Static Crush {M/M} ✔

Chapter #37

Damo watches the television in his periphery. Light like shards of glass twist in his sharp eyes as a photo of Nelson Kipling flashes up to accompany the broadcast. Muscle tension and a hiccup in Damo's function register in Hale's scans, but on the surface Damo only shows distaste.

In a dead, even tone, he says, "Didn't have a whole fuck of options, did I?"

Theo holds up a finger. "I told you, you're always welcome to stay here. That door was always open. You could have come here instead of turning your symbiont into a braindead battery and bringing the pigs down on us."

With the break in her speech, Hale pushes a cup of coffee into her hands. She says, "This isn't alcohol."

Damo scoffs, and his hand twitches at the wrist joint. "You don't get it."

"No! I don't! That's why I'm asking you to use your words and explain."

Damo makes a noncommittal noise.

Silence hangs in the air. Rayner breaks it, sipping his coffee while it's too hot and hissing. Theo, after a long time of looming like a thundercloud, uncrosses her arms and says, "Are you not going to even try?"

"Why do you care?" The vitriol in Damo's tone makes Theo take a step back. "Why should it ever matter to you what happens to me? I'm not your responsibility. I'm not even real. Or does it just make you feel warm and fuzzy to play hero? I'm not your little pet project like Hale. I'm not some perfect little victim you can put a Band-Aid on and feel good about how much you helped. I'm broken. I'm fucked. Capital 'F' fucked, and nothing in your toolkit or upgrades is going to fix me, so just fuck off."

"Don't talk to her like that!" Rayner says, but Theo holds up a hand, and he falls quiet.

Damo looks wrong. Off. His hand twitches again in a manner that makes Hale nervous. Though he's never been particularly amicable to Hale, he always turned on the charm for Theo. The ghost of that charisma lingers like the trace data of a file long deleted. An eerie blankness where something living stood.

Theo stands very still. "Okay," she says slowly. Then she picks up the television remote and turns it off. The room goes darker but also calmer. There's a subtle change in Damo's posture. The defiant cross of his arms looks protective. Vulnerable. With the bandages and the insecurity, he's hardly recognizable.

Hale never particularly liked Damo, but hearing him say 'I'm broken,' stings in a familiar way.

"If you want to cuss me out, go for it," Theo says. "I'm listening."

Given the stage, Damo doesn't seem to want to. He sinks further into the chair.

"Say what you want" Theo says. "I still care about you though."

"You don't."

"I do."

Something in Damo's demeanour cracks. He looks away, folds his arms tighter in front of himself. Theo's bold refusal to hate him leaves him on uneven footing. It's probably the first time Damo's tried to push someone away and it didn't work.

Theo says, "Please, tell me what happened."

Through gritted teeth, Damo finally responds. "Planned obsolescence."

Even the electronic hum of appliances seems to dim in response. Rayner stands up straighter. Hale's heart plummets. Hand shaking too badly to hold it, Theo puts her coffee down on the TV stand.

"Pardon?" she says.

"Planned obsolescence. Designing a product to only be operable for a limited time." Damo recounts the definition with the same tone he might recite the recipe for a fried egg. "It's what Bionic Capital calls killing us so we don't live long enough to become more trouble than we're worth." A muscle in Damo's jaw flexes, and his knee jerks to the side an inch. "So when I show up with half my face caved in, Kipling figures my time's come earlier than most and triggers the fail safe. Know what it is? It's a fucking virus. They've got a bloody virus set to auto-install after three years and screw me up 'til I'm no longer operable. He triggered it manually." Damo's voice takes on a tone that's almost hungry. "So I shoved a knitting needle into his brain stem. The tegmentum, if you wanna get technical. Now he can feel, for a change, what it's like to have no control of your body. To be conscious and in agony with no way to communicate or stop it, and the best part is he knows I put him there." Leaning back into the chair, Damo's fingers twitch, but the dark timbre to his voice relaxes into his usual air of casual disinterest. "Then I pegged it."