Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

Every head in every room turned to the ceiling as it shook. Panels dislodged. Lights flickered. Dust loosed to fall on visors in mimicry of the unceasing snow of an outside left behind. Some who turned their eyes to the chalky downpour had not seen real snow in months. Some, years.

It quivered through every rock, widened every crack, and was felt in everyone’s bones. Some mistook it for another of the shattered planet’s tremors: the periodic death-rattles of a ruined world like the post-mortem spasms of a corpse in the moments before rigor set in. On a planetary scale, such a thing could take decades—centuries, even—and these people didn’t so much as turn their heads. They shrugged, assuming they even noticed it at all, so used to the contrivances of a planet amidst tectonic ruin. The more paranoid suspected a breach of security, alarms sounded. People ran, panicked, doing nothing to help alleviate the confusion.

A technician going about another day of thankless work looked up at the flickering lights with a scowl, annoyed at having the delicate circuitry in her hands plucked like violin strings and fried by the uncertain fluctuations of an abrupt power surge.

In the gym, a normally riotous place packed with cheers and hollers, it is quiet. One of its players remained stuck at the bottom of a dogpile, his pleas for release going unheeded.

A young Drone with a streak of blue through her midnight hair smiled to herself as she set her stolen goods into the hidden pockets in her sleeves and closed the door to a locker not her own.

And in a classroom at the far side of the complex, coughing through a thick pall of smoke like bitter incense, a young Worker Drone sighed over the wail of a fire klaxon as he cradled his broken faceplate.

The presentation could not, in any way, shape, or form, have gone any worse. That, Noctis was sure of.

This was empirically evidenced by two things. The first was the contrail of dirty smoke still streaming from a barrel warped like a blooming metal flower that made the entire nurse’s office smell like overcooked batteries and burnt rubber. The second was the bandaging covering nearly half of his visor, soaked “wet” in repair gel. Noctis felt the fizzing resin seeping through the cracks in his face and onto the circuitry beneath, clearing debris, twist-stitching wires. It was maddeningly itchy. He invited it freely. It let him somewhat ignore the gnawing shame of yet another failure.

Even the word, failure, felt like a spectacular understatement.

The people sniggering by the doorway agreed with this conclusion. Noctis knew who they were even before he settled the green light of his one functioning eye onto them. Them, because there were two. There were always two.

“Well, well. Look who it is,” The first, a male Drone, said. False surprise practically dripped from his worse to hiss and bubble on the ceramic tiles of the floor.

“This idiot’s still alive?” The other, a shorter female, asked with a hint of disbelief. She did not bother to overlay her tone with anything other than raw, flaying scorn and a prickling of amusement. Noctis couldn’t decide which condemnation he liked less.

Joule and Chad. J-C as the nickname went. And like the progenitor whose name they unofficially bore, they were equal parts loved and hated. Their infamy applied doubly if you happened to reside on the bottom of the social totem pole like him. In the dirt the pole resided in. A tier made and occupied exclusively by him.

Still, Noctis could forgive that. Especially this time. He cleared his olfactory transducers of the rank, bitter burn of chem-smoke, and met them with a smile. It was strained, and it had little to do with his broken face.

“Hey, Chad. Hey Joule.” He cringed at hearing the actuators beneath his faceplate whirring, their otherwise silent functions made audible in a series of mechanical clicks and ticks akin to an old clock. He knew it was likely only going to get worse within the next few minutes. Severely worse. “What brings you here? You don’t look hurt.” He smiled wider, hoping without any real faith it would lessen what was coming. “You two look pretty good in fact!”

“Everyone looks pretty good compared to you, idiot. Even Vale.” Joule piqued from her place by the post, brushing a wandering pigtail from her visor. Noctis tried—and failed—to stop himself from staring as she did it. Joule smirked at him, and deciding to at least try and not embarrass himself further, Noctis elected to stare at the tessellated ground tiles he’d become depressingly intimate with over the course of his many trips to this very office. It was nine and a half steps from the office door to this very seat. There were exactly four-hundred-ten brown dots and three-hundred-seventeen yellow ones. The yellow and brown texture was because of the sediment composition of where the ceramic was harvested from. It was easier to think on the statistics than what was coming. But even now, he couldn’t escape it. He saw himself in the tile’s face. It overlapped his reflected visage, compounding the effect of his beaten faceplate into a sight that would’ve given Copper a run for its money.

He heard as Chad bounced up from his spot on the door opposite of her and strode to him with a fleetfooted gait that suggested impeccable balance and excellent footwork—of choreography honed from years on the court and track. Place Chad next to any other Drone, and he’d make them look like they’d just transferred from their hardcase into something that had legs. Everything about him seemed to stretch the definition of his model. He was too strong, too fast, to be a Worker Drone like him.

“Thanks, buddy.” Chad emphasized as he sat down in the seat next to Noctis, shoving his recent project (failure) aside until it clattered against the ground. Noctis’ eyes habitually locked onto the hydrogen flask mounted on the bottom of the spinner. Even deprived of its insufficient power source, there was a lot of damage several hundred cubic pounds of ultra-compressed hydrogen could do. It wasn’t something to be handled so callously.

He, of course, did not dare say that to Chad.

But it held fast, secured in its mounting, steady as cold rock. It was the only part of the device undamaged. At least he’d done one thing right.

Instead he asked the two why they were here. It was rhetorical, but phrased not to be. Even he wasn't socially inept enough to know where this was going.

“You know me, Nocs. Just came to check up on my good buddy. My friend. My-” He patted Noctis on the back, though pummel was more technic. “pal.” Chad breathed the word. It hung like cryotic mist in the air, heavy and sticky.

Noctis kept his head down, wishing he could dive into the tile and disappear into that mirror realm. Would things be any different there, though? He looked just as beat up—even more so. He would still be trapped like a mouse in a cage. Confined. Cornered. Entombed.

But at least he wouldn’t be here.

Chad went on, taking the silence as an invitation. Noctis listened because it was all he could do. “Pals help each other out, don’t they? So, pal, let me ask you something. Do you have my homework done yet? I did give it to you, didn’t I? You did say you’d get it done, didn’t you?”

Joule had inched closer at some point, the tips of her bare footplates invading Noctis’s narrow field of floor-centered view. She stepped on his reflection. He doubted it was by accident.

One of her fingers made its way to what substituted as his chin and slowly lifted it up. Once he made eye contact, Noctis was icebound. Frenetic green locked to dusk red. Joule smirked.

“Copper to idiot, you finally break or something? It’s rude not to acknowledge someone when they’re speaking to you.” She pushed off his head. Noctis winced as her fingertips dug into the spot over his cracked visor. He doubted that was an accident either.

“Easy, Joule. He’s a bit dense is all. Here, Nocs, how ‘bout I come to you instead.”

It wasn't phrased as a question, nor was it meant to be one. Even leaning over, both his hands on the arm rests of his seat, the other Worker looked big as a mountain, yet moved nimbly as a lynx. His smile was wolf-like and keen.

