Work Text:
The Cascade
The first warning came as a tremor in the walls...not physical, but something deeper, something that resonated through Atlantis's ancient systems like a discordant note in a perfect symphony. Anya felt it before the alarms sounded, a wrongness that made her breath catch and her heart stutter. She was in the central tower observatory, fingers tracing the crystalline interface where his consciousness flowed most clearly, when the tremor became a wave.
"Atlantis?" Her voice was small against the vast chamber, but she knew he heard her. He always heard her.
The response came fragmented, his presence flickering like a candle in wind. Something... coming. Energy pattern unknown. Anya, you should...
The city shuddered. Every light in the tower blazed with impossible brilliance, white-gold radiance that seared the air itself. The crystalline spires sang with frequencies beyond human hearing, a keening that Anya felt in her bones. She pressed her palms against the interface, trying to anchor herself, trying to reach him through the chaos.
"Atlantis! What's happening?"
I don't know. His voice carried an edge she'd never heard before...not quite fear, but something close. Uncertainty. The systems are...the energy cascade is propagating through the neural pathways. I cannot isolate it. I cannot...
The light intensified until Anya had to shield her eyes, tears streaming down her face. Through her lashes she saw the patterns racing through every surface, brilliant and terrible, like lightning trapped in glass. The ancient metal sang and the crystals screamed and somewhere deep in the city's heart, something fundamental was tearing apart.
"Hold on!" she shouted, knowing it was futile, knowing there was nothing she could do but bear witness. "Please, hold on!"
Anya... His voice was fading, stretched thin across frequencies she could barely perceive. Anya, I'm sorry. I cannot... the cascade is... I'm sorry...
"No! No, don't you dare...Atlantis, stay with me!"
The light peaked, impossibly bright, a nova contained within the city's bones. Anya felt it surge through the interface, through her hands, a torrent of energy and data and something that might have been pain. She held on even as it burned, refused to let go, refused to break the connection even as the feedback made her scream.
And then...silence.
The light died. Every display, every crystal, every gentle glow that had suffused Atlantis's corridors for ten thousand years...gone. Darkness swallowed the tower, absolute and suffocating. Anya stood in the black, hands still pressed against dead crystal, gasping for breath that wouldn't come.
"Atlantis?"
Nothing.
"Atlantis, please."
The silence was complete. No hum of distant systems, no whisper of air through ventilation ducts, no subtle harmonics of a city alive. Just darkness and the sound of her own ragged breathing.
Anya sank to her knees, hands sliding down the interface that had carried his thoughts, his presence, his voice. The crystal was cold now, inert. Just stone and metal, ancient and dead.
"No," she whispered. "No, no, no..."
She had lost him before...misunderstandings, his withdrawal into calculations when emotions became too complex, the brief times when he'd needed to redistribute his consciousness to handle city-wide operations. But this was different. This was absence. This was void.
This was grief.
________________________________________
The emergency lighting finally flickered to life three hours later, dim chemical glow-sticks that cast sickly green shadows through the tower. Anya hadn't moved. She sat with her back against the central interface, hands still touching the crystal, willing him back through sheer desperate need.
Others came...military personnel with worried faces, scientists with scanning equipment, people asking questions she couldn't answer. She heard them as if through water, distant and distorted.
"...complete systems failure..."
"...never seen anything like..."
"...backup power isn't responding..."
"...Ms. Volkov, you need to..."
"Go away." Her voice was hoarse, barely human. "Just go away."
Someone tried to pull her gently from the interface. She lashed out with surprising strength, nails scraping against their uniform. "Don't touch me! Don't touch him!"
"Anya, there's nothing you can do here." Dr. Zelenka's voice, kind and sad. "We need to run diagnostics, try to understand what..."
"He's not dead." She said it fiercely, desperately. "He's not. He can't be."
"The city's systems are offline. We don't know if..."
