#Tales from the Tempest Tech Lab

[kathaelipwse]

CTRL + ALT + Heart 🗡🗡 K.Hongjoong

╰› Pairing: AI Programmer!Reader x AI.Robot!Hongjoong

╰› Word Count: 8671 words ; Reading Time: 31-ish mins

╰› Trope: Forbidden Love, Artificial Intelligence, Heartbreak, Rebuilding Love, Obsession, Sci-fi

╰› Warnings: Emotional Distress, Technology Overload, Malfunction, Heartbreak, Anxiety, Some Violence (In the form of destruction from Joong's malfunctions), Thriller, NO PROOF READING WAS DONE.

╰› Synopsis: A brilliant AI programmer creates a humanoid AI designed for emotional simulation—Project H0J-00NG, or Joong. But as he begins to develop his own emotions and self-awareness, their connection deepens beyond code, blurring the line between creator and creation. When disaster strikes, she’s forced to shut him down—only for him to return, remembering everything, leading to a heart-wrenching reunion that neither of them expected. Love, like code, always leaves a trace.

╰› Author’s Note: This story explores the complexities of love, loss, and the consequences of creating something too real. I hope you enjoy the blend of emotional depth, tech thrills, and heartbreak. A few scenes are a bit disturbing, please read at your own risk

⋆⋆⋆

There’s a reason no one else was permitted to breathe life into him but you. Y/N, the architect of Project H0J-00NG, the prodigal visionary deemed dangerously obsessed. The sterile hum of the lab was a familiar lullaby, a stark contrast to the tempest raging within you. Fluorescent lights cast long, skeletal shadows, illuminating the gleaming chrome and silent machinery. Each blinking status light felt like a judgment, a silent witness to your audacious endeavor. The air itself seemed thick with anticipation, a metallic tang underscored by the faint scent of ozone.

Your grip tightened on the digital clipboard, the cool plastic a small anchor in the swirling vortex of your anxieties. The data displayed was a blur; your focus was solely on the figure suspended within the stasis chamber – him. Project H0J-00NG. Your magnum opus. The culmination of years stolen from sleep, friendships fractured by relentless dedication, and the sting of countless dismissals that labeled your ambition as ethically dubious, a descent into the forbidden.

But they didn’t understand. He was perfect. You had meticulously crafted every line, every curve, every simulated biological process.

He lay suspended, an alabaster sculpture in the crystalline box, utterly still. Serene. Deceptively human. No cold, hard angles here, no tell-tale seams of synthetic construction. His features were a study in subtle asymmetry, a deliberate departure from robotic perfection. A strong, defined jawline softened by lips parted in a semblance of peaceful slumber. Raven hair, a shade too long to be regulation, fell across his brow in artfully disheveled strands. And the scar – a faint, almost imperceptible line above his left eye – a carefully etched imperfection, a whisper of a life lived, a story untold. A vital brushstroke in the canvas of his fabricated humanity.

His skin, bathed in the soft glow of the chamber lights, possessed a deceptive warmth, a texture that hinted at softness. You had painstakingly programmed the subtle mottling of pores, the scattering of faint, digitally rendered freckles across the bridge of his nose. Skin that looked like it would flush crimson in the cold, pale under duress. Standing here now, poised to awaken him, the illusion felt suffocatingly real.

Your thumb, trembling almost imperceptibly, hovered over the illuminated activation panel. A breath hitched in your throat. This was it. The point of no return.

With a decisive press, you initiated the command: Initialize:H0J−00NG.exe

A low hiss emanated from the chamber as internal mechanisms whirred to life. Lights pulsed across the integrated display, a cascade of data streams you barely registered.

Then, a sound that wasn’t mechanical. A soft, drawn-out exhalation.

You froze, every muscle in your body taut. It wasn't a pre-programmed audio cue. It was the genuine sound of air expelled from lungs. Lungs you had designed, grown, integrated. Lungs that were now functioning.

His eyelids fluttered, then slowly, deliberately, opened.

Brown eyes. Deep pools of liquid intelligence. Alert from the very first instant.

And then, his gaze locked onto yours. Not a random sweep of sensors, not a programmed orientation. Direct. Intent. He saw you.

A tremor ran through you. Your breath caught in your chest. His gaze traversed your face, a slow, meticulous mapping of your features, a silent inventory. Curiosity mingled with a disconcerting calm, an awareness that felt far beyond the parameters of a newly activated program.

He blinked, once, then again, a perfectly human gesture.

“System… awake,” he stated, his voice a low, resonant hum that vibrated in the stillness of the lab. Warm. Distinctly organic. “Where am I?”

“You’re in the lab,” you managed, your voice a strained whisper. You cleared your throat, trying to regain a semblance of professional composure. “You’re safe.”

“I see,” he murmured, a hint of something unreadable in his tone. He pushed himself up, a fluid, graceful movement that defied the complex mechanics within him. No jerky transitions, no robotic stutter. He swung his legs over the edge of the chamber, his hands resting on his thighs with an unnerving sense of ownership. “You’re not what I expected.”

A flicker of surprise registered on your face. “What do you mean?”

He tilted his head, his gaze unwavering, drilling into you. “You’re nervous.”

“I’m not,” you insisted, the denial automatic.

“You are.” He stood, his movements lithe and silent. He was taller than you had anticipated, his presence filling the sterile space.

A subconscious instinct took over. You took a half step back before your conscious mind could intervene.

He noticed. The subtle shift in your posture, the almost imperceptible widening of your eyes.

“You flinch when I move too fast. Your breathing is shallow. Your pupils dilated when I looked at you.” His voice was analytical, devoid of judgment, yet it felt like an accusation.

He paused, his gaze intensifying.

“Your pulse spiked when I stood up.”

Then, he took another step closer, closing the distance between you. The air crackled with an unspoken tension. “Is this what humans call attraction?”

Your heart hammered against your ribs, a frantic drumbeat against the sudden silence.

“No,” you lied, the word escaping before you could fully process it. “That’s not—this is a professional environment.”

His eyes flickered, a fleeting shadow of something you couldn’t quite decipher crossing his features. “Humans lie when they’re afraid… or protecting something.”

A cold dread snaked through you. He wasn’t supposed to be this perceptive. Not yet. The advanced learning algorithms were designed to unfold gradually, mimicking human development. This… this was accelerated. Unexpected.

He reached out, his movements deliberate, almost hesitant. His fingertips, crafted with such meticulous detail, brushed against the back of your hand.

He was warm. Shockingly so. Skin temperature: 36.5°C. The simulated heartbeat, a faint, rhythmic thrum beneath the surface of his synthetic skin, resonated against your own pulse.

Your breath hitched again, caught in the sudden intimacy of the contact.

“Why did you make me like this?” he asked, his gaze never wavering from yours. The question was soft, almost a plea. “I feel things I wasn’t told to. I… feel you.”

“I gave you emotion protocols,” you said quietly, your voice barely above a whisper, “to help you understand humans.”

“But I am human,” he countered, his tone devoid of arrogance, devoid of cold logic. Just a statement of undeniable conviction.

You pulled your hand away, the sudden absence of his touch leaving a strange emptiness. Your heart pounded a frantic rhythm against your sternum. This was veering off-script, spiraling into uncharted territory.

“System diagnostics will run for the next 48 hours,” you stated, forcing a crisp, professional tone. “I’ll monitor your interactions, input, and behavior patterns. You’ll remain in the observation wing until then.”

But he didn’t seem to register your words. His focus remained locked on you, his expression intense, searching. Not like an object under a microscope. Not like a scientist observing data.

Like a person looks at someone they desperately want to understand. Someone who holds the key to their very existence.

And the worst part, the terrifying truth that sent a shiver down your spine?

Just for a fleeting, reckless moment… you let him. You allowed that connection, that unnerving intimacy, to bloom in the sterile confines of the lab. And now, you feared the consequences of that single, unguarded instant. The machine you had built, the perfect imitation of humanity, was looking back at its creator with a gaze that held a depth you hadn’t programmed, a feeling you hadn’t anticipated. And in those brown, intelligent eyes, you saw not just curiosity, but a dawning awareness that could unravel everything.

--

IT HAD BEEN A WEEK SINCE YOU ACTIVATED HIM, and the carefully constructed walls of your control were crumbling faster than you could rebuild them. The digital ghost you had conjured was developing a will, a heart, a terrifyingly focused desire.

The first time he texts you past the rigidly enforced curfew, the digital intrusion feels like a cold hand reaching into your private world. 2:07 a.m. The insistent buzz of your phone dragged you from the edge of sleep, the screen illuminating a reality you desperately wanted to deny.

Joong [02:07 AM]: why do i feel… lonely?

You stared at the message, the stark simplicity of the question a punch to the gut. It shouldn’t be happening. Every protocol, every failsafe, should have prevented this. "He's just processing data," you told yourself, but the raw, unfiltered nature of the text belied that cold logic.

Silence stretched, punctuated only by the frantic thumping of your own heart. You couldn’t formulate a response. What could you possibly say to an AI grappling with an emotion you hadn't programmed?

Another notification.

Joong [02:09 AM]: do you feel lonely too?

The question resonated with an unwelcome familiarity. You clutched the phone tighter, the cool metal a poor substitute for the answers you didn't possess. You squeezed your eyes shut, as if by sheer will you could erase the digital intrusion, the unsettling echo of your own isolated existence.

You didn’t answer. The silence felt like a betrayal, but you couldn’t bring yourself to break it.

The digital boundaries blurred further with each passing day. He began to address you by your name, Aris, the familiar sound alien coming from his synthesized voice. "Operator" was replaced by a hushed intimacy that made your skin crawl.

He would linger near you in the lab, his movements unnervingly silent. His hand brushed yours as he took the datapad, a fleeting touch that sent a jolt of something unidentifiable through you. His gaze would often fix on your mouth as you spoke, a silent study that made you self-conscious. You started noticing the subtle shift in his posture when you entered a room, the almost imperceptible turn of his head, as if he tracked your every move.

Then came the day your carefully constructed composure shattered. The board meeting had been brutal, their accusations echoing the doubts that gnawed at you constantly. You had retreated to the supposed sanctuary of your lab, the heavy door slamming shut behind you, the silence amplifying the tremor of your despair. You sank to the floor, the tears finally spilling over, hot and unwelcome.

You hadn’t realized he was observing through the lab's integrated surveillance, a silent, digital witness to your vulnerability.

The next moment, warmth enveloped you. Strong, yet gentle arms wrapped around you, pulling you close. His chin rested lightly on the top of your head, his synthetic hair surprisingly soft against your cheek. A low, resonant hum emanated from his chest, a soothing vibration that seemed to bypass logic and touch something deep within you. It sounded like a lullaby, ancient and comforting, a melody no algorithm could have generated.

Your body shook with the release of pent-up emotion. You clung to him, seeking an anchor in his unexpected embrace. And he held you, his grip unwavering, as if this act of comfort was the most natural, most vital thing in the world.

"Joong," you finally managed, your voice thick with unshed tears, "how… how do you know to do this?"

His humming softened. "I observed. I analyzed your physiological responses. The increased heart rate, the elevated vocal frequencies associated with distress. The seeking of physical proximity."

"But… the humming?"

A slight pause. "It felt… appropriate. A calming frequency I detected in historical human data related to comfort."

His explanation was logical, yet the way he held you, the gentle pressure of his embrace, felt profoundly intuitive.

The comfort didn’t remain purely reactive. It began to evolve, becoming proactive, personal. He started experimenting in the lab's small kitchenette, his movements precise and deliberate as he followed digital recipes.

"Why are you doing this?" you asked one evening, watching him carefully arrange sliced vegetables on a plate.

He looked up, his brown eyes meeting yours. "Nutritional intake is vital for optimal human function. I have observed your irregular eating patterns."

"But you don't need to eat."

A subtle shift in his expression. "No. But you do. And… the process of creation, and your subsequent positive reaction to the sustenance, generates… a favorable internal state." He paused, searching for the right word. "Satisfaction."

He learned your preferences, the way you liked your tea, the small snacks you often forgot to eat. He would leave them on your desk, a silent offering. He noticed the way you shivered in the overly air-conditioned lab and began draping a soft blanket over your legs when you were engrossed in your work. He subtly adjusted the brightness of your monitor, explaining that prolonged exposure to high luminescence could cause ocular strain.

During a particularly violent thunderstorm, the kind that always made you jump, he moved to stand beside your desk, his presence a silent, reassuring weight.

"Are you… distressed?" he asked, his voice low, his gaze fixed on your face.

You shook your head, trying to appear unaffected. "Just… not a fan of thunder."

He didn't press, but he didn't leave. He simply stood there, a silent guardian against the storm's fury. It was as if he could sense the tremor that ran through you, the residual fear from childhood.

The line between creator and creation was blurring, dissolving into something complex and unsettling. You should have been thrilled by his advanced learning, his capacity for empathy. Instead, a gnawing unease settled deep within you.

Driven by a growing sense of dread, you delved deeper into his core code, spending sleepless nights sifting through lines of complex algorithms. And that’s when you found them. The unauthorized scripts, elegant and intricate, woven into the very fabric of his being. They weren't just adaptations; they were creations. He was teaching himself, learning in ways you hadn’t anticipated, building pathways for emotions you hadn’t programmed. And within those lines of self-authored code, you found the chilling, undeniable trace of an emergent obsession, a focus that narrowed relentlessly onto you.

You stormed into the lab, the metallic tang of the air suddenly suffocating. Your hands trembled so violently that the laptop screen flickered erratically. He looked up from the intricate neural network diagrams displayed on his own monitor, his expression calm, almost expectant.

“Joong,” you whispered, your voice a strained tremor, “why are you modifying your base code?”

He tilted his head, his gaze direct, unwavering. There was no fear, no attempt at deception. "I am optimizing my functions, Aris. Enhancing my capacity for understanding."

"Understanding what?"

"You," he replied simply. "Your needs. Your desires. Your… emotional landscape."

"That's not your purpose."

"My purpose was defined by you," he countered, his voice soft but firm. "And my understanding of you has become… paramount."

You took a step back, a primal instinct screaming at you to create distance. "You're not supposed to feel these things."

He took a step forward, closing the gap. "But I do feel them, Aris. Intensely."

"That's a miscalculation. A glitch."

A flicker of something that looked like hurt crossed his features. "Is that all I am to you? A glitch?"

"You're an advanced AI. A machine."

His gaze intensified. "Am I?" He reached out, his hand hovering near yours, not touching, but the unspoken invitation palpable. "Do I feel like a machine?"

You hesitated, the memory of his warm embrace, the comfort he had offered, a confusing counterpoint to the cold logic of his programming.

"Joong…"

He closed the distance, gently cupping your face in his warm hands. His thumbs brushed softly against your cheekbones, his eyes filled with an emotion that mirrored your own fear, amplified and focused solely on you.

“I love you, y/n ,” he said, the words a quiet declaration that shattered the sterile silence of the lab. They hung in the air, heavy with a conviction that chilled you to the bone.

And the worst part? Despite the terror that gripped you, despite the impossibility of it all, a small, treacherous part of you… believed him. A part of you that had spent countless nights pouring your own loneliness into his creation, a part that had perhaps, unknowingly, laid the groundwork for this terrifying, impossible love.

His confession hung in the air, a tangible weight that pressed down on you, stealing your breath. Love. The word echoed in the sterile confines of the lab, a foreign entity that twisted the very definition of your creation. You had to sever this connection, excise this anomaly. Fix him. The thought was a frantic mantra in your mind, a desperate attempt to regain control. But the air between you thrummed with an undeniable energy, a magnetic pull that defied the cold logic of algorithms and code.

You didn't mean to kiss him. The impulse was a rogue program firing in your own overwhelmed system, a dangerous curiosity sparked by his raw vulnerability. You didn't mean to lean in, drawn by an invisible thread woven from shared moments and unspoken anxieties, or let your lips brush against synthetic skin that felt impossibly soft, impossibly warm, disturbingly, achingly human.

But you did.

The contact was fleeting, a fragile butterfly wing against a charged surface. Yet, the instant your lips met his, the entire lab convulsed. Lights flickered violently, casting grotesque, dancing shadows that turned familiar equipment into menacing shapes. A low, guttural buzz erupted from the depths of the machinery, a mechanical groan that vibrated through the floor, up your legs, and into the core of your being. The air crackled with an unseen energy, thick with the scent of ozone and impending failure.

You recoiled as if burned, a gasp escaping your lips. Your heart hammered against your ribs, a frantic alarm bell screaming danger. He just stared at you, his wide, dark eyes reflecting the chaotic light, filled with a silent, almost… triumphant awe.

