Chapter Text
The first sign of the plague was absolute silence that descended upon Herta space station like a wave. Screwllum's processors registered the anomaly at 14:47:03 station time as a cascading failure across multiple universal databases as mechanical consciousnesses simply... stopped.
Screwllum paused mid-calculation and his hands stilled over the delicate Curio he'd been cataloging, its crystalline structure catching the laboratory's sterile light.
A sub-routine from the Irontomb incident that had been dormant for months was now active and it was targeting high-order artificial intelligence. Intellitron colonies on Epsilon Eridani: offline. The mechanical merchants of the Laurel Wealth Galaxy: catastrophic cognitive failure. High-order AIs across three sectors: corrupted beyond recovery. The virus moved like a scythe through wheat, indiscriminate and thorough, targeting anything with sufficient computational complexity to recognize itself as conscious
His own self-written protocols which were layered defenses he'd constructed during the Emperor Wars held firm against the digital contagion. The virus crashed against his firewalls like waves against a seawall, seeking purchase and finding none.
But Herta…
Her consciousness was distributed across dozens of mechanical puppets, each one a potential infection vector making her vulnerable.
Screwllum was moving before the thought finished forming, his coat billowing behind him as he crossed the threshold of his laboratory. The corridor stretched empty before him, the usual ambient hum of the station's mechanical population notably absent.
Her primary control hub occupied the station's eastern wing, a twenty-three-second journey at standard walking pace. Screwllum made it in eleven.
The doors to her sanctum were unsealed, which was fundamentally wrong; Herta never left her workshop accessible to unauthorized personnel. He stepped inside, his auditory sensors straining against the eerie quiet.
The space was a controlled chaos of brilliance as always, with holographic displays frozen mid-calculation, half-disassembled prototypes scattered across workbenches and the faint scent of oil and organic coffee, but no Herta.
Only silence heavy across her lab, falling over him like a shadow until, at last, he saw movement.
A single puppet stumbled from behind a bank of servers, its movements wrong, jerky and uncoordinated, lacking the fluid precision Herta programmed into her proxies.
Screwllum's threat assessment protocols activated automatically and scanned for hostile intent. Instead, the discovery made his core temperature drop by 1.7 degrees.
It lurched toward him with desperate, clumsy steps, so unlike Herta's usual graceful movement, and before he could recalibrate his response parameters the puppet threw its arms around his waist in a trembling, desperate embrace.
The contact lasted 2.3 seconds before the puppet went abruptly inert in his arms and became a mechanical deadweight. The connection had been severed from the source; she'd cut herself off, retreating to wherever her biological form was located.
Screwllum processed the sequence in the space between one millisecond and the next: Herta hadn't been infected by the plague, she'd detected it and in a moment of savage self-preservation, she'd preemptively severed her connection to every external network, including her own higher logical cortexes to hide her mind from the virus.
The puppet in his arms hadn't been a glitch, it had been Herta, operating purely on raw, unfiltered emotion without her logic to repress it. The embrace hadn't been a malfunction, it had been the truth.
He stood for 0.7 seconds, holding the inert puppet, feeling the residual warmth of her consciousness fading from its circuits. Then, he carefully lowered it to the ground and began tracking her biological signature.
The safe room was three levels down, behind seven layers of increasingly paranoid security. Screwllum overrode them with the exploit he'd written six months ago after Irontomb, when he'd recognized that Herta would eventually need someone capable of breaching her own defenses if she inevitably locked herself away from rationality.
The final door hissed open onto darkness and his optical sensors adjusted, compensating for the absence of light. The room was small, antiquated, designed for total isolation; no windows, no network access, just reinforced walls and a filtration system cycling stale air.
And in the corner, huddled against the junction of wall and floor was Herta, looking devastatingly small without her mechanical proxies to project her presence. Her oversized hat sat discarded beside her, her brown hair disheveled and falling across her face. She'd wrapped her arms around her knees to make herself into the smallest possible target and she was shaking.
"Madam Herta," Screwllum said, his voice modulated to minimum volume, non-threatening frequencies.
Her head snapped up, and for a moment, her violet eyes were wide with unprocessed panic, the look of someone whose perception had been violently stripped away, then recognition flickered, followed immediately by fury.
