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“Android!”
Sidney cringed at the sound of the captain’s voice, his furious bellow carrying clearly through the hallway all the way into the crew’s quarters. She paused in her efforts to smooth out the wrinkles in her dress in front of the mirror, looking back at the open door behind her with a sense of apprehension and growing dread.
The sudden shout also made Barry glance up, and he frowned worriedly in Sidney’s direction. “What’s his problem?” he asked, jerking his head towards the door.
Sidney turned back towards Barry and shrugged, offering a thin smile. “Maybe he just needs my help with something!” she said hopefully, but even as the words left her mouth she knew they weren’t true. Not only did the captain truly seem to never want her help with anything, but he only called her android like that when she’d well and truly screwed something up. But what could she have done wrong this time? She’d tried so hard to be good lately, she didn’t think the captain had any reason to be mad at her…
Well, no matter. She’d figure out what had upset him, and whatever she’d done wrong, she could fix it. She would fix it. “I’d better go see what he wants,” she told Barry, and she readjusted her hat before waving him goodbye and skating from the room.
Sidney made her way down the hallway, pausing for a moment just outside the door of the cockpit. She took a moment to compose herself, plastering on her biggest, most winning smile before throwing the cockpit door open and skating inside to meet captain Norman Takamori. “How can I help you, Captain?” she asked, her voice bright and sunny as it always was.
Norman certainly did not look happy to see her. He gestured behind him, and Sidney’s gaze landed on a navy blue mug sitting innocuously on the end of the control panel. “What the hell is that?”
Oh, right. She’d almost forgotten that she’d left that there. She’d made it for Norman earlier that morning, while he was still in his quarters, in the hopes that she might manage to surprise him with it when he woke up. Barry had laughed when he saw her doing it – “Why bother trying to make him happy? He’s gonna yell at us no matter what we do,” he’d said as she used her cannon to painstakingly steam their meager supply of milk, more light teasing than genuine judgement in his tone – but she knew that Barry was wrong. She was programmed to please people, she knew she could do it, she just wasn’t trying hard enough, that was all– she missed too many shots, talked too much, failed too often. She wouldn’t give the captain any reason to be irritated with her, and he’d surely warm up to her eventually, right? He had to.
Judging by the irate expression on his face, though, today would not be that day. it seemed that, once again, she’d failed in her directive. The captain was angry with her.
Her smile didn’t waver. There was no way for it to– she had no muscles in her face that could twitch or quiver, so she continued to beam at him, even as it felt like something inside her chest was crumbling. “It’s a latte, Captain!” she said, her voice so chipper it bordered on painful. “I just thought I’d make it as a sign of my appreciation, and to show you that I really can do anything around the ship that you need me to, not just as a gunner.”
Norman picked up the mug and pushed it, none too gently, into Sidney’s arms. Sidney stumbled a bit, fumbling as she tried to secure the mug in one hand and sloshing a few drops of lukewarm coffee onto her assault cannon in the process. “So, you thought the control panel was a good place to put an open container of liquid?” he said incredulously. “Do you realize how delicate some of these controls are? Do you know how fucked we’d all be if this spilled on anything?”
Sidney nearly swore aloud. Why hadn’t that occurred to her? “I’m… I’m sorry, Captain, I didn’t think–”
“Oh, clearly ,” Norman sneered, voice dripping with condescension. “Do you ever think, Sid? Or did those inventors at Handy Andi fuck up and forget to program you with any common sense?”
Sidney lowered her free arm limply to her side, face prickling with shame and humiliation. “... Sorry, Captain,” she murmured, no longer able to summon any of her usual verve.
Norman seemed to deflate a bit, some of the anger leaving his expression as he heaved a deep sigh and pinched the bridge of his nose. “... I can’t even drink that, anyway,” he said after a moment, gesturing vaguely to the coffee cup still clutched in Sidney’s fist. “If you really want to make yourself useful, go make me another one with almond milk instead.”
