We lingered in silence for the remainder of the evening, the four of us piled into a bed now built for four. Two of my cocladists and their partner, and now me. Who knew what I was? There was the friendship that we had built over the last few days. There was the camaraderie that we had built through work. There was the acquaintanceship that had been there from years prior.

And now there was more. I didn't have words for it, and Dry Grass was asleep for most of our time together. It wasn't the time for conversations, it was time for just resting, something I realized I dearly needed as well. We all did, as we napped off and on for some time until the clock hit one in the morning, at which point I stepped back home to spend the rest of my night with Hanne.

She was already in bed, curled around body pillow, though not yet asleep.

*"Reed?"* she asked through a sensorium message as I crept into the room, a cone of silence set up over me to keep from disturbing her. *"You back for the night?"*

Startled out of my attempt to be sneaky, I straightened up and dropped the silence. "Yeah, sorry Hanne. I didn't mean to just disappear on you."

"It's okay."

I nodded, shedding my trousers as I made my way over to join her in the bed, once more in one piece.

"Or, well, it isn't," she admitted. "But I figured you had important things going on."

"Right, yeah. I'm sorry," I said, climbing in behind her in the bed. "I actually fell asleep, or I would've been home sooner."

"Oh, okay," she mumbled. I felt her relax against me, and I hugged my arm around her middle. "I was worried you were out running yourself ragged."

"That was earlier. I wore myself out at our little funeral."

Hanne sighed into the long silence that followed, eventually replying, "I went to see Jess's...uh, core, I guess, with a few others. I came home and just kind of lay down and have been here ever since."

I tightened my arm around her. "I'm sorry, Hanne. It's super overwhelming there. Did you get any rest, at least?"

She shrugged noncommittally. "Glad you got some. Where'd you crash?" She winced at the choice of words, curling tighter around her pillow. "Where'd you take your nap?"

"Over with Cress and Tule and Dry Grass. We sat in bed to talk and then just all fell asleep."

"Oh?" I could hear the faint smirk in her voice. "Did you wind up getting all smoochy with her?"

I laughed, pressing my face against the back of her neck. "No. A bit cuddly, maybe, but that's it."

She laughed as well. "Well, good. I'm happy for you."

I kissed on her nape. "Yeah, we'll see. It's a weird way to come about a relationship."

"Mmhm. It's really weird talking about this now, though. All this stressful stuff going on, and we're talking about relationships."

"We talked about that a bit, actually," I said. "Tule suggested that it was a bit of focusing on the good things, but Dry Grass said it might be more like a 'protective measure'. Something about "building more relationships to pin ourselves down after so many were broken"."

"That's a kind of cynical way of looking at it."

"I guess," I said. "She was hurting. We also saw her lost up-tree instance's core."

"Oh, shit. I'm sorry."

I shrugged. "We were all hurting, just in different ways."

"Yeah, I guess we are. I'm still somewhere between numb and grief, I guess."

"I'm...I don't know," I said. "Grieving? Confused? Hurt?"

"Hurt how?"

"Hurt like I've been kicked by someone I trusted."

She nodded. "I guess I can see that. I trusted phys-side. I trusted the systechs. I feel kind of like that trust was broken in some ways."

"Yeah. Thinking of it like that way, I guess I can see where Dry Grass is coming from, though. We're protecting ourselves by holding onto trust that we do have."

"That's a bit less cynical."

We lay in silence for a while, and I found myself lingering on the thoughts of holding onto trust. I was doing that now, wasn't I? I was with Hanne, my partner of nearly a decade, trusting that she would be here in the morning, that I'd still be able to talk to her, drink coffee with her, drink too much champagne and brandy.

"Hey Hanne?"

"Mm?" She sounded on the verge of sleep.

"Remember what we were talking about before...before the attack?"

"You were talking about 2399," she said, then laughed sleepily. "I asked you to sell me on the year. You made a pretty convincing argument that it was a good year."

"I stand by that," I said, grinning. "But yeah, we were talking about the past, asking about life back phys-side. I said, "Am I not allowed to be a bit maudlin?" I was being really sappy."

"You should've said that instead."

I snorted. "Yeah, I guess so. I'm feeling pretty maudlin now, though. I still feel hurt, I still feel like I'm grieving, but I'm feeling maudlin, too. Extremely sentimental. Effusively sad."