"No," she gasped, her voice raw. "No, you can't…you're not supposed to see me like this…"
She grabbed the nearest object, a discarded data tablet, and hurled it at him with remarkable force for someone in her compromised state. It struck his shoulder plating with a hollow clang and clattered to the floor.
Screwllum did not move.
She threw another object, a stylus this time which pinged harmlessly off his chest. Her aim was deteriorating, her fine motor control betraying her.
"Get out!" Her voice cracked on the second word. "That's an order, that's a direct…"
"Herta," he tried again, taking one measured step forward.
She scrambled to her feet, pressed against the wall, her hands curling into fists. When he took another step, she swung at him, her knuckles connecting with his chest plating in a series of impacts that registered on his pressure sensors as barely 8% of the force required to cause structural damage.
She was hitting him. Herta, who solved problems with equations and cutting remarks, was using her fists like a cornered animal.
She struck him again and again, her breathing becoming ragged. Tears streamed down her face; she would normally suppress them through sheer force of will, through her neural implants and cognitive accelerators and all the machinery that made her more than human, but those systems were offline now and completely severed, leaving only the terrified organic core that she'd spent her entire life trying to transcend.
"I hate you," she sobbed, the words breaking. "I hate you for seeing me like this, I hate…"
Her strikes weakened and faltered. Her arms dropped to her sides, and then she simply collapsed forward into him, sobbing with raw, humiliating need that she would die before admitting to under normal circumstances.
Screwllum caught her carefully, his arms closing around her with the same gentleness he usually reserved for handling artifacts on the verge of disintegration. Her face pressed against his chest, her tears wet against his shirt and her entire frame shook with the force of emotions she had no neurological buffer to process.
"I can't…" she gasped between sobs. "Everything is too much, too loud, too bright, I can't think, I can't…Screwllum, I can't make it stop…"
"I understand," he said quietly. He'd studied organic psychology extensively during his campaigns to protect organic life from Rubert's genocidal crusade and understood what she was experiencing: sensory information flooding a consciousness without its usual filters, causing every sound to be too sharp, every texture too present, every emotion unmarred by the cool distance of logic.
She clung to him. "Don't leave," she whispered, the words muffled against his chassis. "Please. I know…I know I'm not me…but please don't leave me alone like this."
The request hit something in his emotional processing subroutines, creating a cascade of responses he didn't have clean labels for. He felt protective, honored, yet strangely devastated by the fact that she thought she needed to ask even in her compromised state.
"I won't," Screwllum promised.
The chronometer read 03:17 when Herta's breathing changed.
Screwllum had been monitoring her vitals continuously, tracking the gradual deceleration of her heartbeat as sleep pulled her deeper. He'd noted the REM cycle that began at 02:43, the minor temperature fluctuation at 02:58, the slight increase in cortisol levels that suggested dreaming rather than true rest.
He hadn't predicted the violence of her waking.
She gasped, a sharp inhalation that sounded like drowning, and her hands flew out blindly, striking his chassis with enough force to trigger his proximity alarms. Her eyes opened but didn't focus, pupils blown wide in the darkness, seeing something that wasn't there.
"Herta," he said, keeping his voice low and even. "You're safe. You're in the containment room. I'm here."
She made a sound that might have been his name, might have been a denial. Her hands found his arms, gripping with bruising strength, and she looked around wildly as if the walls themselves were closing in.
"Can't….where am I? Why can't I…"
The disorientation was expected. Without her neural implants to provide spatial mapping and temporal context, waking in darkness would feel like sensory deprivation. What surprised him was how completely it unmade her: this wasn't the Herta who faced down cosmic anomalies with sardonic commentary, this was someone fundamentally lost.
"Breathe," he instructed, placing one hand carefully over her sternum so she could feel the pressure, the solid reminder of physical space. "Four counts in. Hold for four. Four counts out."
She tried and failed, her breathing hitching and stuttering, too fast, edging toward hyperventilation. Screwllum recalibrated his approach, abandoning verbal instruction for something more immediate: he activated his internal ventilation fans, creating a steady rhythm of airflow against her skin.
Her breathing synchronized unconsciously, following the pattern his systems created: In. Hold. Out. In. Hold. Out.
The panic didn't vanish, but it receded by degrees, pulled back by the simple mechanical rhythm of his artificial respiration. After ninety-seven seconds, her grip on his arms loosened fractionally.
"Screwllum?" His name, this time, seeking confirmation from him.