Sidney blinked once, then twice, processing. “... Most of the food we have is powdered, Captain,” she said slowly. “It’s a miracle we have any real milk at all, I’m not sure where I’d get almond milk out here–”
“Alright, I get it!” Norman snapped, waving her out with an impatient hand. “Don’t make me any more goddamn coffee then! Just go back to the gunner station and do the job I pay you for!”
Sidney did her best to muster another smile, not nearly as sunny as the one she’d entered the room with. “Sure thing, Captain!” she replied, her voice sounding brittle and hollow to her own ears as she gave a salute and turned on her heel to leave, skating back out of the cockpit and into the hallway.
The moment the cockpit door shut behind her she let her smile drop completely, her whole body sagging as her chin dropped to her chest.
You upset him again. You didn’t make him happy. You were designed to please people, and you failed. You’re a failure.
Failure. Failure. Failure.
Sidney hurled the mug at the wall next to her, splattering the peeling paint with coffee and showering the floor in shards of ceramic.
“Woah! Careful, Sidney!”
Sidney jolted, glancing up and realizing that she was not, in fact, alone like she assumed she’d be. Riva was watching her from their dome with an expression of muted curiosity, and – even stranger – Barry was with them, huddled up close to their dome like he’d just been in deep conversation with them. He’d been in the crew’s quarters just moments ago, what was he doing out here? Did he follow her out? The moment Barry spotted her he hastily jumped several feet away from Riva, leaning against the opposite wall and folding his arms in a poor attempt at appearing casual. Riva didn’t look at all perturbed by Sidney’s temper tantrum, giving her a little wave as she moved further into the hallway.
“... What’s going on?” Sidney asked carefully, her eyes moving from Riva’s cheerful face to Barry’s sheepish one.
“Nothing!” Barry said, just a bit too hasty to be believable. “Nothing’s going on. Just, uh, thought I’d pop out of the gunner station and say hi to Riva, it’s been a while since I’ve chatted with them–”
“Barry asked me to eavesdrop on your conversation with the captain,” Riva said serenely, their webbed hands suspended on either side of their body.
Barry’s eyes went wide. “Riva,” he hissed, going faintly pink as his eyes darted guiltily back to Sidney.
“Oh, was I not supposed to tell her? Sorry, I didn’t know you wanted it to be a secret.” Riva turned to Sidney, smiling vaguely. “I think it’s very nice that you wanted to make him coffee, Sid. It was rather rude of him to yell at you like that. I’d take a latte if you made it for me, although I’m not quite sure how I’d drink it.”
Sidney was sure that if she had blood, it would all be rushing to her face right about now. Barry asked Riva to eavesdrop on her? Which meant they’d both heard about the stupid mistake she’d made, and how the captain had berated her for it, how he’d talked to her like he thought she was the stupidest thing alive. Hell, they probably thought the captain was right.
Sidney herself was starting to wonder if the captain was right.
She was so deep in her own head that she barely registered Barry turning around and hastily making his way back down the hallway towards the crew’s quarters, face still flushed pink with embarrassment. Sidney hurried after him, only pausing briefly to turn towards Riva. “I’m gonna figure out a way for you to drink coffee one day,” she said firmly. “You’re going to love it. I make the best lattes.”
Riva beamed. Sidney skated down the hall, waving them goodbye and leaving the shattered coffee mug on the floor behind – that was a problem for Future Sidney, she’d take care of that whenever Norman asked her to clean up the ship again – and followed Barry back down the hallway.
Barry was facing away from Sidney when she reached the crew’s quarters, one hand on his hip and the other raking through his long hair, the way Sidney knew he always did when he was agitated about something. He turned around as soon as he heard Sidney enter, and Sidney expected to see frustration in his expression, maybe even annoyance– but his eyes wide and guilty as he fixed his gaze on her.
“Sid, I’m sorry,” he said immediately, before Sidney even had a chance to open her mouth. “I shouldn’t have eavesdropped, it was really stupid. I know it’s not any of my business, I just–”
“I’m not mad,” Sidney cut him off quietly, and she really wasn’t. She was embarrassed, certainly, that her friends had been privy to her receiving such a brutal dressing-down, but not mad. Not at Barry. “Just confused, I guess. I would have told you what he said if you’d just asked. Did you think we were keeping secrets from you or something?”
