#Ilya Kasharin

[axperjan]

a hound and his flame

[antisocialxconstruct]

they're having a sleepover :)

[antisocialxconstruct]

psychological warfare

[antisocialxconstruct]

the rituals continue to be intricate

[axperjan]

give that dog a gun

[axperjan]

you can cheat at fire magic by using a fire sword

[axperjan]

someone got away with powers and knowledge that's not supposed to escape their order

also the in-game result because they're not even too wildly off

[axperjan]

they'd never get distracted while traveling

[antisocialxconstruct]

okay hiiiii can I interest anyone in uh. an in-depth character study :)

5.9k, Ilya gently tests both their boundaries and Maksim shows off an apparently under-utilized skill 👀

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Ilya let the door swing shut behind them as they trailed Maksim into the apartment, but only barely had time to check that it had latched before they found themself pushed fully back against it instead. Maksim had leaned in, using the same gesture to reach around them and turn the deadbolt as he pressed a kiss to the side of their jaw.

“That was pretty smooth,” they chuckled, gripping his coat collar and trading him a soft, lingering kiss on the lips. “You like me up against the wall like this, don’t you?”

Maksim pulled back, his gaze lingering on their lips for a moment as his own parted, closed again. Taken off guard so easily, even when he had opened with such a bold move. After another beat he said “it’s a good angle,” pulling another sharp little laugh from Ilya. Their turn to be pleasantly surprised, but they were a lot quicker on the uptake than he was.

“Well then.” With their fingers still curled into the fabric of his coat they pushed gently, until he took the cue to step back to an arm’s length away from them. Then they stretched their arms up to press their hands against the door behind their head, arching their back enough to grace him with a glimpse of their stomach and hips below the hem of their shirt. “I better see you really appreciating it.”

He didn’t disappoint. His eyes lingered on their face a moment longer before gliding down the length of them to rest on that teasing strip of bare skin. Nothing he hadn’t seen before, but not like this–a treat and a taunt all at once. Ilya could easily track the unsteady rhythm of his breath, the way his mouth twisted as he bit the inside of his lip, the barely disguised desire in his narrowed eyes. And how strange, that they had learned to enjoy this, to want it even. When had they ever known their own body as something to be desired, rather than simply evaluated, something they themself could delight in and invite someone else to appreciate, instead of…

They didn’t get to chase that thought any further. Maybe Maksim could sense it, the storm cloud just beginning to gather over their thoughts, or maybe his restraint had simply failed him. He closed the gap they had created to kiss them hungrily, to wrap his hands around them, trail his thumbs up over the lines of their stomach. Ilya indulged him for a few seconds before they purred against his still-seeking lips, “did I say you could touch?” Their tone was light, entertained by the display, and he shook his head but showed no further sign of really processing the question as he trailed kisses down to the dip of their collarbone instead. So they slid their fingers up the nape of his neck to the back of his head, took hold of a fistful of his hair, and pulled. He grunted as his head tipped back, until he had to lower his gaze to meet theirs. “Did I say you could touch?” they prompted again. “Answer me.”

Maksim breathed in slowly, lifted his hands away from them just as slowly. “No,” he murmured.

Ilya nodded, trailing their free hand up along his chest until it settled lightly against the throat so tantalizingly on display for them. All at once Maksim’s breath hitched and his hands jumped to their wrist, tightening and loosening around it, tugging lightly, desperately inviting more pressure. It was unquestionably clear what he wanted, but he knew what they wanted too, even if he was struggling to follow simple directions. Their grip remained light, barely there. After another moment Maksim finally surrendered, drew his hands away, and then for good measure he pressed them flat against the door, one on either side of Ilya’s shoulders. “Good boy,” they cooed, and he let his eyelids flutter shut as he made that shuddering little sound in the back of his throat.

Fuck. They already had him whimpering. Did he have any idea what that sound did to them? Did he even know he was doing it? At last Ilya relented, applied the slightest bit of pressure to his throat, just to make him do it again. He did, stoking the hungry heat quickly building in their core. “Well since you want to be close so badly,” they said, prompting him to meet their eye again as they loosened their grip on his hair, “why don’t you give me something to ride?”

No hesitation this time. He kept his hands obediently planted but he leaned in, forehead bumping the door over their shoulder as he pressed them more firmly back into the hard surface. Then he slid one leg between theirs, angled his hips until they responded by pressing into him with a satisfied hum. They ground against him, savored the steady pressure of his thigh, and the angle had become slightly awkward but they looped both hands around his throat. And squeezed, just a little harder. “Good, you’re so good,” they breathed, and the noise he made this time was shorter, tighter, as he panted hot and short against their neck. Maybe he’d finally earned back the privilege they had so arbitrarily decided to deny him. “Put your hands on me, Maksim,” they ordered, and he had to keep one against the door for balance but he wrapped the other around them immediately. When they insisted, “lower,” he trailed it down the slope of their back and snuck his fingers first under the hem of their shirt, and then cautiously, almost experimentally, past their belt and over the soft skin of their hip. Ilya shuddered unexpectedly, released his throat to slip their arms around him and grip his shoulders, only half-consciously trying to press his body deeper into theirs (even now, in the thick of things, they remembered he had his own rules, and they were careful not to even ghost their hands too low). Without any further prompting Maksim shifted his weight slightly, freed up his other hand to take hold of Ilya and drag their bodies closer, grind his own hips into theirs until he pulled a breathy moan out of them. They absently nodded their approval for an order they hadn’t even given him, then they panted out, “now kiss me.”

Ilya had had the thought several times before that Maksim kissed like he was starving, like no one in his entire life had ever kissed him the way he needed. He pressed his lips to theirs with something decidedly like a soft growl, a little tremor that passed into them and and slipped down to bloom through their nerves, gentle but bright and warm. And with that light, almost teasing orgasm came a supplemental thought: as long as they got their way–and they intended to–he would never have another opportunity to be disappointed.

Maksim was the one to break away, allowing them both to catch their breath. His gaze meandered over their features before darting away to the closed door on his left–the bedroom, which Ilya knew only because it was the one room they’d never seen. So he wanted more? That was good, because Ilya was pleased, but they were far from satisfied. Still, Maksim hesitated for just a heartbeat. He was a respectable host, usually. Had they just choked the hospitality right out of him, or was this always the timeline he had planned? When he looked back to Ilya they could practically read the nervous calculations being run behind his eyes. Was it too forward? Was it appropriate? Was it allowed?

They figured they’d spare him the trouble of wondering. “So,” they purred, draping their arms almost casually over his shoulders. “Are you gonna invite me to stay the night or what?”

“Please,” Maksim breathed, “please stay.”

Ilya bit their lip but it didn’t do a lot to hide the smirk that flitted across their features. They liked it when he whimpered but they liked it even better when he begged. His response had come with an immediacy that told them he was well past the point of having any kind of internal filter. That was a fun place for him to be. “Well, I can’t refuse when you ask so sweetly.”

Maksim nodded, relief written clearly across his features, and reached up to take hold of Ilya’s arms, easing himself out of their grip as he looked them over. There seemed to be something else coalescing on the tip of his tongue, so Ilya watched him in turn through hooded eyes until he finally said, “take off your shoes.”

That got a short, surprised chuckle out of them, but they complied all the same, crouching to loosen the laces on their boots. Maksim slipped out of his own far dressier shoes quickly, then plucked them off the floor and padded away into his bedroom without another word. He left the door ajar and Ilya squinted, trying to catch a preview of this newly unlocked territory. Maksim seemed eager to get in ahead of them, so they moved at a leisurely pace, though not so leisurely as to leave him at the mercy of his own nerves for too long. They straightened, shuffled somewhat gracelessly out of their boots (maybe it was best that Maksim had left them to do that alone), and left them by the door to follow him at last.

The room was all muted warm and dark colors that contrasted sharply with the greens and golds of the living room, and it was modest in décor, but comfortable in size. The space was filled by only a plush area rug, a king-sized bed, a punching bag on a stand pushed away into a corner, a tall but sparsely populated shelf, and an armchair. To their left was a spacious and precisely organized walk-in closet, where they could see Maksim had already returned his shoes to their designated place. Ilya again let the door latch quietly behind them, gently sealing them into this enclosed, personal space, and prompting only a momentary glance in their direction from Maksim as acknowledgement. He wasn’t looking at them as he carefully slid his gloves off, but it gave Ilya the paradoxical sense that he was at ease. If he was nervous he’d be keeping them in his line of sight, gaging their reactions to measure his own. He shrugged out of his already unbuttoned shirt and tossed it and the gloves idly onto the bed in front of him, and as he stood there for a moment in his undershirt, Ilya was struck all at once by a feeling of profound, quiet infatuation. It wasn’t as if he had stripped down to anything less than they had seen him wear in public, and in fact they had seen the full extent of his mods still concealed beneath the tank top once before, albeit under entirely different circumstances. It had never been like this, the two of them in the cautious privacy of his home, his bedroom, his guard so completely and conspicuously lowered. It made the sharp angles of his features, softened by his comfort, feel more beautiful. It made the shifting muscles of his exposed arms, without any of the tension and precision of combat, feel more sensual. It felt intimate in a way they would have struggled to describe.

