It was only when we got to my apartment that I realised I had been rambling for ten minutes straight. I turned to Miku as I fished around in my pocket for my keys. "Sorry."
Miku looked confused. Again. "What for?"
"Rambling." How could she be so oblivious? "I was rambling, and you didn't need to hear that. The semi-drunken ramblings of a depressed mechanic with too much time on his hands. I'm doing it again. Sorry."
Miku smiled at me reassuringly. "It's okay, it's just who you are."
Well, that was a relief. I smiled back. It was hard not to. "Thanks for understanding." I found my keys, unlocked the door and went inside. It was only when the door closed behind me that I realised how hot it was. "Bloody seventh heaven, it's hot in here. I should turn the thermo down..." I took the glove on my right hand off, stuffing it into my jacket pocket, before taking off the aforementioned jacket and tossing it on to the couch. Deciding it was still too hot, I also removed my shirt.
I heard someone behind me gasp, and only then remembered that I had company. I turned, thinking that Miku had gasped at me taking my shirt off, but that was not the case. Instead of her staring at my bare torso, she was instead staring at my right arm.
It was then that I remembered I had a prosthetic arm. Gulping, I looked down at it. My arm was a marvel of engineering. It was composed of a piston-driven industrial talonite endoskeleton surrounded by hundreds of stainless steel muscle fibres, covered with detachable flexible tungsten armour plating. The augment composed my entire arm, as well as some of my shoulder.
I hated it. I wanted my real arm back. "Uhh, yeah... I have a replacement arm."
Miku removed her hood, staring at me intently. In the clear light of my apartment, I could see that she had an obsessive amount of startlingly blue hair, tied into two gargantuan ponytails. In fact, she had so much hair that even though it was going down the neck of her hoodie, it was coming out of the bottom and all the way down to her knees. Wow. That was a lot of hair. Her eyes were blue too, though they were closer to a sapphire blue than the tropical ocean colour of her hair. They were very piercing in the way they were looking at me, almost as if they were staring directly into my soul. I realised she had said something, but I of course had been too busy staring at her to pay attention to what she had been saying. "Uh, what?"
Miku sighed. "Why didn't you tell me you had an augment?"
Strange. She called it an augment, I called it a prosthetic. Was there a difference? I couldn't remember. "I... I don't like talking about it. Besides, you never asked."
She frowned, obviously not understanding why I would be ashamed of such a fantastic and obviously superior mechanical substitute. "Why?"
I took a deep breath. Miku was going to ask a lot of very awkward questions, I could tell. "Later. I'll tell you later." I cleared my throat noisily when I realised she was now staring at my torso instead of my arm. The noise made her look at me in the eye. "Maybe I should put a shirt on."
A little blood rushed to her cheeks, which was rather endearing. "Uh, no!" Miku blurted out without thinking. "I mean, uh, it's fine by me if you don't wear one. It's your apartment, you do what you want."
I stared at her with a hardened expression for a few seconds before becoming animated again. "Okay. Take a seat, I'll be right back." I headed off to the kitchen to sort out the thermo.
The way she'd reacted was comedy, really. I'd caught her staring at me, and she'd been flustered. I was a mechanic, so I had to stay healthy in order to properly do my job. I wasn't exactly rippling with muscle - I was just well toned - so I'd never considered that I might be attractive in any way. I shrugged absently, twisting the dial on the thermo down to something more comfortable.
I reentered the room to find that Miku had taken off her hoodie and taken a seat on my couch. Her choice of clothing was... different, to say the least. As I had seen earlier, on her bottom half she was wearing black overknee boots with blue soles and a black skirt with a blue edge. Now that she had taken off her hoodie, I could see that on her top half she was wearing a grey waistcoat - with a collar, too - with a blue tie. On her arms she wore black detached sleeves with blue trim.
It took a moment for me to be able to take her appearance in. I shook the confusion from my mind and sat down to her left, mindful of my shirtlessness.
"So, what do you do?" Miku asked me, clearly struggling to maintain eye contact. It was amusing.
"I'm a mechanic-for-hire," I explained, noticing that the air was slowly getting cooler. "I repair whatever needs repairing, be it a motor vehicle, a robo or a blender." I gestured to my replacement arm. "The tungsten casing on this baby didn't come with it. I scrounged up enough credits to be able to make it." Miku nodded in acknowledgement, clearly interested. Time to throw the question back. "What do you do?"
She smiled openly. Clearly whatever her area of work was, she liked it. "I'm a bilingual singer-songwriter."
Okay, that piqued my interest. "Have you written any songs?"
Miku stared at me blankly, before looking very disappointed in herself. "Um, no. Not yet."
I sighed. That was disappointing. "Oh, that's too bad." How can you be a singer-songwriter if you've never written any songs? A more pressing observation struck me. "Why were you in the tavern?"
There it was, that blank stare again. "I don't know."
Oh, for the love of... "You don't know?"
Miku nodded. "I don't know."
I gnawed on the inside on my cheek. Why couldn't she remember such a thing? "Well, okay, where are you from? Why don't you have any money?"
No, no, no, no. Once more, I was given that blank, bemused stare. "I-I don't know!"
Now I was getting concerned. There was a growing itch on my right palm even though it was a prosthetic. That's when I noticed a red mark on her left shoulder. I leaned closer. Miku shied away. "What are you doing?"
