Word Count: 1,052

100 years passed since Baekhyun left Kyungsoo. The robot simply continued his work. Weeks stretched into months, months into year, and years into decades. He lived a life without change. Kyungsoo knew that Baekhyun was gone and that he could never return, but he didn’t understand the concept of nostalgia or “missing someone”.

Two or three times a year, Kyungsoo would look at the database biography of Baekhyun. “In the history of robotics, never had such a prodigal scientist as Byun Baekhyun lived. His last true project, Kyungsoo, has and will never be surpassed in either form or intelligence. Among all other attempts to make artificial intelligence, Kyungsoo has been the only one to continue operating independently without a human companion for longer than five years.” Kyungsoo sighed. At some point, he had developed the habit of putting his hand over his generator, where a heart would be, after reading the passage. He would look at his hands and think of his creator’s, the hands that had brought him to life.

Sometimes Kyungsoo would read the whole article and sometimes he would stop after reading the introduction. Kyungsoo didn’t know why he re-read it, he just did. He considered the idea that he was feeling nostalgic, that he was feeling something, just like Baekhyun had hoped. The article was published eight years, three months, one week, two days, seven hours, thirty-six minutes, and twelve seconds after Baekhyun passed and had not changed since. In the past century, no scientist had been even close to reproducing anything nearly as complex as Kyungsoo. The only two who knew how Kyungsoo was built were Kyungsoo himself and Baekhyun. Was Kyungsoo to somehow stop, all of the electronic information as to how he was programmed would disappear. No one would be able to create something so heartbreaking again, something that could almost feel for itself, something that would outlive humanity.

This time, when Kyungsoo read through the article, he skipped all of the information in the article about the science that went into building him. The instructions were vague enough that no one could reproduce another mecha like Kyungsoo from reading the article. Kyungsoo knew this part by heart; he knew it all by heart from the first time he read it. This was probably as close as Kyungsoo was going to get to the emotion known as nostalgia. He still couldn’t feel the emotional pain of separation and had accepted many decades ago that he never would. He had accepted that Baekhyun was dead. He had accepted that he would never come back. There was emptiness somewhere in him, but Kyungsoo would not go so far as to say that he was actually “missing” Baekhyun like one human would miss another.

--

There were two things that bothered him and that resurfaced every now and again. There was the mysterious smile that Baekhyun died with. There was also the hint at the location of the program that Baekhyun left for him.

Sometimes Kyungsoo would wander through the house, not turning the place upside down searching for the thing, just looking in plain sight. He hadn’t found it in the den, the kitchen, his bedroom, or the workshop. In the 100 years he had lived without Baekhyun, he also hadn’t looked in Baekhyun’s room. He would glance into the room, but that was it. The room was the same as it had been a century prior, with the exception of an accumulation of dust. Baekhyun’s laptop sat on the desk, battery long dead, looking as if Baekhyun would be back to pick it up any minute.

Kyungsoo would rest his hand on the doorframe as he looked into the room but would never step foot inside. The mecha still lived at the house and slept there, but the rest of the time he was down in the workshop doing commissions. As he took his tours around the house, he could remember every detail of his time with Baekhyun and all of the things they did together from cooking together and watching movies and even when Kyungsoo would sing the boy to sleep. It was almost like he could play the scenes back before his eyes, like he could project their two figures on the rooms that had not changed.

--

Kyungsoo sighed, wondering whether he would just do this for the rest of eternity. It was not a bad existence, but Baekhyun made things more interesting. He muffled the repetitive nature of their work. Kyungsoo briefly wondered if he could do something more with this life that he was given. He decided that he would pause building mecha for an undefined amount of time and find something or someone to, to what? To act as a replacement for Baekhyun? To act as a companion? He didn’t know. The next day he finished his last project and then put up a web note saying that he would be unavailable to build for a while but would certainly be back.

He decided that it was time for change and he was going to do it, but first, he was finally going to go into the room that he had avoided for so long. He would also see what the laptop held within. It was the one place that Kyungsoo had been avoiding but it was time. Somehow he knew that Baekhyun had meant by the fact that Kyungsoo would know when he was ready.

Kyungsoo broke the invisible seal and walked into the room. It was the same as it was a century ago. He changed the battery in the computer and booted it up. Instead of the usual opening screen, the laptop displayed a message.

“I’m glad you finally found this, hyung. I knew that you would. I hope that you find this hear to be everything the two of us hoped for. Don’t miss me too much, hyung. I’ll be right here next to you, all you have to do is think of me...” After the message appeared, a program was ejected from the computer and it shut off for good. Kyungsoo picked up the disk delicately, as if it were something that would shatter in the lightest wind. He took a deep breath, a very human-like thing to do, and began to run the program.

A/N: The story is ending and the last chapter will be the next one. There will be an epilogue, but that is just going to be the song ending. Thank you for your support and for reading. I hope that you liked the story! It was fun writing, but I wouldn't say that it is fun to break hearts.