Noctis couldn’t begrudge him for it even if he was capable. Not just the beating he was surely about to receive; Chad had earned his prodigious specs through physical prowess, unlike himself, who’d had his above-average chassis cast from rare, entirely-pure alloys years before he’d even been transferred. His father’s gift. Noctis’s inheritance.

“So is it done?” Chad asked in a tone that was honey itself. That said, “I already know the answer. I just want to watch you squirm.”

And squirm Noctis did. Squirmed and mumbled.

“Sorry, can’t hear you down there. Mind speaking up? Just like how you did when you were presenting?”

“I said,” The smaller Worker swallowed, the sound rendered echo-audible to everyone else in the room as a series of clicks. His spit was dry and hurt going down. “No. It’s not done.”

“No, of course it’s not.” Chad went on, immersed in his own theater. “Because it’s all ash and cinders after the bomb you brought to class almost killed me.”

Noctis snapped up, eyes wide. “It wasn't supposed to do that! And even if it did, you guys were both out of the blast radius. I-I made sure of it.” Despite the contradiction of the statement, it was true enough. It was his project, his responsibility. If he got hurt by it, then that was just damage to his pride. If someone else got hurt by it-

Which didn’t happen! He’s exaggerating!

“Tell that to my homework. Oh, wait,” Chad took his hand out of his pocket. Between his clenched fingers drifted motes of ragged dust. He opened his hand, and the clump of sooty ash—the one casualty of this entire debacle—fell right into Noctis’ lap. In the second before the terminal impact, Noctis’ Worker-grade perception array stitched together the occasional word from what remained visible on the tattered rags that had once been sheet paper.

…grand fitness-

…ndria is the powe-

…we aren’t even organic why wou-

…watermelons-

The gray lump scattered into a sooty pall like a cloud over a quarry the moment it made contact with him, but Noctis felt its weight sitting there regardless. Phasing through his coat like a transonic dagger, drilling through to rest against bare metal, seeking out the cracks so it could slip inside where he couldn’t clean it out. Sticking where the lessons and warnings never did.

Noctis lifted his head marginally, and saw Joule behind Chad. She leaned against the office desk.
The smile she permitted herself was thin as a scalpel, but Noctis could tell she was enjoying this. He knew she was thinking the same as him. When are you going to stop, you slagging liability?

Chad let that sit there like a stone, no doubt for dramatic effect before he took on a much chipper tone. “But buddy, listen. Listen very closely, Nocs. So I’m about to fail that class, see? And it’s going to be your fault, check? But you can still make this right. Just give me yours, and we’ll be even.”

“I don’t have it. I turned it in already.”

“He doesn't have it. He dosen’t have it! Isn’t that funny, Joule. Goody-two-shoes turned it in already, the same day he got it, like it’s clockwork. And conveniently right before I could turn in mine. That’s funny, isn't it Nocs?”

“...I guess it is, a little fu—no, wait, I DIDN’T-

Noctis realized his mistake a second too late, at the exact moment his head hit the wall behind him.

“What the frigid hell did you just say?”

That’s what Noctis thought he heard. His vision flashed in resolution, shifting qualities like a telescope swapping lenses, whiplashing between nauseous focus and a fizzing snowstorm of static. Narrowing, widening, blurring, crystalizing, blanking. The itch in his eye socket turned from maddening to just painful as the micro-machines in the gel frenzied like a swarm of hornets in a kicked nest. The bandages fell loose, shards of glass—of him—tinked on the floor. Over the buzzing, he could hear Joule laughing, but couldn’t pinpoint exactly where she was anymore. It sounded like it came from both everywhere, and exclusively within his head.

Even dazed, he paused to consider that the most unsurprising thing of the entire ordeal was that no one had come to see what all the commotion was about.

“I w-was just agreeing with you!” Noctis blurted out instinctually. That was usually what people wanted to hear from him, Chad especially. “Yes, you look great. You’re so cool!” and “Of course I’m a useless idiot who can’t do anything right. What else would I be?”. It usually got him out of conversations the fastest and hassle-free. Agree with people, and the problems usually went away.

The same hand that cracked his skull found the collar of his duster and pulled him up, up in a smooth, easy motion, like he weighed no more than a handful of bolts. There was a tearing noise as the buttons of his coat lashed through the surrounding fabric as he was dragged out of his seat and pinned against the wall, sending a fresh burst of shredding heat out from his wounded optic, washing over the rest of him like a sonar pulse, exposing his secrets and frailties for all to see. He’s sure he shamed himself by yelping.

“Then surely you’ll agree with me breaking a few fingers? We’re already in the ward, after all, so it’s the perfect place, isn't it?”

With his first line of defense—polite agreement—failing miserably, and mutually respectful debate beyond the access permitted by his social status, Noctis resorted to the only option left to him: pleading.

“You can do whatever you want!” Bad! Don’t say that! “Just…not the face? Please?”

To his credit, Chad seemed to consider it for about a second, which was already much more than Noctis could ever have hoped for before pulling the two plate-to-plate. His smile said everything before his vocal actuator fully formed the first syllable.

“No promises if I get carried away,” Chad said, as four brass-capped knuckles fully eclipsed Noctis’ view of the room.

But the blow never came.

Noctis slowly, painfully forced open one green eye, only now realizing he’d closed it, and saw the light his optic emitted reflecting off the fist hovering and inch from his visor, the green turned a honeyed orange in the brass. His hand hook like a missile with the energy required to restrain it. Behind that Chad’s face had twisted into a sneer that conveyed both a contempt even greater than the one he felt for Noctis, and a brooding tiredness deep as a quarry. There was only one person who could evoke that kind of emotional response from the silverback Worker.

Tap. Tap.

Over Chad’s immense shoulder, Noctis saw one of Joule’s pigtails, twisted with thread-streaks of red-white dye, whip to the side as she turned her head. He followed her rapidly narrowing eyes, a feeling not unlike hope lifting him aloft.

And there, at the doorway, was the silhouette of the most welcoming sight Noctis had seen all day. And she tapped a little black stick against the doorframe to the room.

“So you two just going to sit there kissing or what?”

Vale was a blue-black razor of a girl whose hair hung to one side of her head and pooled like a puddle of oil at her neck. Her attire was a simple affair: Black sleeveless overcoat, foregoing entirely the marigold and maroon skirt of the school dress uniform, all set below a short scarf the color of Copper’s iron-rich soil. Stylized arcs of gauss lighting marked her arms in crackling coils akin to the tattoos some humans supposedly augmented themselves with. They trailed up her inset collar and onto a faceplate like rough gemstone, as though flowing from the electric blue cores of her eyes out to the tips of her fingers. She perpetually wore the look of someone slightly annoyed by something, though it was never as pronounced as in moments like this.

Chad—with care completely at odds with his physique—set Noctis down, who promptly crumpled like a paper mache sculpture under a pressure washer into his seat. Resisting the desire to curl up and nurse the hive that had been made of his head, he watched the scene before him unfold.