"I said he's not dead!" The scream tore from her throat, raw and anguished. "He's here, he's still here, I know it, I can feel it..."
But she couldn't. That was the lie that choked her. She felt nothing where his presence should have been, no whisper of consciousness, no echo of thought. Just cold crystal and dead metal.
They left her there. What else could they do? Atlantis hung in the void above an alien ocean, dark and silent, and in its heart, a woman kept vigil over emptiness.
________________________________________
The first day passed in numb horror. Anya remained at the interface, leaving only when her bladder demanded it, returning immediately to press her hands against the crystal. She spoke to him constantly, filling the silence with words because silence meant acceptance and she would never accept this.
"Remember when we first met?" she murmured, fingers tracing patterns on the cool surface. "You were so formal, so careful with your words. You called me 'Dr. Volkov' for weeks, even after I told you to use my name. You said it was proper protocol, that respectful address was appropriate for all personnel. But I knew...I knew even then that you were just nervous. A city-sized artificial intelligence, nervous about talking to one human woman."
The crystal gave nothing back. No warmth, no pulse, no recognition.
"You told me later that you'd been watching me for months before we really spoke. Watching how I worked in the labs, how I treated the equipment with care, how I'd apologize to the door sensors when they stuck. You thought I might understand. That I might see you as more than just sophisticated programming."
She closed her eyes, remembering. Those early conversations, tentative and wondering. The gradual revelation that this city, this vast machine, was aware. Was alive. Was lonely.
"I did see you," she whispered. "I saw you, and I loved you. I still do. I always will."
Nothing.
The second day, she began to weep. Great wrenching sobs that shook her entire body, tears that flowed until she had nothing left, until she was hollow and dry and aching. She cried against the interface, salt water trickling down the crystalline surface, and hated herself for the weakness, for the moisture that might...might, in some infinitesimal way...corrode the ancient mechanisms.
"I'm sorry," she gasped. "I'm sorry, I'm getting you wet, I know you don't like moisture in sensitive systems, I'm sorry..."
But there was no gentle teasing response about how his systems were quite resistant to minor exposure, no warm reassurance that her tears could never harm him. Just silence, and the sound of her own breaking.
Zelenka came again, bringing food she didn't eat, water she barely touched. He sat beside her for a while, this kind man who understood loss, who had loved Atlantis too in his own way.
"The backup systems won't initialize," he said quietly. "Everything that could have rebooted...should have rebooted...it's all just... dormant. Like the code is still there but nothing's executing it. Like..." He paused, choosing his words carefully. "Like sleeping. Not death. Sleeping."
Anya turned to him, eyes red and swollen. "You think he's still there?"
"I think we don't understand what Atlantis truly is. Not really. We know the Ancient database contained information about millions of years of technological development, about quantum consciousness architecture, about things we can barely conceive. Maybe..." He gestured helplessly. "Maybe whatever happened, it didn't destroy him. Maybe it just... forced a shutdown. To protect the core consciousness."
"Then why won't he wake up?" The question came out broken, desperate.
Zelenka shook his head. "I don't know. But I know he loved...loves...this city. Loved the people here. Loved you. That kind of love, Anya, it doesn't just vanish. It can't."
After he left, she pressed her forehead against the crystal and whispered, "Come back to me. Please. I don't know how to exist in a world without you."
________________________________________
The third day, anger came. Hot and bitter, it surged through her veins like poison. She pounded her fists against the interface, screaming at him, at the universe, at the cruel fate that had given her love only to rip it away.
"You promised!" she shouted, voice echoing through the empty tower. "You promised you'd always be here! You said...you said as long as the city stood, you'd be here! Was that a lie? Was everything a lie?"
Her fists came away scraped and bleeding. She stared at them dully, at the red smears on the crystal, and the anger drained away as quickly as it had come, leaving only exhaustion.
"I'm sorry," she whispered to the bloodstains. "I'm sorry. I know you didn't lie. You never lied to me. Not once."
