Chapter Text
I really had to stop letting ART talk me into things.
It was supposed to be a simple mission and, really, it was. I had done most of the research and checked the briefing documents myself. I wouldn’t have agreed to letting my humans (and augmented human) participate otherwise.
They weren’t even involved in the main part of it, they were just meant to be a distraction. (ART had called their role one of ‘political motivation’ but I don’t know what it was talking about. They had arranged a business meeting with our target on an allied station so a certain corporate headquarters would be slightly less staffed and more focused on inter-station communications, letting me steal classified information from their servers a lot easier. Sounded like a distraction to me.) The only problem was, my humans never arrived.
Thankfully, I’m good at my job and ART is fucking scary when it wants to be, so we quickly determined more or less where they had gone. A jealous subsidiary of the corporation we were targeting had decided to kidnap them and take them to a holding facility on a remote planet to pump them for info. Thankfully, the subsidiary was stuck with its subsidiary status because of how fucking incompetent they all were. Humans never learn. Lucky for me, I guess.
I mean, just listen to this. The subsidiary had a few shitty planets under their control that were all within the same system which at least gave us a direction to travel in. Already pretty helpful. And as we headed that way, my humans actually managed to send out a message to ART. It was brief but unmistakably from them and gave us a better idea of which planet they were probably on. These idiots couldn’t even reliably secure my humans that they had voluntarily taken. Mistake #1.
No additional messages came after that (not great), but when we reached the planet we were pretty sure the message had originated from, we found the transport shuttle that my Preservation team had contracted still in orbit. It was a little scuffed up from what was an obviously rushed smash and grab (or, board and grab) attempt, but still usable. Now I had confirmation of their presence and an easy way down to the planet's surface. Mistake #2.
On the surface, the subsidiary staff had done their best to conceal their facilities’ locations, but they didn’t do more than a basic encryption on their external communications and they openly referenced local landmarks while reporting in from their perimeter checks. Now I had the information I needed to narrow my search radius. Mistake #3.
And once I made it to their location and started working my way through their facility (they had a floor plan printed out and hung up by the door, for fuck’s sake), they called out for back up to another facility on the same planet but one that was almost an hour away. I’d be done and we’d be long gone by then. Mistake #4.
And then they made their most satisfying mistake. After they called for back up, they didn’t stay out of my way and they didn’t wait for others to arrive. They came at me with blasters and projectile weapons (plus one guy with a net, for some reason), and that was all they had. They didn’t even have a SecUnit of their own and they still tried to take me down and I really, really enjoyed that. A short 13 minutes later, I had the facility cleared. Mistake #5, final and irreversible.
I found my humans toward the center of the facility, on the first floor. They were secured together in a single cell that had both an electronic and physical lock. That didn’t matter much. I hacked the electronic lock and brute force took care of the rest.
And for a split second, as I walked into the cell where they would all be waiting for me, performance reliability finally started to tick back up. I’d been doing my best not to pay attention to it because getting my humans taken, and on my watch, was just…not…a fun thing. My worst nightmare, really.
My eyes scanned over them, and then my drones scanned over them just to be really sure, and then performance reliability dove right back down and in its place threat assessment spiked.
“Where is Gurathin?”
“They took him somewhere else,” Mensah told me calmly, but her face didn’t match her tone.
Fucking Gurathin. Of course they did. He probably said something assholish and pissed them off and got himself killed, ruining my perfectly good rescue in the process. Performance reliability dropped another few points—no, not killed. Not killed. Knocked around a bit, maybe. He could take care of himself. Usually.
Mensah was watching me through all this and casually slipped her hand into mine. And I let her, which I guess says something about how I was feeling at that moment.
“Do you know where they took him?”
“No. It was after we broke out of our first cell. It had an encrypted feed-enabled lock. We got to one of the outer rooms with a connection point and Gurathin was able to break into it and send out a message. They caught us after that and took him away.”
My humans were already moving out from the cell and tracing their way through winding corridors back to the room they had found with the connection point. Ratthi appeared to have a broken arm, and one of Pin-Lee’s eyes was bruised and swollen shut. They didn’t look at the bodies scattered through the halls as they went. Mensah had an already scabbed over scrape along one cheek, and her hand was still around mine.
