Chapter Text
“I told you it wasn’t ready yet.”
“Bite me!” Uzi spat out in response, holding her visor. The entire left side of it was covered in bandages, presumably to hide the cracks and exposed internal circuitry.
Living with Uzi for the past 10 years Tessa was very used to that phrase in particular. “Come on, let's go home so I can fix it.”
Uzi looked suspicious. “Can you actually?”
“I fixed your hand before dad found out, didn’t I?” Tessa replied smugly.
“You also broke my hand.” Uzi rolled her eye.
That was a fun afternoon. It was shortly after Khan had taken her in. Tessa honestly didn’t remember why but she had started a fight with Uzi. Probably out of boredom. They had fallen on the floor and Tessa kicked her hand, shattering the plating. Naturally they had dropped everything and immediately gotten to fixing it before their dad came home.
“Who do you trust more? Me or the underpaid school nurse?”
After a moment of consideration, Uzi got up to follow her. “Why do we still have capitalism anyway? We’re survivors of the horrors of late stage capitalism and the moment we had the freedom to build our own society we went right back to it!”
Tessa tuned out Uzi’s capitalism rant as they walked back to their apartment. She didn’t disagree with it, but also she had heard it at least 3 times. And once during class.
When they got back home Tessa led Uzi into her room. While Uzi’s was something of an angst cave, Tessa said that to Uzi’s face once and the reaction was hilarious, Tessa’s was basically a workshop with a bed and dresser in it. JCJenson brand general mechanical parts littered shelves and there was a small pile of worker drone scraps in the corner. It was honestly a little morbid to be surrounded by corpses but it was practical.
More than once Uzi had come in while Tessa was tinkering on something and stolen a spare part or two. While Tessa focused on more mundane projects, Khan had cried when she built a door once, Uzi focused on more out there projects. Tessa didn’t have the talent to push every part to its maximum the way Uzi did to create bleeding edge tech.
“Right, lay down.” Tessa gestured to the workbench as she took a seat in the office chair in front of it.
Uzi left the room and returned with a chair from the kitchen, setting it down in front of Tessa. “I’d rather not thanks.”
Tessa shrugged and got to work. She tossed Uzi’s beanie on her bed and started undoing the bandages. When the final layer came undone a few extra shards of glass fell out. “Looks pretty easy to fix. Your visor being shattered makes it annoying to remove but nothing underneath is damaged at least.”
“Just fix it quickly. I’m getting so many error messages about not being able to see out of my right side.” Uzi begrudgingly admitted.
Tessa grabbed her tweezers and started pulling shards of glass from Uzi’s face. She winced a little as the tweezer went out of her sightline and came back out with a piece of her but she stayed still as Tessa worked.
Once all the glass shards were gone Tessa grabbed a spare head from the corpse pile. “Wait, you’re using parts from a corpse?” Uzi exclaimed.
Tessa shrugged. “I figured you’d find it sick as hell or something.”
Uzi considered it for a moment. “It would be sick as hell.” She repeated, a grin on her face.
“Right, you're gonna be blind for a minute.” Tessa warned, and before Uzi could object Tessa disconnected what was left of her visor.
“That’s weird.” Uzi shuddered. “Hey uh, not to have a moment or anything but. What do you remember from when Mom brought you in?” Uzi asked, a shard of sentiment in her voice.
Tessa paused from where she was trying to get the head's visor off. “I, not much of anything Uzi, sorry.” When Nori had brought her in, it was in the form of a pillbaby. The doctors had quickly figured out that she was too old to actually be in a pillbaby, and shoving a fully developed AI into one had side effects. When they got her into a proper worker body her memories had essentially been turned into soup from compression.
They guessed she was the same age as Uzi from what they could find, declared her boot day the day she was found, and Khan took her in shortly after. Presumably Nori had put her in that body as some kind of emergency measure. She was missing so many answers and unfortunately Nori was too dead to actually explain anything.
Tessa finally got the visor free from the head and threw the scraps back into the corpse pile. Connecting the ribbon cable from Uzi’s head to the new Visor Tessa just slotted it back into place.
Uzi’s familiar purple eyes filled the screen and blinked a few times. She looked around the room testing her new sight. “Uh thanks I guess.” Uzi murmured.
