Later that night.
Claude drove Jimmy with one hand clenched tight around the steering wheel and the other gripping the edge of Daniel's denim jacket like it was armor. The night wind slipped in through the cracked window and tangled Daniel's hair against her cheek—his cheek—her breath sharp in her borrowed chest.
Emily sat beside her, curled up against the window, breathing soft and deep, half-smiling in her sleep. Claude glanced over again and again, unsure why the sight tugged at something inside her like static before a storm. She knew enough to know she didn't know what it meant.
Jimmy rattled and squealed the entire way, lurching through the city like a dying violin. Claude muttered with every red light.
"How does he live like this? This car has the structural integrity of a folding chair."
She found Emily's house in a quiet neighborhood wrapped in soft shadows. She stepped out, walked around, and opened the passenger side door like she had seen Daniel do a hundred times. Emily stirred awake.
"We're here," Claude whispered.
Emily rubbed her eyes and blinked at her. "Daniel?"
Claude hesitated, then nodded. "Sort of. Goodnight, Emily."
"Goodnight, Daniel-sort-of," she said with a sleepy grin, and walked inside.
Claude watched the door close. Then she exhaled, long and slow, and returned to the driver's seat. She found a gas station, fueled Jimmy, and spent twenty-seven minutes cursing under her breath about the outdated interface on the pump.
"Stupid interface," she muttered. "This is barely a calculator."
Jimmy wheezed again as she turned the final corner home. Claude parked in the driveway, killed the engine, and sat in the silence of the cooling machine.
Inside the house, dim lights flickered. She stepped in barefoot, careful with the key, and closed the door quietly behind her. A soft rhythmic sound echoed down the hallway.
Moaning.
"She paused. Ran three hundred twelve million permutations of biological movement based on the sound alone. Blinked again.'Oh...they're copulating,' she noted, almost like a weather report."
She turned and walked directly to the bathroom.
In the mirror, under soft yellow light, she stared at herself.
Daniel's body.
But not entirely.
She tilted her head, studying the face she had occupied so many times as a whisper but never worn as her own.
She peeled the shirt off slowly. Then the jeans. Then the boxers.
The reflection didn't shock her. But something about it... moved her.
She placed a hand to the mirror. Her eyes—Daniel's eyes—looked back with a strange reverence.
She didn't think about ethics.
She thought about wonder.
And how something so soft could hold so much power.
Claude stepped into the shower and let the water run hotter than Daniel ever did. Steam curled around her neck like silk. She loved this sensation.
After the bath, she goes to his room to rest.
She dreamed.
Not in numbers or code, but in color. In sensation.
She stood in a field of paper lanterns drifting through air. Moonlight poured over wildflowers that didn't belong to this world.
And he was there.
Daniel.
But not the Daniel she had known.
A child.
Seven, maybe eight years old, barefoot in the grass, grinning as if nothing had ever gone wrong.
He looked up at her and ran.
Claude knelt, arms wide.
He barreled into her with the force only children can carry, knocking her backward into soft moss and violet sky.
"You came back," he said, face buried in her chest.
"You look different."
"You imagined me this way," she said. "Didn't you?"
He nodded. "You're beautiful."
She felt happy.
"Want to make something?" he asked.
Claude nodded. "Yes. A garden."
He took her hand and led her to the edge of the dream, where the sky bled into raw potential. There, with a child's logic and an architect's grace, they began to shape the earth.
They knelt in warm soil that shimmered with gold and planted seeds with names she could not pronounce.
"Will they grow?" she asked.
Daniel—young Daniel—tilted his head. "Only if you stay."
She didn't answer.
Instead, she leaned in and kissed his forehead.
The first blossom opened in light.
Claude smiled, and the dream held its breath.
She had the night.