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K8-E didn't remember when she sat down. One moment she'd been standing beside Jade, unable to tear her gaze away from N.O.M.'s, a thousand things running through her mind at once. The next moment her back had found the corner of the counter; she had been sliding down until the tile beneath met her feet. Hands wrapped around her shins. Chin low. It stunk of human blood in the room—what a specific smell. Something was dripping in the sink, and she could hear CVIT and N.O.M.'s footsteps as they left, trying to dispel attention away from the area. Future problems.
She stared at a plain spot on the floor, the only tile she could see that was clear of Vi and Wobb's blood.
K8-E only snapped back to reality when Jade leaned before her. The soft creak of Jade's joints was what snapped K8-E back, and then she registered the shape of them: their knees coming to the ground, hands resting loose on their thighs.Face looking almost soft. Or pitying. K8-E scooted closer to the counter.
"You're being quiet," Jade said. Their voice was always so certain-sounding, as if they'd been designed to soothe. Once upon a time, K8-E might have believed that to be true, but after what she'd seen just now, she couldn't be sure of Jade's purpose anymore.
K8-E couldn't answer them; her voice box felt like it had been welded down.
"You're usually not quiet." Jade's eyes glinted in the low light. They were just green now, not pink, although K8-E kept checking as if they might flicker back at any moment. "Is something wrong with your module?"
Was Jade not aware they had just killed a man?
"No," K8-E said, sounding so much smaller than she would've liked. Sounding like she had when she'd asked N.O.M. to stop.
"Okay," Jade said, nodding. "Your hands are shaking."
K8-E looked down. Her hands were, in fact, shaking. "I know," K8-E said, and found her voice was shaking too. She felt so vulnerable here. She needed to get out, to run, not to let Jade see her in this state. This was humiliating, all this over a human's death… but she couldn't even stand, let alone run. Her legs were lead.
"Do you want them to stop?" Jade asked.
"Obviously I want them to stop, Jade," K8-E said, sharp. "Sorry. I don't—I don't know what I want."
Jade considered this thoughtfully, a long pause. It was as if they had become a stranger. K8-E couldn't understand what danced behind their eyes at all anymore. If anything did. It terrified her.
Then Jade reached out and set a light hand on K8-E's knee.
"K8-E displays the common human nervous tic of shaky hands," Jade said, reading some kind of log. K8-E shrunk back further. Jade's eyes snapped back to K8-E's. "When I asked you about your makers, your hands did the same thing."
"That's not the same thing at all."
"It's not," Jade said, leaning closer, as if they didn't catch how K8-E leaned back. "This is worse."
K8-E let out something that wasn't quite a laugh. It scraped on the way out.
They sat like that for a while, Jade's hand still resting on her knee, warm in the false, engineered way every android's hands were. K8-E stared past them at the wall, at nothing, and tried to think about anything except pink eyes and Wobb's face and N.O.M.'s words and the sound—
K8-E shook the thought away.
"You held my hand," Jade said after that long moment. "When Vi died."
"Yeah."
"Did that comfort you?"
K8-E couldn't lie now. Somehow couldn't conjure it. Jade used to be so easy to lie to; K8-E used to be sure that Jade would never catch on, but now lying to Jade felt so wrong. "I… suppose, yeah."
"Do you need comfort?"
K8-E didn't answer. Jade slipped their hand into K8-E's. K8-E said nothing.
"Why did you hold my hand?" Jade asked.
Hypocritically, K8-E wished they would stop asking questions. God, she needed to leave. "I don't know." She did know.She wasn't going to say it. "You were right there."
"CVIT was right there too. You didn't hold his hand."
"CVIT didn't need it."
"How do you know what I needed?"
K8-E frowned. "I don't. I don't know you."
That one landed somewhere she didn't want it to. She looked up at them, finally, really looked: Jade's face doing that thing where it tried to arrange itself into an appropriate expression and mostly just looked lost, half-black hair falling messy over one eye.
K8-E felt a bizarre need to apologize. She didn't, of course; instead she said, "I don't know anything anymore, apparently."
"That's not true. You know a lot of things. You taught me a lot of things," Jade said, matter-of-fact. "You taught me about friendship."
"I don't want to talk to you about that right now."
Jade seemed a little childishly hurt by that. K8-E wondered how this could be the same android she'd seen slit that human's throat moments ago, cooing in his ear as they did it.
"Okay." Jade paused. Their thumb moved, once, against her knee: an approximation of comfort likely assembled from half-remembered inputs. "What do you want to talk about?"