That burst of infatuation quickly solidified into a more targeted desire. They wanted their hands on him, to mark him, they wanted to show him how few barriers stood between them, just how close he had let them get, how much he would let them do. As they took in the sight of him a single bright, crystal clear thought spurred them to close the distance between the two of them–that’s mine. Maksim finally turned to face them just as they planted their hands on his shoulders and shoved. They had just a moment to register the alarmed expression that leapt across his features as he stumbled back, the second step knocking into the side of the bed and sending him sprawling back onto the mattress with a quiet huff. Ilya didn’t allow him time to react as they followed, straddled his waist and settled their weight down on top, ran their hands appreciatively up over his chest. Then they caught his gaze, wide and still a bit bewildered as he stared up at them–not precisely the reaction they expected, and it was enough to rein them in, just a little bit.

“Are you okay?” they asked softly, leaning forward and resting their hands on the mattress above his shoulders instead. He nodded wordlessly, and they smiled. “That seemed like it really surprised you.”

“It did.”

Ilya chuckled, cocking their head slightly to one side. “Really, mister perfect, finely-tuned reflexes? That seems out of character.”

“I-” Maksim blinked, his gaze once again darting over their face before coming to rest somewhere a bit lower than their eyes. Lips? Throat, maybe? “I wasn’t expecting to be attacked here.”

“Oooh,” Ilya cooed, and then in a sing-song tone, like they’d caught him in a particularly embarrassing admission, “you truuuust me…”

Maksim responded with one of those familiar little startled cough-laughs, still looking a bit like he wasn’t sure how to proceed from the position Ilya had put him in. He raised his hands, but hesitated just a heartbeat too long… trying to decide where to put them? Or wondering if Ilya’s earlier rule was still in effect? It wasn’t, but in that moment Ilya decided it was time for a new one. They caught his wrists in their own hands and pinned them down to the bed on either side of his head. A startled look flashed across his features again, and with him pinned beneath them they had the luxury of taking it all in–the way his eyes widened, lips parted, the way his chest rose and fell with a quickened breath. Easy, Ilya thought fondly, and smiled as they bent down to kiss his neck. Then again, enough teeth this time to make him gasp. Then a deep, slow kiss on the lips that pulled a soft moan up out of his chest. When he tentatively strained against their grip they tightened it.

“You want me to let go?” they purred, placing the ghost of another kiss against his jaw. He nodded, and when they nipped at his ear he offered them something that landed somewhere between a frustrated grunt and a whine. “You don’t need these hands,” Ilya argued softly. “You weren’t using them.”

Maksim exhaled shakily, and with Ilya pressed so close he breathed his question against their ear. “Do you want me to?”

Ilya bit and sucked at his neck again until he squirmed, then pulled back enough to meet his eye. Their hair still tumbled over their shoulders to tickle at the pink welts already darkening on his skin. “Do you want to?”

“Please.” Maksim offered it up quickly and almost automatically, experimentally. Going through his roster of tricks, hoping to chance into the one that gets a reward. He was getting closer.

“Please what?” they pressed. Maksim’s brow furrowed, and Ilya imagined they could see the confusion momentarily give way to disbelief, then understanding. They gave him another nudge anyway. “Tell me what you want, Maksim.”

Maksim struggled halfheartedly under them again. “Please,” he repeated, then “please let go.”

“Why should I?”

He searched their gaze with wide, pleading eyes. “I want to touch you.” The words came tumbling out freely, and he only seemed to process the weight of them himself a moment later, when Ilya smirked. He doubled down with a growing note of desperation. “Please let me go so I can touch you.”

They did, and he immediately pulled them down into another ravenous kiss, gripping the sides of their head, moaning as they slipped their tongue playfully past his lips and then nipped at his lip as they pulled away. His hands trailed down to the front of their shirt, fingers balling up in the material, and he seemed only a heartbeat away from trying to drag them back down when they slid a hand back over his throat and he froze. Easy, they thought again, as he held their gaze and lifted his chin slightly.

The eager, needy way he invited every threatened choking made Ilya suspect it was taking the place of the other sorts of stimulation he had firmly established he didn’t like. His breath hitched as they curled their fingers a little tighter, and left him in a shuddering sigh as they traced their thumb along and then past his jaw, pausing to feel the soft, steady drumbeat of his pulse before they really pressed down. His fists clenched tighter around their shirt, not pushing or pulling but just grasping for something to hang on to, and he arched his back in a way that had Ilya consciously fighting down the impulse to grind their hips into his. “You look so pretty like this,” they breathed, basking in the way he writhed under them, cheeks flushed, eyes glazed as he kept staring up at them, hair splayed out around him like a dark halo. “Maybe you need something more permanent.” That cut through his haze enough to refocus his eyes just a bit, and he furrowed his brows in curiosity. “A nice thick collar for such a good dog,” Ilya went on, laying their other hand on his neck–no more pressure, they didn’t want to hurt him, but they knew the touch alone would be enough at this point. He whined, thin and pathetic. “You want that? You want me to cinch it nice and tight, so you can look this pretty all night?”

He tried to nod, but apparently fearing his enthusiasm wasn’t clear enough he managed to sputter out, “I want it- I want-” before choking on the tail end of the thought.

Ilya took the sign to ease off the pressure, letting their fingers linger on his skin as he gasped in a full breath. He swallowed, panted, head lolling to one side as his gaze drifted, unfocused. When his breath eventually leveled out he gave a long, contented sigh, and Ilya grinned, filing their suggestion away for later. “Enjoying yourself?” they asked softly. Maksim pulled his attention back to them, offering a blissed out, lopsided smile–a look they weren’t sure they’d ever seen before. It tugged at their chest, made them want to dig in their nails and teeth and push him right back over the edge, but they sensed he might need a moment.

In the space they left, he loosened his hold on their shirt, let his hands trail down again to play over their waist. His expression was still distant and dreamy, but there was a newly thoughtful crease to his brow as his eyes traveled down and then back up. Ilya waited another beat, wondering if he would need to be prompted to say whatever was on his mind, but then he asked in a distant, moony tone, “can I… see more?”

Ilya eased back. The request was unexpected, and something deep in the back of their mind squirmed against the idea, but the way he asked was so gentle, so easy, and they paused for only a second or two before nodding. Maksim edged the shirt up, exposing their hips, their stomach, the bottom of their ribs, and when it became awkward for him to lift the shirt higher from his supine position Ilya hooked their fingers into the rumpled fabric and eased it the rest of the way over their head, their hesitation perhaps translating to a tease from his angle. Then they twisted and let the shirt fall in a heap over the edge of his bed.

Given how intentionally he had dressed down himself, they wondered if he might be distracted by a carelessly discarded garment somewhere on his floor. They needn't have worried. As they faced him again his eyes were fixed on them, unwavering, a look of wonder settled over his features like he had never seen anything so flawless. He trailed his hands lightly down their bare chest, lingering an extra moment on each scar he found, traced the curves of their tattoo with a thumb, then slid back up along their back, drawing a shudder from them that was not nearly as unpleasant as they might have expected as he followed the outer edges of their spinal implant. They let their eyes close as his explorations began back down, just barely grazing them with his claws, no harder than ordinary nails against their skin, and this time they inhaled deeply before easing back into the caress with a sigh.

His hands settled at the subtle divots of their hips–a favorite place of his to linger, they had noticed–and when they opened their eyes again, they caught him with his gaze fixed on the same region, before a moment later he met their eye, thumbs trailing along their skin just above the hem of their pants. “Oh,” they chuckled, lightly taking hold of his forearms again. “Now when did you get so greedy?”

He tensed immediately, mumbled a quick “sorry,” but when he tried to pull away they tightened their grip, not allowing him to backpedal.

“I did say I wanted to see you enjoy the view, didn't I?” Ilya mused with a coy twist of their lips. Maksim stared back for another heartbeat, then nodded slowly.

Before they had a chance to rise, though, he said softly, “you can say no.” They paused again, eyed him quizzically. “If you're not… if you don't want to. You can tell me no.”

