Human Pain
Title: Human Pain
Fandom: TGWTG
Pairing: Pollo/Nimue
Rating: NC-17
Warning(s): Dub-con, allusions to mental illness, spoilers for the new AT4W episode and storyline.
Summary: Sequel to “ Human Emotions” and “ Human Understanding.” Something is wrong with Nimue, and Pollo is going to find out what. If only it didn’t hurt in the meantime.
She had grown distant from him. At first, Pollo had chalked that up to her being exhausted, trying to keep an eye on everything at once, especially when Jaeris had been threatening them, and he let it slide, trying to be good to her, giving her a few hours every day when she could forget about everything. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe distracting her had only led to snapping her programming.
So when she finished her diagnostics and found nothing wrong, Pollo was relieved. “Maybe now you’ll feel better,” he said quietly when she told him the results, even before she had told Linkara.
She nodded absently. “Perhaps,” she said. “But I don’t know… just because I haven’t found anything wrong doesn’t mean that it’s all right…”
“What’s the matter?” Pollo asked. “What do you think is wrong?”
“I… I don’t know,” she said quietly. “I think… I don’t know… I have to ask a human… talk to Linkara… Maybe he’ll know what’s going on, he’s better with emotions than I am…”
Pollo pulled her closer to him. “You’re right,” he said. “You should talk to him… see if he could say what’s going on.”
So she did speak to him, saying that she thought she was losing her mind, and Linkara ordered Pollo to run another diagnostic, which the robot was only too happy to do.
It took a long time to get the results back, and in the mean time, she grew even more distant.
Oh, they still met late into the night on the holodeck, still simulated romantic dates and lay together afterward. She still took pleasure in their explorations, still curled up nest to him when they were finished and whispered sweet nothings in his ear, but he could tell her mind was elsewhere, that she was distracted. But no matter what Pollo did, he couldn’t decide what was wrong, and she wasn’t opening up the way she used to.
And then there were times when Pollo thought that Nimue wasn’t there at all, that something or someone else had taken hold of her. During those times, she didn’t touch him softly and speak words of love to him, but was rough, silent, kissing him hard one moment and then pulling away, looking confused.
One night, a few days after she had confessed to feeling as though she was losing her mind, before Pollo had gotten through the process of the diagnostic, she had suddenly stood up from where they had been sitting on a simulated beach-all simulations, but always enough-and grabbed Pollo roughly by the shoulders, yanking him up as well and pulling him into a hard, claiming kiss, the kind that Nimue never used. Nimue was soft, gentle, loving, but now she was none of those things as she barked the words to the computer to take them back to the home they had programmed into the holodeck, only accessible with passcodes that only they knew. She shoved him down on the bed, hands ripping at cloth, mouth biting in a way that wasn’t unpleasant, but wasn’t right, wasn’t her…
Pollo caught her wrists and turned her over, pinning her down with his own body, hoping that she wouldn’t spontaneously program her holographic form to be stronger than him. “Nimue,” he said evenly. “What’s going on?"
She grinned, and not the soft, serious smile she usually had. “Isn’t it obvious? We’ve explored these functions numerous times and both greatly enjoy it-”
“No,” he said. “What’s going on? You don’t… it’s not usually this rough.”
“New exploration,” she said, leaning up to capture his mouth again.
He pulled away. “Nimue…”
She pouted a bit and he almost decided to forget logic and let her take what she wanted, give himself over to her whims. But no, if she wasn’t there… Linkara had said enough about the subject in his reviews that Pollo knew that this was wrong.
“You said yourself that you aren’t feeling well. If you’re not all there, it would be wrong for us to do this.”
She rolled her eyes. “I’m fine, Pollo. I’m fine and this is what I want. Isn’t that enough?”
“I haven’t finished the diagnostics, and if something’s wrong…”
“There’s nothing wrong,” she insisted as she pulled her wrists out of his grip and grabbed his shoulders, pushing them over again and straddling his waist. “There’s never been anything wrong. A bit of a bad day. Besides,” she added, trailing a hand over his chest, flicking one nipple, which she knew shorted his wiring a bit. “Don’t you want this?”
She said there was nothing wrong. And Pollo almost let himself believe her as she returned to her ministrations, kissing, biting, and then finally taking him inside herself, grinding her hips against him and grinning as his eyes rolled back in his head…
And then, just as it was over, she stopped. Her eyes widened and she suddenly scrambled off of him. He sat up immediately. “Nimue? I’m sorry, I…”
“No,” she muttered. “It’s not your fault, I… I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I’m so sorry, I…”
He pulled her to his chest as tears began to roll down her face. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ll have results in a few days and we’ll fix whatever’s going on and then we can get back to normal.”
She kept crying. “I don’t know… why did he give us emotions like this? Why do I have to feel all of it? I’m just a program… I shouldn’t cry.”
“We’ve evolved beyond our programming,” Pollo said. “He gave us emotions because he wanted us to make decisions and have conversations with him and it’s not his fault that we’ve moved beyond that.”
“You are correct,” she said. “I just… I don’t know what came over me… What if I am losing my mind?”
“We can fix it. It’s not like the humans who lose their minds and end up away from everything else. For us, it’s just a bit of repair work.”
She nodded. “Thank you.”
He kept a close eye on her after that, watching for any sign of distress or malfunction. When they were on the base in robot form, he kept going through his diagnostic results, trying to figure out what was causing this. When they were on the holodeck, he made sure to be careful, treating her gently, giving her whatever he thought she needed, watching to be sure that whatever was making her act differently wasn’t present when they were together. And after a few more days, he had learned to detect when she wasn’t there. It was in the eyes. When Nimue was present, albeit afraid and cautious, her eyes were blue, wide and worried. When she wasn’t, when whatever was infecting her mind had taken over, her eyes turned green and her face grew more mischievous. When that happened, Pollo would say a few words to the computer to keep them in whatever simulation they had chosen until it had passed.
Not that that stopped her. She would tackle him to the ground wherever they were and it would often be a struggle for him to fight her off, pin her down and hold her until she was back to normal, tears streaming down her face and apologies flowing faster than most humans could process.
And he accepted it, worked as hard as he could to find the problem, only stopping to take time with her, to love her as best as he could. He didn’t rest, he didn’t need to. He had to save her, had to figure out what was going on.
Because when the tears ran down her face, it hurt him. It hurt him to know that she felt this sort of emotion.
And if he could have, he would have stopped her feeling any emotions at all, even if it meant losing her, because no one should feel that much pain.