a right to be angry with him. He was the only worker who seemed to have sensory issues, and he felt incredibly guilty about the fact that he was unable to do his job as well as the others because of these issues. Mr. and Mrs. Elliot weren’t the only ones to get impatient with N over this; J didn’t do it as often, but she had also yelled at him before for getting overwhelmed during big parties. If even one of his own coworkers had no patience for N’s breakdowns, then maybe he really did deserve to be punished for it.
N’s sensory issues weren’t the only thing that he had gotten in trouble over. Louisa and James had also frequently punished him when he was unable to sit still and began fidgeting. This was another thing that J had scolded N over as well; she didn’t understand why it was so hard for him to just stay still and stop moving. N couldn’t help that he had a tendency to get restless, but he still felt guilty over it.
Tessa never gave N a hard time over his restlessness, as this was another thing that she did as well. N’s “stimming” as Tessa called it never seemed to annoy her, but it sure seemed to annoy everyone else as far as he knew. It was another trait of his that he wondered if J and the Elliots were correct to yell at him for.
And then there were the times when N just didn’t have the energy to speak. When this happened, he would instead communicate through gestures such as nodding or pointing, which was good enough for the other drones that he worked with, but not for Tessa’s parents. They would call him rude and accuse him of disrespecting them, even if he had responded to a yes or no question by nodding or shaking his head. Communication that wasn’t verbal didn’t satisfy them, and this would sometimes result in him getting sent to the basement just like stimming or going into sensory overload would.
While these periods of silence weren’t something that Tessa herself experienced, she did still try to be patient with N when they happened and was able to understand his other ways of communication just fine. She had mentioned a name for this behavior as well - she had referred to it as “going nonverbal”. N thought it was interesting that these types of behaviors were common enough that humans had names for them, though this made him wonder why said behaviors kept getting him into trouble if they were so common.
N figured that maybe the reason it wasn’t ok for him to have these common traits was because he was a robot. He knew that many humans had these behaviors as well, but he didn’t know any other drones that had these things in common with him. Sometimes N could overhear Tessa’s parents blaming him being this way on their daughter. They claimed that he must have picked up these behaviors from her since he spent so much time with her, and that it was probably Tessa’s fault that he didn’t act “normal”. N knew that this wasn’t true, he had always been this way. He didn’t know why. Maybe he was just broken.
“You aren’t the only one.”
N snapped out of his thoughts as Cyn finally spoke up. He tilted his head at her, a curious look on his face. Cyn smiled, holding her head up as she continued.
“I have gotten overwhelmed as well,” she explained. “Back before I lived here.”
N sat up a bit straighter, eager to hear more. He didn’t know anything about V, Cyn, or J’s old masters before the Elliots, and he was curious to know what Cyn’s life was like before Tessa had found her.
The phrase “Now playing: Traumadump.mp3” briefly flashed on Cyn’s visor as she continued, “I didn’t like having to work in loud areas. The people that I worked with did not appreciate my weakness. They disliked my speech patterns and I couldn’t always understand them. So they disposed of me.”
N’s face fell when she finished, but Cyn’s expression was unchanging. She still kept her same, soft smile as she told her story. N held her hand a bit tighter, an intense feeling flooding his core. It wasn’t a bad feeling, not at all; it was just something that he hadn’t felt in a while.
He felt like someone else actually, truly, completely understood him.
“Why are you staring, big brother N?”
“S-Sorry-!” N quickly jerked away from his sister, rubbing the back of his neck. “I just… I didn’t know there were other people like me! I mean, I always thought I was the only one…”
“Tessa shares many of our behaviors,” Cyn responded.
“Yeah, but she’s a human,” N pointed out. “She’s told me that lots of humans have these kinds of traits, but I thought I was the only drone who had them. I’m just - relieved, I guess! You know, that I’m not the only robot out there who has what Tessa has!”
N gestured excitedly as he spoke, before pausing as he tried to remember the exact term Tessa had used. “Gah, what did she say it was called? Like, there’s a name for what she has, when people are born with a bunch of these traits, and their brains work differently than everyone else, and apparently we have it too? What was it called?” He was mostly talking to himself, as he didn’t expect Cyn to know the answer.
“Autism Spectrum Disorder!” Cyn chirped, surprising N as he recognized the term.
“Yeah, that’s what she said!” N replied, relieved to finally remember. “But does that even apply to us two? Why would drones be able to be autistic?”
“Shrug. Why would drones be able to need glasses?” Cyn pointed out.
“…Huh, I guess you’re right,” N laughed a little, leaning back against the wall and accidentally bumping his head. “Ow…”
“Giggle,” Cyn watched as N put his hand on his head, before he laughed as well. The atmosphere was calm and relaxed despite the two of them being in a literal basement, and N was feeling a lot better now that he had been able to talk to someone.
