Chapter 158 – Heart-to-Heart

"It's a rather quiet and relaxed evening, isn't it, Martin?" said Morton, with his salt-and-pepper hair and slightly bulging gut.

Intangible tendrils of solid chance spread hesitantly; slowly, carefully nudging the tensions of the astral plates. Tempting fate.

"Yes," answered Martin, scratching his chin, "it's really been rather calm, today."

A quiet crack pinged across the immaterial. Not yet enough. Morton took out his wallet, a beaten old thing, and opened it gently. Showed Martin a picture encased within.

"Look, that's my adorable Lizzy. Isn't she cute? Just a few more hours and I'll be finished with this tour, ready to take the trip home and retire," he said, and did not lie. And precipitated a louder, more decisive crack.

Fate shattered like glass and poured forth the chaotic fortunes, upending lives and upsetting plans—but that was as intended, for better to lance the boil and trigger the small avalanche, lest The Powers That Be decide to take matters into their own hands and run roughshod across existence itself.

– Murphy's Law, Defanged

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"Why, do you figure, didn't you go all…Battlepoet, any time in this set of battles?" Leah asked suddenly.

I, momentarily distracted from playing with Sonde, threw a glance at her, who was staring into dead air. Presumably at a video screen—and I did recognize that specific tone of voice.

The thought that my girlfriend was yet again watching the clips of me killing that Twenty-Two with my old rifle (and then stretching in my crater of glass, which is what I suspected was what Leah kept going back to that clip for) made me blush a little. Being admired like that wasn't gonna get old anytime soon.

Uncountable millions of mesh citizens doing the same online was a little more weird, and less flattering, but it did have a purpose—I'd really rather not have everybody call me Airmonkey.

Thinking of which, I should check on the progress of that…initiative. Leah's new e-war tank looked like it wouldn't have any trouble linking up with a satellite beyond that floating river.

"Well, there wasn't anything personal about today," I replied. "Lots of fun, but I didn't have, say, a rifle to send off."

"Ah…"

"Ah?" I asked as I returned to playing with Sonde, presenting her with the calculations of my flight brain as I simulated my fall from the sky yet again. This time with randomly changed variables based on recollections I'd kept stored in the Quanta's memory banks.

Sonde happily took the avionics' output and searched it for patterns, which she altered and fed back to the organ for further processing. It wasn't what I'd set out to do, but she was actually, gradually, improving the auxiliary brain's metabolic efficiency by making it form shortcut connections for the most common calculations.

What I had been trying to find out was just how open Sonde's mind was to mine. She did have that privacy blind, after all. She, on the other hand, had total access to my entire life.

If ever I'd been concerned with keeping any adult stuff away from her, then that ship had sailed the moment she'd been conceived inside my brain.

So far as I could tell, she was intact and healthy. She existed on a set of parameters incomprehensible to me; my life and all my weirdness was just data to her. Stuff to draw conclusions from in a logical, non-emotional way. She'd never have to process the crap I went through, even if she referenced it viscerally.

Born to handle infohazards, indeed.

Her ability to use my emotions, both for communication and as tools to manipulate data with—my memories specifically—meant obviously that there was some compatibility, but…

I was starting to wonder if that blind wasn't to protect her from my influence, but rather, me from hers? In particular, from the ego-killing connections she might've drawn between all the behaviors that made me, well, me.

What a strange thing, I mused, to have the demonstrably immature child inside my head also be the single most mature being I've ever met.

Tynea included, I was pretty sure.

I'd stumbled across the concept of the ego-death years and years ago, when figuring out who I was under all that childhood wreckage was still a challenge made labyrinthine by the lack of insight into even the most basic psychology.

It'd seemed like a promising shortcut past all the confusing crap, at the time: Several corporations offered a variety of mushroom-derived designer drugs that were supposed to help one fiddle one's way through the complicated questions of life. They did that by pressing the biochemical edit button of the brain, which had the effect of letting the patient work on particularly harrowing…traits they'd involuntarily picked up. To ask oneself those questions the waking mind stubbornly veered away from.

There were actually solid studies on that kind of thing—one's sense of self was responsible for many behavioral deformations, after all. Killing it temporarily could help a person see past some personal blindspots and…wiggle them.