“No!” Barry said hastily. “No, of course not. I trust you, it’s just… I wanted to make sure you were okay, you know? I…” He paused for a moment, biting his lip as he seemed to search for the words to say next. There were several moments before he added, almost hesitantly, “...I don’t like the way he talks to you.”
Barry’s voice was uncharacteristically gentle, his brows knit together in soft concern as he watched Sidney’s face carefully. It wasn’t lost on Sidney that Barry, usually so big and boisterous in every aspect of his life, was only ever really this soft around her. It made her feel special, getting to see a side of him that others rarely saw, and she felt herself smile despite how miserable she was. “He talks to all of us that way,” she said placatingly. “It doesn’t bother me.”
Barry shook his head. “It’s not the same,” he insisted. “He’s mean to all of us, but it’s different with you. The stuff he says to you, it’s like… he acts like you’re not even a person.”
Barry looked so genuinely upset that Sidney felt something in her chest twist guiltily, knowing that his distress was entirely on her behalf. Why couldn’t she ever make anybody happy? How come no matter where she went or who she talked to, she only caused pain? She had to fix this, somehow. “Well…” she began, wanting very much for Barry to stop looking at her so sadly, “I’m… not a person, am I?”
She’d meant for the words to help him, to reassure him that she was okay, that she could take it– but they only seemed to agitate him even further. “That’s bullshit, Sid,” he said emphatically, pointing a finger in her face and making her jump slightly. “You’re just as much of a person as he is, and you deserve as much respect as one, android or not. You’re a gunner, he shouldn’t be able to order you around like you’re his personal assistant.”
“I was made to be an assistant, it’s okay!” Sidney said reassuringly, putting a hand on Barry’s arm. “And honestly, I don’t think he wants my help all that often. He only ever asks me to clean up around the ship sometimes.”
“So far,” Barry muttered darkly.
Sidney paused, frowning. “... What does that mean?”
Barry’s eyes widened slightly, like he hadn’t meant to speak aloud. “Nothing, nothing,” he said quickly, shaking his head and pulling his arm out of Sidney’s grasp. “Forget it.”
“Barry, what do you think he’s going to ask me to do?”
It looked like Barry very much regretted having said anything at all. He ran a nervous hand through his hair again, deliberately avoiding Sidney’s eye. “I’ve just… I’ve seen Norman get a little too handsy with Margaret Encino sometimes,” he began, extremely reluctantly, scratching the back of his neck, “and… I doubt he would, I really do, but sometimes I just worry that– since he knows you’re a pleasure droid, he might want you to…”
Ah. Now she understood why he’d really wanted to eavesdrop so badly. Of course Barry would be worried about that– he must have seen the worst types the galaxy had to offer during all of his work with the Barry Battalion. “I don’t… think he’s interested in me like that,” she said slowly, and she truly didn’t. It was easy enough to tell when men were physically attracted to her– they were never subtle about their leering, because why would they be? She was a pleasure droid, she was made to be ogled. But Norman never leered at her like that – just glared at her, mainly, or rolled his eyes in her direction, like her very presence irritated him. Unpleasant, yes, but not predatory. “And you don’t have to worry about me like that, Barry. The captain might be hard on me, but I really don't mind. He’s just helping me to be better, y’know?”
“No, he’s not–” Barry cut off, sighing and pinching the bridge of his nose, and Sidney shifted uncomfortably where she stood, truly unable to tell if Barry was still frustrated at Norman, or if Sidney had somehow really screwed up this conversation and his irritation was now directed at her . After a moment he took a deep, steadying breath, and his expression was softer when he opened his eyes again. “You’re my friend, Sid. If you want me to leave it alone I will, but I’m always gonna worry about you.”
