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Update schedule: Every Saturday.

Reminder: No plot, only worldbuilding and social links now.

The course currently remains steady for a return to IFER in September.

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What little gas Fern had managed to procure took them safely across the sea, but not by much. The boat pulled into the mouth of a small inlet just as the tank sputtered its last empty cough.

The town along the coast was larger and somehow emptier the one they'd departed from. A flat expanse of rusted, rundown shacks nestled up to the sea and sheltered by distant mountains whose vivid evergreens were cloaked in low-hanging clouds. Grass came up to V's waist and fully grown trees shed petals and pollen on houses half consumed by gnarled bark. Machine parts littered the area, but they were old and few and stray, like tires taken far away from the husks of vehicles they must have been a part of once.

Nothing but plants and insects had lived in that place for a long time, and they didn't linger long enough to change that.

They moved north and west, according to a route that V had not offered input on. Any knowledge he might have had was comically outdated, so it had seemed only wise to leave the path making to those who knew better. But within a few days, it became clear that Fern and 9S were moving in the straightest line possible toward their destination. The terrain was dense, craggy, and difficult. He might have pointed out their lack of common sense, but ten thousand years without civilization meant that even mountain passes were treacherous places only barely less of a hassle than the direct route.

Far from where machines or androids bothered to go, the world was without shortcuts or conveniences. Even with Shadow to help him navigate up the slopes and Griffon to help him glide down, their progress was modest.

If their pace didn't quicken, it would be winter again before they arrived at Normandy.

V kept that concern to himself, of course. Complaint would not make the first leg of the journey go any faster and worrying would only serve to waste the precious energy he required to go as far as possible in a single day. It would have also drawn attention to a fact he didn't care to dwell on: He was the one setting their pace—and setting it back.

Fern and 9S were always going to be faster, but more importantly, they didn't grow tired or hungry or thirsty. They didn't have to deal with any aches in their metal joints or the stiffness of a feebly constructed body struggling to acclimate to the burden of near-constant motion. If the integrity of their bodies suffered at all during the fourteen or so hours they spent on the move, ten minutes of maintenance was all that was necessary to restore them. At least in this, he could console himself that no amount of power or wholeness would have made a meaningful difference. To be Vergil would have been to go a greater distance, but Fern and 9S would always outpace him in the end.

If he did not fully appreciate the differences between their capabilities before, he would before this journey ended.

After eight days, they came to the bend of a river so broad the other side was just a strip of dark ridges on the horizon. V leaned on his cane, not daring to relax too quickly, while 9S shifted the straps from his shoulders and eased his cargo down.

"Hey," he whispered into the burlap. "Anybody else out here with us?"

Two red antennae popped up from the flaps.

"REPORT: NO RESISTANCE SIGNALS DETECTED."

"REPORT: NO MACHINE LIFE FORMS DETECTED."

Fern loosed a loud sigh and dropped the other bag down in the tangles of tall grass. She rolled her shoulders with similarly noisy appreciation and settled her hands on her hips. "So, this is it then?"

9S pulled up a display with the map of the area. It lacked detail just like the one he had of the city, but there was no mistaking the dark, winding streak of the river across the left side of the screen. "Yeah, this is the one. It should carry us at least as far as Sector I."

"Assuming we can find a boat."

"Looks like there's an old city about 22 km up around the east riverbend. I can—"

"Nope." Fern stayed him with a raise of her hand. "I'll go. You stay with V."

9S watched her trot off into the shrubbery. Fern was always the one who went ahead. She was the combat model who could better tackle any physical risks and she was the worldly one who was better able to navigate the company of normal androids. It made sense to V. It likely made sense to 9S as well, yet there was a hint of frustration in the way he frowned after her.

The look was gone by the time he turned to V. "You hungry?"

"I can't recall many hours since we began this journey when I wasn't."

9S hummed. Perhaps he was unable to reconcile increased activity with needing more energy from external sources. "Must be tough."

V didn't answer and didn't wait for 9S to make the obvious offer. Not with the river right there and Fern bound to be gone for at least the next five or six hours. He threw Pod 042 into the current and tossed his boots aside just as carelessly. Shadow curled and coiled around his back as he sat and sank his legs into the cold. A faint sigh was all he permitted himself. The full scale of his relief would have been mortifying to betray.

9S busied himself making a modest fire. He was quieter than usual. They all were. The nature of traveling through unfamiliar territory in semi-unfamiliar company had given both androids a wary edge that sanded down their animated dispositions and revealed them for the soldiers they were. But 9S' current silence was a distracted kind. One that lingered well after a fish was caught and cooked. One that kept turning his gaze subtly back the way they'd come.

"Something out there of interest to you?" asked V.

