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The rumours surrounding the Mechanisms were many, and more were true than were false. When reality was already so outrageous, it was hard for gossip to outstrip it. Which was why, when it did, it was taken note of.
That the Mechanisms were inhuman monsters was not a new one. Not an untrue one, either, not really. Those that had once been human hardly thought they counted anymore, and ‘monster’ seemed as good a term as any.
But there was one particular rumour, floating through vast wastes of space, born by quiet whispers and fearful glances, which distinguished itself by being so off-base it was actually hilarious. Jonny had laughed until he passed out the first time he’d heard someone tell the tale of the Mechanisms, horrors that walked without daemons at their sides, unable to die because they never had souls, to begin with.
“You hear that Marraco?” he’d wheezed out through gasping laughter. “You don’t exist!”
Beside him, his black goat daemon had snorted, shaking her head as she replied; “I’m a little insulted, frankly.”
No one but the Mechanisms and the barkeep had left the following bar fight alive. It had, overall, been an excellent evening.
And they fed the rumours gladly, though their daemons might complain over being left behind, fuelled ever on by the fearful whispers of strangers as they passed. But it was never more than a rumour.
They all had daemons.
Their very souls, lifelong companions, inseparable despite the distance they could roam from one another.
All, save for the Toy Soldier.
The Toy Soldier, who was not real, and so could not have a daemon. And yet it could not remember a time when another little toy of clockwork and wood had not followed it around.
A koel, carved from the same wood that made the Toy Soldier, her gears forged from the same metals, her painted plumage a speckled brown, beautiful in an understated sort of way. A little secret, always hidden away in the nooks and crannies of the lady’s grand manor house during the daylight hours. If the clockwork koel had ever been part of the old lady’s collection, she had long since forgotten it existed, and the clockwork koel seemed in no hurry to remind her.
Sometimes the Toy Soldier even deigned to pretend it really did have a daemon. That the clockwork koel was connected to it through more than raw material.
It was a nice thought, but unrealistic. None of the other clockwork figures had daemons, false or otherwise, why should it? All it had was a nameless toy that liked to follow it around because they were carved from the same stuff, not unlike the daemon figurines that were sometimes sold with children’s toys, just a little more animated.
The nameless clockwork koel was not remarkable, not really.
But she was very good at pretending.
Night at the manor house was a quiet thing. The Toy Soldier, for all its myriad other uses, was not comfortable to sleep next to. It was free to roam the vast rooms and hallways of the manor in darkness, accompanied only by the steady tick of its own internal workings and the clocks on the walls.
Sometimes, moonlight would stream in through open windows, and its cool blue would make the already cold manor seem colder still. The Toy Soldier, of course, lacked the proper nerve endings to feel the cold, but it thought maybe an empty room bathed in bright moonlight was what cold would feel like.
“Soldier?” a soft voice interrupted the endless silence of the night. The fluttering of mechanical wings broke the quiet stillness as the clockwork koel came to rest in front of it, her head cocked to the side. “You’re quiet tonight.”
“I Am Quiet All Nights,” it said.
She shifted her wings, giving off the impression of settling feathers that never moved and hopped up to perch on the Toy Soldier’s knee. She folded herself onto its lap with the soft click of wood against wood, muffled by the thin layer of fabric between them.
“You are quieter tonight,” she said. It tilted its head to the side. Her words rang true, as they most often did.
“I Do Not Like It,” it said. “It Leaves Too Much Room For Thought.”
The clockwork koel let a low, mournful coo echo from within her throat as she leaned up to push her head against its chin. They clacked together, the smooth sound of wood over wood echoing through the room.
“Too many of your thoughts make you feel like a frown,” she said.
The Toy Soldier did not really understand what she meant. How could it feel like a frown? But she had always said such things, such very odd things, and she always seemed so very sad whenever she did. It could not really tell how it knew she was, for her features were just as eternally frozen as its own, but it did.
“I Think…” It hesitated, raising a hand to cradle her against its chest. “It Is Good That She Does Not Know You.” It nodded, decisively, a small flood of warmth echoing through its chest as if from very far away.
The old lady grew older still. She stooped beneath the weight of her years, moving ever more seldom from her room. The Toy Soldier took care of her, in her final days, did everything she told it as it was bound to do.
She still, to the last, made it say things it did not understand.
