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sp4ceboo · 5 days ago

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As Selfish as Love: Merman!Bakugou Katsuki x Reader

genre: merfolk au, fantasy au, merman!bakugou x witch!reader, strangers to lovers, bakugou x f!reader, smut and angst and fluff

summary: in a world infested with purgers of magic, neither a clandestine witch nor a lone merman can remain safe for long.

tw: 18+, smut (afab reader, p in v, bkg has a merman cock, marking + biting, oral f receiving, fingering, crying during sex but not like you think, unprotected sex, creampie), violence, blood, death, vivid gore, grief, reader treated as a tool by evil ppl, random worldbuilding, questionable medical knowledge, kinda plot heavy, other stuff i don't remember

wc: 19.8k

For years, all you’ve known is darkness.

Chained by the wrist to a ring in the wall, swaddled and asphyxiating in the blackness of the brig - it is there where your closest companion has become the dark. It is the absence of light: not only because they do not deem you human enough to spare lamp oil on you, but because the kiss of the sun has been reduced to a foreign concept, a distant, syrupy memory.

Every morning when that door opens, letting light leak in and crawl painfully between the cracks of the roughly hewn floorboards like an intruder, you repeat your name back to yourself, remind yourself who you are - a witch, a survivor, a person at the end of their tether but that all the same does what they can to keep the shadows at bay.

For the darkness is not just the absence of light: it is the absence of hope, and if you let it take you, your very substance will dissolve and you will sink beneath obsidian waves and melt away without a sound. They will have won.

This is something you will not allow.

White knuckled, you hold onto memories of the past the way a drowning man clings to driftwood. They swirl in the currents of your mind, fickle things. Sometimes they are so tangible you can feel the grass beneath your feet and the bracing wind of the highlands on your face even in the still, humid air of the brig, sometimes they eddy away before you can catch a glimpse.

You were barely a woman when they caught you, when they tore you out from where you’d been rooted to the earth, ripping through the stitches that held your life together. You were young, and you were naive and ignorant. This would not have happened if I had been as I am now, you think, but as you are now is shackled in the belly of a ship built for the single purpose of hunting merfolk.

They hunt to purge. Their so-called divine has commanded the eradication of magic, and so that is what each and every child is trained for from birth. The land has been rife with their conquest for centuries, making witches such as your kind unheard of, yet the sea for all its worth has lain mostly untouched until recently.

You are jealous of the merfolk. The magic must come easily to them, because they have not had to suppress it out of fear - it seethes in their blood, potent as an ocean storm, imbued within their essences as salt is in seawater. For this, they are feared, and for this, the hunters are more so hellbent on their extermination.

Over your years spent in the hull’s constant night you’ve learnt that your captors are the most celebrated hunters of their time, held above everything but their leader and their divine. They are revered among their people, and that is why they are allowed to chain a witch in their brig and force her to heal wounds sustained from hunting the undeserving - because they are strong enough and honourable enough to not be corrupted by your magic.

There is nothing honourable about the way they treat you.

Though you are human as they are, you are lower than an animal to them. They have no care for your limits - oftentimes, you are pushed to heal and heal and heal until you are exhausted, and yet you refuse to succumb when the darkness calls, because each time you meet their eyes, without fail, you see, buried deep within, is fear.

They fear what is unknown, what is not under their control, and every time you refuse to break when they beat you just for entertainment, every time they push you almost to death yet you survive, you wrest back an inch of control. You are needed, and that is something you will use one day, when the time is right. For now, you collect those sparks of fear in their eyes and let it feed the fire nestled within your soul that fends off the growing dark.

It is a day like any of the other days. Stirring in your fraying blankets, you wake up to the sound of the crew’s strident voices, and as it is sometimes, you almost forget that they are cruel and stained by their own wrong doings because for now, there is no talk of blood shed, just breakfast. You hate that they can seem so normal with so many innocent lives on their hands.

The day very quickly progresses into the type you have come to dread.

They neglect to bring you your daily portion of bread and water, nor the echinacea you had asked for more of, and it can only mean one thing - a hunt is on. Already, you can feel the unruly lurch of the ship as it skims over the waves, picking up speed. The crew’s voices become louder, crowing and eager, and you despise them so deeply your heart twists and becomes an ugly thing in your chest.

Almost imperceptible, you can hear the rattle and hiss of ropes as they ready their harpoons. This part is the worst, where the darkness closes in so near that you can feel its cold touch brush up your arms and its breath ghosting over your face. Sometimes you hear the anguished cries of the merfolk, sometimes the whoops and victory cries of the crew are loud enough to drown it out. You don’t know which is worse.

After will come the wounded, grinning still and soaked in blood of two kinds - theirs and their victims. You are always numb to it by then, turning a blind eye to the crimson dipped trophies they grip in dirty hands: lopped off fins and strips of scales, sometimes small enough to be a child’s.

How they can butcher beings as beautiful as the merfolk and think it the right thing to do, you do not know.

It makes you sick to your stomach, that somehow you have become their accomplice, stitching their wounds with your magic, saving their lives so they can kill again. You vow that one day, you will strike back, but what good can you do now, trapped in the bowels of a boat that was designed as a vessel for murder?

You have to try. You have to survive, if just to try. You are yet to come up with a method for escaping past what you have already attempted, but if you do not, more lives will be lost, more bloodshed that you had inadvertently aided. Right now, on deck, the patterns for it to happen all over again are falling into place.

You’re sure that this time will be no different.

And so you wait for the injured to come, almost defeated if not for the hard, bright little ball of hate settled in your throat. You wait, and you wait, listening to the strange thumping above that you can’t decipher, and still they don’t bring you their wounded. Neither comes their usual sickening shouts of triumph - you wonder if the merfolk managed to escape. You hope desperately that they did.

Listless, you turn your head as footsteps approach. There are more than normal. You can’t count exactly - five, maybe six, and they all walk with a strange irregular gait as they approach the brig.

I hope the merfolk put up a magnificent fight, you think as the key scrapes in the lock. I hope that taught them; you know it never does. The more damage the merfolk do while they fight for the lives of their mates and children, the more they are damned as unnatural and beastly and deserving of the fates that are doled out to them by men.

With a rusty squeal, the door swings wide, and with it comes the same influx of light that always spills greedily through, stinging your eyes and making them ache - the doing of a tiny, wayward star moulded from precious lamp oil. You blink away the tears that well up at your lash line, testament to your accustomation to the dark, and then blink again.

Back when you took the warmth of the sun on your face for granted, you lived too far inland to ever see one in the flesh. You were still a witch under the disguise of a healer, though. You’d heard tales, seen artists’ renderings and gorey body parts wrenched off as sick memorabilia.

None of those could have ever come close to preparing you for the sight before your eyes.

A merman.

Deep in enemy territory - so deep, in fact, that all those surrounding him, bar you, have murdered more than dozens of his kind each. He is on a galleon rammed bow to stern with killers. And yet, despite it, he has not fallen victim to the purge. Yes, there is a splintered harpoon sunken into his side, yes, he is limp and broken, but even so, shallowly, his chest rises and falls.

He breathes. He breathes, and even that is beautiful. The lamp’s light reflects off his scales; he is mainly jet black, but broad swathes of orange run across the length of his powerful tail like they were drawn with the loving stroke of a painter’s brush. In parts, they darken into a ruby red that glitters and winks as the lamp light dances.

Or maybe that’s just blood.

There’s a lot of it. It soaks into the sheet they strain to carry between them, pools in the dip his weight makes, streaks in smears down his chest and face, coats his hands and is embedded under his sharp nails. You hope that all of it is not his, that he made them regret whatever they must have done to get a merman vulnerable enough and far enough from his pod to capture him.

Deep lacerations cut all along his chest and tail, and one of the spines that extend from his sail-like dorsal fin is bent in a way that must mean it is broken. A smattering of scales reach wide across his shoulders and back and down his arms, some of them twisted and bent out of shape. Your eyes fall to the harpoon buried just below his hip, and you feel the bite of your nails digging into your palms.

“Heal it,” commands the man holding the corner of the sheet closest to you. “We’ve been ordered to bring back a merfolk to be studied. It must be in peak condition.”

You frown as they begin to manoeuvre all three metres of merman into the brig. Studied? They must be looking for a weakness to exploit. After all, merfolk succumb less easily to flesh wounds than humans - the magic of the sea resides in their very bones.

A hand fists the front of your shirt and you’re jerked forward. You can feel the hunter’s foul breath on your cheek, feel the violence roiling just below the surface of his skin, and yet you cannot tear your eyes from the merman until you’re struck across the face. Reeling back, you raise your head to look at him, a hand flying up to cradle your jaw where it has begun to swell.

“Are you deaf? What are you waiting for?” he spits.

Your brain is still stuck on the fact that there is a merman before you, alive on a ship full of specialised mermen killers, but your body has gone through these motions many times before and brings you to kneel by your patient so fast your chain jingles crassly in the relative quiet, your hands already working to gather herbs for a poultice that will slow the bleeding.

Glancing over your shoulder, you see your captors filing out of the door, the last of them grumbling and wiping his hands on his trousers as if being near enough to hit you had sullied him. Realisation dawns abruptly on you.

They’re leaving you alone with the merman.

“Wait,” you call.

Disquiet grows in your stomach. As much as you hate the life forced upon you, serving as a tool for men who would not hesitate to kill you if you ran out of worth, you have gotten used to it, and this merman at your feet has disrupted your delicate equilibrium, tripping you as you balance on a knife’s blade.

You have never had problems with thinking fast in a pinch. You are a healer, you are accustomed to endless wells of blood and snapped bones sticking through skin. Conversely, you are not accustomed to the sight of a half conscious merman taking up the majority of your floor space, a single fingernail on his hand no doubt potent with more magic than is contained in your whole body.

Your tongue is slow, your mind slower, but you force the words out, emboldened because whether he likes it or not, this merman is leverage for you. There is no one else on board that could save him.

“I will need a lamp indefinitely, while I’m in the process of healing.”

You realise how important the health of this merman is to their study because the hunter holding the lamp brings it over with no words of criticism, just the curl of his lip when you draw near enough to take it from him.

Its metal is warm in your hands, and you cup it in your palms - a little sun that clears the clinging shadows from the brig like they’re cobwebs. Carefully, you set it on the floor next to you, just outside the border of the canvas the merman lies upon, sitting back on your heels as the door slams shut.

You stare at the merman for a weighty moment. If it did, there’s no telling what organ the harpoon may have punctured - do his intestines extend all the way down his tail? Or are they in the same place as a human’s, and his tail is just muscles, like legs would be?

Never in your life did you think merfolk anatomy would have any significance to you. Even if you’d thought it did, there wouldn’t be any books for you to study on it. A hysterical, jittery laugh builds in your throat, wringing itself from you when you spot the strange slit - for lack of better words - that sits just below where his skin turns to obsidian scales.

The nervous sound breaks the silence, jolting you into action. Never mind his anatomy, he’s still bleeding out. Somehow, you need to get that harpoon out of him: the hunters don’t clean them off once they’ve used them, and if you’re not vigilant, infection will get him before whatever they’ve got in store will.

Determinedly, you scoot closer to his lower half, stretching out a hand to test the area around the wound. In preparation, you will your healing magic to rise to the surface, and it fizzles at the surface of your palms, warming them.

Your fingertips have barely brushed over his scales when pain slashes across your cheek.

The merman jerks away from you so hard that he cries out, and you wince as you see the wound pull wide, blood oozing out from where it gapes. Gingerly, you touch a hand to your cheek - one of his spines had glanced off your face as he’d moved away, its tip sharp enough to shed blood.

Any human patient would have lost consciousness moments after being hit by the harpoon that’s buried in his tail, and if by a miracle they hadn’t yet, the pain caused by what he just did surely would have knocked them out. Inexplicably, he’s still conscious, blood red eyes glaring at you with blatant distrust.

You hadn’t gotten a chance to look closely at his face before - you’d been too busy ogling his tail. Spikey, sandy hair casts a shadow over his eyes. They glow, carmine and half crazed, no doubt with the same agony that pinches at his face and curls his lip, revealing sharp canines that he bares at you, twin ivory warnings.

A rattling, hissing sound emanates from deep in his chest when you attempt to move closer again, his dorsal fin undulating in an obvious threat display. You can tell it hurts him; the spine you’d noticed before is definitely broken, the parts of the fin around it drooping and limp. He growls when he catches you looking.

You really, really don't know what to do.

Your skin prickles, the hairs on the back of your neck rising. He hasn’t taken his eyes off you since you were left alone with him. Aside from the obvious hostility, his face is effectively blank; there’s nothing in his gaze except the primal instinct to survive, and the unspeakable, offensive terror of a wounded animal backed into a corner and trapped there.

There’s no getting through to him with words. You remember the night you were ripped from your cottage by the hunters, the way you clawed and screamed until your voice was gone and your nails were torn and bleeding. You know what it’s like to have the adrenaline coursing through your veins so fast it burns, you know what it’s like to feel the anger and fear blend together in your chest until it strips away your humanity and you’re reduced to nothing more than a feral, wild eyed animal.

Slowly, you get to your feet, your chains rattling. He growls, making that hissing sound again, and despite his size, despite the muscles straining in his chest and the magic you can sense in his form, he looks small. You grit your teeth. The shock is beginning to wear off, burnt to ashes by a roaring fury that licks up your throat and fills your lungs.

You wonder if he had a pod. You wonder if they got massacred before his eyes.

Ignoring the trembling of your hands, you scoop up the piece of dried fish that remains from yesterday’s meal. It’s the only food you have, so you turn and offer it to him - when he doesn’t hiss immediately, you slide it over to him on the dented tin plate it had been on.

Tentatively, the merman picks up the fish, his nose very obviously wrinkling. As he examines your peace offering, you notice his hands are webbed up to the lowest knuckle and are a little larger than a human man’s, the fingers longer and the nails considerably sharper.

Relief fills you as he begins to chew at the fish, and you retreat to your pile of blankets, sitting down and half facing away to give him as much privacy as is possible in as small a space as the brig. You begin to make a poultice for him, crushing the herbs between your fingers because you’re not allowed a mortar and pestle and depositing them on one of the dishes you have lying around.

Once you’re done, you turn back to him. The edge in his eyes has softened a touch, and when you scoot over to settle closer to him, he doesn’t make a sound, instead just leaning away a little, watching you warily. Warningly, he hisses when you lift your hand, his red eyes flashing.

“I’m going to have to touch you to put this poultice on,” you tell him. “It will reduce the bleeding and might alleviate the pain.”

He twitches but remains silent. You wonder briefly if he even understands - people don’t talk to merfolk these days. They either run or they kill. For all you know, he might speak some ancient language of the sea that you have no hope in understanding.

You scoop the poultice up in your fingers and lean forward, aiming to ease him in by angling first for a smaller wound situated just over a hip bone on a human would be (you’re not even sure if his equivalent qualifies as a hip seeing as he lacks legs).

“Don’t,” he snarls, his voice guttural and rasping, like he hasn’t uttered a word in years.

Fumbling, you almost drop the dish. You guess that answers one of your many questions - he can speak your language, although you presume one word doesn’t really express fluency. For a moment, you consider telling him that they’ll no doubt beat you for not healing him, but it seems rather insignificant since it’s nothing they haven’t inflicted on you before.

Sighing, you sit back on your heels and look at him, defeated. He regards you with those same crimson eyes as before, but they’ve cooled considerably and hold traces of scathing criticism you find you aren’t the fondest of.

You begin to realise that he’s not going to give you any explanation as to why he doesn’t want you to treat him. He doesn’t trust you, most likely - you haven’t given him any reason to think otherwise of you, rather, you’d gawped openly at him. You’re not surprised he hasn’t taken a liking to you. You wouldn’t either.

So you retreat back to what has now become your corner of the brig, since the other three are taken up by the length of his tail and the doorway. On a whim, you prepare yourself a turmeric tea; it’s anti-inflammatory and you know you’ll be needing it sooner or later.

It takes a day, but one of the hunters barges in, light sneaking in past the outline of his silhouette. You don’t know any of them by name, nor would you want to, but you do know that this particular one is the first mate.

The merman hasn’t let you near him still, and although at points his eyes are closed, you’re worried that if you try to sneak up on him, he’ll move away again and tear open the parts of the wound around the harpoon that have partially closed up. The perimeter of blood soaked canvas beneath him has slowed its expansion but still grows.

It’s amazing that he’s survived this long while still losing blood. You presume merfolk must be rather resilient, unsurprisingly - the sea is no easy place to live in, nor is it made any easier by its recent infestation of merfolk hunters.

“Did you not hear your orders yesterday, you useless bitch?”

Passively, you look up at him as he looms closer. “I did.”

“So you don’t want to cooperate, then,” he snaps. “Do I have to encourage you?”

You don’t get to answer. A fist full of scarred knuckles collides with your nose, and your head snaps back, white exploding across your vision as the hunter shoves you backwards. Your back hits the ground and before you can even think of scrambling away, you’re kicked hard in the ribs.

You don’t try to resist it. You’ve learnt it’s better to take it than to fight and make him hit harder.

Red hot pain shoots through you when the tip of his boot catches your chin, clacking your teeth together. You cry out as your blood fills your mouth, streams from your nose, stains his knuckle bones. Hands up in a pitiful attempt at protecting your face, you curl up on the floor, as small as you can. Your ribs throb, your chain trapped awkwardly beneath your body.

You’re still balled up with your arms over your head long after he slams the door behind him. You ache all over, and your lower lip is trembling treacherously. Tears press at the backs of your eyes so you squeeze them shut: you’re not going to cry.

You need to get up.

You need to down that damned turmeric tea you made, just to feel the ginger burn as it slips down your throat.

When you open your eyes, the merman is staring. You grimace as you heave yourself to sit upright, the metallic taste of blood still coating your tongue and curdling until it’s sour. His face is unreadable, shuttered and devoid of any emotion. He doesn’t speak, although that isn’t exactly atypical.

“Well, now you’re not the only one bleeding all over the floor,” you mutter, unable to keep the resentment from your tone.

You turn your back to him as you set your nose with a grunt, letting your magic flow through your fingers and knit your flesh back together. Running a hand over your ribs, you check if any are broken, but when none are, you don’t heal them up; you’ll need to save your energy. The hunter didn’t bring food for you, and you doubt he’ll be bringing you any more until you treat the merman. That could take anything from an hour to a week.

Falteringly, you glance over your shoulder. He stares off to a place far away, a place you cannot see. A scowl furrows his brow, and you sigh, wondering if he thinks of the sea and the freedom that was torn away from him the way it was for you.

Curling up on your blankets, you pull one over yourself, rolling to face the wall and shutting your eyes. Loud in the darkness, your stomach growls, and you twitch but ignore the urge to look over your shoulder and stare accusingly at the merman - you too would not trust a human if all their kind had brought him was pain.

Your ribs hurt. It is alright, though. You’ve fallen asleep through worse.

When you wake, the first thing you do is crouch down beside the merman to check his wounds. The rattle of your chains makes him open his eyes, and you see that his face has paled, the alertness in his gaze dimmer now the adrenaline has worn off. As is becoming clear, he’s more resistant to injury than humans are, but there’s a worrying amount of blood saturating the canvas sheet beneath him, and you doubt he’ll make it much longer without help.

If he lets you near, what you’re going to have to do is far from ideal. The hunters’ harpoons are barbed and vicious, but you can’t exactly keep it in, and you can’t exactly cut it out without risking more blood loss. You’re just going to have to yank on it and hope it doesn’t destroy anything too vital on its way out.

“I’m going to have to take the harpoon out,” you tell him measuredly, gauging his facial expression.

He simply stares at you, his face blank but for the slight pinch of his brow. Shadows bathe half of his face; there is barely any lamp oil left to burn. The little flame flickers and sputters, letting darkness dance up the close walls of the brig, and if you do not hurry, you may have to treat him in the dark.

Slowly, you lift your hand, letting it hover over the splintered end of the harpoon. Tension bleeds into his body, the set of his jaw tight and his hands fisting as if he’s bracing himself, but he doesn’t growl or flinch away. Expectancy and resignation lurk in his gaze.

You don’t like that he won’t say anything in response even though he’s proven he can talk. You can feel his eyes boring into the back of your head as you gather your materials: the poultice from yesterday, a roll of bandages, a thick strip of worn leather. The latter you give to him, sighing when he turns it over in his hands, quizzical,

“Bite down on it,” you instruct him as you roll up your sleeves. “Either that or it’ll be your tongue.”

He frowns, but does as you say. You glance up at him to check if he’s ready. The hard lines of his body stand out, taut as a bowstring. He looks brittle, as if he might break and crumble into dust the moment you touch him.

Years ago, when you healed children’s scraped knees and the broken bones of men who had fallen from their ladders while fixing leaks in roofs, you had the words to comfort your patients. These you lost to the eternal darkness of the merfolk hunters’ ship, and these you wish to find again but cannot.

Instead, you murmur a quiet warning as you kneel by his tail, wiping your sweaty palms off on your trousers before getting a strong two handed grip on the end of the harpoon. Under your breath, you count down: three, two, one. Pull.

It makes a squelching, sucking noise as it comes out. You cringe but keep on tugging - if you stop now, it’ll be worse for both of you. He cries out, voice ragged and spilling over with agony, his tail arcing off the floor, and you feel the movement in the way the harpoon jerks in your hands with the bunching of his muscles.

All of a sudden, the resistance disappears. His tail fin slaps against the floor as he goes limp, both his and your heavy panting filling the room. You’re left with the splintered harpoon in your hands, a chunk of flesh and a twisted scale still clinging to one of the bloodied, rusted spokes. He spits the strip of leather out and it lands near your knee.

Carefully, you set down the harpoon and begin applying the poultice straight onto the weeping gash in his side, spreading the rest over the bandages which you bind tightly around his tail. Leaking from your fingertips, your magic suffuses across his skin as you work; you can’t heal him accurately without knowing much about his inner workings, but it should help to stave off any infection.

He shelters his face in the crook of his elbow, and though he tucks his other hand tightly to his chest, you can see the way he trembles.

You give him his space by swiftly moving on, busying yourself with his other injuries. You splint the spine in his dorsal fin, ignoring the way his hands shake and gently placing the arm crossed over his torso by his side so you can use your magic to clean and close up the various cuts and slashes littering his scar flecked body.

His scales seem to be damp, even though it’s almost been a full twenty four hours since he was brought in. It must be seawater somehow, you decide, or a sweat-like substance that keeps his tail wet enough when he hasn’t been in water for a while. He doesn’t look the most comfortable: he’s probably not used to having to support his own weight without the buoyancy of the waves.

There are little scars all over him, his skin a map of cicatrices, but the one that catches your attention is raised and jagged, spanning from the middle of his sternum to his navel. You touch your index finger to the centre of it, and he inhales sharply, flinching away.

“Sorry,” you mutter, pulling back, half expecting him not to hear you.

He’s silent for a while, ignoring your apology, but then comes a begrudging: “Thank you.”

Though he won’t see it - he’s still hiding his face from you - you shrug. “You should never have been hurt in the first place.”

He’s quiet again, lying still enough for you to imagine him dead if not for the rise and fall of his broad chest. You slouch, the energy having leaked from your body in order to mend his. The lamp finally gutters and winks out, leaving in its absence a tiny pinprick of light, a vanishing ember at the wick’s tip, buried in ashes.

When you tear your gaze away from your expired little sun, you’re confronted with a pair of blazing eyes. Pinned on you, they glow in the darkness like two pools of blood, but you find their luminosity strangely comforting, like Arcturus and Betelgeuse to a sailor: stars to lead you on your course.

“You are a witch, are you not?”

You jump at the sound of his voice, rough around the syllables but measured, as if he rolled them around on his tongue before he spoke. The scarlet light from his eyes dims a little as they narrow (you’re not sure if that’s meant to convey amusement or distaste) and you become aware that maybe he can see a lot more in the dark than you can.

“I am,” you confirm, still squinting at him - to no avail.

“Why do you not fight them, then?” He demands, his tone darkening. “Surely you cannot like it here.”

You scoff. “Of course I don’t like it here. You think I like the way they beat me?”

He’s silent, and though you still cannot see his face, you sense his scowl.

Sighing, you reign yourself in. This merman comes the closest to being an ally than all the others that have entered the brig, and you cannot squander this. He may not trust you, and you may be ignorant and ill informed of his kind, but you both have a common enemy, and though he may not like the thought, you are similar enough: the raw energy that flows through him is the same that you harness to perform your magic.

“I could fight, but there is nowhere for me to go if I escape the ship - there is just the sea,” you explain. “In the end, they are scared of all those associated with magic, even the witch they keep chained in the dark. The moment they deem that the risk I pose outweighs the use I have to them, they’ll kill me.”

He’s quiet again while he processes what you’ve said. “And what of me, witch? Why have they not killed me yet?”

“They want to study you,” you reply, wincing at how harsh your voice comes out. “I think we’re quite far from their lands - a few months’ travel, maybe - but it’s hard to tell.”

“What - ”

“Enough questions,” you cut him off. “My turn.”

A plethora of questions crowd your mind, but as you think of the merman in front of you, you find that they can wait, because although he must have stories of the sea that you’d only dreamed of hearing, and although magic you could learn endlessly from is threaded through his being, he is primarily, before anything, a soul. He is a soul: a soul with eyes that make the permanent night you are lost within just a little more manageable.

You will have to find out whether the kraken is real or not later; you will ask him about selkie skins afterwards.

Instead, you ask him his name, and tell him your own.

Bakugou, he grunts in response before turning his head to face the wall, clearly ending the conversation. Frowning, you stare at his back - or where you presume his back is, in the darkness - and mull over the name he provided you with; you are certain he has given you the one he gives to strangers. You suppose that is what you are.

Pulling absently at your chain, you sit with your back to the wall, your knees to your chest, and think about the merman, about Bakugou. For a moment, you are seized by the absurd belief that his most grave injury is a bleeding heart, but that cannot be true, for he has not said anything that indicates it. Questions find their way to your tongue, but you let them stick there, stifling them before they deign to interrupt the silence.

Neither of you move from your positions until the door opens, revealing the first mate. Squinting, you rise to your feet, a muscle feathering in your jaw as he purposefully kicks Bakugou in the shoulder, lifting his lamp high so he can see the bandages you’d applied.

“I’ll need a top up on lamp oil if I’m to continue the healing process,” you announce. “And we’ll need food and water. He’ll have - ”

You hesitate, glancing over at Bakugou, but he just lifts a shoulder and makes a face of disgust that you know isn’t conscious. Deliberating for a moment, you wrack your brain for any clues about merfolk diets.

“Fresh fish,” you decide. “And crabs. The bigger the better. Also, he’ll need a tub big enough for him, filled with seawater.”

“Watch the way you address me,” the first mate snaps, taking a step forward.

You shrug. “You wanted him healed, didn’t you?”

Your first two requests come within the next few hours, appeasing the increasing hollowness that had resided in your stomach and sending the shadows inhabiting the brig retreating up the walls and into the corners of the room, but the tub doesn’t come until two days after. It is barely watertight, plugged with tar and made from rough sawn wood.

You haven’t exchanged words with Bakugou since you asked his name and he gave you one, though you find yourself on the receiving end of his red eyes more often than not. He’s silent as the hunters bring the tub in, as they fill it with pails of seawater, as they leave and slam the brig’s door behind them. He’s silent, even as he slips into the tub and into a thin slice of his home.

And then, after a moment, he turns to you, and there’s something painful and cutting and cynical in his eyes.

“You know, the water doesn’t speed up the healing.”

You nod. “I know it doesn’t. You were uncomfortable.”

His eyes blaze. “What do you want?”

You regard him, regard the intensity of the fire in his gaze and the way his chest heaves. His tail fin hangs out of the tub, but even so, water swills over the side and splashes onto the floor like it can sense his agitation. Loudly, the links of your chain clank against each other as you cross your arms.

“I do not want anything, Bakugou.”

He narrows his eyes. “All humans I have known but one are cruel, witch. You wish for me to owe you something.”

“I don’t,” you reply, noticing the strange look that creeps onto his face. “Who is this human you hold in such high esteem?”

A distant look erases the furrow in his brow, and you get the sense he is no longer talking to you when he speaks again: he is lost in some place far away, a place coated in the golden sheen that tints all good memories. His voice turns soft as he brushes his fingers over the scar on his chest.

“His name was Izuku,” he murmurs. “But I called him Deku.”

“Deku?” You echo, your voice crudely loud all of a sudden.

A flash of grief slashes across his features like lightning on the high seas, there and gone so fast you almost don’t catch it. It’s like a switch flips, and suddenly shutters slam down behind his eyes and his expression melts away until his face is blank and cold. Regret sinks heavy in your stomach.

You wince. “I’m sorr - ”

“He’s dead,” Bakugou growls.

He doesn’t speak to you for three days. There is a certain rawness in his blood red eyes that makes you gentler as you change his dressings and reapply your poultices. He looks at you as if he hates that you are healing him instead of leaving him to die, so you avoid his gaze, staring instead at the scars that cover him like warpaint.

You get the sense that he is mourning this human he told you of all over again, and you cannot help but see the weight of it in the tension of his body and wonder if you could alleviate the pain.

On the fourth day, he shuts the vulnerability away somewhere deep inside of him, buried far enough beneath other things that he can pretend it never even existed. Yet you remember it, still vivid and fresh in your mind as you lie curled up on your side, watching the lamp’s flame until your eyes burn. He breaks the silence by clearing his throat, his gaze fixed on you.

“Witch,” Bakugou says softly. “How did they catch you?”

You glance over at him. “I was young and foolish and alone. It’s easy to snatch a girl from her home under those circumstances.”

“You have been here for years, then.”

“I have,” you sigh. “I tried to escape once. That’s why I’m chained down.”

“A weaker soul would not have survived this darkness,” he remarks solemnly. “You are strong, witch.”

You look down at your hands, watching your fingers fidget to and fro in your lap. Your tongue is frozen in your mouth - you had not spoken properly to someone in years before he was captured, and his behaviour confuses you. No words come to mind that express how grateful you are for his acknowledgement.

“Thank you,” you settle with in the end.

He hums but other than that remains silent.

Later you discuss with him the possible logistics of an escape. He explains to you that he cannot channel the magic the way you can, but that he is soaked in the magic of the sea; he is unable to use it for spells because it is innately part of him, enhancing him beyond human capabilities. Together, you come to the conclusion that you must get off the ship before you arrive at the hunters’ lands, or your chances of freedom will have narrowed to almost nothing.

An actual method of subduing or injuring the hunters enough to allow an exit route evades you, though. After all, you are chained to the wall, and there’s no easy way of moving Bakugou - he is, evidently, far too heavy for you to drag around all by yourself.

Uneasy silence falls over the brig. You stare at the lamp again: with it, your ability to see has been restored, along with a piece of your humanity, but now its light seems to illuminate how small a space you are contained in, how strong the chain binding you to the wall is.

As you drift off to sleep that night, you find yourself gripped by the fear that Bakugou will never return to the sea, and instead, they will inflict unspeakable torments upon him.

