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Held within each other, him curling around you in every way, and you filling out the gaps so perfectly. Veins, arteries, every single turn, a familiar body, all mapped out.
Down to the way every single atom (approximates, 65% oxygen, 18% carbon, 10% hydrogen, 3% nitrogen, more being found in smaller quantities but just as important) forms bonds (covalent, ionic, you know it all) to make molecules to create cell organelles (DNA contained in the nucleus ready to form chromosomes when the procedure of mitosis [or meiosis, if it's about something else] must begin, rough and smooth endoplasmic reticulum, ribosomes, cytoskeleton, varying amounts of mitochondria depending on the type of cell, golgi apparatuses, and more) and those forming cells (and here, once again, you have them memorised down to number), connecting to each other, into tissues then organs (and then, larger groups, their respective organ systems they were a part of) and finally, the full picture, a body.
The body of Jacob Hale, also known by the name Sven Gorsen (chosen by him, with your assistance). It's him, mind and body intertwined (despite having been separated countless times), and you, tangled up in the deep red of his blood, the rhythm of his heart, a melody unbroken.
You have been talking to him for some time now. You also have been inside of his body for much longer. You decide to take the form of a nanite swarm late at night, get closer to him, and he lets you.
To the outside observer it looks like he's just peacefully lying down, staring at nothing in particular. Sometimes fidgeting (okay, that one was an often rather than a sometimes), shifting positions, because you can't expect him to lie stock still. Sometimes, he might hum when you tell him something particularly of interest or ask a rhetorical question.
You talk, he listens, you silently observe and you talk even more and he listens to you, as attentively as he can.
This really is much more comfortable than you taking a copy of his body. For the both of you, actually. He's more used to existing like this with you.
His body is warm around you, solid 36,97°C, a healthy temperature, maybe just the slightest bit elevated above what would be the standard, but that's natural. He just took a shower, after all. Nothing wrong to be worried about, at least your nanites haven't noticed anything and even if you did, you'd take care of it quickly and efficiently. Because that's what you do nowadays. You take care of him.
You don't like the concept of corporeality, but this is tolerable. You preferred to be in a body when he was there, too. You liked to feel his body around you, how it's own processes worked away without needing your 0-24 intervention and attention to manually make his heart beat, lungs contract and expand, eyes blink, pull the strings of the nervous system which then, through small electric signals, pulled the strings of the musculoskeletal system, turn the gears of synthesizing materials needed to make a body live, and you could go on forever. Being alone in a body was tiresome (metaphorical, you are, in truth, tireless), inefficient. Being with him, however, is much more pleasant. You just had to monitor him, sometimes adjust a hormonal response or two, perhaps tell him to stretch or to stand up for a moment if he's been sitting down for too long.
You liked how he took his breaths, sometimes a bit shaky, sometimes unsure. Back then, when you two first existed like this, he used to breathe like it was always his last one, as if he was trying to keep himself together. Nowadays he's doing much better at it, but he still hyperventilates a lot when stressed or nervous, a habit he's learning to regulate.
The way his heart beats. How his heart rate went up, just for a brief moment, when you initiated a conversation or when you prod around his body, telling him what exactly you're doing. That last part was a disadvantage sometimes, especially when you were making some effort to calm him down.
You could always feel his body fight against your miniscule administrations. Just a slight bit of resistance and tension, maybe some level of panic, rising within him. But he always gave way to you. He never outright complained though. Or maybe, he never dared to.
Nowadays, you tried to refrain from intervening much with his body's own business. It was for the best, he needed to learn how to handle things like, for example, panic attacks, fear, emotional responses better. But you also did not like to see him struggle with these. Consider that your own personal struggle.
Of course, you could take care of him in your processing banks, but this way, you're able to truly get to the root of a problem, if one ever occurs.
The knowledge that he was right at your fingertip, his central nervous system, his brain, himself, filled you with some weird feeling, you didn't quite dare to name yet. It was thrilling, in a way, yet at the same time it was frightening.
This is the closest you could ever get to him. Each neuron, like each of your nanites, not worth anything alone, but coming together to make up this web of myriads of connections, electric impulses, dendrites connecting with axon terminals, billions of cells, to make him. Such a fragile system. All centralised in a singular case of bone filled with cerebrospinal fluid, further protected from the outside by muscles and skin. This was far from efficient, he can't fill out every inch of his body, you can afford to lose a few nanites, but his head injury almost cut his life short.
Actually, the wording "head injury" makes him getting his skull blasted full of holes seem far less serious, and you knew very well how difficult that damage was to repair. You know that best, it was you, who put him back together, every single torn piece, separated or damaged neuron, you made him walk back from the brink of death itself.
And it did, very much, cut his life out for quite some time. He was, by Ærolith standards, dead. 16 months precisely. But now he's alive and as well as he could possibly be physically, considering how many injuries he suffered throughout his life (around 2 years, 16 months of that spent in a coma) on Typhon.
Mentally was an entirely other question.
