paradisalogs | I cheated myself; Like I knew I would

Entry tags:

church,
tex

I cheated myself; Like I knew I would

Who: Tex and Church
What: Checking in on him after the LW events
When: After returning from San Diego
Where: Church's room
Rating: r for profanity

It was just fucking great that the place would do something like this. No sooner had she gotten Church to the hotel to start looking over him then they were back at this place.

She didn't bother to try to reach him through the journal, she knew where his room was and she would just go look him up herself. She was just going to make sure he was functional because as bad as it was here him being utterly messed up would be worse. It would be like inconvenient.

The grumbling was undoubtedly quiet up until the moment she spotted the name on the door. Knock? Yeah right. Not like there was anything she hadn't seen before, so she just let herself in.

"Hey, wanted to say I've gotten used to doing repairs and--WHAT THE FUCK IS THAT?"

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Wonderfuck strikes again. Man this place has the most shit timing. He tries to sit up but the faulty gyro makes him feel nauseous. Well, fuck that, he steps out of the body to get a better look.

From outside it really does look a hell of a lot worse. He's going to be popping dents for weeks. Oh well, he has a couple of tools here still he might as well get started. He passes through the door into the other room, man he hates leaving the Harper body laying around like that, it looks like damn corpse.

He slips into the body that Harper built him and takes a few seconds to get used to the fit again. Curls and uncurls his fingers and blinks a few times, it may be creepy when it's deactivated but once his inside it's almost impossible to tell from any other person. Not that there weren't tells, but you'd have to be paying really close personal attention to notice.

So, he's not sure why he hadn't thought that Tex would show up. Or that she'd just let herself into his room with no preamble. But he's caught totally off guard, crouched over his old body and looking up at her with a look of total surprise.

"Uh, hey... um." This is so not how he wanted her to find out about this. "Don't you know how to fuckin' knock?!"

Right, because the best way to deal with being on the defensive is to go on the offensive.

There's a few things in the world that will make you stop and go 'huh.'

Rainbows, how eggs balance on the solstice, people who always seem to have exact change right in front of you in line, and your ex-boyfriend who is in fact an artificial intelligence program based on the mental engram of your former real live boyfriend who went a little nuts when you died and created an entire program to try to resurrect you which is also why you came into being, in a human body. Yep, that'll make you pause.

Or in her case just stand and stare for 3.892 seconds of dead silence. No movement, no response nothing that would even indicate that the armor was possessed of anything remotely sentient.

"What.the.fuck.is.that?"

She repeated it, slowly, clearly and without benefit of answering his question.

Edited 2013-07-01 01:47 (UTC)

It's amazing how less than four seconds can still feel like a fucking eternity. Especially when your ex-girlfirend (who has been known to shoot you when she's cranky) is trying to stare a hole through your skull.

"Yeah uh... no, I can explain this." He runs a hand through his hair nervously and stands up. "see there was this guy... um, Harper. He was from a future universe that was really good at robotics."

Church looks from his old body to her.

"The guy was kind of an asshole... he built this body for me just before the castle sent him home."

He totally doesn't miss that guy. Stupid jerk.

So there had been a person here once upon a time that could build robot bodies. They built one for Church. God only knows why they did it, but they did, clearly.

He had a body.

He looked, christ he looked like she remembered. Or like the memories that were part of her programing image files said he looked. He was real, he looked like a person, even had the nervous mannerisms of a person in particular.

Well the fucking blue fairy must have come down because Pinocchio is a real boy, as real as he was likely to ever be anyway. Which meant things between them had just drastically changed. She was a program stuck in an armored shell. He still believed he was a living person's ghost and now he had a passably human body to inhabit.

It meant he could have a life of somewhat normal interactions.

It meant a lot.

"Ok."

She said it, she nodded once and turned on her heel to walk out.

"Tex wait!"

He moved forward to try to stop her. That wasn't the reaction he expected at all, if she had been angry he could have dealt with it. He'd faced her anger so often but this, this he didn't really know how to deal with. It managed to made him feel worse than shouting ever could.

