Which Flesh is Your Flesh?

Chapter 10

“Ready?”

“Ready.”

Raven rushed Iguazu rearing back for a kick. He dodged away, but went wide, almost knocking into the abandoned Furlong base.

“Careful, you’re better optimized for movement now.”

“Better optimized? Melanders are flying bricks! Even with the stripped plating on the C3 a tin can would be better optimized!” Iguazu laughed, launching himself into the air.

He barely had to think before his body was already moving. A light, mobile build suited him way better than his old Melander C3. It was a halfway point, the closest Balam was willing to get to something like a Nachtrieher or a Firmeza. This was a true light craft. Though it was pretty obvious it was never meant to be piloted by humans. His body responded too quickly and his field of view wrapped around 360 degrees, making his head spin. Iguazu loved it. The further he left the old, human him behind the better.

621 snorted as he watched him. Sure they were supposed to be sparring, but he was alright with letting Iguazu fuck around a bit. Fucking around was the best way to learn. It was how he learned, taking his dad’s old mining MT out on joy rides as a kid, learning how to do stupid pistol tricks with his AC, it gave him an easy confidence at the controls.

For Iguazu, letting him fuck around wouldn’t just help him learn, it would probably help him keep his head screwed on too. That was his main weakness as a pilot, he got tilted too easily. Alone, getting tilted wasn’t a huge issue, sure he fucked up a lot more often, but for a human pilot it would’ve been recoverable. Iguazu was an augmented human from a notoriously emotionally unstable generation with a faulty mood regulator. It was faulty, 621 had checked while he was incapacitated. Part of it might have been Iguazu’s bad temper making it work harder than it was designed to, but it had way more wear than it should’ve, even after seven years of use. 621 had tried to fix it up the best he could, but he didn’t know how long it would be until it broke again. He was decent enough with cybernetics that he could rig up a system that connected to Iguazu’s existing augments, but he was an engineer, not a doctor, he didn’t trust himself to go poking around too much in Iguazu’s brain. Having Iguazu fuck around in ANUBIS for a while before he saw actual combat would hopefully keep him from building negative associations with it. The goal was to keep him from entering the cockpit afraid or angry, so that it wouldn’t be so easy for him to bust his regulator in the heat of battle and lock himself into a blind rage.

Iguazu really wasn’t a bad pilot, he was just temperamental. 621 could work with temperamental. He just needed to learn his quirks. Like the obsession he’d developed. 621 couldn’t say he didn’t like it, but he recognized the potential volatility. Hell, he’d been the victim of that volatility once already, but he had managed to get Iguazu stable. Well, more stable. The dependency he had begun to develop was at least safer than the violent need to become part of him that he’d shown before. 621 had once heard the relationship between a dom and a sub described as “negotiated codependency”. With the direction Iguazu was trending he was glad he’d convinced him to negotiate at least. Especially since he was noticing himself becoming more and more attached as well.

Not even Walter ever acknowledged that 621 was human. It probably made it easier for him to just see him as a hound, a weapon, something to be used. Ayre didn’t know what to make of him. She’d been around humans before, but 621 was so stripped down that she’d admitted she hadn’t been sure if he was human until she’d initiated contact. Yet for some reason Iguazu, the man he was helping throw away his humanity, recognized him as human. 621 didn’t know whether to cry with relief or to be offended. After all, Iguazu had identified in him the part of himself he hated enough to cast off. Though maybe it was because he was rejecting his humanity that he could recognize it in 621. He didn’t associate humanity with himself, with the “like him” that others did. It let him see the humanity in something like 621, seeing past the bleeding hole where people had tried to rip it out of him. Or maybe that was just more evidence that Iguazu was slowly going insane. Still 621 wanted to believe he wasn’t, despite all the evidence to the contrary. He wanted to believe Iguazu was right to see humanity in him, that he wasn’t just a weapon slowly being overtaken by the war machines he was supposed to be piloting until there was nothing left.

“Raven. Behind you!” Ayre warned just as ANUBIS slammed into SKY BURIAL, knocking it off balance.

“Got your head in the clouds, freelancer?”

621 smiled. It had been a while since Iguazu had called him that.

“If I’m a freelancer, what does that make you then, a subcontractor?” He grabbed onto the vents in the front of ANUBIS’s core and flipped him over SKY BURIAL’s shoulder, slamming him hard into the ground.

