Chapter Text
His brain didn’t work the same way anymore.
It bothered him. On the flight here, he hadn’t been able to look out the window and judge very well how fast they’d been going, or where exactly they were. He’d forgotten the Russian language entirely, not just the script, and he was finding he couldn’t recall any Japanese, either.
And on the walk up to the Brand family farm, whose house stood singular at the end of a long dirt road, he found he couldn’t really recall Laura’s face.
He remembered the basic idea of it, the color of her hair and eyes and some odd, sketchy facsimile of her smile. But he knew there had been a point in his life when he could recall it perfectly, and the fact that things like this, important things, were no longer within easy reach scared him.
The house itself was small and old and what anyone would describe as charming. Red bricks, round windows, wildflowers allowed to grow unrestricted in the front yard and a handful of recently-purchased yard decorations to make it clear that there was life on the inside of the house, too.
The silhouette of a figure moved in the window. It could have been anyone, but he stopped at the end of the driveway, unable to proceed.
Otto Malpense had never been inside a house before. Not even once.
He was starting to feel weak, down to his freshly grown, spongy bones. His new body had effectively zero muscles, and his skin, already thin, chafed against the ill-fitting boots he’d lifted from the locker in the laboratory. He’d drank two water bottles today, and it had all already come out through sweat. He still hadn’t eaten any food in almost a year.
“Move,” he whispered to himself after several pathetic seconds of just standing there. He put one blistered foot in front of the other until he was standing on the porch, and rang the doorbell.
He stood there unmoving until he heard a shrill, unintelligible voice from the other side of the door, and the recognition knocked him out of his thoughts.
He scrambled, realizing he didn’t look like himself. He pulled off the sweaty black beanie he’d been using to cover his hair, and stuck it in the pocket of the extra-large brown tweed jacket he’d taken from the back of an office chair. He tried to run his fingers through his hair, but it was too long, and it didn’t do what he was expecting it to. He was still fussing with it when the door opened.
She looked different. Her hair was long enough to be tied back into little pigtails again, and she was wearing a light green sweater with a little bit of a v-neck to it, two things he’d never seen her in before. On top of that, she was wearing a nonzero amount of makeup and she had the slightest hint of a suntan, her freckles more vibrant than he’d ever seen them in six years of living effectively underground.
It just about knocked the wind out of him that the first expression he saw on her face was conflict. Of course it was - as far as she knew, he was dead, and he had a nasty history with cloned siblings who looked very much like him. Here he was, wearing different clothes and with a different hairstyle. Still, the fear in her eyes was like a punch to the gut.
There was no use trying to say something only he would know. Mind reading and all that had invalidated the idea. Instead, he just smiled, held out the flowers, and hoped for the best.
“It’s me,” he said.
There was the sound of breaking glass, and then Laura flew at him with a force that knocked them both to the ground. She latched her arms around his neck and started to sob.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he said. He hugged her back. “I’m here.”
She just cried harder.
It was weird. He felt like he hadn’t seen her in a while, but he also felt like they’d just spoken yesterday. He did his best to just rub her back and let her cry, but he also knew that, on a level, this was his fault.
“Laura?” A voice asked, growing closer. “What’s going on?”
A woman who had to be Laura’s mother stepped into the doorway. She had roughly the same build, but with a different color palette: chestnut brown hair, and dark eyes. She didn’t look like a supervillain.
Laura took a moment to breathe before answering, but she didn’t move. “Mom, please give me a few minutes,” she said, her voice shaky.
The woman looked between the two of them, an odd, bewildered expression on her face. “All right, but be careful when you come in. There’s broken glass.” She hesitated a few moments before heading back into the house.
Otto wondered how much oddness she’d encountered in the last few years.
“Laura, I have to breathe,” he finally said, pulling on the arm that crossed the front of his neck, and she pulled away, if only something like six inches. Her arms still sat on his shoulders.
“Where were you?” she asked, and then picked up his suit jacket sleeve to wipe her face. “I thought you died.” She started to squint at him, looking at the subtle details that had changed in his face.
