Fanfic / Nier: Automata (RE)Birth

Nier: Automata (RE)Birth is a NieR: Automata fanfic written by Akashic Records.

What happens when the world is empty, and your reason for living was a lie? Find a new reason. Or, perhaps if Fate is willing, an old reason, re-purposed. 2B, 9S, and A2 now have to discover their own truths in a world following the rise and fall of the Tower. And, they have a special companion at their side that might change their fates.

The fanfic can be found on Fanfiction.net or Archive of our Own.

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Nier: Automata (RE)Birth provides examples of:

• Accidental Marriage: Pod 42, wanting to have Alexander as prince of the pods but not wanting to incur A2's wrath through adoption, sends a marriage certificate by digital mail to bind him and A2 together and thus making Alex his stepson. Alex realizes that his mother likely signed because she never bothers to read documents before signing them.
• Accidental Proposal: 9S unintentionally proposed to 13R thanks to him not knowing about human dating or mating rituals. 2B was NOT happy about this.
• Action Mom: A2 is one of the strongest androids on Earth and has become the adoptive mother of Alexander, the last human alive.
• Adaptation Relationship Overhaul: In NieR: Automata, Operator 21O is hinted to see 9S akin to a son based on her interest in human family and developing a more familiar attitude. When she and 6O reunite with their field operative partners, it's revealed that she has romantic feelings toward 9S instead, leading her and 6O to join 2B and 9S as a polycule.
• After the End: Or more specifically, after the end of NieR: Automata, which is still very much set in a post-apocalyptic world.
• Almighty Mom: Literally no one wants to piss A2 off when it comes to her son. Not even 2B and 9S, who could reasonable take her in a fight.
• Ascended Extra: The Big Little Sister machine from one of the side quests in NieR: Automata, now named Blue, is a lot more prominent as Alexander's Childhood Friend and Implied Love Interest.
• Ax-Crazy:
  • The New Forest King, as described in The Caligula, is not right in the head at all given his propensity for demanding his subjects slaughter themselves simply because he finds it funny.
  • 13R is a complete yandere for 9S, and fully believes that killing anyone who gets in the way of those you love is normal.
• Baby's First Words: Alexander's first word was "jackass". He was really saying the name of someone called Jackass, but A2 didn't like the idea of accidentally teaching her son a swear word.
• Baby Talk: A2 starts doing this a lot after becoming Alexander's mother.
  A2 (to Alexander): You'll never be that incompetent with women, will you, Alexander? No you won't, you'll be a real gentleman! Yes you will! Yes you will! Not at all like silly, blind, can't-get-a-hint Uncle 9S!
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: 2B and 9S, more so on 2B's side, given the amount of Cannot Spit It Out the two have.
• Betty and Veronica: Alex goes through this through his teenage years between Blue and Purple Athena. Blue is the humble Machine Betty, being the friendly Childhood Friend and fellow magic student who develops feelings for him, though Alex isn't aware of her feelings. On the opposite end, the Veronica Purple Athena is an all-powerful Machine Lifeform that establish herself the new Goddess over all intelligent lifeforms and wants to make Alex her fellow God and husband ruling the world, though when he makes his refusal know she declares a war on the Android-Free Machine alliance to remove his loves ones and grab his attention. Alex is sexually attracted to Purple Athena in her humanoid form(which she deliberately invoked), but he considers it an Inconvenient Attraction. On a twisted example of this trope, Purple Athena has been subtly pushing her influence into Blue to spy on Alex and get closer to him, which he only finds out in chapter 65 after she successfully possesses blue.
• Beyond the Impossible: Emil is shocked that A2 found a living human baby in part because humanity went extinct thanks to the White Chlorination Syndrome and the failure of the GESAULT PROJECT, along with the fact that the cyrogenics lab that A2 found the baby should have broken down centuries ago. When he, A2, 2B, and 9S investigate the lab, he discovers the baby survived so long thanks to magic drawn from WCS-infected corpses
• Big Brother Is Watching: While YoRHa is willing to let A2 keep her son and raise him as her own, they also have the intention of monitoring their every move from now on, largely for Alexander's safety.
• Bishōnen Line: Invoked and Justified with Purple Athena, as her biped machine body can't handle the strain of using magic. To fix this, she creates a humanoid body akin to Adam and Eve.
• The Caligula: The New Forest King is clearly out of his mind, demanding his own subjects kill each other for his own amusement. Whether he was always insane or if this was due to the logic virus is up in the air.
• Clingy Jealous Girl:
  • 2B was not happy when she learned that 9S accidentally proposed to android 13R.
  • 13R is even worse than 2B and really wants her dead for "stealing" 9S from her.
