Part Five

It was some hours ago. Not the usual 27 or even 49.5. The gate had been activated and Colonel Sheppard's team was just now returning from P3X-463. The Colonel, Ronon and Teyla ignored her as they walked past, for Miko meant nothing to them as she hurried to the gateroom.

Sunlight streaming in through the beautiful windows illuminated the Doctor as he busied himself on the steps. He surely was the real one and he would know her and talk to her and thank her for what she'd done. He would write his report and insist her chip be removed so she wouldn't see herself killing him anymore.

"Doctor McKay," she said, fully expecting to have to say only that.

"Miko," he responded, not looking up. He fussed with his pack, his laptop, as if he hadn't a moment to waste with her.

She remained quiet, respectfully waiting for him to finish his important task. Then she would tell him about the twelfth one who had survived, who, surprisingly, was still present after time re-looped itself. Miko had glimpsed him lying in his infirmary bed, still unconscious but extubated, before she started for the gateroom.

Finishing with his pack, Doctor McKay rose and began walking away. This was a momentous day, so of course he was preoccupied.

"Doctor, please wait."

"What? Why?" He was almost looking at her, almost seeing her.

"You have returned. I am happy that you are back."

"Thanks." He shifted his feet, rushing her the way he always did. "Anything else?"

"I presume you will want to report to Dr. Weir right away to tell her what has happened."

The Doctor looked around the gateroom, seemingly trying to pull the appropriate words from the air. Miko thought that she might be annoying him, trying to tell him his job, but the matter of the chip had reached the screaming point in her mind and she could wait no longer to mention it.

"You must remove it right away." This she needed more than anything.

He looked confused for a moment, then waved a dismissive hand. "I'll do it in a little while."

He started away again but she blocked his path, extraordinarily bold for her, a measure of her desperation.

"No. You must do it now."

He offered an angry chuckle, as if she were a dog pestering him for kitchen scraps.

"Just run along, Miko! I'll come and get you when I'm done and we'll discuss it then."

"We have nothing to discuss. Take it out right now. I can't stand to have it in for another minute."

McKay stepped around her and continued to walk, picking up the pace. Miko watched his back for a few moments. The thin partition between love and hate and necessity and choice came down then.

He had forgotten about her, about what she had done for him and about the horrendous gift that he had shoved under her skin. She felt hot from anger, from grief, and ran up ahead to face him.

"You don't know what I'm talking about, do you?"

The Doctor said, "I'm tired from this last mission. It must have slipped my mind."

Miko believed him for a moment because he looked away from her, typically distracted and too busy to listen to anything she said, just like every other day.

"There is important news, Doctor. One did not die. The last one that came through survived."

"He's still alive?"

"Yes, in the infirmary, but very sick…"

This time he looked directly at her, and through his large, clear eyes Miko saw that it wasn't her Doctor after all.

She tapped her headset. "I need Security…"

The Doctor—the copy. How had this happened?—grabbed her thin arm and pulled her to him. He held her very close, his shadow eclipsing her small frame. Squeezing her wrist tight enough to make her hand puff up and turn purple, he leaned in close to her ear. "Come along."

Miko's headset thrummed with Major Lorne's queries. "Whoever requested Security, please respond. What is your location?" The Doctor's double reached up and pulled the unit from her ear. He was not a particularly strong man, but his small co-worker was easily bested by him.

She knew where they were going, what he was going to do there. She twisted her body, kicked and screamed and tried to scratch him. But the imposter pushed her against a wall and pressed his hand to her throat until her larynx ached from the pressure. His face came very close to hers. Miko found herself blushing and embarrassed for that.

"Don't try anything," he whispered. Then he dragged her away from the wall and pushed her to continue. "McKay hasn't happened, yet, so if I can get rid of him within a time flux no one will notice."

Throughout all of this, the copy brought up his hand and quickly rubbed his upper arm, where a memory chip would be if he had one. Each motion to his arm cleared the hallway of any people walking there, watching them. It backed up the sunlight streaming through windows, but for Miko and the not-Doctor with her there, nothing changed for them, for what they knew and for what he was doing to her.

"How are you remembering?" he demanded. "Did he give you a chip? Huh, Miko?" He stopped and shook her, making her hair fly around and fall into her face. With a cool, pale hand, he smoothed her hair back, which made her want to cry for all of the things that she had needed but had never received.

