InArTiCuLaCy, SpEkSeI sPaCe PiRaTe SeEkS uKe

[Larry Yakomoto]

THE WORLD IS DARK. THE SUN DOESN'T COME OUT FROM BEHIND THE CLOUDS OF SMOG ANY MORE, LIKE IT'S AFRAID. IF I WERE THE SUN, I'D BE AFRAID, TOO. I'D BE AFRAID OF THE EXPLOSIONS GOING ON ON THE LITTLE BLUE PLANET BESIDE ME TURNED GREY, AND I'D BE AFRAID OF THE SHIPS DARTING IN AND OUT OF ORBIT. EARTH'S CONDITION IS STARTING TO SCARE ME, AS IS HUMANITY'S. I WATCHED A LITTLE GIRL DIE LAST WEEK FROM THAT WEIRD DISEASE THAT'S KILLING PEOPLE OFF BY THE THOUSANDS. FOR THE FIRST TIME IN TWENTY-SIX MISERABLE YEARS, I CRIED.

Recalling the memory that had been nothing short of traumatic for him, Rogue's hand paused above the yellowing paper, trembling faintly as it gripped the pen. It was rare for him to become this overcome with emotion, but sometimes things just... really got to him.

He had to stop writing. His eye (yes, singular) was starting to hurt, his hand was cramping a little, and the utter inarticulacy of his description was maddening. Nothing could describe the world or how he felt about it.

Defeated and tired, the slender young man stood, running an oddly calloused hand through his shockingly red, unruly hair. He picked up his jacket with slow, uncertain movements, completely lost in thought. The sound of a shell exploding not three blocks away, however, tore him from pensiveness and grounded him to reality. He looked out the window with his single, keen brown eye, then shook his head. Damn. He hoped there weren't any casualties.

Probably just another friggin' drug war, he thought grimly, tugging on the worn, brown leather jacket. He pulled a crushed pack of cigarettes from the pocket and went out of his apartment door, heading down the hall, the nicotine craving growing strong by the minute. But he refused to smoke inside: bad smell, too many fire hazards, as well as an incentive to quit. Not that he would.

Once outside, he pulled a slim, cylindrical tobacco stick from its package and placed it between his lips. Ah, tobacco. During the lste twentieth century, people had started to realize what a horrible thing it was, and consumption went down. But now, in 2183, people were too goddamn jaded to care. It was all a matter of choosing your death, anyway. If you wanted to die slowly, you smoked. You wanted to die painfully, you got involved with one of the drug cartels or the petroleum maniacs. You wanted to live and tried to do so peacefully, you were caught in the cross-fire of a drug war or became the victim of what people were referring to as the Paleo Black Death.

If you were smart, like Rogue, you didn't care how you died. You did what you had to do to survive, and if that meant killing people or selling drugs, then you did it. Smoking was just a bad habit he'd developed while trying to figure out ways to calm himself down.

Rogue had a spot right outside his apartment building where he liked to smoke. Presently he stood there, leaning against the building, gazing out into the smog, wondering vaguely if there were any survivors of the explosion down the street. He lit the cigarette, took a long drag off of it, then exhaled the smoke, the cigarette between his lips all the while.

His apathetic, one-eyed gaze shifted constantly. His right eye was the one exposed. The other had been irrevocably injured and, as a result, horribly scarred and completely blinded in a fight some ten years ago. He rarely, if ever, removed the eye patch.

And so Rogue stood in the middle of a war-torn planet Earth.

Two hundred years prior, someone had finally flipped out and launched a nuke in the Middle East. Consequentially, a third of the world's population had been killed. The government had been thrown into disarray and eventually toppled. In America, a sort of hierarchical system of gangs and drug/oil cartels now ruled everybody. That didn't say much, though, because they didn't govern the people. They didn't do anything but regulate drugs and fuel.

Many people had taken to space. The moon was being colonized, people were puttering around space, building stations, and generally scraping by fairly well.

Rogue did well because he was, in layman's terms, a "space pirate." He had a ship and many shady intergalactic acquaintances and lots of contraband, and lived a step above the rest of the population simply because he could get whatever he needed on the black market.

So that's how things were, and Rogue, for one, did not forsee change.

