Chapter Text
N pumps his fist triumphantly as he speeds away from the spire, nearly giddy with nerves and the rush of success, twirling mid-air just to put his energy somewhere. On top of that, he’s stoked as hell to bring all this exciting news to Uzi, and to find out what it is that Khan had trusted him to give her. The mysterious box is still tucked safely against his chest, dimensions like a book and about as heavy as one, next to a half-full can of spare oil Khan had brought back from the Outpost to help N facilitate his ruse. Actually it’s a half-full flask of spare oil. N had quirked a brow, but Khan seemed very confident and pleased that he’d done the culturally appropriate thing by transferring the oil from a storage can to something designed to drink from. N hadn’t really known how to broach the subject of his…like, veganism that he’s trying to implement, but the gesture doesn’t really bother him, anyway, and it being flat makes it easy to tuck into his coat.
The lighthouse crests into view, different from every other time he’d approached it in that there are lights on inside. His face splits into a grin so wide it hurts and he flies a little faster.
He alights on the balcony railing, flapping his wings once or twice before hopping onto the circular walkway and housing them, when a sound of fabric being snipped draws his attention. Glancing down, N sees a bedraggled scrap of his coat settling against one of his feet, and tilting his head over his shoulder reveals a pretty sad situation. He hadn’t thought about it, but between Uzi digging her claws into his back in starvation mode, deciduous branches whipping into him hard enough to draw oil during his crash landing, and his wings briefly catching fire when he’d been caught out in the sun, the expanse of his coat over his shoulder blades is looking downright apocalyptic. It’s shredded enough that there are little strips beginning to fray away from the rest of the fabric, which would now seem to get caught in his feathers when he rehouses his wings. N bunches his mouth to the side. He’s sewn up holes in this coat before, but this might be a cry too far for repairs. Dang, he thinks as he wilts a little. He likes this coat.
Well, it’s nothing to be down about in comparison to all the positives he’s stacked up this evening, and his bounciness returns easy as anything as he moves toward the glass door leading into the top floor of the lighthouse. As he reaches for the handle, his ears perk, picking up something reverberating through the thick windows from inside. Quietly opening the door makes the sound a tiny bit clearer, enough to realize that what he’s hearing is music. He tilts his head, listening carefully. It’s distant enough, it’s probably coming from the bottom floor. It sort of…sounds sad…
Cursing every creak and holding his breath, he makes his way silently down the stairs, not wanting to interrupt whatever is transpiring. Peeking his head into the living room (just his head), he spots Uzi lounging on the couch, feet kicked up on the coffee table and wearing a new shirt that really suits her. Her head is leaned back, eyes closed and brow furrowed, like she’s trying hard to remember something. In her hands is a guitar that N had briefly noted lived in one of the wardrobes in the middle floor, but he’d never touched it. He doesn’t know how to play. It would seem Uzi does. How much cooler could she possibly get?
N silently sits at the top of the steps, watching and listening, enraptured and not wanting to break her concentration, but he also doesn't want to keep spying on her, because that feels weird, and he really wants to talk to her. He waits for what he thinks is the end of the song she’s playing to introduce his presence by, well, what else is he supposed to do? He claps gently.
“AUGH!” Uzi leaps to attention like a startled cat, visor displaying a triangular alert symbol and winding up the guitar over her shoulder like it’s a baseball bat. Her eyes blink back onto her display once they land on him, brows furrowed over an embarrassed blush. “N! Jesus!”
“Sorry,” He says bashfully, standing and making his way to the bottom of the staircase. “I just didn’t want to interrup—”
The breath leaves him as Uzi nearly tackles him to the floor in a hug.
“Scared the shit out of me,” She says into his chest, muffled. “Jerk.”
N is so startled by the sudden and confident contact that his arms flutter in the air for a few moments before slowly lowering to hug her back. When she’d hugged him before she’d seemed like she was, well, not just tolerating it, but it really read to N like Uzi had an upper limit for this sort of display. She’s just being so direct and unapologetic right now with what she wants from their reunion, it’s taking him a second to process. She’d…missed him that much?
“Sorry,” He repeats, voice a little watery at the edges as the touch starts to work its magic on his heart again. “…You play beautifully.”
Uzi clicks her tongue, pushing gently away and pursing her lips at him, annoyed with the compliment.
