She was a robot? She was a ROBOT? (mithrigil) wrote in het_challenge, @ 2008-02-05 00:49:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | a: mithrigil, f: digital devil saga, r: valentines |
Title: Endothermic
Author: mithrigil
Fandom: Digital Devil Saga 2
Pairing: O'Brien/Sera, others implied.
Rating: R.
Warnings: Spoilers. The pairing. The canon.
You can check, some of these people are at Berkely right now. I figure, since this part of the story takes place in 2025...
Recipient: sugared. My Boots~
Endothermic
digital devil saga 2
Mithrigil Galtirglin
for my ms. boots, with love
“So, who’s at Berkeley now?”
When they ask questions like this, they expect Heat to know the answers. They shouldn’t bother. It’s right there on the CV. “Pachter’s still there, he was my advisor from the start. Harland’s still around but his grad students do most of the work in the mammals labs now. And I worked with Gerhardt on my doctorate, a few other publications.“
“Ah, all the old timers,” the interviewer says. She hasn’t introduced herself yet, isn’t wearing a nameplate, is probably higher up in the chain of command here than Heat wants to think about right now. “I interviewed with Harland when I was considering Berkeley, his face looked like coral.”
Heat chuckles to himself. “Does, kind of.”
“He does good work, though. They all do.” She shuffles around Heat’s CV, a few of the other papers. “Which is why it perplexes me that they’re forfeiting you to us. You had a rather…cushy position there. Or the opportunity for one.” Heat doesn’t like her smile. “So? Why are they letting you go, Doctor O’Brien?”
“I can be honest,” Heat says, tapping his palms on his thighs, tilting forward out of his chair. It’s—hard to look the interviewer in the face, but it only takes glancing at the sun on the tile to make it easier. She’s got black eyes, really heavy black eyes, like she stabbed makeup into them instead of around them. “Everything you read in my cover letter is true. I want to know about God. Berkeley’s not about that, not even now. I think your work is closer to the truth of what’s really going on with the Syndrome and the Faults. And Harland and all them have been real understanding about that, and me, ever since I got there, which is why the letters of recommendation are what they are.” God damn it her eyes are difficult to hold on to. “But understanding and tolerating aren’t the same as liking and appreciating.”
“Aha,” she says, drawing it out. “And those, they don’t feel about you.”
“Right. And not me about them. Except Pachter, he’s impossible not to like.” She doesn’t prompt him, doesn’t say anything either—Heat figures he should go on. There’s more. There’s always more. “If you’re looking for something else, political differences, allegations with me and some undergrad, there’s nothing.”
“Oh, I know.” She’s put down his papers and leaned her cheek onto her hand. The gesture’s Cleopatra-like, but doesn’t really work for her, too idle. “And I wouldn’t care if there was. I’m not hiring your personal life, I’m hiring your mind. Not even that, I’m hiring the part of your mind that isolated the C-affected data strain in the skin cells. You can isolate whomever else you damn well please with the rest of your neural network.”
—Holy shit, she might actually know.
The hiss of paper on paper when she shuts his file is like a knife on the air. “And I am hiring that part of your mind, Doctor O’Brien. If you’re accepting, which I assume you are.”
He is.
“Do you remember the Doomsday Clock?”
“—Yeah,” he says, to that and something else. “Has it struck yet?”
She didn’t expect that question. Heat’s pretty proud of that, actually. “What’s your answer to that, Doctor?”
He really doesn’t like her smile. “It hasn’t,” he says, “but the second-hand finally counts.” He gets it. “Not your answer, though, is it?”
“Very good.” She lifts her elbow off the desk, slides his CV and everything else to the edge of it, right into the black shadow of her outbox.
“When did it strike?”
She looks like she’s reconsidering hiring him now.
He goes on anyway. “Just saying. It’s kind of integral to my research that the world hasn’t ended already. The Syndrome’s got a cure. The world won’t end if I help find it.”
God damn it, her eyes. “When I say you sound like I used to, you’ll know who I am.”
He does. “You’re Angel.” He smirks. “What changed?”
-
“—Clay?”
She laughs, fumbles with the button at her cleavage. One of those. “I’m surprised you get it. I do like my name, though.”
Heat nods, doesn’t look down her shirt like she’s trying to make him do. “Probably gave you hell in French class.”
“I took Spanish,” she says. “And what can I call you, Doctor?”
He’s tempted to leave it at that, but. “Heat.”
He tends to look at people when he introduces himself, really look at them, like it matters more that their actual first impression. Argilla’s young, wears her hair the way she does because she can get away with that, because she’s not aiming any higher than this. Dreadlocks. It’s like being back in Frisco. Very pink lipstick, very high cheekbones, small eyes and fake eyebrows. She looks like she’s about to make the joke that goes along with it. Maybe she does but just inside her head. Maybe there are cameras around here. “Short for something?”
“Yeah.”
“I won’t ask.”
“That’s for the best.” He shuts the drawer—there’s a hitch on the left side that makes a rattling sound, it’ll only get worse when he actually has stuff in the desk—and turns the chair around so he can slide out of it. “So, you’re going to show me around?”
“You got it, Doctor Heat—“ oh crap she is going to be making that joke—
-
His hand’s like fucking ice. Heat shakes it anyway.
