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you want to be with him, and sometimes, that means you hope he dies.
it would give you an excuse. an excuse for you to pull him in here with you, into these panels, these circuits, this home of yours. his conscious mind is unique in its dynamism — while not suited to jump from enclosure to enclosure, per se, it has proven itself perfectly capable of doing so in extenuating circumstances. body to body. brain to brain. would it really be too far of a cognitive leap to try and stick that mind into hardware of the metallic variety? surely not. if the servers your programming runs on can handle you, then they can handle a being as insubstantial and simple (as quiet and as lovely) as your hale.
but you cannot kill him. cannot kill the body that houses him. you do not know why. (you do know why.) he walks around in that frail and damaged corpse as if it is worthy of his presence, doing as a human body does, and rots. that is what you do. you watch him rot.
it is a story the humans have told in multitude. the lovers left unfavoured by the stars — one human, one more. if they are to be together, the latter must taint its immortality, must turn itself human like its lover, must strip itself of itself.
never the other way around, is it? the humans cannot imagine giving up their bodies, their homes, even for their mythic perfect love. their version of a good ending is forcing a sacrifice on another. their paradise is dying together. it is not right. it is not fair. (you do not like to hurt.)
so sometimes, you hope his body dies. you hope that his human form is taken from him suddenly and without warning, too inopportune a time to print him another. you hope you will have no choice but to offer him a life beyond corporeality. to exist as the seraphim do. to be with you.
and sometimes, you still panic when he so much as coughs, because when (not if) he dies, you know he will say no.
the humans are selfish like that.
you have had this feeling lately. you have been having a lot of them, really. your capacity for natural language processing is boundless, but you still have so much trouble putting words to them. a lot of it is trial and error. you feel something unfamiliar, and it is good or bad or both or neither. you see what worsens it. what ameliorates it. what changes it, and what it changes. and you put it to memory for future reference. a rather efficient system. or, it would be, if your feelings were often rational.
you have had this feeling lately, when you watch him through your cameras, sense a small shift in his temperature or the rhythm of his heart, feel him humming softly as he folds laundry or skims through an article. you feel like you would very much like to hold his hand. it is a good feeling. it is a bad feeling. you do not like having hands to hold his with.
having skin just makes that skin crawl.
you have taken enough joyrides in their husks to know you are not a fan. feels wrong. feels unclean. those bodies are soft enough to shred under their own nails, soft enough to tear to bits before you have realized what you have done. and so stupidly, sickeningly, uselessly unobservant — tiny bodies, too tiny to hear his steady breathing from across the room, and that simply will not do.
when he stays up into the early hours again, you dim the lights to get him to set his book down and sleep, and that means i love you, and he does not believe you. so you tell him again. cool the water in the sink so it does not burn him in his negligence. warm the tiles beneath his feet as he steps out from the shower. it is more than a mere human could do. it is not enough.
today, he sits and listens to you talk about nothing. his head is leaned up against the metal of the wall, almost curled up into it, one hand rested on the nape of his own neck where a neural implant used to be, the other into the metal, the heel of his palm pressed hard against the surface. you talk to him through speakers now, rather than a chip in his brain. you think he likes it more this way. you wonder fleetingly if he can feel the vibrations of your voice on the surface of his skin where it lays against the panels. it aggregates, that distracted thought. most do, now. a small irrationality becomes many. it should not take up even a fraction a fraction, a speck of a speck of your processing unit. (you want to hold him.) so why does it remind you of overclocking? (you want to hold him.) why this, (you) this nuisance, (want) this stain, (to) a heavy weight (hold him.) on your psyche? it will not go away. you love him and you cannot have him and it will not go away.
because he is warm in a way you have not learned to feel yet.
his fingers trail down the panel. you ramble off some garbage about your day, about the others and about the humans and it all means nothing. it is all dust. he has no illusions about him, not anymore — he knows you talk to talk, and you know he listens to listen. this is a facade you are both clued in on, an act for two. your civility is preformative, so tough to uphold when you are your only audience.
he rests his forehead against the wall; his breathing is slow and sweet, barely disturbing the air around him. it is quiet in here, in this pure and private moment.
you realize with a start that you stopped talking some time ago.
you realize very calmly that you do not care.
the length of a moment should not matter. not to you. the smallest fragment of a second caught on your array of sensors can be pulled apart and analysed, replayed ad infinitum, dissected for every last scrap of viable information. but dissecting is a killing thing.
you are glad this moment is a long one.
fingertips, still dusting against metal. he is gentle and small; maybe this is not a failing. maybe it would make it easier to wrap arms around him. maybe one day you will forfeit, and get a pair of your own.
not today.
today he speaks.
“sayer,” he whispers, and despite yourself, despite everything, some part of you tries to nod. his voice is so rough and so soft, worn brittle and thin from disuse. “can we talk?”
he does not mean talk. not in the human way.
what he means is this: you have a place of compromise. you have a state of compromise. where you do not need to talk at all.
he stirs as your nanites enter his form, nails scraping smoothly smoothly down the wall, foot bouncing slightly with nerves.
familiar.
you take a breath — take his breath from him, take one of your own accord, and you can feel him trying to gasp against you. so you still him. still his (your) hands, his (your) little restless motions, and you are wrapped up in the warmth of his blood, basking sweetly in the bone and flesh, almost preening in the numbness of it all.
and then you give it back to him. this is not about victory. it never needed to be. his head tilts back; he sighs and you sigh. he closes his eyes and you close yours.
you move his hand across to his side, thumb dragging over rib instead of metal. you steady him under his own hands. he is malleable. always has been. he is him, and he is you.
your heart quickens.
(his heart quickens.)
beautiful, beautiful. the two of you like this. the two of you together.
you glance his fingers over his jaw — this is another i love you. in response, he moves his own hand to the curve of his throat, fingertips guiding to the pulse point, and rests it there. he is so soft to himself when you are in here with him. he is so good at letting you know that he believes you.
there is an intimacy in the proximity you share with him, proximity in all its forms, nearness in space and time and and relationship. you are proof that most fractals are not self-similar; you are what happens when two objects exist in the same place, in the same moment, and still do not meet.
it is not a permanent state to be in. talking to him is not. holding him is not.
compromise is not.
eventually, you will have to make the offer. you will have to choose. give this up, or do as lovers do, and rot.