[ Inspired by this post and the above anon. ]The scars from Satya’s arm spiderweb across her b

[Inspired by this post and the above anon.]

The scars from Satya’s arm spiderweb across her back like lightning.

She sits on the edge of the mattress with her shoulders bare, her prosthesis stowed away. Jamison has rarely seen her without it, and rarer still without her clothes. To be here in the absence of both seems somehow strange, like he’s stumbling in something too secret and he must promise with his finger hooked in the crook of hers to keep it forever safe.

There are tiny moments like this, all interspersed among an endless mesh of disparate cityscapes and rattling gunfire, where he glimpses the young woman Vishkar once consumed. They are brief pockets filled with quiet, with soft breathing and the murmur of her heartbeat: the girl who loved to dance, expressions flawless, breathless; the girl who drew symmetrically perfect shapes with rulers and protractors on countless pages until she was given hard-light; the girl who became prodigy through the art of her meticulous, precise design. She doesn’t like to talk of how things were before that gigantic corporation—she must have her reasons, he supposes, and he’s sure they’re good ones—but every now and then, when the nights grow restless and she welcomes his loquacious company, she will think aloud with him in soft rhythmic tones and recount pleasant memories.

Biting at the inside of his cheek, Jamison traces a thumb down her left shoulder blade. Warmth stamps his sliding fingerprint as he smooths over the ripples of her scars. They crack and splinter in fissures from what remains, a knot of muscle at her shoulder. That is one memory she has not cared to recount. He has no illusions about its pleasantness as he knows his own losses well and neither was particularly pleasant, but something grates at the back of his mind that it’s personal for her—not because something like losing a limb could be traumatic, but because her (Vishkar-engineered, Vishkar-issued, and Vishkar-everything else) prosthesis has become such an integral part of everything she is that to ask why’d you let ‘em take it orhow’d you get all these? might be taken with offense.

He lowers his nose to her back and presses where the lightning tapers off.

For once, he remains silent.