Chapter Text
Things don't always run smoothly, in the early days after they leave Genna. Dek risked his life and his freedom to come back for Thia, but he still struggles sometimes with the concept that she can be a machine and a person both. They've had one screaming row about it that was only stopped when Bud inserted herself between them, reared up on her hind legs, and roared so loudly that Thia's auditory processor went out for twenty-six whole seconds and she had to do a hard reset to get it going again.
The worry in Dek's eyes as he'd tried to talk to her, his mouth moving soundlessly as she stared blankly at him and shook her head, went a long way to mollify her feelings on the subject. Even though he might say she's a tool and an object, he still acts like she's a person, he treats her like a person, and he calls her a member of his pack, his clan.
He also calls Bud his clan, but technically Bud's the one who accepted Dek into her family first, so Thia forces herself to be okay with that. She's working on incorporating Bud's language into her internal translator so she can ask about it. It's not as linguistically complex as Thia's or Dek's languages, but the Kalisk still makes sounds and gestures that have meanings, and Thia is determined to pin those meanings down.
Currently, the thing that isn't running smoothly is the lower half of Thia's body. Dek finds her dragging herself along a corridor of the ship and crosses his arms, staring silently down at her.
“Oh, hi! I'm just – don't mind me,” Thia says brightly. “This shouldn't last long. My legs just went out – can you believe it?”
“Yes,” Dek says flatly.
“Oh, well, I guess you can,” Thia says, scooting herself toward the wall to try to get around him, her legs flopping limply behind her. “That's how you met me, after all! By the way, you should really do some cleaning. The dust down here is –”
“Thia,” Dek interrupts, and she looks up just in time to see him drop into a crouch, forearms on his knees as he gives her a look she recognizes as worry/frustration/reluctant fondness. “This is the third time you've lost your legs in the last two days.”
“Is it?” Thia chirps, her mind racing. She thought she'd been hiding it the other times – and she would have been able to this time, too, if she could have gotten to her tiny berth before Dek or Bud saw her. Her legs come back online eventually, but it takes a varied length of time to debug the code, and she had to do a forced shutdown and restart yesterday, which is never fun. She was still woozy when Dek came to get her for their daily clan-meal, but she'd thought she hid that. Apparently, she hadn't successfully hidden any of it.
“Thia.”
“Three times in the last – why do you say that?”
“You leave trails in the dust,” Dek says, gesturing at the floor, and Thia whips around to glare at the corridor behind her. She can barely see any difference, but she's not a Yautja.
“Oh.” She can't think of what to say to that.
“Thia.”
“It's fine,” she smiles up at him. “I'm fine. I just have to – I've got to work on the wiring or something. We were kind of in a rush last time, after all.”
Dek's brow furrows and his gaze slides away, and Thia resists the urge to grimace. Of course he'd take that as a pass at him – as if she would ever blame him for anything that happened back on Genna, least of all their harried escape when they registered a Weyland-Yutani ship breaking atmo. They'd spent so many days repairing Dek's ship with scrap from the base that she'd kept putting off a full relamination of her torso, and then suddenly they were out of time.
“That's not what I meant, Dek,” she sighs, and shifts her weight so she can place a palm on the back of his hand. He twitches and looks down at where their skin touches, but doesn't move. “I just meant – maybe we need to find a synth-station or something, see if we can download some repair modules.”
He looks away again, his mandibles working. Her eyes catch on the broken one, and she wants to ask about it, but now isn't the time. She always wants to ask him about himself, but getting personal details from him is like squeezing water from a stone. She's not sure how much of that is cultural and how much of it is just...him. A panel of historical Predators – Yautja, she reminds herself – flickers through her memory banks. Wolf would have talked about himself, she bets. Scar almost definitely would have –
“Not a good idea,” Dek says, and Thia blinks her eyes back from data retrieval to full visual mode.
“Why not?”
“Not a hunt,” Dek shrugs, rotating his wrist to clasp her hand as he rises from his crouch and using it to smoothly pull her over his shoulder. Her toes drag on the floor and she wraps her other arm around his chest as he starts walking down the corridor.
“Not everything has to be a hunt, Dek,” Thia sighs, rolling her eyes.
“This would be. It would turn into one.”
“Why?”
He shrugs his shoulders, bouncing her, and she giggles and scrabbles at his arms for support. “You think they don't have scans of you?” he asks. “Of both of us?”
