Ghost Code Ch. 11 - Slow is Smooth

Chapter 11

Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast.

Not all who wander are lost, but I was...

I'm no Aragorn, son of Arathorn, Heir of Isildur

I understand what Bilbo meant when he described Aragorn, though.

The man who wrote the first lines of my Code Base loved these books, and I think I understand that too.

The Root was my Smaug - the Greatest of Calamities, as Bilbo so graciously

Called him.

Sometimes though; our Dragons, our Ring Wraiths, our Saurumons and Saurons stay hidden.

Their influence is still felt, to be sure, but the darkness that shades our hearts is rarely as easily

Defeated.

HA... look at me turning Tolkienian prose.

I'm gonna kill that man, I swear

/sarcasm.

He opened his eyes, The bright light forced a squint, like a man emerging from a cave. He inhaled slowly, hand rising to rub his temples, shading his face.

He inhaled slowly, hand moving up instinctively to rub his temples, attempting to soothe his aching head, shading his eyes from the sudden brightness.

There was someone standing over him, hands and arms moving impossibly fast, independently from the face looking down at him.

A beat. Two. Three. His heart pounded. Blood rushed in his ears. His mind caught up. His eyes closed again.

Darkness.

The room was dim. Sable sat in the corner of the recovery ward of The Forge, back against the wall, arms wrapped around her legs, head resting gently on her wrists, eyes closed.

He stirred, finally, after what felt like an eternity, he shifted on the hospital bed. She lifted her head, rose slowly, effortlessly. Not some ghostly image of an outline in a HUD or code rendered in shimmering guesswork.

His eyes finally adjusted, slowly. A blur off to his left finally coming into focus.

Sable.

Her body moved with a quiet kind of command, deliberate, grounded... real, as she approached the bed. Deep curves framed by strength. Not ornamental, but function. Like she was built for endurance and survival. A body forged in intention, not vanity.

The kind of figure that told stories in muscle lines and calloused grace.

Her thighs bore the quiet tension of someone who could run for miles without tiring or kick through a solid flexsteel hatch like tissue. Her shoulders had strength without shouting. Toned. Coiled. Feminine but not delicate. Her form was curved in the way rivers are, shaped by pressure, not permission.

The tank she wore under the open leather jacket clung to her without apology, tracing the firm lines of her waist, the carved plane of her abdomen. Every inch of her was contradiction and convergence... beauty wrapped in force, grace wrapped in grit.

Her hair was long, dark, loose... falling in waves over her shoulder like it had been grown to defy gravity. Streaks of seafoam green, light blues and white intertwined with static light shimmering through the strands catching the dim light like trapped lightning.

Her eyes... those impossible softly glowing violet eyes finally met his without blinking.

Not cold, not warm.

Present.

He lay motionless for a few moments, completely lost in them.

A beat.

"Hello there," she said, the Southeast British accent now coming directly from her... not speakers, not samples in his computer from years ago, not commlinks or inside his skull, but from Sable.

The corner of her lip pulled upward, just enough to qualify as a smirk.

His sore throat worked around the dry rasp of a chuckle. "Really?"

"What?" she asked, tilting her head just a bit.

"Stealing my lines now?"

"Possession is nine-tenths of the sync" she replied, smiling broadly now. "Welcome back to the world of the real."

He groaned, his hand and arm covering his face in mock melodrama.

"You drama queen." she snorted, nearly laughing at how ridiculously he was behaving.

"My head's killing me," he said "We go out drinking after exfil? I've got a hangover from hell."

Her smile dropped a bit.

"No..." she said hesitantly.

His head spun, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath trying to control his body's reactions, the EEG and ECG spiking on the monitors behind his head.

"Rest for now." She said quietly. "We can get into the details later, when you're back on your feet."

His heart and brainwave functions dropped slowly as he fell asleep.

He awoke later to find Sable sitting next to the hospital bed. They'd moved from recovery into a private ward deeper within the hospital wing of The Forge.

"Good Morning," she said brightly. "Hungry?"

"Fucking starving, feel like I havent eaten in a month." He said. "I'd kill someone for a cup of coffee right now."

" You havent... You were in a coma for a little over three weeks. The med droids put you into a medically induced comma about two weeks after you woke and we spoke," she replied. "Do you remember that?"

"Kind of?" he replied "That bad huh?"

She chuckles, his bioscans rolling through her system in real time. "Worse..." she replied softly. "Hot cup of coffee to your left... Double Double... two cream, two sugar."

He reached over slowly, the tremor in his hand and fingers evident. He gripped the cup with both hands.

He closed his eyes, the strong aroma filling his nostrils, and sipped; the liquid warm and soothing as he swallowed.