Still, he couldn’t help but begin to worry.
If Cyn’s old owners had thrown her out due to her being “abnormal”, then how did N know that the same thing wasn’t going to happen to him? If his apparent lack of normalcy kept causing problems, then maybe the Elliots would one day finally have enough and get rid of him.
And who could blame them?
N slowly stirred awake as his yellow eyes replaced the words “SLEEP MODE” on his visor. He got down from the ceiling, landing a bit clumsily due to still being half-asleep. He placed a hand to his forehead as he thought about the “dream” that he had just woken up from. It had been a while since he had had a dream that was just a straight-up memory, and he couldn’t help but feel a bit worried. Usually when he had dreams about his past, something bad would end up happening, and he was scared that today would be no different. Uzi had invited him to go hang out at her house, and it was something N had been really excited about. He really hoped that nothing awful was about to happen.
He checked his internal clock, only to panic when he saw what time it was. He had overslept - Uzi was probably wondering what was taking him so long! N quickly rushed out of the spire, mentally berating himself as he unfurled his wings and ascended into the sky.
Uzi, meanwhile, was sitting on her bed, wondering where the hell the lovable idiot that she had invited over was. It wasn’t like N to be late to things, maybe he was out hunting? He had mostly been feeding off of already deceased corpses rather than killing drones himself lately, so maybe he just couldn’t find anyone who was already dead? Or maybe he had just forgotten that Uzi had invited him over, but that didn’t sound like him either. Did Uzi even tell him to come over? Or was she just misremembering?
She suddenly heard a knock at the door, which made her hop off of her bed and rush out of her bedroom. Uzi made her way to the front door, opening it to see a somewhat-unkempt N standing in at the entrance.
“Hey, Uzi!” N greeted her, waving excitedly. “Sorry for taking so long… I overslept, and then no one was opening the colony doors, so I had to get in through a vent, and I kinda got lost,” He let out an embarrassed laugh as Uzi allowed him to step inside.
Uzi suddenly coughed as N passed by her. “Well, that explains why you’re so dusty,” she quipped, shutting the door. “Anyway, come on! I’ve been waiting for you all day!”
N chuckled as Uzi pushed him towards her bedroom, before finally shoving him onto her bed and walking over to her closet. N made himself more comfortable as he watched her struggle to reach something that was sitting on a shelf in her closet.
“Oh, you need help?” He asked. N was slightly shorter than the shelf that Uzi was trying to reach, but he could probably grab whatever she needed from it if he stood on his tip-toes or something.
“No, I can get it!” Uzi grunted as she stretched her arms out as far as they could go, but she still couldn’t get to the item on the shelf. She let out a frustrated groan as she looked through the floor of her closet for something, before finally grabbing an empty laundry basket.
“Are you sure?” N asked. “‘Cause I’d be happy to-“
“Bite me!” Uzi interrupted him as she turned the laundry basket upside-down and stood on top of it. She finally managed to grab what she wanted, which turned out to be her laptop, before she lost her footing and slipped off of her makeshift step stool, tumbling onto the floor and dropping her precious cargo onto the ground. N quickly got off of the bed, walking over to where she was on the ground, a concerned look on his face.
“…Are yo-“
“Bite me! I’m fine!” Uzi repeated, grabbing her laptop and getting up from the ground. “Anyway, it’s been a while since we’ve watched something together, and since you got to choose what we watched last time, I figured I could choose today!” She plugged her laptop in, before hopping back onto her bed, gesturing for N to sit down next to her.
“Oh, that sounds fun!” N responded, his tail twitching excitedly as he sat back down. “Wait, are you gonna pick a horror movie again-?”
“Yeah, but don’t worry! I’ll choose something super tame this time,” Uzi assured him. She had learned her lesson after N had to run to the bathroom to throw up after she tried to watch the Hostel movies with him.
“Alright…” N hugged his knees to his chest as he watched Uzi look for a film for them to watch. His tail continued to sway and fidget as he waited in anticipation to see what she chose. The end of his tail landed on the bed with a thump, causing Uzi to briefly look up at the noise, before turning her gaze back to the laptop.
For some reason, the fact that N’s stimming had gotten Uzi’s attention had caused him to feel insecure. She had definitely seen him stim before, and she never seemed to have a problem with it, but he was starting to wonder if it annoyed her. Maybe it was just because of the dream/flashback he had had earlier, but N was suddenly acutely aware of every little thing that he did, and he was beginning to wonder if Uzi was secretly judging his every move.
