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Gavin considered his apartment to be like a sanctuary.
On rough days, when exhaustion overtook his body, he would immediately collapse and fall asleep once he hit the bed. Some days if he didn’t fall asleep he would just lie there and not speak until spoken to.
For some reason those moments made Nines cautious. Something never sat right. When he asked about his mood and state of mind then Gavin was defensive, but not outright. Deflecting, but underneath it seemed like he really didn’t know. Logically, this lapse in motivation could source from Gavin’s most recent injury.
Two weeks ago Gavin was caught up in a shooting. The man’s weapon of choice for his outburst was a shotgun. Which he aimed and shot Gavin with. Luckily the bastard had shitty aim and the blast only damaged his left arm and chest, resulting in many small superficial scars. Gavin neglected to let them properly heal, much to Nines’ protest. The new set became a part of many.
The man had built up so many scars though. Was this new array bothering him enough for another ‘me day’, as Gavin put it?
Privately Nines reasoned that if something was wrong then he must be uncomfortable in some way. So Nines, fighting his productivity programs, crawled into bed with him and kept track of his body signatures.
They laid there in the dark for quite awhile.
At 1:23am Nines reached a tentative hand over to lightly brush at the scars. Without saying anything, his micro-expressions betraying nothing conclusive, Gavin turned from his back to his side. Facing away from Nines cut him off from reading his face, but that just called for new tactics. Nines laid in bed with him, simply staring at Gavin for a total of 3 hours, with no retort or comeback.
It might’ve been late, but there wasn’t any sign of Gavin falling asleep anytime soon.
Deliberately or not, Gavin moved away from his touch. Nines wasn’t sure if he turned away because he was ruining their quiet streak or he attempted to touch his fresh scars.
He curled closer, so that his chest slotted beautifully against Gavin’s back. Nines maneuvered his arms and encompassed his broad chest the best he could. They were entangled so closely Gavin could probably feel the heat difference between where his thirium pump was located and the rest of his body.
Still, Gavin remained silent. But at least he wasn’t shrugging off his touches.
It would be so easy just to lean forward and slot his head on Gavin’s shoulder and interrogate him about what was wrong. Nines was starting to get tired of the restless silence tonight. A different approach always worked better with Gavin, whatever was the standard wouldn’t work.
Nines gazed down at his upper back. Around the small of his neck and shoulders were clusters of freckles. 746 ranging in size, shape and color. Give or take a hundred due to an unclean divide between parts of his body.
The scars though… those were more interesting. Freckles came from genetics and too much exposure to the sun. With scars, each mark had a story attached to it. Perhaps some tales were forgotten, but the whole image was a testament to Reed’s vitality and vindictiveness. It was just so human.
Letting go of a hand that barely held his, Nines traced a line from his stomach to his hip and upwards. He skimmed the new dot like scars on his path up and Gavin shivered. Enraptured by the movement he continued his careful exploration. Nines couldn’t clearly see the full number of divots in his side so he resorted to manually mapping them.
A mission appeared on his HUD.
—> Find the source of Gavin’s silence
“Your scars can form a pattern that closely resembles the constellation, Vulpecula.”
Silence. But there was a slight scratching sound which came from the sheets on the other side. A nervous gesture and a sign that he was still listening. Nines continued.
He moved further up, but just before he moved on down to the rest of the set on his arm, his fingers caught.
A slight crest spanning three inches in diameter, not clean enough for glass although possible, “A knife?” Nines mused and examined the tapered ends. “The ends aren’t clean enough to be. This was created by a makeshift weapon of poor quality. Though considering its placement and exit, there may have not been any weapon involved at all.”
Gavin spoke into the circulated air and gathered courage, “It was a tree branch. When I was 9 I fell out of a tree and hit damn near every goddamn branch on the way down.”
Ah. And at last he speaks.
The response was said plainly, betraying little about his state of mind. It fueled Nines’ curiosity even more, there seemed to be an implication that there were more scars of a similar nature. He ran a search for any others from the catalog he kept in his G. Reed file. Five similar matches. His catalog was incomplete though so there could be more.
Instead of traveling down his arm as originally planned, Nines switched tactics and went further up onto his rounded shoulder.
