Author's note: Originally written for the Gundam 00 kinkmeme. The prompt lay along the lines of "Tieria gets off spying on the other Meisters having sex" and I delivered it done cyberpunk-style with servings of angst and Meister-whoring on the side. Come on, the whole thing is set inside a giant computer core, what else did you expect me to do but Gibson it up?

He climbs into the womb and the world shifts.

Neon-lit streams of data, endless and changeable as schools of fish, envelope his being as Veda opens up for him. The material world fades away into nothingness, insignificance, faced with this wall, this waterfall of information.

Veda is the node. From here, he can see everything. Sense everything.

Celestial Being spreads across the surface of human civilization, spider-like, fine threads entwined in the most subtle of places, working its way into and through the fabric woven of humanity. He allows his consciousness to lose focus, to dissipate into Celestial Being's network. Both above and inside the fabric itself, he can see the human race for what it is: a shifting, seething red miasma, drunk on primal desires and conflicts.

Like a mass of mindless insects. The thought repulses him, and he feels his skin crawl in his body somewhere outside him.

He homes in on the spot that is the Ptolemaios, homes in and in until he can distinguish the blocks of data representing each member of the crew. Sumeragi Lee Noriega. In her quarters, alone, blood alcohol content 0.08. He finds the external cameras in her room--three of them--and plays back the feed at triple speed, counting the number of drinks. Six. Nothing to be worried about.

He spins away, goes through the other data points, the bee-keeper checking each colony in his apiary. Moving is so much easier here, so much more intuitive, freed from the trappings of flesh and magnetic gravity. He will never understand humanity's morbid obsession with their bodies, with the things that are material. Those unpredictable meshes of nerves and hormones, at the mercy of fear and instinct, show up as unstable flashes of data in the network, and to look at them for too long makes him uncomfortable.

But he knows how much stock the other members place in those bodies, and he has seen them, all of them, in their private moments, alone or together, coaxing pleasure from them, with soft touches and whispered words. Allelujah, by himself, weeping and speaking to the other in his head, the other which shows up as an irregular spike in his brainwaves. Feldt and Christina, arms and legs entwined in the darkness of their quarters, names of their beloved on their lips. Lockon and Haro, sometimes, in Dynames' cockpit, hidden in the tropical jungle but not from Veda's sight. Veda sees it all.

He is sure Veda disapproves of sex, of conjugal relations, of such wanton displays of affection. But Veda never says anything: a wall of passivity, unjudgemental, like a benevolent, fatherly god, both all-encompassing and distant. Veda has never disapproved of anything, although deep inside, somehow, Tieria is sure that Veda is disappointed, in some way, with all of them. Himself included.

His dissipated mind draws to focus at the near collision of two data streams: one Setsuna, alone in the showers and water-slick, the other Lockon, weaving unsteadily across the corridor towards him. There is artificial gravity on the Ptolemaios, true artificial gravity, but Celestial Being has only managed to make one gravity plate, and it was built into the flooring of the shower room, barely large enough to fit two comfortably. A piece of technology many would die to get their hands on, going into something as banal as a water shower, otherwise impossible in space. He will never understand the thought processes of humans. He never uses the water showers; there seems to be something lacking, something incomplete, about cleaning himself with soap and water. A messy, organic process. Sonic waves work much better.

The cameras catch Setsuna's wide-eyed expression as Lockon comes into the shower room. The hot water condenses clouds of steam, obscuring fine details, but chips embedded in the skin of the boy's neck register the quickening of his heartbeat, the child's untrammeled response to an older man. There is a strange attraction there, and Veda has older records: Setsuna losing it, coming onto Lockon like an animal in heat. As Lockon strips with a casual ease Setsuna backs away from him, his back pressed against the wall.

Setsuna smacks Lockon's hand away as the latter reaches out to him. "It is haram," he says roughly. Forbidden. A lie, Tieria knows, obvious from the response of his nervous system. Setsuna no longer cares about sanctity or profanity.