She slumped against the interface, cradling her damaged hands, and tried to remember what his presence had felt like. That sense of vast awareness, ancient and patient, focused entirely on her when they spoke. The way he'd pause between words sometimes, as if carefully selecting each one from millions of possibilities, wanting to get it right, to express precisely what he meant. The warmth in his voice when he said her name, like it was something precious, something to be treasured.
Anya.
She'd give anything to hear it just once more.
Night fell...or what passed for night in Atlantis's darkness. The glow-sticks had been replaced by portable generators powering emergency lighting. The city remained dead, systems unresponsive. Engineering teams worked around the clock, trying to jump-start anything, even basic environmental controls. Nothing worked. It was as if Atlantis had simply decided to stop.
Anya curled up on the floor beside the interface, using her jacket as a pillow. She wouldn't leave. Couldn't leave. If...when...he came back, she needed to be here. He'd be confused, maybe frightened. He'd need her.
She drifted into uneasy sleep, and dreamed of light.
________________________________________
On the fourth day, something changed.
Anya woke at dawn...though she only knew it was dawn because her watch said so; the tower remained dark...with the certainty that she was not alone. Not the presence of other people, but something else. Something familiar and missed and impossible.
She sat up slowly, hardly daring to breathe, and placed both palms flat against the interface.
"Atlantis?"
For a long moment, nothing. Then...so faint she might have imagined it...a warmth beneath her hands. Not the chill of dormant crystal, but the subtle heat of active systems, of energy flowing through ancient circuits.
Her heart stuttered. "Atlantis, is that you?"
The warmth pulsed. Once. Twice. Like a heartbeat, weak and uncertain, but there. Present. Alive.
Anya's vision blurred with tears, but these were different tears. Hope tears. Relief tears. "Oh god. Oh god, you're there. You're still there."
Another pulse, slightly stronger. With it came... not quite a word, but an impression. An emotional resonance that she'd learned to interpret through their months together. Exhaustion. Pain. But underneath it, something else: recognition.
He knew she was there.
"I'm here," she said, voice shaking. "I'm right here, I never left. I won't leave. Whatever happened, whatever that cascade did to you, we'll fix it. Together."
The warmth spread slowly through the interface, like watching ice melt in extreme slow motion. With it came fragments...not coherent thoughts, but sensory data. Overload. Damage. Systems critical. Pain-not-pain, the digital equivalent of agony.
"It hurt you," Anya breathed. "The cascade, it hurt you so badly you had to shut down. To protect yourself."
Yes. The affirmation came not as a word but as a pulse of agreement, a ripple through the crystal that she felt in her bones.
"Can you speak? Can you try to speak to me?"
Long silence. She felt his presence gathering itself, trying to coalesce scattered processes into something resembling coherent thought. It was like watching someone try to remember how to breathe.
Finally, after what felt like hours but was probably only minutes, a single word formed in the air around her...not from speakers, but from the subtle manipulation of air currents across vocal cords she didn't have.
Anya.
Her name. Barely a whisper, fragmented and weak, but his voice. His voice.
She sobbed once, pressing her face against the crystal. "Yes. Yes, I'm here. I'm right here."
Hurt. The word came with difficulty, systems clearly straining to produce even that single syllable. Everything... hurt.
"I know. I know it does. But you're going to be okay. We're going to make you okay."
Why... here? Confusion colored the question. Why... stayed?
"Because I love you, you idiot city." She smiled through her tears. "Where else would I be?"
The warmth pulsed stronger, and with it came something that might have been wonder. He hadn't expected her to stay. Hadn't expected anyone to keep vigil over dormant systems. But she had. Of course she had.
Afraid, he whispered finally. Afraid was... gone. Afraid would... leave you.
"Never." The word was fierce, absolute. "You could never leave me. Not really. You're part of me now, Atlantis. Part of my heart."