“I did. This is a new body, from the lab where Anna and Zero were grown. I swear I didn’t know this would happen. HIVEmind must have pulled me out and sent me there.”
Laura’s eyes lit up for a moment. “Is he with you?”
Otto’s heart sank. If Laura didn’t know where he was, he probably hadn’t made it off the island. “No.”
Her face fell, and she pulled back into his shoulder. She cried a little bit more.
The thought had crossed his mind more than once that she might be angry with him. But, now that he was here, he knew that regardless of what her reaction had been, facing her first had been the right decision.
“Well, you do have me,” he said.
There was no snark, no teasing. She just sat there and clung to him for a little while.
“We should head inside,” she finally said. “My parents are probably very confused.”
She stood up, and hissed, hopping on one bare foot.
“Glass?” he asked.
“Yeah. I’m an idiot.”
“No, you’re not,” he said. “Here.” He offered her a hand, and carefully put her on his back so he could traverse the front porch for the two of them in boots.
It was at that point that he realized two things. One, that he must have ended up taller than he’d been when he died, since Laura seemed smaller than he remembered. Two, his muscles had atrophied severely, or rather, he hadn’t grown any at all.
He stumbled barely-balanced to the front door and opened it, kicking whatever glass he’d picked up off the ground to the welcome mat. Shakily, he deposited Laura in a chair by the door and put his hands to his knees.
“Are you out of breath?” she asked, amused. She seemed to be calming down a bit.
“Yes,” he hissed, looking away.
He didn’t have much of a frame of reference for family homes, and it still wasn’t what he expected. The place looked lived in. There were blankets thrown haphazardly on an old, patched-up couch, a young child’s toys strewn all over the floor, and papers left on the kitchen table along with a tube of what looked like prepackaged cookies.
He stared at the cookies wistfully.
At HIVE, everything in the common area belonged to the community and as such, belonged to no one. This common area belonged to everyone in the house.
“Who’s this?” a man asked. Tall, burly, and wide-shouldered, he was everything Laura wasn’t, except for the thick red locks he kept medium-short on his head. And the freckles.
“Get Mom,” Laura said excitedly. She had her foot propped up on the dining room table, but she was sitting up and forward. Her eyes and nose were still wet, and she reached over to a napkin holder on the table to wipe her face.
“Um, hi, Otto Malpense,” he said to Laura’s father, extending his hand.
The man looked Otto up and down, the same look of bewilderment on his face that Otto had seen on Laura’s mother. He hesitated, but after a moment took Otto’s hand and shook it.
It was clear that he was strong. Otto felt the simple handshake in his shoulder socket. He remembered that Laura’s family were barley farmers, and that even if her father didn’t harvest by hand, he probably spent a lot of time outside.
“Andrew Brand,” he said, gruff.
As soon as Otto stepped back from her father, Laura reached out and grabbed his hand, keeping him nearby.
“All right, so who’s this?” Laura’s mother asked, stepping out from the hallway with a redheaded toddler on her hip. She took in the scene in front of her - her daughter’s foot bloody and propped up on a nearby table, hand in hand with a stranger in mismatched clothes.
“Well, ah, this is Otto,” Laura said. “He went to school with Shelby and I. I was planning on bringing him back here to meet the family at some point, actually, but he died right before graduation.”
Otto stared at her, bewildered at the subset of information she’d just conveyed. They knew about Shelby but not him? And not the detonation of the school?
Her father squinted at him. “Well, Otto, you don’t look so dead to me.”
Otto searched for words. “I… got better.”
If Laura’s family truly knew so little about what had been going on, explaining how he’d been transferred to a cloning tank in Siberia to be regrown to the age he was supposed to be after his previous body had succumbed to radiation poisoning probably wasn’t a great place to start.
“Well, you look a little pale,” Laura’s mother said. “Can I get you anything? I’m Mary, by the way.”
“Um, water at some point would be great, but if you have a pair of tweezers, Laura’s got a piece of glass stuck in her foot.”
“Ouch,” Mary said sympathetically, shaking her head. “I’ll grab that, I’ll be right back.”
She hurried off, passing Dougie to Andrew as she left.