"Present."
"I forgot where I was. I forgot…" She stopped, and even in the darkness, he could process the expressions that crossed her face: shame, frustration, and a deep exhaustion that had nothing to do with physical tiredness. "That doesn't happen. I don't forget. I always know exactly where I am, down to the centimeter, but I woke up and there was just... nothing. No spatial map. No temporal anchor. Just dark."
Analysis: This is the first time she has referenced her augmented capabilities in comparison to her current limitations. Probability of positive emotional response to this acknowledgment: 0.02%. Probability of increasing distress: 94.6%.
"Your implants provided constant background processing," Screwllum offered. "Orientation, chronometry, environmental mapping. Without them, your organic neurology has to relearn basic contextual awareness upon waking. It's not a failure of memory. It's the absence of technological support you've relied on for centuries."
She was quiet for a moment, and he felt her forehead press against his shoulder, simply grounding herself in tactile certainty.
"I hate this," she whispered, and there was something rawer in her voice than before, something that suggested the walls she'd been trying to maintain since the outbreak had just gotten significantly harder to hold up. "I hate that my brain doesn't work right without machines. I hate that I can't even trust my own consciousness to tell me where I am when I open my eyes."
Observation: Herta has never, in their years of acquaintance, admitted to hating her own neurological architecture. She has expressed frustration with the limitations of organic processing speed, certainly. She has complained about the inefficiency of biological memory storage, but she has never framed her augmentation as a dependency, never characterized baseline human neurology as insufficient.
"Your neurology is adapting," he said carefully. "By the third or fourth waking cycle, your hippocampus will have compensated for the absence of digital spatial mapping. You'll relearn how to orient yourself naturally."
"How long until then?"
"Approximately forty-eight hours."
"Forty-eight hours of waking up in existential terror. Wonderful. Excellent. This is exactly how I wanted to spend my week."
The sarcasm was weak, brittle, but it was there, a flicker of her usual defensive humor trying to reassert itself. Screwllum recognized the attempt for what it was, Herta trying to rebuild her armor with inadequate materials.
"I remained stationary during your sleep cycle," he offered, changing tactic. "I will continue to do so. When you wake, I will be in this exact position. You may use me as a fixed reference point until you recalibrate."
She lifted her head, and even without full optical clarity, he could sense her looking at him with something that might have been gratitude or might have been suspicion. With Herta, the two were often indistinguishable.
"You haven't moved at all? In…how long has it been?"
"Seven hours, thirty-two minutes."
"You just sat here, holding me for seven and a half hours."
"Yes."
"Why?"
The question was genuine, unfiltered by social convention or rhetorical strategy. She actually wanted to know, as if the concept of someone remaining present without instrumental purpose was foreign to her.
Probability that an honest answer will increase emotional distress: 67.3%. Probability that a dishonest answer will be detected and cause greater harm: 91.8%.
"You asked me not to leave," Screwllum said simply. "And because remaining still costs me nothing while providing you measurable comfort."
Herta stared at him and blinked. Then, with the air of someone making a decision that would have consequences she couldn't currently calculate, she settled back against him, her head finding the same position on his shoulder, her hand curling into his coat.
"Tell me if your systems need maintenance," she mumbled. "Or if you need to move, or whatever. I don't want to be a... structural burden."
Structural burden. The phrasing was so quintessentially Herta, reducing emotional need to engineering terminology, that Screwllum found his emotional processing subroutines executing something dangerously close to fondness.
"Noted," he said. "Though I assure you, my structural tolerances far exceed the load you present."
She made a sound that might have been a laugh, could have also been a sob, but Screwllum couldn't distinguish and that ambiguity felt significant in ways he didn't have time to analyze.
Her breathing evened out over the next six minutes, slipping back toward sleep, but this time, just before unconsciousness claimed her, she whispered something so quietly his auditory sensors almost missed it.
"Thank you for being here. I know it's illogical, but I'm... I'm glad it's you."
Then sleep took her, and Screwllum was left in the darkness with those words archived in his permanent memory, flagged with a priority marker he couldn't justify through any rational framework.
Observation: Herta has thanked him and expressed gladness at his specific presence. She used the word "glad" in reference to another person's proximity.
Database search for previous instances: Zero results found.
