Welcome
to the SFR Station April Fools for Love event! I'm super excited to
be a part of this blog hop, as fools in love are so fun to read and
write. For my entry in this event, I've decided to include an excerpt
from my Fracture War series work in progress.
This
particular excerpt shows two characters, Ander and Zerra, as they are
starting to admit to themselves that they like each other. They are
mechanical beings in opposite factions, Gathons vs Skellyds, of a civil war that is tearing
their planet, Beryl, apart. They first met after a horrific event both
factions have dubbed 'The Vega Massacre.' During the massacre, Zerra
lost her core-mate, her lifelong partner. As a result, she is
suffering from an imbalance in her systems that could eventually kill
her. The events of the following excerpt occur many years after her mate's death.
Both
are doctors, but Zerra finds herself as a patient of Ander's. She
tries to hide her true ailing condition from him, but he figures it
out and does the most extreme procedure a Beryllian doctor could
perform on a fellow Beryllian patient. He connects his own systems
with hers in order to try and re-write the corrupted coding that is
making her severely ill. In doing so, he finds that she is also
suffering from extreme energy deprivation and transfers all his
energy to her in order to keep her functioning.
She
thinks he's a fool for going to such great lengths to help her and he
thinks she's a fool for believing she doesn't deserve to live.
Without
further ado, on to the excerpt! Check out the posts of all
the wonderful authors listed above. My excerpt runs a little long, so if you're in a hurry now, you could come back later. The event lasts all month long! Browse around all the posts at your leisure and enter in the Rafflecopter giveaway below.
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Zerra
came out of quiescence with a start. She was disoriented. Someone's
hand rested on her chest-plating and she could feel ex-vented air
near her audio. The weight of the hand felt nice. The next thing she
realized was that she was not in pain. Yet, she knew she wasn't
waking from a nightmare and that this wasn't her core-mate, as the
intense lonely void of losing Gren was still an abyss in her core.
Taking air into her own vents, she turned her head to look at whoever
it was.
It
was Ander. The events of the previous cycle hit her processor all at
once...Ander finding her and, doing nothing less than what would be
expected of any doctor, helping her. Not sure if she was grateful or
not, her pump raced. She would have died if he hadn't established
full integration.
Wouldn't she rather be dead? Though, she did feel
better after having been able to get some sleep and the fact that he
was blocking the pain was a welcome change.
Still
fully connected, she could feel traces of his core through the
connection. Without a core bond, she would never be able to feel his
core fully, but she could catch a sense of it through a full
interface such as the one they had. His core was so different from
her core-mate's, yet strangely comforting.
Zerra's
next alarming thought was what he might have accessed while she was
in such a vulnerable state. She had been entirely too weak to block
anything from him. She quickly ran a systems check to see what all
he'd done. What she found surprised her.
Other
than what he needed to help repair her failing systems, he didn't
access anything at all. He didn't try to find any useful information
that could be used against the Skellyds. He didn't look at one
memory. All he got was what couldn't be avoided, since thoughts
always drifted through integrated connections. He hadn't even taken
advantage of her. Not one line of pleasure code had been touched.
Most Skellyds she knew
would have jumped at the chance. A Skell would have helped her, but
he would have taken what he wanted for his trouble. Maybe Gathons
were more honorable, maybe they weren't, but she didn't feel at all
as violated as she thought she'd feel while integrated with one.
Of
course, having been a Skellyd, she didn't feel compelled, as Ander
obviously did, not to sneak a peak at a few things. She didn't like
the idea of someone snooping around her files, but she wasn't against
doing it herself. Like she said to Miaxa, she never said she wasn't a
hypocrite.
Zerra
just wanted to get a sense of who Ander truly was. She would respect
his memories and leave them alone, just as he had done for her,
though the temptation was undeniable.
She
accessed a directory on his characterization. Ander held a deep
seeded love for every Gathon. He became attached to them, breaking
every emotional rule of being a battlefield doctor. He possessed a gentle core that few rarely saw. To his patients, he seemed detached from them, but it was all just a facade that hid his true compassionate nature. He had just the right amount of balance between doing whatever it took to save someone as a function of his programming, even if the method was extreme, and caring about that being while he did it.
Ander was good at what he did and he knew it. He
possessed a deep sense that he could improve or prolong Beryllian
lives immeasurably. All they needed to do was just listen to him and
follow his instructions exactly. Therein lied the source of his
problems, as nobody ever listens to their doctor. That's why he was
so rough with his patients. He had ways to make them listen, or, in
the very least, make them wish
they had listened.
