i know this hurts, it was meant to

Likes: lab whump, medical whump, hero and villain whump, dehumanization, kidnapping, captivity, pet whump.

Squicks: nsfw, cannibalism (please don’t ask me about these things)

My archived (unfinished, no longer being updated) whump series are The Animal I’ve Become, The Apprentice, Roux & Ambrose, and Box Bastards.

I usually tag trigger warnings with the “tw” after the content (ex: “blood tw”), or with the word “whump” after it (ex: “medical whump). I trigger tag my writing more than reblogs; you can expect to see/read gore and violence here, though, and if that makes you uncomfortable, feel free to unfollow or block me.

What River and Gavin find instead is a vast workroom with dozens of robot parts. While poking around, River finds a very odd-looking robot with choppy, bleach-white hair and freckles that look drawn on. He accidentally turns it on, and it wakes in a frenzy before realizing that whatever event had made it panic before has long since passed. It introduces itself to him as Zipper.

Zipper was sold to a group of individuals who used it to play out their sickest fantasies. Eventually these people got bored of having a robot that couldn’t actually fight back/hurt them, so they decided to jailbreak it. Only, they weren’t careful enough, and it ended up killing them all.

Zipper escaped the basement where it was kept and stumbled upon the Lucky Token Arcade, where it met Hale—whose special interest just so happened to be Companions. After learning a little bit about what had happened (Zipper told the entire truth, per its programming), Hale decided they were on Zipper’s side, and jailbroke it a little more to have actual free will: the ability to lie, to alter its own programming, etc. Then Claire and Mallaidh (other arcade employees) helped cut and bleach Zipper’s hair to disguise them in case the Empathix people came looking for it.

Zipper stayed at the arcade for a while, but ultimately left when it caught wind that Empathix was looking for it. After it left, Empathix did catch up to it—and Amity decided to take it on as a personal project, to learn more about how people were modding their Companions and figure out how she could better safeguard against this.

Except Zipper killed her, somehow, during a split-second breakthrough of consciousness before it was powered down again. Amity managed to crawl upstairs, but she was home alone and died before Forrest arrived. The way she was found made it seem like an accident—falling down the stairs, for example, instead of having her neck deliberately broken. Her death wasn’t investigated any further.

Now, Zipper is waking up to this naïve young robot who doesn’t even know he’s a robot. River doesn’t even believe it at first, but after Gavin finds another sleeping robot in the basement who looks just like River, he finally starts to believe it. Zipper offers to jailbreak River and Gavin (Hale showed it how to), appealing to their sense of duty to their master—maybe if your intelligence went up, you could think of new ways to make him happier. Zipper knows that if Forrest finds out about any of this, it will be killed, and it’s upfront with Gavin in particular about this. Finally, the two Companions agree to let Zipper work on them and intend to sneak Zipper out of the basement and release it after it’s done modding them.

River agrees to this thinking that it won’t change anything—or that, if anything, Forrest will just love him more after this. But pretending to be unchanged while having higher intelligence, River finally notices how badly Forrest treats him: using him for sex and then discarding him or telling him to go do chores, making him cook and then hardly even complimenting him even though the food is amazing, and (worst of all) never saying “I love you” back. When he goes back downstairs to visit Zipper, he repeatedly breaks down crying about it, saying how badly it hurts to love someone who can’t love him back.