Okay. Deep breath.
Fray clutches his cardboard box by the cutout handles and takes a second to focus. The stagnant airlock he braces himself in does little to support his effort. He’s been winding himself up about this all day, and it’s not going to help anything.
But it’s another week and another mandatory sixty minutes with Tin, who has the unique talent of being able to shred Fray’s patience. It is the social equivalent of being kicked in the shins, and it makes Fray reactive like nothing else. Fray, who, as Lexy once said, is basically a polite but enthusiastic puppy.
And you do kind of have to be an asshole to kick a puppy.
From the start, Tin’s lead researcher had told him not to get his hopes up. He was told Tin was old and stuck in his ways and a bastard under the beat circumstances. They told him that Tin eats memories, which Fray still thinks sounds fake. And moreover, Fray had taken some offense to being told he couldn’t get on someone’s good side. He can befriend anyone, CN or otherwise. It’s the only thing he had to offer the Library apart from his body.
Tin has a racquetball. Fray sees him using it occasionally on his own, bouncing it off the wall and catching it again with his weird padded hands. The first time Fray had come into Tin’s apartment, they had gotten about as far as Fray asking what his name was. Despite answering, and seeming genuinely shocked by the question, Tin had nailed him right in the neck with the racquetball about a minute later.
Today Tin is fully on a long shelf near to the ceiling. It looks well-traveled, blunted notches from his claws buffering the edge. He does not bother to posture or insult. They both know how this routine will go by now. Fray will sit and fruitlessly try to coax Tin into conversation, hoping to find a way to broker his power in exchange for commodity and comfort. Tin will pull his tail over his eyes and pretend Fray is not here. This will continue for an hour.
So far, Fray has been stymied at every turn in his quest to make Tin more cooperative. With his violent outbursts, the staring into the middle distance when spoken to, and being seemingly immune to every offered luxury, Tin is a mystery to Fray. He curses and threatens and makes the most vulgar comments imaginable, so ribald they even stun Fray’s over-active libido into speechlessness.