Ilya smiled. “I know, Maksim,” they answered just as softly. Then they lifted themself off of him and got to their feet. Maksim took the opportunity to sit up and shift a bit further back onto the bed, but he never took his eyes off them as they brought their hands up to the waistline of their pants. They hesitated again, just for a breath, turning slightly to angle their back and shoulder to Maksim as they tried to untangle exactly what emotions were coalescing in their mind. They weren’t afraid… not exactly, but it was strange to be quite this present and aware in their own skin. This was a threshold they had hardly ever had reason to cross, and certainly not for a long time–not since they had been a very different person. But there was an eagerness to follow through, a desire to trust Maksim, to allow the attention and reverence he seemed so desperate to give… and a physical desire as well, still bright and pulsing and impossible to deny. With a steeling breath they unbuttoned, unzipped, and finally shimmied out of pants and boxers simultaneously. A striptease didn’t really feel like their style, and they didn’t need to leave themself any extra time to overthink.

They glanced over their shoulder then, but it was difficult to tell exactly where Maksim’s attention was–not on their face, that much was clear. He had repositioned himself a bit more intentionally but he was still close enough to the edge of the bed that when Ilya returned to him, they could settle right back onto their knees in his lap, keenly aware of how much more this felt like a presentation now. As soon as they were within reach his hands were on them again, starting where they had left off at Ilya’s waist as he traced gentle, exploratory circles with his thumbs, over the newly bared skin of their pelvis and down along their inner thighs. Ilya’s breath came progressively thicker and heavier as they buried their fingers into his curls. They momentarily entertained the idea of those hands wandering back up, slipping between their legs to finally give them the release they were starting to ache for–until they remembered the claws, first with a wince and then with a sinking heart. A moment later the thought was jostled out of their mind with a small startled exclamation as he cupped their ass and pressed his face into the curve of their stomach, trailing languorous, sucking kisses over their skin.

Ilya groaned, shivering as they bowed forward and Maksim’s horns grazed their chest, rough and just cool enough to draw gooseflesh along their skin. “I take it you like what you see,” they quipped, albeit a little breathlessly. Maksim nodded wordlessly, the gesture translated into the friction of his skin against theirs. Then he did something that sent Ilya’s mind momentarily scattering into dissonant bursts of light–he licked them, trailing his tongue slowly up from the edge of their pubic hair to the divot of their navel, before glancing up to catch their eye.

Ilya bit their lip, all disappointment over the danger of his hands forgotten as they realized in that moment precisely how they wanted this evening to end. And just what message was Maksim trying to send them now? An invitation? A request, even?

It still felt like a risk to proceed. Ilya knew he had limits that tended to be firm but somewhat unpredictable, and that the last thing they ever wanted to do was overstep. On the other hand… hadn’t he made the first move? Hadn’t he brought them home, invited them into the last private sanctum he had, begged to be allowed to please them? If there was ever a time it felt right to test those limits…

“Hey,” they said softly, easing back so they could see his face more clearly. “Would you still do anything I wanted?”

Somewhere in the back of their mind, they were relieved that it took him a second to answer. They liked to believe that meant he actually paused and thought about it. Then he nodded, slowly, almost hesitantly at first, then with more certainty. “Yes.”

Ilya smiled, brushed a lock of hair away from his eyes before letting their hand trail down his cheek until their thumb rested against his lips. He waited, passive and obedient, as they traced the fingers of their other hand lightly over his brow and then laid their palm down in the space between his horns and tilted his head back further. When they slipped their thumb into his mouth at the same time they curled their fingers under his chin and pried his mouth open, he gave a soft grunt of surprise but offered no resistance. Their thumb pressed his tongue down against his jaw, providing them a clear glimpse of his teeth–more conspicuously unusual than their own, but not half as predatory. “Then I want you to put that pretty tongue of yours to better use.”

There was another silent beat as Maksim processed the order, then his eyes widened and for a split second Ilya feared they really had gone just a step too far. But before they could backpedal he blinked slowly, features relaxing, and with his jaw still in their grip and his tongue cradling the pad of their thumb, he started to drool.

“Oho,” Ilya chuckled, “look at my good dog trying not to beg. But he likes that idea, doesn't he?” Maksim didn't try to talk around their hand, but the way his breath quickened, the way his desperation threatened to dribble down his chin, was answer enough. Ilya let him pant just a few seconds longer, enjoying the heat of his breath over their skin, before lifting the hand away from his forehead and easing the pressure of their fingers. “Let me see him bite first,” they cooed. He let his teeth close gently around their thumb and sucked, sending an appreciative shiver up Ilya’s spine. They moved their other hand to the back of his head, forcing a ragged little moan out of him as they thrust deeper into his mouth. He wrapped his own hands gently around Ilya’s wrist, working his tongue around the base of their thumb and then dragging it up the length, before closing his lips around it again.

They both knew that wasn’t what Ilya had been implying, but he seemed determined to give them a thorough preview of the kind of attention they could expect. And it was working. Their breath shuddered and their other hand tangled into his hair, momentarily torn between the satisfaction of watching him work, and the growing need to have that work somewhere else. Finally they withdrew, thumb sliding free with a soft pop that left Maksim with lips parted and a glazed, distant look in his eyes. Ilya finally lowered themself down into his lap–quietly relieved to take the weight off their knees–then pressed the ghost of a kiss to the corner of his mouth, and whispered, “go on then.”

With the kind of enthusiasm he had just displayed, Ilya half expected him to dive straight between their legs. But when they let go he took hold of them gently and eased them to his right and further onto the bed. He stayed pressed in close as he shifted onto his own knees to follow them, brought his lips down to their throat, to the subtle dip of their clavicle, applied just enough pressure to coax them down onto their back as he worked his way over the rise of their chest and down, hands gripping their hips as he lingered again and nipped at the soft skin of their stomach. Through their quiet, breathy gasps, they had the distinct feeling that he was toying with them, even from the fuzzy depths of his submissive haze. They would have been impressed by the audacity, but it was hard to focus on anything beyond the mounting impatience, the need for release.

If he was going to leave them speechless, they had other ways of getting what they wanted. They took a fistful of his hair again and pushed, willing him down those last precious few inches. He didn’t resist, but he still tilted his head, placed a line of kisses along their inner thigh and paused right at the crux. He exhaled, slowly and deliberately, and just that caress of warm air against their folds, already slick and needy with anticipation, was enough to make them tremble. “Maksim-” they bit out, voice tight in their chest, and it might have turned into a proper reprimand but his tongue finally trailed up the length of them then and all they managed was a low moan. Their hips bucked and this time they allowed themself the impulse, tried to grind against Maksim’s mouth, until he moved his grip down to their thighs, held on hard enough that they could feel the tips of his claws prick against their skin as he spread their legs further.

He set a slow pace at first, leisurely strokes ending in light twirls around their clit that left them all but whimpering up to the ceiling, even as they brought their other hand down to join the first still buried in his curls. They let him tease as long as they could bear it, but when they tugged sharply on his hair they felt him gasp, losing his rhythm momentarily. But he got the message. His focus resettled on their clit, stroking, sucking, nudging them ever closer in sparkling, crackling bursts of pleasure communicated in increasingly undignified sounds.

Then he seemed to find a spot, Ilya breathed in sharply and their back arched as dots of light burst at the corners of their vision, and his grip tightened just a little more around their legs. They barely had a chance to process that before he found it again, sent the same bolt arcing up through their nerves, then a third, more insistent time that sent a broken, sputtering moan tumbling past their lips. Just as they felt themself teetering on the edge they stole a glance down the slope of their own body at him, and he lifted his eyes at the same moment, peering back through his lashes and the tangle of his disheveled hair, and even with most of his face obscured there was a glint in those eyes as they caught Ilya’s gaze–an almost smug satisfaction. Oh, you son of a bitch- was Ilya’s last semi-coherent thought before their climax crested over them, a full-body rush of sensation that had them trembling, gasping, curling in on themself as it washed over them in one wave, two, then tapered as Maksim slowly eased off.

Ilya fell back, panting, and melted into the bed beneath them as their head swirled and they stared dumbly up at the ceiling. They barely even registered that they had finally let go of Maksim, or that he had let go of them, until they felt the mattress shift with his weight as he sat up. They shivered, keenly aware of their own nakedness as they grazed their fingers over their thighs, wondering what kind of marks Maksim’s claws had left. Then Maksim stretched himself out on his back alongside them, and they rolled over to wrap their arms around him. He opened his arms in turn and allowed them to nestle in close, where they threw one leg over his and pressed eager, grateful kisses against his cheek, his lips, his neck.

“Fuck,” they breathed at length, when they could finally form even that simple word in their mind. They traced the shape of a particularly vibrant bruise on his throat and smiled appreciatively. “No wonder you were so eager to show off… you’ve done that before.”

