Sensitive Material

A/N: Once again, a story of life on Doug's couch, where Doug and Alexa play a frightening game of 20 questions about the future of NLA.

Warning: major bummer, swears, and TOTAL SPOILERS (it was the butler, in the cellar, with the candlestick!). Everything good belongs to the geniuses of MONOLITH SOFT (now hiring, oh to speak Japanese and have talent and live in Kyoto, drool, and WHAT ARE THEY MAKING?).

Alexa stepped through Doug's door in a hurry. "I came as soon as I could." Actually, she'd come sooner than that. Back at the Outfitters' hangar, there was a half completed test on a new rifle from Six Stars, a real disappointment even for a company that didn't do ranged weapons as their main product. She would have dropped it even sooner, Doug has sounded so, well, she wasn't sure, but it hadn't sounded good. She had done just as much as she had to so that she wouldn't have to restart the trial all over again, and then booked it over to his apartment as fast as she could.

He didn't look good either.

The living room was a few steps from the door. To be honest, one largish step for her, half a step for him. He had his t.v. set to news, a calming nattering listing the newest developments, newest ideas. Actually, not that much new. Right now there was a feature on Ma-non fashion for Orphe, which was almost mind-boggling enough to distract her. But he really didn't look good. She still wasn't sure why she should be worried, but she certainly was.

"What's up?" she said, keeping her voice neutral.

He was pacing. Back and forth. He didn't join her on the couch, not even when she patted the cushion next to her. Just kept pacing, stomp stomp, and his jaw was set tight enough to crack. His eyes were narrowed, and he kept doing that hard swallow he did when he was trying not to yell at a teammate for putting the rest of them in danger. She'd been on enough missions with him, and seen it enough, sometimes directed at herself.

Had she done something stupid? Destructively stupid? Nope, not that she could think of. Even if she had (and she really didn't think she had), it was better to get him to spill the beans. Easier on everyone, and smart too, because he didn't blow up over nothing. Something was definitely wrong.

"Doug, sit down and talk," she said. Nope. He gave his head a little shake and kept pacing.

Alexa bounced up and stood directly in his way. He almost stumbled, trying not to crash into her, so focused he was on going from Point A to Point B and return. She grabbed his arms, and could feel him tugging, trying to return to movement. "Doug! Hello! Douggie! What the hell is wrong with you?"

He tugged again, and she saw nothing for it but to wrap her arms around him. "Are you loco? In need of a reset? Because I know where the off switch is and…"

He'd grabbed her arms then, suddenly, and arched back. But not away, just giving himself a little distance. His head was back, looking up wildly, panting. He squeezed her arms, a little too hard. She gave a squeak. "Hey! That hurts."

"Sorry, sorry." It was like all the energy left him, draining straight into the ground. The tug was gone, and he leaned in towards her, putting his head on the top of hers.

"Hey, it's okay," she whispered. She wrapped her arms around him again, very gently, and gave his back a comforting pat. She had no idea what was going on, but Doug was in trouble, and it was bad, and honestly she was just a little freaked out about it.

"The couch. The couch is a very good idea right now. As an Outfitter, I need to check it and you need to escort me. Come on." She drew him over to it, again hardly more than a step away. He looked a little stunned, blinking. After a moment, she said, "And now we sit down. You first."

To her great relief, he actually sat down, staring blankly at the t.v. The Ma-non fashion show was over, and the weather report was on. Fine. That could take several minutes. Mira had a lot of different kinds of weather to report on. Alexa tucked her legs underneath herself, and held onto his closest hand with both of hers. Then she sat there, waiting to feel safe again, like a survivor of a ship wreck, clinging to a raft.

As the weather report switched to a commercial (Army Pizza, where the flavors are a blast!), she bumped Doug's shoulder with her head. "Doug. What's up?" She spoke quietly, but urgently.

"There's this girl, a Prospector…" Doug started, then stopped. A shudder ran through his body.