It could also ruin one's common sense of How Things Are permanently; send one spinning into suicidal spirals of existential crises, trigger real psychoses. Act as a catalyst for latent disorders.

Those who weren't unsouled corpo out for a payday always gave the same set of warnings: Don't just take mushrooms. Find a shrink. Find somebody who knows the process. The drug's the smallest part.

I'd refrained. The whole thing stunk of either pharmacy profits, or Trust me, bro!, with a side of Better hope your dad ain't hiding some abnormal genes.

"I've kind of been feeling like your, um, bloodlust's been changing a little with every battle," Leah explained. Her words made me look at her more carefully. "Gotten more…extreme, maybe? More complete."

She returned my look with a certain sense of…scruples.

"But now I'm wondering if my impression was just wrong. If the personal component reduced that bloodthirsty edge, rather than you having been building one."

I smiled, just a little grimly. "Nah. You weren't wrong. That side of me's been waking up again, what with all the violence. It's been making more of a showing."

Leah looked even more uncomfortable with worry. I didn't want her to, so I continued, "It shouldn't scare you. Honest."

She gave me a questioning glance, but didn't speak.

"Honest, honest," I added with what I hoped was a calming giggle, and let every muscle in my body relax all over her—to show I really wasn't worried. She did seem to breathe a bit easier after that, and with my antennae showcasing my attention towards her face and Leah softly blowing them away from her eyes, we were back in familiar territory.

"But…"

I smiled encouragingly. I'd answer any number of questions if it meant my Leah could quit being hesitant and scared. It really didn't suit her.

"...doesn't that mean you're…destabilizing, somehow?"

And there was the core of her worry.

I had to pause for due diligence—explaining the go-go-go was like trying to explain colors to a blind person.

"Bloodlust," I finally began, "sounds so…simple. And everybody's been red-hot angry before. It gives you the impression that you'll know what it's like, how it works, just from imagining it, from drawing on your own experiences with violence and other tense situations."

Maybe it was more like explaining colors to a person who'd merely been colorblind, not fully blind. They'd still understand the shades of brightness.

"And if it were just any old adrenaline dump, then that'd be correct. Everybody will react differently, but you kinda know what it's gotta be like for other people, regardless."

Leah nodded.

"But, do you actually?" I asked her. "Do you know what a career soldier's trained response feels like, or a martial artist's in the ring?"

The gears were absolutely rattling between her ears.

"I…see what you mean," she answered. "Maybe? I have been taking care of entire groups of children and teenagers for years, orphans all, and I can tell you that the normies out there with only one child in their family have no fucking clue what that's like. Even if they're convinced otherwise."

"Mhm." I smiled, sitting up again, hands supporting my weight, one above the other, just beneath her chest. My butt settled on her tummy and I totally enjoyed the squish of our bodies conforming there. I let my jacket with its pauldrons slide off my shoulders, and my torso collapse, so that my shoulders rose.

Leah's wandering eyes told me exactly how cute I was being.

Maybe I ought to slip the leotard, too? Although I was sure the fluffy collar added to my adorableness, rather than detract from it.

"Then you can at the very least picture the gulf of difference between the one and the other."

"I think so," she said.

My smile widened when her hand rose to brush over my belly, especially where the skin-tight material dipped at my navel. I held still for her, breathing only to speak, even when the light strokes were just ticklish enough to add an involuntary, giggling quaver to my voice. It had the amusing result of making me hiccup gently.

"My battle—hic—condition's, like, a whole complex of trained trance, razor's-edge-riding risk manage—hic—ment…thingies…" The digits of my IQ were abandoning me one by one, with every involuntary contraction of my diaphragm. I couldn't even stop the silly giggle that escaped me—but Leah's secretly delighted smile was totally worth it. "And… And… Uh…right! Anti-trauma responses I—hic—picked up as a kid."

"Tell me," Leah demanded as she hooked a finger into my collar and pulled me down so our foreheads touched. It let her escape the tactile attention of my sniffing puppies for a bit. It also let her kiss me and swallow my next hiccup as she tickled my belly again. "How's a childhood-trained set of trauma adaptations to mortal combat, of all things, not a massive problem?"

