The Nasty Zone

[undeviated]

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[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.