"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."
Bella has a list, in her cipher in her notebook. "We know Yeerks acquire skills their hosts have - Aspret was baking, Esclan could drive, etcetera - and can crib personality cues pretty effectively, but it's not clear how well they can copy strictly creative abilities - could one in Robin write a song if she wasn't cooperating on any level, for example?"
"Like, if the host is really, really motivated, they can interfere with the Yeerk's control of their body, maybe even take it back for a second. Or parts of it. But distracting them, like I did, keeping them away from something you don't want them to know - nobody's ever done that before."
"If Robin and Ethan won't do science and you will, that leaves a gap in the necessary participants that has to be filled with me, Andi, Charlie, or Ax - and realistically that means me. Trying to decide if I even have a sufficiently well-defined test to run."
"...Yeah. Maybe. I mean - it's not that it's more appealing if I think it probably won't go to hell. I just feel better about it. Like... the difference between ice cream, and ice cream somebody's poisoned. All the good parts of ice cream aren't any different, but you still want the second one less."
"Well, yeah, you wouldn't. The point is - imagine for a second that you wanted ice cream really, really badly, and it wasn't fatally poisoned, just the kind where you'd be throwing up for a week. The first one's still better. But it's not better because it's better ice cream, it's better because there's something wrong with the second one. The second one might even look tastier, poison and all. But the first one's what you'd rather pick."
"That is unlikely, yes." She sighs. "Renée could show up as early as tomorrow, depending on various factors, so this evening is probably best if I want to get it done this month at all and given that I haven't decided to bring Renée in on the conspiracy yet, given that you're usually a pigeon or whatever."
(The anaesthetic is either too instinctual or not instinctual enough to reach her. It is not included.)
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.
<Damn, I thought the anaesthesia was going to be automatic, I didn't realize - apologizing would apparently be pointless - hi?>
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.
<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.
He warned her that he could theoretically guess what she might write down, but in fact when it comes to it he doesn't even try. He is far too caught up in the physical feeling of her writing with his hands. It is very, very nice.
Not completely thoroughly; there are some physical reactions missing from this equation. But pretty thoroughly all the same. Being cut off from even involuntarily affecting his body doesn't interfere at all with being in love, and it doesn't dampen the rest all that much, either.
The way she moves Trouble's body is not the way Trouble would move his body. It's the way Bella would. He notices that for the first time, and appreciates it very, very much; it's an amazingly intimate thing, to not just see the way she moves but experience it directly. He loves it and he loves her.
Now she is wiggling his toes, experimentally, and taking notes, which are probably on that but could be on anything. There are more than twenty-six symbols in her personal cipher, for one thing, and at least eight of them seem to be allowed to form single-character words.
She is Bella, and she is being herself, and she is wrapped around his brain controlling his every move while he helplessly watches. Of course he's going to be turned on. He couldn't not. It's too perfect. And now he is thinking about the feeling of her wriggling into his ear again, mmm.
For that matter, he's not sure she could move like he does, either. Muscle memory is on her side there, though, and it'd be harder to judge.
<I am actually one hundred percent certain you couldn't fool Ethan, but mostly because I'm pretty sure you'd deck him in under five minutes if you tried to talk to him by ourselves.>
When there is no one else around to care how they talk to each other, Ethan has been known to make some pretty vile sexual advances—in explicit and often degrading terms, with hints or more than hints that 'no' will not be considered an acceptable answer. Trouble thinks it's hilarious and doesn't mind at all. He suspects Bella would have a different reaction.
Trouble is terribly curious. He doesn't think she would necessarily specifically deck him, but he is extremely confident that she wouldn't be able to laugh it off as casually as he does. The art of telling Ethan to go fuck a log if he's that hard up is its own kind of creativity. (Now does she see what he meant about so many things being like that?)
<I'd be tempted to reuse a previous quip if he started acting like that to me under the impression that you were alone in here. I don't think my brand of snark is similar to yours and I don't seem to be coming up with anything you-style whatever I try.> She sits back down, all Trouble-sprawled.
He likes it when she Trouble-sprawls. He likes it a lot. She's better at it than he expected. She's not him, but she's picking it up fast. He wouldn't swear to anyone else being able to tell, if she didn't slip up and do something Bellifluous.
<Partially. I mean, I'd still have your voice, and if I didn't already know English I could get a handle on it just by inhabiting you and by the same token I think I could talk through your understanding of the language and with your accent instead of mine, which would go a long way - I wouldn't make any vocabulary mistakes or anything that way. It's the fine details of making things up de novo that'd be the problem. I bet Yeerks probably use previously rejected ideas for things to say or just reuse lines a lot...>