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“I... like this.”
SecUnit sounds guarded, and Gurathin smiles as he’s allowed. It’s their third rule: while he and SecUnit are in the afterglow, Gurathin has permission to be as squishy and as human as he likes.
(Rule one is: do not touch SecUnit without prior authorization, followed swiftly by rule two: if we can talk about it, we have to talk about it.)
Gurathin is quietly thrilled every time SecUnit takes the initiative with their system, offering up information to Gurathin like shiny new pieces of code, even when it so clearly pains it.
“Would you like to be specific?” He asks.
It’s not ego-stroking if Gurathin is actually curious about what SecUnit means.
This last ‘session’—as they tend to call these intimate moments with the hardwire and no polite company—had been more intense. SecUnit had requested Gurathin topless, and though Gurathin had been instructed not to look, he knew that SecUnit had. It doesn’t surprise him that there might be something they should talk about.
For a moment, SecUnit is quiet. Gurathin has learned not to let the silence make him feel uncomfortable. As fast as the construct’s processing speed is, it can still take a while for it to decide whether an acid bath is preferable to speaking it’s mind, even with the rules in place.
“You can look toward me now,” SecUnit says instead. Gurathin turns over, looking toward SecUnit but not directly at SecUnit, and waits for it to answer his question in it’s own time. It allows him to see when SecUnit waves it’s hand over Gurathin’s bare torso, repeating, “This,” with more intention.
Gurathin frowns and glances down the length of his own body. There are his vitiligo patches, the sparse trail of dark hair that cuts a line down the middle of him, and all the soft edges where his nightware waistband sits beneath his stomach and hips.
“You’re... soft here,” SecUnit continues when it’s clear Gurathin is still confused, growing more awkward and tight-voiced, “It’s good. Better.”
Gurathin’s frown deepens; he almost asks, “Better than when?” until the answer comes to him just as quickly as the question had.
He forgets—enough to still be startled—that just because his organic memory only provides surface-level glimpses of the time SecUnit was held in his augments, it doesn’t mean SecUnit is limited in the same way. Now there’s this—a confession that SecUnit had seen what he’d looked like before. It had kept the memory in storage long enough to recall that the image was different from what Gurathin looks like now.
Gurathin’s stomach swoops with unnecessary fear before he takes a breath and reminds himself that he’s on Preservation Station. The CR can’t get him here. He has SecUnit, who is also safe, and... and SecUnit likes ‘this.’
Gurathin looks down again, looks at ‘this,’ and thinks—after processing—Huh.
He notes where the skin above his ribs isn’t sucked gaunt between the bones by malnutrition and where his hips are covered by a healthy layer of fat; the evidence of wanting a hit more than wanting food is gone. Even the shape and weight of his thighs are starkly changed; the muscles no longer refuse to meet in the middle when standing. When had that happened?
Gurathin knows in the way he knows how to navigate the feed that years have passed since he was in the deepest clutches of the Corporation Rim. He’s needed new clothing in steady increments as he’s healed, and he’s felt adequate when before there was only craving or hollow, but... has anyone pointed it out to him so earnestly? Has he, in the last few years after clearing his rehabilitation modules and relearning how to eat full meals, examined himself enough to mark the changes in his body without a passive, intentionally ignorant eye?
Clearly not enough if he’s feeling this caught off guard by SecUnit’s comment. He wonders what that says about the hurdles he still needs to pass over, that even though greatly improved from skeletal and strung out, he’d chosen to treat his body almost as an afterthought.
“Did I... mess up the ‘afterglow’?” SecUnit asks. It’s tone is carefully neutral, meaning it’s actually worried it might have made a mistake.
“No,” Gurathin says after clearing his throat of thick emotion, wishing more than anything that he could reach over to offer a physical reassurance he knows SecUnit doesn’t even want. He says “No,” again, and shakes his head for emphasis. It isn’t a lie either. He’s just... recontextualizing himself in a way he’s apparently been avoiding for a very long time now.
Silence blankets them, comfortable in the warm, dark bubble of Gurathin’s bedroom. He sets his hand over his stomach and traces a large, pale swath of skin just to the right of his navel, following the perimeter of differing pigment to where the barest hint of a stretch mark introduces a new texture around his waistline.
“I think—” Gurathin finds a hesitant smile pulling up the edges of his lips. He looks back toward SecUnit. “I think I like this too."