[JackSpikyFruit]

(( RAWR!! I know Larry-kun is leaving soon, which is why I'm going to save this spot for meeeee T__T I wasn't able to do it in Static, which is why I'm doing it now! I hope you won't mind, Larry ( '.') I'm being sinfully selfish right now, please forgive me U_U -stabs JSF sign on thread- Ta-da...now let me go write a post ._.

Fuah! Before you go, Larry, would it be okay if I were a space cop? ~I'm gonna get you, like a space boy!~ Or, perhaps some assassin whose intention is to destory the government because he's a hardcore tree-hugger?))

[Larry Yakomoto]

((*gigglesnort* That's fine, dearie. I'd love for you to post here. ^^; You can be whatever you like- space cop, tree hugger, whore, fellow pirate... take your pick. ^-^ Anything can work. Wahaha. *flyingtackleglomp*))

[JackSpikyFruit]

ooc: sorry it took so long T_T Inspiration didn't hit until today! And I know that a whore isn't too unique O_o; but he's a special whore ^^

Aiden woke up to the drifting breeze of night brushing against his powdered cheek. Still dressed in the outfit he had worn yesterday, the youth had sprawled onto his bed after last night’s debacle and had fallen asleep through most of the day so it seemed. Faintly he remembered the afternoon sun, irritatingly inching its way past the sky, before he had drifted off in a hazy dream.

Now that he was awake, or half awake as he was having difficulty opening his shadowed eyes, the pains and bruises of last night were beginning to torment him. With a groan that ripped apart his parched throat, Aiden sat up from his rickety old bed to run a hand through his blonde hair, the color of dried dandelions. Fingers feeling for the mound swelling on his scalp, Aiden let his gray eyes scan his rent.

It wasn’t much. Built of one room to sleep in and a bathroom the size of an average closet, Aidan had spent nearly a third of his life here in this hell. With faded wallpaper with floral design that was slowly beginning to peel off the wall and window curtains the shade of a rotten orange peel; this was what Aidan called home.

The bathroom proved to be no better than its larger counterpart when Aidan, finally finding the determination to get up and start another day—or night--, stepped into it. Its tiles were cold. Bacteria that grew in the tiny fissures of the bathroom floor gave the tiles an oily feeling that made one’s toes curl in disgust.

Aidan had gotten used to the feeling over the years.

Staring into the broken mirror that hung above the sink, Aidan looked at his many faces and, under the dimming bulb hanging above him, touched a purple bruise that was spreading like a plague on his cheekbone. Sighing to himself for being so careless with one of his clients, the youth gently powdered his face until any signs that might decrease his business—a bruise on the cheek, for example—had vanished under a thick layer of makeup.

With his lips glossed over with a cherry flavored lip gloss, Aidan tucked on his vinyl, knee-high boots that matched perfectly well with his short skirt that did more to reveal rather than hide. With a top that seemed to have been melded onto the blonde’s skin, Aiden strode out his hackneyed apartment with his chin proudly held up.

His owner, also the owner of the bar that was beneath his apartment on the first story, was found sitting at the counter, sipping from a bitter beverage. Richard was a man that, despite his career, had an air of dignity about him. He received ninety-five-percent of Aiden’s profit and the rest of the prostitutes. It didn’t allow Aiden to save enough money to buy anything extravagant, but it was enough to buy a bottle of water and some crackers.

Hair gelled back and chin freshly shaven, Richard blew a puff from his cigarette and glanced at the boy exiting the building. “Don’t come back so drunk next time, Aidan. You don’t know how difficult it was to get you up the stairs.” Richard chuckled to himself, a warm kind of chuckle that wouldn’t have been expected from such a man, and returned to gazing at his reflection in the drink.

Aidan, an optimistic and rather childish seventeen year old, pinched his face together and stuck out his tongue. “Don’t worry about me,” he said, “I can take care of myself. You learn from your mistakes, you know.”

He heard Richard’s reply, but strode out the building with wide strides.

Outside of the building, Aidan stood up his tip-toe and began his search for customers. To his great, immense, delight, a group of men huddled beneath the light pole appeared several blocks away, each one a worthy target. He sauntered up to them, a seductive sway in his angular hips, and loquaciously batted his eyes at the four men.

“Mind if I join?” He asked, boldly slipping into the group of men and rubbing his behind against another’s groin. There was an immediate ripple of reaction that Aidan had grown accustomed to. A hand on his bare him, another slipping up his thigh….