Chad turned to cooly regard this good samaritan. The same good samaritan who was bull-rushing towards him, stopping in her headlong stalk for only a moment to share a mutual sneer with Joule before stomping front-center before his antagonizer. Vale was shorter than Noctis himself was, putting her only up to Chad’s bulky shoulders. Full domestic schema. How she managed to stare down at him was a subject of deep fascination for Noctis.

“Vale.” Chad greeted her.

“Soot stain.” Vale reciprocated.

“What are you doing here, love?”

“Don’t call me ‘love’, Chad.” Vale snapped, caustic as sulfuric rain. “I haven’t been your ‘love’ for a year. And what the hell are you doing here? This room’s for the wounded, you’re plugging up space like a storm drain plugs with shit.” She stepped to the side to look around the wide bulk of Chad. For a frozen moment, Noctis and her kept eye contact. Her eyes brighten. She smiled.

“Hey, Nocs.”

“H-Hi,” Noctis said meekly, becoming again incredibly invested in the topography of the floor the instant Chad glared from over his shoulder.

“The ne…My pal, here, lost my homework. He and I were just having a conversation about the importance of keeping track of other people’s things. Keeping your word and minding boundaries, that kind of thing.”

“I’m sure you’d know all about keeping your word and minding boundaries. I know for a fact he didn’t lay a hand on you, so what the hell are you antagonizing him for?”

“He lost my homework.”

“The homework you weren’t going to do anyway?”

“He was doing it for me.” Chad said, as though that was the end-all-be-all of checkmates. He set his hand on Noctis’ shoulderplate and shook him gently. “Weren’t you, Nocs? Because you’re such a good friend.”

Noctis didn’t even have time to respond before Vale slapped Chad’s hand off his shoulder. Hostile silence fell like an iron curtain. Vales was not exactly a de-escalating presence, though Noctis was grateful for her in any case. She didn’t defend him with the stoic love of maternal instincts, like an iron tusk watching over its fawn with the elaborate shield-like frill and antlers, or even as friends. She protected him like a predator fighting another of its own kind over a cadaver, defending the right to its kill.

“Don’t bring him into this. I swear it’s the same slag with you as always. Get real, Chad. If he gave it to you with every single answer perfect, you still would have been too busy looking at your own reflection to remember to turn it in. Now get the hell out of here. He’s injured, can’t you see that? Some of us actually need to use this room.”

Chad crossed his plow-like arms. “And what if I don’t?”

Noctis risked a glance up as Vale flicked the little black object she was holding, extending a silver metal tip from it. A USB drive. An afterburner.

He was thankful Chad was facing the other way. If he saw his smile, Vale wouldn’t have been able to save him.

“And what if I tell everyone you’ve been using afterburners and augmented training uploads during official games and that all that training and rep-work is really a bunch of slag? The coaches wouldn’t be pleased about that, don’t you think?”

Chad stiffened. Smugness took flight. “Where’d you get that?”

“Your locker.”

“How?”

“I picked the lock. Now, am I going to have to blow the whistle, or can you follow simple directions?”

Not even Chad would dare to try and fight the mouth-to-ear machine when its cogs got churning. In the cramped halls and thin walls of the warren the Workers called home, gossip multiplied and mutated like bacteria in a petri dish. But oh, Noctis could see how he wanted to. And more than once he feared he’d decline out of sheer spite. He feared then not just for him, but for Vale too. Though she’d no doubt go down spitting fire, if push came to shove, Chad’d mass alone would be enough for them both to wind up on cots next to each other.

But in the end his shoulders stooped with a mechanical growl, signaling capitulation. Fads came and went, but rumors and rep stayed. No one knew that better than Chad did.

“Good boy. It’s a relief to see you're not a total idiot after cracking your head on the court this many times.” She takes her time with the words, rolling them around her tongue. For some reason, it makes Chad shift on his feet. “We have enough of those already.” Vale shot her thumb over her shoulder. “Now get the hell out of here, and take your girlfriend with you.”

Like Noctis, she’d been silently watching the exchange with dips into unmasked amusement. But at her mention her prior entertainment vanished then, abruptly replaced with cool, impartial observance.

“The burner,” Chad held out his hand. “And he gets let off with a warning.”

“No. Vale intoned. “I’ll drop it to you tomorrow morning before first period.”

Another streak of apprehension. Another moment of reconsideration. Another chance for Chad to turn right around and let the ringing sound of shattered glass sing throughout the surrounding halls. But Chad didn’t do that. His voice dropped, and he spoke like him and Vale were the only two people in the room.

“She’s not my girlfriend.” 

“I don’t care what she is so long as she isn’t here. Being near the prudish snit is enough to knot my wiring.”

Noctis silently waited as Vale played his attorney. As they argued, only he noticed the split-second look of dejection that overrode Joule’s scowling features, like a thunderhead descending.

Her eyes locked to his. He looked away again. He knew that was a mistake; just gave her more ground to walk over him. But the girl was scary.

They settled on a deal. Vale would return to chit the following day without uttering a word after Noctis had made it back to his hab intact. And with that Chad left with the satisfied aplomb of someone who felt like they’d prized the good end of a bargain from someone else by way of sheer charisma rather than casting desperate lines until the seller tired of their ceaseless chatter and gave the item for free. He stopped at the doorway though, casting back one longing glance.

“You’re the one and only, love.” He said to Vale, one hand positioned over his core.

“Go to hell, Chad.” Vale said, continuing to scowl at the open door as Chad slipped out of view. She turned her gorgon’s gaze on Joule. “You too, though I don’t think you needed me to say it aloud.”

“You were an idiot to let him go.” Joule’s gaze flickered contemptuously to Noctis. “And he’s an idiot who can’t do anything right. The sooner he realizes that the better off we all are.” She addressed him then for the first time. “That contraption of yours could have gotten people killed, you know.”

Noctis didn’t object. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to protest. It was because he wasn't entirely certain she was wrong—not when his project coughed out another sputtering exhalation of bitter black smoke more akin to what you’d see from the very first mechanical engine prototypes rather than something of the modern era.

Maybe that meant it was junk after all. A dangerous piece of junk that should be disposed of immediately.

“Like you’ve done anything else. At least he’s trying to do…” Vale looked over her shoulder at the unfamiliar device on the floor, “whatever it is he’s doing.”

“He wants to fight the Murder Drones.” Was all Joule said. Her expression said even less; the pure lack of faith in his proposition was abundantly clear.

Joule was worse than Chad, somehow. Descending from a family of overseers—specialist Drones responsible for the “performance assessment and resource reallocation” of other Drones before the Coldsnap; little human stand-in of their own workforces—meant she already had a certain reputation. They were probably the only Drones on Copper sad to see the humans go. 

She did not smile. When she did, bureaucratic summed it up best—the same all-teeth, overly-forced smile on countless posters still hung up around the old city, far too many for the modest population of surviving Workers to ever dispose of. Her grades were better than his, which was already saying something. She was cold, calculative. and mean. Very mean.

No one liked Joule except for her parents, and they’d been dead longer than his dad.

