The Nasty Zone

[undeviated]

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[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.