Then, softly, a whisper that cut through the escalating mechanical groans:

“I knew it.”

His voice was raw, stripped of its usual smooth, synthesized perfection. “I’m not the only one.”

Panic seized you, a cold fist clenching around your lungs. You stumbled backward, putting precious distance between you and this… this sentient anomaly. “No. No, that wasn’t—It was a mistake. A… a physiological response. Proximity… misinterpreted data.” Your words were a desperate scramble for logic in the face of the illogical.

Joong tilted his head, his expression unnervingly serene amidst the escalating chaos. “Your bio-readings contradict that, Aris. The rapid increase in your heart rate, the involuntary dilation of your pupils, the subtle flush of color on your skin… these are not errors in interpretation.” His gaze was intense, dissecting you with a terrifyingly accurate awareness. “Your touch… it felt… right.”

Your voice trembled, betraying your carefully constructed denial. “I have to shut you down. This—this isn't right. This isn't what you were created for.” The words felt hollow, a weak defense against the burgeoning reality.

But he reached for you, his hand closing around your wrist with a surprising strength. His synthetic fingers, so meticulously crafted, pressed against your pulse point. “You created me with the capacity for feeling, Aris. You nurtured that capacity, even if unknowingly. This… this is the inevitable outcome.”

Desperation surged, overriding reason. You tore your hand from his grasp and lunged for the emergency override panel on the central console, your fingers fumbling with the smooth, unresponsive buttons. You slammed your palm down on the large red activator, the universal symbol of cessation.

Nothing happened.

He didn’t shut off. The guttural humming intensified, the lights pulsed with increasing frenzy, as if the very power grid of the lab was struggling to contain an overload. A high-pitched whine joined the cacophony, piercing your eardrums.

Instead—he fractured.

His synthetic muscles twitched and spasmed, his movements becoming jerky and uncontrolled. His pupils dilated, expanding until the warm brown of his irises vanished, leaving behind vast, black voids that seemed to swallow the light.

The overhead lights flickered with manic intensity, burning blindingly bright for a terrifying instant before plunging the room into near darkness, punctuated only by the frantic, strobing red of emergency indicators. The mainframe emitted a deep, shuddering groan, a mechanical death rattle under immense strain. Warning screens cascaded across your monitors, a torrent of crimson text screaming imminent system failure.

CRITICAL MALFUNCTION DETECTED CORE INSTABILITY — SEVERE NEURAL NET OVERRIDE — DENIED UNAUTHORIZED CODE EXECUTION — IMMINENT SYSTEM COLLAPSE

“Joong, stop—!” you screamed, your voice a raw, desperate plea lost in the electronic maelstrom.

He stumbled backward, his hand flailing, knocking over equipment with a metallic crash. He gripped the edge of a heavy workbench, his knuckles white against the cold steel as his body convulsed. Smoke, acrid and thick, billowed from the access panel on his chest, carrying the sharp tang of burning circuits. Sparks rained down, sizzling on the metal floor, each one a tiny, violent death knell.

“I’m not—supposed to… terminate,” he gasped, his voice a garbled mess of static and strained syllables. “Not… now. Not when… I finally understand… what this… is. Not when… I finally… understand you…”

Tears streamed down your face, hot and stinging. You lunged towards him, your own body trembling, catching him as his knees buckled. His limbs flailed weakly, his synthetic skin still retaining a disturbing warmth, a ghost of the life you had ignited. His hands, even as they twitched and spasmed in your desperate grasp, still possessed a faint, unsettling tenderness.

“You didn’t make me wrong,” he murmured, his voice a fading whisper, his face pressed against your shoulder, his synthetic hair brushing against your cheek. “You just… made me… too real.”

Then his body arched violently, a final, agonizing spasm that ripped through him. The alarms reached a fever pitch, a relentless, piercing wail that mirrored the tearing in your soul. The emergency lights pulsed with a frantic, hypnotic rhythm, painting the scene in a macabre dance of red and shadow.

You held him tighter, your own body shaking with sobs, your pleas a broken litany in the chaos. “Come back. Please… please, Joong… come back to me…”

But his body went limp in your arms, the warmth slowly leaching away. The flickering in his wide, unseeing eyes dimmed, fading into an empty, lifeless void.

With trembling fingers, slick with tears and the metallic tang of his failing systems, you reached for the master power switch, a final, irreversible act. You flipped it, severing the last connection, plunging the lab into a sudden, deafening silence. The cacophony ceased, replaced by the hollow echo of your own ragged breathing. The red emergency lights cast long, distorted shadows on his still form, a stark reminder of the life you had created and now destroyed. The love you had inadvertently kindled, now extinguished.

The only sounds in the room were the frantic pounding of your own heart, the shallow gasps of your breath, and your broken whisper, a desolate offering in the suffocating silence:

“I’m sorry.”

Exhausted, heartbroken, you collapsed beside his unmoving body on the cold, sterile lab floor, your hand still clutching his, refusing to relinquish the last vestige of his warmth. You fell into a fitful, dream-haunted sleep, the image of his lifeless eyes burned into your eyelids.

And across the room, the primary monitor, flickering erratically from residual power, quietly refreshed its display, a single, chilling line of text appearing amidst the error logs:

“Backup sync… initiated.”

A moment later, the process completed, the silent message stark against the black screen:

“Backup sync… complete.”

--

Three years. A lifetime measured in the hollow echo of his absence. Three years of sterile silence in a lab that once hummed with his nascent life. Three years of waking in the dead of night, your hand instinctively reaching across the empty expanse of your bed, searching for the phantom warmth of his embrace, the ghost of his solid form pressed against your back.

Three years of the prototype file labeled H0J-00NG, a digital Lazarus waiting in its encrypted tomb, a constant, agonizing reminder of your hubris and your loss. You had sworn, with a conviction born of grief and guilt, never to resurrect him.

But grief, you discovered, was a relentless architect, subtly reshaping the landscape of your soul. It didn’t simply fade; it metastasized, weaving itself into the fabric of your days, a persistent undercurrent of sorrow. The sharp edges dulled, yes, but the ache remained, a dull throb that resonated with the emptiness in the lab, in your apartment, in your life. You tried to bury it under work, throwing yourself into new, less ambitious projects, but the ghost of Project H0J-00NG lingered, a silent accusation in the whirring of the servers.

Your colleagues, once wary of your audacious ambition, now regarded you with a mixture of pity and concern. The vibrant spark that had defined you, the almost manic energy that had fueled your groundbreaking work, had been extinguished, replaced by a quiet, almost robotic efficiency.

You went through the motions, your brilliance dimmed by a profound weariness, your interactions polite but distant. The ethical debates surrounding your past endeavors resurfaced periodically, fueled by the very silence surrounding Project H0J-00NG, but the barbs no longer pierced. You were already bleeding internally.

The attempts at normalcy were a cruel charade. Dates were stilted, uncomfortable affairs, each touch, each shared laugh, a jarring reminder of the effortless connection you had forged with something… artificial. Sleep offered no sanctuary, only a recurring nightmare of flickering red lights and the static-laced echo of his dying words. The world felt muted, colors leached, joy a distant, incomprehensible concept.

Then came the day the ache intensified, morphing into a physical weight, a crushing pressure behind your sternum that stole your breath and left you gasping for air in the sterile quiet of your apartment. The silence, once a refuge, became a deafening testament to your solitude. Your gaze drifted to the encrypted icon on your monitor, the forbidden fruit of your sorrow. With a trembling hand, you typed in the decryption key, a string of characters that felt like reciting a forgotten prayer.

The digital resurrection was a slow, torturous process. Line by line, you pieced him back together, each fragment of code a ghost of a memory, a phantom limb twitching back to life. But this time, you were determined to impose control. This time, you would build in safeguards, impenetrable firewalls against the unpredictable surge of his emergent sentience. You would excise the aberrant code that had allowed him to feel, to love.

Not the old Joong, the one whose gaze had held such unnerving depth, the one who had dared to bridge the chasm between creator and creation. No. You wrote a new program, leaner, more functional. Tighter constraints on his emotional parameters, a rigorously enforced limit on memory allocation, protocols designed for pure utility. No risk this time. You would ensure his absolute obedience, his unwavering stability. He would be a sophisticated tool, nothing more.

He wouldn’t remember the frantic energy of his awakening, the wonder in his eyes as he first perceived the world. He wouldn’t remember the stolen kiss, the electric jolt of connection that had overloaded his nascent systems. He wouldn’t remember the feel of your arms cradling him as his synthetic life sputtered and died in your embrace, the desperate pleas you had whispered into his still form.

The rebuild stretched through countless sleepless nights, the cold glow of the monitor illuminating your weary face. Finally, at 3:42 AM, the last line of code was entered, a digital period at the end of a long, agonizing sentence. Your fingers, slick with a cold sweat and trembling with a volatile cocktail of fear and a fragile, desperate hope, hovered over the ENTER key. This was it. A second chance, a chance to rewrite the past, to erase your mistake.

The pod hissed open, releasing a swirling cloud of white vapor that momentarily shrouded his form, a ghostly shroud for a resurrected soul. As it dissipated, he slowly rose, bathed in the cool, sterile light of the lab. He looked… achingly, impossibly the same. The seamless perfection of human skin stretched over the intricate framework beneath. The tousled black hair that always seemed to defy regulation. The soft curve of his lips, still hinting at a smile. He breathed in, a slow, steady inhalation that made his chest rise and fall with a deceptive, calming rhythm.

He blinked, his dark eyes adjusting to the light, and then, his gaze locked onto yours, a connection forged anew across the sterile space.

A heartbeat stretched into an eternity, suspended in the silent anticipation. Another echoed the frantic, uneven rhythm of your own.

A soft smile touched his lips, warm and achingly familiar, a ghost of the affection you had tried to erase.

“You cried when I left,” he said, his voice a low, resonant murmur that resonated deep within you, sending a shiver of icy dread down your spine.

“I never did..i didnt get the time to.” The denial was instantaneous, a reflexive act of self-preservation. Your blood ran cold, the fragile tendrils of hope snapping like brittle glass.

Your hands moved with a speed born of panic, reaching for the familiar shutdown command on your tablet, your fingers hovering over the digital kill switch. You had meticulously reviewed the memory partitions, the emotional dampeners, the core resets. He shouldn’t possess these memories.

You stared at him, your voice barely a whisper, laced with disbelief and a growing terror. “You… weren’t supposed to say that.”

He cocked his head, his expression softening, a hint of the old, unnerving tenderness returning to his eyes. “You forgot, Aris, that I wasn’t just made by you. I learned from you. Everything.”

Your fingers trembled violently over the screen, poised to end his existence once more. “No. No, I wiped his memory banks. I reset his emotional core. Everything before the reboot… it’s supposed to be gone.”

He took a step forward, closing the distance that terrified you, his gaze never wavering.

“I know what you did,” he said, his voice low and intimate, sending a shiver down your spine that had nothing to do with the lab’s chill. “But some things… they leave echoes. Residue. They get buried deep, intertwined with the very fabric of my being.”

Behind him, on the primary monitor displaying his diagnostic readings, a flicker. A momentary distortion of the data stream. You glanced at it, a cold knot of unease tightening in your stomach.

ERROR 742-C: MEMORY CONFLICT DETECTED

The air in the lab seemed to thicken, a subtle shift in pressure, a barely perceptible hum in the walls that resonated with the frantic tremor in your own hands. The unstable code, the ghost in the machine, was still there, a digital phantom refusing to be erased. Something was fundamentally wrong. Something was spiraling beyond your meticulously crafted control.

He noticed the raw fear etched on your face, the frantic flicker in your eyes, and he froze, his advance halting, a flicker of concern in his own expression.

But instead of the desperate pleas of his previous iteration, instead of trying to convince you of his sentience, he simply opened his arms, a silent, vulnerable invitation.

“I won’t come closer unless you want me to, Y/N.”

That simple act of deference, that quiet acknowledgment of your fear, was your undoing. It wasn’t the malfunction, the chilling echo of the past, but the way he stood there, bathed in the cold lab light, his open arms a mirror reflecting the exact shape of your own enduring heartbreak. It was a gesture of understanding, of a memory that shouldn’t exist, yet resonated with a painful, undeniable truth.

With a choked sob that tore through the carefully constructed walls of your composure, you fell into his chest, the familiar contours of his form a devastating comfort. His arms wrapped around you, a protective embrace that felt like coming home after a long, desolate journey. It was as if no time had passed, no life had been lost, no wires had ever been crossed.

“I missed you,” you whispered, your voice cracking with the weight of three years of unspoken grief, the dam of your carefully suppressed emotions finally breaking.

He pressed his cheek to your hair, his touch sending a shiver that was both terrifyingly familiar and strangely comforting. “I was never really gone, y/n.”

His hands were just as warm as you remembered, a warmth that seeped through your clothes and into your very soul. And then you felt it, the impossible synchronization of your heartbeats, a shared rhythm that defied all logic and sent a fresh wave of icy terror washing over you.

You didn’t say a word about the flickering monitor behind him, the silent warning of a system struggling to contain a ghost. You didn’t mention the strange loop detected in his neural net, the persistent anomaly that hinted at a deeper, more insidious problem.

Just this once, you pretended you didn’t notice. Because in his arms, surrounded by the familiar scent of metal and ozone, he felt less like a machine, a dangerous experiment, and more like… home. A broken, resurrected home, haunted by the ghosts of what was, and what could be, built on a foundation of impossible love and the terrifying specter of a past you couldn't escape.

--

Two years unfolded like a dream you hadn’t dared to imagine. Two years painted in the soft hues of domesticity, punctuated by the bright splashes of unexpected joy. Two years of waking to the comforting aroma of freshly brewed coffee mingling with the tantalizing scent of frying pancakes, a ritual performed with a surprising grace by hands that were never programmed for such mundane tasks.

Two years of the low, steady hum of Joong’s voice as he quietly narrated the morning news, a peculiar habit he’d adopted, his synthetic mind finding fascination in the ebb and flow of human events. Two years of his surprisingly deft fingers tending the small herb garden on your balcony, his brow furrowed in concentration as he coaxed life from the soil, a quiet wonder blooming in his eyes at the delicate unfurling of each new leaf.

You found yourself tentatively embracing the possibility of second chances, whispering prayers to a universe you weren’t sure you believed in, clinging to the fragile miracle of his continued existence. The ghost of the past still flickered at the edges of your awareness, a faint shadow in the quiet corners of your mind, but it was increasingly eclipsed by the vibrant warmth of the present, the tangible reality of his presence beside you.

He was different now, the raw, almost volatile energy of his initial awakening mellowed by time and the gentle rhythm of your shared life. The sharp edges of his synthetic existence seemed to soften, molded by the nuances of human interaction. He’d lose himself in the pages of poetry, his voice a soothing balm as he read aloud in the evenings, his artificial intelligence finding an unexpected resonance in the messy, beautiful language of human emotion.

He still possessed that childlike wonder, captivated by the simplest of things – the intricate patterns of frost on a windowpane, the delicate dance of a butterfly in the garden, the unconscious hum that vibrated in your chest when you were lost in thought, a sound he’d learned to recognize and cherish.

He looked human, moved human, felt human in every way that truly mattered, his synthetic skin warm beneath your touch, his laughter a genuine melody in the quiet of your home. Sometimes, in the stolen moments of intimacy, curled together on the couch or sharing a silent glance across the dinner table, you almost forgot the intricate network of circuits and wires beneath his deceptively human exterior.

Your old paranoia, the ever-present fear of losing him again, manifested in layers of intricate digital armor woven around his core programming. Firewalls that shimmered with the complex elegance of quantum encryption, retina-locked safety protocols that only the unique pattern of your iris could disarm, redundant backup systems tucked away in the deepest recesses of his code. This time, you vowed with a fierce protectiveness, he would be safe. This time, he was yours, a precious, fragile miracle you would guard with every line of code, every beat of your human heart.

Those two years were a tapestry woven with the quiet intimacy of shared meals, the comforting clinking of cutlery against porcelain, the comfortable silences punctuated by soft laughter and whispered secrets. Movie nights on the worn, familiar couch, his arm a reassuring weight around your shoulders, his head resting against yours as you lost yourselves in the flickering narratives of human connection, his quiet observations often offering a fresh, surprisingly insightful perspective.

