[Fin] Being Okay

[TawnyAngel]

"S'ok," the blond assured. "If you need to. No one's gonna walk in." As for the thanks, he just patted his friend on the back and stared at the ceiling for a while, weighing his words.

"S'ok to not be alright," he said quietly. "We're not. Haven't been, really, since the museum."

"S'ok."


He supposed they hadn't been. Everything was different now, well not everything but a lot of things and not always in big ways but always there like the faint white scars that looked like lightning. Aulus curled in on himself a little more, his breathing becoming a little ragged as the tears started again. He didn't want to be this. He wanted to be positive. He wanted to focus on something that wasn't.... That wasn't all of this. "So uh, I was talking to Tam the other day," he managed in between breaths. "Talking about stuff that maybe could be worked into an arm... you- you think it could have dex functions maybe?" Maybe Alex would start rambling about cool stuff and he could just listen for a little while; it didn't matter if the technical details went over his head, he just wanted to listen.  

[TawnyAngel]

"Yeah. Yeah, maybe." Hayes had started to move his hand again without thinking about it, smoothing out the folds of Kurt's shirt as he talked. "If they can fit the chips in there. Prob'ly can; they fit them in watches these days, and the dex OS is already optimized for the hardware." It wasn't the rapid-fire tech babble that usually came as a result of such questions; thoughts had to be tracked, grabbed, and articulated almost by force.


"Right." Aulus sniffed; he was still crying but the hand on his back was soothing, it kept him from just falling apart completely as he had a few times when he'd been alone in the infirmary. Alex was here. Even though things were going to be hard, even if things went wrong with it all, so long as Alex was around things would be an okay kind of not okay.

"D'you think maybe if it can be fitted in it should have it's own power source?" Aulus continued after a few moments. "So, y'know, not draining the power from... whatever's going to power the whole moving thing." Was he going to have to plug it in to recharge or something? He guessed he might have to, something was going to have to make it move after all.  

[TawnyAngel]

Another pause, broken by the soft shh-shh of fingers on fabric, and the blond's careful deep breathing. Then: "Yeah. 'Cause you don't want to lose the big function if the little one goes. Is it.. are you gonna be able to take it apart, to upgrade the hardware?"


Aulus' breathing began to synchronize with Alex's, a fact he remained oblivious to as the fingers stroked his back and as he thought.

"I don't know," Aulus said eventually, sniffing again and shrugging a little. "All I've been told about so far's the- the implants side and that. I don't know who's making it or how it will all work."  

[TawnyAngel]

Hayes' chest jumped with a little chuckle. "They're gonna stick s**t in your arm and haven't told you where it's from?"


"Heh." Aulus poked Hayes lightly in the ribs; very lightly, in fact it was really just a touch of his forefinger. " 'm going to find out before they stick it on me," he said, his voice still unsteady with tears. "I've just not really had the chance yet. I thought I might talk to Faleen about it." He still wasn't really sure where he stood with Faleen but he was pretty sure she'd find the idea interesting, maybe even want to be involved.  

[TawnyAngel]

"Hey," the blond protested, more from habit than any actual discomfort, and tweaked his friend's ear lightly for good measure. "If you get a 'dex in there, get a USB port. You can write your own apps and upload them."


The ear-tweak was met with a cracked little laugh, followed by another sniff. "I'd like that. I'll learn how to make them; I'm going to have plenty of time on my hand after all." He'd made that joke already to somebody else but not to Alex so it was still valid so far as he was concerned. "I've still got that program Al uses somewhere on my dex... have to look into it properly now I can pretty much focus again." Maybe he'd try to learn some more in depth stuff too, surprise Alex with actually understanding some of his technobabble one day. He'd been meaning to learn some basics for years but there had never seemed to be time for it. Well he had plenty now as he'd just said and the whole coding thing was kind of interesting but if he was perfectly honest that was probably only because of how Alex talked about it.  

[TawnyAngel]

The joke was met with a groan. "That was bad," Hayes grinned faintly. "Nah - well, if you want. Al likes Scratch because it's got lots of colors, but you could learn something with more oomph. Python's good. Simple. Does a lot. Isn't fiddly. Forces indenting," he added, tone shading to 'exasperated TA.'


"Python?" Aulus echoed. "Okay, I'll look into that then." If Alex had confidence that he could cope with it then he'd give it his best shot, and he'd find out what the deal was with indenting too; he was sure he'd heard Alex mention it before. "And it was awful," he acknowledged with another semi-laugh, grateful that the reassuring hand was still on his back. "Just can't resist a pun, you know?"  