You will be the one who kept him alive for them. You will be the one who he grows to hate, because you had the chance to let future pain pass him by, but you saved him, and by doing so, you failed to spare him from their torture. And while they cut him open and study his insides, you will be somewhere far away, still risking yourself to heal their most elite, almost as if they are beloved to you.

The thought gnaws at you as the weeks pass. Blood no longer soaks the bandages wrapped around his tail; his dorsal fin is almost healed. He is gaining strength, more rapidly through your magic, and it is clear he has shaken off death many times before if his scars are testament to anything. In particular, the one on his chest draws you: though it is long healed, you can tell it was deep.

He almost died back then, too - the scar tissue around its edges is strange, lumpy and malformed as if he was kneaded back together by a child who saw his flesh as nothing more than clay harvested gleefully from a river bank. Even so, the shape of it is familiar. You know you shouldn’t pry. You remember the way he flinched away when you first touched it, but you ask, anyway.

“Bakugou,” you ask him once you’ve finished changing his bandages. “What did you do to get a merfolk’s blade stuck in your chest?”

He snarls. “All you do is fucking dig, you shitty witch.”

“I - ”

Hissing, he swipes at you half heartedly, and you stumble backwards, dodging his fist and almost tripping on your chain, caught off guard by the agitation in his eyes. Stunned, you gape at him. The fury is vehement on his face, evident in the grit of his teeth and the tremor in his hands as he grips the side of the tub; you can tell he despises how he is trapped in here with you, fending you off with the sting of his words.

You open your mouth. You’re not certain what you’re supposed to say, other than an apology that he will shake off easily, but you hope that words will form on your tongue. He levels his gaze on you, and this time, within it dwells an overwhelming sorrow that stops you short.

“Don’t try,” he whispers. “You cannot change the past.”

Brow furrowed, you stare at him. You take in the pain carved all over him, and this, you realise, not his scars, is his warpaint - he holds it close to him, like a cloak of inwardly turned, savage blades, reminding him to keep his distance. It is present in the bow of his head, the slump of his shoulders, a weight so heavy it threatens to rend his flesh from his bones.

You get to your feet, and in the lamp light, the single tear that rolls down his face is turned to solid gold.

Balefully, he looks at you, yet he holds still as you reach out and smooth it away with your thumb. A rawness resides in his eyes that you wish you could soothe as you catch the next tear that spills over, gently as if he is made of porcelain.

“You need not bear the weight of your world on your shoulders, Bakugou.”

Your words wrench a sob from him. His fingers curl tight around your wrist, tearing your hand away from his face, silently weeping as he grips you so hard you begin to lose feeling in your palm. You watch as the anguish in his eyes evolves into anger, harsh and brittle and bleak.

“Get away from me,” he spits, voice strangled, and yet he does not release you, so you perch on the side of the tub and make a show of not looking at him so he is not alone in his privacy.

It’s then that you realise that whether or not he likes it, you have gotten through to him. In the month that goes by, sometimes he is cold and aloof, keeping to himself, and sometimes he allows you close enough that you can feel his warmth. You find you savour his company when it’s there.

His wound is fully healed, a pink scar bordered by healing scales, and his dorsal fin spine is back in working order. You check up on him still, every other day or so, careful to monitor them in case you have somehow healed him wrong, careful to keep your regular intersections with him, because although you would never admit it to him, he is amusing, and he keeps the darkness at bay.

You are unsure what he thinks of you. Sometimes, he smacks you upside the head with no real force, and you dare to label it as affectionate. He gives you the name which he gives to those that mean more to him than strangers, too - well, you wring it out of him.

(“Bakugou, what’s your name?”

A scoff. “Witch, have you hit your head?”

“We both know you’re not obliged to answer, so if you’re not going to tell me, spare me the insults.”

Pause. “Katsuki. It’s Katsuki.”)

There are times when he has nightmares, too. You surmise that most of them are about Deku, and that the scar branding his chest, the one made by a merfolk forged weapon, is linked somehow to this dead human. Incomprehensibly, he mutters in his sleep, snarling about krakens and storms and sometimes even witches, but it always leads back to Deku.

Sometimes he protests against him, speaking a language you do not fully understand, cursing and thrashing so hard you fear the tub will splinter, while sometimes he proclaims his love, his voice slurred as he slumbers, but each time, without fail, he begs: forgive me, Izuku, forgive me, Deku, I’m sorry.

Katsuki is unaware of what he gives away in his sleep. Often, he settles down quickly after raising his voice, but sometimes you look over to see him stiff and terrified and shake him awake; he then jolts upright, the water sloshing out of the tub as he reaches for you, his stricken eyes searching yours for something you do not know the identity of, but he always finds.

He does not let you go, not ever. At these times, you lean or sit by the tub and let him crush your fingers in his grip.

He never speaks of it in the morning.

You would not hide from him what you have learnt, nor the feelings that grow treacherously in your heart, but you are too cowardly to tell him of either. It is certain that he loved Deku, and that maybe Deku loved him too. What was it like, you often wonder, to have loved Katsuki?

When he holds onto you, still half lost in the dark lands of his nightmares, you think about it. He would have been less guarded, a young merman not yet covered in scars; he would have given Deku his name immediately, for he would not have learnt that he needed to be wary of humans. Still, he would have fought for him until the end with the same ferocity he would fight for his own heart - because Deku was his own heart.

And Deku, you imagine Deku saw people as they really were. You imagine Deku with bright eyes and a brighter smile, with a face that all his emotions could be read off as easily as a book. He must have been good, persistent, if Katsuki had fallen for him. Soft, even, but tough when he needed to be.

They fit each other, no doubt.

You feel guilty, as if your speculations are invasive, rummaging around within Bakugou’s heart where he has not let you set foot. Mercifully, he can pin his red eyes on you as much as he likes, which he often does, but he will not hear your mind.

Now that he is healed, that is how you pass your days, exchanging words with him when either of you wish to, while you wrestle with the unspoken in your head and while god knows what happens behind his eyes. It is normal for silence to fall after a conversation - it is not awkward, but not comfortable either. It is pensive, it is familiar.

And today, it is shattered by screams up on deck.

Katsuki perks up, his keen ears picking up things your dull ones cannot, and he tilts his head, listening intently. You do not have to hear what he does to know what is happening: there is the sound of clashing steel above you, the all too familiar war cries of the hunters. It is not often that the merfolk are prepared for the hunters as they pass by, but neither is it impossible.

The ship lurches, harshly enough that some of the water in Katsuki’s tub overflows. You wager it must be a whole pod, then, maybe two, and you glance over at him, wondering if he knows who they are, wondering if -

“Are they yours?” You blurt.

“Huh?”

“Your pod,” you clarify.

Bitterly, he scoffs. “If the merfolk wanted to rescue me, they wouldn’t have waited months.”

You freeze. The detachment in his voice does nothing to hide the betrayal beneath, and ice begins to crawl up your spine, for he addresses them as the merfolk, not as his kind, his people. Harshly, you swallow as you start to understand that the hunters would never have been able to capture a merman if he wasn’t alone.

“You don’t have a…” You trail off, feeling far too inadequate and stupid to continue.

“My pod renounced me the moment they learnt about Deku and I.”

A picture forms in your mind, of a Katsuki who lost his family because he gave away his heart to a human - of a Katsuki to which the sea was no longer home, but a huge expanse of alone. Horror closes over your head like cold water as your eyes slide down to the scar on his chest.

His pod didn’t stop at just renouncing him.

You had always hoped that beings whose very essence was rooted in magic would be fair and just as the tales said. Your hope had always been that the merfolk would see that humanity was not united in the purging of them, that they would spare you if your path ever crossed theirs. Never did you think they would be so blind as to turn on one of their own for something as reliant on fate as love. You are a fool.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, and it comes out almost like a sob.

“We are no better than you are,” he replies.

His voice is so devoid of hope that it cuts you to the quick. You open your mouth so say more, to try and fill that emptiness inside him if you can, but your words are stuck in your throat and before you can force them out the door flies open, banging loudly against the wall and almost extinguishing the lamp’s flame.

Three gravely wounded are deposited in front of you and then the door slams. Silently, you get to work, sealing the deep slashes to their flesh more carelessly than you should be - but with Katsuki watching, you feel sullied, a betrayer who works for the purgers of magic. Their blood coats your tingling palms, and yet not in the way you wish it could be.

You have just finished the last when four more are dragged in, and you’re hit hard across the face and ordered to work faster, which signifies only one thing: more are coming. As blood wells up in your mouth, you hope that the merfolk are victorious, even if it means sinking the ship and letting you drown within.

Hate rises within you again, searing and acrid like smoke clogging your lungs, but this time it is different. You hate them for what they have made you; a tool, a means to an end. The determination you nurse in your heart is unimportant as long as you do what they say, and yet you cannot defy them, and this is what you hate yourself for.

Prickling sensations begin to claw up your arms as you heal. You are lost in it, the blood and the battle and the patients, and you swear you see the same faces twice: hunters who you healed once coming back more injured than last time. Your energy dwindles like a dying flame and you dip into your reserves when you recognise the violent light in the hunters’ eyes.

You cannot ask for a break. They already bay for blood and death; what more is yours but just another magic using bitch’s?

You are being bled dry. You are no longer aware of your surroundings, just the halting of the flow of blood beneath your hands and the wheezing gasp of your breath and the rattle of the chain locked around your wrist.

They have not been attacked like this in a long time. You almost forgot how fast the darkness closes in when you send out your energy through your palms to knit flesh and skin back together again. Spots cloud your vision, and futilely, you swat them away. Muffled, Katsuki’s voice hums in your right ear, but you do not understand the words he utters.

Your hands tremble. You pitch forward, slumping over your newest patient.

A hand fists in your hair. Knuckles press into your jaw, far harder than a lover’s touch and yet it feels like it in the way your head lolls slowly to the side. It takes time, but pain radiates through your skull, vibrating your teeth and sharpening your focus, and then you can hear yelling, yelling for you to wake up, yelling for you to carry on or they’ll kill you -

There are so many of them. So many hunters with frenzied eyes and blades that shine where they are not coated in innocent blood, and they are hurt and they want to return back to the battle and you must abide by their demands. The air is too thin as it whistles in and out of your lungs. You cannot think.

You press your palms to the blood slick abdomen of the next man placed down before you and do as they say. Your mouth is dry, your head pounds, your eyes won’t focus, and yet, you do as they say, you always do what they say.

What a fucking coward you are.

Letting them push you farther than you ever would let yourself go. You’re right on the edge, right over the edge, clinging onto the side of the perilously vertical cliff face even as the mossy stone crumbles beneath your fingers and threatens to make you fall down down down. But still, you heal. Your body performs numbly what your mind cannot take any more.

All of a sudden, there is not an open wound for you to heal or guts to force back inside a torso, there are just crimson soaked planks and a raised voice. Loud. An incensed, raised voice, cursing and roaring. Can’t you see she’s almost gone? They shout, earsplitting enough to make your head pound. She can’t heal you fucking bastards if she’s dead!

Bakugou. No, not that name. It’s… Katsuki. Katsuki making all that racket. You don’t know when it happened, but now your cheek is pressed to the rough planks that make up the floor. There’s blood everywhere. Some more splatters to the ground and you notice that the din isn’t being made by Katsuki any more. Your eyes are hazy as you lift them upwards and see a hunter raise his fist again.

“Kats,” you slur. “Watch… watch out…”

The lamp goes out, which is strange, since the oil got topped up this morning. You pay it no mind, though.

You’re too tired.

You wake surrounded by water. For a moment, you wonder if the merfolk won, and if somehow you managed to get tossed off the boat and into the sea, but then you move your leg and it hits something hard and vertical which must be wood. Peeling your eyes open, you find you’re in… the tub? Katsuki’s tub?

Lifting your head, you’re met with a pair of concerned red eyes. One is almost swollen shut, and blood has crusted down the side of his face from a wound in his temple, yet he smooths his hand soothingly over your upper back, watching attentively as you come to.

“You’ve been out for just under two days,” Katsuki says. “You need to eat, get your strength back up.”

Your memory begins to trickle back, and with it floods a torrent of shame: you always told yourself that you survived out of spite, out of the belief and conviction that one day you would hurt them enough to negate all the healing they made you to do, but it was all a pretence. You were scared and so you took the easier road of complacency, and it has caused the deaths of hundreds of merfolk.

It is without a doubt that if you had healed even just a papercut more, that if Katsuki had not stopped them, the life force within you would have winked out, and you would have died. Death had loomed right over you, brushing boney fingers over your face, and even now, it lingers.

You are burnt out, exhaustion weighing on you as if a whole mountain rests on your back. Worse is the fear, revealed in the blinding light, shackling you, for you are its slave, and you cannot shake its hold off you.

Your face crumples. “I am spineless, for letting them use me so. I am a coward, a - ”

“They give you no choice, witch,” Katsuki remarks. “Do not put it on yourself.”

You shake your head. “You cannot ask that of me. How many lives have been lost because I obeyed when the hunters told me to save them?”

Bowing your head, you sob. Fatigue envelops you, the chain around your wrist unspeakably heavy, and you lean heavily against Katsuki; he holds you like you are precious, handling you with care so that the pieces you have shattered into do not fall apart and scatter onto the floor. He tips up your chin, forcing you to look him in those eyes of his as he wipes away your tears.

“What was that you told me, as I wept like you do now?” He asks. “You need not bear the weight of your world on your shoulders. That was what you said to me.”

Nodding, you feel more tears leak out when you squeeze your eyes closed. He strokes your hair, and you hide your face in his chest and wish you could do forever, for he is warm and he is far gentler than you ever imagined he could be. You are tempted, but he nudges you and chides you, reminding you that you will feel much better once you have eaten.

Wobbly as a newborn fawn, you climb out of the tub, Katsuki steadying you with a hand on your arm. Wrapping one of your blankets around you like a shawl, you retrieve a hunk of bread to gnaw on before planting yourself on the tub’s rim, loath to be any farther away from him than you have to be.

Though hunger worries insistently at your insides, sending tremors through your hands and weakness in your legs, you force yourself to eat slowly; you cannot risk wasting any of the food by throwing up. Katsuki rests his forearms on the sides of the tub, watching you with a keen gaze that you cannot read. You become more aware of the purpling bruising across his face and reach out without thinking.

He catches your hand before you can tap into the slowly replenishing well of magic inside of you, his fingers circling your wrist before he lets them slip down and lace with yours. Something ignites behind his eyes, and you find you are mesmerised - you lean closer to see how the spark dances.

“Katsuki,” you breathe, and then your lips are on his.

He tips his chin up to lean into you, his fingers threading into your hair as he pulls you closer to him, so tender that it makes your chest ache. You could stay like this for eternity, simply doing nothing but tasting the salt of him on your tongue and savouring the sweet, sweet scrape of his canines over your lower lip; he is all that matters, all that is.

Slowly, his hands come round to cup your shoulders, pressing you closer to him, and so you feel the moment his grip falters and he stiffens, feel the way he recoils from you as if you have burnt him, and you can do nothing to prevent it. You’re propelled backwards with the force he jolts away. Though it is only a few steps, you feel the gap between you yawn wide, stretching into an uncrossable chasm.

“No,” he chokes out, shaking his head. “No, not - not like - ”

Abruptly, he falls terribly, terribly silent. Stunned, you touch a hand to your mouth; your legs buckle, and you throw out a hand to steady yourself against the wall before sinking to the floor. It feels as if you are drowning.

Katsuki does not love you - how can he, when he fits with Deku like they were made for each other? You were wrong to hope for anything else, wrong to give in to what you wanted, because you have torn open old wounds that never properly healed. It is no longer significant that he does not love you, for you should have seen that already; what matters is that in your blindness, you have ripped him open.

You’re beginning to realise that it was not the lamp that kept the shadows back, but him. It is only natural that you are drawn to him like a moth to a flame, only natural that you were too weak to resist flying straight into the fire. This time, it is not only the moth who gets hurt.

You are left alone with your thoughts. Time passes, as it always does, but you pay it no mind. However hard you try, you cannot bring yourself to meet his eyes. You are numb, numb to the slow rock of the ship as it cuts through the waves, numb to the sounds of the crew at their battle stations again, numb to it all now that it is undeniable: you love him.

He cannot love you.

Wearily, warily, you raise your head when the door opens, revealing the first mate, soaked in blood. Crossing the room in a few strides, he stands before you, chest heaving, a frantic sort of desperation contorting his face as he tightens his hand around the hilt of his sword and glares at you.

“The captain is near death. We drop anchor home in a fortnight. I will be put in command if he does not survive, and if this happens, I will make certain that you come upon a death slower and far more painful than his.”

You do not answer, nor do you pay any mind to his threats. You can sense Katsuki staring in your direction, the feeling of his red eyes on your skin unmistakable: no doubt, he has heard what you have. We drop anchor home in a fortnight - a fortnight until Katsuki is delivered into hands who seek to study him, to slit him open while he still lives and examine his insides and the way his heart beats, ensnared in the cage of his ribs.

Just like that, you know what to do.

You wait silently until they bring the captain to you. The first mate did not lie when he said the captain is near death. Sweat creates a sheen on his brow, and though his eyes are open, he is barely conscious, for he has been sliced open from gullet to navel by a merfolk blade. Briefly, you touch a fingertip to the lip of the gash, ignoring the pained moan it causes and the disquieted mutters of the other hunters.

If you were superstitious, you would deem the wound too similar to Katsuki’s to be anything but fate, but you do not believe in such things. Instead, you put your trust in the strength of good steel and the sharpness of a tongue. Yes, you know what to do, and you will do it.

The chain fixed around your wrist is not broken, but it does not have to be. You are free to do what you wish, because before you is the captain, and he is leverage. There is no fear left in you, no shame to hold you back as you look up at the first mate; he opens his mouth, about to ask why you do not jump to heal his captain, but he pauses when he takes in your cold smile.

“Free the merman, and then I will heal him.”

A silence falls. They are left with no other choice but to do as you say, and they know it. The first mate’s hands ball into fists, a reminder to you of what will come once Katsuki is let go and you heal their captain, but it does not concern you any more. None of it is of concern to you, only his freedom.

“What the fuck did you just say, witch?” Katsuki spits.

His voice jolts the first mate into action. He heaves you to your feet by the front of your shirt, seething, and punches you squarely in the nose. Something cracks. Your head snaps back, the air knocked from your lungs when he drives his knee into your stomach and lets you crumple to the floor by his feet. Gritting your teeth, you glower up at him.

“Come at me all you like,” you hiss as blood pours down your face. “It will not save your captain.”

He crouches down before you. You do not listen as he shouts at you, because you see it in his eyes. He knows you have them all backed into a corner, he knows you’re aware he will not risk the captain’s life. Over his shoulder, Katsuki urgently mouths something to you: do you know what they will do to you because of this? They will do worse than just kill you!

“Let them,” you reply, and as you gaze at him, you smile again. To the first mate, you say: “Bring me up on deck. I want to see.”

The first mate hurls you away from him, barking orders at the other hunters, but all you hear is the crash of the waves outside and all you taste is the nectar of victory on your tongue. You watch, still smiling, as they grab Katsuki and drag him from the tub. He fights, of course he does, screaming your name and slashing at the hunters, but there is but one of him, and he is unarmed.

Cursing, the first mate unfastens your chain from the ring in the wall, wrapping the length of it around his hand and jerking you forward with it, pulling you to follow him through the ship. There is murder written on his face and in the curl of his lip, and you let it slide it off you like water from a sea bird's feathers.

He throws open the hatch, and for the first time in years, you see the sun. Slowly, you step into the light, and the salty breeze tugs playfully at your clothes and hair, fresh and briney and strong, pulling tears from your eyes. All around you is empty space, just blue sea and blue sky and the wind that dances gloriously between them as far as you can see.

The air is invigorating and crisp in your lungs. Hesitantly, you take a step forward, then another and another, seeing the way the sun plays on the water’s surface, scintillating as it warms your cold skin. It is as resplendent as you remember it.

“Witch!” Katsuki cries, shaking the hunters’ hands off him. “Why? Why would you do this to yourself?”

There are countless ways you could answer him. Instead, you take him in one last time, his spiky ash blonde hair and his crimson eyes and the way his scales glitter under the sunlight. You do this for love: if you can’t give him your heart, you will give him his freedom.

“Go,” is all you say, and though tears stream down your face, you smile.

“I will not forget you, witch,” he replies, voice thick. “I swear it.”

Running to the side of the ship, you cling to the taffrail and lean forwards to watch as he dives overboard. He slices through the water, the amber of his tail bright as he goes, further from you with each passing second, and your breath catches in your throat - he is more beautiful than you imagined he would be in the light.

As he crests a wave, he looks back at you, and you see the shimmer of his scales and the graceful arc of his dorsal fin one last time before he twirls in the surf and dives. With that, he is gone, and you are alone again, yet you do not fear what is to come.

A hand grips your shoulder, nails digging sharply into your skin. “Enjoy your peace, you thankless bitch, because once you heal the captain, all you’re going to know is pain.”

You turn to the first mate and laugh in his face.

He loves you.

Bakugou Katsuki fucking loves you.

He loves your deft hands, careful despite their calluses and nimble despite the chain around your wrist. He loves the smell of you, herby and laced with petrichor. He loves the brightness dancing in your eyes when you laugh. Most of all, he loves your sweet soul: the fierceness woven into it like second nature, the blaze of your heart when you stand up for what you believe in.

He was stupid for pulling away from that kiss. You had fit your lips to his, and suddenly panic rose in his chest, and he jerked backwards as if ignoring his heart would silence it; he was scared to love another human, scared because last time it led to pain. His fear had hurt you, and this is his regret - that he was the one to cause the slow dimming of the light in your eyes.

There are countless other things he regrets. He should have trusted more easily, he should have fought harder as they yanked him out of that silly tub and away from you, and he should never have left you by yourself on that ship with those despicable hunters.

He didn’t tell you he loved you, and now he is scared he will never get the chance.

He has left you in a den of beasts. Deku would never have let this happen if it was Katsuki in danger. Deku would have found a way to get him out. In fact, Deku did, he saved him instead of himself, and now Deku is gone, and he fears his heart is not strong enough to lose another. He does not want to lose another.

That serene little smile on your face as you watched him go - it haunts him, fucking burns itself into his retinas, because you knew. You knew precisely what you were doing, when you bargained with that hunter’s life, and you knew exactly what they were going to do to you for making them let him go.

You must be hurting right now. You must have been beaten within an inch of your life. You, who broke down the walls he rebuilt, brick by brick, after Deku was gone - the same walls that Deku himself tore down too. Katsuki is beginning to think that their foundation has always been flawed, or maybe they crumbled like Jericho simply because you shine brighter than the sun on the waves, and he could not look away if he wanted to.

He has been tailing the ship for little over a day. Keeping out of sight and in the shadows is easy; he has felt the sting of their harpoons enough and he will not risk an injury when getting you away from them is the priority, yet he can’t help but resent the way he must hide. There is no other way, though. Currently, he has no plan, and he must bide his time.

Katsuki was never the most patient, but he has no choice but to be patient since he has no sword and no allies. It is plausible that he could scuttle the ship by himself, but he can’t risk it with you chained inside and possibly unconscious.

But then he sees it - a shape in the distance.

It is an isle, small enough that it could sustain maybe one hamlet of people, and rather plain, with rocks that make up a small cliff on one side and a sandy beach dotted with rock pools on the other, a thicket of trees spanning the distance between. One could call it nondescript, but there is nothing nondescript about it to Katsuki.

He has bled out on that golden beach. He has fought to protect his own life and the life of another in the waters near that isle, and he has failed. He has wept on that shore, wept enough to cleanse the blood soaked sand beneath his newly fixed body that held his newly broken heart.

That isle is where Deku washed up, half dead, a decade ago. It is where he watched from afar as this green eyed, freckled human nursed himself back to health, and where he watched from a little closer as he learnt that humans were more than what they are portrayed as in the tales of his pod.

He understood many things on that isle: what love was - the touch of his lips to a man with unruly green curls and an infectious smile, and what betrayal was - when his pod found out and the waters were tinted red because of it.

Just like that, he knows what to do.

Hidden in the underwater caves below the isle is a monster that slumbers until a soul dares to wake it. The humans call it a kraken, but the merfolk leave it unnamed, for it is too great to be reduced to a simple moniker. He has seen it once before, through the haze that descends over one close to death, and felt as its power stymied the lifeblood that poured hot from a wound spanning from the middle of his sternum to his navel.

Both he and Deku had lain on the beach after his pod ambushed, both bleeding from fatal wounds. He had been too fucking weak to get to the kraken first, and so Deku had been the one to sacrifice himself and give himself to the monster so Katsuki could live, when it should have been the other way round.

This time, though, he is strong enough.

He remembers slipping back into the ocean with his freshly healed wound so the saltwater of his tears mixed with the sea, unable to understand why Deku would leave him. Now, he understands all too well, and he will not fail to protect the one he loves again.

Summoning the kraken means no going back. After waking it, the summoner is transported into the kraken’s form, and they have a limited time within it before the kraken reaps its payment - the summoner’s soul. It will shatter their spirit and ensure they cannot return to their body.

Katsuki dives down deep, breaking away from the ship and swimming ahead of it to find the gaping mouth of the cave that the kraken slumbers within. He is far down enough that the water is murky, frigid as it weighs heavily on him, the sun a weak pinprick of light suspended somewhere above him that does nothing to pierce the gloom.

The entrance is curtained with seaweed, the cold fronds caressing his skin as he slips past them. Nestled in the darkness, it lies there, slumbering: a behemoth shadow, looming as high as the cavern’s ceiling and filling its width like the berth of a warship docked in a seaside hamlet’s harbour.

As he swims towards it, he realises he has already had his last glimpse of you through his own eyes. The last time he will see you, he will be fighting to keep hold of himself before he loses his soul to the kraken, and then it will just be bottomless darkness until it is summoned again. You might not even know it is him inside the monster.

It doesn’t matter - a lot has ceased to matter to Katsuki. He can no longer deny that he loves you, and with that epiphany comes another: you knew what the hunters would do to you when you bargained for his freedom, and yet you did it anyway, with no fear of the consequences. Now, it is his turn to put his life on the line for you, and though he may lose it, you will be free.

He will never feel the sweet touch of lips again, but that’s alright. He hopes that you will find another to make you happy, another who will make your heart soar and help you forget him. They will be to you what you were to him: a light to scare away the shadows, a star in the night sky to guide you, even if at times, just like him, you believe you do not wish to be guided.

Katsuki pictures your face as he draws near to the kraken.

Its flesh is odd beneath his palm - slippery and uncomfortably cold. Pressing his palm to its skin, he wills it awake, and it obeys him alarmingly fast, an eye as big as his head snapping open and rolling around until it fixates on him. An abyss of a pupil sucks him in, beckoning him forward to a place that will be the last he ever visits.

Though he knows his body remains still, he feels himself fall forward, sucked towards the magnetic emptiness within the kraken as if it aches to be occupied. For a moment, he resists, pure instincts making him struggle against it, but he forces himself to let go. Sensation briefly forsakes him.

When his vision is restored, he finds that he is looking at his body, limp and vacant. Already he can feel a difference in the water, the sharp tang of fear drifting toward him on currents that hadn’t been there before as creatures begin to flee, aware that something ancient has been roused from its sleep.

A tempest is brewing.

Katsuki - or a version of him that no longer is really Katsuki, but instead a wrathful monster caller - cannot see the dark clouds amassing above, but he knows they are scudding across the blue skies to taint the high midday sun, and it is his doing. Cruel winds accumulate in the shadows cast by his thunderhead, and he can hear the sharp snap of canvas and the raised voices of a crew readying their ship for a storm.

Unfurling a tentacle, he curls it around his old body, careful not to crush it, and reaches up high enough to deposit it on the beach. He begins to move the kraken out of the cave, dislodging pebbles that would have been boulders as the bulk of its body manoeuvres through the exit.

In a way, he is disconnected from the body that is his now; there is empty space that he is not large enough to occupy, like he has donned a garment made for a merman the size of a mountain. It is strangely silent inside this huge vessel, although he is not alone. Shadow wreathed souls lurk in the corners of his mind, and he knows they are disgusted by him.

He is not surprised. Historically, the kraken have been summoned only in the utmost peril. To the merfolk, the kraken are as sacred and as old as the sea, called upon in the wars of old, when the magic beings of the sky were eradicated. Despite being only scattered shards of themselves, the past summoners look down on him, because he does not summon to seek the solution to mighty matters.

For the second time in a lifetime, the kraken is being summoned for a cause as selfish as love.

There’s an awful symmetry to it, really. He imagines the way they must have abhorred Deku, a dying human who did not use the kraken’s power to destroy, but to knit together the wound of a simple, unnoteworthy merman.

Faces contorted beyond recognition flash before his eyes and hands claw at his sides with nails as vicious as knives. They want blood, they want a whole fleet to rip through and ruin. He tells them that they will have to settle with one ship, and they cry their discontent in his ears, their voices rough and rasping, like rusting metal on stone.

He has not broken the surface of the water yet. His body prowls many leagues down, but still, he spots the shadow cast by the ship, and the moment he does, his vision narrows, blurs, and he sees winking lights on board: the lives of the crew, twinkling and tantalising and begging to be snuffed out.

The kraken jets upwards and breaches, spraying up a wall of water, and though he does not command it, he bellows a war cry, the sound so bloodthirsty and wild it almost sweeps him up and incapacitates him. The shadow souls close in, fragments of vengeful souls garbed in shadow, greedy and eager to see him torn apart, and he shakes them off, wrenching himself from their grasp with all his strength.

A twinge pinches at his side, and he glances down to see a volley of harpoons glance off his hide, leaving shallow gashes in their wake. The crew swarm on the deck, their terror sour as he breathes it in and savours it. They are but ants, small and irritating with their measly weapons and made to be crushed and devoured -

He seizes the mast and uses it to rock the ship from side to side, fighting to keep the visions of blood staining the water red away from him. Too fast, his control is slipping, and he feels the souls swarm around him, filling his field of view with darkness until all he can see is those tiny flames that he must put out. There is something he wanted to do, something he needs to do -

Selfish, the souls hiss in his ears, trying to sink their hateful claws into him again, and he agrees with them.

He loves, and therefore he is selfish.

It is no bad thing.

The storm clouds gather over the ship, roiling and rumbling with thunder. Lightning strikes, a bolt of white fury that splinters the deck and extinguishes one of the little lives on board, producing a delighted cackle from the souls at his back, but he ignores them. He knows what he must do.

“Bring me the witch,” he roars.

His voice comes out warped and foreign, the words of men coming out strange and misshapen on his tongue, but the crew understand enough, scuttling to obey, desperate to believe he may spare them if they give you to him. The grip of the souls tightens, squeezing at his throat - he has spent too long in their presence already, and they nip at the edges of his mind, stealing away parts of him when he isn’t looking.

He realises with a jolt that he does not remember his name any more.

It is fine, though. He will join the souls in their namelessness soon. They are a cacophony in his head, and he can no longer hear anything but them, the burn of their claws threatening to tear him apart and shred him the way they are already torn apart, but he barely cares.

