Author Topic: Droplets on a Razor's Edge (Read 5507 times)

Daglobster · « **Reply #40 on:** February 27, 2020, 10:04:26 pm »

The very first thing he noticed was just how bewildered she looked, even to just have her arm stroked like that. That’s what he figured, although when she tried to link their fingers, only to be foiled like the webbing, a feeling of kinship came over him. Most of the time, when a stranger was touching him it was because they were trying to kill one another.

She pulled his hand into her cheek and his heart bled for her. The emotion was universal and he stroked her cheek as she leaned into it. He let his hand explore the shape of her head a bit, enchanted by those thrumming noises she made.

He stepped a bit closer to the tank, nearly chest-to-glass with it. He found himself drawn in, something about her voice, her eyes...

Then, she pressed up against the glass in search of his touch and while he didn’t startle he definitely wasn’t expecting her to just press up against the glass like that. Now that he had the opportunity to get a look at her, he noticed with a bright blush that the shape of her was quite feminine indeed.

“We’ll be safe, for now,” he whispered, taking a moment to gaze up into her eyes. He squeezed her hand back.

“Where we’re going, there’s an old doctor there. Nobody knows we’re friends, so it’ll be a start,” he said. He lifted his hand again and he stroked her cheek again, taking a moment to get a closer look at her hair and satiate his curiosity.

DragonSong · « **Reply #41 on:** February 27, 2020, 10:38:43 pm »

Her hair didn’t feel quite like hair, as his fingers moved through it. The incredibly thin barbels were a little bit coarser than human hair, and didn’t lay quite the same way: just a little too thick, a little too wild around her face, even dripping wet. And as they operated rather like a cat’s whiskers—or a catfish’s, more accurately—they were actually sensitive to touch. Not unduly so, but enough to earn another shiver as he explored.

“Safe...” Seexa repeated softly, almost sounding confused. Which she was, in a way; that word held almost no meaning for her, at least not one she’d ever had real experience with.

She frowned and sort of nuzzled her cheek into his hand. The metal was cool and smooth against her scales, but different from the glass. Oh, anything was better than the glass... “I want you...to be safe.” The words came slowly, puzzled out even as she said them. “But I—I can’t go. I can’t go with you.”

Her other hand tightened on the rim of the tank and she flicked her eyes down to glower at it. “Hate this,” she hissed suddenly, that low, rasping voice slipping dangerously toward a growl. “Hate this. Stuck. Always.”

She was shaking again, though this time it was clearly from sudden, impotent rage rather than the shock of his touch. It subsided surprisingly quickly though, and another sigh escaped her as she sort of slumped against the edge of the tank.

“...Wish I could stay with you,” she mumbled, eyes downcast. “But...if you say it is...safe. I trust you.” She looked up into his face again, and reached up to cover his hand with hers gently. After so long without any form of contact, she was loathed to give up even a fraction of it. “Can...can I...?”

She started to reach toward him, then hesitated, waiting for his permission.

Daglobster · « **Reply #42 on:** February 28, 2020, 11:50:18 am »

That was a surprise, to see anger on her face. Not that he didn’t think the gentle girl who’d been trapped in a tank her whole life would have her resentments, but seeing it twist her face like that affected him more than he thought it would.

“Hey, hey...” he started, and he took his hand off of her cheek to lay it on the hand tightening around the tank’s edge. Comforting her was the least he could do. Slumped down against the edge like that, she was closer to him, and when she reached out for him he just nodded and stepped a little closer.

“I’m not going to abandon you,” he started, and his hand rose back to stroke her head.

“I... I won’t.”

DragonSong · « **Reply #43 on:** February 28, 2020, 12:17:46 pm »

It wasn’t until he said it that she realized that was exactly what she’d been afraid he would do. When he spoke of a doctor, she’d—at least consciously—been more concerned that she wouldn’t be able to go with him to see whoever this doctor was, that she would be stuck in her tank while he walked into potential danger.

She hadn’t even realized that a part of her had been scared he would simply...go. Would get himself fixed, leave her somewhere he thought was safe, and then wash his hands of her.

