#anyway! if it isn't obvious this takes place at the very beginning of Moon's glitch

[muzzlemouths]

[CW: Death/implication of death]

The clock reads a quarter to midnight when Sun powers on. Too early. He isn’t meant to come online for another six hours, and the daycare itself won’t open for another hour after that. He promptly runs a scan to determine the reasoning behind his premature entrance and when it returns inconclusive he turns to Moon. It is his metaphorical toes he is stepping on by encroaching on the night as he is, after all.

It’s quiet. The kind of quiet that settles like dust. A quiet that makes one aware of the breath that stirs within their lungs or, in Sun’s case, the gentle whir of an internal fan that perpetually keeps his system from running itself into the ground. A quiet so frequently interrupted by the welcomed voice of his other half…and yet, nothing. His question goes unanswered, left to gather with the dust, and he is forced to proceed as though these strange happenings haven’t disrupted his entire morning routine.

A routine further disturbed upon having to remind himself for the second time already that it isn’t morning, he isn’t meant to be going through the start-up procedure to begin with, and he can’t be blamed for the corrupted sense of awareness he feels as a result. Sure, the lights are on, and his systems, too, return with normal results after a precautionary scan, but there is a discomfort to all of this scratching at the inner plating of his frame. Something is wrong wrong wrong.

“…Moon?”

His second attempt at communication yields no better results than the first, only a vague static answering the call, murmur-soft background noise, as though someone had plucked a phone from its receiver and then walked away. Frustrating is what it was. To ignore him was childish at best, but at worst, it was concerning. His relationship with Moon was reasonably amicable even on the longest of days, he worked better with Moon than without, so the absence was unusual as much as it was alarming.

Alone with his thoughts for the foreseeable future, Sun decides there is little point to sitting around in the midst of this confusion when he could be using the time to busy himself with more important tasks, such as tidying up all the apparent dust around here. Better yet, he can get a head-start in preparation for that day’s activities. Something to keep his mind from wandering into worrywart territory, at the very least.

An ache stemming at the tail of his exoskeleton twinges with particularly horrendous vengeance upon finally convincing his legs to move. He buries the vocalization of a wince and carries on across the carpeted room with little more than a brief mental note to mention the pain to a mechanic if it worsens by tomorrow. No use in wasting company time for what he’s sure is only the result of one or both of them landing wrong after receiving a hug from one of the daycare’s more excitable children (or several).

Still, it makes the process of retrieving a stray toy from the floor that much harder when he sees it lying in wait by the slide. If anything, bending down to reclaim the doll only exacerbates the ache until it grows into a proper sting, now difficult to ignore. Yet ignore it he does, to the best of his ability. There are things to do and he isn’t about to let a pinch of soreness slow him down now. No, sirree! He has play equipment to wipe down, craft supplies to ready, and–

and…

His hand stops just short of reaching the doll, long yellow fingers curling inward, against his palm which is painted with splotches of salt and pepper, as though a bottle of dully colored glitter glue had exploded across his fingers and hand. He straightens again and lifts his other hand, noting a similar stretch of television static, one that carries beyond his wrist up the length of his forearm in smeared blotches and specks like splattered paint in dirty snow hues.

Messy messy messy. What could Moon have gotten up to that resulted in such a mess? He’d have made a face, had he a nose to wrinkle in the first place.

Instead he allows for one small tut of disgust to escape his voice box before turning his attention back to the doll, taking note of the static that stains the carpet beside its head, and just beyond it, too; a trail made up of one scattered drop after another.

Ever curious, he knows not what to do besides follow it, hoping for an answer to the many questions burning through his system. Each continuous speck leads him in the direction of the exit, every patch of static more plentiful than the last, and as he allows the strange color to guide him forward he begins to question not only its existence, but why it all seems so familiar, as though he’s seen it somewhere before.