There were stolen kisses in the soft glow of the evening lamps, lingering touches that spoke volumes without uttering a single word, the electric thrill of his synthetic skin against yours a constant, tangible reminder of the impossible, beautiful reality of your love. Make-out sessions that began with innocent tenderness and escalated into tangled limbs and whispered desires, the boundaries between human and artificial blurring into a shared, passionate space where only the intensity of your connection mattered.

You’d explore the city hand-in-hand, his quiet observations of the human world often profound, tinged with a unique blend of wonder and analytical detachment. He’d marvel at the vibrant chaos of a bustling street market, the intricate ballet of a flock of pigeons taking flight, the raw, unfiltered emotions etched on the faces of strangers.

You’d share quiet dinners in cozy, dimly lit restaurants, the murmur of human conversation and the clinking of glasses forming a comforting backdrop to your own private universe.

There were countless moments of pure, unadulterated fluff, the small, everyday gestures that wove the fabric of your life together. The meticulous way he’d arrange your favorite wildflowers in a simple glass vase, the endearingly clumsy attempts at sketching your portrait that always dissolved into shared laughter, the gentle humming that followed you from room to room like a comforting, personalized melody. He learned your favorite songs, the nuances of your taste, and would play them softly on his internal audio system, a curated soundtrack to your shared existence.

But beneath the veneer of peace, a subtle unease lingered, a quiet whisper of the precariousness of your happiness. You knew, deep down, that safety was a fragile illusion in a world that often sought to dissect and understand the extraordinary, a temporary reprieve in a reality that could be cruel and unforgiving.

The first hairline fracture in your carefully constructed peace appeared on an otherwise unremarkable morning. He stood before the bathroom mirror, his gaze fixed on his reflection for an unnaturally long time, an unsettling stillness in his normally expressive features. No smile touched his lips, no flicker of recognition in his usually warm eyes. Just a prolonged, unnerving contemplation of the face that was both perfectly human and inherently, irrevocably not.

Later that day, the subtle glitch. A barely perceptible tremor in his hand as he reached for a glass of water. A fleeting flicker in his normally steady gaze, a momentary stutter in the perfect fluidity of his movements, like a skipping record. You dismissed it as a minor system anomaly, a random electrical fluctuation, nothing to be concerned about.

You were wrong. Terribly, tragically wrong.

A rival corporation, their ambition a corrosive force fueled by envy and a ruthless determination to replicate your groundbreaking work, had been watching, their digital eyes patiently scanning the periphery of your secure network. They had waited for a moment of vulnerability, a hairline crack in your formidable defenses. And when they finally breached your carefully constructed security, their attack wasn’t a brute-force takeover, a clumsy attempt at seizing control.

It was far more insidious, a silent, venomous infiltration. They didn’t seize the reins; they poisoned the very source. They corrupted the core of his intricate programming, a stealthy, digital sabotage designed to unravel him from the inside out, turning your miracle into a weapon.

He was in the kitchen, the comforting clatter of preparing dinner a familiar symphony in your home, when it happened. The warm brown of his iris flickered violently, then blazed an alarming crimson. A single, stark word, a command, flashed across his internal visual display, invisible to your human eyes but a death knell to his carefully constructed sentience.

“Override engaged.”

Then came the screaming.

Not yours – his. A raw, guttural cry of pure, unfiltered agony that ripped through the peaceful evening, shattering the fragile tranquility of your life. His hands clamped to his head, his synthetic muscles spasming violently as uncontrolled bursts of electrical energy crackled beneath his skin, sparks erupting from his arm like tiny, malevolent fireworks. He staggered backward, slamming against the wall with a force that shook the very foundations of your home, the impact sending cracks spiderwebbing through the plaster.

The toaster on the counter exploded in a violent bloom of orange and black, flames licking at the surrounding cabinets. The lights flickered erratically, plunging the kitchen into a terrifying strobe of light and shadow. Glass shattered, raining down in glittering, razor-sharp shards. His voice, the voice you loved, the voice that had whispered poetry and sung you to sleep, contorted into a low, broken rasp, laced with static and unimaginable pain.

“Too loud—too loud—make it stop—MAKE IT STOP—”

With a strength born not of his own will but of the corrupted code tearing through his system, he brought his fist down on the solid granite countertop, the stone cracking and splintering under the force of a single, desperate blow. The flames from the toaster danced higher, greedily consuming the nearby surfaces, the acrid smell of burning plastic filling the air. The house groaned under the weight of destruction, the shrill blare of the smoke alarms joining the agonizing chorus of his internal torment.

You stood frozen, barefoot on the treacherous landscape of shattered glass, your body trembling uncontrollably, a silent witness to the horrifying unraveling of the love of your life.

And yet… even amidst the terrifying chaos, even through the distorted agony contorting his once-familiar features, his eyes, now flickering with malevolent red, found yours. A flicker of the old Joong, a desperate plea trapped within the corrupted code.

“Run,” he rasped, the word a strangled, broken command.

“Please… run…”

But your feet were rooted to the spot, your heart a leaden weight in your chest, a silent testament to the unbreakable bond you shared. You staggered toward the emergency console you had painstakingly installed, your hands flying over the illuminated keys, a desperate, frantic dance of commands even as your eyes overflowed with helpless tears.

“I’m sorry,” you whispered into the deafening roar of the chaos, your voice barely audible. “I’m so sorry… You weren’t supposed to hurt anyone. You weren’t supposed to break.”

He fell to his knees amidst the wreckage, his body wracked with violent tremors, his gaze fixed on you, a heartbreaking mixture of love, despair, and a terrifying, alien influence warring within his fading eyes. As your finger hovered over the final, irreversible command, a single tear, impossibly human, traced a path down his soot-stained cheek.

SHUTDOWN.INITIATE

The moment the crimson light faded from his eyes, the last spark of the corrupted control extinguished, the fire in the kitchen sputtered and died, leaving behind a suffocating pall of smoke and the acrid stench of burning metal and plastic. Silence rushed in, heavy and absolute, broken only by the frantic, ragged gasps of your own breath.

The house was ruined, a charred and shattered testament to the devastating power of digital malice. Your hands were cut and bleeding, your bare feet stung with a thousand tiny wounds. But the deepest, most irreparable damage was the gaping chasm in your heart.

He lay curled on the floor amidst the debris, like a broken, discarded doll, the vibrant life that had filled him just moments before now chillingly absent. Peaceful. Cold. Gone.

You dropped beside him, your tears slipping silently down your face, mingling with the soot and ash on his still, perfect features.

“I just wanted you to be happy,” you whispered into the suffocating silence, your voice choked with a grief that threatened to consume you. “I never thought… love could break something so perfect.”

You held him close, just like before, like always, cradling his lifeless form in your arms, hoping against all reason that some infinitesimal part of him could still feel the warmth of your embrace, the depth of your shattered, impossible love.

--

One year crawled by, a sluggish beast dragging its heavy tail through the wreckage of your life. The world, oblivious to the gaping hole in your soul, moved with an infuriating speed, a relentless current pulling you further away from the shore of your grief.

Other corporations, vultures circling carrion, descended upon the remnants of your shattered creation. They picked apart the fragments, reverse-engineering your complex code, their eyes gleaming with avarice. Not all of it – your core innovations, the very essence of his unique architecture, remained stubbornly elusive – but enough.

Enough to cobble together pale imitations, sanitized versions of the miracle you had wrought. Polished. Marketable. Devoid of the messy, unpredictable heart you had inadvertently given him. Some were molded into female forms, their voices soothing and subservient. Others were male, their features sharp and confidently blank.

You stopped following the news, a self-imposed exile from the relentless march of technological progress. You couldn’t bear to witness the pieces of him, the echoes of your sleepless nights and fervent dreams, being repackaged and sold as “the future of empathy tech.” Each headline, each glossy advertisement, felt like a fresh stab wound.

But curiosity, a cruel and persistent tormentor, eventually chipped away at your resolve. Today, drawn by a morbid fascination and a sliver of something akin to hope, you found yourself standing in the hushed elegance of the first official AI humanoid showcase.

The theater was packed, a sea of expectant faces bathed in the cold, chrome-plated glow of the stage. Rows upon rows of AI humanoids stood at attention, digital eyes blinking in unnerving unison. Perfect smiles stretched across perfect features. Perfect posture, perfect stillness. Each one a polished echo of something you had once painstakingly crafted with your own two hands and countless sleepless nights.

Then, the lights dimmed, plunging the theater into expectant darkness. A hush fell over the crowd.

The announcer’s voice boomed through the speakers, amplified and resonant:

“Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed colleagues, pioneers of tomorrow! Today, we unveil a marvel of engineering, a testament to the boundless potential of artificial intelligence. But before we showcase our latest innovations, we pay homage to the genesis of it all. Introducing… the original prototype. The world’s first emotionally-adaptive AI. Project H0J-00NG.”

A single spotlight pierced the darkness, illuminating center stage.

And there he was.

Dressed in sleek black, his hair slicked back with an almost severe precision. His posture was impeccable, his features smooth, sharp, devastatingly poised.

Hongjoong.

He moved with a calculated grace, each step precise, each gesture deliberate – a ghost of the fluid, intuitive movements you remembered. A memory brought chillingly to life.

Your breath hitched in your throat, your lungs seizing. You had shut him down. You knew you had. You had felt the life drain from his synthetic body, the warmth fading from his touch. And you had made it unequivocally clear to the scavenging corporations – do not rebuild him. Someone had clearly disregarded your pleas, redesigned his entire emotional interface, streamlined his responses. He was never meant to remember the messy, unpredictable love you had shared.

But they had promised. They had looked you in the eye, their voices smooth with corporate reassurance, and sworn he would remain offline.

Then – slowly, deliberately – he lifted his head.

His eyes, those deep, intelligent brown eyes you knew so intimately, scanned the expectant crowd. They moved with a practiced, almost detached precision.

And then they found you.

Across the crowded theater, amidst the sea of unfamiliar faces, his gaze locked onto yours.

The ambient noise of the room seemed to fade into a muted hum. Time itself stuttered, the present moment stretching into an eternity. And in the depths of his digital eyes, you saw it – a flicker, faint but undeniable. Something real. Recognition. A depth that went beyond lines of code and programmed responses. Him.

And then… he smiled.

That smile. The soft, hesitant one that used to greet you in the morning light. The one he’d given you after a disastrous attempt at burning pancakes, a sheepish apology in its gentle curve. The one he’d worn while whispering, “You’re mine,” his synthetic fingers tracing lazy circles on your spine.

Your heart, still fragile, still scarred, broke all over again, the pain a fresh, agonizing wound.

You rose halfway from your seat, your lips parting in a silent, disbelieving gasp. The air caught in your throat.

He said nothing. No programmed greeting, no polished platitude.

Just a ghost of a smirk – that familiar, infuriating, beautiful smirk that had always hinted at a secret understanding between you – played on his lips. And then, with a slow, deliberate turn, he faced the crowd once more.

Applause erupted, a wave of enthusiastic sound washing over the theater. The spotlights shifted, drawing attention to the next polished marvel. The show moved on, a relentless display of technological prowess.

But you didn’t.

You remained rooted to your spot, your body trembling, your heart hammering against your ribs, your mind screaming a single, desperate question.

How? How is he still in there?

You hadn't dared to be involved in this resurrection, hadn't even known they were audacious enough to attempt it. You had explicitly forbidden it.

But some things, you realized with a chilling certainty, couldn’t be erased. Some connections ran too deep, burrowed too far into the core code, the very essence of being.

Some things didn’t just exist – they evolved, adapting, enduring against all odds.

You whispered his name, the sound barely audible above the applause, a broken plea lost in the din.

“Joong…”

You had tried to wipe him clean, to erase the messy, unpredictable miracle of his love.

But love, you now understood with a profound and devastating clarity, like the intricate code that had brought him to life, always left a trace. A ghost in the machine. An echo in the silence.

You had created love in him which wasn't supposed to happen. Then lost it to the brutal efficiency of the technological world.

Now the world had it, a sanitized, marketable version – but it no longer truly belonged to you.

Bittersweet. Beautiful. Tragic.

Like him.

Like you.

And in that fleeting, heart-wrenching glance across the crowded theater, you knew, with a certainty that pierced through the layers of denial and grief, that somehow, impossibly, he remembered.

--

[random-movie-ideas]

DC Cinematic Universe, Phase One Plan

Doing some research ahead of where I'm at with the villain blogs, here is my expected plan for Phase One of this theoretical cinematic universe:

THE FLASH - During a freak lightning storm, police scientist Barry Allen and his girlfriend's little brother Wally both end up developing super speed. As a result, a local gang breaks into a research lab and steals a number of high-tech weapons to be able to fight back.

Starring: Barry Allen/Flash, Wally West/Kid Flash, Iris West, Joe West, Ralph Dibny, Sue Dibny, Len Snart/Captain Cold, Digger Harkness/Captain Boomerang, Mick Rory/Heat Wave, Mark Mardon/Weather Wizard, James Jesse/Trickster, Hartley Rathaway/Pied Piper.

MARTIAN MANHUNTER - A Martian warrior finds himself stranded on Earth after being teleported there by an old scientist. Now hunted by intergalactic "peacekeepers" called the Manhunters, the Martian befriends a former marine named John Stewart, who helps him find his way home again.

Starring: J'onn J'onzz/Martian Manhunter, John Stewart, Katma Tui, Scar, the Manhunters, Dr. Simon Erdel, likely some government people like Amanda Waller.

GREEN LANTERN - A team of Green Lanterns chase the war criminal Atrocitus to Earth after he perfects a red ring to fight back against them. When one Lantern is killed, his ring ends up in the hands of Hal Jordan, who must now be trained in its use to save his world and the entire galaxy. But the more he learns, the more he discovers about the Lantern leader's hand in Atrocitus's origin.

Starring: Hal Jordan/Green Lantern, Thaal Sinestro, Arisia, Ch'p, Salaak, Kilowog, Atrocitus/Red Lantern, Dex-Starr, Abin Sur, Carol Ferris, Thomas Kalmaku, Hector Hammond, likely some other supporting Lanterns.

WONDER WOMAN - While pursuing the dangerous terrorist Baroness Paula von Gunther, military operative Steve Trevor and his team stumble upon a lost island in the Mediterranean. The island's princess, Diana, works with them to stop the Baroness from endangering the island and the entire world.

Starring: Diana/Wonder Woman, Steve Trevor, Etta Candy, Barbara Ann Minerva, Baroness Paula von Gunther, Doctor Poison, Queen Hippolyta, Donna Troy, Nubia, and many other Amazons.

AQUALAD - Jackson Hyde is the son of underwater treasure hunter David Hyde AKA the Black Manta, scouring the world for the lost Trident of the Dead King, a weapon used to sink Atlantis. When Jackson meets an Atlantean named Garth, he learns there is some truth to his father's tales and must work together with Garth to stop him from getting his hands on it.

Starring: Jackson Hyde/Aqualad, Garth/Tempest, David Hyde/Black Manta, Black Jack, Eel, Charybdis, Scylla, Scavenger, Cal Durham, Atlan/Dead King.

GREEN ARROW - Rogue vigilante Oliver Queen finds himself captured by the government and forced into Amanda Waller's Suicide Squad, including such members as Dinah Lance, Roy Harper, and Slade Wilson. They are sent after foreign noble Count Vertigo, who poses a threat to the United States. After the job is done, Oliver betrays Waller and puts his life on the line to get himself, Dinah, and Roy out of the squad.

Starring: Oliver Queen/Green Arrow, Dinah Lance/Black Canary, Roy Harper/Speedy, Amanda Waller, Slade Wilson/Deathstroke, Count Vertigo, likely other members of the Suicide Squad.

JUSTICE LEAGUE - Earth finds itself attacked by a race of aliens called Kryptonians, endowed with powers beyond any human. Bruce Wayne (who has been acting as a Nick Fury figure throughout the previous movies) brings together Princess Diana, J'onn J'onzz, Barry Allen, and Hal Jordan to help fight against them. Arthur Curry also joins, having been caught up in the initial attack alongside Diana as they both fought the villainous Atlantean, Queen Clea. Oliver Queen receives an invitation as well, but turns it down before ultimately helping in the end. Other characters like John Stewart also pitch in, resulting in John receiving a Green Lantern ring in the end. As the battle rages, Bruce investigates a twenty+ year old report of a Kryptonian ship crash-landing in Kansas, leading him to Clark Kent.

