It's Not You, It's Me

[Failure-64]

The days following G-01's attack were slow. Failure had woken up in the medical bay of Gehn's ship on the following day and since then, she spent much of her time there for the next week. Broken bones and open wounds were mended by autonomous machines. Antibiotics and preventative care synthesized on the spot.

It was genuinely impressive.

Gehn spent his time recovering in his chambers and only took the med bay once Failure was strong enough to not need constant monitoring. For the next few days, they would take turns with the med bay until the majority of their wounds were healed. A few aches and pains, and some things required follow up, but in just under two weeks, both of them were functional.

As soon as Gehn was past the worst of it, he had begun taking apart the Android that caused all of this. Much of the machine had been destroyed beyond repair and neither of them were mechanics, but Gehn was able to extract a transceiver. After a bit of troubleshooting and coding, Gehn was also able to figure out where the signal was being sent to.

M-1. A harsh and unforgiving planet with no sapient creature making its home there. Primarily, it was a refuge for artificial lifeforms that could withstand the unforgiving landscape. The obvious location.

They went back and forth on what they should do with that information. Clearly, there was some connection to the Doctor, unless G-01 had lied to her. Morbid curiosity gripped Failure and demanded that she go investigate. Even more so as news about other Android attacks had begun to spread. Gehn, pragmatic as ever, was more inclined to set all of that aside for the time being. They had their plan to gather the Namek Dragon Balls. He wanted to regain what the Doctor had taken from him.

Failure relented. She wasn't heartless, and the Wish would be good for all of them. Besides, he had saved her life. Twice in one day. The simple "thank you" she had given him previously didn't feel sufficient.

She would listen to him. They would stay their course.

Weeks turned to months and Failure returned to her trips out into the city. She'd met with Axar briefly, though never got him to explain why he walked away on that day. Sparred with him on and off. Daimon, too, made his return and she couldn't help but be drawn to him. A God who maintained his interest in her even after all of the time that passed. They spoke infrequently, but enough that Failure thought she could trust him.

It would have been stupid to not utilize him for the Dragon Ball hunt. She didn't even think to ask Gehn because it was so obvious. He had the ability to teleport, his was hidden to anyone who could sense Ki, and likely had even more powers that would be nothing but beneficial to them!

When Gehn stared at her, gawking as if she had told him the stupidest thing he had ever heard, she wasn't sure how to respond. He filled the silence with insisting that she couldn't just trust some stranger so willingly, no matter how convincing.

For reasons she couldn't begin to comprehend, he didn't want Daimon to be involved.

Her brows furrowed, she blinked, and then took a breath.

"Is this because of that Earth girl?" She blurted.

Failure didn't recall the girl's name -- Tabby, or something like that -- but Gehn had been shaken up when he learned of her death. There were plans for her to join them, help maintain Gehn's ship and navigate the stars far quicker than he could, but that was as far as the relationship went as far as Failure was aware. The thought of their relationship being anything more than that made Failure's stomach churn in ways she couldn't describe.

Gehn had brought up changing their plans. To aid the people of Earth like they had something to be gained from it. At the time, Failure took it as a exaggeration, or the poor decisions of a grieving man. Not something they were actually considering.

"Running off to that planet will do nothing but get us both killed. The girl is already dead. We will stick to the plan that we've been working on for almost a year. Namek. Dragon Balls. Restore your Saiyan tail and what had been taken from you.

"Daimon is how we do that. He can take all three of us to Namek in a blink of an eye."

 

[Gehn]

Something about Failure seemed different in the days, weeks, following the battle with the machine labeled G-01. She looked at him differently. Her attention lingered in ways it hadn’t before. Gehn found himself staring back at her more often, wondering what she might be thinking, might be feeling.

The scouter in his head started to share more and more about her. Unusual heartrate and blood pressure, other health data, physical strength details beyond the Power Level pouring off her, physiological state from an ever-growing body of biological data, even perceived arou—

He struggled to control it, to get it to obey him and stop its pre-programmed functions at his will. Bit by bit, he got better at it.

