Which Flesh is Your Flesh?

Chapter 12

When Raven woke up again he was covered in bandages. His breathing immediately began to speed up, his chest tightening as he panicked. He couldn’t breathe. All of it had been a delusion he was still on the operating table, he hadn’t been in an AC yet, no one he’d met was real, he hadn’t won, it was all a hallucination brought on by the augmentation surgery. Hell still awaited him, a hell he had thought he’d already lived through. He didn’t want to die. He didn’t want to die!

Raven screamed, the sound coming out choked and raw. His throat hurt like hell and he tasted blood in his mouth, but he kept screaming. He had to escape, he couldn’t let the coral induced dream become reality.

“Raven!” He heard a voice in his head. “Raven, are you alright?! What’s wrong?!” He stopped screaming, his chest still heaving with his panicked breathing. That was Ayre. Ayre was real. Or he was just even crazier than he thought.

“Bandages.” He half recognized the sound of his own voice, but it had grown harsh and brittle from disuse.

Iguazu burst through the doors, the chassis Raven had made gleaming in the sickly fluorescent lighting. All of it was real. He didn’t know if that was comforting.

“What’s wrong?!”

“Take off the bandages.”

“You aren’t fully healed. You could get an infection.

“Please, just take them off.” Tears started to soak the gauze around his eyes, the fabric like a wet sock over his face. He didn’t care that he was crying, he just wanted them off.

Iguazu hesitated for a moment, then he picked up a pair of shears and started cutting. What he could see of his torso was bruised and swollen. There was a Y shaped suture that ran across his chest and cut down to the base of his pubic bone, bisecting the existing scars on his chest and the one just beneath his navel. The joint where his skin ended and Iguazu’s skin began was painfully obvious. Raven’s was much darker, even with the corpse-like pallor it had acquired in storage. He could see a fun-house mirror reflection of his face in Iguazu’s carapace. It was also badly bruised and swollen, making it difficult to recognize anything but his eyes, reddish brown but so dark they looked almost black.

Raven took a struggling breath and tried to sit up, but every part of him screamed in pain and he was forced to lie back down. Even calmer, it was hard to breathe, his half healed ribs ached dully and his atrophied lungs burned after so long without air. Even beyond the fog of painkillers, everything hurt.

Iguazu shifted awkwardly, his eyes occasionally flicking to the socket in Raven’s crotch.

“What?” He asked, trying to return to his usual cold, almost antagonistic tone now that he wasn’t on the verge of a panic attack.

“You aren’t mad?”

“About what?”

“That I couldn’t find your dick?”

“Oh. I never had one. Well, I had a bunch of them, but I think they’re stuck in a storage unit somewhere back on Pluto.”

“You never had one?”

“Yeah, this thing had a better chance of retaining sensation than phallo, more size flexibility than meta, and it’s way cheaper than a lab grown graft, I just have to keep the contact points clean and use a catheter if I’m not wearing a cock.” He knocked on the edge of the metal ring. “I actually really like it. It gives me flexibility that guys that were born with a cock don’t have. The low std risk is also a pretty huge positive. I still get why more people don’t tend to go for mods for this sort of thing though. It’s damn obvious you’re wearing a prosthetic most of the time. Silicon that thick isn’t easy to disguise as real skin. You’re better off going with something more obviously fake.”

“Like what?” Iguazu slid his finger around the rim of the socket.

“I had one that was neon green and prehensile. It had a bunch of internal points of articulation so I could use it to grab onto stuff. It’s a fun party trick at the right kind of party, but it’s also really great for hand jobs.”

“I can imagine.” Iguazu knelt at his bedside and rested his face on Raven’s hip, pulling back when he hissed in pain. Then he ran his finger around the inner edge of the socket. “Can you feel anything here without wearing one?” He was being pretty obvious about what he was trying to do. This was a distraction, he was trying to keep Raven from thinking about the surgery, about the patchwork. Fuck it, it wasn’t like he wanted to think about it anyway.

“Just at the contact points.”

Iguazu spat on his hand. “Is this water based?”

“No, it’s mineral oil. It isn’t conductive.” He weakly moved his hand to the back of Iguazu’s head, giving him tacit permission. His lower mandibles parted and the full length of his tongue slid out. Raven still didn’t like mass produced cybernetics that much, but he had to admit, the mouths on riot models were so fucking hot. Just as Iguazu was about to stick his tongue in Raven’s socket, he stopped him.

“Wait, get my cock for me.”

“You’re still recovering, even if I ride you, I could end up crushing you by accident.”

Raven tugged on his collar.

“Go get it.”

The apertures of Iguazu’s cameras twisted wide open and Raven knew he had him.

“Okay.”

“Good boy.” Raven ruffled his hair.

“Are you really alright, Raven?” Ayre asked as Iguazu left. Raven noticed a slight twitch as he did.

“I think Iguazu might be starting to hear you.”

“Raven…”

“I’m in a lot of pain. It’s hard to sort out what’s what. Once the physical part dies down I’ll be able to tell you. It makes it hard to think.”

“…Let me know when you’re done then. I’ll try to give you some privacy.”

