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It was pure chance that I noticed at all. I was in the Preservation Station shopping concourse with Ratthi, and also incidentally with Gurathin, who was there because -- I'm not really sure why, but I also wasn't really sure why I was there, except that sometimes spending time with my humans was nice. Ratthi was shopping for presents for some of his nieces and nephews, who lived on a different planet in the Preservation Alliance that he was going to be on next week, or something. I was tagging along, and so was Gurathin, because neither of us had anything better to do, I guess.
I didn't tend to see a lot of Gurathin on the station. He wasn't someone I usually spent time with individually -- but not many of my humans were, mostly just Mensah and Ratthi. I usually saw him in group situations, since my Preservation humans often liked to spend time with each other in shared activities. Like now, for example.
I also didn't really make a point of paying attention to what humans wore, even mine, but it was hard not to notice with Gurathin, who tended to dress a little differently from most people on Preservation. He liked layers, and high collars, and in general, clothes that he could disappear into. As someone who was currently wearing long pants and a hooded jacket with my hands tucked into the pockets, I guess I couldn't throw stones from my glass house, or whatever.
"Oh, this little flute is perfect for Nela," Ratthi said. "What do you think? She loves music and bright colors." He held it up for our inspection. We made noncommittal noises. He put it in his bag of things.
Gurathin glanced at me with a little smile. I didn't want to share commiserative feelings with Gurathin, or any feelings with Gurathin, but I guess I allowed myself to be dragged along on a shopping expedition with Ratthi when I knew what it would be like, so ... misery loves company, I suppose? It couldn't possibly go on for that much longer; we were running out of shops. Ratthi had told me that after we were done, he'd show me some new recordings of musical performances he had been to on Preservation, which was enough to get me to stick around.
Gurathin lagged behind, and so did I, not because Gurathin was doing it but because he was right, putting a little distance between us and Ratthi made it less likely that he was going to show us every single thing he picked up and thought about buying. I was, as usual, keeping a casual perimeter around us with the camera drones Mensah had bought for me, using some of them to secure the area, and some of them to watch my humans so I didn't have to use my regular eyes for it. And because I had several angles on all of us, I noticed something I probably wouldn't have otherwise.
Gurathin's high collar was pushed down for once, and as he reached up to scratch at his neck, I glimpsed something through a drone. I ran the footage back, zoomed in.
There were bruises on his neck, near his augment port. I'd probably have taken it for shadows from a different angle, but the station lights just happened to hit it right. I zoomed in again on the still. I would have to see it again to be sure, but those looked like finger-shaped bruises.
Someone had grasped his neck hard enough to bruise him.
Gurathin noticed I had lagged even further behind while I was reviewing the footage. He paused, turning back. "SecUnit?"
"Did someone attack you?" I said.
Gurathin had started to move again, but now he stopped in his tracks. "What?" he said. Then he seemed to recognize what my drones were looking at, and quickly turned his collar up.
But not before I got another look at the marks under the bright station lights. Yeah, those were bruises. Someone had grabbed his neck and squeezed it hard enough to hurt him.
Not that I can't understand the urge -- personally, even. But this flooded my body with a lot of chemicals and the urge to have a private, very intense communication with whoever had done it. No one gets away with hurting my humans. Especially not here. Well, not anywhere, but Preservation was usually weirdly safe most of the time. It made it all the more galling that someone had apparently slipped in and hurt one of my humans and I didn't know about it.
"I'm fine, SecUnit," Gurathin said, low and tense. He tweaked his collar to make sure it was as high and close to his neck as he could get it.
"You didn't do that to yourself," I said. I kept my voice down. Ratthi was a ways ahead of us now, but I really didn't want him involved in this conversation, and from the way Gurathin had lowered his voice, he didn't either.
"It's none of your business."
"If someone is threatening you, that is my business."
"No one's threatening me. It was ..." He seemed briefly lost for words. "A temporary miscalculation, all right? Drop it."