Lockon is drunk, and his biosigns peak and wobble randomly. Tieria feels a frown involuntarily crease his body's forehead a world away: while Sumeragi has shown herself to be still competent while under the influence of alcohol, Lockon has not. Irresponsible. Lacking self-discipline. The man stares curiously at Setsuna, a line between his slender brows. "But I thought--"

"This is different from the other time."

Lockon sits down on the shower bench, a plastic board across one wall of the room, molded and colored to resemble dark teak. "You're still mad at me."

"Mad?" Setsuna's eyes narrow.

"Angry. Upset. About me hitting you."

"No." Setsuna turns away, away from the primary camera, but the chips register the flush of heat in his cheeks, the adrenaline that surges through his body. "That's a different thing."

There's something going on here, something strange, something he can't put his finger on. A sort of vulnerability in Setsuna's voice that is new to the situation, new to Tieria. Setsuna's thoughts are alien to him, separated by a wall of soft human flesh, a web of impenetrable biochemical signals. There are tricks to read a person's thoughts in the way he moves, Lockon once told him, but Tieria doesn't understand it. It's an imprecise discipline, almost repulsive in its inaccuracy.

"You are... intimate with Allelujah Haptism."

Setsuna's reply catches him offguard, not because the information is new, but because the information comes from an unexpected vector, completely irrelevant to the situation at hand. Everybody knows about it; it has become a fact of life in Celestial Being that Lockon Stratos and Allelujah Haptism are sexually involved. Lockon has even spoken about it to Tieria once, his tone neutral and careful. "It's just for the release," he said, his hair sea-breeze blown, "we need it sometimes, to stop from going loco."

In the now, in the shower room, Lockon scratches his head. The sharp edges of his brain activity buzz uneasily as he considers Setsuna. "Does that bother you?"

"No."

"Then why--"

"I can't do this!" The boy's voice grows small, constricted, as his body tenses. The data fluctuates, refuses to stabilize. Tieria feels another frown coming on. Setsuna's loss of control grates on his nerves, and he pulls back, away from him, to consider the relative stability of the Ptolemaios as a whole.

Another block of data, this one decidedly calm: he pulls it up. Allelujah Haptism, asleep in his quarters, but upright in his bunk curled in a fetal position, his knees pulled to his chest. Breathing slowly, in and out, brainwaves comfortably nestled in the shallows of pre-REM sleep. The other one, the madman, the untamed killer, slumbers also with his quiet half. Tieria keeps the monitors on Allelujah's room on, a soothing counterpoint to the unraveling tension in the shower.

"I get it," Lockon is saying, now on his feet, moving towards Setsuna, who grows tenser with every footstep, "you think that there's something more going on between us, between Allelujah and myself, and you don't want to come into that. But Setsuna, it's not like that. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe you don't get it. But for me, sex is just about release, about satisfying a very basic need."

"Allelujah likes you."

"I'm sure he does. Hell, I like him too. But you know what? Even if I hated him, I'd still do him anyway."

Setsuna stares up at Lockon, a confused mix of adrenaline and endorphins. "Do you like me?" His voice is small and strangled, and Tieria hates him at that moment, an unexplainable emotion. He hates how small he is in front of Lockon, hates the slenderness of his wrists and legs, hates the way his dark hair falls around his face in soft wet curls.

Lockon puts his hands on the boy's shoulders. "Yes," he says, perhaps a lie. "I do." He bends forward, compensating for height, and whispers into Setsuna's ear, so soft it barely registers on the monitors. "I like you."

Setsuna's heart rate picks up, and yellow flares across Tieria's vision read his body's arousal. "You're lying," he says in between clenched teeth. "You're always with Allelujah..."

Lockon shakes his head, holds Setsuna close, nuzzles him, strokes his body. "That isn't about me. Not like that at all. It's okay, you don't understand. It's just Allelujah gets so frustrated sometimes, and he needs something to take off the edge. He's already got so much to deal with internally, and I thought I'd help out, you know?"

