Too late to apologize [Eva/Closed]

Boredom. The damnable boredom. Not even trying to find solace in the bottom of a bottle was solving it anymore, the days and nights passing away in a dull haze of nothingness with just the occasional shoot of pain to cut through the oppressive fog. The digimon felt like she was having a staring contest with the four walls of her apartment, and the walls were a most unyielding adversary. 

It was a curious thing trying to decipher maintenance and repair manuals for your own body, leaving Eva with equal parts confusion at its complexity, and a further weight upon her shoulders. If she was a complete digimon, this would have been so much simpler. Chuck a healing move here, a bit of "magic" there and she would have been back on her feet. Heck, even if she was a human it would have been easier to remedy than this, but, instead every befuddling technical readout flashing before her eyes, every mechanism, every piece of human ingenuity reminding her over and over, beating her down with a simple reminder.


You're not one of them.


They're better than you.


They're whole.  


She clenched her fist, slamming it down upon her table, jarring notes, decorations, and her soldering iron, a panel on her arm, open to reveal its intricate components within slamming shut with the clatter of carbon fibre on carbon fibre as she just sat back in her chair, head in her hands. 


KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK


Eva's features furrowed into a frown, her fists clenched as she shakily stood to her feet. It was safe to say that in this frame of mind, being social was not the first thing on her mind. In fact, she was barely holding back simply yelling "Piss off!" through the door, deep down wondering if doing that would make her feel just a little better for a brief moment, when she heard a voice that gave her pause.


"Eva? Are you in there?"


"K?"


She took a moment to look down at herself. She was in no state of dress for company, walking around in just her underwear. Of course, most digimon did not seem to care about such things, even her own species usually just went around as digital nature created them, but, she could never be comfortable like that.

"Hang on, give me a second. I'm not dressed properly."

When Eva opened the door just half a minute later, the Renamon had thrown on a vest top, and a pair of tracksuit bottoms. The apartment behind her was small, but rather neat save for the clutter on the kitchen table, full of notes and various tools. It looked modern with light clean lines, a television in the background with a football game playing. The world cup, most likely. Eva herself though? She just looked tired and drained, her fur had very much lost its sheen, and as for her cybernetics, they were scuffed and scraped, and in some cases even held together by duct tape.

She nonethless forced herself into smiling. "What brings you here? Oh, come in! Can I get you anything? Tea? Coffee?"

Eva did her best to seem cheery and upbeat, a false smile spreading over her features as if she had strapped a mask on them. "Tea. Got it."  She gave a thumbs up as she walked just around the corner into the small kitchen. Her gait had a slight unsteadiness to it, despite her attempts to mask such a thing, she was certainly favouring one leg over the other with a slight grinding noise as she lifted her left. 

She set the kettle to boil, retrieved a couple of teabags, Earl Grey by the look of it and turned to K, adjusting something on her forearm with a slight pained grimace piercing through her plastered on cheerful, jovial expression. "Do you have any milk or sugar in your tea?"


"But I do want to ask.. what.. happened? You look like you've been through hell."


"Yeah I suppose there's no hiding that." Her tone dropping its false joviality, as the more sombre undercurrent cut through. "Had a run in with someone who had considerably more firepower than me. I and the people I was trying to protect survived, and whatever that thing was, didn't. I would say all in one piece too, but- She gestured to a table in the sitting room with a damaged arm, upon which sat a selection of both electronic and mechanical components, all singed, twisted and mangled laid out and arranged in neat organised rows, a laptop computer sat next to them with its screen showing blueprints and technical readouts galore. "-parts of me are sitting on that table over there."

She nodded, finishing the rest of the process, adding two sugars to both K's, and her own cuppa. Picking them up though, seemed to present a problem, Eva's right hand locking in place as she reached for the cup she had prepared for herself after passing K's over. She looked down at it, sighing in frustration, the multi million pound cybernetic refusing to respond. She wasn't a cyberneticist, not even an engineer. She only had the very basics on how her own systems functioned, how they all worked together, thousands of moving parts with their precision engineered synchronicity torn asunder with nought but a hasty improvised bodge or two applied vague hope to breathe life back into their inert humanoid form. 

"I guess I'm a lefty from now on then." She said, a sigh on her lips as she sipped from her cup of tea with the arm and hand that still remained somewhat functional.


"I've never quite run into a digimon like yourself. Most of us don't... come apart like that. Are you going to be okay?"


