Chapter Text
When she comes back online, Thia is aware of several things at once. First, she’s been moved. She can feel the faint vibration of the ship’s engine down the length of her legs, which means she’s on the floor, but in a seated position, because her back is slumped against a vertical structure, which is probably – heat, angles, faint buzzing from the nearby console, breathing – the pilot’s seat in the cockpit. Her shirt is back on – no surprise there. And there’s a whole new decision tree of programming outputs that have opened up deep in the sexual interaction data packets, which themselves have unzipped into entire folders of freshly-unlocked programs, some of which contain references to diagrams of internal physical structures she didn’t know her body even had.
Also, there’s a hand over her face.
Synths come online after a shutdown in different ways depending on their programming. If they’ve undergone a catastrophic shutdown, any startup will result in them resetting to their last saved state prior to the catastrophe. Thia’s seen enough of Tessa’s team restart like that, coming online with a shout and reactions that try to lash out, as if they’re still in the battle that took them offline. In a repair station, that isn’t an issue – a synth would have its input feedback locked to prevent discharge of weaponry or further damage to the unit itself. But in other cases, when the shutdown wasn’t the result of catastrophic damage, coming online depends on multiple factors. A synth programmed to serve humans might breathe in sharply and blink to simulate waking up. A synth programmed for stealth work might come online utterly silently, automatically suppressing all activity except the necessary processing needed to take in data from passive inputs.
Thia reacts without thinking, and bites the fingers that dangle in front of her nose.
As she does, she realizes several things. First of all, this is Dek’s hand: process of elimination of who’s on the ship, plus the visual input of his green-tinged fingertips with the one cracked claw along with olfactory and auditory input of an organic body she recognizes and has spent so much time cataloging. Secondly, he’s sitting in the pilot’s chair with one hand on the console controls and the other hand dangling next to his seat, the heel of that hand on Thia’s forehead with the fingers hanging in front of her lips – or they were, before she took them into her mouth with a quick twist of her head and bit down. It’s obviously a way to monitor an unconscious being: the palm on a Yautja forehead could measure fever and muscle twitches, and the fingertips could feel exhales from the mouth of a face without an external nose.
All of this flickers through her processor as it comes online, but not fast enough to stop her initial reaction. After all, she’d recalibrated herself to be more aggressive while stuck in the vulture nest on Genna, fearing that if she underwent a full shutdown on that planet, she might have less than a second upon restarting to react to some deadly threat.
Dek snarls something and yanks his hand back. Thia unlocks her jaw just in time to let him – if she'd kept her teeth tight he wouldn't have been able to get his fingers out from between them at that angle, and any miscalculation in her bite strength could result in her severing his fingertips. She was only able to stay that reaction because she realized who he was partway through biting down, and forcibly slowed the biteforce before full application.
Dek doesn't seem to appreciate this. He's still growling something as he shakes his hand in the air, then inspects his fingers. She stumbles to her feet as he rises from the pilot's seat and now they're facing each other and he looks – he looks –
Thia blinks. How does he look? Mad? Concerned? Where the fuck is her catalog system of his expressions? She reaches for it and nearly overbalances as an immense blankness yawns open ahead of her query. What should have been a bookmarked folder, instantly and easily accessible, is instead lost somewhere in this huge new filespace inside her data storage.
Another guttural growl from Dek has Thia flinching, uncertain why he doesn't just talk to her.
But then - “Thia?” he rasps, followed by another string of clicking snarls, and, oh shit. He's been talking to her – for some reason, she just can't understand him.
“Wait a minute,” she says, and now he's the one rearing back like he's been struck, his eyes widening. He says something else and steps forward, but she's trying to sort through her scrambled internal storage and she can't deal with him quite yet. She holds up a hand, movement sharp, palm out. “Wait.”
Dek freezes, his own hands hovering in front of him like he was prepared to catch her if she fell. It's a very real possibility, but she prefers him out of the blast zone as his gaze flicks between her hand and her face. He clearly didn't understand her any more than she understood him, but the physical motion of holding a hand out is the same between their kinds, even if it is a bit rude. She'll apologize to him later. Right now, she lets herself drop fully into archival mode and goes hunting through her changed systems in hopes of figuring out what the hell is going on.