Then, the day came: the call with Tabelle, the moment on the street watching the news reports and seeing her die. Meeting Cardo.

After that, Gehn stopped noticing anything different about her behavior. Instead, he thought only of what he could do to minimize the losses and damage in some small way. Return, for example, to Earth, and offer what said he could to Global Prospecting and Mining. Some of those people would serve well aboard Destiny, and—

Gehn blinked his one, good eye and looked up to Failure. He sat in one of those mesh-backed chairs that filled Avondall’s facility in his various work rooms. Gehn hunched over another, glass tablet, and looked over star charts and how he might be able to get back to Earth – a place everyone else occupied themselves with actively fleeing – without drawing unwanted attention.

What interrupted his thoughts, what reached his distant mind, was Daimon.

Daimon.

A purple-skinned man who claimed to be a god. Gehn tried to explain to her that many races in the universe could have such a skin tone. They could even be humanoid, as most sapient races were. Yet, she seemed convinced that he was honest, that he could help them, and she had even told him of the Dragon Balls and how they suspected that they were real – real and on Namek, and maybe even on Earth.

“Sixty-four,” Gehn cut in as his eyes lingered on the tablet. Then, silence, except for the quiet rattle of the metal-framed chair as he slowly turned to face her.

He leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and locked his organic and his green-glass eye both onto her.

“This isn’t about Tabelle,” he told her, flatly. “This is about other, useful people that we’ll both need aboard the Destiny. Which is good for more than just getting us to Namek. With her engines, we won’t get there instantly, but it’ll be weeks instead of months.”

If Gehn still had his tail, it would have swung against the back of the chair in which he sat simply out of irritation. She hadn’t thought any of this through. She saw only a faster way to get what she wanted and considered little beyond it.

“And we’ll have the crew, the medical facilities, and more,” he reminded her. “But none of that is the problem with Daimon. The problem, Sixty-four, is this:

“That I have spent my entire life confirming that reality-bending orbs are even real, and when we go to find out, to potentially use them to do far more than merely restore my tail, you gave that all away to someone you barely know.”

The strength in his voice, the unyielding certainty, was the furthest he had ever gotten to less-than-wholly-accommodating. He had started to regret just how much deference he had shown her, after learning about her situation when he woke her from that stasis pod.

“Now this ‘Daimon’ knows. Perhaps he can traverse the vast distances of space in an instant. The Yardratians are capable of such things, he may have learned it from them,” Gehn went on – this Daimon could have been a Yardratian, if he hadn’t already shown Failure the forms that race took and she confirmed he matched none of them.

“But it also means that in my condition, and yours, there is someone who is aware we may be on the verge of discovering something that changes the universe around us. And if that someone is dangerous, as those who can cross the void between stars in a blink often are, what if he decides to take them for himself?”

He raised a brow at her with that question.

“What would we do if he was even a fraction the strength of Axar?”

Gehn still could not fathom that she had made it a point, especially after they stared up at him at the very edge of that crater, to consort with the man hunting him.

“This should stay between us and us alone. I’ve proven that I would fight and bleed for you,” he told her, quieter now.

He shook his head as he sat there, still leaned elbows-to-knees.

“Why was that, and just a couple months’ travel, not enough?”

 

[Failure-64]

"My judgement of character has proven to be quite sound."

She stared at him. Unyielding.

"Yet, you've done nothing but treat me like I'm some child. 'Don't push yourself.' 'Don't leave the facility.' 'Don't talk to strangers.'"

Those were simplifications of larger conversations, but the sentiment remained true.

"The only reason Axar spared you on that day was because I risked my own neck to get close to him. For you."

She heard a grinding noise in her head and only then realized how tense her jaw was. She licked her lips, forced herself to relax, but couldn't shake the ridged posture that had crept up during this conversation. Her weight shifted onto one of her legs as she stood beside Gehn, staring down at him as he all but collapsed into himself with exasperation.

"The moment you came to my rescue, I could have left. You were a sufficient distraction. I chose to stay and fight at your side and nearly died for it."

Her fist started to clench, but she stopped it. Instead, her thumb picked at her index finger.