"I'm not dropping it if someone on the station caused harm to you." This was starting to sound uncomfortably like I cared. I mean, I did care: I cared that my humans getting hurt on my watch was dumb and upsetting and shouldn't have happened. And I was starting to feel a feeling I recognized at Gurathin specifically, which was anger, because he should have told me and he should be telling me now, and I couldn't figure out why he was protecting whoever it was.
Which he seemed determined to do. "Drop it," Gurathin said between his teeth. "I mean it. It's my life and my business, and I've got it handled, so drop it, SecUnit."
At that point he sped up to catch up with Ratthi, very annoyingly correct that this would end the conversation, because I didn't want to talk about this around Ratthi any more than he did.
But I wasn't going to drop it. If Gurathin had gotten himself into some kind of dangerous situation, I needed to know about it. I needed to stop it before it spilled over onto my other humans, or got him hurt worse than a few bruises on his neck.
***
I did the only thing a self-respecting SecUnit could do at that point: I assigned some drones to him.
I had one drone follow him at all times, and slipped another into his apartment. I had to be extra sneaky with both of these, because Gurathin was alert and paranoid and really hard to tail, and unlike my other humans, there was a definite chance he'd notice if I hacked his door. So I was careful. Getting the drone into his apartment was something I was especially pleased about; I smuggled it in hiding in the cuff of his pants leg.
For the next couple of weeks, my drones got nothing. I kept the feed backburnered most of the time. I didn't particularly want to know everything Gurathin was doing, any more than I wanted to know everything any of my humans was doing (and less than most). Also, most of what he did was really boring. Gurathin didn't have many human friends, hardly any outside PreservationAux as far as I could tell, and he worked in the feed, doing stuff for the FirstLanding university, mostly.
So nothing much happened and nothing much continued to happen. He wasn't having clandestine meetings in dark alleys, or getting hassled for debts, or anything else that might cause the bruises I'd seen. One thing about having my drones follow him around was that I saw some more bruises, around his wrists, but those were older, fading to faint browns and yellows against his skin.
I was starting to worry this might be a sex thing.
Ewww.
But if Gurathin had a sex partner (eww) I also didn't see any signs of that. Most of my humans were paired up with at least one person. Ratthi usually had several. Gurathin didn't. At least, if he did, he never brought them to any kind of group event, and now that I was monitoring him more closely, I still didn't see any signs of more human connections in his life than I already knew about. Which was, honestly, pretty sad. However, I live in a room in a spaceport-adjacent hotel and spend most of my time watching media (and watching my humans' drone inputs) so who am I to talk?
However, one evening I got an alert from one of my drones. Gurathin had a feed conversation out loud with the other party on his living room's display surface, and the place he was talking to was somewhere called the Pink Palace, which was a quick feed search informed me was a (eww) sex club on the station. I skimmed back to enough of the conversation to know, without actually having to suffer through most of it, that he'd asked them to send someone to his place.
Okay, so it was a sex thing. Which meant I should pull back my drones and definitely not listen to a single thing that happened in Gurathin's apartment tonight. Also: confirmation that Gurathin did not have a partner and had to pay someone to have sex with him (or barter, or however they handled it on Preservation), which made me feel ... something. Sex wasn't a thing I cared to have, but it was important to most humans, and it seemed like Gurathin having to pay for it when he needed it was - well, I had emotions about that, I guess. But it wasn't like I could do something about it.
And I didn't pull back my drones, because if someone from that sex club was the person hurting Gurathin, I needed to know about it.
***
The human at Gurathin's door was dressed more like humans in media than I typically saw in real life, wearing colorful and inadequate clothing that left a lot of skin bare, and they were wearing a lot of makeup and carrying a case. Feed ID: Karise, they/them.
"Hi, Gurathin?" They shook hands with him, smiling. Gurathin looked hunched and tense, but he looked like that a lot. "I'm Karise from the Pink Palace. Can I come in?"
They came in. Something about them reminded me of Ratthi -- not physically, but their open, expressive personality, the way they seemed to want to touch Gurathin as they talked to him. I found that it was making me tense, mostly because it was obviously making Gurathin tense as well. I reoriented the two drones I currently had in the apartment to view the two of them from discreet angles.