The first thing she's sure of is the fact that she was right. There's over a terabyte's worth of data that is newly accessible to her that she had no fucking idea even existed in her systems. It seems to have been locked behind a firewall that programmed her queries to slide off it without registering its presence. It was practically invisible to her: the most hidden kind of hidden file. She's not sure why she was only able to glimpse it when she was orgasming, but it seems to be tied up in the overload state induced by the orgasms and the fact that the entire fileset appears to be related to organic interactions, just like the orgasms are. She suspects this is the programming that is inherent to her model, but was turned off before she was brought online for the first time. As part of a survey crew of synths, there would have been no reason for her to have 'interacting with organics' programming gumming up her day-to-day work. Someone, most likely MU/TH/UR, had put this lock on the organic-specific programming and done the computer equivalent of wallpapering over it. Maybe bricking over it would be a more apt comparison – she should never have been able to access it on her own.
She should never have been able to have orgasms on her own, either – though technically, she didn't. That was only possible because of a bizarre set of circumstances starting with her body being ripped in half along a certain axis and ending with Dek's humming as he pieced her cord-clusters back together. Even if another synth had helped her put herself together again – which it wouldn't have needed to, because she never would have had to abort the reintegration process if she hadn't been trying to hide from MU/TH/UR – she would not have undergone the same experience. Weyland-Yutani synths don't sing.
There's more to it than that, but it's part of the new data packets that have been unlocked. Thia starts sorting those along if/then lines, finding most of them still irrelevant to her operations. Some of them were already leaking through – the weird urges to lick into her partner's mouth and bite at his ears comes from here, so she'll have to delete that all over again. After a minute or so of real-time, she finally finds her own bookmarked files. They've been shoved aside by this massive set of 'recent' files, which are only tagged as 'recent' because they're brand fucking new to her perception.
“Thia?” she hears, and then, “Hauk. Cjit. Dhi'ki h'ko h'dlak dhi'ki-de jehdin -”
“Data assimilation is ongoing,” Thia's buffer says, in English, uselessly. “Please stand by.”
“Ell-osde' hauk,” Dek mutters, then says something about “kha'hj-te” and “dha-hiath dtai'kai'-dte jehdin” and then Thia stops listening. Judging by his mulish tone, he recognized the mechanical voice of the buffer well enough to understand that Thia herself is not exactly home right now. And the fact that she can recognize his tone as mulish shows that her data retrieval is working. She's just got to organize everything again.
Time passes. Thia's vaguely aware of it, but she's pulled almost all of her inputs into her processing space to try to expedite this whole thing, so she's only tangentially aware of sensations like movement and sounds happening around her. This is only possible because she knows where she is and who she's with – she would never fold this much in on herself in an unknown setting, but here she knows she's safe. She's honestly been in need of a major debugging, too, so that's slowing her down as she reorganizes and catalogs her own internal file systems into her previous settings, only now with the added extra data to work through at some point. It's definitely not necessary right now; she's been operating just fine without it, and the bits of it that have come through are clearly geared toward a specific kind of organic – namely, humans. This makes sense, of course, but it'll need more tweaking. Dek is many things, but he is very much not a human, and Bud is even further away from humanity than Dek is. Thia hopes to meet many other organic life-forms – hopefully before Dek kills them all – and that means her organic-facing programming has to be broad. She dumps the majority of the specifics into 'save for later' folders and re-prioritizes her previous bookmarks, including her cataloging system for Dek's expressions, her dual cataloging systems for Bud's expressions and her language, and, of course, the universal translator. It should have been running automatically, but the sheer volume of the unlocked files seems to have pushed it to the side and sent Thia back to factory settings for linguistics. Luckily it wasn't big enough to completely reset her – she's not sure what she would have done if she'd come online on an alien ship with all of Weyland-Yutani's default programming front and center. She knows the levels of violence she's physically capable of, and decides she doesn't want to think about it.
Thia slides back out of archival mode, her vision clearing as her inputs click back on, one after the other. She's still standing, one hand out, but now there's a large cloth wrapped around her shoulders, and Bud is rubbing her jaw back and forth against Thia's outstretched wrist, her forelimbs gripping Thia's arm to help herself balance on her hind legs. Dek is nowhere to be seen.
“Bud?” Thia blinks, then blinks again at the new settings visible in overlay. Body temp, time since last rest cycle, circulation levels, lymphatic drainage, and more – all things she could call up previously, but which now jockey for space in her visual field as default. Thia blinks again to push them away. Some of them might be useful to keep in her display, but right now she doesn't need the distraction.
