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Last night, the three of them made a pillow fort in the Izakaya, and stayed up late, talking about nothing, until A-Zhai couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore. Only then did Xia Wa and Ya Dang reach for their charging cables.
A-Zhai’s speech had been so soft and slurred with sleep. Robots didn’t do that, which, in Ya Dang’s opinion, was an oversight. His emotional programming had gone into overdrive, watching A-Zhai struggle to stay awake because he wanted to spend more time with them. Ya Dang’s wrist had shown a pulsing heart all night. If that vulnerable, happy state could induce those feelings in Ya Dang, it must be described as “cute” and would be a valuable trait in a love robot.
He would have to take down the pillow fort before opening for customers. Although… the customers may enjoy it. Zhai Ji D was known for never running out of entertainment ideas. But this was just for them, for their little family, and Ya Dang didn’t want to share it. Perhaps they would build another, larger one for the customers one day. For now, Ya Dang lay on his back in the space that he and the two people he loved most in the world had built together, and built more spaces for them in his mind. All was briefly quiet.
Then the door slid open and shut. A-Zhai’s bag hit the ground, followed by one shoe skidding across the floor, and then the other. “Ya Dang? Xia Wa?” he called, and Ya Dang smiled, guiltily pleased that his name had come first.
He called out in reply, and A-Zhai crawled in to join him, and flumped directly on top of him, his face mashed into Ya Dang’s shirt. Ya Dang’s hands raised automatically to pull him in, but maybe that wasn’t… hesitantly, he settled one hand on A-Zhai’s shoulder and another in his hair, and that seemed to be alright, since all A-Zhai did in response was push his face harder into Ya Dang.
“You’re home early,” he said, and A-Zhai mumbled “tired,” in response, his mouth catching on Ya Dang’s shirt, rubbing the silky fabric against his skin. Ya Dang carefully maintained his breathing speed at a nice even fourteen breaths per minute, well within the standard average for a healthy, calm adult male.
“Where’s Xia Wa,” A-Zhai mumbled again. Ya Dang’s breathing sped up to fifteen breaths per minute, in spite of his best efforts.
“With Mr Big,” he answered, and had to grab A-Zhai to stop him from rocketing up and knocking everything over. “He does not remember her, but he remembers what he learned from her. He considers her his muse, his angel, and she wishes to inspect his recent philanthropic efforts. If I had any concerns at all about her safety, I would be there.”
A- Zhai didn’t like that at all, but after a moment he untwisted his face and collapsed back down onto Ya Dang. Closer than before. His face now pressed into his neck, one leg approaching dangerous territory. “ She’s a grown robot,” he grumbled, his lips now actually against Ya Dang’s skin. Sixteen breaths per minute. “She can make her own decisions.” Ya Dang nodded.
They lay like that for a while, Ya Dang doing his very best to be a comfortable place to sleep, but A-Zhai slowly, tragically, grew more and more wakeful instead of drifting off. A-Zhai seemed just as peeved at this as Ya Dang was, but he didn’t get up, just lay there and pouted about being awake.
“Is there something on your mind?” Ya Dang asked, expecting to be chastised for it – even if there was, even if he did, actually, want to talk, he usually made a show of grumpiness about it first. But today the only fuss he made was a drawn out groan, and he said the thing on his mind without even making Ya Dang ask more than once or make him something sweet first.
“What do you like about me,” he said, with his face still buried in Ya Dang’s neck. “I mean. I know. You’re programmed to. You’re locked in to me. You have to. And that’s kind of nice in a way, I guess. Solid. Reliable. Even when I… whatever I do. But what do you like about me.”
Ya Dang took the time to think this through before answering. It deserved consideration. He gently stroked the hair at the nape of A-Zhai’s neck while he thought, and A-Zhai relaxed into it. When he spoke, it was slowly, feeling the weight of each word as it dropped from his mouth like a stone into calm water.
“I feel a surge of affection when you laugh. When you dance and you throw your whole body into it. When I watch you with the kittens. When you rehearse with the Anime Club. You are enthusiastic and passionate, and you put every part of you into everything you do. You never do anything half-heartedly.
“You can be very sweet, sometimes in spite of yourself. You are a romantic. You want a grand romance, a love story, you want to cherish the person you love and take care of them, to be their knight, but you you are surprised when anyone tries to take care of you. You were lonely, before we came, before you brought us home, but you are not lonely anymore. You have grown, so much, since we met. I feel as though as my emotion module expanded, so did yours. That we grew, and learned, and became more than our programming together.
“When Pink Rabbit came to take me to the future, I didn’t want to go. The thought of being reprogrammed to love someone else was terrible. The thought of forgetting you was worse. I felt sure that some part of me would always remember. That whoever I was given to next would be, in some way, disappointing. That I would be measuring them against the unremembered memory of you.”
A- Zhai fisted his hands in Ya Dang’s shirt and screamed, soft and low, into his chest, as if it were a pillow. After he finished screaming, he lifted his face so that he could glare at Ya Dang. When the glare started to crack – which was quickly – he covered Ya Dang’s face with one hand so that he couldn’t look, then squished his face a little and shook it, very gently, from side to side. Ya Dang remained passive through all of this.
He had very carefully left “when you are angry, you remind me of the kitten puffing up and bopping the dog on the nose” off the list.
“You can’t just go around saying things,” A-Zhai hissed, as though he hadn’t asked. “Sometimes you say things that are so achingly romantic it makes me want to melt you down into scrap metal and then jump off a bridge.” Ya Dang smiled at him, though his cheeks were still being squished. “Ugh,” said A-Zhai, with feeling, and collapsed back down on top of Ya Dang, digging his elbow into his side as revenge.
Ya Dang put his arms around A-Zhai, exactly the way he wanted to, without worrying about being pushed away. A-Zhai snuggled closer. After a while, his breathing evened out into sleep.