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“I think you can take it,” Bloodhound says, and he’s too far gone to care what they mean. Too far gone to guess, to wonder, to think.
Yes.
Yes, always, to anything they ask. Anything they want. Automatically. Yes.
But he can’t say yes, because they have rules. He’s not allowed to make it simple for both of them. He’s not allowed to just say yes. He has to put on the show, do the little dance, boot his optics and crane his neck and look down his snout to see what they mean so he can give them informed, enthusiastic consent.
“I can,” he pants, and faux swallows with the synthocords of his faux throat, the threadless connective tissue that aborts the gulp and gags him halfway. Punishment for the scraps of impulse rotting on his metal bones.
Sure, these days he can lick. He can taste. But he can’t drink them down. No cheers for him. No l’chaim.
Bloodhound hums sympathetically or mockingly and rubs the heel of their gloved hand in slow, firm circles over his pelvis, over the closed plate where his mod would extend[if he had permission to extend it.
Their other hand is four fingers deep inside him. The rim of his valve gapes open on their knuckles. He’s stretched. He’s wet. He’s full of them, but not full enough. It hurts.
But it doesn’t hurt enough.
“You can . . . ?” they prompt, massaging his modplate and//////inside, fuck, their fingers curl and spread; their nails smother swollen sensors in shallow ungentle thrusts. It shorts him hard, to overload; or it would if Hound didn’t shove their free hand into his hip and////and defuse__the charge to to deny//him.
“You can?” they repeat. His valve spasms at their voice, and they smile.
Words.
Why bother?
He has to. If he doesn’t, they’ll stop. If he isn’t specific, they’ll stop.
Nothing’s worse than them stopping.
I can take it for you. These are the words. This is what he needs to say. He knows them. He wants them.
But his body betrays him.
“Yes,” is what he says.
They sigh, disappointed.
And he
slips.
Black ice. Sheer drop.
Olympus wind.
He knows the word he’s supposed to say now.
He also knows it’s pathetic how desperately he clenches around their fingers. It’s pathetic the sucking wet squelch his valve makes. It’s fucking pathetic the sniveling whine that rips out of him when they ignore his efforts and pull out and stop touching him and_a//and it’s pathetic that he_that he
he knows and yet
“Put your hand in me,” he begs, as they sip his slick from their palm. As whatever isn’t on their glove gushes out of his valve and spatters on his thighs, their thighs, the concrete below. “Pl_ease///please put your hand in me.”
Bloodhound closes their lips on two fingers. “Only one?” they tease between licks.
His vision flares. Dies. He reboots and there’s no color but their hair, their eyes. “Both.” He’s shaking with frantic charge. He can barely speak. “Please. Both.”
They meet his gaze and watch him until every single strand of clinging slick is smeared on their tongue. Then they fist their spit-shining hand in his mane and pull him sitting.
He does want this. He does. He wants:he wants:he waits and//and salivates like a_like a dog//for the smell of himself and them and them.
He knows the word [but really what does he know?]He knows the word [but nothing’s worse than stopping/Nothing’s worse than their hands leaving him
He gives himself to them. Leans into them.
“Choose,” they tell him, and kiss his snout. “My hands in you, or your tongue in me.”
Punishment.
“No,” he says.
“Yes.”
“Please no,” he says, helplessly. His pride spills from him. He sheds it; guts it. His only offering, all he has, and it won’t be enough. He begs anyway. “Please, Hound. Please.”
“Choose.”
“Please.”
Their fingers loosen. Push. Push him_back.
He can’t touch he can’t touch them it’s a rule it’s The Rule not very obedient is it
but he needs__//them, he can’t, he can’t
“Please,” he whispers, and shears his claws into his own thighs, and bows to them.
He presses his face to the floor between their legs. Scrapes it raw as he crawls closer. His snout drags through his cooling mess and he doesn’t care. He doesn’t think. He force unhinges his jaw and laps up his filth. He licks and licks and his mouth fills and it leaks between his teeth and mats his mane but that doesn’t matter, their floor is clean. Almost clean.
“Revenant.”
Not clean enough.
“Revenant,” lower, and their hand//their hand__lifts his head__
He shakes them off. “Please, I’ll be good,” he says, in a voice he doesn’t recognize.
“I know,” they say, which is what they should say. They should know. They made him this. They made him theirs. Their pet. Their thing. Their asset. Their slave.
“I know,” they say, again, and their hands take him, again, and then his head is in their lap.
They smell so good.
They should do this, too. Make the choice for him. Make every choice for him.