"Now, thousands are being slaughtered on Earth. A planet that means about as much to me as yesterday's shit. But I know you care about it and that was all the reason I needed to treat our plans with the urgency it deserves.

"We don't have 'a couple months' travel' if you want to make a difference there. You need your strength returned so that you can defend those people. That can only happen with these Dragon Balls. I found a being capable of taking us to Namek instantly. A being who could then take us to Earth just as quickly."

Finally, she tore her eyes away from him. A breath followed that came out heavier than she expected. Her faced began to burn with feelings caught between frustration and something else she wasn't sure she understood. More words started to form, but her throat clenched and only a squeak came out.

She cleared away the lump, closed her eyes, and then shook her head.

"Clearly, I misjudged your priorities this time. All I can ask is that you trust that I didn't give away our secret on a whim. I met Daimon mere months after waking up and have spoken with him quite a lot since."

Her eyes opened, but didn't look at Gehn. She stared with a distant gaze at the hallway she had come from.

"Could you finally learn to trust me? What more do I need to do to earn just that much?"

 

[Gehn]

“I am not trying to rush to Earth’s defense,” Gehn sighed and shook his head again. “I’ve never once said that. I would die if I went to face this ‘Bellak’ the news reports speak of. And being dead does no one any good, least of all Tabelle.”

What comfort it would be, for her to know that he died mere months after her! Were Gehn not stuck explaining the obvious to Failure, he might have chuckled. Instead, he only felt frustration churn in his gut like a collapsing star that swirled as it swallowed itself.

“But it’s hard to trust you when you still don’t seem understand the fundamental problem,” Gehn continued in a warmer tone. “It’s not that I doubt your judge of character, it’s that you should never have told anyone at all.”

Gehn scratched at the back of his head.

“On Earth, there’s a common understanding: you do not trust anyone with matters of business, especially friends and family,” he explained, patiently, for her. “When there’s something that’s that important, as currency is for simply getting by every day in the universe? It draws out the worst in others, because it incentivizes such behavior. If this is all as real as it increasingly looks, Sixty-four? Well:

“Who wouldn’t kill to change some part of the universe, any part big or small, to fit their greatest desires?”

Gehn just left it there for a moment. Silence filled only by the ever-present scouter that constantly gave him telemetry he wished to do without. The hum of the ventilation and air purification systems.

“I know you’ve known him for months,” Gehn nodded, voice softer yet. “But there are countless examples throughout history of people pretending to be someone they’re not, until the opportunity they’re waiting for comes along. Or, even if it wasn’t an act: being irrevocably changed by it.

“That is why I can accept no one else. With something of such important, I’d say the greatest of importance, in play? There’s no one I’m going to trust beyond the two people in this room.

“Because I know the other won’t leave me to fight an android alone, and die, even when she realized that would have been the best move for her.”

 

[Failure-64]

Silence.

She didn't say anything. Didn't even look at him.

It was like how she had been nearly a year ago. Reserved, closed off, guarded -- a reaction she only realized in hindsight. It was as if she realized everything she had said up to that point was pointless and anything further was equally as futile.

After all, he was still talking down to her. Chiding her like she was blinded by naivete and had no grasp of the scale of what they were dealing with. Like she hadn't considered all of that a thousand times over before finally reaching out to Daimon.

"You trusted Tabelle. A girl you barely knew. All because she was attractive and decent with star charts."

Something in her chest ached as if a fist had just run through her. That uncomfortable churn lashed out in response, fiery and wild. Half of her wanted to shove Gehn's head through a wall. The other half wanted to turn away and never look back at him.

Neither won, and so she stayed there. Paralyzed and desperately trying to make sense of why she was having such a strong reaction in the first place.

"Is that why you freed me? Because you find me attractive and thought I'd be easily controlled?"

 

[Gehn]

Tabelle.

Gehn’s jaw set for a moment, and then he released his jaw.

“I never told Tabelle about the Dragon Balls,” he answered Failure flatly. “When we got to Namek, maybe I’d have told her: but only when we understood her. We’d know her power by then, and we’d know if we could handle her if she moved against us.