"You used to be with Sarah, right? She's handling other clients now, so I'm yours for the next hour -- longer if you need more time." Karise grinned. "We can do this however you like. Some people want to sit and get to know each other first, so we can chat a bit --"
"I just want to get to it," Gurathin said. His jaw was tight.
"Right, we can totally do that." Karise was wearing a silvery interface; I saw their eyes go distant for a moment as they checked it. "So I've got your list of preferences on file, and I'm going to ask you a few questions beforehand so we can make this super nice for you, okay?"
"Okay," Gurathin mumbled. They went and sat on the couch. Karise put a hand on his leg. Ugh, they were definitely going to have sex. I prepared to backburner my drones at a moment's notice.
Karise was talking again. "It says here that you like pain and humiliation, marks and bruises are fine as long as they're covered up by clothing, and you don't want to be directly brought off tonight. Is all of that right?"
What. I wanted to turn off this conversation immediately. Instead I went on listening, as Gurathin mumbled an affirmative.
"You've declined aftercare," Karise said, frowning a little. "It says here you prefer to make your own arrangements, is that still correct?"
"It's correct," Gurathin said. He had actually relaxed a little now that they were sitting down, his eyes half closing and his body language getting straighter and less hunched.
I found that this didn't make my organics any less tense. In fact, it made it worse, because I had seen humans doing awful things to each other enough to know what he reminded me of. It was a person relaxing into a blow they knew they couldn't avoid, so all they could do was stop caring about it.
This was definitely not how humans normally looked before sex they wanted to have. (Ask me how I know, too. Better yet, don't.) But he'd asked this Karise person to visit, hadn't he? Based on the way Gurathin was acting about it, I tentatively designated Karise as Hostile One.
"Okay, well, I'll get you good and worked up for your partner, then," Karise said, smiling while they went on caressing his leg.
"Mm-hm," Gurathin said.
Partner??!
This was horrible. I didn't want to know this much about Gurathin's personal life. I didn't want to know this much about anyone's personal life, but especially not Gurathin's. I wanted to shut down the drone inputs right now, especially since Karise was still petting Gurathin's leg as he relaxed more, eyelids fluttering.
"Okay, let's talk about those preferences, then," Karise said. "I want to do this exactly how you like it." They brushed back some of Gurathin's hair from his neck, where the old bruises had long since faded, but he flinched anyway. Then I saw him go stiller, relaxing again. Karise had hesitated. "Are you good with all of this, sweetheart? This is going how you want it to go?"
"Yes," Gurathin said, his voice quiet.
"Okay. I want to give you what you want. Everything you want." They were petting his neck now. I hated this even more. "I brought some toys, so you can pick the ones you want me to use." Yeah, I was turning off my feeds to this room anytime now. "And you like dirty talk? Humiliating dirty talk? Or do you want something else?"
"Talk, yes -- talk," Gurathin said. He took a slightly shaky breath. "I want you to insult me. Degrade me. Is that all right?"
"Tonight, baby, you can have anything you like."
The conversation went on, but I shut down the audio feed from the drones. I went on watching, however.
Karise continued to pet Gurathin. He seemed to like it, based on the fact that his relaxation was starting to look more like actually relaxing and less like weary resignation. However, when Karise moved to put their mouths together, he tensed up and pushed them away.
Good. I didn't want to have to watch that.
Karise opened the case they had been carrying, and ugh, I rotated the drone angle to watch their faces instead, while Karise pulled out items just outside my drones' field of view and showed them to Gurathin. His face was back to a flat, resigned slackness. He nodded now and then at whatever Karise was saying, and occasionally said something, a few words.
When Karise put their hand in his hair and tightened their grip, my threat assessment jumped and Karise's designation as Hostile One slid back into place. I hastily tuned back into the sound in the room.
"Like that?" Karise asked. "That hard?" Gurathin moved his head slightly in a nod. Karise's voice lowered to a purr, and they gave his head another little shake by the hair as they said quietly, "You're a naughty little slut."
The look in Gurathin's eyes was unusually blank. After a moment he said, "Just call me bad. It doesn't have to be - about sex, like that. Tell me I fucked up and you're going to enjoy punishing me for it."