Setsuna shivers, back pressed to the wall. "Frustrated..."

"Sexually, I mean. He really likes Tieria, the poor chap, but you know how Tieria's like. Frigid. The polar caps would melt before he did..."

In his body, far away, something churns within. Lockon's words hit like a bolt, a bombshell, and Veda seethes under him as he claws for purchase, struggling to find an anchor.

Allelujah Haptism. Still curled up in his room, sleeping, his face a mask of stillness concealed. This piece of information is new, something Veda has not registered, something which has slipped under the radar. Allelujah, when planet-side, spends a lot of his time in the blind spots in the jungle, in the places Veda's net doesn't reach. Sometimes Lockon goes with him, and whatever goes on between them isn't recorded. Confidential exchange of information.

It's as if he knows. As if he knows Tieria watches him.

Under Veda's net his body reacts strangely to the shock, and he at once feels angry and betrayed by his inability to read humans, by his inability to see beyond the data they represent. And Allelujah Haptism, still secure in his slumbering, how long has he known? How long has he carried that knowledge under his skin, in a place Tieria can't reach?

"Tieria Erde... impossible." Setsuna frowns, but he no longer fights Lockon's advances. Encouraged by the lack of resistance, Lockon gets on his knees, weight on his haunches, hands holding Setsuna's hips in place. Setsuna looks down at him. "How do you know this is true?"

"I don't. But I believe it's true."

Lockon guides the head of Setsuna's cock into his mouth, and the boy gasps softly, his eyes going wide. The sight fills Tieria with unnamed horrors, every time, but this time he can't look away, can't tear his attention away from the streams of data surrounding Setsuna and Lockon as their limbic systems respond to the stimuli, enlarging, engorging...

Setsuna puts his hands in Lockon's hair and moans, eyes shut, the flush of arousal prominent even under his dusky skin. Lockon makes sounds in his throat as his lips and tongue work their way around Setsuna's erect head, red and glistening like a ripening fruit.

Unaware of what he is doing he finds himself calling up a data file, an old archive, the record of the last session Allelujah and Lockon had in the shower. He plays it on fast-forward, no sound: Allelujah on his knees, face pressed into the synthetic plastic bench, arms around his head. Lockon entering from behind, Allelujah's throat bobbing up and down as he cries out, fists clenching into uneven formations of knuckle.

He pauses the video at the point before Allelujah hits climax, his face contorted into an expression that looks very much like pain. But the data behind it tells the truth: the endorphin spikes, the enhanced heartrate, the muscular contractions--it's pleasure, real and raw, as close to the primal state as the human body can get.

He compares that visage to Allelujah in the now, sleeping his dreamless sleep, and it seems to be two different people he's looking at. Allelujah has precarious features, poised halfway between coarse Asian bluntness and feminine Slavic delicacy. He doesn't understand the lies of the body, the fallacies they tell. He can't see how Allelujah could ever be attracted to him, to something made of such dull flesh, an organic afterthought in Tieria's existence.

In the shower room Lockon is working Setsuna towards that climax also, and Tieria has seen it happen many times, but he still doesn't get it. The thought that Allelujah wants to do the same to him, to draw him out, to string his body on the same sorts of frenetic, throbbing pulses that now envelope the duo in the shower--it's alien. Everything feels strange. A prickling sensation runs through his body, far away, floating in Veda's material shell. He correlates it to data: adrenaline. But of a different sort from the kind he's used to.

He unfreezes the video of Lockon and Allelujah, lets it play at normal speed. Wet sounds of flesh on flesh, sucking and drawing, Allelujah's delighted gasps as the orgasm takes over. The fluctuating data of his brainwaves, in deep canyons and lofty peaks, so different from the soft murmuring plains of sleep he is immersed in, in the now.

