A/N: This chapter has been edited to abide by FF's rating guidelines. The full version is available on AO3: /works/58977832/chapters/151130899
They can feel the two flushes of their skin, both sets of boneless and limp limbs, merge back down to a single sensation as the two of them settle against the mattress. They think to ask him if that splitting is something he knows about, if that's some late-developing symptom of gen four that the literature discredits or a problem their past self has already encountered and solved, or if they are just actually losing their mind, while they're still riding the aftershocks and brave enough to ask.
But then they catch O'Keeffe's gaze, face pressed against the hammering cage of their chest, who always looks the least wrecked of the two of them simply because there's not usually enough of him to wreck. Who's sweat-slick hair is sticking to the lines of his augmentation scars and who's looking at them. Just looking. And bringing that stormy expression with him, churning beneath and through and alongside the pleasure-haze, the cold front of what they can only name as suspicion makes them feel brittle all over again, gallium to aluminium.
621 can't meet that gaze anymore so they don't. They wrap their arms around him, pulling him close enough to bury their nose in his hair. Citrus and sweat.
"What do we do?" they ask.
About this, they think.
About Vogelwerke, they think.
About us, they think.
O'Keeffe shrugs. They can feel his eyelashes dance over their skin, the brush of his lips as he speaks. "Live. It sucks, but there's nothing else left."
They don't respond. They just sit there, back in the scorched field of their grief, and O'Keeffe says live but it sounds like give up and something howls inside them and that howl says no.
The bubble pops.
"I don't know if I can do that," they say. It's stronger than they expected, and so is how they push the two of them apart, sitting with legs curled beneath them. "Maybe the me I don't remember being could. Maybe my memory will come back and I'll make peace with it. Maybe in thirty years I'll have figured out how to pull out the knife like you did. But knowing how the chips fell on Ganymede, seeing what's happening on Rubicon..."
Their hands clench, meat and metal alike. They see their own hands. They see Kabuki's hands.
"I can't let it happen again."
O'Keeffe doesn't respond. Just stands, picking up his glasses as he does, and moves to the bathroom.
Hesitates in the door.
"I know."