Her face scrunched up a little bit, and it became abruptly clear that she was trying not to cry. Shakily, she reached out to mirror his hand on her cheek with her own. Water dripped down his face from the contact, but she kept her hand against his skin as long as he would allow. Her own head tilted further into his touch with a low, thrumming croon.

“But I can’t...I’m stuck,” she repeated softly, desolately. “What if you have to run again? What if the doctor is...what if you have to get away? I’ll—I’d keep you...I don’t want you...to get hurt again...because of me...”

The first phrases had tumbled out in a rush of emotion, but the last few trailed off into damning silence. She dropped her eyes again with a sigh.

Daglobster · « **Reply #44 on:** February 28, 2020, 07:27:42 pm »

He couldn’t deny that what she was saying rang with truth. He went silent, letting her words sink in even as her touch sent a shiver down his neck. It was cool and wet, but her touch was surprisingly soft as she stroked him in return. He expected her to be harder, slimier, but instead...

He leaned his head into her touch, not caring that it made water drip down the side of his head and onto his wounded body. It’d been a while since he felt comfort like this, and there was a sweet numbness that seemed to spread from her touch, taking away the aches and soothing the memory of the brief moment he’d spent without his pain regulator on.

“I can move you with the loader,” he offered, looking down at the machine he was haphazardly standing on to reach her easier. He was just as scared for the future as she was, but he could try to make her feel better. He came closer to her, letting his touch spread from her cheeks to her head, stroking fingers through her hair.

“And if we’re careful, we can hide out until I’m fixed and we can both leave this place forever.”

DragonSong · « **Reply #45 on:** February 28, 2020, 08:23:48 pm »

Seexa made a soft brrrp sort of noise, almost like a chirping cat, and tilted her head further into his hand, encouraging the attention. Her hair almost seemed to move against his fingers of its own accord, just for a moment: swaying and tangling gently before it settled down to frame her face again.

His offer to move her, to take her with him, made her chest feel oddly tight. She just looked at him for a few moments, her fingers stroking gently, curiously over his cheek and down to cup his jaw softly in her palm.

"You...sure?" She blinked, first one set of eyelids, then the second. "It will be...okay? If you take me?"

Her hand drifted back to his where he'd sort of braced himself against the tank, stroking her fingertips lightly over the chrome. "I want...I want to leave, Torien." She closed her eyes and pressed her face into his hand with a soft, shivering sigh. "I want to go away from here, I...I want to stay with you..."

Daglobster · « **Reply #46 on:** February 28, 2020, 10:26:05 pm »

Torien nodded, eyes widened from the movement of her hair against his fingers but otherwise more intrigued than unnerved. He couldn’t contain the little gasp that came out of him when she stroked his jaw. She’d find that the subdermal plates and bracings gave his jaw, chin, and cheekbones a hard, unyielding quality to them. The numbness spread to his throat and collar, and for once he couldn’t feel the pain in his throat as he spoke.

This was crazy. What he did was so crazy, and risky, and-and...

“I’m sure, it’s going to be okay,” he said, and he splayed his fingers and stroked her as she rubbed her face into his chrome hand. As far as he could remember, he’d used those hands to kill and main. They never really felt like a part of him until Seexa reminded him that he could still help, he could still be a person.

“It... when you touch me,” he started, and he would’ve said more, but then the ship’s console was beeping.

“Hold on, I have to land us.”

He gave her hair another stroke and offered her a warm smile, and just like that, he slipped away from her to return to the pilot’s seat.

DragonSong · « **Reply #47 on:** February 29, 2020, 06:27:46 am »

She nearly drew her hand back when he gasped, worried that she’d hurt him somehow. But he seemed alright—in fact he stroked the side of her face again, which she found she was really starting to enjoy—so she left her hand where it was a moment longer, exploring where flesh gave way to metal gently with her fingertips.

Then the beeping, and he pulled away to return to the controls. Seexa nodded, even though he wasn’t looking, and sank back down into the water again. She allowed herself to drift to the bottom of the tank, and her hand moved absently to play with the ends of her own hair as she settled close to the glass again, watching what he did with interest.

