Author Notes: As promised, posted pretty much immediately before I'm about to clamber onto a plane and say goodbye to my home state for a while. I'm not sure when I'll get the next update to you, since this next week is going to be one of flux in which internet may or may not be a thing. But, as always, thanks to the people who support me and I don't own anything.

"The first thing we need to do is fix how long it takes you to adjust when you move in and out of the code."

Soul had gone full security mode, converting the table that the Meister body had lain upon into a planning board after Maka had gone back into the code to summon up paper and a couple pens so that they could write out their plan of attack. She was still readjusting on the bench while Soul was squinting at the paper, dimming the reddish glow of his eyes.

"Don't we need to find some sort of food?" she asked, recalling the pain she had felt in her stomach before she had engaged the Resonance.

Soul looked up, confused. "Food? You mean the stuff that people eat?"

Maka nodded, pulling herself into a seated position.

"We don't need to eat here," the white-haired program responded, returning his focus to the paper. "We get all our energy from the System."

"Will I be okay, though?"

Soul grinned. "Yep. The Meister is a program, just like me. It doesn't need food." Nor did it need to breathe, Maka realized. Though her lungs went through the motions of breathing, they came back airless. She realized that Soul only ever breathed when he needed to speak. He was eerily still as he examined the paper.

"Okay, so if you never needed to eat, then why do you know what food is?" Maka's lips curled sardonically. "I mean, you didn't know what pockets were until a little while ago."

Soul replied without looking up. "Stein."

Maka repeated the name, toning it as a question. Soul was silent for a moment, but then he made a quick mark on the page and looked up.

"I believe that you named him St/In—Statistics and Inquiry."

"My database program? Is he…like you?" Maka stood, grabbing onto the wall as her legs wobbled.

"Sort of. I'm pretty sure he has a form like us, but I don't actually know, since I've never seen him. But we've spoken before."

"He spoke to you?" She moved, still leaning against the wall.

"Yeah." He reached out a steadying hand, helping Maka walk to the table in the center. "Every Update, he'd come around and make archiving inquiries. I'd answer his questions and throw in a few of my own. He always answered. I liked him."

Maka gave him a concerned glance. Her database had gone rogue a couple days ago and she'd had to search for any System information manually.

"Yeah. At some point, Asura's corruption finally got to him and he…got weird. I stopped answering his inquiries because I didn't want to risk corruption, so he tried to force his way in."

"And?"

"My function is security. I did my job." The response was bitterly short.

Silence filled the room. Soul went still again, hand still wrapped around Maka's elbow to help her remain standing. She leaned heavily on the table as she inspected his paper. He'd drawn a map of sorts, though it was vague and amateur.

"So Stein told you about food?"

Soul nodded. "Yeah. Though he knew more than anyone else in the System, he was restrained only to knowledge that was here. Until he met your other database." Soul turned to her, a confused look on his face. "Thank you for reminding me about that. I had meant to ask you what happened there. Stein always wanted to keep an air of mystery to it because he's a theatrical bastard when he wants to be."

"Other database?" Maka frowned. "I only wrote one database for this system, though, and that was Stein."

"That's the thing, though," Soul frowned. "She wasn't from the System. She just appeared one day and then she was gone. Stein was able to receive all her data before she left, but she didn't tell him where she came from. He called her Marie."

"Marie?" Maka giggled. "You mean my flash drive?"

"I have no idea what that means, Meister."

"It's a data storage device in the outside world. It's one of the ways you can move information and programs from one system to another without connecting them." She stretched experimentally, grateful to find that her limbs responded in a timely fashion. "And I have a name, you know."

Soul tilted his head, humming an unspoken question.

"Maka." She extended her hand, taking his when he stared at it with uncertainty. "My name's Maka. Also, it's polite for you to shake someone's hand when you do introductions."

"I wouldn't know, since everyone I've met has been on the other side of a wall." His grip was firm as he slowly shook her hand. "Maka, huh? What does it stand for?"

She snorted as she removed her hand from his. "It doesn't stand for anything. Not everyone's name is an acronym."

Soul responded with a sardonic smile that was a damn good imitation of the one she'd given him earlier. "That's a shame. I guess I'll just have to make you one."

"You might want to focus your energy on helping me fix this system, first," she teased, tapping at his scribbled map. "And finish telling me how the love affair between my flash drive and system database relates to the fact that you know what food is."

"If you want me to finish my story, I suggest you stop interrupting me, Maka." He tapped her lightly on the nose. She tried to ignore how much she liked the sound of her name on his lips. "Anyway, as I was saying, Stein met Marie and drained her for all the information he could get. He's like that. But she was a pretty big database—"

"Flash drive," Maka corrected.

