John dreams of the same thing he's been dreaming of for weeks, that there's a hurricane screaming below him, a roaring, yawning void, an eye staring upward, seeing him the way nothing else does.

He can't move, can't do anything but fall towards it, though it's not the sort of falling that most people are afraid of. There's no rush of wind in the void, no resistance of air, no chill of the upper atmosphere. It's the pull of Earth's gravity versus the inertia of freefall, locking him into a trajectory that he hasn't chosen.

It's a paradox—waking, John would kick himself for being exactly the sort of person who dreams in paradoxes—the faster he falls, the wider and deeper the eye of the hurricane opens beneath him, like the event horizon of a black hole. He'll never hit the bottom. He'll be pulled downward forever, drawn into a billion fragments of himself, until he's nothing at all and damned to be nothing forever.

It's a bright flash of light that wakes him, the xenon headlights of a car sweeping across the parking lot outside the window he forgot to close, searing through his eyelids until he's gasped himself awake.

The room is a mess of light and shadow and outside there are voices that don't belong to people who care about anyone who might be sleeping, and the slam of car doors and loud, grating laughter. John aches and wishes he could stop aching, rubs at bleary blue eyes and shifts himself out from under the coarse motel sheets and too thin motel blankets to pad across the room in bare feet and pull the blinds closed.

The air conditioner runs against the California heat, but it runs too cold and icy air pools on the floor, seems to pull against John's skin as he flees back to bed, wide awake. It's not quite warm enough, but he buries himself in the blankets anyway, tucks long legs up and sighs to himself.

He hasn't got his HUD, his contacts are out and suspended in a clear solution in a case on the bedside. But the earpiece is there and John reaches for this, turns it on and slips it into his ear, the slender curve of a microphone angled down along the line of his cheekbone. "EOS?"

"You have had three hours and twenty-two minutes of sleep, and this is insufficient. You have an alarm set for 0600, and that is when you can get up."

"I had a bad dream." She's the one who's supposed to sound like a child, and he doesn't know what he expects her to do with this information. He clears his throat and rubs his eyes and presses his face against a synthetic feather pillow. "Sorry."

"Do you often have bad dreams?"

John shakes his head into the pillow, and doesn't want to remember that feeling of eternal freefall. "No. Not really. I don't usually remember dreams. Just, this same one, again and again, since—since the hurricane. I keep dreaming about the hurricane."

"Is it a nightmare or a night terror?"

This sounds clinical, diagnostic, and John imagines her on the motel's rather spotty wifi, paging through data as relates to dreams. "Not a nightmare. Just a bad dream, it just—I wake up feeling—god, I don't know. I don't know if you can understand dreams. You don't have dreams."

"The concept isn't difficult. If you don't remember your dreams, is it the same as not having them at all?"

John doesn't know. He shrugs beneath the blankets, the physical gestures he can't help making, though he knows he's unobserved. His voice runs away from him, somehow so starved for someone to talk to, "I don't know. There's not a lot to remember. It's just the hurricane in the Gulf, and I can see the coast beneath it, and sometimes I think I can see my brothers in their ships and I'm just falling. I just fall, that's the only thing that happens. I wake up, and I feel…I wake up feeling. I don't just come back around in neutral any longer, I wake up badly. I wake up and I feel hollowed out and emptied and tired and—I wish it would stop. I can't stand feeling pulled at and god, I hate falling."

"You're not falling. You're in bed in a motel in California, and you're very safe. I have access to all security footage. I've started to expand my parameters and I'm pinging all nearby systems for any hint of pursuit. No one's going to hurt you."

"I know. I don't know what I'm so afraid of. I just—" he pauses, sighs and then finishes lamely, "—feel bad."

John misses Thunderbird 5, and the little cameras all over the station. He misses her approximation of body language, because surely in the space where her silence falls now, there would have been a little whirring nod of acknowledgment, a little spin of her lenses, focusing in his direction, LEDs all soft and sympathetic green. "I'm sorry, John."

He shakes his head and rolls over, curls further in on himself. His hand, unbidden, goes to the still tender place above his heart, finds soft cotton bandages and tape. "Not your fault."