[TawnyAngel]

"Yeahp." Said hand patted Aulus on the back twice. "You have to install a language before your machine can recognize it - I'll show you. There's a book I usually lend to.." Hayes trailed off, remembering the fate of most of his reference books, and winced.

"I'll reorder it."


"Mmm," replied Aulus; he had nearly stopped crying now. Nearly. "Thanks, that'd be good.... We should both get off base when we're up to it, go camping or something. Just get away for a couple of days." Camping sounded good. Some of the practicalities of it might be tough right now but he could deal with that in exchange for a break from the confines of the base, a chance to clear his head a little perhaps.  

[TawnyAngel]

"Yeah. S'a good area, you know," Hayes mused. "Used to come out here in college some weekends." How that was going to work was something he had no idea of at the moment, but that wasn't anything to get worried about.


"Haven't explored all that much," Aulus admitted with another little shrug, "always been busy with one thing and another." He'd got to know Camphoreon okay and he'd explored the mountains seemingly a lifetime ago now; a life that had involved being a pissed off stupid kid with a bike, an Absol, a camera, and not a lot else. Three and a half years he'd been with Rocket now, three and a half. It seemed both a lot less and a lot more than that somehow but as ever he couldn't really regret his stupid decision to join, even now he felt as though it had brought him more a lot more good than bad. Aulus' fingers grasped lightly at Alex's shirt and he smiled a little through the tears.

"At least it's gone, right? You know, It. Boom." Nobody could ever take them back to that white room with the chair bolted to the floor.  

[TawnyAngel]

The blond's gaze flickered from the ceiling to the hand making wrinkles in his shirt's silkscreened Serenity schematic, then back again with a light sigh. "Yeah," he exhaled. "Got that much, right? It's gone." Still, it would take a long time before the reality of the dead ship replaced the live one in his dreams.

His hand curled itself into a fist, catching a fold of Kurt's shirt. "You still gonna talk to someone?" he asked, staring past the dimmed light fixture at old afterimages.


Aulus went silent and completely still, he even stopped breathing for a beat or two. Was he? He breathed again, wishing he had another arm so that he could wrap it around Alex. "Yeah," he said eventually, "I guess." All of this was.... Well it hadn't sorted itself out, didn't seem like it was really going to go away on its own no matter how much he tried to pretend it might. "What about you?" Alex didn't always show what he was feeling but Aulus knew perfectly well that his friend had a lot of the same problems as he did, though some manifested differently. As Alex had said neither of them had really been okay for a long time. "I think.... I think it might do us both good. Izaya is a pustule on the arse of humanity but that doesn't mean he might not have had a point."

He wanted to be okay again. He wanted Alex to be okay. There was no shame in seeking help to get there, right? Why was it that he had no problem with the concept that he needed other people to help him get over physical things but recoiled at the idea of looking for help to sort out the problems inside his own head?  

[TawnyAngel]

Hayes' arm tightened slightly around his friend as if to say 'stay with me,' relaxing when his breathing returned. He didn't freeze when the question was posed to him, instead spending cycles of breath trying to find.. some nonchalant way to talk about it, a last-ditch effort to really be okay. It was in vain, and what clunked out at last was "I should." His eyes closed in a sort of defeat.

"It's too big. Explosions and - it's not normal, y'know? I'm not- you don't learn how to handle that crap." Eyes still closed, he made a thin, humorless grin and let out a breathless laugh. "Who the hell knows how to handle that? I know 'm good at not letting things get to me but s**t, that.."

"You were there," he said quietly.


"You should," Aulus agreed usually razor-edged sarcasm-cracking voice gone soft and sincere. "And... yeah. You don't. I don't know. I was." By squirming his arm he was able to get his hand up to Alex's shoulder in order to give it a squeeze. The angle was incredibly awkward but he kept it where it was anyway. "Always going to be here."  

[TawnyAngel]

Wordlessly, Hayes unslung his other arm from the back of the sofa and gripped his friend's hand.

This wasn't how he'd thought he'd spend the evening, but the explosion had shaken him to pieces that had fallen, jumbled, when he'd landed in the snow, and one piece that had been jumbled for longer than the rest now realigned.

"Yeah," he echoed.


Aulus exhaled softly, smiling very faintly to himself again as Alex's hand touched his. "We'll be okay, one day." And until then, and beyond then, he would be here. There wasn't anyone else in the world like Alex; when he was with Alex he felt... he felt like he was worth something more than the sum of things he could beat up, there weren't many people who could do that. He liked feeling like that.

Some time later Char spread a blanket over the pair of sleeping humans and turned out the light.