"Whatever. The point is: she had a bunch of stories stored, all tales from the outside world. After Marie disappeared, Stein traveled around and retold the tales to programs in the System when he did his data collection." Soul frowned. "He used to sit outside the wall and tell me stories while he was compiling the results."

"I kept my eBooks on Marie."

Soul raised an eyebrow.

"eBooks are what people outside the System call stories," Maka explained. "We also keep them in things called books, which are made of paper, like this." She indicated the map on the table.

Soul rolled his eyes. "I know what a book is."

"Is that how he went from being St/In to Stein?" Maka's voice was thoughtful. "Did he base that off of—"

"Frankenstein? Yep." Soul scratched at his scalp and his hair made that strange, static noise again. "It was always his favorite. I never really understood why he was so fond of it. I liked Grimm's Fairy Tales a lot more…they're pretty cool."

"So you have a taste for the gruesome?" Maka smiled.

"I suppose," Soul replied. "But I confess that I always preferred the parts when the knights rescued the fair princesses and won their hands in marriage." Something in his tone told Maka that he was trying to be charming.

This made Maka frown. "So you're the knight and I'm the princess?"

Soul's low chuckle vibrated in her bones. "No, my Meister, you're the dragon."

/

Apparently it was common knowledge amongst the Programs what was wrong with their System.

"We called it the Unplanned Reboot," Soul said, reclining in the bed that Maka had conjured for him. She'd gone into the code again, trying to make the small space more comfortable. Soul had advised her against making the space larger, not wanting to attract attention from the outside. So Maka had resorted to writing in two small beds, taking out the table in the middle and replacing it with one that was smaller.

If Soul had been enthusiastic about pockets, his reaction to the bed could only be described as bliss. He'd refused to leave his cushy throne ever since she'd finished its coding.

Maka was getting better at working with the subset code. The System somehow wrote it automatically whenever she wrote her own code, filling in blanks that Maka hadn't even known were there. She developed a system of letting the code write itself and then going back to correct it, referencing the programs around her to double-check her work. Though her lines were clumsy, they got the job done.

At some point when she was examining Soul's code, she discovered the typo that had caused his jagged shark teeth. She'd fixed it, but Soul had howled in protest until she went back and returned his teeth to normal. He claimed that he might need them to bite someone. When Maka had asked him who he would possibly need to bite, he'd flashed her a lewd grin and patted the bed beside him. Lacking the energy to hit him again, Maka simply threatened to change his code and give him normal teeth. This mollified him long enough for Maka to recover her physical functions. Though she had no need for drink in this form, she found herself craving tea. She wondered if she could manage to program a cup of tea, and if the Meister could even drink it if she did.

The amount of time it took to readjust to her physical form was shrinking, less like a sack of bricks to the face and more like overstepping a stair. With more practice, Maka figured that she'd be able to make the transition virtually seamless.

Instead of going back to the code, Maka turned to look at her security program. He'd gone completely still again, staring up at the ceiling. When Maka had written in the beds, she'd also dimmed the lights in the room and removed the ones on the floor, allowing for more normal lighting. It made the red glow of Soul's eyes more pronounced.

His stillness ceased when she asked him what had happened to the System.

"Unplanned Reboot?" she kept her tone neutral, but she had a feeling she knew what it meant.

"The System just stopped," Soul explained. "No warning, no Update. Just nothingness. No one knows why or how it happened, but when it did—"

"I was in the middle of writing the Asura program," Maka said. She took a deep breath—out of habit rather than need—and sat up to face Soul. His eyes were wide.

"What you call the Unplanned Reboot is something called a blackout. They're very rare outside the System, and a lot of people have backup generators to keep their computers running smoothly. I've been living so close to the bone, though, that I skipped out on the generator. I figured that I'd get one before I started my experiments with the Resonance, but the decision bit me in the ass."

Soul looked even more confused. "Living close to the bone?"

"I was really poor. I've worked hard on this System and the Resonance, but because of that, I didn't have the money to buy all the stuff I needed, generators included. Do you know what money is?"

Soul nodded. "Yeah, they talk about it a lot in your eBooks. It seemed like something a lot of people outside the System were concerned about."

Maka's laugh was bitter. "In some ways, you could say that it was the only thing they were concerned about."

Sympathy thickened his voice, his expression strained. "You were…okay, right? You didn't need food, or anything?"

Maka shook her head. "No, BJ would never let that happen."

"BJ?"

"He owns a diner…a place where you can buy and eat food…near where I live. If I were starving, he'd know and he'd stuff food down my throat. And coffee." She spat out the last word with vehemence.

"Do you not like coffee?"