His harsh tones softened. "You wouldn't remember if Sheppard had killed him because by now time would have re-set and the memories of it would be gone."

With more gentleness than she thought he would give her, the Doctor unbuttoned Miko's pristine white lab coat and slid it down off her arms. She trembled as he touched her, even when he grasped her left arm and looked at the lump under the skin, pushed with his thumb at the thing buried there. The skin had healed nicely during the past month, but she flinched when he pressed down.

"Clever," said the Doctor. He looked at her face, at the streams of tears sweeping down her cheeks. "I can see why he chose you."

They continued through the hall. There was the Colonel. The Doctor rubbed his arm and the hallway re-set. No Colonel. There were Sgt. Ruiz from Los Angeles and Dr. Suri Veerippan from New Delhi, both in shorts and t-shirts, fresh from a long run. Re-set and they were gone. Re-set, re-set, re-set, with the sun in a holding pattern, its movement strangled by a caress to his arm.

At last the infirmary entrance came into view. A few caresses later and there was the Doctor, her Doctor, the one who had somehow survived what eleven others had not.

McKay lay sleeping, helpless in a small private room off the main ward. Although she didn't think it possible after all that McKay had made her do, Miko felt sorry for him. The twelfth copy pulled her over to the Doctor's bedside. He stood with his thoughts for a few moments, remembering to re-set when people approached. He reached out and touched his progenitor's arm, looking for and finding the memory chip within.

"I was right—again. He stole a chip for himself. No wonder he's still here." Turning to Miko, he looked at her appraisingly and said, "I can only imagine what he's put you through."

The twelfth McKay then strode to a nearby linen cart and removed a pillow from it. This he handed to Miko. She felt the stiff, scratchy covering under her fingers, the light squishiness of the pillow itself. This was so different from the weight of the pistol, the hard handle and the smooth trigger that she had stroked with her fingertip so often lately.

The McKay standing beside her gestured towards the sleeping man. "Go ahead. You want this as much as I do." Re-set. "Do it." Re-set. "I really don't have all day." Re-set.

She held up the pillow so that its shadow fell over the Doctor's sleeping form, over his slack face. Re-set, re-set.

"Do it and we can move on," the perfect copy said, his breath tickling her ear. "I will give you what you want, what you need. That's a promise." He placed his hand on her back, which made her shiver. "Once he is gone, we will be the only ones who know any of this. Together we will keep our secret." And he rubbed her back harder, moving his palm in a sensuous pattern that made her feel flushed and hungry and pathetically weak. As he spoke, he re-set, re-set to take away the memories of anyone watching them.

Miko leaned so close to the Doctor that she could see his eyelashes twitching as he reclaimed a tiny fragment of awareness, close enough to see his eyes open to paper-thin slits, dilated but still showing the blue that made them transparent enough to spy within.

The other McKay grew impatient as he busied himself with re-setting and re-setting. The nurse who came out of the supply room and noticed them at the Doctor's bedside, came out again and again, always having just enough time to register the strangeness of one McKay in the bed and another McKay standing up over him. Then she was re-set back a half-minute or a minute or two.

"Miko, I'm counting on you. I can't re-set time and suffocate someone simultaneously."

Everything was backing up and backing up and Miko remembered everything, the eleven that she had killed, the twelfth that survived and all of the people who came to the cage to ask her why and how could she do this and did she know of their pain. There was Dr. Zelenka and then Dr. Weir and Ronon and Teyla, and she saw the Colonel, his handsome features made ferocious with outrage, strangling her until she died. On the bed lay the person who had made all of this happen to her. The chip ached inside her arm.

"If I do this, you will keep it there forever," she said.

McKay's copy was busy with another re-set. He didn't notice that she had spoken, just like always in the lab, just like every other day.

Miko threw the pillow aside and looked up at the copy's familiar face, so beautiful even now. He watched the pillow fly through the air and land on the floor some distance away.

"Miko—" he warned.

She said, "I have to do this."

He gave her that look, that patronizing, distracted look that she had seen eleven times already, so different from the frightened recognition of the real one.

"Do what? What the hell are you talking about?"