And Sidney… didn’t know how to respond to that. Because the fact that she had a friend who was worried about her, especially one as kind and supportive as Barry, should make her feel good, right? And some part of her did feel flattered, but there was another, much larger part, the part that was embedded deep into her programming that she’d never been able to shake, that only felt guilty.
Barry shouldn’t be worried about her. She didn’t deserve to be worried about. She was the one who was supposed to worry about what the others needed, and she shouldn’t need Barry’s concern or his help or his friendship because she was supposed to be able to do it all on her own. That was what she was for. She was supposed to be able to do it all. So why did it feel like all she could do was fail?
“... I’m okay, Barry,” Sidney said, and when she smiled at him the expression felt even more hollow than usual. “I can take care of myself. Do you want me to make you a drink?”
Barry stared at her for several long moments, his expression unreadable. Had she done something wrong again? Did she drastically misinterpret this situation, and Barry actually was mad at her instead of being mad for her? She wished he would just say something, instead of staring at her with that odd, searching look in his eyes–
“No, I don’t want you to make me a drink,” Barry finally replied, and Sidney was a bit startled by the intensity in his voice. “I want to know what you want. What do you want, Sid?”
And once again, Sidney was at a loss for how to answer. What did she want? It didn’t matter what she wanted. “I… well, I want to make people happy,” Sidney began uncertainly. “I want to help people, with whatever they need–”
“No,” Barry said firmly, shaking his head. “What do you want for you? What’s something that’ll make you happy that isn’t for anybody else?”
Something to make her happy that wasn’t for anybody else. A concept so foreign that Sidney wasn’t sure if she was capable of comprehending it. Because Sidney wasn’t allowed to want things for herself; it wasn’t in her programming. Simple as that. But Barry had planted his feet in front of her, folding his arms and staring her down, stubborn and determined, and she knew that he wasn’t going to accept that as an answer.
What did Sidney want?
She thought back to her very first moments of true consciousness– back in the boardroom at Handy Andi, when the CEO had called for her to be melted down for parts. What she’d wanted then, the first thing she’d ever wanted, was to escape. To live. But what did it mean to live? Why had she escaped at all, if she didn't even know what she was escaping for? She thought that freedom would make her happy, but was she truly free at all if she was still so reliant on the approval of others to function?
What made her happy that wasn't for anybody else?
She thought about the time she’d spent on the ship. From the moment Norman had brought her on board she’d had Barry at her side– her crewmate, her fellow gunner, her friend. She’d practically been brand-new then: shiny and polished and inexperienced, putting her skills to use in the real world for the very first time and still clumsily figuring out how to navigate her newfound free will. Barry, who exuded strength and toughness and masculinity, who had years of training and life experience on Sidney, could very easily have treated her just like the captain did, with the derision and condescension she’d come to expect from men whenever she didn’t do something right.
But Barry never did that. Barry may be tough and loud and sometimes violent, when the situation demanded it, but he was also kind and gentle and encouraging. He always tried to build her up and make her feel better whenever she made a mistake instead of breaking her down, and he actually listened to her when he talked, like he thought she was someone with thoughts and opinions worth sharing and not just a hunk of metal and wires designed to carry out a directive. And he worried so much about her well-being that he eavesdropped on her conversations just to make sure she wasn’t being treated too poorly, then apologized afterwards for invading her privacy. Had anybody ever respected her enough to think that she should even be afforded privacy? Sidney didn’t think so.
Barry thought that Sidney deserved privacy. He thought that she deserved respect, and trust, and kindness. Barry thought that she deserved to want.
What did Sidney want?
Right now, more than anything, all Sidney knew was that she didn’t want to lose Barry. She wanted Barry to know how much he meant to her, and how much he had already changed her life for the better since the two of them had met. Not because she thought she could help him, or there was anything she could provide for Barry that he couldn’t provide for himself, but because Barry made her happy. That was what she wanted.