I didn't want to know what humans enjoying sex looked like, but thanks to my time under the governor module, I had monitored and recorded enough humans having sex to have a pretty good idea what it looked like. I was no expert, but I didn't think this was it.
I really didn't want to listen to any more of this. I turned off my drone feeds completely.
***
Karise had said an hour, so I kept a careful watch on my chronometer while watching familiar episodes of Strife in the Galaxy (I didn't really want to taint Sanctuary Moon with this experience). When the time was up, I tuned in to the drones again.
Karise was fully dressed and seemed to be just finishing collecting items back into their case. Gurathin was curled up on the couch with a blanket over him, his back to the room. He was dressed too, and shivering a little, his hair damp with sweat. I couldn't see any obvious signs of injury on him, but I couldn't see much of him, either. It looked like he had his arms wrapped around himself under the blanket.
"Hey, hon," Karise said, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder. "Your partner will be here soon to take care of you, right?"
Gurathin made a vague, acknowledging noise.
"Okay, well, I hope this was good for you, babe. Drink some water, okay?" Karise leaned down to kiss him on the side of his head. I briefly blanked the visual feed, and when it came back, Karise was just leaving. On the other side of the door, they stopped for a minute, looking back thoughtfully at the door, then walked away.
From inside, my drones continue to register Gurathin lying on the couch, curled up. Over the next few minutes, his shivering grew more violent, until he was wracked with it.
I had suspected he was lying to Karise about someone coming over, and after another five minutes or so, I was sure of it. He was still shivering, a bit less now, and he'd started to make a soft noise.
When I identified the sound as crying, I abruptly cut all the input from the drones, visual and audio, and I just stared at the wall for a while. Even media wasn't enough to help me deal with this situation.
What the hell, Gurathin. What the actual, everloving FUCK.
***
I didn't want to watch any more of this, but I used the drones to do a quick -- I guess you'd call it a wellness check, every hour or so. Gurathin stayed on the couch for a while, possibly passing out or falling asleep for a bit. On the third hourly check, I tuned in to my drones to find the couch empty. I hastily ran the footage back, and discovered Gurathin, a few minutes ago, getting up slowly and jerkily, in a way that suggested his body was stiff and painful. He limped carefully out of sight of the drones. Bringing up the audio cautiously, I heard running water and realized he'd been in the shower for a while.
If he passed out in the shower, I was going to have to do something, although whether that something would be contacting station MedSys or sending a feed message to Mensah or one of his other friends, I wasn't sure. Luckily, I didn't have to decide. My drones had moved to monitor the bathroom door, and after the water stopped, just before I was ready to see if I could fit a drone under the door, it opened and he came out, still moving stiffly, wearing a bathrobe.
I didn't particularly want this information, but since I could see more of him now, I could also catalogue fresh injuries, some bruises on his exposed wrists, and stripes on the backs of his calves that my trauma module helpfully informed me were likely the result of some sort of flogging. No neck bruises this time, for whatever that was worth.
He went into the bedroom, leaving the door open. The bathroom and living room lights were still on, the bedroom lights off. He was moving slowly now, hazily, in some kind of fugue state. His collapse into the bed was just controlled enough not to be a faint.
I quietly moved a drone into the bedroom just in case, backburnered its feed, and stared at the wall some more.
Okay, Gurathin was doing this on purpose, because he wanted to. No one was forcing him. And because people on Preservation had laws about this sort of thing, no one could force him. At least not legally.
But I also found that people on Preservation had an almost magical-thinking level of belief in the power of their laws and the ability of people to say no to things they didn't want to do. My own experience suggested that reality was a lot more complicated. I didn't have to keep working for the company, doing the same things, threatening humans and spying on them, after I hacked my governor module. No one was making me. But I did it anyway.
There are a lot of things people do that they don't want to do.
Maybe this wasn't one of those things. But maybe it was.
One thing I did know for sure was that Gurathin and I could never, ever talk about it, because I would rather rip my eyeballs out, and Gurathin probably would too. I could also never, ever admit that I had seen any of this, because - same reason, and also, the privacy violation alone probably meant he would never talk to me again. Which I considered a bad thing instead of a bonus, apparently, and I wasn't going to examine that too closely, either.
