Which Flesh is Your Flesh?

Chapter 8

The next morning, Iguazu heard Raven enter his workshop and place something on the ground. He picked Iguazu up off the workbench with a quiet grunt and put him down gently on the floor. Then, Iguazu’s vision was filled with searing white. He resisted the urge to cover his cameras, letting himself just get used to the light. Once his vision had adjusted, he began to take in what was in front of him.

It looked like a custom job, with soft organic curves and a light, thin frame. Its legs were reverse jointed, beautifully long and elegant, tipped with four toed feet. Optical fiber cables were seeded into its scalp, glowing teal green at their tips. Its face was thin and angular, with cameras closer to cybernetic eyes in their design, its false irises glowing the same color as its false hair. He felt like he dimly recognized it but he couldn’t tell from where. The rest of its chassis was shiny silver chrome, reflections dancing over its sweeping curves. Though there was one patch that was painted. On its right arm, there was a small hand painted design, a group of ants carrying the head of a dead stag beetle, notably absent the bright red Red Guns flash.

“Is this me?” Iguazu’s mirror-finish fingers touched the cold glass Raven had placed him in front of. Raven stepped behind him into the frame of the mirror.

“Yes.” He ran his rough metal fingers through Iguazu’s hair. The former Red Gun leaned into his touch like a cat.

“You made me so beautiful.” He looked like an art piece more than a weapon, a conceptual melding of the organic and the mechanical that was alive and breathing.

“I based most of it on the old you, you know. That’s just your original face.” Raven gently swept his hair back. The more he looked at it the more he could sort of recognize his old face, but there was still something different about it. He tried making an angry face. Ah, there it was. He was a lot more handsome when he was relaxed and happy, but he had been relaxed and happy so little during his previous life that he had barely recognized himself.

Iguazu got to his feet. He was taller than Raven, even in his exoskeleton, thanks to his longer legs. Iguazu kissed him, tasting Raven’s blood on his tongue.

“You made me beautiful,” He insisted, before kissing him again. “The other one didn’t fit me.” The riot bot was too harsh and intimidating. It would look better standing behind Raven as his bodyguard than on his lap or kneeling between his legs.

“I don’t think it’s right to put a human brain inside anything standard issue. It kills the soul.”

“What if I want mine dead?” Iguazu withdrew, his bright chrome smeared with blood.

“Then you’re no good to me. A machine controlled AC can never match a manned one.” Raven pulled his right arm free from the straps of his exoskeleton and held Iguazu’s hand, leaving fingerprints on the chrome. “I want Iguazu to be my weapon, not a husk with his face.” Now that he had an eye, it was easier for him to tell what Raven was thinking. There was desperation there, a need for Iguazu to understand him, but there was also something darker there that he couldn’t quite place.

“I’m not a fucking husk.”

“You aren’t? I ripped you apart and built you into something that suited my own tastes and you aren’t upset. I didn’t speak to you for days and then I just put my cock in your mouth. If any of you was still left, you would’ve killed me for that.”

Iguazu touched Raven’s skinless face, his smooth cold hands warming as they reddened with his blood.

“It’s because I liked it. If I didn’t like it I would kill you. It would probably be easy right?” His hand darted to Raven’s neck, wrapping around it easily. Iguazu squeezed and the flayed thing smiled, bearing his bloodstained teeth. The former Red Gun’s eyes fell to the chainsaw at his side. “It would be easy for you to kill me too wouldn’t it. You built me, you know where the parts of me that can die are housed. I forced myself onto you, no one would care if you killed me for it.” He released Raven’s neck. “But you can't, can you?”

“I’m the one that turned you into this. I can’t blame you too much.”

“Everything that you showed me about myself made me better, happier. I would’ve done something like what I did to you with or without your influence. I’m better when you just tell me what to do. I don’t have the chance to fuck myself over.” He brought Raven’s hands to his neck and the dark emotion in his eye came to the fore. “You said you would destroy me right? Clearly you didn’t mean my body, you meant my will right?” Raven shook his right hand from Iguazu’s grip and threaded it back into his exoskeleton. Then he returned both of his hands to Iguazu’s neck and squeezed.

