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For It Won’t Be Long
This was all Gurathin's fault. I wasn't sure how yet, but I was going to find a reason. I mean, I've provided security for every single one of my other humans since the initial survey (barring Volescu, who was still very sensibly retired) and I've never ended up in this situation with any of them.
“Are you going to even try helping?” I grit out, scanning the reinforced alloy for any seams or weaknesses. Again. (There hadn't been any the first three times but hope springs eternal).
From behind me, there was a quiet but heartfelt sigh. Gurathin said, “Five minutes ago you told me to stop ‘fidgeting.’” Yes, he put verbal quotation marks around ‘fidgeting’, and yes, they were extremely sarcastic. (In his defense, he hadn't exactly been squirming around, but I don't like touching other people at the best of times, and this was not the best of times). “If there are other ways to help, I'm listening.”
I suppose asking him to build us a time machine with his bare hands so I could go back and tell my past self to admit that Gurathin was right when he pointed out the hole in my genius idea and maybe I should, I don’t know, do something about that, was out of the question.
Yeah. If I’m being honest, the most unlikely part of that scenario is the me-admitting-Gurathin-had-a point part. At least he hadn’t tried to rub it in my face yet.
Right, context: as of 12.9 minutes ago, Gurathin and I were imprisoned in a cube-shaped cell barely 1.5 meters on each side. That’s not tall enough for either of us to stand, so we were sitting down on the floor, back to back. That part wasn’t voluntary – well, none of this was voluntary, but specifically the part where quite a large part of my body was touching quite a large part of Gurathin’s. That was thanks to the chain-like restraints binding us together which, by themselves, would have been laughably easy to get out of, but which had this clever design that incorporated our wrists and elbow joints, so that my right arm was bound to his left, and vice versa. There were various ways I could have released myself, if I’d been alone, but none without severely injuring Gurathin. I assume that was the point of tying us together and not just straight up torture, but who knows? At least they hadn’t realised I was a SecUnit.
The local feed was locked down so hard even I couldn't hack my way in without someone noticing, and also Gurathin was injured. So, you know, I knew I wasn't being fair snapping at him like that, but I also knew there was no way in hell I was going to tell him that. Then I noticed something concerning.
“You're trembling.”
Gurathin made a faint noise I couldn’t interpret, and muttered, “Sorry.”
Why was he–? Oh for fuck’s sake, Murderbot: he's injured. I was too used to Gurathin being the one I didn’t have to worry about. Shit.
“How bad is it?”
He shifted around a little before answering. “There’s no bleeding, but. It hurts.” He’d taken a glancing blow from an energy weapon across the side of his torso, just a flesh wound, but still. Even augmented humans are so fucking fragile. And I’d basically told him to sit up straight and stop touching me.
I rolled my eyes, feeling extremely put upon, and said, “Lean back against me.”
There was a pause as I waited for him to do the whole “are you sure?” routine that my Preservation humans always seem to need to go through in situations like this, but after a few seconds of silence, the restraints clinked as he resettled his weight fully against me. There was a pause, his hands flexed where they were cuffed to mine, and then when I didn’t do what I guess he expected me to do (freak out? Rip his arms from their sockets and make my escape? Shut down?) the remaining tension left him and he slumped into me, letting out a sigh so deep it was practically a groan.
He said, “Thanks, SecUnit,” and was quiet for a long time after that.
It was… fine. I mean, aside from the fact that we were imprisoned in a corporate installation, literally chained together, and he was quite possibly going into shock. The touching was fine, is what I mean. I never usually mind it when it’s mission-related, but this time, ugh, I kind of did mind it but was letting him do it anyway, like I thought I owed him or something for not listening to his, in retrospect, pretty reasonable objections. (“Mind” is the wrong word, but I don’t know how else to categorise it. I didn’t hate the contact, but I was intensely aware of every square millimeter of where our bodies were touching.)
Dr. Bharadwaj once said that it’s harder to take advice from someone you don’t like, because it feels too much like criticism. We’d been discussing something Leonide said before she went back to the Barish-Estranza transport, but Bharadwaj had been making a larger point about the way I sometimes fail to take my own advice, which, yeah – ouch.
I’d like to say I didn’t know why I was thinking about that now, except a) I absolutely did know, because b) I’d been thinking about it a lot since then with respect to one augmented human in particular. You see, I don’t actually dislike Gurathin, despite the things I say about him. It’s just kind of… fun. To argue with him or make him look like he regrets ever having met me. So me not wanting to take his advice when we were planning this stupid mission? Not the same thing. (I don’t think.) I genuinely thought he was being over-cautious, and anyone who says I have a deep-seated need to be more right than him would be wrong.
I really, really need ART to take a look at my risk assessment module.
So no, it wasn’t dislike I felt for Dr. Gurathin, and I think he knew that; I think part of him liked playing along. But you sure as shit could interpret my actions the other way, which felt kind of regrettable given the thing where my fuck-up had led to this whole situation.