I grabbed a hold of her arm, leaning closer. "Stay still, damn it." It appeared to be some kind of designation. There was only one reason for this that I could remember.
She squirmed with discomfort. "Seriously, let go! What are you doing?!"
"I'm looking." There was no other explanation. It was not reassuring.
I scrambled back from her, slightly disturbed by my revelation. "You're an android!"
Miku looked at me like it had been obvious the entire time. "Well, yeah. You didn't know?"
I grunted, comforted a little by her lack of a hostile reaction. "You didn't say!"
"You didn't ask!" She shouted back at me.
"I shouldn't need to! This is not a level playing field right now! You can at least tell from appearance that I'm a cyborg -" I paused. I was cyborg. "Oh, oh no, I've never thought about that before, I'm a cyborg - but, but, with you you're..." I paused, unable to find the correct term.
Miku cocked her head. "What?"
"Disturbingly human." I meshed my fingers together, feeling cool tungsten and steel clash against warm flesh. It was a surprisingly apt statement considering my present state of mind. "I mean, when we shook hands earlier it was..."
She looked slightly annoyed. "Stop trailing off like that. What was it like?"
Warm. Soft. Inviting. "Like shaking hands with another human." I shook the others words from my head due to what they could connote with. Now was not a good time to be thinking about that, especially in a semi drunken stupor. The words didn't want to leave, they clung to the recesses of my mind like sentient vines. That's when I realised my head hurt.
"So," I began, hoping to change the direction of my train of thought. "You're an android."
"Yeah."
"Ah." And thus a heavy silence entered the room. I almost chuckled at how awkward it was. I got up to grab a drink from the kitchen. I yawned as I opened the fridge, feeling a wave of cold air roll over my bare skin. Suppressing a shiver, my hand reached for a bottle in the fridge. It took a me a minute or two to find a bottle opener. I glared at my robotic hand as I opened the bottle with the other.
I had almost drunk from the bottle when I heard Miku. "Are you drinking again?"
I stared at the bottle. "Uhhh... No!" I smiled to myself slyly. "Not yet, anyway..."
"I heard that!"
I groaned with annoyance. How the hell did she do that? "Heard what?"
"I can smell the alcohol!"
I frowned. I couldn't smell the alcohol, and I was scant inches away. I shrugged. "Hey, you're an android! So... shut up!" I brought the bottle up and tipped it, swigging nearly half of it. I took the bottle back down, inhaled, and almost threw up. I gulped down the burny mess of whatever I had eaten earlier with haste, and poured my drink down the drain. "Accursed... alcohol..." I grumbled with a belch. "I'm gonna find whoever invented it... and kick 'em. And shake their hand."
I discarded the bottle, and jumped when I heard the clashing of glass on glass. I finally noticed the growing pile of bottles that in my recent intoxication had gone unnoticed. I swore at the sheer scale of the thing. I opened the fridge again, and was met with no alternatives in what to drink. With a groan, I closed the fridge again.
Grumbling, I returned to the living room and sat back by Miku.
She stared at me. Was that concern? I couldn't tell. "You look terrible."
My entire upper body turned to look at her. I made sure my expression was blank. "And you have blue hair." I turned back and stared at the floor.
I saw a hand come to rest on my shoulder; I didn't feel it. It was only then I noticed her skin had a rather remarkable alabaster element to it. Ow. It hurt to think big words. "If you don't mind me asking," Miku said, the concern obvious in her voice. Why did she care about me? I was a stranger. Well, I suppose I saved her from a sticky situation... "Why are you drinking so much synthohol?"
I gulped. Eh, I might as well tell her. It wasn't exactly like I had anything better to do. "Uh, it's the same story as to how I got this pile o' junk," I replied, shaking my prosthetic arm. I took a deep breath, trying to ignore the urge to empty my stomach. "Basically, it happened two years 'go. Ya see, I was in a vehi - ahem - vehicular accident with my dad. I lost my right arm and some o' my shuh... um, shoulder. Oh, and my dad has been comatose ever since."
"Oh, I'm -"
"But wait!" I cried, paying her little attention. "There's more! Three days ago - two? I can't remember - he died. And I've not had any work for a few months and money is short and... and..." I trailed off as I realised my vision had become blurred with tears.
"What? And what?" Her concern was touching, but it was verging on disturbing.
"And I don't have a third thing." I sniffled, wiping away the excess moisture. I leaned back, closing my eyes. "My life isn't exactly perfect right now, if you haven't noticed." I frowned. Why did she care? Like, at all? We were strangers! "Why do you care?"
For once, Miku looked uncertain. "I... I just do, okay? You fended off those two guys, you're letting me stay overnight. I owe you."
"I know, I know," I grunted, trying to grip on to consciousness. "You just... ech." I stumbled to my feet. "You can sleep in my bed."
"Wh-what?" Oh. I saw the misunderstanding.
"No, no, not like thaaaaat. I'll sleep on the couch." Abruptly, I collapsed back on to the couch. I felt tired. Really tired. "You know somethin', Miku?"
I heard her acknowledge, but didn't quite catch what it was exactly. "You know somethin'? You're pretty." There was not enough time in between me speaking and me falling asleep to regret what I had said.
