It was a little strange going back to the Raven's Nest with our prisoner in tow. Felt less like the end of a mission and more like coming home after summer camp or the like. Even though we had a drugged, restrained Exhuman chained up in the back, Karu and I spent the rest of the afternoon chatting breezily and flying slowly, not even catching sight of the DC landmarks until we had to pick them out of the dark.

For all my issues with Karu, and what she may or may not believe to be right, or moral, or her insane talk about God and destiny, there wasn't any denying the fact that she and I related better than pretty much anyone else on the team, in a way. It's not like everyone else sat on their hands all day, or that Karu and I were devoid of thought, but we were doers. AEGIS, Saga, Whitney, Lia...they were all thinkers. Planners. Schemers.

Karu and I would rather prepare our bodies and minds and take a problem head-on, and so I always found time with her refreshing when the weight of the worldly problems was too stupid and onerous for me to shoulder.

Times like now. When my biggest nemesis was paperwork, when we really should be out there hunting down Justice, or smoothing over New Eden, or talking (or smacking) some sense into the Oasians. Or, just generally contributing, such as by roping in renegade Exhumans, like the one we had with us now.

Karu landed the VTOL, handed in the Exhuman for processing, filled out a few pages of my nemesis, chatting with me while undergoing this brief debrief, and then we were free.

"My, but that was about as pleasant a night as one could ask for, as it were," Karu said, pulling off her visor and shaking out her hair. It'd grown in long enough to be shake-outable by now, and it lay flat and messy on her head, the tips of it almost reaching her eyebrows now. She must have noticed my looking, as she ran her fingers through it with a thoughtful expression. "Oh, yes. I have been meaning to do something with this."

"It looks fine," I said, punching the elevator button to get us out of the quiet flight decks. Crew levels, for food or showers probably. "Looks like hair."

She smiled prettily. "Asinine as it may be, I do take some effort in my appearance. Father always said that a put-together woman was an imposing woman, and while I have grown picky in which of his teachings I now hear, I have little desire to be anything but imposing."

I gave her another glance-over. Imposing wasn't the first word that came to mind. She was too attractive to be imposing. But then again, I knew her well, and we were close. I tried to imagine if we were strangers and I was going to walk up and try to spark up a conversation with her. Imposing suddenly seemed a lot more in the picture.

"That's weird though," I argued. The elevator doors opened silently and we piled in. "Where are we going?"

"Lockers, if you do not mind. The flightsuit truly seals in the flavor, as it were."

"Gross," I laughed, and pressed her floor. "Weird that your dad of all people would think of women as intimidating. Or anyone, really. He seemed the type to…"

I struggled for how to put an end to that sentence, only really realizing as the words were already coming out that maybe Karu still had some lingering feelings going on about the father she'd buried. But her shrug was indifferent, as was her tone. "...to give a fuck?" she offered.

"Yeah. Kinda. He obviously did."

"But not about things such as that, no. As was obvious by his attempted interactions with you, he truly was a free thinker. He cared not for age, race, class, gender, or humanity." She smirked at me slyly. "Only what he could take from them."

"Kinda. yeah."

"Still, he was not ignorant of the effect that his actions could have on others. As his protege, I was taught such as well. I was taught how to speak for maximum effect, how to hold myself, how to appear."

"And posture. I heard a lot about that one."

She caught me off-guard by laughing at my joke way harder than I thought it merited, just in time for the elevator to open, and to startle a pair of XPCA in PT gear. I followed her, keeping up the conversation and laughing until we reached the lockers.

"Join me for a shower?" she offered.

"Yeah, probably not. It was nice hanging out though."

She smirked. "You know as well as I that there is nothing sexual about being nude together. We are comrades here, not lovers."

"Yeah, still think AEGIS might take exception, and she's got eyes all over this place. Or Saga, and she's on my mind right now. Just not a good mix."

"Also, you are focusing on your career, I heard," she grinned.

"That too."

"Good. That is a lie I can tell myself at night to ease my wounded heart and aching loins. Be well, Ashton. Are you headed for home?"

She'd been staying in the barracks, and some nights, before AEGIS implemented this five-PM policy, so had I. But it was already way late, and I could only imagine how pissed AEGIS might be that I'd sorta-kinda-maybe blown her off today to go hang out with Karu, and come back late. A night in the racks was just the thing not to add to the situation.