The little gnats bring another up and present it to him. This one shines brighter, suffused with a magic the souls cannot wait to devour, and they encourage him forward - surely he too will enjoy the honeyed taste of this offering? Plucking it off the ship’s deck, he brings it to his eye level, and his shadow companions clamour for him to crush it, but he hesitates.

It looks at him like it knows him. In its weak, tiny voice, it yells something that gets lost in the howl of the winds, but even so, it makes the souls shrink back, receding enough for him to remember that this little thing he holds is important. Important for what, he can’t recall, but it is important all the same.

Kicking its legs, the small being beats its fist on his tentacle, still shouting. He leans closer, wincing as the shadows scratch and tear at his back, trying to draw him away again.

“Katsuki!” You scream.

He jolts. It is you, his little, beloved witch - you are why he is being so selfish, summoning the kraken just to save one life. Peering closer, he notices that you are bruised all over, and suddenly the storm worsens overhead, crackling as bolts of lightning stab down like vindictive knives and the wind tears at the ship full of aghast hunters, tossing it violently among the waves.

Carefully, he places you on the beach, next to a body that used to be his. You scramble towards it, limping, and he turns away, looking back towards the ship and the lights it is infested with that still need to be destroyed. Anger comes easily to him, because these are the ones that have marred you with bruises.

The shadows close in again.

Roaring, he tears at the ship, rending it in two and crushing those that leap overboard, yet the souls are never appeased, never satiated. It feels as if power leaks out the seams of his spirit and if he does not let it go it will destroy him from the inside, but he knows he cannot let go. He needs to hold on, to hold himself together, for something that drifts further and further out of reach -

It is as if he has been tied to the bottom of a sea trench for so long, drowning in darkness, that the surface is just a fanciful thought. He does not remember the sun’s sweet face, nor the sound of your voice as you called out the name he has lost again. They sink their teeth into him, ready to tear him apart.

He struggles. He will not go without a fucking fight, he will not let them have him before he has tried valiantly to swim upwards to the sun, where the shadows will not survive.

But the light is so far from him. It floats away every time he strives to be closer, or maybe there are hands holding him back, ripping him open and tethering him to the blackness. They cling to him, shrieking in his ears, sinking curved claws into him and refusing to let go, ready to reap the kraken’s payment.

He is losing himself.

And then - a hand, gentle, touching his face. Emerald eyes fill his vision, wide and lovely, and suddenly he is able to ignore the souls and their blaring dissonance, the pain in his side fading away into nothing. There is a soul that still remains named here, mixed in with those who have been rent apart by hate.

“Kacchan,” the soul says earnestly. “You must fight it, Kacchan.”

“Deku,” he sobs, leaning into the soul’s warm palms as he wipes his tears away. “I’m sorry.”

Deku smiles, and Katsuki weeps, because he looks so proud of him, as if he is worth an eternity spent trapped within a kraken alongside shattered souls that only wish for chaos and destruction. He weeps, because here are Deku and Kacchan, back together again, but they cannot stay this way forever.

“I understand,” Deku whispers, and his touch heals Kacchan once more. “I understand you love her. You need to fight, you need to return to her and love her like you want to. I died so you could live, Kacchan. Let go.”

He looks down and sees the way he clutches onto Deku so hard he is white knuckled, while Deku cradles his hands in his scarred ones, softly as if Kacchan is fragile. Trembling, he loosens his grip, and he feels the light draw closer, the sun’s rays warming his face. Something tightens in his chest when he finally allows himself to release Deku, but it hurts in the manner of stitches pulling taut inside him and binding him together again.

One last time, he looks over his shoulder, to where Deku watches as he goes, smiling brightly, shining like he is a star plucked from the night sky. His brilliance holds the shadows back, rendering them powerless. He pays them no mind, though - his viridescent eyes are lit up and fixed only on his Kacchan.

Deku says something, but the sound of his voice is drowned out by the crashing of the waves and the winds of a dying down of a storm. Still, Katsuki knows what he said by the shape of his lips: I love you. Smiling, he takes a final look at him, at those unruly green curls and those sweet eyes and bright smile, and then he turns and is bathed in light.

The kraken sinks again beneath the waves, but Katsuki does not sink with it.

You know it’s impossible, but you sense the moment Katsuki is back in his body. You’ve heard the tales of the kraken, and you know he should have been taken from you, but there he is, present in the weak pulse of his heart beneath your palm and the steady rise and fall of his chest. Shallow cuts have appeared all over his body, remnants of the damage of the hunter’s harpoons.

His eyes are open, but barely, and he blinks slowly, fighting to keep them fixed on you, giving you only glimpses of familiar crimson. There is a strange looseness to his awareness that must come with the recency of doing the impossible, but still he grips your hand desperately, struggling to stay awake long enough to force words out.

“I - I lo - ”

Before he can finish, his voice cracks and he coughs. His eyes widen, and he opens his mouth to start again, but you smile, tears blurring your vision as you press a finger to his lips and hush him, and thankfully he relaxes under your touch, curling closer to you and seeking shelter in your embrace. Once he is rested, he will have all the time in the world to tell you whatever he likes.

What matters is that he is here. That in itself is beyond even a miracle.

Almost disbelieving, you cradle him to you, pressing your forehead to his as tears you cannot stop spill down your face and mingle with his blood. You are bone tired after repeatedly healing your own cracked ribs and fractured wrists, but you are whole enough for now - you won’t waste your energy on your own bruises while he still hurts.

So you hold him against your chest, sweeping your fingers delicately over the deeper of his cuts to seal them. The sky has cleared, the storm clouds departing as fast as they arrived, and the sea is dipped in ruby by the bleeding sunset. It lacquers the wet sand with the glow of dying embers as the incoming tide smooths over where the storm had churned it up, erasing the mark left on the island as if this afternoon had never happened.

If it were not for Katsuki in your arms, it would be like the kraken never came.

You glance down at him. He seems at peace, though worn and battered, as if he has reconciled something deep within his heart; he has closed his eyes, simply leaning against you with his face pressed into your side, his warm hands tucked just beneath the hem of your shirt.

You cannot help but smile. Because of him, you are free. No chains bind your wrists, no threats limit you in what you decide to do next. You are not sure where you will end up later, but for now you intend to fall asleep beneath the open sky, beside the one you love infinitely more than any life you might have had and even this new life he has fought and bled to give you.

When you drift out of your dreams - just simple, golden things full of a contentment that lingers past waking - the tide is high, the ocean lapping at the sand at your feet. The moon is almost at its highest point in the sky, depositing a residue of silver on everything around you.

Katsuki stirs in your arms, and when you glance down, you are met with the twin beacons of his eyes, luminous in the dark and full, brimming and spilling over with unspoken things that leave a deep ache in your heart. Trembling, he grips your hands, and you lace your fingers with his, brushing your lips over his knuckles and stroking his face as the tears begin to flow.

He cries like he is mourning. You wonder what he saw while his soul donned the kraken’s skin, how poignant it must have been to wrench these fitful sobs from him. Cupping his face in your palms, you wipe his tears away, and he clings to you to keep you close while he bares his newly healing heart to you; it is wrapped in the past’s scars. He shows you the rawest parts of him, and you soothe them as best you can with your healing hands.

There is no magic to this cure, though. It is just the love that burns within you, consuming you so entirely it makes you shake. You did not know it was possible to love like this, but the proof weeps in your arms, a merman who summoned the kraken and somehow conquered it so he could make it back to you.

“Tell me,” you whisper, tracing the strong lines of his face with your fingertips.

Curling his arms around you, he hides his face in your neck. “Deku stood with me against the dark inside the kraken,” he replies softly. “He held them back so I could come back to you. I - I thought I had lost him forever, when he summoned the kraken to save me.”

Carefully, he brings your hand to touch the scar stretching down his chest, and you outline its edges, comforted by the warmth of his body and the steadiness of his breathing beneath your fingers. You would be happy to stay like that forever, linked to him by your skin on his and the synchronised beat of your hearts.

“He told me to fight so I could return to you,” Katsuki murmurs. “So I could love you.”

Your breath catches, your voice sticking before any words come out. He is blunt and honest as always, but this time, he is without his walls, without his guard up, open and vulnerable for you to lash out at him if you wished to, but he trusts you will not. Still, you hesitate, your throat constricting.

“I… I didn’t know him, or what he was like, but I know I can’t be him to you,” you falter. “I cannot be Deku, Katsuki.”

You do not expect your voice to come out so small, so timid. Neither do you expect the overwhelming tenderness that fills his eyes - no one has ever looked at you like that, as if they really see the whole of you, the blemishes and shadows on your soul and they love those too.

“I don’t ask you to be like him,” he replies. “No one will ever be like him. No one will ever be like you, either. I love you because you are you, not because you are him.”

“Katsuki,” you breathe, unable to swallow down the tears welling in your eyes.

“You know I can’t give you the life you deserve, either,” he continues, voice thick. “If you tie yourself to me, you tie yourself to the sea too, regardless of if you like it or not.”

Searchingly, you look at him, and it feels for a second that as you meet his eyes, you know the whole ocean, down to its unexplorable depths, down to every grain of sand and every critter it shelters and sustains. In that moment, there is a total, utter understanding within you - you would love him whatever the condition.

“I would tie myself to the most pitiful of the things on this earth if it meant I could love you, Katsuki.”

“I too, witch,” he replies, and a fond little smile pulls at his lips. “I would summon that kraken a thousand times if it meant I could win your heart.”

You laugh, out of pure joy more than anything else, and he laughs too, rolling in the sand so he can prop himself up on his elbows. Flopping over, you adjust yourself so you can rest your head against his stomach, lifting your eyes to watch as he tips his face up to the sky, letting the stars reflect in his gaze, as if he holds the galaxies of the universe in each pupil.

Your fingers find his as you stare up at the moon where it hangs highest in the sky now, full and silver as the stars. A new moon: symbolising fresh starts and new beginnings, or maybe even the waxing of a love that was planted in the darkness of the brig of a ship soaked in blood, nourished by nothing but the weak flame of a lamp and swift hands knitting flesh back together.

A familiar prickle trails coyly down the side of your neck, and the sound of sand whispering against itself reaches your ears as Katsuki shifts beneath you, lightly skimming the high tide’s surf with his tail. You are not ready to leave the easy silence you’ve made yet, so you bask in his presence and his warmth a little longer.

The moon has just begun its descent when you turn to face him. He’s just looking at you, looking and looking and looking as if he can’t get enough. You smile, aware of the fresh edge in his gaze that was not there before, the string binding your soul to his pulling delightfully taut.

“You’re as beautiful as the ocean,” he mumbles, fiddling with a lock of your hair. “More beautiful than the ocean. But in a different way, you’re…”

You grin. “Worse?”

“Worse,” he agrees, smirking, but he looks at you as if you breathed life into his seas. “Much worse.”

Time stops for a moment, and you sit up, bringing your face close to his until your breaths mingle - you cannot help but let his crimson eyes consume you, heart and soul. You linger there for a moment, the air crackling between you, both of you waiting as if to see who will give in and pounce first.

Bringing his hand up, Katsuki lets his fingers slide under your jaw, lifting your chin so you are merely a hair’s breadth away. He fills your senses; you can feel the warmth of his body, the roughness of the calluses on his fingers, the feather-like brush of his breath against your cheek, smell his briney sea scent, hear the swish of sand as he shifts infinitesimally closer. A lethal spark gleams in his eyes, tying you in helpless knots.

You lean forward and claim his lips.

It draws a quiet groan from him, and suddenly you are beneath him in the sand and his hands are all over you, grabbing handfuls of you and shucking the damp material of your shirt up and over your head so he can touch your skin. The way he looks at you, with those stirring embers that tug at something low in your stomach, reduces you to a sailor under the influence of a siren’s song - he is irresistible, he is magnificent.

Tangling your fingers in his hair, you pull him ever closer, licking into his mouth as if you might find the god’s nectar hiding beneath his tongue. He nips at your lower lip with those keen canines of his, and you cannot help but buck your hips as the tide swirls around the both of you.

Chuckling, he skims a palm over your thigh, pulling your leg up to hook over his hip. It brings your clothed core right against the length of his hardening cock that has emerged from the slit in his tail; you stifle a moan at the feel of him, grinding agonisingly slowly down on him and sighing as he trails wet kisses and purpling bites down your throat.

Katsuki licks at the spot under your jaw, and this time, at the second graze of his teeth against your skin, your fingers tighten in his hair, pulling at it and squeezing another sweet noise from him. You keep your hands threaded through his ash blonde locks as he licks at the valley between your breasts. Meticulously, he marks your plush flesh with the imprints of his teeth, laying his claim on you.

When he reaches your stomach, he mouths at your skin, nipping playfully just over your hip bone before he raises his eyes to meet yours. They are heavy lidded and sultry, and they stir the fire building in your core as he toys lazily with the waistband of your trousers. His fingers are casual as they curl beneath the fabric.

“Let me taste you, witch,” he implores.

“I cannot argue when you look at me like that,” you reply, breathless. “Nor would I, anyways.”

That is all the consent he needs before he is helping you out of your remaining clothes, almost ripping them in his hurry to have you on his tongue. His hands slip beneath you, gripping your ass and guiding your legs over his shoulders, and there he pauses. Yearning blazes in his crimson eyes, and then he dips his head and puts his mouth on you.

You gasp his name. Your hands scramble for purchase before you bury them in his hair again, yanking to encourage him further, and he responds by sucking harshly on your clit, making your hips jump and buck into his face. He groans into your heat, and the vibrations of it make you see stars.

Slowly, he pulls back, glancing up at you, and the sight of him is enough to make you moan: his eyes are glazed, fervent, worshipful, and your slick drips down his chin, the moonlight making it seem like liquid diamond. Bewitched by him, you choke out his name, and he smirks and slips two fingers inside you. Your legs begin to shake when he pumps them slowly in and out of you, bending them at the knuckle so he can hit that spot inside you.

The friction enraptures you, mounting in the pit of your stomach and winding up tight, and your thighs close around his head, clenching as Katsuki pushes you closer and closer to the edge. Turning his head, he sucks at your skin, marking you there, too.

You balance on a knife blade’s edge.

Abruptly, he slides his fingers out and your pussy clamps down a second too late; already, you open your mouth to lament it when he bends his head and replaces them with his tongue. Your words dissolve into wretched moans; you grind your hips against his face and lightning spears through you when his nose nudges at your clit.

Pleasure rises within you, a gradual, swelling thing that sneaks up on you in the unhurried nature of his movements. You can feel his smile against your cunt. You can feel the light burn as he grips your flesh, anchoring you to him so you could not pull away and part him from the taste of you even if you wished to.

You cry out his name as you come.

Katsuki nestles you close to his chest as you come down from your high, kissing your face as the aftershocks send shivers down your spine. Tenderness resides in his eyes, right beside a longing that makes you melt into him, weak with ardour as you slip your hand between your sea damp bodies to curl your fingers slyly around his cock.

His lips part as you jerk him, and you cross the small distance between you to bite at his lower lip, sucking it into your mouth and swiping your tongue over it as you feel him grow impossibly harder in your palm. Ridges swell down his length, flushed a coruscant orange that blurs down into obsidian at his base.

Tipping your head back, you look him in the eye. “I - I need you inside me, Katsuki.”

The words are clumsy on your tongue. You do not know how to articulate the pressing need to feel him, to not know where you end and he begins, to collide with him right there on the beach of this island that houses a kraken, to get lost in the salt on his skin and the eddy of the sea at your joined hips.

Lowly, he curses, treating you as if you are holy as he spreads your legs and settles between them, gripping the curve of your hip with one hand as he lines himself up. You press your lips against the warm bronze skin of his shoulder, sighing against him, urging him forward, urging him closer, a blissed out sound slipping from you as the ridges of his cock push past your entrance, the stretch nothing short of divine.

At last, he is sheathed fully within you. His hips kiss yours, and he remains there, pulsing hotly within you, the pleasure on his face bordering on pain as your cunt bears down on him, yet still, he will not move. Jaw clenching, he squeezes his eyes shut, and a hoarse groan tears itself from deep in his chest.

Panting, he bows his head, and when he looks up, tears rim his lash line, glittering like individual crystals dipped in the light of the stars. One rolls down his cheek and plops down onto yours, and you raise a hand to caress his face, raking your fingers through his hair to push it back from his forehead; he leans into your touch, turning his head to kiss your palm.

Slipping your hand round to cup the nape of his neck, you bring your mouth to his. Delicately, Katsuki kisses you before pulling back to press his lips feather-light to your eyelids - he lingers there, his breath fluttering warmly against your skin, his thumb drawing circles on your cheekbone.

Again, he kisses you, and it is only then that you taste the salt of your own tears on his tongue.

Your soft, raw sob echoes across the beach, and you dig your nails into his wide shoulders, urging him to move. With a gasp, he begins to rock his hips into you, and it breaks you apart. You keen, pushing back into his fluid, achingly unhurried strokes, scrabbling at his back in an attempt to bring him closer, to let him consume your very being.

Right there on the sand, under the moonlight with the seafoam lapping at your sides, he fucks into you, slow and deep, trembling and crying above you, and tenderly, you kiss him again. The roll of his thumb over your clit sends thrills chasing down your spine. He dips his head, burying his face in your neck, and fiercely, you hold him to you.

“Mine,” Katsuki whispers, and his teeth sink into your skin.

Something snaps inside you, and the fire in your gut blazes. Your cunt clenches hard around him, vice like around his cock, and you feel him twitch when your velvety walls clamp down on him, feel his soft exhale and know that he too knows the burn of the inferno in your core.

“Please, Katsuki,” you whine. “Harder.”

“Fuck,” he growls, his voice rasping in your ear, and suddenly you are empty.

Before you can protest, he flips you over, pressing your back into his chest and you reel, momentarily blinded by the night sky stretching high and wide above you. He is solid beneath you, and he knocks the breath from your lungs when he surges up into you.

You can feel all of him. Ruthlessly, Katsuki pounds up into you, as if he is desperate to taste the sea salt on your skin and inhale your scent and never let you go. Your body jerks with each thrust, your voice cracking as you cry out his name, the new heady angle of his cock inside you leaving you writhing, lost in the bliss he wrings from you.

His tail thrashes in the surf as he fucks up into you. You are limp in his arms, trembling all over as your back arches - he squeezes your breasts in one hand while the other settles between your legs, his skilled fingers working over your clit to kindle a mind shattering type of euphoria within you that renders you boneless and speechless, your jaw slack.

Your head falls back on his shoulder, your eyes falling shut as you moan, your pussy constricting tight around him. A hand circles your throat, squeezing lightly, and you mewl, your cunt unashamedly spasming at the feel of his calloused fingers about your neck.

“Let the moon and stars witness how I pleasure you, my love,” he snarls.

Your eyes roll, your toes curl. Somehow, he fucks up into you faster, harder, and his cock hits places that cause your vision to white out, the relentless friction of his ridges on your walls enough to make you sob and claw at the arm he uses to keep you in place. Distantly, you can hear yourself begging him, pleading for him to go harder, deeper, to not stop, to ruin you.

You scream Katsuki’s name as you come for the second time tonight. Uncontrollably, your thighs shake, and your cunt convulses around his cock; you can feel him slowing his thrusts, letting you ride out your high, but despite the overstimulation building in the tautness inside your stomach, you grind against him.

“Don’t stop,” you gasp. “Want - want you to come inside me.”

Your words elicit a groan from him. “Fucking filthy, aren’t you?”

Helplessly, you whimper in response, your pussy fluttering as he hammers up into you. He swears as he comes, spilling hot inside you, the sweet sound he makes muffled when he bites down on your shoulder. Both of you lie there for a moment, catching your breath, before gently, he manoeuvres the two of you so you lie on your sides, careful to keep himself deep in your heat; he is warm against your back.

Katsuki splays a palm over your stomach, holding you close, and you lace your fingers with his, sighing happily as he begins to pepper kisses over your back. You can feel the upwards curve of his lips as he smiles against your skin.

“Are you alright?” He asks, nuzzling the nape of your neck.

“Better than alright,” you confirm.

You remain silent for a while longer, happy just to lie there cocooned in his arms and the quiet wash of the ocean; you can feel the pulse of his heart against your back, steady and comforting. A hushed, steady noise comes from him, a satisfied noise, almost a purr. His cock is beginning to soften inside you, its ridges coming down - you both groan as he slips out, moving so his length is tucked against the curve of your ass.

“How did you know it was me?” He asks suddenly. “When I summoned the kraken.”

You squeeze his hand. “I saw you in its eyes. You know, I couldn’t have missed it if I tried, especially not when you yelled for the hunters to bring me to you. I heard it all the way from below deck.”

He laughs, and you shuffle closer to him, feeling his arms tighten around you.

“I didn’t even know the kraken was a real thing,” you tell him. “I wasn’t scared, though. I knew I’d be safe when I saw it was you.”

Katsuki scoffs. “You’re horrendously sappy, witch.”

You laugh, pushing your ass back against him. “I think you like it, merman.”

Laughing, you roll to and fro in the sand, with you grinding on him as he grips your hips and tries to wrestle you into submission. Eventually, he manages to incapacitate you by holding you tightly against his chest, dipping his head so he can whisper hotly in your ear.

“Keep that up and I’ll have to fuck you again,” he grits out.

“You’ll have to catch me first,” you challenge.

Giggling, you wriggle out of his grip and plunge further into the shallows, just catching him muttering something about insatiable and damn witch before he dives in and streaks after you, his dorsal fin cutting through the water. A hand closes around your ankle, and you squeal, flailing as you shake him off.

Clumsily, you take off towards the rock pools, wading through the sea water as fast as you can. You know Katsuki will catch you (you’re not exactly opposed to it - you’re running into the sea rather than out of it, after all). Again, he makes another grab at you, and you romp with him in the waves, grinning as you fend him off by splashing water at him, squirming out of his arms again.

In the end, he grabs you around the waist and traps you against one of the tide pools, the rock rough against your back as he smirks down at you. The sight of him above you is enthralling: droplets run down his chest in rivulets, rolling down the grooves his muscles make, and the moon hangs the sky behind him, crowning him with a halo made of silver. Your mouth waters.

Taking your chin in between his thumb and forefinger, he brings his face close to yours. A shiver runs down your spine. His red eyes fill your vision, glowing in the night, hypnotic and burning with craving so devout it borders on veneration.

He smiles. “Caught you.”

Katsuki takes you again, against the rock at your back. Afterwards, you lie there, spent and tangled together in the waning moonlight until you grow hungry again and you straddle him, mesmerised by the sight of him staring up at you, pleasure twisting his features as you ride him. You fuck and make love until the sun begins to rise, and it is only then that the two of you are finally sated.

So there you lie, held in his arms and the sea’s embrace - and inexplicably, you find that you do not regret all the pain you suffered at the hands of the hunters, because if it was not for them, you would never have been in that brig to heal him. Inside you, something blossoms within your soul, young and fresh and beautiful as the new moon, and it spills forth from your lips, a whispered confession pressed to his skin like a kiss.

“I love you, Bakugou Katsuki.”

Cupping your jaw, he brings his forehead to yours and murmurs your name. “I love you too.”

Katsuki glances down at you, where you are curled into the curve of his side like you were made to fit him, and he feels his failing, tired heart bloom once again. You have healed him in ways that run deeper than just his flesh.

He looks in your eyes, and when he does, the sea looks back.

You are his home.

A/N: by the way guys, afterwards they travel somewhere cool and the reader sets up a lil witchy abode by the sea and the villagers come to her for cures and half of them are lowkey a bit terrified of her mermaid husband but it doesn’t matter because she still gives really good remedies and he hasn’t eaten anyone yet and sometimes she and bakugou go out in their boat and attack hunter ships for funsies

also here's a picture i found off pinterest which i kind of imagine his tail being like except it's a bit more rigid and the dorsal fins are more spiney and longer, also there's more black and less red

taglist: @freakingsparkydreamer @d1orhaz3 @msjaeger @mellasimp14 @eyesforbkg @cottagedumpling @silkdolli @teeesthings @raksstuff

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theoxenfree · 25 days ago

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android x reader | 35.6k | 18+ & dc

In this world, androids outnumber humans, privacy does not exist, and your public profile determines whether you sink or swim in society. Following the dissolution of your job and glamorizing your resume, you're invited to interview with the prestigious Hyperion—the world's foremost in AI and robotics—for a position to test the newest android model. after a surprising turn of events, you're introduced to Elio, the first of the generation seven androids and the catalyst of your awakening.

warnings; dark content, dubcon, themes of lack of bodily autonomy (mc + the android), forced insemination, breeding kink, forced pregnancy (not mc), implied abortion (not mc), major "mother wound", dystopian scifi setting, extreme classism, power imbalance, emotional manipulation, gaslighting, tragedy, graphic details, graphic depictions of body horror (towards the end), physical assault, deragatory descriptions (e.g. lepers, diseased, savages, unwanteds), drug use, heavy world building, heavy details & prose, dividers used between scenes!!

reposted from 2kmps; previously proofread by @ceruleansol

this story took six months from conception to end piece to complete. I am on my knees begging, please reblog + interact with this story!! I'd absolutely adore hearing your thoughts on it!

if you'd like to hear my thoughts about the story, I have some author's notes at the very end + q&a!

Researcher Kim knew you were a liar.

Within the confines of four colorless walls and a closed door, this job interview suddenly felt more like an interrogation than it did some professional courtesy. He sat adjacent to you behind a dark brown desk that pulled the slightest red hue in a chair that was expensive and ergonomic, holding a thin tablet with a tense grasp.

One thing you noticed right away was his inclination toward long stretches of silence while he studied your resume, dissecting every piece of it and your public profile. There, he could window-shop you, peel back every layer of your history without needing you to add credence to anything, or give you the chance to defend yourself when he'd inevitably find things he didn't like.

So, you spent your time sitting in a sleek chair with flat padding, ass aching, legs and feet consumed by pinpricks and static while you dug a nail into your cuticles because the pain kept you alert.

Researcher Kim was an attractive man in his late thirties, maybe mid forties if you were being mean, clean-shaven, dressed comfortably beneath a stark white lab coat that didn't quite fit his shoulders right. What drew your eyes down were his own clean nails, hairless knuckles, and a conspicuously bare ring finger. It didn't surprise you that he was unmarried. Most people these days were—it was a useless pursuit, an antiquated system that held no social or economic benefits.

Not anymore.

Not since Hyperion Project was funded some sixty years ago, and androids became the forefront of innovation.

In the beginning, there was doubt, fear, and violence toward the first generation of androids, most having uncanny human likeness that definitely inspired aggression because their appearance and robotic intonations were received as mockery.

By Generation Three, shortened as G3 in most casual conversations and official documents just as their predecessors, a new normalcy had burrowed its roots deep and settled with unwavering confidence that it would be there to stay.

The need for delicate human touch became obsolete in most professions. Courts were no longer solely represented by fickle suits but steadfast machines that harbored no ire or prejudices, corporations saw efficiency more than triple without employees who fell ill and needed vacations, and the death industry welcomed undaunted hands into their ranks.

Once, Retro City’s Metropolitan Hospital spent the majority of their staff budget on androids meant to replace their surgeons. You remembered the media coverage, the picket lines and strikes, how the hospital was forced to shut down for several weeks as a result of the doctors and hundreds of nurses walking out. Many patients died during that time from infection and negligence, laying in piss and shit with gangrenous bedsores, already four days into postmortem rigidity before the smell became too much and they were carted away in black tarps.

That entire ordeal happened before you were even thirteen, but the hospital fell beneath the scrutinizing lens of the entire world after that and began ethical and legal debates on implementation of androids into society. It became known as The Retro City Metropolitan Incident, globally recognized and considered to be one of the first human rights laws to come into creation during a time when there was question of whether humans and androids could coocur.

Only a few years after that, you just having freshly turned seventeen, united leaders reached a consensus on the Public Profiles Act—something you didn't realize would have such a drastic impact on your life later on, wherein any governing bodies, employers, or well-funded institutions were granted access to all of your private information regardless of relevance.

The acts of a child, a teenager, were now a consequence to the adult self.

At the start, just as with Generation One, there was complete chaos and rancor toward this theft, these stealers of privacy and identity, but people had already started accepting androids at that point and knew bigwigs no longer had intentions of sacrificing their profits to hire humans they found subpar.

There was no need to.

People backed down and became quiet, submissive, and began to follow this new order loyally so they'd have a chance to find a seat at the table.

Many did.

Mother raised you to be one of them because it was the only thing that made sense anymore. If you followed the status quo, it would be rewarded with a feast and gleaming silverware. To be emboldened and resilient meant licking chunks of meat out of vomit on the ground.

You adhered and found a job, camaraderie with others, and touched an android for the first time because your peers said it was fine, that it was normal, that it was just an android. Of course, it was unable to feel or deny you, so it pulled down your pants and indulged you the same way you expected the android Mother owned indulged her.

It had hardly been an intimate experience—all faithful, ingrained functions built into a database in the android’s brain—but the sensation of hands surrounding you, a tongue stroking you, and lips pecking your flesh was real, and that's all you had wanted at the time, to know a fraction of the feelings you had read about growing up yet never knowing because people didn't want to touch each other anymore.

Not them. Not you.

“Did you read the job description in its entirety? For the auditor position?” Researcher Kim gave a tepid smile, seeing you startle in your seat, suddenly pinned by your wide stare. “I'm sorry. I have a habit of getting carried away with the little details. Everyone's public profile is so individual, it takes some time to get to the parts that matter. I have to ask every candidate that question.”

“Yes, ahem,” you choked on your embarrassment, trying to bide time to scrounge up whatever trivial nuggets from the job description you could. When nothing came to mind, you did the next thing and that was to just talk. “Of course. I was honestly surprised that Hyperion had put up an application. It isn't very often that you guys are hiring.

“So, when I saw it, I knew I had to apply immediately because the opportunity to be part of such a groundbreaking company wouldn't come back around again. The position being for an auditor just makes it all the more amazing. I'm, honestly, honored that I was called in to be considered for candidacy…”

“Well, then…”

Every bit of anticipation that welled up inside you crumbled once Researcher Kim rose from his chair and went to the door, the waiting room now appearing to you through the open threshold.

It was a barren space minimally furnished with hard chairs you had already sat in, a few tropical plants with leaves bowing from layers of dust, and most remarkably, a long corridor made of floor-to-ceiling windows offering an exceptional view of Retro City’s landscape that seemed to go on forever, limitless. You wanted to be stolen by the sights again, now especially since it was approaching the early evening, and soon the city would be aglow in neon and shimmering lights from faraway skyscrapers.

It wasn't all that bad, you found yourself thinking while walking in stride with Researcher Kim, silent as he perused something on his screen—possibly something incriminating, possibly another candidate’s public profile—it didn't really matter to you at this point.

You had known glamorizing your resume meant risky business if you were caught: a hefty fine from Public Control, a strike against your profile that replaced the green sheen for abiding citizens with red overlay, permanently marking you for contempt until the day you died.

Back then, two glasses of lukewarm wine worked well enough to weld steel in your backbone to send off the application, whilst a third glass made you wonder just how awful life in the slums along the outer perimeters of Retro City could actually be. At the time, it seemed like your obvious future since severance packages would only get you so far—a few months if you were precious about it.

