A Murderbot prompt: Gurathin's immediate reaction to Bharadwaj being attacked the monster? Or more of his extremely awkward comforting attempts?
I love the Gurathin-Bharadwaj friendship, so this was delightful <3
He'd known it. He even told everyone so. He knew something terrible was going to happen on this stupid, cursed survey. Terrible was simply business as usual when the Company was involved. And the five people in the universe that he couldn't stand the idea of anything happening to were all here (well, okay, Ayda's kids too, but they were irrelevant to the current problem). And now Bharadwaj was badly hurt, and their SecUnit aka killer spyware-bot was malfunctioning, and absolutely nobody seemed to understand how serious that was.
He paced in the medbay, checking on Bharadwaj's vitals now and then. She lay very still on the medbed, breathing slowly and evenly. If she was awake, she would have told him to calm down, probably shared some breathing exercises and soothing tea -- and the insane thing was, it would probably have helped. Instead, he went on pacing and poking around in the stupidly slow feed from the satellite, combing through what documentation he could find on SecUnits, which wasn't much; of course the Company didn't want anyone to know what its proprietary hardware was capable of.
He had to stay busy. If he allowed himself to stop thinking long enough, he could still find himself caught once again in the frozen moment of absolute horror when the distress signal came in from the field team. The ice that went down his spine, the cold terror of knowing that Bharadwaj was hurt (nobody knew how badly) and Arada's condition was unknown and everyone else was about to go out there to get them. And he remembered thinking, <I>This is it,</i> this was the moment when it all began to spiral out of control.
Anyone else on the team would have told him he was being needlessly pessimistic. Bharadwaj would definitely have told him that. But she couldn't tell him anything because she was laying there on a medbed. Her vitals looked good right now, but how much did that even mean? If things went bad, really bad, for her or any of the rest of them, they were weeks away from help and he couldn't start over again, he just couldn't --
A soft sound drew his attention. Bharadwaj inhaled, her lashes fluttered, and he said her name before he was conscious of it.
"Hi, Gura," she whispered, and smiled a little.
He was momentarily frozen. What did you do. Hand. Yes. He fumbled for her hand. She wrapped her weak, cold fingers tremulously around his, and he gripped back.
"Is Arada okay?" she whispered, looking up at him. He could see her eyes focusing more, swimming up from sleep and drugs.
"Yes. She's fine. She's good. You're also fine," he said, groping around for the reassuring words, the ones they would say to him, under similar circumstances. "I mean, you're going to be."
And those must have been the right words to say, because he felt her relax a little, and her smile was less tense and more genuine, and maybe for that moment, holding her hand, he could believe those words too. That she was going to be okay, that they were all going to be.
ellievsbear
tangentwithtanner
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
2087
romaincrisis
vaporwave