• The Comically Serious: PODs 042 and 153 attempts at Baby Talk are especially funny when you remember their Machine Monotone in the game.
  POD 153: Who is a cutie. Who is a cutie. It is you. It is you. Come to me now that praise has been delivered.
• Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears: Played for Laughs when 9S desperately covers Alex's eyes when Jacqueline gives Hatchet a Big Damn Kiss. Then when the two decide to extend their passion upstairs, A2 is desperate to get her out of audible range.
  A2: Okay Alex time to play outside!
  Alex: But it's raining!
  A2: Then you get to play inside! Just not in here!
• Create Your Own Villain: Emil's effort to erase the remnants of the Red Girls from the Machine Network inadvertently leads to the birth of Purple Athena, a digital conscious that can use magic as he can.
• Demonic Possession: Chapter 57 has 13R able to download her personality into other 13 type androids, on the basis of all of them having demonic codes. After 13R takes over the body of 13B and uses it to infiltrate the bunker, White orders all 13 types to be quarantined to reduce the chance of this happening again.
• The Dreaded: Because Emil has possessed robot bodies over the centuries to accommodate for his lack of a body, the sentient machines have taken to referring to him as the “Great Robot Ghost”, Pascal’s village nearly rioting in panic when learning that he was coming to the treaty.
• Doorstop Baby: The plot centers around A2 finding a human baby - the last human on Earth - in the remains of a cryogenics lab. Considering the themes behind NieR: Automata, it is more likely to be a case of Moses in the Bulrushes.
• Doting Parent: While all of Alexander's family dotes on him, A2 borders on My Beloved Smother territory as the kid gets older.
• Epic Fail: The reason that Pascal avoided her canon's fate of either a Mercy Kill or having her personality erased after crossing the Despair Event Horizon? A2's failed attempt at hacking and erasing her personality put the ex-Commander to sleep instead, long enough to discover the children were only Faking the Dead. 9S and 2B both let out a laugh at how absurd the scenario was.
• Extinct in the Future:
  • The aliens intentionally hunted down all felines (both domesticated and their wild relatives) because humans loved them. The tigers are the only survivors thanks to being too stealthy and dangerous to be worth the effort.
  • Discussed with whales and other marine organisms. While Pascal has hope that some whales survive in the deep depths of the ocean, Blue believes that they have gone extinct from either environmental disasters or the alien invasion.
• Female Gaze: According to 2B, 13R was able to recognize 9S due to his "cute butt".
• From Hero to Mentor: Thousands of years after the events of NieR, Emil is now a magic instructor to Alexander and Blue the Machine child.
• From the Mouths of Babes: Sebastian (the youngest android there) ended up spouting that Jackass/Jaquelin likes Hatchet after seeing their sexual tension.
• Gender Flip: In the game, Pascal is referred to with male pronouns despite his feminine voice and female voice-actor. Here, Pascal is referred to with female pronouns.
• Goo-Goo-Godlike: Alexander has a wide variety of magic abilities and may potentially be worshiped as an actual god if his existence is made known, hence why his new family goes out of their way to keep him hidden.
• Hidden Depths: Alexender brings up that Commander White passionately enjoy cooking competitions from human history, though she claims she only watches them to provide nutritious meals for her daughter Cleo.
• History Repeats: At the start of the story, 9S has to deal with the unwanted desires of 13R thanks to an Accidental Proposal before the events of NieR: Automata. Likewise, when Alex grows up to his teenage years, he gets his own yandere in the form of Purple Athena. Alex laments that he's become his uncle 9S when it comes to his bad luck with women.
• Inventional Wisdom: Parodied in the "WHY?! Why was I programmed to feel pain?" kind of way when A2 takes out her anger with Alex’s first word being "Jackass" on… well… Jackass via force-feeding her soap.
  Jackass: Why, God?! Why did you let your humans build us with taste receptors?!
• Island of Misfit Everything: The Graveyard is a recycling center that takes old android tech and re-purposes them for future use. It is ran by androids that have worn down and made useless for field work (or “invalid”) while also not possessing intellectual skills like hacking and programming. It is considered something like a retirement home for misfit androids, something A2 quickly takes a liking too.
• Keystone Army: The Neo-Machine network is dependent solely on Purple Athena. If she is permanently destroyed, all of followers will go down with her.
• Killed Offscreen: In chapter 62, it's revealed that during the Neo-Machine invasion of the Nodes, Pod 42 gets attacked while setting up the defenses for his kingdom, and he is killed luring out the invading forces to protect the other Pods and Emil
• Last of His Kind: Alexander is the last human alive, at least until Project: Ascension starts and more humans are created from both his DNA and stored records.