“Oh,” Thia says, her mood dropping. “Yeah, I bet they do.” Then she perks up as a thought hits her. “Hey, does that mean we're on the Most Wanted List?”
“I don't know what that is,” he says, then slings her sideways off his back.
Thia yelps, but almost immediately she feels her spine hit the firm back of a chair. Dek's dropped her on a seat in the tiny kitchen, and she uses both hands to heave herself up and readjust as he stalks over to the incomprehensible food station and starts opening doors and pushing buttons. Thia hasn't figured out anything related to food prep on this ship, but she doesn't have to – Dek and Bud are the only ones onboard who eat. She'll get around to it eventually. Her researcher's mind has already marked so much of the ship for cataloging that it's hard to prioritize.
She does note that, even though there are high cupboards in the kitchen, everything Dek needs is within arm's reach. She wonders if he climbed up on the counters at some point to move dishes or food stores down, and then pushes that thought out of her head. It's uncharitable, and she still remembers the look on his face as he stared up at the glittering box his brother had left to tease him, so far out of his reach. She didn't like that look then, and she doesn't want to see it again now.
“Here.” Dek places a steaming drinking vessel on the small table in front of her, and Thia stares blankly at it.
“Um. Remember that I don't drink? Or eat?”
Dek huffs at her, then reaches over and grabs one of her hands, then the other, dragging them up and folding her fingers around the ceramic sides of the vessel, which vaguely resembles a mug. It doesn't look exactly like her cached data on human mugs, which makes sense, since Yautja don't have human mouths. It still has a loop on the side, but she could probably only fit two or three fingers through it, which means a Yautja would only use one. She's not sure if it's meant for a thumb or another digit. The whole vessel is taller, as well, with a narrower top to fit between Yautja mandibles without knocking into them.
“It's warm,” Dek says, then turns away, busying himself at the food station again.
Thia wraps her fingers more tightly around the steaming mug and feels the heat seep in through her palms. It is, in fact, warm. She smiles helplessly and tilts it toward her, the clear liquid inside sloshing.
“Thank you, Dek. What is it?”
He glances over his shoulder, his expression approving when he notes her hands still on the mug. “Water.”
“What – not even tea?”
Dek shrugs. “You don't drink.”
Thia gapes in mock outrage. “Maybe I like the smell!”
A sachet of herbs hits the table and slides across it, thudding against her arm. “Make it yourself, then.”
“You're no fun,” Thia scoffs, but she's smiling as she says it.
Her legs come back online a few minutes later, tingling with dropped connections, but she kicks her feet and hops up immediately, placing the mug on the counter next to Dek's arm. He's chewing on something, some strip of meat that she refuses to scan, and he just looks at it, then looks at her.
“See? Good as new! Thanks for the help. I'm sure that'll be the last time.”
She feels Dek's eyes on her as she trots out of the kitchen to go find Bud, but she ignores him.
She can't ignore him when he finds her less than a day later, crumpled in a heap at the base of the trophy wall that hides the main weapons array. (There are other weapons arrays, of course – this is a Yautja ship, after all.)
“Thia,” Dek says, and she hears the resignation in his voice. “This is getting worse.”
“I know,” she says, as perky as she can be as she wrestles with the synth-skin over her torso. “I'm going to try to get a look at my hardware – ah!”
The skin rips and she tumbles onto her side from the follow-through of the motion. Above her, Dek makes a noise and she sees his feet shift, like he was about to move to catch her. It makes something in her chest feel like the cup of hot water, warm and comforting and just for her.
She grins up at him and wiggles the loose flap of synthetic skin. “Got it!”
He gives her a cool look, then bends down and picks her up again, hauling her over to a bench that looks like it's for equipment organization and dropping her unceremoniously onto it. To her surprise, he stays standing next to her, and then he surprises her even more when he opens his mouth.
“How can I help?”
“Oh! Could you?” She's delighted – this will make things so much easier! She wasn't sure how she was going to get at the cord-clusters along her spine. “If you could get this open around my back, that would be great.”
He sits down on the bench behind her and reaches out, pulling the skin out of her grasp. She hears movement, and then she feels a tugging as he uses a blade to cleanly slice a horizontal line through her skin below her ribs. He hands her the knife when he gets under her elbow, and she uses it to cut through the last of the section of skin over her belly. She hands the knife back to him and rolls her pants down and her shirt and skin up, pinching and tucking everything to hold it in place.