When she finally breathed her last, the sudden void left the Toy Soldier confused for what to do. The answer came in the form of people. Harried looking people who arrived at the manor house to sort through her things. She had no heir, no living family to inherit her. An estate sale was to be the fate of all she owned, and the Toy Soldier suddenly felt horribly bitterly afraid.
The lady did not own the clockwork koel, as far as it knew. In none of the many lists and catalogues, appraising and organising, could it find her mentioned. One of the listings said the ‘clockwork collection’ was to be donated somewhere, but the clockwork koel was not mentioned as one of the pieces.
To the people who sorted through the lady’s estate, she did not exist.
“Don’t worry,” she chirped, low and comforting, on one of the few nights the manor stood empty of human life. Their last night before the collection was scheduled to ship off. “There is nothing in this universe that could keep me from you permanently.”
It held her tighter to its chest.
“How Are You So Sure?” it asked.
She did not answer, and it could not understand why, for a moment, beneath its own overwhelming fear, it felt sorrow so deep it could have drowned the cosmos.
The Toy Soldier did not see the clockwork koel for many years after that. It went to a museum, a walking exhibit. There were security cameras everywhere, running at all hours of the day and night. She could not wander unseen there as she had in the lady’s manor house.
So it did not see her, though it knew she was near. It was in the soft birdsong that filled empty halls when the night watchmen were too far away to hear, and flutter of mechanical wings from within camera blind spots.
The Toy Soldier was not alone, but the clockwork koel’s constant, distant presence only ever made the loneliness cut sharper.
So when it finally walked itself out of the Victoria and Albert Museum, and she fluttered down to land on its shoulder, it offered no contest or concern about her visibility.
It discovered, quite quickly, that her presence made things easier. People treated her like a real daemon, for the most part, which changed some but not all of how they treated the Toy Soldier in turn.
Something about something that looked a little like a daemon and acted like a daemon, though she -through her own choice- appeared not to be able to speak aloud like a daemon, made people uneasy about doing anything which might break taboos. No one tried to touch her or to separate them. They eyed her warily sometimes, with the look of people who were very soon going to be questioning a lot of their assumptions about the world.
And, slowly, without ever really realising, the Toy Soldier began to play along. It would not be able to tell anyone, should they ever ask, when it had made the switch. When it had stopped thinking of her as a nameless clockwork construct and begun to think of her as-
Not really a daemon, because it could not have one, but as close as it could come.
It did not know when it had dubbed her as the Toy Soul.
The first time it heard her, really heard her, beyond the noise of the physical world, was the first time it heard an Angel sing. They froze in unison, the Toy Soul coming to land on its shoulder. Two pairs of equally enthralled eyes turned to the stage.
‘She is divine,’ the Toy Soul whispered, and her voice did not echo through the air.
“She Is,” the Toy Soldier agreed.
Abruptly the moment was broken as the Toy Soul jerked and tumbled off its shoulder. It shot a hand out reflexively to catch her before she could hit the ground and damage herself.
‘You heard me,’ she said, and it noted that her voice did not carry the mechanical tang it was used to, no hint of gears of underlying machinery, just a clear, bright voice within its head.
It tilted its head to the side as she re-balanced herself to perch on its arm.
“Was I Not Supposed To?” it asked.
‘You haven’t before,’ she answered.
“Oh! I’m Sorry, That Was Rude Of Me!”
She laughed her musical, trilling laugher and pressed her head against its shoulder.
‘You don’t have to apologise,’ she said, a surge of warm affection rushing through her words. The Toy Soldier’s painted smile looked just a touch more genuine for a moment as it stroked her head gently with one finger.
The Toy Soldier loved the Angel, and the Toy Soul loved the little nightingale that followed her, his sweet song mirroring hers beautifully. It loved her, she loved him. Fiercely, absolutely, horribly.
But she did not love it, and he did not love her.
When it reached out in jealousy and rage and stole the breath from her lungs, the Toy Soul was there. She pinned the nightingale to the floor with a fierce wooden grip and held him still and silent until with the Angel’s last, gasping, breaths he flickered out and died.
The Toy Soldier paused, its touch almost gentle on the Angel’s throat as it tilted its head to the side.
“That voice is too beautiful to die,” the Toy Soul said, voicing what they were both thinking. So it stole that beautiful voice for its own and abandoned the old voice-box of metal and gears it had carried for as long as it could remember. The bathroom was a mess afterwards, and the police would likely have a hell of a time trying to figure out what exactly had happened, but it did not care.