If Zerra had never
bonded, she was certain that she could have come to love this mech.
She found that she was comfortable in that admission to herself. She
truly loved and held dearly to Gren, but he was now gone, through
events that neither one of them had any control over. She would never
dishonor his memory and she would probably lose her life because of his loss,
but she knew, without a doubt, that if circumstances presented
themselves, he would not want her to be forced to die alone.
None of this was
what she ever wanted, but this was where she was and she never
imagined that she would find herself falling for a Gathon.
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Ander felt...warm.
It was a soothing warmth that permeated his entire being. He knew he
was recovering from an energy dump, but he never felt this good after
having done so before. In fact, he didn't recall ever feeling good at
all after a full energy transfer.
He drew the source
of the warmth closer to his frame, then felt warm caressing digits on
his face-plates.
"Ander, you
fool," he heard a voice say. It was cold, biting even,
but the presence within it was warm.
The warm presence
had a warm frame and he pulled it ever closer to himself, sighing
softly, contentedly, as an audio brushed across his mouth-plates.
"You
comfortable?" the voice asked next, a twinge of sarcasm behind
it.
Ander's optics
snapped open in a moment of recognition, his disorientation
dissolving in a rush of sobriety.
He released her
immediately. "Quantus," he chastised himself before saying,
"Zerra, I'm sorry."
He made a motion to
sit up and then realized that they were still attached, dizziness
threatening him as he hadn't fully recovered from the transfer.
"It's okay,"
Zerra assured. "Lay back down. You're going to offline
yourself."
Extreme
embarrassment for snuggling against her so shamelessly poured through
the connection.
Zerra raised her
optic ridges at him, "Don't be so embarrassed. I was feeding the
feeling." A mischievous smile graced her mouth-plates as he
ascertained that she had accessed a pleasure center to make him feel
nice and warm when he woke up.
"You were
what?" Ander wasn't sure whether to be ecstatic that the full
integration and energy transfer helped her or angry for the
violation.
He immediately
disconnected from her central processor to keep any thoughts away
from her.
"Damn you and
your Gathon honor," she snapped, her central processor
connection to him coming free as well.
"It's not about
honor, Zerra," Ander replied. "It's about trust."
They glared at each
other for a long moment. She didn't regret making him feel good, and
he found that he didn't really regret it either. He just didn't know
how to handle these feelings he was having towards her, towards a
bonded mech. Sure, her core-mate was dead, but she was still bonded.
He knew what she couldn't give him.
A spasm wracked her
systems and she winced as the pain spiked beyond what Ander was
capable of blocking with the current code. The doctor in him kicked in again and he dove through the connection; scanning, analyzing, searching until he found the source to re-write the code.
"Better?"
he asked, once her shaking subsided.
She simply nodded,
watching him as he struggled with his emotions. He was afraid of
losing her, yet he knew the inevitable.
As soon as he was
sure that she was stable and he had recovered enough not to feel
dizzy every time he sat up, he went to disconnect their data cables.
"I should go
check on Bazin and Miaxa," he said softly, though he knew Zerra could see through the
connection that it was just an excuse.
She clapped
her hand over the integrated cabling, effectively keeping him from
breaking the connection.
"No, wait,"
she said, quickly stamping down a slight sense of panic.
They were too
integrated for Ander not to catch it. She really needed to feel
someone close, some assurance that she wasn't alone, just to have
someone to be there with her, on the inside and outside of her being.
"Please stay,"
she said, a bit more composed this time. "Just for a little
while. I would," she hesitated, "really like the company."
Ander nodded,
leaving the connection in place as he pulled her hand to his chest.
Laying back down, he didn't say anything and just held her.
Zerra wasn't alone.
She wouldn't be alone again for as long as she lived.
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Kyndra Hatch is the author of 'The Stranger,' a science fiction romance short story published in "Tales from the SFR Brigade." 'The Stranger' was the 2014 SFR Galaxy Award winner for Outstanding Debut Story.
You can find more short stories by Kyndra Hatch on QuarterReads at:
https://quarterreads.com/writer.php?id=13
Prize details:
Grand Prize: $75 gc + 16 ebooks
2nd runner up: $25 gc + 12 ebooks
3rd runner up: $25 gc + 8 ebooks
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