"What happened?" she asked, voice coming out softer than she intended.
The system sniffled once.
"I’m completely useless, Host," he said.
And then he burst into tears.
Not delicate, dignified tears. Actual crying, the ssy kind, tiny lion shoulders shaking, big drops rolling down his fluffy face, the whole thing.
Heena stood there for about two seconds.
Then, without really thinking about it, she got up from her chair, crossed the distance between them, and gathered him into her arms. He was small enough to hold properly, soft and warm and trembling slightly, and she tucked him against her chest and started patting the top of his head with her palm in slow, steady strokes.
"Hey," she said. "Stop that. I didn’t tell *you* to get out. I told that *bastard* to get out. You and him are very different categories."
The system sniffled harder into her shoulder. "It’s not about that."
"Then what is it about? Use your words."
He pulled back just enough to look up at her, eyes still swimming. "What can I even do?" he said, the words coming out thick and wobbly. "You’re so capable, Host. You handle everything yourself. You figure things out before I can even process them. And my seniors — the systems who worked with you before — they were so experienced, so useful. I’ve been with you for two whole worlds now and I *still* haven’t done anything that actually helped you. Not really." He pressed his face back against her shoulder. "Even with the cosmic attacks — if Senior had been in my place, he would have protected you better. Found solutions faster. Known what to do. I’m just—"
He hiccupped miserably.
"Dead weight," he finished.
Heena’s hand stilled on top of his head.
She thought, quietly, about her first system. Her long-term partner — the one who had been with her from the very beginning, through the first missions, through the worst of the worlds she had chosen, through the years of figuring out how to do any of this at all. Brilliant in the way that sothing becos brilliant after a very long ti — not flashy, not dramatic, just deeply, steadily competent. They had understood each other without having to explain things. Had developed a shorthand that took years to build.
Until the thing that happened.
She pressed her lips together and kept patting the small lion’s head.
"Enough with the tears," she said, keeping her voice firm even though sothing in her tone had gentled without her permission. "Are you crazy? You’re going to cry out every scrap of good luck we have left, and I need that luck, so stop it."
System 427 sniffled.
"Listen to ," Heena said, shifting him so she could look at him properly. His face was a disaster — eyes red, cheeks damp, ears flattened — but he was looking up at her, which was sothing. "Whatever happened before is in the past. Right now, *you* are my system. You. Not anyone else. So you can either spend your ti crying about not being soone you’re not, or you can shut up and actually *be* my system. Those are your two options."
He blinked at her, hiccupping slightly.
"And secondly," she continued, ruffling the fur on his head with more energy than strictly necessary, "nobody knows what they’re doing on their first job. Nobody. Not even the seniors you’re comparing yourself to — they were disasters when they started. Every single one of them."
The system sniffled. "Really?"
"Really." Heena leaned back slightly, casting around in her mory for sothing useful to offer. "You want examples? Fine. One ti, early on, I nearly spilled boiling water on a mission target. Not enemy, *target*. The person I was supposed to be protecting. Just — completely fumbled it. And another ti, I broke a master-level artifact that my first system had spent three centuries maintaining."
System 427’s eyes went wide. "You didn’t."
"I did," Heena said flatly. "It made a sound like a dying bird and then just — pieces. Everywhere. My system stood there looking at for so long without saying anything that I genuinely thought he’d gone catatonic."
The system stared at her.
Then, against what appeared to be his best efforts, the corner of his mouth twitched.
"That’s terrible," he said.
"It was terrible," Heena agreed. "The point is, it happened. I didn’t know what I was doing. I learned. Things broke and I got better at not breaking them. That’s how it works." She looked at him steadily. "You’re still young. You’re learning. You can’t compare where you are now to where soone else is after decades of experience. It doesn’t make any sense."
The system was quiet for a mont, processing this.
Then, tentatively: "How old are you, Host?"
"Old enough not to answer that question," Heena said imdiately. "How old are *you*, actually?"
The system pulled back, looking genuinely offended despite the fact that his eyes were still wet. "Host! You *cannot* ask a system their age! It’s extrely ill-mannered! It’s one of the most basic rules of—"
Heena stared at him.
He was lecturing her about manners.
While his face was still blotchy from crying. With one ear slightly inside out from where she’d been ruffling his head.
She pressed her lips together very firmly.
It didn’t help.
The laugh ca out anyway — short and warm, escaping before she’d decided to let it, and then she had to press the back of her hand to her mouth to muffle the rest of it because it kept coming. The image of him — the absolute disaster of his face, the total unearned dignity of his tone, the way he was sitting in her arms like a soggy piece of royalty lecturing her on etiquette—
"You were just *sobbing*," she managed, voice still shaking with it, "and now you’re giving a lesson on manners?"
"They are two separate issues, Host," the system said, with great injured dignity.
"They are happening on the sa *face*," Heena said.
System 427 sniffed. Looked away. Attempted to compose himself. His ear was still inside out.
Heena reached over and fixed it.
He blinked at her, surprised by the gesture.
She shook her head, still smiling. "Fine. I won’t ask your age. But you need to stop comparing yourself to people with decades more experience than you. You’re doing better than you think."
"You’re just saying that," he muttered.
"I’m not," she said. "You’ve been keeping track of Seraphina’s system movents, the plot deviations, the cosmic backlash timing. You caught the inconsistencies in the Duchess situation before I did." She tilted her head at him. "That’s not useless. That’s useful. You just don’t notice it because you’re too busy comparing yourself to a standard that doesn’t apply to you yet."
System 427 was quiet for a longer mont this ti.
Sothing in his expression shifted — the misery not gone exactly, but rearranged, settling into sothing smaller and less acute.
"...Okay, Host," he said, quietly.
"Good." Heena set him down gently on the desk in front of her, then settled back into her chair and reached for her pen. "Now. Since you’re done being dramatic, make yourself useful and help finish this apology letter before my aunt cos back and decides ten thousand words wasn’t enough."
The system’s ears perked forward imdiately. "I can help with that."
"Then stop crying and start talking," Heena said. "You dictate, I’ll write. My hand is half asleep from this pen."
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