Teddy woke up from a nightmare that he had not had in a long time. It wasn't new, though; he'd had the same nightmare at least once a week for years, after his mother died. He'd seen her face on Archon corpses, and then the corpses would come to life, begging sometimes to die, sometimes to live, sometimes to take over his body and consume him from within.

Back in those times, Teddy was scrapping Archons and hating every last moment of his life. If he didn't go wrist deep into someone's neck, he might not eat, or the few workers he had would walk away. But still, day after day he would wander into the wastes and lose his nerve at the last minute, blaming things on the static anomalies or just bad luck.

The worst part was how people let him get away with it. Maybe if someone had confronted him, he would not have had to bear the burden all alone. Maybe someone else with nerves of steel could have done everything but the very last part, letting him steel himself for the sick feel of blood, the odd feelings and noises that came from the internals of the Archon body... many things.

Thus far he had told six people about his powers. One, of course, was his mother. Two more he had to kill in self defense when they tried to kill him for his "sins". One was an Administrator, and he promised Teddy that they would keep his secret. One he had hoped would be his business partner, until he discovered the man ...abusing archon corpses, and then he never worked with him again.

The last was now his ex. Those two facts were deeply and painfully connected. After they broke up, Teddy occasionally saw her face instead of his mother's in those awful nightmares, but it didn't last.

Now, Teddy supposed, he could add Elaine, the last Archon, to that list, although... he hadn't gone into the specifics. The look on her face when she found out, and the fact that she felt the need to forgive him... that told him she probably understood, but could she really? Could anyone?

It wasn't until Teddy finally rolled out of bed and into the yard that the events of the past day really sank in. Not merely the existence of Elaine, but the battle against the static creatures, the... absurd lake of fire that she produced out of nowhere. And as he stood there in the early morning light, looking at the ruined waste that was his northern wall, he wanted to cry.

Powerless.

He had to scrap Archons because he was powerless. He had to venture into the wastes and dodge monsters that could have turned his body to a molten statue. He provided food, shelter, and protection for his employees, technology for... well, whoever bought it. But it was all because he couldn't do anything. He couldn't just make a living as a baker or a technician. He thought about trying, but he saw the same thing in himself day after day, year after year.

He saw himself standing stock still for hours at a time, lost in his own bloody history, crying. He couldn't go back. Nobody would understand.

Staring at the wall, Teddy itched to take his sled and dive into the blasted lands. Not because another bounty would make things better, but because nobody would expect him to be strong. They would let him waste time out there crying and just assume that he had a plan for the future. They would think he was working for them, doing his best for them.

Teddy felt like death. Not like dying... like this was what it felt like to already be dead, to have lost all grip on the world and just be a ghost, a wraith, a monster hanging over the world, unable to let go but unable to move on.

Instead of running off or going back to his room to sleep, Teddy trudged with the weight of long practice to the half-roofed pavilion that acted as kitchen and dining area when the weather was warm. There were people gathered there, and the low thrum of duty in Teddy's heart pushed him to walk over there and show his face so they knew he was still alive.

The people eating there were all the usual faces, although there were fewer of them. Charlie and Bobbi were the guards who had bothered to return, and the two of them were sitting, as usual, together. Charlie liked Bobbi, that was clear enough, and Bobbi didn't mind the company, although Teddy would have given good odds that she didn't actually care for him at all.

Like many things, Teddy kept those thoughts inside. Right or wrong, what he thought didn't matter, and would only get him in trouble.

His scrappers were both there. Anna would probably keep coming back as long as he fed her, and would work as long as he paid her. He'd thought about telling her his secret, but... first of all, he couldn't bear the risk of driving off even her, and secondly, she was definitely not the sort who would ever help him with his work. Anna was a decent tech, and had helped him with some of his construction projects, but she was overweight, depressive, lazy, and generally refused to do anything exhausting or dangerous. Forget whether she was willing to go into the blasted lands, Teddy couldn't count on her being able to survive.

The other scrapper was Jim. He was restless and always searched for something to do, usually welding bits of metal to make something or other better. He had patched holes in the walls, constructed stairs, built towers, and a bunch of other useful things over the years, just because they needed to be done. He did, however, have a bit of a complex, thinking he ought to be the one in charge of everything, and would push people to do things his way unless Teddy had put his foot down and said otherwise. Jim was smart, but it was tiring to be around him.

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As he surveyed the eating area, Teddy finally noticed, with a kind of numb acceptance, that his cook had been replaced by a very young-looking woman with glowing marks on her skin and a relentlessly bright attitude. As he stepped up to the serving counter, Elaine offered him a wide grin and a plate full of fried meat and eggs.

"Hey, you old buzzard. I was wondering if you were ever going to wake up." Elaine split into two just so that one of her could lean on the counter and grin at him while the other finished up cooking one more serving--probably her own. "Don't look so grumpy. I'll help you with the repairs." She gestured at the plate. "You should try it. Apparently none of your people actually know how to cook, because they think my garbage-ass cooking is the best they've ever tasted. One of your boys even proposed to me from the smell alone."

