Chapter Text
The mornings hit her hardest.
Namely, the moment she woke up, when the weightlessness of sleep always suddenly gave way to the hopeless sensation of her whole body being crushed.
It was physiological. Serotonin. Norepinephrine. Dopamine.
She still just missed him.
This made ten days. The last time she had gone more than one day without seeing him was years ago. Then, they had only known each other for the greater part of one week. Even so, she had such an inexplicable attachment to him that she had requested, in the heart of enemy territory, that even if the mission was a failure, to please come back to her.
It had all worked out. He was right to not listen to her; the death of their leader – her creation – was the only reason Neo Arcadia hadn’t destroyed the Resistance.
Ciel just didn’t want to think about what they – she – would have done if he had never come back.
But when he later told her that he was saved twice from certain doom by the unlikely intervention of a friend, one of whom was by all means an enemy until then, she couldn’t help having those thoughts. She especially couldn’t help it when she witnessed it herself: his unconscious body left at their doorstep yet again, this time by the Mother Elf, both fresh from an atomic-level explosion.
She did not believe in luck. As unlikely as it seemed, for Zero, things – so far – always worked themselves out.
Now, her faith was being tested. His signal remained silent; the moment it had vanished, her heart fell. Still, she believed in him because she had no good reason not to. Then, the search parties they sent to investigate his most likely locations eventually found nothing but a few scraps which may or may not have been his. Still, she believed in him because he had come back out of nowhere before.
Ciel spent the days immersed in her research. She woke up early after trying – and failing – to fall asleep at a reasonable time – she knew he hated it when she didn’t sleep – bathed, got dressed, ate, and sat down at her workstation. She planned her next steps to optimize the CIEL System, but couldn’t move ahead with it, since Zero had the Cyber Elf Croire, the system’s main test subject – and soon she would need to find a new one. Thinking of Croire made her think of her baby sister Alouette, so she made a note to spend time with her; the poor girl had asked quite a few times where Zero and Croire went. She wondered if she would be able to face her this time.
After that came something that, for some reason, she had put off – dreaded – doing: diplomacy. Neo Arcadia still had an outpouring of refugees, and someone would have to reach out to them to kickstart any cooperation. If their first contact with the Area Zero settlers had been any indication, it was best that she, not a Reploid, represent the Resistance. So, for the past few days she had tried using her computer to brainstorm how they could approach the different factions and begin to bring them all together, even the ones that might have been at odds with each other. The future of the world, for humans and Reploids, depended on this. But nothing ever seemed to come to her.
She whimpered out a sigh, knowing that her inaction was a disappointment of Zero’s wishes. And like every time, she didn’t realize she was crying until something dripped on her pink gloves.
She remained in the dark with the lone glow of her monitor; through blurring vision, she still attempted to type something. But time and her tears got the better of her, and Ciel eventually got up.
She bathed again. Under the running water that just irritated her bare skin, she sat and sobbed into her knees. It would have been accurate to say that time lost its effect on her if every hour without him wasn’t killing her. She pictured – wished – that he would just appear there in her private bathroom, see her as she was, and pull her up into his undamaged, soot-stained body.
She was dirty, so she stayed in the bath.
She believed in him, she believed, she believed, she believed, she believed, she believed.