Gurathin slept for six straight hours, which weeks of monitoring him had led me to realize was out of the ordinary for him; he usually slept in bursts and got up a lot to do things in the feed, in a way that I knew was unusual for humans, and kind of unhealthy for them. This morning, as he moved around his apartment doing human things, he seemed more -- something? Relaxed, settled ... it was hard to say. But even though he still moved like he was a little sore, he seemed, maybe not happier than usual, but more content.
Maybe the problem was me. For all I knew, humans lying on the couch crying for two hours after sex was a perfectly ordinary thing to do. It's not like I paid much attention to sex scenes in media (more like tried to skip them whenever possible) and if the human sex I had been forced to witness under the governor module wasn't like that, it was also true that I hadn't seen all the possible permutations of human sex (thank deity).
So maybe whatever Gurathin was doing here was perfectly harmless and normal for Gurathin, and I was going to stop thinking about this now.
***
I did not stop thinking about it.
Two days later I messaged the Pink Palace to ask if I could talk to Karise.
Yes, I voluntarily contacted a sex club, and I showed up to talk to a sex worker at a food stand near the club. I have no governor module and I can do anything I want to do, and then I go and do things like this. I hardly know me sometimes.
Karise was almost unrecognizable from two nights ago. They were wearing normal clothes and just a little makeup, and they looked tired, like they'd just woken up, which maybe they had.
But the Ratthi-like attitude was still there. "Hi, hon," they said cheerfully. "You're Rin?" That was how I'd introduced myself on the feed.
"Yeah," I said.
"Do you want to eat something?" They had acquired themselves a cup of some kind of food with a spoon in it from the vendor.
"No," I said, and then put a little more act-like-a-human into my performance. "Thanks. Listen, I wanted to talk to you about a friend of mine who goes to your club. I know he had a --" What did I call this? Date? ".... an appointment with you the other day, and I wanted to, uh ..."
Yeah, Murderbot, what did you want to do, exactly? Do your humans always look miserable and cry after you do sex things with them was not a question I wanted to ask, but then again, no part of this conversation was pleasant anyway.
Karise held up a hand. "Stop you right there, Rin. Sorry, but I can't discuss my clients with anyone. Especially if it's a friend of yours."
"His name's Gurathin," I said, and oriented a couple of my drones (discretely hiding on my shoulders and on top of the vendor's cart) on Karise's face for their reaction.
And there was definitely a reaction. I didn't know what to call that expression, but there was an expression there.
"Look, I still can't talk about that," Karise said. "I'm sorry."
"I just want --" I stopped again, frustrated. Even I didn't know what I wanted; how could I ask a complete stranger about it? "I want to make sure he's all right." Oh. Yeah. That was probably why I was here.
Karise pursed their lips and ate some of their food from the spoon. They made a little gesture with their head, which I interpreted as "come along," and we walked along for a bit until the vendor was behind us and we were a further distance from the club. (Which couldn't be far enough for me. So far I hadn't registered anything more sexual than usual and the people on the street looked normal, but I didn't want to take any chances of seeing something I'd regret.)
"I know you were at his place two nights ago," I said.
"So talk to your friend about it, not me."
"He won't talk about it," I said. And that was perfectly true. In order to talk about it with him, I would have to actually bring it up with him. Which I was not about to do.
"Look, he's ..." Karise heaved a sigh. "He's kind of --" They trailed off, not really seeming to know where to go from there.
Tell me about it, I thought. Weird? Antisocial? Lonely? Okay, where did that last thought come from?
"He's unusual," I ventured.
Karise snorted a laugh, evidently caught off guard. "A little, yeah."
He was, though. Gurathin didn't fit in on Preservation, any more than I did. Okay, maybe a little more than I did, because he'd had more time to adjust. But he wasn't like the rest of them, and I guess the humans here were aware of it too. I don't know why that made me feel sad.
