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“Well, nobody is perfect,” Ratthi said, bumping his shoulder into my arm on his way out.
It surely was an accident – he wasn’t exempt from his fucking stupid platitude, either , ha ha– but still I recoiled. I didn’t know what was more uncomfortable: the words, glib and unassuming and yet still hitting harder than had he aimed, or the touch.
It truly was a toss-up. The touch seemed to linger even after he’d righted himself, but the words … the words drilled into my head like a virus and for the first time in what must have been weeks I missed my helmet and visor.
“Ah, shit, sorry –” Ratthi said, expression anguished, but then Pin-Lee called from down the hall. I desperately tried to school my face into something less revealing. It must have worked; Ratthi gave me another brief, searching glance, and then grimaced again. “Fuck, I should’ve – I’ll be more careful.”
“It’s alright,” I said, as though I couldn’t still feel the press of his body against mine, burrowing into the metal of my bones and hollowing them out.
I hated touch.
Ratthi ducked his head. “Sorry,” he said again and then finally hurried out with another guilty look at me.
I exhaled a measured breath and tamped down on the urge to shake myself.
“Anything I can do?” Gurathin stopped a respectable distance away from me (standoffish? Or merely respecting my boundaries?), and it made me suddenly, irrationally angry.
With a wordless growl that should have made him shrink back but didn’t I pushed into his space, deliberately letting my shoulder bump into his arm.
Like an idiot, he jerked back now, hands hovering uselessly a centimetre or two above my arms.
“Embee –”
Would he really make me say it? I growled again and stepped closer still until I could bury my face in his neck. Gurathin held himself stiffly like a SecUnit on lookout, and for a moment I was sure I’d overstepped. But then he let out a not-quite-sigh, relaxing enough to feel human again (if I’d wanted to hug a construct, I could have called up Three, after all, though it was busy down on the planet doing things I’d rather not think about with Overse and Arada. “Research,” they’d called it. Sure.) and finally settling his arms around me.
As much as I abhorred unexpected touch, his hesitance chafed even worse.
He made a sound somewhere between an exhale and a chuckle. “You could have just asked,” he said, which I was pretty sure was mainly to be an ass.
I slouched myself a little more (Gurathin was tall compared to the rest of the PreservationAux humans, but even with the bits that ART had removed from my legs, I could fit him under my chin comfortably, which was usually nice and sucked rather badly right now) and grumbled into his neck.
He laughed, a soft, quiet sound that sluiced a good bit of the gross feeling right off me like, not unlike the water-showers he was so fond of. “I didn’t want to presume,” he said.
Stupidly conscientious human.
I don’t know how long we stood there like that, with me folded into Gurathin until all I could feel – all I could think about – was Gurathin, holding me safe. Holding me together, maybe.
“Ratthi wants to make sure you know it was an accident,” Gurathin finally said.
I grimaced into his neck and slowly put myself back together (metaphorically) so I could step back and stop imitating a fragile human. “I know,” I said. “It’s as he said – nobody’s perfect.”
I smiled and felt I was doing pretty well, though I kept my gaze fixed to a point somewhere over Gurathin’s shoulder. I could barely stomach the expression on his face via my drones (despite not actually, you know, having a stomach), as he nodded and said, “Very much true.”
I also didn’t know how to tell him to stop. Or if I wanted him to stop looking at me like that. I mean, of course I wanted him to stop so that I would stop feeling like there were tiny critters crawling over my face and arms and chest, but at the same time…
Ugh, things had truly been easier when the worst thing I’d had to worry about had been whether HubSys would find out about me accessing the media feeds.
Gurathin’s face did a weird thing, and then he closed the distance between us again (not that it had been a lot in the first place). Again, he stopped just shy from making contact with my arm. If I wanted him to touch me, I’d have to move in.
Of course I did. It was Gurathin after all. But I couldn’t put that into words (or even concepts to send to his feed), and I didn’t want to, besides, even though I wished he stopped being quite so hesitant.
It wasn’t that it reminded me each and every time of being a murdering SecUnit (or at least that wasn’t what bothered me), but. Well. I had no idea how the rest of that sentence was supposed to go on, and then Gurathin squeezed my arm besides, which made my entire awareness zero in on that bit of contact. I almost sagged back into him, but he’d sacrificed enough of his time for my dramatics, and so I locked my joints in place and held out.
It was harder than it had any right to be.
After a minute or so, Gurathin caught on and stepped back, tilting his head to look up at me. It was a testament to how infuriatingly calming his touch was that I met his eyes head on, focusing on the mesmerising colours of his irises briefly before allowing my gaze to drift to the poorly secured doors. They were nice, as far as eyes were concerned, their colour unlike any augment or actual eye I’d seen (not that I made a habit of studying other people’s eyes, if I could help it).
His smile was even quieter than usual, but somehow more, and I hastily sent my drones out into the hallway to scout before the visuals could make my organics do even more weird things than the off-putting heat creeping into my skin right then.
Thankfully, Gurathin didn’t comment beyond a brief ping on my feed inquiring if things were fine, and I sent back an affirmative before I could think about it.
But they were. Gurathin’s touch had fixed the mess Ratthi’s accidental bump had left behind.
Don’t let it get to your head, I sent back to Gurathin as we started down the hall towards where Mensah would meet us once her meeting was done.
He sent back acknowledgement immediately, but no positive response followed. I turned my head to glare at him (at his ear, but he got the gist), to which he only smiled beatifically.
Oh, great. My cautionary words had already come too late.