Chapter 174 – Agency

We do not become ourselves in the moment of pain, but in the response we repeat until it feels natural.

– Synapses that fire together, wire together.

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"Say, Leah," I began as Leah returned from the tiny onboard kitchen, a steaming bowl in hand.

The scent hit me like a stuffy-savory wall, and apparently the unoccupied drone in my lap too. Its antennae automatically waved to parse the waft…exactly like mine. Leah didn't bother hiding her amusement.

She met my eyes as she sat crosslegged, resting her back against the pod and bowl just beyond the reach of our antennae as she started eating. "Mhm?"

I found myself fidgeting, unexpectedly. The topic I was about to nudge suddenly seemed touchier than it should've been.

"We haven't really talked about it properly, but…um. What will we do when we get back to New Montreal, exactly?"

Why was the question making me nervous? Even Leah stilled, her expression sliding into the serious.

"Like… You're shipping enough construction material to throw up a skyscraper. But—" Oh god. Why were my hands shaking? I was feeling woozy "—um…" My mouth kept moving, but no sound came out. Breathing had suddenly grown difficult. I couldn't meet Leah's gaze.

Tears pricked my eyes.

Then, she gently set aside the bowl, and crawled across, and then she was hugging me.

And I sobbed.

Why?

"Hey, hey," she murmured as she gathered me against her chest and rocked me quietly. "I'm here. I'll stay here too."

And just like that, calm found me again. Like nothing at all had happened except my nose was stuffy and my eyes wet.

It hit me that I'd just had a completely random panic attack. But…why?!

"What the fuck?" I whispered.

Leah leaned back to get a look at me. My hands automatically clutched the front of her gel suit.

She smiled at me, so softly and reassuringly. Patted my hands with one of hers until they let go.

"You're okay, Tin-Tin."

I met her eyes then, staring confusedly. I didn't even know what to say.

She poked my nose gently—which somehow centered me yet again—before she continued, "That tiny episode just reminded me a lot of certain orphans, Tinea."

"Uh?" Well, I guess it wouldn't be entirely unfair to consider myself that? But, like…I'd lived an adult life for like two decades. Self-sufficient the entire way.

Leah saw my skepticism. "Specifically the ones who had found a good and happy second family, only to lose it again."

Comprehension hit. I found my mouth making an 'O'.

She giggled. "You know, they somehow tend to get attached to me specifically."

I threw her a dry glance. Really? Wouldn't have guessed.

But, yes, I thought I understood why the panic. We'd kinda been mentioning plans for Leah and her new orphanage, and even that we'd live together—what with the new cocoon I'd be making—but there were certain parallels to certain events from my earliest years. Things that had taught Aden to never get attached again.

Those learnings which I, as Tinea, had completely broken with since. I was deeply attached to Leah, so much so that I'd already decided to take it to a therapist.

And I'd been about to start a topic full of decisions that would quantify the massive changes in our lives—changes that I didn't exactly understand yet where I'd…get to stand.

Scary, because that meant that unspoken promises would be tested. Aden didn't like that whatsoever. In fact, it scared him terribly.

Tinea might be carrying some heretofore undiscovered baggage.

I sighed.

"Sorry Leah."

She giggled and hugged me again for a few moments. "Nothing to be sorry for, Tin-Tin. You know what you need."

"Yep," I agreed, popping the p.

Leah returned to her meal. It meant she was sitting just beyond arm's reach again, but she kept her legs touching mine, and that contact was everything to me.

"So," I picked the topic up again with a deep breath, leaning more consciously into Leah's reassurance. "What'll we be doing exactly, once we're home?"

"Well," she answered, "I haven't so much as mentioned my ideas of a private orphanage to my coworkers. Sister Lana, especially, is going to need time to think that through."

"Right. Head of an orphanage already."

"Yes. Even for you and me, it's no small decision, and we have nothing to lose."

I looked around the cabin. It struck me again how spacious it was for being inside a battle mech. Enough that I could even string up dividers beneath the ceiling for a tiny attic, if I wanted to. "Yeah. I was kinda imagining we'd be looking to find a place in the city, but…we could live in here for however long it might take to solidify things."

