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“I found you…!” you exclaim softly, your body and breath exerted past your human limitations. The same cannot be said of the object of your attention. Nix hears you perfectly (as he is programmed to!) and turns to look at you across the rubble.
Your body shakes. Your lips ache from how wide the smile on your face is. Those heterochromatic eyes you’ve painstakingly maintained (the color, the shape, why did the most perfect red eye have to be so DIFFICULT—) blink at you.
“...Doctor,” Nix mutters. Your grin closes and turns over. That’s no good; Nix was never programmed to sound anything but clear and precise. This muttering was too low, too garbled, too flawed.
“Oh come on, Nixxy,” you chide him. Well, adjusting his voicebox will be a simple fix. “We’re not at the lab! You can call me Eli~” Please please please—
“...That name hasn’t been entered into my database,” Nix replies slowly, steadily, robotically. Perfectly. Hmm, maybe the muttering sound was your own human error?
“Oh darn, did the others mess with you? I could’ve sworn I coded that into you… No matter! I can give you a proper check-up back at the lab!”
“The lab? Sir?” The address is wrong—too formal, too sudden. Tacked on too late—too sloppy. That’s not how you’ve made him.
…Was it them? Those rotten escapees?
Those ungrateful subjects that wouldn’t, couldn’t, act nice while under your care?
They must’ve been the ones behind this.
They messed with your grandfather’s creation, they destroyed your Nixxy, they are trying to remake and ruin something that belongs to YOU—!
A manic grin appears on your face. That’s right. Nix belongs to you. You and yours can go back home now. Yes, you still haven’t found your grandfather, but it’s okay. You must prioritize getting his creation back.
“Oh, I definitely didn’t code that stuffiness into you! And the others don’t really care for that sort of thing… Oh, my poor Nixxy, I knew I should’ve kept you away from that alien.” Nix startles.
Your lips purse together. “Yes, that’s what’s been off. Your mannerisms are too loose and uncalculated—” too human “—and your speech is the same.” Too wrong. “Have they been giving you regular check-ups? I bet they haven’t. How’s your power storage? Being so close to too many crystals might’ve messed with you. Your parts? Tell me if your eyes are hurting—”
“Everything is fine,” Nix cuts you off. You freeze.
He…cut you off.
He cut you off.
He’s not listening to you.
He’s looking at you coldly when before he’s only ever looked at you with distant eyes. And there is a difference because being distant doesn’t mean hate, it means tolerance, unlike being cold which means you’re not wanted, you’re not needed, you are NOTHING—
“You don’t mean that,” you insist. Those eyes you love continue to stare at you coldly. Your chest feels tight all of a sudden. “You don’t have to lie to me, Nixxy. I know I programmed you to ignore certain things, but you should still be honest if there’s a malfunction or error. I can fix you right up! You can trust me.”
Nix shakes his head. “I can’t, Doctor. You haven’t done anything to show me I can.”
Your hands clench into fists. What? What kind of garbage have those crystal-hoarders fed into your precious creation? You…
“I helped make you, Nix,” you say. You narrow your eyes as you watch him flinch, mechanical joints squealing softly at the too-quick movement. (They’re not even oiling his joints…) “I’m kinda like your uncle, you know~ Oh, or maybe your older brother! So be a good kid for me, okay?”
“Ah, but,” you say. Nix’s eyes shake in their sockets. (That’s a terrifyingly new thing. Is he okay?) “You know that saying about weddings? What is it… Something old, something new. Something borrowed… something blue.”
You nod to yourself. “You, made up of old parts, are new. Things borrowed… I guess you can say I’m borrowing you from Grandfather for now! And you’re blue! Hey, Nixxy.” You smile brilliantly. (Crazily.)
“Doesn’t that mean you’re mine?”
Nix is full-on shaking. (New. New and wrong.) You take a step closer. Still smiling, you coo, “So since you’re mine, we should go home together. You can help me with something, too. See, I accidentally opened up a space rift trying to find Grandfather, and it’s made a real mess of things for other people. I don’t care much about it, but with your crystal, you can help me clean this up.”