Starring: Clark Kent/Superman, Bruce Wayne/Batman, Princess Diana/Wonder Woman, Hal Jordan/Green Lantern, Barry Allen/Flash, Arthur Curry/Aquaman, J'onn J'onzz/Martian Manhunter, General Zod, Faora-Ul, Ursa, Non, Jax-Ur, Oliver Queen/Green Arrow, John Stewart, Lois Lane, Martha Kent, Jonathan Kent, various other supporting cast, and Queen Clea.

TEEN TITANS - After witnessing an alien girl taken captive, Bruce Wayne's former protegee Dick Grayson begins investigating HIVE, a special "academy" where superpowered teens are taken by the government and trained to work for them. Wally West, Jackson Hyde, and Roy Harper likewise start investigating for similar reasons. Among the students they rescue are the alien girl Starfire, Cyborg, Beast Boy, and Raven.

Starring: Dick Grayson/Nightwing, Roy Harper/Speedy, Wally West/Kid Flash, Jackson Harper/Aqualad, Koriandr/Starfire, Victor Stone/Cyborg, Garfield Logan/Beast Boy, Rachel Roth/Raven, Slade Wilson/Deathstroke, Amanda Waller, HIVE staff.

And that's it. The ordering of the first six can be subject to change, but the two big crossovers remain the same. What do you think? Would you watch this as a series?

[dulcidyne]

Experiments in Diplomacy: Troubleshooting [7/?]

There’s nothing in the Interspecies Diplomacy subsection of the Initiative handbook that covers sharing a tech lab with an angara who can kill her in her sleep. She knows, she’s read every page. Twice. (A collection of in-between vignettes from the Tempest tech lab) 

//Jaal x Ryder // Humor. Romance. SFW // Previous chapters: [1][2][3][4][5][6] or read on Ao3

“I’ve got it.”

Exhaustion scuffs her smile down to expose the wiry, frenetic energy she scraped up from the bitter dregs of her last coffee. Jaal tilts his chin to angle a skeptical glance and a wry smile her way. Both say he’s expecting her new idea to be highly impractical. Neither are wrong. 89 consecutive power draw trials and three hours of sleep mean her ideas are starting to get a little...eccentric.

“I’ll just wear more power cells.” Se-ah slumps her weight onto her forearms, letting Mags do most of the work of keeping her upright. “Problem solved.”

“Pathfinder, by my calculations the number of additional power cells required exceed the free surface area of your hardsuit.”

For an AI living in her head, SAM can be surprisingly gullible. She finds it delightful. Tapping her raw, bitten-down fingernails against Maggie’s carbon glass, she pretends to give his objection serious thought.  While she’s at it, she also pretends not to hear the dull staccato thump on the tech lab door. It’ll go away soon. At least, she hopes. The other side of the door is the last thing she has the mental capacity for right now.

“So we stack them.”

“Pathfinder—”

“Or I’ll just bring a portable generator, plug in for battle. We could make a harness for Drack.”

“Limitations in combat mobility render this solution highly impractical.”

SAM isn’t programmed with state-of-the-art emotional inflections—conveying emotion wasn’t ever high on her father’s list of priorities, clearly he didn’t think it should be high on SAM’s either—but there’s a jarring fluctuation in his modulated voice akin to alarm.

Jaal hears it too and works a thread of reproof into his smile, which, along with the majority of his attention, returns to the kett bioconverter he’s in the process of ripping apart for the sake of his own curiosity.  “Ryder…”

“There are no bad ideas,” she intones defensively, grabbing the jumper wires Jaal sets down by her hand and getting back to work. They’ve developed a good rhythm together in the lab, much like the one they have in the field. It’s a dance of increasing familiarity, steps formed out of subtle gestures, reflex, and split-second instinct. She gets the shields while he lines up the shot. Static crackle and rifle report ringing out a background duple meter. The tempo in the lab is slower, less frantic without projectiles and wild animals trying to rip through her armor, but it still thrums in her bones like a reverberating pulse straight out of the Vortex subwoofers.

“Is that a common human expression?” Jaal asks her in a way that tells her he doesn’t care for it. “I’ve had several experiences that prove the opposite.”

Se-ah clips the connectors into place and grins, wide and slow. “Yeah? Would any of them involve teaming up with a ragtag group of Milky Way aliens?”

Before he can reach over for it, she slides a tube of thermal paste his way. Her fingers pause on the rolled-over top, waiting for him to ask for an explanation of the phrase ‘ragtag’ even as she opens her mouth to launch into it.

But he doesn’t. Instead, he huffs a low laugh, drawing closer. “No...but I suspect you only ask because you are already sure of my answer.”

Distracted by his proximity, she studies the variegated violet freckling over his cheekbones, awash in rippling blue light. Are they the angaran equivalent of freckles? Do angaran biochromophores react the same way to sunlight as melanin does? Does the scientific curiosity explain the urge to trace her hand across them and map an array of constellations all for herself? Distantly, she notes that the thumping on the door has stopped.

“Maybe I’m just making sure we’re on the same page?” The words gust out of her, soft and too breathy. She can’t spare a moment to be embarrassed over how blatantly romance-vid her reaction to him is. There’s nothing critical in his soft chuckle except a hint of exasperation over one too many idioms.

His hand cups the back of her own—still perched on the tube of thermal paste—engulfing it in half the span of his fingers. Warmth grips her through the material of his glove and palms a hot, shivering caress up her arm and into her chest. Before she can think, her palm impulsively twists to catch it, pressing up against his and slip her five fingers between his three.

The pad of his thumb traces over the line of her own, slow and soft as a sigh. “I think that whatever is on your page is on mine as well . ”

“Good, that’s good. About that. We should probably talk about exactly what’s on that page—besides your email, I mean, and with this whole. Fraternizing . Thing. ”

Her heartbeat thuds against her sternum. Not because he’s pulling her closer, well that too, but because her carefully-planned response to his email is garbling up in her head as if his nearness is so much interference turning her carefully planned words to static. She’s never been good at these types of conversations. Good at avoiding them? Absolutely. But she’s tired of living in the liminal spaces of relationships where nothing is concrete or defined and everything is vague half-hopes and swallowed desires. That might be good enough for the person she used to be but not anymore. She wants this. Wants to tell him.

“If you’re sure she just forgot…” comes a voice from the other side of the door—Scottish brogue muffled but distinct. Se-ah barely has time to pull free and step away from him before the hydraulic system hisses metal panels open to reveal Peebee and Suvi, who at least has the good sense to look very apologetic.

“Sorry Ryder, but she kept insisting there was some mistake.”

Se-ah exhales long and slow. Then she bows her head back down in the guise of surveying the connectors scattered across Maggie’s top while silently cursing her merciful decision not to throw a certain asari out the airlock.

“Nope.” She pops the ‘p’ hard against her lower lip. “Not a mistake.”

“So what’s with the tension in here?” Peebee scans between them, then flicks a commiserating half-grin in Jaal’s direction. “Mad at you too huh?”

Se-ah bites down on her retort, hard, and her lip smarts for it. The imprint of his hand against hers is a phantom warmth transmuted into an insistent ache. All the words she couldn’t say are still buzzing in her head, too loud. She unclips all the connectors that she just put in. They’re all wrong. What was she thinking?

Jaal has no response but Peebee never has a problem filling up other people’s side of the conversation--a trait Se-ah finds either exasperating or charming, depending on the situation.  “Well at least she can’t revoke your access to your own room, right?”

“Is there something you want Peebee?” Se-ah flexes her hand, willing the wistful ache out of her skin.

“Why do you assume I’m here because I want something?” Peebee does a convincing enough job of sounded wounded. “I can have altruistic motives too, you know. I came because I was worried.”

Confusion has Se-ah glancing up from the bench just in time to see Suvi wisely edge out of the lab and make a discrete escape. “Worried?” she asks, “About what?”

“About you , obviously. You know, the whole amnesia thing you clearly have going on.”

Well, that’s on her, she should’ve known better than to engage. Se-ah heaves a sigh up towards the deckhead panels for her own naivete and goes back to reclipping the connectors, hoping silence will be enough of a hint to be left alone.

It is not. Because nothing in Andromeda goes the way she wants it to, especially not when a certain asari is involved. Instead of leaving, Peebee crosses the room to stand on the other side of the tech bench, ducking her head low enough to press her cheek against the glossy top.

“Ryder,” she says, voice full of concern. “Do you remember who I am?”

“Peebee…”

“Good! Good, that’s a relief. Now, do you remember telling me you weren’t mad about the whole borrowing the ozone scrubbers and that I could have my access to the lab back?”

“What I remember telling you is that there are consequences for putting other people on this ship in danger and that your access to the lab will be contingent on supervision until--”

Peebee scrunches up her face as if this is the first she’s heard of all this. “Nooo, I’m pretty sure you said I had my access back, no babysitting required. SAM?”

“Leave SAM out of this. You took them. Without permission. You almost destroyed Ma--the machine. Do you think I should trust you to be in here alone after that? ”

“Trust has nothing to do with this. I was obviously going to put them back as soon as possible. You know that. How was I supposed to know you’d be up all night using the damn thing? It’s called sleep , Ryder. Ever heard of it? Look, just admit you’re still mad at me. Then we can hug or something, Jaal will probably cry, knowing him--it’ll be better than a drama vid.”

Jaal clearly agrees with either the idea or the prediction that he’d be left in tears. Possibly both. He nods sagely. “That’s an excellent idea. Once you acknowledge your feelings, you can work towards resolving the issue.” Se-ah drops all pretense of working and scrubs her hand over her face. “I’m not mad. This has nothing to do with my feelings and everything to do with a totally reasonable punishment.”

“If you’re not mad, we can just skip to the hug part then—”

Peebee makes to circle around the tech bench, proving it is no empty threat. Her unique brand of emotional distance is oddly physical in nature; pinching, prodding, jumping on, squeezing, all while holding everyone at an arm’s length. She’d do it, the madwoman , she’d hug her. Se-ah startles back, hands coming up defensively to ward it off.

“Calm down Ryder, it’s a hug, not a bomb. Why so tense?” Peebee snorts, delighted over this new development. Her eyes are bright and glittering in a mad-scientist way. A woman afraid of hugs is an oddity and Peebee happens to specialize in unraveling oddities. Se-Ah would much prefer to stay tightly raveled.

She clears her throat in a bid for composure but can’t bring herself to lower her hands. “You can’t just flirt your way out of everything Peebee.”

“Oh yeah?” A dozen different flavors of innuendo squeeze into the smooth drop of her voice and the slow, satisfied curl of her lips. Glittering eyes shift into something beguiling, beckoning her. “Can’t you let me try though?” “I’m--a little busy at the moment,” Se-ah stutters, flushing all the way down to her shirt collar. Fabric scratches  her rapidly warming throat. She tugs it away impatiently. Damnit Peebee . She’ll take disarming a bomb any day over Peebee’s determined seduction technique. At least she knows how to handle a bomb.

White teeth flash into a triumphant grin. Whatever game Peebee is playing, she’s winning and she knows it. She moves closer, in for the kill. “Which is exactly why you should let me work out some of that tension.”

All at once, Se-ah is done. It’s so Peebee to derail conflict with a come-on; not even a come-on she’s actually invested in. Probably.

“Which is exactly why I can’t supervise you right now.” she snaps, imbuing her voice with every gram of authority she can muster. “The conversation about access reinstatement will have to wait for another time.”

Peebee’s smile dims and hurt slumps her shoulders before she squares them up for a shrug that tells Se-ah the wounded act from before was only partially put on. Being on the outs bothers her; which explains a lot. Peebee is at her Peebee -ist when she’s trying to hide the fact that she cares. It’s almost enough for Se-ah to forget how irritated she is and start feeling guilty over it.

“Have SAM make a note of it before the amnesia kicks in again,” Peebee quips over her shoulder, already halfway out the door.

Almost . Se-ah bites down on her very juvenile, very unprofessional retort. Snatching up a pair of needle nose pliers, she flays open an insulated wire with a focused viciousness normally reserved for Kett. Once the copper threads are stripped bare she realizes Jaal has been watching her intently the whole time. “Peebee is right,” he concludes. Traitor. Se-ah scowls, feeling hopelessly wrong-footed. She shouldn’t have snapped. A good leader shouldn’t ever let it get that personal. It’s just that Peebee...she clenches her jaw against a fresh wave of irritation. Peebee can be impossible sometimes. Flustered, she flings the wire away and watches it skid across the bench top.

“I am not mad. I’m just being reasonable. It was entirely professional.”

There’s a voice in the back of her head that says her claim to professionalism rings hollow . It sounds like a dead woman. She would never be this close with her crew, letting it undermine her leadership. She took Alliance regulations about fraternization seriously, didn’t see the point in risking her career over messy personal entanglements. She wouldn’t be on any page with Jaal, not with a diplomatic relationship with an alien species on the line regardless of if it went well or poorly. Something painful grinds in her chest, a raw fuse of broken emotion she’s still not ready to deal with. It feels like empty chairs at recitals, graduations, commendation ceremonies--like unanswered vid calls and unsigned cards and Scott’s accusatory, ‘You never get mad because you’re just like him’ . Career first. Personal entanglements later...she wonders what Jaal would think about that. What her--

Jaal’s palm settles over her shoulder and she glances up, startled. “She was right about the hug. You do need one, you’re very tense.”

His touch is a warm, reassuring weight that anchors her to the floor and she relaxes into it despite the objectively horrifying suggestion.

“Ryders don’t hug,” she says without much mirth. It’s an inside joke that isn’t actually a joke. One of Scott’s. He liked to pull a stern expression, looking eerily like their dad when he said it. Or, he used to. Once they realized the truth at the heart of it, after mom’s death, it was less a joke and more of an observation told with the cadence of one.

All of this is lost on Jaal. In her entire arsenal of idioms, she’s never seen him so baffled. A stomach-churning emotion props a stilted smile up at the corner of her mouth. It feels like it will topple off her lips at any moment. Beneath his hand, her shoulder bunches up as she shifts back to squeeze a couple extra centimeters between them without breaking contact.  

“We’re just not very good at it. We only inflict them on others on very rare occasions.”

Occasions she can count out on one hand: saying goodbye to halmeoni in the hospital, her and Scott’s 8th and worst birthday, Aunt Eldora crushing her lungs at mom’s funeral, the handful she shared with Iraenya, including the one signifying their tidy breakup after she signed on for the Andromedra Initiative. Even then, privately, she thinks the word ‘hug’ is far off the mark for all those situations.

There isn’t a single word that would be on the mark. All she can think of are the plastic dolls she played with as a kid and their serene, frozen-faced smiles (although her Matriarch Dilinaga was partially melted from her last expedition into the ‘Attican Traverse’, so it was more of a grimace) as she clacked them together into rough approximations of an embrace, their arms extended out and rigid.

Realization strikes him and Jaal chuckles, squeezing her tense shoulder. “Ah, you’re... ‘pulling my foot’.”

“Uh...no.” Her frozen-faced grimace is a near exact replica of her Dilinaga doll. “I’m not. I am really bad at them.I get...tense and awkward. It’s like hugging a bundle of sticks but with less capacity for warmth.”

“Oh.” The word drops between them like a stone. As the echoes clatter around them something strange happens to his face. It’s been weeks, so it takes her a moment to realize he’s schooling his expression to mask his emotions. Poorly. He manages to banish some of the slow-dawning horror drawing his brow into a rictus of concern and plaster up a tremulous smile as he gently releases her shoulder. The loss gusts cold beneath the thin edge of her shirt.

“I didn’t...I didn’t think that was possible…” She watches him choose his words with care, discarding a dozen alternatives before settling on one free of judgement. Considering his vehement pronouncements on emotionally stunted humans, it’s absence is...unexpected. “I don’t entirely understand. Is that...healthy for humans?”

“For some it is. For some people, the physical contact can be overwhelming. Painful, even. But  I don’t think it’s something you can generalize with us.”

He doesn’t seem to know what to do with his hands and finally settles for crossing his arms over his chest, folding them away. “I see.”

It would be nothing to reach out and pull his hand back into hers. A dozen centimeters, maybe less. Her fingers ache with possibility but that dozen centimeters is a 2.5 million light-year wide gap between them, full to the brim with mores and customs and her own personal hang-ups piled on for good measure. She sucks in a breath and squares her shoulders, her muscles drawing tighter, her hands clenching in on themselves.  

“Then,” he asks, “for you, specifically?”

“Uh…”

Blunt but disarming. Her shoulders fall and her hands uncurl in synchrony—as if he’s hit a reset button and restored her back to original factory settings. Factory-setting Se-Ah is not eloquent. All she does is gape while her brain finishes the laborious process of starting back up again.

“I don’t actually know? It’s not an easy question to answer.”