A move like that would’ve stopped a human cold. Most new pilots thought they were invincible in the cockpit, that their AC would take all the damage for them. Then they got thrown by an enemy AC, realized they weren’t immune to whiplash, and spent the next month in a neck brace. Iguazu didn’t have a spine to injure so ANUBIS was back up in seconds, despite his graceless fall. That was how he’d always been, you’d turn around after shooting down HEADBRINGER and when you turned back he would have escaped like he was Michael fucking Myers. Then he’d show back up again a week later and threaten to kill him again.

“I’ve created a monster,” he joked to Ayre, ducking beneath a punch.

“Why?” She asked, not matching his joking energy. “I still don’t understand why he did what he did but I really don’t understand why you’re doing what you’re doing.”

“Why not? If I didn’t they probably would have put him through re-education.” SKY BURIAL shot a quick jab at ANUBIS’s head.

“Isn’t that what you’re doing though?”

“No, it’s turned into something else. I’m not breaking him, he’s letting me mold him.”

“What about you? You’ve been acting out of character lately.”

He had been, he’d realized it. 621 was finally starting to feel like himself again. Ayre had only a 621 that was torn into pieces of himself. A thing made dead, made machine, by the gears it had been crushed in. Iguazu was starting to thaw him out a bit. Not because of anything he’d done for him, but because he was so easy to bully and so delightfully reactive. A machine couldn’t be sadistic, but 621 sure had been before his augmentation. A machine could be cold, but not in the way he used to be, a controlled self possessed cold, not an emotionless one. It was good to be in control of something again. Having Iguazu kneeling at his feet was undeniably therapeutic for him. He was an awful sub, not willing to communicate his limits because of his needless pride, but 621 could train that into him.

“I’m an adult, Ayre. I know when someone is bad for me.” Iguazu probably was bad for him, but he was bad for him in a way he needed right now. He was an enabler, and that was something 621 was sorely missing. There was no one that was really concerned with what he wanted, just what they wanted from him. Even Ayre clearly had her own hidden agenda. It was refreshing to have Iguazu’s earnest devotion, even if it oscillated between violence and subservience so quickly.

Iguazu boosted out of the way of Raven’s jab. He seemed distracted, which did grind his gears a little bit, but he knew an advantage when he saw one. This body was still unfamiliar and Raven was clearly better at hand to hand combat, he needed every advantage he could get. He took stock of SKY BURIAL. Lightweight biped, higher jump than his own, close to a reverse joint, less armor than he had, but faster.

In all of their previous encounters he’d been too angry to consider tactics. Though to be honest, when he was with Balam he didn’t consider tactics very much period. It’s not like he had any reason to fight well. The corporate higher ups had already written him off as a failure and he certainly wasn’t trying to impress Michigan. Now, he did have someone he wanted to impress. He wanted Raven to think he was useful, to tell him he was a good boy while he cleaned the blood off of his hands.

Iguazu noticed the pistons in the front of Raven’s knees. He aimed a punch at Raven’s core, baiting him into dodging, then the second he stopped Iguazu launched into a boost kick. His feet connected with Raven’s left knee, bending the piston inwards. He dashed backwards again, but he was limping now, his leg stuck in one position. Iguazu rushed him, going in for the kill. Suddenly, Raven wasn’t where he remembered him being and two fists came down on his back, hard. His head swam as he tried to stand back up.

“Good thinking.” Raven limped towards him extending a hand. Once upon a time Iguazu would have spat and slapped it away, but now he took it, letting Raven help him back up. “Remember to take out the thrusters first next time. I can still fly with a busted leg.”

“621!” Raven’s Handler’s voice rang out over the coms. “Turn on the Balam news streams!”

Iguazu hurriedly switched his own optical input from his cameras to Balam’s corporate news channel.

“-Plutonian court’s ruling has worrying implications for corporate espionage enforcement on the planet. Vice and Cohen Plasma Laboratories have been forced to pay thirty million Choam in damages to the plaintiff for ‘wrongful’ termination as well as ‘damage to reputation’. Now if you ask me, if he didn’t want a firing in his resume he should have kept his damn mouth shut. Of course he was fired! Subsidiaries of Arquebus mandate confidentiality. What’s next? Will Pluto start offering protections for hacker groups like Branch under their whistleblower laws?”

“Arquebus isn’t even reporting on it since VCPL is one of their subsidiaries! You did it 621! You won!”

Raven did not at all match Walter’s energy when he replied, “Thanks for letting me know.”

“Raven, is something wrong?”

“Step off.” His voice sounded even more distorted than usual.