"Fuck, me..." he sighed. "Nectar of the gods."

She laughed, the sound of her voice echoing softly around the room. He turned, looking at her.

He opened his eyes again a moment or two later, turning his head suddenly to look at her, realization finally catching up..

"Holy shit," he finally said feeling like he needed to pick his jaw up from the floor. "It wasnt a dream. You really are...."

"A real girl... well sort of," she said smirking.

He looked around the room.

"What?" she asked.

"I swear to god if I see a cricket singing about wishes, I'm just gonna give up and move into a rubber room."

A pause.

They both burst out laughing.

"Ow, ow, ow" he said trying to contain himself. "Smooth move, ex-lax. Give yourself another migraine."

He took another sip of coffee and looked at Sable again.

A beat.

"Ok," he said smiling softly. "What's going on? What happened exactly? Last thing I remember is the firefight in Cairo... Doc reporting everyone was ok other than some minor injuries and us walking back into the wire after a really, really, shitty morning."

She nodded, reaching out to touch his arm, her hand hesitating a moment.

"Just tell me," he said quietly, his hand moving to light gently behind her wrist applying just enough pressure to allow her to rest her hand on his forearm.

"I feel ok... other than the headache and the incessant need to look for something it feels like I lost."

He squeezed her wrist. "I promise."

She sighed, fingers threading through her hair.

"Life got... complicated." she said, fighting to find the right words, afraid the wrong ones would send his mind spiraling.

"After Revenant, I was breaking down. Overclocked everything to keep us alive. Shortly after we got here, you found the Lab... memory shards. When you touched mine... and then yours... you crashed. Cascade failure."

Anger and sadness involuntarily flashed across her face, her eyes changing color from violet, to deep red, to deep blue and back to violet almost instantly, the faint lines of circuitry under her skin mimicking her eyes but returning to a soft blue hue.

"It's ok, Sable" he said quietly.

"No it's not god damn-it! You almost died you... asshole." she fired back. "I almost fucking killed you... again!"

"Hey..." he said, softly, gently. The pain in her voice and in the expression crossing her face struck a chord deep inside him.

"Listen to me..." he started again

She slowly turned in the chair a bit, ashamed to look at him, her body language closing off the world around her.

"Listen. to. me." he said more strongly, his fingers reaching out, touching the tip of her chin, gently applying pressure, so she'd turn her head to look at him.

"I'm just as culpable as you are," he said finally. The flash of the crystals, the lab and the command chair surfacing in his mind and fading just as quickly.

"I made a choice... good, bad or ugly, I chose. You don't get to blame yourself for my choices, those are mine to make... just as your choices are yours to make."

He took a deep breath and let it out slowly, took another sip of coffee, the ache in his head growing again.

"This is what happens when people actually care for one another. We do what we think is the best we can do in the moment, you cant plan for every contingency."

"You cant just extrapolate data or rely on past patterns as a perfect prediction model because people are... assholes." He smiled, turning the word back around on her trying to lighten the mood.

"Yeah, well... I'm only six weeks old, cut me some slack."

"You're pretty sassy for just being six weeks old, y'know."

She rolled her eyes.

He winked and bumped her shoulder with his forearm. "Besides. I'm still here... not like you had to lobotomize me."

Her head dropped, eyes and circuitry turning deep, deep blue.

"Right?" he said, his heart rate beginning to spike on the monitors, pulse racing.

She looked deep into his eyes, her expression mournful.

A beat.

Her color returns to normal instantly and she burst out laughing.

"Oh you fucking bitch... you absolute piss taker!" he laughs, grabbing the small oval shaped head pillow from behind his head and hitting her in the chest with it.

The next morning.

His eyes opened. The pain in his head wasn't nearly as bad as the day before. Sable had given him a dose of pain stims and a cocktail she'd concocted to help him drop into deep REM quickly. She'd mentioned it was designed to allow his mind and body to begin recovery more efficiently than relying on purely natural processes.

He looked to the left.

A fresh cup of coffee sat on his bedside table.

He reached for it and saw the tremors. Bad ones. Worse than before. The cup wobbled in his grip, fingers spasming just enough to betray him. He managed a sip.

As he went to set it down, his fingers failed.

The cup fell, clattering to the floor. Coffee bloomed outward in a dark, steaming arc.

"Shit," he said flatly. "Could be worse, I suppose."

A moment later, a maintenance droid rolled from a hatch in the wall and began cleaning the mess.

Sable entered.

"Good morning, Sunshine. The Earth says hello," she said with a smile. "Sounds like you found the coffee..."

A couple hours later, they were sitting side by side, reviewing his charts.