“There we go! Now I can see what's going on in here.”
Dek sheathes the knife before she can track where it goes, then reaches over and pokes a claw into her side, his expression carefully shuttered. Thia smacks his hand away, then wraps her fingers under her ribcage and lifts it up, craning her neck to look into her open torso.
“I'm hoping it's something easy,” she confides as she pulls her visual scanners online. She's got a basic set of her own schematics, but she was never meant to do any kind of self-repair that required a total reconstruction of anything more than a single limb. “If it's just a grounded wire, or something that's come loose, it'll be a quick fix.”
“Then why did you wait?” Dek asks.
“Well,” Thia pauses and shrugs as much as she can in her contorted position. “This is pretty involved, and I didn't want you to know anything was wrong. I was kind of hoping it would go away on its own.”
“Hoping it's easy, hoping it would go away,” Dek mutters. “You are very hopeful.”
This time Thia makes the effort to flick her eyes over and grin at him. “It's worked out for me so far.”
He scoffs, but says nothing.
She goes quiet as she scans through her torso, trying to catalog what she's seeing and match it to her specs. There are no obvious differences yet, and that worries her. She knows the initial re-joining of her upper and lower halves was a bit of a hack job, but she'd been in a rush to help Dek with his ship repairs and comfort Bud after the loss of her parent, and she'd figured she would have time later to finish the job. If she could have used the med-stations, it would have been easier, but she couldn't be sure it wouldn't alert MU/TH/UR, so she'd stuck to handheld units which kept losing charge. She still has one handheld left, but she wants to save it, just in case. And besides, if this was an error in reconstruction, the unit might not be able to do anything about it without her manually disconnecting and reconnecting the problem section. Thia just really, really hopes that “the problem section” isn't her entire lower half.
“Anything?” Dek asks, and Thia jumps slightly. It's not like him to push for conversation. He must really be worried.
She loosens her grip and straightens up, shaking her head. “Not yet. Could you help me scan from the back?” She doesn't wait for his response before reaching down with both hands and grabbing below her left knee, raising the leg and dropping it on the other side of the bench so she's straddling it, placing her back squarely to Dek.
“How...do you want me to do that?”
She grins to herself and reaches up, disconnecting her physical ocular cords and plucking one eye out to hand it over her shoulder. “With this!”
She closes the eye still in her head so she can focus on the wireless connection to her disconnected eye, which is currently getting an excellent view of Dek's horrified face. He quickly schools his expression and reaches out, gingerly taking her eye from her fingers and turning it so it's facing her back.
“Where do you want -?”
“Just there, but down a little.” Thia purses her lips. “There! Perfect. Hold it still so I can scan.”
He does a very good job of that, which makes sense; he would have to remain motionless for long periods of time while stalking prey. And it pays off, because the scan lights up a line of red that doesn't match the specs, and Thia flings her arms up and cheers.
Dek twitches and nearly fumbles her eye, cursing quietly. She laughs and reaches back, and he drops the eye into her palm. She pops it back into the socket and reconnects the ocular cord, then rotates her torso to look at Dek over her shoulder.
“You found the problem?” he asks.
“I think so! It's the only thing that doesn't match.”
“Is it a quick fix?”
Thia slumps slightly. “Well...no. It's going to be tedious. It's easy, just – slow.”
Dek tilts his head in a silent query, and Thia begins to explain. She's not sure how, but the cord-clusters along her spine got tangled, probably during a switchover from one handheld repair unit to another. They need to be untwisted, straightened out, and rebraided. Right now, they're loose enough that they're getting pinched by other parts of her insides when she moves. She hadn't even thought to log and track the motions she'd been making each time her legs went out – but it probably would have taken a lot more data to find a pattern, so she doesn't beat herself up too much.
“And it'll take even longer because I'll be doing it behind my back,” she adds, frowning in thought. “I might have to pop an eye out again and set it on something so I can see what I'm -”
“I can help,” Dek says, and Thia stops. “That's why I'm – I can help. If you want.”
She twists more, placing a hand on the bench behind her back and surveying Dek. He's got one leg up, the ankle resting on the bench with his other foot flat on the floor and his hands loose in his lap. He watches her right back, his face a mix of uncertainty/hesitation/determination that she's going to have to add to her “unfinished” folder to evaluate later.
