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Bdubs runs.
There’s a- a thing, hunting him, and it’s a drone but it’s not, it can’t be a drone, not with the- with- with the steel sharp wings and the pointy needle tail and those white haunting lights.
It’s playing with him, he knows. Sometimes it will barely miss him with a shot, or it will stand on some high point nearby and watch as Bdubs tries to hide, just to appear when he least expects it.
Bdubs ducks into one of the many, many abandoned, broken buildings (which, now that he’s seen these, he simply must rebuild-), runs through it and escapes from the other side, hoping the creepy evil shadow drone would stop following him.
He stops, panting heavily, leaning against a wall. Terrible, terrible idea, because it’s still out there, and he has to run, but he can’t get his legs to move an inch further (why is he tired? He doesn’t even need to breathe).
Stupid Bdubs. This is what he gets for, what, wanting an outside opinion on his builds? Sheesh.
There’s a beating of wings, then a whistle. Then everything is silent, for one, then two, three seconds. Then ten, then twenty. His own ragged breaths are too loud in his ears, but… it’s all the noise there is.
No wings are beating, no metal is clinking, there’s no oily, creepy laugh in the air. Maybe… ok, it’s probably too early to sing victory, but… did he do it? He lost the dark murderous weird drone?
He gives it another minute, just to be sure, and… nothing. Nothing! Oh his Craft, he did it!
Bdubs breaks into a little victory dance, all hiding thrown out the window (which, ok, dumb, but)- he survived, damn it, letting him have this!
He sings, “Uhuh, that’s right, I did it, oh yeah, haha!”
The voice behind him says, “Oh, did you?”
“That’s right, I did it! I survived a… a… a…”
His voice deflates. His body stills. His arms are frozen, his eyes open much wider than they should.
Bdubs stares straight ahead, and had he not been frozen his hands would have been shaking. In a corner of his vision, reflected on a broken window, stands the upside down shape of the drone lookalike, hanging from an iron rod like a too-sharp steel bat. Bdubs gulps.
It opens its eyes, and they’re the most menacing white X Bdubs has seen in his entire life.
Bdubs runs.
He pants, runs, almost stumbles to his probable death, runs more. He’s probably suffering of overheat. That’s fine, he’ll deal with that later, when he’s still alive.
In his wild running, he dares take a moment to look behind him, see if he can see it.
Which might be just about the dumbest thing he’s ever done, because he manages to trip on Craftsdamned snow, and-
And it’s right before him, a black mass outlined in white. It flies down (in any other circumstance, Bdubs would have described the motion as graceful), touches the ground what can only be a maximum of 15 meters away from him, way too softly for something that looks so, so heavy. It tucks its wings behind its back.
Bdubs begins to scramble backwards as fast as he can, without even considering the possibility of get up and run, when the horrifying white drone wannabe takes a lazy (lazy! He’s going to die and this guy’s being lazy!) step forward. It begins to unclench a fist, and only then does he get a good glimpse at the fact those fingers are straight-up knives.
And they’re walking towards him.
His back hits- something, he can’t do this right now- but his hunter very notably does not, and crap crap crap-
There’s a blur of motion that Bdubs doesn’t quite catch, but a second the demonic terrible drone murderer is meters away, and the other its face is centimeters apart from Bdubs’s.
Bdubs tries to scramble back, again, but all that does is make him awkwardly hit the wall and Craft, that must have looked stupid. Why does he care about that, he’s going to die!
The thing (way too relaxed for this situation and honestly the disrespect-) says, “This was fun,” and Bdubs can hear the smile behind its black mask, “but, I kinda need to kill you now, so…”
One of its hands is on the whatever Bdubs’s back hit (a wall, he notices, more a footnote than an actual thought. A terribly crumbled wall, that did a really bad job in protecting things), blocking one of the sides it could escape to, and the other is raised with those awful knives ready to strike him. The tail, with that scary (no, not scary, he’s not scared, he’s being very brave about this) needle, is also pointed for a stab. The eyes- Craft, those eyes, with the cracked glass on the left and the almost mirthful way his eyes shift- don’t help at all.
Bdubs is going to fucking die.
Which is why he says, “Why, handsome, ending the night so soon?”
And it must have been the right thing to say, because the knives lower a little in a not-striking-him-to-death way, and the tail wavers. It backs off ever so slightly.
So even though his voice was pitched too high, and his eyes were darting around too terrified for him to really feel in control here, the reason for all that says, “I guess I could dance a little more.”