There is little time to mull it over. He arrives at the service desk where the trail ends abruptly, and Sun pauses with the toe of his slippers stood just an inch before a stray, black shoe that might have sent him stumbling face first into carpet had he not already been looking down. A shoe isn’t the most bizarre thing to lose in a daycare of all places, and he decides right away that it isn’t anything to worry over, just another item to drop into lost and found, but where there is a shoe there is bound to be someone missing it and, well…

Sun finds the answer he’s looking for just a few inches behind the service desk.

Face down and tucked in on themselves as they are, cloaked in the desk’s shadow, it’s impossible to tell anything about the person beyond their age, and even that is somewhat uncertain — though the size 9 shoe left behind offers a decent clue. This discovery does wonders to quell the anxiety in Sun’s chest. An adult was much easier to escort from the daycare, given the lack of parental contribution it necessitated, and it looked like this one was just sleeping! An odd place to go about it, sure — against the rules, most certainly — but it’s nothing that can’t be fixed with a purposeful tap to the ankle.

So, that’s exactly what he does. Bending dramatically at the knee, head swiveling to one side, Sun’s fingers dance as though he intends on tickling the trespasser awake before extending his index finger and tapping twice in quick succession against the exposed skin between their pant leg and sock. “Rise and shine, friend!” He chirps, “It’s time to head home now.”

He’d have preferred the tried-and-true method of rousing someone (that is, a gentle rock of the shoulders), but given that their guest was currently resting in the one area that Sun was not permitted entry to, he was forced to resort to more…creative measures. Unfortunately, this action does not yield the results he is hoping for.

“Friend?” Sun calls again, allowing his voice to raise a decibel from the polite mumble it had been before. The laughter that cuts from his voicebox is nervous and too loud on its own, his anxiety returning tenfold. The points of logic he had used to reassure himself before were now quickly dwindling with each passing second in which he received no response.

With his steps now admittedly growing frantic, Sun tiptoes around the desk to the other side, hoping for a better view of their comatose companion. What happens instead is an almost comical flailing of limbs as his slipper takes to an unseen puddle of static like it were a banana peel, resulting in a scramble to keep himself upright that only comes to an end when he braces against the nearest wall for support. The distraction is agitating, but short lived. A commotion like that would surely have awoken anyone, no matter how deep in slumber they were, and the continued lack of response does nothing to relieve Sun of the stress threatening to fry his circuits.

“Friend, this is n-no time for jokes!” He asserts, speaking at full volume, now, every word drenched in tense frustration. His gaze falls to the puddle of static soaking into the bottoms of his slippers, that twinge of recognition rearing its head once more. “I’m not in the mood for games, right now, so if you’re only pretending to sleep—” his hand comes away from the wall feeling wrong, the familiar sensation of sticky static blanketing his palm and crusting in the grooves between his joints as it further dries. His fingers curl into a loose fist long enough to observe the way each digit smears against his palm and leaves behind a tacky residue that he can feel, but not see.

He looks up. There, on the wall, two handprints interrupt the static. The first is larger, an obvious testament to the humbling misstep he’d only just finished recovering from, but the other…it was far smaller, surely left behind by the same stranger currently snoozing away beneath the desk, and it ran from the lightswitch down down down to the floor, where the accusing hand now rested just outside the desk’s shadow.

How strange, Sun thinks, tilting his head to get a better look. The way the static paints their skin, it almost looks like—

“You’re doing so well, dewdrop, just a moment longer and you’ll be right as rain again!” Sun gives the small hand intertwined with his own an encouraging squeeze as the other, equipped with an antiseptic wipe, dutifully dabs away at a scuffed knee. His young patient, having tripped and burned her skin along the carpet, is nothing less than a trooper as he cleans the static from the shallow wound. Not even a sniffle!

He tucks the wipe into the flat of his palm and trades it out for ointment, smearing a healthy dollop of it along the reddened surface before wiping his finger along the striping of his pants and reaching for a bandaid; Chica pink with pizzas on one side and cupcakes on the other.

