Her heart exploded from her chest and his hand clamped down on her shoulder and pinned her to the table.
Kat’s eyes flooded with tears while her body struggled for freedom.
“Calm down!” He set the reader out of her reach.
“What’s wrong with me?” she cried. “I don’t want to die.” Kat stared at the machine just out of her reach and continued to fight for it, fight him.
“You’re not dying.” Dommik pulled her into his chest and held her tight. “Why do you think you’re dying?” Kat fought until her breath gave up...until her muscles melted and ached. He didn’t let go nor did his hold on her lessen. She was jailed. It warmed her body but not her mind.
“What did the machine say?” she settled into him, out of breath. He picked her back up and left the bay behind. Her eyes didn’t leave the reader until it was out of sight.
He laughed under his breath, “Pretty much that you’ve had vigorous sex recently.” Kat looked up and they were back in the star alcove, their clothes now folded on the seat beside them.
“My grandmother died.”
Dommik caught her chin and forced her to look at him. His lips downcast.
Emotion looks odd on a Cyborg.“I’m sorry,” he said.
“We were close. Very close.” Kat stared at the wall, remembering. “We went through a lot together, two people who had no one else in the universe to relate too, separated by generations and entirely different experiences but that couldn’t change how we felt. She died a month before you and I met.”
“Is she why you’re afraid to die?” He combed his fingers through her hair but it didn’t comfort her.
Kat let out a crazed laugh. “I help people die. I know death. I hold their hands until they breathe their last breath and death takes them away from me. I was born into the profession.” She shifted in his embrace. “Like how you were created for yours.”
He didn’t say anything.
“I’m afraid to die...because I think I will.” Kat let it out and closed her eyes.
“Don’t talk about something unless you want that something to happen. The devil hears everything.”
“Did you kill someone?”
She jerked.What?“No, I’ve never killed anyone.”
“I’ve killed many.”
“How many?”
“I’ve pumped people full of so much poison they never wake back up, I’ve torn out their throats with my teeth, sliced them into a thousand pieces with my claws, and shot countless more. I’ve looked Death in the eye and have been him myself. It’s a raw look, Kat, his eyes. They don’t look back at you but through you, into you, until you’re no longer breathing, no longer thinking. Then he disappears and leaves you cold and you hate and fear him all the more for it. You might know it but what you do, helping people die is far closer to heaven than it is to hell.”
Kat found herself holding him tighter in a comforting embrace that matched his own. “I’m sorry, Cyborg.” She kissed his chest.
“Don’t be. The difference between you and me, angel, is that I love what I do.”
She shook her head, “That’s not true. I love what I do too. It haunts me because it feels right but it makes me a hypocrite because I don’t want to die. I’m afraid of dying.”
Dommik held her close as she told him her story, the way she had been born and never held by her mother, watching her parents die miserably behind a glass barrier, being in quarantine for the first third of her life, up to her choice in letting her grandmother die on her own terms. Leaving Kat to pick up the pieces and clean up the fallout.
She told him about the Gliese parasite and how she lived each day that she might have it hidden within her.
It was word vomit. Her neuroses on display for him to digest and judge at his own free-will and she hated being judged. Kat had stopped telling her story when she was barely out of her pre-teen years because of how people reacted. Pity and fear. Pity for the domesticated medical animal she was and fear that she could be a host to a thing that would destroy them from the inside out.
When she was finished, Kat didn’t feel better, her heart felt as heavy as it always had and she knew that whatever Dommik would decide, life would go on and her burdens would remain.
They sat in silence. Not by choice but because he had yet to respond to her past. Kat waited with every frozen fiber of her being.
“Were you,” she watched as Dommik tried to find his words, “were you a virgin when I claimed you?” It was the first time she saw real emotion in his eyes.
