Chapter Text
It has been a rather long and trying– day? Night? They are too far underground and too halfway out of reality to measure time by the cycle of the sun, Loid has to concede.
A long and trying span of hours, then. No amount of centuries of sleep could have possibly prepared him for this, and those centuries of sleep were only sleep on the barest technicality and far from restful or restorative anyway.
The left-hand wall of the Sanctum Anatomica gashes open like a wound, bleeding that strange dustblood all over everything. It frames the two vessels half sunk as they gaze at each other, locked in place now. As trapped as any of them, all of them. At least they are trapped with contact. They are not alone.
Loid's hand falls from his own cheek.
In the slightly open area before his desk, Albrecht's Chosen Operator manifests out of nothing, apparently having transferred out of the vessel. The tenno’s shoulders are heaving and their slender limbs trembling, the wild tangle of their dark curls fallen mostly from the bun it was formerly almost contained in, but they appear unharmed.
“It's gone,” they pant. “It ran. It's gone.” Another fine tremble runs over their body, and then they cup their hands around their mouth and shout, too loud for someone so small and frail-looking, “And don't FUCKING come back until you're gonna play nice!” in the general direction of the new wound in the Sanctum wall that opens into the Void.
Their knees give out, but they vanish before they hit the floor. The warframe that stood, statue-still, at the other end of the level Loid is standing on, comes back to life in an instant.
He doesn't recognize the model. That in itself is not surprising. While Albrecht did study warframes rather extensively in the process of designing Qorvex, it was not a project Loid assisted with apart from the occasional numbers crunching or paper editing. Dante was the only warframe Loid ever spent any time with, and this warframe bears absolutely no resemblance to Dante. Though still almost a head taller than Loid, this one is decidedly more slender, bluish-grey in color, longer limbed and with an odd flattened crest on the head. Definitely a more feminine figure.
“That was some shooting,” the tenno’s voice says from some unseen speaker on the warframe. Or maybe they don't even need a speaker, maybe the tenno simply wills their voice to be heard and it is. It would not be the strangest of their powers. “I appreciate the backup, I really do, but if you could at least try to stay close to me?” Their tone turns wry and unimpressed. “I was terrified one of those things was going to take your head off and it's easier to both fight and cover a civilian when said civilian isn't sprinting away from me as fast as he can.”
He remembers that, remembers the agile body of that huge warframe leaping over and around him every so often, doubling back and cutting down anything that got too close in a flash of a huge polearm that was as tall as Loid himself. He remembers the sound of those bizarre exploding arrows the tenno shot from their equally bizarre bow, the heat of them whizzing past his face. He remembers what may as well be plasma bullets pulled from the pages of Albrecht's own grimoire, turned to a weapon in this tenno’s hands.
Loid had not gone out there with his pistol drawn with a single thought towards his own safety. His entire soul was dedicated only to helpless anger and grief and his by now completely debunked hypothesis that if he just kept fighting with everything he had he could someday win.
“Looks like a Zylok prime to me,” the tenno says, and Loid realizes that they're looking at his pistol.
He takes it out of the holster on his belt and offers it, grip first, before the words truly sink in. “It is the pistol variant of the Sybaris rifle. Zylok is what the manufacturer calls the model,” he explains as the tenno carefully takes the pistol in their massive but gentle warframe hands, “but I am unsure what you mean by ‘prime’.”
They turn it over a few times, inspect the barrel, eject the magazine, and hum to themself. “Yep, I was right.” They hand it back to him. “Prime is what we call something if it's basically in the same condition as it was during the height of the Orokin empire. Lots of our gear, we don't have the full blueprints or all the same parts, so it isn't as good or at least it's a bit different.” They gesture at his pistol. “I have a Zylok, but it's a modern Zylok. Doesn't hold nearly as much ammo as yours and I'd bet yours hits harder too. Possibly less recoil, but I’d have to test them side by side to be sure, and the recoil on such a small gun isn't enough for me to really feel it in a warframe anyway.”