Leah nodded with a noncommittal smile around the space. It was an option, but apparently not one she really considered either. Something told me she wanted to be close to her friends—and the mechs didn't exactly mean that to her. But, I supposed, we would have a dedicated kitchen if we lived out of the spider. That was already better than my old apartment.

Oh, another thing to sort. I hadn't spent much thought on my old life in general.

Shit. LinewerkCo will have been waiting on correspondence about the draft.

Knock-knock, went the old hassle against the windows of my mind.

Eh…they'll have bought another 'lancer to pick up after me, once they found out about the incursion. Must've figured I died when I stopped responding. Yeah, fuck it. New life, new challenges; don't need to rediscover the more unwelcome ones of the old.

But thinking of emails caused another question to come to mind:

"Leah, have you had to deal with people trying to buy you since you became a samurai?" I asked my beautiful, reliable, insightful, and all around awesome girlfriend.

She shook her head. "I stayed too quiet for that," she answered. The pained twist of her lips completed the sentence: But not as quiet as I thought I did. I gently bumped her shoulder and smiled up at her until the half-formed frown dissolved again.

"From what I understand," I said, "we're already searchable in the Mesh, safe from spam only because we have no email addresses for our Vanguard selves, and nobody knows our real identities to go bother. There's gonna be hundreds of corpos already set up with nice and pretty recruitment emails to be fired off the moment that changes. We're gonna be sorting through a lot of trash."

Leah groaned, "I never bothered setting up my filters."

"I'd guess you never had to do any orthodox job searches in the first place, huh? Want me to help you? Freelancers build a pretty robust pipeline by pure necessity, you know."

The puppy-eyed hero worship she threw at me sent me giggling. "Would you?" she begged.

"Of course I would," I returned, and leaned forward to poke her nose, too. My antennae followed suit, but she blew at them completely automatically before they even crowded her face. I loved it. It meant that Leah was getting used to being around me all the way down to the reflexive level.

The scent of savory broth wallowing against my sensilla awakened my hunger though, so I stopped cuddling the drone in my lap and plopped it on the floor. Its wings buzzed as I moved it, but it stilled again and instinctively sunk its talons into the soft carpet as soon as its feet made contact.

Really, what an adorable moth dragon thing, even with nothing occupying its brain. Maybe it was durable enough to withstand Leah's orphans waging war on it, too? We'd see.

Leah accompanied me into the kitchen where I loaded up with a triple serving and a bunch of medical additives.

Wings took a lot of everything to grow, after all.

⁂

Tynea's voice whispered into my mind while I was still eating at the tiny bench-and-table integrated into the kitchen's wall. Leah had sat herself on the sole counter and was browsing the map of New Montreal for potential orphanage locations on a screen she'd extracted from the wall to become a datapad.

Tinea. There—Oh no. She sounded contrite and worried—may have been a second problematic instance of my omitting some relevant information in order to manipulate your behavior towards a specific outcome I had deemed superior.

I stilled. The sound of my swallowing the last mouthful punctuated the silence.

"What?" I asked, using the Quanta's virtual call function for privacy. Even though Leah had immediately picked up on there being something up and was already looking at me, eyebrows raised.

I shook my head at her, and she went back to her search. I wanted to know what this was about before I'd involve her.

I may have technically lied when I said there wasn't a suitable item to pump your bionite-nutrient solution when Leah required it for her healing shortly after you'd found her.

"Huh?" I could feel my expression scrunch up in confusion. This was too weird and quickly getting uncomfortable. "Why lie about such a catalog? And what the fuck for?"

As I said, it wasn't technically a lie. There aren't exactly a lot of young mothers among the samurai, and neither are motherhood items typically used to combat the Antithesis. But…I could have easily produced such an item anyway. Say, by adapting something from one of the several farming catalogs.

Now I wanted to smash my face into the table. Perhaps this bizarre conversation would've been a lot funnier if I didn't have that unwelcome discomfort roiling in my gut from Tynea's implication of more manipulation.

"Get to the point, please? Did you have me breastfeeding Leah for a purpose other than healing her?"