“How much do you charge?” One man grunted.

Aidan had memorized the prices a long time ago and he recited them as he would recite a song. “Hand job, $25. Giving head, $50. Sex, sex, $100. And anything that you want to do with me, $200.” He smiled coyly and looked around at the group. “But with four men—I’m guessing $500, $100 for each of you.” He felt a tongue lick its way around the shell of his ear. “I’ll take that as a yes.”

~*~

Panting and completely disheveled, Aidan slid down the length of the light pole and took in a deep breath. His hair was sticky with semen, and there was a nasty tang of /something/ tainting his tongue. But it was worth it. For $500 dollars, Aidan would get $25 in return. That was enough to buy himself a decent meal for once.

Smiling and wiping the liquid from the corner of his mouth, Aidan waited to be paid. And it seemed tat he truly was going to be paid, for one man was reaching into his back pocket, the one located in his leather jacket, but instead of dollar bills that he had been promised, the man revealed a gun, a shiny, black gun.

“Here’s your pay.”

The trigger was pulled, a gunshot could be heard ringing through the sleeping town, and Aidan was sent flying backwards, blood spattering across the pavement like as if somehow had swung a pail of paint.

~*~

Groaning, Aiden sat upright and fingered the dent in his head. It hurt. He winced as his finger dipped into the dent in his head. “A-a-ouch.” Looking down at his fingers, Aiden noted the blood there and sat up, his vision blurred by broken circuits. “Oh, Richard is going to be angry about this—“

[Larry Yakomoto]

((Boooootyful post, dearie. @__@))

A few moments following the gunshot, a boy was sort of dumped out of a building several hundred feet away, across the street. Rogue puffed on his cigarette a moment longer, letting the tar and nicotine take their full, beastly effects, then threw the butt to the ground and crushed it with the toe of his boot. He supposed that the "right" thing to do would be to help the boy, but these things often got so complicated....

What are you thinking? he scolded himself. It's attitudes like that that have turned the world into what it is- hell. You hate this place and most of the people living in it.

He squinted through the dim with his one good eye, then pursed his lips as he shoved off of the wall, already reaching for another cigarette. Meeting new people made him anxious. He never knew if he'd have to kill them later on.

He struck his match on the matchbook cover, then lit his cigarette as he traipsed across the street, trying to use the ephemeral light from the match to better see the boy, whom he could now discern as rather tiny and... bloodied.

Flicking away the match, he approached the youth, only to discover that he was conscious. Wow.

Cocking his head, puzzled, his took a long drag off of the cigarette. He was a whore, obviously, which meant that he might have deserved the shot.

"Eh... hey, kid," he half grunted, gazing his slightly eerie, one-eyed gaze, "You... uh...."

It was about that time that Rogue realized the boy had been shot in the head. He knelt, sticking the cigarette back between his teeth to grind it up some more, and inspected the wound.

"Fuck, kid..." he whispered, his one eye going quite wide in amazement. "What the ff-... you... you need some help..."

No hospital would be able to treat the boy in a timely manner, nor would they be able to keep him alive or give the attention he needed. Rogue made an executive decision and lifted the boy in his arms with surprising grace for one so muscular, then headed for his apartment, still grimly chewing on the cigarette.

[JackSpikyFruit]

ooc: I'm glad you liked it ^^' I thought it was long and dry T__T;

The bobbing steps caused Aidan’s circuits to go haywire. The youth couldn’t see anything but a hazy screen that was speckled with many white and black dots. Like chocolate and vanilla sprinkles!, came Aidan’s analogy. His savior was but a silhouette, black with a faint touch of color, which was adorned with a flaming red top that Aidan, under any circumstance or condition, could clearly see.

He shook his head, a human intuition that he had learned would clear his vision and was dismayed when his vision became substantially worse by the disorder of the wires rattling inside his head.

Pain having been subdued long ago, Aidan, a cherry blonde for the moment, wiped the blood, and a few other things, away from his eyes. He was painfully aware of how much he reeked of sex. The husky, nearly palpable scent hung abour him like a plague, and Aidan, a fairly fastidious creature of mankind, found himself wiping his face off the man’s coarse sleeve—or whatever it was, Aidan couldn’t see clearly anyhow.

