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Flynn here, leave a message.

[ ᴠᴏɪᴄᴇ | ᴛᴇxᴛ | ᴠɪᴅᴇᴏ | ᴀᴄᴛɪᴏɴ ]

Should he do this?

Sam's ACE_ID is missing from the contact roster. He'd made a point of steering clear--easy enough to do, here, with ecosystems between them and no real reason to antagonize the boy. Flynn must have noticed his absence already.

Things were so much easier to respond to when Clu's every move had been to hurt, to injure, to damage, threading wounds with salt.

Where is my son?

He shouldn't do this.

I am standing right here.

...He's doing this. Text should give them the distance Flynn might wish.

It seems we've had a roster change. More like a status report, but not impersonal.

Is this good? Let it be good. He hasn't had enough practice at pulling the blow.

You doing okay?

Flynn will answer if he wants. Clu can leave it at that.

He cradles the screen under a cupped hand to see it better, just to be sure.

There are a thousand things to do today, a schedule limned in data packets and archival ink, tourist info and circuit boards. Several of those can be performed alone. For the moment, Flynn favors that route, cloistered in a lab to build a station map from a collection of digital pamphlets.

He considers leaving the ACE there on the edge of the table, the wide slice of glowing cyan screen brightened by Clu's bold messages. Flynn deliberately, delicately drags away a section of holo-map by the corner.

He knows. Knew, rather, an abrupt halt to his morning. No one else new would be coming by now, but sometimes people left in stops and starts not long after that first arrival. They go without warning and, last night, Sam went with them.

Satisfied with his progress, Flynn reaches for his ACE.

Just working, man.

What's a word that means 'fine', but also 'not fine', that perfectly encapsulates the slimmest line between happiness and heartache? He had precious extra time afforded to him, the span of hours teased out to weeks. Months. Now, Sam is gone, and that means Sam is safe. His eyes burn briefly and he sighs, soft in the silence.

I need your help with something.

There's a bridge to keep building here.

Moments become seconds become almost unbearable minutes, and Clu swings up from the chair with both feet, straightens it as it stills. He dusts the desk--there is no dust to remove, but these things have their forms, and so he dusts the desk. He plays at cleaning the knife, the only thing on it, unworn in its holster--and is careful not to water Euclid again, despite the urge prickling at his fingertips: he'd almost drowned the little succulent before, a surfeit of care.

The deep amber rectangle of his ACE does not so much as flicker.

...Clu is not going to lay flat on his bunk and wait for it to move.

Flynn's fine, or not in enough distress to broadcast between them without prying after it. He's just busy! He's fine.

Sam's gone.

It's probably fine.

Clu sighs and scrubs a hand down his face--and gets a beam of text right in the eye, hot gold affirmation that he blinks away with a hiss.

Work is good.

Ooof. How casual. So smooth. And he winces internally but doesn't quit, was not made to give up, because the next correct response is--

...Wait. That's--he's not sure if he's being teased or not, I'm locked out, remember queued there at the ends of his fingers before he discards the impulse as hurtful and (worse!) useless.

~~You want~~

Flynn answered him.

And Flynn needs his help.

Stay put. Much clearer than asking. I'm on my way.

Work is good, necessary, pure in its purpose. Flynn never does anything by half measures, never has. You whole-ass or you just don't do it, man, that isn't something Zen ever had to teach him. To hone his drive, certainly, to slow, to narrow his focus with purpose, to throw open himself to the system that surrounded him; the system he lived and breathed and, regardless of intent, affected with action and inaction alike, and the system that he was just as much a part of as the Programs he'd written to inhabit it.

Even in the Outlands, there was work to do. Here on Avagi, it's no different, but today it's a necessary distraction. You think you're past worry, and the way love can turn sharp and hard like a knife between the ribs...

He taps his fingers against the desktop, then peels the bright shiny tourist-y jargon from another pamphlet, casting it into the small collection at the corner of the wide holo display. More of the map comes together, while Flynn chuckles tonelessly to the empty room.

I got nowhere to be, man.

