#soldixr

Decaf: Impersonate one of your friends.

    At first, Beetee says nothing. He raises his hands to his face, as if pretending to inspect some invisible object he holds —- and then, quite abruptly, he mimes dropping the item to the ground with more force than necessary. Then, folding his arms behind his back, he carefully looks around and feigns a reaction of surprise, then mild sheepishness.

                “I'm sorry, Beetee, did you need that?                 It wasn’t important, was it?                 Oh —-…. well, sorry.”

     He had honestly meant to have the contraption back in one piece by the time that Beetee’s attention had finally drifted away from whatever it was that he’d been pouring over and mumbling about for the past forty-five minutes, and back over to him. Really. It’s just that once he’d disassembled the thing —— well, it would suffice as enough of an explanation as to the difficulty of the task to say that for the forty-five minutes in which Beetee had planned, designed, and begun the execution of his latest invention, Gale had gotten only as far as reattaching half of the contraption back together.

    “Nothing, nothing.”

            ( fuck, fuck, fuck. )

         ”I've got it under control.”

                    ( what even is this —— ? )

    ” … This thing, it wasn’t important, was it?”

                                                       ( oh, dear. )

     Always a fast learner, it had taken Beetee just a few days to store some of Gale’s idiosyncrasies in his memory bank ; restlessness, fierce defense of his family, the jut of his lower lip when aggravated. And, of course, the infamous nothing—which, quite simply, meant something that Beetee was not to know.

                             ----And “I’ve got it under control”---

                         ( oh, dear. oh, dear. what has he done? )

     Turning with a brisk sigh, Beetee’s eyes fell upon the device in Gale’s hands and it took most of his self-control not to moan in anguish. Instead, the barest whimper escaped his lips as he stepped forward as swiftly as possibly to relieve his partner of the contraption.

               “---What the hell did you----?”

     Beetee bit his lip, stopping his words.

                                            ( he was trying to help, you can fix whatever he did. )