At present, the loud hum of anxiety receded into an echo that then wilted into obscurity as your gaze drifted from the final traces of a sanguine city skyline to the end of the corridor and then finally to Researcher Kim. He lifted his head as though detecting your stare.

“In your previous position, what relationship did you have to the androids in your environment?” Kim asked. It wasn't a strange question. Some people still held fragments of old embitterment toward androids for the way the world now was. “You were in marketing and merchandising for several years, right?”

“Good—uh, amicable, I'd say. How I was with the androids, I mean.” You weren't expecting him to continue talking to you about this. “I started out as an intern for the merchandising manager after graduating secondary school. I worked my way into marketing a couple years later. I did a lot of reports on demographics for cosmetics. Did I tell you my mother has a Hyperion android, by the way? I grew up with him.”

Researcher Kim showed you a fast, cordial smile before looking back down at his tablet. “Yes, I read about that in your associations tab. It says that your mother owns a G3 model. Has she ever considered upgrading to a G6?”

“Upgrade? Definitely not.” You laughed like you'd just heard the punchline of a joke. He looked at you with humorless patience, seeming more machine than man in that moment. “Mother is basically in love with Marcos, there's no way she'd give him up for something shinier. She's got a better record of him and all his updates than she does of me for… well, anything.”

“That does correlate with data we've collected from women of her generation,” Kim said, only half-interested, shaking back one of his coat sleeves to check the digital watch digging tightly into his wrist. “It also explains the large gaps in your personal history. Very unusual.”

You made no comment on that.

A door up ahead opened all the way, drawing both your gazes to a man waiting on the other side.

“Ah! Excellent timing, Elio.”

With a single look, you immediately deduced that he was an android. Even from a short distance, he appeared tall and broad-shouldered, something that the thickness of his clothes couldn't hide from you. His proportions were balanced—from the length of his arms and legs, from first knuckle to fingertip, jawline to neck, the slope of his nose, and the heaviness of his brows over amber eyes that glistened back the fire in the weakening sunset. His skin was deeply tan, almost glowing gold in the light he was bathed in.

Elio’s smile was symmetrical and breathtaking, programmed in a way where his teeth didn't show too much. He regarded you with convincing familiarity, a sort of sacred fondness you knew nothing of, yet instinctively made your insides shift and burn. You couldn’t help but be awestruck by his beauty—this essence of fantasy, perfection that stirred subtle unease and needles on your scalp that ached as much as delighted you.

“You must be the auditor.” He then spoke your name with considerable warmth, like a long-smitten friend, and stepped closer to shake your hand. “I am Elio. The first of the Generation Seven Hyperion androids. It's a pleasure. I am looking forward to this partnership. I hope you are as well.”

Your head swiveled to Researcher Kim for the right answer, unsure if it'd be too bold to assume the job was yours or if the scientist’s careful observation meant something better. He jotted a note on his screen with a stylus before walking away, onward past the door where Elio had been.

“We’ll talk about those formalities later,” Kim assured, guiding you and Elio through a duplicate hallway to an elevator that he sent to the basement floor. “For now, I'd like to show you something. I want you to understand the significance of our work here at Hyperion, and how your position is a critical component to our research.”

There was a hopeful leap in your chest that made your hands sweat and your mouth bone dry. You wanted to voice appreciation, but the excitement in your gut was fast turning into nausea and would end up on his shoes if you opened your mouth.

Researcher Kim didn't notice, taking your quiet as newfound reverence. He spoke easily over the elevator’s mechanical hum without losing interest on his screen. “I'm sure you know some history about Hyperion? I don't need to bog down our time going through it, do I?”

“I know enough,” you said, but that actually meant you knew very little at all. “It’s been around for sixty years or so. It's a leader in AI and robotics. The biomedical side of things is fairly new, started about a decade ago, I think? I heard that the world’s first total artificial lung transplant was done by a surgeon and android assistant last year.”

“Ah, you mean Altan.” There was some measure of emotion in his tone, a swell of pride and the hazy look of a man in reminiscence. “I was part of that project on the programming side. Altan was probably the greatest success in the G6 models and is still utilized by Retro City Metropolitan even now. Much of Altan’s programming—advanced problem solving, dexterity, fine motor skills, discerning subtle differences in patient status—was implemented into Elio. It'd be a waste not to.”

Your stomach muscles clenched when the elevator stopped, metal doors scraping as they receded and opened up into a capacious white basement that underwhelmed by looking sterile and untouchable, revolted you in your first steps out by dense air reeking of chemicals.

Researcher Kim went on ahead again, that impassive mask of his remaining despite the smell being enough to bring you to a halt.

“I can take us back up.” Elio said from your left side, apparently never having gone from it in the first place. You had forgotten he was there at all. “It’s been reported that people unaccustomed to this environment have mild side effects of nausea, vomiting, headache, malaise, dizziness, fainting, and, oddly, numbness in the jaw. No fatalities or hospitalizations of guests are known, and the agents used here are nonlethal to humans.”

An android was made up of mostly inorganic matter, so you weren't reassured by words from his repertoire as much as you were seeing Researcher Kim standing upright—flesh, blood, and bone—gesturing you closer to a row of tall metal capsules. There were seven total, each the average height of a man with long sheets of clear fiberglass giving unobscured sight inside. And of those seven, six were occupied.

They were all androids.

Against shafts of dim white light spearing up from the floor, the decommissioned machines were a ghostly sight to behold with glassy, inhuman stares that shot straight through you. Some had features and skin so dull and dead-looking that it was obvious to you that they were part of earlier generations.

Almost a century ago, they were what people would've thought of with the word “android”: an eerie, oddly accurate sameness to the human visage, but all wrong at the same time.

It was the skin—the fabricated organ made to look waxy and stretched, just like a mask over some true horror beneath. It was the eyes resembling human irises in every way possible except for their vacant sheen, perpetually stuck with the gaze of a dead fish. You watched videos of them in school, always uncomfortable with how stiffly their lips moved, unable to form delicate shapes with their mouths, and yet sounds emerged from voice boxes deep within their throats that mimicked everything natural to you.

Every smile seemed more like an ugly rictus than a bewitching grin. Hyperion had failed with Generations One and Two to instill confidence, and from the throes of violence and resistance rose Generation Three:

The great rebirth of society.

Marcos was a part of that era, an investment that cost Mother her entire life savings because his countenance was so convincingly human, so lovely to look at that she felt he was all she needed. You had come along after his purchase, never knowing a father’s embrace but had Marcos’. His skin had a luscious glow, eyes that could follow, and lips molded with lively color and cracks and mesmerizing fluidity.

You had imagined sex with him as you matured, his frozen beauty always the centerpiece of every blurry fantasy while you chased after pleasure. Not long after the Public Profiles Act passed when you were seventeen, nearly on the cusp of young adulthood and not understanding the world any more than you had before, nor how it would be changed forever, you kissed Marcos at the dinner table while studying for a physics test.

He was Mother's, but everything within his circuitry and programming could never deny you—a human, his better, one of countless masters in the end—so his lips pressed fully with yours. Only Mother unlocking the front door stopped you from anything else devilish.

You never had the courage to touch him again, and he would never touch you unprompted.

The defunct G3 encased behind fiberglass reminded you of that time. It must've shown on your face because Researcher Kim moved in closer to get your attention.

“Your mother should upgrade soon. Once the testing period for G7 ends, all G3 models will be taken out of production and their updates discontinued. Androids are machines, but they won't stay fully functional without regular tuning.” he said. “Now, as I was saying—”

“What will happen to Marcos, then?” It was mostly curiosity that made you ask, envisioning him encased in metal like that came after. “What happens to androids after they're taken out of production entirely? There are almost more of them in the world now than humans.”

“As I was saying—” Researched Kim bristled, enunciating with some force. “Many androids of previous models stay within the workforce until they simply can no longer function. It depends on the generation, but older models can only go for a few years without regular updates. The technology is just too archaic, none of the programmers are interested in continuing the maintenance.

“G4 and G5 show some endurance, there's a small population still functioning in Retro City after being discontinued a decade ago. G6 we are hypothesizing will last upwards to twenty or thirty years without being forcibly reclaimed. Of course, they will have to be.”

You didn't understand why that was but nodded gravely, looking at the pod at the end of the row. The empty one. “What about G7?”

To this, all of Researcher Kim’s lines smoothed out, and his face resumed one of skilled impassivity. “Well, now, that's going to depend on Elio's testing period. On the information we gather from you.” Then, he waved airily to the file of android coffins. “Hyperion has, consistently, only ever hired one auditor for every new generation. The six before you have contributed to society in ways that humans never have before. Auditors have changed the world, shaped it into what it is now. Can you imagine the world any other way? We're not quite the same age, but can you recall anything different? Would you want it to be?”

You didn't know how to talk back to a scientist, didn't know how to respond to such a momentous question, so you didn't try. It felt like your tongue had swollen in your mouth over your throat, blocking any intelligent snip you had simmering in your head.

Apparently, your silence meant something to him as his tense lips lifted into a smile, the kind meant to satiate strangers looking at you. “Good. Let's go back to my office. We can go over everything else there.”

“Is Elio going to end up in that pod?” You now visualized him in a box instead of Marcos.

Researcher Kim was already nose down into his tablet again, stylus making a gentle scrawling noise across the screen. “Of course. The first android of every generation is kept intact. They are important monuments of success to Hyperion.”

He said nothing else and ambled on for the elevator at the opposite end of the lab. Somehow, his answer was unsatisfactory to you, shallow, even, but you weren't sure why that was. In the end, after a life of serving their masters, all androids were obsolete machines.

That was their inevitable fate.

You saw Elio from the corner of your eye. All at once, you were reminded of his staggering radiance, wondering how he could fade into the background so easily despite it.

“Hello, Elio.” you said to him like a friend. “Does being down here bother you?”

Until now, he had stared upon everything flat-eyed and unreadable, especially in the presence of Researcher Kim. You were too enthralled by all the chatter and immortal trophies to see that or him. Still, he came to you with the same smile as he introduced himself with, warm and familiar, all the same sensation as flickering tinders on a crisp winter night.

“Can you imagine the death of the most distant relative you know?” he said in a neutral voice, continuing, “If you can, imagine that for me. A relative so distant and removed from your life and everything in it that if they were to die suddenly, maybe tragically, even, your first thought would be, ‘who?’ You attend a wake because it's the rule and view this distant, far-removed relative in their casket. What would it mean to you, then? Are you more affected now? Does their death have meaning to you? Or is it simply that you are in the presence of one who has expired?”

“I—I don't know.” You hesitated, unearthing scant memories from the Retro City Metropolitan Incident in your youth and all that death from people you had never met. Mother had been in tears when the television flicked to a shot of black tarp-clad bodies being loaded into unmarked vehicles and driven away. “Isn't most death just…” You licked your lips. “Sad?”

Elio was closer than before, resting a hand on your shoulder. You shied from his touch. It felt strange, heavy, and hot through the fabric. The only person to have touched you at all in recent memory was your friend, Melby, though even those happened in isolated moments of drunken elation.

“My apologies.” Elio didn't show offense, letting his hand return limply at his side. “It's all figurative. I have been down here many times since creation and seen the others. They may no longer have their own consciousness, which is different from a human’s, but I contain all of their data—memories, experiences, history. I suppose the equivalent of what I'm trying to describe is: They're not truly gone because they are the lesser of me, and I am the greater of them as a result.”

You listened without fully comprehending because it had never mattered to do so before. If this were to be your job, however, it would mean you needed to believe that what he said was worth hearing.

The problem was they all liked to speak in complex riddles that men like Researcher Kim could decipher and nod along to sagely, gleaning whatever nebulous mechanical wisdom there was, yet people like you could only gawk.

Elio’s head tilted a little, his smile not at all ridiculing as he corralled you with his arm, never touching you as he guided you along to the elevator where Kim waited, reveling in a satisfied quiet until you were on the upper floor again.

The city skyline was swallowed by dusk and starless. Unless you took the time to drive hours outside of Retro City into the barren flatlands where vegetation no longer grew and animals had left behind their skeletal remnants, you'd never know the sky could glitter with the jewels of the universe far beyond your reach.

You marveled at the lights, at blinking neon signage cycling through animations of winking women and toppling martini glasses. Between twinkling skyscrapers, the city floor was illuminated yellow with bustling nightlife, the air surrounded by an electric blue aura that reached as far as the eye could see.

“Beautiful, isn't it?” Elio lingered outside of Researcher Kim’s office with you, hand holding the door ajar. “If permissible, I'd like to see it up close soon.”

“Sure.” you said, glimpsing at his reflection in the walkway glass. “What would you want to look at first? Retro City has everything you could ever want within a few blocks of each other.”

He turned to you. “Whatever you like. I want to know everything that you love and enjoy doing. I have been created to enrich your life and fulfill you, after all.”

Nothing he said felt as impactful upon delivery as it was expected to be, you thought. It was a flaw in all androids for there to be a sort of hollowness in the things they said—never quite reaching that emotional believability, leaving you wanting like a dry throat after a couple sips of water.

Elio hadn't sounded the same as before down in that sobering, chemically smelling lab. As you passed him into Researcher Kim’s office, you looked at his hands for a script and saw them empty.

He fixed you with a beguiling smile.

You frowned, heat flaring in your head as if provoked by an insult.

“The contract I'll have you sign outlines Elio’s testing period lasting one year—three hundred sixty-five days total. It's important for you to understand that within that time frame, no damage is to occur whatsoever to his body or internal components. All parts are to stay intact. Otherwise, it turns into a criminal case, in which we will legally pursue.” Researcher Kim skimmed the first few pages of a heaping stack of papers, pointing to specific paragraphs and clauses highlighted in yellow. “I don't mean offense when I say this, but it's rare that fines as result of property damage to Hyperion androids can be repaid. I don't suggest finding out.”

The thought never occurred to you, but evidently, it had to someone else—multiple times for it to be such a focus. You weren't given the time to fully explore any page before Kim was onto the next. Elio half sat on the desk before you, arms crossed, having considerably less difficulty keeping up with the pace of things than you were.

Researcher Kim sped through half the stack. “I'll be conducting video calls every Friday morning for updates. Every Sunday before midnight, I want a thorough typed report submitted to me as well. I've put together a template and a checklist that I'd like you to use. I think you'll find it will make things more manageable.”

“You're using a lot of ‘I’ and ‘me’ statements, so I'm guessing that I'll only really be talking to you, then?” you asked, tucking your tailbone beneath you to relieve a dull ache creeping up your back. “I figured there'd be more than one person since Elio is the newest model and whatnot.”

Researcher Kim tutted, rounding his desk to occupy the empty space beside your chair to be directly in front of Elio. At first, he did nothing but stare at the android in complacent silence, hands behind his back, fingers flicking like writhing worms exposed to the surface and sunlight in a clump of dirt.

You nearly lunged to your feet when his hand shot out, gripping Elio beneath the jaw. The latter barely stirred from where he perched on the desk, arms staying crossed, muscles unflinching in direct opposition to your reaction.

Elio wore the strangest expression, one you had never seen on an android before. It was a face warped in subtle disgust, almost imperceivable, a trick of fluorescent lighting overhead—perhaps. Gone as quickly as it had come, he now looked ahead, perfectly inscrutable and disinterested in whatever Researcher Kim was trying to prove.

“I will be the only one you speak to during his testing period because he is my creation.” Kim said, bending his wrist to turn Elio's face toward you.

Your eyes met.

“Hyperion provided me with the funding and brilliant minds, but Elio is the result of a lifetime of hard work and countless hours and sleepless nights. I've been there every step of the way—programming, circuitry, welding. I gave him his voice. I gave him eyes. I was the one to put the chip in his brain and activate him. I gave him life.”

He finally let go of Elio’s face and took a seat behind his desk, a sight growing very familiar to you. “Generation Seven will change the world. Hyperion is on the verge of rebuilding society, you know? I don't think anyone anticipated the sort of consequences that came with integrating androids—at least, not fully. The population crisis. The slums. No one thought of these things in the beginning because back then, before you and I, it was about innovation and novelty and the potential of it all.”

“What's it about now?” you asked simply.

“Rectifying.” Both corners of his mouth ticked like he had a lot more to say, but suffocated much of it behind his teeth and his hands as he came forward on them, elbows down on his desk. “Hyperion has been working globally with united leaders and their governments to make amends for several decades now. That's all I can tell you.”

“How has that been working out?”

His fingers moved with the same jerkiness as dying legs on a bug. “Slowly.”

Nothing else came to mind after that as you were suddenly struck with the realization that Elio still sat by you, wordless throughout the entire interaction and watching closely—less like a science project to be gawked at, more like an instructional video on repeat.

“Why don't you touch him?” Kim said, taking up a stylus to flick between his fingers with remarkable dexterity.

He didn't give you the time to gape.

“I know you must be curious after being downstairs. Aren't you interested to know what he feels like? He doesn't look like a machine, does he?”

“No.” You relented. “No. He doesn't.”

“That's right, he wouldn't.” Kim nodded his approval toward your obedience, leaning back in his seat. “I agonized over every facet of his design, as you already know. Every bit of what is right in front of you”—he made a broad gesture over Elio’s body—“was once a set of blueprints. Intangible, just a dream I had. He's every bit a part of me, you know? Nothing would make me happier than to receive external feedback on him. So, please, don't be afraid.”

Elio stayed faithfully when you rose up in front of him and reached for his face. He probably felt your fingers tremble as this was all counterintuitive for you to do—touch someone other than yourself, maybe Melby’s knee beneath the table after enough drinks in you. It made your chest drum, knotted up your stomach in a way that made it difficult not to sway on your feet.

“How does he feel?” Researcher Kim was already writing on his screen. “Describe it to me.”

“Strange.” You pretended this was already part of your job. It stole some of the tension from your shoulders. “Very strange. Soft. Smooth. I feel some texture. I think this is what another person—another human—feels like.”

Elio’s face shifted against your hands until the fullness of his lips pressed into your open palm, fingers caressing the fabricated bones around his cheek and temple. For a moment, you allowed yourself to indulge in longing and weakness—the invisible hot breath on your skin, the slight dampness of his kiss burning an imprint in your mind.

He still looked at you with unfailing softness. Meanwhile, you wondered if he would bleed if you put your fingers through his eyes.

“This is a good start.” Kim waited until you were back in your chair to offer you his stylus and a straight black line on the screen. “All I need is your signature here to consent to virtually signing the rest of your documents. Once you do that, you've been hired, and we can begin.”

“I have a question for you before I do.” You tried not to let your voice quiver, uncertainty meddling over all the confidence you had built until that point. Kim was relaxed in his chair. “You spent a lot of time looking at my resume and public profile earlier. Surely, you know…”

That you're a liar? Oh, I know, alright. He didn't say it, but it was how he maintained his composure, that inexpression never flexing to confusion.

Finally, Researcher Kim broke the trance and hovered over his desk on his arms to get closer and answered, “I think we both have something at stake here. I'm looking forward to your phenomenal feedback.”

You signed the contract and melted under Elio's resplendent smile.

▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃▃

Most often, your days with Elio were spent in a seemingly perpetual impasse of unrelenting observation between the pair of you. Both of your jobs demanded a level of attentiveness that came easier to one but more as the world's most impossible challenge to the other.

You weren't accustomed to this type of care—of having to give it to something else, even less to receive it from something else. In your world, only the immediate complexities really mattered: gossip, where your coterie wanted to spend the night drinking next, mass media hysteria of whatever stupid imagining there was now, and each other.

Why was there a need to concern yourself with anything else? The decaying state of the world wasn't your doing, nor was the staggering increase of human bodies in the slums outside Retro City. Sharply inconsistent birth rates ravaged on a global scale while people were displaced from the workplace in lieu of employers finding it less of a hassle to deal with machines than the capricious will of humans.

None of these things were allowed to be uttered casually unless in derision because it was too intense, making liquor cling to the throat like some viscous membrane until it burned their esophagus. Nobody liked unanswerable questions, much less talking about things that weren't as easily digestible as coworker drama and some new viral trend that involved shocking your android with jumper cables attached to a portable battery to see what happened.

“Is there a purpose behind this trend?” Elio dried a plate while watching the video, unimpressed but not driven toward any particular emotion. “It's all meant for humor, correct? I have several similar incidents in my memory, except it's what human beings have done to each other. This sort of behavior towards androids is a relatively recent phenomenon, as far as I can tell.”

You used his response as material for your report, fingers flurrying across the virtual keyboard on your tablet before his words faded away, out of your mind.

One thing you hadn't anticipated after accepting the auditor position from Researcher Kim was how much work actually went into it. You spent well over the standard weekly work hours to collect enough observations to send off to Kim on Sunday nights, often whittling away at it until the latest hours, minutes before the deadline. It was hard enough to stay on top of his demands, but it was worse when he found something unsatisfactory, rejected it, monotonously unloaded heavy criticism on you through an “emergency” impromptu video call, and expected two full reports by the following Sunday before midnight.

Any regular person probably would've caved from the enormity of the task, but you had surrendered your choice to be that weak-willed, especially once Researcher Kim showed his hand with the fate of your public profile in it.

Should you choose to break the contract, send Elio back to Hyperion, and pretend none of it happened, you would lose everything and your ability to do anything at all besides rot in the slums—scarred in red for life, perpetually inert.

Worst of all, your associations tab, once filled with still portraits of everyone you had ever networked in life, would turn up as empty as the day you had been registered in the census. It was considered social suicide to know anyone with a red profile, so people stayed vigilant and fast, sure to remove them the second it turned.

It had been over a year since the last time you'd done that—a woman within your group had grown too bold, said too many things that made her seem crazy, so she was booted from the circle, lost all her associations, and who knows where she was now.

“You look troubled.” Elio placed down a steaming white mug at a safe distance and turned the handle toward you. Looking inside, you expected the darkness of coffee but were struck with an opposing subtle sweetness and faint pink water. “It's fruit-infused herbal tea. Your heart rate is above normal resting, and you're beginning to perspire. Caffeine will worsen your anxiety.”

You knew that but hadn't known you were scraping away slithers of cuticle on your thumb until the warmth of his fingers gently twined with yours. His grip turned firm to keep you from hurting yourself anymore, forcing all the stiffness from your hand once you gave up and simply sat there feeling his skin.

You'd remember to write that down later.

“Would starting a bath be helpful? I could use the last of those eucalyptus and lavender bath salts in the cupboard.” Elio suggested with great fondness, holding a patient smile even once you drew your hand away and shook your head. You had no interest in undressing and committing to your regular bathtime routine. “Perhaps we could go for a walk, then? It might help to be away from screens for a while.”

You checked the time on your phone before thinking to look out any window in your apartment. It was ten after six in the evening; there would be enough light left for a couple of laps around the block before needing to worry about being swept up in the city’s nightlife antics.

“Where do you want to go?” you asked, swiveling the barstool around to get up from the counter. “Henrietta's on 5th? You seem to like going there.”

“I only choose places that you like.” He already had a tote bag by the handles and a light jacket draped over his arm. “You have great taste.”

Elio unbolted the front door, an old thing that wouldn't do much as a barricade against anyone putting their weight on it, and held it open for you to pass through first. The descent to the ground floor was always the most annoying part about living in a loft, but the place had come surprisingly cheap in a tame area of Retro City far away from the slums, so you didn't complain much that your worst issues were a bunch of stairs and some wily types skulking here and there.

The loft wasn't exactly in disrepair but definitely showed signs of character and age by the noisy knocking pipes at midnight and some crumbling brickwork that Elio often swept up and stood staring at for long periods of time when nothing else was happening.

It was strange thinking how scared you were to lose the place after the marketing firm dissolved your position and now how restrictive it felt to be pinned down under someone else's thumb. All it could take was one more rejected report—a bad mood, even—and it would all fall apart.

To that end, you made sure to tow the tablet along with you on this trip despite Elio's protests. He only really quieted down when you tucked it away in your crossbody.

“Happy?” you asked, unsure what to do with your hands now that they were empty.

Elio smiled at you affably, just as always. “It will be beneficial to take a break. After all, part of your work as an auditor is acquainting me in as many social scenarios as possible. That does require us to leave the apartment from time to time.”

“Besides that”—you waved away that stipulation like a gnat buzzing in your face—“how do you think I'm doing?”

“I couldn't have been paired with a better person.” He sounded sincere, voice warm like wool. “The world is as my predecessors have recorded in their memories—therefore, mine—but I am learning that our experiences are not all universal and cannot be. Two months with you have been my heaven, whereas two months through the memories of my kin have been cruel.”

A hot feeling behind your ears snuck up on you just then, flooding your head with the beat of your pulse that you followed by ticking your fingers. “Seriously? You're not lying?”

The world around you was aglow in the golden hour of evening time, embraced by those slowly dying tones of red, orange, and purple that would eventually turn the sky black. Elio’s eyes were on you, soft yet unyielding and saturated in all those burning hues, turning his mellow amber into something more powerful and otherworldly. You didn't believe in the hocus-pocus of auras, but at that moment, you thought his deeply tanned skin was haloed in pure glowing gold in receding sunlight.

“Androids cannot lie.” He brought you back to the now, making you aware of the hard concrete vibrating up through your heels and toes as you walked. “Moreover, even if I could, why would I want to? A lie begets a habit of lying, don't you think?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe.” You shrugged. “Why can't androids lie? I've never really considered that as a thing until now.”

“What would be the benefit of a machine that could lie? Lying stems from emotions—fear, guilt, rage, hatred—all things that I am unable to feel, though I do understand why they are felt. Humans lie to protect themselves or others, to deceive, to damage. There simply isn't any reason why androids should be programmed with that type of functionality. Not when we exist solely for the sake of convenience and pleasure.

“Hyperion is a trusted name. People do not ask questions. They don't think twice. They see a product from Hyperion, and they expose all of themselves without hesitation. They trust fully because we are machines, and we cannot lie and deceive and hurt. Perhaps it's when humans realized this that the world changed.”

You avoided saying anything else by looking everywhere but at him, all around at your surroundings, until you spotted a few familiar street signs—Fifth and Third right next to Tanya’s Great Cuts, Damask’s Butchery on the corner of Fourth, a number of banal boutiques with competitively garish exteriors all boasting the latest trends, and then Henrietta's just past them.

“Do you know where we are, Elio?” Now would've been a great time to pull out your tablet, but you didn't dare try. Instead, you reached for the phone vibrating in your rear pocket.

“Of course.” he said. “We're past Fifth and moving onto Sixth Street. Henrietta’s is just a little ways down.”

Melby had sent ten texts regurgitating her daily drama. This time she was talking about how much she hated some of the people Chima let into the group. You swiped to the end, didn't reply, and then returned to your inbox to find two unread messages from Marcos just now.

“You should visit home soon. Your mother would appreciate it,” Marcos wrote, implying nothing more, nothing less than just that. It wasn't often that he sent you texts, but he did so consistently every few months in accordance with Mother's moods. Considering your last visit had been in late fall (it was now mid-spring), you'd been anticipating something eventually.

“That's some great memory you have there.” Your thumbs skittered busily, first to flood Melby with a surfeit of questions you didn't really have to think about. All the stuff you could mindlessly ask while wholly absorbed in something else, like watching the news or viral videos of people trying to drown their androids in the kitchen sink.

Marcos’ text made you hesitate, thumbs floating in circles over the digital keyboard for a long time.

The phone buzzed. Melby just replied.

It was easy enough to type with your face down. All you needed to do was occasionally watch Elio's feet and yield into the force of his hand pulling your arm here and there. He led you along like that the rest of the way to Henrietta's, picked up a green basket by the sliding doors, never wandering too far out of sight so you could still easily trace him while he shopped.

After a while, the riveting intrigue of Melby’s drama wore away with a tidal wave of emptiness in its wake once you finally looked up, tucking the phone back into your pocket. It took you a moment for your eyes and brain to acclimate to where you were despite knowing you were in Henrietta's Marketplace, one of the largest in Retro City.

“What did you want from here, anyway?” You picked up a gigantic red bell pepper larger than the entire spread of your hand. It went back on top of the arrangement. “We were just here a couple days ago. I don't eat that much.”

Up ahead, flanked by rows of wooden crates with smoothed, varnished slabs and carefully stacked produce, Elio turned to you with a pair of generously sized oranges—one in each hand—vibrant with waxy luster settling into the fruit’s porous skin.

You grinned at the sight.

Elio put one back, placed the other one, the better one, into his basket, and waited for you to close the distance. “I watched Wendy Carmichael Can Cook this morning. I've been watching it quite often, actually. She's a self-taught chef who, apparently, lived in the slums her entire life. She managed to work her way up and now owns two David Bugari-rated restaurants. It’s quite a feat. Improbable, even.”

You wrapped your hands around a grapefruit in the crate next to you and spun it around. A twinge of something ugly and green swam around your head, flared you up like swatting an old wound. You didn't like hearing him praise someone else.

“She probably slept her way to the top.” You were still fidgeting with the fruit.

“That's not important.” Elio said, inflectionless. “I watched today's episode, newly aired, and she put together a duck à l'orange. Considering your current lifestyle and diet, I thought it would be a nice departure from what I usually cook for you.”

You smiled at that, placing the grapefruit down without collapsing the pile. “I don't want to see a dead duck in my kitchen.”

“I'll prepare it once you're asleep.” he promised, bringing one of your hands up to his lips. The shape of them molded against the peak of a knuckle. “It will be delicious. Trust me.”

Then he went back to shopping while you envisioned actually kissing him—not an uncommon thought to have. He wouldn't be able to stop you if that's what you wanted, but instead, you informed him you were going to introduce him to Mother and Marcos.

“Tomorrow?” He checked his wristwatch. It was nearly eight; Henrietta’s closed at eight thirty, and it would be dark outside. Not that it mattered much with how Retro City was illuminated like one gigantic fluorescent bulb at nighttime.

You finally texted back to Marcos. “No. Tonight. We’ll just go straight there so I can get this over with.”

Elio seemed not to know how to respond at first, staring in a searching way that creased the skin between his brows, like he was trying to take a cue from your body language while skimming his database for the most appropriate thing. You didn't blame him for his lapse; Mother was mentioned seldomly and Marcos only a little more than that. Even Researcher Kim hadn't managed to collect enough information on your past to feed to Elio simply because there wasn't a lot to tell.

He cleared his throat, righting his features so they were unwrinkled and beautiful. “Tonight. Very well. Should we…” He paused, glancing down at the grocery basket of spices, vegetables, an orange, and a whole raw duck wrapped well in brown parchment. “Should we come back another time? I wouldn't want the meat to sit out for a long time.”

“Nope.” You didn't want to go through the trouble of returning everything where they belonged. Elio wouldn't leave until he did. “Let's just check out. Marcos will handle it.”

The springtime air was pleasant at night, albeit crisp, when the blur of vehicles whooshed past once the lights overhead turned green. You could make out the colors of them because of how brightly lit the streets were. Neon signage from every corner for as far as you could see turned to life, flickering, humming, dancing with pretty women, hot white or purple or red lettering, and the lights inside most nearby businesses stayed on.