He laughed softly, and they could feel the vibration of it as they laid their head against his chest. “It’s been a while…” he admitted. It sounded like there was more to that thought, but even if Ilya had been inclined to pry they wouldn’t have had the energy. After a moment he pressed on anyway, “it… used to be an easy way to keep my first girlfriend from questioning why I didn’t want her to touch me.” Ilya lifted their head to meet his gaze, trying to gauge how he felt about that, how he wanted them to react. He added, “we were seventeen, it didn’t take much to distract her,” and flashed them a smile.

This memory, this partner, didn’t seem to carry the same weight as… others. Still, Ilya felt a peculiar sort of protective jealousy stir in their chest–frustration not that there had been others before them… but that those others had so clearly not appreciated what they had.

“I would hope I’m better now,” Maksim mused, before Ilya could make any kind of comment. After a brief, thoughtful pause he continued, “I can feel the way your muscles tense… from the right place I can feel when your pulse changes.” He took one of their hands in his, ran his thumb up the length of theirs in a not-so-subtle reminder of his earlier administrations, coaxing another trembling bit of pleasure up their spine. “It’s easy to adjust moment to moment when I know what’s working.”

Ilya considered their hands briefly as they tangled their fingers between his. Then they arched an eyebrow at him. “Are you saying you’re using your combat reflexes to fuck me better?”

This time his reaction was another startled almost-laugh from the back of his throat. “I guess so?”

“Hmm…” They brought his hand to their lips, placed an almost chaste kiss atop his knuckles. “That’s kinda hot.”

[axperjan]

all theirs

[axperjan]

who's got time for courier work when there's romance

[axperjan]

this was just a sketch at first but then it turned into this very good little scene and I had to do more with it

[antisocialxconstruct]

okay I know I just said the dog post might be my only art this month but then I remembered the kiss challenge :)

[antisocialxconstruct]

okay hi hello happy Saturday. We are doing this. If it seems familiar, the first scene is one I posted here a million years ago but it's been revised quite a bit for the new setting and everything. And also just to be better.

word count: 5,600

Ghost City

Chapter One

Somewhere in the club, Maksim suspected, there was someone who wanted him dead. He knew why, in broad strokes at least. But he wasn’t planning to oblige.

“Beer here tastes like warm piss,” Chronic griped, voice raised enough to ensure her complaint would be heard over the persistent clamor of mindless dance music being pumped through the warehouse. The thunk of her empty glass hitting the table between them was less lucky.

Maksim snorted and idly twirled a cigarette through his fingers before settling it between his lips. He tucked it into the corner of his mouth to mutter “that’s why I told you not to order it,” as he flicked open the heavy lighter in his other hand. He didn’t have to make the same allowances for the noise pollution, he knew the military-grade surveillance gear in Chronic’s skull was picking up every word he said, and likely a half dozen other conversations in their immediate vicinity. He lit up with a languid lack of urgency, exhaled a thin stream of smoke that caught the alternating pink and turquoise of the LEDs overhead, and let his gaze wander as he scratched idly at his temple, where one of the rows of short keratinous horns that cluttered his forehead disappeared into the chin-length black curls that were currently gelled neatly into place. The stocky woman across from him leaned back and crossed her arms over her chest, and he arched an expectant eyebrow at her.

“Figured that was just ‘cause you’re teetotal and you don’t like fun,” she said with a shrug.

“Eh, сука.” Maksim plucked the cigarette from his mouth after another drag and met her eye with a thin smile. No humor. “Guess you’re an expert now.” The barely-veiled hostility didn’t earn him much of a reaction, but then he wasn’t expecting it to. He was paying Chronic for her eyes, not for pleasant company, which was the only reason he had let the usual mask of performed affability slip completely. This new persona was a bit of an experiment of its own, an extra layer of distant arrogance just to really emphasize his lack of interest in making friends. Still, he couldn’t afford to be too overtly mean. He did need Chronic’s eyes.

Without moving her head, her gaze slipped over his shoulder and behind him, the minute twitches of her pupils the only sign that she was scanning the crowd as she idly responded, “dunno about that… I can’t figure why a guy like you’d come to a place like this.”

Maksim flicked a bit of ash onto the dingy little ashtray on the table. “A nightclub?”

“I mean Chicago.”

A short span of silence, between them at least, as the bone-rattling treble climbed to a crescendo and hung there for a beat, then another. Maksim resisted the temptation to use that lull in the music to comment on her lack of originality. Chronic had never actually accused him of anything, but the words spy and mafia had been swimming around in her head vividly enough that Maksim had never had to do more than skim her surface thoughts to pick them up. She clocked him as ex-military within an hour of meeting him, and between that, his accent, and the fairly conspicuous modifications to his hands and left eye, she drew her own conclusions. There was perhaps a small degree of irony in the fact that, if his life had gone differently at a couple of key points, he almost certainly would have been serving as a covert agent for the Russian state right now. On the other hand, if he’d been a little smarter he would have gotten out of the country faster and managed to dodge the draft entirely. None of that seemed worth explaining to Chronic to dispel any of her suspicions, not when her cooperation came with a straightforward price tag.

At last the bass dropped with an intensity that vibrated uncomfortably through Maksim’s nerves, and with the fresh cover of noise pollution all he ultimately said was, “still on me?”

“Mm,” Chronic refocused on him. “Sure as.”

A low frustrated sound escaped from the back of his throat to be swallowed up by the ever-present electronic beat. Another drag, then he tipped his head back against the booth, breathed smoke up toward the industrial rafters high above and let his eyes flutter closed. He shouldn’t be doing this. He had invested a lot of money into making it materially harder to do this, and he was going to invest more into making it worse. And yet there was that pesky trouble with old habits… “Describe them to me,” he said, and then tentatively, with the lightest touch he could manage, he extended his consciousness out through their immediate surroundings, like running an open hand over wood and hoping to catch a splinter, scanning for any hint of attention or interest angled toward their booth. He picked up a few right away, but they didn’t register as anything other than earnest curiosity, passersby stealing surprised glances when the undulating lights caught on his horns just so. In 2098 it was no less common to meet a variant than it was a natural redhead, but that didn’t always stop people from staring, especially at a mutation as conspicuous as his.

“Big guy,” Chronic was saying, “but like… ‘no gene-tech’ big. Milled around for a while but now he’s sitting at the bar.” Maksim refined his search perimeter, found the little blip of someone side-eyeing them with more intent from halfway across the room. He raked mental fingers through flashes of awareness and fleeting short term memories as Chronic continued. “Leather coat, camo pants-”

“Stop.” The bartender just thanked him for a tip. A couple of people on the dance floor were eyeing him appreciatively from the back. “Brown hair, jack on his left temple, drinking something green… acting like he thinks he’s the star of an action movie?”

Chronic laughed, a sharp bark of a sound that punched through the club’s ambiance. “That’s the one.”

“ID?”

“None to speak of.”

He shouldn’t be doing this. He started to dig, prying experimentally at the edges of the man’s thoughts, trying to pull away the outer layers to get a deeper look. Who are you? Who sent you? Memories and personal knowledge were always harder to read than surface thoughts, but he was just beginning to glimpse discernible shapes-

All at once his perception snapped back into place like a split rubber band and he pitched forward with a hiss and a muttered curse, pressing his palms to the sides of his head. It did nothing much to soothe the kind of directionless, brain-deep pain that had overtaken him. When after a few uncomfortable seconds he dared to open his eyes again, the strobing lights were almost too much to handle. He stubbornly blinked his vision back into focus anyway, and met the gaze of Chronic watching him impassively from across the table, one arm now slung over the back of the booth.

“So what’s the plan, boss?” she asked, wholly unmoved by the display.

“You can’t even get a name?” He didn’t mean for it to sound quite as sharp as it did, but he also didn’t take it back.

Chronic shrugged, pursed her lips. “Could you?” Maksim answered with a withering glare. “Whoever put that shadow on you wanted to stay clean as all hell. Either they went out of their way to find someone untraceable or they sunk some real money into making him untraceable.”

Maksim chewed on his mounting frustration for another moment as he took a last long drag on the cigarette, then stubbed out the remains and rose to his feet. “So no one would miss him.” Chronic’s eyebrows shot up toward her hairline but he was already stepping away from the table before she could make any further comment.

At the very least, the door slamming shut on his mental prying crystalized his focus, woken up his reflexes and centered him inside his own skull in a way no stimulant ever did. A twinge ran down the length of his left arm, the reparative fiber optic mesh knitted into his muscles protesting against the adrenaline-charged tension he was now carrying in his shoulders. He winced and shook it out as he weaved his way through the undulating crowd of clubbers with minimal effort, the carbon-fiber claws in his fingertips extending and retracting with half-conscious anticipation. As he neared the bar he reached up to check the manhunter in its holster at the small of his back, under his coat and out of sight, but as soon as he caught a glimpse of the man tailing him it was like a switch flipped–his demeanor rolled over into the one reserved for dealing with marks, a casual and open saunter and an easy smile. It would have been faster and easier to shoot him from the cover of the crowd and be done with it, and it wasn’t as if this act would trick the man into thinking Maksim was someone else. Not if he was even fleetingly competent. But Maksim had mulled over the situation long enough to decide there might be information to be extracted here, if he could play the game right.

