The first time Axis knew he said goodbye to someone wouldn't be for years. It would be in the same setting as always, pink and gray, but their eyes were different, golden and brown, and their smile looked like it should have a pair of goggles to match. They cared. He didn't know in the moment what he meant when he wished them well, but they cared. They had come back one last time.
He didn't remember the other two times he lost someone.
Going up to stare at the Steamworks gate for Daddy to get out had been routine for almost as long as she could remember. He'd run to greet her and carry her home. They'd talk about her day drawing and playing. They wouldn't talk about his day at work, because it was top secret. That kind of discussion was reserved for closed doors, when even Mommy wasn't home.
Daddy would open the door with Axis behind him, and Kanako'd cheer, and she'd make up a game for him to play. Most of the time they would leave home and head out to test Axis's whatever in different whatevers. Daddy used to always keep a close eye on the two while they did so, but he let them wander off together more and more as time passed.
After all, Axis would look after her, and Kanako was responsible enough to run back if trouble approached. And it probably was boring for Daddy to watch when he didn't want to play.
If Kanako wasn't so naggy, her stumbling upon Axis the first time they had met would probably have been the last time. But her adorable face convinced Daddy to let them see each other again, and again, and again.
One day, Axis was a part of Kanako's life; the next, she saw a human.
She didn't get to say goodbye. Daddy was close-lipped about what happened to him.
Dalv was alive, she knew, because Daddy told her he went to leave him corn every morning because she didn't go to Snowdin anymore. No matter how much she insisted and pushed, he wouldn't say a word about Axis. Daddy told her Dalv was alive. So if he wasn't telling her what happened to Axis… that meant Axis must be…
The metal gate reminded her too much of him.
She stopped going. She stopped asking. Even if her dad was worried about the former, she could tell he was relieved by the latter.
Axis couldn't pinpoint the moment his creator left. How ironic, that the one person he would always remember, he still couldn't pick out memories of. Is that what irony meant? He couldn't remember how he learned the word.
In some order:
He'd stare too long at the Factory workers.
He did not look at the Factory workers at all, except when he had to log their activities.
He would pause too long between scanning them and sending them off, caught in the moment where whatever interactions they had with him or his creator came rushing back.
His design stifled his recollection of the most important person in his life.
His fists tightened as he reminded himself of the fact that his person was the one to design this limitation.
The amount of glares workers gave him changed in frequency, either upwards or downwards.
His fingers wove into each other and back out again.
He nodded at Dr. Whatever and wished them a productive workday.
He stared at flakes of flower residue in his hand and watched the white powder melt into black.
Nothing was linear. He knew the date and time his creator last entered, and how it compared to today. But depending on who he scanned in to work each day, it would feel more recent, or more distant. What emotions he had left of him were disconnected and out of place.
He kept the ache close to his heart. He wanted to still care, when Mr. Chujin came back. He didn't want to override his feelings on Chujin with what he felt now. But despite every new memory he gained of isolation in a busy home, his creator's absence remained impossible to forget.
He docked to recharge, and all of it was washed away.
Kanako tried her best to be the best all the while. She worked hard on math, and science, and social studies even when it was confusing. She never ate lunch alone. She joined the junior volleyball team.
She came home with a C, once, not crying but doing something close to it. Dad held her and reassured her. Said that it didn't matter, she didn't need to be perfect all of the time.
She was thankful that her efforts had given her this levity.
Even though she wasn't very good at it, and even though it was just for fun, her favorite class was art. She loved the concept of getting to bring creativity to life, loved the texture of crayons on her fur, loved it loved it loved it. It seemed that it made her parents just as happy, too, when she did it. She wasn't sure on why. After all, Mom always said Dad was an artist, when he only ever wanted to do science. Shouldn't she focus on more productive stuff?
All the while, she smiled and bowed. Said please and thank you very much. Roughhoused with cowboys, because that's how you act at the Wild East, and had every hair in place by dinner, because that's how you act in a household. Her social world was an intricate dance, and she knew every twirl and dip. She was flawless, and she was easy.
The robots weren't supposed to know that the Steamworks were shutting down. The hopelessness in the air betrayed the truth anyway.
Engineers turned to hiss at their neighbors that this whole closure was the fault of poor management, of course. The chemists seemed to blame the robotics team. The office workers glared at the chemists. The monsters he didn't care for pointed fingers at anyone.
Axis knew, of course, that it was all of their faults. The judgemental supervisors, the aimless chemists, the shortsighted engineers. It was on full display in the winding, arbitrary catwalks, connecting and splitting off like a virus, paths added and removed on the whims of any monster who cared to stroll down to the office wing and request the path messier. It was baked into the building design—important rooms bordering empty, abandoned ones, useless structures with one room and a forgotten singular purpose merely dropped, towering, over the lake. Failing specialized equipment with no regulations, monsters going home coughing or burned, accidents he couldn't prevent—would never be able to prevent—stemming from the simple reality of the situation: the Steamworks were flawed at their core.
Useless, all of it. What was any of this even for?
