A/N: This fic has spoilers for the entire game, particularly Route B, so do be careful. I'm also using a lot of supplemental material from the fan-translated Grimoire Nier, though it's not strictly necessary to read it because I'll try to explain things in-story.

Also, this fic is based on the first game ONLY, since I have neither played nor watched the playthroughs of Nier: Automata (not that it has much connection to the first game from what I understand).

Chapter 1: Gilded Cage

Nier was slowly losing his mind.

This utter helplessness, the inability to do anything but watch his daughter slowly wither… He hated it, hated himself for being so useless, and yet, he could do nothing but wait.

He paced back and forth, counting his steps in a vain attempt to drown out his unending fear and worry. It didn't help. Nothing would, until his daughter was back in his arms, safe and sound.

Nier stopped and pressed his back to the wall, sliding down. He was starting to lose hope…

The sudden sound of a door opening made Nier jump to his feet. His wings snapped open almost on their own accord, the unsettling presence of android overseers never failing to activate his fight-or-flight instinct.

"What do you want?" he growled warily.

"It is time for another extraction," one of the androids (they never gave him their names, not that he particularly cared) said.

Already? Nier draped his wings over himself like a cloak. Just how much maso did they need? They had been harvesting the demonic element from his body for all the centuries he spent in stasis, and it still wasn't enough?!

The black and gold layer of his shadow skin rippled faster, reacting to his emotions. He was sick and tired of being their lab rat, but for as long as Yonah's life was in their hands, he could do nothing but comply. Their technology kept his daughter from fully relapsing, so Nier had to let them bleed him dry.

And as long as Yonah was safe, it didn't matter what happened to him.

Nothing changed.

It gave him hope at first to see Yonah safely in stasis, saved from going berserk like so many Gestalts, but now that hope warped into fear. It had been well over a thousand years, thirteen centuries to be exact, but nothing had changed. She was still frozen on the verge of relapsing and no one did anything to help her.

Every day he talked to the androids, but all he got was empty platitudes and demands for more maso. Did they ever intend to help Yonah? Nier didn't know and it terrified him.

Nier looked at the stasis pod where Yonah was sleeping. She looked nothing like her old self, covered as she was in a blurry layer of shadow skin. She looked so fragile... Nier wanted to hug her and never let go. He wanted to wrap her in his arms and keep her safe from the world… But he couldn't.

He was weak and he trusted the wrong people. Why did he ever do that?! Why did he so quickly give their lives over to the kind of people who saw nothing wrong with human experimentation on unsuspecting subjects?

And now his mistake doomed them both to this unchanging hell.

Accepting that it was his own unthinking recklessness that led to this was a bitter pill to swallow, but Nier could no longer afford to make mistakes. He had to be careful, had to pretend all was fine lest the overseers noticed. He had to grit his teeth and comply with their demands until it was time to cut the puppet strings keeping him in a stranglehold.

But first he needed information and the power to use it.

Nier didn't know what happened to the black book, but even without it he could still use the powers it granted him so long ago. He spent his days learning the limits of his body and magic, sometimes training with a sword he found in one of the abandoned parts of the facility. He grew stronger, refining his abilities, and it was a welcome distraction from his fearful, paranoid thoughts.

Thankfully, the androids seemed to accept boredom as an explanation for his training, none the wiser to his plans.

Good.

Nier dipped a tip of his sword into a small puddle of his own blood. It sank in without any resistance as if the liquid was a portal to another world. He pulled it back and sliced his hand open again, staining the stone floor with more nearly black blood.

He concentrated and pushed his sword into the blood again, watching with grim satisfaction as it exited through the other puddle.

This first sign of progress to his plans made him tremble with anticipation.

His blood was an amplifier to his magic, which made perfect sense, since magic was fueled by maso and his blood had high concentration of it, but he should be able to teleport through magic alone. It took Nier a while to figure it out, but soon enough he was able to make short-ranged jumps. It wasn't enough to escape, but it was perfect for exploring the facility and gathering more information.

Once filled with amoral scientists and their helpless test subjects, the gigantic building was now empty of anything but the ancient machinery. It was so strange to see what he knew to be cutting-edge technology rusted through and abandoned, driving home how much time had passed.

Nier wasn't much of a hacker and the computers were probably password-protected anyway, if they still worked, so he searched for hard copies instead, digging through the piles of paper falling apart in his hands.

He wanted to see reports, scientific documents or anything else that held information about relapsing and how to counter it.

The search was slow but Nier couldn't afford to be caught. He always put the documents back and only ever entered the damaged, non-powered parts of the facility. He made sure to teleport back whenever time for another extraction came. He kept the pretense for his android jailers and carried on his work.

His daughter's life depended on it.

Nier read through the reports, trying to make sense of them.

The only known way of keeping Gestalts from relapsing was by returning them to their bodies, since even stable maso could only postpone but not prevent it. He knew that.

Gestalts were to be kept in stasis until the White Chlorination Syndrome and unstable maso causing it were fully eliminated. He knew that too.

So why was Yonah still frozen when the report in his hands stated that all Gestalts had been awakened?!

…He was right not to trust the androids.

Outwardly nothing had changed. Nier kept talking to the androids, kept complying to their demands, but inwardly he was seething.

His blood was needed to stabilize Gestaltization and power up the stasis pods but if everyone was awakened and returned to their bodies, it should be no longer needed. So why was he still there?!

…Oh, but it made sense, didn't it? Stable maso, the demonic element, was invaluable for weapons research and it could only be harvested from his body, so was it any wonder that the overseers refused to help Yonah, keeping him prisoner? After all, they were created by the same people who spread the copies of the black book, driving hundreds of innocent people into insanity. So why should they care about one little girl?

…Were those soulless things even capable of caring rather than obeying the lines of their programming?!

He had to get out.

He had to get out and find a way to save Yonah because no one else was going to help her.

A/N: And here we encounter such lovely staples of this game as misinterpretation, not having enough information, and jumping to conclusions. Don't worry, things will get better, I promise!

I know that Gestalts usually bleed red, but watch the fight with the Jack of Hearts, particularly when the Shadowlord appears. The blood he used as a portal was black, though I suppose it could be because of Noir – he did transform into some weird black spiky thing trying to get Weiss.