“Do you believe in love at first sight?”
It was a tacky line, really, and one she’d heard a hundred times before, in a dozen different languages, in a hundred different bars. But that was the game, wasn’t it? That was the dance. They would chase her, make contact — usually just with their eyes and the interested tone of their voice, but some of them were braver, bolder, reaching out to brush gently against her arm or her back, leaving something warm and tingling behind, initiating the dance, whether they knew it or not.
And if she liked them? “Why?” she would ask, flashing them a toothy grin, “do I need to walk by you again?”
It was an easy thing, really. A light hearted game. But it never really meant much of anything. None of it ever did.
His first words were a little different though. An opening shot changed by the nature of the environment and the circumstances they found themselves in. She, stubbornly incommunicative and seething; him, brightly amused and curious.
“I’d be careful. This one looks like a biter.”
She wouldn’t have called it love at first sight. Not even love at second or third. Hell, what was
love anyway? A forbidden pair-bond and the sickness of potals, a knife willingly swallowed that twisted painfully in the chest. It wasn’t something she wanted any part of, nor was it something she had any reason to fear. She was a drone, and drones didn’t do that kind of thing. They enjoyed the chase and the play and the dancing but… it was never more than tacky lines and laughter shared for a moment in a private space. And yet. There was something in the way that the looked at her, and something in the warmth of his mind as it brushed strangely against her own. Something in the way that he looked at her with recognition, something in the way he handed her dignity as if it was inconceivable to him that she might not deserve it, something in the way that he had visited her before he had gone.
There was something… Something warm within her chest.
It felt strange, sitting there as it did. Strange and foreign but not at all like a knife — it was more like he had left a ray of sunlight there, one that reached her even in her cell within her brig.
Maybe she really was going to go crazy here. They said isolation did that. That a drone, removed from the colony and cut off from the Collective would quickly lose all sense of self and direction and descend into madness, chasing echo ghosts and waking dreams.
And yet. She didn’t feel crazy, sitting there. She felt…. warm. Clean. And re-grounded, her hand raising every now and then to touch the bow he had twisted from her bandana. She kept catching herself looking at her faint reflection within the atmo-shield that kept her prisoner, tilting her head this way and that to admire the shape of it against her brow. She didn’t know what to think of it, really.
It wasn’t love at first sight, but… She wouldn’t mind if he were to walk by again.