#dcfpusv25

The day’s end sees parents lingering in droves around the doors. Some caught up in polite conversation, soccer moms and wine aunts sharing a good laugh, heels clinking against the sticky floor. While others tap their feet with impatient expectation and arms crossed over their chest. They check their phones and apple watches as if watching the time will make it move any faster.

Not you, though. Your feet, your time, your expectations, it all travels at a devastating crawl, and you would sooner turn around and wash your hands of this whole ordeal before you willed it to go faster. The drag of your feet is purposeful. 

You disappear into the crowd, and one by one they disappear from you. Parents and uncles and older siblings in various states of mood, their faces brightening when it’s their turn to scoop a teetering tot into their arms and ask about their day, crayon drawings and popsicle stick crafts haphazardly glued together still clutched in tiny hands. Their blurry faces pay you no mind as you stand at the center of it all, choking on the consequences of your own actions. Their numbers dwindle by the minute.

You had eventually learned to tolerate the giggling shrieks of daycare children, having worked enough shifts that the noise fell into the backdrop like everything else, but the quiet — when the doors closed for the last time and it was just you and them, free from the inhibitions of work — the quiet was your favorite part. Now it only proves to further your dread. 

There are a dozen people to hide between, then ten, then six, then four, three, two…

and then you’re alone.

Any minute now Sun will peek his head out the door to ensure that no one was missed. It’s a silly tendency, the checking and double checking and triple checking to an almost obsessive degree, but you’ve long since become fond of these little habits. How miserable, then, to have to rely on its inevitability because you’re too much of a coward to confront him yourself.

It’s this same fear that drives you to turn on your heel at the last second, reconsidering this whole plan to begin with. If you left now you wouldn’t have to see the look of betrayal on his face. If you were quick about it you could still make haste towards the exit and be out of eyesight before the door ever opened, and then maybe, if you were lucky, your heart would consider this a worthwhile attempt and would finally let you leave this all behind.

How silly to think life would be so kind. You’ve run out of chances to avoid this.

Light pours over your back in a soft rectangle curve, warm and, much like the face that greets you, familiar. His voice — a polite ‘Can I help you?’ that lacks recognition — forces you to a halt. You anchor yourself to the spot for as long as you can get away with until the flicker of determination that remains in your chest demands you to move, and only then do you greet him properly; face to face.

The state of him guts you. His dirt coated faceplate, paint chipping at the edges and thumbprints smudged en mass, built up gunk wedged into the grooves, it tells you all you need to know.

It tells you that he hasn’t let anyone help him since your disappearance.

There is something to be said about the emotional range of a robot who cannot express himself in the usual way. You considered yourself quite adept at understanding exactly what they were feeling at any given moment regardless and in spite of the lack of visual cues, rarely being hindered by their static smiles because you had other things to rely on, like the pitch in their voice, their postures, their gestures. 

But Sun looks your way in complete silence, not budging from his place within the doorframe as recognition takes hold.

Silence fills your lungs until its presence is suffocating and this, if nothing else, finally prompts you to speak up. It’s a mess — your guilty muttering of “Can we talk?” — and you’re grateful to have even managed that much, and surprised, albeit relieved, initially, when it does the trick to stir Sun from his stupor.

His response, though lacking words, can be heard loud and clear.

You scramble forward in a rush, just barely managing to wedge your foot in the door before he has the chance to finish shutting it in your face.

“Please,” you rasp, pride be damned. 

His faceplate tilts (in curiosity or frustration, you aren’t sure), and his voicebox clicks like an irked tongue. Though they remain fixated in place you can surely feel the way his eyes find the ugly scar at your jaw and follow it all the way down your shoulder. Another click. 

He widens the door.

It’s not the warm welcome you’ve come to expect over the years, but it’s likely the kindest greeting you’ll receive from him now, all things considered, so you do your best not to spit on the brittle olive branch and quickly duck beneath his arm to make your way inside.

The daycare brings a wave of emotions that immediately threaten the frail sense of composure you’re still clinging to. Memories, new and very, very old, all collect in the back of your throat and sting like fresh bile. 