"I need to," she said, blinking to clear the tears enough so that it could happen, so that she could rest. Her hands crept around his waist and then up his sides and over his chest and his neck, until she cupped his face. He said nothing but placed his hands on her hips, holding her close that way. Her thumbs grazed his high forehead and she pushed back several unruly hairs at his crown. His blue eyes watched her, stared into her dark-brown ones, which hid everything from him. Then she let one hand slide down his side, feeling a little softness around his middle, which thinned out at the hip. She felt the hard protrusion at the widest point of his pelvis, the iliac crest, just under the webbing of his belt.

"I love you," she said, without shame.

His breath hitched in surprise, as her hand traveled down along the side of his leg, meeting the leather holster and deftly prying up the snap.

With the same skill that she had used for forty days, when she had killed and killed and watched the grief play out for 49.5 hours and 49.5 hours, she pulled McKay's 9mm from the thigh holster where he kept it, shoved it into his chest and fired.

He fell to the floor, and Miko Kusanagi allowed herself to go with him. They were so close, embracing, his last breaths on her face, his blood bubbling out over the hand that still held the gun against his body. His arms relaxed their grip around her, then fell away, lifeless. In her daydreams, Miko had wondered what it would feel like to lie with Doctor McKay. She never thought it would happen like this.

Kusanagi slid the bloody gun across the floor, leaned over and pushed at the chip in the slain doctor's arm. Re-set for time, re-set to end this. Then she scampered up and rifled through a nearby cabinet. In the top drawer lay a scalpel, wrapped in a sterile slip. She ripped off the wrapper, slid the blade into the sleeve of the doctor's jacket and drew down until all of the layers of clothing over the site of the implant had been cut away. Then, grimacing, for she was not fond of medicine or things that bleed, Miko plunged the tip of the scalpel into his skin and pried out the memory chip. It was covered with blood and small pieces of tissue. That didn't matter because the important thing was to make certain that no one ever pulled back time again, that the pain and the horror resumed their natural course from this moment on. Miko laid the chip on the floor and crushed it beneath her boot.

There would be no more re-sets.

The nurse exiting the storage closet saw the dead person on the floor and Miko crouching beside him. Miko felt relieved that this time someone else was screaming.

Dr. Beckett and several others ran into the room and stared in disbelief, for Doctor McKay lay dead on the floor and in the bed lay another McKay, straining behind an oxygen mask, suffering from a serious injury. Dr. Miko Kusanagi sat between the two McKays rubbing blood off her hands with a Sani-Cloth. She knew that this looked very bad indeed. If both McKays died, she would never be able to explain herself.

In the seconds before Security overwhelmed her, Miko saw Dr. Beckett race to McKay's bedside, while another assessed the Doctor on the floor.

"He's dead," the other doctor said.

Beckett placed his stethoscope against the bedridden Doctor's chest.

"Possible PE," he said.

Major Lorne's rough hands pressed against Miko's sore arm as he lead her away, his eyes bouncing from one McKay to the other. One man was dead, one appeared to be dying. If she could, Miko would have re-set once again, just long enough to grab the gun and put a 9mm bullet in her head. That's what she wanted, right then: To pull the trigger one last time.

…..

Forty-nine point five hours passed more slowly than ever before. Kusanagi sat in the Wraith cage, her knees pulled up under her chin, her hands folded primly down around her ankles. Her tailbone was getting sore, so she did not rock this time. She heard her wristwatch ticking in the silent room. The cell door opened. Dr. Beckett came in looking tired but, just like the day before, without bruises on his face or rips in his uniform. The force shield was turned off and the doctor entered the cage.

"How are you feeling, lass?"

She nodded.

"I'll just get your vital signs. Do you need anything? Food, perhaps? I know you haven't eaten."

Miko shook her head. The anguish had been wrung out of her until she was dry.

He handed her some bottled water, which she accepted. "It won't be long now. You'll be out of here soon, so don't worry. Procedure. Paper work, you understand."

She looked at Beckett and tilted her head. It was almost 49.5 hours, but he wouldn't know that. In a flash, she understood.

"The Doctor is alive?"

"Yes, thankfully. He came to a couple of hours ago and told us everything."

"He is the real one?"

"Aye, that he is. The Toruvians are not the greatest geneticists in the galaxy. There are several inconsistencies between the real Rodney and the copy." He placed his hand on her shoulder. "It's over."

…..

