Emerson Chapter 16 Heretical Algorithms and Stolen Starlight 192 #2
The live feed shows her laughing now, her head thrown back.
The sound, filtered through Anik's comm, is a shock to my system.
My hand moves, not with precision, but with a frantic need to pin the moment down.
The charcoal scratches across a fresh page, not capturing an image, but a feeling—the vertigo I feel watching her exist so brightly in a world I've always observed from a safe, dark distance.
The graphite under my nails is the stain of a liar. These aren't notes; they could never be just simple notes. They are psalms. And I am not her scholar. I am her heretic. A heretic who would burn this world down to the ground for a chance to worship at her altar.
The truth of it ricochets through me like a seismic shock, collapsing every internal structure I've spent decades building. I shove back from the desk, the chair screeching against the floor. The feed is still live, her laughter a poison that promises ecstasy and delivers damnation. The most terrifying part is how much of me wants to drink it anyway. I don’t understand it.
The feeling is so foreign, so massive, that I have no information to build on to even attempt understanding.
Not in this condition, anyway.
I can't be here. I can't be in this room with the evidence of my own devotion and the maddening questions, guilt, and confusion that nip at its heels.
I need the garden. I need the cold, unfeeling soil. I need to sink my hands into something real, something that doesn't look back at me with her eyes.
Time loses its metric in the dirt.
I don't know if it's been minutes or an hour, only that my arms bear the evidence—I've been tending my plants.
The scratches from some of my more difficult specimens sting the same way my frustration does, reminding me my mind is no quieter—the soil is just soil.
It holds no answers for me today, only the passive acceptance of my turmoil.
The sun has climbed, I realize. Somewhere in my mind, I register that I've missed lunch but ignore it for the feel of the cool, damp earth under my fingers.
The soft crunch of a footstep on the gravel path is a delicate tear in the fabric of my solitude. I don't look up. I already know the cadence, the specific weight of the presence.
Leandre.
He doesn't speak at first. He simply stands at the edge of my plot, a silent acknowledgment of my territory.
Then, the rustle of a paper bag as the scent of roasted meat and fresh bread cuts through the earthy smell of loam.
He sets a sandwich and a steaming cup of my favorite Earl Grey on the low stone wall beside me.
"I see the meal Anik prepared for you never made it out of the fridge," he says, his voice neutral, devoid of the pressure of a direct question. It's an offering and an observation. The kind I can accept or ignore without social consequence.
I sit back on my heels, wiping a muddy hand across my brow, likely making it worse. "I was... occupied."
"I can see that." His gaze is a physical weight, gentle but unerringly accurate. It doesn't feel like an interrogation. It holds the same pressure I feel when running diagnostics on MORDRED.. "Do you want to talk about what's really eating at you?"
The directness is a surgical strike. I look at my hands, at the dark earth packed under my nails—a stark contrast to the graphite stain from this morning.
The words are a confession I haven't even fully formed for myself.
"I am finding myself unwilling to maintain a necessary distance.
And equally unwilling to betray Forrest's trust."
Leandre is silent for a long moment, then lets out a slow, understanding breath. "I know the feeling," he admits, his own voice laced with a quiet conflict. "The pull is... strong."
“You feel it too?” I ask, not wanting to pry but desperate for information so I can build some sort of defense against this all-encompassing feeling.
He nods. “I do. I think Forrest does as well. He’s just not willing to admit it.”
“What is it?” I ask, the question slipping out before I can stop myself.
“I think it’s something bigger than all of us,” he says, and the vagueness lodges like a splinter in my mind.
I want to demand his methodology. I want charts, historical precedents, a statistical model for 'bigger than us.' But I know he has none. His truth is written in a language of intuition I can't hope to understand.
He can no more explain the certainty in his soul than I can explain the silent, screaming why behind the twelve pages of sketches in the Anomalous file—the why that makes all my meticulous data feel like a lie I'm telling myself to avoid the terrifying, singular truth: that I simply am.
I am drawn. I am devoted. There is no reason. There is only her.
He hands me a wet rag, and I clean as much dirt from my hands as I can before reaching for the lunch he’s brought me. He doesn’t leave, and we sit in a comfortable silence.
This kind of quiet is a rarity. In the outside world, silence is a vacuum people feel compelled to fill with inane chatter. It’s a constant, draining demand for a performance I’m not equipped to give—a tax on my focus that typically makes me want to solve the problem with the point of a blade.
But with these men, the silence is different.
They are each a unique brand of chaos, yet they understand the architecture of my mind.
Kieran prattles on incessantly but knows when to grant me a wide berth.
Anik is overbearing, yet he never crosses a stated boundary.
Leandre fusses like a mother hen, but only when he senses the need is genuine.
Forrest is a hard-arse, but his rigidity is the framework that keeps us all safe.
They are, individually, a collection of profound annoyances.
Yet collectively, they demand no false pleasantries and levy no judgement when I miss a social cue more obvious than a flashing neon sign.
They grant me the singular freedom to simply exist, without the exhausting performance the outside world requires.
Here, and only here, my mind can finally stand down from its perpetual state of siege.
Flashes of my childhood home surface—my mother tucking my pointed ears under caps while reciting Keats with breakfast, her whispered warnings and constant surveillance.
With her, life was always an unintentional bombardment on the fortress of safety she kept me in.
She did her best, but isolation warps a young mind.
It makes the screaming hell of no-man's-land feel like a playground.
After a lifetime of whispered warnings, the whistle of artillery was a symphony, and the mud of the trenches felt more honest than any Persian rug.
Perhaps that is the true source of my little anomaly's gravitational pull.
The profound isolation I see in the depths of her gaze is a ghost I know intimately.
She is the first person who might not just see my jagged edges, but understand them.
And the most terrifying, hopeful thought of all is that we might just learn how to hold each other's broken pieces without drawing blood.