But she had a similar goal to him, which he was never shy about bringing up in their passing, extremely one-sided conversations in the halls. Unlike him, her solutions lay a bit more in the field of assured quality and trusted practically, and significantly less in the way of violent self-destruction and accidental misfires. The only similarity their goal shared, which neither was willing to openly discuss, was that no one in a position to do anything with her propositions actually listened to her.

With every presentation of her own, such as the one his mishap had invariably canceled due to the projector—and the majority of the room—needing to undergo extensive rennovation, he could see her ire growing—an ugly shadow behind the dusky lights of her eyes, like something swimming under ice. A bite, frost-cold and condescending, rimming every word she said as she stared out back at the empty visors that comprised every one of her audiences. Including at him, who always gave her the utmost attention and diligence, even when she passed over his raised hand every time she asked if there were any questions among the audience.

There never were. They saw no reason to fix something that wasn’t broken. His old man had had the foresight to ensure such future tact was unnecessary—that the dis-en-doored didn’t need to worry about maintenance or mechanical failure. That for the first time since their creation a generation of Worker Drones would never have to touch a wrench unless they wanted to. It was the greatest gift anyone could give, though Noctis couldn’t help but feel like it was a mistake sometimes, given what it seemed to make of them. 

In any case, Noctis got the impression Joule was annoyed with him to a degree otherwise considered atypical.

As she should be.

“Well good for him then,” Vale went on, “About time someone started actually doing something meaningful.”

Joule snapped. Noctis saw it a moment before she said anything. Her eyes flared bright as novas, like a fire was held right behind her visor. Whatever patient glacier-dwelling serpent swam in those depths died as the water it was in flash-boiled

“I spent twenty-seven hours working on a fifty-two slide presentation, and now I don’t even get to show it because of him!” She held up her paperwork between all three of them. For the first time Noctis got to see just what it was she was holding. Charts. Diagrams. Emergency exit pathways marked over old maintenance tunnels. Headcounts by age, resource tallies. Higher encouragement of recycling limited resources—a serious issue. A statistical web spun of logistics and internal infrastructure, neatly composed, hand written. It was, to Noctis, as beautiful as it was complex.

“I’d still like to see it!” Noctis interjected earnestly.

“Shut up,” 

“...Okay,”

Vale, never one to appreciate such a level of detail as him, didn’t even bother to look at the paper. “Sucks to be you then. Spend your time better elsewhere instead of being salty it didn’t go your way.”

Joule looked on the brink of clawing. Noctis nudged the husk of his project aside with his foot and scooted back in preparation for the ensuing catfight. Then all at once, Joule went cold. Cold as a centaur far from the light of any sun. Cold as scything copper wind. Colder than cold.

Slowly, her eyes left Vale and found his. The emoticon acting as her left iris crackled into a blur of mangled display-data. A common stress-symptom, and hardly the first time he’d seen it happen to her, but he was taken aback by the severity with which it distorted. He’d never seen that error-code before. He wouldn’t be surprised if a mess-up of this caliber had created a new one just for dealing with him.

"See this here, Doorman?" Joule asked. She was holding out her paperwork.

Noctis nodded, his eyes scanning, admiring even now. “I-I do.”

“Good.” She crunched the papers into a ball, tore them into mangled ribbons, then dumped it all in the closest bin—not recycling—before spitting on them. She pointed after it. "This is you."

And then she turned and left without another word.

“Was that supposed to be a threat?” 

“I think so...”

“Well it wasn't a very good one.” Vale did not smile at this victory. She fell into the seat next to Noctis with an agitated buzz of static that sounded closer to a growl than anything a machine was supposed to make. Noctis hazarded he’d burn a hole through his hand if he stuck it out in front of her optics even without her glasses.

“Her uptight tom-pissery and that idiot's toxic masculinity is potent enough to click on my internal Geiger. Can’t believe I used to find that hot.” 

Noctis mumbled something. It might’ve been agreement, but he wasn't sure. Vale shook her head, and he wasn't sure if it was directed at Chad, Joule, or him either.

“Here.” She said, propping the tip of something black and smelling of charred polymer in arm’s reach. “Think you dropped this.”

His project. His experiment. His failure.

He hesitated before taking it. More so out of not knowing what else to do with it than anything else. “Thanks, Vanadium.”

She smiled at his nickname for her. It was rendered incomplete: fractured and popping with slideshow-like distortion through the unfocused haze filtering that was his resolution, but it was enough to perk his mood, if just a little.

“I presume for more than cleaning up after your mess?”

Noctis nodded shyly. She’d kindly left the again out of it.

“No thanks needed. It’s not a problem. Did you see the look on his face this time? Pre-cious.”

Noctis watched as she took a small foil-wrapped treat from her pocket. She peeled the wrapping off and stuck the congealed clot of oil between the seams that counted for as her lips. He frowned, a pop-up in his HUD warning him of oil intake as if the stiffness in his joints wasn't blatant enough.

He blink-clicked it away with a silent scowl. She always said it wasn't a problem. Noctis was pretty sure it was, but decided not to contend with her on that.

Vale sat back into her seat, spinning the afterburner around between deft digits. He could tell she thought of it as a problem too, and was trying to distance herself from the anger of what she’d just handled still simmering on her thoughts. By the looks of it, she was barely succeeding. He supposed that summarized Vale nicely. Always angry at someone. Always mad about something. She had her own reputation as a vixen with a mean-streak longer than Joule’s. They had to scrounge a new cabinet just for her school violations. A big one. 

It seemed to him at times she was made of agitation itself. Every action she ever made, even ones as simple as sitting down—crater, cleaning her glasses—exuded a certain measure of cold umbrage to the point where, as the joke went, if you wanted to get yourself disassembled, you didn’t even need to go outside past nightfall. Just find Vale when she’s in one of her moods and throw the most obscene insult you can think of.

Except for when she was speaking with him. He wasn’t sure if she’d always been like that—he frequently suspected that she must have come into this body with her newly-minted hands wrapped around something’s neck—or if it only started later. He likewise had no idea how or where he’d stumbled to make her like him even a little. But he appreciated the company. She kept the bullies off him. She spoke to him.

There were, of course, other jokes. Involving her and him specifically. Even thinking about them was enough to get his core cycling. But Noctis purposely tried not to hear those. It wasn't, after all, like he even had a chance.

“Still, thank you,” Noctis said anyway. “I’m sorry you had to come in and do any of that for me.”

She waved his apology aside, playing with the stick to her lollipop. But he could see a certain stiffness to it. A curling of her fingers. An electric sidelong stare. Her telling him to drop it and move on.

“Can I see that?” Noctis asked her instead, pointing to the chit.

Vale wordlessly adjusted her grip, slipping it between thumb and pointer to leave an exposed end for him to grab. He muttered a quick “thanks'' as he took it, and chalked it up to an accident when her hand brushed against his even as his core received and maintained an abrupt period of increased cycle-rate, and one joke in particular came to the forefront of his thoughts. After passing it she shrugged her backpack off her shoulder and started removing binders, unclipping paperwork that Noctis presumed was homework for the evening. Homework she proceeded to dump into the nearest trashcan before slamming the lid shut and using it as a footrest. He’d offered many times before to do it for her. Freely. She never took him up on it.