“You look lost, cowboy,” he remarked as he slid up alongside the man, and now he did need to raise his voice just a touch, though the bar was at least a little quieter than the dance floor. His target turned and looked up from his stool, and Maksim took some satisfaction in tracking the array of emotions that flashed across his face in that instant before he set his jaw and straightened his back slightly. Getting ready to play along.

“Not really my scene,” he responded, his voice a hard-edged baritone to perfectly match the rugged-big-screen-hero image he was projecting outward. “Just waiting here to meet someone. You need something?”

Maksim leaned back, braced both hands against the bartop behind him, maintaining his height advantage over his shadow. “Honestly I just wanted to talk.”

Another almost imperceptible hesitation from his counterpart. “Maybe we could move that somewhere more private.”

“I think I’m fine right here.” Maksim flashed him a smile that wasn’t quite mocking. Not openly. An amateur, he thought. Wasting time he could have spent grabbing me. If Chronic couldn’t pull anything on him it’s because he’s nobody, there’s nothing to pull. The shadow sat back slightly, one hand drifting toward the edge of his jacket, and of course Maksim knew the posture of someone going for a gun. “That’s really not necessary,” he continued, gaze flicking pointed but unconcerned from the man’s hand up to his face. “In fact, here. We can be friends.” He pushed one hand away from the counter, drew his own pistol, and set it down on the bar. Then he settled back into his easy stance, not at all primed for a fight. His shadow didn’t seem entirely persuaded, but he didn’t escalate things any further. “How long have you been doing this?”

“Long enough.”

“Yeah?” Maksim’s smile tilted toward indulgent. “So you’ve got stories?”

Something lit up behind the other man’s eyes then, a sudden spark of inspiration. “Everyone does, right?” he began. “Actually maybe you know this one, didn’t happen to me but I heard it friend-of-a-friend style.”

“Sure,” Maksim conceded. “Best source you could ask for.”

The man inclined his head. “You get it. So I heard about this job out in NYC, maybe… a couple months back, real gruesome mess. Team of five go into this big high security warehouse to grab some holy relic, except halfway through one of them just snaps. Turns on the crew, makes mince out of a couple of them before the others can take him out, later he says demons made him do it. And the other two, the only ones who survived, they just accept that and let him walk. Can you believe that?”

As he talked Maksim had gone still, his casual slouch growing a little stiff. The smile never fell from his face, but it felt strained there now. Stale and brittle. “And what do you think should have happened?” he asked slowly.

“Y’know I’ll be honest,” the shadow said, leaning an elbow on the bar and puffing up with the apparent upper hand he had gained in their exchange. “I don’t have a lot of stake in it either way. But maybe there’s a few parties might be holding a grudge against that guy. Maybe one or two willing to spend some money to make sure he faces some consequences.”

That wasn’t good… but it could be worse. Probably. Maksim didn’t know who they had been working for, but if it was someone willing to send cleaners after him for botching the job they’d be more efficient than this, he wouldn’t have been standing there having a pleasant conversation with one of them. Lockjaw and Ziggy probably had friends, but he didn’t know them either. He had hoped none of them would be the vengeful types, but maybe he needed to reassess. Or maybe he just needed to go further west than Chicago.

The shadow shifted in his seat again, opening his mouth to add something else, and without waiting to find out what it was Maksim grabbed the back of the man’s head and shoved hard enough to bounce his face off the bartop. The collision rewarded him with the wet crunch of bone fracturing.

Someone shrieked behind him. In one smooth motion Maksim had the gun in his left hand and the claws of his right locked onto the man’s scalp, keeping him pinned face-down on the bar. He cast a mental net out around them, grabbed every spike of shock or fear he could catch and clamped down on their impulse to do anything about it, digging a little telepathic hole of Nothing To See Here around the two of them. The pain hit almost immediately, driving straight into his skull and down his spine as his vision blurred and the walls of his barrier started to crumble inward like wet sand as soon as they’d been erected. Through a daze his shadow choked out a mangled curse past bloodied lips and made a feeble effort against Maksim’s grip, only to go still again when the manhunter’s muzzle pressed up against the side of his head. Maksim really wanted nothing more than to pull the trigger and paint the counter with this man’s skull, it would certainly resolve this quickly and send a clear message to whoever sent him. But it seemed unlikely Maksim would be able to stop anyone from noticing that.

“I’m going to walk out of this club,“ he bit out through gritted teeth. A chunk of his barrier slipped and he could feel the bartender’s attention drifting their way in a tangle of confusion and concern. ”You’re not going to follow me. Not tonight and not any other night. If I ever see your face again I’ll split it in half properly. Understand?“

No more than two seconds of hesitation, then the shadow nodded–as best he could anyway, smearing blood across the counter under his cheek.

Maksim let the threat hang for another beat, then withdrew and holstered the gun. “You should have a talk with whoever hired you for this,” he said as his shadow lifted his head, cupping the gnarled mess of his nose in his hands. “They di-…” the rest of Maksim’s words died on his lips in a wave of nausea and the barrier finally crumbled. Spots danced around the corners of his vision moments before it began to tunnel, the moment stretching uncomfortably out in every direction.

The voices around him went tinny, distant and indistinct as vertigo gripped him.

He could feel the music boring into him, threatening to vibrate him apart if he stayed there any longer.

Someone grabbed at him and he twisted, shaking them off out of pure instinct, and started moving.

It was all he could do to orient himself, fix his gaze on the high doorway gaping black with the night sky beyond, and shove his way through the remaining crowd as he fought to keep his footing. People became increasingly unconcerned with his presence the further he got from the bar, until at last he crossed the threshold and the cool night air hit him all at once as he staggered to a stop to be sick on the pavement outside.

A chorus of laughs rose up from across the street as he fell back against the club’s exterior wall, and now the music was dulled to a steady thump and buzz through concrete. Someone called out “fuck yeah man party hardy” and earned themself another round of jeering laughter. Maksim grimaced but he didn’t have it in him to pinpoint the source of the comment, much less respond.

He closed his eyes. Okay. So that was a waste of time. Or he had in fact played the game wrong. But if nothing else it was a clear indication that it was time to move on.

He was unsure how long it took to collect himself, for his senses to settle back into place and the piercing in his skull to fade to a level he could ignore. In that time no one followed him out. Not his shadow, who must have heeded his warning, not any of the other patrons, whose attention he had apparently shrugged off against all odds. Not even Chronic, who seemed to have inferred that their brief and unproductive partnership was over.

Fine.

That was fine.

He pushed himself away from the wall with a concerted effort, and started the slow trek back to his apartment. He needed to make some travel plans.

–###–

Ilya Kasharin was already dead.

Figuratively, sure, in the sense that they assumed no one in Boston had really looked for them or spared them much thought at all after they disappeared. Maverick would have made sure of that.

But also literally, in the sense that four years ago they had flatlined on an operating table for a full six minutes, only to be “reassured” after the fact that this did not invalidate the terms of their contract with NervAMP.

This was the one they took some issue with.

The focused clatter of fingers on keyboard was the only sound punctuating the silence of their modest workspace, where they sat folded into a tortured pretzel in their chair. Their eyes were laser-focused onto the screen in front of them, pupils glinting unnaturally in the light any time their gaze darted back up a few lines in their code, catching a missed tag or double-checking their logic as they chided or argued with themself in distracted mumbles.

More than anything, this needed to be thorough. Their last foray into NervAMP’s systems had only been long enough to copy the basic structure of their network and prop open a backdoor, not to exfiltrate any of their data for experimenting. They could throw the worm into the playground of their virtual network as many times as they wanted to see it spread before scrubbing it back out, but at a certain point they would just have to trust that it could do what they wanted and set it free. They were getting impatient with their own iterative testing, and they imagined the worm itself growing restless as well as it unfolded across the screen in front of them, eager to fulfill its purpose.

With a sigh Ilya paused and then sat back, a final assertive jab at a couple keys the only signal the machine needed to compile the worm and inject it back into the virtual network, just to be sure their last round of tweaking hadn’t compromised the basic functionality. Their second and third monitors blinked to life, and Ilya watched intently as the rudimentary visual representation of the network–little more than a sprawling array of interconnected lines and dots–transformed from uninfected green to compromised yellow over the course of about eight minutes.

No changes there, not that they really expected any.

