#hes an automation engineer

[heroicallynude]

I've never tried staying at a semifancy hotel before and I feel so bad everytime I ask anyone for anything. Like I know these people are doing their jobs but I feel like I need to apologize to them when they offer to bring me water and ice in a fancy little bucket at the pool. This is NOT a thing where I'm from

[bonebrokebuddy]

@kodedgeekthings eyo you mentioned wanting a dpxdc prompt for Howard, Batman’s mechanic!

Harold misses fixing toys for kids and in his off hours has taken up the habit of answering questions on forums about machining, electrical, engineering, mechanics, and mechanical design that are often frequented by students.

One day, he comes across a request by a college student who is trying to assemble his own car out of scrap he bought from a local wrecking yard.

Ghostly_Boy states that he has previous experience in machining and can make replacements for broken or too-damaged parts if need be, but he doesn’t know where to start and what specific requirements he needs to reach to ensure it’s street legal.

Harold willing to help, he answers a few of Ghostly Boy’s clarifying questions:

- Great questions!

It’s good to note that if you’re not careful, fixing or making your own car from parts can be a moneysink and can cost you more than a brand new vehicle. - That being said, your first major step to ensuring you can drive the car is to get the title of the body/frame of the car you plan to build. It’ll have the VIN on a plate welded to the frame usually near the lower edge of the windshield wipers on the drivers side. It’s how the DMV identifies vehicles for licensing.

- Generally, you’ll at first get a “wreck out” title that shows the vehicle is listed as a total loss, but if you can assemble the parts for the car with that frame, the DMV can check if it’s properly running and road worthy & license for you to use it on public roads if you’ve done the proper paperwork.

- Once that is done, it’s largely a case of getting the right parts and assembling them. Depending on how much you have to repair, you could be taking on a task that could give a challenge to even a seasoned mechanic. There may be additional paperwork depending on what exactly you need to repair, like the breaks, lights, steering, etc.

- If you want to build the car entirely from scratch, chassis and all, that’s an entirely different story with a much more complicated list of requirements to make it street legal, so getting a frame from a junkyard is a great first step!

- Make sure to keep all bills of sale, junkyard receipts, invoices and manufacturers’ certificates on any major parts you used in building the vehicle to prove its road worthy to the DMV when it’s complete!

Harold doesn’t always answer first but over time he’s found the adventures of this kid amusing and keeps up with it.

Ghostly_Boy keeps the forum updated with his progress:

The kid spontaneously deciding to scrap the wiring system and make his own in a span of 3 days, leaving experienced mechanics on the forum practically screaming at the kid for his updates showing him using random wires he salvaged and pigtailing them together to get the length of wire he needed.

Mixing not only multiple types of wires but ones that didn’t have the protection needed for auto use. DIY-ing his own relay and fuses he didn’t have and connecting the wrong grounds and switches. And planning on leaving the wires unwrapped and loose.

Leaving Ghost to promptly redo the wiring, correctly this time, within 78 hours.

Making a repair of a massive rusted hole on the passenger side by the bumper and the front tire via cutting 1/2in past the rust, grinding it pretty and clean, tac & seam welding the vintage aluminum housing material of a toaster to cover the hole to the response of Harold and many others in the forum just going “… I guess that would work?”

Harold and many others telling the kid that this “ectoplasm” material wasn’t cleared through the EPA’s Clear Air Act and could be illegal to drive with it as it’s fuel source unless he got the emissions tested & the center of gravity of the car adjusted to have the center of gravity a gas car has, it wouldn’t pass Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. Nor would the previously untested on material make it easy or quick to get an Emissions testing certificate. Best to just stick with gas.

Removing what he thought was a “skid plate” that turned out to be another rusted out section on the frame on the bottom of his car and repairing it with steel he salvaged from an old medical table he had laying around. (To the multiple slightly confused commenters asking how Ghost had a spare medical table, he replied, “eh, my folks visit every so often and they’ve been giving me things they’re clearing out of the house so they can move closer to my older sister. I just so happened to get the ye olde medical table. They’re an odd couple of folks but that’s why I love them.”)

People just crying at the kid to go to rockauto.com and just buy the damn parts he needs for his car. (A good resource btw)

The kid kept cutting corners to save cash but through the badgering of Harold and many others that he actually would have to spend money to make this car be safe to drive in, he finally got it completed.