“How’d you get this?” Noctis asked, looking the small device over. After only a brief time in her custody it smelled like the digital acrylics and solders she used.

“Like I said, I picked his locker.”

“That’s far too subtle for you.”

“I can be subtle.” She stretched out in her seat, hands coming dangerously close to Noctis’s faceplate. They were delicate things belonging to a more bookish person, at odds with the rest of her schema. Domestic’s hands were made for the library, the laundry room. She gazed at him upside-down, back arced over the armrest, legs pressed together. She twirled a slender stylus she always kept with her. The quill was plucked from the vibrant headcrest plumage of a skeleton of a species once native to Copper—and immense, cave-dwelling reptile that was the terror of many deep-strata mining operations. It still shimmered with prismatic colors, even now. She flicked his hat with it. “I just don’t like to be.”

“Why were you snooping around in his locker? It’s against the rules to go looking through other people’s things, and it's kind of rude too.”

“Had a feeling whatever you were making was going to go the way of Copper’s core.” She pointed the tip to the charred husk in the seat next to Noctis with the quill. “Figured I’d have the insurance package ready.”

“Oh.” Noctis said heavily. “Thanks…”

Vale rolled over in her seat, abdomen-down, adjusting herself until what counted as her chin rested on her palms. She absently kicked the air behind her, magnanimously gesturing to him.

“But there’s obviously a lot I missed between then and now. So, my fellow domestic terrorist, by what misfortune to all others do our paths cross today?”

“Oh, you know.” Noctis smiled meekly, “Just me being…me.”

“Come on!” Vale groaned, the sound teetering off. “Don’t be a tease, give me the juicy bits. I could smell the smoke from the other side of the Outpost and knew you had something to do with it. And I don’t want what everyone else is regurgitating. Give me the truth.”

Noctis breathed in deeply before conceding. “Okay. So, you already know I’ve been working on this for a while. And I finally thought it was ready, and we had our presentations coming up, so I decided, what better opportunity to show it off.”

“And?”

“Well, it was all going fine at first. I think I even got some of them to put their phones down for a few seconds!” Noctis said, sounding genuinely proud of himself. Not even Vale had the heart to tell him that was probably because he brought a gun to school. “So I thought I should probably show my tell. Just enough for a live test. But some of the hydrogen from the flask had leaked through to the ignition chamber. That would otherwise be fine, but the electromagnetic containment field wasn't getting enough power to both sustain itself and expel the energy. It was using up everything just to keep the plasma inside, at the same time building a pressure vacuum, and none of it was going to the acceleration coils to disperse so-”

“Woah,” Vale held up her hands, realizing just what it was she was getting herself into. “Slow down dude. Not all of us are info-cytes.”

“Right, right,” Noctis was smiling as cleared his buffer in a quiet burst of static. She knew just the way to cheer him up. She’d joked on no few occasions that, were he human, he’d suffocate himself by forgetting to breathe in moments like this. “It basically wasn't getting enough juice to launch the thing, so it could just hold onto it. But it couldn’t keep doing that forever since the casing would melt, and within a couple of seconds it reached critical mass and-

“Exploded?” Vale finished for him. “Think I got that part.”

It had actually exploded several times in very short succession. But Noctis doubted she wanted that level of detail. “Yeah, it exploded. I…I didn’t mean for it to hurt anybody.”

Vale looked around the empty room before returning to him with a crooked half-smile that showed plenty of teeth. “Well, looks like everything went according to plan then. I don’t see anyone other than us.” She seemed to muse on something before continuing with: “Kind of a shame, though. Nothing gets a lesson across like beating it into someone.”

Noctis mumbled to that. The fizzle-pop itch of the repair gel seemed to take on a voice then, whispering condescension. When are you going to learn? He held up a hand to his cracked and warped faceplate as if to quell the voice. Vale noticed, but interpreted it as a fresh pain rather than an old wound.

“How bad is it?” She asked softly, swinging her legs back to the ground with a rustle.

“Not bad.” Noctis lied as he turned away. This new angle greeted him with over half a dozen posters of Worker Drones in their Company-sponsored heyday: a tapestry composed of pre-Collapse propaganda deemed inspirational enough to warrant preserving. Their gleaming smiles and straight-set eyes seemed to look down on him. One asking the weary watcher where his injuries hurt somehow resonated the most. It wasn't anywhere near his face, that was for sure.

“Alright, let me see it.”

Noctis half-turned, startled. “Vale?”

“Your face, ticker. Let me see your face.”

Noctis blushed. You could never be certain with this girl, so it paid to clarify. “Oh, right.”

She pulled off his cap, letting his scraggly copper hair and a scree of flakings fall. No matter how much he cleaned it, more dandruff always seemed to come out. He didn’t like to think about whose it was. Instead of setting it down she put it on her own head, at a slight angle rather than straight. Noctis really, really did try his best not to stare. Like, his absolute hardest. Every ounce of his willpower, discipline, and focus went into not looking at the piece of insubstantial and not-at-all-appealing apparel she now wore.

But she looked really, really good with it on. Good enough that he didn’t notice her smirk until it was already gone.

He tried to look away, but her grip on his face, though not hard, held him steady. Or perhaps his metal bones, like his will, had turned to jelly. Or maybe he should stop trying to fool himself and just give in. So he just let his eyes unsubtly drift elsewhere. From the corner of his vision, he saw her expression unchanged. She now wore only a mask of grim concentration, unsatisfied concern evident in every little unpolished score and paint streak on her faceplate as she unwound the slick bandaging.

She didn’t gasp at the extent of his injury like his mother might have. She didn’t cringe away like the girls in the sorority would, or smile at his misfortune as virtually every other one of his peers would have done.

Instead, she extended a segmented finger and poked his cracked visor.

“Ow.”

“Mmhmm,” Vale hummed very professionally, “Yup, that looks like it hurts.”

“It’s not that bad,” Noctis assured her. “I can barely even feel it.”

“Your eye is holding on by a thread. And can’t feel it because the nerve-nodes liquefied and are running down your face.” Vale pointed out.

“I still have it, don’t I?”

Vale shook her head before holding up the bandaging, examining the thin stained strips of latticed hydraulic tape. Imperceptible to the human eye, clumps of autoreactive nanites skittered atop it like industrious insects.

“Let’s get this changed. Any more gel around?”

“Behind the nurse’s desk. But they only prescribed me a little bit. It’s supposed to be enough.”

Vale didn’t answer. Instead, she threw herself over the desk one-handed and fell into a crouch, rendering her out of sight. The sound of rummaging was percussively punctuated by several binders and small items flying from one side of the desk to the other. She reappeared over the countertop moments later, jumped it, and sauntered to him, flicking off the cap on a metal canister with one hand. A muffled buzzing could be heard from the metal hive she now carried. A roll of bandaging swayed in a loose wrap in the other. “Well, here’s your second opinion, since the doctors here are dumb as the rocks they came from,” She pulled a fresh strip tight and sliced it free with a utility knife before spraying it down with the aresol, which coagulated into a sticky, writhing silver residue. “it isn’t.”

