CRITICAL POWER THRESHOLD — 12% — CONSERVE ENERGY
VOCAL SYNTHESIS OPERATING AT REDUCED CAPACITY
MOTOR FUNCTION DEGRADED — LIMIT NON-ESSENTIAL MOVEMENT
Aether watched the warnings scroll across his vision like a news ticker. His fingers, three of them flickering like a dying television, an involuntary strobe he could not stop, had found his tail without his permission. He became aware of this the way he'd been becoming aware of most things lately: delayed, and poorly. Tug. Release. Tug. The blood had dried in places and was still tacky in others. He was doing the math anyway, some background subroutine crunching through volume and surface area and likely source, and he wanted very badly to reach into his own skull and turn that off. The repair on his left arm had held. He noted this with something that might have been relief if he had the bandwidth for relief.
Layken was in front of him. Aether kept confirming it because his depth perception was doing something concerning and because Layken felt like the closest thing to an anchor he currently had access to. He opened his mouth. His vocoder produced a sound like a radio caught between two stations, and then: "I—" Silence. His jaw worked. Something in his throat clicked, that mechanical tick that only happened when systems were pulling from reserves they weren't supposed to, and then his voice came back at half its usual resonance, the warmth shaved off, the edges frayed. "There was—" A flicker. His left hand went translucent. "In my head—" He stopped. The thing in his head shifted. The way sediment moved in still water when something disturbed it. His processor flagged it the same useless way it had all night: unknown process. cannot identify. cannot isolate. He pressed two flickering fingers against his temple. It didn't help.
"I don't know how to explain what happened to me." Tick. "I'm trying to locate the sequence of it. The order." He looked at his hands. The blood between his knuckles. Two fingers twitched and shook. The grid was out and he was sitting here bleeding electricity he didn't have, feeling himself get slower and dimmer at the edges. Somewhere behind all of that the thing in his head just gnawed. "I'm sorry," he said, which wasn't what he meant to say. His fingers tightened on his tail. "I couldn't stop this." His eyes found Layken's face and stayed there. "There's something in there with me and I don't know what it is and it's... very loud," he finished quietly. "And I'm very tired." He let his eyes close for a moment. Just a moment. The dark behind them wasn't restful. He opened them again because closed felt worse.
Aether wanted to go home. He wanted to go home and he wanted the lights to be on and he wanted to lie down somewhere that wasn't here and let his systems do whatever they were going to do through the night without having to be conscious for it. It took him longer than it should have to register what home meant now. Layken's place. Layken's bed, his couch, his floor, or whatever configuration they'd arrived at without ever formally arriving at it. He just wanted it. The thing in his head had gone quiet. It was still there. He could feel the weight of it, the occupied feeling in his skull. But it was also spent. That should probably have frightened him more than it did. Right now it just meant the gnawing had stopped and he was grateful for small things. He had no idea what they were supposed to do about the power. The thought drifted through and then drifted out again. He didn't chase it. "Always the fucking damsel," he said. His voice came out low and defeated and about as unguarded as he'd ever let it get. He didn't look at Layken when he said it. He was looking at his hands, at the fingers that had finally, mostly, stopped going translucent. "I think I just want to go home."
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