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Jamie was tired.
The exhaustion was, almost, a welcome respite from the mind-numbing fear of SHODAN's attack on the crew, the panic barely held at bay in the cockpit of the Geno Saurer, fighting off hordes of smaller robots and, eventually, mobs of Zoids whose command systems had been overtaken by the malevolent AI. The feeling of helpless terror, of facing his own impending death had become so commonplace since the Daligig had so generously chosen him to help fight their war for them that Jamie was, when he bothered to think about it, surprised - and frustrated, and annoyed with himself - that he hadn't gotten a better handle on it. But it was the same every time, in every single battle, and this instance, as ceaseless waves of metal bodies in every shape imaginable had rushed him and his Zoid, had been no exception.
And then everything had just...stopped. The swarms of mechanized enemies had ceased their onslaught, everything had gone eerily quiet, and there was finally time to regroup, tend to injuries, figure out what the hell had happened. Time to rest.
For most people, probably. Jamie hadn't. There was work to be done, repairs to be made, damages to patch up. None of it was going to fix itself and Jamie wouldn't have tolerated any opportunity to let himself think about the newest horror the ship, or the multiverse in general, had inflicted on them. He'd welcomed the overabundance of work.
He'd gone wherever he was sent initially, and once orders had stopped being handed down, as the preliminary rush of activity had faded and things slowly resumed some semblance of normalcy, he'd gone where he thought he could be of the most use. And as time wore on and his energy reserves became stretched thin, he more often than not found himself wandering to the hangar.
The Geno Saurer lurked in an isolated corner, miraculously still upright but slumping with palpable exhaustion. Surrounding the blue tyrannosaur were the battered carcasses of several Rev Raptors, scattered in ungainly sprawls of clawed limbs and serrated tails and serpentine necks. Jamie picked his way through them, paranoia pricking alarm at dulled senses - what if the things came back to life and attacked again? SHODAN had been defeated, the threat eliminated, or so everyone believed. Believing in things didn't make them true, though. Belief, Jamie was finding, didn't mean much around here.
He reached the Geno, pausing near one hind claw, wavering slightly as he craned his neck to gaze up at her. The Zoid's wedge-shaped head was angled toward the ground, optics dimly lit with the barest hint of cognizance. The brush of her awareness of him was reassuring, something he found himself clinging to for comfort. She was tired too, Jamie could tell. She'd fought hard and needed to be taken care of as much as anyone else.
"'m sorry," he murmured, resting a hand on the edge of one claw. "I should've been here sooner, huh. Everything's just been busy. You understand that, right?"
Of course she did. He could tell. Somehow.
"...yeah." He'd let himself slump forward, leaning heavily against her talon, head drooping and hand still pressed to metal. "'m here now. I promised I'd take care of you, back on the island. I didn't forget."
He wasn't entirely sure how long he'd remained like that when some noise nearby - faint or loud, it was all the same to his rattled senses - snapped him from inaction and he jerked to attention, twisting to face the source of the noise, looking more than a little wild-eyed.
[[This can be bendytimed to any point post-SHODAN, including before/during/after Shore Leave.]]