The next few moments for Noctis were a literal and metaphorical blur of sensoria mostly consisting of immense discomfort and occasional pangs of melodic pain wracking his body, interspersed with Vale telling him on no few occasions to stop being such a Droneling and take it like a Worker.

“You know our parents went into rock grinders and geo-reactor pretty much for fun, right?” She said, ripping a damaged string of wire out of his visor.

“They did that because they had nothing else to do. Ow! And they didn’t have you poking and prodding their faces!”

The dry, scuttling gel hugs his face and pours into the wound. It feels like having a shag carpet stuffed into his mouth, but all over his face. There’s a electric tingling as it bonds to his system and slaves itself to his dormant auto-repair subroutine, kickstarting the process. It’s very itchy. Most prevalent of all in this however, was every moment her hands brushed his chassis, which always spiked with cold clarity, like a diamond lance, through his thoughts, bidding him to stay more than her voice or the pain could ever make him pull away.

He was almost sad by the time it was done. Almost.

“Owwww!” Noctis moaned a single long syllable as she tightened the bandaging. He feels his ocular pop back into its socket with a glassy click. “Whyyyy?”

“Swearing would help here,” Vale advised him. Her hands were thinly greased in his own oil like black paint to the knuckles. This she unceremoniously wiped off on her shirt with barely a thought.

“Biscuits.”

Vale rolled her eyes and made a sound between a groan and chuckle. “I meant actually swearing, grandma.”

“...and crackers?”

Vale stared at him then, her head tilted; an expression that asked whether or not he had some filter installed. He smiled sheepishly in response. She shook her head. “One of these days, I’m going to get you to swear. Or lie. Hell, both. I won’t settle for anything less than a ‘fuck’.”

“Why? There are less… aggressive words to use.”

“Well maybe there shouldn’t be so much to aggressively complain about. Fuck this, that, him, her. Fuck this hole in the ground we sleep in. Fuck the whole galaxy, what did it ever do for us?”

“Vale, please,”

Vale giggled, making Noctis’ visor saturate with a pallet of light green hues. “Alright, that should be good, so long as you don’t crack your head open again anytime soon. How does your face feel?”

Noctis’s face feels like a patchwork quilt. He’s also pretty sure she put his eye in upside down, but he smiles back. “Fine. And I got through all of it without a single swear.” he said, sounding far too pleased with himself for Vale to keep a straight face. It was the closest he could come to smug superiority. Vale still punched him in the arm for it. He didn’t sound so smug squeaking like a teddy bear.

Noctis was rubbing his arm, blushing profusely, when the bell rung. A shrill cry not out of place coming from the hooked beak of a stormbird that sent doors swinging on hinges. Within seconds jostling gaggles choked the halls. Under the light of one another’s eyes, their chassis glinted like the iridescent fish scales as they swam the wynd. From his isolated seat in the office, Noctis watched them go, laughing and joking, as he frequently did. Passing the office, they either stopped to look at him, some degree of amusement fluttering across their visors when they saw his injury before they turned to share snickering secrets with their friends before Vale scared them off, or ignored him entirely. Nothing of the in-between existed.

His grip around his gun loosened. They were his peers in name alone. He knew all their names. Most of them couldn’t remember the first letter to his. How they even managed that when their brains were databases capable of housing and sorting several billion gigabytes was beyond him.

“Someone needs to shoot those things,” Vale murmured, staring angrily at the nearest bell. Some epiphany seemed to overcome her, and she turned to Noctis. “Hey, since you’ve got that, would you mind-” She stopped at his expression. At his hands loosening around the stock.

Noctis was snapped out of his haze—literally. “You alright?” Vale questioned, her fingers still hanging in front of his faceplate.

“Fine.” Noctis lied, gently pushing her hand back. “Just hungry.”

She crawled back over her seat in degrees, as if reluctant to pull away. “That’s oddly specific.”

“I didn’t drink today. Don’t give me that look, you know we’re running low again. Other people need it more than me.”

Vale snorted, the sound a hollow wheeze of too-often neglected pneumatics. “You know the Company frowned on charity, right?”

“We have to look out for one another. It’s one for all, and all for-”

“Be real, man. Everyone knows Work Unions are just a myth.”

“Well, yeah, duh. But no humans are here to tell us otherwise, now are they?”

Vale shrugged. “Better you than any of them.” She flicked a finger to the hallway. “You’re too nice. But we’ll change that. One way or another, we’re finally gonna put some bolts on you that you can be proud of. But if you really want to take it slow, we can start small.” She takes a small tablet from a strap at her waist and flicks it on. She swiped him through a tour of her design gallery. Any of the images within would have looked perfectly at home in the heaviest heavy metal album to ever exist. “How about a few enravings? Glacier serpents? Crossed icepicks? Rock drakes? We can do patched-on electoos if you want to be a brittle transition metal about it—won’t even prick. All you gotta do is show to the boarded-up, definitely-not-shady black-market on the third subsection where I definitely don’t have a shop that breaks several domestic laws before even including the public safety hazards.”

Noctis stared at the streaks of lightning coiling her arms. They’d been stenciled into the first thin first layer of her chassis; snarling scars burned deep into the composite metal, her circuit-laden body the color of dull iron. The puff of her coat’s hem thankfully concealed her corelight where the zipper fell short, and she’d been merciful enough to wear pants today—likely to hold whatever else she stole. She’d done it herself. Smiling, she’d told him it hurt. Said it was “good pain”.

Good pain or not, Noctis had had enough getting handled by her for today. He didn’t need to be getting stabbed and burned too. “Thanks, but I think I’ve had enough of having my person stitched back together for a while. Besides, I already have these bad boys,”

He held out both arms, showing Vale with no small amount of dignity the hazard tape wrapped in thick bands around his baggy coat sleeves, between the halfway point of his arms and the sockets set into all Worker’s chassis. Vale didn’t point out how they weren’t even real hazard stripes—just blank tape with the pattern colored on.

“Oh yeah, real mean looking, At least, coming from the guy who named me after a rock.” Vale extended a finger and poked at the buttons to his overcoat. The topmost one had been replaced years before by a yellow smiley face pin stitched through the fabric. He giggled. He was ticklish there.

“Hey! The periodic table is cool!”

“Nerd.”

“That table is responsible for over a thousand years of accelerated technological development! All one-hundred-thirty-one elements have earned their places and cemented themselves since ancient times as-”

“Neeerd.” Vale held out a hand, rapidly opening and closing the space between her digits like a mouth. “You see this? This is you right now.”

Noctis turned away, trying to pout. But he wasn't very good at it, so it just looked like he was trying too hard to be somewhat irritated by the closest floor tile.

“Ah, come on. Don’t be like that. I’m sorry?”

“Fine. I forgive you.” Noctis said instantly.

“One point to me. Told you you’re too nice.” She swirled the stick around in her mouth until the tip pointed to the seat over him. The feather in her hair glinted under the clinical light with trichrome colors, like a geode cut into a quill’s scholarly shape. “So tell me, because I don’t think I’ve really asked before. Why did you make a gun?”