“I was just screwing around. I’m trying to see what all is missing from up here.” She taps a finger to her temple. “Process of elimination. Looks like I remember how to play a guitar, even though I haven’t touched an actual instrument in years; I mostly do synthboard stuff these days, but there’s no synthboards around the lighthouse to test and see if those memories are still front and center.”
N perks at the talk of memories, reaching to unbutton his coat.
“Oh, say, I’m not entirely sure what this is, but maybe it’ll help!” He pulls the parcel into view and gestures for Uzi to take it. “I’ve got a ton to tell you. Lots happened.”
“I figured, what with the oil all over you,” Uzi says, taking the box from him, expression falling just a little. “Batteries not do the trick?”
“No, that’s the thing, they do!”
“Oh!” She brightens, then, giving him a confused once-over, “…So…?”
N puffs out his chest.
“All this was a ruse! Heheh!”
“…You’re not making a ton of sense.” Uzi smirks and moves back to her spot on the couch, peeling the paper off the parcel in her hands and setting the plain tin box on the coffee table in front of her.
“I know, sorry, let me start at the beginning.” Uzi starts to lift the lid from the box. “So, I ran into your dad.” The lid clatters loudly as it drops from Uzi’s hands, sitting misaligned on the top of the tin as Uzi stares at N, mouth hanging open.
“Dad was outside the bunker again?” Uzi throws her hands into the air, face toward the ceiling. “Is he actually trying to die, what the hell! What was he thinking?”
N chuckles just a little awkwardly, gesturing to the box and saying,
“Well…he was trying to bring this to you. Admittedly, he, uh, wouldn’t have made it very far if I hadn’t been the one to find him.”
Uzi scrubs at her face.
“Is he at least going to fucking stay put, now that I have this care package?”
“I think that’s the idea.”
“Good, because I have no clue who he is if he’s not inside the bunker. An idiot who wanders into the wastes with no plan, apparently.”
N ruffles his bangs, eyes finding the floor uncertainly as he cautiously adds,
“He’s…he’s really glad you’re alive.”
Uzi’s eyes flick over to N, expression complex enough that he can’t parse it all the way.
“Does he know I’m not going back?”
Something in N’s heart twists. He shifts his weight.
“I don’t know. But, um, could we see what’s in the care package?” He moves to join her on the couch, careful to orient his tail so his body is between it and Uzi. “I’m so curious it’s driving me up the wall.”
Uzi huffs, clearly seeing his clumsy attempt at seamless redirection but letting it slide, and shifts her attention back to the box on the coffee table in front of them. Lifting the lid and setting it aside, she reveals what looks like a stack of scribbled-on papers, crumpled and then smoothed out, topped with a folded note addressed to her. Uzi’s eyes narrow, nudging the note aside and giving the top page a quick once-over.
“This is…stuff from my mom. Why is dad braving the wastes to put these in front of me?”
N peeks into the box a little more closely, and he can’t help the way his brows lift into his hairline when he clocks the nature of what’s scrawled on the top page.
“…Why is your mom drawing disassembly drones?”
“Huh?” Uzi raises a brow at him, glancing between N and the page. His reply has several false starts, because,
“The…that’s a disassembly drone.” N carefully points to key features. “It’s…interpretively drawn, sure, but, look. In the middle, the silhouette is drone-shaped. All these scribbles are wings, and that’s an optic halo.”
Uzi tilts her head, lifting the page from the box and squinting at it.
“I’m no art critic, but I don’t—” She turns the paper 45 degrees and her eyes widen. “Oh. Holy shit. Why was my mom drawing disassembly drones?”
“I mean, we remain an issue for the bunker, I’d say it might be top of mind for the subject of art therapy.” N guiltily rubs at the back of his neck. Uzi snorts.
“This isn’t art therapy. This is the product of her getting…weird, sometimes.”
What does that mean? N chews the inside of his cheek. That seems like a topic Uzi will elaborate on when she wants to. So he says instead,
“Maybe the note on top has some answers?”
Uzi hums and unfolds the note, eyes scanning and expression shifting through several emotions as she reads. N’s hands tap on his thighs, biting back the urgent need to ask what it says. She’s silent for two straight minutes, then scoffs and smacks the page into N’s chest with one hand, holding it there until he takes it from her while she begins rummaging through the box with the other. N rubs a thumb nervously along the letter.
“Can…Can I r—”
“Yeah, go on, before you explode.”
N gives an apologetic chuckle and turns his eyes to the note in his hands.
