Work Text:
“I shall see you again.”
But Pixal hadn’t. She had not seen him again.
Pixal Borg was wrong.
She had imagined their reunion many times, excitement filling her processors like she had never experienced before. Pixal would wrap Zane in an embrace and laugh - a sound she had only learnt because he had placed half his heart and given her a new life. Joy, once an impossibility, had become a reality because of Zane.
Instead, she saw him dancing on golden threads, overloading his own power source to save Ninjago.
She wept. No tears traced paths down polished metal - not as they did for Nya, who buried her grief against Cole’s shoulder. But her voice fractured, dissolving into static. Something deep within her chassis shattered.
Pixal had never cried before.
She thought the grief would disappear, then, that the expression of her pain was enough to banish the ache.
It had not.
Life was not fair. Cyrus said that often, usually with a laugh too weary to be genuine, as an invention failed or phantom pains haunted his limbs. She had catalogued the phrase but never understood the meaning.
Now she did.
Her power source - no, his power source, ached in a way that no instrument could ever measure and no words could ever define. It called endlessly for its missing other half. So did she, mourning her own other half.
White hair like freshly fallen snow. A smile tilted to one side. Gentle hands, which always reached for others before himself.
Thousands of simulations ran through her processors. There should have been a way. There was no way. Every scenario lead to Ninjago’s downfall.
He had done the right thing. Pixal knew it. Logic confirmed it a thousand times over. She yearned, for one impossible moment, that she had never learned to feel.
No. Zane would not have wanted that for her. He had not allowed her the gift of emotions so that she could abandon them when they started to hurt. He had given her them because he felt their love long before she could.
And now that she did…he was gone.
She had called Zane outdated. Imperfect.
Incompatible.
Pixal had never been happier to be incorrect. She loved him. No algorithm could quantify the feeling. She felt that she could spend every second until the end of time waxing poetic about Zane - his kindness, his impossible generosity, the quiet strength hidden behind his awkward smile.
They should have had forever. But forever ended with a burst of light and a blizzard.
The very nindroid who had given her life surrendered his.
Pixal did not attend his funeral.
She remained atop Borg Tower, watching as the city mourned Zane in muted silence. She saw the statue of titanium that Cyrus had erected in his honour. Her processors noted every flaw before anything else. The angles of his hair were too sharp. His posture was too rigid.
The hero had been captured but not the droid she knew and loved.
Not the softness of his lopsided smile. Not the warmth in his eyes, or his kind nature. Not the gentle soul that showed the world that machines could possess hearts after all.
She could not bear to stand amongst mourners before a monument which hardly seemed like him.
The snow that fell afterwards… that felt right. It drifted from the sky like a message from Zane himself, that he was there with them even in his absence.
And then she heard it.
Her own voice. Then his beautiful voice. Echoing through computers, replaying memories she treasured beyond measure.
Pixal wondered if she was finally broken. As humans went insane, had she gone mad too? But androids did not hallucinate…did they? No. This was impossible. No calculation supported it.
Yet Zane had said it himself. “It’s not about numbers…it’s about family.” It was about the nindroid she loved. And for once, she chose hope over probability, and she believed.
Pixal ran. Faster than she ever had before. Down corridors. Past whirring machines. Hoping against all logic and all probabilities, that it was truly him…
Machines assembled titanium parts into something resembling a nindroid. Her breath caught - a tiny, involuntary sound which no longer seemed so foreign.
Then Zane’s voice rang out again, unmistakably him.
“Are we…compatible now?”
And Pixal started laughing, power source singing with unbridled joy in a way she had never known.
Pixal Borg had never been happier to be right.