Ghost’s post of him leaving DMV waving the updated title to the car in its envelope in the air, titled, “THE DMV FINALLY SAID IT WASN’T A FIRE HAZARD! ONLY TOOK 2 YEARS! THANKS EVERYONE!” Got the most amount of responses he’d ever had with congratulations from lurkers and previous commenters.

Over the course of those two years, Danny learned how to draw his own wiring diagrams, properly solder and weld, and learning to actually plan out his projects so he got it right at least the fifth time instead of the 20th. Not bad for a kid that went straight from graduating high school with a 1.5GPA to construction jobs.

But after finally getting the car approved, Ghostly_Boy returns to the forum with a new problem. Lamenting that his parents keep coming over and “modifying” his car to no longer make it street legal.

At this point, about half of the answers to the submission think it’s either a joke project taken very, very seriously with a good chunk of money behind it, or a kid with parents that have narrowly avoided falling completely down the mad scientist rogue rabbit hole.

After all, what sort of parent would think that the DMV would approve to “anti-ghost missiles” being attached to the outer body of the car? Either way, the submissions always had video attached showing a demonstration, proving that Ghost wasn’t just completely yanking their chain. And a good amount of money would have to be sunken in to not only pay for the fines Ghostly continued to get from the additions to his car, but to actually manufacture and make a unique working product for each plea for help request.

Harold is not only taking notes on some of these defense measures but also decides to bring up the boy to Alfred. Intrigued, they together keep an eye on Ghostly_Boy. Bruce may be their employer, but they can handle a case or two on their own.

- I wanted Danny to try to make smth for himself now that he doesn’t have access to his parent’s lab anymore but he also doesn’t have access to ectoplasm so he’s fairly unfamiliar how to wire things Not for ectoplasmic standards.

Also I wanted to make a prompt where Danny had a good relationship with his parents & went into a fairly realistic job after high school with his fairly bad GPA so he’s saving up for a technical school via construction jobs as he doesn’t like the idea of working fast food for understandable reasons.

[ofmd-alsaurus]

.

[plumberrypudding]

why does my dad have nearly 100 more hours than me in stardew valley

[roseband]

...@ the rose release the rest of the dates for other countries so i can determine when i need to request pto

[lillybean730]

i like that crochet can't be easily replicated by machines like knitting can, it makes it feel more important that i can do it you know?

[shieldarchitect]

unrelated ish but

Going to Disney world for the first time since I was 8 and going to all the parks and seeing galaxy’s edge and pandora … I am tempted to look into parkitecture as a future career move

If only Florida humidity didn’t make my hair explode

[stars-obsession-pit]

Due to issues with Jack’s fertility, the Fenton kids were both conceived using donor sperm. The donor they ended up receiving wasn’t anyone special; just a random chemical engineer from Gotham City by the name of Jack Napier

And perhaps things could have ended there. Perhaps in another reality, they did, and Danny never had to pay more than a passing thought to his genetic father.

But in this world, Jack Napier faced one extraordinarily bad day, and it broke him. All he could do in response was laugh at the utter meaningless of it all. And by the time his cackles subsided, the man he had once been was dead. In his place, only the Joker remained.

Yet despite how suddenly everything changed, neither of them knew the truth of things right away. The Joker had never even known he had a son, since the service didn’t inform people if their donations were used. And though Danny had known Napier’s name, he had no reason to pay enough attention to the man to notice his disappearance.

That ignorance couldn’t last forever, though.

All it took was a few medical tests from Danny before the automated database systems made the connection.

And that certainly didn’t go unnoticed by those in Gotham.

It looks like it’s time for Uncle J to pay his kid a surprise visit! Ooh, maybe he could break out the ol’ electroshock kit and bring back Joker Jr too, make it a proper family reunion!

[mostlysignssomeportents]

AI turns Amazon coders into Amazon warehouse workers

HEY SEATTLE! I'm appearing at the Cascade PBS Ideas Festival NEXT SATURDAY (May 31) with the folks from NPR's On The Media!

On a recent This Machine Kills episode, guest Hagen Blix described the ultimate form of "AI therapy" with a "human in the loop":

https://soundcloud.com/thismachinekillspod/405-ai-is-the-demon-god-of-capital-ft-hagen-blix

One actual therapist is just having ten chat GPT windows open where they just like have five seconds to interrupt the chatGPT. They have to scan them all and see if it says something really inappropriate. That's your job, to stop it.