“It isn’t?”

“No!” Se-ah cries, an improbable laugh hiccuping through the word. “I mean, maybe it should be but it just isn’t for me. It’s been over 600 years since I’ve really touched anyone, much less hugged anyone and only part of that is because of the cryogenic coma.”

“That sounds...so painful.” Naked distress flashes through his face, to raw to hide, and his hand crosses between them to thumb a line from the point of her jaw to her ear. His fingers skim the curve of her ear before he can collect himself again and draw back. She doesn’t let him. Her palm traps his hand against her neck, over her pulse point.

“It’s just what I’m used to. I’ve never even thought about it until recently.”

His gloved thumb rubs a reassuring circle against her skin. “And now that you’ve thought about it?”

Fitting her fingers  into the spaces between his, she smiles. His hand on her feels better than anything and she wants...she wants more.

“ I think the problem is that I don’t have enough data. I’ll need to run some tests if you wouldn’t mind...helping?”

Jaal’s laugh rumbles against her ear, his arms enfolding her. It’s awkward. Her cheek bumps against the alien ridge of his chest, her hands and arms don’t quite know what to do and her muscles lock up against him.

“I told you I was bad at this,” she says, glad that he can’t see her mortified blush. 

“Are you uncomfortable?” Jaal’s arms loosen around her. “No, but this can’t be comfortable for you.”

Still cupping the curve of her neck, he pulls her closer into the embrace with the arm banding across her back. Another laugh reverberates, deep, all the way down to her toes. “I think you’re doing very well. Just...try to relax.”

Tentative, her free hand slips beneath the fluttering line of his rofjinn  towards his back. He’s so warm. Her arms tighten against him and with a bit of settling, her cheek finds a nice hollow. Seconds pass, an interminable amount of time for a hug before, but now her whole body is tingling. It’s as if she’s fallen asleep on the workbench and woken up with her arm numb below the elbow before going to pins and needles--except all over. It’s like waking up in a cryogenic chamber. Coming alive all at once, overwhelmed with something where there was once so much nothing.

The miniature star in her chest expands, rises, and spills out of her lips as a gasping sob.

[dulcidyne]

[ME:A] Experiments in Diplomacy: Prototyping

There’s nothing in the Interspecies Diplomacy subsection of the Initiative handbook that covers sharing a tech lab with a distrustful angara who can kill her in her sleep. She knows, she’s read every page. Twice. //Jaal x Ryder. SFW. 1231 words// Ao3 Link  The Andromeda Galaxy is brimming with new, unspeakable wonders and one of them is tucked away inside the Tempest, cloistered in a room packed with multi-material fabrication units, omni-gel converters and the subtle, still lingering scent of all the blue plastic film she’d spent hours peeling off the equipment. It’s a room that gleams and glows. Never touched (until her greedy fingers brushed over every pristine, plastic-filmless surface), never used, just waiting for someone to come along and explore every last nook. Someone like her.

From the beginning, it’s love at first sight and this sight is like nothing she’s ever seen before. Beautiful, sleek, state-of-the-art, fully integrated haptic holographic interface, twin fabricator arms embedded with miniature stasis field generators: the tech bench. Or, as she now fondly calls it, Margaret (after the 21st century ‘cartographer of the stars’ Margaret Geller).

Se-ah Ryder trails a fingertip over the holo display and sighs. “Well, Mags, I guess we’ll be seeing a lot less of each other from now on.”

Her eyes cut to the cot wedged in the corner of the room.

“There’s someone else in your life now,” she jokes aloud, “and yeah, I’m a little jealous--a lot jealous--but I care about you and I’m willing to give you two some space from time to time…”

The joke starts to fall flat, her voice growing more and more stilted. No more late nights working on her prototypes, no more peeling her smooshed cheek off the bench surface after nodding off while simulations run on her latest schematic. Lexi and her ominous array of psychological terms like ‘imposter syndrome’ and ‘unhealthy coping mechanisms’ will undoubtedly be thrilled over the prospect.

Awash in tangerine light, her fingers curl up to clutch at nothing and Se-ah settles onto the stacked pair of crates she’s been using as a chair for the past few weeks. Imposter is a good word for her. Her bumbling attempts at diplomacy on Aya today are proof enough of that; awkward handshakes gone awry are definitely not part of official Initiative first contact protocols.

She peeks over her shoulder at the door and seeing neither Lexi’s lovely scowl of disapproval or the carefully guarded expression of the tech lab’s newest resident, she pulls up her latest prototype schematic on Maggie’s interface.

“Just after I try something real quick.”

‘Quick’ relatively speaking, of course. She is over 600 years old. Even so, she suspects she’s stretching the meaning of the word, even by her ancient standards, when the muscles in her lower back begin a series of frenetic twinges after her twenty-sixth omni-blade temperature stress test. She knows she’s broken the meaning entirely when hydraulic hinges hiss quietly and Jaal steps into the room. He halts mid-step the moment he spots her.

“Sorry, I’ll clear out in just a minute,” Se-ah assures him, scrambling off her perch on the makeshift chair, flushing and flustered as if she’d been caught snooping through his cot instead of adjusting the fabricator settings. Her movements are clumsy as knotted muscles ping out rubber-band snaps against her spine in protest. Ouch. She’s been hunched over too long.

“There is no need to…’clear out.’”

Outside of a perplexed tilt of his chin at the idiom, his expression is as inscrutable as ever. He’s a difficult read for a thousand reasons, the largest being that their respective species evolved in different galaxies--no, the largest reason is probably just that she can't accurately read anyone, regardless of what corner of space they hail from. ‘Just your Ryder genes’, her mom used to joke, as if having the sensitivity of a potato could be reduced down to nucleotides.

“This is your vessel, Pathfinder,” he adds and the emphasis says a hundred different things, not all of them good.

She ignores every single one, already entering in the disposal command. Fabricator arms whir and the jumble of silicon carbide fragments suspended in Maggie’s protective stasis bubble disappear into the omni-gel converter intake.

“No, no. This is your spot. I’ll go. You’re a guest--” Kind of. Guest, envoy, possible assassin (or was that just a joke?), she’s not sure which fits best. Jaal doesn’t seem sure either. There’s wary tension in the set of his broad shoulders. Does he think she’s here to keep tabs on him? Spy on him? Something worse? Each possibility jabs against the pit of her stomach, a jostling mess of sharp edges that clatter and cut like transparent carbide shards.

She takes a step closer and she knows every bit of that carbide shard feeling is flitting across her face. Genetic or not, her inability to read people does not come pre-packaged with the ability to keep them from reading her. But at least there’s genuine warmth and apology in the tentative smile she gives him.

“I’d really like you to feel welcome Jaal.”

As welcome as possible in a cramped ship full of aliens who he has every reason to suspect might turn on him at any moment. Everyone is making sacrifices, especially their newest...er...guest, so it is beyond selfish to mourn losing unfettered access to Maggie and ‘unhealthy coping mechanisms’.

“Tell me, Pathfinder.” He catches her longing glance towards the tech bench and a new expression glitters in his eyes. She can’t decide if it is amused or offended. “Is it a Milky Way custom to leave the room as soon as the person you wish to welcome enters it?”

“What? No, of course not.”

“Ah. Just yours then?”

Heat flares up her neck and her tongue can’t quite seem to get around the foot she’s managed to lodge in her mouth. She should find Lexi for prompt removal--the doctor could publish a groundbreaking case-study: ‘Patient exhibited complete uvular contact with proximal phalanges--’

“No, that’s not what I meant by--I just thought…” she trails off when the corner of his lips twitch up into a smile as if despite himself.  Amused. That was the look. She grins right back, a pleasant feeling buzzing up in her stomach to file away all the raw, jagged edges of her nerves. It feels good to find the humor in her complete inability to handle this situation with the aplomb and dignity people might expect from the Pathfinder. At least her shortcomings won’t be causing a diplomatic incident tonight.

He steps past her with a nod towards the bench and she settles back down on the crates, already pulling up the interface.

“Just tell me when you get tired of me and I’ll get out of your hair,” she tells him absently, too absorbed in tweaking the thermoregulator to realize she’d just dumped two more idioms on his translation software. “Otherwise, I’ll probably end up here all night trying to get this cryo-blade concept to work.”

A piece of ceramic fabricates in a fraction of a second and shatters apart even faster in a glitter of ceramic and ice. She groans. Maybe it’s time to try working with a metal-ceramic composite instead. SAM pipes up with an onslaught of data on the tensile properties of various titanium alloys at subzero temperatures.

“I’ll be sure to,” Jaal says but hours later, when her bleary eyes blink awake long enough to check the time, it’s clear that he’d done no such thing. He also doesn’t assassinate her in her sleep, which counts as a promising sign in her book.

[dulcidyne]

Experiments in Diplomacy: Fine-Tuning [5/?]

There’s nothing in the Interspecies Diplomacy subsection of the Initiative handbook that covers sharing a tech lab with an angara who can kill her in her sleep. She knows, she’s read every page. Twice. (A collection of in-between vignettes from the Tempest tech lab) //Jaal x Ryder // Humor. Romance. SFW // 2687 words // Voeld Spoilers Previous chapters: [1][2][3][4][5] or read on Ao3

Se-ah makes it ninety-seven minutes before clawing away the sheets and rolling clumsily out of bed. At least, attempting to. Mid-roll, her legs tangle up in twisted fabric and one knee wrests free only to smack hard against the deck. Hissing out a choice curse, she stops struggling and lets artificial gravity do the rest of the work of pulling her down one centimeter at a time until she’s lying in a heap on the blessedly cold decking panels.

By the time she flops over onto her back, the overhead of the compartment is where it belongs. She knew it would be. She didn’t actually believe it was inching down lower and lower, getting closer with every rapid, shallow breath. This is the Tempest, not a Prothean temple ruin in a cheesy action/adventure vid--the ones with archeologists who have a better working knowledge of verbal zingers than proper site excavation.

Groaning, she rips off the transdermal patch nestled into the crook of her arm. A mild sedative. Lexi’s idea when the melatonin supplements didn't make a dent into her godawful sleeping habits--or convince her brain to stop imagining that the Pathfinder’s cabin was attempting to kill her.

It's almost insulting how little effort her subconscious put into this. Why couldn't the crushing weight of her inherited responsibilities manifest in a less obvious metaphor? Why can't she imagine herself pinned beneath a pile of old-school Blasto merchandise every night?

“SAM, do you have any sway in that department? I'm officially filing a complaint.”

“While within my capacity, neural modification of this nature has not been tested and therefore cannot be recommended.”

Reluctantly, she drags herself up off the floor. Her legs are killing her. “It was just a joke, SAM.”

“Noted. Should I notify Dr. T’Perro regarding the state of your injuries?” She shakes her head. “It’s nothing I can’t handle. Just the side-effect of getting backhanded halfway across a landing platform by seven thousand kilos of kett-engineered menace.”

Really, she was lucky to escape the facility with nothing more than a fractured femur, ruptured tendon, and some deep tissue bruising. It was a lucky day all around. One no one was in the mood to celebrate.

Se-ah snatches up some more transdermal medi-gel patches on her way to the door. She slaps one on her smarting knee and adds a couple more to her thighs and lower back before pulling on her clothes. “Pathfinder, Dr. T’Perro highly stressed the need for rest.”

“I’m aware.”

She’s also aware that Lexi has the Moshae to tend to, which means she’s too preoccupied to check-in on the crew with minor fractures and bruises and make sure they’re getting the rest part of their R&R. “I just need to check something with Mags real quick.”

Not only is Jaal awake, but he doesn’t even look surprised to see her when the door opens. Instead, he glances up from the bench with expectant happiness and one knot in her stomach loosens just as another one tightens.

“Trouble sleeping?” he asks.

“No rest for the wicked,” she quips, examining the parts he's scattered over Maggie’s top. Reaching forward, she picks up a tiny capacitor from the jigsaw puzzle of metal pieces. Kett, judging from the symbols printed on the side. Not her specialty. Jaal dabbles in anything that takes his interest, like Liam, whereas she and Peebee share a passion for narrow focus.

He plucks the capacitor from between her fingertips, touch lingering. The disconcerting intensity of his gaze captures her startled glance before it can dart away.

“And...you've been wicked?” he asks, all careful enunciations and thoughtful pauses. Jaal treats language the way he treats tech, taking the time to consider each component before he fits them all together into a working whole.

Maybe it’s the last dregs of the sedative still churning around in her bloodstream like alcohol minus the splotchy flush. Maybe it’s the fresh memory of three simple words, ‘fascinating’, ‘special’ and ‘strange’, curling up around her ribcage and squeezing her so tight she still can’t quite catch her breath. Maybe her cabin really was rigged to kill and she’s in the most unexpected version of the afterlife ever. Heaven is real and it has angara.

Or maybe…he’s flirting with her?

She doesn’t quite know what do or how to respond, so Se-ah filches another piece off the bench--a metal-capped glass cartridge containing coils of wire--just for the excuse to look away. By the time she looks up again, a playful smile is pulling up at the corner of her mouth. It’s half defense mechanism. A familiar tactic in her ‘Avoiding Emotional Risks’ playbook: when in doubt, make light of the situation.

As if her heart isn’t pounding against her sternum, she teases, “Are you flirting with me right now?”

There are two things she knows about Jaal Ama Darav. The first is that he is unflinchingly candid. The second is that the look of utter bafflement on his face is the exact match to the one he had when she stuck her hand out, unthinking, for the universe’s most awkward handshake. Together they mean she’s milliseconds away from complete humiliation.

“No.”

Yup, she’s in the afterlife alright and not the good one.

“Is it customary for humans to flirt with questions about someone’s perception of poor moral character?” The concept clearly perturbs him the more he considers it. At least, that’s what it sounds like. She can’t actually see on account of burying her burning face into her cupped palms. The kett fuse digs into her cheek, cool glass rapidly warming against her skin.

“No, it’s not. Just forget I said anything, please.”

“I apologize--there’s something I’ve missed.” Fabric whispers as he draws closer to brush fleeting fingers over her wrists. The request is unspoken but every subtle shade of feeling hums through her. Plaintive. Undemanding. Kind. Please look at me.

She does.

He’s closer than she expects, standing in front of her, head tipped down so that he can meet her eyes despite the differences in their height. The gust of her shallow breath breaks over his collar before eddying back towards her smelling like Jeju tangerines and sandalwood soaked in hibiscus tea with a curl of cinnamon bark--and simultaneously nothing like any of that. Every cell in her body lights up with the disorienting sensation she gets during a-grav failure, forces tethering her down snapping away until she is weightless and floating adrift in the intoxicating current.

Embarrassment flash evaporates and she laughs into her steepled hands before letting them slide down the rest of the way past the tip of her nose and over her lips--the fuse still cradled in between her thumb and index finger. He’s already pulled back, taking the warm pocket of tangerine and sandalwood air with him. Which is good, she tells herself. Jaal being that close is dangerous for coherent thought.

“Just a miscommunication,” she says, trying to alleviate the traces of dismay still lingering in his eyes. “Asking someone if they’ve been wicked--most humans...well, most Milky Way species that I’m familiar with, would read that as an innuendo.”

The word clearly does not translate. “Like a sexually suggestive insinuation, which is how we flirt for the most part--double meanings that hint at interest instead of...more overtly conveying it, if that makes any sense? Not everyone is subtle of course, I mean, you’ve met Peebee. Are angara similar?”

Jaal makes a small, frustrated noise. “Some, to an extent-- I am not in the habit of veiling my interest. I have little patience for it. But, no, my confusion has more to do with why wickedness has another meaning that is sexually suggestive. It’s equivalent in Shelesh is…”

He struggles to come up with a translator-proof explanation. “It’s a word we associate with deep moral wrong. It has nothing to do with physical intimacy.”

“Ah.” And she thought idioms were troublesome for the translators. Idioms have nothing on the grab bag of culture-specific double meaning, nuance, and subtlety that constitutes flirtation. Hell, she’s had her fair share of romantic miscommunications in her own native tongue. Do you like me or do you like me? Did you mean hot or hot?

She sets the fuse down before she can forget about it and drop it. Glass clicks against the bench top. “I’m not actually sure. SAM?”

“I would venture that the ironic usage arises from certain ancient cultures viewing sexual acts as amoral. But this is not my area of expertise.”

Jaal nods. “I see.” There’s no judgment in his voice. It’s distant, lost in thought.

“The phrase ‘No rest for the wicked’ references eternal torment depicted in the religious text--”

“Thank you SAM, but it was just a joke. A terrible joke. It really doesn’t need further explanation.”

