Work Text:
The doors of the holodeck slid open at Geordi’s request, and he stepped inside. The sound of phaser fire permeated the atmosphere; the room had been transformed into a shooting range of overwhelming calibre, though ‘shooting range’ was maybe not the most accurate term. ‘Simulated warzone’ was more like it.
And in the centre of the carnage, gripping a phaser in one pale, synthetic hand as if it had personally offended him, was Lore.
“I thought I’d find you here,” Geordi called, as the shooting abruptly stopped and the android’s golden eyes fixed him with a cold stare. “Dr Crusher was looking for you. You skipped your annual physical again.” Every year, he thought. Every year, he does this.
“Computer, clean up this mess,” Lore ordered, kicking one of the holographic corpses on the ground. Instantly, the debris vanished, leaving them in an empty replica of a planet Geordi recognized as Omicron Theta. He didn’t point it out—he knew Lore wouldn’t appreciate it. “Yeah, I skipped it. So what? It’s not mandatory for me. I just get put on the list because Picard wants me to be ‘treated like any other member of the crew’, or whatever.”
Hesitantly, Geordi replied, “Data always goes to his—”
Lore huffed and rolled his eyes, and Geordi knew that had been the wrong thing to say. “As people are so fond of pointing out, I am not Data,” he retorted, his expression snide. “He goes because he’s a goody-two-shoes and doesn’t know how to disobey an order.” He tugged at the collar of his yellow uniform, causing the two pips sitting there to blink at Geordi like a pair of gleaming eyes. “I have better things to be doing and don’t want to sit in sickbay letting an incompetent doctor poke at my circuits for twenty minutes.”
“Sorry,” Geordi said. “I didn’t mean that. But maybe you don’t need a medical examination, Lore, but that doesn’t mean you don’t need some kind of routine check-up.”
Lore folded his arms over his chest. “Crusher doesn’t know what she’s doing,” he repeated.
“I do,” Geordi responded. “Come to engineering, it’ll only take ten minutes, and then I’ll tell Dr Crusher that you’re completely fine, and she won’t bother you again.” He was right, Geordi knew. Beverly tried her best, but the android twins were still a mystery to her.
“Hm.” Lore took a few steps towards Geordi, tossing the simulated phaser back and forth in his hands. “Yeah, okay, whatever. Just get her off my case.”
“Computer, end program,” Geordi ordered, and the holodeck returned to its natural, blank state. The phaser Lore was holding disappeared, and he looked down at his empty hand, almost annoyed.
“Now?” Lore questioned. “I was in the middle of something.”
Geordi just looked at him. “No, you weren’t.” You were hiding in here to get out of your physical, like every time you don’t want to do something, he thought, reflecting what he’d never say out loud.
“No, I wasn’t,” Lore agreed. “You know me too well, La Forge—it’s kind of annoying.” He sighed dramatically. “It’s fi-ine… we can come back here afterwards and run a few more programs. I’ve been told to work on my team shooting anyway, and you’re more tolerable than the rest, so.”
Geordi’s heart sped up. “I’m a terrible shot, Lore, you know that,” he insisted quickly. “I’d just slow you down.” He paused, then repeated, “Tolerable?” It was quite the compliment, from Lore.
Lore rolled his eyes and took another step, directly into Geordi’s space, which forced Geordi to retreat a pace towards the door. “Don’t get too excited,” he said. “You… it’s… ugh, nevermind.” Lore huffed and roughly pushed past Geordi, then left the holodeck and stood in the hall. The doors remained open.
Geordi’s gaze followed Lore’s luminescent yellow form, but he didn’t say a word—the last few moments had left him more than a little confused. His hands were sweating; he hid them behind his back.
“Are we going to engineering or not?” Lore demanded, shaking Geordi from his stupor. “This was your idea, La Forge.”
“Co—coming!” Geordi replied, attempting to stifle the cough that had risen up in his chest. Lore was glaring at him, he was sure. Get it together, Geordi, he told himself. It’s not even a big deal. Why does it feel like it’s such a big deal? He shook his head slightly, trying to clear his jumbled thoughts, and when he looked up again he saw that Lore had vanished.
Refusing to waste another second and risk annoying the android even further, Geordi left his conflicting emotions behind and hurried after him.
The process was nothing Geordi hadn’t done before with Data. In fact, he looked at Data’s circuits fairly often—the younger android was very open about his inner workings, and frequently requested Geordi’s help investigating small malfunctions. But, Geordi realised, as Lore sat down in the chair across from him, he’d never done this with Lore before. The thought made him nervous; Lore was very secretive, and had the talent of being able to say a lot of things that had very little meaning. Oh, he was friendly (sort of) and talkative (very), but everything Geordi knew about him had been pieced together over the last two years from hints and implications Lore left between his words. Even though his circuits were likely to be almost the same as Data’s, the consciousness they composed was strikingly different—and that made all the difference.
“Hurry it up, La Forge,” Lore complained, tapping his fingers on the armrest. “I have other people to see.” Geordi heard the unsaid implication: people that are more important than you.
“No, you don’t,” Geordi replied evenly.
Lore smirked this time. “No, I don’t.” And what was the implication for that? You’re more important than all of them? No—more likely, Lore was just mocking him, or referring to the fact that most of the crewmen disliked him (a fact which he was proud of). It was nothing to split hairs over.