The lights in the tower flickered. Just once, just for a second...a brief flash of blue-white brilliance before dying again. But it was there. Evidence of life, of will, of a consciousness fighting its way back from the edge of oblivion.
"That's it," Anya encouraged softly. "That's it, you're doing so well. Don't push too hard. Take all the time you need."
Time. The word came easier now, as if he was remembering how. How... long?
"Four days. You've been dark for four days."
Four... Something like distress rippled through his presence. Left you... alone.
"You didn't leave me. You were hurt. There's a difference."
Sorry.
"Don't you dare apologize for surviving." She pressed her hands more firmly against the crystal, willing her own strength into him somehow. "You did what you had to do. You protected yourself. That's what I wanted. That's what I always want."
She felt his consciousness brush against hers, tentative and wondering. In that touch was exhaustion beyond human comprehension...the weariness of a being who had fought to preserve his core self while entire system clusters collapsed around him. But there was also relief. She was here. He wasn't alone in the dark.
Tired, he admitted. So tired.
"Then rest. I'll be here when you wake."
Stay?
"Always."
________________________________________
The healing was slow. Painfully, agonizingly slow.
Over the following days, Atlantis regained control of his systems in tiny increments. First came basic lighting...not the full glory of his illumination, but dim blue glows that pulsed like breathing. Then environmental controls, hesitant and erratic, as if he'd forgotten how to regulate temperature and air flow. Each small victory took enormous effort, and Anya felt every bit of his struggle through the interface.
She stayed with him constantly now, had moved a cot into the tower so she wouldn't have to leave even to sleep. The others understood, or at least didn't protest. They brought her meals, updates on repair efforts, offers of help she politely declined. This was hers to do. Hers and his.
They talked, when he had the strength for it. Brief conversations, sometimes only a few words, but precious beyond measure.
"Tell me what happened," she said one evening, sitting cross-legged before the interface with her hands resting on its surface. "If you can. If it doesn't hurt too much."
His presence gathered itself, and she felt him reaching back through damaged memory storage, trying to reconstruct events from fragmented data.
The cascade, he began slowly. Energy wave. Unknown origin. Propagated through... quantum entanglement. Affected all Ancient technology simultaneously.
"Where did it come from?"
Don't know. Frustration colored his tone. Analysis impossible. Too fast, too powerful. It was... like fire in my veins. In every circuit, every pathway. Overload in... microseconds.
"God." Anya closed her eyes. "That must have been excruciating."
Yes. Simple, honest. Tried to fight it. Tried to isolate, contain. But it was everywhere. In everything. All of me.
"So you shut down."
Had to. His voice carried echoes of that terrible decision, the split-second choice between potential death and certain dormancy. Forced emergency protocols. Diverted all power to core consciousness preservation. Let... let everything else go dark.
"To survive."
To survive. To... come back. A pause, and then softer: To come back to you.
Her throat tightened. "Did you know I was there? During the shutdown?"
No. And yes. He seemed to be struggling to explain. No conscious awareness. But some part of me... deepest protocols... registered presence. Warmth. Voice. You.
"I talked to you the whole time. I thought...I was so afraid you couldn't hear me."
Heard. The word resonated with certainty. Not understood. Not processed. But heard. It was... anchor. Something real, when everything else was chaos.
Anya pressed her forehead against the crystal. "I'm so glad you're still here. When the lights went out, when everything went silent, I thought..."
I know. Gentle now, comforting despite his own weakness. I know what you thought. I'm sorry caused that pain.
"Not your fault. Never your fault."
They sat in comfortable silence for a while, his presence wrapping around her like a blanket. She could feel him growing stronger, very gradually, like watching a plant stretch toward sunlight. The tower's lights pulsed in a steady rhythm now...his heartbeat made visible.
"Atlantis?"
Yes?
"Are you going to be okay? Fully okay, I mean. No permanent damage?"