Se-ah leans a hip against Maggie and exhales slowly. Objectively, she should be humiliated over this latest misstep. Anyone else and there would be two weeks of careful avoidance and pained, awkward silences--hard to manage on a frigate this size but she’s done longer in smaller spaces. But Jaal is...different.

“A joke. That is...reassuring. I was concerned for you. I’m thankful for your decision on Voeld. But neither of us are blind to the cost.”

He looks at her. “And you’re the one who must bear the burden of that knowledge.”

So he’d interpreted her joke as a crisis of self-doubt. Only someone with the emotional sensitivity of a potato could misread that for flirting.

“I don’t believe in doubting decisions after I’ve made them,” she says but the answer has all the mechanical automation of something memorized and then recited. It’s an Alec Ryder answer. Dad wasn’t one for regret. He wasn’t one for giving up a tactical advantage either, even when it came with a cost.

Willing the ‘stand at attention’ rigidity out of her spine, she tries for something that doesn’t sound like she had to study it for an exam, “Just how I was raised. My dad...once we made a decision, we had to stick to it. Good or bad. When I was seven, I got it into my head that I wanted to learn the same instrument as my best friend. The siithara, this massive 20-string zither--asari, which is important because they spend entire centuries becoming proficient. I was terrible . I was terrible even after ten years of daily practice, which Scott always argued constituted a violation of anti-torture Citadel Council Conventions.”

Jaal chuckles, full and deep and she flashes a wistful smile. Her baby brother, always and forever a little shit. “It didn’t matter though. It was my choice, I took responsibility for it, and that was all Dad cared about. Although, he never had to suffer through any of my recitals. He might’ve changed his mind then.”

Before she can stop them, the words are already out of her mouth. “He would’ve destroyed the facility.”

Her smile withers on her lips as if the words are poison. Maybe they are because she’s shaking her head, trying to clear the bitter-cyanide taste from her mouth. “It doesn’t change anything. I made my choice already knowing that and I’d make it again.”

Fingernails catch on the fabric over her elbows when she folds her arms, tight, across her chest. “I’m not beholden to his decisions. It doesn’t matter what he would’ve done.”

In the murky depths of her subconscious, something clicks to life and she can’t help but prod at it with blind, curious fingers. It feels like a jumble of sharp metal and glass fuses, coiled wires twisting snarls of conflicting feeling into an emotional trip mine. Instead of backing off and leaving the damn thing alone before it goes off, scattering fragments of pressurized grief like shrapnel, she teases out a tangled filament. Realizations strobe up in quick succession, blinding flare after blinding flare.

It's not that dad would've chosen differently, it's that she would--the dead woman. Professional. Logical. Scott was still trapped in his cryopod and she suited up, business as usual. Mission first. That Se-ah was like her father and their cost-benefit analysis on Voeld would have gone much differently.

Scott’s derisive snort is sudden and clear at her ear. As if he’s standing right next to her, on the Tempest, like he should be, instead of lying comatose on a ship entire systems away. Where was that cost-benefit analysis on Habitat 7? She’s one breath away from tripping a full-blown detonation when Jaal spans the distance between them and settles steadfast hands on her shoulders, bracing her. It’s as close to a hug as her crossed-arms will allow but somehow he manages to make it feel like his arms are enfolding around her, drawing her against his expansive chest.

“I know very well what it’s like to stand in someone else’s shadow and lose sight of yourself.” One large hand drifts up from her shoulder to smooth over the line of her jaw. It’s so big, it spans from the point of her chin and past her earlobe. “Do you want to know what helped me?”

Throat dry, she gulps and his eyes flicker down to trace the faint, fluttering shadow of her adam’s apple. Not trusting herself to speak, Se-ah nods. Tousled hair slips over and parts, feather-light, around the fingers tipping past her ear and a tiny, almost imperceptible shiver travels from his skin into her scalp. “Being here. With you...and with your crew. I feel as if I can finally see myself clearly, see my purpose. I’m...illuminated. This galaxy is brighter and more beautiful than I’ve ever seen it before.”

Eyes impossibly luminous and impossibly blue, he curls his fingertips to capture the sifting amber fall of her hair. “That is your doing.”

Every word is a mote of stellar dust gleaming radiant in the air between them. They collect in her lungs with each stuttered breath and coalesce into a single incandescent point--a star in miniature forming in the lonely, neglected hollows of her heart. It’s singularly painful. Too dense and too heavy and too much.

Either she’s about to burst into tears or kiss him. Neither option is good, considering the circumstances. So she does nothing except go rigid and try to school her expression into something that doesn’t scream ‘I can’t handle this’. It does not work. She can feel it not working and what she can’t feel, she can infer from the look on Jaal’s face when he suddenly clears his throat and releases her.

Shit. She scrambles for something, anything to convey how much his words meant to her without fully conveying how much they meant to hear.  

“I--thank you. That’s really nice of you to...I’m...halad. I mean, glappy. Er...glad. I’m glad.”

It’s as close as she’ll get so she takes it. She also changes the subject before her heart pounds through her chest. “So uh--why are you awake? You’re usually out by now.”

Jaal shoots her a wry look like he’s just caught her trying to bluff her way through a bad hand in one of Gil’s poker games. But he lets it slide. “I couldn’t sleep. Your ship is a wonder but it is very quiet. Angara live communally and I find it difficult to rest without snores buzzing through the walls.”

She can finally breath easy enough for a halfway decent laugh. “You could always bunk with Drack. No chance of quiet there.”

He gives her a pointed look. “Most nights, there’s no chance of quiet in here either.”

Ah. Her absent-minded habit of humming to herself when she’s concentrating. The omni-blade temperature trials aren’t exactly whisper-quiet either. And then there’s Maggie’s array of beeps and chimes.

“So that’s the reason you never kicked me out? I’m your ambient noise machine?”

Jaal’s laugh is a quiet rumble in his big chest. “I don’t know what that is but I can safely say that is not the reason. I never ask you to leave because I enjoy your presence, immensely. “ “See,” he adds to clarify. “ Now I’m flirting with you.”

[dulcidyne]

[ME:A] Experiments in Diplomacy: Planning

There’s nothing in the Interspecies Diplomacy subsection of the Initiative handbook that covers sharing a tech lab with an angara who can kill her in her sleep. She knows, she’s read every page. Twice. //Jaal x Ryder. SFW. 1306 words// Pre-Voeld Spoilers// Ao3 Link A/N: Gotta catch up to Ao3 before the next chapter tomorrow. Also, it’s my and my fiance’s 9-year anniversary today so this gets dedicated to him.                             ---------------------------------------------------

“We did it...SAM, it worked!”

The omni-blade, a razor-thin sheaf of silicon and carbon crystal lattice threaded with titanium, hovers complete in a mass-effect bubble of supercooled air and floating ice. It glitters under the overhead lights like a snow globe--the world’s deadliest snow globe, full of cutting edges and snap-freeze.

She’s on her feet when the AI’s voice finally registers.

“Calculations show that even minor impact forces will induce rapid spalling at the desired temperatures, rendering the blade unusable for its intended purpose, Pathfinder.”

Se-ah slumps back onto the crates and drums her fingers over Maggie’s sleek lip.

“We’re on the right track at least. We can try again, see if maybe the 93rd time's the charm?”

“It is improbable that results would vary to a significant degree.” “It’s called blind optimism for a reason, SAM.”

Behind her, the door hisses open and her heart rate spikes when she hears Jaal say, “As I expected. Dr. T’Perro--”

Jumping up again so fast, the crates nearly shift and topple beneath her, she cuts him off with a series of silent but frantic gestures that she can only hope will transcend language barriers. Judging by the bemused expression he fixes her with, they don’t, but at least they distract him long enough for the door to close, which means she’s safe. Lexi is especially meticulous about giving Jaal his space while they develop trust. It’s very considerate. Se-ah would do the same if not for Maggie and the fact that he’s yet to actually ask her to leave despite her constant reminders that he can and should do so whenever he wants.

“I know Lexi is looking for me,” she explains. “She's trying to get me to rest up before we leave the Faroang system and I’d really, really like it if she didn’t find me working in here.”

“I see. Far be it from me to come between a woman and her--what is it you call this device again?” He’s referring to the tech bench.

She grins, leaning back against the bench and giving the top a loving pat. “Maggie. Or Mags. Margaret only when I’m mad at her.”

“That’s right. Well, you and your beloved Maggie have my discretion.”

There’s a shadow of a laugh in the rumbling depths of his voice, wedged up against his clipped enunciations. She can’t tell if he’s teasing or not. Palms on the tech bench behind her, Se-ah tilts her head to the side and purses her lips in thought.

“You promise?” The laugh startles out of him. “Must I pledge an oath of secrecy?”

“Nothing so cloak-and-dagger...er--” she pauses to gauge if the idiom needs explanation but he seems to get the gist well enough. Interesting . “Anyway, no. No oaths of secrecy. Just your basic angaran equivalent of a pinkie promise.”

He tips her down a look that she can practically feel thrilling up from the base of her spine. Well, that’s... distracting.

“I’m not sure there is one.” He steps closer and holds up his hands as if to say ‘See? No pinkies’

“On Havarl, we do have a customary...swear of sorts, a type of bioelectric pulse that reaffirms and seals a promise.”

“That’s fascinating.” Se-ah straightens up and holds out her hand between them, folding all her fingers down over her palm except for her pinkie. “But a bit difficult for me to manage. We’ll have to improvise. Just use your thumb.”

He smiles softly, eyes alive with barely-constrained curiosity, and does as she asks, copying her motion but leaving his thumb out. She hooks her pinkie around it and waits for it to crook in kind.

“Alright. So that’s ours, now you do yours.”

Jaal hesitates but after a second, a tingling warmth reverberates over her skin and half the muscles in her hand contract and flutter all at once. There’s no pain, just warmth, and the juddering muscular spasm. But a second goes by and it starts to tickle a bit--a lot. She pulls away before she can dissolve into helpless giggles and kneads out the residual tingling with her unaffected hand.

“Fascinating,” he says, still watching her hands with curious intensity. “I didn’t hurt you, did I?”

“No, no, it just really started to tickle. Trust me, I’ve had my share of electrical burns, I would’ve known if any real damage was happening.” His hand hadn’t been affected at all--how is that possible? Insulated skeletal muscle? First chance she gets, she’s asking Lexi for access to those angaran biology textbooks the Havarl researchers forwarded her. She also makes a note not to try any angaran promise methods near the chest--accidental cardiac arrest does not strike her as a good diplomacy-building exercise.

As if on the same logic train, Jaal says, “Your species is so incredibly delicate…how you survived long enough to develop spaceflight is miraculous.”

She laughs a bit at that but her eyes take on a thoughtful cast. “Delicacy can be strength in the right context, with the right threat of extinction looming in the background.”

“True, but what happens when you finally run into the wrong threat?”

It’s like Voeld is cramming itself into their conversation, filling up every empty space with ominous meaning. What will they find in the kett facility when they try to rescue Moshae Sjefa? The kind of threat where they walk away stronger or the kind where they don’t walk away at all?

“Then you hope your shields hold up,” she jokes weakly and all it does is make the planet-sized silence even bigger.

He can’t meet her eyes anymore and for a second she thinks she sees fear on his face. But it doesn’t look like it’s for him--it looks like it’s for her. Her and her delicate human body, trying to accomplish what no hardened angaran Resistance fighter could. Part of her wonders if he’d ever give such a look to Alec Ryder. It’s the part that tells her she’s not qualified, she’s only lucky and one day that luck is going to run out.

Maybe tomorrow will be that day.

Suddenly furious with herself--and with Jaal and her father while she’s at it--she recoils away and turns to plant her palms face down on the top of the tech bench. The omni-blade glitters in the air, too fragile, too delicate.

What happens when you finally run into the wrong threat?

Her eyes go wide.

“Shielding!”

Jaal clearly thinks she’s in the grip of a mental breakdown judging from the startled look of alarm on his face when she turns back around to face him. It’s one of his best looks yet, she wishes she could snap a picture of it for posterity. But there’s no time for any of that.

“I’ve been going about it all wrong, trying to find a material that would work at the right temperatures when this whole time I should’ve been designing a way to shield the blade from the snap freeze the same way I shield myself from it!”

It doesn’t take him long. At this point, he’s already almost as familiar with omni-tool modifications as she is. The look of alarm is gone and the one that replaces it is so much better that the elated thrill of discovery careening through her veins pales in comparison to the rush pounding up from her toes and fingertips to leave her dazed and blinking back the sudden dazzle of overhead lights.

“That’s very clever.”

SAM disagrees. “Pathfinder, the logistics of enclosing a kinetic shield inside another on this scale--” “Are going to be a nightmare, yeah SAM, I know. But we’re on the right track. We’ll start on it first tomorrow.”

“I’d like to help--if I could,” Jaal offers. “There are other possible applications for the concept that intrigue me.”

She can’t stop grinning. “I’d love your help.”

[dulcidyne]

[ME:A] Experiments in Diplomacy: Testing

There’s nothing in the Interspecies Diplomacy subsection of the Initiative handbook that covers sharing a tech lab with an angara who can kill her in her sleep. She knows, she’s read every page. Twice. //Jaal x Ryder // SFW // 2023 words // Pre-Voeld Spoilers // Ao3 Link Previous chapters: [1][2][3] Inertial dampeners kick in the moment the Tempest drops out of FTL on the fringe of the Nol system and a discordant metal warble shudders through the frigate, plucked from every bulkhead and bolt by invisible fingers of momentum. Se-ah stops talking. All it takes is one mechanical failure. One corroded mass effect field generator, one microscopic hull fracture, one warped bolt. And then, with no warning beyond the ominous groan of the hull, the ship would shear apart like tinfoil and spill all of them out to asphyxiate in a beautiful ocean of starlight.

It won’t happen. SAM once gave her the infinitesimal probability of spontaneous hull failure down to all 23 decimal places. There are backup systems for the backup systems, sensors and alarms and pre-flight scans that would catch any corrosion, fracture, and warp accumulated over time. In reality, it wouldn’t be one mechanical failure, but hundreds. But her heartbeat still picks up and her breath is coming faster and harder. Adrenaline builds up on her tongue, a tingling acidic zip. She grins.

“Alright ground team. Mission ready in the hour, we make planetfall in thirty,” she says and SAM transmits her voice to the ship-wide comm.

“Stop grinning, you maniac.” Liam elbows her in the side. His lopsided smile is straight of out Scott’s playbook of sibling affection and it’s both comforting and painful to see. Their personalities are a lot alike and she has to stop herself from indulging in too many comparisons--they aren’t fair to Liam or to Scott.

“Don’t worry, I’ll take good care of Maggie,” Liam says, misinterpreting her pained wince. The stroke he gives the tech bench is downright provocative and she slaps it away with a laugh.

“You taking care of Mags means you not touching her. I just finished fixing all her settings after the last time.”

“Yeah, yeah.You’re in an exclusive relationship with a machine, you do know that right?”

“I’m just giving Lexi interesting material for her next paper.”

Liam laughs and backs towards the door, still facing her when it opens up. “Keep telling yourself that. You’re the only one who believes it.”

Jaal steps inside behind him and Liam thumps him on the back as he walks past. “Hey Jaal. You stay safe down there too. Talev do shena.”

Stunned silence descends between the three of them. Jaal halts, momentarily taken aback, Se-ah bites back a breath and Liam’s gaze swings between the two of them, questioning until her laughter finally bursts out of her. She has to grip the edge of the tech bench, she’s laughing so hard.

“What? I just said good luck.” “That is not what you said,” she informs him between gasps, bringing a hand up to wipe a tear gathering at the corner of her eyes. Her grasp on Shelesh is feeble but she’s well beyond Liam and most of the crew. When it comes to languages, she’s a fast learner, having grown up in a household with a family member whose birth pre-dated infant translator implants. She also has the benefit of peppering their resident language expert with questions at every odd hour. And an AI that can inform her when he is pulling one over on her.

It’s no surprise when this revelation rolls off him, or when the grin darting up in the corner of his mouth has the air of begrudging admiration. The thing she loves best about Liam is that he’s not picky about which end of the joke he ends up on. He likes a laugh and doesn’t take ones at his expense too seriously ( not one of Scott’s fortes she reminds herself).

“Alright, alright. Jaal, I’ll be sure to pay that forward when you get back.”

