I hadn't experimented with all three of these guys in the same room together at the same time and this was my attempt at doing so. Amongst the most memorable moments with KITT, Bonnie and Michael, I found, were those which involved intense turmoil for one or all of them.

If it wasn't KITT sitting in a hospital parking lot for nine days, it was KITT sitting in a repair stand having broken circuitry welding back together with an anxious looking Michael and an irritated looking Bonnie. Seems that Michael just can't help putting her baby through the wars.

Knight Industries Two Thousand.

The first thing Bonnie can think of to say is: 'What the hell has he done to you now?'

The second thing is: 'For God's sakes, this is a useless job, KITT. Michael could've done a better patch up than that.' She really has no idea whose clever idea it was to try and fix the several holes currently adorning KITT's shell with metal sealant, but she's going to have to have words with them. Whoever it was, they responded to the problem just as if he were some run-of-the-mill automobile, clearly without even bothering to look under the hood…

…Which Michael was probably trying to prevent in the interests of hiding the fact that KITT is nothing like a normal vehicle. In the field such disguises sometimes had to be established (if the bad guys knew they were dealing with a super-enhanced, bullet-proof, fireproof, self-driving automobile they'd bring along meaner weapons) and Michael has never been the most careful driver in the world. Bonnie understands better these days how little time is afforded to him in the field for actually paying attention to KITT's outer shell. It's KITT's job to protect his driver, not the other way around. Sometimes damage can't be helped.

Still, every day she sends them out into the field believing that there's no way Michael can get him scratched up this time. Every time Michael exceeds her expectations.

Bonnie Barstow had made it her job to understand the ways in which KITT can be hurt. His main weakness is corrosive substances. Acids, alkalis and the like, mostly because they can weaken his exterior body and make him susceptible to damage. Still, the criminal groups that he and Michael take on in the field don't usually stock up on acid-firing spray guns. Like an egg (or a battle tank) KITT is also weaker and easier to damage if you attack him from the inside, but that's not usually a problem either as Michael doesn't allow just anyone inside of his car.

His car, he always calls him. Bonnie doesn't know how she feels about that.

And of course, any fall from a significant height, or an explosive charge over a certain level is bound to at least put a dent in KITT's shell, yet once again, not many of the criminals they encounter (even in their line of work.) tend to take missile cannons to Trans Am Firebirds. Most of KITT's weaknesses have been accounted for. The only way to damage him is to come up with something that Bonnie Barstow hasn't already bet on.

However, sometimes the most dangerous things are so because they can't be anticipated for. Normally the team is so fussed about making KITT'S exterior surface as durable as possible that it it's easy to forget about the inside. After all, who could get inside of KITT unless he wanted them to?

Well, someone with a shotgun against his driver's head, sure.

Not a real person. Not really. Or that's what a lot of people in power at FLAG would like to believe. Wilton Knight had always known better. Michael had learned too, after a fashion. Bonnie…

Bonnie thinks that she knew it from the second she typed in the first translatable signal and waited for the newborn AI to respond. It's become something of a habit of theirs since then. Whenever she has to shut him down completely, she'll always greet him upon reactivation with the exact same question as she first posed that day four years ago.

YOU ARE THE KNIGHT INDUSTRIES TWO THOUSAND. WHO ARE YOU?

His answer was always the same, though as he'd developed, it had changed slightly. From "This is The Knight Industries Two Thousand" to "I am the Knight Industries Two Thousand. K.I.T.T." to "I am the Knight Industries Two Thousand. K.I.T.T for short. KITT if you prefer." to "I'm KITT."

This time, though, when Bonnie sits herself in the driver's chair and types the usual; question, his answer is different.

'…Hael?'

Bonnie swallows. Her mouth dry. She's unused to such a different response. 'No, KITT, it's me.'

'…Bon…ie.' He sounds no less relieved that it's her than he would have if it were Michael sitting here, and for just a moment Bonnie almost wishes she could be him, just to make KITT feel better.

She lets out a breath. Sometimes, at moments like this, it's hard to tell if he's really functioning on a conversational level. KITT does exactly the same thing that many humans do when they're "damaged" –he clams up trying to work out what the hell is going on. It's the same as a human going into shock. 'Yeah… yeah, it's Bonnie, KITT. It's alright. You're back at the foundation.'