“What do you need me to-“

“Step. Off.” Raven limped back to the hanger. “Don’t follow me. I need to be alone.”

It took Iguazu a few days to work up the courage to see how Raven was doing. He’d helped initiate the transfer of the new funds to Raven’s account, and pay the sharks he owed money too, with instructions given over the base intercoms, but Raven refused to come out and actually talk to him.

Iguazu had found out his name. It was leaked on 16chan ten minutes after the initial news break. Raven’s parents had named him fucking Tiberius Zeta. They must have hated him. It was already hard to come back from Zeta, but fucking Tiberius? Really? If he was in better shape Iguazu might have tried to rag on him for it, but he couldn’t when Raven wouldn’t even talk to him.

Initially Iguazu had intended to do what he said and leave him alone, but then three days passed and Raven hadn’t come out for his dialysis. He needed it three times a week to compensate for his missing kidneys. Without it he would be slowly poisoned by his own body’s waste.

He hesitated for a moment before opening the door. Raven hadn’t expressly forbidden him from entering his room, but he’d still never been in there. It felt too invasive. Iguazu had already been inside his head, but this still felt like rifling through the pages of his diary.

When he tried the door it was electronically locked. Without his AC’s computers to help him he wasn’t much of a hacker, but he did know a trick for this. He fired up the blow torch Raven had included in his hand in case he needed to do field repairs and held it just beneath the door’s sensors. It immediately snapped open, the base’s fire safety protocols overriding the lock. Iguazu used to do the same thing with a lighter to break into Michigan’s quarters back on base. He wondered if his old commander had found where he hid all of his left socks yet.

It took a second for Iguazu’s cameras to adjust to the darkness. Raven’s quarters were spartan, just a low set bed with dark stained plastic sheets, a table with a monitor and a computer tower, and a single steel chair. He was currently sitting in that lonely, uncomfortable looking chair, facing the wall. His exoskeleton’s rear cameras whirred as they turned on and then off again.

“I told you to leave me alone.” His voice sounded horrifically distorted, barely audible behind the haze of static.

“You haven’t had dialysis done in a few days.”

“You’re not my doctor.”

“But, I’m going to be the one that has to deal with you when you start stinking up the base.”

“Fuck off.”

“You fuck off! Do you know what I would’ve done to have that much fucking money dumped in my lap?! And you’re just going to lay down and let yourself die?!”

“No, I’m just going to sit here and let myself die.”

Iguazu grabbed Raven’s arm, trying to make him face him. In response Raven pulled the quick release latch in his arm and it dislocated at the shoulder, clattering to the ground.

“Son of a bitch!” Iguazu bent down to pick it up, but Raven stepped on his wrist. “What the hell is your problem?!”

The half flayed thing in the exoskeleton stood from his chair.

“You just want me to fuck you right? If I do that will you leave me the hell alone?” He grabbed Iguazu’s other arm, detaching it as well.

The rage in his eye made Iguazu’s blood freeze. He had forgotten what it was like to be afraid of Raven, but now, down two arms and facing that hulking exoskeleton, Iguazu was afraid.

“Sit down.” Raven pointed to the dark stain covered bed. Iguazu didn’t move. “I said sit down!”

Iguazu sat on the plastic. It felt awful beneath him. He couldn’t believe Raven slept on it. Raven’s hands didn’t feel much better on him. He roughly pulled the quick release on Iguazu’s legs to detach them and tossed them aside. Then he pulled out his cock. He didn’t even bother attaching it to himself, he just held Iguazu down and shoved it into his ass.

“This is what you wanted right?! Come on, it’s fucking silicone. You’re practically masturbating. I don’t even need to be here.”

Iguazu felt like nothing but in an awful way. It wasn’t the almost meditative self annihilation that normally happened when he had sex with Raven. He was fully present and he felt like he was worthless.

“Th-Thirteen!” Iguazu finally choked out. “Thirteen!” He had barely remembered their safe word, he hadn’t thought he’d ever want to use it.

Raven pulled back like he’d been bitten.

“What do you want from me?” Raven asked. His voice was more static than words. “What is it going to take to get you to leave me?”

“Get your blood cleaned.”

“Why can’t you just let me die?”

“If you off yourself then what the fuck am I supposed to live for?! Huh?! Where the hell do you get off making me your fucking pet and then killing yourself?!” Iguazu knew he was being indelicate, but his fear was making him angry. “You can’t just leave me alone! I need you!”