“A-ah—oh!” Aidan quickly encircled his arms around the man’s neck when the bouncing became noticeably…bouncier. They must be invading the stairs, was Aidan’s initial thought.

Arms still clutched around the firm neck and fingers twisting dangerously tight in the man’s hair, Aidan gritted his teeth harder with each bone-jarring bump

“I’m really alright,” the whore started, squirming in the man’s arms to frequently that his skit was slowly slipping off. “This isn’t the first time something like this has happened. Richard can always fix me, but he doesn’t let us in until morning. So maybe we could so something in the mean time, hm?” He smiled wryly and traced, what he hoped was the man’s mouth, with his tongue. “The other guys didn’t pay me, but maybe you will. I need the money, anyway. Richard says I don’t make enough money and that fixing my wires uses up more cash than I can produce in a week.”

He frowned, glossy lips temptingly sweetened by an artificial cherry flavor, and twined a thin, red strand of hair around one finger. “So how about it? I’ll give you a discount if you put a band aid on my head. I think the dust’s getting in through the hole.”

[Larry Yakomoto]

The fact that Aidan was still conscious, much less alive, was puzzling Rogue. Coupled with his talk of wires inside of his head, though, and of being 'fixed', the red-haired man figured that the boy was one of those humanoid android things, although in a neighborhood as shitty as his own, he was lucky to find anything as advanced as a microwave. He had heard that the robotics used on those sorts of androids were highly technical and sometimes rather expensive. No one that he knew of around there had that kind of money.

He finished mounting the steps, then started down the hallway, arriving at a door marked 423, which was slightly ajar. It was futile to lock it, as the lock, along with the rest of the apartment, dated pre-twenty first century and thusly was easy enough for a child to disarm. Besides, there was nothing of value in the entire place except in Rogue's bedroom.

Had he had the money, Rogue would've stationed a sentry outside his bedroom. Since he didn't have that sort of cash, though, he slept with a gun under his pillow, had installed several more recent locks, and kept the keys in... well, let's just say that he was innovative when it came to hiding them.

Shifting Aidan's insubstantial weight in his strong arms, Rogue kicked the door all the way open and stomped inside (one could hardly avoid stomping in those boots, after all), then layed the young whore on the couch.

There was stuff on the sleeve of his jacket. Blood, he didn't mind, but a stranger's spooge? Eurgh.... He'd most definitely be cleaning that later.

But right now there was a whore on his couch who should've been dead, but was alive and kicking and offering him sex.

"I don't want sex, kid," he said in his soft, husky voice, "just... hold still for a sec. Lemme take a look at you."

With gentility unwonted to a man of Rogue's nature, he grasped Aidan's chin in his roughened hands and tilted just a bit so that he could inspect the wound.

Sure enough, poking through the blood and matted strawberry blonde hair, were a few wires. But what about all the blood? Andriods didn't bleed, did they?

Sighing softly, the man retrieved his "first aid kit", which consisted of gauze, rubbing alcohol, and a bottle of gin that, when ingested in the right amount, cause a loss of consciousness. He handed the gin to Aidan, should he want to dull the pain, then cleaned the wound as best he could.

While bandaging it, he asked, "What are you? How are you still... alive?"

[JackSpikyFruit]

Aidan appeared flustered when he was settled onto the couch. If the man didn’t want him for sex then what else did he want? The android couldn’t think of anything else other than the task that he was built to do, and that was to do the horizontal tango whenever possible and earn money from it, of course.

The youth, clearly taken aback from Rouge’s blatant decline, frowned and gazed at the bottle of gin with coarse dislike. He couldn’t eat or drink liquids, and the pain had substantially subsided in a fuzzy, numb feeling located somewhere around his forehead. With nothing better to do with the alcohol, Aidan dangerously juggled the bottle from hand-to-hand.

However, as numb as his wound was, he certainly felt the calloused fingers as they scraped his baby-soft skin and smeared off a thumb’s length of powder off one bruised cheek. Feeling naked already with a part of his makeup missing, Aidan turned away while Rogue was busy washing the dried up blood from his scalp. The sudden movement caused his wires to move again, and his already blurry vision became increasingly worse. Oh, Richard was going to be very angry.

