Dinner and a Movie [Electric Sheep sidestory]
Jun 20, 2019 1:17:51 GMT
Post by admin on Jun 20, 2019 1:17:51 GMT
Author's Note: And here is the second Pride Month fic I wrote, the one I promised to post within a week of Step 6: Publish Your Results. To quote someone on one of my favorite podcasts, "One is the same as two, right?"
In any case, this one's easier to explain. Tl;dr, for a long time, I identified as a lesbian or at least bisexual heavily leaning towards lesbian until I went, "Oh wait. There's that whole thing I kinda don't want anything to do with. Whoops." Which is to say I know what it's like to be an idiot lesbian who doesn't know how to ask people out. Hence ... this fic. There are no warnings attached to it except for maybe slight shades of internalized homophobia? Somebody desperately needs to teach Door to socialize.
Enjoy!
“And you’re asking me because…?”
Door sighed dramatically—or, well, more dramatically for her. “Because you’re, you know. A supercomputer on legs?”
Geist quirked an eyebrow. Door had ambushed him in the pokémon center’s recharge and repair room, which was unusual enough because it was typically the other way around when it came to ambushing in the morning … which is to say it must have been important.
And then Door asked him when Blair’s birthday was.
In response, Geist politely said that maybe she should get coffee and some breakfast before asking questions like that, and after a bit of resistance on her part, Door begrudgingly agreed. So, there they were, in the pokémon center’s cafeteria, a place that was just a touch too uncomfortably public for the conversation Door was hoping to have, with nothing between them but a cooling cup of coffee, a cinnamon roll with the edge nibbled off, a beat-up Formica table, and a thick, awkward silence.
“Yes,” he replied slowly. “But usually, one would simply ask a person that.”
“Yeah, but…” Door picked up the cinnamon bun and nibbled at the edge. “I mean, can’t you look at her records?”
“I can.”
“Geist.” Her eyes settled into a glare that she hoped felt like it was drilling a hole deep into whatever served as her Companion’s soul. “Will you look at her records?”
He sat back in his seat, crossed his arms, and gave her a look that told her he knew very well what that glare was supposed to feel like. “No.”
“Come on, Geist!”
Door tossed the bun, intending on slamming it onto the plate in frustration. Geist caught it before it could smack into the table an inch away from her plate and set it down right where it should have been.
“Why not?” Door asked.
“Matter of security,” Geist responded. “You don’t just go digging into another user’s personal information for no reason. Not unless you’re the police.”
“You’ve done it before,” Door pointed out. “You got Blair’s number from Opal.”
“That’s different. Opal volunteered it. And besides, a birthdate is a little more private than a phone number.”
“By what sort of moon logic?”
“Polite society’s.” Geist whipped a napkin out of the holder beside him and used it to wipe the frosting off his fingertips. “Anyway, wouldn’t you like to ask her yourself? You’ve been trying to find reasons to have a conversation with her for some time, have you not?”
“I…” Door felt her face burn, and she whipped her head around to avoid facing Geist. “What does that even mean?”
“It means you’re far more awkward around her than anyone else,” Geist replied. “Oh, don’t take it personally. I don’t mean it like that. I mean that it’s clear you like her, and from the way you act around her, I would wager that you’re trying to get her to like you. It would be far easier for you to achieve that if you were to … well. Talk to her.”
Door snatched the bun off the plate and took a massive bite. With her mouth still full, she narrowed her eyes and replied, “What do you know about human relationships?”
“A lot more than you would think.” Geist tapped his temple. “Programmed to serve and please a user in whatever way I can, remember? That requires a basic understanding of human interaction.”
Basic. Basic. As if anything about Door’s relationship or lack thereof with Blair was anything short of complicated. After all, they barely knew each other, and most of what they had done together so far was battle, snark at each other, and run from Team Matrix. A girl couldn’t just ask random personal things to another girl. She had to have finesse.
Especially if that personal thing was, “By the way, would you like to see a movie and go to dinner sometime?”
Or … whatever people like her were supposed to do on dates. Door wasn’t really sure. She hadn’t had that much experience, and honestly, that whole dinner and a movie thing sounded really straight.
“I take it that reminding you of how much I know about humans was a bad idea,” Geist said.
