Archive of Our Own ^beta

Winston's knees were bruised.

Every time he returned home, alone, his first action after closing his door and turning towards the interior of his apartment was to collapse to the hardwood floor. He didn't land face-first - the consequences of turning up the next morning with a bruised jaw and having to face either the embarrassment of explaining how he had acquired it or the sting of indifference towards it aside, it was a well-established human reflex to catch oneself on one's hands when falling forwards. The protective extension reflex, he had heard. This meant he always landed on his knees and the heels of his hands, the former of which were now persistently aching with tender bruises. Recently, he had begun to feel the same shooting pain in his hands - far from ideal in a profession that necessitated the use of his hands over many other body parts.

His hands, and his brain. The brain that ran at a mile a minute, processing every ounce of input it could gather before generating an appropriate response. It bore the weight of producing and debugging thousands of lines of code every day, but also the task of shifting his muscles in the right ways (and not shifting them in all the wrong ways), of forming the right words in his head and guiding his tongue and larynx to develop them. Inevitably, he would almost never get this right - there would be flaws that necessitated a re-run with modifications, or else the single line would throw the running off-course. He'd learned that the hard way.

The only way to circumvent this was to write the script in his head beforehand and run it over and over, at least a dozen times, squashing as many bugs as he could detect, fine-tuning it to walk the narrowest tightrope that was the social norm but somehow also needing not to seem scripted because that was against social norms too but how was he fucking supposed to do that without accidentally inserting another bug? Last time he had done this, it hadn't even worked, at least not immediately. He'd been prepping specifically what he'd wanted to say to Taylor since they'd announced their plan to not pay them for the work they'd done. Winston had unloaded on them the second he was given a chance, the lines running out of his mouth with a Japanese proverb integrated for good measure, only for his carefully cultivated words to be ignored in favour of ad hominem attacks. All that work, and he hadn't even been granted a worthy acknowledgement (apart from being proven absolutely right on his point that they were being socially pressured into deferring payment - and apparently he didn't understand social rules?). He'd been left in the dirt, edging towards a grave that didn't need to be his.

Okay, maybe that wasn't entirely true, considering the aftermath of that incident was Taylor listening to him and scrapping their plan to withhold bonuses. In terms of worthy responses, he really couldn't have asked for more. He should be happy (and don't be so fucking needy).

With that thought, his hands both betrayed and saved him. His wrist twitched, causing his whole hand to flutter from where it had been lying on his thigh. The motion aggravated the smarting in his palm as well as probably not helping the bruises, but Winston was too burned out to care. After a full day of masking, disallowing anything that may be deemed more conspicuous than drumming his fingers on the armrests of his swivel chair (the incident with Dollar Bill had dashed the option of going to the bathroom to release his urges), he was entitled to some relief in the privacy of his apartment. Trying to control his stims fidgets felt akin to that scene in the opening of the movie Charlotte's Web in which Fern's attempts to keep the piglet Wilbur hidden in her school desk resulted in said desk jutting open at inopportune moments and eventually the offending animal being revealed. He hadn't thought about that movie in years, the book in even longer.

Reeerow.

Speaking of offending animals ... Winston's head eventually lifted from its slumped position to focus on the sleek feline form that had slipped his way under his flailing fingers. Schrödinger's pitch-black fur rendered him almost invisible in the shadows of the apartment with only his pale yellow eyes standing out like round moons. Winston's hand automatically went to petting him in greeting. The cat responded by arching his back into his caress as if he was just as touch-starved as his owner. 

Winston finally heaved himself off the floor, turning the lights on so that neither he nor Schrödinger would be subject to the humiliation of bruising their faces on hard surfaces. Now he was more alert, his nose detected the acrid tang of cat urine somewhere in his apartment. The times when Schrödinger would actually pee in his litter box were about as predictable as radioactive decay, but at least the probability of him shitting in the box was significantly higher than 50%. The cat was currently sniffing around the apartment in the same nooks and crannies he had inspected a thousand times before - behind the desk, under the couch, in the grooves of the skirting board. Winston eventually found and mopped up the pungent puddle, under the single chair in the kitchen. "Bastard," he muttered, causing Schrödinger to mew brightly and trot over to his side. He answered to the exclamation just as readily as his given name, having been called it even more often. If Winston didn't know better, he would've thought the Bastard was proud of the mess he made of his owner's New York apartment and wore the insult like a badge of honour. 

(Winston's younger cousin had even suggested naming him Mr Pee Pee after the seventeenth time he had stunk up the apartment in the first month of owning him. Winston had scoffed at the typically childish notion from his cousin, but the name had stuck with him nonetheless - three months into his cat's tenure in his apartment, complete with the requisite pissing as well as thankfully fewer piles of shit, he'd officially been christened Mr Schrödinger P. Bastard. Mr Bastard had celebrated by marking the carpet as his territory).

An hour later saw the weary quant collapsed on his couch, a half-empty Bud Light clasped in his hand that, like every mundane thing in his apartment, caught Schrödinger's olfactory attention. He didn't seem the least bit offended by the smell, as evident by his next move being to climb onto Winston's chest, curling his tail close to his body and staring owlishly at him. Was it even appropriate to describe a cat as owlish? Another long-buried memory from childhood suddenly awoke in his brain - that poem of The Owl and the Pussycat by Edward Lear they'd read in second grade. Would he have preferred an owl?

Nah.

Winston downed the rest of his beer and let his arms wrap around the furry creature, gently pressing the warm bundle of fur, bones and muscle closer to his chest. He knew Schrödinger wouldn't mind - when he wasn't marking his territory on every inch of the apartment, the kitty was as docile as a stuffed toy. Hell, that was part of the reason Winston had adopted him in the first place - cuddling up to a pet felt less lonely more dignified than clinging to a teddy bear (or even a fucking body pillow, dear God, not even he was that desperate - he'd march into Hell armed with nothing but a snowball before proving Wendy "Don't be so fucking needy" Rhoades right on that). Likewise, he was glad for the reason to come home in the evenings. 

With Bobby Axelrod breathing down the necks of Taylor and all their employees, the building had somehow become more claustrophobic than his old quant dungeon. This might've made anyone else more eager to leave when the day was out, but Winston found himself staying long after everyone else had left, feeling more able to relax and work productively without the extra stimuli. The productivity boost in the short-term, however, came with the price of dry eyes, chronic headaches and a botched circadian rhythm that served no advantage to his mood or his relationships with his colleagues. He'd adopted Schrödinger from the local shelter in the hope that arriving home would seem less like something worth childishly procrastinating over, and to the cat's credit, it had worked and worked well. Even though Winston would take coming home to the stink of his latest mess any day over an apathetic room that only accentuated his raw solitude, he was also aware that the longer he left it, the worse the smell would linger and the more cranky his pet would be when his owner turned up, and that simply wouldn't do.

Shaking these thoughts away, Winston grabbed the remote and flipped through the channels to some dime-a-dozen sitcom, something that wasn't worth using much of his frazzled brain to process. The canned laugh track was predictably obnoxious but at least consistent enough that he was able to tune it out. His physical drowsiness caught up to him, the blurry hum of the background noise, the effects of the beer and the warmth of Schrödinger on his chest making him yet more lethargic. 

Then came the blow.

"The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, available now on Disney Plus, along with the whole-"

That name struck him like a poison arrow, sharp enough to instantly penetrate Winston's blanket of fatigue. Before it could get too potent (it was too potent when it arrived), Winston's arm snapped up the remote and zapped the TV off, causing Schrödinger to cling to his shirt with his claws to prevent slippage. Schrödinger mewed at his owner's sudden change in mood, but Winston was too busy trying to calm his panting to notice. Of all the places to have an unregulated, visceral reaction to something others would consider innocuous ... there was never a right place or time, but in his apartment with no one but his cat around to witness it was probably the least wrong time, especially to something so childish. Yes, he realised that it was petty at best and unhealthy at worst to still be affected by things that had happened over 18 years ago, but the behaviour of the human mind to store away information of harmful events wasn't something that could be easily circumvented or erased.

Human. Why did he keep coming back to that? Why did he constantly need reassurance that he was, in fact, human? Not some advanced but still faulty AI? Sure, he was organic, with flesh and blood and muscle and connective and neural tissue, and he had definitely physically grown like a living organism, but the way the whole system operated was always just off in some way or another, ways that required more effort to rectify. Speaking in the right ways and times was the biggest one - at times, the final result of his script, complete with his tone and delivery that was also ill-fitting and needed yet more adjustments, plunged right to the bottom of the linguistic uncanny valley. Was it possible for a non-computer to fail the Turing Test?

Why could his brain shell out an algorithm that served as the bedrock for an entire hedge fund and calculate Sharpe ratios faster than his hands could type and yet overheated and lagged when forced to tackle one of the most basic of human behaviours? Complex equations that demanded solving? His cerebrum could break down and answer them unbidden. Trying to say the right thing in conversation? The Siri on his iPhone probably had a better grasp of that than him. Winston considered how long it had taken to get computers to talk vs how long it had taken to get them to play chess. Both were back-and-forth exchanges that required all parties to pay attention to themselves and each other, constantly re-running and re-evaluating their own strategies. Being a chess master was considered a high-cognitive skill in humans, more so than holding a conversation long enough to endear you to other people (Of course, there were always anomalies, and one Taylor Mason indeed stuck out as the most enigmatic anomaly of all).

The earliest computers had been used to crack Enigma.

Schrödinger's pointy ears grazed Winston's hand as he realised he had been flapping it again, the cat pawing at his heaving chest as he chased the shaky appendage practically offering pets. The pressure plus the familiar, comforting texture helped to ground Winston as he tried to focus on the strong bone and muscle shifting beneath the furry, supple skin. It took more effort than it probably should have to direct his attention away from his musings (as well as what had triggered them in the first place), but Schrödinger was all too happy to enjoy the prolonged strokes. It was certainly a welcome change to have a companion that not only didn't mind his stims but found their own form of pleasure in them. The outside world commanded that he keep them to a minimum, in public and especially at work, but he had to allow himself some leeway. So long as his face didn't divulge his internal battle, his hands could twitch in any small way they wanted. His face might be a mask, but his hands told the truth.

Part 2: Lost in the Waves

The sensorimotor capabilities of a toddler, despite being relatively low-level in humans, were among some of the hardest things to program in artificial intelligence. Unconscious behaviours such as reflexes were definitely the most difficult to reverse engineer. Not all movements (or lack thereof) necessitated as much comparative input from Winston as a robot would require, but one thing was for sure - processing and reacting to the thousands of stimuli that life threw at him at once had always taken close to the maximum level of cerebral power. His brain was straining in all directions that demanded his attention but it just couldn't get a grasp on any one thing and everything started flying out of control because he didn't have any capacity left to function and then someone would demand he snap out of it but now the knowledge that they were there would cause alarm bells to scream in his head and now he was doubly overloaded and-

He'd scarcely been swimming in his life, at least not without his parents holding him tight the whole time. Aside from the fear of sinking and having to hold his own weight, he just loved the feel of his father's firm, burly arms holding him close to his chest and trusting him to never, ever let him slip away. His mother's body was warm even in the chilly water of the public swimming pool, better than any floaties. She'd suggested he play in the kiddie pool, but Winston was too shy to be around children his own age more than absolutely necessary. He was never sure why or how, but he didn't know how to act like them and they always laughed at him when he tried. Trying felt wrong anyway, like taking his brain out and trying to modify it before sticking it back in his head. They just didn't match, like trying to force together parts of a jigsaw puzzle that didn't fit.

Thus, the four-year-old was left clutching his father as the man stayed in one corner of the shallow end of the pool. Winston enlightened his father on the profound observations of the pretty patterns on the pool floor caused by the sun shining through the high windows and refracting as they passed through the water. When he got bored with that, they silently watched his mother in her sleek blue swimsuit as she zipped all the way up and down the pool length. If she'd had a pointy fin on her back, she could've easily been a shark.