You recognize every stain in the carpet that Sun could never get out, can pinpoint how long its been since he’s cleaned by how strongly the smell of bleach contends with freshly soiled diapers. You know by the back of your hand which slides will burn you all the way down and which are permanently sticky from sickly kids and parents who couldn’t afford to bring them anywhere else. You know where the craft supplies are hidden, where the movies are kept, where the toys are stored. You know how bright the stars will shine when the lights go out, and how quickly Moon will abandon his station to find another.

You know exactly where to look when either of them is hurt and hiding.

But Sun isn’t hiding, now, even though he is very much hurt. Instead he stands a few paces from your side, hand still on the door and back to you. He doesn’t run and he doesn’t hide and he doesn’t need to.

Because it is you who ran away. It is you who hid.

It’s you who disappeared to somewhere they could never reach.

“Sun, I—”

“Why are you here?”

His voice cuts through you deeper than even the guilt. You want him to be angry with you, to scream and cry and lash out so your apprehension feels justified, so you can feel like there’s still something to salvage from this relationship, even if it’s negative. Even if it hurts. It would be easier if it hurt.

Instead, Sun addresses you with dry, polite boredom. He speaks to you like a stranger. 

Then, again, arrives the silence. It permeates through flesh and bone to sink into your very core, a poison that takes root deep in the pit of your stomach and blooms into something horrid. Gnarled branches of grief and shame left unpruned for so long that they’ve made a husk of the person you used to be. 

How do you come back from that?

“We didn’t know—” his fingers vice against the doorknob until its metal warps inward, refusing to show you his face. “We didn’t know where you went, why — why you left. You didn’t say anything. Not to us or anyone we asked.” His arms pinch into their shoulder sockets, the neglected casings whining against the tension. “Believe me, we asked everyone.”

Branches twist and unfurl, spindly twigs of guilt tickling against the back of your throat, thick with vinegar. You can taste it on your tongue. It takes all of your strength to step towards him. “Sun, I—”

“Stop,” he rasps. “Don’t. Just — just stay there. Stay right there.”

It stings. You often mulled over how they might react to your return when the day came, but never did you consider that he might not even want to look you in the eye. Swallowing around that boulder draws tears to your eyes. Nevertheless, your feet remain planted where they are, resigned to have this conversation with the back of his faceplate. “I wanted to reach out—”

“I wasn’t finished,” he interrupts. His rays sink inward, briefly, face swiveling at an angle where you can almost see his eyes. “We thought…Moon thought he had killed you,” he admits. “For a short time after you left us, we convinced ourselves that this is what happened. We let ourselves believe it because — because,” he turns, finally looking you in the eye, “because the alternative is that you abandoned us like everyone else.”

Your cheeks warm beneath streams of bitter salt. Words evade you for the longest time, deaf to your pleas to say something, anything, because more than Sun looking expectant for an answer is he deserving of one. 

Sun shakes his head, unimpressed by your inability to pry your tongue from the roof of your mouth. “Two minutes,” he says.

That does the trick just fine. “Two—?”

“You have two minutes to explain yourself,” he clarifies.

Your nose twitches, sniffling. “And after?” You ask, terrified of the answer. If he shoos you from the daycare and bans your name forevermore you aren’t sure you’ll ever recover. It’s selfish to fear such things — you know, already — when your actions were undoubtedly what burnt that bridge in the first place.

His arms cross over his chest, fingers winding fiercely into the metal, and he nods towards the clock. It’s getting late, already. 

“In two minutes it won’t be my choice what happens to you,” he warns.

Your gaze follows his own, eyeing the time. There’s no telling how lenient Moon will be about hearing you out but, if memory serves, you won’t see half the patience that Sun is tentatively offering you now. You don’t have time to argue either way.

You search your heart for the words that need to be said and, when that fails to provide you with a linear path forward, you opt to blurt out the first thing that comes to mind, instead. 

“I didn’t know what to do,” you admit. Your thumb lifts to press into scarred flesh, and follows it all the way down to where it disappears beneath your shirt collar. It’s ugly and it’s deep and you will bear it for the rest of your life. “I didn’t know how to confront this.”

Looking up, Sun hasn’t moved from his spot. He doesn’t blink, and he doesn’t speak, but the way his fist digs into the fabric of his pants tells you that he remembers that night clearly. You’re sure he spent several days thereafter scrubbing your blood out of the carpet.