Alexa rolled her eyes slightly, and felt herself getting angry. Doug and his flirts. Was that all it was, yet another breakup? Because if that was all it was, she'd just gotten worked up over nothing, and somebody was going to pay. Maybe Doug, maybe the nameless Prospector. Still, that didn't feel right. She asked carefully, "What happened?"

"Everything. It's all over." He was still looking blankly at the t.v.

Alexa looked at her friend. Looked at the t.v. Looked at his tiny, simple living room, decorated in no style whatsoever, except mostly brown. This was not working, not at all. But she didn't think getting him outside and moving would help either. He looked like he'd start running for the Oblivia Gap if she let him out the door. No, she didn't like that image. Not that.

When a test goes badly, one thing you can do is restart it, with a fresh target, a fresh round of ammo. If it's armor, you take it off and reattach it. If it's a skell, you turn it off, count to ten, and restart. None of these things seemed appropriate for the situation. But sometimes just letting a piece cool off, untouched, allowed you to continue. They had a bench in a closet for just this purpose. You'd put the knife or helmet or whatnot on the bench, turn off the light, close the door, and walk down the hall for no purpose. A minute later, you'd walk back, pick it up and give it one more try. The Chamber of Last Attempts, they called it.

She didn't think Dougie would like it if she picked him up and put him in that closet. Not that she could lift him, plus there was that whole Oblivia thing, no. And Doug didn't have a closet in his apartment. So she'd have to make one.

She got up and switched off the t.v. Doug flinched a little, but didn't say a word. She closed the blinds, turned off the light in the kitchenette, turned off the light in the hall. His eyes followed her, but he didn't turn his head. Still, that was a good sign. Last, she slapped the light switch by Doug's ear, and the room went dark. Not pitch black, but dark enough that she had to grope her way a little back to her seat next to Doug. He'd held out a hand to guide her, another good sign. She returned to her original position of life raft refugee, holding Doug's hand. They sat in silence for too long.

"What is it?" she finally asked.

Doug gave a deep breath but said nothing, almost groan.

"Is it … is it about Lao?" Because that was about the only thing, the only person she could think of that would hurt Doug this bad.

"No. Yes. No."

She'd have smacked herself in frustration if she'd been willing to let go of his hand. Or smacked him, except he seemed very fragile. Doug and fragile, so unlikely, but she knew that he was, just as she knew that her darling Speedy, fastest skell on the planet and no punk fighter to boot, was not immune to sandstorms or telethia.

"Yes or no? Which is it? Because I'm dying right here and I need you to tell me something."

"The Lifehold," he said.

"Yeah? So? The Lifehold. We got it, they just have to organize…"

"God, no. It's not what you think. Any of it. And now…"

"Doug, I'm asking one last time, tell me what's going on!"

Doug sat up a bit, straightening himself. "I shouldn't be telling you any of this. I should pretend I never heard anything myself."

Relieved though she was to hear him talking in an almost normal voice, Alexa was not pleased to be shut out. She wasn't going to just take it like a good BLADE. He's scared her silly for the past hour and she wasn't feeling okay yet. She looked fiercely at him, a wasted effort in the darkness. "Douglas Barrett. You have opened a can of worms or whoop-ass or whatever. Either you tell me, or I go figure it out myself, using only my wits and the twenty words you've spoken since I got here. If I get it wrong, really wrong, you know I will end up blaming you."

He didn't laugh. Dammit, he was supposed to laugh. She could usually manage that. "It's destroyed."

"What? No, don't talk stupid, if it were damaged we'd be…"

"Not damaged. Destroyed."

"… we'd be dead, and I for one am not dead. Do I look dead? No. So, it's not destroyed. You rescued it yourself. You said so. You and Rook and … and Lao …"

"He knew, we're all dead already …. he must have known…"

Alexa didn't like the shift in Doug's tone, back into that broken record loop of pain. What to do? What to do? A failing test, can't restart, the Chamber helped, let's try … overloading. Push a weapon so hard it has to respond. She fired off her worst and wildest guess, sure to be wrong but it would force him to correct her.