"I want to -- check, I guess," I said. "I know he goes here. I guess I'm just checking on whether you think he's getting what he needs?" And now I wanted to delete that last sentence, or maybe that last whole part of the conversation, but unfortunately talking out loud doesn't work that way, though I wish it did.
Karise didn't seem to consider it a stupid thing to say. They considered it while they nibbled on the food on the spoon. Finally they said, "I don't know. Look, I'm really not supposed to talk about this, I'm not supposed to even know this, but you hear people talking. Your friend has been through four different escorts in the last six months. People tend not to keep him on as a client, and I'm like ... I can see why. I don't think I'll be taking that request again."
"You think he's not good enough?" I asked. It came out sharp, and my threat assessment had flared again.
"Whoa, hey. No, no. Nothing like that. He's really sweet." Karise grinned. "If he wanted anything but what he does want, I'd take him on as a regular client in a hot second." Okay, that wasn't helping with my urge to designate them as Hostile One. "But I don't think he's doing this for the right reasons," they went on, the smile slipping away.
"What do you mean?"
"I've said a lot more than I should. So I'm not going to say any more. Like I said, you should talk to him, not me." Karise shook their head and patted my arm; I steeled myself not to react. "I'm glad your friend has someone worrying about him."
"I'm not worried," I said promptly.
For perfectly rational, non-worry-related reasons, I slipped a bit of code into the Pink Palace's (woefully undefended) systems to alert me if Gurathin hired anyone from there again. It was just due diligence about my clients, after all.
***
It didn't happen again for a couple of months, but it did eventually happen.
By that point I'd been on and off the station on various security jobs, hadn't seen any more of Gurathin than I normally did, and therefore I wasn't really thinking about it much anymore. I didn't have drones on him when I learned that he was with another of the Palace's escorts. And when I did try to get drones on him, I found out he wasn't in his apartment. He was (I eventually discovered with a little judicious hacking) in a rented room in a hotel near the Pink Palace.
At least he wasn't actually in the Pink Palace. I absolutely drew the line at going into a sex club to rescue the augmented human who was rapidly earning the title of "most troublesome client" (previously assigned to Ratthi).
I had to slip a drone into the room through the ventilation system, at which point I saw that they had already started. Gurathin was on his knees, bare to the waist. The human with him had his hand around Gurathin's throat, shaking him like a toy, and a stiffened length of plastic in his other hand: a whip.
Feed ID: Arjan. He/him.
Karise had reminded me of Ratthi. This human definitely didn't. In fact, this human didn't look like anyone who should be around my humans, especially an augmented human who was letting this person hurt him on purpose.
Gurathin had that blank look even more than before, like he'd completely tuned out of what was happening to his body.
And so he didn't react immediately when I slammed the door open, my drones around me in a cloud, and said, "Get your hands off my client."
Arjan dropped him. I wasn't expecting him to do that, so Gurathin slammed bonelessly into the floor in a way that looked like it hurt and then groaned and pushed himself up a little. Meanwhile, I removed Arjan from my client's vicinity and half-pushed, half-carried him to the correct side of the door, i.e. the outside.
I was still processing what it was that had made my threat assessment go haywire. I knew Arjan had been hired by Gurathin on purpose, just like Karise. But he was enjoying it too much. No -- it was the way he was enjoying it. Karise had been having fun and wanted Gurathin to have fun. I didn't think Arjan cared if Gurathin had fun. Or cared if Gurathin got hurt, not in the way he wanted to be hurt, but permanently.
"What the hell," Gurathin said hoarsely from the floor. I looked around and he was sitting up, propped on one arm, rubbing his neck. He looked pissed.
"Just a minute, I'm dealing with a situation," I said.
"What's your problem?" Arjan snapped, trying to remove my hands, which of course didn't work. "You didn't say anything about a jealous partner, you lying slut." Somehow I didn't think this was part of the intentional dirty talk, and anyway, I had already picked him up as soon as he said it and slammed him into the wall.
"Put him down," Gurathin snapped. He picked himself up. He was kind of wobbly, supporting himself on the back of the couch.
