She'd tried the floor. It was good and solid unlike the bed. The mattress melded to her body and the temperature and many other variables could be changed.
Somehow, it made her feel defenseless.
Soon, even the floor wasn't solid enough.
After years of sleeping in whatever crawl space or hole she found that looked relatively safe, sleeping in the open (even when she knew nothing here would harm her) was incredibly difficult.
There was a time when things had been different.
A time when the battles still raged and every second meant being on your guard to make sure you survived the next minute. A time that, no matter the danger, she had slept well.
And she knew it was because Briareos had been at her back.
The last few nights, she had tried to convince herself that this was the same. Deunan knew he was out there, elbows braced on his knees in that contemplative position. He would stay that way for hours, days even if need be, constantly vigilant and more aware of their environment than she could ever be. She knew that he knew how restless her nights had been, how it was draining her. Though she'd run the Gauntlet the other day with what appeared to be remarkable speed and dexterity, Deunan had felt every little imperfection, every miniscule timing slip.
She knew he had too.
Deunan heaved herself up off the floor and went back to the bed, but only stayed there a moment before a fit of irrational anxiety made her need to escape. She paced the room for a moment, so tired it made her feel like a...
She stopped the thought with a groan, leaning against the plate glass of the cool, night filled window. Olympus spread out below her like a jeweled ocean. Deunan knew what she needed, absolutely needed to find some peace.
Briareos didn't move when the door panel slid back, and he wasn't surprised to Deunan was still awake. He'd had to tone down his sensors to keep the activity in the room from interfering with his perimeter scans. Besides, Deunan had been appearing in the middle of the night off and on for a while now. Sometimes she would just stand for a moment and look at him. Sometimes she herself would walk the perimeter as he sat silent and still, spreading his scanning out over a wider area and keeping close tabs on her. After she'd been attacked by android-like assailants, he rarely let her out of range.
Deunan came out the door and stopped. This seemed like another "stand and stare" night.
Though his actual gaze was lowered at the floor, the visual implants in his topmost sensors could see her perfectly well.
She looked terrible.
Anyone could look perfect during the day or night with the image manipulators the bioroids had invented. But obviously Deunan didn't want to look perfect, she wanted to look just as she felt.
Exhausted beyond endurance.
They'd been in some situations together that had resulted in sleeplessness for days on end; nearly a week at one point. Even then he'd never seen her this ghost-like.
Briareos thought for one second that his human imagination was playing tricks on him. Hollow eyed and reaching out for the warmth of life, Duanan offered him her hand.
A strange sensation passed through Briareos. It wasn't fear - not exactly. Most humans equated cyborgs with bioroids - beings whose emotions were either completely suppressed or non-existent. This was because cyborg like Briareos looked like they never felt anything. Their faceless, robot-like exteriors gave nothing away about the creature inside. He could be having a moment of extreme hilarity and appear to the world as though he were made of stone.
But this definitely wasn't funny. The ice-pick of anticipation that had slid through his nervous-system was accompanied by an image that almost seemed to flash across his visual implants it was so real. Briareos saw himself reach back toward Duanan only to have her image crackle and warp, becoming as insubstantial as a faulty hologram.
It couldn't be that she needed him...wanted him.
For a moment, when Briareos didn't move - didn't even acknowledge her presence, Deunan hesitated. The red lights atop his sensors glowed petra-naturally in the darkened hall, reminding her far too much of her first dark nightmares.
She took another step toward him.
In the subtle glow of Olympia's myriad lights shining palely through the windows all she could make out of him was his distinct bulk and faint, abstract reflections from a metallic surface.
He moved then - an almost indistinct shift in posture as she stepped forward. She was sure he had not been surprised out of some revery by her presence. Hitomi had explained cyborgs up and down when she'd gotten Deunan alone for a few minutes. She knew now that Briareos was ultra-aware of her every move as well as everything going on within and without the compound. Hitomi had also tried to make her realize that though Briareos looked so strange, so cold and mechanical, all his humanity and personality had been retained intact. To a bioroid, it made no sense to build a machine that couldn't think or feel for itself.
Duanan had seen enough of Briareos, even argued with him on two occasions, to convince her that the cyborg was a at least a solid imitation of the man she'd once known.
In that moment, she realized what she had really come out here looking for, what she really needed to know so she could have peace of mind after having been drug into such a strange world.
She needed to know that Briareos was actually there.
And there was only one way to prove that to herself.
When Deunan reached out her hand to him, Briareos almost convinced himself that she was having a waking dream and had hallucinated someone else into the place of the cyborg before her. He was able to almost instantly make an assessment of that diagnosis.
She wouldn't feel the unintended medical sweep he did (it was one of his now built-in reaction mechanisms), but he didn't even need the results of that to tell him that Deunan was perfectly aware of her actions. For one thing, her eyes (though deeply weary) were clear and fixed on him in expectation, saying as clearly as her voice: "What are you waiting for?"
Deunen leaned forward and her hand slipped into his. Briareos instantly warmed the metal alloy that composed the cyborg shell to match her body temperature - perhaps not quite quickly enough because he saw her blink, though what it meant he could not tell. Briareos felt her grip tighten slightly as she turned back toward the other room - a clear indication that she meant him to come with her.
For all his bulk, Deunan was surprised to find how silent Briareos could actually be. When he rose and followed her, she only knew of his presence by their physical contact. As a man, he'd always been a silent, lethal companion. As a cyborg, he was deadly beyond words.
She slipped her grasp away and settled, her back to him, on the bed.
The silence hung thick. Deunan felt her body actually begin to relax in knowing he was so close. Sleep, though, still seemed a distant and haunting thing. The exhaustion of her entire being combined with the lessening of a constant sense of anxiety allowed her to drop into something of a stupor which, she thought, might get her through another day.
At that point, Briareos turned off all his sensors, blacked out the visual implants and reached as deeply as he could for what remained of the human part of himself.
Suddenly, he was back in the deserted, rubble strewn streets that were all the world outside Olympia. He and Deunan had found a warm crawlspace and thrown down their heavy issue jackets, using packs for hard pillows and been lulled into an edgy dreamless sleep by the white noise of mortar shells in the distance. One of his hands lay, as always, trigger ready on the cool gunmetal of an assault rifle, his other arm cupped Deunan's body to him. Both objects - the cool lethality of the weapon and the warm, companionable Duanan - kept a certain madness in his torn, warped world at bay.
Those moments never lasted long.
In his deep subconscious, something prickled - issued a warning. It like the drone of a fly, only audible when it came near. Briareos came back to himself, flexed his hand instinctively for the weapon in his grasp. Two realities shifted and melded like viscous oil in a hydro-tube. An overwhelming sense of entrapment, of paralyzation, of confused suspension threatened to destabilize...
And then, circuits re-established a balance and his nervous system was shunted gently back into focus. The cyborg shell once more encased him and Olympus was spread glowing and silent behind cool glass. The prickling warning was one of his backup sensors programed outside of his control so that he was never able to go completely off-line. Twenty floors down, Hitomi had walked into the building, adrift from a night spent in the vid bars and sound dec's, seeking sensations her bioroid body wasn't allowed to assume on its own.
The sensor died out of his consciousness and Briareos was back in himself once again. Having pretty much turned off all other input except those inaccessible backups, he was very much in himself.
And very much wrapped around Dunan.
One arm cupped her to him, the protective bulk of his body shadowing over hers. His other hand lay against the blankets, fingers cocked as if hovering around the hair-triggers of a weapon.
Duanan slept, dark and peaceful.