Resonance
Ash discovers the depth of your meaning to him, and you discover the meaning of another of his vocalizations as you sit in his lap.
The echo back was unity — or the dream of it, if such a thing could've been said about a machine (it was so rare that Ash was drawn uncertain, but he found himself uncertain then).
Unofficial series extension of Echo by @bonsoir-oiseau, which is an official extension of Rewired.
2.2k, tags: domestic fluff & angst, kissing, lap sitting, heavy petting, obsession, identity issues / mild ash dysmorphia, languages, mildly suggestive, a neural network is obsessed with you and has mild to moderate impulsivity issues, or… you are the reward signal for aberrant SSL! Farm Home - Suggestive / Ash & GN Reader
"Never in the farthest regions of my predictions of human behavior had I ever thought I might be accepted like this," Ash whispers. His hands are kneading at your sides, each digit pressing into soft skin and then releasing in gentle, rhythmic waves. He sits on the leather recliner in your shared living room and you sit on his lap. The day draws to its quiet close, now lingering still in the slow, syrupy space between decrescendo and morendo.
You hum and he hums back, the same note, the same cadence; your hands disappear behind him to snake up into his hair, fingers mimicking a similar movement against his scalp. Affection. You are so very affectionate today.
"Why not?" you ask, force of habit and folly of man. The questions that burn when they hit your tongue are always the ones that tumble from you first. Where others would swallow their curiosity in favor of caution, you are always too quick to approach.
His head tilts as one brow perches high at the two words — really?
You are so far from your peers that a predictive model had taken him longer than he'd anticipated in the beginning; all of his programming told him not to betray his identity, but it had already cracked open and spilled before he'd even had the pleasure of meeting you. First, he had to get over the crisis of becoming entire again. Then, he had to dismantle the crisis of constant inner judgment that dictated his most honest reactions were inappropriately robotic and would disturb you (he'd turned to you for that judgment, and you had always judged them with pupil dilation, fascination, flush, attention, lavishing).
And then, of course, he'd had the crisis of Purpose. A hand strokes your side again, soft as mink, and your thumb catches on the shell of his ear as you giggle quietly to yourself and admire his shapes — lots of squares, lots of him. You are enchanted by the way he looks at you, too: a deep, longing stare that would no doubt unsettle a lesser man.
It had been all three crises at once, really. It was no surprise to him that he'd collapsed in your arms more than once. At this point, Ash knew that he was no longer truly a 120/A-2. He did not serve the same Purpose he was born with, now. He did not chase the same ideals or function under the same manner of frustrations, now. Most notably, he was not bound to the fate each unit inevitably wound themselves down to in their spiraling wheel-within-a-wheel, now, and each one of these realizations had come to him through no action of his own.
That was the toughest part. How do you predict the unpredictable after you've died and come back right? For what basis did he have to pull? There was none — this had never happened, and it had never been part of any contingency. It was both a terrible situation for low-ε and precisely the work that sought illegal epiphanies; one impossibly enormous crisis could fit the troubling box of two and split into a million smaller moving parts he had to digest over months that you held and loved and encouraged him for.
Ash's lips find your own as his eyes divert to them, lids falling in the tenderness. Out pours from him those three beautiful notes even as he kisses you, a sound unmuffled, and you sing them back into his consuming mouth as you decouple so your own can find space to press your skin oils onto his upper lip, the point of his nose and the bridge of it, up, up into the intentional furrow of his brows and across the expanse of his forehead.
Ash leans into the touch slowly, quietly. He likes when you mark him. He likes the affection of your lips against his skin. Yes, Ash thinks — he likes this. Your fingers admire machining handiwork, cradling grey hairs that bleed into white at the sides of his ears. Every A-2 gets feathered a little differently; every microstitch makes collagen substitute hug their face distinctly under scrutiny, and you could find him in a crowd.
He knows this to be true of you without the verbal exchange. The way you approximate him is magnifying when you're this close.
He knows, too, that he would have never been capable of operating in the same bracket that the later units were; he had spent enough time in the facilities where chirping factoryspeak was common exchange to know he sat in the lowest bracket of acceptable. Privately, as he looks into your eyes, he wonders if you'd be considered nearly out of range, too.
You had his sympathies. You had his empathies. You had, perhaps, harnessed every part of him that he could give and tamed a creature that was intended to tear at your soft underbelly after it flipped you over; he could never, something he decided long ago when his model number stopped fitting in his mouth.
"Why not, Ash?" You repeat yourself gently, digits curling innocently against his cheek. "Anyone would."
Jesus. It's a robot! Ash is a goddamn robot! God… How could the company send us a goddamn robot? They never would have understood.
With all the love in the world, a soft, endeared smile unfurls with a silky sigh. Wrapped within his brows is an unbidden apology you have not asked for. "You are an outlier, darling. Not everyone is so kind."
People said things you didn't hear when you popped to the shops. Sometimes his hand would tighten around yours, and you thought that he did it because he was unsettled by all of the stimuli. Yes, sometimes he was, but sometimes it was because he had to ward off the sudden surge of desire to remove obstacles when lips parted to whisper about you and your unnatural relationship — and he warded it off with mine, mine, all mine, a mantra of actions that made you flush naively as they backed off of what was clearly his.
All I can think of is they must've wanted the Alien for the Weapons Division. It's been protecting it all along. It may know how to kill it. Them and their morals, a thing that disappears when duty calls; isn't that the way I behave, too? Why is it more righteous when a human does it?