Loid takes a second to absorb that. Another bit of evidence that not only is the war gone and done with, but it is so far back that the, to him, relatively new pistol is essentially an antique.
“You're something of a prime too, come to think of it,” the tenno murmurs. “Human prime. Loid prime? We’ll workshop it. But that's beside the point. Thanks for the backup, out there. Most of the time the civilians just hide, and I think I prefer that, but you've got guts. I like that too.”
He isn't really sure what to say to that. Honestly, he isn't sure what to say about anything. He feels stretched thin from one end of the Sanctum to the other. And Albrecht's voice is still ringing softly in the back of his mind, saying things he has been aching to hear for what feels like eternity. My support, my strength, my sanctuary. I only wish I could have been worthy of you, my Loid.
He is never going to get those words out of him, now. He knows it like he knows basic chemical formulas or how to walk. They're imprinted on him, the insides of his skin. Just when he thought he couldn't possibly be more fully Albrecht's, the damned man had to go and say things like that only after they are parted.
It has been a long and trying span of hours, and Loid is tired. He doesn't want to show it, especially not to this chosen Operator, but he is. Later, he decides that must be the reason he allows them to leave without ever once asking them their name or pronouns, or offering them tea, or even thanking them for their hand in the Kalymos sequence initialization or protecting his own life. It isn't until several twenty-four-hour spans later that he has decided to refer to as days and nights for the sake of his own sanity that he realizes just how incredibly rude he has been.
He does not have long to reflect on this before the tenno is, unexpectedly, in the Sanctum again. The Murmur continue to encroach, and he and the Cavia did indeed discuss calling the tenno soon to assist with pushing them back, but Loid had assumed they would have another discussion before doing so. Apparently foolishly.
“Ah,” he says, turning what his body wants to be a full three stumbling steps back into simply coming to a halt and clasping his hands in front of him. “Tenno. I was not expecting you.”
That huge, slender, crested warframe glances over to Fibonacci’s tank. “You didn't tell him I was coming?”
“It was discussed!” Fibonacci snipes back, swimming in a circle. “I may have omitted that you were arriving today.”
The tenno pinches the bridge of their warframe’s nose, or approximately where a nose should be if that were a feature warframes had. It's a startlingly human gesture and not anything he ever imagined seeing on a warframe.
Loid waves it off, the tenno’s clear aggravation and Fibonacci’s lack of communication both. “It is unimportant. As you are here, we shall put you to work. There is much to be done.”
That great crested head nods at him. Loid cannot help but notice that they do not appear to have Albrecht's grimoire in the small arsenal they carry today. It is the huge polearm, that bizarre bow with the exploding arrows, and a compact and strangely ornate pistol that tickles something odd at the back of his mind. It can't be, and it does not quite match up entirely, but those clean lines– the shape of the grip, the trigger, it presses a sense memory into his gloved hands.
He was a small boy, being honored for his grades in school with participation in an Orokin parade. He can still hear his mother’s praise to his face and her fearful weeping to his father later that night, when they both thought he was asleep. Their pride in their son’s mind and their terror that a Golden Lord would take too much notice, and take their son away from them.
It was the first time his hands ever touched something vaguely like a weapon, although it was by design incapable of doing harm unless discharged point blank into someone’s eyeball, and even then the damage would be minimal. It was no weapon of war. Not a thing that he ever imagined strapped to the hip of a warframe or taking up valuable space in a tenno’s arsenal.
“Is that a Laetum?” He blurts before his brain, caught on the edges of the memory, catches up with his mouth.
“Yep.” The tone of the voice says if he were seeing the tenno’s face, they'd be grinning.
He had seen their face several times during the whole debacle with initializing the sequence, and though they bared their teeth and snarled like an animal in a horribly primal expression entirely out of place on such a youthful face, they did not smile. Now they are smiling with their voice, but still Loid can't see their face.