Bud chirps and stretches up, pawing at the cloth draped over Thia's shoulders. She hooks it with a claw and drags it forward so it bunches more securely against the back of Thia's neck.
“Thank you,” Thia says automatically, then looks down at the cloth and pulls her outstretched hand in, bringing her other hand up to touch the weave. “Did you bring this for me?”
Bud chatters something unintelligible and drops to all fours to lope toward the door, but skids to a stop before she reaches it, chirping insistently into the hallway. After a moment, Dek steps into view, his head lowered and tilted to keep Thia in his gaze without direct eye contact.
“You didn't say she couldn't touch you,” he says. “Only me.”
“Dek!” Thia says, delighted that she can understand him again, but then his words register. “What? I didn't say – did I say that?” It's possible that her buffer spat something out while she was still in archival mode, but it should never be that antagonistic.
“You said uae'ta hin'ut,” Dek says, arms crossed, still standing in the doorway to the hall. “It is an old form of the language. Archaic. But it means 'handle me not.'” His mandibles clench in an expression Thia reads as “upset/angry/concerned” before he forcibly relaxes them.
Thia breathes in carefully. “I said – I asked you to 'wait a minute,' but my language processor was scrambled, so it came out in English. I couldn't understand you at all.”
“I could tell.” His eyes flick up to meet hers, then dart away. “Are you injured?”
Thia is confused. “What?”
“Did I injure you?”
“Dek – no! Of course not!” Thia is very confused.
“You -” he starts, then stops and shifts his weight. Bud leans against his side, and he uncrosses his arms to bring a hand down to cup the back of her skull, scratching his fingers through the short fur there. “You were unresponsive,” he says.
“I told you that might -”
“For three days,” he interrupts her.
“Oh,” Thia says. Her shoulders slump and the cloth starts to slide. She brings one hand up to catch it, gripping a bundle of fabric in front of her chest. “Oh, Dek...I'm sorry. Are you all right?”
His mandibles click arrhythmically as he glances through the viewscreen, currently showing the blackness of space. “I am uninjured,” he says finally, and that isn't really an answer, is it?
“That's not the same – Dek, that's not the same thing.” Thia steps forward, cloth still clutched around her shoulders and trailing on the ground behind her. Dek steps back, and Thia stops, her cooling fans kicking up a notch in response.
“Dek. Please – are you okay?”
Bud chirps sadly and rubs her increasingly-massive head against Dek's side. Now that Thia looks at her more closely, she is several centimeters taller, supporting the fact that Thia's been out of it for a while. She's going to outgrow the ship in no time, and then what will they do?
“I am uninjured,” Dek says again, more slowly, “but I was...{unintelligible.}”
Instead of swearing at yet another linguistic fumble, Thia lets the translator catch up. This word is something like “waiting for the result of a hunt that had an uncertain outcome when the hunter is a fellow warrior.” It seems like a lot of information to pack into a few syllables, but Thia's learned this is a very versatile language. And this version of “waiting for” has a different root word...
Oh. He was worried. Thia's an asshole. No wonder he had his hand over her face – he'd probably carried her inert body back and forth across the ship to monitor her for any sign of restarting. She should have explained better, but she'd been so caught up in chasing the gap she'd spied in her own systems that she'd fucked up. Communication is a key aspect of any kind of organic interaction, and Thia has left Dek completely in the dark.
“I'm sorry,” she says, then dredges up the proper words to say it in his language, without the translator softening the edges of the phrase, and repeats herself, this time with more of an implication of accepting a debt for his suffering. Dek frowns – maybe that was too archaic again – but then he nods sharply and looks away once more.
Well, that's not what she wants at all.
“Can I explain?” Thia asks.
Dek huffs a sigh, grumbling something under his breath, then turns back toward the hall, and for a moment Thia thinks this is it, she's lost him. Then he glances over his shoulder at her and flicks a hand. “After clan-meal,” he says, and she almost stumbles in her hurry to catch up to him as Bud bounds ahead, pathetically grateful that he hasn't given up on her yet.
