Alright, here's the last chapter of the first installment of Recovery! Although, really, this is more of an afterward for our "prequel" story. I'll try to update regularly, but real life does call, as I'm sure you all know. Next up is a new fic, the second installment, so do keep an eye out.

Rockman and all associated characters/property belong to Capcom. We're not making any money off this, unfortunately.

Warm. There was light on his skin, even ultra-violet light, which he felt rarely. Even when he broke free, they'd still needed to hide away indoors, away from the sun and natural light.

The vitamin D his skin cells produced added to the feeling of animal contentment, the knowledge that all was well.

Soft breathing all around, as though all he would have to do to feel another was reach out. Or roll to the side, so he did that, and rested his head on what might be someone's shoulder when he was greeted with a small, "Mmp," and the contact was permitted, even curled into.

Safe, warm, full, unhurt... It was like a dream.

Mind still dim, he reached out for Quick, because only he would have cut a skylight into the younglings' room, of all things... Yes, he understood wanting natural light, but... Automatically, as his mind and nanite functions booted up, he reached out for the other five as well.

A leg kicked the blanket off his body, so he could enjoy more of that light. It was a rare delicacy in his experience: he pitied the humans who had to hide away from it. Without nanites, the light they needed to create a chemical they needed to be happy and healthy would attack their DNA, slowly damaging their skin and perhaps even killing them.

Such weak things... they died so easily, even when Elec's attack had only been meant to scare them off. He'd looked up the proper voltage for electric fences after that... Was he still so upset about it?

The comfy person beside him shifted beneath his own blanket, curled to his side. He hadn't detected the sunlight yet; his body was covered by the blanket, his head almost completely obscured from sight. He scooted closer and reached out as well, looking for the others. It was warm here, very warm. Had they turned the heat lamps up again? He should check the door, the hall was always such a mess if he didn't watch it. But it was comfy here, and they were all sleeping, so comfy…

Wait.

Wait.

Ice's eyes snapped open, wide and surprised. Realizing that he was back in Light Laboratories wasn't what alarmed him (though that merited its own concern, which he would address momentarily), but what was this in his logs? He sat up, abruptly, holding a hand to his head, eyes unfocused as his mind's eye was fully engaged. A deviated personality? It was true: about half of his memories were missing…oh, no, they were in a separate folder. What was this? He…what had he done to himself? Someone had put him back together, with great care, and he was grateful that whoever it was hadn't outright deleted the second personality. That wasn't an imaginary friend; that was half of his mind.

His systems registered the sunlight and he jerked from his daze, blinking, and looked around. As shaky as his new findings were, it was more imperative to assess his physical situation. He looked down and around…they were all laid out, beside one another. There was a skylight above them; the source of the sunlight. He blinked up at it, then around and back down. Cut's movements were what drove him from his status, was he awake too? He placed a hand on his brother's shoulder.

"Mmph, Quick, put the roof back..." Cut said, and rolled over.

Ice blinked and shifted, almost having to get to his knees to reach back to Cut. He was very small compared to the others. "Cut!" He shook Cut's shoulder slightly.

"Yes, I know the light is nice, but..." When that trailed off in mumbling, Ice felt Cut try to reach out to someone. One of his children?

He felt his brother's shock and worry as Cut authorized the adrenaline production to wake him up fast. Where was his child?

...Where was he?

Ice bit back the instinct to quell Cut's anxiety with his own nanites and instead let Cut wake up naturally, much like he had. Ice glanced back and around at the others. They were all still, all asleep. A quick probe of the room indicated that for the moment, they were unattended.

Unattended, in a room with a large skylight. They could break out through it, the question was how far they would get.

The other four were here, but neither of the two second-eldest... Roll, that was who had fixed his mind.

None of the children were here.

He couldn't feel the children.

Panic blossomed inside of him as he scooted to his other side, to the brother on that side: Elec. He could see Bomb on the other side of him. He gripped Elec's shoulder and shook him a bit harder than he meant to. It was hard for him to focus, he was still trying to go through his own logs, figure out what he'd done to himself. Had he hurt his children? Where were they? Even if they weren't beside them, he should still be able to hear them, feel them.

Elec's noise was more one of annoyed confusion. None of his children had gotten as far as words, although they had gotten to the point of randomly tackling him and trying to get daddy to pay attention to them when he was trying to work on keeping them all safe. It wasn't a focused message, but his broadcast state, or aura, was along the lines of, 'Knock it off!'

Ice responded immediately with an aura of his own, since physical contact wasn't working. He pressed panic into it, laced it with his own identity (and hoped they'd recognize him now that he was whole) and pressed to Elec to, 'Get up!'

"What... Ice?" Elec stared up at him, once his eyes opened.

