#thats my justification. bc i cant give cyber this without giving it to boyf it has to be a penilian thingBDKAJS

[lycankeyy]

creature comforts

Actual ficlet woagh,,, (~750 words lol). I wrote this earlier before my head started hurting and my head still hurts so I can't really edit it but I want to post it bc I haven't been posting content much and its supposed to be kind of stream-of-conscious anyway. Like I'd apologize for it not being super coherent but it's not really supposed to be yknow BDJQJD

TW: past torture and trauma discussion

BFs in this one-shot: cyborg!bf (cyber, mine), yourself is extensively talked about but only kind of technically there I guess (ys, @ochrearia)

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Cyber was a good listener. When you lived the short life that he had - and it was easier to convince himself that he was merely a few months old compared to his body's fourteen years - always listening was what kept you safe. You listened to conversations you weren't meant to hear. You listened to the feelings under the words, and then the feelings under those, until you'd heard five variants of the same sentence and had a plan for each. It was another thing he was sure that if he told anyone about it, it would be another poor Cyber thing. It was only second nature, though. Something that wouldn't bother him until he was older.

He knew Yourself more than he'd ever wanted him to.

Didn't blame him, not really. Cyber was the baby. Littlest brother. The littlest brother who'd already been through enough. It's not like he expected an adult to come to a would-be high school freshman for emotional support, anyway. Still, he was good at listening. Overhearing. Knowing.

He wondered if YS knew him. Not the surface of him, but the things underneath, the same way Cyber pried apart other people. Wondered if he knew the way nothing had been afforded to him. Not his life. Not his body. Not his tongue. Not his memories. Not even his own self. All, at one point or another, belonged to someone else. Autonomy stripped completely, slowly fought back for, a battle he had a gut feeling would never quite end.

Not that he wanted other people think about that, or what it meant. He didn't want people to see his scars and think about what led to him getting them. He didn't want people to see the way he flinched at the smallest touch and think about what caused it. He did not want a single person to ever look at him and know. Too deep, too much.

But, y'know, he wondered.

Wondered if he ever realized that this was one of the few choices he'd ever been allowed to make. Loving him, he meant.

It was far from a secret that YS hated himself. It was one of those things Cyber wasn't supposed to know, though. One of those things that wasn't supposed to be his problem. One of those things that he wasn't supposed to worry about. Not that he had a choice in it, either. Too good a listener.

Unfortunate thing about that earlier part about his tongue hardly being his - how was he supposed to say anything? He'd never been good at words in the first place, according to his boyfriend (and Boyf backed that up), and they were so much more... difficult, than feelings.

Too easy to slip up. One wrong phrase and the whole thing goes under. Things meant as compliments could be taken so easily as insults to someone who wasn't in the right frame of mind. And when, exactly, was a good time to talk about something like this, anyway? He didn't know. Nobody ever told him.

So he would sit at YS' side, praying that mere feelings would be enough, knowing that they wouldn't be. When he was really desperate, he invoked something deeply childish and hoped that if he could just think it loud enough, maybe he would hear him.

Thank you for being Safe. I love you. You are like if a muscle relaxer was a person - is that funny to say? I love you. You make me less scared to be alive. I love you. Your joy is like stars twinkling in a new-moon sky. I love you. Thank you for being alive. I love you. I love you.

And then he would curse the mental blocks in his head that made utilizing the man's telepathy magic almost impossible.

It wasn't enough. He wasn't enough, but he supposed nobody had asked him to be. So he would press himself into YS' shoulder, purr as loud as he could, and maybe get a laugh - "the hell are you doing that for? There's nobody else here." - and he would love, love, love. Love until YS got sick of it. Least he could do.

He knew something else he wasn't supposed to. His little secret, for now, which he was more than fine with, as his non-human eyes painted his angel a nice candy-apple red whenever he entered the room.

What a coincidence for it to be Cyber's favorite color.