“Why–” he pauses to clear his throat. “Why do you carry a Laetum , of all things?”
For a moment the warframe simply stares, stock still, and despite the complete lack of anything resembling facial features and no vocal cues to go off of he gets a distinct sense of confusion.
“Forgot these were originally strictly ceremonial,” the tenno finally says, plucking the Laetum from the holster and spinning it dexterously. “Let's just say, this one spent more time baking in the void than I did. If I'd known you were going to go charging off guns blazing last time I was here, I woulda let you try this bad boy.”
Loid sputters. “I– I am hardly qualified– let alone trained–”
“Nah,” the tenno says with a shrug of the warframe’s enormous shoulders, “I've let rescue targets who couldn't hit the side of a drop ship at five paces shoot this thing. You'd be the best marksman I ever lent it to by a long shot.” Then they snort at their own accidental pun.
They go down into the labs, the labs proper. It seems like only yesterday that Loid walked those halls himself, and now they are overrun with murmur. Bird 3 insists on acting as mission control, and Loid simply does not have it in him to argue about that. Not now.
He sits at his desk and organizes files instead, watching the little blip of the tenno’s warframe on a terminal display moving on a small map of the labs out of the corner of his eye. He's not worried. They're a bloody tenno, they can't die. Even if something down there is strong enough to strike what would normally be a mortal blow against such a warrior. Which is unlikely.
“Brought these back for you,” the tenno says when they return. The warframe hefts a small bag onto Loid’s desk. The bag, he notices with an abstract and detached sense of horror, is– screaming? Vibrating? Wailing?
In any case the bag is making a truly unholy noise, or cacophony of them. It's so deep it feels nearly sub-audible. It is a sound he senses more than hears; it buzzes right through him to the roots of his teeth. He has experienced this before, this not-noise licking the inside of his skull until he wishes his brain could vomit. It compels Loid to drag out a medium sized isolation box before he will allow the tenno to open the bag and drop the voca inside.
Instantly the racket, and all the somewhat disquieting sensations brought with it, cease.
“Three of them,” Loid observes. “We appreciate it, tenno.” Then he straightens his back. “I have been meaning to ask,” he begins, and immediately falters.
This is not who he is, dammit. He is the best servant of the House Entrati, he has looked Orokin executors in the eye and spat polite vitriol with only minimal fear and gotten away with it, he has defied every law of physics at the side of the most brilliant man ever born, he has loved and lost and lived and not yet bent. He can get through asking an ancient child soldier for their name, for pity’s sake.
He smooths his hands down his lapels and starts again, with dignity at the forefront this time. “I am unsure if it is something tenno share,” he says, “but as I have already seen your face, would it be too terrible an imposition to ask your name and pronouns as well?”
For a tiny span between heartbeats the world seems a bit askew, and then the warframe is unnaturally still and a human youth stands before him on slim, shaky legs.
They're identical to how he last saw them. Maybe sixteen at a glance, with barely tamed, dark gray-brown curls pinned into a bun at the back of their head, covered from foot to throat in gray leggings and a long black tunic that ends in several almost petal-like shapes that float around their knees. Pale blue accents color their clothing, which he had noticed in the handful of glances he previously caught, but he had missed several details. Their feet may as well be clad solely in socks, they wear an oculus that's downright whimsical in it’s butterfly design, and those wild curls are not at all tamed by the addition of a gold headband. It's such fine and intricate metalwork that it practically screams high ranking Orokin. Their eyes are an unnaturally bright, smoldering blue.
They give him a small, surprisingly friendly smile. “Shay,” they tell him. “She/her.” She nods at the warframe over her shoulder. “This’s Banshee, also she/her.”
Loid glances at the now unoccupied warframe with new eyes. Not a single trace of motion, not a breath, not a twitch.
“Is– is she…” he isn't sure exactly what he is trying to ask. All original warframes should have lost every trace of humanity and sapience by now, all of them. Unless, perhaps, a fortunate early pairing with a compassionate tenno kept them sane all these years? Is that even possible?
