What does it mean to be real, especially when you know you're a character in an arcade game with a programmed backstory? Sergeant Calhoun has some time to think about it.

"Real isn't how you are made," said the Skin Horse. "It's a thing that happens to you."

Calhoun needed sleep.

Well, technically, none of the characters in Litwak's Arcade needed to sleep. But one of her game designers seemed to think that after a full day leading the charge against wave after wave of Cy-bugs, she and the other grunts would naturally want their rest. It was part of her programming to become exhausted; that was one of the reasons why she hadn't once ventured out of Hero's Duty in the first week they'd been plugged in. Oh, her men needed the R&R – deserved it, even – but she'd decided that if humanity's hope hung in the balance, at least one of them needed to stay behind in the game.

Of course, just because she needed sleep didn't mean she welcomed sleep. Not when the dreams came, and they came like clockwork. Brad's final moments alive, again and again – the moment when the Cy-bug touched down at the altar, Brad vainly trying to find some way to fight against it – the moment the thing leaned forward and drew him into its glowing, gaping maw, devouring him as efficiently as the hybrid insect machine it was – the moment when, even as she opened fire on the thing, she remembered what she always told rookies: "Watch out! They become whatever they eat" – and the bone-chilling horror of having to kill a creature that was at once her mortal enemy and her true love –

No, she didn't welcome sleep. But her programming told her she had to – so that she could experience the nightmares, so they could fill her again and again with fear, with self-loathing, with guilt over what she'd done to Brad, and above all with hatred for the Cy-bugs. It was one of the reasons why she didn't sleep in Hero's Duty any more if she could help it. Not long after the incident where Wreck-it got into her game and set the Cy-bug hatchling loose, she'd found it was possible to sleep in other games – and that sleeping somewhere else cut down on the nightmares. She and her men had started to take turns on the night shift.

And that gave her more time with Felix. He'd built them a little house in his own game, a short distance from the Nicelander apartment building, complete with the most luxuriously comfortable bed she'd ever slept in. Felix didn't really share her psychological need for sleep, but he was more than happy to nestle into her arms and rest with her – even though the first time she'd had a nightmare about wrestling with a Cy-bug, she'd instinctively clocked him before she was completely awake. She'd apologized profusely, but he'd just pulled out that golden hammer of his and *ping!*, good as new – and then he'd held her close and talked softly to her to calm her down, to make the fear leave her, until she could sleep again.

"Does it hurt?" asked the Rabbit.

"Sometimes," said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. "When you are Real you don't mind being hurt."

Her backstory got markedly fuzzier in the time before she met Brad – the game designers didn't take the time to flesh out much past her wireframe and the source of her pain – but one thing she remembered clearly: when she was a child, she had slept with a stuffed bear toy. It was an odd detail to remember. She couldn't remember her parents' names, where she'd grown up, even whether she'd had siblings, and yet she remembered holding that cussed bear through the night whenever she was afraid. No matter what happened, the bear would never judge her, never lie to her, never leave her, and its softness comforted her and calmed her fears.

Those same old feelings returned now, as she curled herself around her little husband. Well, not that they were exactly the same. Her bear had never been so strong for his size, so warm and gentle. Her bear had never held her and spoken soothing words to her when the nightmares came. Her bear had never touched her cheek to wipe the tears away. And her bear had never, never kissed her back. Felix was so tender, so protective of her, so... well, smitten, as though love had struck him on the head with its own magic hammer. The corners of her mouth twitched into a crooked smile.

"...once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand."

She hadn't expected the brainless grunts in her command to understand what drew her to Felix, and they didn't disappoint. Not long after Felix proposed, she'd caught two of her men off-duty at Tapper's, making crude jokes about her and her fiancé. One of them had just finished snickering, "Bet once Sarge goes 8-bit, she never goes back," when he met up with a roundhouse to the jaw.

"Get one thing through your thick skull, maggot," she'd growled at him from his new spot on the floor. "I would happily wipe the walls with you if I didn't think it was the root beer talking. But from here on out, you will NOT speak disrespectfully of your CO or her soon-to-be-husband again in a public place if you want to keep the rest of your teeth." She raised her head, staring daggers at the other soldier. "Fix-it may be half my height, but he's ten times the man any of you ladies will ever be. Am I clear?"

Word got around fast. After that incident, whenever Felix ventured into Hero's Duty the men treated him like a visiting four-star general. Of course, Felix didn't notice a thing. He only had eyes for her.

She was still trying to get used to that. She was well accustomed to other looks from her men – anger, hatred, lust, fear, respect – but none of them knocked her off balance quite like Felix and those big blue puppy-dog eyes of his. Not even Brad had ever looked at her that way. It was – it was as though when Felix looked at her, he saw pure happiness made visible, and it seemed to radiate back at him and bloom across his face – what was that corny thing he called it? Honeyglow? – and leave him with that sweet, goofy, endearing smile.

She wasn't used to making someone so happy.

It felt good.

It was a different kind of sensation than anything she was used to feeling. And it struck her that the reason why it was so different was because it was a real feeling. It wasn't part of a backstory that had been programmed into her by someone else – it was something she felt firsthand, and somehow that made all the difference. Her men still didn't understand what a complicated high-definition character with a tragic backstory could possibly see in a simple 8-bit hero like Felix. They were too inexperienced to see what Calhoun was starting to understand: that Felix had become far more than his original simplistic programming had intended him to be. He'd had thirty years of real experiences, of helping his neighbors, of watching the excitement of gamers as they played, of getting to know the Nicelanders and the other characters outside his game, of finally developing sympathy for Wreck-it – and, incidentally, of meeting her. Her skin might look more realistic than his, but in so many other ways, his life was far more real than hers.

"It doesn't happen all at once," said the Skin Horse. "You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept..."

That kind of experience would come in time, she supposed. She might be programmed to be cynical, but something about Felix's earnest optimism was starting to rub off on her. He was making her believe he could protect her – not that she'd ever needed protecting before, not from physical danger – but from the kind of wounds that cut where no amount of battle armor could help her. He could hold her close like this, head to head and heart to heart, in a place as far away from old loves and Cy-bugs and being humanity's last fricking hope as it was possible to be. And every moment she spent here with him, a thought pulsed through her body like a heartbeat: Safe. Safe. Safe.

Felix must have felt the tension leaving her body. He leaned in and kissed her gently, letting one hand trail along the line of her jaw.

"I love you, Tamora Jean," he whispered. "I always will."

And she knew without a doubt it was real.