"In the likely scenario that you won’t want to talk to me at all, which I totally get, here is an explanation, both of what’s in this box and…some other things.
You recognize your mother’s handiwork, of course. When we referred to it as bouts of crazed prophesizing in the past, it was half as a joke, but now, in light of…well, I’m not so sure there’s nothing of meaning in here. There was some kooky, insane stuff that happened with her that I never told you about, and I’m realizing maybe I should have, for a number of reasons. One, you deserved to know. I’m sorry I made the wrong call. Two, maybe if I’d told you about it, there might have been ways to recognize what’s happening to you now.
I say might, because though I do think this kooky stuff is related, I’m not sure they’re the same. Hopefully what Yeva and I were able to decipher will help answer that more clearly.”
“Who’s Yeva?” N asks, glancing up from the note.
“My aunt. My mom’s sister.” Uzi is leafing through the pages, setting them into groups and keeping her gaze trained on them. “I’m surprised she’s back on speaking terms with him.”
“Why ask her for help going through your mom’s things instead of asking your mom?” Uzi’s hands still, and N feels a creeping chill in his heart he can’t name for a moment until he replays his words in his head. Had…Had Uzi been using the past tense? His shoulders wilt, voice small and aching. “Oh. I see. Uzi, I’m so sor—”
“It happened a long time ago.” She interjects, resuming her rifling. “It’s not your fault. It’s fine.”
N exhales sadly. He cares so deeply about Uzi, but he knows so little about her, and that really doesn’t sit well with him, but…he got the message loud and clear that she doesn’t want to talk about it. He flicks his gaze back to the letter.
“Your mom had some sort of telekinesis, at the end. That’s how she bought us all enough time to escape. She said something about maybe having superpowers in the past, she just couldn’t remember them. Yeva has the same thing, but from what I understand, she’d kept it a secret. She thought Nori was better off not really remembering what she and Yeva went through, and didn’t want to rattle anything loose. When I asked her about what she thought might be happening with you, she called it the Solver.”
Solver.
Something buzzes around the edges of N’s consciousness. The buzzing gets louder. Closer. The paper slips from his hand as his fine motor control wavers. Reflexively he tries to back away from the thought, the word, the line of questions that Solver points to, but this particular key phrase had opened his locked memories many more levels deeper than what he’s used to combating. He feels like he’s being drawn in, consciousness sucked into a black hole, and his attempts to resist are useless and laughable. Solver is an event horizon.
His stomach fills with ice. He remembers this feeling, now.
Oh no, oh no, no. No, no, he doesn’t want to be reset, not this time. He has so much to lose, he can’t go back to not knowing about the worker drones, to not knowing about Uzi. What if he attacks her? What if he kills her?
He distantly senses Uzi glance up to him.
“…N?” He jerks his gaze to meet hers, his expression full of terror that’s beginning to be overtaken by bars of colored static. Uzi’s eyes hollow. “No, wait, no, what’s wrong? What happened? What is it, what’s happening? Why is this happening again?”
He tries to tell her. Has to tell her.
“S-Solv—”
Then his vision goes black.
Uzi is on her knees, naked except for her one remaining boot, and the titanium plating on her chest has been forcibly torn away, baring the ribs of her endoskeleton. They’re all scratched and dented, like she’d clawed at them, and the heat coming off her core is causing its metal housing to glow and smoke, a stage of meltdown that would be fatal if this weren’t some kind of deathbed fever dream N’s intruding upon.
…He knows this memory. He remembers this memory.
“I…I don’t know if it’s entirely your fault, just to be fair.” She fidgets, poking at the glass cover of her core, housed like a glowing jewel on display in the melting treasure chest of her ribs.
Solver could mean anything, so why is it his memory of his connection with Uzi that surfaces?
“I had a drea—well, it’s stupid, but something makes me think there maybe was…something already in me, you just woke it up when you nearly killed me.”
Something already in her. He still doesn’t know why she has that line of regen code, or any of her other odd traits a worker drone shouldn’t have. It didn’t matter at the time, he was just relieved he had a chance to save her, to pull her from starvation mode.
“If you can still come out of this, we’ll make it happen.” N hears his own voice, though he’s pretty sure his mouth isn’t moving. Uzi takes his hand, brave and beautiful. His heart does a little thump and he’s not sure if it’s from the memory or not. “I’ll see you on the other side.”
The other side.