It was an accident. As much as one can accidentally attack a loved one with blind violence, that is. You tell yourself it wasn’t intentional and you had hoped that they had, too. Both of you knew the day would come eventually either way. A dog that used to bite will bite again, no matter how strong the bond between him and his owner is. And you aren’t his owner, anyway. You can’t even call yourself his friend — not anymore.

“I thought I’d have enough time to think things over while I was recovering,” you croak through tears. “Every day in that hospital bed was spent thinking of you and Moon. I was—”

“Angry?” Sun asks.

“No!”

“Then why—?” His voice twists with the same bitterness as the dread in your stomach, almost a plead. “Why didn’t you say anything? A phone call, a letter, anything—”

“I was scared!” Despair pours from your throat like a leaky faucet having finally burst. “I almost died, Sun. I — I wasn’t sure what to do, where to go from there. I thought I just needed time, but everything happened so fast, it all passed so quickly, and the company—”

“You were fired?”

Your teeth clatter sharply against each other, lips pinching together, tongue tied. The clock tick tick ticks away. “They told me if I didn’t return that week I shouldn’t bother coming back at all. I…I could have kept my job, I could have come back, put the nightmares up on the top shelf and hope that everything just went back to normal, but…”

“You didn’t have to figure it out alone,” he answers solemnly. “Had you told us what you were going through, we could have figured something out, helped you transfer to another department or— or at least given you space. We would have come up with something.” Sun’s shoulders slump forward with a quiet, mechanical clink. He rubs anxiously at his arm and looks away from you. “Did you even like us?”

Your heart squeezes like it’s going to burst and plummets to the soles of your shoes, aching the whole way. Every instance of the love you felt for them comes barreling down on you at once; every fond memory, every moment of laughter, every hardship that you faced together. You never got the chance to tell them. “Of course I do,” you exclaim. “I lo—”

The room plunges into darkness. There is no twitch or flicker of the fluorescents to warn you, no method of hastily restoring power, nothing to keep stripes from becoming stars. Bittersweet familiarity sinks its teeth into your skin with nothing more than the quiet toll of a bell. His gaze blankets you in crimson.

You inhale sharply and prepare for the worst. “Moon—”

“Get out,” he snarls.

You flinch a foot back, but go no further. “Let me explain—”

“No.”

Your brow creases, nose wrinkling to match. “I’m not leaving,” you declare. “Why won’t you hear out what I have to say?”

“You’re a liar,” he spits, each word threaded with anger. Unlike Sun, he has no problems advancing towards you step by slow, meandered step. “Why would we want to hear a liar speak?”

Your heart twitches in your throat, threatening to suffocate you with every breath. Sun accused you of a great many things, all of which you are surely guilty of, but being a liar isn’t one of them. “I didn’t—”

“You left us!” He snarls. “Promised you wouldn’t. Promised you weren’t like the rest. You lied. Liar, liar, liar.”

His outburst convinces you to fall back another step. At this rate he’ll corner you, walk you against a wall. He’ll— “I didn’t mean to hurt you,” you insist, blinking through tears. “Either of you.”

“Liar!”

You break into a sob. “I’m not—”

“Get out,” he repeats, not sparing you the patience to further plead your case. He’s nearly erased the distance between you. “Won’t ask again.”

The croak in his voicebox doesn’t stem wholly from anger, of that you are certain. You can trace it all the way back to that very night when he came back to himself, hands still painted red, claws cinched to the bone. 

He had rushed into action, even if it was in vain. Daycare first-aid kits offer little more than boo-boo bandaids and palm sized ice packs, and as it stood, you were bleeding out in his arms. Despite his own personal biases he had called out for help, and help answered in the form of red and blue lights that blinked just outside the window. 

Your memory of the event is still fuzzy around the edges even now, yet still, there are two things you remember without any doubt. First, that Moon trembled with such vigor that his casing bears scars to this day from the metal rubbing together, and second, that he spoke to you endlessly, tirelessly, until they took you away. The cadence from that night hasn’t disappeared with time. 

It isn’t anger, it’s fear.

A dog that has bit before will inevitably bite again, and a dog that fears losing what it loves will refuse to let itself love at all.

Against your better judgement, you firmly stand your ground. “I’m not leaving,” you tell him. “Not until I’ve said what I came here to say.”

“Aren’t you scared?” 