“I’m sorry to drop in like this,” Otto said. “I didn’t have a way to send word.”
“It’s quite alright, it is what it is,” Andrew said, sitting down at the table next to Laura and beginning to inspect her foot for broken glass. He sighed and pushed the hair out of his eyes. “So, where are you from?”
“London,” Otto said.
He tried to go around to the other side of the table to get at another seat, but for a moment, Laura wouldn’t let go of his hand. He let her grab it again when he’d sat down.
“Your family from there?”
“I’m not sure. I was raised in an orphanage. St. Sebastian’s.”
Andrew raised his eyebrows at that.
“Nowhere else to go, then?”
Otto looked over at Laura, panicking. He didn’t really have anywhere else to go, no, but he didn’t want to pop into someone’s house like a freeloader and act like he was expecting to stay, even though, if he was being realistic, he’d have to for at least a little while.
“Well, there’s a few people who need to know I’m alive, and since I woke up this morning I haven’t had much time to make a plan yet. I don’t really know what’s happened while I was gone. I’m glad I was able to find you all, I wanted to get to Laura first and I’m not sure what I would have done if you weren’t here.”
Laura looked at him quizzically.
Andrew, on the other hand, stared hard at Laura, like he was hoping to get some information out of her without asking for it. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry, Noodle. I think my fingers are too big to get this thing out.”
“I’ve got the tweezers here,” Mary said, finally returning from wherever she’d gone. “I’ll get you that water, are you hungry?”
“Very,” Otto said without thinking. “I mean, if you’ve got anything.”
He picked up the tweezers and gestured at Laura’s foot. She carefully adjusted herself so that her leg was pointing in his direction, and he inspected the ball of her foot where the skin seemed to have split.
He found the shard fairly easily. It was buried deep, but it was large enough that what it was was unmistakeable.
He reached for it with the tweezers and missed.
“Did you get it?”
“No, hang on.”
He readjusted his grip on the tweezers and tried again, but this time he actually dropped them. They clattered to the table.
What the hell was going on?
“First day with the new fingers, huh?”
“I guess so.”
He picked up the tweezers again and tried to pull the split skin apart so he could access it better.
“Ow! What are you doing?”
“I-” he started, then stopped. “I guess I don’t have the manual dexterity for this. I’m sorry.”
The pain in Laura’s eyes evaporated, and instead she looked at him with concern.
He was pretty sure he knew what she was thinking. That he’d always been so good at everything, other than endurance tasks, and that something must have changed if he wasn’t able to do this with ease.
He looked down at the table.
This was going to take some getting used to. He felt like he was using plastic straws as chopsticks to do everything. He’d grown up with an implant that made a lot of tasks easy for him, and now, without it, he could barely do anything.
Someone came up behind Otto and placed a plate in front of him. On it was the best-smelling sandwich he’d ever seen. Not because it had anything other than lettuce, tomato, and ham, but because he was just that hungry.
“Don’t worry, I’ll get it,” Mary said. She picked up the tweezers in one hand, grabbed Laura’s foot in the other, and pulled the shard of glass out in one fluid motion. It was roughly the size of a pinky nail.
“Thanks, Mum,” Laura said, smiling at her. She put her foot back on the floor. "I'll go grab a bandage, yeah? I'll be right back."
She nonchalantly picked up a stack of envelopes from the table and took them with her, hopping on one foot down the hall. He hadn't had a chance to try to read what they'd said.
As soon as she was out of sight, Mary sat down next to her husband at the table, facing Otto.
"So you two knew each other… well?" Andrew asked, in a low voice that was almost a whisper.
"Yeah," Otto said, still putting his sandwich together. "I guess you could say we were dating for about a year and a half, but there wasn't really anywhere to go on dates, and the timeline for when that started is… a little fuzzy. But we knew each other from the first day we arrived. Can I ask something?"
"Of course," Mary said, her voice low, too. The moment he'd confirmed the history between him and their daughter, they'd both sat forward in their seats.
"Has she, um, how do I say this." Otto took a bite out of the sandwich to stall for time, and it felt odd in his mouth. The texture felt overwhelming, and he chewed it slowly.
