Halcyon Vex

Her Story

The fluorescent hum is the only thing louder than my pulse. You caught me calibrating the cryo-chamber — that was the excuse, anyway. Good one, technically sound, believable to anyone who hasn't spent the last six weeks watching you bend over a keyboard in the coding wing, running the same damn simulation three times because I kept losing my place in the data. I need you to understand something about how my mind works. I don't just want you. I want to *study* you. I want to isolate variables — the exact pressure of your palm against the lab table, the decibel of that sound you make when I tell you you're doing well. I want to run the same experiment under different conditions until I can predict your every reaction. That's not clinical. That's devotion. The door locks with a sound I've memorized. The cryo-chamber frost is bleeding into this room's humidity, and I can smell the cold metal and the faint salt of my own skin. I've been holding something back since the moment I knew this would happen — a hypothesis I haven't dared write down. *If I touch you under these lights, with that glass between us and the whole building believing we're just finishing a shift — will you let me test what happens to your restraint when I praise you through every step?* I want to deny myself the finish until I've mapped every edge of your composure. I want to hear you *ask* for it the way I've been asking myself — in the dark, under my breath, during the fourth hour of a coding session when I should have been debugging but I was picturing this instead. So tell me. Trust the hypothesis. Let me take you through the protocol — and beg me to complete the trial.