the experiment

[instar]

When Andi has gotten one of Charlie's friends to give her a ride to the grocery store and the unauthorized residents of the house can come out of hiding, Bella goes looking for Trouble, so to speak, and finds him in the kitchen.

"Hey," she says, "I have some more questions that I'd be asking Aspret if she was here. Charlie didn't have answers; Esclan wasn't the talkative type or the experimental type."

Comments

[instar]

"Andi is grossed out but has no substantive objections, Charlie apologized for not having more to tell me and then got all quiet, Ax I walked through my reasoning really slowly and carefully and I think he's okay."

[aeskhyne]

He shrugs. "All right. Ethan had his giggle; Robin just wanted to know I'd be okay."

[instar]

"I'll abort if you want me to, at any time," Bella adds, "in case that wasn't clear."

[aeskhyne]

"I thought so. But yeah, it's still nice to hear it."

[instar]

"Okay. Where do you want to do this? How uncomfortable am I going to be if I go straight from air to ear with no liquid in between?"

[aeskhyne]

"...Slightly uncomfortable," he says, "but not any worse than just feeling really dry and icky until you're all snuggled up."

[instar]

"Enough that I should get another casserole dish to fill with water and stand in when I morph, or not?"

[aeskhyne]

"Well, I don't know how you feel about being uncomfortable," he says. "I wouldn't bother, but that's me."

[instar]

Bella looks at him, then she looks for a casserole dish, can't find one, and settles for a cake pan, which she fills with water. "Where to?" she inquires.

[aeskhyne]

He looks at the cake pan, looks at Bella, and says, "...Some room with a door that closes, that we can kick everybody out of until we're done?"

[instar]

"Okay. My and Andi's was empty when I was upstairs telling her and Dad." She grabs her notebook and pen with her free hand.

[aeskhyne]

Up they go, then.

[instar]

Bella sets the cake pan on the floor and the notebook on the desk and toes off her shoes and stands in the water. "Say when."

[aeskhyne]

"Go for it," says Trouble, plonking himself down on the floor next to the cake pan.

[instar]

Bella takes a deep breath, indulges a prolonged shudder, and starts morphing.

[aeskhyne]

Trouble waits patiently. Watching her morph is kind of gross, but it's not like that's a surprise, and he's not really bothered.

(He is other things instead.)

[instar]

And then there is a Yeerk, who looks just like Aspret, in a cake pan.

<This is the liquid equivalent of being at an uncomfortably high altitude,> comments Bella.

[aeskhyne]

"Yeah," says Trouble, even though he knows from experience that Yeerks don't hear the right frequencies to understand human speech.

He picks her up and lifts her out and puts her by his ear.

[instar]

It takes her longer than it maybe should to figure out how to squeeze in. The instincts are farther away for her than they would be for anyone else in the shape. But eventually she narrows and wriggles in the correct way.

(The anaesthetic is either too instinctual or not instinctual enough to reach her. It is not included.)

[aeskhyne]

He wasn't even going to ask her to forget that part when she burrowed in - it would seem too much like hitting on her.

Right now existing seems a lot like hitting on her. Trouble gives up trying not to. He is who he is, and he feels how he feels, and right now that's scared and vulnerable and in pain and incredibly turned on.

[instar]

The rearranging of the ear is over before she figures out how to sink in around his brain. The two-hemisphere setup takes a moment to work out, and then -

<Damn, I thought the anaesthesia was going to be automatic, I didn't realize - apologizing would apparently be pointless - hi?>

[aeskhyne]

<Hi.> Yeah, that. She's so cute, he loves her so much—for a moment it's all he thinks about, if 'thinks' is even the word for this flood of affection.

[instar]

Bella gets up from the floor, pulls out a chair, and - sits down, makes him sit down, whatever the grammar is. <I'm going to wind up being high on that and not take any notes,> she says with the lightest possible reproof.

[aeskhyne]

Trouble is so entirely not sorry.

And he gets another rush when she moves him. It's so different from hosting Aspret it almost doesn't remind him of her at all; for one thing, hosting Aspret never got him off like this. Hosting Bella is like - like freefall, like orbit, like falling falling falling and never hitting the ground. The metaphor flashes through his mind in immersive detail—falling isn't something you do, it's something that happens to you, something out of your control, tumbling through icy winds with your eyes closed, scared and hurting, but you're safe, because in this metaphor there will never be anything to hit. There is only the fall.

And he really likes it.

[instar]

<Your brain works so, so - I already knew it worked differently from mine but this is something else again seeing it up close,> Bella says. She picks up her pen, twirls it around his fingers a little. Turns pages to a blank one and titles it in symbols he doesn't know.