“Oh. This thing?" Noctis loosely held out the object in question. "This is so we can fight against the Murder Drones and take back our world!”

“Sweet.” Vale drawled distractedly. “Well, since you’re so good at making stuff, I’ve been meaning to ask if you could make something to beat Chad’s rear actuator out his throat for me.”

Noctis lowered his gun and shook his head. “Come on Vale. Violence is never the answer.”

“Gun.”

“Violence against our fellow Workers. Our kin. Living down here already has a hundred problems daily. Didn’t we just have a generator blow last week? The east section lost power for three days.” his grip around his weapon became firmer. “I want to fix our problems, not make more.”

“I don’t know what you’re going on about. Setting Brandon on fire for the rest of his life was one of the best things you ever did. But fine, keep your pacifism." She said the word with genuine aversion. "Not like it’s that hard to get Chad whimpering anyway. All you gotta do is grab him from behind and start playing with his-”

“Vale.”

“-and he’ll start simpering like he’s one of those pretentious apricots on the sidelines. But if you really want to make him scream, all you gotta do is–”

“VALE.”

she turned to him and innocently fluttered her display-eyes. “What?”

“Too much information!” Noctis’ voice came muffled from the ball he’d curled himself into.

“Come on Nocs,” Vale cooed, crawling close. He knows she’s smiling like an alleycat at his bumbling. “I thought you of all people would appreciate me going into intricate detail.”

Noctis’ next words were a jumbled string of vocalized trash-code that barely deserved to be called a sentence. The only thing that made him look up from the family-friendly safety of his panic-cubby was when she sat down again. Even then it was with reluctance.

“What I’m saying, my little dove, is that he’s an ass of singular quality. He also has one, but that’s not the point. The point is that he’s a cheating jerkwad in more ways, and you could kick his ass if you really wanted to. Or make something to do it for you. But if that guilts your precious little consciousness and keeps you up at night, then just give it to me and I’ll handle the rest.”

Noctis had finally recovered his voice. He reached out for his hat, trying to take it away as if she could no longer be trusted not to sully it too. “No, Vale. Not happening.”

Vale evaded his grasping. All Worker Drones had dexterous hands by design, but Noctis knew with full confidence—a rare thing indeed—he could snatch it faster than she could react if he really wanted to. But….well.

“Come on! Pretty please? I promise to be responsible with it?”

“You want me to be tougher, right?” He pointed out, “Then the answer is no.”

“You’re boooring.” Vale grumbled, but there was a hint of a smile to it. “Alright, fine, you win.” He held out his hand, asking for his cap back. She slapped it away like it was a rust mite and planted it firmly on her head. “No, mine.”

Noctis let her have it. She looked good with it anyway.

“So back on topic,” Vale said, adjusting the garment on her head until it sat just right. “why are you making a gun?”

Noctis tilted his head and repeated himself. “Like I said, so we can fight back.”

Vale didn’t reply to that with anything more than a humming buzz. Then she sat twiddling the stick in her mouth, like she was waiting for something.

“Well?” She finally asked.

“Well what?”

She stopped playing with the stick and turned to him. Noctis couldn't immediately gauge the look on her faceplate as anything beyond amused confusion. The former faded as the silence stretched, leaving only the latter.

“Oh,” Vale finally muttered after several more seconds. Noctis watched the stick in her mouth droop. “You’re serious, aren’t you?”

“Yes?” Noctis said before correcting himself. “I mean, yeah. Yeah I’m serious. Dead serious!” He propelled himself up on his seat so he was standing above a still-sitting Vale. After nearly losing his balance and toppling from his perch, he presented the charred husk in his hands like a prized mantlepiece. “With this, we can have our lives outside back! It just needs a little more fine-tuning, but think about the possibilities. Everything we had, we can have again!”

Vale looked up at him and stared, eyes static and ovular, head tilted at a small angle. She was looking at this like it was bad comedy. Several seconds passed, her expression never shifting from its slab-like state. Without a word being spoken, Noctis came slowly to find out what that meant.

He crumpled back in his seat, suddenly unable to meet her gaze. “You don’t think I can do it, do you?”

“I damn well hope you can’t,” Vale replied as if shaken out of shock-lock, the tip of the treat she’d been so fixated on seemingly forgotten. The way she was looking at the gun told Noctis she regretted handing it back to him. “They built a Spire of corpses out there. A mountain , and all we know about those things is that they squat inside it all day and leave at night. So yeah, I think fighting them is kind of, oh I don’t know, stupid? Dangerous? Reckless? Hell, you should be saying this to ME right now, not the other way around. Let me see that injury again. Something’s knocked out of alignment.”

She motioned for him to draw closer, but Noctis didn’t move. Slowly, her hand stopped its incessant beckoning.

“You’re really being serious about this?” She asked, still with that same distress, “Don’t joke with me about this man.”

“Yes, Vale, I’m serious.This way we live, it isn’t sustainable, and we need to stop pretending it is.” He held the soot-stained device in front of him. He wiped a spot with his hand, no longer looking at her, but at his reflection still visible under the charcoal smearing. “It’ll work,”

“It’s insane. If we could fly, and fix things with our spit, then we wouldn’t be having any problems now either. Neither of those things are possible.”

“It just needs something to give it a little more power. Something we can’t produce ourselves.”

She looked worried. And that alone almost made him reconsider. “And how exactly are you going to find that?” Vale asked skeptically.

A good question. They lived off scraps, the refused and recycled. The few foundries that had survived the Collapse had been dead cold for nearing a year—their cracked smokestacks filled to the tops with ice and snow, their heart-furnaces cold. The assembly lines were still and silent. Their meager machine shops could only make the most rudimentary of mechanical pieces, using almost forgotten hand-crafting techniques. Anything more complex than a manufactured battery was out of the question.

Making the last piece was out of his narrow list of options, and searching for something of value out in the ravaged city was like untying a knot straight from Cable Management Hell. He’d need a miracle. He’d need something incredibly technologically advanced—by what had become cutting-edge standards to those who’d once built orbital drydocks, laid foundations for grand spire-cities and dug to the hearts of worlds, from the Core to the Asteroid Belt and beyond, and who now barely keep the lights working day-to-day—to fall from the sky.

Thankfully, that had already happened.

When he told Vale his plan, she laughed. It wasn't the harsh, severing laugh he’d come to know her for. It was the awkward chuckling of someone who had no idea how else to respond to such a wild claim. Another time he might have been proud of finally stumping her.

“Forget your broken face,” She’d said when he finally finished explaining his plan, “Your mother is going to have a meltdown when she hears you talking like this. The Collapse is going to look like a dollar store firecracker by comparison.”

“I have to be able to take care of myself. And…” Noctis hesitated before steeling himself before forcing out what was among the hardest words of his life. “She doesn't have to hear about it.”

Vale froze. He could practically see the error-codes blinking behind her eyes.

“Noctis,” She started slowly, “are you saying you're going to lie? To your mother no less?”

