Work Text:
The morning started going sideways before Sandrone had even finished her first cup of coffee.
She woke up early, which was normal for her. She left Columbina asleep, a decision that was harder every time she did it, but necessary, because Columbina slept deeply and needed more rest than she'd ever required in whatever life she'd had before being... mostly-human? Not the point. Sandrone had padded to the kitchen in socked feet, started the coffee machine, cursed existence approximately twice, and stood a bit watching the condensation on the kitchen window.
Normal. Fine. Good.
Then she checked her email.
A firmware update she'd pushed to the drone fleet two days ago, which was technically supposed to improve cold-weather performance by fourteen percent, had also, for some reason, decided on its own to brick three units overnight. She had personally tested the software six times, four of those with Columbina watching her on the roof, and nothing wrong had happened before. The error hadn't been catastrophic, and it hadn't happened in the field, thank god, but still, three units of her and Zandik's making were now sitting in some emergency services depot in Portland, entirely unresponsive to commands. Their client, a man named Timaeus, had sent eight messages between midnight and six AM (Sandrone had always thought his email tone felt like someone two minutes away from a stress-induced medical event, but Columbina had, for now, managed to convince her not to tell that to his face). The last one had just been the subject line: URGENT URGENT URGENT, and then the body of the email was blank, somehow communicating the stress more effectively than words would ever have.
Sandrone put down her coffee cup and stared at the ceiling.
"Fine." she told the empty kitchen.
That was six hours ago.
It was now afternoon. She was on her fourth cup of something that started as coffee and was now more accurately described as "caffeine delivery fluid", and she had managed to fix exactly one of the three bricked units remotely, which meant she needed to drive to Portland tomorrow, which meant she needed to reschedule a review she had scheduled with Zandik for that Thursday, which meant she needed to call the county emergency services liaison she'd been trying to reach for two weeks to reschedule their already-rescheduled meeting, which meant spending forty-five minutes on hold listening to what she could only charitably describe as music, which mea—
Zandik had called at ten. Then at eleven-thirty. Then, finally, at one, when she actually bothered to answer, and they spent ninety minutes working through the last intact logs together, voices strained and polite in the way people's voices got when they were trying very very hard not to blame each other and not entirely succeeding.
She was currently squeezing the bridge of her nose, annoyed. "The issue was ... the cold sensor."
"I thought you tested that."
"I did."
"In conditions that matched Portland's?"
His silence was all the answer she needed. "I tested the sensors in our lab, it's a controlled environment. I pulled the temperature down to negative five, I was freezing."
"Portland hit negative nine last night."
Another silence. Longer.
"Fine," Zandik had said. It was not the same as 'understood', but it was unfortunately what they had.
She sent an apology to Timaeus, detailed and technical and specific and honestly, probably wasted on him. She started a post-mortem document, drafting instructions for a testing protocol for cold weather that she probably should have written six months ago and hadn't, because she'd been distracted by Columbina's physical therapy appointments and learning how to cook things that didn't require a stove because Columbina couldn't safely use one yet.
That was a thought she pushed back down. Not helpful right now. Very pretty girl, though.
At two, her laptop froze.
Not crashed. Frozen. Cursor stuck, screen unresponsive, everything just stopped like the machine had gotten tired and decided to take a personal vacation day. She waited. She tried shortcuts, frantic clicking, staring at it with the incredibly specific hatred she reserved for systems that decided to fail at moments of maximum inconvenience (which was always).
Then she did the thing she hated doing, the one that always felt like admitting defeat: she held the power button until it shut off.
It restarted fine. That actually made it worse, it just came right back looking all innocent, without explanation, like nothing had happened.
She lost forty minutes of work.
She had backups. Of course she had backups. She recovered most of it. But forty minutes of her very precious life were now gone, dealing the final blow to the last remaining strands of her focus, that had always been fragile to begin with.
They had an appointment for physical therapy at three.