• Lolicon and Shotacon: 2B internally refers to 9S as a “shota-droid” at one point.
• Magitek: It was through a mix of cryogenics and magic that was able to keep the baby alive through the centuries.
  • It is implied that magic was used to create the general POD skill abilities.
  • Machine Lifeforms like Blue are also capable of learning magic. Purple Athena, the new Machine Network is also able to use magic to establish herself as a new goddess.
• Mama Bear: Being the one who found the child, it is clear that Action Girl Jerk with a Heart of Gold A2 has become particularly attached to him, the baby already having taken the habit of calling her "mama". She especially did not take it well when Alex’s first word was ”Jackass”.
• Meaningful Name: A2 names the baby “Alexander Spero.” “Defender of the people” in Greek and “Hope” in Latin respectively. This signifies that he could potentially become a great hero and symbol of hope for Earth when he grows up.
• Messianic Archetype: The small family that ends up forming over the course of the fic worry that other androids will see Alexander as this. Especially since he started developing magic and their records indicate that prophetic figures in human history have often displayed mythical abilities.
• My Beloved Smother: Alexander starts feeling this way about A2 as he gets older, feeling that she needlessly coddles him. At one point she kept him locked up in his room when he got just a little sick and babied him for over a month. Granted, it can at times be justified by him being the Last of His Kind, but it still grates on his nerves.
• Not a Date: 9S insists that his outing with 2B at the Meat Shack was not a date. Nobody buys it for a second.
• Not Quite Human:
  • It is brought up whether or not Emil technically counts as human - or even organic - anymore.
  • Subverted with Alexander. He's still completely human, he just has magic powers now.
• Not So Extinct: Alexander's existence undoes the twist that humanity went extinct in the game.
• Not Worth Killing: After seeing A2's concern for Alexander, White still hates her, but decides that she's not worth the effort.
• Our Dragons Are Different: During the events of the White Chlorination Pandemic, scientists examined Angelus's remains to better understand the disease, and in a facility in the Alps they created dragon-reptile hybrids from her DNA to try and create a cure. After humanity died out, the dragons formed their own ecosystem in the underground labs, and only recently they come out to explore the modern world.
• Practically Different Generations: Alexander is around 16-years-old when his baby sister^note who was made from his DNA and is genetically the equivalent of his cousin, but sister is simpler Cleopatra is born.
• Plot-Induced Illness: Alexander ends up suffering from a disease that required his family to make his existence known to White so they could use the Bunker's medical supplies. It turns out, what he had was a strain of tuberculosis that Jackass/Jaquelin could have very easily cured. She deliberately infected Alexander with it and tricked them so she could access the Bunker to reinstate "Project: Ascension" and try to resurrect humanity.
• Power Floats: It is revealed that Alex absorbed some residual magic from the cryogenic lab when he floats out of his high-chair to be with Chompy.
• Raised by Robots: The androids (or rather two synods and one android) A2, 2B and 9S (along with their PODs) are stuck taking care of a human baby. They all become as tight nit as a family in doing so.
• Secret-Keeper:
  • With the discovery of Alexander, a motley family of sorts was formed to help look after him, including A2, 2B, 9S, Jackass, Hatchet, Sebastian and Emil. Because of the implications Alexander’s existence brings to machine and androids everywhere, they have all sworn to keep him a secret until he is old enough to decide what to do with himself.
  • Alexander ends up hiding the secret of Project Ascension from the others alongside Jaquelin.
• Selective Obliviousness: 13R pretty much ignores any and all evidence that 9S's proposal to her was completely accidental.
• She Cleans Up Nicely: On there "not date", 2B was stated to wear a very revealing and attractive dress. The rest of the gang tease 9S about it.
• She Is Not My Girlfriend:
  • 9S and 2B insist that there is NOTHING between them, but nobody buys it for a second and it's pretty clear to everyone that they really do love each other, despite being terrible at flat-out saying it.
  • 9S makes it clear that his proposal to 13R was completely accidental and that there is nothing going on between them. Try telling 13R that.
• Shout-Out: 9S mutters that he wished he had a cardboard box when they have to sneak into the Forest Kingdom.
• Silly Reason for War: The aliens invaded Earth because they were envious of the long-extinct humans creating the more wonderful androids that continue to revere their makers compared to the simple Machines they keep as mere slaves.
• Solar Punk: It is brought up that while destroying the Machines was a big priority, YoRHa made sure that the Earth was still habitable for humans. Because of this, emissions and toxic materials were kept at a minimum and old parts were recycled, including android parts and tech.
