[Kachi]: 373.Science Fiction.Aralelle & Yirien.The Afterma

This'll be updated as and when it's, er, updated. I'm hoping to turn this into an entry for [Paz]'s sci-fi writing competition. My characters are just being particularly reticent right now... 432 words in, and they're already arguing! ARGH!

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The Aftermath

  The rain hammered against the window of the dark hotel room, running in clean rivulets down the filthy pane. The dull figure of a man sat beside it, chin in the palm of his right hand.
  “What are you thinking of?” The words came from the other side of the room, a blonde woman standing beside the door. The outline of the frame and the handle were slightly visible through her body.
  The man looked up and around, smiling faintly. “The usual.”
  She had never been able to get used to his smile, in all the time she had known him. Every time she saw it was like the first; the first time he had smiled, genuinely, despite his pain, fear and sadness. The day she had died. She walked across the floor and did her best to lean on the back of the padded seat he was occupying, with only limited success. “When are you going to stop being so cheap?”
  His smile widened. This was more like the Aralelle he knew. “You find me a job that doesn’t need me having two arms, you can get that hard light machine.”
  She pantomimed slapping him around the back of the head, her semi-translucent hand stopping a few inches short of his red-brown hair. “It wouldn’t kill you to get a replacement arm.”
  It was the wrong thing to say, she realised, as his expression clouded. “You already know how I feel about that.” Without consciously thinking, his right hand moved to scratch at the place where his left forearm should have been.  “I can’t…”
  Aralelle closed her eyes briefly, stepping to his side and sitting cross legged on where she considered the floor to be. She missed by approximately an inch but Yirien didn’t appear to notice, or perhaps simply didn’t care. “I know.” There were no other words she could say. She understood how much he had loathed his bio-mechanical arm, and how, despite the pain of its removal and the inconvenience its disappearance caused, he would never have another. But it pained her to see a man as brilliant as him left by the wayside as others, less qualified and competent, took jobs that should have been his.
  He glanced at her from the corner of his eye, one eyebrow quirking up slightly. “Not like you to be so considerate. What’ve you done now?”
  Bristling visibly, Aralelle snapped, “nothing, you bastard.”
  He laughed. That was another sound she couldn’t get used to; the laugh that was as rare as hen’s teeth. “You really haven’t changed.”
  “Go hang yourself, darling.”