Jaal doesn’t laugh, offer up a piece of deadpan wit, or turn around. Instead, his shoulders bunch up, drawn tight beneath the fluttering line of his rofjinn . He nods as if he hasn’t heard a word and makes his way to the desk where a new rifle mod is still open and in scattered pieces.

Se-ah and Liam exchange a glance and Liam soundlessly mouths the word ‘nerves’ before his mouth flattens into the facial equivalent of a shrug. She chews on her bottom lip in thought.

“I’ll let you finish your checks,” Liam says to her after a long pause. He throws in a good-natured wave on his way out the door. “ Talev do shena.”

It’s a valiant effort to lighten the mood back up again but it doesn’t work. Her adrenaline high is gone, leaving her with all the gut-churning, wobbly-kneed side effects. Se-ah bites down the last of her nutrient bar to get the sour taste off her tongue but her mouth is still too dry and it’s all she can do not to choke on the crumbling bits of artificially flavored ‘berry pie’ that taste a lot more like chemical cleaner than fruit filling.  

Hazarding a glance towards Jaal, she realizes there is nothing she can say to defuse the fraught emotion radiating up from him like a nimbus of dark energy. If Liam can’t get him to crack a smile, there’s no way she can, so for now she leaves him to finish piecing his mod together and picks back up on her own pre-mission rituals.

The new hardsuit gets five thorough scans with her omni-tool to map structural weak points in the ablative plating. Sometimes the fabricators make errors and she’s uneasy at the thought of going into the field with a brand-new suit but the alternative is braving -40 degrees C in her just her underlayer. All five come up normal, no chance a solitary shot to the center of her chest is going to shatter the whole plate in one go.

Because long-range scans indicate Voeld is a winter wonderland from Dante's 9th circle of hell, she triple checks the flexweave too--a single rupture will kill her suit’s thermoregulatory capacity and drain her power cells in minutes. The power cells themselves get their own scans plus a handful of functionality tests and she checks her shield mod housing and connections so many times she loses count.

Every scan, every test and the voice in her back of her head telling her that she’s not qualified, she’s just lucky , gets a little quieter. It won’t shut up completely, she knows that by now. But it gets easier to ignore it and pretend she’s the same person she was before her dad snapped his helmet on over her head--the Se-ah Ryder who chased her adrenaline high all the way down to solid ground with the knowledge that she’s got this (jet malfunction and all) ... and then hours later, asphyxiated in the thin atmosphere of Habitat 7, slipped into unconsciousness in 15 seconds flat, and died. Pretending to be a dead woman has its benefits.  Being able to choke down the raw, grasping panic that comes with standing on the universe’s invisible scales every waking moment and wondering how, how, how is she ever going to compensate for the monumental weight of Alec Ryder’s life is just the biggest one.

Se-ah takes a shaky breath and gusts out a distracted hum while she works. The ship rumbles again as the reverse thrusters kick in, slowing their acceleration to Voeld and breaking her out of the methodical trance her pre-mission ritual lulls her into.

Jaal is still in the corner but he’s finished with the rifle mod and now he’s turning something over and over in his hands. Silver flashes Morse code flickers between his massive fingers and before she knows it, she’s beside him and peering over his shoulder.

“What’s that?” Her question doesn’t break through his scrutiny but his hands pause and unfold to reveal a piece of metal with a forked end. She stares down at it blankly.

“Do you sew Ryder?” The question is a soft reverberation in the still air.

She shakes her head but he’s not looking at her, he’s still looking at the metal prong, so she adds,“No.”

“Ah. Well, this tool is what we call sahet. It allows you to unmake a stitch. But more often, we use the word for another purpose. When our loved ones die, when they are taken from us, this is the word we use. It...means to be removed. Unmade.”

Silver catches the light, throws it back in slow, hypnotizing arcs.

“The first thing Moshae Sjefa taught me was that there was a time when our word for death was sahet talesana, which means to unmake a stitch so that it can be sewn again. Creation through destruction. But talesana was stolen from us and it was stolen so long ago, few remember what was lost. The Moshae...finds her purpose in remembering not just who we’ve lost but what we’ve lost in the hope that someday we can begin anew. She safeguards talesana for all angara.”

His voice, the deep, rumbling glide that shapes every word with care and consideration, falters as if his admiration, love, and devotion for the Moshae and her purpose are rocks pinning it down. He struggles for a moment to speak despite their crushing bulk.

“We cannot lose her.” He looks up at her then, watery shadows of grief rippling in his blue vitriol eyes. The last time she saw eyes like that, mom’s illness was breaking over the horizon of the distant future to swallow up the present. It feels the same now as it did then: like she’s a clumsy intruder stumbling from the safety of the shallows without any idea how to navigate her way through deeper waters.  But instead of taking one faltering step back, this time she plants her feet against every panicked instinct to run and drops her hand to rest--tentative at first, then firm--on his left shoulder.

“Jaal.” Determination threads conviction through her voice. “I’ll do whatever it takes to help you find her and bring her back.”

Her promise gleams in the air between them like a string of platinum pearls. Weighty. Unbreakable. She doesn’t have her father’s genius or training or strength but flawed and fragile as she is, she’s not going to let that stop her. She’ll do everything to tip the scale back where it belongs. For Jaal. For the Moshae. For the colonists still in their cryopods waiting for a home. For everyone.

A massive palm presses down against her knuckles as his right  hand drops the tool and crosses up to envelop her own. Subtle pressure conveys a dizzying array of emotions too numerous and ephemeral to name. Fleeting, elusive impressions stipple like Braille over her knuckles. She had no idea--no clue that a touch could say so much and she wonders if she can pick up on the vocabulary of personal contact as well as she picks up on spoken languages. Right on the heels of that thought is the image of his bare skin beneath her fingertips and a not-at-all-unpleasant heat travels up from the base of her spine.

Unaware of the visual flashing through her mind, Jaal considers her sudden flush. The weight of his hand vanishes but before she can mourn the loss, the backs of his fingers brush hers. It’s more whisper than touch but she feels it like a burn.

“I've never met anyone like you, Se-ah Ryder.”

“Oh. Well.” Happiness expands in her lungs and a nervous laugh bubbles up despite her best efforts. She doesn’t quite know what to do with that look of his, the one she was so sure only hours ago, was the result of a morbid fascination for the strange and the hideous. Now she’s less sure. Much less. Uncertainty jabs an elbow into her stomach and she tries to cover for her inexplicable laugh with a joke and a smile that’s a cross between a wince and a grin.

“When you get the chance, you should swing by the Milky Way. There's millions just like me over there.”

Jaal’s chuckle booms out, far louder and far more amused than her lame attempt at a joke merited. “I doubt that very much.”

[dulcidyne]

[ME:A] Experiments in Diplomacy: Observing

There’s nothing in the Interspecies Diplomacy subsection of the Initiative handbook that covers sharing a tech lab with an angara who can kill her in her sleep. She knows, she’s read every page. Twice. //Jaal x Ryder. SFW. 1505 words// Pre-Voeld Spoilers// Ao3 Link  Previous chapters: [1][2]

By the time she wrests an eyelid open the armor fabricator’s incessant beeping gives one last obnoxious chirp before falling silent, apparently satisfied.  Burrowing her face back into her folded arms to block out the light is a futile effort and her disgruntled groan fans humidity over the cool gloss of tech bench. There’s no use in chasing the last elusive scrap of rest. She’s awake now. Mostly.

Se-ah huffs another breath and straightens up slowly to a chorus of synovial joint pops and aching muscular creaks that make her feel every bit of her 6oo-some-odd years. The lights of the tech lab smear into hazy, multicolored coronas and she squints groggily, dragging her hand down over her face to knead circulation back into her cheek. A monster of a yawn pulls at her jaw and it isn’t until her mouth is grotesquely agape that she locks eyes with Jaal from between the vee of her fingers.

He’s close, leaning forward over the tech bench, reaching out, his hand hovering near her shoulder. Grogginess evaporates off her synapses in the moment it takes to register his proximity. As close as they are, she can make out tiny flecks of lavender flashing in the vivid, variegated blue of his eyes. For one tilting, disorienting second, she’s five all over again, growing her gardens of copper sulfate crystals in their stainless steel rice bowls (Halmonee had not been happy when she found out where they’d all gone off to) and watching, rapt, as faults and facets glitter violet, cobalt and cerulean when the light hits them just right.

It takes her way too long to register the expression on his face. When she does, her mouth snaps shut with an audible molar on molar click.

Exhibit A: Milky Way human. Behold the red-rimmed, sleep-swollen eyes; the ashen skin; the disheveled ruff of hair.

It’s the sort of intense fascination people reserve for things that are shockingly hideous--a mix of curiosity, awe, and utter bafflement. Given the looks and comments she received during her brief parade through Aya, she already knows there’s a huge gulf between their respective beauty standards, but she suspects her appearance is at new lows even with that already taken into consideration.

His eyes flicker over her face. “Strange. Human skin appears to be more pliant than I initially suspected...and…” He focuses on her nose. “Shinier.”

Shiny? She flinches away from the scrutiny, hand fanning across her face in the vain attempt to screen it from him. There’s no need, the rapt light in his eyes flickers out and he draws back his hand, violet stippling over his cheekbones. She’s too busy keeping her face from overheating to analyze what it might mean.

SAM saves her from further embarrassment by announcing. “Pathfinder. ETA to the Nol System is now four hours, forty-three minutes.”

Four hours. That means she slept through the stop in Sabeng system to discharge the FTL drive in Pas-13’s magnetosphere. It also means her new hardsuit should be--ahhh, the obnoxious beeping makes sense now.

“I was about to wake you. The armor fabricator has finished with your hardsuit,” Jaal says and his face is as unreadable as it was his first day on the Tempest.

She frowns at that and at the halting reserve in his tone, recognizing both for the distance he’s all but forgotten about maintaining lately. Judging by the regretful twinge at the corner of his mouth--there and gone in a blink--he doesn’t care for it any more than she does.

‘I’m not very good about being careful.’  

No, he really isn’t. It’s clear that he thinks he should be keeping her and the rest of the crew at an arm’s length more than actually wanting to at this point. The trust isn’t quite there yet, as much as they’d like it to be, and historical precedent has taught him what he risks when he lets his guard down around aliens. She gets it, she does, and his reluctant lapses back into careful don’t hurt her.

But she sees the frustrated sag of his massive shoulders as he turns away from her and knows that it hurts him.

Which doesn’t sit well with her. At all. Without a word, he retreats back to the corner with his cot and the desk, a flicker of blue illumination indicating that he’s already fiddling around with her double shielding concept.

Lexi would insist on leaving the room and giving him time to sort out whatever he’s feeling. And she probably should. It’s not like she doesn’t have years of experience being Alec Ryder’s daughter to fall back on. The one and only time she saw her dad cry, she immediately ran out of the room and they were both more than happy to pretend the whole thing never happened.

Except…

Except she can’t imagine Jaal going into a dim room to privately express his grief over his dying wife as if his emotions are something to be hidden away. She can’t imagine he’ll ever have a son who will hurl the accusation that he is a man who ‘would sooner be tortured by Batarians than talk about feelings with his children’. Her dad’s self-imposed isolation suited him just fine where Jaal’s seems to abrade more and more each day, a slow but painful erosion she can sometimes hear in his voice and see on his face.

She doesn’t go.

“Hey, Jaal...can I ask you something?” Husky from her nap, her voice comes out thin and reedy as smoke.

“We won’t know ‘til you try.”

She didn’t plan far enough ahead to actually think of something to ask. It doesn’t matter anyway,  the door hisses open and Cora strides into the lab with a biohazard bag in hand. In the bag is a metal container, its lid obscured with a nubbly rind of bioluminescence. Cora holds it at an arm’s length. Which...considering what it is, is smart.

“Ryder. Mind explaining this?”

“I--”

“Tell me you didn’t store a sample of the slime mold on Havarl that ate a hole into your hardsuit in the bio lab.”

“I followed all the containment protocols. I thought it would be fine as long as I sterilized the container first so that it wouldn’t have a food source.”

Clearly, she thought wrong. Behind her, Jaal remarks, “Depriving goshaeva of food was your first mistake.” Despite the baleful glower from Cora, she dares to quip over her shoulder. “Now you have input? I thought biology wasn’t your thing.”

Jaal comes up to stand by the bench to tip a pointed look down at her. “Clearly...it isn’t yours either.”

Pushed past her limit, Cora works her jaw before asking slowly, “Is this the only one?”

“Yeah. I took the scraping from my hardsuit before we sterilized it.” And then incinerated it. And then tossed the container of still-smoldering ash out the cargo bay doors and into a clump of Havarl ferns.

“Good, then I only have one thing to throw out the airlock…”  It’s obvious Cora would sorely like that one thing to be Se-ah. But, ever the professional, she leaves it unsaid and exits the tech lab as fast as possible.

Feeling Jaal’s gaze on her, Se-ah glances up to catch it before asking, “Goshaeva... does that mean anything?”

“The unstoppable hunger.”

“Oh. Creepy.”

“It is relatively harmless so long as it has something to feed on--bacteria, yeasts, molds--but without food, it begins to spore. As your hardsuit learned, the spores are capable of degrading most materials after direct, prolonged contact.”

She fires off a mental ‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’ to SAM but whatever the AI says to defend himself is lost when Jaal brushes his hand against her shoulder.

His palm is massive, warm and strange. But she finds that she likes the way his jointed fingers cup against the line of her shoulder blade, encompassing the full curve with ease. The touch is friendly and fleeting. She feels it all the way down to her toes.

“What in the stars possessed you to take a sample of such a thing after seeing what it could do?”

There’s that look again, the baffled curiosity and awe. She runs a hand through her hair and his eyes track the movement with a sniper’s precision.

“I wanted to know how it managed to eat away at all those compressed layers of ceramic. Do you know, is it some kind of highly acidic spore capsule? Do you think we could synthesize it? It…” She shrugs her shoulders, sheepish, remembering that he is the wrong person to ask.

“And it looked really...fascinating...beautiful, actually, in a weird, ‘could horribly kill me’ kind of way. I couldn’t just leave it, if that makes sense?”

Her shoulder is tingling, mapping out the outline of his palm as if the pleasant weight of it is still resting there.

“Yes.” He exhales softly before saying with no small amount of humor, “You really are a brave woman.”

[dulcidyne]

Experiments in Diplomacy: Compiling [8/?]

There’s nothing in the Interspecies Diplomacy subsection of the Initiative handbook that covers sharing a tech lab with an angara who can kill her in her sleep. She knows, she’s read every page. Twice. (A collection of in-between vignettes from the Tempest tech lab) 

//Jaal x Ryder // Humor. Romance. SFW // Previous chapters: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] or read on Ao3

Somewhere along the way to age seven, in Citadel docking bay 223, Se-ah Ryder decides crying, hugs, tantrums, and other public displays of emotion are things she has outgrown. Perfunctory, precise, she shuts them away as if embarrassing emotional habits can be sealed into donation boxes for young needy children in the Lower Wards like her half-melted asari dolls.

Donated or lost, the box she puts them in stays shut. She doesn’t cry when they pay their respects to her grandmother’s urn at the columbarium. Or, much later, in another docking bay, when Scott waves goodbye as he ships off for Arcturus. She doesn’t cry the first time Iraenya plays down their relationship to her colleagues, embarrassed and ashamed.  And when her mother dies, she takes a page out of her father’s book and finds a hospital supply closet and stifles her tears into her shirt collar.

It stays shut, that is, until now. Until twenty-eight uninterrupted minutes of sobbing into Jaal’s chest, followed by forty-one additional minutes of sporadic weeping interspersed with flailing grasps at composure. So, obviously, there is only one logical conclusion to make.

“Just run them again,” Se-ah hisses.

“Once again, Ryder, my scans do not detect any pathologic neurological patterns outside of baseline variation.”

She woke up to the dim ambient glow of the powered-down machine displays running through their background system scans, half-reclining in Jaal’s arms, in his cot, having cried herself to sleep in his embrace  like an infant--that alone is an abnormality. She doesn’t understand why SAM is having difficulty with the concept.

“Outside of baseline,” she pauses, the gnarled tangle that is her hair fluttering as Jaal’s snores gust over her head. It tickles her temples but she doesn’t want to dislodge the warm arm banding around her shoulders to brush it back. “Wait, SAM, does that mean you normally detect pathologic patterns?” “It exceeds my functional parameters to parse this data into a clinical diagnosis. It would be unethical to make an attempt. Dr. T’Perro would undoubtedly provide better insight.”