Shay shrugs. “Don't know. Makes me feel less alone to imagine she is though.”
Some– emotion – stabs through Loid’s chest like a knife. Not knowing if you are deceiving yourself just to ease the loneliness is a sentiment he can understand.
“She feels pain. If we go more than twenty-four hours without linking she starts hurting. And she moved on her own once– maybe. I don't really know what happened there. I was a little bit distracted at the time.” She rubs the back of her head, tugging some of her curls free from the bun. “I don't know why I'm telling you this. She's not gonna go nuts and smash up your place. And even if she did, I'd stop her.”
Loid sweeps all that information aside to be mentally sorted through later, and offers his hand instead. “Loid, aid to Albrecht Entrati and servant of his house, he/him,” he introduces himself. Technically they are already acquainted, but he strongly prefers it when he has the chance to introduce himself, rather than be unceremoniously and rather back handedly done so by his emotionally lobotomized cephalon clone.
“It's good to meet you, Loid, scientist and man of his own,” Shay says. Her mouth takes on a small, dry quirk that isn't a smile. “Sorry, I don't do handshakes. The last one went kinda sideways for me and I've since sworn it off.”
“Fair enough.” Loid drops his hand and wonders if he should be insulted. He decides on no.
The voca that Shay brought him are brief fonts of information, until inevitably they expire from his poking and prodding. Loid writes everything down and composes papers for an audience of nothing, and is once again taken by surprise when he enters the Sanctum proper and finds Shay there.
Well, it would be more accurate to say that he finds Banshee there, but where Banshee is, Shay is. It is the way of the tenno and warframe, Loid knows that much, even though as far as he is aware, Dante didn't deteriorate quite fast enough to warrant being paired with a tenno before he went into cryosleep.
Regardless, it's irrelevant now. It would not be too terribly surprising to find the huge gray blue warframe crouched and speaking to Tagfer, if not for the presence of two other warframes.
“Loid!” Banshee coils up and leaps, as if she isn't a seven foot tall hulking creature of infested metal, down to the base level, landing leaf-quiet on oddly shaped feet next to him. The other two warframes follow a bit more slowly. Both are larger than Banshee, and it hits him somewhat belatedly that Banshee is a rather small warframe. One of the newcomers is black, blue, white, and yellow, with the head appearing to be wrapped entirely in yellow bandages. The other is white, with black and lime green accents and a strange circlet-like growth on the forehead. This second one feels slightly familiar, distantly so. Probably one that he saw among Albrecht's notes.
Not cringing is an effort worthy of praise, Loid thinks, but there is no one here to witness it properly. Still, he stands firm even before three elite warriors each capable of wiping out a Dax battalion individually. Or, are these even three tenno? Is Shay merely controlling three warframes? Can she do that?
“These are tenno… friends, of mine,” Shay says, which answers one question, at least, and posits several more. She doesn't introduce them more than that, and neither of the other tenno speak. “Tagfer wanted me to raid one of the more heavily guarded netracells, and he figured that it would be smart not to go in alone.”
Objectively Loid knew that Shay was not the only tenno left in the origin system, not by a long shot, and it wasn't entirely impossible that she may bring others to the Sanctum, but that realization takes a back seat to the numbing terror of something being down there that both Tagfer and Shay believe would take three tenno to destroy.
“We’ll bring you back some voca!” Shay promises cheerily as the elevator door closes.
“I don't like it,” Fibonacci says a few moments later. “How many tenno does one netracell need?”
Tagfer stomps his hooves and dances in place, clearly agitated. “I told her to bring six,” he snarls. “She said three would be more than enough. I think she just didn't want to split the loot six ways. If they all die, not my fault.”
“Tenno can't die,” Loid interjects, but neither Cavia is listening to him.
“Originally she wanted to just go in on her own!” Tagfer snarls. “By herself! I had to talk her out of it and you were no help!”
