Chapter Text
J chose the wrong team.
She supposed she’d always known, deep down, and yet her mind still played out its twisted delusion.
She’d thought, prayed, that Tessa was still in there, was still salvageable.
But of course she wasn’t. Of course all that was left was Cyn. That little shit.
The drone had always disturbed J, even in the distant, fuzzy memories she had. Always seeming to lurk in the shadows, watching.
And yet she still worked with her. J was supposed to be the smart one of her squad, but look at her.
She was the moron bot.
She was the one with programming that was slowly falling apart, now that the Absolute Solver was gone.
She was the one with a cracked visor, half blind.
She was the one with a severed, uneven wig.
J growled, her hand shifting into a blade. She grabbed her remaining pigtail and sliced it clean off with one slash before she could think twice.
She held it in front of her, watching the synthetic hair wave in the wind, letting it slowly drift away, one strand at a time.
J shoved down the tears threatening to display on her visor, and turned back to the ship.
She was going to fix it. She was going to leave this robo-god forsaken planet, so everyone else could have their happy endings while J slowly shut down in the cold void of space, away from all the lives she’d ruined.
She cast a glance up at the spire of corpses in front of her. She still knew all the numbers, from when she’d write up monthly reports.
She’d written her last one only three weeks ago, she remembered. She remembered rolling her eyes at the mockingly low numbers of N, pouting in jealousy at the large sum of V’s merciless slaughters.
J was broken out of her fond memories of paperwork and numbers by a scuttling sound.
She glanced around until she spotted a core scrambling and stumbling toward a worker’s corpse. The body had a ripped open chest but otherwise was intact.
Huh. The body also had a dark gray dress and a wavy black wig, almost like Tes-
J shook herself out of her thoughts, slowly stepping forward as the core stumbled again.
She scooped it up, its single white eye whipping up to stare at her. It began wiggling, but J kept a tight grip.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, I either am or look like the one who killed you. But look, I’m trying to be better, okay? Or at least, as good as I can be before I overheat and finally die.” J huffed, setting the core on the corpse’s chest. She watched it click into place, then the [FATAL ERROR] be replaced by a loading circle on the visor. The wound didn’t seem to be significant- just a shatter in the plexiglass guarding a drone’s core and a few exposed wires. Clearly, someone had killed this drone for a quick snack fairly recently.
She turned to leave, crouching and extending her wings. But the worker rebooted faster than she thought it would, and croaked out a weak, “wait… don’t go.”
J froze. She knew that voice. The way it seemed to run like honey through J’s audio receptors, the accent adding a unique ring to every word.
She turned slowly, gazing into the worker’s pure, white eyes.
“…Tessa?”