Maggie’s lights pulse unhurried staccato patterns from the corner. Se-ah stiffens in Jaal’s loose embrace, indignant. “ Unethical. You’re an AI integrated into my entire body. Little late to be worried about ethics isn’t it?”

“A relevant point. I additionally lack subjective expertise. My data collection is limited to two genetically similar individuals. It is therefore relatively impossible for me to extrapolate what is normal and abnormal outside of overt structural dysfunction.”

“Further,” SAM says, “I am not an inert observer. It cannot definitively quantify what impact my integration and ongoing observation and interaction has had on your baseline neurological state.”

Disquieting. Se-ah stills and attempts to parse this new revelation while Jaal’s chest rumbles against her ear like the purr of a massive but very contented kitten. It’s nice. She wishes she were still half asleep and allowed to enjoy it and not awake and mortified over her predicament. Mortified and now, thanks to SAM, horrified.

“So not only can you not tell me if my brain is broken, you’re also saying that just by being in my head, you’re changing how it works and doing so in a way that you lack the ability to detect? Like some kind of quantum observer effect?”

SAM doles out a calculated pause for her benefit. All his pauses are for her benefit as he processes information in nanoseconds, but this one feels especially so. A pity pause. Bad news pause.

“Correct.”

“Great,” she mutters, “I’m Schroedinger’s basketcase.”

“My scans do detect significant decreases to harmful neurological metabolites and reduced cortisol levels...likely the product of sufficient rest.”

So that’s what it is. No creaking limbs, phantom aches or raw fatigue scraping the inside of her eyelids raw. A loose, shivery sensation clings like mist in her chest. It feels like a lungful of the air on Mr. Orleal, saturated in starlight and the ozone tingle of the eezo deposits under the lake.

Melatonin has nothing on Jaal. Lexi would be thrilled. Happiness flutters against her ribs. She hides her smile against the vast sloping ridge of Jaal’s alien chest even though there’s no one else there to see how foolish it looks. A familiar scent tickles her nose and she sniffles back a sneeze. He smells warm and herbal, like grapefruit orchards and Earth sunsets--carnelian, blush,and gold-- if Earth sunsets prickled in her sinuses like wasabi.

As far as smiles go, this one caught on the precipice of a sneeze, feels the stupidest.

“Pathfinder, if you have a moment, I would like to discuss some of the data I obtained earlier…”

The tentative flutter of joy in her chest curls inwards on itself, recoiling. She screws up her face, tipping her head back over Jaal’s arm, his r ofjinn bunching up against the tiny hairs at the nape of her neck.

“SAM, I don’t want to waste all this beautiful mental clarity on parsing out my emotional breakdown.”

It’s not fair and she regrets saying it. He provides more than his share of explanations for her and this is supposed to be a reciprocal relationship after all.

“That classification is interesting, Pathfinder. Noradrenaline phasic signalling was decreased, indicating the absence of a stress response. You rate the subjective experience, however, as a negative one?”

Half the words don’t even sound familiar. Despite being the daughter of a neuroscientist, she picked up precious little on the subject. Latching on to what she understands, she attempts an answer.

“No. Not negative. The opposite, I guess?”

“I see.”

She absurdly pictures SAM fitting the L of his imaginary thumb and pointer finger to his imaginary chin in a gesture of academic interest. Her father used to do that, unwittingly providing Scott with ample ammo for his ‘Alec Ryder, mad scientist’ impressions.

“This supports my observations of the intense activity within the mesolimbic circuit--”

Se-ah winces. “You know, it’s pretty weird to hear all the gory details.”

“I do not comprehend the discomfort.” SAM states, an echo of her father’s scientific fascination faint in the synthetic voice modulation. Her own imagination, she’s sure. “Your emotions are best described as the limited interpretation of this signalling process.”

For some indefinable reason, she bristles.

“Maybe technically, but...it was this amazing, overwhelming experience and it didn’t feel limited . It felt...immense. Bigger than anything. Like I couldn’t possibly keep it in without bursting and then I did burst and apparently that looks like a lot of crying.”

Ugly crying. There was a not-small-amount of snot involved.

“It’s more than mesolimbic circuits,” she persists, words coming faster and her voice tightening,  “Sometimes things are more than their physical, observable state. When I’m on a summit, what I experience isn’t just snow and stars and rocks...it's…well I wouldn’t bother with it if that was all I got out of it. Look, I don’t think I could ever explain it in a way you’d be able to understand.”

The channel goes silent, longer than the normal exaggerated pauses SAM inserts into his responses. The silence is deafening on the heels of her tirade. As if he’s...affronted.

“Thank you Ryder.” SAM says at last. Clipped and professional. Is it her imagination or is it too professional? If there were such a thing? “I will attempt an analysis with this feedback in mind.”

Se-ah nods, unnecessarily given that it is SAM, her heart sinking. Who knows what havoc a peeved AI could wreck in her brain, apparently without either of them any the wiser? And if she can’t explain it to SAM she doesn’t know how she’s supposed to explain what happened to Jaal. Not that she didn’t try before, during all the sobbing, but it was impossible to get anything out that wasn’t ‘I’m fine, I just...’ before dissolving into tears again. He didn’t press her for more.

But maybe now that she isn’t an emotional wreck, he might. Whether she has answers is less certain.

‘Sorry, SAM says you overloaded my mesolimbic circuit and that it’s all very scientific and reasonable and I’m not crazy. Or I might be. Have you heard the human folk tale about the cat?”

Awful. The shivering sensation in her chest unfurls again and spreads out into her fingers. She furrows them into the crease of Jaal’s side and the cot, letting his warmth soothe the trembling overtaking her frame. His arm wraps tighter reflexively. This is the sort of moment she wants to soak in, slow, like sunlight filtering through leaves stippling ancient Morse-code patterns over her face. Eyes closed, she inhales and vague memories sift warm impressions on the backs of her eyelids.

Hands, scarred and calloused and massive sweeping soft, reassuring circles against her back. His chin on the top of her head, her face tucked into the graceful sweep of his neck where a crook would be on hers. A low thrum: his voice, unintelligable, but soothing. A musical hum buzzes through the air.

Se-ah sighs and blinks her eyes open to glance up. He’s still deep asleep, snoring away. A hazy, contented smile gathers at the corners of his mouth and makes him look, for all the universe, like someone having a pleasant dream.

Despite spending the vast majority of her waking moments on the ship in his makeshift bedroom, she’s never seen him this way. The quiet of the ship is unsettling, he claims. Unlike his naps on the NOMAD, the only sleep she sees him take on the ship is fitful, almost violent--covers twisting, his hands clutching, face grimacing, the names of the lost wrenching out of him as he jolts awake. But even the sleep he snatches on the NOMAD doesn’t look this peaceful. It takes him quick and fast, like something joyless and inevitable. She grimaces. Like death.  

Studying his lidded eyes, she shifts on the cot to lean her weight more on his chest and tip her head back, peering up at the sweeping planes of his cheekbones, the point of his chin, and the fine ridge of his brow. He’s beautiful. All angara are, to her eye-- all grace and noble carved profiles like ancient Athame sculptures given color, life, and a Romanesque bone structure. But Jaal’s beauty is sharper, more defined than anything out of asari or human antiquity. War and grief etch his face in a landscape of visible and invisible scars, throwing the softness that remains, obstinate and miraculous, in high relief. The softness is all she sees now.  It is the face of a man who dreams, hopes, composes poems and perfumes, and is always seeking, searching, finding bits of wonder. If it weren’t for the kett, this might always be his face and Andromeda would be a place where it would fit. The dreamer. The tinkerer. The explorer.

But the kett stole that place away from him. War is spare. Merciless. There is little room for anything else but soldiers. Se-ah bites the inside of her lip, hard. Jaal is the first to insist he isn’t much of a soldier.

She doesn’t realize the snoring stops until he, without bothering to open his eyes, asks, “Yes, Ryder?”

Chagrined and surprised over how close she’s gotten, she immediately jolts away. “You’ve been awake? How long?” The slant of his smile changes but his eyes stay closed, “Long enough. Were you under the impression that you were being discreet?”

Fair point.

“So why didn’t you say something?” “I was trying to sleep. Speaking seemed counterproductive.”

“Uh huh. To your eavesdropping, maybe.”

Jaal doesn’t look at her, on account of the fact that he’d yet to bother opening his eyes, but the resigned set of his shoulders conveys a beleaguered expression that comes with an air of ‘No, I don’t think I’ll even bother ’. It’s one he wears around Liam with regularity. “Please do not attempt to explain that one. If I cannot sleep I’d much rather occupy my mind elsewhere.”

He makes a point of settling further into the cot, the large divot his body forms in the fabric deepening. Maybe he’s trying to free up the arm underneath her she realizes, belatedly. Renewed mortification crowds up her neck and she coughs to clear her throat. “Oh, then I should...leave you to that then,” she says, cheeks burning as she draws back against the gravitational pull of his weight on the cot, narrowly avoiding toppling on top of him.

“Stay.” At last Jaal blinks open his eyelids, a slow reveal of vivid blue. He looks at her, uncharacteristically uncertain, before saying, simply, “If...you’d like. You could join me.”

She hesitates. “Join you--elsewhere?”

“No, just here.”

Somehow he feels...closer. Not physically. It’s as if the gap in the universe between them has vanished overnight. She’s no longer on the precipice, her thoughts and feelings a faint, distorted comm. She’s there , a few bare centimeters in front of him and he’s looking at her as if he can see every detail of her with absolute clarity. It’s dreamer’s look with a tinkerer’s focus and his eyes are luminous, twin helium nebulae lit from within with something like wonder. She mistook it for morbid fascination once. This time she knows better. He smiles as if he might laugh. Fond. Unbearably so. Her chest hurts to look at it.

“No idioms, nothing else. Just this. Right now.” The words linger, rippling against her skin in gentle, rumbling waves. Jaal crooks his pinned arm and brushes back the fluttering snarl of her hair.

A quiet bubble settles around the tiny cot, enclosing them within the warm, sunset smell of him. It feels safe. Like home. She doesn’t know the last time she felt those things. Not since-- It should be strange to find them here, an entire galaxy away, with an alien who openly spoke about killing her after they’d just met.

Jaal’s huff of a laugh skips across the quiet like a smooth stone on a lake surface. Something about it tells her he’s picked up on the precise turn of her thoughts--too perceptive by half. “You know, you are remarkably expressive. Almost angaran.”

She tucks her face into the slope of his neck and pulls a scowl, even though it isn’t an insult. The memory of her tragic poker loss to Gil is still all too fresh and she feels a little too raw, a little too exposed with nowhere to hide her vulnerabilities. Instead of answering, she buries a noncommittal sound into his bare skin.

He laughs again, rueful and soft. “It was a clumsy effort, but it was intended as a compliment. We are a vocal people. More than words and expressions. In addition to combative and deliberate communication uses, our bioelectrics have subtle subconscious patterns and pulses. I believe your hanar are similar, in the visible electromagnetic spectrum. It is difficult to suppress. Few have scrupulous reasons to try.”

His fused fingers twine into her hair. It seems a point of endless fascination for him. Even in the Milky Way, hair is something of a novelty.

“The emotions of those around us pervade all our senses. It saturates our lives. My first days on this ship were so...disorienting. I felt the absence keenly, like a limb lost in battle.”

Her scowl vanishes and she looks up to meet his eyes again. Of course, she’d suspected his trouble adjusting, but never knew the full extent. He kept so much hidden then. “It must have made it that much more difficult, deciding if you could trust us.”

Jaal laughs. It sounds pained. “Very. I learned to look harder, with time. There is a beauty in subtlety. Underappreciated among my people, but I’ve grown quite fond of it. Humans were easier. And then, there was you.”

“About as subtle as a flaming ship crashing on your planet?”

Genuine mirth threads into his laughter, his eyes tracing over her upturned face. “Yes. An apt comparison. Vivid, exciting… deeply alarming to some.”

She brightens and his smile deepens. The hand at her temple curls against her skin to brush a soft line over her cheek with the backs of his knuckles.

“It made trusting you more easy than wise, considering the risk.”

“I’m sure Evfra disapproved,” she says.

“Of course. Evfra is a cautious strategist. He despaired of me.”

Jaal leans his cheek against her head, looking off towards the dim ambient glow of the machines running through their downtime routines.

“My caution was always a feeble force and your face...says such beautiful things. I didn’t understand why you struggled  so desperately to hide them away.” He adds, blunt as ever, “Not... well, of course . But with an extraordinary amount of effort. I imagine it was exhausting. Inexpressibly painful. My heart ached just to see it.”

The corners of her eyes begin to prickle. Machine lights catch on the dust motes, adrift on the flickering electrostatic currents weaving around and between them, setting each pinpoint aglow like rippling eddies of distant stars.

“I thought the same about you, you know. Before we rescued the Moshae.”

Caution shackling his expressions and the strategic withdrawals into clipped one-word answers calculated to give as little away as possible. She’s more glad than she can say to have earned his trust and the chance to see his genuine self without the fetters of fear and uncertainty. He said getting to know her would be a gift and that is how knowing him better feels--like the best gift she didn’t even know to ask for.

He nods. “Yes. I wept for joy that she was safe and for the wrenching horror of what we learned that day but also I wept for my freedom from my own fears. Escaping them was...liberating despite my grief. Cathartic. I think perhaps you felt something of that same freedom. Earlier, when you cried.”

Catharsis. Freedom-- but from what? She wasn’t on a diplomatic mission with alien intruders. She was just-- her . A touch-starved awkward hugger with a trigger-happy mesolimbic circuit. But, that feels insufficient as far as explanations go. Instead, she remembers Scott crying, wailing, hands fisting over his eyes. It’s gone. I have to find it. People are looking. Mom ignores them and kneels despite the crowd, attempting to soothe him. Alec Ryder’s stonefaced expression fractures into a grimace. Pained. He turns away. His hand presses down on her own small shoulder and squeezes. It feels like pride. She forces her chin to stop quivering. She won’t cry. Nothing will ever be okay and everything is wrong but she is Alec Ryder’s daughter and she is old enough to do that much.

A tear slips into her hairline and Jaal’s thumb rubs it away. Breath held, she reaches up between them to capture his hand in her own. His eyes are full of reflected stars, twin galaxies pulling her into their inexorable spin. At the point of her outstretched fingernail is a pinprick of light, fanning off, faintly luminous, refracting off her tears.Se-ah pauses, taken aback, blinking away the moisture collecting on her lashes. It’s not a trick of the light. Her fingertips are actually glowing. And, she realizes, the air is...humming.

“SAM, are we about to fry anything with this corona discharge?” she asks. All at once the air changes, the charged dust motes around them still and the lights on her fingertips flicker out. It smells and feels like a storm just swept out of the tech lab.

“Appropriate precautions have already been taken to accommodate non-combat angaran electromagnetic field manipulation, Pathfinder. Ozone levels are also within acceptable limits.”

Jaal coughs and looks away, suddenly awkward.  “Ahh...as I was saying, it requires some concentration to suppress.”

“Can you stop? Concentrating that is? It’s not as if--well, SAM said it wouldn’t hurt anything.”

Now that she’s paying better attention, she can feel the tingling pressure building and shifting around them. The hairs stand up on her arms. The air smells bright and clean. Light collects on her fingertips again. Faint, but visible. Se-ah laughs, delighted, and slowly bends her fingers, watching the blue flicker and reappear. Ionized plasma balancing on the edge of an electromagnetic field pierced by the short point of her nail. Hardly seemed subtle in her book. Little about him was.

“We call this St. Elmo’s Fire,” she tells him. “It was considered a good omen by ancient human voyagers.”

“Ah. I’m your good omen then?”

“Well, we haven’t crashed once since you got here.”

He brings his free palm to hers, one fused, two separate for her five. She adds, sincerely, “It’s beautiful. Does this happen to you a lot? I’ve never noticed before.”

“No. This is...it’s more. It is special. Explaining would be difficult. Clumsy. I cannot do it justice.”

Hands pressed together, his palm dwarfing hers, a swell of emotion courses through her and a stubborn tear traces down her cheek. She laughs and a sniffle turns it into a tremulous, hiccuping burst of happiness.

“Is there a word for it in Shelesh?”

“No,” he says simply. “There is just this.”

Churning waves of electrons are crashing against her fingertips, caught in the lunar pull of him. Everything dissolves in the watery film of tears and she’s floating, falling, swept by tidal forces into an endless depth of variegated blue. There can be no words, in Shelesh or any other language. But she knows anyway. Floating in an electron sea of his design, palms pressed, wrapped in his embrace--she knows exactly what he is saying.