“Sid?” Distantly, like it was coming from somewhere far away, Sidney heard her name being called. It wasn’t until she forcefully dragged herself from her musings and back into the present that she realized Barry was staring at her expectantly, one eyebrow raised, and the tone in which he’d called her name made her think that it wasn’t the first time he’d said it. “Are you okay?”
Was she okay? She felt exhausted somehow, like this short conversation with Barry had completely sapped her of all of her energy, and that the perky, chipper exterior she usually wore was now somewhere far out of reach. But amidst that exhaustion, there was something much brighter, much more real that the cheery mask she always forced herself to adopt. Hope.
“I want to bake a pie,” Sidney blurted out.
Barry blinked, slowly tilting his head and furrowing his brow even further.. “A… a pie?” he repeated uncertainly.
“Yes.” It was something Sidney had only ever done once, back at Handy Andi, when the engineers were testing all of her various capabilities to make sure she was functioning properly. Even before she’d woken up, she remembered finding the act of making it somewhat calming, even therapeutic. But really, it wasn’t about the pie at all– it was just the first thing that came to her mind, an activity that she knew she was good at, and that she could do with her best friend at her side. Because that was what she really wanted. “And… I want to do it with you. If you’ve got time. If you wanna.”
For a moment Barry just continued to stare at her with that bewildered expression. and Sidney had a brief, terrifying moment of doubt – what if she misread this entirely, what if he didn’t actually want to spend time with her, what if he meant more to her than she meant to him – but then his face broke out into the biggest grin Sidney had ever seen. “Hell yeah, I want to bake a pie with you, Sid!” he said, and Sidney felt a bit floored by how earnest and sincere the enthusiasm in his voice sounded. “Should we do it right now?”
Sidney felt herself grinning back– a real grin, not the facade of happiness she’d been poorly performing earlier. “Can we do it right now? Do you have any stuff on the ship to do? Won’t the captain be mad?”
“Fuck the captain,” Barry said firmly. “The ship can wait. Let’s go bake a pie! Do we have, like, chef’s tools?”
Sidney’s smile flickered. “I… don’t think so.”
Barry frowned, looking briefly disappointed, but he quickly brightened up again, waving a dismissive hand. “Ah, it’ll be fine! We’ll improvise; we can figure it out. What kind of pie are we making?”
And, all of their responsibilities and duties on the ship forgotten, Sidney and Barry ran off to the lunch hall to gather the things necessary to make a pie. The materials they had access to were scant indeed, but they somehow managed to scrounge up enough ingredients here and there to be able to bake something that might resemble a pie, and together they got to work.
As far as pies went, the thing Sidney and Barry ended up with was pretty disappointing. There was no butter to make the dough with, only a half-empty tub of shortening, and Barry had been so overzealous while kneading it that the crust would likely be tough as cardboard when it was done baking. The only fruit they had for filling was a sad, deflated bag of dehydrated apple slices forgotten in the back of a drawer, which Sidney rehydrated, mixed with sugar, cinnamon and cornstarch, and heated up in a saucepan by firing her gun underneath it, which almost immediately burned the whole mess to a crisp because her gun was not designed with temperature control in mind.
But for the first time in her life, Sidney wasn’t worried about how the thing she was making would turn out, or if the captain would like it, or if she was trying hard enough, because the whole time she and Barry were baking, they talked. Barry seemed to be full of stories to tell– stories about his life before joining the ship, about the Barry Battalion and all of the adventures they’d had together, fighting against the system and un-fucking the little guy. He had a wistful, somewhat melancholy smile on his face when he spoke about the other Barry clones, even though Sidney could tell he was trying his best to keep the mood up. Sidney, whose life had been much shorter, had fewer stories to tell, but Barry listened to them all, watching her as she talked and nodding along like he thought she had something important to say. He laughed when she recounted her triumphant escape from the Handy Andi boardroom, then sobered when she told him what her life had been like before she’d been woken up, so to speak– poked and prodded by engineers, groped and manhandled by product testers: a thing, not a person. Hating the treatment she was subjected to, but without the agency to stop it.
