In many ways, Virgil and John were the same, almost identical in the way they thought, viewing the world as schematics, cold and analytical, but there was one key difference—Virgil lived to build and shape while John lived to dismantle and destroy.
The differences were small things, but small things build over time and become big things. Time does so like to change things. Both will take something apart for curiously, the need to see how it works, to put it back together shifted and changed, but Virgil will draw the line at people, at altering the functions. John's line is blurred, faded, kept only in place by his brothers.
She runs her fingers through Virgil's near-black locks, too dark for his completion. He is small and fragile and she wants to wrap him up, to protect him and lock him away.
Someone has tried to kill him, tried to hurt him. To rip the heart from her family, and they had come so close to succeeding.
If not for his stubborn streak, she doubted he would be here, but his is. With that heartbeat so slow and laboured, but constant in its rhythm, much like his breathing. Like the machines he loves, he lives on patterns, the constant ticking of the clockwork.
John paces outside, marching up and down, caught in loops and lost in thought but he can't bring himself to be confined by the room. John needs space, he needs to be able to stretch, he needs to be doing something, always something.
It's one of the few things the two share with all their brothers: that inability to just stay still, to stop and listen. It's that stillness that haunts her now. Virgil and Scott can't or won't move, but the weight of the situation reaches out, ensnaring the others, pulling them down and locking them all in place.
She needs to be strong, she needs to keep moving, for them, so she sat here and prayed while John paced outside, the agitation and anger clear in his posture.