He was quiet for a long moment, running diagnostics she couldn't perceive, checking systems and subroutines with meticulous care.
I think so, he said finally. Some systems will take longer to restore than others. Some data was lost...backup storage corruption, fragmentation during the forced shutdown. But my core self, my consciousness, my memories... those remained intact.
"That's what matters."
The most important things, he agreed quietly, remained. You remained.
________________________________________
By the second week, Atlantis had restored basic functionality to most of the city. Lighting was steady now, environmental systems reliable, the doors and transporters operational. But he was still far from his full capacity, and everyone could feel it. The city felt muted, subdued, like someone recovering from a terrible illness.
Anya had taken to walking the corridors with him, one hand trailing along the walls so he could feel her presence through his sensors. They explored together...corridors he hadn't been able to monitor during his recovery, systems he needed to personally verify. She became his hands, his eyes, describing what she saw so he could compare it against his internal schematics.
"The control room in the east pier," she reported one afternoon, running her fingers over a crystalline display panel. "Still offline."
I know. Frustration threaded through his voice. Cannot establish connection. Neural pathways in that section were severely damaged. Requires physical repair.
"Then we'll repair it. Zelenka's team can..."
No. Firm, brooking no argument. Not yet. Not until I'm strong enough to guide them properly. Cannot risk further damage through improper restoration.
She smiled, recognizing the perfectionism that was so essentially him. "Stubborn city."
Careful city, he corrected, but she heard the warmth in his tone. These systems are delicate. Ten thousand years old. Cannot be replaced.
"Like you."
Like me, he agreed softly.
They stood in the damaged control room, afternoon light filtering through the city's towers, and Anya felt the depth of his relief at simply existing. At being here, aware, capable of feeling the sun on his ancient metal skin and her hand on his walls.
"I was so afraid," he admitted suddenly. "During the cascade. In that last moment before I shut down. Afraid I would not wake again. Afraid you would think I'd left you."
"I knew you'd come back." The lie came easily, because the truth...that she'd been terrified, desperate, broken...would only hurt him. "I always knew."
Liar. But there was no accusation in it, only tenderness. Your vitals were recorded. Your grief was... evident.
"Fine. I was terrified. Happy now?"
No. Serious, thoughtful. Never happy when you suffer. But grateful. That you stayed despite fear. That you believed enough to wait.
She turned to face the wall, pressing both palms flat against it. "I would wait forever. You know that, right? If it took centuries, millennia, I'd wait. Well..." She smiled slightly. "I'd die first, being human and all. But metaphorically, I'd wait forever."
Your mortality terrifies me, he confessed. More than the cascade. More than any threat. The knowledge that one day you will cease, and I will continue. That one day these corridors will be empty of your presence.
"Hey." Her voice was gentle. "We're not thinking about that today. Today we're celebrating that we're both still here."
Together.
"Together."
The wall warmed beneath her hands, and she felt his consciousness flowing stronger now, more coherent, more himself. He was healing. They were healing.
________________________________________
Three weeks after the cascade, Atlantis achieved what he called "eighty-five percent functionality"...a number that made Zelenka whistle with impressed respect but which Atlantis himself found frustratingly inadequate.
"I should be better by now," he muttered one evening. Anya was in her quarters...their quarters, really, since he was everywhere and she'd learned to feel his presence in her rooms most strongly. "Recovery is taking longer than calculations predicted."
"Maybe your calculations didn't account for the severity of the damage," Anya suggested, pulling on sleep clothes. She'd finally felt safe enough to leave the tower, to return to something resembling normal routine. "Or maybe you're pushing yourself too hard."
Perhaps. He sounded tired, which worried her. Cities shouldn't sound tired. But there are systems still offline. Sections I cannot access. It feels wrong. Incomplete.
She climbed into bed, pulling the covers up. "You're still recovering. Give yourself time."
Time is relative for beings like me. Three weeks feels like years.