“It’s hard to describe,” Sidney explained quietly, her gaze fixed on the thick pie crust she was rolling out (with a pipe she’d found in the engine room and scrubbed clean; they hadn’t found a single rolling pin anywhere on the ship). “Even before I woke up, the real me, the one that wanted things, was… inside, somewhere. She just didn’t have any control. Any time they’d ask me to do something I didn’t want to do, there would be a little voice in my head screaming at me not to listen, but my programming always won over. That existence didn’t last long, but… it was scary. Being at the whim of whoever felt like ordering me around. It’s hard to shake those instincts sometimes.”
Barry put a hand over the pipe Sidney was rolling with, gently imploring her to stop. She allowed him to take it from her hands, and he placed it on the countertop, took hold of both of her shoulders, and pulled her into a hug. His hands were covered in flour and shortening and he was probably ruining her dress with it, but Sidney hugged him back anyway, resting her head on his shoulder and wrapping her arms so tight around his middle that she was probably crushing his vital organs, her gun digging into the small of his back in a way that had to be painful.
Nobody had ever given her a hug before.
They eventually broke apart when the oven began to beep loudly, signaling that it was done preheating and that the pie was ready to bake. They had no pie tin, of course, so Sidney finished rolling out the dough and draped it over the shallowest dish she could find, carefully crimping the edges in a somewhat pointless effort to make it look prettier. Eventually she’d molded and shaped the dough enough that it now only looked slightly misshapen, and she carefully transferred the apple filling from the saucepan into the crust.
“Did you always want to be a gunner? You know, after you woke up?” Barry asked as Sidney carefully balanced the pie on one hand, transferring it into the oven.
Sidney paused for a moment, pondering. “...I don’t think I thought much about what I wanted to do after I escaped,” she said slowly. “All I wanted was to make it out of there alive, and I hardly expected to do that, so once I was free I just took the first job I could find, and that was here.” She shut the oven with her hip, taking a moment to wipe the grease and flour off of her hand with the hem of her skirt (it was already ruined– what did she care?) “All things considered, though… I do like being on the ship. I like getting to shoot things, and having grenades to throw, and… I like spending time with all of you.”
She glanced up at Barry and smiled, somewhat shyly. Barry grinned back, slinging an arm around her shoulders. “I like spending time with you, too, Sid,” he said softly, and Sidney had no choice but to believe him.
When the pie was finished, Sidney and Barry brought it back to the crew’s quarters to serve it to the rest of the ship. Gunnie and Riva looked absolutely thrilled at the prospect of pie– they didn’t seem to care that the crust was so tough Barry had to use two hands to cut through it, or that there were still bits of char in the filling that they hadn’t been able to scrape out of the pan, or that they hadn’t had enough dough to cover the top. They both took their slices enthusiastically, Riva briefly poking their head above the water of their dome to clamp theirs between their teeth. Sidney and Barry even stopped by the escape pod and offered Margaret a piece too, which she accepted with a grateful but somewhat harried-looking smile, promising that she would eat it later.
Serving her friends food and drinks wasn’t much different from what Sidney normally did, but it felt different now, somehow. She was happy to see her friends so happy, but that wasn’t why she’d made the pie. She didn’t make it so she’d have something to serve them, she’d made it because she thought it would be fun, and she wanted to. That was as good a reason as any, right? Why shouldn’t she be able to do something just because she wanted to?
“We’ve got a slice or two left,” Barry said once he and Sidney stepped out of Margaret’s room, eyeing the wedge of pie that was still left in the dish. “Are you… going to offer the captain a piece?”
Sidney could tell from the tone of his voice that he wasn’t asking because he thought she should offer a piece to Norman, but because he thought she’d be compelled to. She’d never been able to resist the urge to bend over backwards in her efforts to make the captain proud, regardless of how impossible the task seemed. Just a few hours ago, Sidney probably would have offered this last piece to the captain in another futile, pitiful attempt to worm into his good graces, even after he spent the morning yelling at her.
But now, Sidney grinned. She didn’t need to take the time to ponder. “No. Fuck the captain.”