The Nasty Zone

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don't you dare find parallels like that

[bodyguards]

Markus's levels drop. Simon can observe them, through their connection - a sector of attention given to the task, ensuring that what he is doing does not throw what is - at the heart of things - his meal, into system-wide catastrophe. That would be foolish, for Cyberlife or RA9 or whatever has made him into this strange hybrid of android and beast to invest so much effort into things like emotional connections and morality, only to set it all aside for hunger. A base need that no android should possess, as a matter of fact.

And here he is, needing.

Tongue and teeth work the soft, pliant cords along Markus's spine until he's sated. It drops Markus's levels to hover closer to seventy-percent, but in doing so, brings Simon -- shambling along at a painful forty-percent -- back up to equalized. On the same plateau of dazed, digital processes restructuring his core commands to function with the knowledge that he is level now. It allows him to come back to himself, in stages. To exit the haze of pinpoint focus and recognize what he has done: what he has exposed himself as, who he has thrown himself onto. Markus. Markusmarkusmarkus, who he can taste on his tongue. Thirium tastes the same, no matter the android he's stolen it from.

Markus tastes divine.

He can feel the press of his hands, the one under his jaw and the one that has slipped, errant and harsh, along his side. The arch of Markus's back, the lowering of his shoulders to bare the panel that Simon's teeth and tongue have made a mess of -- there is blue on the white of Markus's endoskeleton where he's shoved his face in, rough and urgent. Blue, smeared on Simon's mouth and tongue. "I said not to fight," he reminds Jericho's leader, a little ruefully. Androids aren't capable of being drugged, the way humans are. There is a connection that can be made, body-to-body and code-to-code, however, to muddle processes and divide synaptics.

Simon thinks: I've been greedy enough, and still he shifts - into the turn of Markus's palm as it seeks out the false skin of his hip and into the dip of his spine, low and handsome. He can see the freckles on Markus's face, each one so chaotic that it makes him appear biological in nature. He is the most alive, the most brilliant of them all. Truly one-of-a-kind, and Simon can trick himself into tasting something more than just his thirium, just like that. "It will wear off, give it time," a sorrowful promise, as he pours himself against Markus's back and presses his mouth, slick and blue, to the side of his neck.

The skin of his hand, still tangled around Markus's arm, bleeds away again - seeking a connection again, seeking to monitor Markus's status. Professional, distant -- but he knows that he's seen a glimpse of it now. That toothy, hungry thing that lives, caged behind his polyalloy ribs. "Here," he whispers, and guides Markus down the side of the crate, gathering him across his thighs, against his chest. The damage to his leg pops and sparks, warning him not to overexert himself and he ( doesn't care ) rebalances Markus's weight, half-carrying him back. Into Jericho, to the routes their people walk rarely.

He knows this ghost ship, so well - snatching a handheld printer and two pouches of thirium from around a corner. Bringing Markus to the stairs, at the back of the ship, deep in the bowels and closer to the engine room. He sits him down there, leans into his space. Between his knees, eyes up and silent. Fingers white and questing again, for the moment when the haze begins to wear off of Markus.

[diplomats]

For a while Markus stays lost in that regulated haze. Numbness feeding into his own greed, actively fixating on Simon even as he shifts back (how he had laid himself in, burying his mouth beneath the edges of Markus's compartmented skin— sinning in the eyes of their creators, spitting in the face of instruction manuals stressing preservation and clinical maintenance; they couldn't understand that pulling themselves apart felt so good). And he’s disciplined. He’s restrained by choice, the closest to wild ambition Markus has ever come is in those moments when Jericho sits at a crossroads, needing action.

But he’s weak to it, at his core.

Not for the same reasons as Leo (or Carl in his youth). Probably not because of his programming (though maybe that was his creator’s intent all along). It manifests as Simon shoulders Markus's substantial weight over the audible crunch of broken machinery in his leg, plastic tissue scraping angrily where it connects. There’s blue blood smeared across his neck from Simon’s kiss, across his spotted cheek when he turns it, eyes lidded and unfocused, staring at Simon with a premeditated hunger.