"Look, I didn't... I didn't want you find out about it like this..."

You don't stop one thousand pounds of battle armor once it's in motion. Not unless it lets you, Tex whirled when he moved after her and fixed him with that unreadable faceplate.

"How did you want me to find out? The day I see you walking through a fucking field of flowers? Or laying out getting a tan?"

The faceplate may be unreadable, but he knew her well enough that the rest of her body language made up for it. You don't spend years only ever interacting through armor without learning to express yourself through it. Even the way she turned spoke volumes about how upset she was. Not just angry, but upset.

"I was going to wait until you were settled in... I don't know, tell you about it first."

His eyes flicker over her, trying to gauge her posture and through that, her reaction. Technically, he could stay perfectly still and the optics in his eyes would take in the whole scene in perfect detail. But he had been human a few times now and his subconscious was getting better and better at mimicking his mannerisms each time.

"Well now you don't have to."

Her posture was rigidly perfect, no slouching, no easy minute sway that mimicked the human body's need to remain tension and locked joints to keep one upright. She could have been carved of stone for all the movement she made. She could have been, but she wasn't.

"Long story short. You have a body. There, nuff said, didn't have to settle in or anything."

She started moving again, her earlier thought coming back to her. "Congratu-fucking-lations Pinocchio."

"Goddamn it, this is why I didn't want to just tell you about this!" He scowls and waves a hand in the air. "I fuckin' knew you'd be jealous!"

Because what else could it be. She had tricked him out of the body he stole fair and square from Lopez. When there was only one robotic body around they had fought over it until he convinced Sarge to build them each one of their own.

“Jealous?” Her voice took an edge and she leaned in as if this was going to turn into something else, but there was a pause and things…changed. The hand that rose up, fingers curled, just hovered there with a cocked elbow locked in place, in a moment it lowered back to her side and she turned back for the door.

“Yeah, that’ exactly fucking it. So I’m just going to leave before I jealously punch your pretty new body.”

He sees the hand come up and waits, but the punch never comes. Which is frankly kind of strange. Just one more thing to add to the strange that's been the past few days.

If she's not jealous why was she being such a bitch about this? Yeah fine, it was a surprise but come on, that can't be the reason she's all bent out of shape.

"Well if that's not it then what the fuck is it?!"

Edited 2013-07-02 22:57 (UTC)

"It's..." Just what the fuck was it?

It hurts, it is making big tuff Tex want to curl into herself and just shut down. Because the last time she saw that face she'd said goodbye.

"It's nothing. I gotta go."

"Fine, go." What the fuck did he care anyway.

She didn't want to tell him what was going on... she never fucking told him what was going on. So why the fuck bother.

So why did it bother him so much? Because it did. Maybe it was because he liked to think that there had been a time when she would have talked to him... told him what was bothering her. Those days were long over, felt like a lifetime ago.

"But you're a shit liar."

Edited 2013-07-03 01:30 (UTC)

"Don't fucking push me, Church!"

She had been controlling her temper, the hurt made it easier to fall into pacivity than lashing out. But he was so good at pushing her buttons, he could set her off faster than anyone.

This wasn't exactly something she could tell him, not something she was even sure she could say out loud.

"And I'm a great fucking liar."

"Or what? You'll kick my ass? You're already leaving, might as well complete the package and give me the parting gift too!"

They pushed each others buttons, sometimes intentionally and sometimes not. He wasn't sure which it was this time. All he knew was that he was catching shit for something that didn't seem like it justified it. For reasons she wouldn't explain.

It was just so damned frustrating. He thought things had been going pretty good between them. He should have realized it wasn't going to last.

"God dammit you don't know when to leave things alone, do you?"

Well you got her talking now, talking and moving. She hooked her arms around to grab his and shove him back against the wall, flat of her forearm pinning his throat there as she leaned in close, his own reflection staring back at him in her visor.

"You've got a body, a real one now. More real than this anyway." She flexed her fingers in the suit as a gesture of explanation. "So take it an live whatever normal kind of life you can. Keep away from the Freelancers. You get a second chance here." One she wasn't going to get.