And then it backs off, just like that. It takes a step back, away from Bdubs, and Bdubs is alive, and-
It’s holding out a hand for him. The fingers aren’t knives anymore. He can’t see its mouth, but he just knows it’s smiling. The eyes tell him too much, and yet…
Bdubs swallows. He steadies himself, reminds himself to play along, and tentatively takes his soon-to-be murderer’s hand.
It’s warm. It’s way warmer than a drone’s hand should be.
Before he can stop himself, he says, “You’re warm.”
It chuckles, pulling him up. It settles itself into a position Bdubs vaguely recognizes as “dance”. He can’t dance, but he tries to follow anyway.
Craft, this is stupid. Bdubs is going to die anyway, why’d he- submit himself to this stupid little false hope?
A song begins to play, from the killer. Bdubs blinks. It says, “Shall we?”
The truth is, neither of them can dance. In the beginning it feels like it has a sense of what it’s doing, but at some point they both delve into something more akin to freestyling, or something. Bdubs doesn’t know.
He doesn’t notice it happen, either, because he somehow lost himself and was actually having fun. He’d let himself be taken by the music, by the steps, by the ease of not looking at those terrible knives or needle or wings, until they drew too close to each other in a move.
The world seemed to still, that second, like slow motion.
“This was really fun. It’s been a while since I’d had some company. I’ll have to kill you, though.”
But it doesn’t let go of his hand, and it doesn’t make any moves to stop. Nor do its hands turn to knives, or guns, or whatever else they turn into; nor did its tail coil up to attack him.
Bdubs gulps. Every processor in him is going one thousand miles a minute, every instinct in him is telling him to run, but he very literally can’t and it’s driving him crazy-
He feels the stupidest idea he has had in… ever, probably. But he really, really doesn’t want to die, and wouldn’t it be even more pathetic if he didn’t even try?
So Bdubs says, “You live here alone? In all these broken buildings?”
It shrugs with a hum.
“I could- I could fix them for you! Make ‘em all nice and cozy for you to live!”
They don’t stop dancing, but its gaze seems lost for a second. Unlike it usually does- Bdubs thinks it’s so much nicer, when it’s not laser focused on murder (and, more importantly, the murder of him).
He wasn’t expecting anything, not really- his smile was as wide as normal, but nervous in the uncomfortable, terrible way, like if Cleo caught him doing something he shouldn’t. He’s sure that if he could sweat, he would have been. But it asks him, with a new type of amusement “You’re a builder?”
“I’m the best there is.” says Bdubs, rather proudly for someone about to die.
It hums. “Could you get me a roof?”
“A roof, a ceiling- oh, lights, and you’d get to pick a color for everything and all, it’d be great-“
It stops. Bdubs almost trips and falls- that was a really bad time to stop- but he doesn’t, because he’s really balanced and put-together. He swallows again, but his smile doesn’t falter, so it can’t be that bad, right?
“You’ve got yourself a deal.”
“Oh, but- wait. I what?”
“Get me some roofs, and your… other stuff, the things you talked about.”
“But- and I’ll live?”
“I’ll let you live ‘til then,” it says, way too teasingly for a murder creature drone thing talking about Bdubs’s life, “but who knows…”
Some kind of… something, breaks in Bdubs, which leads him to sputter and walk around angrily and go “Craft!” in a really annoyed way. All the thing that might not kill him does is chuckle.
It’s not a bad laugh, when it’s not trying to kill him- NO! Focus, Bdubs, now he has to get out of this mess alive.
He stomps into the ground angrily, and somehow- somehow it makes him trip, which is really stupid, and he definitely doesn’t shriek in blind fear.
Bdubs hits his head on something dull, with not more than a groan following. And he did that just after establishing he wouldn’t die yet- what if that made the disassembly drone change its mind-
Oh. Disassembly drone. That’s what it is.
Bdubs announces, more than says, “I’m fine!”, which is followed by him dusting off his moss cloak, and “I’m Bdubs, by the way!”
It nods with a hum. “Etho.”
The having of a name, in Bdubs’s mind, grants the other drone (Craft, an actual other drone, and he referred to him as creepy evil shadow drone- no, yeah, nope, that’s still true) the honor of he/him pronouns. Which is something he should maybe get around to fixing, but he’s alive, damn it, and his last project before attempting some great escape gets to be the super cool actual buildings, there’s so much to think about!
Bdubs stops his thoughts- takes a deep breath, focuses. Here’s what he knows:
- He’s alive, for as long as he doesn’t build a roof;
- He has to go back home, without being followed, in a probably very daring and well executed plan he still has to come up with;
-His only company for the next who knows how long is Etho.
-Etho is a Craftsdamned disassembly drone.