The Solution (Part 2)

Nothing hurt. He was traveling fast, far faster than his own thrusters could have sent him, protected from the night air by two arms. He struggled to snatch a few seconds of vision, but half of his visor was pressed against cloth covering a hard metal surface. What he could see was washed with crackling, red-amber light.

~~~

The plush surface he was lying on was alive with wiring. It overwhelmed his sensors, but his limbs had turned to lead and his mouth was beyond his control. He opened his eyeforms. Fluorescent light painted everything pale, and voices spoke in hushed tones... no, she was yelling. She was crying. He wanted to look, but a foreign energy wormed into his mind and put him back into sleep mode.

~~~

A tube was sending something liquid down his throat. He was sure that it was about to rise, tear him apart, finish him off... but there was no such reaction. He couldn’t tell if it was because he didn’t have the energy to reject it, or maybe it was that the tube was fastened onto the opening of his throat so that nothing could escape, but his systems were taking it well. He felt it seep through each of his core systems, quenching the lingering embers left by the failed relaxant. His thoughts softly settled into darkness.

~~~

It was impossible to tell how much time had passed. Fletcher felt comfortable except for a strip of metal near the front of his torso, which was tender as if it had recently been replaced and the artificial nerve endings restarted. He assumed that to be the case, for if he was alive, somebody had opened him up to repair the damage.

Alive? The fledgling lifted his hand and watched his fingers flex to form a fist. Yes... he was alive. That meant his parents knew what he had done. Quinn must have saved him, but what did that mean? He had failed on an entirely new level... he had almost died... what would it have been like if he actually had? Would it have felt the same as what he had experienced, but without waking up? Would it have hurt more? He reflected that it didn’t matter since it hadn’t happened, but death was more of a reality now.

Four white fingers layered themselves on top of the young robot’s fist, followed by a blue hand. Fletcher gazed at them for a moment. He didn’t want to look at the owners of the hands yet. He hadn’t had time to give any thought to actually facing them, but they were both there... just out of the range of is vision. He turned his head on the pillow to see both of his parents sitting in a pair of chairs next to his cot, as still as if they’d been built there. Fletcher looked from his father’s expression to his mother’s. He pulled his hand away.

What was he supposed to say? An apology seemed in order, but for what? For hiding? For lying? For almost never seeing them again?

His visor stung as the weight of what they must have felt hit him full blast. As the only one who drank the failed relaxant, he was the only one in danger, right? The four optical units trained on him now held just as much pain as he’d felt. As soon as he opened his mouth to speak, he was pulled into a hug. Fletcher was left without words.

His vision became blurry. He buried his head in his parents’ shoulders and sank into their electrical wavelengths. His sensors were flooded with their love, concern, relief. It was more than he could handle. He started to cry.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered. There was static in his voice, and his speakers stung.

“Shhh, darling, it’s okay. You’re okay,” Two whispered back.

They laid him back down on the pillows, though Two held on to his hand. Nos gently gripped his son’s shoulder, and Fletcher noticed a dull, dry trail on his cheek, the remnants of a tear. He’d never seen anything like it before. Had his father cried?

“You scared us to death,” the Energy Vampire murmured. “What were you thinking?”

Nos-4-a2 wasn’t accusing him of anything, he looked hurt. Fletcher lifted his free hand to rub the stinging corners of his visor.

“I-I just... I thought I knew what I was doing... I’m... so sorry.”

Two kissed the back of his hand. “It doesn’t matter now. You’re okay. Everything’s going to be fine.”

Fletcher looked back and forth between his parents. He knew that they would be speaking more in depth about what had happened later, but for the time being, they were all satisfied with a secure grasp on life. Guilt weighed on Fletcher’s conscience like lead.

“You should get some more rest, Fletcher,” his father soothed.

“That’s right. Go back into sleep mode. We’ll stay right here with you the whole time,” Two crooned.

It was then that Fletcher noticed how slow his processing was. The engineers must have downloaded some sort of inhibitor to keep him from overworking while he recovered. Despite his aches and rotten thoughts, he felt warm and heavy in the hospital bed. The red and blue of his parents’ optics softened all the hard edges, his field of vision darkened and deteriorated. It was easy to fall asleep in the midst of his family’s electrical presence.

Nos and Two watched Fletcher’s face as he drifted off.

“Nos... please go easy on him. He’s punishing himself enough,” Two didn’t look away from their son.

Nos looked down at her with clouded optics, finally mustering the strength to admit it now that they'd seen him awake. “It's all my fault in the first place. I promised I would protect him in the lab...”

Two leaned her head against Nos’s shoulder. “All that matters is that he’s safe.”

Nos rested his cheek against Two’s head, only able to nod.

~~~