Bad things seemed to happen whenever he had dreams about his past. He had tried to repress the thought, but N couldn’t stop thinking about the same thing he had wondered when he was younger: what if he was abandoned for not being “normal”?
Uzi had never seemed to mind it when N went nonverbal, or when he started infodumping about dogs, or when he needed to get things done in a very particular way, but what if she secretly hated all these things about him and just wasn’t saying it? What if she finally got tired of it and decided to just stop talking to him? Could he even be upset at her?
“Hello? N?”
N looked over at Uzi, who he hadn’t realized had been talking to him the entire time he was spacing out. “Oh, sorry-! What were you saying?” He asked her.
“I’m hungry, so I’m gonna get something from the kitchen real quick,” Uzi replied. “Are you all good on oil, or do you want me to grab you some while I’m there?”
“Ah, I’m good! My tank’s like 78% full, so I’ll be fine!” N responded, giving Uzi a thumbs-up.
“Alright, I’ll be right back, then we can start the movie,” Uzi got off of the bed, heading out of her room and disappearing into the hallway.
As N waited patiently for Uzi’s return, he hadn’t realized that he had started stimming with his tail again. He quickly stopped himself, sighing heavily as he laid down on the bed. It wasn’t like he was still embarrassed, or anything. He just didn’t want to accidentally cut himself or something, he said to himself.
He definitely wasn’t still thinking that Uzi might abandon him.
Uzi finally returned, carrying a mug of oil and a bowl of AAA batteries. Most workers ate any type of battery, but N noticed that Uzi seemed to mainly prefer that type; she had mentioned that she couldn’t eat AA batteries without gagging. She set her drink down on the desk next to her bed, and sat down beside N with the bowl. “Alright, you ready?”
“Oh - yeah! I’m ready!” N sat back up, hoping that he didn’t seem like he had been having an insecurity-induced existential crisis mere moments ago. Uzi pressed play on the movie, and N tried his best to relax as he watched it with her.
“Uzi, I thought you said you were gonna pick something tame!” N exclaimed, once they had made it about a quarter through the film.
“I did! Nothing super crazy has happened yet!” Uzi replied, pausing it.
“He’s literally holding her prisoner so that he can cut off parts of her body and eat her!”
“He’s not the only one eating her, he’s selling the meat to other people, too!”
“That’s worse!”
“N, we’re literally cannibals. This should be nothing to you.”
“…Fair enough,” N replied, allowing Uzi to press play again. He was honestly enjoying the movie, he just hadn’t expected the plot to be centered around a man-eating black market after Uzi had called it “tame”. Though, he couldn’t really argue with her logic.
“I wonder if any humans in real life ever ate each other,” N said, which was definitely a normal thing to be thinking out loud about while hanging out with someone.
“Oh yeah, tons of people have, actually,” Uzi replied.
“Woah, really?” N asked, not having expected an actual answer.
“Yep, there were entire forums and stuff dedicated to it on the internet,” she continued, pausing the movie once again so that she could talk. “Apparently in some places it wasn’t even illegal to do, you just had to have consent from the person you were eating.”
“Huh. Was it for survival? Like how we have to drink oil to keep from overheating?” N was eager to hear Uzi talk to him about this, despite how morbid the topic was. He enjoyed hearing her talk about things that she knew a lot about.
“There are some cases where it was for survival, but there were also a lot of cases where the people doing it were just weird,” Uzi explained. “Like, they just had this weird, gross obsession with eating people for no other reason. Actually, apparently there were cases of humans getting sick from committing cannibalism. There was some research done centuries ago that said that maybe some humans have some sort of gene that prevents them from getting diseases from it, but it was disputed by a lot of people.”
N listened intently as Uzi continued, “Apparently some cannibals have said that the part that tastes the best is the eyes. There was actually a lot of debate about what human meat actually tasted like, a lot of different people gave different descriptions of it-“
She cut herself off as she realized that she had been rambling. She sheepishly looked away, which N thought was pretty endearing since she was usually so aggressive and brash. “Sorry, I kinda know way too much about super morbid topics like this,” she apologized, seeming genuinely embarrassed.
“Oh - no! I don’t mind it at all!” N reassured her, a smile on his face. “I like hearing you talk about things you’re interested in! Even if they’re kind of dark and disturbing.”
Uzi chuckled at his response, laying down on her bed and turning her head back to N. “Alright, then. Well, if you’re up for it, you can listen to more of my dumb autistic ranting after we finish the movie,” she joked.
N’s eyelights hollowed as he suddenly had a surprised expression. “Wait - you’re autistic?”
He realized that he probably shouldn’t have asked the question so bluntly, as he probably ended up sounding accusatory. However, Uzi didn’t seem to hear any accidental malice in his tone, and responded calmly.