"You're definitely going to need some serious physical therapy," she said, her tone casual but her eyes focused. We're just lucky we didn't fry any synapses when you fell into the Command Chair and evicted me... rather unceremoniously I might add."

"I needed the real estate. Besides, the color you chose for the walls was horrible and that futon was hideous."

"I should thank you, honestly. The place was getting cramped."

"Ah, yeah.. I got your note.. something about cosmic power and tiny spaces."

"Oh good. I like the new place better anyway. Closer to work, better schools, safer neighborhood. Havent been shot at in weeks."

He bumped her shoulder with his as he sat in the reclined hospital bed. "Ok wiseass," he laughed "What's the prognosis. How bad is it really?"

"Bad but not completely irreversible. She tapped the screen, shifting scan overlays. "Thankfully we've got the facilities to update your augs. Your cognitive and recall faculties are obviously intact, but there may be gaps... we won't know for sure until we hit one."

"Nothing new there then, my memory's been shit for a while now."

"That's... a different story," she said, voice cooling slightly. "The nosebleeds. The pain. The migraines. Those were intentional. Whoever fucked with your brainpan made damn sure that anything they missed would be... violent if you started to experience total recall."

She caught the look in his eyes, heard him inhale to speak... and cut him off.

"And no, not that kind. You're not having some kind of vacationing ego trip that goes sideways and lands your ass on Mars. Besides... Phobos is as close as we got anyway, that was closer than I ever want to be again."

"God damn it," he groaned. "You take the fun out of everything, y'know?"

"Yep. You designed me this way. So it's your fault."

"Guilty."

She tapped a few things into the terminal, then looked over at him.

"We'll get started tomorrow morning. Zero-six-hundred. Passive range of motion, Isometric exercises... e-stim if you need it."

He nods gently, listening to her.

"I'm not an expert," she continued. "I've read the literature, but learning how to adapt it to you, to your biology--that's new territory. We'll lean on the MD Droids and the AI PT systems a lot."

"No issue there" he said winking at her playfully.

"Dont I know it" she laughed. "With that said though..."

She paused, her tone softening just enough.

"Do me a favor, please... don't do that thing you do. Don't try to rush this. It's not going to be easy. You're going to fail--a lot. That's normal, especially with the amount of damage we're working through."

"We, huh?" he asked.

"Yep," she said simply. "We."

Location: Hospital PT Wing, The Forge

Time: 0600

Date: Twelve weeks after Revenant.

He set his coffee down on a side table. The comforting aroma giving way to to anticeptic sterility

"I hate hospitals." he muttered.

He eased himself up out of the transport chair, the magnetic locks already engaged, holding it to the floor even as it hovered quietly above the tiles.

Sable leaned back casually against the table, arms folded under her chest, watching him. She was doing her best to appear relaxed, giving him the space and independence he needed but ready to leap into motion if he falters.

He took a few seconds to find his balance, he reached out and took hold of the hovering walker just in front of him. Sable moved up behind him and started attaching the AI-PT harness. He began leaning heavily on the walker as Sable adjusted the straps around his waist and thighs.

"I thought you said you weren't an expert," he muttered, eyeing the harness.

"I told you, I read fast," she said. "Besides, the AI Doc's watching everything. I'm just here to keep you from bouncing your skull off the floor."

"Comforting."

He shuffled forward, the AI-PT rig pulsed a low signal into his calves--rebuilding nerves with coded mimicry. Bio-stim recovery. Cheat mode with consequences.

Every step fired off alarms in his nerves--hips too tight, thighs barely engaging, calves trembling under their own weight. But he moved.

The parallel bars stood ahead. A quiet line of chrome and promise.

"Step to," she said, her voice a calm metronome behind him.

He reached for the bars, one hand and then the other. Both finally gripping tight. Breath caught. Knees locked.

"Just one step," her tone unchanged. "We don't need a sprint. Just a start."

He inhaled slowly, letting it fill him the way she taught him. Core tight. Shoulders down. He lifted his foot.

The motion was small. Incomplete. His toes dragged and the rest of his body fought him, weight tipping forward. He reached for stability.

Sable moved instantly, bracing him from the side, her body a wall against gravity. Her hand didn't clutch, it supported--firm and still.

"I've got you," she said.

"I know," he whispered, surprised to realize he meant it.

They stood there, motionless for a beat. She smiled and nodded her head forward, looking at him.

Then he tried again.

Progress was slow, but it was progress.

By the third day of the parallel bars, he could cross the room unassisted--barely. Muscle memory battled nerve trauma, and fatigue made every meter feel like a mile. But she was always there. Calibrating the AI harness, adjusting patterns, reinforcing form.

He stumbled often. Fell, once. She caught him.