She drove Columbina there twice a week, waited in a beige waiting room with a potted plant that was either very hardy or fake (she would bet 5 dollars on fake, but she'd never gotten close enough to determine which one, and wasn't going to do so in the middle of a crowded waiting room), and then drove both of them home. It was a good appointment. Columbina worked hard at everything she did, always had, and PT was no different. She pushed herself carefully, progressed steadily, reported her limitations with such honesty that the therapist could feel nothing but gratitude.
Today, though, the therapist was sick. Her replacement was competent, Sandrone had to agree, but he didn't know Columbina's case, so they spent the first twenty minutes reviewing charts and spreadsheets and other similar bullshit and using the incredibly careful tone that some people used to refer to her partner's disability. Columbina found this gently patronizing. Sandrone thought the whole thing was maddening, and the only reason she didn't give this asshole a piece of her mind was due to Columbina's hand finding hers under the table.
Columbina handled the appointment with the grace it required, of course. She always did.
Sandrone sat in the beige waiting room and answered emails on her phone and tried not to think about Portland.
The appointment ran long, twenty minutes over the appointed time, so their parking time expired.
They had a ticket on the windshield when they got back to the car.
Columbina, who was currently navigating the sidewalk with the help of a cane and Sandrone's elbow, tilted her head, "You've gone very quiet."
"Parking ticket."
"Ah."
"We got here twenty minutes late."
"I'm sorry. The new therapist—"
"It's fine. It's not your fault."
"I know it's not my fault," Columbina didn't sound offended. "I was simply going to say that he took longer than he needed to because he was nervous. I could feel it. He'll be better next time."
Sandrone helped her partner into the car. She took a few minutes folding the wheelchair and putting it in the trunk — long trips like this required it, even if the cane worked for short distances — and then stood there for a moment with her hands on the rear bumper, looking at the parking ticket she'd tucked under her arm.
She took a long, long breath.
"Fine," she said again, to the parking lot.
The drive home was quiet, though not tense. Columbina had her window cracked slightly despite the February cold, face turned toward the air, reading the city through wind and sound and whatever it was she perceived that Sandrone didn't have words for. Pulonia, who had absolutely not been permitted in the car but was also somehow always in the car, was currently a very furry weight on top of Sandrone's laptop in the backseat, not deeming it necessary to comment on the parking ticket.
Traffic was bad.
Not... catastrophically bad. No emergencies, not an accident, just the standard late-afternoon gridlock that turned a twenty-minute drive into forty-five minutes of boredom, the kind of delay that was individually meaningless but became significant when stacked on top of a day that had already been dismantling itself piece by piece. She sat in the stopped traffic and watched the brake lights ahead of her pulse red while thinking of Portland, the testing protocol she still needed to finish, the three emails she'd promised responses on by end of day, about the fact that it was currently four-thirty and she still hadn't eaten since the piece of toast she'd had at seven.
"You should eat something," Columbina commented without being asked.
Sandrone looked at her. Columbina was still facing the window.
"How do you even do that?"
"You get tense when your blood sugar is low. More brittle." Columbina turned her head, dark glasses catching the light. "And your stomach made a sound twenty minutes ago."
"I'll eat when we get home."
"You'll get home and forget because you looked at your emails."
She was right. Sandrone didn't answer.
They stopped at a place near the apartment, a sandwich shop that Columbina had memorized by smell months ago and could now navigate independently, delighting her and panicking Sandrone the first time she did it alone. Sandrone ordered without really tasting anything, eating in the car in the parking lot, since she was too tired to go inside and sit down like a normal person, feeling fractionally better after eating.
Relief.
Columbina ate her sandwich carefully, systematically. She was always careful with her food, had only become more so after losing her sight. Start with the bottom-left corner, work methodically through the rest. Never lose track of where things are.
Sandrone interrupted this by groaning. "Timaeus sent three more emails."
"What does he want?"
"To communicate his stress to me, mostly, but also to update me on the Portland situation."
"And?"
"I fixed one. The other two need hands-on diagnostics. I have to drive tomorrow."
"I'll be fine here."