“Yeah, my dad and I barely found out in the middle of senior year. So, that’s cool, I guess,” she replied, shrugging.
N was speechless for a moment, before he thought that Uzi might worry that he was upset if he didn’t say anything. So, he finally spoke up, only managing to get a few excited words out.
“I-I am too!”
Uzi raised an eyebrow at him, and her smile had disappeared. Crap. What had he done? N really messed up, hadn’t he? He was right, Uzi wasn’t going to like him anymore, and she was going to stop hanging out with him, and she probably hated him now, and it was all his fault, and he probably deserved it.
“Uh, yeah. I’ve pretty much known that since we met,” she jokingly responded, smiling again. Her tone was blunt, but… she wasn’t mad? She wasn’t judging him?
“And… you don’t… care?” N asked, his voice a bit quieter. “Like… you don’t mind it or anything?”
“No? Why would I?” Uzi sat back up. “Like I said, I’m autistic too. Obviously we’re not exactly the same, but I kinda get it. Why would I have a problem with it?”
“Because, I’m…” N paused, memories of his time in the Elliot manor flooding his brain. “…Not normal…”
“Yeah, of course you’re not normal!” Uzi replied, folding her arms over her chest. “You’re a murderous robot with an acidic tail who has to drink oil so that you don’t get too hot and friggin’ explode. If I’ve still been with you even after you nearly killed me twice on the same day, why would I start hating you just because your coding’s different from other people’s? If anything, that’s the most ‘normal’ thing about you.”
“I… guess you’re right,” a small smile formed on N’s face again. For some reason, when Uzi put it like that, N felt like he had really had nothing to worry about. “I’ve just… always been really worried about you thinking less of me, because…-“
“Hold on, sorry,” Uzi interrupted him, gesturing to his face in confusion. “Why does your visor say ‘Loading: Traumadump.mp3’?”
“Agh-!” N quickly covered his face, the message disappearing as his eyes reappeared in its place. “Sorry-! It’s really not important, let’s just go back to the movie.”
“You sure?” Uzi asked. “If you need to talk about something, I’m fine with listening.”
N thought for a moment. “You sure…?”
Uzi nodded assuringly. “Yep. Take it away!”
After contemplating for a few seconds, N decided that he did want to talk about it. Taking a deep breath, he explained everything.
“Back when I worked at the manor with V and J, Tessa’s parents… really didn’t like me,” he explained. “They’d host these huge, elaborate parties, and I had to work there while it was super loud and crowded, it gave me really bad sensory overload. I’d try my best to do a good job, but… it always ended up being too much for me. They’d get mad, and they’d start yelling at me, and I usually got punished by being sent to the basement…”
N’s voice went softer as the memories came flooding back to him. Uzi moved her hand closer to his, as if she was asking if he wanted her to hold it. He gladly allowed her to.
“I-I mean, I understand why they were mad-!” He reasoned, his voice sounding a bit frantic. “There were really important things that I had to do, but I wasn’t doing them very well! And like, I didn’t like being sent to the basement, but I don’t really blame them for being mad at me! And it’s not like they were punishing me for being autistic, nobody knew that I even was, but…” his voice went quiet once again, as his brain was stuck between trying to rationalize the abuse he had received, and just wanting to vent out all the pain that it had caused him.
“There were other things they punished me for too, like if I stimmed too much,” he continued. “I… I got really scared that if I annoyed them too much, they were gonna get rid of me… And, that fear just kind of stayed with me as I got older… So, eventually, I started wondering if you were gonna leave me because of these things…”
He felt Uzi put her hand on his shoulder reassuringly. He looked down at her, seeing the warm smile on her face.
“N, trust me. I’m not gonna leave you just because you don’t act exactly the way that some people think you should,” she said. “And besides, even if we’re not exactly the same, I kinda get how you feel. Hell, I’ve had a lot of moments where I felt insecure about my own autistic traits, but you shouldn’t feel bad about yourself just because you don’t fit someone else’s idea of ‘normal’.”
“Thanks, Uzi…!” N responded, cheering up a bit.
“No problem! Tessa’s parents can bite me,” Uzi joked, gently ruffling N’s hair. “If the two of us are gonna be ‘abnormal’, then we might as well do it together, right?”
“Yeah-! You’re right!” N exclaimed, leaning back a bit, causing him to suddenly bump his head against the bed frame. “Ow-!”
Uzi laughed, holding her hand out in a concerned gesture. “You good?” She asked, in between giggles.
N held his hand against his head, but couldn’t help but start laughing as well. There was a warm atmosphere in the room, it felt calm and comforting. “Yeah-!”
“I… feel great now, actually!”