" 'Cause—hic—'cause I wasn't ever going to be anything like them."

That came out with a lot more vehemence than I'd meant to. But instead of unsettling Leah, it seemed to give her some sort of…smug satisfaction. The fiery pride in her eyes was weirdly difficult to look at.

Clearly that was another thing to take to therapy.

Leah's fingers, meanwhile, kept tickling the underside of my abdominal muscles, really teasing the sensitive skin there.

Foreplay that wasn't. It made me hiccup once, harder. And blush. Again.

I just really, really loved my green-eyed tease.

"I wasn't gonna be like them," I reiterated, calmly this time, if a bit laughter-breathy. "Where they sought release by projecting their suffering on their victims, I sought release through exhilaration. Mania, even."

Leah understood that very much. I could see it in her eyes, in the rapt attention and the way she readily accepted that into her calculations. Also in the way her fingertips tickled my navel's dip rather decisively to coax another giggle from me.

"Where they rode their abused rage to drown out fear and pain, I rode the lightning and beat the risks before they could kill me. I learned to go too fast for the razor's edge to cut me."

Leah smiled up at me and poked me in the side, making me twitch. Then she poked all around my lower tummy with a beautiful, impish smile. Teasing the underside of my abdominal muscles with feathery fingertips.

She knew exactly what she was doing to me, but she wasn't going there.

Tease! She was still teasing, the teasing tease. I repaid Leah by kneading her shoulders.

"How'd you learn not to chase that high at all the other times, then?" she asked. Her words didn't match the smirk she sported.

It took me a few breathless moments of getting the giggles under control, before I could get the answer out.

"I didn't, not at first. Iiiieeeh—" The squeal ripped from me when Leah suddenly and vigorously tickled my flanks again.

It had a devastating effect on my composure. It took me several seconds of resting my forehead on hers, and about a hundred new markers on my Tickle Time Tally Revenge list, to find my words again.

"I… I'd tried to keep the mania going at all times, at first. I loved the way it made me unstoppable. But there was a—hic—" I bounced.

Ah. The hiccup was back. Leah giggled with an adorableness that I was sure she'd yoinked from me. I had to kiss her to reclaim it.

"—point where I realized that the mania was even more useful, against them, if I kept it under wraps. After that, switching it on and off on demand came naturally."

I laughed, with just a little bit of Schadenfreude to it. The energy of my speech changed with it, and all the remaining words just tumbled free like a mean echo.

"They didn't know what hit them when I finally turned it up to eleven and broke out, right from headquarters—they'd been watching me closely on my missions, even the solo ones. So I pretended I couldn't go funny unless I got hurt badly. That the presence of threat, the bullying, wasn't enough. Thought they had me locked down back at the base, they did. Underground. But they didn't. The surprise was why they couldn't catch me, and then I made it clear across the ocean."

Leah's gaze gained a slightly queer quality as I spilled. A clashing mix of rage at what I'd gone through, of overwhelmed processing of my words and reading between the lines, and a mirrored energy of satisfied violence.

She understood, I was sure of it, even if it'd take her a while to really work through the whole thing.

But I wasn't entirely sure if she'd noticed that she'd progressed from teasing to teasing teasing. It seemed like a subconscious action. At first, at least. Featherlight brushes down there, so light I barely sensed them even through the thin fabric.

It was becoming impossible to hold still. I'd had enough of talking anyway. There'd been so much tension today, so much stuff happening, and I'd had enough.

Leah, too. It showed in her eyes as she put the topic aside for later and refocused on me. The renewed attention stole my ability to breathe, shoved a different kind of energy through my spine. It all but scorched me, inside out.

I whined as I finally gave in, rested my forehead on hers again, and let my hips respond to her touch.

Although by this point, even as she teased my entrance, I was fairly sure she wouldn't…pop my cherry, not until she could do it with her own flesh-and-blood fingers.

I didn't mind. It actually kinda made me happy to wait until then.

I fought to stay still anyway, because it was…thrilling, to spread my legs for her and let her choose. A dirty little gift I'd let her claim whenever.

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