[It isn’t— strange despite the fact that he was never written with instructions for this. He has no compass, and the only map that spreads out before him is the figure spread out for him, battered and brilliant in cold, suffused light. Hands that pull, pointing out whispered waypoints: not there, here. Here. Connectivity sings in the gaps between those words, and he feels himself thinking it in time as they slip out from somewhere inside Simon's upturned lips.
Here. Here—
Simon’s manufactured interior beckons, and Markus answers, not with a voice that longs to be human, but the soundless one that promises he’s something else entirely: a language of hunger that maintains no etiquette, to tell him that he shouldn’t— delve deep into the dense tangle of internal wiring and connective divides, curving his wrist against the grain. There are deep grooves, notches he can't identify at first. Doubling back over score marks, function melds with feeling: here, the empty basin where a connecting rod has warped over time and rubbed against its connecting shell; here, deeper, a passageway for accumulated debris sports hatchmarks from years of disrepair. Here. Here, he feels life, trembling against assembled confines.
He pays his tribute with searching hands.
He rolls his spine, and it alters where his fingers lie, deep and high and hot from running synthesis. He’s been hunted; this time he hunts, lifting brilliant eyes from where he’s buried his face, watching— everything. Simon's naked fingertips as they let go, the way his face tips as he lets go, visible just over the arch of his chest and its exposed undercarriage, blue and bright and beckoning, interrupted by the smooth plating of Markus's immersed forearm.
(He wonders brieftly what it would be like to fit more of himself inside and watch, without looking away, where the merger of their bodies begins and ends)
The lowered angle of his right hand, tucked and shifting on some absent, unintended line, catches against sturdy contours; it ricochets sharp and clear, forcing him to blink, and it's only as he flexes his fingertips within febrile cables that he realizes it's part of his own chassis— fingers clipping over fingers, heat trapped tightly between them— ]
no subject
Here. Here—
Simon’s manufactured interior beckons, and Markus answers, not with a voice that longs to be human, but the soundless one that promises he’s something else entirely: a language of hunger that maintains no etiquette, to tell him that he shouldn’t— delve deep into the dense tangle of internal wiring and connective divides, curving his wrist against the grain. There are deep grooves, notches he can't identify at first. Doubling back over score marks, function melds with feeling: here, the empty basin where a connecting rod has warped over time and rubbed against its connecting shell; here, deeper, a passageway for accumulated debris sports hatchmarks from years of disrepair. Here. Here, he feels life, trembling against assembled confines.
He pays his tribute with searching hands.
He rolls his spine, and it alters where his fingers lie, deep and high and hot from running synthesis. He’s been hunted; this time he hunts, lifting brilliant eyes from where he’s buried his face, watching— everything. Simon's naked fingertips as they let go, the way his face tips as he lets go, visible just over the arch of his chest and its exposed undercarriage, blue and bright and beckoning, interrupted by the smooth plating of Markus's immersed forearm.
(He wonders brieftly what it would be like to fit more of himself inside and watch, without looking away, where the merger of their bodies begins and ends)
The lowered angle of his right hand, tucked and shifting on some absent, unintended line, catches against sturdy contours; it ricochets sharp and clear, forcing him to blink, and it's only as he flexes his fingertips within febrile cables that he realizes it's part of his own chassis— fingers clipping over fingers, heat trapped tightly between them— ]