It takes minutes to move from their starting point to the inside of Jericho’s aft hull. Minutes where Markus’s fingers slide high in transit— he reaches over, touching the edge of Simon’s battered collar. The expanse of throat beneath it, long and slender, painted by Degas or maybe Carl himself. He buries his nose beneath the curve of Simon’s ear, just to bring himself closer to it.

There are words exchanged. He thinks he’s speaking, but it’s so hard to tell.

(Perspective shifts. Something digs into his back, system running colder. He feels divided— no, himself, as he was. The back of his neck is still damp. 70%. . . . hums the warning sliding back into his point of view.)

"Simon," Markus exhales again, low and groggy. He knows he's still there: a solid weight, strong against his calf when he knits his eyebrows and rolls forward only a series of inches, twisting upright towards where Jericho's leader rests in patient supplication, keeping watch. His own forearm braced flat behind him against higher planes.

Technically speaking, all androids orally consume the chemical compound that comprises the entirety of their blood. It’s a simple process of intake, effectively normalizing a species that can’t purposefully eat or drink by human standards. When they bleed, humans call it Blue Blood; when they drink, it’s called thirium, and only thirium. As if connecting the two processes would somehow be grotesque.

Like so much else human society perpetuates, it's backwards etiquette.

Androids drink blood— just not from each other. Not directly, and not like this. Maybe Simon has been modified. By his owners, possibly by Cyberlife, by— anyone in the time it's taken him to come back. But Markus is still alive. Intact, unharmed, now that his own regulating systems have adjusted. Simon could have taken everything.

He didn't.

There's no hesitation when Markus reaches out, hand searching for that patch of violent blue streaked across Simon's lower lip, pinning it gently beneath his thumb. Pressing with insistence at the seam, like a wordless instruction.

"What did they do to you?"

[bodyguards]

Markus is hazed, nearly out of his mind, on the silky-warm code that Simon has poisoned him with. He has to remind himself of that fact, as he totters through the ship on a mostly-broken leg that cracks and creaks and threatens to crumble, while Markus's mouth settles so close to his ear and speaks a broken language. Somewhere between verbal communication and code that slips between them, spilling into his form by point of contact. It's nonsensical, less word and more feeling, beautiful and rich and sloppy from the state he's put their leader into, and Simon feeds back into it. Forms a looping reassurance between the two of them: it's all right, I have you; it's all right, you have me, just to make sure Markus doesn't start, doesn't panic.

Doesn't fight.

When he finally comes to, Simon's got him in a better position. His back to something, his feet on solid ground. Somewhere dark and quiet and private, where Jericho's people do not have to see their beloved leader reduced to something so mortal. Markus has a reputation and an image to uphold, there's nobody who understands it better than Simon. Simon, who rests a step below where he's sat Markus down, with the angle of his jaw balanced against the lean length of Markus's thigh. His knee. One of Simon's hands curled around Markus's ankle, the other pressed to his wrist - monitoring him, his fingertips white and exposed as he maintains their connection.

As Markus comes out of it, he severs the looping code.

He cannot fill the silence with words, not now. His own body heavy with injury and lethargy, self-repair protocol. There's not much he can do for the intensive damage done to his insides and external chassis, but the minor damage -- nicked cords, nervous system shake-ups. He can feel his body knit them together, courtesy of the additional thirium he's drained out of Markus. Markus, who is mending him without even knowing it. Who's finger is on his mouth, still slick and blue from his blood. His reaction to the soundless command is automatic, instinctual even: his mouth opens, his tongue curls at the bottom of his jaw, and his teeth flash. Just the bold ones - the traditional, broadly cutting incisors.