Finally, they stopped in a room I had come through just 19 minutes earlier. There were two bodies slumped in a corner (one was the guy with the net, fucking weirdo), and a communications interface set in the wall.
“It was here,” Pin-Lee said. They pointed at the corridor we had just come down. “They took us this way.” Then they shifted, and pointed to a door across the room. A stairwell, based on the facility floor plan. “And they took Gurathin that way.”
I slid my hand out from Mensah’s and moved toward the door.
“SecUnit, let’s look for him together. We don’t know what’s down there or if they moved him again.”
“Facility staff called for backup, which could be here in approximately 36 minutes.” And that was assuming the other location didn’t happen to already have people in the air at the time the call was issued. “You need to get to the shuttle and prepare to leave.”
“All the more reason to let us help. We can cover more ground together.”
I stopped at the door to turn and look at her with my eyes. My actual eyes. She didn’t miss the significance, and that’s why she’s my favorite human. “I will find him. But I need you in the shuttle. If anyone else approaches, leave.”
“Fine. Okay.” She gave me a weak sort of smile and shushed the others when they started to object. “Maintain feed contact? Please?”
I gave a curt nod. “Go.”
They went. And now, all I had to do was find my idiot augmented human who was stuck who knows where. And I had 34 minutes to do it.
I tried pinging him over the feed, to start, but got no response and couldn’t triangulate his location from nothing. Whenever we were in proximity, I could always expect a ping back. So that wasn’t promising.
Even with that set back, it wouldn’t take long to locate him. I knew that. I’m too good at what I do to not know that. No, the biggest question was what shape he would be in when I found him. I had a few modules for dealing with things like that, but none of them were particularly inspiring, so to keep my performance reliability up I went down the stairs and progressed through the underground level while thinking up cutting things to say to Gurathin when I finally found him.
I was hovering between You just couldn’t keep your mouth shut, could you? and Why do you have to make everything so difficult all the time? when optical analysis on one of my drones zoomed in on what looked like scuff marks only 21 units from the exit of the stairwell. The scuff marks ranged from one side of the hallway to the other for several paces, until they became drag marks, which I wasn’t exactly thrilled about. It made for a clear trail, however.
The trail ended at a non-descript white door two thirds of the way down an excessively long hallway. The door was locked, and I couldn’t hear any movement on the other side. Didn’t like that much, either.
I didn’t even bother with the lock. I pulled the door handle and its locking mechanism straight out of the door panel, leaving a gaping hole where they had been. I had 29 minutes left to get him and get out of here, and it wasn’t like anyone was left to get upset about a non-functioning door, so I was justified.
The door swung open easily after that and—oh. It was basically a glorified closet. Kind of. A small, dark, windowless room and sitting on the floor with his back crammed into one corner was my augmented human.
Gurathin was alive, but also a little roughed up. Not to the point of permanent damage, I didn’t think, but we’d have time to check that later. Lightly beaten, is how I’d describe it. His clothes were intact, thankfully. I’d seen what humans tended to do when they got each other isolated, so, at first glance it wasn’t good but it could have been a whole lot worse.
And then it was worse. Not a whole lot but definitely… worse.
He had looked up as I swung the door open, but he didn’t move after that. I waited for that moment of recognition to cross his face when he’d realize that I had saved his ass once again and I’d get to say something quick and sharp to him about it, but it didn’t come.
Instead, his eyes stared through me and his mouth contorted into a grim sneer that looked nothing at all like the small quiet smile he usually wore. He brought his arms close to his body (and it was then that I realized his wrists were cuffed and fucking chained to the ground) and then he stayed like that, tensed and waiting in the corner like a frightened fauna preparing to strike. What the fuck.
“Gurathin,” I said, just to try it out.
He didn’t do or say anything in response. It was like I hadn’t said anything at all. I tried to ping him next, but like before I got no response and now I could tell why. Shit.
They had turned off his augments, including his feed access. He couldn’t see, hear, or communicate with me in any meaningful way that would let me tell him that it was me.