“You said you couldn’t feel Daimon at all. These two things are not remotely the same.”

Then, he pinched the bridge of his nose. It was true, he had gotten to see Tabelle: once he got an encrypted link setup with her back on Earth, to something besides that old Scouter of his, they were able to have calls with full video and audio all in real-time. Clear across the stars.

She was rather pretty. But for Failure to bring that up.

With his organic eye closed, he just sat there for a moment.

“Is that why you think I risked my life for you?” He asked her after that second stretch of silence. “Because of your beauty? Because I believed I could control you, despite how much more powerful you are than me?”

It just didn’t make any sense.

He took his fingers away from his nose.

“I freed you because I didn’t want to walk into that room with a bunch of people trapped in stasis because of what Avondall did to them, and then walk out alone after what he did to me,” he told her. “Maybe I did choose you, in part, because of how you look. But I don’t know what to say, if you believe for a moment that everything after that moment has been anything but a deliberate choice.

“A choice I still wish to keep making.”

 

[Failure-64]

"Then why do you treat me like a drooling infant?"

The words came out sharp, louder than she expected, and with an edge. Before she even had the thought, they had come blurting out and the fact that she couldn't control it only fueled her frustration.

She looked back at Gehn, finally, and held his stare.

"You constantly talk down to me. Spell out every detail as if you think I'm so fucking stupid that I didn't think for a moment that Daimon might turn on us. You say that you trust me and that you wish to keep trusting, but every. Single. Time. You are given the chance to prove that, you treat me like this."

The ache had spread her face like another punch.

"Do you know who doesn't do that?"

She didn't need to answer.

"Since my actions haven't been clear enough, let me spell it out for you: You are the single most important person in my life. I don't believe I'll ever be able to repay you for everything you've done and sacrificed for me.

"Come with Daimon and I to Namek. You don't have to trust him. All I ask is that you trust me."

 

[Gehn]

Gehn waited until she finished everything she had to say.

“…Because you are acting like one,” he answered her, his eye sharper than it had been this entire time. “When I point out the catastrophic risks this has created, you don’t discuss it or how we might mitigate the risks. Instead, you declare that I’m treating you like a child and unilaterally decide a course of action – and phrase it as though any denial on my part is a cruel refusal to trust you.

“That’s not how you work with, and compromise for, the most important person in your life, Sixty-four.”

He didn’t blame her for any of this. In many ways, she was just born yesterday. But how could she blame him when she had required such hand-holding before being prepared to go out into the world? If he had let her go out the door on that first day, as she had insisted, it would have been a disaster.

Gehn prevented that, yet Failure continued to fail to see how the pattern extended itself.

“It’s manipulative, whether you realize it or not. Emotionally and socially. You’re attempting to twist me into agreeing to something instead of finding a middle ground,” he told her straight, as he always had.

“Why do you feel a need to reach for such a tool when we’re just talking like this? Or do you just refuse to budge, now that you’ve made up your mind?” He asked her next. “Because I am not going to put myself in the hands of someone else to whisk me across the cosmos. The last time I was forced to trust someone to merely pull me, unconscious, from a wreckage, he ripped out part of my brain.

“I would feel much better in my own ship, among the stars. Just like we’d been planning before you ever met Daimon. Perhaps he could even join us – but that is a maybe, and how you’re acting isn’t helping that case.”

 

[Failure-64]

She grabbed the back of his head, ripping hair and scratching the scalp. He barely had time to choke out a betrayed scream before she cracked his head against and through the table. Blood splattered on the ground, he struggled against her but was too weak to stop her. She reeled his head back, then shoved back do--

She blinked and the fantasy was gone. Her stomach churned again, even more violently, when the realization sank in. Something crawled up her throat, this time sour and sharp, and she had to swallow hard to force it back down.

"Has it crossed your mind how important this is to me?"

The words were soft. The edge from moments ago now dulled. Again, she couldn't hold his stare and instead found the nearby table to be a suitable distraction.

"He is the very thing I was designed to be. I could spend the next millennia searching for another like him and turn up empty handed. Every fiber of my being is demanding that I learn from him, absorb the wisdom and skill that would otherwise be forever out of my reach."