Raven’s fingers sank into the metal like it was clay, leaving deep imprints in Iguazu’s skin. He was pretty sure he understood what that emotion was now, it was the desire to have him at the end of a leash.

Iguazu whined into his hands. He breathed through spiracles placed sporadically around his chassis, but hands around his neck still felt good. The still human parts of his brain recognized it as unfathomably intimate. An attempt to touch not only his body but his very life force.

When Raven released him his breathing had grown ragged. His eye darted to the dented plates of his neck and his breath stilled. The dark intensity left his face.

“Sorry. I can fix those.”

“Why don’t you let me keep them?” Iguazu could see Raven battling with himself.

“You won’t be able to move your neck properly.” He brought his hand to one of the dents, feeling the imprints of his own fingers. “I can get you a collar instead if you want.” His expression darkened again. “I heard you have a habit of running off. It’ll make sure that people know who to send you back to.”

He detached the plates at Iguazu’s neck, exposing the wires and motors beneath so that he could ensure nothing important had been crushed. Iguazu noticed his cock begin to come to life as he prodded, teal silicon slipping from between his plates. Raven glanced at it but left it alone.

“For the record, I did not like having bits of you sewn onto me.” He slipped his hands from his exoskeleton and lifted Iguazu’s chin to get a better look. “I’ll take you apart and rebuild you all you want, but if you ever try to do that to me again I’m sticking my chainsaw in your core. It’s just rare I get to work on a project like this.”

“Like what?” Iguazu asked.

“A robot that isn’t made to kill people.” Iguazu looked down at him quizzically. “This is meant to keep you alive and look pretty.” Raven knocked on his chassis. “It can kill but that’s not the primary purpose of the design.”

“Are you a bot fucker?”

“What?” Raven took Iguazu’s neck plates out of his exoskeleton’s hands and went hunting for a hammer.

“You said you made this to look pretty.”

“As in aesthetically pleasing.” Raven covered the plates in cloth to protect the finish before he began banging out the dents.

“What’s up with the legs then?” Iguazu hovered behind him, watching him work. Raven’s hands had been his own hands once, but they had never moved with sure practiced surety when they were attached to Iguazu.

“You said you didn’t want to be like the person you were before, right? That you wanted to carve the humanity out of yourself? I figured it would be easier for you if you at least looked less human. The tongue though, that was for me.” He put down his hammer for a moment. “I’m probably going to regret fucking saying this, but xeno shit. That’s what I’m into.”

“Like… aliens?”

“Well, monster movie aliens yeah. The real ones don’t tend to be sexually compatible with humans, if they’re intelligent and not part of the fossil record anyway.” He started hammering away again. “I figure if this is going to be a regular thing I ought to be honest with you about what I like right?”

“I’ve got this kind of fucked up divinity thing.” Iguazu admitted. Raven spun around in his chair.

“Oh? Do tell.”

“I was raised Catholic. I don’t know how much you know about old earth religion-“

“The one with all the blood right?”

“Yeah the one with all the blood. But like growing up I was surrounded with all these images of god as a handsome naked guy in the middle of being executed and then there’s all this art of people fingering his wounds in a way that’s really fucking erotic for no reason and all the priests telling you he loves you more than anything and put himself through that for you, I think it crossed some fucking wires.”

“So you want to fuck god?”

“Yeah.”

“And I look like god to you?”

“You fucking made me. You’re god by default.” That wasn’t the whole truth, he knew it wasn't the whole truth. “You’re what I was conditioned to think god was. Something so powerful It could crush me in an instant, but so vulnerable I can see beneath its skin.”

Raven reached out, playing with the wires beneath the removed plates of his neck.

“Deus ex machina?” He asked. Iguazu recognized the feeling of the fingers on his neck, though they had never touched him so delicately.

“It didn’t work out that way.”

“You saw god in a mushroom cloud and tried to make yourself just like it, of course it didn’t work. You just made yourself a nuclear bomb instead.” Raven affixed the plates back onto Iguazu’s neck. “Try moving around for me.” Iguazu turned his head side to side and tilted it up and down. “Any resistance?”

“No. You’re not going to cut power to my nervous system again are you?”

“No.”

“What do you want me to do then?”

“I’m sure you can find some way to entertain yourself.”