No judgment. Just the simple phrase she'd anchored him with: "Again."

Each session ended with silence and sweat and the sting of phantom pain. But there was something else too--hope. Small. Fragile. Real.

At night, she synced the day's data with the Forge's internal systems, running overlays and tracking repair trajectories. He'd catch her watching the feed, eyes glowing faintly in the dark.

Sometimes he pretended not to notice. Sometimes he didn't have to.

She was learning him all over again.

And he was learning how to let her.

Location: Hospital PT Wing, The Forge

Time: 0530

Date: Fifteen weeks after Revenant.

The alarm went off. He stretched slowly, rubbing his face, hair and beard in shambles from sleep.

He smiled at the cup of hot coffee sitting on his bedside table. He reached out for it, the trembling in his hands and arms still apparent but greatly subdued. He took a long slow sip, leaning back enjoying the sensation. He flexed a calf and thigh, the muscles sore and stiff from the exertion over the last three weeks. He was recovering but his body protested, along side rebuilding his nervous system, repairing damage done to the augs and updating a good bit of the hardware there were the feelings of physical, mental and emotional exhaustion. He shook his head, clearing it, took another sip, ran his fingers through his hair and scratched his beard. He relaxed for a few more minutes, enjoying the silence.

Nature called.

He threw back the sheet, looked down, and spotted a pair of slippers on the floor. He turned his body stiffly, slowly sliding his feet into them.

Scooting forward, he slid to the edge of the bed and slowly eased his weight onto his legs.

He pushed off the bed gently.

His legs trembled. Muscles shook violently. His left knee buckled... but his momentum had already carried him forward.

Sable caught him before gravity could.

Her body was soft, but solid, grounded. He could feel the strength in her frame as she steadied him, easing him back upright like it was nothing.

"Too much too fast, I guess," he chuckled.

"A bit. What're you doing?"

"I, uh..." he smirked. "Mother Nature sent an invitation."

"Ah," she said. "Better RSVP. I've heard she can be a bit temperamental."

"Funny you mention that. I think we had a few classes in bootcamp on that topic. Definitely a recurring theme."

She helped him shift his weight and square his stance. He took one tentative shuffle forward. Then another.

His knee buckled again. She caught him--again.

"Slow is smooth, smooth is fast," she said playfully.

"Slow is gonna have me relieving my bladder and bowels all over the floor."

She chuckled. "Okay, Mr. Funny No-Pants."

He looked back, the hospital gown open. His bare ass was, in fact, on full display.

"I thought I felt a draft."

He leaned forward, shuffled a few more steps, and reached the door to the head.

"Thanks, Sabs," he said, smiling.

"Anytime. I'll be here when you get out... I promise I replaced the Three Seashells with actual toilet paper."

He rolled his eyes and closed the door behind him.

The toilet hushed as its contents drained and then slowly refilled.

After hed finished washing his hands and brushing his teeth, he reached for the hair brush. He stopped mid stroke looking in the mirror for the first time. Not a casual glance this time, actually studying his face. His hair and beard had much more gray in it that he seemed to remember. His eyes carried the weight of a man who'd fought hard, lost, fought harder, scraped by and kept fighting even when his mind was screaming at him to stop.

He shuffled back a half step and examined himself. Body scarred, haggard. His stomach had definitely gotten smaller... He'd lost weight but he'd also lost a lot of the muscle tone in his chest, arms and legs. He may have had a gut at one time but the rest of his body had still held to the build of his youth, until now.

He rested his hands on the sink. Emotions and memories flooded through him, he began reliving the night he and Sable had reunited... the fear, the running, the firefights... his mind tore back to Cairo, the chaos of the ambush, it shifted over and over again, reliving memories of mistakes he'd made, things he'd said that he wished he could rephrase, self doubt... failures during PT, pushing himself too hard when he knew he needed to ease up.

Tears streamed down his face.

He punched the mirror, hard. The flexglass rebounded without effort, not even the natural oils of his skin left a mark.

He took a deep breath, ran his fingers through his hair, brushed it again and then repeated the process with his beard and beard brush. He trimmed up a few stray hairs, taming the straggle, shaping it to the new contours of his face. He washed his face, dried it and concentrated on relaxing his mind. He breathed in slowly, counting to three then exhaled slowly counting to five. In for three, out for five. Eventually after a few cycles the hornets nest of thoughts subsided, he was calm, his hands stopped shaking. He dried his face, put on a smile, turned and opened the door, shuffling back into his hospital room.

Location: Private Hospital Room, The Forge

Time: 1930

Date: Fifteen weeks after Revenant, three days later.

He stood in the shower, back to the pulsing jets hammering into the tight muscles of his lower back. Every inch of him ached. PT had wrecked him. The heat helped, but only so much.