This next step was the one they were least eager to take, and perhaps on some level all the systematic tweaking and troubleshooting had been in an effort to push this off as long as they could reasonably justify. Unfortunately they didn’t feel like they could reasonably justify much more, so they sat forward again, nudged the deck closer in front of them, and combed their fingers through the choppy layers of their auburn hair, flipping it over their shoulder and off the back of their neck. With their other hand they drew out the thick meshjack cable that sat spooled up inside the left side compartment of their deck, then eyed the head of it for a moment, the way one might eye a particularly unappealing morsel of food they were nevertheless about to swallow whole. Then their fingers found the edge of the port nestled at the base of their skull, they locked the cable into place and flicked a switch on the face of their deck, and they had just a split second to feel the electric shudder pass through their body before their consciousness was no longer rooted there.

Ilya was familiar enough with common depictions of the Immersion Mesh in popular media over the years, even spanning as far as a century back when the internet itself was still a fledgling concept. They had only learned fairly recently that those depictions were all, essentially, completely wrong. Pouring your human perception directly into an information network was not really comparable to the things people evoked when trying to depict it, it was not an elegant heads-up display, or a virtual chatroom, it wasn’t rudimentary gridlines and geometry any more than it was an elaborate surrealist landscape. More than anything, it was impressions. The idle half-awareness of a long highway drive, the sustained mental effort of solving a puzzle, the keyed-in focus of a hunt… or the animal anxiety of being hunted. The mind was bombarded with information and then left to make free associations, impose will and desire like any other machine running a script, and while most people’s brains did end up translating this flow of data into imagery in order to make it easier to comprehend, it was a bit like dreaming–amorphous and highly individualized.

It was not an environment just anyone could thrive in, it often required either an incredible reserve of mental focus or a willingness to dissociate at will. Ilya had neither, but what they did have was a very particular goal and a deep well of spite. At first they had simply avoided the mesh as much as they possibly could, instead sharpening their skill in every facet of the process that could be done with eyes and hands and a keyboard. Tactile, satisfying. But when they continued to hit obstacles that couldn’t be cleared from the physical side of the screen, when they had finally overcome their revulsion enough to go under the knife one last time to have a meshjack installed, they did the only other thing that seemed reasonable.

They got fast.

As their mind swirled and readjusted to the change in perception, they imagined cupping the worm in their hands, and knew that it was now within a little pocket of onboard storage inside the jack, ready to be deployed alongside the array of other programs they had loaded there for intrusions. None of those should be needed to begin with, this was a route they had already mapped out specifically so they would not need to linger. Then the nothingness of the mesh fully closed up around them and within a heartbeat they were on the move–in a sense. Navigating the public expanse of the mesh was largely effortless and unremarkable, their subconscious hardly having time to settle on a clear visual translation for their marathon sprint through their previous steps, out of the familiar (relative) comfort of their own system, zig-zagging through a handful of tethered machines to disguise their trace, and finally shouldering their way inside NervAMP’s servers through an unprotected wi-fi enabled conference room light system. It was a hilariously irresponsible oversight (Ilya would make sure it was hilarious in the retelling, even if they felt sick with the discomfort now), and not the first one they had ever taken advantage of. Last time they had been trying to get out.

Once inside, they paused. Their surroundings were beginning to take on shapes and patterns, artificial daylight spread across white walls, long clean lines and tasteful chestnut accents, floor to ceiling glass panels dividing hallways from meeting rooms from offices from employee lounges without any of the rhyme or reason a physical building would demand. Ilya’s mind squirmed and protested against the visual, and they might have shuddered if they could still feel their own body. But they would need to go deeper than this. They were on the administrative level, and while meddling with NervAMP’s employee schedules and canceling their next delivery of office supplies would be amusing, it wouldn’t make the trip worthwhile.

Still. Maybe on the way out.

Ilya strove to navigate the halls with purpose–if they left too many meandering traces in the mesh, NervAMP’s MAID would be on them immediately. They had never been allowed to walk these halls alone before (they had never walked these halls, they reminded themself, and they weren’t walking them now), and there was a nagging irrational fear that someone would catch them and walk them back to Carter, sitting patiently behind his desk in one of these non-Euclidian offices waiting to waste Ilya’s time with more condescending bureaucracy. Their subconscious offered up the impression of people moving around them, bustling footsteps and clattering mailcart wheels and snatches of conversation, though it was always around a corner, across a room, behind a closed door. Ghosts of other people on the network, going about their business. Eventually Ilya began to settle into the flow of traffic, get a picture of where people were lingering and how to avoid them. As they dug deeper into the company’s directories, the architecture began to shift around them. Less glass, less tasteful accents, more thick doors and keypads.

This was worse. The memories stirred up by the upper levels were the ones that left them bitter and frustrated. These were the ones that made their skin crawl and their hands tremble–or would have, if they were still in their body, which only accentuated the distance and added an extra dimension to the discomfort. The halls they were traversing felt strange, somehow too narrow, too constricting, and yet uncomfortably spacious and empty at the same time, and they couldn’t shake the growing sensation of eyes on them. Housekeeping, they thought, sighing internally. The MAID’s attention was on them now. They picked up the pace again, focus darting back and forth as they tried to judge what felt like the best spot in this warren of half-data-half-memories to set off a bomb. Of course they weren’t going to shake the MAID that way, nothing about their behavior now could be interpreted as anything other than an intrusion, even to the most incompetently trained algorithm. So they started forcing doors, cracking passwords and spoofing credentials without much remaining concern for the fingerprints they were leaving behind. It wouldn’t matter once the worm had done its job anyway.

Then they shoved open a pair of double doors and stopped cold. They’d found the spot.

The advantage of meshjack visualizations was that they could translate innate, subconscious knowledge into something immediately comprehensible. An encrypted file became a lockbox, network traces became footprints, an intrusion countermeasure became a tripwire. In this case, Ilya’s subconscious had translated the best layer of the directory to deploy the worm into the one room they would have most liked to torch. The operating theater.

An approximation of it, at least, the surgical table standing cold and impassive at its center like some grim monument haloed by the blaring lights overhead, leaving the rest of the room draped in ambiguous shadows. Ilya took a step forward-

And froze, pain arcing through their nerves. There was a sensation of weight bearing down on them, of a crushing pressure fixing them in place and determined to grind them down into the ground.

The MAID. Locked on, running a final check before it tried to forcefully eject them from the system.

Not fast enough.

They resisted the temptation to glance behind them–MAIDs weren’t programmed to look like anything, they were invisible specters inside the network, and whatever Ilya’s own mind could supply would only serve to further disrupt their focus and make them an easier target. They had a counter-countermeasure for this, they didn’t need to panic. It would only work once, and not for long, but they only needed a few uninterrupted seconds. Probably. They turned their focus inward, called up one of those little executables inside the meshjack storage. The MAID clawed at them with greater determination, certain now that they were an interloper that needed to be removed, and they were grateful for the layers of obfuscation they had wrapped around their signal but no amount of reminding themself that this was all in their head was making it not hurt.

Then their form shuddered, flickered, and a second copy of it stepped away and moved purposefully back through the door. Ilya kept stock still, not even daring to look too closely at anything yet, but they felt the pressure of the MAID’s focus lift slightly, hesitantly, and then pull away completely as it peeled off to investigate the new intrusion.

That wouldn’t take long. The decoy wasn’t programmed to do anything but move up and down through directories in an extremely conspicuous manner, the MAID wouldn’t need more than a few moments to snuff it out. Ilya bolted into the room, fell forward and grabbed either side of the surgical table in front of them, and urged the worm into action. There was the briefest hesitation, a single microsecond just long enough for them to worry that it wouldn’t deploy right–

And then it went to work. Fissures opened up on the surface of the table under Ilya’s hands, splitting and spreading in every direction, pouring over the sides and across the floor and leaving Ilya with the impression of fractures shooting out across a pane of glass from a single impact point, of the room losing cohesion before their eyes. (Of rot.) If it could keep up that pace, they dared to imagine it could eat half the archive before anyone quarantined it. If they’d had a voice inside the mesh, they might have laughed.

Their time ran out before they fully registered what had happened. The MAID came down on them like a hurricane, likely with the same force it had brought to bear against their decoy, leaving them with the sensation of being ripped away by a vicious windstorm as everything cut to featureless white.

Then they were out of the mesh, fumbling with the cable plugged into their brainstem the second they had enough fine motor control to reach for it. Once it was out they flicked it away like a live snake, all their triumph and satisfaction of a moment ago forgotten. Sharp, ragged breaths punctuated the silence–my breaths, they assured themself, as they stared down at hands that felt clumsy, distant and out of focus in exactly the way they had dreaded. They flexed their fingers, straining to feel and notice the bend of each joint as they closed their hands into fists and then opened them again, then slouched forward to press their palms to their forehead as they drew in and then released one long, deliberate sigh. Then another. A half-conscious desire to feel contained wrapped their arms tight and close around their own torso–a mistake, they realized too late, as their fingertips found the subtly raised edges of the inlays that spread across their arms, an elegant metallic map of the contours of their musculature. They shuddered, as the sickening impulse to pick, scratch, dig flared alongside a familiar and inescapable thought.