"No." Maka's voice was too loud in the small room, and it seemed to shatter the sleepy atmosphere of the room. She lowered her voice sheepishly. "No, coffee is really bitter and gross. Tea is better."

"I do wish I could taste them."

Maka smiled. "Maybe someday I'll be able to program some for the both of us. I kinda miss drinking tea. But we have to take care of this system first."

The program nodded in agreement. "We need to get the Asura program under control."

Propping herself up on her elbows, Maka gave Soul a confused look. "The Asura? But I thought that the program was lost."

Soul's laugh was bitter. " No, it wasn't. It's the reason why the System is so messed up."

"How?"

He caught her gaze, unblinking stare making her uncomfortable. "When the Unplanned Reboot—"

"—blackout," she interjected. His responding roll of the eyes was quite impressive.

"When the blackout occurred, the recovery programs managed to restore almost everything to its natural state. But the programs assigned to restoring the Asura didn't do their recovery functions correctly; he was left alone and unfinished." A note of sympathy resonated in Soul's voice. "He managed to save himself, but he became paranoid. He believed that you were trying to delete him…that every Update that the System went through was filled with orders for us to delete him. Since then, he's been corrupting more and more of the System."

Maka frowned. "Corrupting it how?"

"We're not exactly sure. Stein had been working on a theory that the Asura was able to somehow alter the code around him…."

"Did it not pan out?"

Soul's shoulders made a soft noise against the sheets of his bed as he shrugged. "I never found out. He left to go test his theory, came back here to Update, and by then it was too late."

"We'll save him." Maka rolled onto her side, catching Soul's eyes. There was an intense quality to them, but Maka's expression made him soften. She hoped that he sensed her sincerity. "Stein was a good program. Not only because of his usefulness to the System but also for the friendship he shared with you."

Her security program's murmured thanks made a tired smile form on her face as silence fell over the small room again. Maka felt her eyelids drooping, and she found it strange that the body of a program, which needed neither food nor air, still seemed to need sleep.

"Soul?" Her voice was soft as she called out to him.

"Yes, Maka?" It seemed that he was tired as well, voice low and thoughtful. It seemed to Maka to be somewhat less robotic. Or perhaps she was just getting used to the way that he spoke. It struck her that she had been locked in this tiny room with him for what must have been an entire day...and it was the most human interaction she'd had in quite some time. Sort of.

"Do programs sleep?"

Soul was slow to respond. "In a way. We…Update. We slow down and reboot…fix our software. Updates used to be pretty regular, but after the Unplanned—the, uh, blackout…they've been irregular and difficult to trust."

Maka closed her eyes, wishing that she had thought to code herself a blanket. "Do you Update?"

"Yeah. My Updates have been safe, as have the Meister's. We're closed off from the rest of the system. But…it was a bad Update that got Stein."

Maka made a soft noise in her throat. "I'm sorry."

"Not your fault. And besides, you're here to fix it. We'll get him back soon."

Silence reigned once more. She was exhausted, but the brightness behind her eyelids kept her awake, and she began shivering from cold before long. Maka was considering pulling up the sheet from her bed as a way of keeping herself warm when Soul spoke again.

"Are you cold?"

Maka didn't have the energy to lie.

The bed on the other side of the room creaked softly as Soul got up and moved to hers. His fingers lingered on the edge of the mattress; Maka didn't need to open her eyes to know how uncertain he felt.

"It's okay," she said. "I'm the dumb one that forgot to make us some blankets."

Maka managed to crack an eye open so that she could see his smile. His eyes made her bed awash with soft red light as he climbed in beside her, carefully positioning himself between her and the wall.

"Are you gonna hit me if I try to put my arms around you?" His sleepiness made it difficult for Maka to tell if he was teasing or genuinely peeved. She shook her head, moving closer to him in response.

He pulled her body to his slowly, the sudden warmth of another person beside her an alien sensation. Yet Maka was glad for it, nuzzling closer to his heat. Soul tucked her head under her chin, his arms warm but greatly restricting her ability to move. Maka shoved her cold toes between his calves, giggling as he hissed.

"Do you ever get cold?" She was half asleep, voice muffled by the press of his chest against her face.

Soul didn't speak for a long time. Just as Maka thought that he might have begun Updating, his voice rumbled in his chest, vibrating against her forehead.

"I think this might be the first time I've ever been warm."

Side note: Soul spent a lot of time telling St/In to "tell him the one with the knight and the princess again." St/In was always trying to tell other stories, especially Frankenstein, but Soul was stubborn and insisted on hearing the fairy tales again. He and St/In were also under the impression that pockets were a sort of hipsack, like a fanny pack. They never really paid much attention; they were more interested in things like food and money and what the moon looked like. Maka didn't have many scientific books on her flashdrive.