“No, that’s always going to be creepy, but I’ve gotten used to it.” Door bit off another chunk of her bun. “I just think walking up to her out of nowhere and going, ‘hey, Blair, wanna go see a movie or something’ is not gonna go the way you think it will.” She waved the bun at him. “And that’s because you only know about people but haven’t experienced what it’s like yourself.”
“Oh?” Geist propped his chin on a hand. “What’s what like?”
“You know.” Door motioned in the air with her free hand. “Being human. You’ve never been embarrassed about getting rejected and stuff like that. All of your relationships are preprogrammed. You’re supposed to be my friend, and if we humans didn’t want you Companions around, we wouldn’t have made you. So it’s not like you know what it’s like to be told, ‘Sorry, but I don’t like you that way.’”
Geist simply stared at Door for a second. It took one more of those seconds for Door to realize why. And to that, she clicked her tongue.
“Doesn’t count,” she said.
“Doesn’t it?” Geist said, lifting his chin a little. “Because it was pretty humiliating, the way you carried on after you found out I’m a Companion.”
“Okay, first off,” she said, waving the bun at him again, “you can’t actually feel humiliated, and those are your words, not mine. Second…” She took another bite and mumbled, “I thought we were past that by now.”
“I can’t, and we are. Just making the conversation interesting,” Geist replied lightly. He rested his hands on the table, fingers laced together. “But you have a point. I don’t know what rejection is like for humans, and given how sensitive you lot are—”
“Jerk.”
“—I think I can understand why you’d like to be … delicate about this.”
Door relaxed. She liked it when Geist agreed with her. First off, it made things easy. Second, it was validation. After all, she had a reason to be worried. Throughout all their time together, Blair had never mentioned whether she liked boys, girls, or something else. In fact, she had never shown any indication that she liked anything at all, let alone Door. And given that they were traveling together, Door had to be careful. What if she asked Blair, and it turned out Blair didn’t think of her like that? Or worse yet, what if she asked Blair, and it turned out Blair was straight? The sheer magnitude of how awkward that would be … just the thought of it sent Door cringing visibly at the table. If she screwed this up, it would be the point of no return. She would be trapped in a traveling relationship with someone who knew she had feelings for them, and they didn’t even think of her that way. It would be mortifying. Giving herself up to Team Matrix or even letting Belle shoot her would have been preferable to living with the embarrassment of that hanging over her head forever.
Or maybe Blair would just leave. Go off on her own journey. Find a nice significant other eventually and forget all about Door. On the one hand, at least that would be preferable to the mortification that was living with someone who had rejected her. On the other … Blair was too cute and too sweet, so did Door really want that to happen either?
So maybe she did need Geist’s help. In actual, legal ways, not ways that involved hacking the trainer database to look at Blair’s ID for a possible conversation starter. Apparently.
“So?” she finally said, still wincing from the thought of being rejected.
Geist frowned. “Talking to her would still be the best option.”
Door groaned, slid the plate with the last chunk of bun on it across the table, and buried her face in her arms as dramatically as she could.
“Come on, Door,” Geist said. He reached across the table to rest a hand on her shoulder. “It’s not going to be that bad. Even if it somehow goes wrong, the two of you can still be friends.”
“You literally don’t know how rejection works, do you?” Door said into the table.
“I don’t,” Geist admitted, “but think about it. What’s the worst that can happen? Blair isn’t the sort of person who would take offense so easily, especially if it’s coming from you. If it turns out she just wants to be friends, then there’s nothing wrong with that either, is there? At least you’ll still be friends, yes?”
Door lifted her head. She was tempted to say “that’s just the point,” but she didn’t. And she didn’t partly because it was way too early to have an argument like that, but also … she begrudgingly admitted that she didn’t really have a good follow-up to that. It would be bad if Blair rejected her, but she couldn’t quite put into words why. It just was, and it was in ways that Geist, being a Companion and not a human, couldn’t possibly understand. For one thing, he was never a teenager, so he obviously had no chance of getting it.
“I guess,” she said.
“Right.” Geist patted her on the shoulder, then leaned back again. “So here is what you should do. Today, go up to Blair and say, ‘Hello, Blair. Would you like to go out for dinner and a movie sometime without our Companions? I would love to get to know you more.’”
“That sounds really dorky.”
“Paraphrase.”