The pool hadn't been too crowded when they'd arrived, but as the session went on, more and more families came to have their share of the fun, complete with colourful inflatables and pool toys and many, many noisy children - many of whom were older and much, much bigger than Winston. When there were only a few more families, Winston just held tighter to his father, occasionally burying his face in his neck whenever things just got a bit too loud, but it wasn't awful.

Until a large chunk of children from the kiddie pool decided to migrate to the shallow end of the main pool.

It all started rising before Winston knew it, the feeling that he couldn't put words to other than wrong and suddenly the water was too cold and the waves were too rough and the sun was too bright and even his dad's hold felt too tight and the hairs on the arms surrounding him were too scratchy and the other people were too noisy, noisy, NOISY it was too much too much LET GO OF ME NEED TO GET OUT-

He shoved at his father's chest with as much strength as he could muster and the man let him go in surprise, but Winston had pushed too hard and now he was out too far away from his father and the side of the pool and he couldn't get a grasp on anything and suddenly he was pushed under the water and it was rushing in the wrong way and his eyes were stinging and he couldn't fight to get himself back where he should be he was going to die-

The same scratchy arms were grabbing him again and he started thrashing involuntarily but then they were pulling him up and out of the water and away from the noise and the big kids and he was trying to scream but his lungs were pushing out nothing but water and coughs and it hurt ...

Suddenly they were alone in a small, dim, quiet room and a voice was speaking to him. A voice that cloaked him like a soothing blanket. "Winston, hey, Winnie, can you hear me?" Something fleshy and warm slipped into his small fist. "Squeeze my hand if you can hear me." Winston held on for dear life. "Good, now take a big belly breath in for me?" He tried, and it hurt, but not as much as trying to breathe before. "Slowly, ahhhhhhh." Gasping it out. "Good, now breathe in again."

This repeated several times until the little boy finally relaxed and his eyes stopped hurting enough to open again. Winston stared at his father's softly smiling face and hugged him tightly, crying hard into his shoulder.

Winston had been terrified of water for weeks. He'd throw a tantrum whenever his mother would bring him upstairs for a bath - she would have to wash him with a cloth. The way Winston saw it, he didn't need baths anyway because he never, ever got dirty - he preferred sitting inside to read or play with a toy over making mud pies or finger painting. He hated the feel of the squishy paint on his hands anyway. He would even refuse to drink water, terrified that it would go down the wrong hole. He would have to be given juice or milk instead as, to his 4-year-old mind, they weren't water, and therefore they couldn't harm him.

When he went back to pre-kindergarten, he'd told his teacher that he had drowned. She didn't believe him, saying that if he had drowned he wouldn't be in pre-K anymore.

That was until he "drowned" again a couple of months later at the park after they'd been walked down there. There had been hundreds of other kids and families there, crowding everything and making so much noise ...

Winston had insisted to his teacher that it was drowning. He'd felt the exact same way he'd felt at the pool, just with no water and without his dad there to comfort him. She'd told his father about it when he'd picked him up at the end of the day. Winston wasn't sure what it all meant, but his dad did explain to him that there was no reason to be afraid of water as it wasn't what was causing him to "drown".

It took a few more months of slowly getting used to being around water again (starting swimming lessons at school had been a nightmare), but slowly, Winston came to believe that too.

On his 5th birthday, he was gifted a small pair of earmuffs. His mother told him to put them on if he ever felt like that again. Winston ended up wearing them almost all the time when he wasn't at home, from the shops to school (during recess, as his teachers wouldn't let him wear them while they were teaching). The earmuffs had to be replaced every six months for the next few years as Winston would wear them out from wearing them so much, even when he didn't feel that awful feeling rising. He just preferred the comforting pressure of the earmuffs on his head and the way they shielded all the noise from piercing his ears. It didn't earn him many friends, but Winston told himself he didn't care. He kept himself to himself, reading through the small shelf of books in the classroom, muttering the rhythm of The Owl and the Pussycat, The Jabberwocky and The Highwayman and trying to ignore the bellows of the taller boys in his class and the snide remarks of the girls.

Until one lunch hour when his ear defenders were snatched away from his head.

"Why do you always wear these, Winnie? Stop ignoring us, Winnie!"

Winston's head snapped up, too stunned momentarily to process what they were saying, just that they were talking to him. "What?"

"You wear these stupid things all the time! Why? WE'RE NOT THAT LOUD, WINNIE!" The boy, Wilbur Schlatt, yelled, leaning right up to his face while holding the earmuffs far out of reach.

"Stop spitting on me!" Winston retorted, moving back away from Wilbur's face. Indeed, Wilbur's over-enunciating was projecting saliva droplets all over Winston's small glasses. "And stop calling me that!" He added, processing the nickname as well. Somehow, it didn't sound the same coming from Wilbur's mouth as it did his parents' mouths.

Wilbur and his friends laughed. "Why not? I heard your mom call you that. You're Winnie , like Winnie the Pooh! You're a POO! POOH, POOH, POOH!"

The entire class laughed even louder at this and Winston sensed that awful emotion rising again for the first time in months, only it was ten times worse because they were all laughing at him - he was wrong , there was something wrong with him. So very wrong. Frantically, he reached for his earmuffs before remembering they weren't around his neck, they were in Wilbur's hand! Mustering up his voice and trying his hardest not to cry, Winston yelled, "GIVE THEM BACK!!"

"Come get them then!"  Wilbur retaliated. "Hey Gary, catch!" He tossed the headset high in the air towards his second-in-command standing a few yards away, who then ran away, waving them in the air like a trophy, leaving Winston running in fruitless pursuit. Behind him, he heard a song, getting continuously louder and harsher  even as he was running further away from it.

"Winnie the Pooh,

Winnie the Pooh,

Chubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff,

He's Winnie the Pooh,

Winnie the Pooh,

Willy nilly, silly old bear!"

This wasn't drowning, Winston realised. It was burning , stinging - or was he freezing as well? It was hard to tell, but he knew that he had never felt so awful in his life. He needed his earmuffs, they would shield him and make it all stop. Now they were at the other end of the playground and Gary was standing over him, holding the earmuffs high over his head. "You want these?" he taunted. "Go and get them from over there!"

With that, he tossed them right over the fence, far out of reach for any of them, causing Winston's heart to plunge through his sneakers to under the grass.

"What is the meaning of this?!" shouted the voice of his teacher, Ms Wessels, causing them both to turn sharply towards her. "Gary Tenneson, inside, now ," she commanded, sounding angrier than any of them had ever heard her. "The principal and I will have a good long talk with your parents when school is finished."

Gary swallowed, turning his head to glance at Winston before stiffly making his way back towards the classroom. Ms Wessels gave him a stern glare before kneeling down to Winston's eye level. "Are you okay?" she asked, her tone significantly softer.

Winston didn't dare try to speak - his throat was all closed up and even he, socially inept as he was, knew that crying in school in the third grade was something you shouldn't do. Instead, he just pointed over the fence where his earmuffs now were. "I know, I saw him throw them away," she said, placing a hand on his shoulder. Winston flinched away, curling in on himself. "I'm so sorry, Winston, I should've stopped them sooner."

When Winston still didn't respond after several seconds, Ms Wessels continued. "Do you want to come inside and sit somewhere quiet for a bit?  We can have a drink of water and not have to see the others yet. Is that okay?" A few seconds later, a nod. "Okay, come with me." She stood up and led him inside without touching him again.

There were still a few tell-tale voices chanting the Winnie the Pooh song when they got back to the other end of the playground, causing Winston to have to cover his ears as he no longer had his earmuffs, but Ms Wessels gave them a very stern look and they stopped.

Winston spent the rest of the school day in Ms Wessels's office, rocking himself in a soothing motion and stroking the scarf that she'd left in the room with him. She let him hold it because he loved the velvety texture - rubbing it against his cheek made him feel better. The light was off, the blinds were pulled and Ms Wessels had even been kind enough to lend him a spare pair of earmuffs she'd found, though she said he had to give them back when he went home. He was only missing one more lesson anyway and he'd much rather spend it by himself in a dimly lit, quiet room than in the classroom with all the kids who had laughed at him and called him Winnie the Pooh. Winston was NOT a poo.

When his mother finally arrived to pick him up, Ms Wessels called them both into the principal's office with Gary and his mother. It should've been satisfying to watch Gary get scolded by Ms Wessels and Mr Rodriguez, but the death glares Gary kept sending him made it harder to enjoy the victory.

When he got home, Winston begged his parents to never, ever, EVER call him Winnie again. Not ever. Especially not at school in front of the others in his class. He even dug up his old stuffed Winnie the Pooh doll from where it was lying under his bed and threw it in the trash.

Gary left him alone now, but Wilbur didn't. In their history lesson, the following day, during which Winston was trying hard not to look at his classmates, a crumpled-up but clearly drawn-on piece of paper landed on his desk. Winston opened it up under the desk to see a crude drawing of the character Winnie the Pooh but with glasses and a blue shirt not unlike the ones Winston usually wore. There was a lump of brown wax crayon scribbled next to the bear as well as in patches on Pooh Bear himself - clearly labelled " POO ".

Winston's hands shook as he took it in, before glancing up at the front of the class. Gary had been moved to directly in front of Ms Wessels's desk, on the opposite side of the room from Wilbur, but it didn't take someone of Winston's intelligence to figure out who it was. His eyes met Wilbur's face looking back at him expectantly, only for the taller boy to pull a fiendish grin. He mouthed "Winnie the Pooh, Winnie the Pooh ..." in the most mocking way he could without giving himself away to Ms Wessels. Winston felt his jaw clench, but he couldn't let himself cry here of all places, so he folded the paper as quietly as he could and set it down on the floor, staring firmly down at his desk and away from Wilbur.

Next lesson was English, and Ms Wessels announced they would be reading the book Charlotte's Web , about a runty pig named Wilbur who becomes best friends with a very bright spider named Charlotte.

As time went on, Winston noticed how Wilbur Schlatt didn't get made fun of at all for having the same name as a smelly animal who laid in mud and dung (who laid in poo ) and who ate slops. From the way he'd seen Wilbur eat in the cafeteria, he definitely ate like a pig. Winston wasn't anything like Winnie the Pooh - he didn't eat a lot of honey, he didn't get stuck in holes, and he definitely didn't have "very little brain" - from what all his teachers had told him, Winston had a very BIG brain. He always completed his math exercises before everyone else, and he could read and understand the long, unfamiliar words in books, including the ones uttered by the titular spider in the book. If there was one thing Winston KNEW about himself, it was that he was smart, and neither Wilbur nor Gary nor anyone else could steal that from him like they had his earmuffs (his mother had made a long strip that clipped to his collar and attached it to his new ones so that they couldn't be stolen).

Then again, maybe his big brain was the reason he could hear everything so much better and needed ear protection - because he heard every little thing (and big thing) all at once until the noise in his head was incredibly loud. Even with the ear defenders on, he sometimes saw the other kids look right at him, their mouths forming the words "Winnie the Pooh". His throat closed up every time they did, but he tried not to react. His parents had told him that the best way to respond to bullies was to not respond. To their credit, it worked a little bit - the kids tormented him less as the year went on - or maybe they'd just gotten bored with it.

The summer before fifth grade was both the longest and shortest summer of Winston's life.

It had started out fine - great, even, with his parents opting to spend a week at a beach resort. Winston had come out of his shell somewhat since the traumatic experience with Wilbur and Gary almost two years earlier. After third grade ended, he'd finally gotten properly examined and diagnosed (although his condition should've been evident to everyone with functioning eyes and ears and Ms Wessels had always been kind to him for it, it had taken over a year for the waiting list for Asperger's Syndrome* to catch up to him) and he was able to get proper help and support at school. For the first time, Winston had friends, people who were willing to include him and listen to him talking about dinosaurs and space and whatever else grabbed at his interest and held it in its claws for the next absurd length of time. They still teased him for his weird way of speaking sometimes, but it was better than what he'd had before.

