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Baley sets his mouth, inhaling through his teeth, and Daneel watches his ribcage expand, then sink, the skin spread taut and open where it had once hung lamely. His hands are closing over his thighs; he can only watch the ribs, not the loose hands nor the minute lock of the knees, the tensed stomach or the cautious smile, which he intuits the presence of but cannot watch in this moment, though perhaps one impending. Elijah is used to the scrutiny, the intense attentiveness with which he regards him, but still isn't quite natural under it.
(At one time, not long after their reunion, Daneel, having recognized this, developed a little habit of turning his head slightly aside as he regarded him, which, as cute as it was, for its awkwardness and air of humanity, was dispelled quite explicitly for how uncanny it was; He was rather too good at feigning disinterest, and the nonchalance of his posture in conjunction with the hindbrain sciention of predation made Baley constantly itchy.)
He rubs his jaw to dispel embarrassment. For millennia the image--of his slightly loose skin, waxen by the knees and shoulders, his unshaved body, crooked like a sardine in its tin--will stand; he imagines Daneel half-submerged and stiff in some cracked and broken plain, with silver reels of film being peeled from his slack head by some coming civilization's curious, and each printed with the uninteresting, baffling milkiness of his bare flesh. For now, he’s sitting on a white bench, a bronze idol in a clean and undistinguished white-walled room, his eyes alert and his back touching tile: it’s still that, a back.
Elijah’s eyes are open when he triggers the spray, and though he doesn't squeeze them shut completely, they narrow to slits, through which he watches Daneel. He releases his held breath in an awkward, pseudoerotic pah! and his stomach sinks toward his ribs, the harsh topography of his abdomen highly visible. He braces on the wall, there's a dark tangle of hair beneath his armpit, Daneel feels--perceives--intuits--becomes conscious of--he’s always mincing, lately--the shift of an advanced potential giving him something he imagines would be restlessness in a man; that potential waits in him, in the closure of his fists and the intensity of his attention.
Baley moans a little, draws his arms up close to his body, closes his eyes properly as the water films over his head completely, “Jee-hoshaphat!”
Daneel smiles, though Baley cannot see it, a sheer darkness over his temples and in his eyes, a continuity of shape slung from the end of his hair to create an odd geometric plane before his face; His hair is only now long enough to do that--it’s longer than Daneel has ever seen it, getting longer still. He had asked about it--Elijah had balked, only hours later putting his hand on his knee and explaining, quietly, slowly, in a qualified manner so that Daneel, who could not understand then, might one day do so; So that Elijah, who had not quite accepted it, might one day do so. The memory replays instantly in his mind, collapsed into this moment to color it with its savor, print it with its textures.
His body is shivering, as if wracked by a sickness. Blindly, he intuits the inset of the dispenser; though the mechanism is soundless, it makes a utilitarian tone, like grinding, for the duration of the pour.
“You think they’d spare a bit of hot water for their founder’s old man.”
“It is well within your rights to ask for such a privilege; I do not believe it would have any untoward political consequence.” Daneel’s hands open flatly, before he realizes that he’s engaged the activity, he’s standing. The lather works quickly in his large, flat hands, white foam spraying in an imperceptible aura about them.
He shivers, his elbows shrinking inwards, though keeping his hands from the spray. The cold has made him pink like a babe; he grins blindly. "Hell no."
Daneel is touching him in the next instant, holding him by the biceps with both of his hands, though standing slightly apart from him. Elijah leans back, his crown tilting out of the relentless drum of water so that it flows in a curtain over his mouth--tilting further and the stream follows the sunken cheek, down the jaw, into the collar, running down that flinching body.
"Hello, Daneel." He says, looking at him through his lashes, and only after that smiling faintly. His ribs hanging, and errant strands of his hair coming loose under the torrent, serpenting down his shoulders and clinging to the trail of hair rising from his groin, constellating, scrawling dark glyphs on the very edge of cipherability. "It's you."
" Elijah ." Daneel says, and he takes up Elijah's hands, maneuvers them like instruments to tuck beneath his own armpits and tangle the hair there, runs their enmeshed fingers down over his ribs, feeling each one-one-one, hard bone, loose skin, water flowing fast and cold, first clear as a second skin, then, as it passes over their joined hands, translucent and turbid with scentless soap.
“Ooh…” An advancing positronic potential; Daneel is unhappily conscious of all his seams, and fancies that he is flying apart at them. He feels the backs of Elijah's hands, the joints of his fingers, and his ribs through them again, counting again.
With body pliant, Elijah sinks forward, and the water drums over his head and deflects off the tip of his nose, his voice is dry, low, and somehow sounds scarred, it's Daneel's favorite sound in the whole world.