He backs a step and takes a deep breath. (Since when did he require oxygen?) He raises his cybernetic arm towards you. (Oh, how you’ve missed tracing his bright circuitry.) He makes a finger gun at you and the tip of his finger opens.
You suck in your own deep breath before you rage. This wasn’t there previously. You’ve never authorized Nix to have a hidden weapon like that. You’d have been there making it if so.
Someone else built it. Someone else touched Nix. Someone not you touched Nix and messed with him.
Who dares? Who dares touch and break what is yours and yours alone?
You’re working yourself up (That’s no good.) but you can’t calm down. Hyperventilating, you glare at the offending hand. Who dares to touch your belongings?
Nix’s intercom flashes a hot pink color at his ear. Another unauthorized mistake. It irritates you to no end that someone else has touched what is yours. But the color…
“Ah, was the zombie that’s messed with you?” you ask in sing-song, trying hard to keep your rage beneath you. “You could’ve told me if it was him, Nixxy. Come home with me and I can disinfect you, fix you up and make you whole again. I’ll wipe his influence clean from you.”
Nix continues to stare at you coldly. Your fists unclench as you throw your hands up in front of you—like a hug. This is the universal sign of surrender, isn’t it?
“Nixxy—”
“I’m not going with you.”
“You’re just saying thi—”
“Doctor, I am—”
“Don’t interrupt me!” you shriek. At your rationality’s end, you stride towards Nix. If commands won’t make him go home, then an old-fashioned shutdown and manhandling will.
Nix backs up more, keeping his gun-finger steady towards you. “Don’t make me shoot you, Doctor.”
“Why not?” you spit. “It wasn’t programmed in you to stop, was it? Or did that zombie do even more things to you that I haven’t figured out yet!?”
You’re getting closer. You can see the way Nix’s shoulders stay straight but his hands shake. How unsightly. You don’t know when you’ve started scowling, but your lips curl even further. (You’ve never wanted to show Nix such a bad expression.)
His hands stop shaking. Your hands start to reach out again.
“ELI!!”
Bang!
You hit the ground at the same time as the gun fires. A heavy weight presses down on you. Your vision swims.
You hear growling. Running footsteps. The rustle of clothes as your body moves without you controlling it. Your own heartbeat beats loudly in your ears. In your blurred vision, you see different shades of blue. Only the dark blue blot stays to let you focus on it.
“Eli? Eli!? Elias, look at me! Shit!” Warm hands grab your face. “Shit, Eli, breathe.”
It’s like you’re the machine now as you follow the command, greedily sucking in the dusty air as you teeter on the edge between rage and fear. The visual world slowly corrects itself. Your own hands come up to put themselves over the hands holding your face.
“...Caelen?” you rasp. “When did you…?”
“I just came to look for you since Liron is done ransacking the place,” the dog-man responds. The frown on his face is typical when discussing anything lawbreaking. It's expected. It’s normal.
Things are as they should be.
You take control of your erratic breathing, slowing back into a normal rhythm. “Is that so?” you ask. It’s rhetorical, so you don’t pay attention to Caelen’s voice as you take stock of the situation.
Nix is gone. He attacked you. Caelen saved you. Nix ran away. He’s gone. Caelen—
“What’s that?” you ask, cutting through Caelen’s story of whatever Liron’s ended up doing on top of stealing. Your eyes are entirely focused on the large dart sticking out of his shoulder.
“Oh, this? I think it’s a tranquilizer,” Caelen says while shrugging the impaled shoulder. “But don’t worry, it hit my vest, and it’s thick enough to stop the needle from going all the way through.”
“But it still hit you, didn’t it?” you ask. You’ve seen Caelen shrug his shoulders before, mostly when he asks you to watch him during his training. His movement just now was slower, not quite sluggish, but definitely noticeable. (You’d be nothing if you weren’t meticulous in everything you do.)
“Come on, let’s get back to the temple.” You push at his chest, careful to not jostle the laced dart. “I’ll run some tests on you to make sure it didn’t affect you. And some more tests to see just how potent it is and reveal exactly what it does.”
Tests can be controlled. Broken down into major and minor components. Understandable concepts. Static.
“Sure, Eli.”
And Caelen will follow your orders obediently.