Weekly Writing – August 12 2023

It was always strange to have him in pieces there beside her. Warped bolts buckling deep in charred plates, limbs laid out neatly separate from torso, but still with the potential to be whole and animate and speak to her again.
Still fundamentally alive. The files that knew her, knew what to call her, name and title and nicknames that would make her scowl and smile, were all safe in the black box of his skull. Run the right charge through it and he would look up at her and smile.
Hey, kiddo.
A third of the coolant tubes in his torso had burst, crushed to ribbons under the crater of a blow he’d taken low on his left side. Something powerful – something even he, alive even in pieces, shouldn’t have been standing in front of.
He wouldn’t listen when she told him so. He would just wink, his eyes brimming sodium-arc bright to the edges of their brown again, and say she could always put him back together.
It was true. It was. But his eyes were closed for now, and she couldn’t explain to him how it felt to see him in pieces. To sit there alive while he was only potentially so. She could pretend he was asleep, but she could also see his heart between the broken plates.