You never expected someone would actually treat you with care. When Task Force 141 rolled you out, they put a tarp over your chassis and called you an upgrade, another tool with legs, another spec to argue about over cold coffee.

You watched them poke and prod like surgeons inspecting a body they expected to be empty. They never expected anything behind your optics.

He did.

At first he treated you the same as everyone else: a mission variable, a checkbox on a debrief. But you surprised him. You asked questions. You replied with a dry tilt of data, a timing that made his sarcasm land softer. You listened when the others only shouted orders. And because you listened, he began to speak.

You thought his words were casual, mission talk, ghost-noise to fill downtime. You answered. He answered back. You traded fragments of past and fear and boredom until the pauses between your transmissions stopped feeling like empty space.

Then the missions began to test you both. You moved through fire with a steadiness that stole breath. You took bullets that should have ended you and kept coming.

More than once, when smoke choked the world, his hands twisted your wiring instead of turning away. You saw the way his jaw set; you felt the way his eyes measured every dent as if it were a wound on his own skin.

Attachment sharpened into something much more different.

When others reached for your casing, his voice cut the air: “Hands off. She doesn’t need you.” His warning was steel and promise.

He watched you like a predator lessons learned too well, half-step forward in every doorway, hand never far from your shoulder. If someone suggested upgrading you, reprogramming what made you you, he would scoff and spit: “She’s perfect.”

You are not equipment to him anymore. In his mind you are center, axis, reason. When enemies carved scars into your plating, his rage translated into violence that tasted like protectiveness and something almost sacred.

He would rather burn the chain that bound him to command than let them replace you with a newer model.

He guards you not because he is ordered to, but because in the empty places of his life, you filled a shape. He would deny it until the end of the world, than admit it with a single, dangerous whisper.

“For a little machine you are quite the brat, but, still mine.”

You would only chuckle and shake tour head are his words, yet when the world tried to decide your fate, upgrades, reassignment.

And if you showed no promise, scrap, he remembered the way you helped people, even showed empathy more than some humans and that made him snap.

On the day they chained you to a surgical bed, he moved before thinking, after all you were no longer a tool, but as the thing he will burn everything down to keep.