Her voice softened, the hand not pinning him moved to gingerly touch just the edge of his cheek. Felt real, she could tell there were differences of density and texture but a hell of a lot more like a living body than what she had. "So just let it go."

He hits the wall with a huff, like she knocked the wind out of him. His fury reflected back to him by the unreadable visor.

Eyes flick over to her hand as it flexes, he can hear just the faintest hint of the servos. His first thought is that she still sounds envious. But then she's brushing his cheek and he can't help but lean into her touch, just a few centimeters.

"I have the blueprints." Obviously he isn't letting this go. Because it sounds too much like letting her go and he can't do that. He's never been able to do that. He never will.

That movement was so perfectly human, so perfectly..honest. Like he really wanted her to touch him. That almost hurt worse. Here he was looking like a real person and she was some moving suit of armor. So fucking unfair.

"And?" So what if he had blueprints? What did that mean?

Well aside from that someone left instructions on how to build a body like he had. After that sank in she back, damn near staggered but regained her footing and dropped her arms back from him.

"Are you saying that another body could be made?"

He does, he hadn't realized it until just then but he really does. And that is what makes him realize what giant fucking idiot he was. Because that's the real problem isn't it. Before they were at least on even ground and now.

Now he was stuck thinking about that touch and knowing there was no way he could return it. And it fucking sucked.

"Yeah, maybe... I think." He ran a hand through his hair absently. "I have to find someone who can understand them."

"Yeah, going by my luck the chances of that aren't great." She folded arms across her breastplate and looked at the floor as if in thought.

"I could take a look at them, Don't know how much they would be like anything I've worked on but..who knows, right?" She's forcing a level, nonchalant tone in her voice, trying to keep that part of it casual.

"Sure, yeah. I can figure out some basic repair stuff, but most of it's way over my head."

He goes over to little terminal he uses to access CastleNet and works through the encryption to access the prints.

"But you know, I'm not exactly good with computers and mechanics and all that shit."

He shrugs and offers her the chair once the blueprints come up. Most of the plans are surprisingly straightforward and easy to understand, but the neural net is far beyond what they're used to.

"Yeah, add computers and mechanics to the list." She scoffed and shoved him slightly as she took a seat and looked over the plans.

"Fuck." She could understand about half of what she was looking at, but there were things here..processing interfaces that worked like neural pathways to give the reactions of a realistic human body. Pupillary response, involuntary reflexive actions, breathing for coolant of the interior parts..there was shit here far beyond anything she'd ever dealt with and with that her head fell and what hopes had soared in the past two minutes crashed down.

"This is really fucking specialized, no robotkit shit here. You'd need someone like your friend who understood these kinds of things, someone that could work on a nanotech level and a shop that could handle all that. The parts fabrication along would require... "

Yeah best not to beat that dead horse, right? She just pushed away from the desk and stood. "But you've got yours and that's good. Like I said it gives you a chance for something almost normal."

"Then we find someone who understands it. There has to be someone..."

Fuck! Why did the castle have to send Harper back?!

Why hadn't he asked Harper sooner, he could have had a body here waiting for her. This was such bullshit!

"Tex, we'll figure something out."

She grunted noncommittally and moved back for the door, she needed...fuck she just needed to not be looking at him looking like that.

And face it Church, keeping the inanimate form of you on again off again girlfriend around would be way fucking creepy. It
s probably for the best that you didn't do that.

"I've got a few bugs to work out too so I'm going to work on that. I'll see you around." Because really this was getting painfully awkward.

He opened his mouth to protest but realized it wouldn't do any good. She didn't want anything to do with him like this.

His shoulders slump and he tries like hell not to look disappointed. Or worse hurt. Even though he feels like shit about this whole situation.

Which of course means that instead of letting himself acknowledge that pain, he'll just cover it up with bullshit anger. Because it's better to be angry than hurt.
His posture changes to reflect that, shoulder square again and he sets his face in a carefully neutral expression.

So fine, fuck her! If she wants to be a bitch let her.

"Yeah, sure. See you around."

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I cheated myself; Like I knew I would

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