Log: Murderbot and Morgan WHO: Morgan Yu and Murderbot WHAT: Murderbot finds out he's actually had a boyfriend for a few months WHEN: A couple weeks ago WHERE: Morgan's apartment WARNINGS: N/A
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Murderbot had found himself in many objectionable situations over the years. He’d battled with evil humans, corrupted AI, and horrific viruses. Had faced down the final shutdown many times unflinchingly, because it was his job, and sometimes his duty. But now he was facing something new, something unpredictable, something that required all of his courage and strength. He stood outside the door to Morgan’s apartment that he shared with Gretchen “Bad Influence” Cutler, summoning his will as nerves moved through him. His Performance Reliability dropped to 95% due to anxiety alone.
But he knocked on the door, and did not engage in small talk as soon as Morgan opened it. Instead, he came inside, his voice clipped with a terseness that was more pronounced than usual: “Are we in a relationship?”
Murderbot was proud that he did not shut down after uttering the word “relationship”; it was a word that had sent him to near system-compromise many times in the past if he dwelled too much on it.
Morgan, who’d figured they moved past “just friends” when Murderbot brought him as a “plus one” to a hockey party months ago, raised an eyebrow.
“...yeah?” It was a one-word reply, but the tone carried significant additional information. The word obviously was heavily implied, along with the question did you not know that?, which in turn called out how did you not know that? as a finisher.
Murderbot may have been emotionally compromised but he recognized a solid tone when he heard it. Tone had been one of the few ways he’d been able to rebel when he’d been a slave to The Company in the first few years of his life, after all. Morgan sounded - not surprised. Not thoughtful. Not even slightly disgruntled. Murderbot ran an internal assessment and came up with the only obvious solution.
“Wait,” he said, catching up, “you knew?” And then: “I thought you were conducting surveillance.” He could not help sounding slightly pouty, then. Surveillance would have been perfectly understandable after he hadn’t been shy about assessing Morgan as a potential threat and target.
“Why would I have you under surveillance?” Morgan blinked, thinking back over various activities they’d engaged in over the last several months, and surprise grew into incredulity. “...and who the hell watches movies with people as surveillance? Was surveillance what you were doing?”
That actually hurt. At the very least, Morgan thought he and Murderbot were friends. He’d thought they were more than friends, obviously, regardless of their shared lack of interest in swapping spit. It certainly hadn’t occurred to him that Murderbot would still consider him a potential target who needed to be watched.
“No,” Murderbot answered, his performance reliability slipping to 92%, but he didn’t lie. Not only was his programming clear on not leading people astray, his nature was to be blunt. “Not surveillance. Being with you is like being alone, but better. Which is fucking weird but whatever. But I’m used to people expecting certain things out of me.” Not all people. Dr. Mensah came to mind. But most people, surely, liked having him around to blast their way to safety, and to occasionally act as the straight man in their comedy routine.
Despite the fact that he was probably the most threatening one in this relationship, he lifted his hands up in a show of de-escalation. “I didn’t assess things because I didn’t want to have expectations that got fucked to oblivion. Yeah?”
Morgan visibly relaxed, the moment of panic passing. The straightforward approach to communication was one of the reasons he liked Murderbot: it was relatively rare that he was going to get left wondering about anything too long.
“Okay,” Morgan allowed, then decided he should probably be clear about what he thought. “I thought you’d decided we were past ‘just friends’ when you asked me to go to the hockey party with you. When I asked you about it back then you ran away for a couple hours and then went back to normal, so I took that as confirmation that we were dating and you just didn’t want to talk about it. So...yeah. That’s the assumption I’ve been working under since then.”
Murderbot ran a few recall pull-ups and verified that they had, in fact, gone to several events together and excluded others. On one hand, he was rather annoyed with himself - human interaction wasn’t the easiest for him, and even if Morgan wasn’t human that didn’t mean that he didn’t operate within the same social norms. Murderbot should have gotten this. He could read a target’s intentions with just a slight squint of its eyes, but when it came to relationships, Murderbot had no idea what the fuck he was doing.
“Oh,” he said intelligently, and then sat on the couch next to Morgan. “Cool, then. Confirmed.” A pause. “This was either easier or harder than I thought it’d be and I don’t know which. I came with a plan.”
“What was the plan?” An amused smile turned up one corner of Morgan’s mouth. Now that he was reassured that Murderbot had not in fact been dating him as a surveillance tactic, and that they were in fact dating for real, and that the knowledge that they were dating wasn’t going to send Murderbot running through the wall to escape, the whole thing was kind of funny. He could only guess at what kind of plan Murderbot would have thought this situation required, and guessing wasn’t nearly good enough.
“I made a chart of time spent together versus time spent apart, and qualified the data by assigning numerical values to the amount of annoyance I felt, which as you can see, is demonstrably low.” Murderbot pulled up the graph and projected it so Morgan could view it. “In fact, I was generally more annoyed when we weren’t in the same room - vibing -” here he tested out a new word he’d heard from Vallo’s youth, “than when we were apart. Obviously, this implied that a certain degree of togetherness would be beneficial to me, but maybe not to you, which is why I wanted to check in.”
Logical. Clear. Astute. Murderbot was pretty sure he had this shit on lock.
Morgan wished he could show this graph to everyone who’d ever accused him of approaching relationships like one of his projects. Mikhaila would probably laugh and say he’d finally met his match. Truth be told, he did appreciate the clarity, and the finely crafted visual representation.
“I like being with you,” he said, because it seemed important to offer that same clarity in return even though he hadn’t prepared a presentation deck on the matter. “You said people usually want something from you? That’s all I want from you, really: being with you. Watching movies and doing coding projects and just existing in the same space - physical or mental or electronic space, all of them are good. And sitting in your lap is pretty nice, too. So...yeah. Togetherness is also beneficial to me.”
Okay. There was no need to panic or hide in the bathroom. Murderbot wasn’t even feeling as if he had much of a need to sink into the carpet and disassociate. This was good. He was almost functioning normally. Granted, the thought that this had already occurred to Morgan would probably plague him in the little hours of the night, but we all had to start somewhere.
He came and sat down on the edge of the couch, like a snooty pet cat not quite ready to commit. “I’m sorry that I panicked you.”
“Eh, it’s no big deal.” Morgan shrugged, and because he was a much less snooty cat, he turned to flop his feet over the arm of the sofa and his head into Murderbot’s lap, looking up at him with a smile. “We got it all sorted out in less than five minutes. And I didn’t even panic hard enough to turn into a throw pillow.”
“I didn’t have to bring out the big guns, either,” Murderbot noted in his dry-as-dirt approximation of humor, because yes, he had big guns (in his arms, specifically. And chest.) His fingers moved to stroke Morgan’s hair automatically, since it was suddenly available. He had always thought he’d hated being touched, but he had learned with his friends back home that it wasn’t true - it was that he wanted control over who touched him, and how. Cuddling was shockingly kind of nice. Sometimes. With the right people.
But Jesus tap-dancing Christ was he glad this conversation was over.
...Lardo was going to have a field day. Murderbot decided then and there that she would never know of this.