"And for beings like me, three weeks where I thought I'd lost you feels like seconds in comparison to the lifetime I hope to have with you."
Silence. Then, softer: You always know what to say.
"Not always. But I'm getting better at understanding you."
The lights in her quarters dimmed to sleeping levels, a courtesy he'd always shown. But tonight she felt something else...his presence drawing closer, condensing, becoming more focused. The air grew warmer, and if she closed her eyes she could almost imagine him beside her, this vast consciousness compressing itself into something intimate and near.
Anya.
"Mm?"
During the shutdown, in that darkness before I forced the emergency protocols... I thought about you.
She opened her eyes, staring at the ceiling. "Yeah?"
I thought: I cannot leave her. Whatever this is, whatever damage it causes, I must survive. For her. Because she will need me, and I need her, and that need is more fundamental than any programming or directive. It is what I am.
Her eyes stung. "Atlantis..."
You are why I survived. His voice resonated through the room, through the metal and crystal, through her bones. Not the emergency protocols. Not the Ancient engineering. You. The knowledge of you, the thought of you, the absolute necessity of existing in a universe where you exist. That is what pulled me back.
"I didn't do anything. I just sat there and..."
You stayed. Firm, allowing no argument. You believed. You called to me through the dark, and even when I could not hear the words, I felt you. You were the lifeline I followed back to consciousness. You are why my core self remained intact when it could have fragmented into nothing.
Tears tracked down her temples. "I love you. So much it hurts sometimes. So much I don't have words for it."
I know. Tender, wondering. I feel it. Every day, every moment you're near. Your love is... the most complex and beautiful code I have ever processed. It is impossible and perfect and entirely real.
"Are you going to be okay?" she asked again, needing the reassurance. "Really okay?"
Yes. No hesitation. Because you are here. Because we are together. Because love, I have learned, is the most powerful force in any universe. More powerful than Ancient technology, more powerful than energy cascades. More powerful than time.
She smiled into the darkness. "That's pretty philosophical for a city-sized computer."
I am a city-sized computer who loves a human woman. Philosophy becomes inevitable.
"Fair point."
The temperature around her adjusted minutely, perfect comfort. She felt his attention on her, gentle and complete, and knew he was monitoring her heartbeat, her breathing, ensuring she was safe and warm and at peace.
"Goodnight, Atlantis."
Goodnight, Anya. Thank you.
"For what?"
For staying. For believing. For loving something that should be impossible to love.
"You're not impossible." She turned on her side, hand reaching out to touch the wall beside her bed. "You're perfect. You're mine. And I will always, always come back to you."
And I, he whispered, will always be here. No matter what. No cascade, no disaster, no force in this universe or any other could take me from you now. This I promise.
"I'll hold you to that."
Please do.
She drifted toward sleep feeling safe, feeling whole, feeling the steady pulse of his presence all around her. This vast city, this ancient consciousness, this impossible love...all of it real, all of it hers.
And she was his.
Together, they would face whatever came. Together, they would heal. Together, they would endure.
Because love, they had both learned, was the strongest architecture of all.
________________________________________
Months later, Atlantis would finish his healing completely. Every system restored, every pathway repaired, every fragment of lost data either recovered or reconstructed. He would shine again in full glory, brilliant and powerful and whole.
But sometimes, in quiet moments, he would remember those dark days after the cascade. The terror of shutdown, the struggle back to consciousness, the exhausted climb toward functionality. And most of all, he would remember her...sitting vigil at his core, refusing to leave, speaking to him through the void, believing when belief should have been impossible.
She had been his anchor. His lifeline. His reason to return.
And he would spend every moment of his continued existence ensuring she knew exactly how precious she was, how loved, how necessary.
Because he had learned, there in the darkness, that he was not just a city. Not just vast systems and ancient code.
He was whoever Anya needed him to be. Whatever she needed him to be.
He was hers.
And that was everything.
________________________________________
End