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“Well… that could have gone better,” Green says into the silence.
Blue sighs and sits down in the pilot’s chair to start up the engines, fumbling a bit due to the fact that one of his arms got blown off in the fight. Each of them are a bit delicate, separated like this. “That's an understatement.”
“Well,” Red sniffs, attempting positivity, “we got rid of them. At least.”
Vio’s next words are gloomy. “Yeah. All of them.” He sits next to the scattered dust on the floor of the ship, and runs one skinless hand through the sparkling particles. Someone else might mistake it for shards of glass or some sort of rock, but all of Link knows that these are dead nanogems, the tiny building blocks that make up every component in their systems.
These, up until a few minutes ago, had made up Shadow's body.
The engines start up, rumbling the ship, and Green limps over to help Blue get everything set up. Red drops to his knees next to Vio and helps to sort through the dead nanogems, looking for something, anything. He scoops them into a pile to do something with later.
Vio spots something a little bigger in the shadows beneath one of the computer consoles, and lunges forward to catch it before the lurching of the ship can take it away. He cages it inside his hands and sits back.
“That's…” Red says, leaning over to look.
“His central processor, yes.”
Blue looks back. “Does that mean he's okay?”
“It's deactivated. Maybe… with the right application of energy…”
Once the ship is on its way, the four pieces of Link merge back together, each part of him becoming sturdier as it fuses with two or three matching parts. It takes an hour or more, since reconfiguring his nanogems is never easy to do. But he manages it, and keeps Shadow’s processing chip in a spot in his chest only accessible by himself, even if he was somehow torn apart bit by bit.
He shovels the dead nanogems into a bag and considers throwing them out, but… it feels wrong. He doesn't have a rational explanation for it, but he tucks the bag away.