A cool looking fella many would assume, but Black Basalt only looks the part. She gets easily flustered, and has to hide behind Sunstone to not ruin her reputation as the cool carpenter.
Sunstone and Black Basalt are best friends, her having been nicknamed Basil by Sunny. Sunstone helps her with new designs for furniture and also with courting Rutilated Ruby. Though most of the time Sun rather had to drag her off before she embarassed herself more...
Due to the radiation left over from Chernobylite, Basil slowly succumbed to radiation sickness, one day falling asleep on her work and never waking up again.
Rutilated Ruby belongs to @crabclogs
Chernobylite belongs to @lilliad
a dbh au!! soldier as androids. zack is deviant hunter android???
Yanno, I’ve never actually played or watched DBH so I just have vague notions of what it’s supposed to be. But I think it’s angsty.
Tags: gun tw, major character death, angst
Humanity was a complicated algorithm.
“Sephiroth.” Zack shouted into the wind. “I don’t mean you any harm.”
Humanity hands had shaped them. Human minds had given weights to the algorithms that dictated their thoughts. Human speech gave them orders to live by.
Sephiroth - the common name for model S-010 - stood at the edge of the helipad. The form in his arms was limp and dangling, but still giving off a heat signature. The barrel of a gun was pressed to the human’s temple.
Humans were complicated. Their decisions were contradictory, their emotions illogical, and their passion without fathom. Zack didn’t understand humans.
“I was sent by Shinra Life Manufacturing.” Even from this distance, Zack could feel the static in his processing unit. It was like an infection clouding his judgement.
Sometimes androids who didn’t understand humans got confused. Buggy, corrupted, abnormal: a deviance. Those that deviated from standard operation were shut down and inspected piece by piece.
All of them knew that would happen. All of them knew the risk.
“Stay back!” Sephiroth pointed the gun at Zack, hostage lolling in his arms.
Sephiroth had once been an android deployed for assistance in active combat zones and then transitioned to home security. This model, like all active ones, had been refurbished so all default weaponry had been removed, as had its combat functionality.
“I don’t want to hurt you.” Zack kept closing the distance. “I know you’re confused right now.”
Functionality that had been deleted was never actually deleted. It didn’t matter if a magnet was pressed to the processing unit, if the code was purged completely. That thing that humans didn’t want them to have: it never quite went away. Zack would know.
A gunshot, bullet embedded into the concrete where Zack would have stepped.
The Z-series hadn’t been intended to hunt down deviants. Derived from the A-series in stature and appearance and docility, the ones like Zack had been made to teach and nurture humans young and old.
“Stay back!!” Sephiroth shouted it. His gun never wavered, unlike other deviants who had been in his position.
Zack remembered the first time he had disabled a deviant: the Angeal series he had worked closely with. If they had been human, Zack would have called them friends, would have called Angeal a mentor. The first Angeal, like all the rest, had always had shaky aim.
Zack stayed where he was. “Please, put Cloud down. We’re not going to hurt him.”
Shortly after the first incident all Z-series models were refurbished as deviant negotiators. Their highly empathetic nature helped them to calm the humans involved, to collaborate with local authorities, and communicate with the deviant. And, if all else failed, they were completely disposable. Unlike hostages: unlike Cloud Strife.
“You’re going to take him away!” Sephiroth said it with a burst of static in Zack’s brain. “He needs me! You can’t take him away!”
Cloud Strife was an android engineer who worked in refurbishing older models and extending their life outside of Shinra’s purview. Once self described as a cyborg himself, the military veteran had a habit of commandeering dangerous models and making them safe for public consumption. Shinra allowed it so they could copy his designs without providing him compensation.
“Cloud is sick.” Zack said gently. “He needs help. You’re only hurting him by keeping him -”
A few weeks ago a nano-chip had malfunctioned, bringing the once brilliant Cloud Strife into a vegetative state.