What had he been going to say? Did he not want her to touch him anymore? She wondered if she’d done something wrong...but he’d been so kind about it, and smiled at her like that, and she thought maybe that wasn’t the issue after all.

She didn’t say anything, just watched as he navigated the stolen ship in for a landing, black eyes wide and fascinated behind the glass.

Daglobster · « **Reply #48 on:** March 02, 2020, 01:01:10 am »

Torien guided them through Cancer’s interior. While it was sealed off from the outside, there was still enough space in the sprawling station’s interior for ships to fly. Towers, struts, and strips, all containing habitation blocks and starship bays. Nothing on Cancer was really developed with an overarching plan, new extensions and life support was constructed as needed by the populace and the result was an asymmetrical city that rose from the floor, hung from the ceiling, and went about every which way in between. He couldn’t help but take a glance back at Seexa and he smiled a little when he saw how engrossed she was in the sights.

Torien was looking for a different landmark, however, and when he saw a familiar looking slum with a prominent dome with hovering advertisements for sporting events such as hovercar races and cyborg fights.

“There, that’s the place,” he said, and he took a hand off the controls for a moment to point.

“We just need to stay quiet for a little, until the commotion dies down,” he said, and then took them in lower.

Thankfully for them, the goblinish junker he was flying was both small and trashy looking, so all it took to conceal it was a dark, garbage-filled underpass near the dome to hide it. He set the ship down as softly as he could, right on top of a trash pile. He hoped it’d be enough.

He set about turning the ship off and then stood. He stepped past the tank to glance about at the interior of the ship. There wasn’t really anything to sleep on, or look at really. There was a bathroom somewhere on the ship, he could smell it from here, and maybe one of those junk piles in the ship was concealing a chamber.

“I’m tired, Seex...” he murmured, and finally gave in and leaned against her tank. He turned the loader off, so that it could save power and set her tank down, and then sat down against the tank’s base.

Torien didn’t care, he was too fatigued. He’d spent the whole day fighting and taking a beating and that was before he’d been shot several times and then blasted with a rail-pistol.

Still, his smile was real as he put his hand on the glass for her.

“I think I’ll take a few hours to get some sleep. You should rest too,” he said, even as he slipped off his bloody shirt and bundled it together so he could lie on the metal floor and have something for his neck and head. He couldn’t hide the external reinforcements on his spine or the way his body looked sculpted and almost angular from the sub-dermal plating. Most of all, she could see that he was also wearing the bandages and wounds from his fights at the arena that day, including a long gash on his chest that looked healed and clean but still displayed the gleaming metal beneath his skin through the wound.

He moved a bit more onto his side and laid closer to her.

DragonSong · « **Reply #49 on:** March 02, 2020, 11:00:15 am »

Seexa shuffled back into a little ball at the floor of the tank as he set the ship down, wrinkling her nose a bit at the camouflage of the garbage around them, but she couldn't exactly complain. It would do better to hide them than nothing.

She watched with interest as the ship's systems began to shut down, a small part of her missing the flickering lights and dull humming of the engines--but she knew those too would easily give away their little hiding place.

When he allowed the loader to set down the tank she lurched slightly with the movement and had to brace her hands to either side; she could do it easily, her "home" wasn't even wide enough in diameter for her to stretch her arms out fully and touch either side. He settled down on the floor just beside her and she almost instinctively raised her hand to shadow his on the other side of the glass again.

"Sleep..." She encouraged him quietly...and she tried not to stare as he stripped his shirt. He looked...almost patchwork. Taken apart and put back together, but not quite cleanly. It made her chest and the pit of her belly ache.

When he shuffled to lay closer, she pressed her shoulder into the glass. Though she had been grateful for the four-inch barrier when they were being shot at, now she was suddenly irritated with it. She glanced up. The tank, settled on the floor, was not too much higher than the head of a tall man. Maybe...maybe she could...

She glanced at Torien again, then sighed. No. Best not. If it didn't actually work, there would be two of them in need of care--and her unable to even move to find it. She didn't want to burden him like that.