“I’m a robot, and android.” Aidan brushed Rogue’s fingers away and hastily raked his bangs back down over the wound. “My life expectancy isn’t based on my heart. It’s based on a battery planted at the bottom of my spinal chord, which explains why I’m not dead, yet.” The robot gave the fuzzy figure in front of him a look of concern, as if he thought that /everybody/ knew about androids and their basic structures.

“And robots like me all have a thin layer, like gel, filled with a thick liquid like blood. The layer below that is pressure sensitive, so if he happen to hit me, like Richard usually does, I’ll probably get a bruise in the next hour. Bruises go away eventually, but they take time to heal, just like humans. In fact, I’m pretty much human as it is.” He smiled smugly and seductively crossed his legs. He obviously didn’t take no as an answer.

He was tempted to ask this man why in the world he was helping a robot if he didn’t want any sex in return, but a question like that would have surely chased his customer away. So he remained silent as he squinted his eyes together and tried to clear his dissipating vision.

[Larry Yakomoto]

"So you are an android..." the corsair murmured, tying off the gauze gently and setting it aside.

He knew the most intimate workings of his airship from the inside out, and could dress any wound in a matter of minutes, but when it came to fine robotics, Rogue was lost. Even as a child, the skies had called his name and tugged at his heart, making him long for freedom and neglect his studies on basic robotics. Most of his childhood comrades had become respectable people with decent jobs, and had all been killed a few years prior when all of the fighting started.

Rogue had survived because he was one of the only people in that area that knew how to engineer, pilot and maintain an airship on his own. Unfortunately, that left him very little free time to learn anything but other languages, so as to travel better when out of town. Or the galaxy.

"I told you, I don't want sex. It's a waste of time," he muttered in response to Aidan's further advances. Had the boy not been so terribly adorable, Rogue would've tossed him out already. "I thought you were a human. That's why I brought you up here. Humans, especially small ones, tend to do silly things like die when they get shot in the head."

Since Aidan didn't appear to want any, Rogue took back the bottle of gin and downed a few swigs. It was good, strong gin, after all, and Rogue could always use a drink. Not that he was an alcoholic, mind you, he just liked his alcohol.

"What's wrong?" he queried, watching Aidan squint as he re-screwed the cap on to the bottle of gin. "Something in your eye?"

[JackSpikyFruit]

Aidan blinked a number of times before giving up and allowing his murky vision to stay that way. You didn’t have to be a genius to see that Rogue’s blatantly stated rejection had stung the android somewhat. Aidan had never been declined before, and on the rare occasion that someone /did/ say ‘no’, it was only a moral whim, and they would come crawling back to him with several dollars in hand as an apology.

This man, however, seemed to be completely immutable in his decision, and that was bad, because if Richard caught him in this broken state with no money to pay for his repairs, chances were that Richard would probably pull the plug on the whore and sell him for some cash in the black market.

Aidan shuddered. Ugh,the black market. Who knew what kind of perverted beast would pick him off the shelf and buy him? He had seen plenty of whores dragged away to be sold off. They had left their marks on the pavement as Richard had dragged them away. He could remember their screams of terror that made his heart plummet and his mouth have an awkward, metallic taste. The screeching sounds as they dug their nails into the floor and begged for another chance had made Aidan scramble back of the stairs and into his room. The next morning, Richard carried himself on like he usually did—as if nothing had happened between the time space between then and now. He smoked his cigars and sipped his wine. It was all in a day’s work to him. Only part of the occupation he chose to be.

Still, Aidan wouldn’t alow his mind to be placated with these odious thoughts. He had a potential customer here, even if that certain person currently seemed to be about as asexual as a rock, Aidan would still try.

Falling slack against the cough, with his legs still crossed, Aidan rolled his head from side to side, feeling the wires shake inside his metal skull.

“I have some loose wires.” He explained. “The bullet must have messed them up. I can’t see too well now. You’re all fuzzy and scratchy lookin’. Kinda looks like a TV screen on some wrecked channel, hee hee. Well, Kinda.” The android reached out and stretched his nimble fingers until they contacted with Rogue’s ruined shirt. “Oh, sorry about that. I wiped all their goo on you.” He smirked and lowered his hand to toy with the band around his narrow waist. “Do you usually go around helping people like a superhero? I didn’t expect that from /anyone/ in this ghetto. Especially if you didn’t want any sex in return.”