"Effusively!" She sighed, squirming around to give me a kiss. "Reed, my darling, my love, please never change."

"Wasn't planning on it," I said, grinning. "But yeah. The grief is really starting to kick in. I got so *angry* at Lily today. She was being such a bitch about Dry Grass, I mean, so of course I did, but...well, I hit her. Slapped her across the face."

"You *hit* her? Jesus, Reed."

"Yeah, I know. I feel terrible about it. I know a lot of people are super angry about things now, so maybe it makes sense, but that was a pretty good way to knock myself out of that mindset. I feel betrayed, yeah, but not that fury anymore."

"Well, good. I don't want you hitting people."

I laughed, feeling tiredness starting to pull at my cheeks once more. "Neither do I, trust me. I feel betrayed and depressed, and it's got me all maudlin."

"Tell me something good, then," she suggested. "Try to get back to sappy or mawkish or whatever else you called it."

I nodded, thinking for a moment before offering, "Cress was talking at the funeral today about how it was playing with gender and how it's the reason Marsh started going by they/them. It got me thinking about how I started going back to that transmasc identity. I tried just forking myself into how I looked back phys-side, but it was...I don't know, unsatisfying."

"How so?"

"It felt like I'd taken this big shortcut. I put all that work into it phys-side, and it was like it lacked all the weight of that process to just turn into what I remembered from those first days after uploading."

She furrowed her brow. "I thought that's what you'd done, actually."

"Not in the end. In the end, I wound up going back to what I remember of my pre-transition life and taking the long way around."

"How, though? It's not like hormones do anything here."

I shrugged. "I met up with a bunch of other folks doing the same thing — actually surprised I didn't run into Hold My Name in the process — and we all talked about the various ways we could go through the process. Some hunted down doctors who had uploaded and were willing to do things like help act out the process. I mostly just forked once a month from that cis body into what I am bit by bit. I let my voice change, bound my chest, added surgery scars, each bit step by step."

"That's wild," she said. "What's this got to do with Marsh, though? Feeling maudlin over gender?"

"Well, kind of, after Cress talked earlier today. Mostly, though, I was thinking about how, for a while, I was merging down with Marsh every month instead of every year, since they got my previous instance's memories. They got to experience the act of transitioning right along with me. They sent me this really heartfelt message about how they'd forgotten the joy of it all, and how it was nice to live through it again, in a way."

Her expression softened to a smile. "Okay, that's more like the memories I was thinking of. How does that fit into maudlin?"

"Just remembering that, I guess. That was back when we talked a bit more, and we wound up having a little chat after every merge. They sounded so fascinated by everything I was seeing and going through, so I asked why they didn't do the same. They said that it was my life to live, and that they'd just remember it for me, just like how they'd remember Lily's and Cress's."

"Oh," she said, then stiffened, averting her gaze. "*Oh.* And now they aren't here to remember it."

I sighed. "Right. It's still a good memory, though, and I'm going to remember it at least."

"Well, so long as you can hold onto the good stuff, too."

I nodded. "Has me thinking, though. They apparently added cross-tree merging in the process of getting the System back up and running. Cress and Tule and I started talking about what it might take to merge the whole clade to see if we can get Marsh back."

"Wait, what?" She looked taken aback. "Cross-tree merges? Would that work?"

"It might," I said, shrugging. "It'd be all of us, at least, right? All of our memories from over the years, combined with those from when we *were* Marsh. I mean, it wouldn't be exact, of course, but it'd still be something."

"Not exact?" she asked, then winced, answering her own question, "Oh, right, because it won't have their memories for all of that time."

"Yeah. Not exact, but who knows, maybe they could still live on in a way."

Hanne once more rolled over, settling back into my arms again. "I guess."

"Just thinking of those stages of grief, though, it makes me wondering if I'm also stuck in the bargaining stage. Trying to find ways to ask the universe to give them back."

"Yeah. I–" She interrupted herself with a yawn. "I'm a bit wary of it, maybe, but maybe some good will come of it."

I stifled my own yawn. "Why wary?"

"Just worried you won't get what you want."

I sighed. Sleep was clearly tugging at us both, so as I surrendered to it, I murmured, "Yeah, me too."

-----