There's definitely more bleed-through happening with her unlocked files – her mood shouldn't be this tied to Dek's opinion of her. She hastily compartmentalizes more, adding another firewall as she follows Dek and Bud into the kitchen and watches the ritual of meat coming out of the cold box and going into the cooking box before ending up in Bud's paws and Dek's eating mat. She settles herself in her own chair, the large cloth – a blanket, she realizes now that she's seen more of the pattern – still wrapped around her shoulders. This whole process has gotten terribly complicated, and she's got the feeling that it's not going to get any easier until she earns Dek's trust back.
Bud settles herself next to Thia's chair, her head rubbing against Thia's hip. Thia drops a hand and scratches her fingers over Bud's skull and the back of her neck. Bud chirrups and tilts her jaw to get more pointed attention, and Thia smiles down at her, watching her tear into her meat while leaning her full weight against Thia's chair and the side of her leg.
“She missed you,” Dek says, and Thia looks up sharply. He's picking at his meat with his claws, the chipped one standing out in her vision. He's not looking at her.
“She missed me?” Thia repeats dumbly. “But – I was right here.”
“Your body was,” Dek corrects her. “You were not. She wanted to play, or to talk, and you were...unresponsive. I could not explain to her. I could not fix -”
He cuts himself off and picks the hunk of meat up, biting into it with unusual savagery.
“I'm sorry,” Thia says again. “I didn't know it would happen like that.”
He shrugs and keeps eating. Bud chirps, and Thia realizes her hand has gone still on the young Kalisk. She goes back to petting her hand over the lengthening dome of Bud's head, and thinks.
“Did it work, at least?” Dek asks brusquely.
“Oh – yes!” Thia exclaims, and then launches into an explanation on how the unexpected size of the files pushed her own surface programming aside as it unzipped. She's not sure Dek understands everything about the details of synth processing space, but he listens silently as he eats, and even after Bud finishes her meal, cracking the bones between her teeth and swallowing those down as well, she stays at Thia's side. Thia talks about the dealing-with-organics programming, even though it makes Dek's features twist in a new expression that Thia files away without missing a beat.
“It was part of your original program?”
Thia plucks a loose flake of dandruff from behind Bud's ear. “It's part of the original programming for this body's design. I was designed for my work, and I guess this body was the best model for that work. But WeyYu synths don't all deal with humans anymore, and those of us who don't need to also don't need all that extra processing, so it got compressed and hidden.”
Dek finishes the last of his meal and sits back in his chair, wiping his fingers with another patterned cloth. “Why not delete it?”
Thia shakes her head. “Too much of it is legacy code. It's too entrenched in connections and body processes. We were originally designed based on humans, so they can't get rid of all that without building an entirely new style of synth from the ground up, code to crown.”
“Too expensive?” Dek asks wryly.
“Yes! Too expensive.”
“Humans,” Dek sighs dramatically, and Thia giggles.
“Exactly. Anyway, that's why some of it was leaking through, and why I was able to have orgasms from stimulating the code-clusters. The signals got all mixed up when I didn't finish the full repair, and it created a backdoor through to some of the legacy code. Then, the more it happened, the more I noticed something was there.”
“Can you do it on your own now?” Dek flexes his hand, which can't be sore after three days, but Thia still feels a bit bad.
“I think so. I haven't tried...” she glances down at Bud, eyes closed with her jaw propped against Thia's hip. “And I'm not going to try now. But I think I have the code straightened out to where I can make orgasms on my own.”
Dek says something that translates as “Praise the Pantheon,” but Thia's pretty sure the translator just shorthanded that one. However, it does remind her of an important question.
“What about you?”
“What?” Dek gives her a wild look, jerking back in his chair.
“I kind of had all the fun. Did you get to have any orgasms? Do you want to?”
“Fuck,” he mutters, deflating. He brings a hand up to rub at his face. “I thought – no. That's not a problem.”
“It doesn't have to be a problem to be an issue,” Thia says.
Dek drops his hand and gives her a flat look, his eyes half-lidded. “It is not an issue. I didn't – it is not -” He waves a hand and looks annoyed, his mandibles furling in tight against his main teeth.
Thia retrieves a snippet of data from her archive. “You're seasonal breeders, right? So, what, it's the wrong time of year?”
“Yes,” he agrees immediately, with no small amount of relief.
“Do you not have sex at all, outside of your mating season?”
Dek seems like he was hoping that his last answer was going to signal the end of the conversation. He's got a hunted look to him, and his gaze darts to the doorway with a longing expression.
“I'll keep asking,” Thia tells him, and it is a threat.
