Chapter Text
There was always an electric buzz wherever Irkens were.
It was a sound that reminded Pinq of dying lightbulbs and refrigerators. That low buzz of something being flooded with electricity and living in the way that machines do.
It wasn’t the worst noise to wake up to.
Pinq stuttered to awareness, not quite the slow waking of someone done with sleep, but also lacking the panic of there being a threat to wake up to.
Sleep was weird for her now.
She didn’t actually need it, hadn’t slept at all during her time as a Manager.
But now? As a solider?
She almost slept as much as she had as a human. It was to give her body time to rest and heal, sleeping shutting down nearly all of the programs that an Irken had running and letting her PAK direct its full attention and power to repairing her body.
But it left an Irken so vulnerable.
Pinq still didn’t know how so many soldiers could sleep alone in their barrack beds, unaware and unprotected.
How they hadn’t all ended up in a situation like Red and Purple’s.
Pinq’s only free eye slowly opened, first just a slit, and then a slow blink to let her see what had roused her.
Not that she could see much of anything from her position.
She was laying on her side, face buried into the more giving than usual flesh of another Irken.
She could see nothing but shadows and the magenta of the Irken army uniform.
Her arms were wrapped around a pair of hips, a thigh pressed to her chest, and another draped over her side. There was a gentle pressure of a forearm on her temple from where one of the Irken's arms reached across her.
There was a resistance to the back of her head, a tight pressure against either side of her PAK.
Pinq knew, with all of her heart and soul, or with her PAK and her battery depending (she was not having that fucking crisis again, the boys gave her such looks) that Purple’s boney irken ass was pressed right up behind her head and that Red’s stomach was pressed to her face.
She was not going to turn and around and check though.
Pinq flicked her antennas, an instinctive attempt to gain more awareness about her environment when her eyes weren’t doing much.
They rubbed both against Red’s chest and Purple’s lower back, making her fully body shiver at the stimulation of the tips actually hitting something instead of the passive contact from before.
When they had been just pressed against the boy’s bodies, it hadn’t been nearly as intense, but if she moved them herself then it was like getting tickled in her brain.
She didn’t get much information from doing it though.
Purple had been trying to teach her how to read more of the signals that her antennas were picking up but were being discarded as junk data by her PAK.
She caught that they weren’t the only ones in the barracks, making use of the downtime to sleep. Though she couldn’t tell how many of the beds were occupied.
She could ‘taste’ that the boys had cleaned up after eating, only the faint smell of sugar on their breath rather than a stink on their claws.
She could ‘smell’ that the boys were relaxed and comfortable, that neither of them had gone to bed stressed out or angry. Just tired and wanting a rest.
She also had it confirmed that it was Red in front of her and Purple behind her, but it wasn’t like she really needed that confirmed.
They always slept like that, Purple at the entrance and Red at the wall.
There were no assigned barracks in the army, but there were barracks that you weren’t allowed to use. Barracks that were height restricted or rank restricted.
When Pinq had first been placed in the army for her mandatory service, she had been locked at the lowest rank, something that overruled even her height rights.
Pinq was certain that wasn’t allowed, but she had been sent here to die, so it wasn’t like she expected them to treat her well.
She had only ever spent a single break in the smallest barrack bed, a time that she didn’t even spend sleeping, just curled up and miserable.
Every other rest period, she had been dragged to which ever bed Red and Purple had claimed for their after-mission rest. All three of them shoved into the biggest that was on offer for whatever base or ship they were currently on.
Purple always slept facing the most dangerous direction, placing his back (his PAK) to Red who was always directly behind him.
Purple needed to face the room so that he could catch the danger, his threat programs running even when he slept, able to easily separate Irkens from aliens, and even Irkens with aggressive body language from Irkens who were just walking by.
Red was closer to the wall to give Purple the space he needed, but he also faced the more dangerous direction. He had one arm pressed to Purple’s PAK and the other on his hip. A thin wire leading to Purple’s PAK from the port in Red’s spine jack so that if Purple’s programs threated something, then Red could shoot them. A gun not quite in Red’s hand but laying on the holster that Purple wore on his hip.
Purple’s ever running programs gave him a slower start up time, and so Red hooked in straight to respond as quickly as possible, the both of them acting as each other’s safety net.
It was a system that worked for them and had kept them safe and alive for cycles.
But then Pinq was added to the mix.
And she was shoved to the bottom of the bed and pressed between them.
The most useless Irken in the safest place.
Well, it wasn’t like there was anywhere else to put her.
They wouldn’t want her at their backs and putting her in front would only make her more like to be lost to a surprise threat.
Better to have her tangled between them, than to let her be lost or give her an advantage.
Pinq closed her eye and nuzzled her face deeper into Red’s stomach. Rolled her back into the legs that were pressed to her PAK in a lazy stretch.
She could hear Red’s digestion, knew that before he had climbed into the bed, he must have been gorging himself on whatever he could get his hands on, leaving him with a bit of a food bump.
She bet that Purple had one triple the size. He always ate the most. He had to in order to fuel his threat assessment programs that he always kept running full time.
Pinq mind sank back down, slid back into a deep sleep, still unaware of what had woken her up.
Unaware of the implications that her waking and moving unnoticed between the soldiers meant. What if meant that she hadn’t roused the two soldiers from slumber around her despite how she should have activated something. Some kind of fail safe.
But no, she went back to sleep, snuggled in the safest place she could ever be. Between a pair of vicious blood thirsty Irken soldiers.
It was only a few moments later that Pinq’s quiet purring stuttered back into being, but this time she slept through it.