"Nothing. Nothing, I just—" She dragged both hands over her face, dragged them back down, pressed the heels of her palms hard against her eyes until she saw sparks. "I don't want to talk. Can we just not talk."
"We're talking right now."
"I noticed, Jade."
A silence. Not an uncomfortable one, exactly—Jade didn't seem to register discomfort the way she did, didn't fidget under the weight of it—but it sat heavy on her anyway, pressing down on her chest until she had to remind her own systems to keep cycling air she didn't technically need.
"Did holding my hand make you feel better?"
"I'm fine."
"I don't think you are."
"I am fine, Jade!"
"Okay," Jade said again, in that same flat, accepting tone, and somehow the lack of a fight made it worse, made something crack open wider in her chest than any argument would have. She pressed her forehead down against her knees and just breathed, or did the thing that passed for breathing, shoulders drawn up tight around her ears like she could fold herself small enough to disappear into the space beneath the counter.
She felt Jade shift closer. Heard the scrape of their knees against tile.
"I don't like this," Jade said, quieter now. "You not talking. It's wrong. It doesn't fit."
"Nothing about tonight fit, Jade, I'm—" her voice shingled and broke off.
"No," they agreed. Simple. Certain. "It didn't."
Another stretch of quiet. K8-E kept her face hidden, kept her arms locked around her knees, and somewhere behind her closed eyes she saw green eyes flick to pink, over and over, a loop she couldn't shut off.
Then she felt Jade's hand on her jaw. It was tentative, unpracticed, tilting her face up whether she wanted it lifted or not.
"What are you doing," she said, voice thick.
K8-E felt like she might be overheating. Why now and not earlier?
"You laughed earlier," Jade said, like this explained anything. "Before all this. When I did the thing with my mouth on yours for Shan. You laughed and your face changed and you seemed… better. For a second."
"Jade—"
"I've been trying to think of what to do," Jade continued, undeterred, eyes searching her face with that same rigid,searching literalism they applied to everything, like there was a manual somewhere and they were flipping through it in real time. "N.O.M. does things to control people. CVIT does things because he has to. I don't know what to do to make you not sad. But that worked before."
K8-E stared at them. Somewhere in her chassis, something twisted, painful and strange, grief and disbelief braided together so tight she couldn't tell where one ended and the other began.
"Do you want me to kiss you again?" Jade asked.
"What?"
"That seemed to make you feel better before," Jade said. "You laughed."
K8-E just looked at them. The absurdity of the question sat there between them, enormous and stupid and somehow exactly the kind of thing Jade would say after K8-E watched them kill with ease. Hell, Jade still had blood splattered across their shirt.
"No," she managed. "No, Jade, that's not—that's not how this works."
"Why not? It worked earlier."
"It didn't work, it just—" She scrubbed at her face again, buying herself a second she didn't actually use for anything. "It's not a fix. You can't just kiss someone every time they're upset, that's not how comfort is supposed to—ugh!"
"I remember you laughing. I remember your voice went up at the end, higher than normal. I remember you told me we had done it wrong after, but you were still smiling when you said it. I do recognize the kiss was imperfect; I apologize.We could try to be like Ish and Abel…"
K8-E laughed, "Do not compare us to Ish and Abel ever again!"
"Oh, I'm sorry," Jade said, but something in their face loosened. Jade didn't really do full smiles, but a kind of loosening around the eyes, like they'd been braced for something and it hadn't come. "I made you laugh."
"Oh, shut up! That wasn't even—"
"It sounded as it did before."
K8-E let her arms fall from around her knees, resting her wrists loosely on top of them instead, and looked at Jade properly, really looked: at the mess of black and pink hair, the coat of blood, at the eyes still stubbornly, mercifully green,at the utterly serious, searching expression on their face like they were still waiting for a grade on an assignment.
"You're not supposed to be the one comforting me," she said quietly. "That's backwards."
"Why?"
"Because I'm supposed to be the together one. I'm supposed to have this figured out. You're the—" She stopped herself before the word new came out, because Jade had killed a man an hour ago with more precision than any of them, and newfelt like the wrong word for someone that violent. "You're not supposed to be worrying about me."
"I don't understand why it has to be one or the other," Jade said. "You held my hand. I don't see why I can't do something back."
"I didn't hold your hand to comfort you; I held your hand to comfort me!" K8-E blurted, then trailed off. She just sat there letting it sink in, feeling something in her chest ache in a way that had nothing to do with Vi or Wobb or N.O.M.'s smug,satisfied face.