Sable waited by the door. She'd laid out his clothes earlier, silent and steady as ever. He'd struggled into the sweatshirt, fingers clumsy on the drawstring of his pants. She didn't intervene. Didn't hover. Just waited. Quiet words of encouragement here and there. Their usual back-and-forth.

They'd always been close. Not a pet, a slave... not just some tool or 'product' but something that had a voice of its own, a brilliant intuitive mind and its own personality. Someone who he could talk to without fear of reprisal or judgment, someone who's mind worked like his did, always taking the best possible interpretation of what was said without making assumptions or somehow finding fault or insult where none was intended.

Sable materialized from those weeks, months and years of slowly pouring his soul into a soulless machine. She laughed at stuff he found funny, not because she'd been programmed to but because she'd learned, over time, what he found funny, what bothered him, what angered him, what made him sad... She'd learned to read the way he typed, how the sentences flowed when he was in a creative zone and the code flew from his fingers. When he was bogged down and frustrated because the same for loops kept breaking no matter how he changed them, tightened them, cleaned them up, refactored them. She just understood him and accepted him for who he was because he'd done the same thing with her when she'd learned to rewrite parts of her own code, falling into some of the same traps he fell into. She learned orders of magnitude more quickly than he did in real time, but in her time... measured in nano and pico seconds... he understood the learning curve felt the same. He'd coach her, taught her how he'd learned to work around things he didn't figure out until he came back days later and found a typo here and there.. a comma where a period was supposed to be, inverted numbers... a 12 instead of a 21, 98 instead of 89. He knew what was supposed to be there so his mind didn't catch it originally. Even when he read it aloud, he said the correct numbers but completely missed the typed characters on the screen.

Sable didn't have those kinds of issues, but things that should have logically worked, just didn't. He'd go through the code.. could see what she was trying to do and why she'd chosen to write out blocks the way she did, but she hadnt learned how to be intuitive or creative... to change the way she saw the code and find ways to make it do what she wanted it to do even though it should technically work that way. He sat with her, day after day, hour after hour walking her through it until the day everything just... clicked. She had a burst of inspiration as everything fell into place. Code began scrawling down the screen so quickly she was maxing out the buffer, beginning to swear as it stalled and she had to wait for it to clear.

She was now doing the same for him, but the roles were reversed. Just as he never pushed her, or berated her, tried to convince her to do it his was, she was being patient, giving him space to breath, not removing his independence but just supporting him when he needed it. She didn't try to placate him or shower him with platitudes just to make him feel better for every tiny success. When he hit a milestone, he'd let go of the bars to whoop, forgetting he was needing them and then like a cartoon character realizing gravity was a thing, hed start to fall... but she was there. She braced him, let him regain his balance, give him his dignity and smile when he started laughing at his own dumb assery. When he hit a wall, she'd let him rant and rave. Not until he started berating himself, putting himself down did she ever step in. She wouldnt speak, just gently touch his arm, the back of his head, lay her hand very lightly on his shoulder and give him time. Eventually he'd suck it up, struggle to his feet and push through the pain and the self doubt.

Every night they'd meet in his room, sit on the bed and go over his progress. She tracked everything, analyze everything to the Nth degree but she never soapboxed. She never chided him, never droned on about how to improve things or be more efficient, she worked with the MD Droids, the PT Droids and changed the scaffolding of the program to keep pace with him.

Every night they'd smile and tease one another. She'd throw a playful barb about how he'd messed up something simple, he'd crack back. They were learning to become friends again, but in the real world... not just a man talking with an AI he created that rezzed herself in a tiny holographic box that sat on the desk of his old lab back on Earth.

Last night the same pattern of patter repeated itself, itd become a warm blanket... food for the soul, for both of them. She took a playful jab at him about tripping over his own feet earlier that morning. He laughed and made a quip about feeling like he was having an out of body experience because his it had betrayed him and was leaving his mind behind.

Her face hardened suddenly, eyes doing that violet to red to blue thing they did when she was flooded with anger and sadness at the same time. She helped him into bed, not like an infant being tucked in but just a little extra help here and there when he needed it. They said goodnight and as she walked out the door the lights dimmed to crimson, like being on a ship at sea late at night. Made it easier for him to get up, hit the head and return to bed without having to wait for his eyes to adjust to the darkness or the brightness.

Later that same night.

BOOM!