Once Geordi got over himself and finally started, the check-up didn’t last very long. He ran diagnostics on all of Lore’s systems, asked Lore questions about the functioning of different components, and did a full test of his capabilities. The only thing he had left to do after that was…
“And now you want to pull open my chest like an autopsied corpse,” Lore drawled. “Can’t you just let me go and pretend you did it? I got flying colours on everything else and I’ve been brainstorming a great idea for a new kind of drink I think you’ll like.”
Geordi sighed. “It’s the most important part, Lore, and it’ll only take a few more minutes,” he replied. “Just sit back and… relax.”
Lore put his head back with a loud thunk. “Then have your way with me, La Forge,” he purred suggestively, undoing the front of his uniform. “I’m all yours.”
Geordi knew Lore was just teasing, just trying to make him embarrassed, but that didn’t stop his cheeks from burning. In retaliation, he jammed a wedge into a seam he knew was there and pried open Lore’s chest cavity with a bit more force than necessary. Lore gasped in surprise, but Geordi didn’t stop there. He took in the mass of wires and metal components, mentally comparing it to what he’d seen on Data, and realised that it was just as similar as he’d hoped.
“Well?” Lore questioned. “How bad is it?”
“Not… not bad at all,” Geordi replied, a wave of emotions slowly crashing over him as he processed that he was the first person to see Lore like this since his reassembly. Me. Why me? Why is Lore trusting me like this? “There’s just a few things that seem a little out of place, or like they’re going to be out of place if they get jostled around too much, so I’m going to nudge them back to where they should be, okay?”
Lore was quiet for a moment, then said, “Yeah. Fine. Just be quick about it.”
With approval from the android, Geordi felt confident to proceed—though confident about absolutely nothing else. He slowly snaked his hand underneath a large coil of wires, then reached deeper, filtering through the views on his VISOR until he could see everything he needed to see. Lore stayed silent as he navigated the first two parts back into place, and Geordi could feel his eyes on the back of his neck, surely watching him like a hawk as he rooted around in the very fibres of his being. Geordi thought for a moment that it was almost intimate, in a weird, mechanically gorey sort of way, before abruptly getting off that train as soon as it arrived.
“Are you almost finished?” Lore asked, sounding almost strangled.
“Just one more,” Geordi told him. “I… I don’t have the right angle. And I can’t just leave it alone, because it seems pretty loose, but I just can’t reach it like this, can I…” He didn’t know how to ask it, so he simply trailed off, hoping Lore would understand what he meant.
Lore grunted noncommittally. “Do whatever you have to, I don’t care.”
Fighting to keep the deep red of embarrassment from his face, Geordi removed his arm from Lore’s chest, reminded himself that this was necessary maintenance, and climbed into Lore’s lap. He didn’t check to see if Lore was surprised, just zeroed in on the loose component again and wormed his hand towards it as fast as he could.
Geordi clicked the part back into place, and Lore jolted.
Lore’s hands closed around Geordi’s upper arms, keeping him firmly where he was. “That,” Lore breathed, “was definitely out of place. I don’t entirely know what it did, but I didn’t even realise I felt awful until you put it back.”
“Oh.” Geordi would have been frozen even without Lore holding him fast. “Uh, you’re welcome?” His hand was still in Lore’s chest. For some reason, that didn’t seem like a big deal anymore.
“Kiss me.”
“What?” Geordi just about choked on his surprised exclamation. His chest tightened into a knot and he found that he couldn’t breathe; he must have misheard, he must have—
“I said, kiss me,” Lore repeated. There was a beat of silence as Geordi struggled to comprehend. “I mean, only if you want to, but I’m pretty sure you do.”
Geordi struggled to find something to say for a long moment. He finally settled on, “Can I get my hand out of your chest first?”
Lore’s grip on his arms loosened. “Be my guest.”
Geordi awkwardly jerked his hand out of Lore’s wiry interior and settled it on his shoulder, then raised his gaze to take in Lore’s perfectly-crafted visage, almost overpoweringly bright with electrical energy. “Why?” he asked quietly. “Why now? Why do you want to—”
Lore snorted a laugh. “You really want to ask that, La Forge? What is it you humans say—oh, don’t look a gift horse in the mouth? I want to kiss you; just have what you want and ask questions later.”
“Okay,” Geordi breathed. “Just… one thing, though. Call me Geordi. Please.”
Lore surged forward as soon as he finished speaking, sitting up in the chair and catching the sides of Geordi’s face in his hands. Geordi found his face forcibly tilted in one rough yet calculated movement, and then Lore’s mouth was on his. Geordi had imagined kissing these smooth bioplast lips before, but it had never been Lore that they belonged to—however, the realisation settled over him as the kiss continued that there was nobody else he would rather be doing this with. Lore was rough, one hand under Geordi’s leg and the other on the back of his neck as he hauled both of them out of the chair and heaved Geordi onto a nearby desk; the kiss was severed for only a brief moment before Lore knocked all the air out of Geordi’s lungs again with a fervour Geordi knew he would never run out of.
“Geordi,” Lore murmured against his neck, when he finally let Geordi breathe again. “Geordi.”
“Lore,” Geordi replied, chest heaving. “Lore, I—”
“Shh,” Lore whispered, pressing another kiss to Geordi’s lips to silence him. “I think we’ve finally found something about me that you can’t compare to Data.”
At a loss for a response, Geordi simply said, “Your chest is still open.”
Lore looked down, as if he’d forgotten. “M-hm,” he hummed. “You should probably fix that.”
“But you’re not going to make it easy for me…” Geordi breathed, “...are you?”
The android trailed a finger under Geordi’s chin, tilting his head up. “No,” he answered. “I’m not.”
And he pulled Geordi in for another searing kiss, and Geordi didn’t care at all.