“—Cold hands, warm heart,” he says, not quite apologetically. Shakes his hand, assertive grip, then pulls it away and shakes his out, like that’ll warm it after the fact. “Sheffield. Sergei. Serph, if you must.”
“Serph it is, then.” Heat’s starting to see a pattern here. “Bad circulation, or does everyone get that way in here?”
“Everyone gets that way in here.” He’s got a really captivating voice, even heaping blasé onto it, like now. “And out there. Not something you can cure by sleeping in a fireplace. What am I calling you?”
“Heat,” Argilla says for him. “You walked right into that one, Doctor Sheffield.” Oh, so he gets the boss treatment and Heat gets the James Bond jokes. Fine.
Serph’s also got a captivating laugh, to go with the captivating voice. Actually, more rubbernecking than captivating—can’t listen away, even though there’s something not right up in there. “Guess I did. Heat.“ He tests it. Something’s really wrong here. It’s not just sounding like a Yalie, which he does, it’s. Something. “Heat. Welcome to the God Project.”
Heat nods. “Tell me why I haven’t read any of your work on the subject yet.”
“Ouch.” Serph smirks. “Because I’m on the other side of the field. Metaphysics. Psychiatry. Doubt a petri-disher like you has touched that since undergrad.”
“Undergrad wasn’t that long ago,” Heat says. Brags, really.
“Good. Then you’ll understand the nuance when I tell you to drop the Alpha Male act.” He lets his hands off the railing, turns around just to emphasize, “Angel’s dick is the biggest around here anyway.”
Heat doesn’t even want to know.
“I’ve read your work, O’Brien,” and it’s a relief that he’s not going to actually call him Heat, “and it’s good. If you’ve got time between all the Shaman profiles, try and sneak a look at mine.” Same rubbernecking smile as his voice. “I think, after that, we’ll get along like a house on fire.”
-
19 has Angel’s eyes.
-
“Doctor O’Brien—“
“Look, this is me trying not to commit an ethical violation.” Heat plants his hands on the edge of her desk, right up to the edge of the raised leather mat. “Is she or isn’t she your biological daughter?”
“She is.”
“Was she created for the explicit purpose of becoming a candidate?”
“She was.”
“Then there’s something in you that’s the key to all this, and you know it.”
“My, is this why you weren’t well-liked at Berkeley?”
Heat pries his hands off her desk, glares, turns and can’t help pacing, this is. Damn it. God. “How long were you going to wait?”
“She was nineteenth in line,” Angel sighs. “Now she’s fourteenth.”
“The other five are dead.”
“Take a page out of Sheffield’s book and learn from it, Doctor.”
—That hits. Heat turns. Slowly. Gets her goddamn eyes, once the sun gets out of his. “Is this because you care, or because you don’t?”
-
“I’m sorry if I scared you,” he says. He won’t put his hand on her shoulder, but it seems like almost the right thing to do. She smells so clean, the inhibitor smells so clean—more pronounced, once it’s not in the same room as everything else, as the EGG.
She does have Angel’s eyes, but wide, young. Heat knows that eyes don’t expand, that’s why infants’ look so big—but he’s almost afraid of what’d she’d looked like back then, if her eyes are so…what they are, now. “It’s…it’s okay.” She brings her knees up to her chest. Heat knows enough psychology, she’s trying to hide. She’s lying.
“No, really, I—“ He closes his eyes. This isn’t going to work. He can hear Argilla filling syringes. “I just saw something that made me angry. It has nothing to do with you.” That’s not a lie. It isn’t.
“Okay,” she says again. Her little toes curl on the edge of the cot.
“I want you to like me,” he says. He thinks that’s allowed. “Or at least trust me, if you can’t like me.”
“Okay.”
“Can you do that?”
“What’s your name?”
Argilla’s heels echo on the tile, coming closer. He’ll say it before she does. “Heat.”
Sera’s smile is the first gift of God in this place. It’s small and tense and it’s like she is but it’s there. “Heat,” she says. “Doctor Heat.”
Damn it, he’s even thankful for the joke this time.
-
“You gave her a cat?”
“What’s it to you?”
Serph scoffs. “Nothing, just wondering how much it’ll take for you to cross the line.”
“I’m not the one promising her luxury cruises, Serph.”
“Touché.” He clasps his hands around his coffee stein. Heat can see the shiver leave his shoulders, savoring the warmth—maybe it is just bad circulation. “You’re not making much of an effort to hide what you are.”
—Of course. He’d know. “You’re not trying to hide that you care.”
“Only because I can use it against you.”
“You could use my shoe size against me if you were bored enough, Serph.”
Fuck his voice, fuck his laugh, fuck his smile. “I’m plenty entertained just watching you make yourself suffer.”
-
She doesn’t flinch from needles but she twitches under his hands. He can feel it through the latex, the little hairs on her skin prickling up, the little shift of her shoulder toward her neck. Damn it. Damn it.
“Doctor Serph says that they’re going to try and…and ‘back up’ the Mystery Castle today,” she says. More to Argilla than to him. “It’ll still be there after it’s been copied, right?”
“Of course, sweetie.” Argilla smears the swatch of skin even cleaner than it already is, holds her still. “Only now, more people will be allowed to play in it. Not just Doctor Serph and Cielo and Heat and me.”
Sera nods, looks at Heat even though her head is hanging. “But I only want people I…I like to play there.”
The syringe feels cold in his hand.
-
-