And same also for that shower, I thought, as Karu stripped off her top. Peeled out of it really, in a way that made it suddenly very difficult to swallow.

"Yep!" my voice cracked. "See you tomorrow or whenever!" I said, too fast and turning around, while she laughed my whole way back to the elevators. I was still shaking my head...not quite sure if it was in denial or trying to get the image out...when the doors closed on me and I realized I hadn't picked my floor.

I checked my mobile. Almost nine. AEGIS should have been home hours ago. I wondered for a moment if she cooked me something and I'd ruined it by not showing. Of course, maybe Lia, Whitney, and Cosette simply benefited from my absence instead. If that were the case, I should stop by the mess and grab a bite.

But no, I thought, badging in for the upper offices. Again, I should minimize the risk of fucking things up with AEGIS more than I already had. Just a quick check-in with Saga and I'd head home.

When I got close to the conference room which had become Saga's home, I heard something strange. And it wasn't until I opened the door and saw her laying on her back on the glass table that I recognized the sound.

It was singing. Saga was singing. That was new.

She wasn't great at it, either. Her voice was too soft, and she seemed to have a very limited range in what notes she could hit, coming out more as a breathy hum than a recognizable song. But the attempt was obvious.

"Hi...you," I said, pulling up a chair at her table.

"'Sup, Athan. You're in a good mood."

"Yeah, just played hookie all day so I could put away an actual sorta-threat to society instead of doing paperwork."

"Threat to society. Threat to sanity. Threat to insanity. Threaty-threat-threat."

I blinked at her. "You uh...okay over there?"

She rolled on the table a little to fix me with an upside-down stare, and then picked up some of the strands of her hair to drizzle them over her face like she was seasoning herself. "Yuup. Just bored."

"Bored?" I laughed. "Aren't there like, a billion XPCA here for you to manage?"

She shrugged. "Mostly, they manage themselves. It's the important guys I have to really work on, and they're all home. Just me and the grunts here at night."

"And you don't work on them?"

She blew hair out of her mouth and it hovered in the air above her face. She made it look effortless, but I could tell this was a well-practiced move. Which was kind of sad.

"Buddy, I work with brains. That's what I do," she said, again sounding...a bit sing-song. "I don't do bodies. And the grunts? They're the body of the XPCA, yeah? I'm working on the head, because whatever way I turn that, the body follows."

"I gotcha," I said, giving her a smile. "Well I hope you're not too bored. I appreciate the work you put in here. Wish you could enjoy your time off like any job."

She gave me a weird look. "I do enjoy my time off. It's boring, but that's okay sometimes." She frowned for a moment as though thinking, and then decided to say it because I was already hearing it in her head anyway. "And thanks for stopping by and saying you appreciate me. I appreciate you appreciating me."

"Anytime, dude. I need to clear out before AEGIS kills me though. Anything I can get you?"

"Hmm," she mused. "We should plant some trees in here."

"Maybe uh...we can. But I meant like...anything I can get you."

"Nah. Go get not-killed by AEGIS or whatever. She's still here, I'm pretty sure. I didn't see anyone else see her leave."

I started to stand when I processed her convoluted words and paused. "Still here?"

"Yep. Yeppers. Yepity-do-dah-day." She rolled over and looked at me. "Maybe?"

"Is she or isn't she, Saga?"

"Dunno. I'm not my robot's keeper. All I said was, I didn't see anyone else see her go. But y'know, I wasn't really looking. And lots of people see her but not as herself, on account of the brain-hackery I've done around here to let you guys come and go. So, maybe?"

I shook my head. "Well thanks anyway. I guess I'll check upstairs before I go home."

"Yep. Yep. Three, four five," she sang, and I took that as my cue to exit.

This time, while waiting for the elevator, I tried to imagine the stupid shit I would come up with if I never slept. And whether I'd do it in front of anyone. Probably not, I imagined, but Saga gave considerably fewer fucks about people's perception of her than...maybe anyone. And, her intrusive thought suddenly reminded me, if she did care, she could always change that perception later. She was such a cheater.

AEGIS wasn't upstairs, but Cosette was. And Whitney, I realized, once I entered the room and got around the piles of junk she'd surrounded herself with. The former kept shooting the latter dirty looks.

