For TLC Ship Weeks
Week one, day six: non-themed Cresswell
tell me when you hear my heart stop
-vii-
Do you have stars
in your mouth?
— Every Time, Jude Goodwin
She
forgets.
Something important.
Significant. Essential. l`a`r`g`E.
So colossal, gargantuan, it had encompassed her whole mind, her whole being, her massive data core and its bumblebee miniscule codes for that short, heartbeat moment she had known it.
She remembers that feeling. Remembers the shift of her world, her broken, fading, malfunctioning being. She remembers that. Only that. But nothing of the thing. The important, essential, gargantuan thing. She remembers its significance and the drop-fall-voidless-void moment it summoned.
But she can't remember it.
.
-ERROR-
.
Incorrect. Data cannot be forgotten, only deleted. She remembers, she remembers. Because she forgets nothing. It's there sleeping somewhere behind stone and brambles and ice and encoding and a dragon guarding it. Its shadow claws tipping tapping her t5""""errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
12(&&*12string=88888]]]]]ERR\\\\oooooooooooo
R
She forgets.
.
-ERROR-
.
Nothing.
.
-ERROR-
.
Nothi
ng.
.
-ERROR-
.
"Captain?"
He almost drops the portscreen. Again. ALmost
drops her.
"Mmh?" His voice sounds high and thin. She remembers the last time she had done this. Slipped into her Captain's port to assist him in burning down Research Unit Alpha and Luna's secret poison brewing inside it. The plague. The Queen's red apple meant for the fairest of them aaaaaaaaaaaall—
"Where are we going?"
She knows but she asks anyway. Her GPS indicates only one possible destination.
"To see your girlfriend," he says, "and get my money back. She says you're fine and the second she leaves you crash? I'll be marking 'Extremely dissatisfied' in my review."
"I'm fine now," Crescent tries to placate him. "I think it might just have been a temporary glitch. I'm okay."
She is. This time, she truly is. The walls around her core have been rebuilt to twice their previous strength. No amount of poking or scanning will affect her now. Her fairy stitched her a dress of the strongest coding. She is safe, safe from curiosity and killings. From her own self. Saaaaaafe. She i s
"Sure," her Captain says, but he walks only faster, his fingers on his port wind tighter. The screen is angled away so she can only look at him though the passing windows.
Mirror, mirror
"Have you run diagnostics?" he asks.
"Yes."
"Report."
She says nothing.
"Crescent?"
"No anomalies discov—"
.
-ERROR-
.
"—ered. Primary systems functional. Unrecognized damage to Data Strain Delta. Reboot suggested."
The Captain speaks after a while. Forty steps, two storefronts, one sigh later. A finger taps against the port, jostling the screen just a little. "Right. Okay. That's good. Is that good?"
"It's…not optimal. But it's not bad."
Crescent catches creases on his brow, a soft tremor of his hands, an unevenness on his tap-tap-tapping. She doesn't know if this is fear, frustration, anxiety, or everything. Cress might have known. Cress might have taken the Captain's shaky hands in her slight, steady ones and kissed his fingers, his creased brow, his eyelashes, his lips. Cress might have, would have made everything better, made her Captain calmer, made Crescent whole.
Like some fairy goDmot`h`eR of net dramas.
"Well we're going to have your mechanic take another look," the Captain says. His fingers still for a second, two, three. Then oh so sloooooow his thumb starts to move back and forth in soothing arcs. The ghost of a k`i`s`s. She can almost, almost dream feather-soft traces down her spine. Unintentional. Unthinking. u`n`r`eaL.
"I didn't pay my left lung and foot to her for less than optimal results." He laughs and it's so thin, so heartless, it could shatter like glass and wind.
Crescent's reply is immediate. Automatic."Miss Linh's commission is actually quite reasonable compared to several of her lesser contemporaries." A pause. "You are also walking in the wrong direction."
Thorne skids into a full turn and starts walking in the opposite direction, which again is the wrong one. He lifts the portscreen to call up the map and he's no longer a dream inside a smudgy glass, unclear and distorted like hope.
Crescent can see sunlight slanting on his lips as he mumbles, "I knew that."
.
.
.
Miss Linh is a god under her canvas and iron stall. Hephaestus with her hammer—arms bared, cheek smudged, a halo of sparks to celebrate her strength. The song of metal against metal is a chorus against her skin. Crescent imagines she feels a nameless heat crawling though her wires, mocking this glitch inside her.
Miss Linh is taking apart a dated android. Its flimsy metal casing is rusted and tearing. Clang! Clang! And its arm falls. Miss Linh smiles and wipes the sweat off her brow. Whimsically, experimentally, Crescent imagines the Captain this way—between electricity and force and old, old metal. Arms and sweat and a grease kiss running down his face—
—a god, a Greek trage d y—
a period net drama hero who rescues a damsel from a satellite, or a military base, or a crumbling castle, or a tall, tall tOwerrrr rRrrrrrr.
Her imaginary heat burns though her, melts her processor, lodges against a chest she doesn't have. Far away in the Rampion, she turns on the air conditioning. Here, in this small metal and plastic port, she lets the overworked fan try its best to sooth her fictitious flames eating though her forest of wires and coded personality.
"Hey," the Captain calls out as they reach Miss Linh's stall.
Crescent gets the privilege of watching a could-have-been god startle in surprise and crash back against a shelf of spare android parts. A foot falls on the floor.
"Oh," Miss Linh says when she sees the Captain. "It's you." Her eyes shift to the side, past the Captain.
He turns around to look with her. "Yes. Me. Were you expecting someone else?" He gasps suddenly, dramatically. "Are you telling me you're seeing other customers behind my back?"
She frowns. "Several," she says after a brief pause. "You're actually my side piece."
The Captain places a hand on his chest and takes a shocked step back.
Miss Linh's frown drops like an autumn leaf, oh so softly. "Why are you here? Is there a problem?"
"You tell me," Captain Thorne says. He places the port on her counter. "Crescent, replay the incident...the eh, the damage thing to data drain...train? ...thing."
.
-COMMAND CONFIRMED-
.
-Accessing memory bank-
.
-REQUESTED FILE: Memory Strain #9739553877600288910 :READY FOR PLAYBACK-
.
-SELECT MODE: Hologram/Screen-
.
-PLAY?-
.
If Crescent had been Cress and human, she would have wrung her hands nervously, touched her tongue to the roof of her mouth before she lied.
"Error," she says, imagining wringing her hands. Her un-tongue licks at her words before she transmits them though the speakers. "File not found."
Ayyy I'm back. And no, I have not abandoned this fic. Though I was MASSIVELY blocked for a while. Still kind of am? But I'm trying to power though it.