Now, after a week of excursions, boat trips and activities (Winston had even felt brave enough to join the kids' club instead of clinging to his parents like he used to), they were on their last night. The sun was setting down over the huge, shiny blue ocean, easily the most beautiful sight Winston had ever seen. He was swimming with his father in the water while his mother stayed and looked after their supplies. His father kept a close eye on him, but Winston was no longer that 4-year-old who had been so terrified of water that he'd refused to even drink it. Six years later, he was determined to prove it, once and for all.

Winston took a deep breath and dove deep, his goggles protecting his eyes from the salt in the sea. It wasn't too deep here, less than ten yards, but the dimming sunlight made it harder to see. But something gold flashed at him from under the water, and he realised that the sun's rays were reflecting off of something lying on the sandy bottom. Quickly, he kicked his way downwards and snatched the smooth seashell from the dirt before pushing all the way back up.

Gasping, Winston broke the surface, holding his prize up in triumph. He saw his father grin widely before starting to swim over to meet him. Winston clutched the shell and started to make his way over - before an unseen force pushed him far, far away and under the water again.

He didn't have time to take a breath this time - the water forced its way into his open mouth and down his throat. The concentrated brine viciously stung his mouth and nose and pierced him all the way down to his chest and stomach. Winston flailed his arms helplessly, but the weight of the water above him was too strong. How could he swim back to the surface if everything hurt like this? He wanted to thrash and fight for his life, but his limbs felt like they were being tugged down. Oh God, he was actually done for, why did he have to go after that stupid shell? Now he was drowning for real - God, Winston would've taken a thousand sensory overloads over this!

His vision was darkening, all sound was muffled, and for once, Winston wished it weren't so. He'd never wear earmuffs again if he could just stop this, stop it, JUST LET ME OUT ...

A dark shape blocked out the meagre light, a pair of strong limbs grabbing him, an almighty SHOVE ...

Winston's face was bathed by air, the cold breeze stinging his wet cheeks and forcing him back to awareness. Speedily as his small, tired limbs could propel him, he swam back to shore, collapsing on the sand just as his mother and a coastguard came rushing up to greet him. His mother immediately scooped him into her arms and held him tight, not caring a jot that he was coughing seawater all over her.

"I'm never letting you out of my sight again," she gasped, her voice quivering. Her face was covered in salty water too as she carried him back to their deck chairs. Winston was too weak to struggle against her, his throat was sore from salt and his ribs aching from coughing, but he was just starting to realise that his father hadn't been behind him.

"D-dad, he's ..." he gasped, his chest still heaving, but the coastguard cut him off.

"We know, we saw," the young man assured him. "I've called for help, they'll be here soon."

Winston's ears were still full of water, but he managed to spit out, "Now!" Soon wasn't soon enough, his father was still out there, probably drowning like he was!

Indeed, it was too long before the lifeboat was sailed out to the end of the riptide where Winston and his father had been swept out. Too long they stayed at sea trying to locate the 39-year-old, dark-haired man - or his body at least. Too long did Winston and his mother sit together on the beach, clinging to each other, freezing and stiff in the twilight with only a beach towel wrapped around both of them for protection. Neither of them dared move or speak a word, only staring rigidly at the horizon and the tiny orange boat floating on the vast ocean.

They were eventually given the facts.

Winston, while playing in the water, had been caught in a riptide and thrown far beyond his father's reach and under the water. His father realised this and had immediately dived to the rescue. Fighting against the undertow, he had raced to save the life of his son.

The only thing about a race was that someone had to lose.

For months after the incident, Winston remained convinced that he had drowned too.

After all, how else could he explain why there had been a damper on everything since that harrowing evening?

Even though his ears had long since drained of water, all sounds around him were almost completely muted. Not like he was deaf, more like ... they had less impact. A person could talk at him for five minutes and he'd nod along numbly, but realise seconds later that he hadn't processed a single word of what had been said to him. Even when he tried to watch his old dinosaur DVDs, he might as well have been watching and listening to TV static the whole time. He no longer needed his earmuffs - even the ear-piercing timbres of the fire alarm or ambulance sirens didn't bother him like they used to. It should've worried him, the fact that there was apparently something wrong with him, but how could he worry about that when his father was dead , and everything was wrong?

His eyes were much the same. The brightest of colours or lights might as well have been reduced to grayscale. 3 weeks after his father's death, Winston decided to experiment. Like every young boy at the time, he had heard the rumours of an episode of Pokémon that had apparently been banned after it gave a bunch of Japanese kids seizures. After digging through Google for hours on end, Winston found the episode and watched it. Sure enough, the flashing lights hurt his eyes, but only a little, and it still didn't feel real. It was like his eyes were only hurting because he thought that they should hurt. The rest of the time, it was like staring at a white wall, watching paint that never dried.

Winston's mother always gave him an extra-long hug after tucking him into bed every night. To Winston, it consistently felt as icy cold as that night on the beach when she had fished him out of the water and held him in her arms the whole time they were waiting for the coastguard to find his father. Still, he always reached up and hugged her back because that was what he was supposed to do. He hated feeling that way in response to her hugs - she was all he had left, and he had to respect her, but his brain seemed to have forgotten how to feel warmth - or much of anything.

Why had he been closer to tears when his earmuffs were stolen than when his father had been taken for good?

Winston knew why. The noise in his head had been mostly quiet since that night, but one voice still remained that fluctuated in volume. It was loudest whenever his mother hugged him or whenever some adult tried to talk to him about the stages of grief.

Or when he truly reflected on those perilous few minutes in the Atlantic.

My fault.

My fault.

My fault.

My fault.

My fault.

It was something he could never ever tell anyone else about. No one but he and his father truly knew what had happened in the riptide, how it was his stupid desire to prove himself that had led to him diving for non-existent treasure and his father following him all the way out there to a watery grave. He didn't deserve to cry, but the numbness that had settled in his brain at least provided a dam to the tsunami of self-hatred.

The dam never caved fully, at least not enough to do any acute damage, but it cracked plenty. Enough to let streams through, pooling in the crevices of his brain. With no outlet, they became stagnant, crawling with contaminants.

Two months passed by in a haze. Days and weeks and months blended into each other. School starting again, two months after the incident, felt like falling asleep on a bus and waking up at a totally different place and time. The numbness in his brain had eroded around the edges, just enough for him to pick up what his teachers were saying. The school helped a bit, he found - the part of his brain that could do maths still worked, processing sums, equations and problems like clockwork, spitting out precisely the right answers every time. It shocked the teacher, who had been informed of his bereavement and was all too prepared to give him leeway. But schoolwork was the least of Winston's problems.

Public school food had a reputation for tasting almost as bad as it looked, but Winston and the thousands of other children in the system choked it down obediently because otherwise, they'd go hungry. On the first day back, they had been given canned hot dogs and French fries as a "treat" to "celebrate" the start of school again. Winston sat down with his tray, picked up the pale bun that engulfed the orange frank, and took a bite.

He'd forgone condiments, but one flavour stabbed his tongue.

Salt.

Winston spat it out immediately to the audible disgust of those that shared the lunch table with him, but he didn't care - he just grabbed the single cup of water next to him (at least he was no longer naïve enough to manifest the fear of all water after the incident) and downed it in five seconds. The rest of the hot dog remained abandoned on the tray, and the Winston consumed the pale, greasy French fries instead - at least they had lost most of their seasoning.

His old teacher, Ms Wessels, witnessed the whole thing from the staff lunch table and brought him aside when he got up to put his tray away. When she questioned him about the hot dog, he said the only thing on his tongue: "Salt."

The first sensory overload Winston had after the riptide was in middle school, three years later. He didn't understand one of the instructions they had been given, which was uncommon for him. Still, he raised his hand, and the hand stayed raised for the next half an hour because the teacher was completely ignoring him. He would go to other students with raised hands that had been waiting for a fraction of the time he had. To make matters worse, the girl next to him was asking him for help even though she was further along than he was and why couldn't she see that?!

Winston's other hand was flapping wildly on the desk, trying to release the building pressure before it blew up all over his body. Why could the teacher not see him?! He was falling far behind because this one instruction was holding him off and he would lose sync with the rest of the course and everything was flying around him in a flailing hurricane and he couldn't get a handle on anything-

And then the girl next to him raised her hand.

Winston exploded.

The dam broke, releasing the torrent from Winston's brain and larynx. He went off on her, about how far behind he was and about how he had been waiting for help for ages and why should she get the help he wasn't getting?! Couldn't she see that he was the one that needed help, not her?! He was past the point of caring about the rest of the class staring at him, or anyone outside that may hear. He barely even cared about the words coming out of his mouth, just that he was burning and he needed to let it off-

"Winston!" scolded the teacher, grabbing his shoulder. "Outside, now."

Crying in front of teachers had been disallowed in the third grade, even the nice ones like Ms Wessels. Crying in front of hard nut male teachers in the eighth grade? Social suicide. As such, Winston clammed up as the teacher admonished him. He didn't open his mouth to speak up about the teacher ignoring his long-raised hand or about how she had been annoying him with requests for help he couldn't provide.

Most of his middle school teachers knew that he was autistic, as far as the fact that it was listed on the class register, but with the added factors of him never having an overload in front of any of them until now, or the fact that this was no longer elementary school, they were less willing to go easy on him. He walked away from that class with a detention slip and demands for apologies to the girl he had made cry, but he was almost glad it had happened.

One - it was the first time he had really felt anything since the riptide.

Two - it had taught him that, as much as possible, he had to mask. Find ways around those pesky behaviours that had been hard-wired into his brain almost since birth.

Large earmuffs were replaced with small earplugs. Hand flapping and fidget toys were replaced with smaller tics. Saying whatever came to mind was replaced with pre-prepared scripts.

Winston was nineteen years old when he'd had his first girlfriend.

It wasn't a bad venture, all things considered. He'd met Irene Phillips met on the same course, both being scholarship students at MIT. After exchanging ideas at their math meetup, they'd started meeting up to discuss more than math. Their interests, their experiences, their philosophical views. He made sure to covertly avoid the subject of families, at least whenever she asked him to talk about his own. He'd been pushing away the feelings - or lack thereof - around that incident for several years and he wanted to delay the other shoe dropping for as long as possible, least of all in front of Irene.

Their first date was seeing the film Man of Steel in theatres, but the scene that grabbed Winston's attention most wasn't Clark Kent's first flight as Superman, or Zod's neck being snapped, or even the beginning on Krypton when Jor-El was brutally murdered trying to save his species and his son (though his throat tightened dangerously and he'd had to wash his feelings down with Cherry Coke). It was the scene with the younger Clark in school, running from the classroom to hide in the closet because of the overwhelming stimuli picked up by his super senses. Even more so was the metaphor his mother had to give - her voice was an island in a vast ocean, and all he had to do was swim to it.

When he and Irene bade each other goodnight later, Winston called his mom. He still wasn't ready to talk to her about his father, but he made sure to inject more love into his tone and words than he usually did, to prove that he hadn't completely frozen her out. Winston rarely had the inclination time to talk to his mother, but he couldn't leave her alone. She and his father had been his most loyal companions through most of his young, lonely life - it was only fair that he return the favour any small way he could.

Their second date had been little more than eating and cuddling up together in Irene's studio apartment. After a homemade dinner and dessert (to many well-crafted compliments from Winston even as he'd choked down the salty carbonara), she'd cracked open a bottle of red wine and shared it liberally between them both. At some point, they had ended up lying on her single bed, covered with a warm crimson throw, sharing embarrassing stories and jokes until their red cheeks ached and making out when they couldn't think of anything to say.

Irene giggled serenely, resting her full body weight on his chest. "You're so cute, Winnie," she cooed, running a hand over his cotton-covered chest.

Winston felt his face heat up even more, but the sharp twist in his chest that pulled the rest of his muscles taut couldn't be ignored. "Don't call me that," he murmured.

