Work Text:
“I gave the robot a wife while you were gone by the way.” Xara throws over her shoulder as Jean enters the lab with their takeout, quickly turning back to her coding and writing out another five lines. Her brain is running a mile a minute and her fingers are shaking trying to keep up. Or maybe that's the three 12 hour energy’s.
“Xara I left for ten minutes.” Jean says, dropping the takeout in a bag next to her. She’ll grab that in a second, she has to make sure SEC is utterly devoted to his wife in all iterations. Coding a hivemind is kind of difficult, but the concentrated energy drinks make it a breeze.
“Yeah, and in the ten minutes you were gone I gave him a wife.” Xara reiterates briskly, waiting for Jean to get with the program. Out of the corner of her eye she can see Jean briefly put his head in his hands.
“…Okay.” Jean says in a muffled voice, before lifting his head to grab his takeout. “But why.”
Xara pauses. Her hands stall on the keyboard. She can vaguely see the computer typing a constant string of E’s while the sound of a computer crash plays in her brain. “Uh.”
Jean reaches over to take her hand off the E key and starts backspacing for her.
“Vibes.” Xara says after a long pause, finally unfreezing in favor of subtly vibrating instead. She’s probably going to bore a hole into the floor with how fast her leg is bouncing. “Takeout?”
Jean slides it to her and she opens it. Nice, noodles. She doesn’t remember giving Jean her order at all. “Is this Sinnohan?”
“Nah, that 24/7 Johtonian place is the only one open right now, remember?” Jean responds, and Xara blinks. Looks at the clock. It is four in the morning. She already knew that, but like- it's four in the morning. She’s been coding for three hours straight.
“Nope.” Xara answers, and starts shoveling food into her mouth since she hasn’t eaten in eight hours. She hums, pleasantly surprised. “Wow, did they actually add the right amount of spice for once?”
“No, I had to ask for extra. I knew you’d call it too bland otherwise.” Jean says, and Xara nudges his shoulder in appreciation before gesturing at the computer screen.
“Okay-“ Xara nearly chokes and decides to actually chew her food. She holds up her chopsticks in a pause motion and rolls her eyes when Jean copies her. “Okay, you take over.” She instructs, rolling her chair back to the side so she can actually focus on eating. Usually she does most of the coding and Jean revises after her, and she really wants to hear his thoughts on tonight’s genius coding ideas.
“Well for one, you’re missing half of the brackets you need.” Jean says after .5 seconds of examination. Xara pauses mid bite.
“We all make sacrifices for creative genius.” She defends, then silences herself with more noodles before Jean can poke holes in that.
“Oh, you’re pairing him with the more advanced security model?” Jean asks, giving up on correcting the code in favor of rapidly scrolling through it. “Are you sure CLARA won’t hate him?”
Xara shakes her head. “I coded them so the SEC hivemind and CLARA are completely dedicated to each other. He’ll use the bajillion units he has to protect her and she’ll love them all equally!” It's the perfect robot love story. She coded both of them to be completely insane.
“The SEC units that can self-destruct? Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Jean questions, shooting her an incredulous look, and Xara shrugs.
“Hey we’re just the admins, Xen gets to deal with their quirks.” She points out, and Jean doesn’t respond. She spins to look at him and he’s making his ‘this is a terrible plan’ face at her.
“...Whatever you say.” Jean inevitably gives in and goes back to sifting through the code, and Xara smirks. “Arceus, what are these modeling sentences?”
“Which ones?” Xara prompts innocently.
“...I’m not repeating that. Or that- hot piece of metal?” Jean’s voice pitches up a hilarious amount in confusion as he reads through the test dialogue she wrote.
“It's funny.” Xara says, and nothing else. Jean makes an indiscernible noise of distress.
“How many energy drinks did you have?” Jean asks, like that’s relevant to her coding at all. Xara shovels more noodles into her mouth and holds up three fingers. “Three?”
“At once, yeah. You should check his vocabulary, I gave him the ability to swear.”
“Why would you-”