Archive of Our Own ^beta

Pochi’s on the computer, typing, calculating, analyzing like he does every night while Nyoro sleeps. Huge winding chargers plug into his back, a ladder down the knobs of his artificial spine, linking him to the computer and the wall. Blinking, buzzing, recharging. They remind Pochi a bit of leashes winding back to a dog house; he’s considered looking into programming a “sleep” function for himself, so he can join Nyoro in the bed. It’s big enough for two, after all. They’ve been together for years — adults, in the world the Go-Getters Club saved. 

Still, Pochi gets a lot of good work done at night, when it feels like he’s the only creature awake, robotic, organic or otherwise. In the morning, Nyoro will brush a kiss against the side of his cold head, ruffling his hair with a slim brown hand. She’ll bring him coffee, though a robot like him doesn’t technically need to drink. It will smell like apple-cinnamon almond milk creamer, and taste warm as a processor overheating. He’ll tell her about his progress, and her eyes will go bright and proud, excited, running through the calculations. Thinking about their work together.

Maybe it’s lonely for Pochi, knowing he can only ever pretend to sleep… pretend to feel genuine rest, instead of his batteries winding gently down… as he holds Nyoro, lying curled next to her. But it’s certainly satisfying, knowing how she’ll light up seeing what he can do. If he had a tail, it would wag and wag just thinking about her waking up. About morning. 

Tonight, Pochi works, as usual, until Nyoro appears in the doorway of his office with a fluffy quilt Yuki gifted them wrapped around her shoulders. It’s too early for her, though: three-sixteen AM. Pochi’s internal clock fills in the number as soon as he reaches for it. 

Nyoro’s hair, streaked brown and cream and white in snakelike patterns, is braided down her back. Ruffled from sleep. She’s wearing her big black glasses, though she stumbled through the hallway in the mostly-dark, trailing her fingertips along the wall. Following the blinking lights of Pochi’s cords, his computer. 

“You look upset,” Pochi tells Nyoro in one of his softest, fondest voices. “What’s wrong?”

“I keep waking up,” Nyoro sighs. “Earlier, I thought… ‘What if one of us had actually died, during that pretend killing game when we were kids? What would we have done?’ And now…” 

And now she can’t sleep. Human bodies can be like that, sometimes. All Pochi ever has to do is make sure his chargers are latched in properly, curled around his artificial bones. Oh, and check that Chuko’s striped orange house cat didn’t chew any of the cords apart while visiting, again. 

“I’ve thought about things like that before,” Pochi offers. He knows from experience that camaraderie will help. But of course, also, he’d never lie. 

“Yeah? You have?”

“Yes.” Pochi considers. “While it was happening… the killing game… I thought I’d have to act fast, if anything terrible happened. I’d have to scoop whoever it was up and carry them to MAIK. Get them… uh. Get them put in a healing pod, like what he did for Vanilla.”

Nyoro nods, thinking. Frowning. “We would’ve given you a hard time about that.”

“Oh. Haha. I would’ve had a lot to answer for…” Pochi trails off. He imagines himself back then. Smaller, with skinny pale arms and a bowing head, hands clenched around the game console he was using to puppet Reycho. He imagines himself shambling into a room to find one of his friends’ skulls really, truly smashed open, looking like clumpy strawberry jam and oozing grey matter, dribbling over the floor. Looking like a broken toy. 

Pochi imagines someone falling off the undersea aquarium’s many precarious ledges… someone getting torn apart by shattered glass, the viewing walls spilling open on top of them… someone drowning, grey and waterlogged in his hands, colder even than his own robotic self.

Pochi shivers, and Nyoro slides over to him. She props herself in his lap, leaning into his shoulder. Yuki’s quilt folds over them both, though not quite over Pochi’s chargers. Don’t want to start any electrical fires, now.

“It was… it was all really dangerous,” Pochi says, slowly. “But we got each other through it alive.”

“We did.”

“And if we hadn’t… mm. Those healing pods are a considerable feat of engineering. And I would’ve been okay answering difficult questions.”

Nyoro chuckles, just a whisper. Then, “If one of us genuinely killed another…”

“We didn’t.”

“Yeah, no. We didn’t.”

Though down another road, maybe someone did. Pochi knows that well enough. Knows other worlds are possible, with someone dead and someone else a murderer, their club finally carved into pieces. Would it have been Aniki, leaning into brute strength and not realizing how permanent his crashing violence could be? Meant to be a punch, but it’s a cracked skull, you know. Would it have been Chuko, talking big, thinking she had to pull the rug out from beneath someone else to survive? And then watching them fall, horror slowly twisting her face into an awful mask, blood splatter mixed in with her cute freckles. 

In the end, pushed far enough, could it have been almost anyone? No, right? But if Nyoro had blood on her hands, now, wouldn’t Pochi help her cover up the crime? Bury a body, concoct an alibi? He would, he suspects. He knows, just like he knows what time it is without even really thinking about it. But that must mean something about him, too. 

Pochi allows himself to imagine other, gorier timelines for just a moment, and then files the thoughts away. That’s another nice thing, about a body like his. He can essentially click and drag a thought, and then dump it in a folder far away from the rest. Sometimes, he even marks that folder for permanent deletion and never looks back.   

Nyoro can’t do that, so Pochi murmurs to her. Changes the tab on his computer until they’re watching a show — a sitcom she likes, that she watched with her dad as a child. She relaxes in his arms. Falls asleep against his whirring chest. In the morning, she’ll ask about his work… their work… and her eyes will gleam again. It will be very much as if this night never happened, although of course it did. And after everything they faced, it will probably happen again.

This time, Pochi will leave Nyoro coiled up in his computer chair and go make their coffee himself. The neon flashing of his charger cords will flicker and fade, when he clicks them out of his back one by one.