The Toy Soul took wing after it as it left the Angel’s apartment for the last time. The sound of her wings beating against the air was off, somehow, but the Toy Soldier had no time to consider that past noting it and moving on.
It would take years, well into its wanderings, into its time with the Rose Reds, before it realised the Toy Soul’s plumage was much too soft to be wood. Before it sat down and sank wooden fingers into soft, smooth feathers to find the wood that still rested underneath.
It did not ask where she had gotten her beautiful speckled coat.
It did not think she would have been able to answer even if it did.
The Toy Soul looked even more like a real daemon, with her plumage of soft feathers. If someone looked closer, they might notice that her beak and legs were built of shining copper, or that her bright red eyes looked just a bit too glassy, but people seldom did.
Even as the Toy Soldier sat listlessly in a shop window, no one tried to touch or remove her. Some mistook her for taxidermy, others for a figurine. All she had to do was move and glare for them to pull away all hands and curious words, glancing around for the person the daemon belonged to and, upon finding no one, eyeing the Toy Soldier with eyes filled with a slow-building dread.
The Uncanny Valley was a hell of a thing.
It was almost fitting that the first person the Toy Soldier ever met who would disregard that feeling entirely was Jonny d’Ville.
The Toy Soldier had not been with the Mechanisms long. It had come on for one show, and they’d liked its voice enough to keep it around. But it had not yet met Jonny d’Ville. After all, he was the reason his bandmates had needed a replacement on such short notice, and not one of them was keen on helping him break out when he’d gotten himself locked away right before a show. So, for the first bit of the Toy Soldier’s stay aboard the Starship Aurora, Jonny d’Ville was still in prison.
Until the day he wasn’t.
He strode into the common room with all the cock-sure confidence of a conquering hero returning home, his black goat daemon walking a steady step beside him. None of his friends seemed overly impressed by the display, scoffs and eye-rolls garnered from all corners.
“I should kill the lot of you for leaving me to deal with that myself,” he snarled. His wide grin, a delighted thing bordering on feral, contradicted his words.
“You shouldn’t have gotten yourself caught right before a show,” Nastya said, glancing up at Jonny with mild disinterest. “Дилетант.”
Jonny flipped her off but offered no retort or real protestation as he dropped himself onto one of the couches, a sure sign that he was in an uproariously good mood. His eyes scanned the room almost lazily until-
“What the fuck is that?” he yelped, though he would deny it was a yelp until the day the narrative finally saw fit to off him permanently.
“I told you we’d picked up a new crewmate, didn’t I?” Nastya asked.
“Yeah!” he said. “But I thought you meant the Doc had gone and made another one of us not-!” He gestured emphatically towards the Toy Soldier, who stood stiff in the corner.
Jonny didn’t like it. That was not ideal. If it’d known it would be meeting him today, it would have put some extra effort into its appearance. Its uniform was immaculate, of course, but it was sure it had a better one somewhere. It could have done something nice with its hair!
“Jonny,” Brian cut in. “This is the Toy Soldier. TS, this is-”
“Jonny d’Ville,” Jonny said, stepping forward with a slight bow despite the unnerved look that lingered in his eyes.
“It’s Jolly Good To Meet You, First Mate Jonny, Sir!” it said. “I Am The Toy Soldier!” It stuck out a hand for him to shake.
“Right…” he said, pushing its hand back down pointedly. “The hell are you, anyway?”
“I Already Told You!” it said brightly. “I Am The Toy Soldier!”
“So are you-”
“I Am Not Real!” it cut him off before he could even finish the question. “I Am Just A Toy!”
He squinted at it for a moment, before his eyes fixed on the Toy Soul, where she perched on one of the many bird-perches around the common room, there for Nastya’s white goshawk on the rare occasion they decided to show their faces in the common room.
“Huh, it even comes with its own daemon.”
Quick as a flash, he plucked her from her perch, turning her to face him like she was little more than a fascinating curiosity. No one in the room so much as twitched, while the Toy Soldier froze in place, realising quite suddenly that no one other than it had ever touched her before.
And all at once, it understood what it had only ever heard described. A deep feeling of wrong flooded through it, of invasion, unasked for and unstoppable. He shouldn’t be holding her, she was-
She wasn’t real. She wasn’t a real daemon because it wasn’t a real person-
But he should not be touching her.
In a flash it reached out and yanked her back, clutching her to its chest. He blinked at it, a moment of genuine shock on his face.
