Chapter Text
The next few cycles should have been relaxing. The humans were preparing for our first official joint mission. All I needed to do was pick up a few supplies that ART couldn’t make in its recyclers and hopefully find some interesting new media from the university servers. Unfortunately, my ship had been acting strange ever since the party. ART had kept its walls up tighter than normal and was being unusually nice which was pissing me off.
With 12 hours left before the humans were due back for the pre-mission briefing I decided i couldn’t ignore it anymore.
What’s wrong with you? I shot through the feed.
ART sent back an innocent query.
Ugh! There is clearly a problem you don’t want to mention. You know I’m normally happy to ignore problems, but I can’t let the humans back on tomorrow if you are compromised.
It seemed offended which was a good sign and said, I am not compromised. There is nothing wrong with me that will impact our crew or the probability of mission success.
That was less comforting than it thought. I switched to talking, “ART… you’ve been weird ever since Amena said… what she said. I’m not freaking out about it, why would it bother you?”
Because I should have said it first.
What?
I guess it mistook my shocked silence for horrified silence because almost frantically it started trying to explain. I know you don’t like talking about emotions so I was trying to respect that boundary. I wanted to express my positive feelings towards you but I ran many simulations and the majority indicated that you would react poorly to that kind of statement, and now I-
“ART, stop.” It didn’t need to stop for breath but thankfully it did anyway. “Are you telling me you are upset because Amena told me she… loved me, before you could tell me you loved me?”
Yes.
I kept my shock to a minimum this time so it wouldn’t start rambling again and I said, but I already know you love me.
Well, now it was ART’s turn for shocked silence which was actually a pretty rare occurrence.
Elaborate.
I steeled myself then explained. You are always taking care of me, whether I want someone to or not. My act-like-a-human code made me start ticking things off on my fingers which was a new one. You save media you think I’ll like, you stock inventory items specifically for me, you make all my stuff way fancier than you need to - remember that time you remade all my sheets because I said in passing I liked a pattern I saw in a painting? There are so many other examples, but the point is, I know, okay?
It paused for 2.6 seconds before responding, and you are fine having this knowledge? This seems like the kind of information you would delete from storage.
That’s fair, but it actually didn’t bother me so I just said, I’m fine.
Are you sure you are not the one who is compromised? ART replied with a hefty dose of sarcasm.
I smirked at the nearest camera before saying, yes, I’m sure asshole.
After a short pause, ART squeezed me so hard that I let out an involuntary “oof” noise that would have been mortifying if there were any humans around to hear me. A few moments later it gave me my lung back, so I took a breath and said, “I love you too ART”.