Her eyes fell shut and, this time, it was her turn to hang her head.

"I'm not trying to manipulate you. I'm not trying to bully you into a position you don't want to be in. I'm explaining myself in the only way I know how while deciphering sensations burning through my body that make no sense."

She shifted her weight onto her heels. Her head lifted, eyes stoic but lacking the usual nonchalance. Forced into something familiar. Something safe.

"If you want a middle ground, then here: Daimon and I will go ahead. Your ship will take you to Namek well before we can scout the entire planet. When you join us, the three of us will work together to complete the set."

 

[Gehn]

The offer she put on the table was, in the most charitable reading, a way to salvage something from an argument she'd clearly stopped engaging with.

Gehn sat with it for a moment before he made her feel even more like that drooling infant.

“You've just proposed that the person who spent a decade establishing these objects are real — who has the research, the contacts, and the only working concept for a detection device we haven’t even tested yet — should follow along behind while you and a stranger go ahead,” he said.

Gehn let her sit with that, instead.

“Because without me there, Sixty-four, you’re just praying and hoping it all works. You are doing that on an alien planet with someone who didn’t design and research that very device and someone who, by his own account, has no need of Dragon Balls whatsoever.”

He leaned back in the chair, more relaxed, elbows on the arm rests and not his own knees.

“Think about that. Actually think about it, please," His voice stayed patient. Unhurried. He wanted, needed, her to really follow this. “He can cross the void between stars in a moment. He is divine — or claims to be. The very thing you were built toward. If that is even partially true: then what does he even want with wish-granting orbs, Sixty-four?”

Gehn shook his head slowly and a flash of irritation, that he had to spell it out like this despite all her clamoring that he didn’t need to, appeared for only the briefest of moments.

“Gods shouldn’t need wishes, Sixty-four. Mortals, beings with limits, need wishes. So either he isn't what he's claiming, which would make the last several months of trust rather misplaced — or he is, and he has his own reasons for wanting what we're looking for.” A slight tilt of his head followed, a silent beckoning to draw her own conclusions before he did it for her. “I think we know that you haven't considered either possibility yet and both are rather large problems, aren’t they?”

The chair creaked as he shifted his weight.

“Please, I’m not trying to talk down to you, truly I am not, but this goes gets even worse: Now consider the timing,” he continued, one finger raised to begin to count his points – not to accuse or scold. “You woke up. You had never been outside that facility. No experience of the world, no contacts, no frame of reference for what was real. And in those first weeks — those specific first weeks, when you were at your most disoriented and most open — you happened to meet, at random, in a moon-spanning city full of a thousand species from across the universe, precisely the kind of being you were designed to recreate.”

He sighed and looked at her steadily.

“I mean this quite literally: what are the actual, true, mathematical odds of that?”

The ventilation hummed. His scouter tried to calculate it. He told it to shut up, again.

“Someone with an interest in your connection to his idea of ‘divinity’, who then makes first contact with you when you are at your least guarded, and who you now wish to take to the exact planet where we believe these objects are,” he summarized.

“I am not telling you he is an enemy. I am asking you why the possibility that he might be is the one you won't look at.”

The screens, usually perfectly silent, suddenly seemed loud the further down this path Gehn went. As if the acquired volume and rose in decibels to drown out the sheer insanity that was this conversation ever needing to happen at all.

He didn't wait long before continuing.

“The middle ground you've offered isn't one. It's your original plan, unchanged, with an invitation for me to arrive later and participate in something I built, after you've already decided the shape of it with someone else,” he said and his flat delivery remained. “That is not compromise, Sixty-four, please. That is asking me to sanction an arrangement I've told you I find dangerous, and then follow obediently now that it seems I’ve finished the part that required my knowledge.”

Gehn glanced to the desk next to him, away from Failure. For a moment he considered whether he should say this next part at all.

He looked back up at her.

“I am not going to stop you. I've never been able to stop you from doing anything, and I'd have no right to try,” his voice dropped the way sadness, or a depressed resignation, always dropped anyone’s voice. “But I will not pretend this is reasonable.”

