Work Text:
Sighing, you plot another pair of coordinates onto the map. A red dot appears inland, about where the compound’s gardens would be, if the map had any features beyond the line where sea meets land. You curse, deleting it.
Last week, you had pitched the idea of experimenting on the sea anemones that grew around the island. You think they can be bioengineered. Like most of your ideas, it was a desperate grasp at something that sounded insane enough to keep you employed. But for some reason Boy was interested, although you have no clue what traits he would encourage sea anemones to develop, and you hope you don’t have to find out. So far, it has been a disaster.
The assistants you assigned to collect samples had delivered the first batch to the lab. They sat there, unpreserved, all night. The room smelled like the red tide when you walked in the next morning. Suffice to say, none of the samples were usable. After berating them, you sent the trainees back out for more. At least this time they had returned while you were still in the lab. Only for you to find, after preparing every sample with care, that the origin coordinates they recorded won't properly map onto your model of the island. Just your luck.
It’s Tuesday.
“Are you almost done?” Kirsh asks, crossing his arms. He never leaves the lab until you do, no matter how much you insist. It’s been an hour and a half overtime today. Time that you won't even be paid for, as usual.
You know what he thinks about humans. Inefficient.
“Someone’s getting fired tomorrow, and it’s not going to be me,” you grumble.
“Isaac could have done that in half the time. Correctly.” There it is.
“My part, or theirs?”
He shrugs. The annoyance that clouds your thoughts only deepens. You try reversing latitude and longitude, in case the assistants are that incompetent.
The red dot appears farther out in the sea than a person could swim. You can practically hear Kirsh telling you a synthetic could swim farther. He’s still standing behind you, watching. You hope he hasn't been there the whole time.
“I’m not leaving until I fix this,” you say.
He leans over your shoulder, eyes narrowing. He doesn’t have to do that to focus his sight, but you wonder if he mimics it by design, or just because it amuses him. Whenever another assistant asks him a question about his construction, he gives them an unpleasant job to do instead of an answer.
Kirsh hums. “I see.”
“What?”
The hand on the back of your chair swivels it around. He eases down onto your lap and begins to type. Your hand flies up to balance him, but by the time you realize it’s not needed, you’re already holding onto his waist. Heat races down your spine.
Kirsh is sitting in your lap. You were dozing off before, but now you’re wide awake. He isn’t much heavier than a human of his size and stature would be, despite all the metal. You hadn’t expected him to be warm. It feels a bit like holding your hand against a light bulb that has been on for a long time.
He’s making changes to your map. You don’t dare to move, not even a little bit. The smell of antiseptic that clings to him makes you feel lightheaded, even as you take a deep breath in to calm down, which isn't working.
“The scaling is off. You mapped this onto a grid without setting a distance or center. It’s placing latitude and longitude by pixels.”
“Oh. Right.” You can’t process half of the words he says. His voice is a rumble next to your ear, absent of the hot breath that means life. There is a faint serial number along the hinge of his jaw. You’ve never been close enough to notice that before. You imagine running your tongue over it, feeling how the synthetic skin raises into letters and numbers. An artificial birthmark.
“I’ll fix it.”
He shifts to straddle your lap. If you simply pass away, you’re sure Boy would laugh about it afterwards, and that might be the only thought keeping you alive at the moment. The weight of his thighs bracketing yours is a suggestion, not a trap, though it holds you captive all the same. You make eye contact with a security camera across the room. It's late, maybe no one is watching.
Kirsh leans closer to the screen, into you. Your arm slides around him. His fingers fly across the keys as if he doesn’t even notice you having a crisis far too close by, can't feel the heat radiating from your face to his neck. A little closer and you could brush your lips against his jugular, although there would be no pulse.
“How… long will this take?” you ask, voice cracking.
“A few minutes. Be patient.”
You bite your tongue. He doesn’t mention the fact that your hands now rest on his waist. The fabric of his baggy jumpsuit has always hung off of his figure loosely, but now you can feel every contour of the synthetic body splayed across your lap. The way he's arched over you borders on obscene.
You breathe out a soft curse.
“Excuse me. What was that?” Kirsh asks. You can hear the smirk in his voice.
Right. Perfectly engineered hearing, like everything else about him. Your mouth is so close to his ear, you might as well have shouted. You wonder what else his senses can tell about you. Your heart rate? Your cortisol levels? All damning evidence.