Dr. Weir and the Colonel came to the Wraith cage within a day of Beckett's visit and brought Miko out of it. Their wary expressions did little to calm the nervous young woman as they walked her to the infirmary. Miko feared the Colonel, but he was being nice to her and he even smiled a little when she looked at him. They passed her quarters. There wasn't time now, but Miko wanted to go in and look at the family photos that she kept in a binder, and wear something light and loose against her skin.

But first she had to do this one thing.

The Doctor lay in a special room that Beckett had made up for him. He was struggling but alive, bleary with morphine but looking straight at her as she stood in the doorway. He had looked at her this way only one time before, the night he had put the chip in her arm. McKay moved his hand, beckoning Kusanagi to come to him. She hesitated, so needing to forget right now that it took all she had to keep from whimpering.

"Please," he breathed. And she approached and stood by him.

Dr. Beckett sat her on the mattress, next to McKay's legs. The physician took up a thin-needled syringe, poked it into a bottle of Lidocaine and drew out a couple of cc's of the anesthetic. This he injected into Miko's arm where the memory chip was buried. Miko didn't say anything as Doctor McKay looped one of his fingers around her thumb. His eyes kept closing and then opening sleepily. His finger tightened and relaxed along with his eyes.

Dr. Weir and Colonel Sheppard stood nearby. Miko blushed to think that they might be watching this touching, which, even though light and careful and small, felt bigger than almost anything to her now.

Once Miko's arm was numb enough, Beckett picked up a scalpel, made a slit in her skin and removed the memory chip with a tweezers. He looked at it with interest.

"This little bugger's an amazing piece of technology."

"What is?"

She found herself in the infirmary, sitting on the edge of a bed occupied by the Doctor. He looked gravely injured and deathly pale, with bandages on his chest and an oxygen mask on his face. The Doctor. Her Doctor McKay. Shocked, she stood.

"What has happened to the Doctor?" she asked Beckett. As if frightened of her, Elizabeth stepped back, as Sheppard stepped forward and placed a hand near his firearm.

"Take a moment to get your breath, Miko," Beckett said, reaching for her.

Miko stepped away from him. "Please tell me why I am here."

…..

"Good morning, Miko. How are you today?"

Dr. Kusanagi was hard at work when Zelenka entered the lab. She started at the sound of his voice. Her calculator slipped from her hand and clattered to the floor.

"I am fine," she replied, trying to sound sincere. "And you?"

"I am well, thank you." Her good friend poured himself a cup of coffee, tasted it, winced and muttered something in Czech while reaching for the sugar. "I have just seen Rodney. Today he will be released from the infirmary."

"I hope that he will not be sent off world again." As she bent to retrieve her calculator, Miko noticed Dr. Zelenka watching her intently. He had been doing that a lot, lately. Two nights ago, Miko dreamed that she and Zelenka were downstairs in the Wraith cage. He was asking her questions in his native tongue; she was saying, "I don't know," in hers.

Two weeks had passed since that strange moment when Miko realized that she was in the infirmary seated on the edge of the Doctor's bed. Dr. Beckett explained to Miko that she had been in the gateroom when McKay was brought through, barely alive, shot in the chest while on an off-world mission. The shock of seeing him like this had sent her crashing to the floor in a dead faint. She came to unable to recall what had happened, a form of retrograde amnesia, Dr. Beckett had said, caused by the trauma of seeing her respected colleague's terrible injury.

News of the Doctor's wounding had produced a tidal wave of reaction among the city's population. Miko had tried to console her friends, the Doctor's teammates, but they behaved strangely towards her and she gave up trying to help them.

Then Miko realized to her horror that everyone knew. The Doctor knew, as did all of her colleagues, Dr. Zelenka and the rest. She worried that Doctor McKay would get rid of her rather than have to work in the lab every day with a lovesick puppy. She worried that all of Atlantis thought her silly and schoolgirlish, that the only reason she had not been returned to Earth was because she possessed the gene and was useful in this way only and no other.

Pushing her hair behind her ears, Miko reseated herself and continued her work.

Dr. Biales arrived. Dr. Ketrovna, tall and gangly but very nice, loped in some time later. The scientists worked together quietly, one occasionally joking with another or asking a question. For two weeks no one had yelled or thrown insults or snapped their fingers sharply and said, "Come here." Biales had remarked several times on how much more focused he felt without Dr. McKay's typical outbursts breaking his concentration.

Miko thought that Dr. Bialis didn't like Dr. McKay very much. And Dr. Bialis seemed downright scared of her.

…..