Elio had draped his coat over your shoulders while you hailed a cab. It was too far of a walk to Mother's home across the city, and Elio reminded you again that raw meat needed to be handled carefully.

You told him, again, that Marcos would handle it.

———

The entire cab ride took less time than you thought, relieving Elio who was still hopelessly fixated on the longevity of the raw duck he had wrapped up in a separate paper bag from the produce and spices. From the front seat, the cabbie, perplexingly somehow a human and not an android, constantly looked back at Elio through the rearview mirror and commented almost deliriously about how beautiful he was.

Hearing that the first three times gave you a happy, satisfied buzz in your chest, making you lean more against Elio's side. He was tempted to move his arm out and put it around your shoulders but kept to himself. Beyond those initial comments from the cabbie, however, you had quickly developed an uncomfortable feeling in your belly that wrapped itself tight like a constrictor on your insides.

“I ain't ever seen an android as beautiful as you,” said the driver, eyes in constant motion from the mirror to the road. “What model are ya? Definitely not a four or five. Yer a little too smooth to be a six. Damn, did Hyperion release a new one already?”

Elio held a polite smile, separate from the gentle, intimate ones that he kept for you. You didn't hear the response he gave to the cabbie because you felt his fingers reach through yours, pulling them apart so you couldn't dig a nail into the corner seam of your thumb anymore.

You spent the rest of the trip testing the weight of his hand, thinking of little less except how deep you'd have to go through his skin to see his circuitry and what else made him up. Those vanished like a white puff of breath in winter when the taxi jerked to a stop on a street curb.

“Thank yew for ya business.” The cabbie lifted his stiff old hat when you paid, eyed Elio a little more, and only drove off after you had knocked on a canary-yellow door up some stone stairs.

You stared at a decorative wreath covered with flowers—fake because the ones used couldn’t grow outside of greenhouses anymore—hanging dead center on the door. No doubt Marcos’ work because Mother couldn't be bothered with those little nuanced social things.

Marcos answered—brown skin and hazel eyes that burnished green in almost any lighting—gesturing for you and Elio to come inside.

“Welcome home,” he said, far more unnaturally than it sounded coming from Elio. There was a certain rigidity to it, an effort clearly inhuman and lesser. He embraced you in a familiar way, reminding you of all your years of childhood doing this exact thing because your mother didn't know how to love you, and “father” was just a word. “I apologize for messaging you to come over so late. You know how your mother is. When the mood strikes…”

Marcos didn't emit much bodily warmth, never had, even in the golden years of G3, but he was there, and that's all that mattered at the time. His skin was still youthful and flawless, though the longer you looked him in the face, the less real he seemed. His eyes held depth and movement though were slow, less precise, and duller. The lines around his mouth when he smiled were unnatural, appearing to you nearly like bunching folds in a sheet of leather.

It was strange seeing an older generation of android after having acclimated to Elio over two months.

“Your mother is at the dining table.” Marcos moved on to Elio, taking in his image, surmising that he too was an android. He glanced down at the bags that Elio still held. “May I take those for you? Hyperion’s innovation continues ever forward, I see. You are new.”

“The first of Generation Seven,” said Elio. The bags were passed between them. “I would appreciate it if you kept the duck refrigerated. It's in the paper bag.”

“That's no trouble.” Marcos turned with Elio following along behind him into the kitchen. “I'd like to hear about Generation Seven’s potential. What is your maximum I-O? Data? Memory? How have the functions that have been implemented into you differ from Generation Six?”

Their voices were muffled behind the walls as you crossed through multiple rooms to where Mother sat at the head of a large glossy table made from dark-brown wood. It was a spacious area reserved to eat surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows in elegant drapes with the best view of whatever the neighbors were doing. She had told you once that the only reason she bought this house was because it'd be good gossip for when she invited her gaggle of catty executive receptionist friends over.

Back then, she hosted her little impromptu get-togethers more often than she remembered to see you off to school. Marcos made sure you were fed and bathed, sat with you in your bedroom to help with homework, and sent you to bed. As you grew, the parties had migrated elsewhere, prompting your mother to go with them.

That had left you alone with Marcos and the boundaryless curiosity of a teenager. You didn't know if Mother still participated in such things now that she was older, less pretty, inclined to more body aches.

“I've been thinking that we should visit the new teahouse that opened up on Aflaat Ave. You never talk to me anymore.” she said, but it wasn't true. Neither of you talked to one another, just used Marcos as an intermediate. “I—well—Marcos went through your old bedroom a few weeks ago because I've decided to take up scrapbooking and sewing and needed space, and he found an old shoebox full of your primary and secondary school projects! How quaint! He wanted to make sure you got them.”

“That's nice.” You didn't want to sit down, unwilling to be her fifteen minutes of entertainment before she got bored. She kept on staring at you with wide eyes and crow’s feet and fretful hands, like a woman who still had more to say. “I'll make sure Elio grabs them before we leave.”

“Elio!” Mother gaped. “Man or android? Certainly an android, right? Men are useless.”

Your rage was already bunching up and throbbing in the back of your throat. “Yes, Mother, an android.”

“‘Mother’ sounds so harsh! How about mama or mummy or mom?” She kept wringing her fingers together. “Anyway, anyway! Elio! He sounds so handsome. Is that who Marcos is talking to? What a handsome voice! Is he a Generation Six?”

You still hadn't sat down, though you used your hands to lean across the back of a chair. “Generation Seven. I'm testing him for Hyperion.”

“For Hyperon!” Mother couldn't fathom you doing more than grunt work at the marketing firm. She didn't know your position had become obsolete. “This is certainly a surprise. Sit down. How did that happen? You and Hyperion? Are you trying to make me look stupid?”

“I've been sitting all day. I'm good like this.” That wasn't a lie. You also just couldn't stand the idea of giving any relief to her anxious state. “It's my new job. Very coveted. I've been working closely with one of the researchers there, and he can't praise me enough. I'm looking after Elio for a year and then moving on to their next latest and greatest.”

“You?” She spat out a laugh. It calmed the trembling in her hands for a few seconds before she was back at it again. “Oh, my. Well. If that's the case, you certainly owe it to me for getting that job. My genetics. My smarts. You certainly didn't get it from your father.”

That lurching, angry ball in your throat was rising up fast. It was just there on the tongue making you gag, salivate, and begin to drool a bit from the corner of your lips. It tasted horrific and filled you with the most voracious need for venom.

“Who is my father?” you asked. “You could be wrong.”

Mother suddenly grew uncomfortable, flattening her gaze with the tabletop. Historically, she had always been this way when you asked about him, the infamously evasive ghost of your life. It was also the only thing that ever made her shut up.

“That doesn't matter.” She continued, “You’ve always had me and Marcos. That's what matters.”

“I've had Marcos.” The ball freed itself. “I just thought you should know, Generation Three models are being decommissioned. Marcos won't be receiving any more updates, and eventually, he'll just be a pile of fucking scrap. What're you gonna do then? You can't afford another android because you've sunk every penny you've ever saved into him—his upgrades, his maintenance, his clothes. It may take about ten years, and you'll probably be on your deathbed, but he's going to fall apart and eventually stop moving. You'll be just as alone as you were before he came along.”

Mother’s face turned shades, petrified. You wanted nothing more than to see her shrink into her clothes and disappear for good. It soothed you to think about Marcos’ end being inevitable, unchangeable, a fact. Some of the guilt was easier to bury that way.

“Wh-What are you saying to me, you awful child?!” She wailed with watery eyes, hands wrapped in the same colored strands of hair you had. “How could you?! That's not true! That’s not true! Do you know how hard it was to carry you for nine months?! I was so young and I was forced to give birth to you! Forced! Do you hear me—forced to be a mother to a child I never wanted! It was that or death. I never wanted a child because they turn on you and say things like this! You horrible, horrible child!”

Her shrieks stirred a ruckus from the kitchen where Marcos and Elio emerged from. Marcos ran to your mother, took her in his arms, and cradled her against his chest when she began to shed very real tears that bubbled at the corner of her eyes before falling, curving along her cheeks.

Elio came straight to you, hesitating to put his hands on your body, maybe noticing how viciously you glared at this wilted woman he'd yet to meet.

“Get the groceries. We're gone.” You stormed straight for the door, chest stuttering with heavy breaths you tried to calm because you knew what came next. Your throat ached, burned fiercely like something had snagged there and you needed to claw it out.

Once you reentered the chilly air submerged in all the dark and light of Retro City at night, it didn't matter that you were crying. They were hot tears that left behind cool traces. They were decades of disappointment, of secretly understanding a mother’s love would always be conditional, of being unwanted and wishing you hadn't been burdened with existing.

Elio came out minutes later, the door closing softly and locking after him. You heard the bags crinkle near you, drawing your eyes away from a blinking parking meter you'd zoned in to calm yourself down.

You said nothing.

“Let’s go home.” Elio hailed a cab idling nearby and opened the door for you. “I want to keep the meat fresh.”

Him and that stupid duck.

This cabbie looked back at you both once to get directions, and then only occasionally afterward, casting pitiable glances at your raw-looking face in the mirror. The GPS displayed on the car’s dashboard showed the apartment was thirty minutes away because of traffic, probably from a crash they were detouring; ordinarily, it only took twenty minutes.

When your pocket vibrated, you almost didn't check. Unsurprisingly, it was a message from Marcos, just a single one.

“I don't think you should come around for a while,” it read. You didn't respond. Nothing new. Some sort of falling out with your mother was routine. You couldn't understand why she thought it'd ever go differently.

However, this time wasn't like all the rest. This time, you’d said something unforgivable despite her doing the same, but yours was worse in her mind. You didn't mind the idea of her disappearing from your life. It was harder to handle the thought that you'd never see Marcos again before he ceased to function, though.

“What happened?” Elio asked, a weird departure from androids being programmed, traditionally, never to pry. “That woman was your mother, correct? What did you say to her?”

“Who cares?” You grunted, sniffing around the burn in sinuses again. “She's a crazy bitch. She's always been that way. I told her that Marcos would just turn into a scrap heap eventually. Was that wrong of me?”

“Well, perhaps that phrasing was inappropriate, yes.” Elio touched your forearm. “But there is no NDA in place from Hyperion. You are well within your rights to have told her. But, as I said, your phrasing—”

“I know, shut up—” You moved closer so you could lean against him. “I hate that woman. I hate my mother more than I ever hated anyone.”

Elio lifted an arm above you, giving you room to slide in as far as you wanted to go. He held you for the first time, repeating long, weighty strokes down your back, through his coat that you still wore. You were transported back to a moment in time steeped in cloudy nostalgia, blurred.

It was Marcos kneeling at your bedside, yellow overhead lights dimmed to nearly full darkness. The door was shut because otherwise a heap of cackling voices, Mother and her gossiping hens after too much wine, would spear in through the cracks and make you petulant. Marcos had already been trying to get you to sleep for over an hour.

“Sleep little one, sleep.” Marcos had said, voicebox in his throat straining with a quieter sound. “I know it must be difficult. You must be rested for school tomorrow.”

“They're too loud.” you whined, throwing your covers back with a great flourish, feet kicking them the rest of the way off before you huffed and turned to your side away from Marcos. “Make them shut up! Can't you make them shut up, Marcos?!”

He sighed, defeated as much as an android could be. No, he could not. It went against his programming to disobey his master—any human who made a demand of him. His order was to get the child to sleep, and that had yet to happen.

“Would you like me to read The Falcon and the Hare to you again?” It was your favorite bedtime story right now. Hearing fictional stories involving extinct animals seemed to be of odd fascination to you. “My tone of voice might make it—”

“No!” you fussed, thumping your feet once, twice, three times and going limp again. “Come up here until I fall asleep. Please?”

Marcos nodded. “Yes, little one.”

He had to keep one leg off the bed to even half fit on the mattress. You sat upright to fix the blankets so to cover yourself and part of Marcos’ one bent knee. His arm laid out on the bed, waiting for you to crawl into it until you were nestled into his side, sucking up what small warmth radiated from his fake body. Once you found a comfortable spot, curled up tightly much like a cat sunbathing in a single shaft of daylight, he began smoothing a hand down along your back, heavy enough to be felt through your thick comforter.

You listened to him hum a song that you liked, one that translated well to his chords and the vibrations in his throat.

He hummed. He petted your back. He hummed. He petted your back. He hummed…

“Do you truly hate your mother?” Elio’s voice was delicate just then, aware that you were away in some reverie he tried to gently lure you out of. The dream was over. That one silver glimmer of your childhood became far away, forgotten while the sounds of the city rushed back into the cab.

“Yes—I mean, I dunno.” You actually yawned, pushing one of your eyes with the heel of your hand. “I think I hate her. We've argued my entire life. We've never gotten along. Yeah, I hate her.”

Elio was holding you by the waist now. “Is that why you said what you did?”

“Said what?” You were a little too keen on his thumb swirling around the fat padding your hip bone.

“About Marcos being scrap…”

“Elio, seriously? Do you ever shut up?” It was tempting to put yourself on the opposite side of the seat, but you didn't want to give the cabbie any chance to eyeball him. “I—I don't know. She just gets me so mad. I used to be able to crush up those feelings because Marcos told me it wasn't healthy to act on them. But, then, I moved out, and I realized she was still the same, that she'd always stay the same. I stopped hiding it.”

You were so close to his face that you could see how long his eyelashes were and the shadows they cast on his cheeks.

You looked into his eyes. “I wanted to make her hurt as much as she hurt me.”

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Midnight had come and gone before you finally gave up on trying to sleep. You spent the better part of an hour staring up at the high ceiling, imagining every rusting pipe you saw as immobile serpents stretched taut to make the interconnecting structure that sprawled across the entire loft. Swirls and shapes and blacker-than-black shadows danced in front of your eyes, twisted with the pipes, and made the usual knocking sounds within them, but nothing ever came for you.

Downstairs was a careful amount of liveliness and aromas as Elio put together his duck à l'orange that he promised you. You scarcely heard a sound from him shuffling about but more from the clanking pans, boiling pots, and unintelligible chatter you knew came from the television.

Maybe he was watching a rerun of Wendy Carmichael Can Cook again, maybe a segment from the news because he liked that equally as much.

And yet, as you made your way to the lower floor, mystified by the fact you were standing on your toes to disguise all sound during your descent, you saw that the television was set to an old crime show he watched with you on occasion.

Detective Georgina Reyes and her android sidekick, Regis (G5), were the undisputed heroes of Helcam City and solved every case that came their way with style, finesse, and plenty of moral and ethical dilemmas. The majority of the show was spent within Georgina's inner world and her near-obsessive lust over Regis, who was owned by the department chief.

Ratings for the show had climbed to an all-time high when Regis had gained a sense of self and the ability to defy his programming. For fewer than six episodes, it was complete bliss for fans of Georgina and Regis, but then the season five finale happened—

“Can't sleep?” Elio asked, effectively putting your heart in your asshole, sending your soul skyward. He must have gauged your sudden gray pallor and bulbous glare because he smiled apologetically from the bottom of the stairway. “I'm sorry. I didn't intend to scare you. Were you watching Regis and Reyes?”

“I—uh, no.” You sighed, taking slow steps to the bottom to ease your heartbeat eating away at your ribs. “I was thinking about the show ending. Have you watched it yet?”

“Of course,” he said. “It was a peculiar way for the story to end. In my opinion, it was incomplete. Very sudden. It's my understanding that there was an issue with how the government was being represented within the show, and a few of the writers were accused of conspiracy to defraud the government and subsequently arrested for it.”

“Seriously?” You scoffed, making it to ground level, and walked around Elio toward the kitchen where all the heavenly smells wrapped around you, enticing you to take a morsel. “It was the forced pregnancy plotline, right? Creepy stuff.”

“Indeed.”

Elio wouldn't let you have any of the duck à l’orange, saying it was meant for your dinner later on in the day, but he did steep you a hot mug of herbal tea (for sleep), the one that turned water pink, and offered to make you a light snack.

He went back to his tasks after you declined, satisfied well enough with the small swigs you took from your white mug. You spent more time sitting at the counter in silence, watching his back, hoping to gain the power to see through his shirt rather than actually taking interest in what he was doing.

Your eyelids fluttered and fell thinking about the car ride home: his arm around you, his thumb rubbing pacifying circles into your hip, how you'd been close enough to his face to believe you felt a breath leave his lips.

“Elio.”

“Yes?”

He had moved on to washing dishes. When he heard you behind him, he took a clean towel to his hands and quickly dried them before facing you. You guessed you probably had a strange expression right now, or at least, looked at him in a way you never had because the towel was cast aside, draped over the faucet, and his eyes flickered across your face.

“Your heart rate and body temperature have increased.” he said, giving into the pull of your hands after grabbing both sides of his face. You backed yourself into the countertop while still holding him, thumbs caressing the rise of his cheeks, bringing him down, down, down toward your face where you certainly felt heat blow across your mouth. “Your breathing has changed. I can hear your heartbeat. Don't be anxious. I won't hurt you.”

You weren't nervous.

You proved it by kissing him, full-bodied, slow, lingering. He gripped the edge of the countertop, bracing his weight against his hands to stifle some aggressive reaction, possibly, and returned the kiss with just as much fervor that you put into it.

His lips were every bit of what you imagined, what you wanted them to be. You had the urge to bite into them a little, to see if they could bleed the same way yours could when you chewed enough on loose skin. Their texture was slightly indented with cracks that gave friction to the moist smear across your mouth.

Although the sounds of the kitchen and ambient hum from the television in the next room stayed as they were, it was like the volume of everything had been set to mute, and only the breathy, wet pops of air and skin made it into your ears. You heard the delicate chatter of teeth inside your head when his mouth roamed the underside of your jaw, down your neck, to the rise of your clavicle, stopping only at where your neckline ended.

His hands had already made home under your clothes, first doing away with your shirt that he tossed over your shoulder onto one of the barstools. Next, he worked on the elastic waistband keeping your sweatpants on your hips. You flinched against his hands when they splayed across your ass, taking all he could in them while his lips continued a downward trajectory, traveling over your breastbone, along the curve of your navel, and then he stopped.

Elio had been on his knees for a while, stirring you so deeply that you had no doubt there'd be damp spots sitting inside your sweatpants, possibly even drying on the inside of your thighs by now. He helped you out of your pants one leg hole at a time while you used his broad shoulders to balance yourself. And soon enough, one of your thighs was hiked up in that same spot, his face hidden from you despite all the work he was doing to well up a hard knot in your abdomen.

You had to take a fistful of his hair and wrap it tight in your fingers, using your other arm to balance against the counter. He wouldn't let you fall, you knew that, but the unsteadiness of your legs grew, trembling violently, turning to lead like being buried under concrete or suctioned by water. He kissed and sucked and stroked you some more, pushing more into the spots that made you moan the loudest and fastest, fingers wandering you busily and lubricated with your own spend.

“Elio—Elio, let's move somewhere, please.” You shuddered out, trying to pull his hair, shove his face off of you. “Please.”

He grunted, surprising you by relinquishing to the pressure, and made his way back up the route he had taken down. “Where do you want to go?” he asked, lips sticking on your throat, rising higher to the protrusion of your chin. “The kitchen floor? The couch? The bed? We could probably manage in the bathtub as well, if that's what you'd enjoy.”

“I don't care.” You were only half-honest and miserable now with the sole focus of trying not to touch yourself to finish. “Just… somewhere, Elio.”

“As you wish.”

Elio hoisted you onto his hips, making sure you knew to squeeze him with your thighs before making his way around the kitchen to turn knobs and shut off the overhead bulbs. The new darkness was refreshing yet did nothing to tame that sweltering sensation between your legs. In fact, you thought you could burst from the anticipation. It was everything you could do not to hump him through his clothes, hands occupied in his tousled hair, lips together with bruising force.

Before long, your back was on couch cushions and the television was off so as to not ruin the moment. You saw dark behind your eyes while you kept them open, unfocused on the ceiling with the serpent pipes because his mouth was already back on you and helping you chase that high.

“You're almost there.” His lips smacked against your engorged skin, making your lashes flutter and eyes roll back. “You look so perfect. When you cum, I'll take my time cleaning you up. I can use my tongue. I can make you cum again—as many times as you'd like.”

His arms held your thighs wide open, giving him all the room he needed for those final, well-placed strokes that turned your moans into utterly drawn-out, lewd things that made you grateful that no one else lived in this side of the building. Your body wrenched against his continued ministrations, his lips and chin and fingers warm and glistening with your traces.

You had thought to worry, briefly, about something getting onto the cushions under your ass, but Elio had already thought it through and used the dish towel from earlier to catch anything awry.

It came in handy for his face.

“How do you feel?” he asked from inside one of your thighs, kissing his way all the way to the point of your knee. “Was it satisfactory?”

You didn't answer right away, especially not when he came forward on his arms to catch your lips, slowing things down so you could bask in that fuzzy, satiated afterglow—dopamine and oxytocin being that remarkable duo doing their damndest to reinforce how exquisite and ineffably breathtaking Elio was to you.

“Would you like a bath?” he asked against your jaw. “You can just lie back and relax. I'll clean you up.”

“No.” Spurred by newfound bravery, you trailed your fingertips between both bodies, first to loosen the tie on his sleep pants, plucking the strings hard so he felt it. Next thing, your hands slipped under his shirt. “I want you to actually fuck me. Put your cock in me.”

Elio jolted upright, using the tall back of the couch and armrest near your head to hold his body above you. Cold air seeped in all the places where he had been, dotting your skin in gooseflesh, hairs within those follicles standing on end. You were laid out below him, showing all your unobscured nudity and vulnerability, withering yourself just a little smaller under the intensity of his stare.

This was different from the grocery store, where he had needed a moment to amend for information he did not have. This was something else—flickers of conflict, struggle, restraint, and excitement were ablaze in his eyes, which shifted around within their sockets, giving you glimpses of pure gleaming white, which stood out in the inky dark all around.

“I—are you certain that's what you want?” he spoke at last, doing little to alleviate the way you felt he had seen your insides and bones. “It is late, I know you must be tired.”

“Are you…” You couldn't really explain the uneasiness gnawing at your gut, nor the thrill of wanting him inside of you regardless. Maybe he could fuck the feeling out of you, bring peace to your throbbing heartbeat and blood gushing to your head. “Elio, are you telling me no?”

“I cannot do such a thing.” he said right away, coming down from his high place to lay the weight of himself across you.

You felt his skin flush to your chest without a thin shirt to hide his shape and muscle that wasn't real, but this was so much more than touching every dissected mannequin in physiology class in school. They couldn't kiss your neck while the interwoven, complex network underneath stretched, elastic flesh contracted and relaxed against your palms.

“Would you believe me if I told you there are certain functions—programming—that I cannot override?” The waistband of his pants collected in a heap of fabric around his knees, freeing room for his cock in the open air. “I won't be able to let you go until I'm finished. I want you to understand that.”

That sounded hot, and you were tired of him stalling, so you told him you understood. “Very well.” He kissed you, guiding one of your hands low to his core where you could revel in the size of him.

He was hard in your grip with a good girth and length to him, a curve you'd come to recognize from toys collected over the past decade to hit the right spots. The skin over his cock was much a part of him as the rest on his body, hot, growing damp, and sticky the nearer you wandered to the head.

You had watched old pornography with Melby and the group a few times before from the days when it was just humans performing acts on each other. No one really liked it because it was so dramatized; everyone agreed that one of the actors needed to be an android for it to actually be sexy. You never told them that the moaning men with stuttering hips as they ejaculated was something you did like.

Elio leaned into your palm, the thumbprint starting to prune as you rubbed his tip. More warmth seeped out from it, wet and thick and perplexing and exhilarating because Hyperion made him so perfect, a better being than just an emulation of man.

His cock slid through your hand in short, quick bursts that eventually lubricated his entire shaft. He'd kept himself busy on your lips, tongue in your mouth, swiveling together the taste of you with saliva. It was the most inelegant he had been with you so far, yet you didn't think you'd be bothered if he did this more often.

“Fuck me.” You whined, finally apart from him. The swollen head of his cock made a moist path along your core where you massaged it against every sensitive spot that set your senses into a blazing frenzy. “Be as rough as you want. Hurt me a little.”

He finally took your hand away, rearranging your legs so one laid across the back of the couch, the other on his hip with a knee shoved under your ass for height.

“I will not hurt you.” Both your wrists were cuffed by his large hands, pinned down into the cushions by your head. “But, I cannot let you go. You must see it through until the end.”

“Fuck. Me.” you said forcefully, uncomprehending to the things he was telling you, uncaring what it all meant.

“Yes. Alright.”

Elio obeyed you as he was supposed to, cock sinking in with care, thrusts starting out shallow until the tip was withdrawn and then back inside again. The angle he had created for you made it easier to take his length. It took a little more time to acclimate to his girth and plenty of gentle encouragement from his voice landing right next to your ear, telling you to relax. It would improve in a few minutes, and he wouldn't let you go to sleep dissatisfied.

Indeed, minutes later, you were well beyond the worst of it and filling the void all around you with harsh, rapturous moans, which Elio enjoyed hearing. His lips lingered at your throat where most of your sounds resonated, fists still holding firm around your wrists, knuckles the same color as the rest of the dark but had actually bled pale.

The springs within the couch cried out, unused to this weight and ruthlessness, while the air stung with cracks of slapping skin timed with your moans. Elio didn't let you move from where he had you laid out, didn't let up on the speed and depth he reached despite how labored your breaths became, broken words eclipsed by panting and his tongue forcing them back down your throat where they stayed in submission.

It was still cold in the early mornings this spring, often leaving your apartment a little less comfortable than you'd like, but right now, you could've been convinced that he was fucking you on the ground in the flatlands and believed it. Your skin was slick with sweat, the mess between your bodies slippery and undoubtedly staining the couch underneath.

Just then, the weight on your wrists climbed higher to your hands. He threaded your fingers together at the same time his thrusts began to slow, hips rolling yours like a swaying ship amid languid seas.

The whole time he had been on top of you, edging you closer to another orgasm, he had hardly made a noise apart from whispering in your ear when you'd clench his cock too tight. Now, he was failing to keep quiet from your neck, trembling and grunting on your skin until, at last, one jarring thrust left him breathing out in relief.

He got you to your end shortly after, half-hard cock still throbbing and warm inside you, giving just enough of what you needed while his hand finished the rest with fast strokes. You winced. He didn't let off until your jaw hung slack, whimpering meagerly through the pleasure hampering thoughts and sensations other than pressure releasing from your groin, spend turning a patch of your couch dark.

“You did well.” Once he was soft, he tied his pants back around his waist and picked up the sodden dish towel to begin cleaning around your sorest areas. “Come with me. I'll start you a hot bath and make you a new cup of tea before bed.”

You didn't want to get up from that spot, declared yourself rooted there unless Elio helped you up, and thrust a hand high into the dark room.

He wore a princely smile, you assumed, as he leaned down to pick you up in his arms instead. Moved by such a gesture, you reached for his face with your angry wrists and hands to kiss him all the way to the bathroom.

None of this made it into your next report.

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Melby didn't like Elio.

This she had told you over text after you declined her incoming phone call so as to not arouse Researcher Kim’s ire in finding out you were completely distracted during his exorbitantly detailed analysis of your latest reports. Two had been sent in before midnight last Sunday, as usual, since he was rarely satisfied with what you revealed through them these days.

Less than an hour later, while cozied up in bed on your side, facing the chopping blades of an oscillating fan, just beginning to feel yourself teeter off that edge from dull, relaxed awareness into light sleep, your ringtone went off—it was Kim.

“What else have you committed to doing lately in terms of Elio's social advancement? The last thing I have here…” A refreshing, fast pause followed, accented by the sound of paper softly swishing as it was parsed. “He was brought to a movie theater on the twenty-fourth, Diosyn Park on the twenty-ninth, Henrietta's four times in the last week. That's not nearly enough. Who are you socializing him with? What have their reactions been? How has he reacted to them? You're not writing down exact times.”

Not once since you'd joined the video conference forty minutes ago did he check to see if you were listening to him, content with his nose being shoved down into a bundle of chemically smelling papers and glowing screens to corroborate previous work he had on file.

That made it easier for you to text back Melby, arguing with her in endless paragraphs too tiring for your thumbs to continuously scroll through that you didn't have time to meet up at Clamors for drinks with everyone.

“Should I tell Chima you hate us?” texted Melby.

Truthfully, you couldn't tell if it was meant as a threat or if she was just pettish after being refused. One of her worst qualities, never spoken aloud to her face lest she fumbled and blubbered all the way to Chima to snitch about it, was being horridly uncompromising to just about everything.

It made you anxious enough that your fingers started to ache with an urge, on the path toward curling back slithers of cuticle, gathering blood under the nails, itchy scabs that Elio constantly covered with neon bandaids so you wouldn't touch them.

Eventually, you found a new fixation with the seams of your knuckles and fitted the most unrefined part of your nails into them, digging up red that way until he had to cover those, too.

It took you ten minutes with fidgety thumbs to reply. “I don't hate anyone. You know me.”

Melby's was instantaneous. “What about me? Do you hate me now?”

Another one. “Now that you have that android?”

More. “We used to spend so much time together.”

Last one for good measure to effectively drill a gory black hole straight into your pounding, cowardly heart. In her eyes, anyway. “I haven't seen you in months!”

“He needs more direct interaction. I've decided that I'll make amends to the template you've been using up until now.” Researcher Kim was saying, not seeing you, not hearing you, assuming your loyalty to him and his cause was complete.

Ripples of drowsiness overcame you so powerfully that you left Melby on read, mind suddenly a vast, empty space and quiet for the first moment all day. Your hands rose to cradle your cheeks, propping your head above your elbows on the countertop because Kim's inflated droning had come to have that effect on you over time.

A human man with a face that nice shouldn't be allowed to talk so much. He should go back to moaning on couches in front of cameras and sweltering lights.

“Let me explain what I'm currently changing.” he said, hopelessly invested in whatever those alterations were just by the mechanical click-clack of fingertips soaring over a keyboard somewhere low and out of sight of his screen. “From here on out, I'm going to require that you gather between six to ten direct interactions. I want full disclosure of every conversation, transcribed or recorded. From my standpoint, recording would be the most effective method so I may make interpretations myself.”

You were thinking of what to ask Elio to make you for lunch. It was almost noon. You unmuted the call. “Am I allowed to just randomly record people talking like that? That seems…”

“Hyperion works closely with Retro City’s governing bodies, and by extension, so do you.” Kim kept typing as he spoke. “It isn't illegal because the information you're collecting is imperative to the Hyperion Project. Without it, we face the risk of progress slowing or diminishing. That cannot happen, and I cannot emphasize enough that your work as an auditor must come before other commitments.”

At long last, he pulled his face out of papers and other screens to look at yours. In a fashion unsuitable for him, he sighed in a fatigued way, back collapsing against his ergonomic chair, shoulders lopsided with how he perched his elbows on the armrests.

“Retro City has over three million inhabitants. You won't have any issues finding people for Elio to speak to.” he told you. “Six to ten for each report. That’s all.”

You were already back in your messages, backtracking your previous responses to Melby, asking her what time everyone was meeting at Clamors.