"So you're trying to tell me that the Lifehold was a ruin, destroyed during the escape from Earth. We've just been robots all along. Plus, the Ganglion are coming back to build a Dairy Queen. Am I close?"

Doug shook like he'd been blasted with ether. His breathing had turned into a wheeze.

"Holy crap, I was joking. I'm not right, am I? Because if I'm right…"

"Not during the escape. When we hit Mira. The Lifehold has been broken all this time."

Neither spoke for the longest time. Alexa didn't trust herself to say anything short of a shriek. She concentrated on inhaling, and exhaling, and willing Doug to follow suit. She could sense him relaxing. He wriggled his hand a little in hers, making her realize that she'd taken a death grip on his fist in the past minutes. Poor Doug, it was probably a little painful. She modified her routine. Inhale, exhale, relax her hands a little, repeat.

"When we hit Mira," Doug started, his voice almost normal, like he was rattling off the targets for that day's mission, "the Lifehold took enough damage to compromise the shields. It would have been okay if it had landed on dry land, probably, but it landed in the ocean. The whole thing flooded. Months ago. Everything was destroyed."

"So all our bodies, they all were…." The image was gruesome. Alexa stopped before saying more.

That's when Doug started to laugh. Oh no, wrong response. If he'd been a weapon in a test, she'd have hit the emergency stop right then and there. No good would come of this. He laughed harder.

Right. Emergency stop. She let go of his hand, climbed right into his lap, and grabbed his face between her hands. And kissed him. Not a particularly good kiss, and not very enjoyable, but very firm and distracting.

"What the hell?" he said, almost shaking her off.

"Got your attention. Good. You're freaking me out, so stop it." She swung back off him, settled into the corner of the couch, and grabbed his hand again. She gave it a little shake and said, low and surprisingly menacingly, "Do not make me do that again." She shook his hand, his whole arm, one more time for emphasis.

"What was that?"

"Me hitting the restart button. I repeat, you were freaking me out."

Doug sighed his normal sigh. Alexa decided to take charge of this test before something went wrong again.

"Let me see if I got this straight. The Lifehold was destroyed, or at least significantly damaged, right at our very arrival here."

"Yeah."

"And our bodies, I don't want to hear any of the details, none, but basically they were all destroyed." When he hesitated, she snapped at him sharply. "Do NOT start laughing again! Answer me: yes or no?"

"No." He sighed once more, but his voice stayed steady. "Those have been gone a long time."

"Where did they go?"

"They never were there to begin with."

"Enough of this. You just gotta start telling me stuff, and to hell with security and safety. This is secret, right? Because I swear I've heard nothing about it in the daily logs."

He laughed, softly, and Alexa relaxed. He was responding correctly again. She leaned back and waited for him to explain, but she kept hold of his hand as a precaution.

"Our bodies were never on board, Alexa. They all were destroyed with the Earth. Don't ask me about them, I don't know, I don't want to know even. What we took along was complete data for every person, all our memories and genetics and stuff, all running in a massive computer. That's what's been controlling our mims."

"Like brains in bottles, except computers."

"Pretty close. And not just us. They had an extra 20 million people stored."

Alexa couldn't even come up with an exclamation worthy of her amazement, even if she'd had the breath to say something. Eventually, she managed one word.

"Wow." She paused, reverently, for a moment. "So, what does that mean, we were just going to be robots for the rest of our lives?"

"No, there was plan to restore us, make new versions of our human bodies and jam us back in somehow."

"Oh-kay," she said, slowly. She didn't hide her hesitation.

"It didn't seem quite right to me either. Doesn't matter anyway, now."

"Because the Lifehold was damaged."

"Right. The computers, the ones holding our consciousnesses, those were all destroyed in the crash."

"And you know this because…"

"There's this Prospector. She was one of the crew that went with Elma, to restore main power. She spilled the beans by accident. She must have thought I already knew everything."

"Why would she think that?"

Doug turned to look at her in the dim apartment. She swore she could feel him raise an eyebrow, even if she couldn't see it.

