Chapter Text
STAR Labs has to take their time handling her case. Objective instrumentation is capable of detecting her, but anyone trying to interpret the data finds their attention skittering off to literally anything else. The scientists have to talk Kon through the more hands-on things like how to administer blood tests, because at least he can feel out where she physically is. (She tried to help by performing them herself, but it seems like it’s easier not to misplace her samples if there’s a middleman.)
Trial and error gives them a procedure for handling her. There’s a checklist, a set of basic everyday instructions on how to interact with her and more detailed reminders of what they’ve been working on. Eventually, they start bringing in a telepath, who has some success observing her once he knows she’s there, even if it tends to cause headaches.
It’s… frustrating, exhausting, how much effort it takes for them to just interact with her on a basic level. She thinks about giving up, sometimes, just walking away and letting them go back to their lives and their jobs and stop wasting time on someone who might as well be a ghost. It would be easy. She could follow someone onto their computer network and erase the data they’ve collected, get rid of the checklists. Without the repeated reminders that she exists, they wouldn’t even remember they were missing something. Kon would be more of a problem, but she’s pretty sure even he’d forget about her eventually, given enough time.
She goes so far as to leave the building for a full day, just to see how she’d feel. At first, it’s a relief, not having to fight so hard for the tiniest pieces of interaction. No one’s wasting their time on her. But an emptiness sets in again, hollowing her out and dragging her back down to that place where nothing she does matters.
Kon’s waiting in the room they gave her at the lab, sweeping the room every couple minutes with his TTK. Looking for her. It brushes over her shoulder, and his head jerks up. “Tim?”
“Yeah,” she says, even though she isn’t sure he’d know. He’s getting better at the fine concentration and control it takes to feel her out and interpret the motions of her mouth and vibrations of her voice in the air, but it’s still incredibly difficult.
His TTK circles her wrist, holding on desperately like she’ll melt away if he doesn’t keep ahold of her. He tugs her forward. “I thought you were – “
Missing. Gone. Dead. They’d effectively mean the same thing; he wouldn’t be able to find her again, no matter which it was. She takes another few steps forward, until she’s near enough for him to reach out and replace the TTK with his hand.
“Don’t disappear like that again, okay?” He gets a look of concentration on his face while he feels out the location of her hand so he can try to squeeze it. “Just don’t.”
She can’t promise it, so she just shrugs and lets him hold onto her until one of the scientists gets a reminder to check if she’s been found.