"Why noooot," Irene slurred. "It's a cute name, like you. You're soft, and sweet too, like Winnie the Pooh. Hey, that rhymed!"

Winston flinched hard, his breath hitching and his eyes starting to burn. "Please, don't call me that. I have a crippling fear of that fucking bear." Had he been sober, he probably could've found a more articulate way of conveying his negative emotions surrounding the innocent children's character, but the wine was putting a familiar haze around his brain, blocking off the higher reasoning channels he'd honed over the years.

Irene laughed louder. "Really?! You never told me that before. What's so scary about Winnie the Pooh of all things?"

A soft thudding sounded throughout the room. It took a moment for them both to realise that it was Winston's hand, the only part of his otherwise rigid body that dared move. Irene noticed it and her teasing smile instantly dropped. Her expression sobered as she tenderly grasped his flapping hand, massaging his wrist and palm and kissing his knuckles. "It's okay, you don't have to tell me," she murmured, seeing his eyes convulsively blinking and his Adam's apple bobbing in his throat.

"Don't call me that," Winston echoed once more, before collecting a few more of his thoughts together. "I'm sorry for not telling you before. You know that scene in Man of Steel, where Clark Kent is in the classroom and he sees and hears everything, so he has to hide in the closet? That's-"

"I know," Irene interrupted. "I knew within minutes of seeing you."

Winston froze. Was he that obvious? He'd been masking diligently for his whole time at MIT, yet Irene had apparently known almost at once. What did the others think of him? Before he could spiral, Irene was leaning down and kissing his lips. He could still taste the wine in both their mouths. "I'm here," she whispered. "This doesn't change anything, I promise."

Slowly, Winston came to believe that too.

He believed it when he let himself stim comfortably in front of her, whether he was flapping his hands or using one of his numerous stim toys that he normally dared only use in the privacy of his own room. He believed it when she had cried to him about her grades slipping, and he had offered to help, explaining the concepts to her in the best way he could formulate. He believed it when she'd led him to her bed, smelling of mandarin, and he gave up his body to her.

Winston believed it even when he'd taken a good look at his "soft" physique in the mirror and decided that being mistaken for Winnie the Fucking Pooh in any way, shape or form was unacceptable. A new obsession sparked like a piece of flint lying in a dark corner of his brain.

His studies meant he already spent hours on end staring at numbers, but it wasn't long before he saw numbers everywhere - grams of fat, protein, sugar, sugar alcohols, omega-3s and 6s and 9s. DHA, EPA, riboflavin, folate, cobalamin, ascorbate - why hadn't he studied biology in school?. Calories had to be carried and accounted for at every step, and, not for the first time in his life, Winston was consumed with the feeling of drowning. The visual of  numbers and equations swirling around his head and in front of his eyes was made to look cool in the movies, but it certainly didn't feel that way when he was living it 24/7.

Next time Irene invited him to dinner, he'd asked for a smaller portion of lasagna, no dessert and had sat as far away as possible from the M&Ms when they turned on Netflix. Even lifting his fork to his mouth seemed a Herculean task. Not because he was fatigued - he walked from his classes to his apartment to Irene's apartment without a problem - but the knowledge that every bite would have to be calculated to the eighth of an ounce was almost enough to stop it being worth it. His brain could handle the extra math when he was alone, but in the company of his girlfriend, when he had balance talking with her as well as hiding how slowly he was eating, his brain was lagging behind and had to work even harder to hang onto her every word when all it wanted to do was crash and shut down until it had cooled enough to work correctly.

Irene Phillips wasn't stupid - she was the smartest person Winston had ever known, and not just in the academic way like he was. She was observant, she could deduce anything about a person from the way they spoke to where they placed their legs while sitting. He knew it was only a matter of time before she figured out that something was up on her own, if not the whole truth. If she figured it out from that date - or from their other dates over the next several months - she never once let on. No offhand remarks, no direct confrontation, no extra reassurances, not anything. Things remained the same until they broke for the summer and moved back to their home cities. Winston had been unpacking his clothes back in his room at his mother's house before he felt something crinkled in the pocket of his burgundy MIT hoodie. Frowning, he took it out.

It turned out to be a pamphlet for the National Institute of Mental Health, of the kind often seen in the waiting rooms of medical clinics. Winston didn't remember putting it there at all - fuck, he'd only been to a clinic once in the last year, and that was to register. Still, he sat down on his bed and flicked through the usual information on depression, anxiety and ADHD before landing on the section about eating disorders.

There, stuck to the page, was a single yellow Post-It note, displaying Irene's clear cursive: Get help x

Winston's breath caught in his throat. How long had that pamphlet been there? How long had she known? How long had she watched him drown in his own obsessive thoughts, only thrown a life preserver when he'd already been swept so far out that he could no longer see where he'd come from?

He'd said as much to Irene when he texted her two minutes after finding the note.

After a long silence, she replied:

Winston, you're a sweet guy. I know you've had it rough, with your autism and your father not being there and your million and one other issues. I've tried my hardest to be there for you, but I can't fix you. You need help I can't provide - I am not qualified. Eating disorders kill - I've seen it happen to people I've known and it's not pretty. I don't want that to happen to you. Please, if you won't go to a clinic, at least call the helplines. They have texting options if you don't want to talk with your mouth, I know you have trouble with that. Get help, please xx

You didn't answer my question. How long have you known and why didn't you tell me then?

Be happy, and don't be so goddamn needy.

"But sadly, though you may have genius-level IQ, you have no control over your emotional state. THAT's why you're lashing out in here - defensive, allowing your rage at yourself to manifest in boorish, childish behaviour. He couldn't figure out the box, so he did that to it, then he let the rest of his bullshit cloud his thinking. He has no idea why he had to resort to brute force, so he doesn't get to work here."

Taylor Mason's words were the only noise in Winston's head for hours after exiting the building, replaying over and over like one of his scripts. Of course, what he had heard prior about Taylor Mason had been nothing short of exemplary, but he'd never been informed that they were a fucking mind reader (or that they were non-binary and used singular they pronouns - he'd had to find that out from their Wikipedia page after his dumpster fire of an interview**.) They had seen him for all of two minutes and had somehow managed to dissect not only his behaviour and thought process in the moment but for much of his life.

Logic told him that mind readers couldn't possibly exist - at least, not without a very conspicuous instrument directly attached to his brain, which he was positive hadn't been used in the interview nor at any point in his 24 years. There was no possible way Taylor could've known about his father, or Irene, or his conditions ... okay, maybe the latter was a bit more obvious. Even so, what did it say about himself that he'd utterly failed to do everything he'd schooled himself to do for the last decade, when it mattered most? No script, unmasked gestures - he'd regressed right back into that entitled, egotistical 13-year-old that had lashed out at an innocent person when he didn't understand a task.

Winston's mind seemed to regress even further as he made the journey back to his tiny apartment - past 13, all the way back to 10. The stunned numbness introduced itself again, and he greeted it like an old friend. His old earmuffs long replaced with headphones, he hadn't even reached for them on the subway, despite the daytime rush and the thousands of voices clamouring to be heard over each other that would've normally been enough to disconcert him. The numbness clung to him as he unlocked his door and got out his laptop, opening up Uber Eats. He scrolled through almost every pizza and fried chicken menu presented to him - a considerable number, considering this was New York City - and finally said, "Fuck it," ordering a family-sized bucket from KFC along with a large fries.

Ten detached minutes later, he received the food (The delivery driver had given him a look that might've been sympathetic if Winston had possessed the capacity to interpret it). Thirty dazed minutes after that, he was lying alone on his apartment floor, the containers lying empty and his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling.

Then the wave crashed into him.

Why the fuck had he done that?! He'd just wasted twenty goddamn dollars on food that was nutritionally barren and would do nothing to help his body, his mood or his prospects, and for what?! A moment of pleasure?! He hadn't even tasted it after the first few bites. Now his stomach was straining harder than it ever had before as a result of all the shit he had forced into it, sending shooting pains up his oesophagus to his chest.

-000-

Contrary to Irene's judgement, Winston was not completely ignorant when it came to eating disorders. He'd sat through health class videos on them like everyone else - bulimia, anorexia, pica, even whispers of binge eating disorder. But those were few and far between. The only thing less talked about than eating disorders were males with eating disorders.

It would only be just this once. Winston could control himself (you have no control over your emotional state).

Winston got out his phone and googled "how to make yourself throw up". Scrolling right past the warnings stating not to attempt to do so to get rid of excess food, he found one that looked like it might work - concentrated saltwater disrupted the electrolyte imbalance in the body (he let the rest of his bullshit cloud his thinking).

Mixing up the concoction in a glass, Winston moved to the bathroom - the website said that this could apparently take as long as half an hour to work, so he had to settle in for the long haul. Taking a deep breath, he tipped his head and the glass back and gulped down the saltwater.

The effect was instantaneous - but not the one he was hoping for.

A boy on his own, submerged in the Atlantic by a rip current. His strong, loving father valiantly laying down his life for the sake of his son's. The saltwater burned them both as the ocean grasped them firmly, refusing to let them go without a fight. More salt grazed the boy's chapped lips as he scrambled back to shore.

In the end, the saltwater hadn't even worked . It, plus the memories it had triggered within him, had made Winston acutely nauseous, as well as causing his whole body to shake uncontrollably, yet no matter how long he waited or hard he forced it, nothing would come up. 

-000-

Reeeooww.

All he could taste was salt. Not a hint of chicken or potato or any of the 11 herbs and spices KFC claimed to use in their original recipe. Worse still, there was now salty water on his face.

Meeeroow!

What would his father think of him now?

Mrrrreeeeoooowwwww!!

Winston's eyes snapped open with a gasp. For a long moment, he lay there, convinced that he had irrevocably destroyed his prospects and body, before the past two years' worth of memories slotted back into his brain. Taylor Mason was not only his boss but easily the best boss he'd ever had. He was the sole quantitative analyst for a major hedge fund that allowed for all the investment opportunities he could want. For all accounts, Winston had made it.

He took stock of his surroundings and realised that he was lying in his bathtub, having slipped down far enough in the tub that his whole face was almost submerged. The water, which had once been warm and comforting and smelling of lavender, was now as tepid as rainwater. The dark bruises winked at him from his knees. Winston felt a tugging on his arm and realised that Schrödinger had grabbed hold of his wrist by his mother and was currently doing his level best to save his owner from drowning. Winston was starting to develop a scar on his wrist from Schrödinger's other attempts, as well as yet another shooting pain. This one was in his right shoulder, developed as the result of his cat's lifeguard training. Schrödinger was getting better at it, stronger - maybe, one day, he'd fully pull Winston out of the tub.

Winston broke his arm free, shook the water off and petted his cat's head. "Hey, Schrödinger," he greeted, "I'm fine, I promise. I'm okay, you bastard." Schrödinger was still fishing around for his arm regardless of his words, so Winston took that, plus his bathwater-shrivelled skin, as his cue to get out. Even as he dried off and changed, the cat still stared directly up at him, not breaking for a second.

The two of them headed into Winston's bedroom, where Winston shut off his laptop from where it had been left on standby and left his phone on charge. He carefully lifted the duvet from the bed, followed by the thick, blue weighted blanket lying underneath it. Winston was the frugal type, not often one to splurge, but he could safely say that this was one $200 investment well spent.

Climbing under the blanket, Schrödinger leapt softly by his side. Winston knew that his presence was more likely due to the fact that the bed, with him sleeping in it, was warmer than his cat basket, as opposed to him genuinely appreciating his owner, but Winston was glad for the company nonetheless. The only light in his room came from the moonlight peeking through the blinds and, brighter than that, Schrödinger's wide yellow eyes, looking at him with an expression he could almost never decipher.

Winston's own eyes were drowning in saltwater again.

Humans were adaptable. Stimuli and events that were initially a shock to the system would have less and less impact every time as the body and brain adapted to it. Much like how physical exercise would become less uncomfortable as the body adapted, a person bearing a burden would (in theory) learn to manage it.

