Space
Charon finds her in the captains room with the lights turned low and her body cradled in the alien bed. The lights pulse a soft yellow that makes her exposed arms look diseased when married with the bruises up and down her flesh.
She is a small woman, but when he leans against the door frame and watches her in the small alien bed, built much like a cocoon, it is even more apparent.
It looks like she took a wrench to the command controls. There is the vibrant light of exposed mechanics, mysterious mechanics, under torn white metal. A short spark ignites deep in the display. There must have been a part of her terrified at the idea of the bed engulfing her while she slept to risk electrocuting herself like that.
He is about to leave when she twists at the waist, her shoulders hitting the bed and her head rolling towards him. The torn blood-soaked linen around her head is gone and he sees the shaved portion curving on the right side of her scalp and the bare patch where they'd removed an eyebrow. The start of red, beaten skin fused with alien glue is only partially visible. She bears the same needle holes at her eyes that he does but his scar is larger by far. It is only her luck that her skin is so fair and smooth that her wounds appear more vividly than his own upon his patchwork hide.
He looks away from her body to her face after too long.
Her eyes - bloodshot, crusted with red around her lashes - terrifies him.
"Hey," she whispers. It does not escape him that she finally sounds scared. After everything her lower lip is finally trembling.
Instead of speaking, worried she might note the same emotion - new emotion he reminds himself - he merely nods. She does not need to hear him expressing his concern. It would do no good, only intensify her fear.
"How is Sally?" she asks.
"How are you?" he counters without thought, taking solace only in how emotionless he sounds. The fact that she would ask about the little girl's well being, as nothing can phase the child, tells him she is merely trying to deflect whatever she sees in his own eyes. Maybe she notes the concern. There is no distracting him when she looks as she does however.
Those eyes. They blink and he almost sees blood seep out like tears at their corners.
"Feel like my brain's been fucked with needles, same as you."
No, not same as him.
They gave something to her. They took something from him.
A vivid flash of memory grips him - of waking up, strapped to a standing table, his eyes sloshing in his eyes until his vision finally crisps upon a tray of wire worms swimming in blood and pink matter. He was terrified, floating in a wave of fear he'd never known. They'd ripped his programming from his skull and slapped in on a table for study, leaving him to free himself when the chaos started - to stare at his own torment...
They took something out of him, and he is worse because of it. He has to try to remain the same - emotionless. She knows more now, sees things he can't and senses...something. He feels he cannot hide it from her for much longer, so he concedes and walks forward.
Her chest goes still, holding her breath as he approaches and it takes a certain degree of determination to not stop at her raw body language. No doubt she will feel the psychological effects of her trauma for a long while and the fact that he might trigger them, unintentionally shouldn't offend him.
He stops a foot away, towering over her. A small table, one he sits down on with no simplicity, offers a way for him to seem less a threat.
He is still too tall, so he waits as she scoots up against the tiny bed, further away and sitting as high as possible. There she stares at him, fingers itching along her neck - a signal of how uncomfortable she is.
After her hand falls to her lap he speaks, "I am no longer in your service."
Her expression changes little, only her eyes move and eventually they look away at the blank wall to his right. Do not be offended, he reminds himself when she hugs her middle, shrinking further away.
"Was it some sort of computer chip?" her question is so tiny he barely hears it and when he does discern it it takes him a moment to understand. She knows they took something from him. How? He doesn't ask, only shakes his head and says, "Wires. Something artificial and organic."
Even though nothing changes, on her face or her posture, he knows she is thinking deeply about what he just said. He can feel it. Something in the air. It is a new, almost sore sensation. When her eyes reach over to him his gut rolls softly. Born again, is how he would describe this new state of awareness.
"Are you going to kill me?"
It is the last thing he would expect her to say, and offense doesn't begin to describe the emotion that follows her silence or the pained expression on her face. He rises, anger flaring like molten lead in his lungs; leaking up his neck to his face where pounding blood vessels in his eyes tint his vision half-red. For a second his fingers crack into a fist at his thigh.
He sees beads of sweat form on her face, bloodshot eyes leaking globs of sticky pink liquid. It was her that had tried to free him in the beginning. Later it was her that nervously laughed off his annoyance when she bandaged his wounds - wounds he took for her. Or more privately it was her that would sneak a skinny arm around his waist in the night, after a nightmare.
Their relationship was not one-sided though. It was him that watched her back in tunnels, in the open and in the dark. It was him that listened but rarely talked back. It was him that held her until she fell asleep the night of her fathers death. In the end though it was him with a balled up fist, looming instead of wondering why she could think he would mean her any harm, regardless of his contracts current state. He would never harm her now. No one could take the piece of paper hidden underground, force his hand. No one, not even him, would ever hurt her now.
"No," he says with finality, sitting down again. The table screams under his abrupt weight and he sees the sound give her goosebumps. He continues, looking down at his hands upon his knees, "I'm going to stay," a deep, nasally exhale, "...whether you want me or not."
He watches her slowly smile. It is a delicate, uneasy smile as if she expects him to lunge at her any moment, but she gives it to him anyways and he feels better because of it.
"Good," is all she says before sliding off the bed, getting up on weak legs and stepping like a wounded animal towards him. It is then she holds her hand out to him, shaking between them. The beds of her nails are as raw as her eyelids, showing a failed attempt to claw her way out of a room or maybe a series of tight restraints. They have suffered, but he does not feel it has been in vain, and with a lump in his throat that has never been there before, he grasps her frail hand in his own and shakes.
"Good," he repeats, for the first time feeling a creep of heat touch him between the ribs, and loving it.