It catches you off guard.

“That’s what you told Sun, isn’t it? I might hurt you again,” he warns. “Run your skin beneath my claws, tear it to bloody pieces until there’s nothing left.” His hand twitches at his side. “Maybe this time I’ll really kill you. Aren’t you scared?”

Your feet remain planted in that spot even as every molecule of your being screams at you to run. You are anchored here, for better or for worse, even as he inches ever closer. Even as he raises his hand — old blood still caked beneath the claws — and lingers beside the old wound.

“Yes,” you answer. It halts him immediately, hand still poised at your cheek. “I’m scared, I’m terrified, that much is true, but…” your eyes trace him, each pointed nail and crimson stained finger, the lilt in his voice that spells remorse as deep and as wide as your own.

Despite it all, your eyes fall shut. “...I trust you.”

Moon remains stone still. You hear no whisper of his bell, can feel no greater heat from his vents. He surely watches you to see how much truth lies in your commitment, searching your face for any hint of malice and trickery, but he won’t find any. You’re done running. You’re through with hiding.

He lurches forward—

and embraces you fully, metal frame trembling on its hinges. 

“Thought we lost you,” he whispers. “You left. You left us.”

“I know,” you whisper in turn. Warily you echo the gesture, wrapping your arms around him and holding him close, closer than you’ve ever been allowed before. “I’m sorry,” your words spill across his chest. “I’m so, so sorry. I’ll never leave you again—”

“Don’t.” He pulls away abruptly, holding you back with locked elbows, and the sudden absence leaves you cold. “No more promises. We can’t—” he whines beneath the palm you bring against his cheek, but nevertheless relaxes into it. “Can’t handle it. Another broken promise.”

“But—”

“Please,” he mutters. “No promises. Just this is fine. This—” His hand travels meekly upward to rest atop your own. “This is enough.”

It stings, as it very well should, but you aren’t going to argue with him about this. A nod answers him, simple as. You have all the time in the world to prove to them that you aren’t going anywhere this time.

There are a million and one things to say now that you finally have the chance. A year’s worth of events to catch them up on and the whole night to discuss it all, just like old times. You’ll make new friendship bracelets, read each other stories, gossip and laugh and play. There is still something worth saving, here. They haven’t given up on you yet.

But rebuilding a relationship requires honesty, it requires communication, and there is still one secret you’re hiding. The question is, how do you go about it without tarnishing what you’ve only just salvaged? What should you say, and how should you say it? The amount of times you’ve stuck your foot in your mouth while trying to do the right thing is not insignificant. But if you don’t tell them now, you might not get the chance again.

“I still haven’t told you…” Your eyes follow the curve of his face, the familiar way with which he lets your hand cradle his cheek, and in spite of everything a smile sneaks its way forward for the first time in ages. “I never stopped loving you, you know,” you whisper. “I care about you both — more than I’ve ever had the courage to say.”

Slowly, surely, you find yourself stretching onto your toes, finally feeling brave.

His vents breath against your palms, warm steam tickling between your fingers. Telltale fumes itch beneath your nose that smell faintly of burnt wires and old oil. 

A sputtering core kicks into third gear as your face nears his. Electricity bounces from his casing to dance against your fingertips until you’re breathless and floating. You can almost taste the cold metal beneath your lips, just a breath standing between them now. Almost. Almost.

“You have to let us go.”

Your blood freezes over, paralyzing you to the core. You don’t immediately pull back for fear of what you might find. But you have to face the music eventually.

Moon is painstakingly careful as he cleans your tears with the base of his thumb. He looks you over mournfully as though taking in your presence one last time. Then he laughs, short and sweet. “Nap time is over, starlight.”

You wake up.

The pillow is wet beneath your cheek, salty and cold. You stare at the wall bleary eyed, feeling an ache in your chest that eats at you now more than ever. How pitiful, how cruel, to be haunted by missed opportunities. Guilty pleasures of received forgiveness and enough time to make things right. The chance to fix everything held just out of your reach.

You turn against your pillow to reach the other side, taking your blankets with you, but even with their weight at your shoulders you feel impossibly cold. There is nothing to reach for anymore.

The glow of a television paints your back. Turned to the news, it’s been left on all night. You remember now. You remember everything.

The reporter talks about a fire.