Chapter Text
Slowly, consciousness faded in. 2B felt the pressure of hard ground beneath her cheek and a warm hand on hers. She opened her eyes slowly to see 9S lying across from her, visor off. For a moment, she let herself stare.
Then the memories came rushing back.
She should be dead, for a final time because the bunker was destroyed. YoRHa is over and–
She sat up and began to take stock. She seemed whole and healthy, though she couldn't see their pods. Her visor was still around her neck. As she started to pull it up, 9S suddenly opened his eyes and scrambled away from her, summoning his sword.
She turned, “Are you okay?"
He panted heavily. “You're tricking me again? Ha. It's good to see you.”
2B’s eyes widened. He found out. Of course he did. He looked haunted.
“What happened?”
His grip on his sword loosened. He fell back, tears in his eyes, “I can't do this again.”
2B made up her mind. She had been a coward for far too long. She had kept too many promises. “I'm not going to kill you. YoRHa is over. I–”
“Pod 153 wishes to inform you that you have been resurrected. Pod 042 and I have… realized something. We care about you. We could not let you all die. YoRHa is over. We could not save any other units, only the ones to which we were assigned. I am… sorry.”
The pods hovered, buzzing anxiously.
2B sat stock still, trying to process it. 9S had died too. She had failed. YoRHa was gone. He had found out.
“What happened,” 2B echoed.
“It is a very long story–"
“I can do this, it's easier this way,” 9S interrupted. He turned to 2B and reached out tentatively. His hand trembled. She was really alive.
“Hacking in.”
The world folded in and he saw flashes of her data and sensations. The feeling of the ground. Her internal temperature. He narrowed in on sight and sound, and reached into his own files. He was through with this. He didn’t filter, he didn’t warn, he didn’t transfer it neatly in a ZIP file to be accessed at 2B’s leisure. He made her see as he fell apart.
She saw his death at A2’s hands. She saw the machines he killed, the ones that begged for mercy. She saw the boxes of flesh and soul and god. She felt the anger and pain and the betrayal and grief. She stabbed 21O and a dozen versions of herself. She discovered what made up their hearts and screamed. She felt the life drain from his body.
9S was empty. His memories and emotions had all poured through the data sync. He couldn’t muster the energy to feel anymore. He felt a hand brush through his incorporeal form, and looked up to see 2B’s hands in his cheeks, passing through illusory tears.
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be.”
“I know.”
The mindscape shifted from catwalks and memory blocks to a beach in the drowned city. The sun was setting, but it would never set here. They sat on the sand, hands phased through each other. 2B’s flight unit appeared and repeated her final message.
“Do you want to know what happened before?" 2B asked, "before this version?"
9S hesitated. He knew she had killed him. He knew, but he didn’t know how. How many times. He had been careful not to wander too close to her memories when he’d hacked in.
“Did anyone else know?” he finally asked. It was easier than the other questions.
“6O knew. The commander. Everyone else… the bunker cycles fast. The operators get to keep their memories longer than most, and I avoided the wipes by being high ranking. I don’t think anyone else noticed that you got wiped so much. You got a new operator every time, so 21O didn’t know, I don’t think.”
“6O knew?” she had been nice to him, they’d made jokes about how stuck up 2B was and she–
“She still believed,” 2B responded.
“And you didn’t?” they’d all believed. They’d watched him die.
“Not for a long time,” 2B stared into the distance. An image shimmered on the ocean.
9S and 2B standing by a lake full of sparking machine corpses.
2B drew her sword and held it against his throat, his back pressed against her.
2B spoke. “It-”
“Do you know why you're killing me?”
She blinked, “You're a traitor.”
Tears started to flow from his eyes, “I found out the truth. There is no council of humanity. YoRHa is a PR stunt. We were made from machine guts. We do not matter.”
She stared, “I did know.”
“How do you go on?”
“The birds. The feeling of my blade against metal. Glory for Mankind.”
He let out a huff, “Glory for a dead memory. Promise me something, after you kill me.”
“You're not going to ask me to let you be free? To run away with you?”
“I can't live knowing. Knowing I am nothing and worthless and purposeless. When you kill me, they're going to make a new unit. Right? 9S is a high performing model.”
“Yes.”
“Follow him. Make sure to kill him when he finds out. These days with you were the best I've ever had.”
She said nothing as his head fell to the ground. “2B to 6O. Target eliminated”
The water shimmered. It was like the floodgates had opened. It flickered through a thousand images of 9S. Smiling, laughing, bleeding, hacking, fighting. He felt the pain every time she killed him. How she mostly did it with her hands, holding him as his life drained away. And he felt her love. The faint smell of oil and the soap he used to feel fancy. The jingle of his pouch as he ran. He felt the way her hand longed to run through his hair and caress his cheek. He felt her thrill as his hands dug into her wires after she'd gotten cut to pieces. Rooting around sending sparks of joy and pain through her.
He stared at the flickering simulacrum of her face in the mindscape and broke. He fell into her, feeling the ghost of her presence enter every joint and wire and thought he had. He let himself feel and remember. He didn't have as many as she did, but he always let himself watch, admire, want. The little gasps she made when he switched her chips out. The whirling contours of her mind. The feeling of her hands round his throat, comforting in their finality.
They lived for a while in all the times, forgotten, remembered, and not yet realized. Hands played with the rippling surface of their holograms, causing waves of memories and sensations. 9S remembered having 2Bs arm, and she felt her fingers run through his hair and caress his chest. They tumbled into 9S's memories of bathing. 2B lay within him, his every shift and wiggle filling her chest and phasing through her skin. He ran his fingers over the inside of her metal ribs, wrapping his fingers around where her black box was in her physical form. Heat radiated through her body as he plunged deeper into her systems. He passed her sensation module, a hand passing through the pain and heat and sweat of combat. He passed her emotions, letting his own desire melt into hers, the longing to meld their forms into one. Then, he reached her thoughts. A spark went through her as she felt him inside her, knowing every inch of metal and every spark of electricity. Her body seized up and her thoughts went blank as he ran his tongue along her processors, pouring pleasure into her gears. She still felt his hologram in her chest, his heaving chest pushing in and out of her with every breath. He continued to bathe in her sensations, toying with sparks all over her body, building the intensity with a single minded drive, taking her apart. She felt as his hologram inside her became more solid, pushing her out around him, filling up her insides with his throbbing body and the sparks of his million holographic hands. Every part of her was touched, caressed, pulled apart as pleasure crested through her, too much and not enough of 9S all at once. He kept touching her, filling up her chest, as she lay there. The sensations slowly faded and they floated for a bit. It was hard to tell where one ended and the other began. Thoughts wandered through. They dreamed of t-shirts and birds. Of holding hands and of all those they’d lost.
Slowly, 9S opened his physical eyes, and saw the pods, still floating anxiously.
“Are 9S and 2B okay?”
He turned to her. He loved her. He hated and feared her. He needed her.
“I don't know.”
The pod looked at him with more wisdom than seemed possible. “We have time.”