That’s right…the trip back hadn’t been completely straightforward. He remembers now.
Hot and blinding like twin suns, an image of expressionless yellow eyes suddenly sears itself into N’s mind, and he doesn’t understand why he’s all at once full of affection and terror.
As if in a dream, N senses more than sees the eyes begin to dissolve away into strings of ones and zeroes, just like all the agency and instances of consciousness in Uzi’s code, unraveling upward into nothing.
As their half-moon yellow remains vanish completely with a glitching, screeching howl that terrifies N to his core, there is an immense, inexplicable sense of both relief and loss that aches in his very soul.
Something had been in there, next to Uzi’s consciousness. Something he…something he had cared about, somehow. Something he recognized.
…Someone?
<ERROR: 606>
<PREPARING TO INITIATE RESET>
N sobs. He doesn’t want to forget Uzi. Khan is counting on him to look after her. He doesn't want to wake up and see nothing more than a meal and a means to meet a quota. She’s his friend.
She’s his friend…
His heart hurts.
Please, no, she’s his friend.
…His heart really hurts.
The white of his surroundings flickers.
“…eh…!”
…Eh?
It had been muffled like it came from underwater, but it sort of sounded like a voice. It could have easily just been a blip in his reset protocol as it does its grim work, though. The oddity is pushed to the back of his mind as the pain in his chest redoubles; it’s enough to make him wince. Has he ever been heartbroken before? He doesn’t care for it at all.
“…Eh!”
Wait.
…Uzi?
“…N!”
Clear as a bell, that time. Knowing she’s calling to him as he resets makes his heart ache even more. Sort of to the point where he thinks something must be physically wrong.
“N, d—you f—dare!”
Something else pierces his consciousness from the outside, some other sound, like tearing metal. N looks down to see the titanium of his chest splitting open of its own accord, a triplicate of claw marks drawing down from his collarbone like three gruesome zippers that give way to oil pouring from him.
“I’m sor—need y—focus on this!”
The pain in his chest shifts from an ache to a sting, and then to a sharp stabbing that makes him gasp. The hold the liminal space has on him slips.
Oh. Like when they’d crashed. She’d inadvertently jolted him out of the reset when she’d nearly collapsed his trachea.
He understands.
N draws upon all his willpower and fights back. He demands the unreality bend and release his consciousness. He focuses on what’s real and tangible and grounding. He focuses on her.
His eyes blink open.
Uzi is on the floor in front of where he’d slumped forward on the couch, on her knees with her disassembly drone claws stabbed through his chest, hooks anchored upward under his collarbone and yanking.
That brings him back to full cognizance.
“Ow! Ow, ow!”
“N? Are…Are those fully-conscious ‘ow’s?”
“Yes! Ow, I’m awake, I’m up!”
She exhales in what could be mistaken for a sob before rage overtakes her display.
“You stupid asshole!” She yanks on his collarbone again and N yelps. “Stop fucking doing that!” She pulls him sharply downward by the skeleton with each word.
“I can’t help it! I don’t control it! Ow, Uzi, please, ow!”
She growls at him through a glare that suggests to N that she does not want to stop before withdrawing her claws. N presses a palm to the yet-more-tears in his coat to stem the flow of oil with a little sigh of relief. Looking around, it seems like Uzi had kicked the coffee table over in her haste, upending the tin of drawings and scattering them across the rug. A stab of anxiety pierces him and he hurriedly averts his gaze. Uzi follows his line of sight, clearly doing some mental math.
“So…you were fine looking at the drawings. It was something in my dad’s letter; something needing to be solved, right?”
Ah, damn it…what had it been? N chases scraps of memory now that the danger has passed, even as they begin to elude him again. He narrows his eyes.
“I remembered you in starvation mode. I remembered…connecting to you.”
“…Oh. That’s…not what I expected.” N glances up to see Uzi just a little flustered, in a she’s-still-mad-at-him way. “I didn’t realize you’d forgotten.”
“I only forgot disconnecting,” N scrubs at his face. “At the time I figured the corrupted milliseconds of memory were a result of being connected to a drone in starvation mode, but it looks like it’s more complicated than that. There was something about my connection with you that was suppressed.”
“What was suppressed?”
“I…I can’t remember.” N presses his palms into his visor, details leaking through his hands like water as he tries to drink. “It was…loud. I felt…confused, maybe? I think there was, like…yellow.”