KITT takes a moment to process what she's saying. 'Ar… going to lie… o me about i…t be…ng night, …gain?

Bonnie smiles. She can't help it. If he's cracking jokes then he must be okay. 'Actually, I'm not sure what time it is, I haven't looked. It's late, though. It probably is dark.'

'I dete…t a of artif…al lightning from the… ain cabin. My interna… chronomet—'

'Shh,' it feels strange, telling a machine to "shush" but less so because it's KITT. 'Don't mind your chronometer right now; just leave that to me.'

'I can't ac…ess ma… prima…y syste… Are they… b…dly da…ged?'

'Not as bad as it could've been. You were very lucky, KITT.'

'Lucky?' KITT's wavering voice modulator sounds surprised and indignant. 'I think…'s natural skil… and abili, Bo…e no… luck.'

He's actually probably right on that one. Either that or KITT really is the luckiest sentient automobile in the world (asides from being the only one). As far as exterior damage goes, there isn't much to speak about. The problem is mostly on the inside –there are at least sixteen individual damaged components, two of them purely mechanical, others more important as far as KITT's cognitive functioning is concerned. It basically seems to be hardware problems –things that can be taken out and replaced. Bonnie is slightly worried about his main memory core, which some of the shrapnel has just brushed against, but the odds are if anything significant had been harmed, KITT wouldn't be trying to talk to her like he is now. Technically that's a good sign.

'I'm sure it is, KITT. Now, I'm going to close down your main processor for a while. Is that alright?'

There's a pause. 'I'm no… cr…zy about th… idea.'

Even with his tonal modulator going screwy, she can still hear a kind of anxiety which she doesn't often get from KITT. 'I know you're not, but just to be safe. There are things I want to get a better look at here, see what else you've managed to rip up.' She's already pulled open his outer hull. Several of the other FLAG technicians are hovering around, but they know it's best to give Bonnie her space. She'll call one of them if they're really needed, until then…

'Bonnie.'

Anxiety has turned to fear. She hesitates, fingers poised over keys and controls. 'You really don't want to be shut down right now, huh?'

'No… rea...y.' The cockiness has gone and been replaced with anxiety. Bonnie takes a deep breath and lets it out. She knows it's kind of the equivalent of asking someone to perform simple brain surgery while the patient is conscious, but… KITT's not a human. KITT's not even really the car he's contained within. 'Alright. Activate your system-sleep mode, then. Stage three, no lower. I promise.'

'A…right. Activa…ing.'

'No talking, KITT, promise me now.'

'Unders…od.' For KITT, that's as good as saying "I promise". He's true to his word.

Bonnie keeps working. Lights flicker where they shouldn't flicker, and are absent where they should be present, but that's the only sign from the outside that there's any real damage. There aren't many things that can damage KITT from the outside, but technological advancement is as technological advancement does, and every day it seems as if people are coming up with new weaponry which is capable of taking on the Knight Industries Two Thousand.

Bonnie knows this. She understands how KITT's systems operate so well that they feel like they're like an extension of her. She knows exactly how to hurt him, and what he can stand. She keeps thinking about what could've happened in there, trying to work out in her mind just how KITT ended up like this (again, she's running out of fingers to count his repairs down on. For a supposedly indestructible car, KITT sure seems to get bashed up a lot).

She knows, really, that's it's not the fault of the driver. Michael knows the rules of street warfare. When someone is holding a gun to your head, you either play it safe and do exactly what they're tell you to do (even if what they're telling you to do is "get in the car or get your brains blown out all over that nice leather seating, wiseass") or judge your actions very, very carefully upon an appraisal of the man holding the weapon. The guys Michael had been dealing with weren't fools who had just happened to be handed a cornucopia of illegal drugs (and weaponry to boot. Seems you just can't make the dime in just one area of the business these days, Bonnie thinks dryly). They were professionals, and Michael had just blown a scandal that had taken them eleven months to organize. He'd known they weren't kidding about threatening to shoot him.

Michael had let the gun runner into KITT, because if he hadn't, he would have been strewn across the room himself, like his bones were oh so much shrapnel.

He didn't have any choice in the matter.

Bonnie knows that, but knowing it doesn't make her feel any better about the shrapnel ripping up KITT's systems.