"I know you will." Sandrone stared at the sandwich shop's sign through the windshield. "I know. I just don't—"
"Don't like leaving?"
"... no. I really don't."
Columbina was quiet for a moment. In the backseat, Pulonia made a small sound of deeply ambiguous significance.
"It's one day," Columbina said finally. "Lauma will check in. Flins is next door. He made me tea yesterday; knocked at our door with a pot of tea, and we talked for an hour. Did I tell you?"
"You told me he knocked. Not about the tea."
"It was very good tea. He said he brought the leaves from somewhere that doesn't exist anymore." Columbina tilted her head. "He's older than he lets most people see. I can feel the... mass? Of time, around him. Like standing near something geological."
"Does that bother you?"
"Not really. We're both things that fell out of categories people thought were fixed. It's comfortable, actually. Knowing someone who understands that."
Sandrone finished her sandwich, crumpling the wrapper. "We should go home."
Columbina reached across and found her hand, unerringly, fingers curling around hers with the certainty of long practiced habit. "It was a hard day."
"It was... a very hard day."
"Portland will go fine tomorrow, and the drones will also be fine. Timaeus can email someone else for a while."
"You don't know that."
"I know that you're very good at what you do. The rest follows." She squeezed once, then released. "Let's go home."
The apartment building was quiet. Sandrone maneuvered the wheelchair through the lobby, past the mailboxes, to the elevator that was slightly too small but workable. Pulonia walked beside them with such authority she could only believe herself to be the leader of their direction, somehow.
In the hallway on their floor, the door to 7C was visible down the hall. Flins's door. Closed, no light under it, either empty or the darkness of someone who didn't need light. Sandrone didn't know which.
She unlocked 7A, pushed the door open, got the wheelchair over the threshold she'd only mentioned seventeen times the first day (she was up to at least two-hundred-twenty-four by now but they stopped counting some weeks ago).
The apartment was warm. She kept it warmer than she used to — Columbina ran cold sometimes now, something about the ongoing metabolic adjustment to being more human than she'd ever been, whatever way her body was recalibrating to existence.
It smelled like the lavender candle Lauma had brought last week and coffee from this morning, something that was just themselves, their combined presence, the smell of a place that was theirs.
Sandrone stood in the entrance for a moment after closing the door.
Columbina was already moving, cane put aside, hand trailing the wall with confidence. She'd had several months to get used to this, she knew where everything was by now. The couch was eight steps from the door, angled forty-five degrees from the window. The coffee table was... a known obstacle. The kitchen was to the left, fourteen steps, counters clear on the near side. The bedroom was through the short hallway, twelve steps.
Pulonia launched herself onto the couch, circled twice, and sat.
"Come here," Columbina called without turning around, already lowering herself onto the couch carefully.
"I need to answer my emails."
"You need to sit down first." Columbina patted the cushion beside her. "Five minutes."
"Five minutes won't—"
"Sandrone."
She crossed the room and sat down, because Columbina doing that tone was unfair to her brain.
She found her immediately, hands moving to Sandrone's jacket. She had always been able to find Sandrone in the dark on the first try, every time. She worked the zipper down. Tugged. "Take this off. You're not about to go anywhere."
Sandrone shrugged out of her jacket, letting it fall somewhere. Columbina's hands moved to her hair next, gesture as natural and habitual as breathing, fingers finding the clip she'd had it up in and releasing it. Sandrone felt the tension of it come undone, the slight ache of her hair after being pulled back for hours.
Columbina patted the couch again. "Lay down."
"I'm going to fall asleep."
"Is that the worst thing that could happen today?"
Sandrone looked at the ceiling, at the warmer light she'd switched to when Columbina told her she could still feel brightness in her skin. "My emails—"
"Will still exist after you've slept for an hour." Columbina's thumb moved along Sandrone's temple. "Timaeus will send more. Portland will remain in Oregon. The drone you fixed is still fixed. None of that is on fire right now."
"Three of my units are bricked."
"But not on fire."