Before the Doctor regained full consciousness, Miko visited with him every day. On a couple of occasions, when there was no chance that he would awaken and after assuring herself that they were unobserved, Kusanagi had slipped her hand into the Doctor's and stroked her thumb over his slack fingers.

Her visits were brief. Usually someone else was there, the Colonel, or Ronon and Teyla. Many people came to see the Doctor. They held his hand without embarrassment, even when he was awake. They stroked his high forehead and offered him sips of water and spoons full of jell-o. Once Miko saw Teyla kiss him on the cheek. He had smiled awkwardly and blushed.

When the Doctor became fully awake, Miko did not visit with him again.

In the late afternoon on the two-week anniversary of his shooting, the Doctor arrived in the lab with Ronon Dex, of all people, pushing him in a wheelchair. The huge Satedan stood head, shoulders and chest above Miko Kusanagi, who thought herself small even when standing beside Radek Zelenka. The Doctor, still under the influence of painkillers, surveyed the room while Ronon and Dr. Zelenka talked quietly in the hallway. Drs. Bialis and Ketrovna showed Doctor McKay what they had been working on. The Doctor nodded and flicked his eyes towards Miko, who tried hard to look busy.

After giving Dr. Bialis a brief instruction, McKay turned to Miko and said, "I can't work this chair, Dr. Kusanagi." He showed her how difficult it was for him to bring his hands to the wheels and push them, what with his chest injury and the stitches there pulling with every exertion. "Come here and discuss what you've been doing for the past two weeks."

She came and stood beside the chair, rifling through a few sheets of data. While looking down at McKay for a moment, she saw him shot, bleeding, lying on the gateroom floor, gasping. She smelled the sharp stink of burned gunpowder and felt the weight of a pistol in her hand, heard explosions and the sound of slugs hitting a paper target, thudding into his chest and snapping bone as a bullet tore through his skull. She saw Colonel Sheppard's reddened face as he murdered her and heard someone say, "Make sure she's dead." The data sheets flew from her hands as she covered her face to hide from the sounds and pictures in her mind.

When her hands came down, the Doctor was gone, taken away by Ronon Dex. Zelenka and the others did not stand beside her or ask her what was wrong. They waited silently near the doorway until she collected herself and then muttered some quiet words of concern.

"Perhaps I should see Dr. Beckett," she mumbled, preoccupied and seeing over and over the horrible images that played out before her. Zelenka nodded, looking relieved that she was leaving.

Dr. Beckett gazed at the floor as she described the frightening visions. He placed a blood pressure cuff on her arm and pumped it full of air. She watched him intently. Something else happened, then. She saw him, saw them, together, downstairs in the Wraith cage, and he was doing there exactly what he was doing right now.

"Your heart suddenly started racing, my dear," he said, removing the cuff and placing his right middle finger over the radial artery on her wrist. This made her heart literally pound in her chest. Her breaths came faster, with so many heartbeats and not enough oxygen to keep up with them.

"Come, now. Lie down." She let him help her with this, and she lay there unhappy and frightened. Her eyes welled with tears. "I'll give you a sedative. Rest awhile, then we'll talk." He didn't question her about recent illnesses or other problems. He didn't ask about the amnesia or how the Doctor's visit to the lab had gone, as if he didn't need to.

…..

The sedative that Dr. Beckett gave Miko worked like a charm. She was left alone on the cot, where she slept peacefully until raised voices and the tromping of boots on the infirmary floor broke her dreamless slumber.

"I told ye that handing her load of crap wouldn't work! Nothin' can stop this and we're goin' to have to…" and someone closed Beckett's office door. Miko couldn't hear what was being said after that, but looking over at the glass-enclosed room, she saw the physician speaking animatedly with Dr. Weir, the Colonel, Dr. McKay and Ronon Dex, who was apparently still on wheelchair detail. The conversation lasted a long time, with even the large Runner contributing. Everyone seemed quite passionate in what they said and there was a lot of arm waving and forehead rubbing, the latter mostly on Dr. McKay's part, since he was still too sore to raise his arms above waist level, let alone wave them around.

At last, the Doctor hung his head. The group looked at him sadly, as if he were burdened with a great woe. They reached out to him, and Elizabeth crouched next to the wheelchair and placed her hand on his arm. She said something, her large grey eyes compassionate and worried. He nodded and raised his head gamely.