But the adaptability of humans wasn't always desirable. A heroin user would be urged to raise their dosage after ceasing to experience the same highs. A person subjected to repeated trauma would (again, in theory) become so numb to the horror that in some cases, they would fail to recognise their own damage as such. Even people dealing with burdens sometimes developed suboptimal coping mechanisms.

Computers didn't follow these principles. Inputting the same command a thousand times a day into one computer wouldn't make it any more or less likely to generate the exact same result. Furthermore, computers and even AI didn't react well to trauma, physical or electronic - if a computer had a virus, there was no chance of it fighting it off alone - it required manual debugging. Physical trauma spelt even worse - most computers taking a beating would be broken beyond functionality.

In retrospect, Winston could've kicked himself. For all of his questioning and reasoning and weighing the factors that made him more akin to a human vs computer, it hadn't even been those efforts that had led him to his answer. Then again, considering the implications of said answer, it was perhaps unsurprising that he had been so blind to the factor that had tipped the scales once and for all.

Winston tended towards rationality, but there were times when trying to reason every how and why took more effort than it was worth. The prime example of which was figuring how he'd ended up in a bar with Rian. No, that part was easy - he was here because she'd asked him to be here. The hard part was determining why she'd asked him out.

"You're not gonna have another drink?" Rian queried, taking another sip of rosé.

There was an easy one. "One of us has to be sober enough to get us home," Winston pointed out, eyeing the tall bottle sitting next to them on the bar along with his can of Pepsi Max. "Do you know how easy it is to get mugged when you go out in New York City while drunk? Or worse?" 

"You could just fake a Russian accent," she replied, her lips quirking.

Winston groaned. "Listen to me here," he instructed, lowering his voice. "Do not ever follow a single piece of advice that comes out of Mafee's mouth. Do you hear me?"

Rian snorted. "Point taken. I mean, this is the same guy who believes it's bad luck to be empty-handed for the toast."

"Lazy math?"

Rian nodded. "Here's to lazy math," she echoed, lifting her glass.

Winston poured out the last of his Pepsi into the provided glass and clinked it against hers. Somehow, when they both sipped, he felt that they were drinking in perfect synchronisation, the sound of them placing their glasses on the bar a single, assertive clunk.

"You're all out," Rian noticed, sliding the bottle in his direction. "One more drink won't kill you."

Winston shook his head more vehemently than he meant to. "Please, no," he insisted, pushing the bottle away. "There's a very good reason I didn't have a drink for that toast. I really don't mix well with alcohol." Least of all around his colleagues - not only did alcohol make the task of saying the right things even more strenuous, but it also rendered him less willing to put in the effort to do so. He'd learned the hard way that he couldn't afford to compromise what ability he had to maintain decent working relationships. Though he had quickly reasoned that Wendy targeting him for firing was due to her efforts to axe those loyal to Taylor Mason, it was still telling that he had been the first one on the chopping block - or rather, the first one smothered.

"Says the guy who downs nootropics with Red Bull," Rian smirked.

Winston huffed. "Not the weirdest thing my family has done with drugs," he let out. "My cousin in New Jersey, he told us about the time he took this weird pill in Junior year that made him hallucinate that Keanu Reeves was criticising him and telling him how to be cool." He let out a laugh at the very notion, akin to explaining a bizarre fever dream after it ended - which, he supposed, wasn't too far off from the truth. "Still, this girl he liked took the same stuff and now they're dating so ..." he shrugged. "Nothing like untested, Class A shit to bring people together, I guess."

"At least he didn't take it with an energy drink," Rian pointed out with lazy sass, though her raised eyebrows gave her away.

"He did, actually," Winston retorted quickly. "Took it with Mountain Dew. He won't touch it now. That ecstasy really fucked him up." He swallowed, remembering his cousin's visible discomfort at previously benign topics of discussion at their last family reunion the prior Christmas. How his back would jerk erect whenever he started to slouch in that uncanny manner similar to a marionette being hauled upright on its strings. "We got off really lucky with that limitless shit, trust me."

"Touché," Rian conceded before her gaze broke away from his to glance around the bar. "There was a bar like this back in my hometown," she began, and her face and voice carried something different, devoid of her typical wit that Winston couldn't recall her speaking without in the short time he had known her. "When I was old enough, I used to come every night, just to get away from my family." Her expression suddenly hardened into a tight, stoic frown. "My mother would let me go out and damage my liver on the regular, but God forbid I go to prom with a girl."

Winston's shoulders tensed. "Fuck her," he stated bluntly. "Just ... fuck her so hard. It's the fucking 2020s, anyone who makes a big deal out of that now needs to get the fuck off of the mortal coil, stat."

Rian's frown shifted. "It doesn't bother you?"

"Of course," Winston pressed on. "I mean, I'd be a fucking hypocrite if it did." No point trying to mask now - she had just dropped her armour to reveal one of her weak, vulnerable spots - one that he could see reflected in himself no less. This was more than just lazy math. 

"You're bi?"

Winston flicked his eyebrows up. "I mean, I've only ever had girlfriends but, yeah, I'm pretty fucking sure." High school had earned its reputation as an oppressive Thunderdome for a reason - Winston had enough reasons to lay low and try hard to remain inconspicuous without adding to it by letting on that he was as queer as a clockwork orange in both meanings of the word. It wasn't as if anyone other than Irene had ever taken that kind of interest in him - until now.

Rian was staring at him, her expression indecipherable, long enough to make Winston wonder if - yet again - he had been careless in dropping his mask. Shit, he didn't even have alcohol as an excuse, he'd just-

"Nice to have bisexual solidarity then," Rian spoke finally, cutting off the voice in his head.

And then she reached out and touched his hand.

In the span of a microsecond, every single voice in Winston's head was muted. Her soft hand against his skin, though slightly cold from the glass, tingled with a warmth that soon escalated into infrared prickling, just bordering on too harsh, like plunging into a bathtub when the water was just a bit too hot, or like the pain felt in one's hands upon stepping inside a warm building after walking outside in the frosty wind without gloves. His skin hadn't even been numb in the first place, but the pins and needles travelled from his hand up the nerves and blood vessels over his whole arm, concentrated where she touched him and in the lymph nodes in his elbow and underarm.

In the quiet of the bar and the eerie, atypical silence inside his own head, he swore he heard his sensory nerves firing, electrical impulses surging and crackling hard enough that he was momentarily sure that some relay neurones would blow like fuses.

"Are you okay?" Rian's voice cut through his awareness, and Winston realised that, in response to the unfamiliar jolt to his senses, his whole arm had stiffened up, his fingers frozen around hers. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have crossed that boundary with you, I was just excited to have someone to relate to what I've been through and who won't judge me for it."

Winston understood, oh God, he understood her so much that her words drew a solid pike through his chest and windpipe, but he also realised that she had pulled her hand back away from his. The warmth was fading, replaced with a crawling, itching sensation that he vaguely recognised as wrong. Now he thought about it, the same chilly wrongness was budding up over most of his skin, just around the edges, though it was concentrated at the hand-shaped imprint she'd left behind.

Rian took a deep breath. "I'm sorry," she repeated, her gaze lingering on the bottle, away from his face. "We can stop this if you-"

It was her turn to be cut off when Winston reached out and gently clasped her hand, manoeuvring their grip so that their fingers fit comfortably together. At her perplexed expression, he tried to give her the it's okay look, with a small, closed-lip smile for good measure. His arm hadn't been the only part of him rendered tense by her initial touch - his voice had seized up too.

The warmth from their linked hands continued to radiate as she relaxed and continued talking, which gave Winston ample time to compose himself and start engaging with her properly once again. Their hands never left each other for the rest of the date, and a fraction of Winston's mind never left them either.

Days later, the same fraction of Winston's mind hadn't left the memory of them holding hands in the bar. Despite his best efforts to direct his attention elsewhere, he couldn't exactly avoid Rian in the workplace without being awkward at best and stand-offish at worst (granted, most of their early days of knowing each other had mostly been him being awkward and stand-offish and she had still, somehow, found him pleasurable to spend time with) and interacting with Rian meant having to think about her, and thinking about her meant pondering over how the small comfort of her touching him was still clinging to him several days later. He had even started using that hand less frequently than his other hand, not wanting to dampen or wash it out like the taste of a brownie after eating an apple.

On some level, he'd rather it not bother him. Aside from the hindrance it posed in him completing his tasks efficiently due to his newfound reticence to using his left hand, as well as the mental distraction that couldn't be so easily blocked out with headphones, Winston found himself chastising himself several times a day for this being his latest hyperfocus. This wasn't middle school, he wasn't at the stage where a girl touching his hand was something worth obsessing over. Hell, not only was it juvenile, it was fucking pathetic - how low had his social life gotten that hand-holding was anomalous enough to be memorable?

Then again, it wouldn't be the only instance of him being disproportionately sensitive to innocuous touches. After his father's death, Winston distinctly remembered how cold his mother's hugs had felt, as frigid as the icy sea breezes on the beach. Whether it was by Pavlovian association or by the pits of depression, he knew it was utterly wrong.

Moreover, one of Winston's only major triggers was something that he couldn't even pinpoint a trauma-based origin for, which made it doubly hard to explain to people when it manifested. For as long as he could remember, he'd despised being touched by fingertips. Even a brief touch would set off all the wrong nerves possible and cling to him like a burr, lingering for over an hour afterwards while he desperately tried to drown out the awful sensation by rubbing hard, or scratching, or slapping the area so hard it hurt because even the pain was better. God help anyone that dared tickle him - no, God help him if he was tickled. It had been the source of his one major meltdown in high school - he'd been sixteen at the time, and one of his classmates thought it was funny, but Winston had screamed out loud, shoved them away and locked himself in the bathroom for two whole periods, his whole body shaking along with his hands, lips pressed together aside from the occasional yells of "DON'T TOUCH ME!" and "GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM ME!" whenever teachers had tried approaching him. How was he able to explain himself when his entire capacity for existence was consumed with every possible alarm in his head maxed out, his own inner voice screaming along with them, as crawling, sludgy parasites grew and spread all over his body, under his skin, in every possible surface, cavity and crevice of his internal organs, squeamish and writhing and WRONG, WRONG, WRONG?! 

Much like Clark Kent, the school was forced to call his mother, who had proceeded to admonish him for pulling her out of work when they arrived home. Winston had tried his hardest to explain why he had reacted the way he had, why he hated it so much, but it was nigh impossible to give a sufficient reason when he hardly knew it himself, and it had shown in his mother's mere half-understanding of his viewpoint. It was just another bug in his coding, a faulty piece of wiring in his brain that no amount of reasoning could fix. After that, nobody in his class who had witnessed his breakdown dared lay a hand on him, and even his own mother had been reticent to touching him.

(It had been a similar incident that ended up being his only full-blown meltdown in front of Irene. They had been spending time together in his apartment and he knew she hadn't meant to harm him, just like his old classmate hadn't meant it either, but he'd still found himself recoiling away from her, shivering like a kitten and begging her not to touch him, albeit with marginally more decorum than he had treated his teachers in high school. The poor girl had been at a complete loss of what to do for an hour, which was understandable when Winston himself didn't even know how to calm himself down without merely waiting it out. When the parasites had finally abated enough for him to speak, he'd apologised profusely for scaring her and attempted to give her a more cohesive explanation. Irene had apologised as well and promised that it would never happen again, but even so, Winston couldn't help his nerves being set just a little on edge every time she touched him after that, tensing briefly before relaxing. That incident had been in their last month together and, in hindsight, had likely precipitated her incentive to break up with him).

Irrational triggers aside, Rian's touch still hadn't left him, an island of warmth settling in the barren, frosty sea of starved skin. The more he'd allowed himself to focus on it, staring at his left hand like it didn't belong to him in the dim light of his apartment every evening, the sharper the contrast grew. The neglected nerves were cracked, open fractures exposed to the crisp air; the wind nipping at the exposed edges of the broken fragments; frost growing on the raw, jagged tips, just around the borders. Only his left hand had been treated to the balm of human contact, and the more Winston let himself dwell on it, the more he craved her touch, to soften the serrated edges that only irritated him more as days and nights passed.