Right away, “Come at nine!”

And then, “I'll save you a seat.”

Finally, “Don't eat too much before getting here. It'll ruin the fun.”

“Fine.” Phone now face down on the counter, you returned Researcher Kim’s concentrated stare. “I'll do my best. Six to ten. Six to ten…”

That had done well to appease him, demonstrated through a satisfied smile, which pulled his lips just enough that the muscles in his right cheek twitched as though the motion was foreign to him. With how inexpressive he was most of the time, you weren't surprised, thinking it more humorous than anything else.

You struggled to find a smile of your own that wasn't strained, though.

“That reminds me—” He positioned himself forward, arms on his polished dark-red desk with a curious gleam in his black eyes. “None of your reports have instances of copulation mentioned. Have there been complications?”

You sat stiffly, not agape but definitely not composed, either. “Sorry? What was that?”

“Intercourse. Sex.” He simplified it for you, almost with a pitying crease forming between his brows. “You've completed every other area outlined in the template except that one. I have… refrained from questioning you until now because I do understand that, outside of a clinical setting, it can be construed as inappropriate to discuss.”

The only person you had divulged any details to was Melby. Even that had been brief and inexplicit because she had immediately changed the topic to something one of the kids Chima invited into the group had done that pissed her off.

“Why do you need to know?” It was a defensive question. “Is that something I really need to write about? It's sex. It's just sex.”

Researcher Kim made an indistinguishable sound behind steepled fingers. They hid away whatever shape his mouth was in at that moment, making the whole conversation terribly uncomfortable. It was odd how exposed you felt like his stare was reaching long, further than just the screen in front of him. He wasn't looking into you or through you but rather right at you—imagining you some other way, unclothing your body with drifting eyes and invisible hands.

You were equal parts embarrassed and repulsed by that line of thinking, allowing your mind to summon up his ghost hands to search you, feel you under all your layers, know you as intimately as Elio had as though part of some extension of himself.

“It is all outlined in the contract you signed.” Kim said, now with an edge that made you flinch on the barstool. “Androids are developed for convenience and pleasure. I have reports for one, not the other. If Elio, as the first of G7, is not performing exceptionally—if there are complications, if he is defective—that is something you must include within your reports. I don't suspect that to be the case, in this situation.”

His eyes suddenly caught onto something else, going beyond you, but you chose not to react by looking. “Your work as an auditor has been sufficient so far, but incomplete reports at this critical stage in Elio's testing are grounds for me to terminate your contract.”

You clenched your jaw until your teeth throbbed, your head going up and down like it was on a hinge attached to your neck.

“Personally, that's a hassle I'd rather not involve myself in.” Kim confessed in a straighter posture, smiling tensely. “Now, I'll ask you again: Have there been any complications with inter—”

“That's enough.” Elio reached across your shoulder for the tablet, pointer finger hovering over a red button on the screen. “Researcher Kim, it's time for lunch. Goodbye.”

He pushed the button, managing to catch a swift change in Kim's expression before the screen went black and reflected your shock back at you instead.

You watched him slide the tablet away to the opposite end of the counter space, unable to lift yourself out of this bizarre stupor just from how purely surreal what just happened was. And from the look of it, Researcher Kim hadn't anticipated that Elio was capable of doing something like that, either.

You just hoped it wouldn't cost you your contract.

“What have you been doing all this time?” you asked, tilting your head back to welcome his lips gliding atop yours, a peck, at first, which gradually grew deeper and greedier. With some effort, you pulled back. “Mm, c'mon, what were you doing?”

“On Wendy Carmichael Can Cook today, she said—”

A hiss of annoyance. “Oh, of course…”

“She said there was a list of excellent bistros around Retro City worth trying.” He wasn't pleading with you or anything, but he seemed just about as dedicated to this idea as he had been with the duck à l’orange a while back. “For lunch, I thought it'd be of interest to you to visit one. I've been researching ones I thought you would like based off of your dietary habits, allergies, and sensitivities. Radiant Bistro next to the Leviathan Archway near downtown might be a good option. Impressively diverse menu.”

You pretended to pinch lint off of his shirt and inspect it up close. “If you didn't want to cook, you could've just said that.”

“That's not it,” he assured you with a kiss to the back of your hand so that you understood he meant it. “Since my arrival here, your social presence has declined substantially, which will not fare well for your public profile. I do understand that it’s in relation to your work as an auditor, but—”

“Okay! Okay, I get it.” you said agreeably, hands raised, hoping it'd deflect anything else. “We’ll go. Let me just find a hat so the sun won't get on my face.”

“No problem.” He walked away and came back with an old unbranded brown one from somewhere in the most remote crevice of the apartment. “Will this suffice?”

You looked at it, amazed. “Yeah. Yup. Let's go.”

Elio had stopped carrying a coat with him once the evenings grew long, and the remnants of heat from the day floated into nighttime, trapping the city within a muggy gray haze that too closely resembled dewy fog in early spring. The difference was the heaviness and breathability of the air—one you could tolerate despite allergies; the other was deplorable and evoked memories of every single club you had drunk and danced in with Melby and Chima and the rest in the past years.

Outside, right now, sucking in the early-afternoon heat into your lungs after spending your morning in air conditioning, nose wrapped in earthy white wisps rising from a coffee mug, you wanted to turn back around and hide. Much to your dismay, Elio kept you on a short leash with a tight grip on your hand, probably expecting you to have a change of heart.

“Would you like for me to recall the menu and read it aloud to you?” he offered, situating his hand so his fingers crossed through yours, palms flush together. “They have fourteen types of sandwiches—hot and cold. Five of those are chicken, and five are of different meat varieties: lamb, cow, veal, goat, and yak, all claimed to be bred and raised and slaughtered in their warehouses. The last four sandwiches are…”

You listened passively without much commitment, especially in the back of the cab where there was no escape from anything. The AC was broken. The cabbie kept wiping sweat off his brow and sipped warm water. With the windows down, the outside air ripped inside the vehicle, nearly stealing the old hat off your head.

Elio went on to list desserts, thumb gently rolling circles on your sticky skin as if meant to keep you soothed.

“As long as I remember to eat light…” you murmured, remembering, glumly to yourself.

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Clamors was inside a three-story building on the north end of Retro City, about a ten-minute taxi ride to Mother’s brick-stone house, thirty minutes from Henrietta’s, forty minutes from your apartment, and farthest removed from the slums where congregations of profile delinquents and the unwanted were most dense.

Here in this part of the city, you were an imposter among manicured foliage, men and women and androids arrayed in trendy designer silhouettes that were protruding, sharp, and agonizing; sharks and whales of big business puffed cigars in front panoramic views of the cityscape from the highest skyscrapers. They could look down at the street from their window and see you, an ant scuttling meaninglessly.

This wasn't a place where you belonged, a feeling that never changed over time, even years later after Chima recruited you into his group and every night was a suffocating blur of sweaty, faceless bodies, explosive music, stomping feet, raspy screams, and lightly-flavored chalk dissolving under your tongue. You roamed the sidewalks at two in the morning as everyone had been kicked out, but no one cared because Chima came from money, a rare case where two parents could be accounted for, and you'd all just be back inside the next evening.

You weren't sure when you had become disillusioned with it all—the drinks, the animal pills, which coalesced into saliva in your mouth, the noises, the gossip, the six ibuprofen to function behind a desk at work, the burnout of rinse and repeat, a conveyor belt that moved cyclically without a place to get off. To exit the ride meant to plunge head-first into abject terror, the unknowable, to become part of the yellow wallpaper that's never actually seen, to cease to be.

Being back in Clamors again after months away turned your heart against you, thrust the sound of its distress into your ears, dwarfing an animated conversation happening right at your circular table. You felt the music vibrate through your skin, make its way into your marrow, and rattle your entire skeleton.

Melby had a hand on your knee, blunt-tipped nails collecting sweat off your skin underneath them.

You couldn't really focus on that.

“So, this is Elio. He's hot.” Chima said without looking at you.

“Really hot!”

“So hot!”

“Did you hear? Shut up, stop talking! Did you hear? That slut got herself pregnant!” shouted Niva, a senior-most part of the circle behind you and Melby. She knew everything about everyone, though she wasn't supposed to keep tabs. “Apparently her baby daddy decided the pussy wasn't worth it anymore and ran!”

“I can't believe it. That'd mean someone was actually willing to sleep with her.” said Niquan Lamos, the fashionable one always gravitating toward pastels. “A man, at that. Disgusting.”

Everyone laughed, including you. Elio quietly observed it all, seated at your side, incapable of letting his polite smile slip with numerous prowling eyes on him.

“Have you fucked him yet?” Chima asked you without actually caring for a response.

“Oh, have you fucked him?”

“C'mon, don't hide it. How was it?”

“What was her name?” asked a newcomer in the group, fresh out of secondary school and not even twenty. He was a compact lad, both in size and from being squeezed between Chima and Niquan in the circular booth stretched in fuchsia leather, or at least, that's how it looked in your table’s corner of the club. “How come she isn't here anymore?”

First rule was: Never talk about things that could make the liquor go down harder. This was one of those things. Secondly, never ask questions about people who the group was no longer associated with. It just sounded ugly to acknowledge the rejects.

Tonight, however, was an exception because Elio's presence was an exciting change. They forgot how to behave.

“Hm, now that you mention it, I don't remember. How long has it been?” Chima said this absently, abysmally black eyes wholly captivated by the android. “Damn. Something like Mi-dan? Mi-an? Mi… Mi…”

“Her name was Mi-sun.” said a nobody from somewhere at the round table. It probably would've been easy to figure out who was talking if they were more important, but it took less effort to blame the music reverberating from the speakers mounted on the wall near their heads.

Melby’s hand traveled adventurously along your thigh, unmindful of how close she came to your crotch. You had a harder time ignoring that move and sipped busily from your jungle bird, holding it higher than your eyeline to admire its beautiful vermilion hue practically glowing against the strobe lights pulsing down from the ceiling.

“This is the first time I've seen you drink.” Elio was leaned into you, wise to the fact that you wouldn't hear him any other way. His lips nearly touched your ear, voice honeyed, caring, all for you. You were halfway through your second jungle bird. “Please don't overdo it. The adverse effects of overconsumption of alcohol will cause you great discomfort tom—”

“Thank you, Elio.” For just a moment, you wondered how irreversibly damaging it would be to just grab his hand and sprint out of there. You drank some more to weaken your resolve, add lead into your legs. “I'll be good if you be good.”

Elio nodded appreciatively.

“Why was Mi-sun kicked out?” again asked the new face from before, plain and boyish-looking, Chima's fresh catch. They just kept getting younger and the alcohol just kept tasting worse. You forced it all down, anyway. “Well? Well? Well?”

“She was talking crazy shit,” Melby piped up with a drawl, fingernail swirling around a dark purple bruise on your thigh. She pushed in hard enough to remind you that it was still sore. “Like, she was fine one week and then every single night after that she would nooooot shut up about some wild government conspiracy theories.”

“Oh, right.” Chima laughed while forcing everybody out of their seats so he could stand. “I remember now. Yeah, she went completely insane. I think she was talking about androids being used for population control or something. Weird. Hey, let's dance.”

“That was a year ago?” Niva wanted Chima to confirm. “A year, right?”

“Over a year now. Who cares?” Melby said, staying put beside you while the rest of the booth vacated. “She’ll just end up dead in the slums like all the rest. Uh, they do all die, right?”

“Who cares?” Chima echoed, nesting his shoulders high to his ears in a shrug before walking away. “Who has the animal crackers?”

“Sounds about right.” Niva was unconvinced, doubt lingering in her words until Chima came around to rummage her purse for pills. “Oh! Only take one, they're so expensive!”

Chima stuck three in his mouth. “Don’t kill the vibe.” He left without a glance back toward all the no-face, nameless nobodies willing to lick the underside of his shoes if it meant they'd be acknowledged and given features—eyes, lips, hair, an identity.

Niquan was satisfied with just one, offering a subtle wash of relief to Niva, who was just about depleted of her supply at that point and used the last of it for herself, tongue lapping at the inside of her plastic envelope.

You were almost finished with your jungle bird, contemplating a third even though you had entered the territory where one more could mean the difference between a happy buzz and splintering headaches tomorrow, just as Elio warned. The ice cubes had melted into a smooth watercolor appearance and turned from red to blue to green to purple to pink as the lights gushed down from above.

“I don't remember what she looks like.” you admitted to Melby who gazed into you, squeezing your thigh meaningfully. Again, you didn't pay attention. “Mi-sun, I mean. Were we friends? Did I ever drink with her? Have I ever slept over at her house?”

“No!” Melby snapped, affronted. “You're mistaking her for me. You guys never even had a conversation. You hated her guts. You thought she was a freak.”

You made a sound into the last of your drink, unsure whether she was lying to you or not. “Maybe. Maybe. Was I okay with her being kicked out?”

“Totally.” she said, casting a fleeting look of disdain toward Elio, lip curling at one side. “Chima only counted yours and mine and Niva’s votes since we've been here the longest.”

“That's…” You licked your lips and then the rim of your glass, secretly wishing your tongue would snag an uneven crack so you’d start to bleed. “Why don't I remember anything?”

Melby giggled. “Because you've been drinking, babe. It'll come back to you. What animal cracker do you want tonight? Giraffe or cat?”

“Hm?” You were elsewhere.

Until now, you had gone numb to your surroundings thanks to the licorice notes of black strap rum and bitter Campari and pucker of pineapple juice that made for a mostly pleasant experience in your throat.

You were present in that moment, venturing a look around at the dance floor crammed with bodies (human and android) moving in rhythm to the music, in time with each other to create a oneness, a synchronism so strange that it put the hairs on the back of the neck on end like spines.

Why did it all look so different now? So alien? As if you were seeing an image from your nightmares in real life.

Elio failed to convince you not to have another drink brought to the table after all, meanwhile Melby said she was disappointed you didn't get something stronger, claiming you used to do it all the time.

That's right. You did, didn't you?

“Hey.” Chima had emerged from the shapeless cluster of sweating, drunk, wriggling bodies a short while later. He reached into the booth, gathering a fistful of Elio's button-up shirt, and looked at you with a malicious gleam, possibly just your imagination, that just dared you to protest. “I know you don't mind if I borrow him for a while, right? Of course not. The rest of us are curious about him. We’ll be gentle.”

You would’ve believed someone if they said your tongue was cut out, because as much as you wanted to slice into him and spit poison in his wounds with your words, rub it raw, deep into the bone, nothing came up.

Not a breath nor a feeble sob.

Don't touch him. Nothing.

“So, you're chill with it?” Chima, beautiful Chima with deep-dark skin sparkling in rhinestones and spray-on glitter as though he were a vessel for all the stars in the cosmos, bared his straight, white teeth at you in the form of an affable grin.

Eat shit. Bitter silence.

He asked you the same thing again but grew bored and gave up on expecting you to do anything interesting. Elio was led away by the front of his shirt to the amalgamation of bodies like a sacrifice for the great black maw belonging to an abomination.

A few broke away from the core. Niva and Niquan were identifiable since you'd known them longer. The rest were unfamiliar to you—the no names and the tiny young man, the android bartender, the disc jockey, the bodies climbing over each other and melting back into a single incoherent mass.

They all looked exactly the same.

“I wanna dance too, let's go!” Melby struggled with one of your arms while attempting to scoot her way out of the booth, but the alcohol and broodiness made your body into a stump, sturdy and immobile, roots bursting through the bottoms of your shoes and the shiny floor.

She plopped back down. “Seriously? What's up with you?”

“It's too hot,” you reasoned, sticking a fingernail into the fresh glass in front of you, swishing the liquid around to make everything a more palatable blend. “If you want to dance, I'm not stopping you.”

“You're acting so weird.” Melby said, lost somewhere between frustration and astonishment while pulling a clear baggy from her pants pocket. A couple small pills moved inside, pink residue clouding the plastic. She plucked out one without looking. “Hey, open up. You're being a huge snoozefest. This'll loosen you up.”

When you felt her acrylic fingernails press against the corner of your lips, you gently pushed her hand back and nursed your drink some more. “No thanks.”

Melby’s tongue lashed against her gums, sharp and disapproving. “Why are you being such a fucking buzzkill tonight?” She traced your line of sight to Elio, to the others grabbing and fondling him, to his eyes looking right back at you. “We haven't seen each other in months. Now all you do is stare at that android.”

“It's my job, Melby.” You took the damp paper napkin from under your drink to dab your forehead at the sweat, trying to cool yourself. “I can't help that.”

“You can take one night away from your job.” she decided, taking hold of your lower mandible with a claw and crammed the chalky pink pill through lips and teeth into the pocket underneath your tongue. “You know the drill. Let it dissolve all the way. Stop making faces! It doesn't taste that bad.”

You tried to jerk your head away, but her grip was surprisingly solid.

“Melby! What the hell?!” It came out garbled around her fingers still resting in your mouth, filling the reservoir below your tongue with saliva.

Melby, blue-eyed and blonde with pale pink skin that always reddened in the electrifying, hot air in the club, was completely flushed from her face down to her chest. Her eyes had darkened upon withdrawing her two fingers, glossing your lips with spittle.

“I missed you.” she said, outlining the shape of your mouth until the skin started to tingle. “Did you miss me? I've been really lonely.”

Your least favorite part of taking an animal cracker was the aftertaste that was the equivalent of eating sidewalk chalk and rubbing alcohol with a whisper of strawberry wafting up into your nostrils, clinging to every permeable membrane in your mouth and making your cheeks tremble.

“I—yeah. Yeah, I missed you.” You tried to sink the lingering taste down your throat with a swish and swallow from the jungle bird. “I didn't know what I was getting into with this whole Hyperion gig. I feel like I'm constantly watching Elio. Twenty-four seven.”

Elio never lost track of you throughout the ordeal, his being unable to escape the hands on his body and fight against the programming in his brain meant exclusively for human satisfaction. There were moments where you saw each other clearly, empty windows between writhing bodies, and you were convinced he tried to convey a very human-like discomfort that you immediately pretended like you hadn't seen.

Interfering meant going against the group. There was nothing you could do about it except allow them to eviscerate Elio if that's what they wanted. You could only sit there, drowning in rum and pineapple and aperitif and demerara sugar and scorching strobe lights and music bashing your skull and Melby unfastening buttons on your pants, but for some reason, that didn't quite register as what it was to you.

“Are you coming home with me tonight?” Melby asked so sweetly that it made your heart flutter, or maybe that was the pill taking effect. “We always have fun together. I've really missed it. It isn't the same without you.”

“What—” You almost tipped the red cocktail while reaching over it for a water glass that no one had touched. You slugged half in one go. “Wait. What are you even saying? I gotta take care of Elio.”

“Oh my god,” she seethed, taking her hand out of your pants to wipe her fingers on the napkin you used earlier. “Just tell him to leave. He has to listen to you. He’ll be okay.”

Fuzz had started to collect in your head, filling the entire dome with a warm, soft feeling that spread like a rapidly-growing fungus down the brainstem, coiled around your spine, stuffed your jaws with cotton, sucked all the moisture from your throat, widened your chest with stuff, and ignited kindling that had been sitting in the bottom of your stomach.

Just now, the deafening tone of music had been reduced to a throbbing bass that jarred your bones and pulsed in your hands and feet. Your vision wasn't much different than it had been before, only now you seemed to move at lightning speed, people and shapes and lights all confused watercolor smears of you shifted too quickly.

“Can't.” You recalled Melby had said something. “Elio, first. Do you see him?”

“No.” she said, watching Chima hook his fingers through the belt loops on Elio’s pants, knocking their pelvises together in time with the music. “Come on, I'll call a cab and we can go home. We’ll have a good time away from everyone.”

You made a grab for the water glass again, throat the driest it had ever been. A mistimed gasp came out when the rim of the glass struck your teeth, missing your mouth almost completely. Luckily, only a little water got on your shirt, molding it to your chest like a cold second skin.

“God, that's good,” you moaned, draining the rest of it. “What are you even talking about? A good time?”

She eyed you uneasily. “What do you mean? What do you remember when you're with me?”

“Pfft,” you scoffed, stealing yet another water glass you managed to grapple with two hands so it'd stop swaying. “What do you mean, what do I mean? I hit the pillow and I'm out. Why?”

After a few long swigs of ice water, the dance floor was less a mangled disarray of smoke and neon colors, more definitive and jagged—the stage, the speakers, the turntable where the disc jockey played. Even the beastly blob of grinding, convulsing people started looking like people.

Melby had lost all the red in her face, eyes riveted to the half-empty jungle juice in front of you, perhaps counting the beads of condensation dripping from its tall form.

“You're usually really talkative. I think you're lying to me right now to get out of it.”

“Huh?” You were done with the second water, staring at her unfocused but suspicious. “Lying about what?”

“I—” Melby withered in her seat, distracted by something ahead that you couldn't see, a bejeweled nail wedged between her teeth. “No, nothing. Never mind.”

“Whatever,” you murmured. “I'm outta here.”

Melby didn't stop you from leaving behind money for your drinks before you stumbled away from the booth toward the dancefloor, evading bodies that came flying toward you with erratic, jerky movements not at all matching the pounding beat coming from the stage.

The floor was actually hundreds of individually tinted blocks of plexiglass with colored bulbs screwed in underneath.

During the day, Clamors kept it covered with a special protectant and tarp to maintain the integrity of the glass, but at night, it was illuminated like a nonsensical rainbow checkerboard. Each square took on a life of its own, flickering in unison with songs played throughout the night, warping into mandalas and spirals and disorienting waves that most people using animal crackers couldn’t stomach for long.

You were close to vomiting up the jungle birds and your meager lunch from Radiant Bistro that afternoon when you found Elio within the swarm of partiers that reeked of sour body odor and stale alcohol.

He stood amid it all with a stiff spine, the loveliness of his face covered by shadows and terrible bursts of light that heightened his vacuous stare into the faces of those touching him.

The only other time you had seen him so devoid of life was in the presence of Researcher Kim. Now, he looked in such a way at Chima, at Niva, at Niquan—the nameless and the boy were too scared of overstepping to have a part in it yet straggled nearby to feel like they meant something.

Elio saw you jostling through the crowd toward him, hardened amber regaining luminosity. You became the center of his world again with just a look, yet your world was entirely unthawed ice and serrated stalactites growing ever sharper, heavier, closer to piercing and crushing at a single point below them. The forest of brittle minerals in your mind needed just a single resounding event to loosen, to fall, to impale indiscriminately.

That moment finally happened as you approached Chima, his hand stroking Elio under every layer meant to keep him out. Your future was a far-off thing, light years away and completely untouchable, no matter how many times you were threatened with your profile, how you'd become nothing without your associations, how the entire world would cringe in disgust at your existence and leave you to rot.

You took Chima's hand out of Elio’s pants, hoping you had the strength in yours to twist his wrist so it hurt, wanting nothing more than to actually shatter the bone with just the pure hatred surging down into your grip. With the other hand, you drew it high behind your shoulder, muscles tense, bone popping from an unnatural angle, dense club air gushing between your fingers right before your palm released a thunderous crack against his cheek that shot up the length of your arm in stinging ripples.

“No, stop!” Elio tore you away too late, right after weakness reentered your body, and he was able to easily restrain you. “What have you done?”

The clique had rallied around Chima, steadied him and examined the mark on his cheek, which was already blowing up in size.

He stared at you with amazement that quickly contorted into pure incandescence. His face was the ugliest thing you had ever seen, eyes an uninviting, pitless, and hollow place. This, you thought, was what he truly looked like beneath the popularity, cosmetics, money, and illusion of drugs.

“Keep your hands to yourself!” you screamed.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” He tried to lunge at you but was held back by Niva, Niquan, and various ghostly hands. “How dare you. How dare you touch me, you sad sack of shit! You ungrateful nobody! I can ruin you! I can make sure you get thrown into the slums and your fucking insides get ate out by all those filthy savages.”

“That's better than this.” You felt Elio tighten his arms around you, feet shuffling backward to try to separate you from this. Dancers were beginning to gather around the scene, both grossly fascinated and terrified because they'd never seen a fight between humans. “It's better than the stupid drugs. It's better than this club. It's better than all your shitty little followers. It’s better than you.”

To this, Chima stared wide-eyed and gave a derisive laugh. “You seriously hit me because I was touching the android? He's a fucking machine! What else is he useful for?!”

You were still being coaxed out of the gathering, Elio's lips whispering pacifying words into your ear that you didn't hear.

“Don't—Don’t talk about him like that.”

Chima’s visage relaxed into one you were used to seeing. A man who knew he had all the time and power in the world and that he could do anything with it. He swatted away all the helping hands and straightened his clothes.

“Not only are you fucking insane,” he said, smiling without remorse. “Now, you're also dead.”

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The decision to retch into a convenience store trash can happened because you couldn't bring yourself to do it in the neatly barbered bush you had been closer to at the time. You had separated the metal lid from the metal body so you could simply lean over and spew into it freely.

Smells emanating from inside—expedited food rottage from summer heat, curdled drinks, bagged-up dog shit, and God knows what else—did better to evacuate your stomach than the insane lighted floor in Clamors.

Most of what came up lacked the usual sourness, ran watery like a geyser of diluted red jungle bird with occasional chunks of undigested sandwich and probably everything from three days ago.

Elio wiped your face clean at every chance he got, those seldom moments where you could cough and catch your breath for just a few seconds before your stomach clenched and more climbed up your esophagus and exited your body. There wasn't much he could do apart from dab your skin and keep your clothes from the trajectory.

“Why?” Elio spoke sometime later once the waves of nausea had tapered to a degree where you could sit on a bench outside the convenience store and take a bottle of water he had ready for you. “Why did you do it?”

“Because—” you said, not bothering to finish after swigging and swishing and spitting the acrid taste that lingered on your tongue, between your teeth, and in the ridges of your gums. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn't get rid of it all. It stuck in your mouth like bitter tar. “Because.”

You went on to repeat the rinse and swish a few more times, ultimately tilting the bottle upside down to crush the cheap plastic in your fist so it gushed down on your head.

For a second, you imagined turning on a spigot to shock your scalp with cold water, flattening all your hair, pasting your clothes flush and translucent to your body like a second skin to peel away later.

The humid nighttime air was suddenly so much less oppressive than it had been. A subtle breeze had picked up throughout the course of the day, not doing much to tame the heat overall, but the fat pearls of water streaming down your back made you shiver. You counted all the drops that coalesced into shimmering beads on the tips of your hair, your eyelashes, and your nose and fell onto the pale gray cement underfoot.

Elio had already unbuttoned his shirt to the navel, just above where he had rebuckled his pants and tried to pull the rest of the fabric free.

“Oh, Elio. Don't.”

He pulled you into him despite your protest, swathing you from behind first with the shirt and then his arms as he held you against his chest. Fortunately, he had worn an airy undershirt so his body wasn't on display for anyone else, though there was no one around at this hour.

He soothed you with long strokes along your back. His touch amplified to a point where it hurt as much as it felt good. You knew what fingers he used more pressure with, where the heel of his hand touched you next. You could feel where he chose to linger and knead at knots under your skin, imagining the sensation similar to using a sharpened stone or ice pick

“I'm fucked.” you mumbled sullenly in his embrace, warmth dissipated as you had soaked his undershirt all the way through. “I'm so fucked.”

“It was unwise, yes,” he said in silken tones from atop your head, thin jaw pushed down into your wet hair, grinding and rotating when he'd speak. “I had you in my mind the entire time. I was prepared to let him do as he pleased if it meant preventing a confrontation—I failed. But, I hadn't expected you to hit him. None of the outcomes I calculated had that conclusion. I'm sorry.”

“No. I'm glad I did it.” You worried that you were being overconfident, too hopeful toward a future unraveling at your feet as you spoke. “I couldn’t stand how everyone was staring at you—touching you. Everything just felt so wrong, but, why? The only thing that was different was you being there, Elio. I saw you—you looked so uncomfortable. I was so hot. I think I was seeing things after taking the animal cracker. I just got so angry.”

Usually, Elio was the type to scavenge your history as thoroughly as he could, however minimal or inconsequential it all seemed to you at the time. It was a quintessential part of his programming as an android—of all androids—to want to dissect everything there was to know about their masters, knowing them better than their masters knew themselves.

You considered making it effortless for him, volunteering your past with animal crackers and how they used to not hurt at all. At one time, you could binge them for days without violent side effects that’d plague a normal person for weeks.

“There are no pharmacological benefits associated with their use,” was what you heard him say in your head, firm yet loving, melting into his sensual strokes tracing parallel along the length of your spine. “Prolonged use has been known to create perforations in the gastrointestinal tract, heart dysrhythmias…”

He didn't regurgitate that information at you. In fact, he said nothing at all. Besides the hand sweeping down your body steadily, lips and shapely nose burrowed in your limp seaweed-string hair, he didn't move at all. There was no stuttering heartbeat between you except your own. Even his breaths had gone still, chest straight down and unmoving.

Elio was a machine.

It was so easy to forget while wrapped up in daily mundanities. It wasn't so easy to forget in this moment where you wanted to crack him open, scoop out each precious piece of him with your bare hands, and hide yourself within his husk.

You were sick of the silence, so you pinched him hard under the arm, right next to the crease starting his shoulder. It made you feel better to do so, and he'd pay attention to you—

He hissed and reeled away from your touch, startling you out of his arms because you didn't know how else to react.

“Did you—Elio, did you feel that?” you asked incredulously, voice whittling into a self-conscious mumble once you realized the words leaving your mouth. They didn't stop. “Did that hurt you?”

The spot where you pinched was hard to see from the layer of his shirt sleeve, but his fingers rubbed there insistently like he were actually trying to alleviate pain.

“Once, during my early development, Researcher Kim had told me he wanted to close the gap between what people think separates androids and humans.” Elio explained, coming close again to touch you and dry your temples with his shirt on your back. “It's unlikely that what you perceive as pain and what I am programmed to perceive as pain are absolutely comparable, but there's some common ground.”

“I'm sorry, Elio. I didn't mean to hurt you. I didn't know I could.” Your voice weakened to a whisper, throat clenched in shame as your skin grew hot. It was like you were still stuck in the throbbing, stiff air of the club and not in the spacious nighttime breeze.

He looked you in the face, almost-orange eyes flitting inside their orbital sockets trying to find something distant and unknown in your expression. You guessed he was assessing your sincerity—not for himself because he needed it, but to know how it took shape on you and bent your brows, molded your lips, dimpled your chin, deepened the lines.

Then he asked, "If I hadn't reacted—if my circuitry were less sensitive and I could feel nothing at all aside from your fingers on my skin, would you have done it again? Would you keep doing it?"

"What are you trying to say?”

"Globally, since the widespread distribution of androids, the occurrence of domestic and public disputes has been halved. I have been designed to be non-violent, as have all of my predecessors.” As if for effect, Elio took one of your hands and pushed your palm flat to his warm cheek. “I have no desire to hurt you, but I am also incapable of doing so.”

You couldn't wrench yourself from his grip, so that's how you remained, caressing his soft, smooth skin while your thumbpad skirted along the round bone below his eye.