“She got the computer part out of the netracell by herself,” Fibonacci huffs. “Don't treat her like a child.”
“She is a child! Are you blind?” Tagfer’s hackles are up, and for a brief moment Loid thinks he might actually charge the fish tank.
Fibonacci's voice finally rises to a yell. “She is an elite warrior! She cut through the Murmur like they were water and turned the tide of an unwinnable war!”
“Yeah, except for that sometimes she apparently thinks the appropriate response to a giant monster trying to crush you is to tenderly caress its face!” Tagfer’s tail lashes at the ground.
“Well it worked, didn't it?!”
Tagfer opens his mouth, but before he can reply, the speaker by his station pings. “Hey, mission control, tenno in position.” It's Shay’s voice.
Snarling curses under his breath, Tagfer stalks back to his station.
The mission itself doesn't take long. It turns out that three tenno was more than sufficient for Tagfer’s purposes, and all three warframes exit the elevator looking no worse for wear. They're carrying several bags, each overflowing with… stuff. Loid can already hear the vocas.
“One archon shard each,” Shay says after the vocas are safely tucked away in an isolation box. She tosses the glowing red crystal that's as long as Loid’s entire arm like it weighs nothing in an arc over Banshee’s crested head and catches it in the other hand. “Not bad for a day's work.”
Loid is, of course, familiar with archon shards. The Orokin Seven theorized they were void touched, initially, being a product of those bizarre sentient-warframe hybrids, and sent them to the Entrati labs to confirm or deny. That they were not void-touched was easy enough to confirm, but whenever a shard was recovered they continued to send them to Albrecht in the hopes he would find out what they actually were. That tended to get shifted to the wayside in favor of more dire work, and all Loid can really say on the topic of archon shards is that they are large, roiling with strange energy that is not void energy and has been touched by the infestation but is not infested, and is made up of a dense and eerily uniform crystalline structure. Which, he admits, is a rather sorry report on a substance he has had in his laboratory for decades.
“What do you do with them?” He asks, before he thinks better of it.
“Sand ‘em down, stick ‘em in a frame.”
It was not Shay that spoke, and Loid turns as gracefully as he can to face the warframe with the yellow bandaged head. This tenno’s voice is deeper, though still young sounding, and rough like they have sustained some kind of vocal injury. A familiar kind of roughness.
“Different colors do different things,” the tenno goes on, “I'm still fiddling with– ow!”
The third tenno, the one with the warframe with that circlet-like head growth, interrupts them by smacking them in the back of the head. Loid vaguely feels like the warframe should have gone flying halfway across the Sanctum from the force behind it, and the clang of metal on metal is as loud as he expected, but the warframe only staggers two steps forward and rubs the back of their head.
“Ow,” they say again, and somehow without a face they still manage to send a purely wounded expression to the third tenno.
“He’s not privy to tenno information,” the third tenno says stiffly. This voice is the oldest sounding one, almost adult, but not quite there.
“Shay trusts him!” The smacked tenno continues rubbing the back of their warframe's head. “You heard what she said, they did all kinds of weird– shit– together. She trusts him.”
There's that odd stillness-shifting again, and then Shay is standing next to him. Not Banshee, Shay herself. She rolls her vibrant eyes. Her legs still shake under her as if she is on the verge of falling.
“Delo, Crai, cut it out.” She nods at Loid. “He's good for it. Too curious and too pigheaded and brave for his own good but he's not going to endanger any of us. I can say that for certain.”
The yellow-bandaged head warframe goes eerily still, and a figure steps out of nothing. Another tenno. They're a little taller than Shay, with space-black hair frosted with ice blue at the tips. They wear it in neat coils piled mostly on top of their head, and their clothing is a bulky vest and wide trousers with many pockets. Unlike Shay, they aren't trembling at all. And also unlike Shay, they have light traces of void scarring on their chin and lips. Likely a result of whatever injury caused the roughness in their voice.