"Huh? Oh, no." He hunched into his cloak. "I don't know. I spent so much time back in the city. Pretty much my whole life. My 48th one, anyway. I keep feeling…"

From the corner of his eye, V watched him struggle for the better part of two minutes before he offered: "Displaced?"

"Lost." 9S caught the suspicious way V eyed the overgrowth around them and tossed a stalk of grass that went nowhere near its target. "Not like that. I keep getting this feeling like I'm supposed to be back there. Or that I'm not really sure how I got here. Even though I know exactly what I'm doing here. It's odd being away, I guess."

"I see." V plucked a thin, translucent bone from his lips. "You're homesick."

9S head fell, his eyes wandering the short grass as he lapsed back into bewildered silence.

There was a splash somewhere between their bank and the opposite one. The waters were relatively still at the water's edge, but they were muddy and choppy further out. Somewhere upstream, spring thaw or spring rain was churning the idle flow. V only hoped it was the fore as he fought the skeleton of his catch for meat.

"Do you ever get homesick, V?"

"Not particularly."

9S' gaze unmistakably focused on the bracelet clasped around V's wrist. "...Did you used to?"

V stopped chewing.

9S had been very honest about how much he saw of V and Fern's time together while he was trapped in her mind. The bracelet's origin and importance were not mysteries to him. Perhaps that was why the question was low and careful, seeking permission to be asked almost as much as it sought an answer.

"Yes." He relinquished the remains of the fish and all its bothersome bones to Shadow. "I used to."

Without a word, 9S scooted closer to sit at his usual polite distance. Above, the sun was as bright as ever between vast, cottony piles of clouds, but the shadows had grown a few inches longer, and the shafts of light dropping through the trees a few degrees steeper. The same endless sunshine, frozen in a slightly different place relative to the still Earth.

V held out his arm.

9S shied away, his tone sulky and defensive. "I wasn't gonna ask."

V shot him a witheringly unconvinced aside glance and tugged his sleeve back. "Then I have spared you the effort. You should accept, before I think better of it."

For once, 9S looked with his eyes alone. Examining the ornate arrangement of crescent and butterfly and gemstone on the face. The silver embellishments to the band that resembled curving bones and claws. When looking no longer satisfied him he did use his hands, but only to tilt V's forearm to his liking. Tactile as he'd been with examining V's hands, he ventured no more than the gentlest prod at the bangle's horn-like protrusions.

"When the fire happened," he said carefully. "It burned everything, didn't it. Not just her."

V gave a wry smile and sank his chin down on his other hand. He'd seen such stark visions of that day so many times in the grip of his maso fever. There was no point in 9S being so vague. But he didn't know that, and V wasn't in any hurry to make the spoken details finer than they needed to be.

"It did."

"How old were you?"

"…Eight."

9S' eyes unfocused. It was unlikely that he had any frame of reference for what it meant to be an eight-year-old, but he tried. With everything he had, he tried. And perhaps he came close because V had to rap his fingers with the cane where his grip had turned rigid and vise-tight around V's arm.

"Sorry," he blurted, and yanked his hands back, close to his stomach. Despite the red imprint left behind in V's skin, he noted 9S' hands still didn't shake. Given the truth, his programming no longer plagued him. "That's so—so young."

V said nothing. There was nothing to say.

"How did you survive?"

"With my sword and strength." And those were very different memories. Ones that he had not had the opportunity to linger on. "In a sea of red."

"On white streets," 9S completed. "I lose my faith."

The shadow of a cloud raced over the water, covered them, and passed on its way. V waited, but the question he was expecting did not come. 9S was watching the river with a sentimental smile.

"2B told me that some things are hard to talk about for old soldiers. If it's just a bunch of bad memories, I don't need to know. Like I said, I never expected you to tell me everything."

It wasn't an inaccurate comparison. Warrior, soldier—semantics, really. 9S was correct, both in that he did not need to know, and that it was a bunch of bad memories. It would suit V fine to not think of them at all. And yet his mind was suddenly occupied with old things and old places and nostalgia that didn't suit him. Gone years full of gone joys. Just like the rediscovered memories of his mother, he thought they might be better treasured than discarded. Even if they did all end in ash and blood.

"It would seem that speaking of homesickness is like speaking of the devil." 9S tilted his head, and V smirked. "Say its name, and it appears."

"Then you are homesick?"

"Apparently. Even I have known my share of happy hours. I could spare you the task of asking again, if you are curious."

"I am." 9S' eyes brightened. In anyone else, that immediate eagerness would have cast an insincere light on the previous moment's consideration. For him, it was natural. "If you're offering."

V glanced down where his sleeve was still tugged back and the silver bangle curved around his wrist. A faint, amused hum left him.

"I suppose I am."