Door scrunched up her nose. “And is dinner and a movie too … straight?”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Uh … huh.” Geist furrowed his eyebrows. “So, will you do it, then?”
“I guess.” Door shoved the rest of the bun into her mouth. “It’s not like you’ll tell me when her birthday is.”
Geist grinned. “Sorry, Door. There are strict rules about that.”
Door nodded, swallowed, and took a swig of her coffee. After a second, she said, “Okay, but what if it was a direct order during a life-or-death situation?”
At once, Geist’s smile vanished. “Just ask her out.”
Sometime later, long after breakfast settled in Door’s stomach, she found Blair by the practice battlefields outside of the pokémon center. There, she made her move … after about five minutes of composing herself and gathering up the courage to jog over, anyway.
“Hey, Blair? Can I ask you something?”
Blair turned away from watching a sparring session between one trainer’s sawk and another’s alomomola. She blinked at her with those wide, blue eyes that made Door’s heart speed up.
“Sure,” she said. “What’s up?”
Door took a deep breath. “Um … I was just wondering. When’s your birthday?”
“November 27. Why?”
“N-no reason.” Door shrugged. “Um … wanna go out sometime to, I dunno, get to know each other? Just you and me?”
Blair grinned. “That sounds like fun. Maybe for dinner and a movie?”
Door nodded vaguely. “Oh, uh. Yeah. That’d be great.”
“Awesome. Meet me in the pokémon center lobby at seven. And let Geist have the night off, okay?” Blair’s grin widened, and she half-turned and started walking away, hands clasped behind the small of her back. “I’m really glad you asked. I was worrying myself sick for the past two weeks about doing it myself, but I was super worried you weren’t even interested! Or … I hope you are, otherwise this is all embarrassing, but you wouldn’t ask if you weren’t, right?” She shook her head. “Sorry. I’d … I’d better…” She thumbed over her shoulder. “I’ll see you tonight, okay?”
And with that, she turned around and jogged off, into the pokémon center, presumably to avoid further embarrassment.
Door didn’t notice that embarrassment, though. She had heard what Blair said, but half of it was still processing in her mind. After a few moments, only one thought managed to cobble itself into a coherent thing in Door’s head, and that coherent thing tumbled out of Door’s mouth before she could stop it.
“Huh,” she said. “I guess dinner and a movie aren’t too straight.”
In any case, this one's easier to explain. Tl;dr, for a long time, I identified as a lesbian or at least bisexual heavily leaning towards lesbian until I went, "Oh wait. There's that whole thing I kinda don't want anything to do with. Whoops." Which is to say I know what it's like to be an idiot lesbian who doesn't know how to ask people out. Hence ... this fic. There are no warnings attached to it except for maybe slight shades of internalized homophobia? Somebody desperately needs to teach Door to socialize.
Enjoy!
“And you’re asking me because…?”
Door sighed dramatically—or, well, more dramatically for her. “Because you’re, you know. A supercomputer on legs?”
Geist quirked an eyebrow. Door had ambushed him in the pokémon center’s recharge and repair room, which was unusual enough because it was typically the other way around when it came to ambushing in the morning … which is to say it must have been important.
And then Door asked him when Blair’s birthday was.
In response, Geist politely said that maybe she should get coffee and some breakfast before asking questions like that, and after a bit of resistance on her part, Door begrudgingly agreed. So, there they were, in the pokémon center’s cafeteria, a place that was just a touch too uncomfortably public for the conversation Door was hoping to have, with nothing between them but a cooling cup of coffee, a cinnamon roll with the edge nibbled off, a beat-up Formica table, and a thick, awkward silence.
“Yes,” he replied slowly. “But usually, one would simply ask a person that.”
“Yeah, but…” Door picked up the cinnamon bun and nibbled at the edge. “I mean, can’t you look at her records?”
“I can.”
“Geist.” Her eyes settled into a glare that she hoped felt like it was drilling a hole deep into whatever served as her Companion’s soul. “Will you look at her records?”
He sat back in his seat, crossed his arms, and gave her a look that told her he knew very well what that glare was supposed to feel like. “No.”
“Come on, Geist!”
Door tossed the bun, intending on slamming it onto the plate in frustration. Geist caught it before it could smack into the table an inch away from her plate and set it down right where it should have been.
“Why not?” Door asked.
