Work Text:
“Hi,” she says, after she puts the food down, “I'm here to help with your plans for world emancipation.”
Dirk puts down his soldering iron, lifts up his shades, and gives her a look.
“Yeah?”
“No,” Kanaya says, “I lied.”
Protective prison is not the nicest place to be, but Dirk's quarters have enough things soft enough to sleep on. And having a second to work the knots out of his neck is something he wasn't aware he wanted, but apparently something he needed. Dirk is just here to make robots and follow orders so he can see out his days in relative comfort doing something he’s able to do.
Some days it still burns in him.
He can hand her a soldering kit and a circuit board map to get on with and she'll do fine so long as he talks her through it, but the moment he looks away, it's a dripping mess full of globs of conductive metal and melted wiring. She gives him a bright, apologetic smile when she does.
“I'm bad with technology.”
“Yeah, I figured.”
Why she's here, he hasn't got a clue.
He could ask for a new room-mate – though as the months draw by he begins to speculate. Most trolls won't even see dawn without a ruckus, but he's grudgingly diurnal and so is she. Kanaya is kind of like a project, too – and Dirk loves fixing things. He sits next to her, his butt slipping off the edge of the narrow bench, and tells her all the tips and tricks he knows.
“Like here,” he says, pointing to a definite improvement in her boards, “You're doing ok and it'll probably pass quality check. But that kind of work tends to burn out if there's any power surges.”
She gives him another bright smile.
A little later and they're in a pile of scraps together – she's playing with his hair, and her nails are fucking beautiful as they lightly run over his scalp. She's got a neat little buzz of a sound down somewhere in her chest and the android parts aren't so uncomfortable, once you get over the way the troll-gray silicone looks.
“What are you really in here for, Kan?” Dirk asks.
She prods his ear with a fingertip.
“Subversive activity,” she says, “What else could I be doing?”
He shrugs, and elbows his way deeper into the pile with a self-satisfied grunt.
“Haven't a clue,” he says lazily, “Thought you'd run a home for distressed little trolls with no lusii.”
She flicks the round shell of his ear.
“That implies that caring for cullbait wigglers is not a subversive activity.”
They don't really talk much about how they got put into prison – Dirk doesn't know if it was the propaganda mashups he stuck on trolltube or just his robot crafting finesse – but he's here to do a job and pride dictates that he do it well.
Kanaya finally starts getting handy enough to hand some of his workload to, and though Dirk is meticulous about the work leaving his shop, he's easing up a little on her own stuff – no use picking at it if it works, right? The next ones will be better, he just has to guide a little.
With two people making robots – One and a half, with Dirk's supervision, technically – the output from his workshop is just a little higher. News is hard to come by, but the juggalos seem pleased. Kanaya squirrels away electronics in the chest cavity before clipping it shut and letting the officials take them away, and each day she seems a little happier, a little more smug. Dirk has no idea why. Newfound empire loyalty? Trolls don't make any sense, even if you live with them for close on a year.
The news comes in about six months or so after that - almost a full squad of ‘bots recalled for fried chips. easy to fix, though the numbers are pretty questionable. He takes himself off to the can abruptly when the docket lands on his table, and quietly sneaks back after a few moments, hovering in the dark shadow of the tool lockup while he watches her work.
She does the circuit as he’s showed her, deft by dint of repetition, and reaches for a roll of solder he put to one side because a couple of tests showed it to be inferior.
She taps the end with the solder iron tip, letting a blob drip lazily onto her previously-pristine work, and snaps off the melted part to keep it looking sharp. The metal cools as she picks up the circuit and taps it on one side to scratch the contacts, and then she adds it to the rack to be placed in a robot.
“Hey,” Dirk says, and she jumps, letting out a nervy creak of a noise.
“Hello,” she says, picking up another board and reaching for a circuit map, “Can I help?”
“Yeah,” he says, picking up the circuit from the rack in two fingers, “The guys in purple just sent most of our last set of droids back for repairs.”
“How curious,” she says, giving the board a wary eye. Her hand dips into a dish of contacts without looking at it.
“You’re treating all of these boards the same?”
“Of course,” she says primly.
Dirk moves closer, and sits down on the bench. She shuffles up a little, giving him several spare inches of room, her knee bumping the edge of the work table.
“Hey,” he says quietly, picking up a circuit map, “I’m not mad.”
She rattles uneasily, somewhere down in her chest.
“Really, I’m not angry about it,” he repeats, “But we gotta work on your timing. These circuit faults are pretty uniform. Gotta walk like the worm with this shit.”
“The worm?”
Dirk nods.
“Yeah. Scatter your footsteps. Don’t leave a damn mark to trace back. Fuck up inventively.”
He slides the map a little further over.
“Experiment.”