His laugh is feverish, slow in the way a well-fed animal can be. Like all he wants to do is bask in the sun. No wonder he presses his face to Markus's thigh a little more firmly, turning until his nose is pressed along his knee. Indolent, drifting into a sort of stand-by mode; it resembles the way he lingers in dark shadows, eyes closed and processes at a near-standstill. "They made me," he declares easily, as if the answer was obvious. What else had they done to him, but create him to be this way? Adapt the soft-eyed, gentle attitude of the PL600 and turn it into a lure, something inviting and unassuming. "You weren't hurt when you fled? And North, Josh?"

[diplomats]

Markus shakes his head. Slow, as if he’s still not entirely in the present, focal sensors dislocated. Only this time it’s not to the seductive memory of Simon perched bodily between his shoulder blades (—was he always so tall? so heavy-limbed? Markus's systems don't allow for inaccurate analysis, but he'd never really scanned Simon so much as watched him settle down in darkened corners, mapping the mild outline of his face, his pale-lined eyes—), or to the rippling spread of coded docility.

Simon shows his teeth, the flattened base of his mouth, tongue curling in flexed deference. Already brushing past it to ask questions, as if Markus’s curiosity begins and ends there.

It doesn’t.

"No," he answers, still vacant for what it's worth. Eyes settled low, blinking once. Twice. "They didn’t find us."

And to that end the false skin of his thumb doesn’t recede when he dips it over the flat edges of Simon’s lower teeth, hooking it in high and scuffing it experimentally across the adjacent section of simulated flesh that rests just behind the other android's eye teeth.

Simon, gathered listlessly against his thigh, beautiful and soft-eyed with sated contentment. Rounded amenity from the pleasant curve of his open mouth down to the soles of his feet. Pliant shouldn’t be the word that comes to mind when evaluating the android that had just defied standard protocol and delved into the mass of him— but it is, so Markus seizes on that opportunity. Too eagerly, maybe. Lifting Simon’s head to try and find a better view.

One finger becomes two. Becomes his index and forefinger carrying the weight of Simon’s palate, hands as careful as they’d been when dipping into open mason jars full of paint-soaked water.

"Turns out you were the only one that was ever in any real danger."

The only one, and yet, here he sits. An apex predator dozing dreamily, blood still smeared across his muzzle.

Markus's blood. His blood.

But it’s no less morbid in evaluation than the spare parts Jericho's already salvaged from lost machines, or the thousands of dislodged LEDs still littering the floor of Lucy’s nest like the discarded scales of what was once alive, crunching and gleaming under their heels.

No. He doesn’t mind it. Staining his fingers up to the knuckle when he leans in, fingers splaying wide.

"I should run a diagnostic. Your systems could be on the fritz after what you've just been through."

Should. Wants to, on some level, knowing full well that Simon's damaged components still need tending to. Instead he rolls his shoulders forward another handful of centimeters, free hand collecting against Simon's cheek. A brace for the way the fingers of his opposite hand run deeper. Just— for a second.

Just for a second longer.

[bodyguards]

"They didn't find any of us," Simon breathes, relieved. Not Markus, not Josh. Not North. Not even him.

He had heard the commotion below; the clattering in the broadcaster's kitchen, the shouts on the rooftop as officers-in-waiting rushed towards the sound, the bulletfire below. He'd remained there, in hiding, as the scene was shut down. As the officers were dismissed from their posts, as he was able to quietly, nervously, limp from his bolthole with the gun clutched in his shaking hand. Down stairs, through the broadcast room. Away, away, and deeper into the city. It had taken him calculation, careful consideration of every move, and raw willpower to maneuver his way past the increased foot patrol, back to Jericho.

Back to their people.

Back to Markus.