“You can get somebody else to dom you. Hell, with the money I’m leaving you, you could hire somebody. It doesn’t have to be me.”

“I need you, Raven!” Iguazu wished he could just touch him. He wouldn’t need to leave his heart exposed like he was going to have to. “I love you, you fucking bastard. Do you think I would’ve done what I did to you if I only wanted you for sex?”

The mercenary’s eye darkened.

“How else was I supposed to take that? Clearly you didn’t give a shit about what I wanted.”

“I gave myself to you! What do you mean I didn’t give a shit about what you wanted?!”

“Because you didn’t do it for me! You did it for yourself! You did it because you thought you could get something out of me for it! It didn’t even cross your mind that maybe I was fine the way I was!”

“Then why the exoskeleton?! Huh?! I looked into it, you know, why the hell you didn’t just get cybernetics. It would’ve fucked your surgical outcomes if you got your own limbs back. That doesn’t sound like someone who was fine!”

“Fuck you! You’d never understand!”

“Try! At least fucking try to explain it to me!”

“I still wanted to believe I could get my fucking life back alright?! Look at me! You think I could still hold down a fucking desk job like this?!” He punched a hole in the wall of the base, the concrete crumbling out of the impact site. “I can’t even make myself leave my fucking exo skeleton anymore! I went into this thinking I could just undo the augments, get my body back, and be normal again, but that was never a fucking option! If I got cybernetics… if I got cybernetics I’d have to acknowledge it! I wish I’d lost the fucking case Iguazu! I wish I’d lost because I have everything I need right now to leave this fucking rock and go home, but I know I can’t and I don’t have an excuse to pretend I could anymore.”

He was crying now, the brown eye Iguazu had put in his skull weeping where the wires embedded in his left eye socket couldn’t.

“My own mother wouldn’t recognize me now. I don’t recognize me! The man I was is fucking dead! His body just hasn’t realized that yet.” He looked down at the exposed muscles of his stomach and the ragged scar from where he had been opened up and hollowed out. “Hell, it has realized, the fucking ghost haunting it just wouldn’t let it die in peace.”

“Do you want to know what your name was? It got leaked.” Iguazu was grasping at straws now. Maybe knowing his own name would ground him. Hearing it again might tie him back to that old identity.

“No! Don’t bring him into this! Just let him rest. Just… just let me rest. I’m done fighting the inevitable.”

“Can you at least re-attach my arms before you surrender to the fucking inevitable. I don’t feel like starving to death.” Raven hooked Iguazu’s arms back into their sockets, letting him reattach his legs himself.

“Now will you leave me the fuck alone?”

Iguazu lit his blow torch right by the sensors of Raven’s exo-skeleton and the fire safety protocol took over, forcing the suit to unlock.

“Mother fucker!” Raven cursed, falling out onto the floor. Iguazu grabbed him before he could weasel away and hefted him over his shoulder.

“So you can’t get your old life back, so what?! You still have one!” Raven ineffectually struggled against him.

“I told you that you wouldn’t get it!”

“No, I get it! I just think you’re a stubborn bastard! Just because you aren’t living the life of a perfect corpo you’re going to give up?!”

“I’m a killing machine! I’m not even considered human on most planets!”

“Who fucking cares?! You can control machines with your fucking mind and you think you would be better off human?! Get over yourself!”

Iguazu heard that buzzing in his head again and Raven stopped struggling for a moment.

“I’m giving you dialysis. If you want to kill yourself when I’m done, go blow yourself up like a fucking adult, but I won’t let you take such a chicken shit way out. Fucking commit asshole!”

Raven paused in shock and then, he started to laugh at him.

“I’m serious! I’ll fucking give you the gun! Just make an actual decision instead of just letting yourself die!”

“You want me dead that badly?”

“I don’t! I don’t want you dead! But if you have to die, I want it to be by my hand, not the bastard who took your kidneys!”

Raven started to laugh even harder.

“You’re a fucking psycho.”

“I might be, but the Raven I know is a petty fucking bastard. I didn't think he would let Arquebus win so easily.”

“I won against fucking Arquebus.”

“Not yet. You think they’ll let the insult of losing stand? The second you get out there again every single vesper is going to be gunning for you. Don’t make it easy on them!”

“It would be funny though wouldn’t it? Freud shows up to the base, thinking he’s finally going to get a good fight, and all he finds is a half a corpse with its brains blown out.”

“You have a sick sense of humor.”

“I’m still funny aren’t I?”