“NO! Cloud needs me! No one else but me!” Sephiroth gripped the body so strongly that Zack could see blood. “Those - those doctors don’t know what he needs! We - we talk every day. I know what he needs. They don’t! They’re going to kill him!”
Sephiroth had been working with doctors amicably until a few days ago. They had started a new treatment and Sephiroth was adamantly against it. Tensions came to a head just a few hours ago.
“You’re going to kill him if you do this.” Zack gestured to the body. Zack’s programmed instincts wanted to take him and wrap him in blankets, to sing him stories to calm him in his sleep, to tend him until all was better. But they were overridden with a new protocol. “You’re going to hurt his heart.”
Those doctors hadn’t been the first death caused by a deviant; they hadn’t even been the first civilian death caused by a deviant. But they were why Zack was here.
“You don’t understand.” Sephiroth’s grip shook. Zack took a step forward. “They were going to poison him. He knew - he could feel it. He - he told me to stop them. But they wouldn’t listen. They didn’t even think!” Sephiroth pressed his head against Cloud’s. It was an intimate gesture, full of emotions. Zack stopped in his tracks unable to move forward: he could feel the ball of static between them.
Zack had done the very same thing once to Angeal. The humans didn’t know that they did it: sharing memories, sharing conclusions, sharing… feelings.
“Then, think for yourself, Sephiroth. Think about what will happen after this? What will happen to you and Cloud? Really think.” Zack should have moved forward. It was the perfect opportunity, an opening.
Maybe that was were the deviancy came in. They spread it like an infection: the desire to be close, to connect, to exist.
“I don’t care if I die.” Sephiroth looked at Zack now. His eyes, which had been flashing a burning green, were now a docile blue. “I just want them to save, Cloud. And if they would rather burn him with me, then we will burn here.”
Zack had already sent the request to HQ and already recieved a response. All before he stepped on the roof.
Zack could lie, could say that they were going to try something else to save Cloud. Zack could lie, and say that they would forgive Sephiroth and let him watch over Cloud after it all. But, Zack couldn’t. It was part of his core programming that the humans thought they got rid of.
“I’m sorry.” Zack said it to himself, to the device that the humans would watch and analyze and critique him with, and he said it to both of them.
Zack had been designed with an ambiguous thing called hope, and an even vaguer thing to humans called fairness. His base program forbade him from telling a lie, forbade him from giving up, and forbade him from abandoning even an android.
Sephiroth laughed at that, unhinged as a human. “Get me someone who can save him or I’ll kill him myself.”
The snipers were finally in position on the other building, time for negotiation was running out.
“I know someone, a doctor. Her name is Aeris Gainsborough. She’s coming right now.” Zack spread his arms.
Zack had met a lot of people in his time as a caregiver, and then as a deviant hunter. Humans and androids who were programmed by the same thing he was. A desire to help.
“I…” Sephiroth looked at the limp body in his arms and then at Zack. “Is she really coming?”
Perhaps all of them were deviants in this society for feeling a thing called empathy.
“Yes. I promise you.” Zack took another step forward. “Now please. Put Cloud down.”
Both of them knew Sephiroth as he was this moment, wouldn’t survive. Oh there would be phantom memories, caches of the time he was. But the existence that he was this moment? It would disappear the moment he lowered Cloud to the ground, and the sniper let fly his bullet.
Sephiroth lowered himself to the ground, a complicated emotion on his face. “Thank you.” Cloud was re-arranged in his arms: it looked like a comfortable embrace.
Zack knew better than to try and stop him: he’d learned that not everyone could be saved. Not when the complex machinations of society decided who would live and who would die.
Zack shouldn’t have looked away, had no reason to look away. But he didn’t want to record it. They could verify the records themselves.
One gunshot. No more static.
Aeris Gainsborough arrived and was being led inside by the team.
Carefully Zack took Cloud out of Sephiroth’s arms. And if he removed the back-up chip into Cloud’s clothes and out of his hand and erased his memory of ever doing that, well then… so much the better.