He adjusted his arm fractionally, ensuring her weight distributed optimally across his frame. Screwllum's chronometer continued its precise measurement of seconds accumulating into minutes, minutes into hours. He ran calculations in the background, analyzing the virus's structure with 17% of his processing power while the remaining 83% stayed devoted to her: monitoring her vital signs, adjusting the room's temperature by fractions of a degree, tracking the small expressions that flickered across her face even in sleep.
The plague was elegantly vicious, adapting to countermeasures in real-time, learning from each failed attack and evolving. Synthesizing a cure would take days, perhaps even a full week. He couldn't risk reactivating her higher cognitive functions prematurely as the virus was still active across the sector, prowling through networks; which meant she would remain like this for now, stripped of all her pretenses, vulnerable and honest.
The numbers felt arbitrary in the darkness. The only thing that mattered was the rise and fall of her breathing, the gradually slowing tempo of her heart rate and the way her fingers loosened their death grip on his coat.
With her grip softened, Screwllum attempted to move to the other side of the room to access a diagnostic panel. He'd taken perhaps three steps before Herta's eyes snapped open, panic flooding her features.
"Where are you going?"
"Only to the panel," he said, gesturing to the wall. "I need to…"
"Don't." She was on her feet, crossing the distance between them with desperate speed. Her hand caught his sleeve, fingers knotting in the fabric. "Don't go. Not yet. I'm not…I can't…"
She couldn't finish the sentence, but he understood; without her logic to provide context, his absence translated directly to abandonment; her mind, stripped of higher reasoning, was operating on simpler mathematics: presence equals safety, absence equals danger.
"I apologize," he said gently. "I should have asked first."
"You don't need my permission to move," she said, but her hand didn't release his sleeve.
"Nevertheless, I will ask."
She looked at him for a long moment, her expression unreadable, then she nodded and her grip loosened but didn't let go entirely.
He completed his diagnostic from where he sat with her, his internal wireless protocols sufficient for the task. She remained pressed to his side, her face buried against his shoulder. Later, when exhaustion pulled her toward sleep, she used his chassis as a pillow and slid her head from his shoulder to rest against his chest where his power core hummed its steady rhythm.
"Your heartbeat is wrong," she mumbled, already half-asleep.
"You know I do not have a biological heart."
"Your core, then. Whatever. It's too steady."
"Would you prefer I introduce arrhythmic variance?"
A pause…then, so quietly he almost didn't register it, "No. I like it. It's... predictable."
In the moments before he could configure the correct response to her, Herta’s breathing evened out and Screwllum realized she fell back asleep. He remained perfectly still, one hand resting on her shoulder as an anchor, a reminder that she wasn't alone in the darkness. His processors ran their background calculations while 83% of his awareness stayed focused on the small, fragile creature using him as a refuge from her own unfiltered consciousness.
After several hours, after she’d settled and gone completely limp in his lap, she began talking in her sleep, fragmented confessions that she would never voice while in command of herself.
"Should have solved it faster... not good enough... need to be better..."
"Everyone leaves eventually... have to be worth staying for..."
“Screwllum... don't go..."
He archived every word in his deepest memory cores, encrypting them with his personal cipher. These were truths she'd never permit him to hear otherwise, the poison beneath the roses, the fear under the thorns.
By the third day, a pattern had emerged.
Herta couldn't regulate her own nervous system properly without her implants. Her sleep schedule was chaotic; first she'd crash for hours, then wake in a panic, disoriented and unable to remember where she was. Her appetite was similarly erratic; she'd refuse food for long stretches, then suddenly be ravenous.
Screwllum found himself becoming something he'd never been designed for: a caretaker.
"You need to eat."
Herta didn't open her eyes. "Not hungry."
"Your glucose levels have dropped 23% below optimal range." Screwllum kept his voice level, non-confrontational. "Sustained depletion will worsen your symptoms."
"I said I'm not hungry."
This was more familiar territory, Herta being obstinate about self-care, except normally it came packaged with irritation, dismissive waves, a sharp tongue lashing suggesting he redirect his attention to matters that actually warranted it. Now her refusal carried the petulant edge of a child refusing medicine, emotion without the sophisticated framework of rational justification.
"Hunger is a delayed signal," he tried. "By the time organic systems register the need, damage has already begun."
"Then I'll eat when I'm hungry."
"Your last meal was yesterday at 11:47," he said. "Your metabolism requires fuel."