“No,” they say at his curling starving tongue; No it snaps like electric mindless training pain. The recoil’s worse; shock prods, they lance two ways, and the return current hurts triple. Impulse gnaws his vestigial nerves, needles him to slither back, to insulate himself. Hound holds him, though. Hound wants him to hurt. To take it. So he will.
He obeys. He waits.
The recoil never comes.
Just their hands, ungloved.
“You did well,” they say, touching him.[?]“You did well for me.[?]You did well for me, Revva.”
[They don’t stop.]They caress his face; fold over him and trace his fangs. Their fast breath warms his tongue; their lips move whispering across his muzzle.[?]He tries to shift, tries to obey, to not touch; and he can’t so he tries to petal his frame apart, remove it from their presence plate by plate; and he can’t. Their body is heavy. It holds him.
He doesn’t deserve it.
“Lying,” he manages.
“No—”
“Performance unsatisfactory.”
“No,” they murmur. “No.”
No current, no recoil.[?]Their breath is warm. Their lap is warm. Their arms are wrapped around his skull.[?]
“Then//___: what?”
“Mishandling,” they say. “I pushed beyond your bounds.”
That’s his problem. A solvable problem.
“Retrain me then,” he croons.
“No, Revenant.”
“Reprogram me.” He fumbles for the base of his neck, the port to his neural bundle. He pries the panel loose.
Yank it out and jack in and devastate me, he hums.
Sever every node that won’t obey. Hunt ’em all down.
Override me.
Core me out.
Make me easier to handle.
Make me take it.
They trap his hands and he goes limp. Collapses concave for them. Turns his face in to their stomach. He could eat through them but he never will. He could hollow himself a place in them, twist a nest in their intestines and root in their ruined lungs and notch his muzzle in the narrow of their throat; but why would he when he can be empty for them instead? When he can be this: the whip of their will and the fangs in their mouth.
“Make me,” he says.
Bloodhound_Bloodhound_Bloodhound kisses him. He smells himself on their breath. He tastes their sweat; their static.
He begs, again. His voice slithers out staggerish and glitching. Oilslick streams from his broken maw.
Make me.
“No,” they tell him, and reach for his neck.
He wakes in water, one subsystem at a time.
The bathroom window is open.
Bloodhound is in the tub. At the other end. Their back to him. Their hips snug between his calves. Their hands hold his ankles.
His jaw’s been repaired.
He watches them while his brain screws itself in. Their loose hair and rounded bare shoulders and the fragile knobs of their spine. He counted their scars once, months or years ago; got jealous of the beasties that left them. Now his marks outnumber the wild things’.
“Do you know the story,” Bloodhound says quietly, “about honeysuckle in winter?”
“No.”
“May I tell it?”
“Yeah,” he says.
“A honeysuckle seed takes root beside an elder tree. The tree casts such consuming shadow that it is not until winter, when the tree’s branches are stripped bare, that the honeysuckle is given the sunlight it needs to grow.”
They hate when he interrupts, but they like when he guesses wrong and they get to show him up. He goes with the obvious. “So it dies.”
“No,” Bloodhound says. Of course. “It grows. It blooms. The tree taught it to withstand the darkness and the cold. When the tree awakens in spring, the honeysuckle thanks it. ‘Without you,’ it says, ‘I would not have thrived.’”
Their hands tighten. “The tree is surprised, but accepts the honeysuckle’s gratitude and advises it to rest early, so it may prepare itself for the next hard winter. The honeysuckle again thanks the tree, and heeds this advice.
“And that is why,” they say, “it is asleep before summer, when its brethren bloom. That is why it does not see how other honeysuckles have many thousands of blossoms, and it only has one.”
They turn and stare at him.
“What,” he says.
“I will not,” they say, “be another tree, Revenant.”
He stares back at them.
“But if you need me to act the part,” they go on, “with your consent,” and he is abruptly very dizzy.
They raise a dripping hand, and his HUD flashes IMPACT WARNING IMPACT WARNING IMPACT WARNING until they lay it steady on his snout. Until they say “Good boy,” soft in him a signal flame.
The forestshadow mass of him swarms to it, to them. Leans into them, the endless field of them; the snow. He presses his nose to their chest, and they rest their forehead on the slope of his muzzle. They tell him he can touch them but he doesn’t.[Not yet.] He chews their pulse in the pocket under his tongue.
“I should not have punished you,” they mutter.
“Forget it,” he says, and then, “Would you,” he asks, because he can’t not ask.
“Punish you?”
“Yeah,” he breathes. “And.”
They tilt their head and find his eyes. Solder scent dusts their skin. Campfire. Honeysuckle.
“Yes,” they say. “And.”