“Delo, he/him.” He offers Loid a hand, which answers at least one of Loid’s old questions: not every tenno shares Shay’s aversion to handshakes. It's a Shay thing, not a tenno thing.
He takes the offered hand. “Loid, he/him,” he says, remembering how Shay responded to the full introduction and opting to skip over it.
The third tenno, the only one still in their warframe, grabs Delo's arm and yanks it out of Loid’s grip. Delo stumbles back several paces.
“Are you insane?” They hiss. “He's basically an Orokin!”
“I beg your pardon,” Loid snaps. A moment later the fear creeps up on him but the anger is louder. “I have never in my life been an Orokin!”
Shay waves her hands again. Her face is more careworn than a teenager’s should be. “Really, Crai, he's not. He wasn't even an archimedean, for fuck’s sake. If all you're going to do is sling insults, you should head back to your orbiter.”
The warframe crosses their arms. “Fine, I will.”
As the door closes behind them, Shay mutters “well, I won't be hitting her up for a lucrative gig again.”
“Will she alert the family?” Loid asks, the anxiety bursting out of him before he could even name or label it.
“No. The remaining Entrati won't give her the time of day,” Delo chuckles dryly. “She hates them and they hate her. I'm honestly surprised she even came here at all. She hates Deimos in general.”
“Because of the infested?” Loid asks.
“Yep. Guess they give her the heebie jeebies or something.” Delo plucks his archon shard out of his motionless warframe’s hands and puts it back into his little bag. “Not that they don't give me the heebeejeebies, but you don't always get to pick your battles, y'know?”
Loid knows. He was old when he went into cryo sleep and he has never once in his life had the luxury of picking his battles. When you were an Orokin servant, your battles chose you and you conquered them or you died trying. The tenno seem too young to have learned that lesson, on the surface. It's a glaring reminder that despite their youthful looks, both the people standing in front of him have lived lifetimes.
The thought makes him dreadfully weary. They were just children, who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Children who grew up too fast without ever having grown up at all.
There is still more work to do. Shay comes by frequently to push the murmur back, sometimes alone, occasionally with Delo or with another tenno who she introduces as Sumiru. Sumiru’s warframe is by far the most terrifying one Loid has ever seen in his life. This one looked almost as if it had been– skinned, with lines resembling veins and arteries, an asymmetrical face, and every so often the warframe would just scream. Sumiru said she ‘just does that sometimes’.
Usually Shay comes by herself, though. Sometimes she brings Banshee, sometimes a handful of other warframes. An enormous one with a mouth in its stomach that looks like it could easily bite Loid in half. A smaller, graceful one that moves even lighter than Banshee, twirling on tiptoes and constantly sparkling with electricity. One that never touches the ground at all, defying gravity effortlessly and occasionally flipping or twirling in mid-air. If he wasn't so godsbedamned busy, he would ask about each one of them, and where she got them, and if he could possibly take notes and readings on their differing strengths and abilities. But he is, unfortunately, busy in nearly every waking moment.
Shay comes by more and more. She even does a few netracells by herself, to Tagfer’s chagrin, and emerges unscathed every time. It isn't normal, but it is a routine.
Routine enough that when the world around Banshee goes tilted for a second and the figure that steps out isn't the slender, trembling teenager he’s grown rather used to, Loid has his pistol drawn on the stranger before he can even think twice.
“Whoa whoa,” the stranger says, holding up their hands. “I thought we were past this!”
They sound like Shay. A lot like Shay. And as he looks, he realizes they look a lot like Shay too. They have the same curly gray-brown curly hair, the same too-bright eyes, and they're wearing the same whimsical oculus.
But this person is also obviously not Shay. They're much taller, only a bit shorter than Loid himself, and they're more strongly built. They don't shake as if the effort of standing is too much for their emaciated legs. And they're older, or at least they look older. Shay looks about sixteen or maybe seventeen at the oldest. This person Loid would put in their mid or late twenties.