Those aren’t your hands. Those aren’t your arms.

They abruptly let go again, stretched their arms out in front of them, groaned when one of their shoulders popped. That finally made them aware that they’d been holding their truly horrendous posture for far too long, so they unfolded themself, rose to their feet, and stretched properly, taking a sort of perverse satisfaction in the way their stiff and protesting muscles affirmed to them they were in fact here and fully present inside their own skin. Then another reminder: their stomach growled insistently. They grimaced and peered down at the clock on their terminal. Measuring time in the mesh was challenging but their access log said it had only been about twenty minutes. They must have already worked straight through dinner and into the evening when they went in, because it was coming up on 22:00 now. Too late to go out or order anything in. Too late to cook either, especially with the kind of headspace they were in, but as they wandered out of the glorified walk-in closet that had evolved into their workroom, and through the equally modest rest of their apartment, they figured they could scrounge up something.

[antisocialxconstruct]

Okay "I'll wait until saturday" was a lie. "I'll post it tuesday"....... also a lie. But here we are, at probably the worst possible time and day for visibility :)

word count: 3,400 (total 9,000)

[ch1]

Ghost City

Chapter 2

Maksim winced as the clock in the corner of his laptop’s screen ticked over another minute. It had done that quite a few times now while he sat and watched, and he had not yet been stricken with any miraculous clarity or inspiration on what to do next.

He had gotten as far as hitchhiking to Denver. Two weeks of meandering travel and fifteen hundred kilometers seemed like a good buffer between him and his tail, and he needed to be here anyway, but he had another few weeks to kill while he waited for an appointment. It had occurred to him that he might have better luck being “on the run” if he knew exactly who he was running from and why, and he had very confidently settled down at the dining table in his musty hostel and opened his laptop and then remembered that he did not know how to do this kind of research. He didn’t handle contracts and he didn’t handle data, those had been the jobs of Avaricia and Strikeout respectively. Contacting the former was out of the question, and the latter…

As if to encourage him, the computer screen finally flicked to power-saving black, and he dragged his gaze away from it to stare instead at the phone abandoned with the other contents of his pockets on the opposite end of the table. He did not doubt for a second that Strikeout would help him. He leaned over, grabbed the phone and dragged it closer, lined it up neatly alongside the laptop and thumbed on the screen, opened up the contact list. And stared at it a little longer.

Strikeout would help him. Ze would be happy to, eager even. Which was precisely the problem.

Maksim groaned and slouched in his seat. He rubbed his eyes and then stared vacantly up at the ceiling as he tried to fight off the dread slowly tightening its grip around his ribs. He didn’t want zir help. He didn’t need it, he just needed to… ask questions. The right questions, to the right people. At length he hauled himself upright again. He woke the laptop to pull up a browser window, and the open-endedness of the unremarkable search engine landing page that greeted him was almost enough to stall him out once again. With a sharp intake of breath he muttered “соберись,” typed nyc cat warehouse murder, and hit ENTER.

–###–

Silence had settled thick over the modest office where Ilya now sat, staring across the desk at the person who was meant to find them work. They had the impression that this was an intentional little power play, a lull in conversation left to stretch until they started to squirm. But Violet underestimated how comfortably Ilya could settle into an uncomfortable silence. They slouched deeper into their chair and stretched their legs out in front of them, ankles crossed casually, and let idle curiosity carry their gaze throughout the office–from the window off to the left with the shades half-drawn, to the long fluorescent strip-lights lining the ceiling overhead, over the assortment of books and notes on the desk, the files in chunky binders on the shelves over Violet’s shoulder… lots of physical media, which was interesting. It could have easily passed for the office of a tax consultant, maybe a travel agent if there were more posters of exotic islands tossed in. Nothing about any of it broadcast a business in corporate espionage.

With a light click of their tongue, as if finally coming to an internal conclusion, Violet said, “I admit it is an impressive display,” bringing Ilya’s attention back over to settle on em. Eir own gaze was still focused on the screen atop the desk that separated the two of them, where ey had ostensibly just been going over reports, or notes, or the earlier versions of the worm Ilya had provided to prove it was their work. “Stock fell almost twenty percent overnight, internal reports suggest at least three years of research lost, there will undoubtedly be layoffs to offset the loss in revenue… I still think it’s a shame none of that data was extracted…”

“Well if you wanted it that badly you could have done the hack yourself,” Ilya fired back.

Violet finally sat back, pressing a button that lowered the screen into a slot in the desk so ey could meet Ilya’s eye. “That attitude won’t serve you well when you’re doing this for other people,” ey said, with an impassivity that made it feel less like a warning or admonishment, and more like a simple observation. “As I was saying, it’s a shame none of that data was extracted, but this is all I need to see to be confident I can place you. Although…” here ey paused, tilting eir head slightly to give Ilya a brief, assessing once-over. “I did put out some initial feelers, to see if anyone was already looking for a tech specialist… you haven’t exactly been making friends in San Mena, have you?”

That was a remarkably charitable way to characterize the way Ilya socialized. They tried for a disarming smile and felt like they landed much closer to a grimace. “Do I need friends?”

“It helps,” Violet replied. Ilya managed to bite back their impulse to challenge that assertion, but they were still fishing for a decent, less revealing response than not in my experience when Violet curtly appended “give me another week” and called up the screen again, leaving them with the distinct impression that the conversation was over. They hesitated for a beat, pulled their legs back in and sat forward, preparing to excuse themself, then stopped.

“You know if you really want NervAMP company secrets,” they said, “why don’t you just wait to find out who gets laid off and talk to them? At least some of them are going to be bitter.”

Violet tipped eir head again to see Ilya around the side of eir screen, and in the thoughtful look ey gave them Ilya was sure they could see the calculations being run behind eir eyes. The slightest hint of what Ilya chose to interpret as an approving smile lifted the corners of their lips, but all ey said was, “I’ll be in touch soon, Naspok.”

–###–

The waiting room of a back alley surgeon was rarely what one might call luxurious. Or even particularly hospitable. By now Maksim had sat in enough of them to know this was one of the better ones–it was well lit, clean, and at least a few square feet bigger than a walk-in closet. In total it was a far cry from the dingy vermin-infested storage unit he’d stumbled into the last time he’d needed maintenance, after a blow to the head had left him with the vision in his eye implant tearing and an ice pick migraine a cocktail of alcohol and narcotics hadn’t been able to curb. In retrospect it was a wonder he hadn’t walked out of there even worse, or that he walked out of there at all.

It was really just the waiting that was getting to him. This situation was far less dire, but to Maksim’s sensibilities at least, no less urgent. This was the last modification he had planned, and it had been the hardest to lock down but it was the one that would finally tie everything else together. Bioware was finicky, expensive, and hard to source without being traced and probably shot dead by some repo man because most of it still wasn’t consumer tech. Maksim had needed to find someone who could not only get their hands on it, but could be trusted to install it without shorting out some other essential part of his suite. Or his brain. Clark had come as highly recommended as he could have hoped for–sharpest eyes and steadiest hands anywhere outside the west coast, and discreet on top of it. With a price tag to match, unfortunately, but he had stopped allowing himself to think about debts pretty early on.

So he waited.

When his left leg began to bounce restlessly he willed it back into stillness, dropped his head back against the wall and tried to channel the impatient energy instead into his hands laying palm-up on his thighs. Controlled, intentional fidgeting. The short blades were sheathed cat claw-like in the artificial third digits of each finger, protracted by the minute flexing of thin tendons that had been painstakingly restrung and retrained to the purpose. It was second nature by now, a full decade on from when they had first been installed, but it still served as a good grounding exercise to focus in on the process. Slowly, deliberately, he touched the point of each blade to the soft pads of his thumbs, the only digits left unaltered (no telling when he might need a fingerprint), until another twinge of pain shot up through his left arm and he flinched, nicked the tip of his thumb and grit his teeth to swallow back a curse. It was an unnecessary confirmation of his reason for being there–an imperfection in the careful web of cybernetic control he had spent the last two months weaving over his own reflexes. It needed to be absolute. The pain, he could tolerate. The reaction, the body moving without his will or input, was a reminder he could not allow.

He fixed his eyes on the stippled off-white ceiling overhead and traced the irregular edges of water stains, knowing that if he closed his eyes now there would be memories waiting for him in the dark, blood and terror-wide eyes and the wet heat of fresh viscera, the fear, the sensation of being caged.

