"Clang—skrrrch—clang!"
For a moment, control returned. Dogmeat came into view, dragging the replicon's metallic body across the ground—taking it somewhere—before everything went dark again.
"Don't worry, I'll fix ya friend up. I won't do any harm."
A familiar voice rang out—one the android had heard before.
"BUZZZ—CLING—CLANG!"
The sounds were deafening. Repairs were underway... but by who?
After a while, power surged back through the system. This time, it held.
"You were hurt pretty bad," said a voice off to the side. The unit tried turning, but the neck joint refused to respond.
"Your neck joint's wrecked. So's... well, everything else. What were ya doing—fighting an entire army? I've never seen a replicon this torn up in so little time. What put ya in that shape?"
The voice was unmistakable. Mariah.
"Most likely a human supremacist group," the machine answered after a pause. "I've dealt with many before, but none of them were..."
The sentence trailed off. Even now, the memory was fractured—wrong.
"Were?" Mariah echoed. "What were they? Magus? Delvandlists?" She kept probing, assuming the silence meant a missing name.
"Either way, they must've had some serious tech to do this to ya of all people," she added, continuing without noticing how quiet the replicon had gone.
In truth, the synthetic had encountered many such groups over the years—had watched their weapons evolve with every confrontation. But this time—no weapons. Just fists.
And yet, what they did... was something no ordinary human should've been capable of.
Mariah stepped closer, hands working on the damaged swivel joint in the unit's neck.
Cling—crack.
A long silence followed, until awareness sparked again.
"How did I get here?"
The question slipped out, raw and unfiltered. The replicon had been so focused on the battle that no thought had been given to how it had ended up here at all.
"I saw some kids playing with ya body," Mariah replied. "And that dog—he was guarding ya. Seemed like he was tracking my scent off ya."
That caught the machine off guard.
Dogmeat... tracking her scent?
That wasn't expected. Not from a stray like him.
To smell past the rust, dust, and blood just to find Mariah? That was something even trained dogs couldn't do. And he'd done it without knowing whether she was an ally.
"Where is he, anyway?" asked D-45, curiosity cutting through the static in the processor.
"Sleepin' behind my counter," answered Mariah.
"Don't move around too much now. Took me three days to repair this much—who knows how much longer it'll take to fix the rest."
To say the android was shocked would be an understatement.
"Three days?!" shouted D-45, right into Mariah's face.
"Don't ya yell right into my ears!" she snapped.
"I apologize," the unit replied, though a new thought was already forming.
"Why do you talk like that? It's terribly inconsistent. The only thing that changes is you. Are you... trying to fake an accent?"
Mariah turned and walked away.
"I'm takin' an early lunch break. Good luck," she muttered, leaving the damaged replicon alone—lost in what felt like the start of an existential crisis.
"Wait, come back! I didn't mean to offend you! TAKE ME WITH YOU!"
But it was no use. Mariah had already left.
With nothing better to do, the unit was alone with its thoughts.
Three days later, May 29, 2217, Mariah managed to finish repairing D-45, although the unit had to help her with most of it.
"Where are ya gonna go now?" said Mariah to the droid standing by the door alongside Dogmeat.
"I have to finish my investigation first, then I'll go see what those two assassins are up to." The reason D-45 was even in this city was due to the unit obtaining a 150-year-old data map.
The data map led to where a failsafe fragment of the freo virus was located. If all the fragments were found, they could remove the freo virus from replicons and strip them of their free will. D-45's mission was to stop that by all means possible.
The map D-45 obtained led to the very building where he was ambushed. The fact that the assassins knew he was arriving there meant they most likely took the fragment. But the bigger question on the unit's mind was: how did they know D-45 was going to arrive there?
"Was the data map made by them?" The unit scrapped that idea instantly—the map was authentic, he knew it. The age couldn't be faked. That meant the only way they knew was by leaving the data map in a place where D-45 could find it.
They had planned for this from the very start.
"I have to keep a low profile. By now, everyone hunting me down has most likely heard what happened in that desert village." Thinking back, the unit realized the village was better off than this city. It was also one of the best places he'd seen since the war. It was shady, but the replicon had no intention of going back to the crime scene.
Ironically, D-45 went back to the building where the assassins almost shut down the unit for good.
The unit knew that the fragment was gone, making the data map useless. D-45 grabbed the chip implanted in his right arm and threw it away.
As D-45 was thinking of what to do next, Dogmeat started barking while sniffing the ground. This gave the unit an idea and a use for Dogmeat.
With Dogmeat's great sense of smell, they could track down where the assassins went. Them being humans made it easier as well, since they were bound to leave a trail of some kind.
With Dogmeat leading the way, the unit and his companion started heading southeast, with D-45 buying some supplies for Dogmeat from the market.
After a while of tracking, Dogmeat would lose their scent just to pick it back up in tracks they left behind like a camp.
After days of the same thing over and over again, with Dogmeat losing and finding their scent, they managed to see something that wasn't a camp.
"HQ. Those fuckers built their base of operations on HQ." HQ was where D-45 was made and where everything had gone down—from the freo virus to the war—it all started there.
It made sense why a human supremacist group would build their base there. That place was a symbol of what humans had lost.
D-45, however, didn't attempt to get closer to the place. Instead, he started looking from far away.
D-45 didn't want to get close to that place, not only because the unit didn't know what those people were capable of, but because of what happened—and how many innocent humans and replicons were killed by his hands.
The unit found a great place to hide and spy from and watched, and watched, and kept watching. Eventually two days passed by of D-45 watching and feeding Dogmeat.
Eventually, the water supplies for Dogmeat started running low, so he had no choice but to head somewhere to resupply. He had seen enough of the human supremacist group. They called themselves the Menders. They had it written down everywhere—on the walls, flags, even their vehicles.
The unit also saw what was inside the vehicles. They had humans in chains; they seemed to be experimenting on them.
A human supremacist group experimenting on humans. They did get a group of replicons once in a while to beat up just for entertainment, but the experiments were much worse.
Eventually, D-45 started packing up Dogmeat's supplies so they could head back to Reuy City, knowing it would be up to the unit to take care of them eventually.
D-45 knew he was going to have to deal with them eventually.
The unit was tired of looking at that place, but a pair of eyes unknown to D-45 was watching as well.