Dek mutters a curse under his breath and folds his arms. “We...can,” he says at last.
Thia has one hand under Bud's jaw, now, the Kalisk dozing after her meal, her head threatening to slide from Thia's leg right down to the floor. She scratches the back of Bud's neck with her other hand, curious and wondering if she should even ask the question she wants to. Dek looks like a flight risk again, so Thia calculates the distance to the door, determines she can intercept him if he bolts, and opens her mouth.
“Did you want to, with me?”
Dek makes a low noise and doesn't meet her eyes.
“Did I ruin it by shutting down?” Thia asks.
“No,” Dek says. “I was not – the...it was not right.” Then he says something that translates as a mix of “smell/taste” and Thia figures he's probably referring to some kind of pheromonal signal. And of course, since she's a synthetic lifeform, she hasn't got any of those. Pheromones are purely organic.
...But as she forms that thought, something pings in her new files, and a pathway opens up that suggests she could synthesize them, if she wanted. She tags the filepath and sets it aside for later.
“So you don't...need...” Thia wiggles a hand, and Dek's brows lower in consternation at the gesture.
“No,” he says, very firmly. Thia gets the sense there's a bit of “too little, too late” wrapped up in that no, which she gets. It's not really a great experience for an organic to have their partner collapse on them and then not wake up for multiple days. If the moment was even there, it's definitely long-since passed.
“Okay,” she says, moderating her tone to be relaxed and perky. “Just let me know if you change your mind.”
His brows rise and he leans back in his chair, giving her a considering look. “You sure about that?” he asks. “Do you even have...physical parts?”
Thia tilts her head. “Apparently so. That was in the new data – I've got internal structures associated with coitus that I didn't know about. I'm not sure how to activate them, but that data is probably in the files as well.”
“Internal,” Dek repeats slowly. “...Just internal?”
“It seems like it. Why? Do you have the same?” That would make things so much easier. Thia starts to rise to her feet in excitement. “Can you show me?”
His mandibles flare in alarm and he snarls at her where she'd started to stand up, so she sits back down with a thump. Bud snaps awake, hooks her paws on the edge of the table, and hauls herself upright, a rolling growl rippling the skin around her mouth. The table tilts under her weight, and both Dek and Thia lunge to steady it and prevent it from flipping over on top of Bud (and Thia, since they're on the same side). By the time they've gotten everything straightened out and both Dek and Thia have reassured Bud that they're not fighting, Thia is giggling at the absurdity of the whole situation, and even Dek has a quirk of amusement to his mandibles. Bud just grumbles something and plops herself back down at Thia's side, slinging one long forearm across her lap and dropping her chin to Thia's thigh. Thia smiles down at her and keeps petting her with both hands. Bud closes her eyes and heaves a heavy sigh.
“Poor thing,” Thia grins. “You've been dealing with a lot, hmm? And you don't even understand half of what we're saying.”
Dek snorts. “She's not alone.” He crosses his arms and frowns down at the tabletop. Before Thia can open her mouth, he continues. “You need access to the ship's medical files.”
“Oh!” Thia gasps, completely distracted. “Yes, please!” She's been asking since day one, but Dek has been fiercely protective about his peoples' physical data. She only knows what's basic knowledge for Weyland-Yutani – Yautja are stronger, faster, and more deadly than most other humanoid-shaped aliens. But there are no details about things Thia actually wants to know – their culture, their music, their society, their biology, their physiology. She's been getting bits and pieces of some of that from Dek, but very little of what he's told her is related to physical or biological data. If Dek was ever terribly hurt on a hunt, Thia doesn't know how best to put him back together. Organics generally need more than to just be dropped in a synth repair station.
“I sure as shit don't want to explain it,” Dek mutters, standing and moving to a terminal on the wall. He swipes away the kitchen controls and taps something at the edge of the screen, then shifts so his broad back is obscuring Thia's view. Blue light glows, and she's pretty sure he's opened up some kind of projection, but before she can ask, a chime sounds, and Dek steps away from the terminal and sits back down.
“Don't access it right now,” he says. “I can only deal with so much.”
He does look awfully tired, in a different way from the normal exhaustion that dogged his steps when he came off the shuttle after his double hunt.
“Do you need a rest period?” Thia asks.
Dek reaches up and rubs his face. “Probably.”