I needed to get him out of here. But I wasn’t sure how to do that without giving him a heart attack.
I was weighing my options when a priority message broke in. SecUnit? Progress, please?
Mensah. Fuuuuuck.
I found him.
What is his status? ETA?
I didn’t know what to say. All I knew was that I was very, very relieved that my other humans weren’t with me right now. They didn’t historically have great reactions to things. I didn’t either, but, at least I didn’t have to figure out next steps with crying and needy humans around me.
No lasting damage. 27 minutes.
Was 27 minutes reasonable? I hoped so because that was the time we had left. It also wasn’t going to get any shorter if I just stood around staring at my lightly beaten augmented human instead of doing anything about it.
I took two steps into the room (which was all I could take without ending up in Gurathin’s lap) and then crouched down to his level. Maybe if I went slow and gentle, the touch would feel different enough from the facility staff that he would know it was me. I mean…he must know that I would come for him. So, maybe…
I reached out one hand toward his shoulder and put the slightest pressure on it—
—Gurathin’s tensed form thrashed, kicking out one leg in the direction of the door, which happened to also be my direction. I caught it easily, holding his leg against my body in case he decided to try that again and hurt himself. Apparently he did want to hurt himself, because with that point of connection made, he twisted in my grasp and aimed right at my head with his other leg. He got me, too, and if I were human I definitely would have felt it. But I’m not, so the only thing I felt was pissed off.
I’d had enough of this. I pulled on the leg I still had a grip on, bringing him close until his arms were stretched and wrists tight against their cuffs so he didn’t get any ideas about trying to punch me next. I managed to get an angry grunt from him for that. Then I forced him over onto his stomach (he managed to kick me one more time in the process) and sat on his back. There. Try kicking me now, asshole.
With my hands free again, I touched a few fingers to the back of his head. He tossed his head around to get them off, and I was forced to grab him by the hair and push him against the ground. I wasn’t rough, but I knew I had to be firm because he was going to hate the next bit.
I brought my other hand up to his side and slid it under his chest until I could get to the pocket he always kept his hardwire in. I figured this would send him thrashing again and tightened my thighs around him proactively, but… he didn’t. He tensed, and then held perfectly still. He even held his breath for a beat. So that was something.
The hardwire was exactly where I assumed it would be—he was particularly consistent compared to other humans and augmented humans (consistently annoying, consistently effective, consistently reckless, consistently a pain in my ass)—and I dared to let go of the back of his head to plug it into the modified port that ART hid for me in one arm. He was still tense below me, but he stayed still, even when I pressed my fingers against his jaw to tilt his head slightly and then plugged the other end of the hardwire into his neck.
Gurathin, it’s me.
I’d barely shared the words across our connection when he went completely limp between my thighs and released a noise I’d never heard him make before. It was like a half sob, half plea—like he’d been wounded. I hated when my humans were actually wounded, but this wasn’t that. I wasn’t sure what this was. It went straight to my organics and made me feel really, really weird though.
But it didn’t matter what it was, because we didn’t have time to deal with that. We had 23 minutes left to get out of here. I needed to get him up and running and out of these fucking chains (complete overkill, if you ask me, even for an augmented human).
First though, I climbed off him. Gurathin knew it was me now and probably wasn’t going to kick me anymore, so I didn’t need to hold him against the floor. And I was still feeling that weird way, and the last person I wanted to feel something weird and new about was Gurathin, so maybe less contact was better.
Don’t! he sent as I swung a leg over and leaned away from him. His whole body started to shake and he had his eyes squeezed shut.
I could feel his panic at losing that physical connection. And, right. Okay. I guess it made sense that he would need that. I still climbed off, but I settled next to him and let the side of one leg touch his arm.
I’m not going anywhere.
I pushed my leg against him a little more until it brushed his chest to make the point. He pressed back, curling around where I was now sitting on the hard floor, and then he went limp and soft again. He stayed like that, occasionally shivering, as he tried to regain control of his breathing, and his presence through the wire was just a thoughtless litany of relief and thank you and safe and trust. And that weird feeling was back, twisty and sharp and making my organics feel hot and cold at the same time.