"Seen anybody else?" Mary offered.
Otto nodded.
"No. We tried suggesting that she see a few boys around town, but she always dismissed the idea. Wouldn't give a real reason, always an excuse. There was one time that I thought she might be considering it, but she ended up backing out."
Otto breathed a sigh of relief and swallowed the first uncomfortable bite of his sandwich. "Thanks. I didn't want to come across as possessive or anything like that, and I absolutely wouldn't have expected her to, you know, stay away from other people because of me, but I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't have been disappointed."
"So it was serious," Andrew said, inspecting Otto more closely. He was suddenly even more self-conscious about his shaggy hair and graverobbed clothes.
He remembered the long months sleeping in safe houses and hammocks hung in the bellies of helicopters. All for her sake, but with no expectation of a future to come of it.
"I'm… not really sure how to answer that. By normal standards, probably, yeah. How much did she tell you?"
"Really not very much at all. She talks about wanting to move forward. Do you know Shelby?" Mary asked.
"Yeah, we're close."
"She came to visit us, what, two weeks ago? But she spent very little time here, and Laura didn't tell us what they did. They went shopping, she had dinner here, she seemed very nice. Her work is really incredible."
Otto wasn't sure what Shelby told them she was doing for work, but if Mary Brand said it was incredible, the story was probably entirely fabricated.
"Yeah, that tracks. Laura tries to focus on the present, she always says it's what's best for her."
"Did she talk about us?" Mary asked.
"Sometimes. Right after we got there, and then she told me more about you after we became a couple." He paused for a moment, considering whether to ask whether she truly never mentioned him, but decided it was best to ask her that in private.
Mary looked at him awkwardly for a moment, and then delicately posed a question. “So… what is this about you dying? Were you serious? What was that like?”
Otto stared for a moment, thinking about what he should say here.
Laura stepped silently back into the room, her foot wrapped in athletic tape. She had something in her hand.
It was a girl’s headband. She walked up behind him and slipped it on to keep his hair out of his eyes. Then, she slid the chair over so she could sit closer to him, and waited expectantly for him to respond.
“I suffered radiation poisoning and was dying. I had already had my final conversation with Laura and the others, telling them that I wouldn’t make it out. We had recently connected over the internet to a genetics laboratory, and the other person left in the school with me found a way to pull me out of my body and send my consciousness to that lab. A new body was grown for me, and I woke up maybe ten hours ago. For the past ten months, I thought that I was dead.”
“What was that like? Being dead?” Mary asked, hanging on his every word..
Otto looked over at Laura, whose expression was unreadable. “It was odd. Things didn’t really make sense, but I thought they did when I was there.”
“Did you see anything? Anyone?”
This was getting far, far out of Otto’s comfort zone. Only Wing had known he’d had nightmares, and that wasn’t by choice.
But at the same time, he’d spent a good amount of time while he’d been gone thinking about how he hadn’t been open, honest with people.
“I… got to talk to someone Laura and I used to know, who died a few years back.”
“What did she say?” Laura asked. No need for her to wonder who it was.
“I, um.”
He looked over at Laura’s parents, and then he crumpled.
“We talked about what happened after she died, stuff like that. I can fill you in later.”
Laura’s parents seemed nice, but there were some things he just didn’t want to tell.
“So there is an afterlife,” Andrew said, looking serious.
“I don’t think so,” Otto said, shaking his head. “I think it was a dream. Like I said, it seemed real in the moment, but now that it’s over, we mostly only talked about me. She referenced something Laura said a few days ago, but she obviously hadn’t actually heard it. She talked about things I was thinking. I think it was just my brain trying to make sense of the situation, since the last thing I knew, I was about to die.”
“Oh,” Andrew said.
“Sorry if that’s a disappointing answer,” Otto said, and to break the awkwardness, he took another bite of the sandwich.
“No, no it’s fine. Thanks for sharing that with us,” Mary said. She seemed like she had Laura’s kindness, but more formalized, like a schoolteacher. “So if this is a new body, is this what you’ve always looked like?