"No, most people don't. Honestly, I'm not sure if I'm okay or not. I can't fix this though, I know that much. I can't make heads or tails of all this stuff, even with all the design documents I could scrounge up. Not that I even have the tools to make the tools to make the components that I'd need"


"I came to check up on you, but.. I wasn't expecting this. I could try to help if you want? I've got a form that might be powerful enough to do so; with a healing ability that might do the trick. Can't say for certain though Eva."


"I tried to see healers before and it didn't do all that much. It's something to do with... all of this. Everything's data here, sure, but this is all human world materials. Carbon fibre, titanium, carbon nanotubes, graphene and god knows what else. You're certainly welcome to try though, I'm sure as hell not in a position to turn any help down right now."

"Finding a Digital mechanic might be your best bet, Terminus is one of the most advanced cities in the digital world. They might have something that they can help with. There are robotic digimon out there; some advanced some not."


"I looked." She said, sitting down heavily at the table. "I looked god damn everywhere. Human technology is different from what you'd find on a robotic digimon. It was made by their hands, it follows their laws of physics. Their laws of reality." She reached over, picking up some sort of device from the table, holding it and flipping it idly over and over in her hand.

K's next query and suggestion though got a raised eyebrow from the cyborg, as she slowly put the ruined piece of equipment back down. "I'm not sure how "strong" they were. They seemed qualified enough, but, all their efforts did was fix a few surface scuffs in the carbon fibre and hairline cracks in the frame. It's certainly worth a shot though. If we can get my left eye working too, I could bring my HUD back online and actually see what's working and what isn't."

"Made by their hands? What are you saying...?"


"As in humans built these cybernetics. From scratch. It's not like I popped out of a digiegg like this, these things have to be assembled, manufactured. Built." She paused, thinking for a second. "Not that I remember that. Coming out of an egg, that is. If that's even a thing people typically recall. I'm not sure if I am made up of copied data somehow, or, maybe I was someone before this happened. Something something NanoWerx Industries quantum computing experiments. I was dragged there by accident. If I had memories before, they're gone now."

She tensed up for a moment at the pat on the shoulder, the strange mashup of jagged pixelated vector lines that once made up her HUD flickering red for just a moment, as if trying desperately to signify something. "Hey, as I said it's worth a shot. Not like anything else has worked so far. Wait. Are you even going to be able to fit in here?"

The "healing" effect was instant, though, not what K might have been expecting. The waves of light rolled and played over Eva's entire body, her cybernetics slowly rebuilding, slowly piecing themselves back together with, cold, clinical mechanical clicking and whirring as each came back online in a rapid cascade, not that anyone could have heard that, of course. For the first few seconds, it looked like all was well, even the minuscule weave of the carbon fibre glowing, radiating with a soft gold orange light coalescing around its fractured jagged edges like burning steel wool. 






Then, all was sudden darkness. At least, that's all Eva saw and felt. Her HUD gave a brief flicker, a brief desperate attempt to warn its host before winking out of existence along with any other sensation, sight, sound, or thought that there could be. K though, would have seen a lot more. She would have seen Eva tense firm for a moment, before falling limp, tumbling off the side of her chair and hitting the floor hard, lying there completely motionless.

She didn't weigh much. In fact, if anything she was lighter than a regular Renamon. Curiously though, she felt very warm to the touch. Hot in fact, especially over her cybernetics that were typically just cold machinery. She didn't move for a while,  just lying there still on the couch staring blankly into the ceiling with blank unfocused eyes, taking shallow shaky breaths with long pauses between each one. 

The seconds rolled on. Then minutes. If K was in fact timing proceedings it took a further five minutes and thirteen seconds for Eva to once again start showing signs of life. A slight twitch of her right hand, the apertures and lenses in her eyes shifting, refocusing with a near inaudible whirr. Save for being passed out on the sofa, Eva did actually look a whole lot better. Everything was back in place, every component, every little detail down to the last screw and last carbon fibre panel, their black surfaces shimmering with their normal dull sheen now free of scuffs and scratches. The floor on the other hand could have done with a tidy up, now covered in zip ties and duct tape from the cyborg's more improvised repairs that had fallen free during the whole process, fluttering down to the ground as everything clicked back into place.

Another two minutes crawled past. Still nothing save some minor movement, likely from some sort of automated systems until finally, Eva took a gasping breath, coughing a few times and rolling off the sofa, landing on her hands and knees as she tried to catch her breath.