He only had two models out, the final day. Fitting, in a way, with how he lived his life in pairs. Him and Mr. Chujin. On and off. Success and failure.
He used one model to look at the robots heading back to their lockers to shut down. This was after watching the robots say goodbye to each other. Which was just after seeing the creators of the bots saying goodbye to each and every one of their creations. Just watching one of them made his whole body ache with a dull pain. But he watched. He wasn't really paying attention to that part, anyway.
He used the other model to keep watch at the Dunes gate. Just in case, just in case.
Other workers passed by that second model, heading from behind him and leaving for their homes, never to return. A few passed him glances that were… they weren't irritated, anymore. Sympathetic.
He didn't meet any of their eyes.
Nobody came back to see him. As expected, of course. He didn't even truly know what he was waiting for—obviously, naturally, Chujin, but it felt like more was missing. Like his fingers had been ripped off and he could still feel the missing spaces where they used to go. But regardless, Chujin was long gone, and who else would be there to come back to see him, anyway? There was no logical reason to wait here. None at all.
He waited by the door.
The monsters trickled out, and the him that was peering over the lake stopped seeing any robots, and the him that was watching the gate stopped seeing any monsters.
"Hey," a voice said. He should've known that someone came beside him, but he didn't. He could make a note to check on that, but it wouldn't matter soon. "Uh, all the robots went back already. Are you supposed to…"
A monster, a worker was talking to him. He knew their name, position, age, height, weight, eye color, date of birth, date of employment—He'd add date of layoff to that list, but it wouldn't matter in a moment anyway. They were at the gate. He'd never see them again.
"APOLOGIES," he said instead, and rolled away.
He looked behind him as they swung the gate open, catching a glimpse of the golden light, before the door closed.
Obediently, he rolled both models back to his lockers. His last thought as the power was cut was of a paw in his hand.
In the end, he must have been better off without her. As their time together faded into memory, she got better and better. Looking back at how she acted before hurt. She was mean. She punched and kicked and swore.
Poor, poor Axis. She was the worst friend ever.
She had stuck by his side, refusing to let him go, refusing to let him move on without her. Clinging onto him like clumps of mud.
And despite that—despite all that, how horrible she was to him—she barely even knew him. It wasn't long they had each other. Even as they had grown closer, even when she believed he had gotten more attached, there was always a divide. Sometimes, his protocol would lead, and he wouldn't say a word to her. Other times, he was there, but distant; mind elsewhere, her as nothing more than an obstruction to his purpose.
No matter how much he had meant to her, no matter how much she wanted it, he couldn't ever have been her brother.
Axis dreamt of snowfall.
When Daddy died, she was not by his side. Just as he would want it.
A few hours beforehand, Kanako was in the basement she was never meant to know about.
To say she didn't was a lie. She knew Daddy didn't return to the Steamworks every time he wanted to bring out Axis. She had always figured wherever Axis was kept had to be close by. She just didn't know where. When she heard Daddy murmur it into Mommy's ear, it made sense. Of course it was always lying in plain sight. Daddy was terrible at hiding things.
The tapes on TV were unscientifically simple and slotted themselves perfectly into her understanding. Everything else was a nonsensical mess.
The books were perfectly stacked and incredibly dense, so she moved on to the next. The neat folders, she flipped through and couldn't grasp. The rolled up diagrams, she thought she could at least examine, since they were pictures, but she couldn't understand.
She was too young to know this. She deserves a happy life free of supposed looking at the adult science was a waste of time.
Think. She needed to grab onto something more basic. Less logical, therefore more emotional. She was not meant to be in here. Where would be something she really was not meant to know?
In the trash. Buried beneath burger wrappers and ripped up, useless papers he had never taken to the dumpster, was…
…nothing. Obviously.
Obviously he was smart enough to not hide anything where Mommy was about to look.
So she checked in the kitchen trash instead.
She didn't even have to fish. It was tucked into the side, covered by a clean napkin. She had an incredible flash of oh, he wanted to hide it where Mommy wouldn't see, so today he threw it away and covered it up so it wouldn't be seen. Impressive. But not as impressive as her.
She fished out the unlabeled tape, glanced around for prying eyes, and then ran back to the basement and hit play.
The tape burned a hole in her heart; and then, in her pocket. She left the vicinity untouched, pristine as always, for when her mother would soon enter it.
Aaah, what a strange thing! To know someone! One of the greatest mysteries of the Underground, and the solution was one that had already crossed her mind. Human-killing robot, there at the scene, versus a human. Oh, she really was grateful she had kept it all secret. And so, so grateful. Axis really would protect her.
The tape went under her bed.
A couple weeks later, it went to the bottom of her toy box.
And, on occasion, it went back to the television.
A few months after her father's death, in a slot dug with her own two paws, behind her father's grave, she laid the confession to rest. She knew it by heart, and nobody else could hear a word. She'd secure her father's legacy as a protector, not someone who let the controls slip. She'd protect Axis, too.
He'd still need protecting, wouldn't he? Because he'd won absolutely against the human. So he was still alive in there.
She was a horrible daughter for feeling such reassurance so soon after her father's death. But she'd see Axis again. One day.