“I fucking hate you.” Iguazu kicked open the door to the old med bay and roughly strapped Raven to a chair.

“I thought you loved me?”

“I do, but I still fucking hate you.” Iguazu wheeled out the dialysis machine.

“Do you even know how to do this?”

“Yeah. I downloaded a bunch of medical protocols onto this thing.”

Iguazu sanitized Raven’s inner arm before poking twin needles beneath the skin. He watched as blood flowed through one tube and into the machine.

“Wait here.” Iguazu stalked off to go find his service pistol.

“I agree with him, you know, even if he isn’t being very delicate. This isn’t like you.” Ayre buzzed as soon as he was out of sight.

“How would you know?” 621 was starting to feel nauseous now. Dialysis always made him nauseous. “The person you know is a corpse kept standing by hatred. You don’t know what I was like before that.”

Ayre took a breath.

“Raven, when I first met you, you couldn’t feed yourself. Whenever you picked up a fork, you broke it because you weren’t able to modulate the amount of force your exo-skeleton put out. But you kept trying. I watched you try even though your skeleton fed you intravenously, even though you didn’t have to do it and when I asked you why, you said it was because you might need to live on your own in the future. That doesn’t sound like someone who wanted to die to me.”

621 stayed silent.

“I don’t want to lose you, Raven, and I think Iguazu is so scared of losing you that it’s making him irrational.”

621 picked at Iguazu’s fingernails.

“I know you think you’ve lost yourself, but have you considered that you might have just changed? Humans change all the time. There are still people who will like the person you’ve become.”

“Ayre, I don’t like the person I’ve become. Every day I feel more and more like a monster and I know I can’t go back to being who I used to be. Ayre, I just want it to stop.”

“Then go forward. You can’t go back but maybe you can change course. Raven, I believe in you. I know you can be more than a monster if you want to be.”

Iguazu slid the door open and slammed his pistol on the table before sitting down. He crossed his arms and glared angrily at 621. It was nostalgic.

“You’ve come to your senses, haven’t you.” 621 smirked.

“Guess so.”

“So are you going to try and kill me if I don’t take the gun?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I didn’t say I loved you because I was out of my mind. I fucking wish I was.”

“Hey, Iguazu.”

“Yeah?”

“Why do you hate me?”

“Why do you hate me?”

“Because the second we finished our first mission together you sent me a voicemail telling me I’d just been lucky and then continued to act like a raging fucking dick every time we deployed together.”

Iguazu shifted uncomfortably.

“I hate you because you don’t make sense to me. You were always better than me, when I had more resources and help than you ever did, and I still don’t understand why.” He stared at his fingers. “And because you climbed the wall, after Volta tried and never came back and it makes me think that if I hadn’t gone awol that day…” Iguazu squeezed his hands together. “I don’t know, at least he wouldn’t have died alone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be, I’m the screw up, not you. You’re just fucking perfect.”

“Says the guy who tied me to a chair so I wouldn’t fucking kill myself.”

“I tied you to a chair so that you wouldn’t let yourself die. There’s a difference.”

The machine beeped, letting them know it was done cleaning his blood. Iguazu carefully unhooked him and let him up. 621 stood, and darted to the gun on the table. Iguazu didn’t stop him.

“If you’re going to do it just do it,” he taunted.

“Raven, please!” Ayre begged.

621 pulled the hammer back and held it to his head. Iguazu sat down and watched him. He tried to tighten his finger, but he couldn’t force it to curl. He tried gripping the barrel with his other hand, tried steadying himself, tried to force himself to make a fucking choice for once in his life, but he couldn’t.

Raven dropped the gun, bile rising in his throat. He hadn’t eaten in days but still his body tried to rid itself of the awful feeling anyway it could. Raven fell to his knees and threw up, coughing as the acid burned on its way out. Iguazu knelt down next to him as he retched.

“I got you back.”

“Congratulations.” Raven retched again.

“No, I mean the pieces of you. I know you didn’t ask me to, but-”

“They weren’t sold?”

“No. I had to twist some arms, but I think I got everything.” His eyes darted to his arms, attached to Raven’s body. “If you want I can see if I can get those off you.”

“No, it’s fine. It’ll give me something to bury.”

“Still think you’re a corpse?”

Raven sighed.

“No, but the guy I used to be is still dead. Even if it’s stupid, I feel like I’m entitled to grieve a little. Just give me my own eye back.”

“What’s wrong with mine?”

“You’re colorblind dumb ass.”