"That offer is still on the table!" said Jim pleasantly from somewhere behind Teddy, and several people laughed, including Elaine.

Teddy felt conflicted, because he genuinely did want to smile and laugh, and he did... a little. But another part of him was convinced he was supposed to still be depressed and miserable. It was... duty, in a way. He had to bear the weight for everyone else, and that meant being somber and heavy-hearted.

But my god, that meat smelled delicious. How had she sliced it so thin? He picked it up with his fingers and bit off a section--delicious! Teddy stared at the rest in his hands, and turned towards a table. In his heart, the conflict warred. His problems couldn't be solved with delicious food, but still...

Naturally, by the time Teddy had sat down, Elaine was already sitting opposite him, leaning on the table with one hand on her cheek, looking at him. "So I've been thinking," she said, with an air to her that suggested that she hadn't thought very long or hard about it, "but you need some seriously improved tech out here. Now, there's a lot about ansible tech that I don't know, but I asked your scrapper buddies," and she jerked a thumb to Anna and Jim, "and she said you basically have none of the docs on how this stuff works, right?"

Teddy, his mouth full of bacon, nodded.

"Well, I have a bunch of service manuals and some disk drives. The CFA used a lot of straight up ansible tech, and the manuals and disks were everything you needed to repair a damaged unit in the field, assuming you had the parts." She paused. "I don't actually know that you have the right parts, of course. We used some off the shelf Qiron SBCs, Celli quantum key MUXers for communications, and pretty much any ansible board we had the drivers for, if we could connect it via PCIQ or USB." She paused. "Though of course as slow as USB is, those had to have their own onboard processors."

Teddy stared at Elaine for a minute, his thoughts in a state of temporary paralysis. He slowly lifted a bit of fried egg to his mouth, chewed it for a minute, swallowed it, and when it was clear Elaine was waiting for a reply, said, "I'm pretty sure that most of the ansibles we pull out of..." he paused, cleared his mind, and skipped ahead, "...are 512-channel PCIQ. Someone somewhere published enough of the standards for the interface that we could hack it with an oscilloscope and some fiber optics, but we really never knew what we were doing. I don't know the brand names you mentioned."

Elaine studied his face for a minute, then smiled again. "Probably not," she said. "Not if you get most of your tech out of Archon corpses."

Teddy almost choked on the very small sip of water he was in the middle of. He looked around, seeing everyone staring at him, and immediately started--

"I already told them," said Elaine with a wave, her face suddenly showing a tiredness that she didn't usually let through. "I wanted to know what they knew. I'm pretty sure everyone here is... well, probably not happy? But willing to keep working with you. A couple others definitely weren't, but they're not here anymore." She smiled again, and this time it felt just a little fake. "You surround yourself with good people, Mr. Helmann. Mostly."

Teddy looked around, meeting the eyes of people for, in many cases, the first time ever. They weren't... scared. Not happy. Not angry. Teddy swallowed nothing once, then again a few moments later. "...Sorry."

"For keeping quiet? Hell, I woulda." Anna held up her plate, and another Elaine appeared to take it, and gave her another plate full of bacon in return. "Though I probably woulda quit, to be honest."

There were some mutters of assent from Charlie and Bobbi, but Jim was looking somewhere else. The look on his face suggested he was thinking about the next thing he ought to be doing, which was fine with Teddy. Jim would be able to steady his nerves as long as he had something to do.

"I... would have," said Teddy slowly. "Except you guys needed me. And... giving up was death. Didn't... didn't want to do that." He let his eyes fall to the table in front of him, not really focusing on anything.

Where Teddy expected an awkward silence, he only got a strangely sympathetic hum from Elaine. He looked up to find her staring at him, her face drawn flat. "Yeah," she said. "The war for survival does that to you. I was a soldier, Teddy. I killed people because I thought they might. They might kill me, or oppose my people. I don't know how much blood you have on your hands, but I have more." And suddenly, the table was surrounded by copies of Elaine, mostly in different clothes, and each laid one hand down on the table. "More hands... and every single one of these hands has more blood on it than yours do."

"I killed people only to find out they were innocent, Teddy. I killed people that were my friends when we ended up on different sides of a battle." As Teddy watched, Elaine's face sank until she looked very, very tired. "I know what wrestling with guilt feels like. And I know what it looks like. But butchering the dead isn't a weight you should have to carry alone. I don't think you should have to carry it at all. You aren't a murderer, and you aren't a monster. Don't convince yourself that you are."

Odd feelings swelled inside Teddy, and tears came. It wasn't... relief, exactly. There was still a deep reserve that kept him from feeling quite at ease. But parts of him were able to let go, to vent deep stresses and pains, and that...

...that was more than he could take all at once on its own, and he cried, for hours. It hurt, and also... was important. It hurt like... like old heartaches always do, some part of him thought. It hurt like being alone always did, but... a little less than usual.

Especially during those times when one of the others, especially Elaine, put a hand on his shoulder or gave him a hug to help him get through.