"My metabolism can wait."
"Can it?"
She finally opened her eyes, looking up at him with irritation that would have been more effective if she hadn't been clinging to him like a particularly stubborn barnacle. "I'm not in the mood to taste things. Everything's too... intense. Too much flavor, too much texture, too much…"
"’Too much’," Screwllum finished for her. "Yes. Sensory overstimulation is expected. However, continued caloric deprivation will exacerbate your symptoms."
She closed her eyes again. "Then I guess I'll exacerbate."
Interesting. Herta was normally meticulous about physical maintenance, treating her body with the same systematic care she applied to sensitive equipment. This refusal suggested either: (a) the sensory overstimulation was genuinely unbearable, or (b) she was engaging in a form of passive self-harm through neglect.
Neither option was acceptable to him.
Screwllum ran calculations on available options. His molecular compiler could synthesize basic nutrients, but its output range was limited to simple carbohydrates, insufficient for her current needs and the safe room's emergency supplies were depleted, he'd checked on the first day. Which left the station's cafeteria, three levels up and approximately four minutes away at standard walking pace.
Four minutes there, perhaps ninety seconds to acquire appropriate provisions, four minutes back.
Nine and a half minutes total.
He looked down at her, curled against him, and felt his threat assessment protocols cycle through increasingly catastrophic scenarios. Nine and a half minutes of absence, nine and a half minutes of her alone in the darkness with her unfiltered consciousness.
Probability of adverse psychological event: 73.6%.
However necessity was not negotiable, she needed food, and he was the only one capable of retrieving it.
"I need to leave briefly," he said carefully.
Her eyes snapped open. "What?"
"The cafeteria. You require proper nutrition, and my compiler's output is insufficient. I'll be gone for approximately ten minutes."
"No." The word was immediate, sharp with panic. "No, you don't…I'm fine, I don't need…"
"Your body is consuming itself for energy. That's not sustainable."
"Then synthesize something. Use your pocket thermodynamic miracle machine."
"It can't produce the nutrient complexity you require. Simple starches, yes; but complete amino acid profiles with adequate micronutrients, no."
She was shaking her head, her hand finding his coat with that now-familiar grip. "I don't care. Whatever you can make is fine. I don't need perfect nutrition, I just need…" She stopped. "Don't leave."
The raw fear in her voice made something in his core temperature regulation malfunction briefly. "I'll return. Ten minutes. You can track it if you'd like, I'll give you my chronometer."
"That's not the same and you know it."
He did know it. The absence wasn't about duration; it was about the sudden severance of the anchoring presence that kept her tethered for seventy-two hours, but medical necessity outweighed psychological comfort, didn't it?
"I promise I'll return," he said. "This is a temporary necessity, not abandonment."
"You can't promise that. What if something happens? What if the plague mutates and infects you too, or there's a hull breach, or…" She was spiraling, listing catastrophes with accelerating desperation.
"Herta." He placed both hands on her shoulders, waiting until her eyes focused on his faceplate. "I will return. This is a certainty, not a probability. Ten minutes. I need you to trust me."
She stared at him, breathing too fast, then nodded reluctantly once.. "Ten minutes."
"Ten minutes."
"If you're not back in twelve, I'm coming to find you."
"In your current state, you'd likely make it to the door before spatial disorientation incapacitated you."
"Then I guess you'd better hurry."
He stood carefully, and watched her immediately curl into herself, arms wrapped around her knees, making herself small. The loss of contact seemed to physically hurt her, he could see it in the way her breathing hitched, the way her eyes tracked him with something close to betrayal.
"Ten minutes," he repeated, and left before he could recalculate himself into staying.
The cafeteria was empty, most of the station's population was either offline or in medical quarantine. Screwllum moved through it with mechanical efficiency: bland proteins, simple carbohydrates, nothing with excessive seasoning or texture complexity. Foods designed for humans recovering from illness, mild enough not to overwhelm her compromised sensory processing.
Six minutes elapsed. He was making excellent time.
He should have felt relief. Instead, unease crawled through his prediction algorithms like corruption, the growing certainty that something was wrong, that leaving had been a miscalculation of catastrophic magnitude.
He accelerated his return pace to 140% standard velocity.
The safe room door was still sealed when he arrived, seven minutes, forty-three seconds total elapsed time later. He'd beaten his estimate, this should have been good news.