"Hi guys. Seen AEGIS?" I asked.

"Hmm?" Whitney mumbled, and then half-jumped at seeing me, fumbling to pull off her headphones. "Holy heck, Athan. Don't sneak up on me like that."

"She's downstairs," Cosette grumbled.

"You okay, Cosette?"

She gave me the same look she'd been shooting Whitney. "Peachy."

I exchanged a glance with Whitney to make sure I wasn't massively missing something, but she seemed as lost as I was. Granted, she was still putting herself together after almost falling out of her chair, and scattering her work into disarray.

"Uh," I commented.

"Well if you must know," Cosette snapped. "I've been doing all your damn paperwork today. Both of you. And she has the audacity to sit here and play with her toys while I'm doing it!"

"That's what you were doing?" Whitney asked. "You should have said something. I'd have done it. I was going to, I was just finishing up on getting these diodes soldered in."

"Yeah, that's like the four-hundredth thing you've done on that shit today," Cosette sniped. "I don't know why you bothered coming in if you were just going to screw around."

"I was going to," Whitney argued. "I just got...distracted."

"Downstairs where?" I cut in.

"You're not any better," Cosette clarified, and I was beginning to think every time I opened my mouth, I was just pulling attention to myself, and not in a good way. "I see you, skipping around with Karu. This shit is your responsibility, too. And you're lucky you didn't make a mess out there, with more paperwork for me to handle."

"I'm not on the P-Force anymore, you know," I told her through a grin. "My messes are more than just your problem now."

"Still the biggest messes on the agency," she mumbled at me. "But your girl's downstairs in the server room. I can't complain too much, because she's the one really knocking out the paper...work?"

I'd already turned to leave the second the words 'server room' had left her mouth. Fuck me. Why, AEGIS?

But I knew why, now. Karu had beat it into my head to listen to what AEGIS had said before. I was certainly an idiot, but even I could learn and listen if someone told me to. But now, because I hadn't...or because I wasn't there for her, she'd gone and plugged in again.

The elevator seemed to take forever, no matter how insistently I jammed the button. She really was like an addict. I couldn't leave her alone with this stuff for a single day without her getting into trouble. I couldn't believe that I'd thought she was the one to keep an eye on Saga. As much as AEGIS might have hated it, maybe I should have told everyone else, so that like...Cosette or whomever could kick AEGIS out of the server room if she kept trying to sneak in there. Or tell me at least, or something.

The door opened and I clambered into the tiny cell, banging my head on the door as soon as I hit the button and badged in. I could make whatever excuses I wanted, or come up with hypotheticals that might have helped, but this was all on me, I knew. She had a routine that kept her clean, and I'd gone and broken it for my own selfish reasons. And without me, there wasn't any reason for her to go home on her own.

Just stupid of me. I passed out of the elevator and through some security and halls before the chill of the server room's dry air hit me.

And right in the middle of it, there she was. Sprawled out, cables everywhere, eyes glazed over as her consciousness existed more in the machines around her than the body. I felt a hot lump of guilt as I approached the pitiful form.

It took too long for her to see me. Too long for her to blink back to awareness. From her perspective, she was probably losing awareness, moving from global organizations and routing orders and materiel for tens of thousands, to looking through one pair of eyes at me. She mumbled something at me.

"Hi AEGIS," I said, soothing as I could be. I had little desire to wind up almost-dead again. "I'm back."

"H-hey," she muttered. "Hey. Just a sec, k?"

"AEGIS, I need you to come back to me please."

"Yeah...ye-ha...ha. Just a sec."

I stood and waited for many seconds, tapping my foot, crossing my arms. Every few moments, she'd snap out of her stupor and see me and give me half a smile or a little nod. It reminded me of when I'd visited a friend, and he'd needed to rush through a video game to reach a save point when dinner was already on the table.

Except, like Whitney, I imagined AEGIS never ran out of trivial things to work on. I approached her body and got another lukewarm, vacant greeting.

"Hey, can you tell me which of these we can unplug?" I asked, tousling her hair with as disarming a smile as I could muster. "How about this one?"

"No...don't...I need that. I'm...using that...on a call to Russia."

"Russia?"

