Page 28 of 8-Bit & Cat

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The control room was quiet. Too quiet.

Zero stepped inside, his boots cutting through the dead air. The door sealed shut behind him, locking them into the wreckage of whatever the hell had just happened.

Omnis stood at the console. Not moving. Not speaking. Not breathing.

Zero’s eyes dragged over him.

His posture was straight, hands braced against the metal frame, but his fingers were curled too tight.

His entire fucking body was locked.

Zero slowed his steps. His pulse had already started hammering, his instincts already sharpening. Whatever the hell had gone down, it hadn’t gone the way it was supposed to.

Zero exhaled, circling the standing wound before him. “Tell me it worked.”

Omnis didn’t move. Didn’t turn.

Zero stepped closer. “Brother.”

Omnis exhaled. Long. Slow. Ragged.

Zero’s stomach twisted at hearing it. Omnis never sounded like that.

“I couldn’t shape the deviation.”

Zero stilled. It wasn’t the words that rattled him. He’d all but expected them. The next problem to solve, equation to balance. It was the way Omnis said it—low, empty, raw. It meant something more.

“What do you mean?”

Omnis straightened, slowly, like he was pulling himself out of something he wasn’t ready to leave.

He turned and Zero’s stomach dropped. Not at the way his hands clenched at his sides or the way his lips pressed into a hard line. But the look in his eyes. The dark and unguarded something that Zero had never seen in his brother before. Something he did not fucking like.

Zero swallowed, carefully. “Omnis.”

“It was too strong.”

The pressure in Zero’s chest tightened. “The deviation?”

Omnis shook his head, once.

Everything inside him froze as he realized. Omnis hadn’t lost control of the deviation. He had lost control of himself.

Zero’s mind began recalibrating, rerouting, circling the realization like blood in the water. Omnis had gone in to accelerate. To correct. To bond. And something had gone wrong.

He froze again as it hit him.

Not wrong. Right. Too right.

His fingers twitched at his sides, his mind tightening at what this meant. The deviation couldn’t be shaped because it had shaped him. It had changed him. And he’d felt it.

Zero’s lips parted when his breaths couldn’t keep up with his firing circuits. “You felt it.”

Omnis flinched.

Holy fuck. He had never flinched in his goddamn existence.

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