A/N: Something a little bit different. Upping the rating to T for this one idk.

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Unit

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When they first step out into the filmy gold light of the Outside, they are both disoriented and frightened. The years that had skittered past them and their long sleep, a different sort for the two of them, had cleaned away the people they had once been and all they have ever known was the Facility. They feel like they could fall up into the endless vault of sky.

Even though they are free now for a while they stay close to their once-prison once-home for a long while, huddled in the shadow of the metal shack, holding on tight and shaking together until the sun begins to die. It rolls beneath the horizon as it bleeds out, and the star-studded darkness that takes its place seems so much less threatening to both of them.

They set off, walking as close together as they could without tripping over each other, following where the wind-blown wheat points them. For a long time it's just the two of them, hungry and cold and bedraggled but together, and that's always enough.

They cling to each other against the emptiness of the Outside, shake together from hunger pangs or sickness or the same anonymous terror, and they marvel together at the loveliness of the sky, which they've grown used to, and the subtle music of the world around them, soft and organic and warm. They bathe each other and wipe the cold fever sweat from their brows and sleep in a tight tangle of limbs. They are happy.

When they eventually stumble into the village they aren't sure how to react to People, although the People welcome them with wide spread arms. They are given a small house and bread and jobs to do.

The hollows in their cheeks fill out, the dark rims under their eyes fade, and they grow strong and vibrant and they aren't afraid so much anymore. During the day they work together, and in the evenings when the work is done they sit together by the bonfire and laugh with Everyone, and at night when they return home they still sleep in a tight tangle of limbs, although now that they sleep in a bed they no longer have to pick leaves out of each other's hair come morning. Everyone sees them as a single entity almost; no one ever mentions one's name without the other's.

All the while something grows between them, a hot, aching hunger that food can't fill, a burning in the blood when they look at each other. They both know it's there, they both know that they both feel it, but they don't talk about it. One of them can't and one of them can't find the words.

The Something lingers and swells inside them quietly until one night when it storms. Outside thunder moans and lightening scars the dark sky, and electricity seems to pass between them as well. Everything becomes a mesh of heat and skin and wordless communication as they guide each other to a place paradoxical, where they are blind and deaf and yet somehow hyperaware. They break together, and while the rain falls outside, telling secrets that they think they can almost understand in this moment, they quietly reassemble themselves.

They're put back together a little different before, some of the pieces of one getting mixed in the other, and even if they are no more whole than they were before, they feel like they are. More than ever they are a unit, an unbreakable They, and life goes around and around and They go with it.