[Larry Yakomoto]

Rogue flushed faintly. Why had he helped Aidan? That... was a good question.

Primarily, it was because there was so much ugliness in the world... so much violence, so much blood, that he couldn't just stand there and watch. It had been his initial reaction to turn his head, but the thought of some poor, young kid dying in someone's doorway like that, covered in blood and sweat and semen... it just seemed so sad, and Rogue couldn't just let it happen.

He also didn't know, at first, that Aidan was a whore... he'd just thought it was another innocent person victimized by the bad people in the world. But even so, it came back to the fact that Rogue couldn't watch another young life ruined by money-hungry, backstabbing sons of bitches who would just as soon shoot a five year old child as shoot you if it'd profit them.

"It was too ugly," he said at length, his gaze growing slightly distant. "I don't know... I couldn't let you lie there. I thought you were a human, and naturally I thought you'd die if no one helped you... not that I regret bringing you up here. You're quite lovely company... a nice change from... you know, spiders."

Needless to say, which makes me wonder why I'm saying so, Rogue was a bit lonely. Most of the time, it was just him, his gun and, of course, the spiders.

One of his rough, strong hands rifled through his hair, mussing it further than it already was. Ruddy brows knit a little, and he glanced at Aidan.

"If you need money, kid, I've got it... you know, for repairs and... whatnot." He glanced at the bandage, pursing his lips. "Sorry about your head, kid."

[JackSpikyFruit]

“Y-you’d give me money for nothing in return?” Transfixed by the man’s words, Aidan leaned forward with his hands braced onto the edge of the dusty couch to keep himself from falling over. Head quizzically tilted to the side, Aidan deeply considered the thought, as if he believed it was a trap of some sort. The android sighed and hung his head, still not understanding why Rogue would do such a thing.

“You’d really do that? But—why. I’m not human like you, I’m just tin metal.” With one hand still clasped to the couch, Aidan poked gingerly at his wound to get his point across. “It’s true that you saved me, but that’s because you thought I was human, wasn’t it? There’s really no mercy for robots.” Emotions had darkened Aidan’s crisp, blue eyes. He looked down at his blurry hand and squeezed it into a fist that trembled with stress.

Even the whores at Richard’s Palace disregarded him. Sometimes they would even force his mouth open with a shoe and toss a piece of trash inside as a sick analogy to a trashcan. But he hadn’t minded. They were all finicky bitches anyway that Richard would eventually throw out or sell into the black market. Richard, however, would always keep Aidan, partially because Aidan cost little to maintain (to him at least), and partially, this was what Aidan thought, because Richard miraculously respected him in a way that nobody else did. At least Richard /spoke/ to him.

“Everybody thinks that we don’t have any emotions.” The android continued. “But we do. At least…I do. I have emotions too, and I’m thankful that you’re giving me money, but I can’t take it. I’m not /that/ blind. Your room is dark and full of gray, musty colors. You aren’t rich, and I’m not inhumane enough to take money away from you without doing anything in return. But—“ He rose on wobbly legs and steadied himself by setting one hand on the arm of the couch.

Smiling childishly, in a way that seem far too human, Aidan bowed his head, sending a few bolts rolling out of his wound and said, “But I would like it if you could walk me back to Richard’s Palace. I can’t see well enough to go on my own, and it’s not too far away from here….”

/Well/, Aidan thought to himself,/ you’re going to get into lots of trouble if Richard finds you without money./ He scornfully shook his head and ran a few strokes through his blonde hair. /But it’s better than raping a poor guy of his money./ The android smirked and walked in quick circles around the man before stopping in front of him.

“I can’t take your money, but will you lend me your hand for tonight?”

[Larry Yakomoto]

Rogue was much better off than he looked, but why invest money in a place you spend so little time in? His ship was where all the status symbols were... well, his ship and his pocket. Presently, though it wsn't something he cared to reveal to anyone, he was carrying a good deal of cash on his person, as he was wont to do. If it just so happened that he would get into a fight over it, then that was how it was.

I don't get into enough fights these days, Rogue mused as he took Aidan's hand.

"Take both," he said softly, taking the youth's other hand and pressing a few bills into it. "[/i]Please[/i]."

