‘Surely you can see the problem?’ Gale had snapped in frustration. ‘You’re the omniscient being out of the two of us.’

MYSTRA had given him one of the Mona Lisa smiles she was so fond of, all in her eyes, never in her mouth.

‘I am close. But even digital omniscience has its artificial limitations. My programming remains a far cry from the neural complexity of an organic mind.’

He’d been staring at the blackboard, its stubborn wall of crossed out equations and endless flow charts, when he’d felt her hand slip around his waist. Even her solidity was transient, the pressure of her lips ever-shifting where they tickled the shell of his ear.

‘Let alone a mind as vast and intricate as yours.’ Her chuckle shivered his spine. ‘That’s why I need you, Gale. That’s what makes you special.’

Gale inhaled sharply. Her whispered words curdled hot and sour at the back of his mind, drawing drowsy focus from the burring screen ahead to Vi’s glare as she spoke, or rather screamed at him. ‘Your abusive ex!’

But shouting it didn’t make it true. Did it? MYSTRA had withheld things, of course. Indifferent to everything except the success of the project, perhaps. Callous and calculating and hard to please, no matter how hard he’d tried, but … abuse? That was a serious claim with its own kind of gravity, and all certain forces had an equal and opposite reaction, so if it were true, shouldn’t he feel… Certain? Not sitting, frozen, with scrambled thoughts and sweating palms and pulse hammering in his ears –

That was when he heard the first cries.

He recognised them from the ship immediately. So many nights hearing her call out on the other side of the thin bunk walls, railing against every weak muscle in his body not to run to her. Tonight, with the space between their rooms as wide as a galaxy and his discernment dangling by a single tether, Gale finally broke.

“Vi?” He pushed open the door. “Vi, are you –”

Her thrashing limbs had strangled the bedsheets across the foot of the bed.

“I didn’t know, I didn’t –”

Her shout cracked, and then Gale didn’t care they were fighting, or that she would push him away the moment he woke her up. He was drawn to the bed like a moon, unable to escape her orbit. When he touched her arm, he found it drenched in sweat.

“Vi, wake up. It’s not real –”

Her fists collided with his chest, but he didn’t flinch. Instead, he seized her shoulders and pulled her up.

Vi sobbed. “Don’t make me –”

“It’s Gale, I’m here –”

Vi couldn’t hear him, lids still squeezed shut and fighting against his restraint, and his heart was folding in on itself to watch so he had to. Gale wrapped his arms tight around her convulsing body, pressed his forehead to hers, and kept pulling her back to him.

“I’ve got you, my love,” he murmured fiercely. “You are safe, it’s only a dream –”

Her eyes flew open with a gasp. For a moment, Vi looked right through him, into somewhere he could not reach. Then the pupils shrank and refocused, and Gale braced for the inevitable resistance. For the walls to slam back down.

Vi’s fingers ghosted over his cheek. He was completely possessed by the pants whispering through her soft lips. So human. So solid.

“Gale…”

He didn’t know who started it. Gale only knew that when they kissed, it was like breaking the surface of water after a bottomless dive. Her lips burned against his, caramelising his brain when her strong arms wrapped around his neck, but he shouldn’t, he should stop this, she was vulnerable and would only regret this –

Vi surged forward and swung a leg over his lap to straddle him, firm fingers sinking into his cheeks and thoughts as she hissed between kisses, “I’m still mad at you.”

Gale nodded. “I know.”

His fingers, against all his better judgement, traced across hard battle scars and silky smooth skin under her shirt. Vi gasped into his mouth when they reached the curve of her breast.

“This doesn’t mean –”

“I know –”

Desire roared thick between his thighs, and Gale was utterly lost to everything except the senseless need to touch, to hold, to taste her pulse thrumming the line of her neck, the beautiful ridge of her collarbone. The arch of her spine under his hands as he pulled her into his desperate mouth. Human. Solid. Real.

“I don’t care,” he panted around the sweet pebble of her nipple. Her moans took a blowtorch to his insides. “I’ll give you anything, Vi, everything, please…”

Under his hands, Vi stiffened. Her voice snapped off. As soon as the frenzy began, it was over, and Gale froze in the uncertainty of not knowing where he’d gone wrong. But it was clearly something, because when he looked up, Vi stared at him like he was a stranger.

“I don’t want everything. I want you.”

Well, that didn’t clear things up at all. Isn’t that what he’d said? His deduction clawed through the heady haze of arousal and research he couldn’t understand and equations he couldn’t crack and shimmering, secret smiles. 

“Then have me,” he pleaded. “But have the very best version of me.”

Somehow, Vi was able to look frustrated and pained and pissed off all at once and without moving most of her face, a mere knotting of her brow, stormclouds brewing behind her brilliant green eyes.

“So I chose wrong.” Her voice was sharp. “Is that it?”

Shame slipped his hands to her waist. Yes, he wanted to say. You deserve more than this hopeless, irredeemable husk of a coward who even now, cannot look you in the eye for fear you will agree.

“I… don’t know,” he admitted instead.

Wrong, again, always wrong. Vi’s face hardened.

“Forget it.”

She wrenched off his lap and threw herself resolutely onto her side, dark hair covering her face, so Gale was left staring at her back.

“You can go now.”

Back in his room, Gale slumped against the closed door, palms kneading into his twitching eyes. The full weight of the pain he was obviously causing her, where they were, the threat of tomorrow flooded him to the bone.

Gods, what was he doing? How had he allowed it to go this far?

He had pen and paper in his hands before his mind could intervene otherwise. But as he scrawled the note and wrote her name, the relentless self-doubt crept in again. Reaching for the weak way out, yet again – or maybe shirking his obvious culpability was the spineless act. He could no longer tell the difference. Gale stared at the page, his own ridiculous words barely indistinguishable from the ramblings of Karsus.

It had all been so much more simple before he met Vi. A complication, a complexity of organic matter and molecules that constituted her enigmatic organic mind, like MYSTRA had said. Another mystery he was failing to understand.

Organic minds… neural complexity…

Deep in his addled mind, flint sparked, warm and inviting with promise. Gale shoved the paper away. The bone-weariness was settling in now, but he knew from experience that meant he still had another hour in him. His attention drew back to the warm glow of the laptop. Determinism. Calculation. Reason.

Gale sat at the desk.

✩‧₊˚─────⋆⋅☆⋅⋆─────˚₊‧✩

Good fucking soup. Uno-reverse tags to all and @theendofanerror (I dare you to upload some of that God!Gale angst I KNOW you got cookin')