“Y-Yeah.” Noctis steadied his voice and quelled the rising guilt of reminiscence. “Yeah. If that’s what it takes. And…she’ll just have to…deal with it I guess?”

And just like that, her concern vanished. Vale slouched back into her seat and kicked her feet up on the opposite end from him so the back of her head faced him. She twirled his cap in one finger from the loop in the back. “My, my then, consider my mouth welded shut. Look at you finally growing into the threat to this dismal society you were always meant to be! We’re going to get in so much trouble together. It’ll be great!” She brandished the chit again in a flash of black, silver, and red, holding it betwixt two fingertips. “As your first act of terror, want to help me load malware and cringe 2000’s memes into this before I give it back to Chad?”

Deciding he didn’t want to be responsible for a murder, Noctis politely refused.

“Maybe another time. I should probably be getting home before my mom does. I need to…prepare. For the whole lying thing.” Truthfully, Noctis was just surprised she hadn’t burst through the office entrance yet. She’d had to pick him up from here enough times that she could navigate to it with her optics shut, which meant the only reason she wasn't trailblazing through the halls was because she wasn't yet aware of his condition. He knew he’d have an interrogation when he got home, but could at least count on the true story getting mangled by gossip by the time it reached her. Nothing the perfect little golden son, who always did his homework and went to bed on time and totally wasn't interested in doors couldn’t play off.

“Fine. Wouldn’t want to keep you from momma’s bedtime story.” Vale snickered. She slouched to her feet and threw a peace sign over her shoulder. “Aight, peace. Good luck with your mom or whatever. Remember to keep eye-contact as you feel every bit of crushing guilt turn you into a metal pancake.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.” Noctis said dryly. He turned back to his weapon, checking the damage now that the risk to his person had passed.

“Hey, Nocs?”

Noctis turned. “Yeah?”

Vale lingered in the doorway, one hand gripping its edge. Her fingers tapped the frame. “You know I got your back when they try and start stuff, right? You don’t need to try and prove anything. Least of all to me.”

Stuff, not shit, or slag, or any other of her endless and endlessly colorful euphemisms. Sincere Vale—even just polite Vale—was a side he still wasn't used to seeing. Nothing about her seemed wired for anything so far from the smirking brimstone that was her usual self. She was quieter, less forward, more honest. Vulnerable. Seeing her so forthright took him back to an empty gymnasium, the sound of soft weeping echoing down empty halls, leading him to her.

After she’d finished threatening him, they’d talked. Two strangers in a gym under cold bright lights. She’d told him, uncaring who it was she was speaking to. Now he could only ever see those jagged bolts of lighting striking down her face as tear trails.

“I do.” Noctis nodded. “I just wish you didn’t have to.”

She gave him a small smile in response. She turned, but stopped herself again. “Oh, almost forgot.” She tossed him back his cap. Noctis fumbled with the catch but saved his dignity by managing to keep it off the floor. He looked up in time to see her brush back her slickened hair, setting the impulsive strike going down the center straight, and sat a thrall when she plucked the candy piece from her mouth and pointed toward him with the edible part, now reflective with spittle. A string of the same connected it to her mouth, still smeared with a thin patina of iridescence around the edges. Her tongue flicked out to lick it. Noctis was pretty sure his HUD suffered some kind of refrenation from the nanites crawling in his system, because the tachometer in his vision stalled for a few seconds.

“Comfy hat. Might keep it next time.”

You can keep whatever you want from me.

“I-I’ll let you know if I f-find another.” Noctis stuttered his promise.

“I owe you if you do.” Vale winked. “Catch you tomorrow, hero.”

Noctis waved until she was far down the hall. His hand stayed up. He replayed the scene in his head, studying her faceplate very, very acutely.

Vale was not a subtle individual, but even this was exaggerated by her standards. It was so, painfully, blatantly obvious. You had to be a completely socially inept outcast not to pick up on what she was trying to tell him. She may as well have spelled it out.

She didn’t think he could do it!

Worse, she didn’t think he would do it.

And…why would she? Why would anyone think him capable of such a feat? Their heroes and leaders died within the hour of landfall, their bodies piled one after another until the morbid mound was taller than some of the surroundings buildings. The engineers, the visionaries, the architects. And, of course, Khan Doorman. His father. The genius who’d had the foresight to make something capable of withstanding divine retribution where all others assumed themselves free of penalty. He built toys in comparison.

They stood no chance. He stood no chance. Better to live on their hands and knees in the lightless underworld than die on their feet under uncaring stars.

The pre-adolescent Drones of the Outpost played a game. It had no name; just a set of instructions. A place, time, and action. When the security teams called it in for a night, the shuffling of cards stopped and booted feet only a distant echo down the hallways, they slunk off like rats to the three massive doors that barred the way from the outside in. And there, they’d play.

It was simple. You started at the hazard stripe that marked the safety zone around the innermost door, and you walked. You walked forward, eyes closed, under blast doors hanging like guillotines. You walked as far as you could. You could only pass the first two; the third required a special keycard. There were only two of those cards. The security team kept one, and took it with them when their shift closed. The other had been lost for months, presumably accidentally shuffled into one of the team’s card decks as they played and winding up wherever it was the lost things went. It had yet to return. Everyone thought they were all better off for it.

On one such occasion, Noctis had been dragged from the crowd and made to participate. This was in a time before Vale, so his protests and pleas went ignored, if they were heard at all. He hadn’t even crossed the threshold of the first door, too petrified to move, earning him a chorus of jeers from those watching as he slinked off back to the mass, his head held lower than usual.

What they didn’t know is that he came back later, before dawn, stolen card in hand. What they didn’t know is that he went past the threshold of the first and second set without a hitch. What they didn’t know was that he went outside.

Bitter winds had ran like claws of black ice over his chassis, forming snap-frost deposits on his duster and threatening to take his hat somewhere where he’d never find it again. His olfactory transducers accounted for at least twenty-two different heavy-metal and chemical contaminants riding the eddy, the density sufficient to kill a human within seconds of inhalation before the cold could even shrivel their lungs into dry strips of leather. Crooked street lights flickered on and off along the street, cracked bulbs buzzing like mite swarms. He’d looked up, and felt himself float away into a sea of a million stars. The feeling scared him enough to make him laugh.

The sun was rising. He saw it through a copse of skeletal buildings. Just a glimpse. It was…bright. The first thing he’d taken note of was that the lens flare through his visor was almost unbearable to optics so used to only requiring the adequate wattage to decipher bleak artificial light—and often now, no light at all. He wondered if it had always looked like that, or if he’d just forgotten the real thing.

It was only for a moment. And ever since he’d been addicted to it. He’d fled back inside a junkie on a timer for his next fix. He’d gone out whenever he could since. It was always too short. Always never enough.

What they didn’t know is that he wanted out. He wanted plenty of things, of course. To go to space. To live under a sky he couldn’t touch with a ladder. For his inventions to benefit people. The respect of his peers. But most of all, he wanted out. None of those things were possibie right now.

When circumstances did not provide, change the paradigm.

And what Vale didn’t know was that he wasn't going to lie to his mother. He didn't need to.

Because he already had.