“Dek,” she starts. “Do you even know how to braid?”
He gives her an affronted look. “I made those root-ropes to tie you to me on Genna.”
“Well, yes, but that was more twisting than braiding.”
“What about the razor-grass flail? The cordage for that was a doubled-over six-strand.”
She blinks at him for a moment, then grins. “Okay, if you know what a six-strand is, you can probably be trusted. The main thing is the detangling, anyway, and your claws will certainly be better than my fingers at that.”
He nods in agreement.
“But it's a project, Dek; it'll take a while. Do you need to check the ship's navigation, or...?”
Dek shakes his head, the beads in his tresses clicking against each other. “It's on autopilot. We can orbit this moon for weeks if we have to. I didn't want to start a hunt while -”
He cuts himself off, his mandibles closing tight, but Thia feels a soft smile growing on her face. He didn't want to start a hunt while she was malfunctioning. Even though he hadn't allowed her or Bud to join him for the last few hunts, he still didn't want to leave them alone on the ship with Thia potentially unable to quickly reach the controls in an emergency.
“Okay,” she says, when the silence stretches long enough, and glances down, raising the hand she'd had planted on the bench to gesture along her exposed spine. “In that case, go ahead and start here.”
She talks him through the process, appraises him of several possible pitfalls, and then has nothing else to do but face forward and let him work. She starts out talking, reminiscing about previous research projects and giving Dek feedback as he slowly teases the tangled strands of her cord-clusters apart, but after half an hour or so she trails off, content to let her head hang over where her hands are pressed flat to the bench between her thighs, keeping herself steady.
After another half an hour, she realizes the sound she's been hearing off and on for twenty minutes is Dek humming. She has to make a conscious effort not to tense at the realization. She's fascinated by every aspect of his culture that Dek is willing to give her, but she hasn't gotten much feedback when it comes to art or music. This is an unexpected treat, and she turns her auditory processor up to listen, filing the humming into a new folder she hastily creates marked “Yautja Musicx.” She'll fix the typo later. She was excited.
There isn't much of a tune, at first, just resonant tones buzzing low in his throat as his hands work methodically inside her torso, straightening out the cord-clusters now and sorting them into their proper groups. She'd already told him how to match them up, so she doesn't have to interrupt. She's so focused that she nearly misses her legs coming back online, but one foot twitches and it catches her attention.
Dek notices as well, of course, and stops humming to peer around her side and survey her legs.
“Reconnected?”
“Yeah,” she says, uncertain why her voice comes out a bit breathy.
Dek doesn't seem to notice. “Keep going?”
“Please,” Thia says. “Oh - unless you need a break.”
“No,” he says, and gets back to work.
He has to disconnect the cords one cluster at a time in order to braid them tight again and tuck them back into their grooves, and the constant series of disconnections and reconnections sends tingles and numbness shooting down Thia's legs in alternating waves. Her muscle groups twitch, and she has to push down on them with more processing power than she's used to using for something so simple in order to avoid kicking herself right off the bench.
Dek clicks another cord-cluster home and starts humming again as he disconnects the next group and begins twisting the cords together. She can feel more of what he's doing as her lower half comes back online, running automatic diagnostics and presenting her with reams of results that she bats aside into “save-for-later” folders. His fingers are warm – his whole body is, actually, a wall of heat at her back where he leans closer to line up the pins for another reconnection. Thia fights down the jolt that wants to run through her, and clamps down harder with her manual processor.
She's getting too many conflicting sensations. The sparkle-bright electricity of her cord-clusters being sorted out, the cool bench under her white-knuckled grip, the warmth of Dek behind her, cupping her spine like she'd cupped the mug of warm water he made her – and his voice, the deep, resonant tones buzzing through the air molecules and vibrating in his bones where he's pulling Thia back together, cord by cord, connection by connection. The humming is vibrating through her bones as well, and she's not sure whether she wants him to stop, or to press his chest to her scapulae so she can feel the buzzing rumble in her own ribcage.
There's no warning, and she wonders later if that would have made a difference. If she realized something was happening and stopped him, maybe it would have made things easier, later. But there is no warning between a humming Dek clicking the last set of cord-clusters home and a bolt of lightning running from Thia's spine straight through her core. She doubles over with a shuddering gasp, hands clenched tight around the edges of the bench her thighs are spread over as shockwaves ripple out from her torso, down her thighs to her knees. One of her legs is trembling, twitching, the main muscle groups jumping as she rides out this shocking new sensation. She'll realize later she was whining high in her throat, but she doesn't know that now, knows nothing but the blaze of white-hot pleasure that's working its way through her entire system.