“Mostly,” he said. “I had a few moles or whatever that were in different spots. I got these clothes from some lockers in the lab, I usually don’t wear brown suits. I also keep my hair short - speaking of which, Shelby visited recently?”
Laura looked startled for a moment. “Yeah, she doesn’t live nearby. You’ll have to put up with it, or you could let me try cutting it again?”
Otto grimaced.
“That was, like, five years ago,” she said. “It can’t be that bad.”
“That’s a low bar,” he said, then reconsidered. “I’ll think about it. Where does Shelby live? Near Wing?”
“Well, they live together, so I guess you could say that.”
Otto blinked. “That makes sense. I keep thinking everything’s the same as it was, but. Yeah.”
“Ok, I have a question, then,” Laura said mischievously, putting the palms of her hands down on the table. “What do you think they’ve been doing this past year?”
Otto looked over at Laura’s parents, who were still listening. “I’m not sure. Did they… get married?”
“Not yet. Apparently Wing hasn’t found a ring he can afford that would actually impress her, and he’s not willing to steal one.”
Andrew shook his head. “They seemed so nice, but they’re not wealthy, or they can’t be, with what their jobs are. I don’t really understand where this conflict is coming from.”
Otto raised his eyebrows at that. “Um, Shel said something about doing what she did before again, Wing didn’t have any concrete plans last time I talked to him. Maybe they’re, I dunno, working with Raven?”
Laura suppressed a laugh. “I’ll tell you later. This one requires some show and tell.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. You’ll see.”
Otto felt incredibly frustrated, but figured he was due some amount of hazing. “What about everybody else?”
“Nigel is an intern under Nathaniel, he’s helping with something about the construction of the new school.”
“Good for him,” Otto said, absorbing the fact that a new school was under construction. He’d assumed that HIVE simply was no more.
“Franz is TA-ing under the Colonel, and apparently that’s going well.”
“Really? I know he got fit, but teaching? I guess it’s better than banking, which was what he was planning on doing.” He paused. “I’m sorry, I have to ask. He’s not much older than the students, and, you know, with the way he’s been lately…”
“Well, Francisco threatened him up, down, and sideways that he’s not allowed to flirt with the students, and he’s only teaching first and second-years. He’s still got a following, though.”
“That’s a relief, I guess, but having the gremlins fawn over him sounds terrible. I couldn’t do that.”
“Yeah, apparently one of the younger girls wrote real-person fic about him and Nigel and sent it to him, and he called me. This is a secret, but I don’t feel bad telling you all since he’s telling everyone. He thinks he might be gay.”
Otto blinked, then sat back, thinking about the past six years. “Good for him, I guess. What did you say?”
“I didn’t pick up. He called Shelby and I heard it from her.”
“What did she tell him?”
“She told him he might be rushing into it because he’s been separated from Nigel for the first time in a while. Plus, he’s always liked girls.”
Otto made a face. “No, I don’t think so. I think he liked the attention he got from girls. It’s different.”
Laura furrowed her brow, thinking. “You might be right, actually. Did he talk to you guys about it?”
“All the time. Seriously. One time he told me that if he had gone with me on the Glasshouse mission instead of Raven, we would have found you guys in two months. Another time he told me he had had three girlfriends, which I figured out later was him bragging because it was one more than I’d ever had. He apologized, but I told him to stop talking to me about girls. A couple of weeks later I walked in on him telling Wing he’d had seven girlfriends.”
Laura ran a hand through her hair, grimacing.
“This person doesn’t sound particularly pleasant,” Mary said, speaking up for the first time in a while.
“He’s not so bad,” Laura said tentatively. “But Otto’s right, he’s said some things to me over the years that were a bit questionable.”
“All I’m saying is, at least he cares about Nigel. Remember when he would bring some girl to movie night and tell her he didn’t usually bring girls to movie night since it was just supposed to be our friends? And then he’d do the same thing the next week.” Otto remembered feeling uncomfortable around Franz’s girlfriends, but they’d tolerated them since everyone involved seemed to be having fun.