I needed to get him out of here. I needed to get us both out of here.
I started poking around in his augments, looking for the source of the block. He kept shivering, which was a little distracting when he was doing the shivering up against me, so I put one hand back on his head, which he now seemed to like if the feeling of yes ok yes yes yes was anything to go by, and then I started to pet his hair.
I know. I know! Why would I do that? Listen, I was not feeling my best and was trying not to think about it too much but I’d seen it in some of the sadder episodes of Med Center Argala and, whatever, it worked. He stopped his shivering and stayed nice and soft where he was, and started to feel melty and hazy across the wire. His breathing evened out, and his lips (one was split; they looked redder than usual) parted in a soft exhale against my thigh.
Performance reliability started ticking back up for the first time since I’d found my humans, before I’d realized Gurathin was missing.
So…I just kept petting his hair.
Things were finally working for us, as much as things do when you’re trying to free someone from an evil for-profit detention facility. He was letting himself relax and the terrible thrum of stress chemicals was draining from his body. I was making progress with his augments now that I was in them (easy, no resistance, Gurathin practically pushed them at me and no I wasn’t thinking about that right now), and based on the script I was running to dismantle the block I’d have his augments working again in 5 or so minutes.
Not bad. We had 20 minutes before I would need to pick him up and run, but having him able to see and hear was definitely preferable. We could wait for 5 minutes. We could just sit here like this (me, petting his hair) (him, curled around me on the floor) for 5 minutes. This wasn’t weird at all.
So. The problem with 5 minutes when you’re just sitting and not actively fighting something is that it’s too short a time to do anything useful (like watch an episode of premium quality media) but also too long to pass quickly (especially when you have a processing speed like mine).
So. I caught myself thinking some things. Maybe it was because I was still stroking his hair (soft), or because the contact with his body (also soft) was pushing performance reliability back up to the low 80s. Maybe. Maybe I was just realizing that Gurathin’s always been the odd one out of my humans and this whole situation just reinforced how odd he was.
The thought pattern went something like this:
Most humans in proximity to a SecUnit experience wariness, fear, distrust, repulsion, which, yeah. They don’t experience trust. Reasonable response, probably, to the average human. But my humans and augmented human are different.
Most humans tied up and made helpless in proximity to a SecUnit, even a SecUnit tasked with retrieving them, experience fear, anger, hopelessness, desperation. They don’t experience trust and they definitely don’t experience relief.
They don’t curl around the SecUnit and let it comfort them, or play with their hair.
And they definitely, absolutely don’t drop all security protocols and firewalls and let the SecUnit run whatever script it wants in their augments responsible for their ability to see, hear, and communicate. But my augmented human is very different.
And most humans wouldn’t relax completely. No one would. I think in this situation, even Mensah would still be stressed. Not about me (because she’s the best), but, you know, about the situation.
And Gurathin is by far the least relaxed of all my humans.
And yet…Gurathin is currently melted like a puddle at my feet with no protection at all between me and him. And he’s fine with that. He’s happy, even. He’s full of trust and gratitude and mushy relief. Because I’m here playing with his hair and doing whatever I think needs doing in his augments.
That strange hot-cold feeling twisted in my abdomen again and felt like sharp, tight light in my chest. Could a feeling do that? Could it be in two places at once? I could have asked Gurathin but I was keeping him firmly on his side of the wire and I didn’t want to discuss this at all, with him or anyone else, actually.
He sighed under my hand and curled in a little closer. Now something bright and a little painful was blooming in my chest. Gross. I didn’t want anything blooming in me, figurative or physical.
And then I thought…maybe I should dig my fingers into his scalp a little. See what that does.
I deleted the impulse before it could spawn anything else equally weird. I had enough going on as it was.
Just then, the script finished its runtime and saved me from doing or feeling anything more embarrassing. It generated a report of the dismantled block and affected systems. No permanent damage. Everything was fine and once more functional.
I looked at him. He was blinking a little against the sudden reintroduction of light. But he didn’t move.
“Can you get up?” I said out loud, a little quiet. His auditory augments were tinny for a while after a reboot.