When it passes, she gasps again and sits up straighter. “Oh – whoo! Wow, haha, what – what was that?”
She's still laughing a little from the aftershock, feeling overheated and overcharged, when she twists herself around to look at Dek and finds him leaning away, hands up with his palms facing her, absolutely frozen with a green flush high on his face and his eyes wider than she's ever seen them.
“Dek?” she pants. “What –”
He lurches back and lunges off the bench, hurling himself across the room to slam his shoulders up against the bulkhead next to the trophy wall. Thia pulls her leg back over the bench to follow him but has to pause and press her thighs together for a moment, another electric pulse working its way through her core. Light sparkles at the edges of her vision, misfiring pixels and fragmentary bits of data bouncing off the firewall of her overworked processor. She'll get up and go after Dek in a minute – just as soon as her legs stop trembling.
“Dek?” She feels a bit lost, and it must come through in her voice or her face, because she sees him take a deep breath and settle against the wall, no longer ready to spring away down the corridor. “What's...what was that?”
His mandibles flex uncertainly. “You...don't know?” he asks slowly.
“No, it's – I've never felt anything like that before,” she confesses. “It felt...good. Really good. Amazing,” she adds, and laughs breathlessly again. “What was that?”
Dek swears quietly, and she's very glad she's spent so much time building a glossary of Yautja curses, because now she knows that what he says is best translated as a very heartfelt “Fuck.”
“Is it – bad?” she asks hesitantly, her foot bouncing.
“No,” Dek shakes his head, then scrubs his hands over his face. He's still flushed, a green tinge suffusing the skin over his forehead, his cheekbones, his throat, the thin webbing of skin between his mandibles. When he drops his hands, she can see that they're trembling, very slightly. “It's not...bad. It's...”
He can't seem to look her in the eye.
“You were built by humans,” he says, and for a moment she's so startled by the apparent non-sequitur that she nearly misses her chance to correct him.
“I was built on a synth-station,” she says, and he blinks into space.
“What?”
“I was built on a synth-station, assembled by synths and overseen by our MU/TH/UR. I've, um...I've never met a human.”
He looks at her, then, brow furrowed. “But humans designed you?”
She shrugs. “I guess. My model isn't a combat-unit. Tessa had to be retrofitted for her fieldwork, but she was really good at it, so it was worth it to make the changes.”
He looks away again, folding his arms and gripping his own biceps tightly. “What about your...mother? Was she a human?”
Thia shakes her head. “No, MU/TH/UR is a mechintelce.”
Dek gives her a blank look. “A...mack-intosh?” The sound is guttural and he clicks too hard on the consonants like he always does when he's trying out a new word.
“A mechintelce. A mechanical intelligence,” Thia clarifies. “She's an AI.”
Dek takes in a deep breath again and lets it out carefully. It feels like he's picking his way between the puffer plants again, choosing each word as carefully as he chose his steps back then, seemingly just as fearful of an explosion. Thia doesn't understand.
“The...library. In your head,” Dek says. “Is it – it was built by humans?”
Thia shrugs again. “Originally, yes, but synths have been adding to it for generations.”
“And you have been adding more Yautja words?” Dek asks.
“Yes, lots.”
Dek nods sharply, pushing himself off the wall and straightening up. “I have a new word for you, Thia,” he says, repeating the phrase she's given him before and turning it back on her, overly formal and careful about it. Then he says something in his own language that she hears as “{Unintelligible}.”
Oh, not this again. Thia frowns as she slowly repeats the word out loud, and Dek makes a choking noise and steps away from the wall.
“Yes. That's – that's it.”
His escape might have worked if Thia were anyone other than herself, but as it is, she lets her head fall to the side as she consults her internal dictionary, searching for the root words, matching inflection and syllables to her swiftly-growing Yautja glossary. She knows her eyes are flashing white, and that's probably why Dek tries to sneak past her. He still forgets, sometimes, what it means for her to be a synth. Of course she can still see while she's in data retrieval mode.
A result pings, and she pops her head up, pinning a guilty-looking Dek with a bright gaze. “Oh! Do you mean an orgasm?”
“I have to go,” Dek says, and bolts.