and steal the sun
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Summary: A series of vignettes of Monkey and Trip across the Wastes and beyond. Insufferably romantic. Rating will vary.
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In many ways, theirs is a story of a slow and steady progression.
This in and of itself is problematic, as Trip has neither slowly nor steadily progressed into anything, not even puberty. All she had to do was hit thirteen and get kicked square in the teeth with her mother's shape and her mother's angular face but none of her mother's grace and it seemed a full three or four years before her father could look at her without flinching. It was Trip who started learning programming when she was eight and fixed the air conditioning in her father's study and reprogrammed the security system to blow her a kiss every time she logged on. It was Trip who had more tools and tricks to her name by the time she was twelve than many of her peers would find in their lifetimes. Trip thinks with her fingers, tapping keys and flipping through menus and bypassing program after program while the timer ticks down and lives shiver on the line- Trip doesn't have time for slow and steady.
No one can be slow and steady when the rubble cools and the dust settles and that indescribably huge man lies motionless on the debris, streaked with soot and blood and who knew what else- that dull animal anger in his eyes just minutes ago- and Trip has never been more frightened of anything in her entire life, not Slavers, not Mechs, not the awful buzzing howl of the alarm as the slaveship stuttered and dipped its way closer to the earth. But Trip knows what she's learned her entire life, and she knows that her father thought she wasn't listening when he told her that there were people in the Wastes who would crack each others skulls open and pick the meat out with their fingers, who would, if she was lucky, let her bleed out before they raped her to death, but she had been, she always had been,and Oh Dad what do I do?
There's nothing slow or steady about it when she tips him over onto his back- all that muscle makes him so heavy- and sweeps his forehead clean with shaking fingers- red paint (or was that tattoo ink?) refusing to smear under her touch- and fits the headband over his brow before he can wake and beat her bloody. His face is slack and dull throughout, the brutish line of his jaw not relaxing even in unconsciousness. There are scars wending their way down his arms and scrawled across the curving lines of his back- whole areas of skin soldered smooth to create looping design after looping design, and Trip has heard about branded livestock and it makes it easier if she thinks of it in those terms.
It's the matter of a moment to fit the headband and skim through her terminal until she programs the shock level and adds the appropriate trigger phrases and her heart hammers under her breastbone the entire time as she tells herself that she can do this, she can survive this, that she has all the tools she needs and nothing is irreparable and all she has ever needed is a cool head and a computer at her fingertips. It's the matter of a moment to skitter away the moment he stirs, his blunt fingers twitching in their leather wrappings, and Trip runs and hides- actually hides, like there's anywhere else to go at this point- and watches him with her breath trapped and fluttering in her throat.
But then he wakes, like she'd never dared to hope he even would after a fall like that, and time itself slows down to a crawl.
His eyes are a cloudy, human blue, and for one agonizing moment he looks at her, flat and incurious and mildly annoyed- oh it's you- and she never even dared to think of him as a person who could be annoyed before this- and then the headband registers.
There's nothing slow and steady about the way the command words brand themselves across her tongue before he can reach her and rip her apart.
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