The Living condition

4

You're young again, sitting at the foot of your bed, listening to your father's words. You're hardly old enough to think for yourself, to form memories that are meaningful or mean anything at all. You don't know what he's saying. But he is angry. With you, maybe. Or with your mother. Or with his job, or the friends at work. You do not know. But he is angry. And he stares at you, little baby-fat covered you with little fingers that once would grip his thumb in your entire first, with Ire. An Ire you knew somewhere within you that you hadn't earned. But you were taught never to talk back. You were young, and you knew this. To talk back is to be disrespectful. To talk back would be to be a bad child.

You're not a bad child.

You're just A child.

—

You're not sure when you fell asleep in the landing pod within the corpse spire. Or how, with the cold and the only companion being the one that has decided she definitely does not like your presence. But you wake up somber, curled in the seat with your knees pressed against metal, sideways in the chair.

V sits back as you raise your head, glancing in a different direction as she glowers at you from what she considered to be a distance. You'd hardly call four feet a distance, but to each their own. You rub the sleep from your eyes, finding your face a little more puffy to the touch than it was when you'd entered the landing pod that evening. You find yourself glad that the drones only saw you as a mass of void with eyes.

"Sorry." You don't know what you're apologizing for. Your natural equilibrium was thrown off by cryo-sleep, let alone suddenly getting out of the house in the evenings with Uzi to spend time goofing off with two 'Murder-drones'. "I don't know why that happened," you sigh, yawning. You pick your head up a little more to look at V, and she only stares.

It happens faster than you can process it, but your expression stills at the feeling of cool metal against your forehead. V's eyes hollow and she grins widely as she leaned forward in her chair, pressing the metal of her exchanged gun-hand to the base of your forehead.

"I could blow your head off right here," She remarked with a wide grin "And they would hardly blink. What loss would it be?"

"What good would it do?" You question, not moving from the spot, less you set her off to be trigger happy.

For a moment, her expression stills, and she lifts her gun away from your head with a scoff , rolling her eyes as she sat back in her seat. "You can't even pretend to be scared? You're no fun at all."

"You think I'm not scared?" you questioned in a voice smaller than you'd tried for. But, at the least, it gets the drone's gaze back on the void of your face "I've never had a gun to my head. I am scared. I just don't think you'll do it."

"So you're saying that–" V bristles as you interrupted her.

"I don't think even you would be able to resist guilt in the face of sad dog-eyes enough to fill a pound." You sigh, sitting back in your chair as you glanced over your shoulder. The door was closed, keeping in the heat that V herself was generating by being operational. That's probably how you fell asleep. You'd felt Warmth.

"...." V doesn't answer your statement, and you take it as admission. Someone who was more awake and prepared, or perhaps someone as crazy as Uzi would push the line and tease the drone for silent admittance.

You instead, change the subject. "Where are they?"

"Testing out the sad purple one's new powers," V grunts "Put me in charge of you." she stares hard at the void of your head, and you laugh, bemused "Something funny?"