…Yes.

I was left blinking, and now truly unsettled. Probably because I was starting to feel like my actions back then were being…dirtied, retroactively. And what would that mean to Leah?

"But…why?"

Because I had calculated that the hormonal response to such intimacy would render the bond then still developing between the two of you quickly unbreakable. Which, in turn, would strengthen your ability to cooperate, which would secure your survival in a situation where you had little else. And because my calculations indicated that you would experience the least friction to the process by not knowing of other options.

"Leah."

Her head whipped up at my unsteady tone. I absently noticed that my fists were balled so hard I'd stretched the steel spoon between my fingers. My belly was absolutely swimming with fear, and it got worse when Leah moved over to hug me from behind.

But I kept breathing and reminded myself of how easily Leah had accepted my previous panic. Whatever uncertainty Tynea's confession had just injected me with about our relationship, there was a lot more to it than that one…event.

"What's up, love?" I almost flinched.

Breathed deep. Then spoke, as steadily as I could, "Tynea. You will explain."

From the corner of my eyes, I saw Leah's head turn to the datapad when its speakers crackled and Tynea's tinny voice came out. I couldn't look at her. I forced myself anyway.

Her expression was…polite interest. A little reserved, but mostly willing to hear the AI out.

"I was explaining to Tinea how I'd committed a second instance of a betrayal against her agency shortly after your initial meeting."

"I see. Continue."

"The greatest issue, I believe, is that this event included you, and more specifically, your relationship with her."

I stopped breathing. The spoon tore inside my fist. I couldn't tell if I was more mad with anger, or more dying from fear. Adrenaline pounded in my skull either way. My antennae had already swung behind my back—like they did when I was in combat—and clenched shut.

Leah shifted. She slid her hand between my breasts and under the fluff that cradled them, and then further down to cover my belly, skin-on-skin. Her other arm squeezed my shoulders tight.

She hadn't even heard the specifics yet. I was so scared. What if she hated what Tynea did? What if that changed things between us?

"I see. Continue," she repeated. Her breath tickled my hair.

"When you required reconstitution shortly after Tinea rescued you, I told her that I did not have access to motherhood materialia that would allow her to administer her bionites in a less personal manner. That was, technically, a lie. Or rather, only technically true."

Leah sighed and patted my stomach. "I see. Rationales?"

"Two. One: the so required intimacy would boost your bond, your mental stabilities, and your shared chances of survival. Two: you were both painfully low on points. The adaptation of a milking device would have been dangerously expensive."

That I could almost hear her rolling her eyes penetrated the emotional singularity occupying my mind. Maybe…she wouldn't mind after all.

"Incompatibilities, in hindsight?" she continued her interrogation of Tynea.

"Two. One: the choice was one of a particularly agentic nature, and these must be made by Tinea herself, and in this specific case, perhaps the choice should have been offered to you as well. Two: whether points end up wasted or not is not my call to make, unless my Vanguard is not sound of mind. Tinea was."

"And have you ignored similar incompatibilities elsewhere that Tinea is not aware of?"

"No."

"Will you in the future?"

"No. I fear I have already caused irreparable damage with those two events. It is my desire to avoid more, and if possible, to repair what can be repaired."

Leah kissed my temple and untangled herself from me. It…didn't feel like she was rejecting me or anything, even if it left my belly abandoned to the cold lack of touch.

"Then consider the involvement of myself forgiven, with the caveat that you will remove yourself from any further decisions that would affect our relationship. The rest is between Tinea and yourself. Tinea?"

I twisted around to look up at her, and whispered hoarsely, "Yeah?"

She smiled easily and caressed my cheek. "We're good. I love you, and I would've loved you anyway. Physical intimacy or not, it was your unconditional gentleness given when I needed it that caught my eye. Yeah?"

I teared up. Leah was such an amazing person. "Yeah."

"Good." She poked my nose again. "I'll give you some room to think."

"Okay."

Leah smiled once more and untangled herself from my wing arms before she left the kitchen.

I still had a lot of broth to eat, and…a lot of internal chaos to settle.

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