So she curled herself up in the bottom of the tank, resting her upper body on the coil of her tail, and pressed as close to her side of the glass as she could manage. Her eyes closed with a small sigh, and she allowed herself, finally, to rest.

Daglobster · « **Reply #50 on:** March 04, 2020, 01:07:03 pm »

Her encouragement was the last nail in the coffin for him and Torien nodded, mostly unaware of her plight save for how she looked at him as he stripped his shirt. He was used to the looks, but getting them from Seexa felt differently. It wasn't her fault, tenderness was something not really present in his life, not since the accident. He shifted fully onto his side to face her better and curled closer to the base of the tank. The warmth of its power source was actually fairly nice and he went so far as to lay his forehead against the glass.

"Yeah, I think I will," he whispered, but yet his eyes didn't close. Instead, he watched Seexa for a little, smiling at how oddly cute she looked all curled up and sleeping.

"Good dreams," he murmured, nigh inaudible and he finally found his rest with a smile on his face.

DragonSong · « **Reply #51 on:** March 04, 2020, 04:03:39 pm »

Dreams were strange--they almost always were, of course, but these felt...a little different. More frightening, but somehow more hopeful than she could ever remember too. Though she of course didn't know it, the markings along her body pulsed in a subtle, steady ripple of faint light as she dreamed, starting near the nape of her neck and flashing down her spine in a soft arc of blue before trickling out over her hips, her ribs and waist, and down her tail.

Without much room to move, she woke in essentially the same position in which she'd fallen asleep. Big dark eyes blinked open and she yawned, gills rippling, before pushing herself up a bit to look around.

Right. Still on the ship.

So yesterday had really happened then.

Seexa shook her head, feeling a little...unreal. As though she expected this to be the dream, and she was just waiting for it to end. "Torien..."

Her voice was low and rough again, nearly as rasping as when she'd first spoken to him. She tried to clear her throat, winced a bit, then tried again a little more successfully, "Torien, you...awake?"

Daglobster · « **Reply #52 on:** March 04, 2020, 05:58:12 pm »

When she awoke, she'd find him turned away from her, curled up tighter. Sleeping when all your limbs were made of metal was interesting. Usually they just lock up after you start drifting off, but Torien shivered and a cold sweat covered his body, making his chrome shoulders glisten with moisture.

Something about the wounded shoulder brought on an old memory. A bad fight, one that he won, but at a cost...

When she spoke a second time, it managed to wake him. He sprang up into a sit. The sleep hadn't done much to heal his crippled arm but he came up swinging with the other, sword fully extended. His serrated, alloyed teeth were bared, and his eyes had gone fully red as his scanners turned on. He was used to sleeping alone. Never anything a stricken mind could mistaken for a nightmare...

Like a whip, he struck, but as soon as he'd done so he stopped, and as his pupils slowly dimmed back down to his natural green the horror of what he'd almost done set in and his skittered back, muttering pitiful apologies as he slammed his back against the far wall and tried to hide himself and his shame.

He covered himself with his good arm, sword still drawn if only from the stress.

"No... no no Not... I didn't... Seexa..."

DragonSong · « **Reply #53 on:** March 04, 2020, 06:44:51 pm »

She cried out. She couldn't help it, it was instinctive--a prey creature's reaction to being trapped with a hostile predator.

But the tank shielded her as much as it caged her, and it only took her a few moments to realize that he couldn't actually get through the glass to hurt her, not swinging blindly as he was. It was only a moment more before she began to realize what had happened.

But by then he was already skittering away, looking stricken. She surged forward from where she'd automatically pressed back against the furthest part of the tank and placed both hands against the glass, tilting her head at him with a low, throbbing croon in the back of her throat.

"Okay, it's okay," she whispered, not even really deciding to speak the words. The just sort of...happened. "It's okay...you're okay... Safe here, we're safe. Remember?"

Daglobster · « **Reply #54 on:** March 06, 2020, 07:00:32 pm »

"I remember, I remember, just..."