Glaring at nothing, I muttered, “I don’t not like you anymore.”
Gurathin took a moment to sort through my double-negatives, then let out a soft breath that might have been a laugh.
He said, “I know.”
I rolled my eyes again, considering rescinding the statement.
He added, with just a touch of deadpan sarcasm, “But it’s big of you to admit it. Does that mean we’re friends now? If I’d known all it took was getting captured in hostile–”
I snapped, “Don’t push it.”
He huffed again, like he thought that was funny, too. I hadn’t been lying – what I felt about Gurathin didn’t fit neatly into any category of friendship I had ever come across. It was different to how I felt about Mensah, definitely different to Ratthi. Maybe closest to ART? But these feelings, they were sharper, more volatile. They had teeth, and I regularly found myself wanting to bite with them. So yeah, it took me a while to disentangle that from animosity, but I still don’t really know where the fuck that leaves me. (Us?) (Probably just me.)
Gurathin said, “I’m not laughing at you, SecUnit. For whatever it’s worth, I don’t not like you, either.”
He sounded amused, except – softer? (I’m going to have to look up if there’s a word for that once we’re out of here.) It was a little confusing but mostly it just made me feel bad.
“I should… apologise,” I said, glaring now at the row of three projectile holes in the leg of my pants. “You were right when you said the partitioned nanny subroutines could cause a problem.”
He said, “The odds were really low. We were incredibly unlucky.”
Well, I guess that was nice of him. ART would have spent at least the next cycle gloating; sometimes it was easy to forget Gurathin had that earnest Preservation side to him, too. (It was what made him so fun to poke at, that combination of assholishness and kindness – kindholishness? Uh, nope. No. Tagging for immediate deletion. The point is, if I poked and prodded at the others the way I did at him, I’d just feel bad.)
Gurathin's body was hot against my back, and through his uniform shirt I could feel his heart rate and respiration, both faster and shallower than his baseline. Conclusion: he wasn’t doing too great, and I needed to stop wasting time thinking and figure out how to get us out of here.
I said, “Okay, I have an idea,” and opened my left gunport.
At the soft snick of my servos, Gurathin started and tried to move his head to see what I was doing. “Is it a good idea?”
It was nice he wasn't flat out telling me not to do it before he’d even heard what the plan was. It looked like this not-friendship we were intrepidly navigating included trust! That was new and exciting! (And that was sarcasm. Absolutely no weird feelings of warmth going on in my organics.)
I said, “I'm just trying something.”
“You're not going to shoot your own hand off, are you?” He said it like he didn't seriously think that was a possibility but needed to say it just in case. I glared at the wall of the cell and wished it was his stupid face so he'd know how stupid he was being.
“No,” I said. “How would I untie us, after? I'm going to shoot yours off.”
To his credit, he didn't flinch or tense. In fact, he actually relaxed, like he knew I was just being an asshole and would never actually hurt him. (It wouldn't have worked anyway. He'd have gone into shock from blood loss before he could do anything useful.)
That did give me an idea, though, and it was better than trying to cut through the restraints with my onboard energy weapons from this angle (which risk assessment had given a whopping 95 percent chance of ending with, yes, my hand getting shot off. Shh.)
“Uh, trying something else now. Maybe don't look for a few minutes.”
“Why would I–” he started, and stopped abruptly at the admittedly unpleasant sound of my organics coming apart as, for the second time in my existence, I voluntarily started the process of detaching my hand from the rest of my body.
The sound of gunfire grew more distant as the hatch closed and sealed behind us. I shoved Gurathin as gently as I could into one of the shuttle’s acceleration chairs and darted for the forward cabin.
“Do you know how to fly this thing?” he called after me as I threw myself into the pilot’s chair.
“Three shared its piloting module with me,” I yelled back, hurriedly unpacking said module and parsing the B-E proprietary code it was written in as I spoke, while simultaneously running the characters on the control panel in front of me through a translation matrix. He didn’t need to know I hadn’t looked at it before now or that this was my first time attempting to use it. “Are you strapped in?”
The moment he confirmed, I overrode the automatic safeties, metaphorically crossed my fingers, and sent the shuttle shooting for the exit.
Flying out from the sensor shadow of the moon I had hidden us behind, I confirmed for the fifty-fifth time that no one was following us, set the auto-pilot to take us to the rendezvous with ART, and went back to the main cabin. Gurathin was where I had left him, grimacing and pressing one hand to his side.
“We’re good?” he asked, looking over my shoulder scrunch-eyed.
I said, “For now. Come on, we need to deal with that wound. There’s a medical kit on the ship’s manifest.”
He grunted in assent and I unbuckled the acceleration straps and helped him over to a padded bench that ran the length of the bulkhead. When I came back with the kit, I asked, “Can you take your shirt off?”
He let out a sound that from someone else I would have called a laugh; oddly high pitched and warbly. “I don’t think I can, no.”