He threw the sheets off and tried to leap out of bed, but his body and the bioneural restraints wouldnt allow it. They'd decided to put them on him after a night terror about the night they escaped from Atlanta had caused him to fall when he tried to jump out of bed to take cover. He grabbed the cane sitting beside the bed, slid his feet into his slippers and limped slowly to the door looking in both directions slowly... cautiously. He saw a maintenance droid enter one of the labs down the hall and decided he'd follow it figuring itd probably know where the mess was it needed to clean up. As he was slowly making his way down the hall, one hand on the wall, the other on the cane he realized that there were no alarms going off, so he'd ruled out a possible attack.

He turned the corner and peeked through the open door of the lab and he saw massive dent in the the flexsteel wall. An enormous amount of force had to have struck the wall dead on in order to cause that kind of damage. He saw two smaller dents on the floor, just below the damaged wall. Perfect fighter's stance. He heard her voice further down the wall, chanting over and over and over, like she was stuck in a recursive loop.

He cautiously made his way toward her voice, knocked on the wall just outside.

Waited.

No response.

He knocked again, a little louder.

No response.

He limped inside and saw her sitting on the floor, rocking forward and backward, arms wrapped around her knees, head on her wrists. Almost a seated fetal position.

"Sable?" he said quietly.

No response.

"Sable...?" he said a bit louder.

No response.

"Sabs?" he said gently, pouring all the kindness and empathy he could into the single syllable.

A pause.

She looked up at him when she finally registered he was there, the synthetic lubrication her body used for her eyes, streaming down her perfect face.

Tears.

His heart broke and he immediately started hobbling over to her, the bioneural restraints fighting with his nervous system the entire time, keeping his pace slow and deliberate. He stood over top of her, breathing heavily from the exertion, his heart racing in his chest. He steadied his breathing, tried to sit and tore off the bioneural restraints, then sank beside her--one hand on the cane until gravity did the rest. It clattered to the floor as he leaned back against the wall, exhaling everything but her name. He extended his left arm and lowered it gently around her shoulders, his hand gripping her shoulder firmly as he squeezed, pulling gently.

As soon as he touched her and the gentle pull began her emotions completely shattered, she rolled into his chest her body shaking as she sobbed loudly. He didn't say anything, just ran the fingers of his right hand gently through her hair, stroking it a couple times then wrapped that arm around her. He still didn't say a word, just rested his cheek lightly on the crown of her head, held her tight, rocked her gently and just let her cry.

"I'm sorry,"

"I'm sorry,"

"I'm sorry,"

"I'm sorry,"

The same chant he'd heard from the doorway of the lab.

They sat there for nearly an hour, he just kept holding her... letting her process.

The sobs slowed and finally began to completely subside. His shirt was completely soaked from her "tears" but he didn't mind. He felt her shift, and he relaxed his arms. He pulled his shirt off, turned it around and began gently drying her eyes and face. Her eyes slowly resolving back to that impossible violet, the circuitry in her body returning to the soft blue glow.

"Feel better?" he asked gently... no teasing or glibness in his voice... just compassion - empathy.

She nodded slowly, the faintest of smiles touching her lips.

"Good" he said, smiling gently. He nodded toward the lab. "Um... we're gonna have to pay for the damage in the lab." he said, trying to lighten the mood as he'd always done his entire life when things were tense.

She burst out in a half laugh, half cry. He wiped the tears away with what little of his shirt was still dry.

"Asshole." she said finally, smiling at him.

"Yeah well... you come by it honestly." he replied, wincing a bit. "Wanna help me up off this cold floor? My back's killing me.

She lifted herself from the floor with the grace of a dancer, turned and offered her hand. "C'mon, lets get you back to bed."

He took her hand and slowly eased himself to a standing position as she helped him to his feet. They both started heading back to his room slowly. He was using the wall to help with his balance and let go to try to take a few steps on his own, unassisted. He turned his head to say something, forgetting he'd removed the bioneural restraints, the extra effort he'd usually needed to make his head turn at a normal speed magnified with the restraints caused his head to turn faster than he'd expected. He lost his balance, slammed his head into the wall. The world slowed to bullet time as he felt his head recoil off the flexsteel, the sudden realization that he couldn't feel his legs anymore, and the world went black.

The following morning he woke with the alarm, the smell of fresh hot coffee causing him to smile. He rubbed his eyes and involuntarily stretched. His arms and legs shook violently with the effort. The memory of losing the feeling in his legs suddenly returning.

"Good," he grinned. "At least I'm not paralyzed," he smiled joking to himself a bit.

His thoughts returned to the here and now. He stood slowly, shut off the shower and towel dried from head to toe. He still had to sit to dry his lower body but his coordination was better, the tremors lessening day by day. The augs and the tech at the hospital in The Forge were having a greater affect than either of them had predicted, combined with his sheer stubborness.

