The Source
By Numnut
1 Jul 2004

He could see him

A ghostly figure sketched by moonlight. A pale face staring out into the dark, its features painted in milk. He stood on the terrace, the old stone, a mosaic of lichen and faded paint, cast in porcelain and sculpted by shadows.

He could see him.

A tall man, young in age, but aged by life. Two lives. His very stance reflecting those flickering thoughts that tortured him.

He could see him.

He crept along the track in the dark, his engine silent, mesmerised by the unguarded moment.

The Knight Industries Two Thousand was fully capable of scanning the scene on several different frequencies. Infra-red, ultra violet, even the all revealing x-ray, but for the moment Kitt was content to rely on the moonlight, the silvery paintbrush sensitive to the mood.

Today had been another day. A day of disappointment, of sacrifice, of yet another near miss that may have cost them everything, but Kitt knew that the risk to themselves was not what had brought the man out here alone.

It had been the body in his arms.

Yet another life squandered by the cruelty of fate.

Kitt was not human, but he could feel. And as he watched his driver bounce from day to day, his natural optimism and zest for life, battered by circumstance and those tragedies he could not prevent, he worried that one day it would be just too much. One day he would have to watch his driver succumb to the beating this life continually gave him.

And they would lose everything.

He was programmed to protect this man, to save him from the dangers that haunted them. But there were some things that speed and strength could not prevail against, and as Kitt stared at the lonely figure, a mere pain-filled shadow in the dark, he was confronted by so much more than lines in a computer program.

What he felt could not be coded. It was an ethereal thing unbound by logic and unfettered by the demands of reality.

A risk.

He could see him, sketched by moonlight.

And he wondered.

Wondered if Michael knew.

Knew how much his life was the source of another.

------------------
FIN.