Of course, most Trans Ams don't come equipped with electric-shock systems designed to incapacitate intruders. KITT does, and chose that very moment to use it, sending a 150 volt jolt right up the intruder's spine, while somehow managing to avoid electrocuting Michael at the same time.

It worked, for the most part, in that it got the gun away from Michael's face. It failed in that the gun was then pointed right at KITT's CPU. As soon as the charge had died, under the illusion than the man was incapacitated and before anyone else even had time to react, the dealer had taken the opportunity to shoot KITT right in the representative equivalent of his "face". Or maybe that had been an accident, a reflex from the electric charge. Bonnie neither knew nor cared.

It hadn't been a normal bullet in the first place (though it looked and felt enough like one to send a chill down Bonnie's spine). It was a new and rather nasty design of weaponry, which utilised your average hand pistol as a propulsion system, but stopped behaving like a regular bullet the moment it'd left the barrel. It was constructed out of a heavyweight substance, contained a microscopic "homing device" that arrowed in on the target. After impact, a tiny explosive would be set off inside of the bullet/capsule, causing it to "shed" its titanium skin rather violently into the surrounding flesh and bone. Or in this case, the surrounding metal and circuitry. Needless to say, KITT's CPU wasn't half as bullet proof as his external shell.

Pain isn't a factor where KITT is concerned. But the damage caused by the shrapnel is. It might've been a strange, new fangled design, but it was still, in essence, just a bullet. Bonnie Barstow knows exactly how bullets work. This one had bit in hard, narrowly missing several of KITT's microprocessors before the secondary effect of the bullet kicked in and sent fragments of shrapnel flying into several major systems and barely glancing his main fuel tank.

It's like getting buckshot from inside the wound, and Bonnie really can't see the point of such a design except to be as painful and sadistic as possible. The fact that this hadn't immediately ignited the hydrogen fuel was mostly due to the fact that the tank had been almost empty at the time. KITT had already been running on reserve power.

It's… ridiculous. The idea that KITT could be harmed by something so utterly simple and utterly human…

'It wasn't simple, if you ask me.' Michael's voice. Bonnie isn't sure just when he arrived, and it's only now that she realises she was talking out loud.

'I know that. I know, it's just… God it was just a…'

'A goddamn bullet?' Michael finishes what she doesn't say. It's true. Neither of them can really picture the Knight Industries Two Thousand being taken out by a gun.

'That's w…,t I sai…d.' KITT's voice is still crackling and vague, but present and no less communicative than usual. She uses it to convince herself that things are okay and she's really not shaking.

'Yeah, that's what you said,' she can hear the smile in Michael's voice, tinged with just a hint of "what the hell am I going to do with you?" that she's come to associate with their relationship.

'Gl… you remem…'

Bonnie gives KITT's dashboard a light warning tap. 'Hey, I said no talking.'

'Te…cally Bonnie its trans…itting. No… tal…ing.'

'Wiseacre,' Bonnie smiles. 'I'm serious, set your stage three sleep mode and keep it there, KITT.'

'A… I going to get a… ank you fo… he save, yet?' KITT adds, clearly without any intention of reactivating his Sleep mode. Michael blinks innocently (or as close to innocently as he ever gets, anyway).

'What, I didn't already say it?'

'V…y funny. I belie… your exac… ords were "W…at… hell're…y… doing y… idiot, do…'

'KITT…' Michael starts, then trails off so that KITT can finish.

'…you…self killed.'

Silence.

Bonnie pretends to be working on KITT's CPU. Michael pretends to be messing with the coffee pot on the desktop. KITT never pretends anything, and now isn't going to be an exception.

'…Thanks, KITT.'

'Y…r …elcome.'

'Okay,' Michael sighs. 'Now we've got that settled, promise me you won't do it again.'

'Yo…'re forg…ting, Mi…el, it's i.. my… j… escription to act as—'

'To hell with your program, KITT.'

'Mi…hael, rea…ly., I can say "wh…t the h…ll" to my pro….m about a… much as you ca… say "what te hell" to the f…male membe… of your sp—'

'KITT, I'm deactivating your systems now,' Bonnie puts in before KITT can launch off with either the Knight Industries list of regulation and protocol or a list of Michael's previous female "acquaintances". Michael's clearly having a guilt trip, so she decides to cut him some slack. He doesn't need the third degree from a car right now, and the car could do without going into that kind of conversation himself.

