"Horgox." Quiet, in the dark.
"Yes."
"Tomorrow. Whatever happens. Whatever they decide." Her fingers trace the circuit tracery on my ribs, the cold blue lines that the claiming color now frames in opalescent warmth. "You are not what they made you. You are what you chose."
The words land in a place I didn't know was still wounded. Beneath the bond, beneath the claiming, there's a part of me that still carries the product designation. HX-347. Still hears the handlers' voices. Still expects the next room to be a containment bay and the next hands to carry instruments.
She feels it. The old pain, the deep doubt, the part of me that isn't healed yet.
Her arm tightens around me. "I chose you. Sober, clear-eyed, with an engineer's understanding of exactly what I was choosing. And tomorrow I'm going to stand in front of a tribunal and tell them the same thing. You are not a product. You are not a designation. You are the male I love, and they don't get to take that away."
The male I love.
The words settle into the bond and reverberate there, travelling through shared neural pathways, registering in both our nervous systems simultaneously.
"Say it again," I manage. Rough. Raw.
"I love you." Simple. The way she says things she's certain of. "I love you, and we're going to win tomorrow, and when it's over—"
"When it's over, I will not be respectful anymore."
Her breath catches. The spike of arousal is mutual and immediate and threatens to undo every responsible decision we've made in the last hour.
"Promise?"
"When the hearing is done and your career is secure and no one can take me from you." My hand settles on her hip, thumb tracing the circle that has become our private language ofsoon. "I intend to be extremely thorough in my disrespect."
"Extremely thorough."
"Comprehensively disrespectful."
"You can't say things like that and then expect me to sleep."
"Consider it motivation for tomorrow." My lips brush her hair. "Win the hearing. Keep me free. And I will show you every disrespectful thing I've been imagining since you licked my palm during the truth fruit incident."
The sound she makes is small and desperate and does things to my discipline that the bond amplifies into a shared experience.
"Sleep, little flare." I pull her closer. "Tomorrow we fight. Tonight, we rest."
"Rest is a strong word for what's happening in my nervous system right now."
"Mine as well."
"I can feel exactly how much you want—"
"And I can feel exactly how much you want. Which makes me want more. Which you feel. Which makes you—"
"It's a feedback loop."
"It's a feedback loop."
"We're never sleeping again."
But we do. Eventually. Tangled together in a bed that's better than any moss padding, in a room with a locked door, with the bond humming between us like a current and the claiming color pulsing soft opalescent in the dark.
My last conscious thought: tomorrow, a tribunal decides whether I am a person or a product.
But tonight, the woman who loves me is sleeping against my chest with my heartbeat in her lungs and her certainty in my bones.
