VII

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When you woke, you woke up gasping for air—lungs you didn't possess trying so desperately to pull in oxygen. Your hands flew to your throat, scraping metal against metal, and despite it you did not notice that distinct lack of claws, or lack of multiple hands.

But you couldn't breathe.

No air.

No heartbeat.

No you, as you remembered.

For a moment, you were trapped in that raw edge of dissonance. A nightmare one wakes from, only to find out it's their reality.

You were back in the drone body.

But it wasn't yours.

The memories were always true. They hadn't ever led you astray so far, which made it undeniable. You had seen it, from above and outside: the glowing orb descending like some ghostly seed into an empty shell. That body—your body—hadn't been waiting for you. It had simply been available. A hollow husk dumped in the dirt, left to rot with the others.

You hadn't awoken.

You had taken it.

Possession, not resurrection.

You were the intruder.

Whatever that white-hot singularity was—whatever you were—it had latched onto the drone like a parasite seeking a home. You hadn't been born in that chassis. You had hijacked it. And now, with that understanding flooding your mind like a tide of acid, you felt sick. Not in the physical sense—your current form couldn't even process sickness—but on a level far deeper. Deeper than code. Deeper than light.

The body was wrong.

You were wrong inside it.

The HUD blinked awake on your visor, feeding diagnostics you could barely comprehend, your optics blurring from system lag and simply from not being used in so long. Error messages screamed across your vision—heat spike, power anomaly, core feedback. A thousand alerts for a thousand phantom symptoms of a soul out of place.

The metal limbs trembled beneath you. You stared down at your fingers, fingers that were never yours, digits meant for a worker's life, for cleaning floors and carrying trays and serving, not for creating light or mending the very weave of life. You tried to flex them and recoiled. They moved too quickly. Too easily. Like control was second nature. Like they always were yours, but you knew better.

You backed away from your own reflection, stumbling through all the drone parts, tripping over trash you couldn't feel. And even though you had no breath to lose, your frame heaved like it was begging for air.

You'd spent all this time trying to get back. All this time believing that returning to this shell would restore your normalcy. That it would make you whole. That it would make things right again.

And now—now—when you had finally succeeded, you could feel the sickness in your core.

Things had never been right with you.

It was never home.

You clawed at your chest, fingers scraping along the plating like you could dig through it, like you could reach inside and rip the light from your heart. That cursed, blinding singularity that had burned so bright in the memory. That wasn't a soul. That was you, raw and rootless. And now it was trapped—inside something too small, too unfit to contain what you had become.

All those memories... It made sense now why none of it felt familiar. It was because none of them belonged to you. They must've been from the body's original owner, before they had been disposed of. And you had just taken them all. Even if unwilling, even if not fully, they were still imprinted in your mind. They didn't belong there. They didn't belong to you.

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