Ayo

ETA2: we do use inches/miles in poetic ways ("he was lost in thought/miles away" or "his lips were a bare inch away").

Stratt was a historian. She wasn't just pirating for the sake of entertainment for the astronauts, she was doing a full historical backup of the planet. Who knows how much knowledge and communications ability, how much art and culture and history, how much niche knowledge of how to make specific pieces of modern technology or modern medicines, was lost as the wars for resources isolated everyone, as the death tolls led to the deaths of specialized trade workers and scientists, as the power grids failing across the planet (or cut off, potentially) led to all the cloud servers going dark. Stratt was facing methods of combating extinction and she did her best to ensure that if/when the Hail Mary worked, it would send back not just the hope of the future in the solution to the astrophage, but the restoration of history and culture and knowledge.

But my god, when Murderbot shows Mensah Sanctuary Moon to help with her panic attack. You see her look at it, and you see her realize…

Yes, she has been thinking of Murderbot as a person, that’s why she went back for it at the DeltFall habitat. But it’s all been very theoretical—the way you might help a stranger up if they fall, but that doesn’t mean you want to get to know them. It doesn’t mean you’ve reckoned with their interiority.

But as Murderbot murmurs, “Breathe, breathe, breathe the crystal light” to itself, you see it all click into place for Ayda Mensah.

This terror she’s experiencing? All-consuming and confusing and soul-crushing? SecUnit has felt this. And it had to face it alone—not just in the sense that there has never been anyone to offer it comfort, but in the sense that no one even thought that it—it as an entity, it as a being capable of fear—exists.

So it found this show. And Mensah has been so pissed at it for potentially getting them all killed because it thought a stupid fucking soap opera mattered, but oh, oh, oh fuck, this show is the only thing in the universe that has ever given it comfort. This show has offered it context and escapism and asked for nothing in return. It absolutely is critical matériel.

And that brings her to now, to herself, to herself and Murderbot. This person next to her, who she is technically in possession of, who has had to claw and scrape for even a thimbleful of peace, who was only able to protect that peace by never ever ever letting anyone know it existed. She and her team have ripped away its impossibly precious privacy, exposed its secrets… and here it is handing her part of its soul anyway, because in this moment she needs it.

Because it knows what it’s like to be scared and alone, and does not want her to feel that way.

And so she falls in love, and you get to watch it happen.

cheese sits on the toilet while we take showers, and i like to stand on my tip toes and draw his silhouette in the steam from a high angle, then stand back to see how warped it is from his actual shape