"That's an incredibly low bar."
"On some days, a low bar is appropriate." Her fingers moved through her hair. Sandrone's eyes were already heavier, which was honestly kind of embarrassing. "You drove me to my appointment, fixed broken things, navigated terrible traffic and ate a sandwich for me without complaints. That's a full day."
"I got a parking ticket."
"Yes, what a terrible tragedy. I'm so sorry for your loss."
"Sarcastic angel."
"Exhausted engineer." Columbina's hand stilled for a moment, resting light against Sandrone's hair. Her voice dropped, quieter. "You don't have to hold everything up all the time. Not with me."
Sandrone stared at the ceiling. Pulonia, queen and monarch of the armrest, watched her with profound disinterest.
"I know that, obviously."
"Do you?"
She didn't answer immediately. Outside, the city carried on its business, indifferent. Traffic. Someone's dog. The distant thrum of the city's ordinary life going forward without particular concern for her life.
Her laptop was in her bag, three feet away. Her emails were in it. Timaeus was somewhere in it, probably, shouting his stress into the void.
"I fixed one of them remotely," she whispered, mostly to herself. "... just one."
"Mh."
"The other two need me to be there, though. It's not—it's not that the design is wrong, our parameters just needed a wider range. It's a calibration issue, not a fundamental flaw."
"Mh."
"I'll have it sorted by... Thursday."
"Mh." Columbina's hand moved again. "Close your eyes."
Her eyes were already most of the way there. She didn't fight it. The couch was familiar, the apartment warm, Pulonia a judging but present grey weight that had repositioned herself to sit on Sandrone's feet.
She lasted approximately four more minutes before her breathing changed and she was gone, somewhere below conscious thought, somewhere quiet.
Columbina sat still, hand against Sandrone's hair. Outside, a car horn, then nothing.
Her phone buzzed on the cushion beside her. She tilted her head.
She found it after searching a little, thumb moving to use the text-to-speech function, set to low volume as it always had been.
A message from Zandik. She parsed it without the audio, running a thumb along the raised dot of the button to trigger it quietly, a single earbud on. Timaeus had called him directly to say they were satisfied with the remote fix on the first unit, and confident the team could handle the other two on-site tomorrow. He was also asking to shift the visit to next week if Sandrone preferred. Not required. Just an option. He had messaged Columbina, since Sandrone was notably bad at answering her phone, and was also, seemingly, not taking calls at the moment.
Columbina answered, speech-to-text: She'll see the message when she wakes up. Thank you for handling it.
Is she okay?
Columbina considered this. Looked at where Sandrone's face would be, approximately.
She will be.
She set the phone aside. Found Sandrone's hand where it had fallen open on the cushion between them, closing her fingers around it loosely.
Pulonia regarded her from Sandrone's ankles with an expression of imperial tolerance.
"She's asleep," Columbina told the cat.
Pulonia appeared to already know this.
"She had a bad day."
The cat's eyes narrowed. Then, with great deliberation, Pulonia stood up, circled once, and went back to her usual spot, which was either agreement, indifference or, most likely, both.
Columbina leaned back into the couch cushions. Tilted her face toward the window where the afternoon was going silver and cold outside, light shifting, city changing gears from day to evening. She felt it move, that quality of light, the whole day settling toward its end.
She asked about 7C once, early on, the apartment that now belonged to Flins. Sandrone answered honestly, the only way she had ever known how to answer.
For you, in case you came back. I didn't know if you would, but I couldn't not do anything.
Columbina hadn’t had a response to this. Had simply stood in the doorway of 7C, white furniture and white flowers, understanding how a year's worth of waiting had been made three-dimensional, a room, into gestures too large for words to describe.
She thought about that sometimes, the year she spent not-existing and the year Sandrone had spent refusing to stop setting a place at the table. The math of it. The way love sometimes expressed itself not in grand moments but in the sheer stubbornness of a daily refusal to let go.
Her hand tightened slightly on Sandrone's, just for a second. Then relaxed.