In the shower room, in that same now, Setsuna shudders and arches his back, breath coming in short, frantic gasps. Tieria can't bear to watch; he pushes the camera view in and in until all he can see are the fine dark hairs on Setsuna's upper lip, moist with sweat and desire. Still he can hear the sounds: Lockon's low sounds deep in his throat, his tongue sliding over Setsuna's wet cock, Setsuna whimpering for release as Lockon teases him.

Superimposition: another time, another angle, this one on Earth, Allelujah on his knees, looking up at Lockon as he orally services him, water running over his features, drenching the curtain of hair that hangs over half his face. Grey eyes, pupils dilated, a wide swathe of hot pink flush across his cheekbones. New images, ones not stored in memory: Allelujah between his legs, searching for an elusive answer with his tongue, the grey eye calm and pliant, willing to do something, anything for Tieria...

In the shower room Setsuna is approaching climax, a messy influx of tension and fluids, and Tieria can't help but watch the whole thing, multiple angles, as the boy strains and bucks against the shower wall, his upper lip trembling. From the spikes in Lockon's data Tieria knows that he, too, is rising towards climax, the sounds of his masturbation discernible under the sounds Setsuna is making.

Setsuna pulls at Lockon, hard, and turns around, bends over. Lockon understands. A blur of motion, a change of position. As Lockon thrusts hungrily into the boy's willing body Tieria feels a sudden heat in his distant belly, a fire which spreads through him and blurs his perception of data. Setsuna hits orgasm hard and fast, semen coursing down his slender, sculpted thighs. Tieria's breath catches in an odd way.

From the sea of data, almost unbidden, comes an archived image of Allelujah alone in his room, hands moving swiftly over his groin, whimpering as his climax spills over his fingers. In the sounds from Allelujah's throat Tieria realizes that he can hear fragments of his own name.

Tieria.

He pictures himself straddled above Allelujah, enveloping his hard cock with his own body, a body he does not understand, and the two of them plunge towards climax, the data recorded by their nanochips playing a violent and complementary symphony.

Tieria comes involuntarily, half-shocked by the sensation, the muscles in his calves tight, hips and chest thrust forward, meaningless and guttural data pouring forth from his throat. Wetness, between his legs. An uncontrollable, unquenchable tide.

The yellow world spins under him, a complex, ungraspable construct of bright lights and endlessly shifting information.

For a moment he ceases to exist, becoming data itself, lost in neon thrusts of heartbeat and pulsation.

One beat, two beat. Breathe.

He returns to his senses still floating in Veda, numb and immobile, a disconnect from the unreadable colors around him. In the shower Lockon has Setsuna wrapped in a thick white towel, one arm around the slender boy as they sit on the bench. His other hand strokes Setsuna's thick, dark hair. He's saying something but Tieria can't hear it, something in the audio messed up but he has no energy to correct it.

In his room Allelujah is suddenly awake, sleep-pattern broken. Still curled in his fetal position he frowns in the direction of the camera, as if he can see Tieria there. He gets off the bed, goes to the mirror, checks something in his reflection. Tieria watches the muscles ripple under his thin shirt. Segmentation. Somites, a throwback to evolutionary biology. He remembers then that Allelujah, too, is an artificially-enhanced being, his body adjusted with nanoparticles, rendering it perfect. Perfect and beyond comprehension, the disparate sachets of data that dance in his head the legacy of some hideous past.

A cold, tired sensation washes over his rebellious body. He understands the need for the towel, good foresight on Lockon's part. The air in Veda is silent and weightless, and he very much wants warmth around him. He imagines what Allelujah's body would feel like beside his, hard and sweat-slick. He shudders.

Veda never judges. Never disapproves.

He can't help but feel disappointed.

It takes him a long while before he exits the module. By then the flush is long gone from his cheeks, and he nods mutely to Sumeragi as he passes her by, she a good deal more intoxicated than when he'd last checked in on her. His grip on the travel handle remains firm, calm. Keeping up appearances, keeping up the mask. Not letting the cracks show.

He wonders how long it will take before they finally do.

FIN