It was already happening. Maybe Celerus and Ollis were right. This was folly. The universe would never let something like this happen. The closer he got, the more circumstances seemed to conspire to ruin it all.

Maybe that’s why Axar was here: the final firewall against reality-changing power.

“All these months, you’ve said you’ve been seeing things and feeling things you don’t understand. I believe that, and I probably understand it better than most on this moon. But feelings that don't make sense are not a reason to hand the most consequential decision we've ever made to someone you met six months ago on the street. They are a reason to slow down.”

“And I am pleading with you to heed that before you run off with someone under circumstances that I have, quite clearly, laid out as the most suspect they could possibly be.”

 

[Failure-64]

"Yes, I'm proposing that the two strongest of us go ahead to a potentially hostile planet to test your device and respond to any immediate problems. So when you arrive, it will be safe and we'll already have a working foundation for this mission.

"As opposed to you potentially being thrust into another life or death situation."

That was the part of his argument she could best counter. The one that she truly believed he was the one not thinking rationally about. Strip away his concerns about Daimon, the logic was sound and she refused to back down on that.

"And Daimon is..."

Her voice faded because there were no words yet ready to be spoken. That war between emotion and the logic was slowly tearing her brain in half. She knew Gehn was right to be skeptical. She knew that the odds of everything happening the way they did and turned out to be true were astronomical.

But not impossible.

"I have thought this through, whether you believe me or not. I have slowed down and have been nothing but slow this entire time. I have restrained myself out of my respect and trust for you.

"If I wasn't doing any of that, I would have taken your device and run off with him months ago."

Soft, tired eyes drifted to the side, further away from the source of the ache in her chest and face. She shifted her weight again if only to calm the feeling of ants crawling under her skin.

"I don't understand why you or anyone else cannot see the world as I can, but I promise you there is something different about him," she said with a voice that's conviction was beginning to die out. "You're right. It's possible he's not a god. It's possible that this is some grand scheme. Just as it's equally possible that you are just as dangerous to me."

She scoffed, eyes briefly flicking back to him.

"What are the odds that you just so happened to crash near this facility. Just so happened to be interesting enough that the Doctor took you in as his next test subject. That you chose to kill him after the fact -- that he so vastly underestimated your power that he couldn't control you. That you wandered through the halls and stumbled upon my pod. That your new eye has the security credentials to free me and access everything in this lab?

"And, mere months afterward, I was attacked by an Android with obvious connections to the Doctor? Not you. Not the one who actually killed him."

Her eyes wilted once more, this time joined by her lips that finally broke the fine-lined stoicism.

"For me to put all of my trust in you when I was, as you correctly pointed out, at my most vulnerable, feels no different than putting my trust in Daimon with these Dragon Balls.

"Both are risks that I weighed considerably. Him over the course of months -- multitudes longer than I had even been alive -- and you only a few days. I have become cautious. I do stop and think. I have you to thank for that because I know it's likely the only reason I yet live."

Did it matter saying all of this? She felt no closer to reaching him than those first couple of weeks where he was lucky to get more than a few exchanges with her in an entire day. All of this felt like a waste of breath. All it had done was stoke the pain within her.

She wasn't going to change his mind because they were so fundamentally different. Not just on a biological level. His was a life full of betrayal, hatred and fear. Hers a story of luck and comradery. Where he had been scorned by the universe, she had been given nothing but patience and...

...and whatever it was this feeling that consumed her when she was with him.

"This is pointless," she vocalized the thoughts because keeping them inside made her head feel as though it was going to explode. "What's done is done. Daimon knows and I refuse to risk earning his ire by betraying him. I refuse to put your life in danger again."

Again, her weight moved but this time with purpose. She twisted and took a step to the side. But the other foot felt like it was glued to the ground. It was the half of her that begged her to stop and stay with him. The side of her that she had been listening to this entire time.

She looked back at him with those soft eyes and down turned lips. An expression she had never worn before and didn't even make an attempt to decipher it.

"...Are you sure you don't want to come with us?"