OUT OF THE DARK

 @detectiveconnor​ sent: “I broke the lock. You were screaming.”

        Shouting might have been a better word for it. Or howling, even. Stringing together semi-coherent things, pleas of various shapes and address, all while beating her open palms against the door. Now Daisy stood uncannily still. Like she had not yet come to grips with the fact the door was open. Her LED was a yellow that was nearly orange, that was nearly red; the way it was spinning, wheeling, all but completely confirmed that something was still making itself make sense. Too much had gone cavorting through even her vast mind for the whole situation to click.

        The door was open. Her LED stopped spinning, but remained -solidly- yellow. She took a handful of steps forward, and stopped again. She hugged her arms around her narrow chest.

 @digitizedsouls​ (Sage) sent: “We’ll do it together.”

        Cypress was standing still and rigid, cemented down like he’d stepped there while the pavement was setting and become a permanent fixture, at the gate. Behind him, the sanctuary of home, doors closed but not locked, windows full of light and familiar voices. Ahead, the world. And so much world. So much space. So many people. Such dizzying numbers of mixed welcome and refusal. Hate and injustice loud though the middle of it. Dark despair and rage. Like... ... sinking. Or shattering. ... Scattering- -

        Sage gripped Cypress’s sleeve. Cy turned. He studied the younger boy for a handful of seconds, time tick ... tick ... tick ... ing by. He, at last, offered a tense, flickering smile. It slipped and stuttered, as disused as the rest of him, but the effort was there. The reaching; bumping shoulders across that link that bound them again. If Sage could try — Sage. The notion itself a marvel. The name a revived title, no longer erased. The fingers patiently weighing on his arm an impossibility. ... ... statistical improbability, but there. Sage who’d gone. Sage who’d lost more than all of them and had not gotten it back. If Sage could try.

@growingarden​​ didn’t like x

“Wisteria.” The full name - not ‘Wisty’, not ‘Lily’, though that was how she’d been greeted thrice already, by the staff around New Jericho, who had not seen her since she’d moved on to take her own next steps. She’d made herself busy in her own place of refuge: another choice, for young Androids. There was a way the community had of organising themselves, to offer choices. Wisteria, especially, had … well, impressed him, in what she had built.

He said her full name as a compliment. Connor saw no reason to hide that he was impressed.

But she was at New Jericho again, and partway through conversation with someone who had called him down (she must have asked for him) - “What do you need?”

        In the time since having her name returned to her, Wisteria had pointedly reintroduced herself some countless number of times. Some, clearly, had retained the information better than others, with Lily still echoing ahead of her and in her wake. It did not strike her as a particularly worthwhile war to insist and insist again to people whom she saw only sparingly. They would call her what they called her. Her name remained her name.

        And, oh, how she rose to it. Lifted from her politely pleasant into a smile that was, perhaps still somewhat cool, but backlit by a private, genuine delight.