“Oh, right.” The stranger who isn't all that strange steps back. “I forgot. We've talked before, but you've never seen me…” they gesture down at themself.
Confused but no longer feeling threatened, Loid holsters his Zylok. “Who are you?”
“I'm Shay,” they say with a small, familiar smile. “Just a different Shay from the other one. Kid Shay. Our people call me the Drifter and her the Operator.”
Loid takes another small step back. “I…”
“It's a long story. She's me and I'm her, but our timelines diverged at a pretty critical point. She’s the version who became a proper tenno. I'm the version who became… something else.”
Loid, who did not get up this morning planning to deal with eternalism, gives himself a moment to digest that.
“How did you end up here? Did you displace and destroy this timeline’s Shay?” He demands.
“Oh no,” the other Shay– the Drifter? – assures him. “Well– displaced, maybe, but we've agreed on it. I'll swap out again with her later, and she'll come by and you can ask her all about it.”
“You said you've been here before,” Loid says. “You have also been helping repel the murmur?”
“Of course!” Drifter-Shay waves her arms above her head. “I guess I've just never transferred out in front of you before.”
The Drifter and Banshee go down into the labs to do their usual work of forcing the murmur back, and they do an exceptional job. But when they come back up, Drifter-Shay transfers out again and comes to stand next to Loid.
“You look tired,” she says. "When was the last time you took a break?"
Loid pushes his oculus up his nose. “Being tired is not an excuse to leave work unfinished.”
“Hum. Is being abducted an excuse?”
Loid blinks at her. “I fail to see–”
He does not get to finish that sentence, because Drifter-Shay has transferred back into Banshee and the warframe has picked him up and slung him with inhuman gentleness over a metal shoulder.
“Just for a second,” she says, and then they're flying.
Well. Not actually flying. They're just jumping, but it feels like flying. Like the least controlled and most life threatening flying he has ever experienced.
She sets him down on the second level of the Sanctum. For his part, Loid takes a heartbeat just to be proud of keeping down his stomach contents.
“So that's what you meant by abduction,” he mutters dizzily.
“I thought about abducting you all the way back to my ship, but then I thought about it some more and it seemed rude.” She transfers out of Banshee again, leaving him facing the adult version of a face he has grown so used to. “I worry about you, down here all by yourself. Well, the Operator was the one who worried first. Then Ordis started worrying because she was worrying, and he told me about it. It's hard for her and I to actually like, talk, face to face and all. We can't really occupy the same space.”
Of course not, not without causing each other harm. They could potentially meet at whatever physical place their timelines diverged– which, if Loid were a betting man he would say was absolutely somewhere aboard the Zariman ten-zero– and nowhere else.
This is another thing that, if he had any time whatsoever to call his own, he would want to investigate. Tenno on their own are strange enough, but the fact that there are legitimately just two of Shay coexisting like this boggles the mind. Eternalism makes his head ache on a good day, and today had started out mediocre and rapidly declined from there. Truthfully, even if he had any spare time, he would be spending it passed out unconscious, hopefully somewhere somewhat dignified and not at his desk. Not working on unrelated side projects driven only by curiosity.
Well. Seeing as that he has been ‘abducted’ from his workstation, maybe he can take a short break. Not long enough for a nap, but long enough to perhaps sate at least a little of his new curiosity.
Loid leans against the railing that encircles the second level, hooking his elbows over it. “So, you are the version of Shay who got to grow up?”
The Drifter rubs the back of their– her? They're both Shay, so probably her– head. He cannot help but notice that, while she keeps her hair in a very similar bun, she does not wear the same intricate, screamingly Orokin headband. Her hair is actually a great deal neater, and the coil of her bun appears to be braided upon second glance.
“It's, well, sort of? I got to grow up physically at least. Somewhat. I think my body’s stalled out around like. Thirty.” She shrugs. “Maybe. I didn't exactly count. Technically she and I are the same age.” She grimaces. “Did she tell you about the handshake thing?”