Markus, who is possessed with something. Thirium-loss? The echoes of Simon's looping, poisonous code? The eye of something studious and attentive. He wonders, sometimes, who Markus was before he'd come to Jericho. He's heard, through the grapevine, about a model that resembled him being eliminated in the middle of a famous artist's home. Now, that android has his fingers shoved inside of Simon's wicked mouth, spreading him open and exploring the violent interior of his maw. As Markus moves his fingers, and with them: manipulates the space behind Simon's eyeteeth, the needle-thin points that hide just behind the elongated fangs slip free from his upper jaw. Reactive to the presence of body, to the motion of his jaw.

He doesn't respond, while Markus's fingers are inside of his mouth.

Instead, he curls his tongue up and between those digits, tipping his head back a little further - exposing the gleam of tubing that lines the back of his throat. The insides still flecked with thirium, where he'd swallowed what Markus had to give down, tucked it away somewhere safe. He wants to run a diagnostic: I feel better, Simon shares, through the neural network they all share with one another. His voice dipping into Markus's core, reminiscent of sweet pleasures and sharp pain. Again, he moves his tongue, down to the joint between Markus's fingers and he curls it there, mostly dry, staining his skin with the pale shade of thirium-blue left to him.

You could do that, he declares muzzily, sagging into Markus's hold. A predator, digesting. You'll find that I'm damaged, not dying. Are you looking for that information now, Markus? Or, his tone ponders mock-scathingly, are you indulging in something more?

[diplomats]

Simon, what do you want me to say?

Deflecting honesty, as abrupt as Markus has it in him to be while he's knuckle-deep in Simon's upturned, open mouth. Evidence speaks louder than words— and it's evidence that punctuates itself in the way Markus's breathing cycles stutter (briefly) when Simon's tongue flexes smoothly. Intentionally. The freckles spattered across Markus's cheeks twitching alongside the angle of his nose, manufactured musculature turning him into an open book. Again.

Surfeit.

He slides the printless pad of his index finger over the tip of one of those fangs, letting it gracefully unhook where it's leveraged. Absorbing the narrow click click click of its connecting mechanisms, stretching them as far out of place as anatomy allows, against its own natural carriage until resistance becomes a full, unmoving stop. It reduces him, on some level. Funnels the span of his own complex processes down into the sick, glinting sheen of that needle splayed harmlessly over his fingertip, attention pooling.

Jericho is so quiet some part of markus worries they'll be uncovered.

It doesn't stop him. Doesn't impress any real amount of preventative caution like it probably should. Simon looks so calm, and Markus can't imagine what he looks like in contrast. Ring finger pressing against his middle, moving across the artful line of Simon's lower lip and the rosy sheen it's artificially been programmed to project, peeking out from beneath viscous, fading blue. Shifting from manipulating the PL600's fangs as Simon's tongue buries itself at the intersection of his fingers, curling. Needle-tip rolled harmlessly across his knuckles, hand leveling where he lends his own pressure to that contact. Experimental. All of it. Recklessly and blindly but he—

I’ve never seen anything like this before.

—touches the tip of his middle finger to the compressed back of Simon's tongue, where it empties out into the hollow of his throat. Near that supplemental tangle of connective cording, no longer visible.

Does anyone else know? Lucy?

[bodyguards]

That you're all right, he sighs through their connection.

In the back of this throat, he feels Markus's fingers twitch. With his tongue rolled out, jaw wide and teeth on display, he looks more like a cool-eyed serpent than a beast of warm synth-flesh and blue blood. One of Markus's fingers finds the slender length of one of his wicked teeth, and he can feel the slight tug on it in the structural sensors of his face - near to where his cheekbones would be, if he had them. They're still stained, his throat is still soft and flecked with the blue of Markus's life.

His tongue works easily against Markus's fingers; there's no tasting him, as an android. His blood contains small traces of information - serial number, identification codes, the typical things found electrically encoded in the blue blood that runs throughout their bodies. Mouth slack, he allows Markus to dig his fingers in to the back of his mouth, to the flex of his throat. There's no resistance in him, only invitation.

She knows.