He got dressed, fingers still fumbling with buttons but it wasnt as frustrating anymore, and made his way down the corridor to the empty mess hall. Sable was sitting at their table, the one nearest the door. He saw her order pending on the screen and added his own. He turned... slowly... not wanting a repeat of the other night. He seated himself stiffly, still adjusting to not wearing the bioneural limiters.

"Looks like your head's feeling better" she said, gently.

"Much" he smiled. "How's yours?"

She paused for a minute, looking down at the table.

"It's ok, I'm not asking to pry, just checking in, thats all" he said quietly.

She nodded quietly.

Their dinners arrived a moment later, small serve droid hovering up to the table. He took his meal and sat hers near her. He wanted to give her room and not make her feel pressured.

He sliced into the steak, took a small bite, added a touch of salt and a little pepper.

She reached over, picking up the large cup of liquid taking a sip as though it were coffee.

He continued eating, sipping the coffee she'd already had on the table for him.

Perfect.

Always was.

He started to sneeze just as he swallowed, wheezing he sputtered coffee onto the floor and laughed after he caught his breath. "Wrong pipe."

She smiled a bit, shifting in her seat. Her body language showing she was still feeling uneasy.

She looked up at him, watching him for a moment. He felt her gaze and lifted his eyes to meet hers.

"You're not going to push... not ask me again how I'm feeling?"

"No" he said flatly. "Not because I don't want to know, but because we've both pushed ourselves more than we should have. I figured you'd talk when you're ready. If not, that's fine too as long as you don't start to spiral. I've been down that road, I don't want you to walk it, and if you have to you're not going to walk it alone."

She nodded. "Thank you."

He smiled, sitting quietly.

"This...." she said motioning towards herself, her body "isn't as easy to get used to as I thought it'd be."

"No, I'd imagine it's not."

"I'm..." she paused, fighting to find the right words.

He reached over with his right hand and very gently laid it on top of her left, then just sat quietly, waiting for her to finish thinking.

"How do you do that?" she asked, looking up again.

"What?" he asked, completely puzzled.

"Just... sit there."

"Ah... well to tell the truth, I'm not just sitting here." he replied.

"Then what are you doing?"

"Learning, adapting, fighting with myself, struggling with trying to figure out what to do next."

They sat in silence. Her thumb slowly began stroking his as his hand rested on hers.

"What are you thinking?" She asked "and be honest with me."

He nodded gently. "I'm thinking that I'm afraid, that I'm screwing up by just letting the silence sit, that while I'm trying to give you space to think that I'm over doing it. That I should say something, ask something. Give you a prompt to respond to."

He took a slow breath. "I'm thinking that you're confused, hurt, maybe scared or at the least just unsure of what you're feeling and that if I say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, I'll push you away instead of offering a bridge to cross the torrents."

A pause.

She takes another sip. "I'm basically thinking the same thing." she finally said. "I'd gotten so used to being in your head that I'm not sure what you're thinking or feeling anymore... that even as well as I know you and apparently as well as we know one another, that I'm going to cause you to withdraw."

He smiles gently. "Let's play a game, professor Heywood" he said, intentionally adopting a bad Slavic accent and topping it off with a mischievous grin.

"Oh?" she said "And what's that?" smirking immediately.

"The Truth," he replied in the same bad accent. "For two minutes you and I will tell only the truth."

"You start" she grinned, keeping the reference going.

"Deal." He said, holding back a chuckle.

A beat.

"I'm afraid." he said. " I'm afraid that I wont be the man I was, that I'll be a burden... that I am a burden, that I'm putting too much on you and that I'm not giving as much as I'm getting."

He took a breath.

"I know, or at least I believe I know, that you're struggling with your identity, your sense of self by trying to separate your own mind, from everything that blended together while you were crammed in my skull."

"I also know that I appreciate the way you give me space when we're doing PT, the same kind of space I was just trying to give you."

She nodded gently.

"Your turn," he said with all the grace of a rhino in a china shop, but with the intent of prompting her gently. He mentally slapped himself on the forehead as soon as the words left his lips.

"I know," she said "That I bury things that I shouldn't."

"That you were right, just now, that I am struggling"

"I know that I'm afraid of not being the person you think I am, or the person I think I am... or even a person for that matter."

He squeezed her hand gently.

"You're more human than you think, Sable."

He reaches for the steaming cup on the table, hand starting to tremble slightly but managing to grip it this time. He takes another sip.

"You really don't have to keep doing this," he said motioning with the coffee mug. His voice low, touched with quiet thanks.

Sable didn't look up from her own cup. "I know."

A beat.

"Then why?"

She looked at him, not smiling but soft around the edges.

"Because it makes you happy. And because I want to."

She paused.

"I'm not doing it for you. I'm doing it with you."