“I-” it faltered. “You Don’t Touch Daemons Without Permission,” it said, almost sharply, voice a wavering.
Immediately every eye in the room was on it as Jonny looked it over with renewed interest, a quiet suspicion behind his eyes as he took a step back.
“Alright,” was all he said as he settled himself back on the couch. Marraco settled in next to him, her head resting on his lap as he began flicking through a datapad for something to watch.
It took around a month aboard the Aurora for the Toy Soldier to spot one of the other’s daemons running about without their Mechanism. It had been walking down the hall towards the kitchen when it spotted her, a very distinctive shape against the grey of the Aurora’s hallways.
Her pale white coat stood out clearly, a splash of light brown around her throat. Long, gently curved horns curled out of her head. It blinked and turned, and there indeed stood Kassandra, Brian’s scimitar oryx.
With no Brian anywhere in sight.
It opened its mouth, then closed it. Curious as this was, it was not nearly close enough with Brian to speak directly to his daemon. It glanced down at the Toy Soul, who returned its look with an equally baffled one of her own.
‘I can ask?’ she suggested, though it knew she would prefer not to. She had never spoken when anyone besides the Toy Soldier could hear her. She had not said a word aloud since they had come aboard the Aurora.
“I Think We Should Find The Drumbot!” it said decisively.
Kassandra let out an amused snort and shifted her head in a motion to follow. It was not an Order, but the Toy Soldier fell into step regardless. It did not steal glances at her as they walked, because that would have been rude, but it did wonder.
Brian, it turned out, was on the bridge, where he was supposed to be. He glanced up briefly as they entered and flipped a couple of switches to put the Aurora in auto-pilot so he could take his eyes off their flight for a moment.
“TS.” He smiled, and it looked genuine enough from what the Toy Soldier could tell. “Kassandra said she startled you?”
“Not Startled!” the Toy Soldier corrected. “Surprised! I Thought You Were Real.”
Brian winced and turned away. “I am,” he said quietly. “Or I like to think I am, anyway.”
He drew an unnecessary breath and reached for Kassandra, who pressed her forehead against his palm.
“She’s the best proof I have of that,” he said.
“Drama queen,” she teased, though her voice was all quiet understanding.
“I Am Ever So Sorry, Brian,” the Toy Soldier said. “I Meant No Offence.”
Brian shook his head sharply, blinking a couple of times as if to shake himself from a dream.
“No, it’s…” he sighed softly. “I can see how you’d come to that conclusion.”
“I Thought People Couldn’t Be Away From Their Daemons?” the Toy Soldier tilted its head to the side inquisitively. Brian cast an odd look its way, but whatever it was that troubled him, he shook it off in favour of answering its question.
“It’s the Mechanisation,” he said, tapping a finger against his chest, right over where the last piece of his living flesh lay, still beating against all odds. “It… did something, to the bonds with our daemons. They’re still there, we haven’t lost them, but we don’t have a limit on how far we can be from them anymore, either.”
“Oh!” the Toy Soldier nodded. “That Makes Sense. Thank You For Telling Me!”
Brian shot it a small, half-smile.
“We don’t exactly try to hide it,” he said. “You can talk to Ivy if you’d like a more detailed explanation.”
“Thank You I Think I Will!” it said and with a quick salute, it turned around and marched off of the bridge towards the library.
Ivy Alexandria was pleasant to be around. She was quiet, in a fierce sort of way. Her numbers and statistics and logic didn’t always make a lot of sense to the Toy Soldier, but it didn’t mind. She wasn’t kind, her words clipped and tone harsh even when she wasn’t upset. Her face blank of expression in a way that had taken the Toy Soldier a while to learn did not mean she was angry.
She accepted the cookies it brought her with thanks that sounded genuine but banned tea from getting anywhere near her books. She didn’t mind it hanging around the library so long as it took care to put everything back where it belonged.
It spent many hours there with her in silence as she read. Sometimes she let it braid her hair. Sometimes she even did the braiding.
It was… nice. Even when her daemon would drift.
He was a cobra, pale brown in colouring, with subtle patterning almost invisible to the naked eye. Neith, she called him, and he was seldom away from her. He drifted sometimes, she said, an after-effect of her Mechanisation. He struggled to stay present, lost in memories neither of them had access to in the waking world.
Ivy was braiding the Toy Soldier’s hair one evening when Neith stilled, his eyes staring unfocused into space. She made no move to collect him as she usually would, though, her shaking hands sliding down to hold the Toy Soldier’s.