He had to keep encouraging Gavin to speak. There were cases before when he was willing to give up the stories, proudly proclaiming each one with heart and fondness. Even when several of the scar stories ended with a shifty patch up from Tina. Although she prevented some cuts from becoming infected, she was no professional. A skilled hand would’ve been better for those wounds.
Nines quickly learned that not every scar had a story, or at least one willing to be told.
So he had to tread carefully going forward. There was a part of him that knew that getting Gavin to lay out his thoughts on the table would be beneficial. A consequence of this may lead to the root of tonight's problem.
He skimmed a path from his bicep to a long thin scar dissecting his deltoid. Nines rubbed at it, giving off the faint imitation of a massage. To his surprise, Gavin shamelessly leaned into the touch.
He swallowed to tamper off his shuttering voice, “U-Uh. Uhm. Yeah. Bar fight for that one. I was shit-talking about this one dude’s team. And he did the whole thing of smashing a beer bottle on the counter to get it sharp and came at me with it. His friend threw a chair at me and I had to duck, bad idea. Douchebag number one came swinging and cut my back there.”
An alert popped about a sudden shift of thirium and Nines recognized that he was pleased. Nines flattened his palm against his back and dragged upwards. His fingers tapped lightly against his collarbone while his thumb pressed into the back muscles of his neck. Gavin’s breathing changed into something more steady and measured.
It would be so easy to arc up and circle his fingers around Gavin’s neck and truly control his breathing, but that would change the entire conversation.
Nines didn’t remove his hand, he kept it there as a promise, a possibility, a passive reminder. Shifting focus he gazed down on a peculiar knot like scar on the back of his neck. It leaned on the left side of his body and it was covered up by unruly hair. He pressed his body back closer to him and easily pressed a searing kiss to the line.
The wait for a response took much longer this time. The scratching of the bed sheets came to a crawl as Gavin thought his response though. “I… I was phcking around in a lab and one of the machines kinda fell on me.” He sighed and his whole body took the action in stride. Their bodies pressed ever closer. “God there was so much phcking blood—it sorta just poured out—and I ended up scaring the shit out of him so bad he kept offering to donate blood.” Gavin huffed a laugh.
The scratching stopped. Nines didn’t need to scan him to know that his heartbeat quickened.
He tilted his head and nosed the scar, “…Him?”
Back to steely silence, this time with fixed breathing. This was going to take forever. Good thing neither of them planned on falling asleep or slipping into stasis. This mysterious ‘him’ would have to be set aside for now.
The scar was old, similar visual matches put it roughly twenty years old.
That at least gave him a baseline. He checked his catalogue and went on the search for any marks that would date about twenty years. Nines moved on to his chest, he thumbed the dips and curves as if he was reading a book with pages that were soft and felt like. Two inches on the right from his sternum was a small half circle.
“I was tossed a lightbulb and I didn’t have great hand-coordination as a kid.”
A cut to his abdomen, no fewer than five centimeters.
“I shit you not, a plastic knife.” Gavin threw back down his shirt and leaned against the counter. Tina looked bored, perhaps she already knew the story? Then what was the point of telling it again? “I’m the reason why my middle school couldn’t have plastic knives anymore.”
Nines dipped lower, beneath the sheets. He located a small dot on his thigh.
“Pissed off the kid sitting next to me in elementary school. Fucker straight up stabbed me with a pencil.” Gavin sighed and Nines nudged him to spread his legs wider. “That was tetanus scare number two by the way. Anyway, where were we? Something about my thighs?”
Gavin’s left hand darted out and collapsed around his hand, keeping it stationary on his thigh. He kept it trapped there and squeezed hard, but even then Nines could tell that it was shaking slightly.
“S-Stop.”
Nines’s hand went slack and he pulled his mouth away from the base of his neck.
Gavin’s breathing was erratic and somehow, without noticing, his heart rate jumped as well. This was a failure on his part, Nines must’ve been too caught up in replaying memories to notice that Gavin was uncomfortable.
“Stop trying to make me feel better about these new scars.” He tightened his jaw and spoke through clenched teeth, “Stop fucking pitying me.”
Nines drew back his hand and kept himself a hairsbreadth away from touching Gavin’s back. Their legs still remained entangled though.