“I said good luck.”
You relax bit by bit as he works. It’s been too long since you last took a break and sat without working on one project or another. You’re in the lab pretty much from the moment you wake up until you fall asleep, only leaving to eat because it might contaminate the experiments.
Your thumb traces absent minded circles over his hip before you notice what you’re doing. His chest expands once as a soft whir begins, some kind of cooling system kicking online. It sounds like a purr. You know better than to mention that.
The lab doors slide open. You tense immediately, heart pounding.
“Hello? Is anyone here?” someone calls. The voice should be familiar to you, but in your panic, you can’t place it.
“Kirsh,” you hiss.
“What is it now?” You push upward as if to stand, but his hand finds your shoulder and presses you back into the chair. “Stop wriggling.”
“Get up.”
“In a minute.” If you weren’t so busy trying to figure out an appropriate and not awkward place to put your hands, you might have questioned the petulant tone of his voice.
“Please—”
You recognize the face belonging to the voice as Joe rounds the corner. He stops in his tracks. You thought you were dead before, but that is nothing compared to how catastrophically, fatally dead you are the instant he makes eye contact with you.
He looks at you. Then he looks at Kirsh.
“Uh,” he starts, then stops again, mouth hanging open.
“Did you need something?” Kirsh asks.
“Um. I had a question…” Joe glances around the room, as if the uneven paint job and chemical damage are the most interesting things he has ever seen. “I guess it’s not really important.”
“Come back later. I’m busy,” Kirsh says, without so much as a glance up from the screen.
“Tomorrow. Yeah. I’ll… come back tomorrow."
Joe turns and bolts out of the lab, face red. You groan, tilting your head against the back of the chair. You can see a sliver of Kirsh’s face this way. His eyebrows are pinched in concentration. Fluorescent lights above halo him in a white glow.
“You know,” you start, faltering when he glances down at you, “he definitely thinks he interrupted something.”
“He did.”
You blink. “Uh… what?”
“My work. Obviously.”
Your eyes narrow. “Just because you barged in and started correcting stuff doesn’t mean you get credit for my work, thank you very much.”
He raises a brow. “I was being helpful.”
“By sitting on me?” Shit. Why did you have to bring it up? Now he’s looking at you as if he only just noticed how close you are, and you’re melting under the sustained heat of his gaze. It’s unreadable. He has always skipped over some well known human cues, especially nonverbal ones, if only to see you caught off guard. But now you’re not so certain what his blankness is hiding.
“It was efficient,” he says. A pause. “You were in the way.”
Your heart sinks. Of course it doesn't mean anything to him. Never mind the fact that he hasn’t gotten up, that he’s still watching your face from inches away. If he knew what you had been thinking, he’d… not laugh, Kirsh doesn’t really laugh. But he wouldn’t take you seriously at all.
This time, when you push against his chest, he stands. You swivel around and review his work, each line of code so perfect that it makes your eyelid twitch. You log out.
“Alright,” you breathe, straightening. You have to smooth out wrinkles from your outfit. Kirsh’s eyes track the motion of your hands. “See you tomorrow, then.”
You don’t wait for him to reply before running through the door.
Joe probably won’t tell any of the others. He’s not like the Neverland kids. But if Wendy gets curious, he won’t be able to keep a secret from her, and there’s no hope for you once that happens. Maybe it’s the paranoia of living under constant surveillance (there’s even a security camera in your room for some reason) but having a secret to keep has frayed your nerves. Especially since you have to go back to the lab tomorrow.
It’s fine. It doesn’t matter. If Kirsh wants to treat you like an inanimate object, that’s his right. Enough people treat him that way, so you suppose it’s fair.
But wouldn’t it be fun to get a little revenge? Not that you're looking for a reason to get close to him again. No way.
As luck would have it, your opportunity comes the very next day. The other assistants have shuffled off to the break room early, and you don’t even grit your teeth anymore because you know their days are numbered. The anemone samples are working nicely. You already have several ideas for genetic resequencing. The list of desired traits Boy has emailed you are a little concerning. Why would anyone want a sea anemone with opposable thumbs? That one will take a lot of work considering the fact that they don't even have hands to begin with, but you'll figure it out.
“Come here.”
It’s the first time he has addressed you since yesterday, beyond the halfhearted pleasantries in the morning. Not that you’re offended by that or anything. Nope, couldn’t be you.