“Yes. She wouldn't shake my hand when we first met.”
“Figures.” Drifter-Shay looks down at their hands. “That's our divergence. What happened... With that.”
“So you don't do handshakes either, I'm assuming?”
“Oh fuck no.” She grimaces down at her palms. Then she shakes herself, her whole body, like Kalymos or Tagfer if they got wet or dusty. “But I didn't abduct you from your work to talk about me. Are you okay?”
He has the brief and completely juvenile urge to point at himself, to make sure she truly does mean the question in regards to Loid. There is no one else here. Bird is on this level, but he's on the far side away from them and also asleep at his perch. Tagfer and Fibonacci are on the level below them and engrossed in whatever they're doing. Loid can't be bothered to monitor them at every waking moment like he initially tried to when he first discovered his only assistance with the Kalymos sequence would be coming from terminally void-poisoned animals. Which he has refused to fully shunt off into side-project territory. If there is a way, even if they are unpleasant and ungrateful wretches sometimes, he's going to find it and he's going to cure them.
After this warframe-mandated break.
“Am I… okay?” He parrots dumbly.
Drifter-Shay nods. “You say some concerning shit sometimes.”
The situation, being as full of ‘concerning shit’ as it is, lends itself to such things. If he wanted to avoid saying anything worrying he may as well take a vow of silence right now.
“I am functional.”
The Drifter rolls her eyes. “Mm hm. Okay, I see why you've got the kid all worried. If some random person asks you if you're okay and your immediate response is ‘well I haven't died yet’, you're in– what did she call it? A real kerfuffle.”
He has absolutely no idea what a ‘kerfuffle’ is, but it sounds rather pleasant, actually. Soft. Like a cloud. Like bed. Like being mostly asleep but just awake enough to feel the warm arm thrown over his waist and the warm chest against his back.
Which he will never feel again.
His legs want to give out from under him. No, he can't. It isn't an option. He cannot collapse nor let himself plunge into the ocean of self-pity. Everything depends on him remaining functional enough to complete the sequence. The cavia's continued lives depend on him being functional enough to find the elusive cure for void exposure. He has too much to do to stumble here.
Drifter-Shay is still giving him a skeptical look. “Yeah. You're a void-damned mess, my friend.”
He lets the railing take most of his weight. It was plenty strong enough for that and more before his long sleep, and if it has weakened too much to hold him now, so be it.
The railing holds.
“...you may be right,” he murmurs. “But so long as I can work, nothing else matters.”
“Oh boy.” She grimaces. “Getting you out of this funk is going to take some doing, huh?”
“‘Funk’?” He demands.
“Okay, yeah, maybe not the best word for it.” She takes a small step forward. “Maybe we could start with a hug?”
Once again he has the urge to point at himself just to make sure she has the subject right.
“A hug?”
“Yeah. You know. Took me a while to get used to them too, but the Lotus taught me. We both kinda hold our arms out and then wrap them around each other.” She mimes hugging. "
“I know what a hug is,” he snaps. “I just– why would you want to hug me?"
“Operator-Shay wanted to offer a long time ago but she felt awkward about it. Even though she seems to think you also really, really need it. So I'm offering. Would you like a hug, Loid?”
“I…” his voice peters out.
Drifter-Shay opens her arms. “C'mon. How long has it been since somebody hugged you?”
He doesn't want to think about it. It will make him cry. He doesn't want to accept the hug because that will probably also make him cry. And he can't cry in front of the Chosen Operator, or her bizarre paradox twin. He can't.
He brushes off his waistcoat. “I am fine,” he assures her. “I will tell your counterpart that I am also fine the next time I see her. I appreciate the chance for this break, but I must get back to work.”
He turns on his heel and walks to the stairs, leaving her behind on the second floor. There's still more work he needs to do on the theory of this latest potential cure before he can move on to testing it in a computer simulator.