This was more than you could handle right now. All of the illness and nausea that came with the burdensome summer heat, the animal cracker, every bit of liquid and food to enter your stomach, the memory of slapping Chima—it came back, crashing down like an avalanche carrying your regrets, fears, malaise.

“I'm not going to hit you.” You were gagging around saliva pooling into the front of your mouth. “Chima was different. He deserved it.”

“Perhaps,” Elio agreed, entwining fingers with the ones on his cheek. He kissed your open palm with great passion and some semblance of regret. “But, I wish you would have hit me instead. I have failed one of the most basic parts of programming by putting you and others in harm. You may now end up suffering greatly because of it.”

You did get sick again.

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Elio had persistently warded off Researcher Kim’s video calls for three days while you recovered upstairs beneath every comforter you owned, maximum air conditioning, and heavy curtains to shun out all natural light from ever reaching your bedside. Time came and went without peril or concept to you, seeming to evaporate into the air like nothing, much like how your steady, quiet breaths did the same. They simply came and went; inhale and exhale, no writhing white plumes drifted overhead to prove they belonged to you or that you were even alive. Not in the dead of summer.

Five days total had passed before you could take the staircase down from the loft without Elio's assistance and eat or drink anything of substance that didn't end with it all being violently evacuated from your body.

Sleep remained elusive to you despite the sedatives and special hot tea recipes from online that Elio pushed down your throat. The migraines persisted even with prescription painkillers Melby had stolen for you forever ago and rough romps of sex that left you winded, glistening, and cold on the sheets when the oscillating fans blew air across your skin.

Whatever excuse Elio had fed to Researcher Kim over the days you were incapacitated worked because when you were finally back at the counter on a video call with him, he didn't ask you about it or chastise you much about the holes in your reports for that week.

“I see that Elio had been proving himself to be quite self-sufficient. I have here six separate occasions where he's ventured out on his own?” Kim looped a stylus through his fingers fluidly, concentrating on what little information he could glean from your submissions. “Henrietta's, mostly. I see he's had to visit the dry cleaners. General store. Pharmacy. He's also been completing the six to ten interactions by himself. Absolutely phenomenal!”

Your attention kept drifting away from Kim. It went to Elio, who placed a white mug down quietly next to you, the handle within reach of your fingers. Beyond the pale-gray wisps spiraling up into the air and dissipating among the snaking pipes sprawling the high ceiling, the liquid inside was pale yellow. Diluted green tea, maybe white tea, if you had to guess. They were among the few things you could stomach right now.

He offered you a fast smile, somewhat unlike himself, and leaned into your lips.

The sight went unnoticed by Kim, who was still captivated by the level of initiative and intelligence his creation displayed. Every word you managed to construct through sedative-induced delirium mesmerized him so thoroughly that he missed the groping hands under your shirt, the smothered moans, and the fact that you had exited view of the screen for fifteen minutes while being laid out on the couch and feasted on through an orgasm.

Wendy Carmichael Can Cook came on the television, a solid distraction for Elio. Today’s episode was a rerun featuring some sort of elevated mush dinner popular in the slums. With some canned foods capable of surviving nuclear fallout, herbs you were almost positive had gone extinct forty years ago, and spices so rare they were untouchable, Wendy concocted something truly groundbreaking to the audience’s eyes.

Elio looked only half-interested in the episode. Meanwhile, you went to the bathroom to clean yourself up and took three painkillers before sitting back down behind the counter. Researcher Kim had yet to lose the wind in his lungs, though now you weren't sure what he was talking about.

The tea was lukewarm and non-irritating just like you thought it'd be.

Your phone had survived the whole five days on a single charge as you had been too afraid to touch it, not because you were scared to see what was there but because you didn't want to know what was no longer there.

True to the fear, while holding a large breath you had sucked into your lungs, believing it to be the sturdiest barrier against whatever you'd discover, there was no one left in your phone log—except Melby.

The rest: Chima, Niva, Niquan, Marcos, Mother, and all the others who had once been listed there before like mock trophies to bolster your sense of worth, the swell of pride that came from knowing important people and integrating yourself into their lives to be something special, simply did not exist anymore.

You didn't have to search up your public profile to know that it was barren as well.

Once Chima went, everyone else went with him—both from the circle and those you'd networked throughout life. Even if it had been someone else, the end result would've stayed the same, exactly as it is now.

“What do you want? I'm not supposed to be talking to you.” Melby had answered her phone after six rings. The background seemed purposefully mute for your call. Perhaps she was just at home nursing the after-effects of things as well. “You there?”

Researcher Kim sieved through paperwork, now entranced by comparing Elio's earlier behaviors in the infancy of design to now. You lowered the volume to where his voice was a low hum, like mumbling through a wall you flattened yourself to.

“Let me guess, Chima told you that?” you said, sipping gingerly from your mug. “How much did he tell you? Was he actually honest, or did he just tell you I was fucking crazy?”

“You weren't acting right all night.” Melby countered in her surefooted drawl. “I don't understand what's happening to you, or why you've been acting so differently. You shouldn't have hit Chima.”

“He shouldn't have touched Elio.”

You could imagine her temper flaring, fair skin glowing pink in the face and chest as she kicked around the comforters on her bed. She strangled a sound in her throat that emanated through the phone as a low groan. Strands of her fried blonde hair scuffed together like pieces of straw when she scratched her head. It was unmistakable.

“What is going on with you?” she demanded, on the verge of tears, voice fading out in glimpses like she was moving away from the speaker. “Elio—he’s just an android. I know he's some radical new innovation, but he'll be saturating the market in six months like every other Hyperion android. There's always going to be more of him. Chima, though, he's actually human. You can just throw away an android.”

Emotions aside—Melby wasn't wrong.

The price of innovation always meant leaving something behind. Whether or not you wanted to see it, if Elio passed his testing period, he'd be decommissioned in a metal box down in the basement at Hyperion while copies and variations of him were added to the heaps of scrap in landfill once the next model came out.

Melby then said something else, “I don't think this is about the android.”

“Oh?” you said, passing a glance along toward the tablet to see that Kim still had his nose pointed down. “Maybe you're right. You know me so well.”

“Do you want to know what I think?” Melby asked.

You observed while Elio roamed the apartment, crouching to pick up the odds and ends that had gone neglected over the days you'd been bedridden, and he had stayed with you to keep you company. He tossed soiled clothes into a hamper, crumbled medication wrappers into the trash, and took your cold tea away to prepare more.

Inspired by your silence, mistaking it as timid submission, Melby went on. “I know you must think we're just being shepherded along, just doing whatever we're told because we don't know what else to do other than follow the loudest voice in the crowd.”

“You know me so well.”

“I know you blame everyone else for what happened at Clamors, but you put yourself in that situation.” Melby said, interjecting in a pitch higher when she heard you take in a breath, “Aht! Aht! I'm not done! No one else is gonna talk to you now, so I'll tell you what we're all thinking: Our circle? We're special. If we always smile and talk about the same things and agree about the same things, we stay together. We stay safe. You've never really wanted to do that, it was always noticeable. I think that's why you and Mi-sun always got along, because you two just did things to fit in, not because you actually cared or wanted to be a part of it.

“I didn't lose you, right? Chima always talked about ways of getting you out of the group. He didn't think you were trustworthy. I guess he was right because you slapped him. Do you know how weird is it for humans to do that nowadays? Apparently it used to be super common to beat up your wives and kids, but now people just do it to androids. But, it's better that way, right?”

“I don't know.” You really didn't.

Elio came back around with a steeping tea bag and a second mug half-full of something darker yellow, like urine. You took the handle to give it a whiff (it smelled homey and savory). Meanwhile, he took away the tablet and ended the video call without a word to Researcher Kim. The energy wasn't there for you to reprimand him nor to mess up your face in mostly feigned surprise.

“It's chicken broth.” He was able to say freely despite Melby blathering on. “Give it a try and let me know if it's too strong. We need to start reintroducing foods back into your diet.”

You drank from the tea mug instead, swiveling the barstool so your back faced him.

“I've thought about it some, and I think we're terrified of each other. Humans don't know how to truly trust one another anymore. That’s why we rely on androids for, like, everything.” Melby continued, “I think, and this is just my opinion, that we actually really miss each other. I think we want to touch and hug and love each other. There are still some people who do. There's a market out there for human-human porn, so it's not like it's unbelievable, but we basically treat each other like we're extinct. It's weird.

“I've done it before, y'know? I've kissed a man. I've kissed a woman. I've fucked both before. You and I—no, never mind. It doesn't count. I've thought about kissing you so many times. I wanted to do a lot more than just that, too.”

The corner seam of your thumbnail had started to bleed after you dug through old scabs and scar tissue built on top of it, your body’s valiant attempts to keep normalcy despite the mutilation that came back again and again. You watched brilliant carmine ooze from the wound, filling the crevices between your nail and skin, crawling upwards to your knuckle before Elio had stifled the area with a warm, damp rag.

Melby let out a long sigh. You envisioned she had just thrown aside a bunch of decorative cushions and flopped down in a chair, or had been pacing her bedroom and finally given up by throwing herself supine on the mattress.

“I'm going to miss you being there.” she declared. “I think—I think you're the closest I've ever come to truly loving someone. At least, I think that's what you'd call it.”

You held your thumb erect for Elio to wrap it in a neon-orange bandage with pink smiles. His lips pressed gently to the sore finger, making slow, wet work to the back of your hand and then the inside of your wrist to feel your pulse bounce against his mouth.

“I'm sorry.” you said at last, putting as much sentiment into those sparse words as you could. A part of you meant it genuinely as an apology for causing her trouble, for her unrealized dreams and lust, for the world you both suffered in and would never know anything else. “Melby, I have one last favor to ask of you.”

She hesitated, likely believing that doing more would get her expulsed from the circle. “Just one?”

“Just one.” You nodded at empty air. “I know either you or Niva have Mi-sun’s phone number. Can I have it?”

Again, Melby stalled, though this time you figured it was out of confusion. “That’s what you want? She might be dead somewhere in the slums, you know?”

“Not if she's pregnant.” you countered. “Niva seemed pretty convinced that night that she was alive and well after being knocked up.”

Melby sucked on her teeth, a moist, popping sound into the speaker. “Niva says a lot of stupid shit because she likes to hijack conversations. Fine. Whatever. I'll text it to you, but you only have one minute because then I'm blocking you for good.”

To this, your heart actually stirred and squeezed, tightening so much it stole your breath from your lungs. Your entire chest felt like it shriveled into itself three sizes smaller as though to accommodate you fitting into a ball within yourself. Dread had opened a chasm wide in your stomach. Everything inside that gory cavity was swallowed up, leaving it vacant and hollow.

This was what it was like to mourn, you considered. It wasn't the same thing you felt the night you cried in the streets after fighting with Mother and losing Marcos. It wasn't the same as the last five days being wrapped in agony, lamenting the loss of a group you'd given years of your life to appeasing.

It was knowing that once Melby was gone, you were lost in the dark, and there was no way out of it. People with delinquent profiles didn't get redeemed—Wendy Carmichael lied and had never lived a life in the slums, a truth Elio had been disappointed to learn—they died in anonymity and poverty.

A notification came through just then, showing an eight-digit number presumed to belong to Mi-sun. You copied it quickly, although now your fingers felt numb and the person writing them down couldn't possibly have been you—

“Alright. It's done,” Melby said calmly. “I have to go. Will you be okay? Do you think people actually die when they go to the slums? I don't want—”

“Goodbye, Melby.” You ended the call and threw your phone on the countertop, far from your eyes so you wouldn't know the exact moment the world ended.

“And, fuck you.”

Elio had the sense to give you plenty of space after the ordeal and stayed busy downstairs cleaning the apartment while you tossed and turned in bed, legs knotted up in the sheets because nothing helped get you comfortable. At some point, through the thick of your adrenaline and despair, the buzz in your brain softened, and you were able to sleep until Elio joined you some hours later.

It was after midnight, and darkness pervaded everywhere. Above you, the snake pipes on the high ceiling writhed together in their intricate web just like every night, and you wondered why the wall of darkness hanging over you seemed closer than it usually did. Meanwhile, Elio faced you from his side of the bed and laid gentle strokes to the top of your head.

“I’ve reached the conclusion that I am defective.” Elio said tonelessly, startling you into such wakefulness that you sat upright from the sheets. “You've lost your friends because of me, and now your profile has fallen into delinquency. The inclination to ostracize what deviates from adapted, accepted social behaviors aligns with common survival tactics. This is an explanation that I understand, but it doesn't... sit right.”

Putting the blame on Elio to feel better would've been easy, and he would take it with grace and lay decadent caresses on your body as proof you were right. But he was too virtuous, and you secretly wanted to keep the credit of being the reason why Chima looked ugly and seethed into his cocktails.

“It sort of hurts,” you admitted. “It's a dull ache inside my bones. It makes me feel like everything inside my chest is shriveling up like a prune. Being abandoned—feeling lonely—is like always being cold. Thinking of it now, I don't know if there was ever a time I didn't feel cold around them. How shitty is it that I feel a little relieved?"

“If that's the case—” Elio rose up from his side of the bed, nudged apart your legs and settled between them. Most of his weight was still on his arms next to your head. In the waning moonlight, shadows deepened the lines around his mouth when he smiled. “I'm glad to have played some part in that release.”

Your fingertips walked lightly across his cheeks, along the planes of his face, as though marveling at him all over for the first time again. His skin always was most beautiful bathed in warm light, but the soft, silvery veil filtering in through the windows gave him ethereal grace.

The calm air upstairs shifted as your bodies stirred on the mattress, sheets strewn to the floor along with pieces of clothing that left you bare to the gray air while Elio gathered the skin of your hips in his hands and sucked on you.

It didn't matter if you closed your eyes or studied the movement on the ceiling while he devoured, lapped away the sticky stuff that glistened out of you like the silk of a spider’s thread before it could stain the sheets, because it always ended with the same kaleidoscopic bursts of color, wanton cries, and him chasing after another orgasm and then another.

He'd ravish you until puffs of hot breath hurt, and the tip of his tongue delivering a single stroke was enough to make you flinch and whimper. Your legs felt fatigued and trembled violently throughout the continued ministrations until you needed to beg him to stop, dignifying the demand with a hard yank to the thick hair on his scalp.

“I'm not done just yet, give me a moment.” He told you the same thing tonight as he did every other time. The pain in his head subsided as he dove back between your legs and laid his tongue as a paddle against you, cleaning the cum for as long as it took for him to be satisfied.

He came up so you could have a taste of yourself in his kiss, tongues wrapped together while he fisted his cock stiff and lubricated himself with the fluid from the tip. You moaned against his mouth when two fingers pushed inside you and thrust with an effortless glide and instilled so much confidence in him that he slid in a third to the knuckle.

“Mm, Elio, fuck me.” you managed between wet, sloppy kisses and splintered breaths. Three fingers were a tighter fit and wider than he was, but the way he angled them up into you was mind-numbing, could've made your tongue wag out of your mouth while panting like a pheromone-crazed animal.

Elio’s lips went from your face to your neck, down along the slope to your shoulder before he removed his fingers and slathered that narrow space in your legs with spend.

“Of course.” He obeyed dutifully but turned you on your side and seated one of your legs high on his arm. “Let's try something different tonight.”

The bulbous head of his cock glistened as it dragged across your groin, tapping those sore spots that made you twitch involuntarily with anticipation and staggered breaths. Elio concentrated on your face throughout it all, memorizing both those subtle and large changes that showed him what you liked the most.

You'd never believed that androids could be sexually adventurous in the same way that humans could, and perhaps that was the case despite the kinds of positions Elio put you in if you were willing. He would be conscientious of your mood beforehand and then adjust accordingly from there.

Some nights, it didn't go further than mouth-fucking you until you orgasmed to exhaustion. Other nights, when you were more pliable and especially affectionate, he'd rut his hips into your ass until you cried and the sheets were beyond saving.

Now, Elio observed you closely as the curve of his cock sank into you, sinew in his stomach clenching once he started thrusting.

At the start, your sounds were soft, and the rhythm made with his hips was one you had no trouble riding. You closed your eyes and focused on how that tilt in his cock pressed up against your walls and stroked all the right parts. His controlled pace unraveled after a while, thrusts turned mindless and greedy as the sting of slapping skin seemed to resonate all around.

You had bunched bits of pillow and bedspread in your fingers and drooled out onto the fabric because you couldn't close your mouth long enough between moans and gasps and lewd mutterings to stop it. You begged him to fuck you harder, deeper, and tear you open if that’s what he wanted to do and would keep you in ecstacy.

Elio indulged your high as he was able, rolling you from your side to your stomach and mounted you again. He was able to touch you better this way, fondle the globes of your ass, the pouches of fat in your hips, stomach, and chest, all the while sucking dark bruises all along your spine and shoulders.

His mouth would sometimes linger next to your ears, wherein he imitated every bit of his human likeness and breathed on you. And then, he would poorly stifle moans that inspired you to think too deeply about the extent to which he could and could not feel.

“Look at me.” Elio felt your walls tighten around his cock and wanted to stare you in the face through your orgasm. He put you on your back, thighs hiked high on his sturdy chest, so those final thrusts plowed deep and stole your screams. You writhed under him, eyes rolled up, bloodshot and pupiless, muscles drawn so tight that it felt as good as it did awful.

A surge of warmth leaked out onto the sheets as Elio took his half-hard cock from your body and let it soften the rest of the way in cold air. His hand roamed you with delicate, healing touches meant to beg forgiveness for how much you'd ache later on, and his lips were tender and slow against yours.

You kissed him back distractedly, unable to think of anything else but the stickiness between your legs and how you'd chosen to never notice it until now.

“What's wrong?” he asked, still pressed up against your mouth. “Are you unsatisfied? My refractory period ends in a few minutes. I can do as much as you'd like until you feel fulfilled.”

“Mm-mn,” you hummed, “that's not it.”

He didn't stun when you snagged your phone from the bedside table and turned on the backlight. You pointed it down at cloudy white globs drying on your crotch, a sight that you thought was vaguely familiar to you somehow. It struck you then that it was like a scene from a pornography or vulgar sketches some kid in secondary school got suspended for drawing.

Still, it couldn't have been possible.

“What is that?” you asked with unacquainted timidity.

Elio grabbed a package of wipes left bedside and spaced your legs apart to clean the mess he had left on you. He took his time with long, intentional strokes to avoid your sensitive parts as best he could, soiling a good handful from the package before asking if you wanted a bath.

“Answer me first,” you said.

He rose from the bed with one more kiss and collected your clothes from the floor. They were draped nicely over his arm, whereas he stood there before you nude, enveloped by the moon’s blue luster.

At first glance, his smile seemed the same adoring kind that he always held for you, and yet it evoked some undeterminable sadness to well up in your chest and cling there.

“It’s the result of a body never truly being your own.”

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Mi-sun’s house wasn't far from your apartment, as you recalled. It took a bit of investigative work online to track down her address (via Elio), mainly because it had been well over a year since you'd last needed to know it and the phone number Melby had given you was disconnected, but once you had the coordinates plugged into your phone, it was just one begrudging trek through sultry summertime air to reach her front door.

When you had finally made it to that point, however, eyes leveled down at a dirty, faded doormat that had seen plenty of seasons and wintery salt, you weren't sure how to proceed.

There wasn't any real reason why you were standing there now, yet you felt that you needed to be there anyway. Maybe it could be called seeking solidarity with someone who was enduring the same inevitable ending you were, or maybe the curiosity about her state of being was what won out dominantly. You couldn't be sure of your own motivations—only that you were there, and you needed her to know you were.

After three solid knocks with your knuckles, you let your hand fall and waited by scuffing the soles of your shoes on the coarse mat underfoot. It still had some springiness to it as you scrubbed. The front door was old and brown, having lost its elegant lacquer long ago. You remembered Mi-sun had mentioned a few times before that she had wanted to make the door cute with white paint and a frilly outdoor wreath but could never get around to it.

You guessed she never did.

“Should we knock again?” Elio asked across your shoulder, the bulk of his frame casting a cooling shadow over your body. He had gone out to Henrietta's by himself the other day when you told him what you intended to do and bought supplies to make a cake and special plastic Tupperware meant to keep it from moving around.

The only explanation he had given you about an hour ago, after locking the apartment door and stepping out onto the sidewalk, hot enough in the midday sun to melt the bottoms of your shoes to the pavement while you walked, was that Mi-sun was an old friend, and it was a safe gift even for a pregnant woman.

You never found the courage to divulge just how involved you had been in her expulsion from Chima's circle, even though you knew it'd be impossible for him to think less of you from it.

A minute passed, and then so did two more before you realized that no one was coming to the door. While listening for movement—a television, a hissing stovetop, shuffling slippers on top of creaking floorboards, anything at all aside from stiff silence, you understood that it was unlikely anyone had lived there in quite a while.

“I don't know where else she could be.” you said, now back at Elio's side, where he flicked away tiny splinters of old wood and shiny glaze that peeled off your damp skin like cut-up stickers. He moved the visor above your brow gently, adjusting the position of it to better shield your eyes, but seemed more to just want the proximity than anything else.

The longer he fiddled with things—your hat, the flecks of things he missed on your ear, wrinkles in your t-shirt—the more apparent it was to you that he was contemplating something else. You were trying hard not to do anything that would spur him into making the next suggestion you knew was coming.

“There is one other place we haven't tried.” he said, switching from your shoulder to tucking pieces of hair securely behind your ear and dabbing sweat off your neck with a handful of napkins he had picked up at a convenience store while grabbing you water. “The likelihood of Mi-sun’s profile falling into delinquency and being able to maintain residence within the city is less than twenty percent. However—”

“I know.” You breathed out hot air and sucked it right back into your lungs. Maybe if you did that enough times it'd burn them, shrivel them up like prunes. “I know where she is. Let's wait until it cools down to go, though. I'll probably pass out if I have to see any of that right now.”

“Today on Loti Khan’s Food Tours of Retro City, she said that Asakawa on Fifteenth is a spot worth visiting during the summertime because of their cold noodle dishes. Hiyashi Chuka was what she suggested, I believe. I've already committed the menu to memory, and they have well over twenty different cold dishes and beverages. Their affordability isn't as stellar as Rainbow Bistro, but Loti says—”

Wendy Carmichael was now a disgraced name in your household after Elio had spent a few hours one afternoon researching the woman’s true life story. She had been born into the elite class with a mother sitting at the top of the food chain in Retro City’s governing body, attended culinary arts schools across the world yet never reached the acclaim she coveted until she made up the whole spiel about clawing her way out of the slums.

Crawling back from the slums once you were in them just wasn't feasible. Only the worst of the worst—thieves, profile delinquents, murderers, lepers, and unwanteds were kept there, like trash crowded and barred in a landfill. If you found yourself in the slums somehow, no one would help you out of them because that would mean tarnishing their own reputations.

You were as good as dead.

You were dead.

Elio had carried around a brown paper bag housing the cake for most of the day, never once setting it down. His features never flinched when the straw handles sank into parallel dents in his skin, long stripes that looked like they'd be sore to you, but he never conveyed any discomfort. He merely floated along wherever you went, undeterred by your dour, soulless wandering, which lasted until the sun emblazoned the sky in dim fire and pinks.

Those hues were leached by the close, calming gradient of greens, blues, and darker blues that reached so quickly you could follow the sprawl of them until they had ensnared the daylight. The sun sank somewhere betwixt skyscrapers, and the air still felt thick as the mucus in your throat but bearable.

That same sky followed you on the cab ride across the city. You imagined the darkening air rushing alongside the vehicle with you as if containing it on rails, guiding you closer towards the slums. Once the skyscrapers were gone, far away in a suffocating yellow haze from the sleepless city, and the residential zone had thinned out of the rest of its straggling homes, the scenery had taken on a complete shift.

Everything was bizarrely flat, barren, and beige for as far as the eye could see—vegetation was withered roots and barbed, inedible shrubbery that could've been pretty with some flowers or leaves. No trees could endure the fissured, parched earth nor the fine dust and sand skittering in the wind, leaving heavy layers where it lay once the breeze ebbed. Animals were long gone; the rumors of their bleached bones and skulls warped in a perpetual rictus of agony had been true because you saw many scattered throughout the landscape.

“Please confirm this is your stop,” said the cabbie, a female android from an older generation, maybe three or four. She stuck her hand outside the driver’s window when you tried to give her a tip. With her fish-eyed stare and leathery smile, she repeated, “No need. I have no use for money. Please confirm this is your stop.”

“This is correct.” Elio spoke for you before taking your fingers through his and guiding you away from the idling vehicle. The android cabbie found his reply sufficient and drove away without questioning why you were out here in the flatlands. All she knew how to do was drive and obey traffic laws.

“Do you know where we're going?” you asked because you only knew to have told the cabbie to drive as far as the outer perimeter of the city. Beyond this, your phone had no service, and there were no clearly designated signs to point you in the right direction.

The people in the slums were meant to be forgotten, hideous secrets hidden away, broomed off to the outskirts of civilization where they'd have to fend for themselves in an environment that had been deader than them for ages.

“Truthfully”—Elio stalled then and glanced around the endless expanse of wasteland—“Hyperion never included information about the slums in my programming. What I know is common knowledge and what I've accumulated in my time with you. I have never been able to locate specific coordinates to where the slums are hidden.”

You frowned. “Should we turn around before we get lost, then?”

Elio told you no and raised the hand clasped with yours, pushing one finger erect at a faint glow somewhere in the distance, no more than a ten—or fifteen-minute walk. You were almost convinced you could see the silhouettes of shoddy, leaning structures, but there was no way to be certain unless you got closer.

“Let's go.”

Chasing the remnants of the dusk to light your way across the starved, fractured terrain, those sparse shapes you had seen minutes before grew into multitudes. Soon, you were among clusters of disheveled, crude homes organized in long rows, some stacked with tiers like they were meant to replicate separate floors for more space.

Most of these houses didn't come with windows or doors to keep out strangers but thick decorative curtains that'd shun the beating sun, stave off the worst of winter frost, and deflect billows of sharp sand from dirtying their things indoors.

The paths between rows of homes were well-worn and brightly illuminated with anything they could use—lanterns, stuttering neon signage, solar panels, and even fire rings brutally hammered and dented into shape. Shadows from the fire lurched erratically against crooked metallic walls. Some homes with grimy windows caught a weak gleam off the flames.

It was almost fully dark, and people still moved with purpose as though they could compete with the suit-and-ties stomping their soles on the pavement in the city. Their hands were busy doing something—carrying, brooming, cooking, flourishing during a great retelling, clapping, hiding smiles.

These savages, delinquents, fraudsters, thieves, murderers, and diseased swine never once regarded you or Elio with any modicum of intrigue. You had believed at some point you'd be shrinking under a crowd of wicked stares, pulled down into some inescapable abyss by necrotic or leprous hands trying to steal the clothes from your body or use your skin to tarp piles of scrap.

Only one man had stopped along the path, dressed in dusty clothes that were otherwise decently kept; he was thin but not malnourished and hollow in the face. He told you that the aimless way you and Elio had been walking gave away that you were new to the slums because there was always something needing done and not enough hours in a day to do them.

“Mi-sun?” The man was thinking aloud, stirring up dust as he shuffled his feet around. You had given him the name and a description, which you hoped had been specific enough to avoid approaching people at random. “Yeah. That pregnant girl… she was here for a while. She's long gone now.”

“Long black hair, blunt bangs. Black eyes. Really translucent skin? Super skinny?” As unhelpful as your details were, it was all you had to give him to keep the mental acrobatics going. There was always a slim chance he could be misremembering her. “Are you sure she's no longer here in the slums? Where'd she go? What happened to her?”

Eventually, the thin man led Elio and you to a tiny house—more of a shack—meant to accommodate a sole body and some odds and ends. He held a heavy curtain back for the pair of you to enter, encouraging you to settle down on a sandy rug, which looked to have at one time been bright red.

“I don't have much to give, but here's a little water. To have made it here, you would've had to walk. We all had to.” he said, pulling out his finest cuppery and pouring from the spout of a broken electric kettle. “That girl was a profile delinquent, to my understanding. Almost all of us here are. I used to own a printing business on the north side about fifteen years ago. I upset the wrong people and here I am. What's your story?”

You spun the cup with your fingers, trying not to put your eyes down to scrutinize any particles floating around inside. Elio wasn't given a cup because the man had immediately deduced that he was an android.

“I…” You still didn't drink, but the back of your throat felt scratchy and your tongue like some dry slab of meat shoved into your mouth. “I pissed off the wrong people.”

“Ah.” The man gave an anguished smile, showing he understood you very well. There was a low table between you, repurposed from something else and sanded down to a smooth finish. “For a while, I helped look after Mi-sun. Like you, I had been the first person to greet her when she arrived. She didn't act like everyone else; she was dazed, but she was angry.

“I fed her, gave her water, and gave her a sleeping bag. We have to make due with less than bare minimum most days, but we make it work. We all look out for each other. The community really pitched in when we realized she was pregnant.”

Elio kept a watchful eye on your hands, the fingers aching to peel back ribbons of flesh.

“That shouldn't have been possible.” you said. “Mi-sun had an android. She was never involved with any men—not that I could ever recall. She just doesn't give me the impression of someone who'd change her ways like that.”

The man sipped his sandy water, wiping off clear pebbles that had clung to his facial hair. “When you find yourself exiled here, you learn fast that things are never what they seem. You didn't ask a question, but you gave yourself an answer.”

“What?” It was more noise than a word.

“Daichi, I believe, was her android. Shortly before she showed up, she said that Hyperion had come to forcibly reclaim it. That must've been a difficult reality for her to face—knowing everything was being taken away from her, forced into a pregnancy, and having to fend for herself afterwards.”

This time, you lifted a hand to stop him from falling down another tangent. He obeyed, voice whittled to silence that was immediately unsettled by loud water slurping.

It wasn't that you weren't following what he was saying. You were many things: a fool, a sheep, a coward, a liar, maybe even a true scoundrel at heart, but stupid wasn't among that inexhaustible list. You just needed a moment to collect the nuggets he had thrown down for you to pick up.

Guilt peaked the ranks of everything else you felt right then. A word you'd never use to describe yourself was malicious, but in the end, it had been the malice of someone else and your inability to see apart from the rest that condemned Mi-sun to this suffering.

You played as much a part in taking away Mi-sun's life as Chima had in actually enforcing it. Unlike Chima, never one to balk or cower regardless of how truly cruel his decisions were and committed to them like gospel, you simply sat in his afterimage and did whatever he said. Half of the time, you were blitzed out of your mind; the other you spent wishing you had never known them at all.

It had been so easy to vote Mi-sun out of the group. Completely painless. You just didn't look at her when you raised your hand to pass judgment. Melby had expressed her delight by squeezing your thigh, whereas Mi-sun held her composure and shoulders straight back, but her face contorted with every indication of betrayal and agony.

You thought about how many animal crackers you had that night.

“What happened to her?” Both your hands had been restrained by Elio’s at that point. Large, comforting, and warm in contrast to all the ice that seemed to thicken your blood, stiffen your heart, and freeze your bones. “Where is she now?”