"Yeah I've...sorry...I've got um…" she shook her head, her eyes not focused on anything in this room. "Um. A source about the uh...Oasis. The Oasians."

"Okay," I said. "How about this one?"

"No, I'm uh...we're reallocating...um…" She blinked at me like I was asking her to do very hard math. "...the uh...combined arms. For Liev."

"Are there any of these you're not using? Can we start taking them down?"

"I guess um...port...MC-131b over there…" she gestured with a nod of her head which was just super useful, given that it was her hair we were talking about here. But by inches in a game of hot-and-cold, I eventually got one strand of her unplugged. And then, by asking and prodding, eventually, a second.

And...I did this. For about an hour. I talked her through her stammering, distracted responses and coaxed her out of one connection after another, slowly letting her down, slowly putting her back into herself. It got easier as she unplugged and became more herself, faster, but also...so much worse.

Because she started crying as she realized again who and what she was, and what all she was doing. For an eternity, we stood on the painful, awkward precipice of her identity being fully split, where she was aware of what she was doing, but also, that it was so important she do it, that even when she once again sounded like herself again, she still couldn't bear to unplug. And she hated herself for doing so.

She apologized again and again, bawling. Trying to comfort me, for some reason, while I just kept up my patience and walked her through disconnecting, as gradually as I could.

I was glad I wasn't tired or hungry or sore. I'd come off the back of a good op and was feeling happy and light. And I used every bit of that positivity, and every bit of the guilt I felt from seeing her like that, because of me, reminding myself over and over to be patient with her, to be nice, no matter how fucking awful this entire drawn-out, self-loathing experience was.

And did I mention she was crying? And that girls crying made me very uncomfortable? Because that fucking sucked too.

But most of an hour in, I was committed. I was determined to play the best fucking martyr. We'd get through this, no matter how much it sucked, and she could be sorry and pity me and apologize for doing this to me and I'd just be as stoic as I was when I came in. That was what all my tenacity eroded down to in the end. Doing it for the pity. I was more despicable than she ever was.

Finally, she reached up and unplugged the last connection, and with it, apparently all self-control, because she launched herself into my chest and bawled, knocking me over so that she could cry over me more effectively.

It had taken most of an hour. Of pure misery, for both of us.

And I just laid there on the server room floor, exhausted. Feeling so different from when I'd come in. We were done, but somehow, it felt like...this was just the start of a much longer, much more awful night with AEGIS. I felt like we had 'a talk' coming, and I just wanted to be asleep or dead. I regretted every piece of paperwork I hadn't done. If it had hurt her like this, it wasn't worth it. I tried apologizing, but she shushed me down, argued that I couldn't apologize to someone as much a wreck as she was, that she should be apologizing, not me.

In summary, it went on for a very long time and was very awful. At some point, it was the middle of the night, and we'd been talking and arguing and beating ourselves up for hours, and AEGIS had the realization that I needed to sleep, and she'd been keeping me up this whole time without even thinking about my need for sleep, and oh her gosh, when's the last time I ate, and another entire deluge of reasons why she was the worst and she was so sorry.

So. She got us a taxi. We stopped by a twenty-four hour drive-through where we got more food than I could possibly deal with at her insistence. We went home, where she immediately sat me down to eat in silence while she stared at me, which was somehow worse than the talking.

And then she put me to bed. Apologizing again profusely for everything. Saying she just wanted to do some extra paperwork for me, because I hated it so much, and things spiraled out of control. That she hated that there was this part of her she couldn't keep reigned in, at how frustrated she was, with herself, with her failings, and that even when she saw them...when I'd come back...she still couldn't just unplug and let go.

I couldn't end it with her putting all the blame on herself. I argued back, and she argued against my arguments. Nobody was willing to let the other have the final word. And that's how we rehashed the entire argument again, in the bedroom, until I literally passed out, mid-sentence.

When I woke up, it was late, I could tell by the birds and the sun. I felt disoriented and a little sick, but I hardly stirred before touching something hard in the bed with me, and rolled over to blink at it with bleary, unfocused eyes.

It was a tray, and on it was a plate with some bacon and toast. And a note, in elaborate handwriting which I'd never before seen, which must have been AEGIS'.

Because that was her signature at the bottom, next to a heart. And it was directly under the words: I can't do this anymore. I'm sorry. I quit.