They watched, in somewhat stunned silence, as the Toy Soul fluttered from her perch to lay down next to Neith. He curled loosely around her soft from, and she laid her head over his.
Ivy’s hands tightened around the Toy Soldier’s, her breath shaky against its neck as her daemon curled around the closest thing it could have to one.
They stayed there, two separate piles of entwined bodies until Neith blinked and shook himself, moving with the sluggishness of a reptile waking from its winter hibernation. He slithered off the Toy Soul and Ivy extended her arm for him to snake his way up to coil around her neck.
“Ivy,” he murmured his voice a low hum that the Toy Soldier immediately thought sounded pleasant.
“Not your fault,” she answered in a low voice, pressing a quick kiss to his scaled head before settling more comfortably, the Toy Soldier still leaning against her chest.
Neith’s tail brushed against its shoulder, and Ivy sighed, running a hand softly through its hair, undoing her meticulous work. The Toy Soul fluttered over to settle in its lap as it felt Ivy’s breathing even out, slipping quietly and quickly into a deep sleep.
Despite everything, it wasn’t until the Moon War that the Toy Soldier realised just how very, horribly good at pretending the Toy Soul really was, and how good it, in turn, was at following her lead.
The Mechanisms killed each other regularly, this was true enough, but they left their daemons out of it. Even while they were chasing each other down through the ship, hollering with laughter as they hunted one another down in a deadly game of tag, their daemons rarely if ever got violent with one another. Only in real, heated, serious arguments did they ever come to blows.
And they never killed each other. Likewise, no matter what torments its friends were devising to unleash upon each other, the daemons were off-limits. Occasionally they might get caught up in the chaos, that was unavoidable, but absolutely never under any circumstances would one of them raise a hand to another’s daemon.
It was one of the few, possibly the only, hard boundary set aboard the Aurora that had never been crossed over the countless years she had been carrying them all through the stars. They even included the Toy Soldier in this rule, though it was not really clear on what it had done for them to think that was necessary.
So the Toy Soldier had never died because someone had killed the Toy Soul. Not even during its time with the Rose Reds. Though that was more luck than any kindness on the part of the Rebellion. It had not even known it could die that way.
All it took was a single well-aimed gunshot to change that.
Just one among many. Insignificant in the grand scheme of things. A single shot, to shatter its world completely. A horrible, burning, tearing pain ripped through it. Pain unlike anything it had ever known, and with it an overwhelming sense of loss. Something had been torn from it. Something it needed, more even than it needed its stolen voice.
It cried out, knees buckling as it fell. Its chest was on fire, but fire didn’t hurt. Living with Ashes had ensured it knew that much. Fire was horrible to deal with, left damage that was awful to look at and repair, but it didn’t hurt. Nothing in the universe was supposed to be able to hurt it.
Not like this.
It looked to its side, where the Toy Soul should have been. It only had time to register her shape, flickering out like the image on a broken display screen, before darkness took it.
It woke with a weight laid on its chest and Jonny sitting at the end of its cot, his thumbnail bitten down enough to bleed. Marraco’s head rested against his chest, his other hand running absently over the ridges of one of her horns, keeping him grounded and present in the moment.
The Toy Soldier shifted, and the Toy Soul only pressed in closer, a string of barely-coherent thoughts reached it from her. Apologies and reassurances that it tried to assure her it didn’t need, but she kept pressing towards it regardless.
Jonny jerked and looked up.
“Finally awake,” he said, smacking it lightly with the back of his hand. His jovial tone did not translate to his face.
“Terribly Sorry To Keep You Waiting, Old Chap!” it replied, though it made no move to get up. The Toy Soul’s weight on its chest felt necessary. It needed to be able to reassure itself of her presence, as its thoughts tumbled over themselves in an attempt to make sense of what had just happened.
The silence stretched for longer than it likely should have, which usually the Toy Soldier would not stand for, but it could not find it within itself to speak just then. Jonny seemed even less inclined to, staring off into the middle distance with a vacant expression on his face.
Still, it was he who broke the silence first.
“Y’all’re really connected, huh.” Less a question, more a statement.
“What Do You Mean?” the Toy Soldier asked.
Jonny gestured vaguely to the whole of the Toy Soldier and the Toy Soul. “You two. She’s really your daemon.”
The Toy Soldier tensed, but Jonny held up a hand, the warning look on his face was enough to keep it silent.