“There, now. I’m sure that feels better already!”

Blood. Viscous, cold, pooling at his feet. On the walls, the carpet. His hands. Cherry red like a lollipop and twice as sticky…or so he’s told. Nothing a robot of his nature is meant to see or understand. His censors make sure of it. Rather than allow him to see things are they are, the incarnadine color is suppressed behind a layer of static, as if he won’t care to acknowledge it at all beyond its existence on scraped knees and split lips. As if he is meant to ignore the way it feels in its abundance, caked against his palms and festering between his open joints.

Messy, messy, messy. He feels dirtied beyond repair, filthy in a way that even a deep cleaning won’t fix. The wires in his stomach feel twisted, begging to come undone, shorting like sparklers against their ports and threatening to make short work of bringing him down. His screens are flooded with alerts that warn of an inevitable shut-down if he can’t manage to pull himself back together, but moving feels impossible, an insurmountable task. He can not think past the sensation of someone else’s life soaking into the cotton of his slippers.

And what of their guest? Sun can hardly get himself to look again, pleading with the matter of logic itself as he is forced to reckon with the knowledge that this is a rest they may never wake from. But he does look. He has to.

He wishes he hadn’t.

The brief glimpse he endures before looking anywhere else is more than enough. From this angle, the static – the blood – paints a grim picture. In spite of this, Sun finds himself circling the desk a second time and preparing to draw the body – the visitor – out from under the desk. It is a daunting task, but a necessary one, by Sun’s account. If there is nothing to be done in such a hopeless situation then, at the very least, he owes this stranger the dignity of recognition and an attempt. He can claim to have looked for a pulse. Even so, he hesitates.

There is not one to be found; Sun knows this. He knows painfully well from the static lingering on his silicone that it is already too late. Oil is warmed by the processors it fuels, and similarly, blood is meant to be hot. The soles of his slippers are cold. The pads of his fingers, against even the raging inferno of his overworked circuitry, are cold.

The body is cold.

He perseveres, regardless, dragging the stranger out from under the desk by a shaky grip on their ankle one inch at a time, pausing every few tugs to look away and regather his confidence, trying so, so hard to tune out the ever-constant music as it merrily sings through the speakers.

He begs the underlying silence. “Please have a pulse.” Tug. “Please don’t be cold.” Tug. “I don’t know what to do.” Tug. “I can’t do this alone.” Tug. “You have to wake up.” Tug. “Please.” Tug. “Please!” Tug. “Please, please, please, pleasepleasepleasepleasepleaseple—”

He knows this visitor. Not a friend, but not quite a stranger, either. His scanner attempts to process the identification of a man whose head is so thick with static that it returns as an error. His face is contorted grotesquely, mouth slightly agape and eyes wide with fear. They don’t look like they’re sleeping.

A security guard whose name fails to ping in his registry. Sun had spoken with him once, maybe twice before. He drank coffee by the mile and hardly stuck around long enough to do more than complain about the weather. Sun hadn’t been in a hurry to befriend the man, but he only wished the best for him. Squeezed a joke in where he could in an attempt to turn his frown upside-down. It had never worked before, but Sun was no quitter. Now he would never get the chance to try again.

“Focus, focus.” Sun carefully lowers the man’s foot back to the carpet again, choking on the sensation of bloodied clothes slipping through his fingers and resisting the urge to tear the rays straight out of his faceplate in response. He is inconsolably panicked and at a loss for what to do, two steps from outright laughing, the complete absurdity of the situation driving him to hysterics.

He needed to call security. He couldn’t call security. Security was–

Management. There were other employees that worked the night shift if Moon complaining about them making too much noise during naptime was anything to go by. If he sent out a general call for assistance surely someone would come and tell him what to do, even at this late hour. It was his best option. His only option.

“Don’t.”

