wip wednesday on an actual wednesday!! you're right babe it is a miracle
[also my first in like, forever, sorry! AH]
“I’m fine,” she repeats through gritted teeth. She’s still shoving clunky 3-pronged plugs aside to dig deeper into the collection. “I just need a new cord. You’re gonna slow me down.”
“Hey, okay,” he says, hands lifting at his sides in surrender, stepping back. “I get it. That’s cool.” It is decidedly not cool. He’s seen this kind of thing when his roommate, Eliot, gets back to the dorm after an underground fight somewhere and he’s too stubborn to ask for help and he’s gotta watch the guy basically lick his wounds by himself until Hardison can’t stand it any longer.
She’s not looking directly at him when he backs himself out and into the aisle again. He checks his mental grocery list again and picks a few things off other shelves and shoves them in his backpack before he circles around to her other side.
For a second, under the sweep of his flashlight, she freezes.
It’s a head wound. Maybe a concussion, too, he thinks, looking over the bright, wet, red streaks he hadn’t seen from where he was standing before. “It’s just… I’ve been in here enough times. Class requirements, you know. Maybe I could help. More hands on deck, right? Get in, get out, we’re both cool. Maybe I find you a washcloth, some Neosporin, I dunno. What kind of cable are you looking for?”
Her shoulders slump a little, like she’s realizing he’s not gonna leave her alone. And she’d be right, if that were the case, he thinks, because he’s not. Still, she takes in the space, looking around the dark room like it’s the first time. “You know computers?”
“Do I - ? Yeah - Yes, I know computers,” he says, leaning against the shelf. “I’m more of uhh… A robotics engineer, really. I make stuff, but I - I dabble, you know. I’ve hacked. I can… Do other coding. I build a lot.”
There’s a moment where he can hear the ringing silence in the room again before she thrusts the frayed and bloody cord towards him. “This, then? Can you build this?”
“May - maybe? Probably. What does it go to, did you bring it with you?”
“You ask a lot of questions,” she says with a frown.
“Woman, you are covered in blood and broke into the engineer’s closet, and I’ve never seen you around before, so I don’t think you’re actually a student here. I think I have a little right to.”
“Fair enough,” she nods, shifting her hair from her face and brushing it all away from her neck. Hardison catches just a glimpse of a tiny smile on her lips. “It’s for this,” she tells him simply, revealing a series of diamond-studded dermal piercings along her hairline, and a real-life, honest-to-god connection port embedded into the skin just behind her ear.
She sighs. “Don’t freak out.”
tagging with no pressure; @ninzied, @bottled-bliss, @tuntematonkorppi, @the-restless-brook, @myletternevercame, @fortysevenswrites