Parasite║LGBT+ Romance 🏳️‍🌈

7: Ying

Rage ripples across Ying's face as she takes in my features. She points a shivering finger at me. "Arrest xem!"

Jaya shuffles forwards muttering, "Respected, xe's just a doctor sent to treat the man who hacked this 'porter."

"You left me in a coma! You just disappeared!"

My mind rushes to fabricate a plausible excuse for Ying's ire before the wardens pulse me, but my hunger and Shiro's betrayal and abject terror have all exhausted me. I can't even begin to think up another lie. I hold up my arms in surrender. "Ying, I'm so sorry. I'm glad you're OK now."

If the two wardens had been disgusted by my dalliance with Shiro, they look utterly sickened now. The scarred warden reaches to their belt with all the alacrity of someone who has been waiting for the merest semblance of an excuse to pulse me. "Xe committed a crime when you were together."

"Yes! There's something wrong with xeir skin. I touched xem and then I..." Ying claws at her neck, as if phantom feeding tubes and sensors are obscuring her airways, "...I got ill. Xeir touch hurts people."

The scarred warden's finger taps eagerly on their pulser's trigger. Jaya stands agog, their pulser now trained on me. How many times in one day can I stare death in the face without going utterly mad?

I find myself screaming into Ying's face. "That's not fair, Ying! You promised you wouldn't touch me! You said you loved me, then you touched me while I was asleep!"

Jaya blunders in, their pulser now hanging limp. "Respected, if you touched the doctor without xeir consent, that is a crime."

"Xe put me in a coma! Xeir skin hurts people!"

Jaya's kholed eyes jump between Ying and my competing glares. "Respected, this doctor was... in intimate contact... with the ore thief who hacked this 'porter. That wouldn't have been possible if xeir touch hurts people."

Ying's face corrugates with disgust. "You did what?"

My nerves close to scorching, I latch onto Jaya's deduction and run with it. "And that thief then stole my hov and an ammonia cannister, so he clearly wasn't in a fucking coma after touching me, Ying!"

Ying shakes her head vehemently. "You're twisting things!"

Jaya stows her weapon. "It's clear that the doctor couldn't have hurt anyone with xeir touch. Forgive me, Respected, but you must be mistaken."

Ying's stare begins to waver. She's doubting what happened four years ago.

My heart aches. I hurt Ying in so many ways. I'm a monster.

She wiggles her shoulders, sending her tethered helmet swinging into her hand. "You're scared of your own shadow, Heems. You wouldn't do that with a complete stranger. You must know him. You came here to rescue him."

"I don't know him! We thought we were going to die in the storm. It just... happened."

"The hospital often sends doctors to treat miners on rigs and transporters, Respected," says Jaya with a weariness that suggests that they'd prefer pulsing rioters than enduring more of my sordid private life.

"He stole a transporter, and I will make an example of him. Any evidence that you've been helping him, and you'll be an official criminal too, and the wardens will be forced to act. Think about that."

Ying clips her helmet back onto her turquoise suit and disappears into the airlock in a whoosh of compressed air.

The wardens bundle me into the back of their armoured hov. It's clearly designed as a mobile prison unit, but I expect they've never had cause to install better seating for doctors dying of misadventure. Megumi Kida's faded face smiles out of a poster attached to the back of the hov seat reminding wardens that meatware function is impaired by cold and to keep the heaters running at full blast in their counterpressure suits.