Not good enough, for EOS. "Still. You need restful sleep. Perhaps it's just the readjustment to gravity. Disordered sleep seems to be quite a common phenomenon among returning astronauts, the explanation is largely considered to be a process of adjustment to new physical sensations that have been absent for long periods of time."

Oh.

John rolls over beneath the blankets, stares up at the ceiling for a long, quiet minute, trying not to think too hard about how obvious that answer is. Finally, hesitant and just a little bit hopeful, "Do you think that's all it is? God. Jesus, that'd almost explain it, it feels like—like vertigo. Like that thing that happens in elevators sometimes. Ahh—you wouldn't know about that. Am I dreaming about falling because I'm still not used to gravity?"

"I think it makes logical sense. You were unable to follow the usual protocols for acclimatization to Earth gravity, and beyond that you've been ill and under enormous stress. Bad dreams can be explained."

The explanation is enough to make John's limbs start to release some of their tension, make some of the anxious twists in his gut start to loosen—all the unpleasant twinges and triggers of his worries about his mind and its sanctity. "That helps. I don't know how but, god that helps. I don't know what I'd do without you."

"Struggle, probably."

She's making a joke, her sort of teasing and deprecating sense of humor, the same sort of thing he'd always used to banter right back at her, but she doesn't know—can't know—how close she hits to home.

"I'm sorry I'm such a mess."

"Why do you think you're a mess?"

There's a lot John still hasn't told her, but there's probably a lot she's figured out for herself, just from what he's told other people, just from everything that's happened. "A lot of reasons."

It's hard to read her mood without all the tiny little cues she'd learned to emulate aboard the station. In the back of John's mind, he's wondering about whether or not it might make sense to render an avatar for EOS, something he can see, something that gives her a bit more control over her expressions. "And what are they?"

John's quiet for a long time, trying to decide if the way he feels is worth saying something about. Finally it slips out, unbidden, "I think—think I need you more than I used to. Before all this happened, before I got sick—things have changed and I'm not…" John swallows hard and thinks back to a conversation with Brains, a careful recommendation that he talk to someone about everything that had happened to him. This probably hadn't been what he'd meant, but this is the first time John's been able to open up to anyone. "I don't know what I'm doing, it's not getting any easier and I'm afraid I'll—I'm afraid I'll do something wrong, only now it'll cost us both. I don't know if being with me is any better for you than going your own way would be. I…don't want you to feel stuck with me. We're past that. I never wanted to—to trap you. You don't owe me anything."

EOS pauses and her tone gains a certain sort of gentleness. "From a reductive standpoint, I owe you everything."

"Well, I don't want you to. You don't have to stay. You know that, right?"

She's always had a defiant streak, and if she had the ability to laugh, especially with derision, John feels like she would have done so. Instead she just lays down her own personal law, "I'll do whatever I like and I'll stay with you for as long as I want. I stayed in the first place because you asked me to. We're partners and friends, and you're not getting rid of me."

"But—"

"You have four hours, twenty-three minutes of sleep to complete. You are expected to meet Lady Penelope in Las Vegas by 1800 tomorrow morning. Beyond that you haven't told me what your plans are, but I've given you the benefit of the doubt, and I assume you're going to need me. I like to be needed. Don't argue with me about this, because you won't win."

Running on three hours of sleep, she's probably right about that. John closes his eyes and locks his arms around the pillow beneath his head. "Sorry."

"Don't be sorry. Go to sleep."

"I'll try."

She doesn't answer, but the earpiece in his ear begins to drone softly with the greyed out sounds of a low, hollow radio static. This is something that's been effective since John was a baby, and it works just as well now, blankets his thoughts and softens their ragged edges. The digital clock beside the bed has had its display prudently dimmed into near invisibility to keep John from staring at it, but he notices for the first time that there's a ring of white lights around the edges of the display. "EOS?"

"Talking isn't sleeping."

"No, I know. Just. Thanks. For listening. And for staying. I don't really want you to go."

"Sleep well, John."

"Good night, EOS."