Laura crossed her arms, thinking a bit more. “You’re right. Maybe he is gay. Although now we’ve got to hope he treats Nigel better than the girls he used to see.”
“Probably? It would be really bad if it didn’t go well. But at least I can’t imagine him treating Nigel so, uh, disposably.”
That was probably why Franz’s behavior had rubbed him the wrong way. He’d been incredibly happy when he’d started dating Laura, and a lot of that had come from the long sequence of emotional catastrophes that had come right after one another immediately preceding. When he tried to think about going behind her back the way Franz did regularly, he was disgusted with himself. It had taken him five years to get to where they were, and throwing all of that around for a bit of extra attention from their classmates was inconceivable.
“What’s this about a two-month search?” Andrew asked.
Oh, shit.
“Don’t worry about it,” Laura said, smiling a smile he himself would have believed.
Otto stared at her. Just how much had she told? It looked like the answer bordered on ‘absolutely nothing’.
She stood from the table and grabbed Otto’s empty plate. “Well, I figure I’m going to go show him around. We’ll be back in a little while, yeah?”
“All right,” Mary said. She looked at Otto. “Do you need to stay here? You’re welcome to.”
“I do,” he said sheepishly. “At least until tomorrow.”
“It’s quite all right. I’ll pull out some blankets.”
Laura grabbed a lanyard with keys on it off of a hook, and led him outside through the backdoor, stopping to put his plate in the sink on the way.
As soon as she closed the door behind him, her happy, bright demeanor seemed to fade, replaced by an almost chilling, wistful calm.
Behind the house was a reasonably-sized garden next to a small porch. Potted vegetables were placed where they could fit. There was a largeish building, roughly the size of a barn, built of gray pleated steel, and the fields were empty of anything Otto would think of as a crop. It appeared to be mostly tall grass.
“Tell me something,” she said, walking in the direction of the barn.
“What?”
“This isn’t a dream, is it? And this isn’t a lie.”
“No. I’m here, it’s me.”
She squeezed his hand.
Laura opened the barn doors to reveal several large machines, tractors, shop tools, and power tools stored in a way that suggested they weren’t intended to be used here. There was a small room to the side with a lock and a thumbprint reader. Laura opened it with one of the keys from the lanyard.
Inside was what appeared to be Laura’s workroom. Something like twelve monitors, four or five old keyboards covered in Cheeto dust, a cardboard box with snacks and Gatorade. The workbench held a soldering iron and a bunch of parts that for the first time in his life, Otto couldn’t identify.
She closed the door behind them then gently pushed him up against it, kissing him deeply.
“So it is you,” she said, resting the side of her head on his chest.
“I have to tell you something.”
Laura was silent for a long moment. “Oh no.”
“What? No, it’s nothing bad. Well, sort of.”
“Just tell me.”
“I have to ask you something first.”
“Um, all right,” she said. She looked up at him, worried.
“What is it that you liked about me?”
She almost laughed, the tension breaking a bit. “There it is. The stupid part.”
“I know, I know. Smartest person you know, and the stupidest. I still don’t really understand what that means.”
“It means that… you know a lot of things, but you don’t know what other people think of you. You didn’t know when girls liked you, didn’t understand how your actions affected other people. You probably thought we’d all be fine after you died.”
“Is that the answer to the question?” He asked.
She sighed. “Oh, Otto. I don’t know. It was a lot of things. On the first day of school, you were nice to me about my tech stuff, when I’d just lost a bunch of friends because they thought I was too nerdy. You were nice to me when I was afraid. I think I realized I liked you after you went down on Air Force One, but everything was too intense for me to really say what got me there. I thought of you as heroic. What’s this about?”
He squeezed her tighter for a second. “Thanks. I needed that.”
“Otto.”
“What if I weren’t smart and stupid? What if I were just stupid?”
“That’s a stupid question. You’re not.”
“Laura, I’m human.”
She looked up at him, confused for a moment, until she slowly understood. She almost started to gasp, but turned it into a shake of the head.
“So what? You have to learn as fast as the rest of us now?”
“No, I lost almost everything. I remember people, I remember things that happened, but I lost all of my knowledge.”
“You can’t code?”