Uzi sighs and shifts her weight, leaning her back against the couch at his feet and flopping her head onto the cushion next to him to look up at him with tired eyes.
“Having your brain reset seems like a steep punishment for remembering yellow.”
N chews at the inside of his cheek, debating. It had felt so important.
“I could…I could try to look at your dad’s note again.”
“No,” Uzi shuts that down immediately. “Nope, no, twice is enough. I’m not going to do this with you ever again.”
N chuckles ruefully.
“I wish I could promise you that. Really, I do. But I have next to no control over the resets. The best I can do is not think about the things that make my head feel fuzzy, but sometimes it’s too late.”
“Your teammates deal with this, as well?”
“Yeah, to varying degrees. I seem to be the most susceptible to it, though.” He knocks a knuckle frustratedly against his display between his eyes. “Hair trigger for memory resets in this dome.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” N shrugs weakly, rubbing at his eyes. Uzi is silent at his feet for a moment too long, and when N lifts his hand from his visor and refocuses, there’s an anxious blush on her display.
“…I. Could try to. You know. Find out?” N cocks his head, expression questioning, which makes Uzi scowl and scrub at her face. “Don’t make me say it.”
“…Connect to me again?” N feels a little bashful flutter at that, too, but Uzi is being particularly flustered talking about what would be their third time connecting. Besides, “There’s something in my head that’s real serious about keeping me in the dark. You wouldn’t be able to access my programming deep or directly enough to do that sort of debugging over a wireless connection.”
Uzi glares at him from between her fingers still covering her face, fidgeting something fierce.
“Don’t make me say it, N.”
He opens his mouth to respond, but her meaning clicks before he draws breath. His jaw snaps closed.
A hardwire connection?
…That’s something he’s never done. That’s so intimate. He unconsciously brings his hand up to the back of his neck, fingers brushing over the port at the base of his skull. He doesn’t have a cable to facilitate something like that. Does she? His whole display heats up. He’s sure he’s run out of pixels he can allocate to blush marks.
Connecting wirelessly is vulnerable and intense, sure. Placing consciousnesses right next to each other and allowing for any amount of access to another’s mind is not something to be taken lightly. Hardwire connections are another beast entirely. Those are something drones only do with each other when they trust their partner with the very binary that shapes their souls.
Wait, so. Does Uzi…?
Or…is this something she wants to do as…like, a favor? She’s an engineer, and this is, basically, a coding issue she could ostensibly fix for him.
…How the hell does he feel about either?
N can’t hold her gaze.
“I…don’t. Um. Heh. I don’t have the cable for…something like that.”
“Oh, I mean…is that…the only thing giving you pause?” He hears her shifting back onto her knees to face him more directly and he flicks his eyes back to her. She’s looking down, visor still full of blush marks, but, her expression is less flustered than…troubled. “I get it, it’s…I mean, I haven’t…I’m not even sure I could…ugh!” She presses a palm wrathfully into her visor. “Just…forget I said anything.”
That stings, and it helps N form the reply he wants to give her. V crosses his mind in that moment. He thinks about his growing frustration with his memory threatening to reset and how he’d been hoping to ask V to help him with it, somehow, after he’d spoken to her about the worker drones, their sentience, the viability of worker drone food as a source of sustenance for them. If things had shaken out differently, if V had agreed and they hadn’t gone on that hunt, would a hardwire connection be something she’d have suggested?
…No, he thinks. She doesn’t trust him like that. She wouldn’t go that far to keep him from resetting. But Uzi will.
“No, no, it’s…it would…mean a lot to me…if you would try to help. But it’s…y’know. A pretty major thing to do at the drop of a hat.”
Uzi exhales heavily, glaring at her knees.
“I didn’t mean this second, but…just, think about it, okay?” Her face scrunches up, like the words are painful to force out when she adds, “You’re my friend. I just don’t want to lose that.”
N’s throat tightens.
“Uzi—”
“Nope, that’s all we’re saying about it for the rest of the night.” She clambers up onto the couch next to him, digging through a side table. “I got the TV to work while you were gone.”
“You don’t want to keep sifting through the care package?”
“After the roller coaster I just went through with you? I want to turn my brain off and do senseless violence. Tomorrow Uzi can keep doing sleuthing and decoding and deducing.” N snorts, clumsily catching the controller she tosses him. “You know how to play Soul Caliber?”
He does not, but that’s okay. He loves doing anything with her.