I did, not because he told me to, but because it would be difficult for Arjan to leave if I had him pinned to the wall, and I really wanted him out of there. I slammed Arjan back onto his feet hard enough that he had to catch himself on the doorframe. "You are leaving," I said.
"You're damn right I'm leaving. Next time you decide to stage a scene without telling me, you can do it on your own, you fucking splicer freak," he spat past me at Gurathin.
I picked him up again. "Don't talk to my client like that. Ever again."
"Just let him go." Gurathin no longer sounded angry. He sounded apathetic and flat.
I shoved Arjan across the hallway, looked around to see if he had brought a case like Karise's, found it, grabbed it along with the whip, and slammed both into his chest."Goodbye," I said. Then I closed the door.
I turned around to look at Gurathin. He was half leaning on the couch, apparently using it to hold himself up. Body temperature was low, heart rate all over the place. His shoulders and arms were striped with red lines from the whip Arjan had been using on him.
"Well, thanks for probably getting me blacklisted from the only provider of BDSM services on Preservation that'll still deal with me," Gurathin said between his teeth.
My organics were all over the place, too. The part of me that wanted, that needed to protect my clients was screaming at me to do something. The part of me that avoids awkward social situations just wanted to flee, move to a different polity, and erase all of this from my memory.
Instead, for reasons completely unknown to me, I asked him, "Why do you do this?"
Gurathin gave a small, strange laugh. He slid down a little so he had his hips on the arm of the couch. "Because it feels good, SecUnit. Or at least it makes me not feel anything at all, which is basically the same thing."
He was shivering, and I remembered how he'd fallen into incoherent shaking the last time I watched him after he had done something like this. It was shock, I realized -- a natural human reaction to stress and pain. I'd probably added some emotional trauma to that, too, which was also something that could cause humans to go into shock. Good going, Murderbot.
At least this was the sort of thing I had the skills to deal with. I fetched a blanket from the sleeping area, while Gurathin watched me, leaning on the arm of the couch and shivering.
When I put the blanket around him, he roused a little. "SecUnit, what are you doing?" he asked through chattering teeth.
"Keeping you from going into shock." I took careful hold of him and started lowering him, sideways, to the couch.
"It's not shock, it's --"
"I don't want to know. But I do know how to deal with shock. Lie down."
He put up mild resistance. But when I grasped him more firmly to move him, he went suddenly limp enough that I was able to put him down and keep him there. I realized with a second's reflection that I had probably hurt him by pressing on the flogging welts. But he didn't act hurt, and he was conveniently easy to manhandle when he was floppy. And his breathing seemed okay. Steadier, even.
The only vague guidelines I had for what to do next were what little I had seen of what Karise had tried to do before they left him alone. Karise had mentioned aftercare, and seemed to expect someone would be there to provide that for Gurathin, whatever it was. I very cautiously searched it in the feed, braced for unpleasantness. It wasn't as awful as I had feared. Okay, some of these things I definitely would not be doing. Ever. But some of it was ... not so bad.
Karise had wanted to offer him water. So I got him a glass of water. While I was doing that, he said blearily from the couch, "How'd you know what was happening here, anyway?"
No point in hiding it; he wasn't stupid and he would figure it out on his own when he was more coherent. "I followed you with drones," I said, coming back with the glass of water. I pressed it into his lax, cold fingers. "Drink this."
He pushed himself up a little, with a wince, enough to sip at it, and looked at me over its rim with an expression that was a little more present than he had been a minute ago. "Of course you did. I am going to be really fucking pissed at you soon, just so you know."
"Sure," I said agreeably. It wouldn't be the first time Gurathin got mad at me, and I didn't regret it. I didn't know how far this would have gone with Arjan, although I was pretty sure a lot farther than it would have with Karise. But even if nothing terrible happened, I didn't like the idea of Gurathin going through all of that and then crying himself to sleep on the couch alone. My organics were not okay with that at all.
He put the glass on the end table and lay back down again, pulling the blanket up. "Anyway, you can leave now," he muttered, half into the couch. "You had me followed and ruined my sex life for the night, so go away and take your drones with you."