Gurathin swallowed and then nodded, so, after one more slow slide of my fingertips through his hair, I pulled my hand back and gently disconnected the hardwire. Where all his mushy relief and trust and gratitude had been, now there was just my steadily climbing threat assessment. There were 15 minutes left. I had a small collection of messages from Mensah asking us to advise on our ETA. We really needed to get out of here. Now.
I shuffled back from him, just a little, and carefully he levered himself up. He seemed suddenly exhausted, devoid of all the energy he’d shown only a few minutes ago when he was tightly coiled and willing to fight whatever he could reach.
He did eventually make it up to his knees, sitting mostly on one leg with the other splayed out to the side. It was a strange way to sit.
He stopped there and finally looked up at me. His dark eyes were a little wet and glistened in the half-light of the room.
He held up his arms and rattled the chains. “Are you going to help with this, or what?”
Oh. Right.
I reached out and started prying apart the chain links, annoyed at myself for being annoyed that the soft, trusting version of Gurathin had been replaced so quickly with this asshole again.
I suppose him being back to his usual self was a good thing. He couldn’t be that damaged if he could manage to rile me up this much just by asking a question.
Once the chain links connecting him to the floor were broken I started working on the cuffs, which was a more delicate situation. He let me move and position him as needed, not flinching even when I dug a finger under the edge and started to pry it away from his skin, though he did say “Try not to break my wrists, if you can help it,” in a very dry tone of voice that I could have done without.
When I finally dropped both cuffs to the floor, I stood, expecting him to follow, but he stayed sitting, rubbing at his reddened wrists. We had 11 minutes left. Why wasn’t he following?
“We have to go. Get up.”
He looked at me again before looking down and over at his leg that was still stretched out to one side. “My ankle is broken.”
That…wasn’t great. But also. What? “That ankle? On the leg you kicked me with?”
“Yes, that ankle. I broke it before I kicked you, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I wasn’t worried. But humans are fragile. He’d been almost completely silent while thrashing against me except for a few grunts. If his ankle had been broken I think I would have known.
I bent over and pulled up his pant leg slightly. And…yeah. It was broken.
“Then why did you kick me?” It was just like Gurathin to have a broken ankle when we needed a quick escape, and if he had made the injury worse then I was going to make sure he regretted it. ART would back me up.
He pulled his pant leg back down. “I didn’t know it was you and I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction of knowing they’d broken it.”
And I was the one regretting now. I regretted that I had killed all the facility staff already. I would have liked to do so again, but more slowly this time.
There was no way around it. I picked him up, one arm under his knees and the other under his back. Gurathin went all tense in my arms, hard and prickly and so different from how he had been only a short while ago.
“SecUnit, this is unnecessary. Just get me a stick or give me your arm and I can walk.” Yeah, right. We had 9 minutes left and I wasn’t wasting them arguing. At least, not while stationary.
I had him pressed tight against me and was already moving swiftly through the corridors, but I gave him the benefit of saying, “We’ll move faster this way. More subsidiary staff might be coming. They sent a distress call to another facility when I arrived.”
Gurathin sighed at this but then reluctantly relaxed.
“You can hold onto my shoulders if it makes you feel more comfortable,” I suggested. I didn’t really want him to, but most humans (that were conscious) felt anxious when I had to carry them and liked the stability of holding onto something themselves, even though it was useless and I’d never drop them. Never drop them unintentionally.
He just sighed again and crossed his arms over his chest, hugging himself slightly.
“Thank you, SecUnit. I’m fine. Let’s just get this over with.”
Like I said, my augmented human is weird.
We made good time, because of course we did. I can travel fast when I need to and when I don’t have to slow down to accommodate a limping idiot.
Gurathin took it pretty well, for him, which involved the usual amount of arguing and complaining. That was preferable to the gasps that he kept trying to hold in every time I had to jump over debris or adjust him to kick open a door, jostling him in the process.
To keep his mind off it, I grilled him about how he ended up separated. He didn’t give a lot of detail, but it seemed to come down to a Chief Asshole on the subsidiary staff who took him managing to send out a message as a personal insult. The Chief Asshole apparently was responsible for his ankle and the scratch on Mensah’s face.