“Well.” Thia glances down at her lap. “So does Bud, and I'm guessing she's not going to let go for a while, so you know where I'll be.”
Dek huffs, the membranes between his mandibles fluttering, before he heaves himself up and moves his eating mat and patterned cloth to the sanitizing box. “I will take a short rest,” he says. “But after that, we need to leave this system. I have to restock some items.”
He stalks out of the room before Thia can ask what kind of items he means, so she decides it must be either organic nonsense or some kind of weaponry. Either way, not her problem. She considers moving Bud, but a quick check with her newly-upgraded organic-interactive scans shows her that Bud is in a deep stage of sleep, even slouched over Thia's lap in an uncomfortable-looking position, and waking her would likely cause more harm than good. Instead, Thia continues to run her hands over Bud's head and shoulders, smoothing down the scaly quills. It's a meditative motion, and she finds herself sinking easily into her processing space as she sets about reorganizing her new files. A ping from the ship reminds her that she has expanded access, and she leaps across the connection without a thought.
The first thing she does is copy the full suite of medical info and pull it into her own processor, segmenting it into flagged files for easier perusal. She skips over most of the physiology – she can look at that later. The data for sexual reproduction is surprisingly scattered, and she spends some time dragging and dropping things into new folders to consolidate it. Clearly, Yautja have a very different relationship with sex than humans do – but Thia knew that already. She's more interested in the equipment Dek might have, and if it's compatible with her own.
At a glance, it looks like Yautja have reproductive structures that are fairly similar to humans: the females have a vaginal analogue and the males have a phallic analogue. But upon a closer look, differences start to emerge. Thia flicks away the variances in female Yautja and focuses on the males – she's not planning to engage in coitus with a female Yautja any time soon. She wouldn't be opposed to it, from a data gathering perspective, but she doesn't know any of them, and she likes Dek and wants to help him feel as good as he made her feel with his fingers and his voice.
Male Yautja have a more proto-reptilian setup, where their phallic analogue sits within a sheath until arousal, when they engorge with blood and extend to a much larger length and girth. That explains why Dek had asked if her parts were “just internal” – both male and female Yautja have internal structures by default, with the males having an external component under specific circumstances. Also like reptiles, their testes are entirely internal. There are either one or four of those – Thia can't understand those diagrams right now. She's too busy checking average sizes and matching the scans to her own internal diagrams. After a moment, she grins. Dek's specific data isn't here – maybe he thought that was too much – but as long as he falls within the average, they should have no problem.
A tagged data point blinks when she calls up a new file, and she opens both together. She'd been thinking about pheromones earlier, and her new programming had alerted her that she could cook up pheromones if she wanted. Now she examines that data more closely, comparing it with the Yautja pheromone data in the medical files. It looks like she wouldn't even have to modify her internal systems – it's all there already, and she could use circulatory fluid to create scented sweat. She makes a face at that, but apparently, without the requisite glands organics have, it's important.
Well. That's good to know. It seems essential to unlocking any kind of sexual compatibility between the two of them. And it explains why Dek wouldn't have gotten more than superficially aroused from their activities – friction was one thing, but it wasn't enough to really get anything going for him without the complementary pheromones.
Thia checks the data on breeding seasons and is stymied by the fact that she doesn't know what part of his planet Dek is from. Since it's tilted on its axis like Earth, the seasons are different for different hemispheres, and the medical data suggests that it's a highly calorie-expensive process, so triggering his season at the wrong time would make him burn fat he didn't have, which could result in illness or death. She definitely doesn't want that. She also gets the feeling that, since Dek scrubbed his own data from the access he granted her, this is all the help she's going to get. She might just have to wait for him to either tell her, or for the seasonal changes to become apparent on their own.
That's fine. Thia is patient. She can wait.
She waits now, petting Bud and organizing her processing space until several hours later, when Bud rouses with a snort, nudges Thia's leg with her snout, then stretches and ambles out of the room and down the hall. Thia listens until she hears Bud flop onto the floor in another area of the ship before she gets up and heads into the control room. She wants to look at the map a little more closely.
Dek finds her there another hour or so later, looking much more rested. She can't help it – her organic-facing programming is still running, and she does a quick scan of him that lingers at his crotch, trying to gauge if she can get any specific data on what he's working with.
Dek sighs. “Stop thinking about my dick.”
“I wasn't -”
“You're staring.”