Dr. Miko Kusanagi didn't think it necessary to hide the fact that she had been awake from her nap for a long time, observing the others. When Ronon opened the office door, he looked out across the silent infirmary and smiled at her in his small way. She smiled back uncertainly. The group approached her bed, where Miko sat up with her legs crossed and tucked up under her. The Colonel sat down at the end of the mattress. Elizabeth and Dr. Beckett stood at bedside, while the Doctor, her Doctor, was wheeled up close by Ronon Dex.

Dr. Weir began. "We have tried to keep the truth from people in the past," she said. "It usually..."

"Always," the Colonel interrupted.

Dr. Weir refocused herself. "It always fails."

Miko nodded, although she didn't understand at all.

"There is something that we have to tell you. About what happened to Dr. McKay."

She nodded again, suddenly feeling so small, so tiny in this high bed, with all of these large people around her, weighing her down with their presence.

"About the Doctor?" she asked, trying to make her voice big, fully present, not like a girl crushing on one of her tutors.

"You're starting to remember, lass, and as much as we'd like prevent that, it's going to happen anyway no matter."

"I want to go back to the lab," she said, trying to get up. "Just let me do my work."

A hand caught hers and she saw that the Doctor was holding her fast even though it pulled his chest and irritated the healing incision there. He looked her right in the eye, and the memory of a similar moment showed its thin edge, a one-dimensional representation of itself.

"Sit," the Doctor said, asking. "No one blames you for anything, Miko." He let go of her hand, which made his presence less embarrassing. She leaned back against the gentle rise at the head of the bed. Dr. Beckett brought it up a little more and arranged her pillow so that it was just right.

Doctor McKay spoke for a long time. Miko unconsciously brought her hands up to her chest, remembering the times that she had shot him there and how the frothy pink sputum that had bubbled over his lips.

She remembered more than the Doctor, because he had not been in Atlantis all twelve times. She remembered more than the Colonel, his battles with Dr. Beckett and especially the day that he had strangled her. Dr. Weir knew nothing of standing outside the Wraith cage, letting her tears fall onto the floor. Ronon couldn't recall the times that he and Teyla and the Colonel had stayed in McKay's room, praying their various prayers, staring at the Doctor's diplomas hung on the walls.

Miko remembered all of it for everyone, even if she didn't tell them so.

The Doctor told her about the dodecahedron, the 12-sided polyhedron where he had lived when there were a dozen copies of himself, about what the twelfth had discussed with him and about the memory chip still buried in his arm.

He didn't tell her why she had been his chosen one. So many people had come to her wanting to know why. Even when she'd told them the truth, no one had believed her. So she didn't ask Doctor McKay, in case the truth was unbelievable or painful or so embarrassing that she would have to return to Earth and never see him again.

"Ultimately, I didn't have a choice," the Doctor said. "The twelfth copy said he'd come through the gate and kill Ronon and the Colonel to prevent them from killing him. Then he told me that he'd changed his mind and would rather stay behind and work to help his people. Which meant sending me in his place."

McKay paused then. Ronon looked protectively over the physicist's shoulder, checking his welfare. The Doctor shifted in the chair and continued. "In the end he double-crossed me. I'm actually a little impressed. Didn't know I had it in me. He was seriously flawed, though. Absolutely no conscience. A perfect copy in every way except for that. At least, I hope his ruthlessness would be considered an exception.

"My one mistake was assuming you were slower on the draw, Miko. I reminded myself first to implant the chip, and your involvement was not given a high enough priority." His eyes darted towards her face, and then focused somewhere else. "You did a…good job. Thanks for trusting me. I know how much you want to forget everything that happened, but your memories are returning. I'm sorry."

Doctor McKay looked pale and thinner than she remembered. He had suffered through all of this, in his own way more than she had. One day they might be able to talk to each other about what had happened, to share their experiences as friends who liked and supported each other. Perhaps one day she would be as close to him as someone who went with him on missions through the stargate.

Miko closed her eyes. She imagined a garnet, a blood-red, 12-sided gemstone that symbolizes never-ending love and devotion. She turned the vision of her Doctor and the dozen times she killed him into a blood-red stone, which she held tight and tighter, squeezing the suffering out of it until there were only her memories and her never-ending love left inside. The imaginary stone was then placed under her skin, in her arm where the chip used to be. This she would carry with her forever.

FIN