They're extremely lucky, really, that none of that buckshot had affected KITT's manual steering system. Michael had been able to get the vehicle back to the truck without the car's own input.

'Bo… is tha… real…y ne…ssary? Al… of them?'

Bonnie pats a monitor. It's the closest she can really get to comforting a mechanical creature. 'Yes, all of them, from the ground up. We've done it a thousand times before, right?'

'…Yes, bu… not usu…ly this clo… to explod…g.'

'Hey,' Michael's voice is softer than it usually is, and Bonnie recognises the way his hands brush against the edge of KITT's hood. She's seen it before, but she never really noticed it from Michael. It's the same thing Bonnie does every now and then, trying to interact with a living computer through the only "skin" it has –the molecular bonded surface of a car. 'No explosions buddy. We'll promise if you will. Deal on that?'

'…Can't st…y in stand-by …ode? I'd really pre…er to st… in stan…by.'

'Sorry, KITT,' Bonnie says. 'There's some stuff here I need to check out, I can only do when you're completely inactive. It's okay.'

'Defin… "stuff…".'

'Important things which don't require me being electrocuted like the goon who tried to get one up on you,' Bonnie mixes in just the right amount of what she hopes is compliment. One of the best ways to get around KITT's safety precautions is ego. 'So I should probably be turning your security precautions off, okay?'

There's a rather lengthy pause. '…Lright.'

Bonnie nods to a techie at the nearby control panel. A few seconds later, the lights inside KITT's processor flicker and die completely. She can't see it from the driver's seat, but she knows the red scanner light just faded to black, too. She shivers without meaning to.

It's just a shell, Bonnie tells herself. A highly advanced, technologically constructed shell, but that's it. It shouldn't feel like sitting inside of a dead body as much as it does. Michael let's out a breath so hard that Bonnie wonders whether he was holding it.

There is silence between them for what feels like forever, as there often is in moments like this. Similar silences hang between her and KITT whenever it's Michael pulling himself together and sealing up bad wounds: the kind of anxious uncertainty where they draw comfort, rather than anxiety, from each other's silence.

'I'd been hoping that this time the damage would be kept to a minimum,' she says dryly, putting a bit too much effort into her work on a circuit board. 'You always manage to surprise me, Mr Knight.'

She hears Michael draw a sharp breath through his teeth. 'Mister Knight, huh? It's that bad?'

'Remember the toxic waste pit?'

'…How could I forget the toxic waste pit?'

'Good. Use that event as the maximum number on a one-to-ten scale. In this scenario, you're hitting a seven. You got points back for response time and for not being omnipotent.' Revert to technical speech, Bonnie tells herself. Let him know you're still angry, rationally or not.

'But… he's okay, right?'

'He will be. You didn't lose anything especially important and none of his processing software was damaged, bubble chip system is mostly in tact… just don't be surprised if he can't remember anything that happened on your last…' Bonnie counts the damaged memory engrams down on her fingers. '…Four missions or so. You skirted the edge of the worst and came away with your hands clean, Mister Knight. KITT wasn't quite so lucky.'

'This means I owe him blackjack rounds doesn't it? And I need to let him win.

'Let him win?' Bonnie can't help ut sound amused. She can't even begin to calculate the odds of KITT losing at Blackjack. 'It's not your fault,' she says, and as clipped as she tries to make it sound, she also knows it's true.

At least this time the technicians had had nothing to gawk at in horror as KITT was steered back into the truck. Bonnie remembers the look of the faces of the entire department when they saw the wrecked shell that remained of KITT before that incident at the Toxic Waste Grounds. Eric thought it was a joke and laughed. Jenny had welled up a little bit, at which point Eric had stopped laughing.

Actually, given the lack of apparent surface damage this time, nobody had realised there was a problem until Michael shot out of the vehicle like he had activated the ejector seat, and someone had gotten close enough to see that KITT's main control panels were smoking.

Bonnie's nerves had jolted right about then, before her inner technician kicked back and took over. 'It's really not,' she finds herself sighing before she can stop herself. 'Just fill me in here on exactly what else happened.'