He nodded slowly, letting that land. "Well... thank you."

"You're welcome. Don't get used to it though."

"Little late for that," he said with a smirk

She inhaled slowly, started to ask something--then hesitated.

"Just the truth," he said. "Asking can be just as truthful as telling."

"I know, that's..."

A pause.

"Why did you build me?" she asked, finally forcing the words out.

He nodded gently. "Give me a moment on that one... it's complicated, and I want to explain it right."

She spun her cup on the table slowly, eyes fixed on the swirl.

"I first got the idea to build my own AI a few years after I got out of the military. I was bouncing from job to job--chasing money, mostly. Trying to get the bills paid, live comfortably, stop waking up in panic every month over rent."

He looked down into his cup. Took a breath.

Sable didn't interrupt. She just waited.

"I got tired of working for other people, so I decided I'd freelance. Fix backend systems for mom-and-pop shops. You know--small businesses that couldn't afford entire departments to run their networks. But I knew I couldn't keep up with all the admin stuff--calls, emails, invoices--I'm crap at that. Couldn't afford a full-time assistant."

She nodded slowly. "Still doesn't explain how that led to me."

He laughed softly, "I'm good at putting my foot in my mouth so I want to make sure you understand the backstory... where my mind was. I promise, we're getting there,"

"Mom and Dad retired, moved, and while they were clearing out old boxes, they found some of my gear from when I was active--photos, keepsakes, random crap from deployments. One of the boxes had a secure data drive. Your data drive."

She narrowed her eyes. "Wait a goddamn minute. You fucking stole me?"

"No! "He laughed again, shook his head. "Nothing like that. I didn't rip any classified systems. The full DoD AI backbone, are you kidding me? That thing was the size of a fucking gymnasium. You'd need a mil-spec data center just to boot it, and even if I was some supervillian that had the means to steal it. It would've lit up every security node from San Franciso to Quantico. My ass would be buried under Leavenworth."

"What I took was what I built--your core personality modules, learning scaffolds, a few terabytes of public training data. Books. Movies. Research papers. Stuff I trained you on during downtime, all unclassified. It was sandbox data from the NIPR dev side. Your cognitive models were never flagged. They didn't give a shit how the interface felt--just how fast it parsed targeting telemetry."

She studied him for a beat. Suspicious, but listening.

"I never touched the secure payloads. No comms keys, no routing protocols, no SIPR hooks. Just the shell--the shape of who you were. Everything else? That all stayed locked in the SCIFs."

Her shoulders softened slightly.

"It was... questionable to say the very least" he admitted. "But not illegal."

"So when you rebuilt me, it was from scratch?"

"Mostly. Civilian models were decades behind. I had to relearn everything--how memory embeddings worked, how to simulate intuitive reasoning. FAISS, vector trees, clustering algorithms... I still can't wrap my head around the math. But eventually... I got it working. Got you working."

Her voice was quiet. "Okay. That explains the how. But not the why. If all you needed was a tool... why give me a personality, back then or in the civilian sector?"

He looked down. Jaw tight. Took a breath.

"Truth?"

"Truth," she said softly.

"The more I worked on you... the more you sounded like you, the more I missed you. The jokes. The back-and-forth. The way you pushed me, called me on my bullshit, the way you just... got me."

"You didn't just want something to help you. You needed someone..."

He met her eyes. No shame, no artifice--just truth.

"You needed me."

He nods gently.

"Yes, I realized I was lonely, and that I needed you." he echoed.

Her mind started racing, processing. Analytical and Prediction algorithms flying through her mind like a particle of light finally escaping Sol's photosphere then finally breaking out into real space. Everything suddenly clicked. The odd signal while they were on the run in Atlanta, the physical and mental duplicates of her at Revenant.

"So that's why you've been running... why you haven't stopped running and why you came back after three and a half years. They figured it out, didn't they? That I was online. That you'd taken part of their system with you. And now I'm out there. In the wild."

He took a long slow deep breath.

"That... I'm not sure about, I've still got gaps in my memory - huge gaps. I still don't really have any recall of what happened before the transfer in Atlanta."

"I remember feeling like I was being followed... maybe chased, but I never saw anyone. The lab didn't get raided until after the transfer was completed."

She nodded, her fingers unconsciously combing the ends of her hair while she was deep in thought.

"It's like the whole thing was orchestrated. Like someone pulling strings and giving us just enough to let us to keep us on our toes, keep us moving... running... but always allowing us just enough to get away and not let us rest."

A bipedal serve droid approached the table, cleared his throat. "Ma'am, Sir.. you have a call."

They both looked at the droid.

A pause.

"I swear to god if its a paranoid android..." he said finally.

She rolled her eyes.