Work Text:
“Ready...”
“Set …”
“...Smile!” Eruno clicked a button on the device she was holding and a monotonous ticking began to sound from it. Light glinted off her sunglasses in the midday warmth of the empty Little Berry parking lot, her baseball cap doing precious little to shield her from it. She stood in a power stance, one hand on her hip and the other holding up an antique stopwatch, which she’d shelled out the money to buy instead of using the timer on her Bitphone because damn it, it looked cooler.
When Aira’s new mimetic muscles were first installed they weren’t even sure if they were working. It was a matter of celebration when she was finally able to get them to work without strain. 4 days in of practice she’d gone the opposite extreme; frustration looked like rage, sadness looked like anguish. Eruno figured that hey, if it works it works, but Aira insisted on perfecting it.
They were on day 7 of Eruno yelling out expressions and Aira replicating them to the best of her ability.
“Good… good…” she nodded for Aira to keep going, “You’ve got this….” the corners of her mouth twitched, then stretched into an almost a literal ear-to-ear smile, eyes bugging from her head.
At the abrupt, shrill scream of the whistle hanging from her neck, the smile snapped from Aira’s face back to her default neutrality. Eruno clicked the timer off and adjusted her cap, then made her way toward Aira, waving her hands in exaggerated disapproval.
“Too much! Too much! You tryna smile or scare people off?” Aira hung her head in response.
“Nngh.” she grunted in monotone frustration, dropping back into the grass and sitting with her legs crossed. “Aira! Is frustrated! It’s been a week and she still. Hasn’t mastered her memetic muscles!” At her frustration, Eruno’s coach demeanor faltered. She took a place next to Aira, folding her glasses and putting them away.
“Hey, hey, you held it way longer this time, you’re doin’ leagues better than last week. Look, sorry if I was bein’ harsh--”
“No! Aira needs. Your honesty. If she wants to get better! Aira will not give up on becoming more human!”
Human.
Aira had always wanted to pursue humanity. From the minute they met, standing smack-dab in the middle of a downpour and staring at the sky, like Eruno’s heard turkeys do sometimes (insisted she was staying hydrated, because that’s what humans do, which she made sure to emphasize. To say the least, it raised questions, but hey, they’d been more or less looking out for each other since then). She’d had Kiri make her taller so she could grow alongside her friends, and she’d been enrolled into a local highschool despite having the knowledge programmed into her.
“Hey, you don’t hafta worry about that kinda stuff anyways. You’re already great, as Aira.” She patted Aira on the shoulder, who pulled another exaggerated grin in response. Eruno smiled back.
It didn’t matter if she was a ‘human’, or if she fit in with other people. Why should that be the end-all-be-all? Aira was blunt, she spoke in her own odd monotone choppy way, and she was curious and eager and kind. She had more compassion than a lot of the humans she did know, and that was worth more than any sense of normalcy she thought she needed to achieve.
Aira hummed, rocking back and forth on the grass, “Well Aira would like to be! An Aira. Who can better communicate her emotions!”
“Right.” She nodded. Hey, if that’s what Aira wanted, then she’d do what she could to help. It’s not like she knew what it was like. She jumped to her feet and the whistle shrieked again, scaring off a flock of bird that took perch nearby.
“Then we’d better get back to work!” She said, making sweeping gestures for Aira to follow her.