He's saying, in that precious voice: "Do you have temperature perception, Daneel?"
This berth of insensation between them, full of warm miasmas, and though Elijah can conceive of a judgment to cast, he much prefers to refrain, naked and observed, and shivering.
“I do.” He replies, soaked now to the elbows, and his chest glistening in the deflected moisture, sprayed between them like light. He places their joined hands on Elijah’s hips, and clenches down. Untwitching, how could he ever believe him to be man--yet how could he be anything but?
“No flinch reflex, though,”--Daneel fills the taken breath, in a tone near to a murmur that thrills Elijah’s heart, no-- “Don’t you mind the cold?” Just the right hand, now, sinking down the line of musculature that marks the thigh, the inseam. Baley grunts, a faint twinge developed in the wrist and shoulder at the stretch the change of position provokes.
“It is not a stimulus directly associated with positronic feedback. Its relevance is relational; should a human being in the vicinity be similarly exposed, I may be compelled to action.” To accommodate Daneel’s ceaseless inquest, and apparent refusal to release their hands, he hikes his opposite leg up, propping his knee against Daneel’s iliac furrow in much the way a man would lean upon a wall. Daneel touches the inside of his knee, he shivers, and sways.
At this point, Daneel releases one of their clasped hands and holds him to his breast (warm, very warm), still knuckling into the inside of his knee. The twitching of his knuckles and the pliant posture of his thin hand beneath Daneel’s slightly proprietary and untender grip is nearly rejection, and rejection is nearly command. He had expected a more extreme reaction, when the gesture had amounted to punishment.
“And so, now, of course, you act…?” Elijah strains, fond-voiced, and slightly warbling when the water passes his lips, having been pulled back into the primary spray. He is half-erect against their close stomachs, this expression of physiological function already proven exquisite to observe against the skin--and again mincing, it stimulates, and decisiveness, exquisite once more.
Daneel says nothing, very close to him, not feigning breath. Elijah, breathing heavy, moaning a little with the pretense of the cold tries to maintain impartiality. Sure, sure.
He possesses in himself these huge, voluminous silences, that are sometimes aweing, something archaic about them, worshipful and sacrilegious both, but Elijah is bathing, with the water filling his senses and creating harsh noises, plugging his nostrils and stiffening his lips with cold water, so he sneezes, then laughs when Daneel proceeds to release him and crouch down with no sense for grace--his economy, still, is beautiful, and the posture does nothing to help Elijah’s erection.
Unfairly, he projects an intentful disinterest, his head turned slightly down and away as he lathers over Elijah’s feet--archaic, looking very closely at the hair over his pronounced metatarsals--and then up to his shivery knees--and now he lingers again, stroking their soft insides unrestrained by Elijah’s clumsy instrumentation, under the pretense of scrubbing.
“Would you prefer to live somewhere warm?” He tries, liking to watch Daneel work, but not enjoying to be on its receiving end; they could be put to better use, he’d like to hear his voice, and Daneel doesn’t look up at him, wishing to make a ghastly expression of pained longing, if only to feel it upon his features, for once. Those potentials building up in him, stacking behind his nape, threatening to drop him.
“I would not.” Solemn by the nature of his voice, but not particularly so. Sure--Elijah can’t follow the pace, his aimlessness throbbing in a disembodied point of Daneel’s encephalographic material.
“In that”--stretching to offer Daneel his opposite thigh--”you would actively prefer not to, or that you have no preference?” Stepping from the stream and wiping his eyes. Lapsing into the conversation, which is better, easier. Daneel gripping his upper arm to lead him away, likely to dry, but he remains under the frigid rinse, doing his best not to sneeze again.
“I prefer to be wherever it is you are.” If his heart stops, he blames age, or the cold water. He knows that Daneel had wanted to say his name and had refrained; He had intended to fall in, but it’s a professional hazard, everything turned to material, sacrilege! Daneel has much the same problem surely, beyond his ken and lifespan to tackle.
“Gah--Daneel, I meant--” Fingers closing under Elijah’s resistance, pressing him, he wants to acquiesce, which, in this case, is likely to be further resistance. This thing will kill him, and Elijah resents his gratification; they are each other’s ward, and their entanglement, however precious, however tender, is palliative in nature.
“I don’t intend to flatter you.” He bats Daneel’s hand away, and takes his own grip on his biceps. Forceful.
Right, talk. “Like I believe that. Alright, your turn.” And, open-eyed now, he triggers another dispensation of soap, enduring the bracing for so long as purification requires.