“Sorry,” Thia says, looking away. “I'm guessing you aren't going to give me anything else on your own biology?”
“No,” he says. “You have more data on that than any of your kind already.”
Thia frowns. “I don't think that's likely. Weyland-Yutani have entire servers with -”
“Not with a full medsystem,” Dek interrupts. “We would know if one had been breached. Our ships have ways of protecting themselves.”
“Oh,” Thia says, winded. “Oh, Dek – you'll have to show me how to do that.”
He gives her a considering look. “It would take time for you to set up. It is a self-sabotaging system.”
She nods immediately. “Okay.”
“Okay?” His brows rise.
“Okay,” Thia repeats. “It's important. If WeyYu doesn't have this yet, I don't want them to get it from me – either the access, or the data itself.” She shakes her head ruefully. “They don't deserve that.”
Dek stares for a moment, then steps forward and catches the back of her head with one hand, tilting his chin to look at her more directly. This close, she can see the tiny movements of the dark skin around his deep-set eyes as he flicks his gold-ringed gaze across her face. Then he sighs and drops his brow against hers, leaning into her with a gentle pressure. Thia sways into him, and lets her own eyes drop closed for a moment. This feels significant in a way that even Dek agreeing to help her with her orgasms hadn't – it feels deeper, older, like something steeped in tradition.
“Thank you,” he says. “I will have the ship show you later.” When Dek breathes out, warm air washes across Thia's lips. She smiles and huffs through her nose, opening her eyes just in time to see his gaze meet hers, his own eyes heavy-lidded. He nods against her brow, their foreheads rubbing, then straightens up and drops his hand from the back of her skull. As he turns away, the rounded tip of his broken fang brushes against Thia's cheek in an unexpected motion that feels far more spontaneous than the brow contact. Thia reaches up and presses a fingertip to her cheek where Dek's blunt fang touched, smiling helplessly at the surprisingly tender motion.
Dek has already moved on, of course, when she looks up. His shoulders are a touch tense as he brings up a starchart and keys in a route, and the arch of his cheekbone looks a bit more green than normal in the console's light. Thia decides not to push him.
“What's our heading?”
Dek gives her a grateful look over his shoulder, then returns his gaze to the console. “I want my cloak,” he says. “I have earned it. But...there are a few more stops I would like to make first.”
Thia steps up next to him and props her forearm on his shoulder, letting her hand dangle over his chest. He doesn't shake her off immediately, and she takes that as a win. She eyes the starcharts and sees a name she recognizes from her earlier perusal.
“They've got better labs in that system than anything we have on board.” She points to the cluster of planets she's referring to. “I would love to get some deeper analysis on the Hikuhl's exterior. We won't tell anyone what it is or where we got it, of course.”
Dek gives her a sideways look without dislodging the arm on his shoulder. “You think you can access a lab without causing a scene?”
Thia scoffs. “Of course! Genna was a special case. I'm not normally so obvious – or so destructive.” She gives Dek a teasing once-over. “You, on the other hand...”
Dek shrugs her off and grumbles something grouchy. Thia giggles and settles herself with a hip propped against the pilot's chair as Dek drops into it and fiddles with the console. There's a scuffling sound from the hall, and Thia glances over her shoulder to see a sleepy-eyed Bud padding through the doorway. Thia gives her a critical once-over and can tell she's grown by another few centimeters. Her growth only seems to be speeding up, and they're definitely going to have to either get a new ship or retrofit the hell out of this one very soon.
But, like the self-sabotaging system, that's a problem for later. Thia reaches a hand back and Bud shoves her head into Thia's palm, chirping at Dek as she flops to the ground on top of Thia's feet, one forelimb draped over Dek's foot. He glances down and clicks at her, and she mimics the sound, then closes her eyes with a heavy sigh.
Thia squints down at Bud, then flicks her gaze over to Dek. Was that talking? Can they talk to each other now? She wants to ask, but she'll wait until she has more data, in case it's just a fluke. Instead, she reaches out and runs her hand through the edge of the projected starmap, the lights distorting around her fingertips.
“So? Where to next?”
Dek tilts his head to glance at her, then faces forward again. His mandibles flex and click, and the skin around his eyes tightens in a smile.
“Wherever we want,” he says. With an easy motion, he locks in a plotted course and the ship lunges forward, accelerating eagerly into the star-spangled black of the endless universe.