The blast had caught his right side, over his ribs, and his right arm was tucked stiff and protective over his upper body, obviously too painful to move. Okay, then. I would have to help him. I could do that. Not a big deal at all.
I shot him in the arm with a dose of analgesic and knelt down in front of him. “Um,” I said helpfully, reaching for the hem of his t-shirt. “Can you, uh…”
Gurathin blinked at me, his expression somewhere in the vicinity of (but not actually) incredulous, then shifted back to look over my shoulder as he raised the arm on his uninjured side. Carefully, I got it off that arm and over his head, then gently started peeling it down his bad side. The fabric was stuck to the wound, crusted and sticky with pinkish fluid and bits of cauterised flesh. He flinched violently as the fabric began to pull away, a horrible, pained sound trapped in his throat.
I stopped and glanced at his face. He was pale and clammy, good arm braced awkwardly against an overhead storage compartment, knuckles white and the tendons in his bare arm and shoulder standing out. Right, this wasn’t a headache, the analgesic probably wasn’t doing shit.
I’d never seen Gurathin in pain before. I didn’t like it.
He swore through gritted teeth, something I couldn’t translate, then added, “Shit, sorry. This must pale in comparison to the kind of hits you take on a regular basis.”
That was stupid, I was literally designed to take hits. Calmly working the shirt down micron by micron, I said, “Yet another reason I wouldn’t want to be human. Pain is really inconvenient.”
His laugh turned into a choking hiss as a bit more came free. He swayed a little, unsteady with the pain (burns are the worst. Seriously. I’d rather have a limb severed than my human skin burned and that’s based on personal experience) so I gently cupped a hand around the back of his neck and guided him closer.
“Here, lean on me so you don’t fall over.”
His forehead made contact with my shoulder without resistance, his good arm coming up around my back to steady himself. I kept my voice warm and firm and confident as I talked to him while I worked. And then, because it was Gurathin, I added, “You’re right, though, this is nothing by SecUnit standards, it’s barely even a scrape. I disconnected my entire hand less than an hour ago.”
His pained laughter got him through the last little tug and I let the shirt drop to the floor as I attached a wound pack over his ribs. He groaned in relief as it shot him full of anesthetic, and let me take more of his weight.
We stayed there like that for another 1.7 minutes until he could move again, then I pushed him upright again, unzipped my hoody, and helped him get his arms into it before he collapsed back against the bulkhead, eyes closed, breathing carefully.
I had the navigation and sensors on two of my inputs through the shuttle’s system, so while I checked in with those, I went to the compartment where the medkit had been stored and cycled through its contents until I found a nutrition pack and some water.
“Hey,” I said, returning. “Gurathin, don’t go to sleep yet,” and nudged his boot with my own until he opened his eyes. He looked a lot better already – still tired, but he was a normal color now and not wincing with every movement. He gave me a small smile as he took the supplies, which melted into a frown as the water bottle slipped out of my grasp before he could take it.
His eyes fell to my recently reattached hand, and he asked, “Want me to take a look?”
It really wasn’t necessary. Sure, it was a bit janky, but it could wait until we got back aboard ART, and the thought of him touching me again, it…
Huh.
It didn’t seem to bother me? What, was I inoculated now? And it was just him, because when I tried thinking about Iris or Kaede working on my hand, it was just as unpleasant and uncomfortable as always.
Confused by my own reaction, I said, “Finish eating first,” and sat on the opposite bench to have an emotion about it.
When he was done, I did let him poke around in my wrist, and it did involve more touching. I could tell he was doing his best to avoid it; even so, his fingers kept brushing my skin. But… it was fine. Just as it had been fine in the cell, and earlier when he had his whole entire shirt off and was practically hugging me for comfort.
What the fuck, Me?
Should I be worried? Since when is Gurathin touching me fine?
He must have noticed me freeze because he quickly finished the adjustment he was making and sat back with his hands up placatingly. “I’m done, I’m done. How does it feel?”
Stupidly, I cradled my wrist in my other hand, frowning as I flexed and twisted the various joints and connections. I said, “It’s fine. Better.” Somehow, my stupid hand didn’t feel that important right then, though, compared to the bad feeling inside at Gurathin misunderstanding me. So obviously, the next thing I said was, “I don't mind you touching me.”
He made startled eye-contact, but didn't say anything for an excruciating 2.2 minutes, finishing up one last adjustment and putting his tools away. Then he sank down on the bench beside me, closed his eyes, and let out a long, slow breath.
He said, “We are going to talk about what you just said. But, later.”
I risked a glance at his profile, and yeah, he did look exhausted. I wondered how long I could put that conversation off for. While I was making a list of potential distraction techniques and escape strategies, I shuffled closer to him until my shoulder brushed his. He didn’t move for several seconds, then slowly, he let his head fall to rest on me. He slept the whole way back, using me as a pillow, and honestly? That was fine too.