Flynn couldn't rightly say just who led who out of the silvery light of the Ingress, into the corridor and farther still to the residential block. Hand in hand, an equal decision then, a furtive giddiness between heartbeats and circuit hum, over dark thresholds into-

This is his room, right? There hadn't been a fumble for the light, not when they had their own to offer, and Clu was either pulling him or he was pushing Clu onto his bunk. Side by side then, Flynn's hand left their shared hold to card back through his admin's hair, the other traveling a short distance to his hip, feeling over his fitted armor and skirting, for now, that stripe of hot gold.

He couldn't rush this, didn't want to, as if hastening his slow perusal of Clu's lovely mouth, sucking his lower lip so gently between his teeth, would make the whole station vanish.

The dark was no obstacle to the radience they were pouring out together, a low neon charge in the very air between them, a soft crackling counterpoint in their narrow and rapturous hallway dance. They stood together and fell together side by side, fingers entwined: he pulled, or Flynn pushed. Flynn broke their grip only to stroke his hair, to bring him close, his other arm pulling them into line with measured, delicate touches that just missed burning gold.

Clu rose to meet him, lips slanted upward with a sharp eager indrawn breath for the careful track of teeth. It was new and raw and familiar, and Flynn was beautiful like this, haloed silver in the backdraft of their light, blue eyes blown dark and glittering. He'd never kept a beard, before, and Clu had been curious about it for months, too warily circumspect to just ask--if it grew that way, if it hurt, if he could stroke it.

Clu reached up and cradled his Maker's face in both hands, deepening the kiss with a tug of eager fingers. Patience was a virtue that wanted some teaching.

He hummed a note against Clu's lips, a sound that traveled low into his chest; a rumble of approval as he was drawn in. Flynn opened his mouth to him, daring to seek more than just a taste, coaxing with the deft curl of his tongue to Clu's. Intimacy was an equally old friend, welcomed just as readily as Clu's hands against his face and his–his, Clu was all his–admin's warm, solid weight against him.

His fingers felt their way over plateaus of stiff plating and the low valleys between, mapping the darkness between the radiant circuits on Clu's chest. He drew whorls across his sternum, lines like protective sigils, a god's blessing in the flat press of his open palm. Canting his hip, Flynn drew his knee up over Clu's, wanting, needing to have him closer.

The bridge came to mind then for some unthinkable reason, suspended in light and cut through with hard bands of simmering, furious yellow.

Flynn gasped for air and kissed him like he was dying, because he was; because they were both already gone, as the teaching went, and he had a thousand cycles of love to pour into Clu.

Flynn opened for him with a rich low rumble of approval, drew their mouths together in a curl of tongues, and Clu's fingers tightened a little, threaded in trim coarse warmth sleek in his grip. He could feel Flynn's voice in his collarbone, radiating through where they touched, his Maker warm and real beside him.

He made a noise like the keen of high tension wire for the track of Flynn's fingers stenciling glory in the darkness and leaving mounting static bright in the gaps, glittering in their wake. The smooth sudden spread of his palm was an anchor, a meeting place for curving lines of benediction.

Flynn pulled them flush, pinned trapped circuitry alight with the pressure, and Clu ground his hip into the welcoming arch of Flynn's thigh, eager to be closer, to get together, to get connected.

The idea of the bridge cut through, then, clean lucid focus on a moment he hadn't yet lived--one he'd lived already and would live (wouldn't live) again. Time was a circle, irregular, imperfect, deliberate--like a pearl--as pearls themselves were responses to stress, and some of it was his idea and some of it wasn't, shared metaphors thrown wide with the gentle tang of the Sea caught between them.

Flynn broke over him like a wave, all hard swift indrawn breath and racing heartbeats aglow with something Clu did not name--only trusted and let catch, sparked into something very old and entirely new.

"User," mouth open with the shape of it, low and swift, then traced close with an insistent tongue.

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txt; somewhere in wiggletime around the 8th

txt; lovely

txt; no u

txt; o gosh

action;

and prose most violet

<3!

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