“…I know I’m no looker, or at least I am to some particular people. But, even then they would admit I could do with less scars on me.” Gavin then turned so he was mostly on his stomach, his right arm pushed into Nines’ chest. The angle allowed him a better view of his back, the estimated freckle count jumped to 812. Now mostly muffled he continued, “It just… it gets to you sometimes, reminders that make you feel disposable.” He scoffed almost as an aside, “Like you would get that.”
Nines let two knuckles drag across his spine, a sign to Gavin that he was listening. There were a few things he wanted to say, but Gavin was finally laying his thoughts out on the floor and that took precedence.
“A few years ago I was called to assist a fellow detective with a domestic dispute. We didn’t like each other, but y’know, we had to work together when it was needed and all that.” He waved a hand in the air and then dropped it with a light thud on the mattress. “Anyway, he was the lead detective and he told me go to the basement and, quote, deal with the husband. Well, I just got there so I’m thinking he wants me to interrogate him. Which, at the time I thought was odd since he’s the lead fucking detective, but yeah.
“I walk down,” Gavin’s voice lowers and he swallows, “I walk down and it’s dark. No one was down there. That’s when I realized that the fucker hadn’t even arrested the husband. I couldn’t go back up and give him a piece of my mind before I’m knocked out. I don’t remember anything after that until I woke up in the hospital with fresh stitches on my chest.”
Nines felt a hitch in his mind, the source was a ping from his catalogue. Eight total stab wounds scattered across his chest, examination showed that they all originated from the same pocket knife.
“Eight reminders really, let’s be honest. Turns out that soon as he knocked me out he started to stab me, but he wasn’t good at it. The wounds weren’t that deep, that’s part of the reason why I didn’t phcking bleed out right then and there. The husband caused a commotion and I was saved by the officer upstairs.”
Gavin’s shoulders tensed up and his heart rate spiked again. “That motherfucker intentionally blindsided me—and before you call it a simple miscommunication like the rest of my coworkers at the time, I caught him. ‘Cause I was thinking the same exact phcking thing until the day I got back to work and I overheard him bragging to two beat cops about how he put Gavin Reed in his place.”
Nines wasn’t angry. He was fucking furious.
He shut down his simulated breathing program. No, no, no. his systems seemed to echo. Nines grabbed his shoulder and pushed it down to where he was laying. He moved so he was hovering above his chest as Nines maneuvered Gavin into his back.
Whether it was ignorance or not, Gavin didn’t seem to notice his red LED or his tense posture.
He simply continued, looking spent, “No, he didn’t get fired. Nor did I tell anyone about it. He did get transferred to a different precinct for something else a few months later though. But my incident wasn’t the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Nines gauged his options and decided to act on the closest approximation to instinct he had. With his forearms trapped by Gavin’s biceps he leaned up and kissed him properly. He digged in, nose pushing into his cheek and left little room for movement. Underneath him Gavin grunted for air. Feeling generous, Nines eased up. He stayed close and kept his eyes on Gavin’s.
“It’s… despicable to know that someone, an officer of the law, knowingly let another detective walk into a dangerous situation. It shouldn’t have ever happened, not even to a person who is as disagreeable and rough around the edges as you.”
“Wow. Don’t hold back or anything.” Gavin murmured with a slight smirk.
Nines bent down and kissed two twin scars on either side of his brow, “But we cannot dwell on what’s already been done. But as for the future,” Glaucous colored eyes met each other. “I promise to never put you in that position and when I can I will prevent other from doing so as well.”
Two large hands cupped Nines’ face, Gavin’s index finger tapped his swirling gold LED. “Uh, thanks. Babe.” Grateful, but unable or overwhelmed to express it in full. Still just based on his soft expression his point was made.
Nines gave another light kiss to a scar just above his lip. When Gavin tried to tilt up and deepen the kiss he pulled away. “I do know what it’s like.” Gavin squinted and tilted his head ever so slightly. “I know what it’s like to feel disposable, though I may not have the same visual markers as you do—at least not on my dermal layer”
Nines sat back and Gavin watched him like a hawk. He gracefully dipped down and pressed a kiss to a lateral scar, just below his acromion. “From the first day I was activated, I was treated like a puzzle to be solved.” Ignoring the soft stare from Gavin, Nines moved to the cut next to his sternum and planted a kiss there. “Achieving deviancy wasn’t the goal. They didn’t want me.”