"Right, never mind, what with you being one of the Heroes of the Lifehold and all…"

"I've known about the real bodies not being there for a while."

"Since when?" she asked sharply.

"Since we fought off Luxaar. Elma had to explain the complete and utter lack of stasis pods. Kind of hard to miss 50,000 bodies, or miss the lack of them. Like I said, I haven't been real comfortable with that whole thing, but what are you going to do? Gotta trust that it works out, ya know."

"And Lao knew about it too."

"Yeah, probably from being on the Whale, maybe even before. He had a long time to lose it over this."

"Might explain some of it."

"Yeah."

"Still, doesn't excuse it any of it. Honestly, your friend …!" She shut her mouth sharply, because she had resolved not to bring it up, ever. No point, but, ahhh, trash garbage jerkloserahhhhhh! Okay, okay, she was calm, she was cool. She turned her mind back to the point.

"So the computers were destroyed. But we're not dead."

"Nope. And we can't go back."

"Like I care. We're not dead."

"Obviously."

"Which means," she said, and her voice was rising with excitement, "which means we really are robots! Doug! We're real!"

"No, we aren't. That's sort of the whole point."

"No, we so absolutely are! Doug, this is awesome!"

Doug twisted away from her, and his voice was tinged with disgust. "Only a person as hyped on skells as you would say that like it's a good thing."

Alexa didn't care. "We are real, absolutely real, not just temporary. This is who we are! Doug! We're real!" She hopped up from the couch and started to pace in the darkness, cracking her shin almost instantly on Doug's coffee table. "Ow ow ow ow."

She heard Doug sigh and stretch. He hit the light panel, filling the room with gentle illumination. He always could fix the glare that she otherwise managed to trigger every time she touched it. She paced some more, her turn to try to figure things out through the tool of pointless movement. "Why isn't it a good thing? You know we never would've gotten off Earth if we stayed as humans. Most of the construction team was switched at the facility months before we took off. And there is no way we could have survived on Mira if we were still all squishy and weak."

"Not weak, Alexa. Real."

"I'm real, and, bonus!, I'm not weak. Hey, I just realized. I've only known you as Doug the Robot, not Doug the Human. Maybe we wouldn't be friends the other way." She stopped and looked at him.

"I am not Doug the Robot," he growled.

"No, that's right, you are not. You're Doug. Real Doug. However it happened, you're still real. Don't let theory get in the way of facts, Doug. Maybe we should all have been different by now, dead or squishy or I don't know, but fact is, here we are. Strong. On Mira. How cool is that?"

Doug closed his eyes and frowned, and she plopped next to him, grinning, a lot, and starting to shake, just a little. "You realize, as soon as I get over this high, I'm going to be scared to death. We need to talk about this, endlessly. Start to figure stuff out. This is either awesome or disastrous, but I'm going to go with awesome, since, you know, we're not actually dead."

"Yet."

"Yeah, that's what's going to terrify me next. So we need to talk. Tons."

"We're going to need pizza."

She beamed at him. "Dougie! You'd make a pretty good Outfitter. Always get all your tools ready before a big test session. Snacks are a key tool."

"I was thinking weapons and gear. Same difference, I guess." He sighed again, and pulled out his comm device. "I'll order pizza and maybe some beer. You make a list of stuff you're going to chatter about. Let's get this over with."

She leaned down and put a hand on his, before he could fire the device up. "It's going to be all right. We can figure this out. We won't lose." She looked at him earnestly.

He looked back, finally calm, before nodding and punching in the number for Army Pizza.

A/N: At a certain point, I decided that Doug deserves Alexa as a friend, somebody that he can get all unwrapped around, because he certainly tries so hard to keep it together. Trying not to think about stuff only works for so long. We all know that the Lifehold bugged him, and I can only wonder about his response to the final information (if it is ever released). Here's my take on it.

Next up (possibly the last): An alternate version of post Ch. 12 life, pro-organic and shamelessly fluffy. I'm personally Camp No Return (*cough*mechon*cough*) but I will play in alternate pools if I can have fun.