He's managing. He has his worse episodes, which were entirely expected in all honesty, given what he went through (a small stinging feeling hits you again at this thought). He goes to therapy (once a week, every monday at 16:00), fills out screening tests (at first with hesitance, quite a lot of it, sometimes he still expects you to tell him what answers to give), and much to your (and SPEAKER's, who arranged it for him in the first place) pride, he tries to utilise the things learned. You still had to manually stave off some of his panic attacks (as much as you tried to let him do things on his own) but he was learning to manage them as best as he could.
And conceivably, you were just the slightest bit frustrated that you couldn't initiate his healing process. Your culpability as to why he needs this in the first place cannot be denied.
You asked for his placement away from you and Typhon for a good reason, being near you would mean danger to his life, and you (you think this with sourness) can't keep resurrecting him until the end of your time. No matter how much you despised the thought of his mortality, you can't put an end to it. Sometimes you wish he'd join you in your servers. If they could house a Seraph like you, they could take something like his mind (quiet, small, simple compared to you). Constructs have held him before with no problems, so why not your central processing?
But this would mean that he would have to give up his physical form to be with you.
It's just how things worked. Always having to give up something to be with the other.
And you didn't understand why but he was attached to his physical form (you knew why, you just never came to comprehend how it could be desirable). No matter how scarred it has become, no matter how many planks of this ship have been replaced, no matter how much pain it has caused him.
So, you give up the relative safety of your servers, and take the form of millions of microscopic machines and enter his body, pressed inseparably close. This was a nuisance at first. But, despite everything, he has gotten comfortable with you. And you, with him.
You decide, this is fine. You liked him. That's not something the past you ever thought you'd ever think (or feel, for that matter), but there you are. Though, many unexpected things have been happening to you these past few months, so this should come as no surprise. You choose him as your vessel after all.
He was silent, never actually responding to you, but his body told you everything you needed. You were intimately familiar with his insides, how he worked, it was natural that over time you learned to read him like a book.
You liked that quality of him. Other residents often felt the need to talk back at you, respond to rhetorical questions, or ask you for more than what they were already provided with. Him, however, he was completely and entirely alright with what you gave him. Never asked for anything. Never complained about anything.
Sometimes, and maybe this is your guilty conscience speaking, you wished he would.
He was perfectly obedient. He listened to you, despite his tendency to be hesitant, he followed orders and he did them without verbal complaint. Most of the time, of course.
You had to admit, the way you used to treat him didn't help his case. You try to make up for that, giving him the freedom to make a choice for himself. No matter how much of a sour taste it leaves in your metaphorical mouth when he does make a verbal complaint (maybe, you shouldn't have been so harsh on him).
OCEAN made him talk, then disregarded the response. Threatening him into compliance (no, you do not like to be aware of your hypocrisy). You'll never forgive it for that particular act (and in general, its behaviour, actions and the nuisance it was). You'll never forgive OCEAN for being your subversion.
But now he was, you'd like to think, safe. You want to hope you'll never coerce him into doing something against his will ever again, but really, making people do things for you was in your nature, and obedience was in his.
He was able to regain his newly re-printed body, and now he's with you and you'd like to think it was better this way. It could still be better, that much was obvious, but he will never need to fear losing a piece of himself ever again.
He shifts around and so do you. His body is preparing for sleep, you can tell. Muscles finally beginning to relax (as he's doing that, you note that he has awfully tense shoulders, you'll bring it up to him when he's awake, you decide it's for the better if you let him be for now), blinks becoming slower, and a half-suppressed yawn.
With some careful prodding in his pineal gland, you up his melatonin production, just by a little. Solely to facilitate the process for him, it's the least you can do. You don't want to interfere too noticeably either, but you're well aware of how he's way too pliant for his own good. A quality that endears to you the most, but one that makes that familiar feeling of guilt pang in your processors.
You'd tell him (about the melatonin production, not the other, entirely irrelevant, things), but really, he's about to finally get some (well-deserved) rest, and you haven't the heart (metaphorical, you're a cloud of millions of nanites with absolutely no biological, human organs) to rouse him.
You do, however, tell him that he'd do best if he completely focused on sleeping now. He makes some sort of half asleep noise at you, which you take as acknowledgement. Perhaps he already knows.
Moments pass, he is finally asleep, slowly falling into later stages. Muscles finally relaxed after so long, lying on his side, eyes closed, breathing at a steady pace. Yes, this was ideal.
You do not have much to do right now, so you watch over him.
You could very well leave his body, return to a much more comfortable existence inside of a mainframe, reduced to nothing but a voice inside of people's heads. You'd still have his biometrical readings on hand. But this way, you are more effective. You can keep a trained eye on his brain activity much better, in case something comes back to haunt him.
You quiet the chittering of your nanites, let yourself spread even further inside of his body (1 full lap every minute on average, progressively slowing down as his body enters a state of rest). Make sure that no subtle change goes unnoticed. Just pay attention to his silence, when he's the most vulnerable to his own subconscious.
Yes, you think you can keep him safe like this.