“I ain’t saying you’re real,” he said. “You say you ain’t real, fine by me, but she dies you die. That’s something.”
“We’re Very Good At Pretending,” the Toy Soldier said, though its voice sounded far weaker than it would’ve liked.
Jonny growled. “Bullshit. I don’t care what you say, you don’t pretend the kinda pain a daemon’s death causes.” His hand tightened on Marraco’s horn, drawing her head closer to his chest.
“I Do Not Want To Talk About This Anymore,” the Toy Soldier decided. Jonny’s face curled in distaste.
“Fine,” he bit out before jumping to his feet and leaving their tent. Marraco followed a step slower, sending a final, unreadable look towards where the Toy Soldier still lay with the Toy Soul curled tightly on its chest.
“We’re Not Real,” it said, its voice as close to a whisper as it ever got.
‘But we are We,’ came the answer. She pressed closer to it, and it ran wooden fingers over her soft, feathered head.
‘We are We,’ it agreed, silently, within the confines of the bond only they shared. The urge to pretend to cry bubbled up in its chest, confusing for a moment before it realised the source came from the Toy Soul.
It leant down to press its forehead against her. She trembled faintly in its arms, her joints sending a soft wooden rattling through the confines of the tent.
‘I am sorry I didn’t listen,’ it said. She pressed her head to its cheek, something like a laugh echoing through their bond.
‘There’s nothing to forgive.’
Tim had been on board for nearly a century when the Toy Soul finally spoke again.
It happened early in the morning, around the time when, usually, almost no one was awake. But that morning was different. Ashes had had a hard night. They would not say why, and they did not need to. Brian would need to find somewhere to land soon if Ashes didn’t want to deal with the fury Nastya would inevitably unleash when they set the fire that was already smouldering in their eyes.
The soft tread of large paws, with claws clicking against the floor, marked the passage of their daemon. Restlessly, back and forth, across the length of the kitchen Aodh, their great maned lioness, was pacing. A faint growl sounded from their throat, wisps of near-invisible smoke rising from between their clenched jaws.
The Toy Soldier was making tea because it did not know what else to do. The Toy Soul watched it intently, perched on the counter beside it.
“Could use more teeth,” she said. Her voice clicked and whirred, stalling a bit as it struggled with long disuse.
Behind them, a glass shattered.
The Toy Soldier turned to see every eye in the room trained on them, open shock on Ashes’ face. On the floor next to their seat lay the ruined remains of what had been a glass of water.
“Are You Well?” the Toy Soldier asked.
“I thought the Toy Soul couldn’t speak,” Ashes said slowly.
The Toy Soldier tilted its head to the side.
“I Can Speak!” it pointed out.
“Your voice is stolen,” they argued.
“Oh!” it said, realising where this miscommunication must have occurred.
They thought the Toy Soul was similar to Neith, or Marraco, whose heart did not beat, or Kassandra who seemed too firm and unyielding to the touch, or Aodh with the smoke that curled on their roar, or Tim’s stoat, whose eyes had not returned with his Mechanisation.
“Oh, I See! There Has Been A Misunderstanding! I Could Speak Before I Stole This Voice!” The old lady had needed it to, after all.
“Huh.” They got up to fix themself a fresh glass of water, a thoughtful look on their face. “Why’d you keep it a secret?”
“I Did Not Mean To!” the Toy Soldier said, glancing briefly down at the Toy Soul. “Why Did You Speak?” it asked. Aodh had stopped their pacing, staring at the Toy Soldier and Soul in quiet fascination.
The Toy Soul hopped from one foot to the other, her head cocked sideways in thought.
“I am not sure,” she said. “It feels safe!”
Ashes huffed a quiet laugh. “You’ve got a fucked definition of safe,” they said.
It paused to consider their words. The violence both on and off-board. The many times Jonny -and Tim when he was fresh and hurting and so, so angry- had thrown it out the airlock. Of bullet holes and explosions and fire and wood that knit itself back together in ways that it should not be able to.
But it also considered music. Games, deadly and otherwise, played and meals eaten together. Playful fights and friendly insults. The rare quiet moments, and that it had been decades since Tim had thrown it out the airlock. That Jonny had stopped entirely, almost abruptly, without any clear explanation as to why. It considered silent support and gifts given because words would or could not suffice.
It considered daemons, curled up together in a pile because they refused to be separated from one another.
“I Do Not Agree,” it said, and Ashes smiled.