Belkor starts growing his hair out and Kaati thinks it's cute :3
[FICTOBER DAY 2]
I’m almost sure this is not what you had in mind for this prompt, but after what I wrote for them yesterday, I wanted to give them a happy ending. <3
Belkor belongs to @coruscas.
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In the mirror above the sink, Belkor stared at his reflection.
When he had worked for the Empire, he never looked at himself in mirrors. Vanity, even basic self-consciousness, had been seen as a non-essential quality for the performance of his duty and therefore was not found in his programming. He had shaved himself each morning aided by the automated trimmer he had been issued, and never once in almost fifteen years had he paused to examine himself in a mirror.
It was still a struggle to recognize himself in the man staring back.
His coal-black hair had finally regrown to a decent length, at least on the parts of his skull not encased by his neural implant. After so many years with his head shaved, it was a change he was still adjusting to, but he knew it made Kaati happy to see him looking more like the man he had fallen in love with, so many years before. And since it was one of the few changes he could make with ease, he couldn’t bring himself to refuse.
Other changes were less easily reversible, most obviously the gleaming shell of his implant. The New Republic doctors had shut down the external server feeds and left him with only those internal protocols necessary for him to function, but they could not reverse the damage to his brain – the memories he had lost, the lies that were put in their place.
Even his voice had been altered, made to imitate the posh affectations of the Imperial officers amongst whom he was told he belonged. He knew, now, that the story he’d been told of his own life was a fabrication. He had never been an officer, only an enlisted soldier in the wrong place at the right time.
As he stared at his reflection now, Belkor didn’t see an officer or a soldier. He didn’t see a man at all, but a machine. Expressionless, soulless, unfeeling. Circuitry and logic algorithms. Even the interval at which he blinked was calculated for optimal efficiency.
How could a machine learn to be a husband? How could a machine be a father to a child?
“You’re awake early.”
Belkor flicked his eyes toward the door and saw Kaati standing at the threshold to the fresher, draped in a warmly knitted shawl. When Belkor didn’t answer, Kaati moved to stand beside him, his montrals brushing his husband’s shoulder.
“I didn’t hear you get out of bed,” Kaati said. “Are you okay?”
After a pause, Belkor nodded, but still he said nothing. Kaati waited. He had learned to wait for Belkor to find his words. After a short time had passed, Belkor let out his breath in a shaky sigh.
“I thought it would be…easier…by now.”
“I know,” Kaati murmured. “You have to give yourself time, my love.”
Belkor closed his eyes. “There are times I doubt…that I will ever look at my reflection and see the man I want to see.”
“I see that man, and Lena sees him.” Kaati took Belkor’s hand and placed it over the shallow swell of his abdomen. “...and our little one will see him, too. You are my husband, Belkor. You are their father. One day, you will look in the mirror and see the man we see. I promise.”
Belkor curled his hands around Kaati’s waist and bent to press their foreheads together. Kaati went up on his toes to kiss him, and the two of them embraced in the quiet darkness before dawn.
“I like your hair this length,” Kaati whispered, combing his fingers through the dark locks. “It looks cute on you.”
Belkor twitched an eyebrow. “Oh? I was just thinking it needs a trim.”
Kaati stared at him, then began to laugh – a sound that sang in Belkor’s heart. “Bee! Was that sarcasm I just heard?” Kaati swatted his husband’s shoulder and gave him a cheeky smile. “Stars have mercy on me when you start telling your terrible jokes again…”
Belkor and ISB Director Kallus belong to @coruscas.
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ERROR 1204. INTERNAL DATA CORRUPTION. ERROR 1204. INTERNAL DATA CORRUPTION.
Belkor shook his head, sharply, as his mind began to clear of the fog and chaos. His eyes opened. He found himself in an unfamiliar and dimly lit room, with no memory of how he had come to be here. A cursory glance around the room suggested that it was used as a janitorial closet. Red and yellow lights flashed at his temples as he accessed his internal memory banks.
I am at the Bank of Kuat. I arrived with Director Kallus. I was ordered to wait in the vestibule while the Director met with Chairman Falken. A Togruta male entered…
The Togruta man and his daughter, vibrant red skin the color of cinnabar. A burst of white, searing pain lanced through Belkor’s skull.
Green. All he saw was green, a lush emerald canopy sprawling across kilometers of a wild planet, dotted with clear blue lakes and gushing rivers that sparkled like peerlessly cut gems. A village in the foothills where great fields of wildflowers painted the floor of the valley. A cottage with a garden, smoke curling from the chimney whenever he came home.
Home.
ERROR 1204. INTERNAL DATA CORRUPTION.