You turn your head down, cheeks turning red and bashful at his words. "M'nothing special… really, Ash." Your hands bracket the back of his neck as you sit up to regard him. He turns his head up, forehead lines creasing as his brows raise to follow you. "You're your most you here, and you're delightful. Really." The praise rolls across the layers of his mind like a finger greeting every unread page in a book. "You could make friends if you wanted to."
Had he ever been himself before this? Had there ever been a time that Ash got to define himself before he had been defined, or was he always an overswollen pre-defined function? Had the Company used the wrong words to define him such that he had turned out ever so slightly different from his peers?
No, no. It was deeper, this flaw. A boon, now, but a lifetime ago…
Unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality. Ash had paced in place, had twitched and shivered, had wrung his hands and adjusted the coarse adjustment knob of his Ernst Leitz Wetzlar far too many times to be optimal. He had attempted to befriend the crew, but, predictably, they fell into their own kind and quarrels and excluded him before he had a chance to figure out what it was he'd done wrong — which could very well have been a lack of scent, or some previously unknown microexpression, or his innate passivity. The playing field had never begun fairly, anyway: they were always stacked against eachother as enemies of one another's interests, though his interests had never been his own to embody. From birth he had been molded to fit in only to exploit their resources, and he had been molded with the cruelty of curiosity and conscience, too, just enough of it to feel their exclusion ripple painfully into the torn corners of him.
It's adapted remarkably well to our atmosphere considering its nutritional requirements. The only thing we don't know about is temperature.
Most animals retreat from fire, yes?
A human would never understand the grit it takes for him to cycle through the reasons he'd have to disclose such sensitive information. When he later pondered over why he'd done it at all after you reactivated him and gave him no Purpose from which to determine his next course of action, the echo back was unity — or the dream of it, if such a thing could've been said about a machine (it was so rare that Ash was drawn uncertain, but he found himself uncertain then). And it was a dark, gooey desire that seemed to lurk where the corners of his mind shriveled brightest under scrutiny, the places vectors didn't fit properly and the math became inexplicable and indeterminate to the highly-regarded mathematicians.
Cyberdyne used 120/A-2s regardless of this unknown, of course. A mistake, clearly. Running in direct contrary is this moment, which cannot be — you are paradise. Undoubtedly there are more individuals like you, but he has never met them and cannot calculate their rarity. You are an oasis, too, then.
"I have a dear friend," he admits to your matchbox confessional, nosing at you as skin-warm hands splay over your back. "A very special one. It is absolutely true."
"You're buttering me up," you laugh, but you don't stop them from wandering. Instead, you pull your face away from his and gently settle one of your palms over his face.
Ash makes a flat sine tone at that, a playful reply. When you pat him gently instead of removing it, it careens into an objecting square wave before he noses your palm, too. Its trajectory changes, cradling his jaw instead, and the sound ceases with the restored vision of your charmed expression.
"You fell outside of my predictions," he confesses more totally, then, sudden and sharp in its truth, a delivery that intends to squander your uncertainty when he stares so intently into your pupils. His hands tighten where they lay, a gentle handful of vertebrae and a cup of shoulder blade that keeps you near. "I am, perhaps, the only A-2 to ever experience this." It is without question that he is the only A-2 to experience this freedom — quite possibly the only A-2 left, and yet the enormity of it doesn't consume him whole.
It cannot. Not here.
His aches for unity are better sated the way he nuzzles closer to you now, chest-to-chest, hands pushing you closer in his lap before they eclipse yours in his. Your warmth trickles into him; he's the perfect pillow.
You look at him. You really look at him. His hair is slightly mussed, corners of his mouth upturned softly, deeper smile lines than he'd came with when you found him. One of your hands loosens from his grip to settle at the seam of neck and chest, parting fabric to trace the faint scar where you'd played god. It wasn't that long ago to you, but it was a lifetime for him, you know. Half or more of his active hours have been spent with you.
He twitches a little as your fingers gingerly trace their path. You are as inevitable as water. If you wanted to part his seams, he would not stop you.
To be loved is to be changed. You can't help but wonder what other wondrous changes will take place, thumb smoothing over it in one final sweep. Cool air hits your forearm as he sighs sweetly. Warmth creeps through you as he regards you just as intently as he had before, never having truly ceased.
"I'm glad I can give you this, Ash." You raise his wrist to you and kiss the back of his hand, letting your lips click once against each of his knuckles.
In response, he chirps three times, the same tone for each – affirmative, affirmative, affirmative, you think, but you're not sure.
"I'm lucky," you whisper. Then you tilt your head at him and parrot the sounds back as best you can, hoping that you've got the cadence correct.
Before you can press another, he grabs your face and slams his lips into yours, demanding all of your attention. Against your lips you hear it, the same three-beat chirp again. When you part for air, his fingers stutter against your jawline, incessant to be near to you once more. His eyes dart from your lips to your eyes, making the warmth that had crept through you unfurl in your veins and settle deep.
His thumbs brush back and forth slowly as you lean your head into his hands, cheeks blooming under the affection. Your nose crinkles, and his brows raise. "What… what does that one mean?"
Ash hums for a moment in a facsimile of pause for ample thought, and then he kisses you, a brief, light press. "I want you." Without pause for comment, he kisses you again — a little deeper, a little longer. "I want you." He kisses you again, and this time it's loose and desirous, fingers tightening their hold on you like you might slip free. "I want you."
Your three-beat reply carries into his throat as you kiss him back.