You stride across the room to find Kirsh looking through a microscope. Apparently he’s taken it upon himself to start sampling the anemones before you’ve even finished dissecting them. Your teeth grind together.
“Look at this.”
Kirsh leans back from the microscope and raises his eyebrows at you. He’s scooted back to make room for you, barely enough, but you ignore that and sling yourself over his lap the same way he did to you.
You lean over the microscope. Some of the anemone’s cells appear cancerous. Forgetting your position for a moment, you lean closer for a better view, brows furrowing.
“That’s odd. I wonder if we took samples back when the compound was first built here. Don’t we dump a ton of stuff into the ocean? Or am I not supposed to know about that? Whatever. Did you have any ideas why this might have happened?”
He doesn’t respond. You refocus on a different area of the slider, noting the same phenomenon. Not a lot of your attention is on the cells in front of you anymore, even though it’s really quite interesting and concerning, but what’s more worrying is Kirsh. You can’t see his face from this position. All you can sense is the tense line of his body beneath you, holding as still as inhumanely possible.
“I hope Boy doesn’t make me give up the whole experiment just because this evidence might implicate the company,” you continue, because it feels safer than staying silent. But once you start you can’t shut up. You’re not even sure what you’re saying. Something you recently learned about anemones that Kirsh has probably known since the day he was born.
“Did you know that clownfish can survive the sea anemone’s sting? I wonder if we have any around here. I mean, probably. I’ve never seen one. Isn’t that cool though? The clownfish get shelter and the anemones get a live-in cleaning service. Super efficient.”
A hand ghosts against your thigh, a touch so light you might have imagined it. You bite the inside of your cheek but that can’t stop the words from spilling out for long.
“Maybe that’s only certain species of sea anemones. I don’t know.” An opportunity he would usually take to inform you of something is filled instead by the touch trailing to your hip. “This is super weird though. The oldest of these samples was… twenty years, I think? Anemones are biologically immortal. Kind of like you, huh?”
Kirsh freezes as if he hadn't realized you were talking to him all that time.
“I have nothing in common with Actiniaria,” he says.
“Are you sure? You’re kinda venomous and clingy." You wince as the words leave your mouth.
“But you don’t seem to mind,” he says, confusion tinting the words but not quite turning them into a question. Your face burns.
“Sorry.” For what, you have no clue, but it seems like the right thing to say once he’s caught on to the fact that you’re teasing him. Only he doesn’t seem to mind either.
You move to get up, placing a hand on his shoulder, but Kirsh winds his arms around you. Your stomach drops. He holds onto you the way anemones hold onto their prey when it wanders in, but you let yourself be caught.
“I don’t think I was clear enough, before,” he murmurs.
“You mean when you told me I was in the way?”
“That wasn’t what I meant.”
His cheek brushes against yours. Then you feel the cold bridge of a nose pressing under your jaw. You jump. He breathes in and holds for a minute as if analyzing something in the air, then lets it out again, almost like a sigh.
“Kirsh, did you just smell me?”
“... No.”
“This isn’t helping.”
He drops his chin onto your shoulder. “I find your presence restorative. More so the closer you are.”
“Restorative?” you ask, as if it’s a word in another language.
His throat bobs in something like a swallow. When he speaks again, it is in a softer voice than you’ve ever heard.
“Comforting.”
Your hand skates up the slope of his neck bit by bit until it rests pillowed in his hair. His body goes slack as your fingers run through the strands, even as his grip on you tightens.
“So you sat on my lap for comfort?”
He huffs. “Do we need to get into the specifics?”
"It's comforting to me too." A grin stretches across your face. “I wish you’d done it sooner.”
"I'll keep that in mind."
This time, when the lab doors slide open, you make no effort to move.
“Hey, I’m back for—” Joe stops. “Um. Again? Seriously?”
“Did you need something?” you ask, and he flushes. Kirsh’s lips curve into a smile against your neck.
Joe sighs. “You know what? No, I don’t.”
“I can be with you in a minute if you just–”
“No!” He turns on his heel. “It wasn’t important anyway. Have… have fun?”
The lab doors woosh closed behind him. The silence left behind feels warmer than before. Kirsh jolts as your thumb finds his jaw, tracing the string of numbers there.
“Do you think he’ll be back?” you ask.
“I doubt it,” Kirsh replies.
You rest your forehead on his shoulder and laugh.