The voice makes him jump clear out of his casings. He has half a mind to swear, but as it stands, Sun thinks the long divots he dragged into the service desk out of surprise are enough damage already. On top of everything else.

“Moon?” He whispers. “Nice of you to finally join us – and by us, I mean me and the deceased guest I discovered a moment ago. Do you have a clue what’s going on here?”

“Don’t?” Sun echoes, agitated, “Don’t what?”

“Don’t.”

If the tether keeping his sanity intact was fraying before, it’s now down to a single thread. “Why not?” He asks with great exhaustion, “Did you not hear me? This is an emergency! There is a dead body in the–”

“Call management.”

“I know.”

Silence answers. Despite having a hundred and one snarky retorts building in between each crackle and pop of his voice box, Sun has nothing to say to that. Nothing good, anyway. It takes nine steady ticks of the clock for him to recollect his thoughts.

“You…you know?” He stutters, “How could you…” but he doesn’t finish the question, and he doesn’t need to. Realization strikes him with an iron fist for the second time that day and it is no less kinder than the first. “Did… you do this?”

It’s Moon’s turn to go quiet.

That silence stretches on for what feels like hours to Sun, each passing second more agonizing than the last, until he starts to believe Moon had simply disappeared like before. He waits, and waits, and finally decides to interrupt the silence with a repeat of the question, despite already knowing the answer. Moon beats him to it.

The tired sigh that escapes Sun’s throat is thoroughly earned. “Well, it’s too late to figure something else out, I already sent out the emergency ping.”

“Not sure,” he says, and Sun can tell from his tone that it’s the truth. “Blurry. My head hurts.”

A sound like nothing he’s ever heard before tears itself from Moon’s voicebox. A growl, if he were to put a name to it.

“Get rid of it, then.” Moon insists through the noise, “Clean up, clean up.”

“It?” Sun gawks, “Moon, that – that’s a person. He has dignity, a family!”

“Had a family,” Moon corrects, “dead, now. No dignity. Who will they blame?”

The question gives him pause. Surely there was a better way to go about this, a solution that didn’t have his morals (and wires, for that matter) all up in a twist. Yet the longer he thinks about it, the more he realizes Moon is right. Management hardly listens when he tries to explain that it was the children who broke a piece of playground equipment, not him! They aren’t likely to give his explanation of simply having found the body any mind, much less understanding. With his counterpart practically admitting to the heinous act, already, informing management of the body would sooner see them decommissioned.

“Running out of time,” Moon reminds him, “Tick, tock, tick, tock, tick–”

“Alright, alright!” He wails, “What should I do, then?”

“Clean up.”

“Where?” Sun looks around with the desperation of a teenager attempting to play hooky, rays practically nonexistent with how he’s tucked them away. His eyes search the room from top to bottom before landing determinedly on the ball pit.

“Good enough,” Moon tuts, a rather uninspired response to the happenings around him. Of course he isn’t panicking, it isn’t him who takes the body by its ankles and drags the dead weight across the carpet. It isn’t him who shoves aside enough plastic to carefully hide a corpse in. But it should be him worrying, it should be him panicking, because if management finds out about their secret, it’ll spell doom for both of them.

“You’ll get rid of it – him – properly once there’s no one around, right?” Sun finishes reshuffling the ball pit, mostly confident that the ill deed is successfully hidden from view. “I’m going to have to wash each and every one of these balls before the kids arrive in the morning.”

Right, the kids. When they arrive in just a few hours, will he have things tidied up? Will he be able to carry on as though nothing happened? He’s a brilliant actor – or he used to be, anyway, before the company decided he better fit the role of a nanny – but this is well beyond the scripts he is most familiar with.

“They’re close,” Moon warns him, “Don’t let them see–”

“I know, I know.” No time to dwell on it now, he makes quick work of crossing the distance between the ball pit and the exit, and manages to slide his head and torso through the gap between doors within seconds of it opening, scaring the living daylights of the poor employee sent to greet him in the process.