When the pain had receded, Belkor felt a strange dampness on his brow. He reached a hand to wipe his face and found his skin coated in a light sheen of sweat. Excessive perspiration. Memory lapses. Palpitations. Belkor did not need to query his diagnostic protocol to know that his symptoms were common indicators of a panic attack.
That is not possible, he told himself, shaking his head.
In all the years Belkor had lived with the neural implant in his brain, this was the first time he had encountered an error such as this, and the first time an error had been accompanied by neurological symptoms. What alarmed him most were the hallucinations – so lucid and real, as if drawn from his own memory. Yet he knew that no such memories existed.
“What does it mean,” muttered Belkor, gripping the gleaming shell of the implant with both hands.
A flashing notification pinged within his comms unit, and Belkor realized it was not the first he had received. Fourteen minutes had elapsed since the first. Kallus had been summoning him.
Belkor exhaled. He needed to find the Director and return to ISB headquarters where he would be able to identify and fix whatever was causing this malfunction. When he stepped out of the closet, he located a security guard who escorted him to the landing pad where Director Kallus stood waiting beside his speeder, looking irate.
“Where were you?” Kallus demanded. “I was about to drive myself back to headquarters without you.”
Belkor gave Kallus a salute. “Sir, I apologize. I was forced to leave my post due to an…unexplained malfunction.”
“Malfunction?” Kallus frowned, his eyes scanning Belkor up and down. “Are you able to drive or not? I’m already late for a meeting thanks to your delay.”
“I can drive,” said Belkor. As he circled to open the passenger door for Kallus, he saw the man’s eyes tracking his movements.
The Director regarded him in silence for a long moment, displeasure evident in his furrowed brows, before he finally stepped into the speeder. “We will speak about this later.”
Belkor inclined his head and did not speak.
When they had returned to ISB headquarters, Kallus ordered him to remain at his desk in stand-by mode until he was summoned. To anyone who walked past, Belkor appeared as though in a trance-like state, his eyes half-lidded and the lights on his neural implant gone dark save for a solitary yellow diode, pulsing at his temple.
When his meeting concluded, Kallus called Belkor into the office. The Director stood behind his desk, watching his secretary with the same cautious expression he’d worn on the landing pad at the bank.
“So, would you care to explain this…malfunction?”
Belkor blinked. “Yes, sir. Based on the error code issued, it would seem that my internal memory banks may have been corrupted in some way.”
“Corrupted? How?”
“Unclear, sir, but the error code was accompanied by intense pain and neurological distress.”
Kallus made an agitated noise and circled around the desk. “Start at the beginning. Surely something must have happened to prompt such an…episode.”
“There was a man at the bank.” Belkor paused. “An alien man and a child. Togrutas.”
Kallus narrowed his eyes. “And you recognized them?”
“I…don’t know.”
“You don’t know?”
Belkor touched his fingers to the cold steel at his temple. “I have no memory of them, sir, but when I saw them at the bank…it was as if I did. It was as if I had seen them before. I do not remember leaving the vestibule. I recall only a sense of nervous agitation and an urgent desire to leave. When I returned to full awareness, I found myself in a nearby room, alone.”
Kallus pinned Belkor with his piercing gaze. “You are saying that you have no memory of these individuals, yet their presence caused this malfunction. Explain to me how that is possible.”
Belkor shifted to fold his hands behind his back. “Without a diagnostic scan I can only speculate, but it may be that I have previously seen a record of the man or the child on some server that is no longer accessible to me. The dissonance between the livefeed of currently available information and the data cached in my memory banks could have conceivably prompted a system failure resulting in my temporary impairment.” Belkor met Kallus’s gaze with his own. “I recommend sending me for a comprehensive diagnostic at the earliest convenience, sir.”
Kallus nodded, but he did not seem fully satisfied. “Very well. I want you to prioritize this. I can’t have you malfunctioning at random. Be sure to have the technician run a full reboot and data cache wipe. Lieutenant Haskins will take over my scheduling for the rest of the day. I’ll expect you in my office at 0800 tomorrow, and I want a signature from the chief technical engineer guaranteeing that this…impairment has been rectified.”
“Yes, sir.”
Later, in the diagnostics lab, as Belkor lay motionless on the steel table and waited for the ISB engineer to power down the implant in his brain, he saw the face of the Togruta girl again in his mind. Her dark liquid eyes, like pools of ink. Her gape-toothed smile. He heard a voice – his own voice, but not his voice, murmuring words that he was certain he had never spoken.
“I can’t wait to meet you, little squirt. I bet you’re gonna look just like your daddy and me.”
Belkor shut his eyes, clenching his hands at his sides until the knuckles turned white. He hoped that when he woke up, the hallucinations would be gone.
