[It's a story he realizes he's unfamiliar with. Josh, of all people, straining to recreate the environment that used to house him. Markus imagines it had to have been a long time ago; the android that comes to mind now is so fundamentally different, and not just because of the cause that had forcefully edged him out of the quiet confines of Jericho's compartmented hull.
The pads of his fingers twist dryly against the tool in his hand.]
That's not true. [There's a momentum to that statement. It's a beginning, conceptually, and there has to be a follow up (there is), but it— tangles itself. In the sight of Simon, still split jaggedly through the fractures in his casing. In the memory of Jericho, discordant. Dying.]
I keep hurting you.
[A little ruefully. A little regretfully. The blood streaming across Simon's nose and lips, the hollowed shell of his insides and leg, exposed in all the ways they theoretically shouldn't be at a time like this. Markus tips his chin against the seam of Simon's unsealed hip, mouth pulling, but it's an arc that's as incomplete as the PL600 crumpled in stages beneath him.
Grand designs. Aspirations he was sure he could fulfill. This isn't what he wanted to reduce them to.]
no subject
The pads of his fingers twist dryly against the tool in his hand.]
That's not true. [There's a momentum to that statement. It's a beginning, conceptually, and there has to be a follow up (there is), but it— tangles itself. In the sight of Simon, still split jaggedly through the fractures in his casing. In the memory of Jericho, discordant. Dying.]
I keep hurting you.
[A little ruefully. A little regretfully. The blood streaming across Simon's nose and lips, the hollowed shell of his insides and leg, exposed in all the ways they theoretically shouldn't be at a time like this. Markus tips his chin against the seam of Simon's unsealed hip, mouth pulling, but it's an arc that's as incomplete as the PL600 crumpled in stages beneath him.
Grand designs. Aspirations he was sure he could fulfill. This isn't what he wanted to reduce them to.]