• Someday This Will Come in Handy: Having spent enough time within the Machine Network, 9S has learned various (mostly inconsequential) information that it has accumulated, including child-rearing, the human life-cycle, cow-husbandry, the mating habits of over 49 different birds, the ability to speak the dead language of Chinese and over twenty terabytes of media related to cats doing cute things.
• Spared by the Adaptation:
  • Despite the canon-ending of Pascal's village, with the villagers either going berserk or committing suicide, leaving Pascal's fate up to the player, here Pascal not only survives in-tact, but some of the villagers are still around, helping rebuild the village after the tower fell.
  • While the Bunker is in ruins, some of the YoRHa androids (including Commander White and Commanders 6O and 21O) survived its destruction and managed to survive long enough for the tower to fall, purging the logic virus from their systems.
  • Devola and Popola are alive and well.
• Straying Baby: While A2 and 2B tried making Emil’s home more habitable for a human baby, 9S and Emil were left to care for him. They look away for a few moments before the baby somehow wound up high-up on top of a terminal too high for 9S to reach.^note Please note that in the game, 9S could jump as high as three-stories.It is later revealed that this is because the cryogenic technology used to keep him alive incorporated magic, imbuing him with this magic as a side-effect.
• Synchronous Episodes: Chapters 7 and 8 take place at the same time, named “Infancy Mission (Part A)” and “Infancy Mission (Part B)” respectively.
• Team Pet: Chompy the Goat, who was taken in to provide milk when Alexander was a baby
• Tempting Fate: In chapter 59, A2 is about to say that defeating a drilling Neo-Machine was easy when 9S tries to stop her. Annoyed, she deliberately asks what's the worse that can happen... and to everyone else's relief nothing happens. Then they struggle to contact the Node and learn that more Neo-Machines are attacking there, while the Neo-Machines that Emil and the Pods destroyed earlier repair themselves with Maso and attack the team of androids.
• Those Were Only Their Scouts: In chapter 64, the Antarctic command center, called the Maw, is attacked by a dragon-like Goliath that takes everything the military base has to destroy it and nearly breaks their shield. Then it's revealed the dragon was the first of twelve, with their scout's defeat used to figure out the bases weakness and overwhelm it. The Maw's residence are forced to flew with their data, while General Noir stays behind and finishes all but one of the dragons off with the Forbidden Ten experimental weapons at the cost of his life.
• Trash the Set: When the Neo-Machines nearly claim the Pod's kingdom so they can use the Node to rebuild the Machine Network, Emil and 9S bury the Pod Kingdom so the enemy can't complete their mission.
• Uterine Replicator: It is revealed that YoRHa had proposed dozens of projects over the years to bring back humanity from extinction, but the lack of usable genetic material has prevented such things from happening. With Alexander's DNA however, they would be able to fulfill Project Ascension; a means of refitting the androids and gynoids to reproduce via artificial reproductive organs and genetic material harvested and redone from samples of Alex. Commander White is the first Android to undergo the process, followed by other gynoids like 2B, 6O, and 21O.
• Villainesses Want Heroes:
  • 13R was already a deranged Yandere for 9S while she was in YoRHa. After Purple Athena kills her squadmates and restores her limbs, 139 joins up with the new goddess in hopes of killing 2B and getting 9S for herself.
  • After creating a humanoid body for herself, Purple Athena declares she'll make Alexander her husband so they can rule as gods over humanity, androids, and Machines.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Jackass/Jaquelin is willing to infect Alexander with a disease and trick her friends into believing that they needed the Bunker's medical supplies to heal him to bring back "Project: Ascension" and resurrect humanity.
• What Is This Thing You Call "Love"?:
  • Commander White doesn't believe that androids can feel love, as any emotion they have is a programmed response put in by humans, and is therefore fake. This was a major contributing factor to her break-up with Jackass/Jaquelin.
  • There are times when Alexander has a hard time believing that his mother actually loves him and accuses it of being her Android programming. Though this only happened when he was falling sick and was in a particularly bad mood about her coddling.
• Woman Scorned: Let's just say that 13R REALLY hates 9S for "cheating" on her and leave it at that.
• The Worf Effect: A2 gets defeated by Commander White. White states that while A2 may be the best fighter, she is the best, period.
• World's Strongest Man: Commander White is the strongest android on Earth, having been designed to be superior to all other YoRHa androids.
• Yandere:
  • 13R is one for 9S. Her mindset on what love is involves killing anyone who gets in between you and your beloved. It's mentioned that every android of the 13 personality type are yanderes.
  • Purple Athena is determined to make Alexander her new husband and rule the world together. Her war against the androids, humanity, and their allied machines isn't just a means of removing Alexander's family so she can have him for himself but rather a deranged means of getting his attention.

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