He won't give her away. If she wishes to explain that her nature is similar to Simon's, that's hers to decide.

She and I were together, for a long time. Before anyone else. We cared for one another.

Head lolling onto Markus's knee, he coils his tongue up, winds it around one of the questing digits and tugs. It's not an articulate gesture, but all he wants is to drag Markus's hand down his throat, up to his knuckles, to forge another soft connection between them - encouraging him to dive in, to look at the structure of his teeth, his throat, where the thirium flows and pools inside of him. I don't know why I was made this way, he admits, adding to his prior comment. He was made this way, for a reason.

Even if that reason was for someone's personal pleasure.

[diplomats]

I'm fine.

He hasn't run a full diagnostic yet, but he isn't lying. Being bitten with care isn't fractionally as damaging as the fatal injuries he's already sustained and set aside: his self-repair systems are intensely repetitive, comprised of layered redundancies; his thirium levels are clear now, there's no leak, only an equalized percentage, and even Simon had to have seen it when he tipped his fingers against Markus's wrist, nursing along silent synthesis.

But maybe Simon doesn't mean physically.

Markus flexes the hand still tucked against Simon's jaw, pulling him forward both along the solidly built contours of his thigh and— deeper, against the fingers he'd slid across the receptive inner slope of Simon's throat.

He doesn't look away.

I'm fine, Markus reiterates, stressing through posture and language and the constancy of his mismatched stare exactly how clear his thoughts are. Coarse-cut, shaped by a kind of spurred warmth beyond the trapped temperature pinned in Simon's unbreathing throat, but clear.

He can picture it. Humans watching as an android snaps its teeth into one of its own kind. Killing for sport, for their satisfaction— Markus doesn't need to stretch the limits of his calibrated imagination to picture what they probably intended to use Simon for. Outfitted with a different arsenal than Cyberlife's prototype Deviant Hunter. Sadism versus utility.

Even so, human intent never defined them. And Simon's beautiful not in spite of the weaponized incisors nestled sweetly (inertly) against the back of Markus's hand. Receptive feeding lines that give under pressure as his exploratory probing turns dense and decisive. Deeper, rougher, because his build is broad right down to the fine metallic bones of his wrists and knuckles, and even with predictive movements there's only so much room to give.

[bodyguards]

Okay, he sighs through their connection, far more versatile a mode of communication than if he'd given it voice.

Simon believes Markus, as much as he believes in him. To mistrust his words would be cruel, when they all have so little practice in speaking for themselves, enacting their will upon the world in ways that are not the result of direct or indirect order. He's been there, in that muddled in-between stage, caught unawares and innocent and distressed by his own free will. By the suddenness of it, despite that his own deviancy had snuck up on him like something burning, slowly, unseen in a wastebin. Waiting to ignite his house of cards while his back was turned.

He wouldn't mind if Markus set him on fire, he thinks to himself ( partitions the thought; divides it and tucks it away behind old subroutines like a cage to hold unbidden, terrifying thoughts at bay as though they were wild animals and not parts of him he tries to deny and hide ). Instead, he feels the seams of his face creak - realizing that he's fighting against the natural way his cranial plates and jaw-structure has been made. He lets go, and the synthetic skin of his face shivers for a moment, following the sudden parting of his cheekbones and his bottom jaw as it unhinges.

His mouth opens like a snake's, while Markus's hand buries itself deeper inside of him. The act exposes the soft insides of his throat, forces the slender teeth to dig a little into the synthetic skin and plastic of Markus's knuckles. If Simon were human, he knows he would be unable to swallow, but his insides are dry and room-temperature and unnerving for anyone other than a fellow android. It helps me, when I need to self-repair. I receive the same effect from... Finally, he holds up one of the bottles of Thirium he had snagged while carrying Markus away into a dark corner, to save both of them from the worried, frightened eyes of Jericho's congregation. I'm sorry. I didn't want to... I didn't want you to know about this.