But he wouldn't let himself dwell on it. Experience had taught him that dependence on another individual was detrimental both to him and to the poor soul he'd found himself latching to and he refused to do that to Rian. She wasn't some angelic paragon of light and virtue that had come to save his broken soul - she was a decent but awkward human being, one who'd left home as soon as she could; who'd somehow found herself navigating an altogether different oppressive environment; who could match wits at his level. Moreover, Winston was no longer that young student with a slew of mental health and body image issues (though since graduation, he had mostly been flipping between periods of caring too much about what and how much he ate to barely giving a hoot, stuck on a swinging pendulum that he was getting heartily sick of) - he was a grown-ass man who should be able to shut up and deal with it. He couldn't afford to be so needy.

Winston steeled himself and ran his left hand under the cold tap.

For the first time in a long time, Winston didn't slump to the floor upon entering his apartment.

On this occasion, he'd had far less incentive to do so with Rian entering it with him, which he and his knees were quite thankful for. Equally gratifying was the lack of stench - Winston thanked the laws of probability that Schrödinger had opted to actually use his litter box this time. After introducing Rian to the languid cat and allowing her to feed him his favourite cat treats, Schrödinger warmed up to her, even following them to the couch when they sat down to watch Detective Pikachu.

"So this guy is actually named Justice Smith?" Rian queried as the credits rolled and Tim Goodman's actor's name flashed across the screen.

"No relation to Will or Jaden," Winston responded.

Rian snorted. "Can't begin to imagine the blind jokes he must've gotten."

Winston frowned, glancing at her in confusion. "What?"

"Because ..." Rian began, before seeming to change her mind, her shoulders slumping. "Never mind. I guess I can't judge when it comes to awful names," she admitted with a grimace. "If I had a nickel for every time someone heard my name and thought I was a guy ..."

Winston flinched - his initial reaction to Rian's name, even without her knowledge, had definitely not been the correct one. "Your name's great," he offered up lamely, before re-scripting. "It's a cool name, powerful, and beautiful too." Fuck, that was lame too.

Rian blinked, and Winston felt his very cognition stumble at the realisation that he'd made blush. The moment only lasted for a few seconds before her now-familiar knowing smirk fitted its way onto her face. "Yours isn't so bad yourself, Winston."

The sound of his name in her mouth thudded in his ears like a soothing heartbeat, relaxing the tension in his shoulder blades. "Thanks," he breathed, but she wasn't done.

"Did people call you Winston Churchill a lot?"

Oh, he wished. "If I had a nickel for every time someone called me Winston Churchill, I'd have ... three nickels." A fairly accurate estimate - more often, it had been something far less desirable. Winston made a mental note to warn her to never call him Winnie and fucking NEVER EVER touch him with fingertips if this relationship would continue.

Not now, though. That was a conversation for another time. "You want a drink or something?"

Rian nodded. "Yeah, could I have a coffee? Milk, no sugar?"

"Really, at this time?" Winston glanced at the clock on the wall, displaying the time as 8:48.

"I still gotta get home safely," she pointed out.

"Point taken." Winston stood up from the couch and made his way over to his small kitchen, preparing Rian's coffee as well as tea for himself. When he returned, Rian was petting Schrödinger lounging at the top of his cat tower, both of them turning at the sound of his approach.

"You're also having coffee?" she noted as he handed her the mug and they sat down on the couch again.

Winston shook his head. "I'm a tea person."

"You know that tea also has caffeine, right?" Rian pointed out. "Good luck sleeping tonight."

Winston shrugged, sipping casually. "At least coffee isn't a laxative."

"You sure you're not just lactose intolerant?"

"Definitely not," Winston retorted, showing her the milky contents of his own mug.

Rian nodded, smirking slightly as if she had just added two and two. "Can we at least agree that hot chocolate is better than both of these?"

"Sure, if you don't mind blood sugar spikes," Winston blurted out, before catching himself - he was backsliding into being antagonistic. "I mean, it's great, but I don't drink it that often."

"I thought that the guy who chugs Red Bull like most guys drink beer wouldn't be concerned about blood sugar spikes," Rian cracked back.

Fuck, she had him there. "Have you tasted the sugar-free Red Bull?" Winston retorted. "Tastes like TV static flavoured with aspartame and dish soap."

"Touché," Rian conceded. "I guess you're familiar with all-nighters, then."

"Don't I know it," Winston groaned. "See that Bastard over there?" He nodded towards Schrödinger, stretched across the cat climbing tower. "He's 75% of the reason I come home at all." The other 25% consisted of the pesky human needs for washing and sleep and the desire to not have Axe Cappers breathing down their necks for any longer than necessary.

"'Bastard'?" Rian echoed.

Why did so many of his choices have to sound stranger coming from anywhere other than his own head? "He's my Bastard," was the only answer Winston could offer, his creeping lethargy - despite the tea - making him less inclined to prepare a more eloquent response.

Rian seemed to accept it, however, and they fell into silence, sipping their hot drinks. The dimming light in the apartment reflected their waning energy as they finished up and set down their mugs, which gave credence to Winston's disinclination to get up to put them away. Equally so was his close proximity to Rian - the longer they stayed silent, the more his skin bristled. Hell, he wanted their skin to touch so badly that it tugged at every fibrous nerve in his body - tugging towards the woman at his side. But this time, he wanted to step in of his own accord, one leg at a time, push away from the side of the pool and attempt to hold his own.

Rian was on his wavelength, Winston knew that, but evidently just a few crests ahead of him. Without warning, she snaked her arm around his shoulders and shuffled closer, pulling his torso closer to hers so that his head landed on her sweater-clad shoulder. "This okay?"

Her words were blocked from registering by the rush of noise inside of Winston's head. The touch on his hand prior had been one thing, but this was- how was it possible for a gesture so gentle to be so potent? Every square centimetre of him subjected to her body's warmth burned; crackling like lightning and radiating down to the pit of his stomach; aching in his ribs and throat. It was a different kind of ache to the starvation from before - unyielding, overpowering, yet coloured with the desire for more, Winston realised, as he pressed his side closer into hers.

Rian's hand in his hair cut through all the noise, her thin fingers gently tousling the soft brown strands. Winston caught a whiff of astringent pine from the Irish Spring he had lathered into his hair that morning, the typically fresh scent stinging his nostrils. He tensed initially at the contact, dangerously close to fingertips, fuck, he should've told her before now, but Rian seemed to settle for gentle strokes, which ... well, he could now see why Schrödinger sought out pets from him if his touch was half as soothing as hers was.

When had been the last time someone had touched him with as much affection as this?

Fuck, when had been the last time someone had touched him, period?

The realisation impaled him in the solar plexus, iron-solid as a broadsword. It stabbed at his larynx, seared in his eyes, threatening to bubble over and crash-

"You're crying," Rian mused, her voice heavily tinted with surprise that made Winston want to retort, but he daren't try to speak. His head pounded with the effort of holding himself together, the carefully built dam shaking with exertion, if he could just-

"Come here," Rian said, and then her body was shifting, her other arm coming to place itself around his back, firm enough to keep him pressed firmly against her, which was just as well, because if it weren't for that and the fact that they were already sitting down, Winston was positive he would've crumpled to the floor, unsteady as the dam. His arms snapped up to cling to her back far too quickly, face still pressed up against her shoulder in a last-ditch effort to contain the rampant storm, the dam struggling against the tide.

A coarse, jagged crack; a wet gasp; Winston realised the dam had been made of ice, glacial and intimidating but deceptively brittle. Lightning-bolt cracks spreading all over, letting more steady streams cascade forward, there was no way it would hold, shit-

One of Rian's arms, the one lower on his back, let go of him briefly, leaving a cold streak behind and causing Winston to scramble to stay upright despite her other arm stabilising his shoulders and his own grip on her. For several terrifying split-seconds, he panicked that she was pulling away from him, that he was becoming too much for her to handle, just like with Irene, before he felt her gently tugging on his glasses, slipping the frames away from his face so that he could bury his face into her shoulder comfortably, before she set them aside and replaced her arm, squeezing him just a little bit tighter.

A shockwave shattered the dam, taking Winston with it.

Burning could no longer do this justice - Winston felt the very foundations of his being crumbling to shards, leaving him to hurtle into the chaos manifesting below. His body was being attacked from all sides; shockwaves ricocheted; shurikens tearing through his organs; katanas slicing his torso to ribbons; not leaving a second to breathe. Part of his brain was screaming for it to stop, to end, but the larger, primal part - the human part - was begging for her to please don't ever stop, please don't let go, which just set off more alarm bells blaring don't be so needy, don't be so fucking needy. His circuits were scrambling, sparks flying in all directions, pulling his cerebral hemispheres apart, torn between his familiar instincts of shutting down and recoiling and the feral, overpowering urge to howl with the pain of it. The force from this clashing manifested in ugly, strangled sobs that kept catching in his trachea, too big for his throat, asphyxiating him like he was ... he was ...

Drowning.

The word had been buried in a small, dark yet familiar corner of his brain, a childhood hidey-hole. Winston had to fight through brackish waters, buffeted by the waves and the undertow, to finally snatch it from the sandy floor. Only, this time, Rian was here - she was here and holding onto him, a rock that had somehow not been swept away by the stormy waters. Winston tried to catch that train of thought before it could start - thinking of Rian in those terms was a dangerous path to deification and dependency - but trying to catch and redirect it took more power than he had the capacity for. Not when the tears were escaping faster than they ever had before after he'd choked them back for over sixteen years.

A small mewl padded at his ears through the sound of his own cries, as well as a soft nudging on his leg. He belatedly realised that it was Schrödinger, evidently trying to comfort him just as he had done regularly for the last several months. The sweet gesture from his cat yanked another cascade of sobs from Winston, but his arms seemed glued to Rian, hard enough to discourage any amount of energy that would be used to break away and attend to Schrödinger. Somehow, Rian was still holding him, letting him cry like a child in her arms for reasons unknown to her and not known much better to him.

There was no way of knowing how long they sat there, clinging to each other like magnetic claws. It might've been a few minutes, it might've been almost an hour if not more, before Winston's tears finally dried up and they both fell silent, sitting on his couch in the dark of his apartment. Winston himself had no way of knowing how dark it was, given that his eyes were closed and his face was still buried in Rian's shoulder, and he had no inclination to move from his current position to check. He couldn't break from his only significant human contact in months if not years, soothing the agitated nerves.

Except that now his skin was crawling for an entirely different reason - embarrassment. Why had he done that? Moreover, why had he let himself do it? After programming himself for years to keep his strongest emotions inside, to never let other people see the worst of him, what had precipitated a malfunction like this? The fact that Rian was still here was even more baffling - until he realised that she was likely still there out of pity, making his chest sting horribly. He owed her an explanation, but how could he formulate one from so little information? In addition to that, his mouth and throat managed to be both dry and clogged with phlegm simultaneously, making speaking undesirable even if he had the energy for it.

Winston swallowed and sucked in a breath, deciding to make an effort to try anyway. "I'm..."

"It's okay," Rian murmured, rubbing his back gently. "You don't have to tell me."

The memory of where he'd heard those words dislodged a broken whimper from him. Somewhere he couldn't see, Schrödinger whined in tandem.

The closer Winston and Rian had become in their personal lives, the harder it became to maintain their now-infamous workplace banter. Not necessarily to the people around them - to their coworkers, barely anything had changed. On the inside, however, Winston and Rian were getting better at knowing what to look for in each other's quips and mannerisms, sussing out exactly what the other felt about their answers. With this added factor, a chunk of their retorts' edge and snappiness was lost as they refrained from touchy areas. The longer it went on, the more it was akin to watching a magic trick after already knowing the secret as to how it was performed.