Iguazu ducked back inside, Raven’s dick in hand. He started to twist it into its socket, but once again Raven stopped him.

“Hold on a second.” He connected to it wirelessly. If he hadn’t done it before, being able to feel his disembodied cock in Iguazu’s hand would’ve been disconcerting. “I don’t have to tell you what to do with that, right?”

Iguazu swallowed thickly. No matter how much he thought he’d shed his humanity Raven could still see it in him. In the way he moved despite his alien anatomy, in the small involuntary twitches his metal body still made, in his sheer expressiveness, rage and devotion twisting shining muscle and tendons to their will. Raven had been still in comparison, but now the writhing of his living organs, back beneath his skin, was obvious to him. The nanobots tasked with ensuring everything healed properly felt like hordes of insects under his skin. The motion of life in his body was rhythmic and unending. It was disgusting. Like a circuit board that bled when a connection was desoldered.

Iguazu knelt beside him again and fed Raven’s cock into his own ass, shaking a little at the intrusion. The tags on his collar jingled as he rocked backwards into his hand. Raven sighed contentedly as he felt himself enter him.

“That’s a good boy.” Raven ran his fingers through Iguazu’s synthetic hair, before gently coaxing Iguazu back down to his socket. “Go ahead.”

His jaws parted again and his tongue fell from his mouth again. The soft silicon curiously probed the edge of his socket, taking his time to explore the metal ring. Iguazu moaned as this tongue slid deeper. If he was still flesh and blood Raven would’ve thought he had been shocked by the contact points embedded in the sides and base of the socket but he knew that was impossible, his tongue wasn’t conductive.

“That feels pretty good.” Raven petted Iguazu’s head as he licked. “You know, I’ve never done this before. I would’ve felt pathetic making anyone else do all the work like this.” Iguazu looked up at him with his glassy teal eyes. “I feel like I should thank you, I don’t think I’ll ever feel pathetic compared to you.” His pet whined, reaching his one free hand between his legs to get at his own cock.

“Leave it.” Raven commanded.

“Please-“ Iguazu crackled.

“Leave it. You’re a fuck toy, you don’t get to touch yourself.” About now was when Raven would step on his cock, if he wasn’t bedridden and trying not to throw up at the feeling of his own intestines moving. “If you want to cum, you need to work for it.” Iguazu intuited what he was asking him to do and began to jab Raven’s cock into himself faster. “Harder! Come on, we both know you can do better than that.” Iguazu’s eyes began to glaze over as he fell deeper into the comfortable place in his mind where he didn’t want to question Raven’s orders. He fucked himself harder, messily. If he could move, Raven would have done it with more precision. He knew where all of Iguazu’s most sensitive parts were, he had built him after all. Iguazu probably didn’t know his own body as Raven did. Iguazu probably knew Raven’s body just as intimately, he had put his hands inside him. He was the reason Raven was this grotesque thing.

Raven’s fingers tightened in Iguazu’s hair. He could dissemble him. Iguazu would probably even like it. He could take his brain out of his chassis and crush it, the nerves and fat falling through his fingers-

Raven forced his train of thought to derail. He loosened his fingers in Iguazu’s hair. It wasn’t his fault. Raven asked for this. They’d talked about it beforehand this time. It wasn’t Iguazu’s fault. It wasn’t Iguazu’s fault. It wasn’t Iguazu’s fault.

“Raven?” Iguazu looked up at him. “Did I do something wrong?”

“No, I’m sorry. I think I just need some sleep. You did a good job, okay?” He weakly patted Iguazu’s head. He heard a buzz in his head. Walter was calling, probably to see what was going on since he hadn’t checked in this morning. “Can you get that?” Raven asked. Iguazu huffed, but he got up and closed the door as he left to take the call.

Now that Iguazu was gone Raven took a better look at himself. All the inflammation and the sutures made him look like an autopsied drowning victim. He could see the nanobots moving under his skin, the shuddering of his muscles as they attempted to deal with the pain of being torn open again, the sluggish motions of his organs as they woke from their long slumber. He didn’t feel human again, he felt like a microwaved corpse.

“Ayre, are you there? I’m done.” This time he remembered to use his internal comms instead of his stiff and ragged vocal chords.

“I’m here.” She answered. By the tone of her voice Raven could tell she was holding back from asking him if he was alright again.

“I feel like shit, Ayre.” He admitted. “I feel like absolute shit.”

“Do you think something is infected? You look swollen.”

“No, that's just what humans look like after they’ve been cut open. If it doesn’t go down after a couple of days then we might need to start getting worried.” Raven paused for a moment. “It isn’t physical. It’s just, I feel like a fucking monster. None of this feels like a part of me anymore. It’s been too long, I can feel everything moving.”

“Maybe after a few days it’ll fade into the background.”

“Maybe.” He needed to get back in his exoskeleton. He needed the cold metal back on his skin. He needed to escape from this flesh that he knew didn’t belong to him anymore. It was the body of a dead man that he’d let Iguazu resurrect for him when he should’ve just let it rest. He hoped Ayre was right. He knew it was useless to hope, but he still hoped she was right.