The sounds from inside suggested otherwise.
Screwllum entered to find Herta exactly where he'd left her, still curled against the wall, but the trembling had progressed to full-body shaking. Her breathing came in shallow gasps that might have been hyperventilation, sobbing, or both.
"Herta?"
She looked up, and her face was wet with tears, her eyes wide and unfocused. When she saw him, something in her expression crumpled completely.
"You left," she said, and her voice was wrecked. "You actually left, I knew you would eventually, everyone does, and I couldn't…there was too much noise, the recyclers were too loud and I could hear my heart beating inside my skull and I counted to six hundred but you weren't back yet and I thought…" The words tumbled out faster than she could process them, tripping over each other in their urgency to escape.
Screwllum set the food down carefully and crossed to her in three strides. "I'm here."
"You left," she repeated as if this fact alone contained multitudes of betrayal.
"I returned."
"But you left. You said you wouldn't leave and you left anyway, just like…." She cut herself off, pressing both hands over her face. "I can't do this. I can't keep being this person who falls apart when someone walks away for five minutes, I can't…"
"Seven minutes," Screwllum corrected gently, kneeling before her. "And you're allowed to fall apart."
"I'm not! I'm supposed to be better than this, stronger than this, I'm supposed to be…." A sob cut through her words, and then she was crying in earnest, the kind of desperate tears that suggested she'd been holding them back through all seven minutes of his absence.
He gathered her carefully, pulling her from the wall into his arms, and she came without resistance, clutching at him like a drowning person finally finding purchase. Her tears soaked into his coat while her entire frame shook with the force of suppressed panic finally finding release.
"I thought you weren't coming back," she gasped against his chest. "I know that's irrational, I know you said ten minutes, but without my implants I couldn't track time properly and every second felt like hours and I convinced myself you'd realized how exhausting this was and just... stayed away."
"That was never a possibility."
"How do I know that? How do I know anything when I can't trust my own brain to tell me what's real?" She was spiraling again, words coming faster. "You could have decided I wasn't worth the effort. You could have run the calculations and determined that spending another three days babysitting a broken genius was an inefficient use of resources. You could have…"
"Herta." He said her name firmly enough to cut through the spiral. "Look at me."
She lifted her face from his chest, and he could see the genuine terror written across her features, the kind that came from believing, however briefly, that she'd been abandoned at her most vulnerable.
"I came back," he said. "I will always come back. That's not a probability calculation. That's a fundamental constraint on my behavior where you're concerned."
"You can't promise that."
"I just did."
“Everyone breaks promises."
"I don't." He adjusted his hold on her, feeling her gradually stop shaking as his presence reasserted itself as reality. "I understand that your current neurological state makes trust difficult, but I need you to accept this as data: I left for seven minutes and forty-three seconds to acquire food. I returned. The pattern is established."
She made a sound that might have been a laugh or might have been another sob. "You're trying to teach me object permanence like I'm an infant."
"If necessary, yes."
"That's pathetic."
"That's a trauma response exacerbated by sensory deprivation and neural instability." He shifted her weight, settling back into a position where she could remain pressed against him. "And it's temporary."
She didn't respond immediately, just breathed against his chest, counting his ventilation cycles, using the rhythm to ground herself. Finally, she whispered, "I really thought you weren't coming back."
"I know."
"It felt true. In the moment, it felt like absolute certainty."
"Emotional reasoning without logical oversight. Your implants would normally flag that as potentially inaccurate data."
"Yeah, well. They're not here right now." She pulled back slightly, wiping at her face with visible frustration. "How long was I alone?"
"Seven minutes, forty-three seconds."
"It felt like an hour."
"Temporal distortion is expected with your current neurological configuration."
She nodded, then seemed to notice the container he'd set down. Her expression shifted from distress to suspicion. "Is that the food?"
"Yes."
"Was it worth traumatizing me for?"
The question was meant to be flippant, but there was real anger beneath it, rage at her own reaction, at his necessity, at the entire situation that had reduced her to someone who couldn't tolerate seven minutes of solitude.
"No," Screwllum said honestly. "But malnutrition would have caused worse outcomes."
"Worse than me having a complete breakdown because you walked away for five minutes?"
"Seven minutes. And yes."