When they sat down together at their desks the Monday after Winston had broken down in front of Rian, there was silence. Barely a nod in greeting and scarcely any acknowledgement for the whole morning until lunchtime. They didn't need to say anything to know that the game was up. The façade was as transparent as glass - and just as fragile too. When Rian stole glances at Winston, all she saw was the young man who had shattered to pieces before her very eyes carefully glued back together into something resembling a functional person, but the cracks were obvious to those who knew where to look for them.

It was an accurate observation on her part, as just below his typical working surface, Winston's insides were quivering, vibrating like a hard disk with diminished performance due to being screamed at (a running joke during his university days - "So what? Getting screamed at diminishes my performance too."). There was, thankfully, no external screaming from angry Axe Cappers this instance, but the voice inside his head had been admonishing him since his breakdown. Not for the first time in his life, Winston wished for noise-cancelling headphones that would block out the noise in his head.

Lunchtime rolled around and Winston left his desk as soon as possible to get a bagel from the cafeteria. Not that he much appetite - not only due to his shaky insides making him queasy, but in an attempt to take back some semblance of control, the pendulum had swung back to the extreme of following hard-line rules about what and how much he ate. Case in point, his bagel that day had no cream cheese or mayonnaise. Rian was absent from her desk when he returned to their station, though he didn't recall seeing her on the path between their desks and the cafeteria.

She returned a good fifteen minutes later, her metallic lunch box tucked under one arm and a takeaway coffee cup in her hand. She slowed on her way to the door to the office, glancing furtively in all directions, but there were practically no people around at this hour - most preferred to escape the claustrophobic rooms for as long as possible. The only other person in the vicinity was Taylor, and they were alone in their office, staring intently at their screen as they ate from a container of salad.

Rian's behaviour seemed strange enough on its own, but even more so when she resumed walking and headed straight for his desk, placing the takeaway cup right next to his hand.

Winston's head snapped up to meet her gaze, his face and eyes heating up dangerously at the realisation of her intentions. She couldn't miss him blinking hard several times, initially from indignation - why couldn't she carry on with the routine of keeping their personal lives out of the workplace, especially one as emotionally hostile as Axe Capital? Then again, that had probably been why she had checked for observers before gifting him an unsolicited pick-me-up - one that he would now have to factor into his caloric intake.

But the exasperation wasn't enough to cover up potent feelings of being deeply touched. Even after what Rian had already done for him - and after that whole morning of the silent treatment - she'd still considered his vulnerable state (loath as he was to dub it as such). Winston took in her resolute expression as he reached for the cup, warm from the drink inside, like her hand fitting his, and took a small sip.

The taste of the hot chocolate was almost enough to extract another round of tears from him right there in the office - he had to quickly stop drinking and grip the cup with both hands as he swallowed it all down. The warmth and comfort soothed his shivery insides, spreading from his stomach to the rest of his body, like being hugged from the inside out. The sweetness and dairy creaminess, while palatable, also set off an alarm in the back of his mind, foretelling of blood sugar spikes and him having to cut his dinner in half that evening to account for the extra calories and fat.

But that hardly seemed to matter at the moment, with this sweet (in more ways than one) gesture coming from Rian, who had moved back to her own seat behind her desk. She met his eyes as he opened them again, staring very intentionally. Once again, Winston didn't trust his voice, but he gave her a small smile and nod in acknowledgement. She appeared to accept it with a smile and nod of her own before turning her attention back to her monitor.

Though Winston did likewise, he couldn't help but notice Taylor's steely grey eyes observing both of them from their office. Even if their brilliant boss hadn't watched their nonverbal exchange and extrapolated information from that, Winston had no trouble believing that they had been the only one to notice any changes in his and Rian's dynamic the whole time they had been together.

Winston wasn't one to believe too much in luck, at least as it pertained to human lives. For the most part, people were responsible for their own choices, and the outcomes of those choices - Einstein himself had said that the definition of insanity was doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. Moreover, it was a paradigm that computers - and, by extension, Winston - followed pretty well. Then again, if Einstein had really believed that in his own life, he'd clearly never flipped a coin more than once. The belief that luck didn't exist or that chance never played a significant factor in life was naïve and small-minded.

At least, that's what Winston kept telling himself when his phone rang on Friday night, almost a week after his breakdown in front of Rian, displaying the word "Mom."

It wasn't as if Winston didn't love his mother or didn't like talking with her, or even that he found her phone calls annoying. Even though a rift had formed between them after his father's death and Winston's subsequent depression, Winston had done his best as he grew older to rebuild their relationship and repay her for her love and patience. Answering her phone calls was the least he could do. It was just that his emotional centre was still ragged from his meltdown, just starting to heal, and he didn't feel like putting on a mask and pretending everything was normal after the week he'd had.

Was it bad luck that she'd decided to call him so little time into what was possibly the worst mental space he'd been in since his very first interview with Taylor?

Only one way to find out. Winston answered the call and pressed his phone to his ear. "Hey, Mom."

"Hi, honey," his mother, Susan, answered. "How are you feeling?"

"Not too terrible," Winston answered, which wasn't a complete lie. "Just ... work has been annoying lately. Axe was almost as pleasant as he was last week." Another not-complete-lie.

Susan laughed. "Well, just hang in there," she replied. "What about Taylor? Are they treating you right?"

Winston nodded firmly before remembering she couldn't hear him nod. "Yeah, they're keeping us in line. They're under a lot of pressure, though, with both Axe and Wendy breathing down their neck, and ours. You know in Orwell's 1984, Big Brother Is Watching You and all? That's Bobby Axelrod to a T."

"I can believe that," Susan said. "Wasn't the main character in that book named Winston too?"

Winston groaned, he'd walked right into that one. "I'm not like that, Mom."

Susan laughed a little. "Have you eaten? Go and eat if you haven't, there's something important I need to tell you and I want you prepared for it, so go and eat something and call me back when you're ready."

"I've eaten already, tell me now," Winston insisted, having eaten his lentil soup with kale half an hour prior.

"Alright," Susan said. "Are you sitting down? Comfortable?"

Winston sighed. "Yes, just tell me, please." His already frayed patience was wearing threadbare.

"Okay," she said. "Winston ... I've met someone new."

Winston's breath caught in his throat; the temperature of his apartment dropped several degrees. "Wha- ... what?!"

"Yes," she continued. "I was lonely, so I decided to try out one of those dating sites. Turns out, there's something to them after all - I met this lovely guy named Andrew that lives just a few blocks away. We've been dating for almost six months now."

"Six months?!" Winston echoed, the first thing he could latch onto. "Why haven't you told me until now?!"

"I wanted to be sure he was serious," Susan explained. "There was every chance that he could turn out to be a scammer, or a criminal, or just not who he said he was. But he-"

"He could still turn out to be a scammer, Mom!" Winston interrupted. "You've heard all those news stories about catfishers and people who prey on people through dating websites!" It was often older people too - his mother was a 58-year-old lonely widow and a prime target for predators. "How do you know this guy doesn't want to borrow a bunch of money and then run away and not pay it back?!"

Susan sighed. "Winston, listen, I know this is coming as a shock to you, and I'm sorry for not telling you sooner. I understand you're concerned, but I didn't walk into this blindly. I've been to his house, met his parents - it's like my first boyfriend all over again." She let out a small laugh before seeming to catch herself. "I don't mean your father, of course, I had boyfriends before meeting him-"

"So you haven't forgotten about Dad?" Winston retorted. "You know, the man you loved that died years ago?! He gave his life to save mine?! Just ... how could you do this? How could you do this to Dad?!"

The room crumbled to fragments, noiseless as the interval between lightning and thunder. Winston suddenly found himself immensely glad that his mother had checked he'd been sitting down before telling him this new development, as he was overcome with lightheadedness that made it harder to even sit upright, let alone stand. He flopped backwards onto his bed, panting slightly. He could feel that, in the liminal space between two phones making a call, he had done the equivalent of whipping out a hand grenade, pulling the pin and tossing it between himself and his conversation partner. Now it had blown up in both their faces.

The phone stayed glued to Winston's ear, even as he felt it overheating against his cheek - or was that just him? All he heard was air on his mother's end of the line. Much like with Rian, he didn't dare break their shared silence.

His mother broke first. "I'm really sorry, hon, I shouldn't have done this over the phone. Stay right there, I'll be over."

Winston forced his voice to work again. "W-what? You're, like, an hour away and it's late! Don't bother, we can talk it out over here."

"No, we can't," Susan insisted, sounding rushed. "We need to talk, face to face. I'm not mad, don't worry, I just need to see you." She hung up the phone, leaving no more room for argument.

Winston's arm shook with the rest of his body as his phone slipped from his hand and softly thumped on the bed. The room faded in places and sharpened to the point of hurting his eyes in others, though his glasses were firmly placed on his face. The heating in his apartment was also in working order, yet still, he shivered. His ears felt blocked like they hadn't popped after getting off a plane (like they were filled with water). The term "brain freeze" had always held a different definition for Winston than the average person - it, like most things pertaining to the way he functioned, was more analogous to a computer freezing and not responding to any commands rather than any headache acquired from eating ice cream too fast. Or maybe he had literally frozen - Winston had experienced cold shock before (in the Atlantic), and it fit here, with every muscle and joint rendered both rigid and unsteady.

The idea of his mother with someone new ... Winston had lived more of his life with his father dead than alive, and the disparity would only grow as he got older. She was moving forward ... from the man who she'd been married to for nearly fifteen years until death did them part (until their son did them part). Did she even any idea of who this guy was? How could she like him so much that she was able to pretend she wasn't failing the memory of her dead husband, of his father?

Could Winston even pretend he hadn't failed in some way?

In his trance, Winston felt a small dip near the foot of the bed that travelled carefully up towards his torso and shoulders. His brain freeze gave credence to the fact that he couldn't figure out what it could be until-

Mreeooow.

Of course. His dear, loyal cat, the only Mr Schrödinger P. Bastard in the world. Who stayed by his side and comforted him the best he could while Winston was at his lowest and asked for nothing in return but warmth and pets and food. Schrödinger padded over to Winston's face and pawed curiously at the crease between his eyebrows before lying down on his chest and staring expectantly. Winston reached up and stroked the cat's soft head, causing the feline to purr audibly. It wasn't often that Winston found himself in a state of distress and unable to rise from his bed or couch, but the warm weight of Schrödinger on his chest plus the purring served better at grounding him than even his weighted blanket. His

Winston gently took Schrödinger into his arms and finally sat up - he would've preferred to stay lying down with Schrödinger on top of him, but he feared that he'd fall asleep if he remained in that position for too long. He kept Schrödinger pressed to his chest as the cat softly butted his head against Winston's chin, administering a few licks that draw a small laugh of all things from his owner. God, Winston adored this cat - he thanked his past self for his decision in going to the shelter that day.

But his mother was still arriving in a meagre 45 minutes - Winston had checked the timestamp on his call list and realised that he'd been lying on his bed taking it in for over ten minutes. With his head slightly less clogged, Winston decided the best way to approach this was with a script. He began muttering some parts of it to Schrödinger, using the cat as his rubber duck. It was unlikely he would even get through the whole thing, at least not all at once, but it was infinitely better than having nothing at all to go off of.

Twenty minutes to go. Schrödinger had left his arms after protesting his hold - as patient as he was, Schrödinger was still very much a cat and just as notoriously prone to overstimulation. Winston had let him go, knowing full well how unpleasant overstimulation was. Schrödinger leaving the room had compelled Winston to finally get up from the bed and follow him out to the living area where his scratching post was. Though the cat was clearly not the slightest bit interested in what Winston was actually saying, it still felt better than talking out loud to nothing at all.

Ten minutes to go. Winston had thawed enough to have a clearer picture of what he wanted to say - not antagonistic, not overtly accusatory, but making it clear that he wasn't happy with her decision to trample on his father's grave- no, that was too boorish, too childish.