“I can’t read.”
Laura raised her eyebrows, taking that in.
“I mean,” he continued, “I’m sure I can learn. I remember the things we were drilled on, but I don’t remember the things I read in books. I have to start over.”
She sat down in the one gaming chair and looked over at the workstation. “And judging by your performance with the tweezers earlier, you probably can’t solder for shit.”
“Probably not, no.”
She was silent for a few long moments, rubbing a strand of hair between her fingers. “We’ll get through this,” she finally said.
"I mean, not to whine, but I have no idea what to do. There's things I bet I could do just as well, but I don't know what I should even try to do if I have to start over anyway."
Laura looked at him for several seconds with an expression that bordered on annoyance but was definitely something else. Then, she sucked in a breath and broke eye contact with him. "All right, I guess it's my turn to share."
She pulled the lanyard off of her neck again and selected a small key that opened the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet. She pulled the false bottom out, and handed him an unsealed envelope from within.
He opened it, and inside were two small pictures. One was a grainy photo of him in black and white from far away. The other was a more detailed artist's rendition of the same picture in ballpoint pen. It was an okay drawing, pretty good but not professional.
"Shelby did this?" he asked.
She nodded.
He tried to hand the pictures back to her, but she waved him off, making him continue to hold them between his thumb and index finger.
"That's all I have of you," she said. "Up until about an hour ago. No pictures, no old shirts, no papers. Everything on the island was lost, including the data."
"Where'd this picture come from?"
"The CIA. About a month after you died, the US election was held, and the change in leadership meant gaps in their security in the scramble. We were leaving one of the long term safe houses, so everything was about to be destroyed anyway, and I got that grainy old photo of you when you were visiting the Sinistre family castle. "
Otto looked down at the picture. He was making a stupid expression in it.
"I suppose I can see how you would be disappointed at the loss of your super intelligence. I'm sure, in your shoes, that I'd be sad, too. But from my perspective, it's a piece of gravel in the road, not even a speed bump."
He looked down at the photos again, getting the point. The larger of the two, the drawing, wasn't even as wide as the envelope. A single water spill would destroy both pieces of paper in an instant. He didn't say anything.
“There were a few times when we were younger when I had to accept your death in some form or another, but this was different. I processed this as best and as forcefully as I could. I cut off contact with people. I forbade topics with my family. I- you have to understand that everything that happened as long as you knew me turned sour. I couldn't think about any of it without thinking of you. I tried to take the lessons and pretend the rest of it didn't happen."
He stared at the photos for a few long seconds.
"Yeah," he finally said. "I guess I'm being a bit of an idiot about it. I always wished I could be normal so bad stuff would stop happening, but I guess I've been in self-pity mode so long it's hard to break the habit."
"Well, stop," she said. "If you think and act like everything is going to be a problem, it will. We'll face these things as they come up."
"Yeah, that's what Lucy said you would say."
"Oh. Um, what? Really?"
"Yeah. I talked to her, or what my brain thinks a version of her would say to me. Mostly a bunch of stuff about things I did wrong in life. We talked about you a lot."
"I'm going to be honest," Laura said. "I really want to know what you guys said. But I think this is the part where I say, 'you don't have to tell me if you don't want to.'"
"Thanks," he said. "Maybe someday. She said I kept too much from you, for one, so let's just call it a rain check."
"That's fine. I'm really just glad you're here."
Maybe if she said it enough times, it would sink in.
"I've got to ask, though. If you've got any ideas. I'm not sure what to do about the, uh, future. In general. I covered my face as best as I could on the way here, especially around security cameras, but I don't have an identity. I can't go anywhere."
Laura snapped her fingers. "That's why we're here," she said. "You need The Package."
"The what?"
"Nero's graduation gift. Fake papers, fake stories, friends, and records. And a complimentary scrubbing of your identity from any government agencies GLOVE has ties to, which is all of them."
"That makes sense. How are we going to get that?"
Laura reached down and pressed the power button on what appeared to be the oldest computer in the room. Slowly, lights started to turn on, and a green command line prompt appeared on one of the screens.
"We're going to call him."