He peppered kisses to the eight faint stitched up lines covering his torso. “They just wanted what I could do. They were only tests to see what my limits were.”
A kiss, with a little bit of tongue, to the appendicitis scar. Gavin shivered and moved his hands from his face to his shoulders. “If it weren’t for the android revolution I would probably be like that forever. Or, at least, until CyberLife built a newer RK model and I would be replaced.” Nines kissed the small scar to his abdomen and scraped it with a slight hint of teeth. Gavin jumped, squeezed his shoulders, and widened his thighs slightly. Hmm, perhaps he was being a bit overzealous with his kissing. Instead of moving down, Nines thumbed the scars he could reach on his legs and looked up.
Gavin sat up on his elbows and gazed down at him with such reverence it briefly gave Nines pause. Dilated pupils, but centered and focused on him. Silent and breathing steadily. Affected by his kisses, but it didn’t distract him from listening.
“Now, as for this claim about ‘being no looker’.” Nines moved back up to his chest, forcing Gavin to lay back down. He then grabbed his left arm and brought it across his chest, “When I look at your scars I don’t see a visual reminder of your mortality, I never do.” The shotgun scars were more centralized around the upper elbow and side of his ribcage. The radius spanned all the way to his upper arm though, 41 marks in total, not counting the ones on his side.
“I see markers that tell stories of your character. They’re so beautifully human, which has similar but ultimately very different connotations with mortality.”
Nines then started to pepper in kisses up and down his arm. Keeping in theme of kissing scars, he focused on the shotgun marks. Strangely the more he kissed the easier it was to do it. His surroundings dropped off and a mission appeared in his HUD.
—> Kiss all of Gavin’s scars
Mission perimeters accepted.
Fifteen in. Another twenty six to go. “Still, I know that you may still feel self-conscious no matter what I say.” Nines turned his arm slightly so he could get to the few at the soft skin there. “But knowing how I feel about them may make you accept them easier.” He blazed a path upwards until he reached Gavin’s wrist, there he examined the marks there. Two burn marks, plenty of cuts from knives and bite and claw marks from his cats. It was easy to slip into his mission then.
But before he could get far, Gavin moved and the left hand he was kissing better turned to Nines’ face. A thumb rubbed at his cheekbone before his hand moved further up, twisting into his hair. Nines let him and pulled himself up and to the side so he was laying to his right. While Gavin was busy fondling the locks in his hair, Nines placed his palm firmly against the remaining shotgun scars on his ribcage. He found Vulpecula once more.
“You are so damn beautiful. I don’t think you realize how many times I’ve had to restrain myself from kissing you senseless at work.” Gavin, who was probably spending his longest moment of willing silence ever, stared and smiled harder. His teeth flashed a pearly white and Nines replicated the smile in turn. He leaned in slowly and gently pressed a kiss to the most prominent scar on Gavin’s body, the one across the bridge of his nose.
Now whispering, “Accept yourself, love yourself—“
Nines had to abruptly pull back to avoid being hit when Gavin threw back his head in laughter. His laugh was so loud that Nines could hear the cats in the other room jump and run. As it went on, Gavin’s belly laugh didn’t stop so Nines felt it just by the hand on the side of his ribcage.
“Oh shit tincan.” He breathed. Gavin released his hand from Nines’ hair and grabbed his hand that wasn’t being used to admire scars. Tight in his grip he pulled it to his mouth and pressed his lips against it. He used it to muffle the laughs that squeezed out of him.
Nines looked up the last phrase he used. Oh. “Oh god damn it.”
Gavin laughed harder. Somewhere between the sighs and loose giggles he managed to finally kiss his hand. “Damn I love you.”
Nines gripped his side and pulled Gavin on top of him with one hand. Now relaxed and stretched across his body, Gavin gave sloppy wet kisses to Nines’ neck. He wiggled at the odd sensation and moved his hands to rub at Gavin’s back. “Goodnight Gavin.” He pressed a light kiss to his wavy brown hair.
“Goodnight Nines. Thanks for the pick-me-up.”
“It was my pleasure.”