We made it outside, and I was very pleased to learn that the Chief Asshole was also the first member of the subsidiary staff that I had killed. Gurathin saw his body slumped over by the entryway as I maneuvered him through the doorway.
He made a disdainful noise and pointed at him. “That’s him. He took my bag and my kit.”
We paused and I leaned Gurathin against the outside of the facility. I checked the Chief Asshole and I didn’t find Gurathin’s bag, but after I pushed the body back up to sitting, I did find his kit tucked under a not very effective discount tac vest. The kit was only a little charred.
“There’s a face I won’t miss,” Gurathin commented from where he was propping himself up on the building siding.
I stepped back and pointed a gun at that face.
“Oh, for the love of—“ Gurathin swore, but I lost the rest of the audio because then I was busy blasting the Chief Asshole’s head from his body. There. No face to miss.
Gurathin looked at me. “Ugh,” he said. Whatever. I picked him back up. “Feel better?” he asked in that same dry voice as before that didn’t help anything.
“A little,” I replied, copying his tone. Through a drone, I caught him smirk.
We made it back to the shuttle with -1.25 minutes left (the Chief Asshole detour cost us some time. Worth it.) so I was a little rushed.
“Put me down!” Gurathin said again. He had this weird idea that everyone would respond better to his injury if he limped in on said injury instead of letting me carry him in. I kept telling him that was stupid but he wouldn’t listen.
“Please, SecUnit.” Fuck, he was saying please now? We didn’t have time for this.
But I’m the stupid one I guess, because I did it. We reached the loading ramp that Mensah still had deployed and as we waited for the hatch to open, I gently slid him down to standing. I didn’t let go of him though.
He looked first at the arm wrapped around his waist, and then at my other arm which I was holding out for him to take. “You don’t have to do that.”
“It’s for support. Don’t make the injury worse.”
His face made a strange twist and then smoothed over into something flat and hard to read. I had caught him doing that before, replacing one expression with another. “Okay,” he said. He laid one hand over my free arm, pressed down on it to let it take some of his weight. And then, “Thank you.”
His hand was warm and a little shaky, and his voice was small and soft and made me think of how he’d been when I first found him. That tightening or blooming or both (how could it be both when they were opposite feelings? What the fuck was this shit) was back in my chest again. I ignored it, and tightened my arm around him.
The door opened and we started the very slow process of limping in, which was immediately made slower when everyone rushed out to fuss around him and pepper him with questions that could have waited until we were inside.
I got him settled on a bench, and then he let go of my arm and I let go of him and we didn’t look at each other at all and my chest and lower abdomen did something really weird so I had to go stand in the corner for a while. But, my humans are good at what they do, and I was able to take as much corner time as I needed while they took care of the rest.
We lifted off at -6.44. That was a really shitty job on everyone’s part (I was responsible for only 1.25 minutes in overage and I want it noted that the rest of the overage was everyone else). But it didn’t seem to matter. The subsidiary was even shittier than I assumed (what a surprise) and scans showed no aircraft within range. I took the win.
After we had been in the air for several minutes and the autopilot confirmed the programmed course back to ART, Mensah stepped away from the cockpit and went over to Gurathin.
I tried not to listen, but it’s hard when you’re a literal surveillance device.
“Oh, Gura darling.” She held his hands and ran her thumb over his knuckles. It was really soothing when she did that. “Promise me you won’t do that again.”
He smiled a version of his small smile that he only ever showed to Mensah. “Promise me you’ll never be in that situation again, and it’s a deal.”
I logged the footage and time stamped it. And I reviewed it once more. Not to linger over any smile or the way the hand holding made them both sort of drop their shoulders and smooth their various face creases. That would be stupid. It was the Promise me you won’t do that again that I paused on. So he had done something, something Mensah didn’t appreciate. Fucking Gurathin.
I didn’t want to think about weird new emotions. But I did like unraveling mysteries and maybe getting one over on Gurathin. A distraction sounded good.
I needed to know what that thing was.