My Friends Will Keep Me Honest || Saiouma

1 - New World City Streets

A/N: 

Sorry for the incredibly long first chapter (nearly 18k words!!), but I just couldn't find a better place to cut it off sooner. This was actually originally only meant to only be a 20k word oneshot at longest, but then I was shocked to find it had grown far past that only a few days into writing...

Anyway, I hope you enjoy!

. . .

One year. A lot could change in one year, that was a bit redundant to state, he knew that, but still, it shocked him sometimes to remember that it had only been a year since he had died. He was reckless, sure, and near-death experiences were more common in the world he lived in then, but it wasn't even the same world from a year ago.

One year ago he thought he was living in the past—albeit a strange, twisted past where one of his favourite pastimes could be bullying a robot named after 'hope'—but still the past. Ever since he died, he's been living in a world where he could imagine Kiibo would fit right in, instead of sticking out as much as he had in the game.

That didn't matter though, because Kiibo was long gone. When he had died, he had died for real.

He put the small, retro-style headphones that hung around his neck over his ears and fished his phone from his pocket to press play on the song that he had already had queued up. He stood still for a moment, until the song started playing, then he began walking.

It was impossible to tell what time of day it was from that deep in the alleyway with the towering buildings on both sides of him, but he was the type to enjoy the darkness and danger of a place like that anyway. Weak, distant lighting attempted to give him a slight guide through the place, but he didn't even need that.

To an outsider, the only sound was the beat playing faintly from his old headphones and the clinking of the zippers against the chains that decorated his worn, yet trusty boots. Each staggering step to the music's beat echoed through the long hall of stone and metal.

Trash littered the ground; old, faded posters hung and peeled from the abandoned walls; sometimes he'd come across the colours from spray-paint graffiti still lingering, a reminder of a long past time; and the discarded remains of robots and other machines alike were swept aside as if they were simply trash themselves.

A memory of Kiibo's voice rang in his mind. "Such robo-phobia! I am not just scrap metal and junk parts!" But in the world he lived in now, sometimes that's all that old creations like that robot really were to people.

But that was alright. Thanks to such treatment of robots, a scavenger like himself was able to be worth something to the group he found himself stuck with still even one year later.

Well, even without the bonus of having an inventor among their group who could actually benefit from scrap like that, he would still be a useful member. Even if the memories of the old world in his head were fake, he still had the skills retained from then that allowed him to live such a lifestyle so effortlessly.

Once a child of the streets, always a child of the streets, he supposed.

He filled the many pockets of his baggy pants with miscellaneous mechanical bits and pieces, having learned after many retrieval journeys like this which parts and doohickeys that Miu found useful. Then, he carried on down the long path, humming along to the song playing in his ears with his hands placed in the only pockets he had left mostly empty.

The next song played as he turned down the first corner that had begun to head downwards. Home, he thought with an amused smile. The closest thing I've ever had to that anyway. Still, he was quite the distance away, since the old, forgotten underground tunnels he was nearing weren't as straight-forward as the almost as forgotten alleys.