“Matter of security,” Geist responded. “You don’t just go digging into another user’s personal information for no reason. Not unless you’re the police.”
“You’ve done it before,” Door pointed out. “You got Blair’s number from Opal.”
“That’s different. Opal volunteered it. And besides, a birthdate is a little more private than a phone number.”
“By what sort of moon logic?”
“Polite society’s.” Geist whipped a napkin out of the holder beside him and used it to wipe the frosting off his fingertips. “Anyway, wouldn’t you like to ask her yourself? You’ve been trying to find reasons to have a conversation with her for some time, have you not?”
“I…” Door felt her face burn, and she whipped her head around to avoid facing Geist. “What does that even mean?”
“It means you’re far more awkward around her than anyone else,” Geist replied. “Oh, don’t take it personally. I don’t mean it like that. I mean that it’s clear you like her, and from the way you act around her, I would wager that you’re trying to get her to like you. It would be far easier for you to achieve that if you were to … well. Talk to her.”
Door snatched the bun off the plate and took a massive bite. With her mouth still full, she narrowed her eyes and replied, “What do you know about human relationships?”
“A lot more than you would think.” Geist tapped his temple. “Programmed to serve and please a user in whatever way I can, remember? That requires a basic understanding of human interaction.”
Basic. Basic. As if anything about Door’s relationship or lack thereof with Blair was anything short of complicated. After all, they barely knew each other, and most of what they had done together so far was battle, snark at each other, and run from Team Matrix. A girl couldn’t just ask random personal things to another girl. She had to have finesse.
Especially if that personal thing was, “By the way, would you like to see a movie and go to dinner sometime?”
Or … whatever people like her were supposed to do on dates. Door wasn’t really sure. She hadn’t had that much experience, and honestly, that whole dinner and a movie thing sounded really straight.
“I take it that reminding you of how much I know about humans was a bad idea,” Geist said.
“No, that’s always going to be creepy, but I’ve gotten used to it.” Door bit off another chunk of her bun. “I just think walking up to her out of nowhere and going, ‘hey, Blair, wanna go see a movie or something’ is not gonna go the way you think it will.” She waved the bun at him. “And that’s because you only know about people but haven’t experienced what it’s like yourself.”
“Oh?” Geist propped his chin on a hand. “What’s what like?”
“You know.” Door motioned in the air with her free hand. “Being human. You’ve never been embarrassed about getting rejected and stuff like that. All of your relationships are preprogrammed. You’re supposed to be my friend, and if we humans didn’t want you Companions around, we wouldn’t have made you. So it’s not like you know what it’s like to be told, ‘Sorry, but I don’t like you that way.’”
Geist simply stared at Door for a second. It took one more of those seconds for Door to realize why. And to that, she clicked her tongue.
“Doesn’t count,” she said.
“Doesn’t it?” Geist said, lifting his chin a little. “Because it was pretty humiliating, the way you carried on after you found out I’m a Companion.”
“Okay, first off,” she said, waving the bun at him again, “you can’t actually feel humiliated, and those are your words, not mine. Second…” She took another bite and mumbled, “I thought we were past that by now.”
“I can’t, and we are. Just making the conversation interesting,” Geist replied lightly. He rested his hands on the table, fingers laced together. “But you have a point. I don’t know what rejection is like for humans, and given how sensitive you lot are—”
“Jerk.”
“—I think I can understand why you’d like to be … delicate about this.”
Door relaxed. She liked it when Geist agreed with her. First off, it made things easy. Second, it was validation. After all, she had a reason to be worried. Throughout all their time together, Blair had never mentioned whether she liked boys, girls, or something else. In fact, she had never shown any indication that she liked anything at all, let alone Door. And given that they were traveling together, Door had to be careful. What if she asked Blair, and it turned out Blair didn’t think of her like that? Or worse yet, what if she asked Blair, and it turned out Blair was straight? The sheer magnitude of how awkward that would be … just the thought of it sent Door cringing visibly at the table. If she screwed this up, it would be the point of no return. She would be trapped in a traveling relationship with someone who knew she had feelings for them, and they didn’t even think of her that way. It would be mortifying. Giving herself up to Team Matrix or even letting Belle shoot her would have been preferable to living with the embarrassment of that hanging over her head forever.