Ice tried to ignore the fact that this was probably the first time any of them had spoken to him while he was lucid (Why was that thought alone making him sick?). "Elec, I can't find any of the children." Oh, and they were in Light's labs again. But that was more like an afterthought. They needed everyone to get up. They needed to find the children.

Elec look at him, and Cut, then at Guts, who still slept. "It might just be that there's interference." He was the one who had set up how they'd stay in touch with each other over such distances. "Guts got his children out even before Dr. Light sent the second eldest..." He nudged him with his foot, hitting Bomb and Fire as well with, "Wake up, it's important." He asked Ice and Cut, "What did I miss?" He was the first to fall: if all the others were here, that answered that question, but they all knew more about the situation than he did, since they'd lasted longer.

Ice hesitated and glanced back at Cut, even as Fire stirred and Bomb groaned. "I just woke up, too," Interference…he could cope with that. So long as they were okay. His own memories were so choppy, and he couldn't trust them, not until he finished going over what changes were made to him.

"Same here," Cut agreed. "And he came for me second, Elec." So he didn't know much more than Elec did. "The news claimed that when they opened up the morgue, your children were gone."

"That was the story for each of us, and for my children as well, I imagine." Fire's voice cut in. He'd woken up readily, though Bomb still languished under his blanket. "The hospitals didn't report us properly to Dr. Light. Now they will begin slinging blame and pointing fingers." He didn't feel bad for what they'd done. He flexed his wrist, inspecting that it healed fully. "I was the last."

"The second eldest?" Ice wondered. "Roll worked on my mind," so he knew she'd survived. "He captured all of us?" Intact? Or at least fixable?

"He did." Fire stretched his legs experimentally. On the other side of him, Bomb sat up, dazed. They'd all needed a lot of work done to bring them up to a healthy state. There'd been six of them, yet they'd all fallen. Why had Dr. Light even allowed them to reawaken? Fire looked up, toward the skylight, reaching out to scan the room and their surroundings. Figure out the building's weak points in case they did try to make a break for it.

The room was white, bright and clean. The six of them were resting on a couple large futons pushed together, piled with more of the necessary amount of pillows and blankets in cheerful colors with much more personality than anything that belonged in a hospital, at least in their experiences. Children's wards were different: they'd all borrowed things from them for their children. There were also pitchers and stacks of paper cups on the top of a low cupboard near the door.

Ice eased up on trying to reach his children, though he still did try periodically. He hoped that they were safe and warm, wherever they were. All of them were looking around owlishly, still sleep-hazed and not quite believing that they were actually together, awake. Bomb flopped back down onto his back, seeming almost petulant, but they could feel that he was scanning the area as actively as the rest of them. He saw no reason not to enjoy the sunlight while doing so.

It wasnice... Someone else could see if the door was locked. At least they didn't have to worry about being drugged, not anymore. Even if they just sat back and waited, someone would be along to check on them.

It was Fire that finally got up. Now that none of them were wearing armor, they looked no different from any of the humans. He tested his limbs, stretching experimentally before heading over to the door. He paused by the pitchers, sending nanites to examine their contents. Ice water, as expected, but there was orange juice and lemonade here, too. It was freshly made. The ice was still floating in the pitcher, too; these hadn't been put out very long ago. They were expecting them to awaken, so that might make this easier. He broadcast the pitchers' contents back to the others before turning and trying the door.

"Roll?" Ice wondered. She was Dr. Light's servant, and would a human have taken care like that? Fresh-squeezed, not the fake or from concentrate stuff.

Like the blankets. Nice things, not just the minimum. Putting them together like this.

The doorknob gave way to Fire easily and he gently opened the door. Judging from what they'd heard about the dynamic of the Light household, it wasn't unlikely that Roll was the one tasked to setting all of this up for them. It also explained the care taken, the consideration.

She was one of them, after all.

Roll sat primly in a chair with her eyes closed: she had gone back to work analyzing while waiting for them to wake up. They hadn't known how long it would take the others to wake up naturally, especially when they would probably go into REM state if they weren't forced awake, since after what happened they'd have a lot to deal with in their minds, too.

When the vigil started, Rock had sat there nervously, but when it was clear their brothers weren't going to wake up immediately he'd decided they had the right idea and curled up on the couch across from Roll: there was a coffee table between them, and a loveseat and more chairs around it. Both of them were alerted when their brother entered the room, but they didn't react immediately, in order to give him the choice of going back in the room without talking to them, if he wasn't ready yet, without being rude.

Them not responding right away actually alarmed Fire slightly and he probed them gently to see if they were okay. Rock spoke as though Light treated them like family, but if they weren't okay…his systems returned that without contact, he couldn't be sure, but they seemed fine.

It gave him déjà vu, to be the one standing here, the one in the position to invite them in. Just like he had to Rock when Oil was being insistent. Except this time, his child wasn't here. He wasn't sure how he felt about that.