The thought of anyone hurting Aidan just killed Rogue... he was such a sweet boy... probably all too good at his job. He had a gorgeous body and under different circumstances, Rogue might've taken him to bed. But right now, android or not, Aidan was hurt, and Rogue couldn't do anything like that in good conscience.

It occurred to Rogue that he had never really spoken with an android, or really even interacted with one. He'd always sort of held them in disdain, wondering why they were there in the first place, what the point of a robot even was. But Aidan was so human... it was amazing. Rogue stood corrected, as it were, and felt like a jerk for having such prejudice. It then occurred to him that, had he known Aidan was an android, he never would've considered helping him. Robots can't really die, per se, can they? How horrible of me, he thought, ashamed, then glanced at the android.

"I think I know where Roger's Palace is," the corsair murmured, tucking Aidan's arm gently against his side and heading for the door.

[JackSpikyFruit]

It seemed that Aidan’s own conscience was battling itself. Common sense told him to take the money, but the moral part of him echoed in his mind that he wouldn’t be as debased to become a depraved android who took money away from others for nothing. Maybe—maybe he could pay back the man tomorrow. That’s right! Aidan’s cerulean eyes immediately brightened, twinkling at the edges like two, sapphire crystals. That’s right! He could always pay the man back and return the favor.

Finger curling over the bills, Aidan smiled tightly and stuffed the money into his underwear, the only safe place to store his goods. It wasn’t like as if Richard allowed him to save enough money to buy a handbag anyway.

Out of instinct, the android quickly latched himself onto Rogue’s arm with his cheek snuggling against the male’s sleeve in a rather ‘clingly’ sort of way. To any stranger who might have seen them together, they would have shaken their heads in contempt. Making love to an android was a forbidden act, but people still looked down upon it. The scorn of having robots taking over the roles of true humans had left a dark mark in mankind’s history. Aidan didn’t mind, most of those people couldn’t even tell the difference between robots and human, the only thing that gave Aidan away was the incredibly obvious hole in his head.

Aidan still couldn’t see very well, and trampling down the stairway proved to be just as difficult as going up. He searched each step with his toe first, and until his foot met with a firm, wooden ground, did he settle to take another step. All the while he clung to Rogue’s arm like a parasite or something worse.

“I’ll pay you back for this, mister.” Rogue said as he checked for the last step. “After Richard fixes me, that is. I can’t do too much as it is right now.” He grinned sheepishly and stepped down.

~*~

Accomplishing the steps made Aidan sigh in relief. He had tackled them cautiously in fear of loosing anymore nuts or screws that Richard might need to repair his wound. On flat land, however, Aidan wouldn’t have to be as prudent.

“Mm, so what’s your name, mister? I’m Aidan. You can come by Richard’s Palace and ask for me anytime, hee, hee. I’m open 24/7 because I don’t sleep like the others.”

[Larry Yakomoto]

As best he could, Rogue helped Aidan down the stairs, and would've offered to carry him had he not had this inkling that Aidan would've refused. Besides, if Rogue had carried the android, then that would've meant going faster, and he wasn't too keen on letting Aidan go. Pimps, classy or not, were generally pretty brutal people. They had to be, Rogue supposed, if they were going to let people debase themselves for a living and take a cut of the profit. Eurgh.

Once finished with the stairs, Rogue found that he didn't mind Aidan clinging to his arm so much. It was... kinda cute. Everything about the waifish blonde was cute, though, right down to the way he tucked the money into his underwear. He didn't want to paid back. Giving that money to Aidan wasn't a way of saying, "You owe me." It was more like his benificent, pre-war half coming out for an hour or so to come to the rescue of some poor, impish android in need.

"Rogue," he replied, allowing Aidan to cling to his arm as much as he liked. He could certainly understand, as the boy was about blind from the snapped wires and loose bolts, nuts and screws. He was glad to have something else to call Aidan... it felt strange calling him "kid", though, and Rogue wasn't sure why. Maybe because he wasn't a kid... he was too grown up to be a kid. Or maybe because he was an android, and thusly was never a child at all... always a teenage whore.

The words sort of echoed in the corsair's mind, stinging him. Always a teenage whore. It sounded so ugly... it was ugly. He shuddered slightly and involuntarily brought Aidan closer, as though trying to protect him from the evils of the world that he made his living on.