#suchlike

The elevator was creaky.

Emily nibbled at a hangnail, warily looking towards the ceiling. All in all this was probably the nicest elevator she’d ever been in—the walls weren’t basically beefed-up chainlink, for one thing—but she didn’t trust the damn things no matter how nice the carpet was.

If there was a lift in the city she was pretty much guaranteed not to die in, though, it’d probably be this one.

The thing dinged politely, the doors opening with only a slight squeak, and Emily half-ran out of the elevator and into Thomas’s—

—entire floor.

Emily frowned a little. She’d known his lab was pretty decent—the city seemed to think he was the best thing they had, so they’d been almost annoyingly generous—but she hadn’t thought he lived in it. But there it was—a whole storey, all the walls knocked down and replaced with pillars, the carpet ripped up to show the bare floorboards underneath, and every square inch covered in blueprints and the skeletons of half-finished machines.

So much so, in fact, that she didn’t even notice the mattress in the corner until she’d stepped on it. Further examination showed a kitchenette to her left and there was a little walled-in area a bit right of the middle that she hoped was a bathroom.

The mattress squeaked more than the elevator. God, he didn’t even bother getting a proper bed? Her bed was nicer than this piece of shit.

“Thomas?” Emily picked her way back to the elevator, giving up on finding a free path on her own. “Thomas! Look, I’m sorry I’m late, b—”

She spotted movement out of the corner of her eye and instinctively tensed. She turned her head as incidentally as she could, straining until she managed to spot the figure.

Thomas. Just sitting there, perched on a workbench instead of on a chair like a normal person, scribbling and frowning at a clipboard.

Emily huffed an annoyed breath through her nose and started making her way to him. How the hell did he even make it across the lab with all of this crap in the way?

He didn’t react to her presence whatsoever until she’d actually reached out and shaken his shoulder a little bit. Of course, he made up for it then with the girliest yelp she’d ever heard, yanking a slim pair of cords away from his ears and nearly falling off of the workbench in his haste to stand.

“Emily!” A startled smile flitted across his mouth. “I’m sorry I didn’t hear you come in, I was just listening to…” He flushed a little, coiling the cord around his fingers and setting it aside. “Well, I—I should have thought. I’m sorry.”

A mournful voice came from the miniature speakers. ‘Cause no, no, nobody knows you when you’re down and out…

“Er—” Thomas turned to his side, fumbling across the workbench for a moment before locating a battered, silver something-or-other. He pressed a button and the song cut off mid-word.

Emily scratched the back of her wrist. “Hi,” she said. “Sorry I’m late.”

The doctor gave her a self-deprecating smile. “I’m sorry I wasn’t paying attention.” He cleared his throat, looking at the wall. “Can I make you some coffee?”

She raised an eyebrow at him. He hadn’t really forgotten the whole scheduling thing already, had he? “Nah,” she said instead. “I’m good.” She paused, trying to think of a different topic of conversation. "What's that thing?" she asked, nodding briefly at the silver object.

Thomas's gaze seemed to fumble across the desk as if he'd somehow forgotten what was on it in the two seconds since he'd put it there. "What's--? Oh! That's a disc player. It... It plays discs." He flushed, smoothing his trouser legs with his palms nervously. "Of--of course," he added. "You're a clever woman, you would--you would have figured that part out..."

Emily sniggered. "Stay away from flattery, doc," she told him. "It's not your forte."

The doctor somehow managed to blush harder, ducking his head a little.

"So you like music, huh?"

Thomas seemed to brighten a little. "Oh, yes," he replied. "My father used to sing--ah, before..."

The worker-woman winced, touching his forearm briefly and hoping it was good enough. She hated comforting people. Of course, she was also horrible at it, so that wasn't so bad. “Did you build it yourself?”

He actually looked startled. “Goodness, no!” he exclaimed. “I don’t have—err, I don’t have the tools to work on a scale quite that small yet, unfortunately. Rather, I found it on one of my excursions to the abandoned cities.”

Emily raised an eyebrow at him. She seemed to be doing that a lot, actually. “Thought those things were death traps.”

“Well—” Thomas gave a slightly nervous-sounding laugh. “I suppose the architecture is a bit… unsteady, but they’re the only places to find many of the components I need. Not very many of them were actually bombed, you see, but no one wants to take the risk…”

Sensing that he was going to keep going for a while, the woman moved a few clipboards, something that looked like the innards of a lamp, and a pair of rubber bands away so she could perch on the workbench in their place.

“There are libraries still intact in some areas, if you can believe it,” he continued excitedly. “I’ve brought home what I could, of course, but there is still so very much out there and so very much we don’t know. Do you know we have no idea what year it is?”

“Well, yeah,” Emily said, with the overly patient air of someone talking to a very young child.

“The destruction was so severe that even that knowledge is lost to us! It’s difficult to imagine the carnage… I have been trying to ascertain the causes, but much of the pertinent information was censored—an attempt to contain the uprisings, I suppose, but we barely even know that the uprisings happened at all, let alone why they—”

Dr. Light paused, staring at a pencil for a moment.

“Oh dear,” he said. “Oh dear! I’m not boring you, am I?”

Emily laughed. Like, really laughed. “Don’t worry about it, doc.” Absently, she tugged at the lamp thing, taking it out of the debris.

…Okay, that definitely wasn’t a lamp. That wasn’t a lamp at all.

“Holy sh—” Startled despite herself, she nearly dropped the gleaming tangle of metal and wire like it actually was the disembodied limb it was meant to resemble. “Do you always leave robot hands lying around or is that just for me?” Her voice was a little more acidic than she’d meant it to be and she winced, hastily qualifying it. “God, that startled me.”