When he did that instead of retreating, they opened their eyes, and he felt that they were the ones worried if he was okay: they hadn't wanted to scare him. Rock especially.

Fire lingered in the doorway for a moment longer before stepping fully into the room. He could feel worry from both sides; the brothers back in the room impacted him more acutely. Their link was more direct, more intimate. The twins…he did not know so well. Yet. He could feel their worry nonetheless and he automatically tried to quell it. He wasn't angry or even upset. They weren't to blame.

"Welcome," to my house, Roll said politely.

"I didn't fight Oil," Rock told him, knowing that was Fire would be most worried about. "Or Time." And he knew they'd have to call him if they found any of them, now that they were awake and could figure out to defend where they settled the way their fathers had. "No one's seen any of anyone's children."

Roll nodded. "I was given permission to monitor signals looking for them." She would have picked up the alarm and radio chatter of the kind of operation it would take, for the humans to think they had a chance at assaulting another hospital, or who knew what, turned fortress.

"With any luck, they won't be fool enough to draw attention to themselves." He wasn't going to help them look. As far as he was concerned, it was a good thing that the children weren't in contact. It was far too dangerous right now. He turned to Roll then, not forgetting his manners. "Thank you for keeping an eye out on it." If they were stupid enough to try anything, this way, perhaps it could be caught before it got out of hand. Before people were hurt, or worse.

Roll nodded, then frowned a little. "You didn't change the survival imperative, did you?" She'd figured out why Dr. Light was worried last night, and since then she'dbeen worried.

"Huh?" Rock looked at her, but she kept looking at Fire instead of turning to explain it to him. She didn't want him to have to worry, even for a second, if he didn't have to.

He actually bristled at that, clenching his fists as his entire posture became more rigid. He frowned at Roll. He could have gone into a rant, a lecture even, of how human a suspicion that was, but they could probably read it just fine with their nanites. "No." Ofcoursenot.

She held up her hands, telling him to calm down, she wasn't trying to insult him or anything. "I just wanted to make sure. This is Japan," where troops had killed themselves rather than surrender, "And they knew what happened to you. Dr. Light's been worried." That they'd killed themselves rather than fall into hishands.

"Roll?" Rock asked again.

"Never mind, Rock," she said, with an air of finality.

Dr. Light was worried? About all of them? That was a bit of a strange notion, but…"It's not something we need to be worried about. It's not even on the table." They wouldn't have brought new life into the world and set them up to self-destruct. The entire concept was just so…perverse.

"That is a relief, because even though you wouldn't have done it deliberately, it might have just happened in the process of adjusting something. I know you didn't make them the same way you yourselves were made." They wouldn't have given them any imperatives or limits meant to make them docile, for example.

Fire had scanned his children many times, to comfort them or to check their well-being. Their programming and imperatives were part of those scans; nothing like what Roll was suggesting was ever present. As stressed as he was to be separated from them, as terrible as not knowing how they were doing, whether they were well was, it was still better than them being here, trapped with their parents.

"That's good," she agreed, although she only knew that he was glad they were safe. Probably. For now. "So... That room is yours, I won't even go in to clean or bring more food without knocking and asking permission." They had better respect that supreme sacrifice.

"Um.." Ice's voice came out from the doorway. He stepped through, looking around almost nervously. Warily. He stepped forward and fell into line beside Fire. He looked to Roll for a long moment, then bowed deeply, as per Japanese etiquette. "I wanted to thank you. For helping me."

She opened her arms and got up, indicating that she wanted to go closer and hug him, but she didn't want to worry them, go threateningly close to the entrance to their den. She hoped they'd feel safe in there. "You're welcome." Hug?

Ice nodded and closed the distance between them himself. He wasn't afraid. Not of her, at least.

He was shorter than his sister even though she wasn't adult. All sorts of strange to pick a midget for a bioroid's body, especially when it meant less room in the chest cavity for organs to grow. His head fit under her chin when she hugged him. They all felt that Rock wanted to hug too, but he hadn't even gotten up yet, still nervous that he would worry them.

Ice didn't want Rock to feel sad—he remembered how upset Rock was when he realized what Ice had done to himself, even if it was to survive. He held an arm out to Rock, inviting him to join in.

Rock did.

The twins didn't look anything alike, in theory. Their bodies had come from different sides of the globe: Rock was Japanese and Roll was probably Swedish (runaways moved around, especially when their country of maybe-origin was so cold).

They still looked like family, somehow, with their arms around their brother.

Maybe it was that they were bioroids, that their nonhuman halves were kin.

All of them were family here.

That hadn't saved the Eldest, but... There wasn't any harm in staying here, for now. In seeing if safety was possible, if living with humans was possible. If the peace the second eldest had fought for could be, not recovered, because true peace and equality between human and bioroid had never existed, but created.