He held himself a little tighter as he just shook. He'd gone into a state of boosted adrenaline, and even if it was for a second or two he still felt the effects of the crash when he came off of it so suddenly.

He nodded as she spoke, and when he finally lifted his head to look at her she'd see that his retractable visors had come out to cover his eyes behind a carbon glass shield, tinted red. Torien hated how it made him look like a robot, it covered the only human things he had left on his face.

"I'm sorry, I just... I thought I was somewhere else," he finally managed, and he uncurled. He shuffled towards her on his knees, pitiful and apologetic, and his combat features slowly retracted back into him.

He laid his hand on one of hers and rest his head on the tank.

"I'd never want to scare you, or hurt you."

DragonSong · « **Reply #55 on:** March 06, 2020, 08:56:33 pm »

"I...know."

Seexa tried for a smile. Her expression was still a little pinched, both with worry and the last dregs of instinctive wariness, but it was a smile. "I know...Torien. I know you wouldn't...hurt me."

Her eyes skated over him, taking in the gleam of metal so stark against what was left of flesh. She glanced up, then gave her hand a quick, firm press against the glass before uncurling herself from the bottom of the tank so she could rise up through the water and pull her head and shoulders free, leaning forward over the rim.

"Let me...see?" She reached down to him with one webbed hand. "You're shaking. I...want to help." She smiled again, soft and kind and sad. "I won't...hurt you, either. Promise."

Daglobster · « **Reply #56 on:** March 09, 2020, 10:05:38 pm »

That was nice, to have someone promise him something. He nodded against her tank and tightness ran through him when she told him that he was shaking. He tried to reel himself in with steady breaths, and he used his hand against the tank as support to rise to his feet and into her reach.

"I just need a moment..." he said, but he surrendered to her assistance nonetheless, eyes downcast and shoulders slumped.

"I... They make me fight. All that killing..." he said, and finally looked up to meet her eyes and didn't say much else, because her smile struck him deeply.

DragonSong · « **Reply #57 on:** March 10, 2020, 10:17:43 am »

It was still awkward to try to reach him, even when he stood up onto the loader to get closer to the top of the tank. The rim of glass dug into her belly and ribs uncomfortably as she leaned down, but she didn't paid it much mind.

Her hand came to cup his jaw, a few droplets running down her arm in spiraling rivulets until they reached him. Another low croon thrummed in her throat and she tilted her head at him, hair spilling forward over one shoulder.

"Not...your fault," she murmured, her eyes searching his. "I'm sorry. So sorry. Sorry they...hurt you. But it's...not your fault."

Daglobster · « **Reply #58 on:** March 10, 2020, 06:55:59 pm »

"No, never my fault. Never had a choice," he said, and he covered her hand with his own, giving her a smile, albeit a grim one. He could see her struggling with the rim of the tank, and his eyebrows knit with concern. He held her hand for a moment more before he took it off of his face.

"That looks uncomfortable," he said, and his expression turned sympathetic.

"You should sit tight. I need to find this doctor, and something to eat for you, too. Are you hungry?" he said. Now that he'd thought about it, her tank was open only because it was technically broken. How long had it been since someone actually fed her?

Did the tank feed her? Torien hoped so, he had no idea what it was she would eat.

DragonSong · « **Reply #59 on:** March 10, 2020, 07:11:29 pm »

Seexa winced a bit and glanced down at where the smoothed edge of the glass was digging into her ribs. With a sheepish sort of smile, she admitted, "Not...comfortable, really."

He pulled her hand away from his face and she sighed quietly, the sound instinctive more than anything else, and gave his fingers a quick, firm squeeze before she withdrew her hand completely. He'd stopped shaking, at least. That was good.

Her face brightened a bit at the idea of food. She'd been surviving off the micro-plankton in the tank--which gave it the greenish tint to the water--for nearly three days. "Yes, please. I'm...hungry," she said with a quick nod.

She probably could have gone a few more days without proper food, but it certainly wouldn't have been comfortable. In fact, she was starting to forget what it felt like to be comfortable, well fed and safe with enough room to do more than turn in tight circles in the water.