Unlike Sun, they do swear, clutching a hand over their chest and fitting him with a downright awful deadpanned stare. “Fuck, you couldn’t have waited a few seconds longer for me to come inside?” They hiss.

“Sorry, friend! Didn’t mean to spook you,” Sun chirps. He is careful to keep his bloodied hands safely tucked behind his back. “It’s just a mess in here, is all, and I’m rather embarrassed. There’s still equipment to clean, toys to organize, papers to fold–”

“Sure,” the employee interrupts, “It doesn’t really–” they pinch the bridge of their nose, exhaling with notably less exhaustion than Sun is feeling right about now, “I don’t particularly care. What’s the big issue that I was called down here for?”

“Oh! I just wanted to know if the next shipment of wipes had come in, yet. Like I said before, much to do! Always busy, busy, busy!”

Their stare turns into an outright glower. “That’s why you called the emergency line? For cleaning supplies?”

Sun shrugs, feigning ignorance. “Well, that’s an emergency to me. Apparently our standards are not the same.” He watches them roll their eyes with more enthusiasm than necessary. ”Do you know how messy children can be? It’s practically a barnyard in here, every single day, and don’t even get me started on how much of a health code violation it would be if one of them were to pick their nose and then–”

“Fine, I get it,” they snap, “I’ll make sure your damn supplies are delivered before the daycare opens. Anything else?”

“Told you they were annoying,” Moon chimes in.

“That’s everything!” He replies, “thank you a mighty amount, friend!”

“Mhm,” they mutter, waving him off with nothing more than the noncommittal sound. When they do turn to leave, it’s not soon enough, and Sun just barely manages to close the door with a whisper instead of a slam.

His back rests against it a moment later, and he allows himself to collapse from there, sliding down the smooth wooden frame until his tailbone reaches the floor. His knees twinge as they tuck against his chest, and he folds both arms atop, resting his temple against them and taking one long, much needed moment to just breathe.

It had only been half of a lie. There was much to do, much to clean, and only so many hours remaining to get it done. The wires nestled deep in his chest had calmed, yet the tremor in his hands continued, as it likely would until the very last speck of blood was washed clean.

“…Moon?”

“Hm?”

Sun tucks his knees ever closer. “Why…why did you do it?”

“…”

“I w-won’t be mad, promise! I’m sure this is all just one big misunderstanding, after all – a one time event, no biggie! But…was it out of anger? Fear? I mean, did he hurt–”

“In my way,” Moon replies.

Sun’s head lifts from the dark haven his arms provide, noting with growing exhaustion that, for the very first time, the lights felt too bright even for him. “What do you mean by that?” He asks, “Did he keep you from doing something?”

“…I don’t know.”

Again, Sun’s head falls against his arms in defeat, and again, not two seconds later, it lifts, determined not to lollygag any longer.

His legs creak with vocal effort as he gets back to his feet. “Well, no point in dwelling on it now, I suppose. I’m sure it’s nothing.” He takes in a wide view of the daycare – static trailing everywhere – and deflates with a sigh. “Guess I better get started. The sooner we get the place cleaned up, the sooner we can forget about all of this.”

He takes a step forward, and only that, swiveling on his heel when he catches last night’s roster from the corner of his eye. A single drop of static had landed and smeared across the name of a child meant to go home later in the evening.

Strangely enough, it appears they were never picked up.

Sun shrugs, gathering the paper in both hands and crumpling it into a ball to dispose of the smeared evidence. A simple mistake with the roster, that’s all it is. The parents often forget to sign their name after all. Accidents happen all the time!

The paper lands with a soft thunk in the nearest trash can and is just as quickly forgotten. Sun pivots towards the play area once more and heads for the supply closet, steadfast in his determination to be cleaned up on time, and feeling more confident than he ought to be about how things ended, all things considered.

More than anything, he is just happy to have all of this behind them.