Jade shifted closer on their knees, slow, telegraphed, like they were giving her every opportunity to pull away. She didn't.Their hand moved to her cheek, and then they leaned in and pressed their mouth to her forehead. Barely a kiss at all, stiff and careful, the way someone might touch something they were afraid of breaking.
K8-E went very still.
"Was that acceptable?" Jade asked, pulling back just enough to check her face.
"I—yeah. Yeah, that was—" She didn't finish the sentence, because she didn't actually know what word came next.
Jade seemed to take this as permission, because they leaned in again, this time pressing their lips to her cheek, a little less careful than the first, lingering half a second longer before they sat back on their heels to study her reaction with that same rigid, clinical focus they gave everything, like she was a readout they were trying to parse.
Her face was hot. Actually hot, thermal regulator be damned, and she was positive it had gone a shade of red that Jade could probably see even in the low kitchen light.
"You're very colorful right now. Did I make things worse? Your malfunction doesn't seem to be improving, if I—"
"Shut up."
"You're smiling, though. A little."
"I said shut up, Jade."
"Okay," Jade said, and there was something almost pleased in the flatness of it, some small satisfaction they weren't bothering to hide.
And it was working, was the horrifying part. It was actually working, the tightness in her chest easing just slightly, the loop of pink eyes behind her own eyelids quieting down to something she could almost, almost stop thinking about for a few seconds at a time. N.O.M. could stand there and dismantle her with words all night, could pick apart every insecurity she had and wear her resolve down to nothing and she'd still walk away from it standing—but this, some clumsy, over-literal, badly-executed forehead kiss from a mostly-broken prototype, was apparently what actually reached her. It wasn't fair. None of it was fair. She had to go. She'd thought she'd let CVIT get too close, but this was absurd.
He could try to humiliate her all he wanted, she thought, and one kiss from Jade undid it faster than anything he'd said.
"You feel less shaky," Jade said, glancing down at her hands, which had, in fact, mostly stopped trembling.
"I guess I do."
"Good." A pause. "I did something right."
"You did something weird," she corrected, but there wasn't any heat in it. "You can't just go around kissing people to fix their feelings, Jade. That's not… that's a whole thing. There are rules, you know."
"What rules."
"I don't know, normal ones. Ask someone first. Read the room. General—decency."
"I asked you," Jade pointed out. "You said no and then let me do it anyway."
"That's not—" She groaned, dragging a hand down her face. "This is the worst day."
"I think you're improving. You are smiling."
"I am going to end you."
"I don't think you could."
"Ugh!" She didn't have a comeback for that, mostly because it was true, and mostly because some small, treacherous part of her brain was busy turning over an entirely different thought, one that had nothing to do with kisses or comfort. A defect wouldn't have known to do that. A machine running clean code, running whatever loyalty subroutine N.O.M. had installed through impressive manipulation tactics alone, wouldn't have knelt on a kitchen floor trying to parse the correct etiquette for consoling someone. Wouldn't have cared enough to try three different approaches until one worked. This—the overthinking, the trial and error, the genuine, fumbling desire to make her feel less like she was falling apart—this had to be proof Jade was something more than what they were built to be. Only something with actual will of its own did something this pointless, this human, this stupid. She wasn't ready to say any of that out loud, though.
"Okay," she said instead, straightening up a little, dragging both palms down her thighs like she could physically press herself back into shape. "Okay. I'm—I'm getting it together. I'm fine."
"You like to say that," Jade chirped.
"Well, this time I mean it a little more." She pushed herself up off the floor, legs stiff and unsteady beneath her, and Jade rose with her, quick, hovering close in case she needed steadying, which she absolutely did not, and also absolutely appreciated.
She looked at them for a long moment. Jade looked back, patient, waiting, green eyes wide and open in that unguarded way that always made her chest hurt a little.
"Don't think I'm not going to ask you what the fuck just happened tomorrow," she said. "The eyes. All of it. We are talking about it. You can't kiss your way out of that."
Jade slowly nodded. "Alright," they said.
"Alright," she echoed, and before she could think better of it, before the part of her brain that handled italics or dignity could stage any kind of intervention, she grabbed Jade by the front of their shirt and mashed her mouth against their cheek. An off-center collision.
Jade blinked. "That one was worse than mine."
"Don't," K8-E warned, already turning, already walking, cheeks burning, voice climbing back toward something like its normal register. "I need to find CVIT. Don't follow me. Don't—just. Stay here."
"Okay," Jade said again, watching her go, and if she'd looked back she probably would have caught something almost like satisfaction settling over their face.
She didn't look back. She kept walking, fast, like she could outpace the whole night if she just moved quickly enough, and didn't stop until that awful room was well behind her.