“…ah,” Thomas said awkwardly. “Er—Technically I wasn’t meaning to make that at all.” He took it from her, turning it over to fiddle with a wire that just wasn’t quite tangled up enough. “I was meant to be working on the, ah, bodyguards for outside excursions—Joes, I think we’re calling them; G.I. Joes, after—”

“Thomas.”

“—what? Oh! Terribly sorry.” He cleared his throat. “At any rate, the power to the Joes’ weapon was too lethal…”

“So you made a hand out of it?”

“I meant to destroy it,” he mumbled. “Start afresh. I, er… became distracted.”

Emily shook her head. “No shit.” Out of habit, she pushed her little fringe of hair away from her forehead. She’d have to cut it again soon—

Thomas paled again. “You’re bleeding…”

“Huh?” Emily looked at her hand, the discoloured, half-assed bandage wrapped a little too tightly around her finger.

Huh. He was right.

She shrugged, hiding a grimace. “I’m all right.”

The doctor frowned, taking her wrist and gently tugging her closer to examine the injured digit. His fingers hesitated over the scrap of fabric. “May I at least look?”

Emily unclenched her jaw. “Knock yourself out, I guess, but I told you I’m fine.”

Thomas didn’t seem to be listening to her insistence. He untucked the taped end of the bandage, unwrapping it with twice the care she’d taken in putting it on. Blood seeped into constricted veins, a burning kind of tickle, and she tried not to squirm at the unwelcome renewal of sensation.

Her finger’d swollen since the last time she looked at it. Huh.

“…oh,” Thomas said quietly. “Er—oh—oh dear.”

“What?”

“There’s—there’s no easy way to s—” The scientist gulped a little, looking a little bit turquoise. Hesitantly, he plucked something from the crusted bandage.

Damn. That was half her fingernail.

“Guess that’s why it’s been itching, huh,” she deadpanned. “You done yet, doc?”

“Not—not quite.” Thomas wrapped the fragment in the now-useless bandage and awkwardly set it on the worktable. Emily picked it up again and put it in her pocket.

Leaving her blood lying around some random guy’s apartment seemed just a little creepy.

The doctor turned around, fumbling in drawers, looking puzzled at the odd screwdriver, that sort of thing. She pretty much stopped paying attention after a bit, absently running her fingers across a gleaming red shield instead.

Why there was something so stupidly simple amidst all this weird-ass machinery was kind of beyond her, but she was starting to give up on trying to understand Thomas.

“Here,” he said from behind her. Emily huffed out a quick breath and whipped around, forcing herself not to flinch.

“Dammit, Tom, don’t sneak up on me like that,” she muttered, pulse still hammering away in her throat.

"Oh," he said, chagrined. "Sorry. Er—" He apologetically wiggled a bottle of antiseptic at her. "May I?"

She sighed. "Already told you to knock yourself out, Tom."

"...right." The scientist swallowed a little, dabbing the antiseptic onto the clean rag he held in his other hand. Dr. Light put the bottle down, taking her wrist with an annoying amount of care. "I'm sorry."

Emily kind of wanted to smack him for saying that again, but then the disinfectant actually touched her and she figured it was appropriate this time. It hadn't hurt this much when she'd smashed the damn thing in the first place, why the hell—

But hey, she didn't flinch. Didn't even make a noise. There was that.

Way too slowly for Emily's liking, Thomas finished cleaning the wound. He dried it almost gently enough not to hurt like everliving fuck, discarded the rag on the workbench, and procured a fresh strip of bandage from his pocket.

He was so careful, barely even touching her hand, wrapping the cloth around like her arm was going to fall off if he was too rough. It was kinda cute.

She hadn’t thought that. That hadn’t happened.

"There," Thomas said triumphantly, securing the loose end with a little piece of fabric tape. (Emily absentmindedly wondered if she’d watched the bandage being made.) “I would say ‘good as new’, but… er…”

Emily snorted. “No shit.”

The silence turned worryingly amiable. She bit the inside of her cheek a little. “…thanks, Tom.”

The scientist smiled, raising her hand, brushing his lips to the base of her injured finger. His mouth was warm. Wow.

…Wow.

“Of c—” he said in the half-second before he realised what he’d just done. He dropped her hand like she’d caught fire or something (and it kinda felt like she had, actually), his eyeballs trying to crawl out of his skull. He squeaked and took a half-step backwards, bumping into one of the tables and making a lamp wobble.

Emily laughed, the sound shaky and light in her throat. “You okay, doc?”

“I’m s—“ Thomas swallowed. “I’m so sorry, Miss Stanton, I—my mother used to—for me, you see, and I—” He tried to blink about five times all at once. Got pretty damn close, too. “I am sorry,” he said, voice small and sincere. “I hope I’ve not been—”

She playfully punched him in the shoulder, just a little too light to really hurt. He flinched anyway. “Don’t worry about it.”

Silence again. Emily kind of felt like her skin was trying to turn into a really cheerful porcupine.

“I, ah…” Dr. Light stared at pretty much everything in the room that wasn’t named Emily. He jerked suddenly as something occurred to him and abruptly spun around, his lab coat smacking her in the knee. “I have—I have blueprints,” he continued, his voice weirdly stilted. “Of the machinery as it is—I hoped you could check and see if I’ve made any… any errors?”

Somehow she didn’t think he was just speaking about the drawings. She took a step forward, getting on her tiptoes to peer over his shoulder at the papers.