'You didn't read the report?'

'I did, but that's a report. Humour me.'

'There's not much I can say that wasn't already in there. We followed the leads as was called for… got into a bit of trouble a few times over, probably due to me deciding to ride around in a flash car like KITT in a place like that. You won't believe the number of kinds someone tried to break into him. But… nothing big. The problem didn't start until we tracked down the not-so-well-hidden warehouse-slash-factory they had set up.'

'I can imagine… And the other holes? I presume the bad patch ups weren't connected to that bullet.'

Michael shuffles visibly, and Bonnie can tell he's no more pleased about that than she is. 'Uh… no, that was us trying to make him look like a convincingly normal car at a local station before we got to the actual bust up. Either we let them seal up the holes straight off or they started looking inside.'

'At which point the fact that KITT is very much not a normal vehicle would've pretty much been given away…' Bonnie finishes, replacing a circuit board as carefully as she can, leaving behind no signs that it was ever damaged.

'Seemed like a good idea at the time. I think we realised at about that point that we weren't dealing with normal guns… We were in one of those areas,' Michael adds in a voice Bonnie is fairly sure only she understands. 'They get so many beat up cars with suspicious looking wounds up there… they didn't ask where the holes came from but they probably would've started being a little more curious if they'd gotten under KITT's hood. The real problems started after we bust into the hold and… it wasn't deliberate, they caught us off guard, we didn't have time to call for back up. Next thing I know I'm standing in the warehouse amongst half a billions worth of crack cocaine and the jerk has a gun to the best of head. He tells me to get in the car...' he shrugs lightly, as if to say "you know the rest, I don't need to spell it out."
'…You're surprised.' Bonnie hears herself whisper.

'I'm not surprised; I'm just confused by the means in which he did it.' Michael says evenly. 'I know exactly what he's always supposed to do. What he's programmed for. Somehow it still bothers me that he did. He could've died.'

Any anger Bonnie felt disappeared at that moment. 'There was a gun pointed at your head.' she says, blankly. As if that explains everything. Maybe it does.

'At my neck, actually. Professional smugglers they might've been but I don't know how well they were trained in handling the damn things. He might even have missed if I tried to get one over on him.'

'Somehow I doubt that, Michael.' Tell me you're not having a guilt trip over this. I really didn't mean for you to…

Damn it.

'Hell, my brain versus KITT's CPU, Bonnie, I know which was the bigger target.'

'He didn't know to aim at the car, Michael. It was a cheap shot.'

'He didn't have to take that chance.'

'That's the way he's programmed, like you said,' Bonnie points out, shakily. She doesn't say 'but yes, he still has a choice' because neither of them can be entirely certain just how true that is. Not even Bonnie herself, who knows KITT's systems inside and out.

'…He said "Michael".'

Michael looks up at her and somehow, they manage to meet eyes and Bonnie sees, for a moment, just what she imagines Wilton Knight had seen in him. 'What?'

'KITT. I heard him saying your name before anything else, the moment his voice modulators were back online. He wanted to know you were there.' To know he'd succeeded.

Michael pauses and just looks at her the way he hasn't looked at her since the Toxic Waste Incident. Then he nods, understanding. Then he turns and walks away, fingers brushing KITT's hood again as he leaves.

Needing to survey her handy work, Bonnie starts carefully flicking switches and bringing basic systems back online. She draws out her key-code pad and types.

YOU ARE THE KNIGHT INDUSTRIES TWO THOUSAND. WHO ARE YOU?

'I…

'KITT. I'm KITT.'

Bonnie smiles. 'There you go, see? Promised you I wouldn't keep you down for long.'

There's another very pregnant pause. Bonnie's heart skips a bit. 'Since I do…'t have access to my chronome…er in that state, it wasn't even a …econd.'

Bonnie laughs. But the laugh becomes something else, before she can stop it.

'Bonni…?'

She doesn't answer.

'Bonnie, are you a…right?'

This time she has to say something, unable to help feeling glad that KITT'S visual sensor is offline as she does so. 'I…I'm fine. Just… a goddamn bullet, KITT. I wasn't expecting that.' She carefully adjusts a memory chip, holding it gently in place as she welds and pretending her cheeks aren't wet. 'I wasn't expecting that at all…'