Or maybe Blair would just leave. Go off on her own journey. Find a nice significant other eventually and forget all about Door. On the one hand, at least that would be preferable to the mortification that was living with someone who had rejected her. On the other … Blair was too cute and too sweet, so did Door really want that to happen either?
So maybe she did need Geist’s help. In actual, legal ways, not ways that involved hacking the trainer database to look at Blair’s ID for a possible conversation starter. Apparently.
“So?” she finally said, still wincing from the thought of being rejected.
Geist frowned. “Talking to her would still be the best option.”
Door groaned, slid the plate with the last chunk of bun on it across the table, and buried her face in her arms as dramatically as she could.
“Come on, Door,” Geist said. He reached across the table to rest a hand on her shoulder. “It’s not going to be that bad. Even if it somehow goes wrong, the two of you can still be friends.”
“You literally don’t know how rejection works, do you?” Door said into the table.
“I don’t,” Geist admitted, “but think about it. What’s the worst that can happen? Blair isn’t the sort of person who would take offense so easily, especially if it’s coming from you. If it turns out she just wants to be friends, then there’s nothing wrong with that either, is there? At least you’ll still be friends, yes?”
Door lifted her head. She was tempted to say “that’s just the point,” but she didn’t. And she didn’t partly because it was way too early to have an argument like that, but also … she begrudgingly admitted that she didn’t really have a good follow-up to that. It would be bad if Blair rejected her, but she couldn’t quite put into words why. It just was, and it was in ways that Geist, being a Companion and not a human, couldn’t possibly understand. For one thing, he was never a teenager, so he obviously had no chance of getting it.
“I guess,” she said.
“Right.” Geist patted her on the shoulder, then leaned back again. “So here is what you should do. Today, go up to Blair and say, ‘Hello, Blair. Would you like to go out for dinner and a movie sometime without our Companions? I would love to get to know you more.’”
“That sounds really dorky.”
“Paraphrase.”
Door scrunched up her nose. “And is dinner and a movie too … straight?”
“What?”
“Never mind.”
“Uh … huh.” Geist furrowed his eyebrows. “So, will you do it, then?”
“I guess.” Door shoved the rest of the bun into her mouth. “It’s not like you’ll tell me when her birthday is.”
Geist grinned. “Sorry, Door. There are strict rules about that.”
Door nodded, swallowed, and took a swig of her coffee. After a second, she said, “Okay, but what if it was a direct order during a life-or-death situation?”
At once, Geist’s smile vanished. “Just ask her out.”
—
Sometime later, long after breakfast settled in Door’s stomach, she found Blair by the practice battlefields outside of the pokémon center. There, she made her move … after about five minutes of composing herself and gathering up the courage to jog over, anyway.
“Hey, Blair? Can I ask you something?”
Blair turned away from watching a sparring session between one trainer’s sawk and another’s alomomola. She blinked at her with those wide, blue eyes that made Door’s heart speed up.
“Sure,” she said. “What’s up?”
Door took a deep breath. “Um … I was just wondering. When’s your birthday?”
“November 27. Why?”
“N-no reason.” Door shrugged. “Um … wanna go out sometime to, I dunno, get to know each other? Just you and me?”
Blair grinned. “That sounds like fun. Maybe for dinner and a movie?”
Door nodded vaguely. “Oh, uh. Yeah. That’d be great.”
“Awesome. Meet me in the pokémon center lobby at seven. And let Geist have the night off, okay?” Blair’s grin widened, and she half-turned and started walking away, hands clasped behind the small of her back. “I’m really glad you asked. I was worrying myself sick for the past two weeks about doing it myself, but I was super worried you weren’t even interested! Or … I hope you are, otherwise this is all embarrassing, but you wouldn’t ask if you weren’t, right?” She shook her head. “Sorry. I’d … I’d better…” She thumbed over her shoulder. “I’ll see you tonight, okay?”
And with that, she turned around and jogged off, into the pokémon center, presumably to avoid further embarrassment.
Door didn’t notice that embarrassment, though. She had heard what Blair said, but half of it was still processing in her mind. After a few moments, only one thought managed to cobble itself into a coherent thing in Door’s head, and that coherent thing tumbled out of Door’s mouth before she could stop it.
“Huh,” she said. “I guess dinner and a movie aren’t too straight.”