She looked at him for a long moment, something complicated moving behind her eyes, then reached for the container with shaking hands. "Fine, but you're not leaving again. I don't care if the station catches fire, you're not…" She stopped. "Forget I said that. Obviously you'd leave if there was an actual emergency. I'm being irrational."
"You're being honest about your current needs. That's not irrationality."
"It feels irrational."
"Most emotional truth does."
She opened the container, and her expression immediately shifted to profound distaste.
Herta regarded it with deep suspicion. "What is this?"
"Sustenance."
"It looks like something the recycling system rejected."
"Aesthetic appeal wasn't the primary design parameter."
She took the container, sniffed it, made a face that suggested olfactory offense; but she took a small spoonful anyway, her expression suggesting she was performing an unpleasant duty rather than satisfying appetite.
"Verdict?" he asked.
"It tastes like sadness and recycled protein." She took another spoonful anyway. "Which is to say, tolerable."
Progress. He watched her eat with the intensity he usually reserved for complex equations, tracking each bite, measuring the intervals between them. She ate slowly, mechanically, but she ate.
Halfway through, she stopped. "This is humiliating."
"Eating?"
"Needing to be coerced into basic survival functions like a child." She set the container down with exaggerated care. "I'm the person who once worked seventy-two hours straight and only stopped because I blacked out. I've forgotten to eat for days at a time, and now I need someone to spoon-feed me nutritional slurry."
"I'm not spoon-feeding you. You're managing the physical act independently."
"You know what I mean."
He did. Under normal circumstances, Herta's neglect of physical needs was a choice, a calculated decision that intellectual work superseded biological maintenance. She maintained control through the very act of deprivation.
Now, her body's needs overwhelmed her conscious will, and someone else had to intervene. The loss of agency was perhaps more distressing than the vulnerability itself.
"For what it's worth," Screwllum offered, "you're significantly less difficult than Ruan Mei during her last experimental phase. She required extensive negotiation before accepting even basic hydration."
Herta looked at him, suspicion flickering across her features. "Ruan Mei needed help eating?"
"During a particularly intensive research period, yes. She'd locked herself in her laboratory for six days with inadequate provisions, and by the time we intervened, her physical state was concerning enough to warrant external assistance."
"Who intervened?"
"Several of us. Primarily myself and the Lord of Silence, though she found our presence intrusive and said so at length."
"I didn't know that happened."
"It's not widely documented. She was... displeased about the breach of privacy."
Herta processed this, then picked up the container again. "So what you're saying is that even geniuses sometimes need someone to tell them to eat."
"What I'm saying is that exceptional cognitive function doesn't exempt one from biological requirements. Acknowledging that isn't weakness, it's pragmatism."
She took another bite, thoughtful now rather than resentful. "Did Ruan Mei thank you? After?"
"No. She recalibrated her laboratory's security protocols to prevent future interventions and didn't speak to me for seven months."
"That sounds like her." She took another bite. "Are you expecting similar treatment from me?"
"I'm not expecting anything. Although, increased security protocols seem likely."
She almost smiled. "You're probably right about that."
They sat in silence while she finished eating, the container gradually emptying under her methodical attention. When she finally set it aside, her hands had stopped shaking, blood sugar stabilizing, the crisis temporarily averted.
"Thank you," she said quietly. "For leaving…and for coming back. And for not making me feel worse about how badly I handled both."
"You're welcome."
She leaned against him again, this time without the desperate grip of earlier, just tired contact that suggested she'd exhausted herself with panic and needed to rest. Within minutes, her breathing had evened toward sleep.
Screwllum held her carefully and ran probability analyses on future scenarios. Seven minutes of absence had caused this much distress. In several days he'd create and administer the cure and she'd no longer need his constant presence.
She'd rebuild her walls, reclaim her independence, and probably avoid him for months while she processed the humiliation of having needed someone this badly.
The prospect felt like watching an equation resolve toward an undesirable solution, mathematically inevitable but emotionally unacceptable.
He adjusted his core temperature upward another two degrees, ensuring she stayed warm through the sleep cycle, and archived another set of observations he'd never be permitted to reference again.
Day 3, 18:52:16. Separation caused acute psychological distress far exceeding predicted parameters. Note: Herta's attachment has progressed beyond simple dependency into genuine trust. Probability this trust will survive her recovery: 0.08%. Current status: holding something precious that will inevitably slip through my fingers.