Chapter 1 #2
Mercury: Honestly? I think I’d be doing exactly this. Talking to you. Just... maybe with better tea. And possibly that roast beast we discussed.
Binary: That’s your ideal scenario? Conversation and unspecified meat products?
Mercury: Don’t undersell it. It’s conversation with YOU and unspecified meat products. There’s a significant difference.
Lincoln stared at the screen. The words sat there, simple and devastating in their simplicity.
Binary: Mercury.
Mercury: Too much?
Binary: No. Just... processing.
Mercury: Take your time. I’m not going anywhere.
And there it was—the thing that undid him, every time. She was patient. She gave him space to think, to feel, to find his way to a response without pressure or expectation. She didn’t demand immediate reciprocity or fill the silence with anxious chatter.
She just waited. Like she had all the time in the world for him.
Binary: I find myself looking forward to these conversations more than is probably wise.
Mercury: Probably. But wisdom is overrated. I’d rather be foolish and happy than smart and lonely.
Binary: Is that a poem?
Mercury: No. That one’s just me.
Binary: I like the ones that are just you.
Another pause. When her response came, it arrived slowly, each word appearing like she was choosing them with care.
Mercury: “The cold wind doth blow, and we shall have snow, and what will poor robin do then?” That’s not just me. That’s Mother Goose. But I think about it every winter. Those little birds with nowhere warm to go.
Binary: Robins migrate. They’re generally fine.
Mercury: Way to ruin the metaphor, Binary.
Binary: I apologize. The metaphor stands. Concern for vulnerable creatures in winter is valid regardless of ornithological accuracy.
Mercury: “Ornithological accuracy.” I’m putting that on a t-shirt.
Binary: Please don’t.
Mercury: Too late. It’s already designed in my head. Maybe a little cartoon bird with glasses looking at a thermometer.
Binary: This is why we can’t have nice things.
Mercury: No, this is why we HAVE nice things. Our nice thing is this. Ridiculous tangents about Seuss and robins and hypothetical t-shirts. I wouldn’t trade it.
Neither would Lincoln. He wouldn’t trade any of it—not the poetry quotes he didn’t always recognize, not the tangents that went nowhere, not the silences that somehow said more than words.
He checked the time. 9:22 PM.
They’d been talking for nearly half an hour. The party continued without him. His family was probably wondering where he’d disappeared to—or more likely, they’d simply accepted his absence as a Lincoln quirk, not worth examining.
Binary: I should return to the chaos.
Mercury: The chaos. Right. Your annual gathering of humans. How many this year?
Binary: Approximately forty, including children.
Mercury: Forty people who love you. That’s not nothing, Binary.
Binary: I know.
Mercury: Do you? Because sometimes I think you forget that you’re someone worth showing up for.
The words hit harder than they should. Lincoln read them twice, three times, trying to find the appropriate response. Something witty. Something deflecting.
Instead, he typed the truth.
Binary: I remember more often than I used to. These conversations help.
Mercury: Then I’m glad. Go be with your people. Eat suspicious desserts. Tolerate children. I’ll be here tomorrow.
Binary: Tomorrow. 9 PM.
Mercury: Like clockwork. Like postal workers. Like two very weird stars that somehow ended up in the same orbit.
Binary: Binary stars don’t orbit each other randomly. They’re gravitationally bound. They couldn’t separate even if they wanted to.
Mercury: Is that a metaphor?
Binary: It’s astrophysics. But it can be both.
Mercury: Stay strange, safety.
Binary: Stay safe, stranger.
The chat window went quiet.
Lincoln sat in the small, cold room for another minute, reading back through their conversation. The absurd bits and the tender bits and the places where they’d said something real without quite saying it.
He could find her.
The thought surfaced as it always did—unwanted, undeniable.
He had the skills. He had the tools. Somewhere out there, Mercury existed as a real person with a real name and a real life.
She drank tea by fires and read Dickens at Christmas.
She worried about robins and quoted both Jane Austen and Dr. Seuss.
And made him feel less alone in his own head than anyone he’d ever met in person.
He could find her.
He wouldn’t.
Some mysteries were sacred. Some connections existed precisely because of the space around them—the things left unsaid, the boundaries that protected the tender places where trust lived.
Mercury trusted him. And that trust was worth more than answers.
Lincoln closed his laptop, tucked it under the bed like he’d been doing for two and a half decades, and went back to the party.
The main room had shifted in his absence.
The dinner food had been cleared away and soon everyone would be starting on desserts.
The music had changed to something slower, and in one corner, his parents were dancing.
Not formally—just swaying together, his father’s arms around his mother’s waist, her head against his shoulder.
They’d been married for over thirty years. They still looked at each other like the rest of the room had disappeared.
Lincoln didn’t understand it. But standing there in the doorway, watching them, he thought maybe—just maybe—he was beginning to.
“Lincoln!”
Aunt Charlie materialized at his elbow, her face a study in focused determination.
“Good, you’re back. I need you at the dessert table.
” She gestured toward a long table against the far wall, currently empty but clearly designated for the after-dinner sweets.
“People are going to start bringing things out soon, and you know how that goes. No organization. No system. Just chaos.”
“You want me to organize it.”
“You’re so good at that sort of thing.”
Lincoln looked at the table. Clear parameters. Measurable outcomes. A problem he could actually solve.
“I’ll handle it.”
Charlie patted his arm. “Knew I could count on you.”
She disappeared back into the crowd, and Lincoln made his way to the dessert table.
Behind him, the party continued. Forty people who loved him. Chaos and noise and the particular warmth of being known, even when he didn’t quite fit.
And tomorrow, 9 PM, Mercury would be there.
Like clockwork. Like postal workers.
Like something he was only beginning to let himself name.
*
* Books from characters in this chapter:
Lincoln Bollinger (& Mercury) – HERO’S TOUCH
Charlie Bollinger – EAGLE
Callum & Sloane – HERO’S HEART