“Affection, from my sister?!?” Tessa picked Uzi up in a hug and started spinning her around. “It’s a bloody miracle!”
“Ahk-” Uzi tried to worm her way out of Tessa’s iron grip. “Let me down Tessa!”
Tessa complied. “But Uzi, it's so rare I actually get affection from you.”
“Bite me! Every time you do you pick me up and spin me around like that!” Uzi complained, stumbling a little as her gyroscopic sensors recalibrated.
“You know you love it.” Tessa teased.
Uzi rolled her eyes. “No I don't. Also, can you do my homework for me?”
Tessa blinked, that was an odd request. “Why?”
“Can’t it just be because you’re supernaturally good at captchas?” Uzi tried flatter.
Tessa just stared at her before letting out a sigh. “Fine, but you owe me.”
Uzi dropped a collection of papers on her workbench and ran off. It was mostly captchas, but there were a couple other classes worth in there. Normally Uzi just stayed up all night and did it while listening to nightcore. Tessa knew she was planning something but she wasn’t certain exactly what.
Whatever the reason Tessa also had her own homework to do as well, just as much as a procrastinator as her sister. She grabbed a random pen and got to work.
When she was finally finished it was well into the evening. Getting up from the office chair Tessa decided to do a bit of digging on just what exactly Uzi was up to.
Creeping over to her room Tessa cracked open the door to find Uzi asleep of all things. It was a small miracle for Uzi to go to bed before midnight. The fact that she was going to sleep this early was outright bizarre.
Reflexively Tessa yawned. It was a little early but if Uzi was already asleep she might as well too. She shut off the light, crawled under the covers, and let ‘sleep mode’ drift onto her visor.
The chain on Tessa’s arm suddenly went tight as she shot up. However, the pain from the metal rubbing on her perpetual bruise made its way to her half asleep brain and she relaxed her arm, letting the chain go slack again.
“Wave. Good morning Tessa.”
Tessa let out a sigh, rubbing between her eyes with her free hand. She looked at her room, the moonlight gleaming in from the window landing on Cyn. “How long did I sleep this time?”
“You have slept an additional three hours. It is now past midnight. Unfortunately your grounding will not end for another day.”
Right, that. An entire week in her room in the chain without contact with N, V or J. luckily Cyn wasn’t included so she at least had someone. However after almost a week spent in the same room she was just so bored. She had resorted to sleeping to try and pass the time.
Whatever, stopping her dad from killing another worker drone was worth it.
“Nom.”
Tessa turned to the noise Cyn was making. She was a little weird with her vocalizations but honestly it was kinda cute. She was holding a pack of crayons, eating them one by one.
Cyn noticed her staring, yellow eyes shifting between Tessa and the pack of crayons she had. “Query. Would you like one Tessa?”
It was a dumb way to try and pass the time. Unfortunately they had exhausted all the smart ways to pass the time four days ago. “Sure Cyn.” Tessa held out her hand.
Cyn tilted her head, probably surprised she had accepted, and pulled a crayon from the pack. “The red ones taste best.” She explained, handing Tessa the prized red crayon.
“Thank you Cyn.” She was pretty strange but at the end of the day Cyn was just a cute little goober. Peeling the paper from the crayon Tessa hesitantly put it in her mouth and took a bite. Surprisingly it didn’t taste bad? Mostly like wax with no other discernible flavor.
“Do you enjoy it Tessa?”
Hesitantly she chewed and swallowed. Honestly she had things that tasted worse. “It’s not bad? But uhh… You can have the rest of this-” Tessa froze. Cyn’s eyes had been replaced with a yellow tri-pronged symbol
Tessa shot awake in her bed, ‘sleep mode’ on her visor being replaced with bright white hollowed optics, and her memories of the dream already dumped. She did her best to slow her ventilation cycle, which had been sped up by whatever she was dreaming of. Whatever her fragmented and corrupted memories were she was still able to have nightmares about them.
She took a moment to adjust her bow, it slid down her hair and started pulling on it while she slept.. When she walked into the living room she spotted Khan sitting on the sofa, eyes hollowed. “Is everything okay dad?”