Five minutes to go. As a reward for being a good rubber duck, Winston was feeding Schrödinger some of his favourite treats from his hand. The pit in his stomach was digging itself deeper and deeper as the time his mother was due to arrive drew nearer. After Schrödinger had finished the last morsel, Winston scooped him into his arms and rubbed his head against his cheek for another time, a stim spot that he had been aware of since he was a small child and one of the only pleasant bits of atypical hard-wiring. He made sure to keep his grip loose so that Schrödinger could leave if he wanted to.

A loud buzzer destroyed the quiet of the apartment.

Shit, she wasn't meant to arrive for another three minutes! Technically, the drive from Brooklyn to Manhattan was a little under a full hour, but New York traffic often had a way of holding commuters up. For once, Winston wished that the traffic had been just a little worse.

Time to rip off the band-aid.

Winston strode deliberately over to the door and opened it to reveal his mother's careworn face, looking about as washed out as he felt. "Hey."

"Hello," she greeted, reaching out to hug him before pulling back. "Hello, darling," she echoed with more emphasis, perplexing Winston until he realised that she'd directed her attention towards the black cat still tucked in his left arm. Had Winston forgotten to put him down? Likewise, had the cat really chosen to stay? He hadn't protested the handling like before and was currently being stroked by his mother. "You taking good care of him?"

"I'd like to think so," Winston admitted, before his mother cut him off with, "I was talking to him," gesturing to Schrödinger.

Winston swallowed, feeling his face heat up as he awkwardly backed up into his apartment. "Did you drive here okay?"

"Yes, thank you," she replied, shaking off her dark green coat. "Shall we sit down?"

Winston nodded, though he was acutely aware of the expected social norm being thrown off-kilter. As the host, it should be his job to suggest they sit. Still, he led them to his couch in the living area, trying not to show how his stomach was roiling. Schrödinger squirmed in his arm as he unconsciously held the cat a little tighter, so Winston carefully placed him on the arm of the couch instead, where he immediately headed for the cat tower in the corner of the room.

"Look, let's cut the crap," Winston began as his mother sat down next to him. "You're dating a guy you met online."

"I am," she conceded, "and I understand your fears and concerns, but Tinder has a system in place for identifying fake or suspicious accounts. Andrew is verified and all."

"You're still a prime target, Mom," Winston said. "That's what these scumbags do - they prey on older people; lonelier, less tech-savvy - no offence," he added quickly. "The fact that you're a widow makes you even more vulnerable. Do you see what I'm saying here?"

"I do," Susan replied, "but that doesn't guarantee that I will be targeted. In all the time I've known Andrew, he's been genuine - never asked for money,  unless you count splitting the bill on dates. He has an honest job and a modest apartment. I'm not stupid, you know, Winston. You can meet him yourself if you want to."

"I don't want to meet him!" Winston protested before he could catch himself on how childish he sounded. "Say he's legit, and you two fall madly in love - what then? You're gonna marry him?! Have a new lifelong companion?!"

"Is that such a bad thing?" Susan shot back, bristling slightly. "It's been over a decade since Nathaniel died, Winston, and I've been lonely without him. I understand that you miss him - I do too, and I'll probably miss him for the rest of my life, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to move on and be happy again. It's what he would've wanted."

Her last statement made Winston's throat tighten around his retort. How could either of them truly know what his father would've wanted? The man was dead - it wasn't as if he could testify to it himself. But Winston knew what he wanted. "I can't let you do this, Mom," he let out finally, mustering up as much voice as he could fit through his compacted throat. "Dad died because of me. I can't let anyone disparage his legacy like this."

Just like on the phone before, Winston had thrown an active grenade between them as if he was expecting a different result when it blew up. Technically speaking, he hadn't done the exact same thing a second time - the grenade was similar enough, but it was different over the phone vs face-to-face, and both of them knew it.

Susan held a contemplative expression, her lips pressed tightly together as she stared at him, taking in her son and the ruined rift between them. Winston stared straight back at her, unblinking, not daring to miss a single microsecond.

Just like on the phone, Susan gave in first. The line between her eyebrows smoothed and her lips relaxed. Her whole face softened into something that Winston couldn't quite place into the context of the rest of this conversation. "I don't think this has that much to do with my safety at all," she confessed. "Do you honestly believe that you killed your father, Winston?"

Disappointed understanding, that had been her expression. Winston wasn't, and had never been, so naïve as to believe that he had murdered his father by his own hand. He hadn't intended to swim into the path of the riptide or bring his father down with him. But it didn't mean he hadn't led his father down the path that led to his grave. Much like a drunk driver that had an accident and killed someone else in the process, the driver was undoubtedly at fault for their death. "Maybe."

Susan sighed, shifting on the couch, so she was sitting facing the front, slumped against the back. Like countless times before in his life, Winston realised too late that he had said the wrong thing and upset her. Yet this wasn't a case where it could've been solved by a better script. There was no sugaring a pill as bitter as this - no amount of Red Bull or Mountain Dew would make it any more tolerable to down. The problem had always been him, and Winston resorted to the only words he could find: "I'm so sorry."

His mother wrapped an arm around his shoulders, pulling him close in a motion eerily reminiscent of Rian's the week prior. Also evocative of Rian's actions was the result on Winston - while the human touch didn't burn as badly as it had before, it was still potent enough to twinge in his throat. Winston wondered briefly if he was destined to be an android programmed to cry when touched with love, by intense association if nothing else. "Tell me exactly what happened out there," Susan instructed. "Everything you can remember."

Remembering what had happened was no trouble for Winston, even after sixteen years - the problem was that he recalled it too well, too vividly. The account he gave his mother was peppered with unnecessary details about the weather that day; the colours of their beach towels; the tanned brown of his father's skin. All to avoid getting to the crux of the incident. His mother, ever patient, listened to his every word, gently prodding him as he moved from one minute to the next. She squeezed him tighter when his voice cracked; wrapped her other arm around him when he started shaking uncontrollably; kissed his head when he finally described the sensation of drowning (which wasn't difficult at all given that it wasn't dissimilar to how he was feeling in that very moment) and his father's efforts to save him that ended up costing his life.

"That's what happened," Winston finished, his voice scarcely above a whisper. "You can hate me now - report me, even. I'm sorry if this is the last civil conversation we two have together." Yet he made no move to disentangle himself from her grip.

His mother's breath hitched and she held him tight. When she spoke, her voice was clear and firm, yet bore some of the shakiness of Winston's own. "Winston, I am your mother, and that means you listen to me. Got that?" A nod. "Good. Now, listen closely - what happened to you and your father that night was not your fault. Never has been, never will be. You were ten years old and you couldn't have possibly known what would happen out there."

Winston shook his head. "Yeah, but ... he would still be alive if it weren't for me. I'm the reason he's not here anymore, the reason you've been so hurt and lonely and ... shi- damn, I've just tried to take your partner away from you again," he realised, his heart sinking with added guilt.

Susan sucked in a breath and pulled back from him so they could see each other's faces. Her cheeks and eyes were flushed matching shades of pink. "Let me tell you a story," she began. "When you were very young, about four years old, you had a rather serious incident at the local swimming pool when we took you there on a day out. Nathaniel got you out of there fine, but it was then that we truly started wondering about the challenges of being parents, of raising you together. We knew there would be a million incidents like that where we wouldn't be able to save you with our own hands like he had then. But there's one part of that conversation that I will never forget for as long as I live. Do you want to know what that is?"

Winston nodded stiffly, unable to verbally respond.

"Nathaniel asked me what I would do if both he and you were drowning and I could only save one of you," she said, "and I told him the truth. I said that I would save you over him in a heartbeat. He said that he wouldn't blame me for doing that, because he also knew that if you and I were drowning, he would always, without fail, choose you."

Something in Winston cracked apart; he removed his glasses to bury his face in his hands, but Susan beat him to it, extracting the frames from his fingers before engulfing him in her arms, protecting him as he broke down. His mother's arms were a safer place to cry than Rian's - soft and warm padding against the crystalline blades of fresh grief that tore at his soul, releasing equally harsh sobs from behind the broken slashes. There were no words that could describe this; none that were needed. Every human recognised the pain of losing a loved one without the need for eloquent description.

His mother rubbed his back and rocked him gently, and Winston almost physically felt himself shrink down to that ten-year-old whose father had just died, only far less reticent to receiving hugs and comfort through it all. "Nathaniel was such a strong, kind, caring man," she whispered into his ear. "He loved us with all his heart, and he would've gone to the ends of the Earth for us. Winston, I knew your father well enough to know that when he realised you were in trouble out there in the ocean, it was no competition for him. Between his life and yours, or between my life and yours, it would always be yours."

Her statements wrenched a stream of particularly loud and painful sobs from his larynx. She said nothing more in return, just holding him tight until at long, long last, his tears slowed to a halt and Winston was left slumped against his mother, in the hazy place between Awake and Not, listening to her heartbeat inside her chest.

Susan clapped him a few times on his triceps. "Come on, don't fall asleep on me now," she teased gently, shaking him. "I think that you and I deserve a hot drink, don't you?"

Winston nodded weakly, too far gone to even think verbally. Susan stood up from the couch and made her way over to her handbag that she'd left by the doorway, taking from it something that Winston couldn't make out with his vision blurred from tears and the lack of glasses. In his mother's absence, he pulled his legs up in front of him on the couch and rested his head on his knees, running his hand over the ridged seam on his jeans as he listened to the sounds of his mother at work in the kitchen.

She returned just a minute later holding the only two mugs he owned and pressed one into his hands. "Drink up, you don't want it to get cold."

Winston gave a small nod, before raising the mug to his lips.

The taste inside was enough to make his breath hitch dangerously several times - just when he thought he was all out of tears. The hot chocolate in the mug was exactly the way his mother used to make it whenever he'd been feeling bad as a child - hot chocolate powder with a 1:1 milk to water ratio and just a pinch of cinnamon for extra warmth. Though it had been his favourite drink as a child, his mother had stopped making it for him when she'd given it to him for the first time after his father died - much like with salty foods, Winston had been repulsed at the cocoa bitterness and cloying sugar, and even the cinnamon had seemed obnoxious. He'd spat it out in the sink and she never made it again - until now.

"Like it?"

Winston nodded firmly, even as he had to grit his teeth against another avalanche of sobs. Susan pulled him close again, petting his hair. "I think you and Nathaniel were the only people I ever knew to like cinnamon in their hot chocolate," she mused.

Winston didn't dare speak in response, not while he was trying to keep himself under control. He hadn't received this much affection since ... well, since about a week ago, but before that ... it had been a long, long time since he'd let himself accept people being kind to him. It was overwhelming to his starved soul, and yet, he didn't really want it to stop any time soon.

Why am I so fucking needy?

“I think you’ve had to be strong for too long,” his mother responded, catching Winston off-guard before he realised he’d uttered that thought out loud.

"Why can't I keep being strong?" he whispered.

"You are," Susan insisted. "You are strong no matter what, Winston. Look at you - you made it through MIT, made it in the big city, got a great job with a wonderful boss. You should be proud of yourself for coming as far as you have. If your father was here to see you now, he would be so, so proud of you too."

"I don't think I've ever known how to love someone that much," Winston confessed. "Enough to just ... throw my whole life away for them." It would be disingenuous of him to say that there had never been times, where he had felt so inherently defective that he'd feared for his whole future, when he'd seriously wished that his father would've chosen to preserve his own life instead.

"You will, one day," Susan said, kissing his head.

Unable to answer, Winston just allowed himself to slump against his mother's shoulder, sipping hot chocolate in a silent room.

Winston may not have been a computer, but that didn't mean he - and humans in general - didn't share some similarities with computers. One of those things was the need for external help in squashing bugs and viruses. Computers required IT workers - humans needed doctors.

Digging back through his old scraps, he found the worn pamphlet, yellow Post-It note still stuck inside, and flicked through it until he found the right number. Before he could change his mind, he dialled it and pressed the call button.

"Hello, you've reached the National Institute of Mental Health, how can we help you today?"