I sat down beside him on the couch. He was shivering again. Very cautiously, I put my hand on his head where it rested beside my leg. He went so rigid that the shivering nearly stopped.
"SecUnit," he mumbled into the couch. "What are you doing?"
"I don't know," I said, and began to slowly and carefully run my fingers over his hair.
One of the things I had figured out during my time as an independent being was that I didn't actually hate touching. It wasn't something I wanted to do often, but the thing I really hated was people touching me -- specifically, people touching me suddenly and without warning, without asking, and especially when I was upset. That was the kind of thing that used to happen to me as a governed SecUnit.
But when I was in control of it, touching was actually kind of nice. Like a new sort of media I hadn't experienced much, one that I wasn't quite sure if I was going to like or not, but I was hesitantly optimistic about.
Gurathin's hair was slightly damp and sticky from sweat (hopefully just sweat, that was bad enough) but it was also kind of soft, and not bad to touch. I had never petted someone's hair before. It had seemed more impersonal than trying to touch any other part of him, but now that I was doing it, I wasn't so sure about that.
My feed research suggested that touching and holding was an important part of aftercare for most people. I should probably have called one of Gurathin's friends, the ones that actually liked touching and holding. But it didn't seem like a good idea short of an actual emergency. If what I had already done felt like a violation of his privacy, telling his friends about it was on another level.
And also, I wanted to do this.
I felt his rigid tension begin slowly to relax. He was shivering again, and I pulled the blanket tighter around him. He moved toward me slightly, worming along the couch in a sort of instinctive way, and ended up with the side of his head pressed against my leg. Then he froze. I could feel him pull back a little.
"This okay?" he mumbled.
"Yes," I said. "It's okay." I went on petting his hair. I felt him relax again, settling against me, melting almost.
I liked to protect my humans. I liked them to be safe and contented. Even Gurathin, apparently. Well, especially Gurathin, today.
I didn't like that he felt like he needed to hurt himself, or have other people hurt him. But it did seem to make him feel better; at least it had with Karise.
I didn't think crying alone on the couch was a necessary part of that, however.
I went on petting his hair and felt him melt, and I liked the way it made me feel. That trustingness. My human, who had been cold and alone and upset, melting against me. This wasn't how people were supposed to react to SecUnits. I hadn't known I could do this. But I liked that I could.
I wondered if I could do the hurting part too, if that was what he needed to relax and feel better. I wasn't sure if I liked the idea. I'd have to think about it. But I thought if it was to make a client feel better, and if it wasn't a sex thing, or at least didn't have to be a sex thing, it might not be that bad. I could hurt clients if I had to in order to help them, if I was pulling them out of a collapsed building, for example. Maybe this was something like that.
And I had liked the feeling of Gurathin going all floppy when I took hold of him. I liked it when I could put clients somewhere safe and have them stay there. It was sort of like that, but different. Hard to explain.
After a few more minutes of petting his hair, I said, "Do you think whatever you get out of having them hurt you is something that you have to have a stranger do? Or could anyone do it?"
He said, blurrily, "Can we talk about this later?"
"Okay," I said, relieved. I didn't want to talk about it now in particular, either. I checked the feed again for more information. Sometimes watching media could be part of aftercare, apparently. "Do you want to watch media?"
He made an incoherent noise.
I wasn't sure if that was a yes, but it wasn't a no. I sorted through my media library for something soothing but not too boring, and settled on a show I hadn't seen much of yet, about behind the scenes happenings at a big Rim fashion house. It was kind of slow and had lots of pretty costumes. I only realized after I started an episode in our shared feed that there was probably going to be sex, but I could skip over it if necessary.
The episode opened on a fashion show with lots of long, lingering shots of colorful costumes. Also, humans having emotions at each other, mostly jealous emotions about someone else getting the top runway model spot. It seemed unrealistic enough not to bring up anything bad, and Gurathin was so relaxed that I doubted if it mattered what we watched anyway; it was just for the noise. I made sure he was in a comfortable position, since it looked like he was going to fall asleep like that.
And he did, with his face against my leg and my hand in his hair.
I switched to a show I liked better, but I kept petting his hair for a long while after he fell asleep.