It was easier to think about what came after. This process had begun a week later, with a fiber optic muscle replacement knitted into his left arm, intended to correct the nerve damage Strikeout had done with a 9mm round lodged in his shoulder. The discovery that the mesh had granted him a steadier pistol aim than he’d ever had before “the incident” had eased some of the lingering trauma he carried out of it. But not enough. So he’d had the claws refitted for even finer motor control, the eye replaced with a newer model designed for minute motion tracking. A lighter muscle augment had gone into his right arm to synchronize his articulation, adrenal amps installed to increase his situational awareness and response times. The flexwires had gone into his arms on top of the muscle weaves, winding around just below the skin like careful geometric scarification and smoothing his hastened movements into precise, razor-sharp reflexes. The most invasive augmentation so far had been the spinal implant that nestled along the ridge of his back like some segmented mechanical insect, chaining the muscle augments, the adrenal amps, and the eye implant to a neural chip that could accelerate his processing of visual and auditory input, as well as dampen the full effects of the suite in everyday situations, when he didn’t need to be constantly barraged with sensory data.

There was a secondary effect, something he had been warned of back when he was first signing himself away to the Russian army in exchange for a purged arrest record and a functional left eye. The human brain was incredibly delicate, and his uniquely so. In a vanishingly small number of cases, the variant mutation manifested not only in physical quirks, but in certain advanced mental abilities. In his case, it had granted him the capacity to not only pick up the conscious thoughts and feelings of those around him, but to broadcast his own back out to a limited degree, like a short-range radio that only worked on human brain waves. Despite such genes being disseminated into the human population several generations ago, they were still not well understood, and Maksim’s superiors feared that placing too much additional processing burden on his brain via cybernetics might dampen his telepathic ability–the only thing they actually wanted. He hadn’t noticed any material difference after that first operation or in the decade that followed.

Now, he had the very real sense of a door almost fully closed, of the signals tapering off unless he really strained, and it was an indescribable relief. Whatever had happened in New York, it would not, could not, happen again.

Unfortunately that “processing burden” was affecting him in other, more immediate ways as well. He could feel his body protesting under the strain of the augments, without enough time to fully adjust to each introduction of heightened senses and tightened reflexes. And after living with an ability that had manifested when he was six years old, at 32 he could not seem to break himself of the habit of mental tampering no matter how many migraines he had to nurse in exchange. But a bit of research had presented him with a solution: an inhibitor could omit the pain response from the equation, allow him to bear the pain without distraction while his body did the work of adjusting quietly, in the background.

Then maybe he would finally feel like he was in control again.

A soft buzzing against his ribs startled him out of his musings. He lifted his head away from the wall and reached into the inner pocket of his coat to pull out his cellphone, then fumbled with the screen for a moment as he tried to check the caller ID, and only realized that he had instead blindly answered the call when he heard Strikeout’s voice filter through the tinny speaker. “Avos! Hey, I- shit I really didn’t think you were going to pick up.”

Maksim scoffed and let his head knock back against the wall. “I didn’t mean to,” he stated, and Strikeout chuckled as if it had been a joke. “This isn’t a good time,” he pressed on. “I’m waiting to meet with someone.”

“Ah…” Strikeout hesitated for a moment, the silence punctuated by some kind of indeterminate rustling on zir end. “With a loan shark?”

Maksim grit his teeth at the boldness of the assumption, even if it was frankly even odds at this point. This had been an expensive process, and his savings had only gotten him about halfway through it before he had started having to beg and borrow for the rest. “A surgeon,” he said pointedly, just because in that moment he wanted Strikeout to be wrong.

“Where are you now?”

“I’m not telling you that,” Maksim volleyed back, rolling his eyes up toward the ceiling. “But it’s far enough, you can tell Reece I understood her message clearly.”

“That’s not why I’m asking, I-” Maksim’s focus immediately disengaged from the call when a door opened at the far end of the room. The person in the doorway had a tall and willowy stature with angular features, but Maksim couldn’t immediately tell if those were variant features. They beckoned him in with a smile, and he returned it as he stood and quickly pulled on a more sociable persona.

“Hey listen, I’m glad you called but I’ll have to connect with you later,” he said brightly into the phone, then ended the call and tucked it back into his coat without waiting for Strikeout’s reaction.

“I hope you’re not nervous,” Clark said softly as he followed them into the next room.

“Not at all,” he insisted, his tone bright and conversational–a carefully modulated performance, and this was one he had had years to perfect. Another necessary form of control. “I’ve only heard good things.”

-

All told it was an unremarkable procedure, at least from Maksim’s perspective. Clark supervised him for a day and a half, then asked if there was anyone available to help him with basic tasks for a week or so while he recovered. He assured them that there was, and then went back to the hostel alone.

He could take care of himself. He’d been taking care of himself for a long time, and by now he’d recovered from enough surgeries to know he could do that by himself too. Still, this had been a particularly strange and disorienting one. Everything still hurt–there was a tension all through his upper body, like a chord strung from his temples down through his neck and into his shoulders had been pulled impossibly, dangerously taut. Sunlight burned the back of his eyes. So did screens. The light brace on his neck, to stop him moving enough to pop any stitches, left him feeling not unlike a dog in a cone. And yet, all of it receded to the back of his mind the instant he shifted his focus to anything else. It was easy to ignore, leaving him free to go about his day as he normally would, only to be hit by a fresh wave of soreness and exhaustion every time he settled down enough to let his mind empty. This, he assumed, was why Clark had strongly advised him not to do much for at least two weeks, not to be too active, or in any unpredictable situations, not until his mind and body had time to calibrate the new signals being sent back and forth.

He had been filling most of his time with cooking, carefully avoiding the hostel’s handful of other tenants, and trawling forums he had only barely remembered how to access thanks to Strikeout’s instructions almost a year ago. “Unindexed,” whatever that meant. He had surreptitiously put out inquiries about the warehouse run, hoping to tease out someone who seemed like they might know more than just sensationalized rumors or the same talking points that had already been in the news. It hadn’t amounted to much except the name Alabast–a low level crime syndicate in the New England area, and apparently the people who had hired his team for the job.

His phone screen lit up beside him, the vibration loud and obnoxious against the table’s surface, and he grit his teeth. He had also been ignoring a lot of calls from Strikeout. That particular pastime was rapidly becoming unsustainable, especially when ze had gradually increased zir attempted contacts from one every day or two to one every few hours. In a burst of frustration Maksim finally grabbed the phone and answered it, barking out an unfriendly “what?”

“Thank fucking god,” Strikeout breathed. “Avos are you in Denver?”

Maksim flinched. How did ze know that? “I told you, I’m not-”

Strikeout swore under zir breath. “Have you been posting about the run on Arsenal?”

The abrupt subject change left Maksim scrambling to catch up for a moment. “I thought… if I could find out-”

“From your personal computer?”

He opened his mouth. Didn’t actually say anything. The laptop sat open in front of him and he shot it a sidelong glance, feeling suddenly threatened by its presence. He had the distinct impression that if he told Strikeout the truth, it would also be the wrong answer. All he managed to offer was “это…“

Another frazzled, desperate string of curses from Strikeout, then, “you need to get out of there.”

“Out of… this building?” Maksim asked cautiously. Optimistically.

“Out of the state,” Strikeout insisted.

The deep, steadying breath Maksim tried to take caught in his lungs, as the tingling numbness of panic began to creep up through his extremities. “Why…?”

“Because if I know exactly where you are who else do you think has that information?”

“Oh.”

Who indeed. Why did they even want him? Would Alabast hunt him this far just for a botched robbery? It wasn’t like he owed them money, no one had gotten paid. Maybe it really was a friend of one of the others, not content with simply running him out of town. Strikeout was still talking on the other end but he was barely listening. “… just give me a little time I can set up a secure line for us, if I find out anything I can-” he ended the call.

Okay. No. It was fine. He didn’t have a lot to pack. He’d spent a lot of money on the inhibitor and this hostel but he could afford a bus ticket to… somewhere. Further west than Colorado. He still had options, and he was probably in good enough condition to travel. As soon as he felt like he could breathe again.

[antisocialxconstruct]

I've been thinking a lot about art and why it doesn't feel good anymore, and a lot of what I keep coming back to is a) simply not being happy with my style, but b) not feeling comfortable experimenting because I feel like I need things to be """post worthy""" 🙄 so like... it's kind of a vicious cycle lmao so I'm heeding the advice I used to give people trying to overcome perfectionism which was "don't worry about making things that are 'good enough' to post and just post everything."

So... some vague style experimenting 🤷‍♂️ and also a sketch of Ilya from forever ago that I really liked but kept thinking I would come back and do more with.