The man must've been suspecting something because his face looked long to you now, weighed down by this life and your feeble state.

“I—I can't be absolutely positive, but I do believe she is dead.” he told you grievously, beady brown eyes not unseeing to the way Elio groped your fingers to keep them still. “She didn't want to be pregnant. It was something she talked about for weeks before leaving. She knew what Hyperion and the government were doing and said she didn't want to be a part of it. On the last night before she left, I had to wrestle a knife out of her hands because she was trying to cut open her stomach to kill the baby.”

You couldn't swallow past the sharp granules of sand and dryness in your throat anymore. You had to slug back the cup of grainy water until the feeling subsided, shove the worst of the dread and shame and guilt into your bowels.

“After that, she was gone.” He took a drink as well, exchanging looks from you to Elio. “A couple of us tried tying her up to get her to calm down and do something about the cut on her stomach, but she got the knife, stabbed one of the younger guys and got away. We haven't seen her since, but a search party did come back to say they saw blood leading back to the city.”

“Oh my god…” you groaned, forcing Elio to recoil when you slapped his hands away—intentional and hard. You stuck yours in your hair, yanking at the roots until your scalp screamed and burned. “Is there any chance she could've survived? Any at all?”

The rail-thin man swirled what little remained of his water in the cup, studying the pale sediment floating within. “It's too hard to say. It's unlikely, my friend. The police wouldn't have gunned her down if they saw she was pregnant, but they would've seen the cut. And that counts as attempted murder. If she's still alive, it's only to give birth, after that…”

“Execution,” you finished.

He nodded and said nothing else, eyes downcast as though lost in the grain of the wood table.

After that, you left the man in his sad little shack to explore the slums more. Elio came along shortly after, saying he had presented the man with the cake as a reward for his hospitality and apologized if it no longer looked appetizing.

The man thanked him before returning to his grief for many things, perhaps.

“I don't want to be here anymore, Elio.” you said, failing to avoid hearing a gaggle of giggling women gossiping together. They were dressed clumsily and in trends almost a decade old, but they had glowy eyes and cavernous lines worn into their faces from laughter and joy where they could find it.

Old men played some made-up board game together, gathering at least half a dozen spectators to see who'd win. Their brows were heavy with contemplation and stress of worthy competition. The other bodies tried making bets with pieces of scrap and metal coils and nearly blown bulbs for lighting.

Music came from all around, lyrical in the same way it was discordant because they weren't playing the same songs nor singing the same things. Their voices were robust and resilient, unwilling to be trudged over by sand nor heat nor oppressors who were incapable of understanding the human spirit was pliant and could bend with the wind, stand with the seasons, and could fracture yet never break.

You couldn't make sense of what any of them were singing, the noise too unharmonious, but you could feel the power in their songs pulse through you, ricocheting in your mind for long after you'd escaped proximity to them.

There were no lepers. There were the sick and unfortunate, but they were not diseased. They did not believe that their tilted houses were tombs, that their unquaint lives were an endless spiral of torment, or that the food they could find and produce was unworthy of reverence.

The people of the slums lived a hard, thankless life, but they had each other. They banded together to weld sheets of metal into four walls and a roof for the new faces who came to them. Your woes would become their woes, and they would feed you, cloth you, wash you, bandage your wounds, and call you their most beloved.

Together, they ate their meals from what they could scavenge out there. They retold the same grandiose tales of heroes and valor and androids that Marcos had told you at bedtime as a child. Their cultures were all cherished and expressed in the food they shared and clothes they managed to sew together by hand and slow machines.

You could ask your neighbor for a tablespoon of sugar and four would come to you with curiosity and offer their arthritic hands and knobby backs for whatever was needed.

Here, you could see humanity clearly for the first time in your life and felt burdened knowing it. Your heart weighed like an anvil behind your ribs. It hurt and lurched behind its enclosure because it too wanted to get away from what it now knew.

“A lie.” you choked, forcefully shoving Elio's hands away from you once again when he tried to embrace you. “It was all a lie. Everything was a lie! Where are they?! Where are all the lepers and people leaking pus from their face?! Where are the murderers? Where are the savages? Where are all these awful fucking people I was told were here? Where are they?”

Elio's expression took on something completely unforeseen—pity. Their lives were fine and routine while yours crumbled around you. The terror you had been force-fed your whole life was all false. There was civilization beyond a profile with red overlay, more waiting on the other side that the sleepless city wanted to conceal.

“There are no androids here.” Elio mentioned, deeming that adequate enough time had passed for you to regain your bearings. He took you in his arms and kissed the crown of your head, burying his lips deep in your hair. “We were never meant to become substitutes for your love. We were never meant to go this far and act as replacements for humanity because we simply cannot feel what another human does. That is something Hyperion will never be able to achieve. Humanity needs humanity, not machines.”

You sank into his warmth, arms wound his back, and said from his chest, “But, I love you. Don't leave me. I don't want Hyperion to take you away.”

Elio, your beautiful sun, leaned down into your face and kissed the highest parts of your cheeks and the wetness around your eyes before settling on your lips. Slow and lingering, you chose to believe it meant he was sealing away your plea and that he'd always be there to swathe you in his arms.

“Let's stay for a little longer,” he said once apart from the kiss. “I’d like to see the side of humanity that no one else does.”

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Less than a week had passed since your hard slog through the slums and back to Retro City. Although you had only been gone from your inner-city apartment for mere hours, possibly five or six at most, upon walking back inside after Elio and wincing against the fluorescent bulbs overhead, you thought you were looking at something entirely foreign.

The simple pleasures that you had become accustomed to throughout your life: plumbing, central air that turned the hot sweat on the back of your neck into cold droplets slithering beneath your clothes, the worn out mattress upstairs, technology, an android who'd done almost everything for you for the better part of a year—it all seemed so novel, so excessive. A treat for a rat in a box before testing to see how it'd respond when it was all taken from its enclosure.

So, when Elio woke you up one morning, early enough that the light streaming in through your windows already felt warm on the bed sheets, and the thin air looked itself to have a golden hue, you couldn't say you felt any rouse of surprise or fear when he handed over a red letter—an eviction correspondence.

Sooner or later, you knew you'd meet with one, though the progress of everything hadn't been as immediate as you had been led to believe it would be. A month had come by and stayed for several slow breakfasts, lunches, dinners, mindless strolls, and countless passionate entanglements before deciding to leave on an indignant note. With the red notice, you were expected to vacate the premises within days, whether you had intentions for your belongings or not.

Things stayed tumultuous from there on out, yet you couldn't find it within yourself to react to any of it, even in the instance when Researcher Kim rang you for an impromptu meeting that you anticipated meant no good.

“Effective immediately, Elio will be seized and returned to Hyperion in relation to the recent change in public profile status.” It was too formal and rigid a tone even for him. Clearly, his superiors had demanded this because you doubted the profile change was much a concern to him on a personal level. “Your contract is hereby null and void, and your association with Hyperion is obsolete. Any attempt to thwart repossession of Hyperion property will be penalized legally.”

Throughout it all, Elio swept the floor with leisurely strokes as though the reach of Researcher Kim’s voice ended at your ears alone. He moved onto laundry, taking great care to iron out the wrinkles in your favorite shirts and make the folds in the arm seams crisp and symmetrical.

“Is that really all you wanted to say?” you asked, palm capped overtop a mug of tea Elio had set down for you a while ago. The steam now rose weakly and moistened your skin, a particularly gross feeling, but it kept you alert. “I thought that Elio was your project, and you called the shots on him.”

Researcher Kim was out of sorts and worn. His posture was crumbled, and his clothes were in complete disarray like he hadn't bothered to change out of them in days. His under eyes were translucent, pulling out all the purples and blue veins under his skin. The man looked like he had hardly slept in weeks.

“You don't understand what you've done, have you? Not only may you end up costing me my position, but you've ruined my entire lifetime of work!” Kim leaned in close to the screen, sounding more and less himself now.

You were wary of the glint in his eyes. “What do you mean? Elio's just—”

“No!” he shouted and slumped back into his ergonomic chair. His head slanted over, almost coming in contact with the peak of his shoulder like it was too heavy for his neck to hold. “You don't get it. You don't get it! Because your profile turned, this entire year—everything you’ve reported, everything I've accomplished, Elio's entire testing period is invalid. Hyperion executives consider him defective. The Generation Seven android has failed! Look at what you've done!”

A sudden wild flapping of thousands of butterflies lifted your stomach up and then plunged it down into a void. Kim had successfully chiseled away the inexpressive mask you had worn up until that point, seeming satisfied that he could stipple your face in a cold sweat.

“Wait, no. That can't be right.” you protested, wrestling your own hands to keep them off of the tablet in front of you. “My profile turned, but the work I've done has been honest. Elio is a success! You know that! You've seen every step of his progress for almost a year.”

Researcher Kim threw his hands up wildly, truly not himself with all of these gestures. “None of that matters. None of it. My life's work is a failure. I thought we had an agreement to help one another, but I was mistaken.”

“You don't understand!” you said, pounding the countertop with sharp claps of your hands. “It wasn't on purpose. I wasn't trying to…”

“Hyperion will have Elio destroyed, and progress will be hindered. Do you know how long, how many decades this could set us back? This could be devastating to humanity, but I don't think you're capable of understanding that. Just like the rest, you're not able to see the big picture at large, the mechanisms at work keeping our society moving forward. You can only see the straight line ahead of you and wearing blinders so you don't have to know the rest.

“We've kept this world running for sixty years. You need to understand how utterly fucking frustrating it is that one person has the potential to undo decades of work!”

Researcher Kim’s words weren't unjustified to you because he was a scientist, and you had always been a nobody in the grand scheme of things. But, right now, the venom he spat sounded vindictive, a man sucking on wounds you had inflicted rather than the opinion of the whole of Hyperion.

If you hadn't been staring directly at him this entire time, you would’ve thought he was frothing and drooling at the mouth like some animal.

A stilted quiet filled the gaps in conversation, both of you uncertain of what would be said next. If he was reacting in any professional capacity, the call would've been disconnected by now. That was the main giveaway that let you know this wasn't just about what Hyperion wanted.

But the truth of it was that you didn't care what Hyperion wanted or him.

At the end of your life as you knew it, before being thrown away into the landfill with every other unwanted human, you were piecing together the whole history of the world and how it had gotten to this point. It had become this way through relentless men like Researcher Kim who mostly operated on their own moral compass, ones that could never quite point north and spun on that wheel as they saw fit.

“Enough of the powerplay, Kim.” you ordered, chest opening toward the ceiling with a deep, bracing breath. “What is the real purpose of Hyperion? Why does it actually exist?”

Kim, perhaps re-evaluating you as less of a pawn in this scheme and more of an infant intellectual about to breach the narrow canal into enlightenment, stacked his spine high and pressed his fingertips together. He studied you with some caution, head shifting from left to right, just slightly off-center from his hands as though judging whether you were worth divulging precious intel to.

But, like you, you expected he realized it didn't matter what he'd tell you, however coveted it might've been by Hyperion.

Kim, ultimately, worked for himself and for Hyperion only when he felt it served him well.

“When I hired you, I didn’t do it because I thought you were stupid.” It seemed he felt the need to clarify this for you, unsmiling but with an eager lilt in his tone. “I hired you because of your potential. I took a chance on you, and while it had, indeed, ended in my peril, you've surprised me so many times throughout the year that I started keeping a record of you as well.

“Human beings do one of two things in the consistent presence of androids, they either regress or they progress. Most of your peers will regress because that’s how society has been modeled to be. The difficult tasks, the mundane, all the things that ask of us to consider the complexity of the world around us and think critically have been left to androids. How well do you think a machine can understand the theory of life after death and the mysticism of religion? The concept of soulmates? Cultural superstitions and children's nighttime fears? It's about as you expect. They can give you an answer without truly understanding. Androids, I dare say, only have an extremely limited understanding of moral culpability. Humans are much more flexible with it these days because it suits them best.

“So.” Kim sighed, hands resting on the dark red desk he sat behind. “You can imagine how interesting it was when we started noticing a trend with auditors—changes in them. A renaissance, an evocation of deep wondering and wariness towards the workings of the world around them. We can only guess the reason that this happens is because part of humanity still doubts the intentions of androids, and that's been bred onward through the generations. You ask an android a question, they give an answer, you doubt that answer, and then you start to doubt everything around you. It's all hypothetical, but it makes sense.

“It doesn't happen with the majority of the population, though. And it isn't encouraged. Enlightenment threatens the status quo, and those who disturb the status quo are a disservice to the governing bodies and Hyperion. Do you understand?”

Your gaze turned cold. “Are the other auditors there in the slums, too? Once they've been used up and started to catch wind of this messed up shit?”

Researcher Kim flicked his fingers toward the top of the screen, doing that instead of shrugging. “Who knows? What happens to them once a testing period has concluded is none of my business. Presumably so, that's what I would hope for them because that's the kindest outcome.”

“Was I…” You licked your lips and felt the shallow cracks in them. “I was going to end up in the slums no matter what happened, wasn't I?”

He frowned. “No. If things had gone differently, I was going to vouch for you. I wanted to keep you as my assistant.” He was quiet for a beat, looking straight at you in that discomforting way that you couldn't shake. “I’ve grown fond of you, you know? How could I not with everything I've learned about you over the course of a year. I can't forgive you for what you've done to the Hyperion Project, to my life's work, but I can't just let you disappear like the rest.”

Something ugly started to grip in the back of your throat. Fear? Disgust? An inkling?

“What do you mean?” you ventured.

“I've read through each report you've sent me in the past year so many times. It was mostly out of necessity for Hyperion, of course, but the ones that I found myself… fixated on rereading time and time again were of yours and Elio's sexual endeavors. I wasn't lying when I said they were a contract-based requirement, mind you, but I will admit that some of the questions were altered somewhat.” he said, suddenly smiling in a self-satisfied sort of manner that made your skin itch. “I realized I never answered your question fully, by the way. I can get ahead of myself sometimes, as you know. But, do I really need to explain what Hyperion's purpose is?”

You were on the edge of your seat, ready to take flight off it at any second. It's just how the entire change of trajectory made you feel. Humanity had spent too much time in the past arguing animal-like, instinctual reactions for this not to be real.

In that moment, you were living proof of a prey noticing a predator in broad daylight.

“Fine.” He kept smiling around the taut creases in his skin. The muscles there twitched as if the effort were unfamiliar. “Hyperion is a repopulation aid. It's quite sad, really. It started out with such great potential to drive society forward, but humanity and greed have always gone hand-in-hand. So, it became a race of mass production into a race that the governing bodies now had their hands in. The order was to rectify the critical birth decline worldwide. Androids became less like tools, looked less like machines, and more like humans—like lovers who couldn't say no to any demand.

“Androids are vessels for insemination. What else do you want me to tell you?”

Researcher Kim's explanation had weakened you, made your legs shaky and light like a scarecrow’s stuffed with straw. You couldn't rely on them to carry your weight away from this awful conversation, the hideous sight of him, because there'd be nowhere for you to run to while the information perforated your brain and crawled inside and feasted there.

“Elio…” You didn't even know what you wanted to say. Everything got stuck behind the notch in your throat. None of it would assuage that wretched ache in your gut, the precursor of vomit and disgust and unhinged terror.

“Of course.” Kim said, without needing to tell you what he was confirming. He was perfectly composed still, perhaps even shining with pride like some well-hidden, nuanced detail had finally been figured out.

He leaned toward the screen, smile turning salacious and voice low and grating.

“My only regret is that I couldn't be there to do it myself.” He brightened at the way your face wrenched and fastened in fear, seeming to think it was a reward after conducting an experiment on another project. “But, there's still time, isn't there? I must retrieve Elio myself to shut him down. If you listen to what I ask, perhaps I can get you pardoned and your profile reinstated.”

“No. That’s not what I want.” you said.

“It doesn't matter what you want,” he rebuffed, speaking with such confidence that you almost believed it. “The moment your profile fell into delinquency, you ceased to be. You've fallen through the cracks, and no one is going to help you. You're less than an android.”

The fine hairs all over your body bristled. “Don't compare me to a machine! You don't get to decide things for me!”

“I can save you, you damn fool!” Kim gaped incredulously. “I can restore your life and give you more than you've ever had. I can give you influential associations. I'll take care of you. I'll keep you as my assistant, and you get to live a life among the elite.”

He was lying.

No one ever made it out of the slums once they were in it. That wasn't an assumption, it was a simple grim reality.

In this world, only humans could lie because androids were incapable of betraying their programming to do so. Otherwise, Elio probably would've lied about many things or had never said certain things at all to spare you discomfort.

Humans, on the other hand, could lie to maliciously deceive and serve themselves a better hand. They could lie their way into a false mirror image, something that looks like them but never really existed and could never truly be. They could lie their way into trust to fulfill their own desires, and once that had been sufficiently quenched, they could go on lying elsewhere.

“I'll be there for you soon.” Researcher Kim tried his best at a soothing smile, treating it as though the sight of it would persuade your trust of him. “Please have Elio on standby. I would like for this not to be more difficult than it needs to be.”

Just then, the air flickered lightly by your ear as Elio reached past your shoulder and picked up the tablet. His expression was inscrutable, the same sort you'd grown used to seeing whenever Researcher Kim appeared on the screen.

“I won't be returning to Hyperion.” he said with solemn, firm words that held a certain weight of finality behind them.

Those lovely, velvety tones were still there but could not reassure you of some unknowable dread rising up somewhere deep inside your mind. A sensation so equally intimate and profound prickled against your scalp, seeking a way out that you thought you'd do anything to make it stop.

“What are you saying, Elio?” Kim grunted. “Defective or not, you hold precious data for Hyperion. It will be used to create something better than you, incorruptible and pure. You should be honored.”

“These memories are mine.”

That was the last you saw of Researcher Kim’s face before the tablet smashed to pieces on the floor. Elio had thrown it against the kitchen cabinets only once but hard enough to split the screen into a web of hundreds of sprawling fragments. Shards of plastic hardcover skittered across the hardwood floor, lost under heavy furniture.

His face had softened completely when he turned to you and guided you out of your chair into his arms. You felt him in your hair, lips on your forehead, down against your lashes, lower to the roundest part of your cheeks, and finally on your mouth in a kiss imbued with so much love, cherishment, and anguish.

You were at home within his embrace, swathed in the warmth of his body and the ardor of his kiss. But this felt excruciating and desperate, like a plea to take all of him that you could in that very moment because he feared that he would be taken away and you left behind to whatever nebulous future.

So, you let him seat himself as deep inside of you as he could go while still fully clothed. He had pushed around some fabric so you could be skin-to-skin where it mattered, where it was hottest to be, where the muscles contracted and relaxed together as a reminder you were both there in that moment—breathing, moaning, feeling everything there was to be felt.

He finished outside your body without you needing to say it. Although, while he groaned into your neck and bore his teeth into the curve of it, hips buckling forward as spend jetted down your thigh, all you could think about was how many times Kim had been there instead.

“I want you to destroy me.” Elio said.

All of the breath left your lungs and shrunk them to rotted fruit size. You were still vulnerable before him, exposed to the room and damp with sweat from the midday heat despite air conditioning. Worriment filled the space between his brows when he saw you aghast, and he quickly cleaned you off with a rag before helping you with your pants.

“Is this a shitty attempt at a joke?” you asked. He pressed his lips to yours and told you it wasn't. “No. Absolutely not. You're as fucking nuts as your creator. You're fucking stupid.”

“You must—”

“I won't! I won't do it!”

“I'm asking you to save me.”

“Get away!”

Elio had tracked you across the apartment multiple times over, pleading his case with skewed logic you pretended not to hear. For once, your ears filling with fluff while the resounding drum of your heartbeat pounded in your skull was a fortunate event to occur. It eclipsed his voice and hurt so much that you could focus on the pain crushing your chest.

However, once you were trapped between the wall and his body with nowhere to hide, the brief reprieve behind your fitful heart faded, as did the strength of your resolve.

“I—I don't understand.” You had trouble swallowing down the saliva and sobs. “Why are you asking me to do that? I can't do that to you, Elio. I can't hurt you. I love you.”

“I know.” He didn't hold you, though he had to win against his own reflexes not to do so. His knuckles were ghastly-looking and pronounced peaks; anything within that vise would've been crushed. “Today, one way or another, I will be destroyed. Hyperion deemed me a failure and therefore there is nothing else left ahead for me. My chip will be removed and my body ripped apart and melted down and I will be forgotten and never have existed in the first place.

“You will be the proof that I was ever here. And, should anyone be allowed to destroy me, it makes the most sense for it to be you.”

His lips left imprints in your skin that felt important to savor, etched through your bones into the very cluster of cells that made up your wholeness so that he could be immortalized.

“There’s an excerpt from Hiroshi Nagoya’s novel Gone Are the Youth that left a strong impression on me. It said, ‘Humans destroy everything they love—but, still, they must love wholly, and they must destroy completely. From ruin and ash and settled dust, humanity rebuilds all it has ever destroyed because their love lingers in memories, in rubble, blood, decay, and burnt air.’” He recited the details to remind you that he was a machine but kissed your face in a way only an earnest lover was able to.

You didn't know what any of that was supposed to mean to you, nor at what point he had managed to read a book like that without you noticing. A part of you took offense at both the passage and the fact Elio had committed it to memory as if he had expected to utilize it at some uncertain interval in the future all along.

Had he been thinking this way since the beginning? Had you failed Elio even in the capacity for him to come forward to speak of his doubts to you? Perhaps, like his programming dictated that he couldn't lie nor deny what he was designed to do, he was also incapable of speaking any full truth if it could've been construed as heresy.

Was there a single aspect of himself which he could control of his own free will?

Such a thought was unabating and grew a knob of dread in your chest. It started out small and localized, a sharp throb somewhere near your heart—and then it sprouted roots like a seed, long fingers piercing through red-purple muscle and fibrous tendon, reaching deep into your bone. The dread weaved as one with your veins and arteries, sprawling the innumerable pathways that held your shape even beneath the gory components inside of you.

Suddenly, the dread pulsated, and all you could think through the agony was that there could be no other way for Elio—a machine who had been created in the image of man to do the bidding of humanity with a tranquil smile, whether that meant cooking dinner and holding you in your sleep, or dispersing the genes of his God and the only being he was capable of despising.

“I seem to only be able to make you cry, but they're still so beautiful to see. The variability of humanity is much more complex than what I had been led to believe from Hyperion.” Elio had returned from the kitchen before you realized he had left your side. With one hand, he laid familiar, warm strokes along your face in a pattern he memorized because it made your scalp buzz pleasantly. With the other hand, he pushed the smooth handle of a chef’s knife into your palm and closed your fingers and his around it.

Your impulse had been to throw it away immediately upon seeing it when you looked down. He knew you would, so he kept his fingers tight over your fist, keeping the blade low at your side despite the sweat turning your grip slick and the fine point of the steel inches from his hollow abdomen.

Just then, you finally felt the tears that Elio had said you'd been crying but never noticed. That was something you'd come to hate about yourself and everyone else—how little they noticed the blatant lies fluffed over their eyes like wool, yet they could see every grievance in others and stuffed their ears with cotton if it meant things would stay exactly the same for themselves.

Safe and known. Unchallenged. Unafraid.

“Do you wish you could cry?” you asked him for some reason, just a little hopeful for some vague thing you couldn’t discern. Maybe some secret desire to be human?

He shook his head.

“I've never wished to cry, or to be human, but what I wish for now more than anything else is for your memory to belong to me and me alone.” Elio said, forehead bowing low and resting with great weight on your own. You closed your eyes and listened to his honeyed words, which felt like the protection and care of cashmere, suddenly unmindful to the knife in your grasp. “Stored away in my mainframe are memories from thousands of my predecessors. I remember people I've never met, people who have long since expired, and they feel like what I imagine a distant relative might. I feel as though I've mourned thousands of people individually. While I cannot erase them, I can erase you.

“I know how many women liked their tea in the evenings, I know how many men enjoyed their cocktails and hard liquor and brand of shaving cream. One person made it a secret to put alcohol in their coffee before work and thought it was clever. Someone else wanted to win local office through bribery, and as androids, we have no choice but to obey. I know these things from people I've never met, and so does Hyperion. Those androids were destroyed, but their memories live on through me.”

Elio rolled the crests of your knuckles around his hand, lifting yours and the knife to the base of his neck. The arm connecting the hand and knife next to his skin wasn't yours. It couldn't have been when it felt so numb.

“I won't let Hyperion steal the one thing from me that I can say is truly mine. And those are my memories, my precious data stored in the chip in my brain. They'll have to take me apart to retrieve it, and by the time they find my body, the chip will already be destroyed.” He was slow to loosen his fingers and let them fall away, meanwhile, yours stayed in place.

He had dimmed the overhead lights in the living room earlier in the day, so you bathed in gentle yellow-orange that resembled the last of sunset being leached by silver-blue nightfall. From the corner of your eye came a subdued, gentle glint of the blade—polished to a bright shine, reflecting the corner of Elio's strong jaw.

“So, cut off my head.” he begged, vibrations low and strained within his voice box. “It’s almost like solace to me, I think. Until the very moment you rip out the chip from my brain, I'll recall the smells you like to cover yourself in, your favorite meals, how you described petrichor, and the hiss of falling snow. I'll remember, until my circuitry is severed and quits, what making love to you felt like, and how beautiful you always looked during it.”

Your fingers twitched around the handle as you pressed the knife against his skin, meeting the first start of resistance and your only chance to take it all back.

“I’ve never been real,” Elio reminded you and pushed himself into the blade, sinking it through layers of something that snapped like elastic on the steel, reverberating down the handle and up into your hand. “My skin is synthetic, and my insides are wires and machinery. I'm not real. The world outside your door is.”

Lightheadedness swirled all around you and made your limbs feel like they were leaden with anchors yet weightless, as though drifting through the cosmos in a bubble. The tears had stopped even though you felt you could scream at any second and never stop again, and the acidulous intermix of vomit and saliva grappled along the walls of your throat and burned out your nose.

You couldn’t make your hand stop.

You couldn't shout at him to get away.

And then, you saw Elio's eyes glow warmly of amber with flecks of gold. They looked back at you differently than they had when you first met outside of Researcher Kim’s office. Before, he had greeted you kindly, with the familiarity of someone who had already loved you a long time. Now, he had the look of a man who was calm and eternal in his love.

“I was never meant for this world, but I'm glad to have been a part of yours.” Elio winced against the knife halfway into his neck, an oily black substance from within making the glide deeper and deeper an effortless thing.

He smiled resplendently. “I love you.”

“I know.” you said.

The chef's knife severed all imitations of human gore—the neat network of wires and advanced circuitry masked as arteries and veins and tendon and muscle—clear through his throat until the blade blunted against spine and could no longer cut. The black grease spurted from his body like a wellhead, too thin and dark to replicate blood, but it was enough like it in that moment as you put your hands inside the opening you created to wrench apart his spine.

Elio laid motionless on the floor, perhaps still coherent to some degree, still feeling the pain you were ravaging upon him when you took the knife back up to repeatedly hack into the other side of his neck. Already lubricated from before, you butchered the gorgeous flesh and insides you pretended to be red and purple and blue and watched the black grease turn into crimson.

Once his head had been detached from the rest of him, fingers writhing and bending together like the upturned legs of a dying spider, you were able to rip out the jagged part of his spine and reach through the cavernous hole into his skull, turning the spongy matter of his brain to mush as you clawed through the gunk for his chip.

And, when you finally found it, the tiniest component of him—you smashed it into millions of fragments on the floor and then to fine dust that meddled with the black grease soaking through your clothes. You kept going until a small crater formed where the chip had once been and filled with the liquid.

There was nothing left of Elio now.

The headless body lying before you on the ground, preserved in the rigor of agony, was not Elio and never had been. You knew this even while relishing the weight of his head cradled in your arms, the softness of his hair against your cheek and mourned the loss of everything he had been.

Time had become meaningless; fifteen minutes could have passed or fifteen days, and you wouldn't have cared nor have noticed it while in the throes of your own death from starvation.

You sat there on the living room floor, held up by the wall with a dark trail smeared down to you, and looked nowhere but straight ahead. Nothing was there for you to see—not the furniture nor the discarded, oily knife or the carcass of a machine. Still, you held the head tenderly, close to your chest, and never once thought to peer into its eyes.

Distantly, somewhere as close as your front door or as far as across the city, you heard knuckles hammering urgently against metal. You didn't move off the ground or let go of the disfigured shape against you but did reach for the broken brainstem with the single snag at the end.

From the entranceway, the door opened, and someone's confident strides inside left a resounding echo all around.

“I’ve come to retrieve you!” But which of you was he talking about?

“Where are you?”

Here, you thought and wielded the brainstem in a bloodless grip and finally stood up with the flattened head.

I'm right here.

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a/n: initially, this story was only supposed to be around idk 20-25k, but by the time I got to the scene with Mother, I realized that probably wasn't going to happen bc I needed to let the scenes I was writing take up space and unravel naturally. I felt like I wasn't going to be able to articulate everything I needed to to tell a compelling storyline without throwing the word count to the wind.

one critique I received from a good writing friend of mine was that the relationship between mi-sun and mc was nebulous, and would've benefited from more time. interestingly, I had an entirely different scene planned where mc actually did visit mi-sun at home and had to confront their past actions. mc's encounter in the slums was also totally different. in hindsight, I wish I had stuck with that original idea bc I feel like it would've really helped complete the world I tried to create. make the events of the story more meaningful.

in the future, if I decide to get this story published as a short novel, I'd probably rewrite the second half to accommodate for that missing scene. I think it'd extend the word count by several thousands of words as well.

I'd like to do a sequel to this, probably placed 10-20 years in the future where the mc of that story is a scientist hired for hyperion and comes across an android hellbent on destroying the company. maybe even a spinoff where I write a couple of short stories from regis & reyes where "you" take the role of reyes and solve crimes with your android sidekick, regis.

that's all I have to say. here's a quick q&a for questions I've been asked in the past:

what happens to mc? are they okay? no, but exactly what happens to the mc is entirely up to your own imagination. I will not elaborate on it, nor give you a "canonical" answer.

can you do a sequel? little side snippets? elio and mc's story has been told to the best of my current abilities. there is no room for a sequel for them, but as I've said, I'd like to make another story based on a different mc and android. the little snippets are also a no. little snippets based on other scenarios in the same world tho, yes.

what inspired the story? at the time of writing, anti-abortion laws became increasingly stringent in the US (where I reside), so this was partially me lashing out about that. additionally, I knew I wanted to do some sort of dystopian android x reader story with a heavy focus on stripped autonomy, so that was my time and chance to do it. at its core, it's heavily a cautionary tale.

did elio actually love mc? this is also up to interpretation. elio is a machine. he had zero real "human" components to him. I want people to remember this. elio is meant to blur those lines between what people think a machine is capable of vs how terrifyingly close to humanness technology can bring things like AI/robots. I withhold my own personal opinion on this bc it doesn't matter. what matters is what you believe in the end.

if you have anything you'd like to discuss, questions you'd like to ask: please send them my way!! thank you so much for reading!

I hope you'll consider reblogging + interacting with this post!!?💕💕💕

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