Blix admits that's not where therapy is at…yet, but he references Laura Preston's 2023 N Plus One essay, "HUMAN_FALLBACK," which describes her as a backstop to a real-estate "virtual assistant," that masqueraded as a human handling the queries that confused it, in a bid to keep the customers from figuring out that they were engaging with a chatbot:

https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-44/essays/human_fallback/

This is what makes investors and bosses slobber so hard for AI – a "productivity" boost that arises from taking away the bargaining power of workers so that they can be made to labor under worse conditions for less money. The efficiency gains of automation aren't just about using fewer workers to achieve the same output – it's about the fact that the workers you fire in this process can be used as a threat against the remaining workers: "Do your job and shut up or I'll fire you and give your job to one of your former colleagues who's now on the breadline."

This has been at the heart of labor fights over automation since the Industrial Revolution, when skilled textile workers took up the Luddite cause because their bosses wanted to fire them and replace them with child workers snatched from Napoleonic War orphanages:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/26/enochs-hammer/#thats-fronkonsteen

Textile automation wasn't just about producing more cloth – it was about producing cheaper, worse cloth. The new machines were so easy a child could use them, because that's who was using them – kidnapped war orphans. The adult textile workers the machines displaced weren't afraid of technology. Far from it! Weavers used the most advanced machinery of the day, and apprenticed for seven years to learn how to operate it. Luddites had the equivalent of a Masters in Engineering from MIT.

Weavers' guilds presented two problems for their bosses: first, they had enormous power, thanks to the extensive training required to operate their looms; and second, they used that power to regulate the quality of the goods they made. Even before the Industrial Revolution, weavers could have produced more cloth at lower prices by skimping on quality, but they refused, out of principle, because their work mattered to them.

Now, of course weavers also appreciated the value of their products, and understood that innovations that would allow them to increase their productivity and make more fabric at lower prices would be good for the world. They weren't snobs who thought that only the wealthy should go clothed. Weavers had continuously adopted numerous innovations, each of which increased the productivity and the quality of their wares.

Long before the Luddite uprising, weavers had petitioned factory owners and Parliament under the laws that guaranteed the guilds the right to oversee textile automation to ensure that it didn't come at the price of worker power or the quality of the textiles the machines produced. But the factory owners and their investors had captured Parliament, which ignored its own laws and did nothing as the "dark, Satanic mills" proliferated. Luddites only turned to property destruction after the system failed them.

Now, it's true that eventually, the machines improved and the fabric they turned out matched and exceeded the quality of the fabric that preceded the Industrial Revolution. But there's nothing about the way the Industrial Revolution unfolded – increasing the power of capital to pay workers less and treat them worse while flooding the market with inferior products – that was necessary or beneficial to that progress. Every other innovation in textile production up until that time had been undertaken with the cooperation of the guilds, who'd ensured that "progress" meant better lives for workers, better products for consumers, and lower prices. If the Luddites' demands for co-determination in the Industrial Revolution had been met, we might have gotten to the same world of superior products at lower costs, but without the immiseration of generations of workers, mass killings to suppress worker uprisings, and decades of defective products being foisted on the public.

So there are two stories about automation and labor: in the dominant narrative, workers are afraid of the automation that delivers benefits to all of us, stand in the way of progress, and get steamrollered for their own good, as well as ours. In the other narrative, workers are glad to have boring and dangerous parts of their work automated away and happy to produce more high-quality goods and services, and stand ready to assess and plan the rollout of new tools, and when workers object to automation, it's because they see automation being used to crush them and worsen the outputs they care about, at the expense of the customers they care for.

In modern automation/labor theory, this debate is framed in terms of "centaurs" (humans who are assisted by technology) and "reverse-centaurs" (humans who are conscripted to assist technology):

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

There are plenty of workers who are excited at the thought of using AI tools to relieve them of some drudgework. To the extent that these workers have power over their bosses and their working conditions, that excitement might well be justified. I hear a lot from programmers who work on their own projects about how nice it is to have a kind of hypertrophied macro system that can generate and tweak little automated tools on the fly so the humans can focus on the real, chewy challenges. Those workers are the centaurs, and it's no wonder that they're excited about improved tooling.

But the reverse-centaur version is a lot darker. The reverse-centaur coder is an assistant to the AI, charged with being a "human in the loop" who reviews the material that the AI produces. This is a pretty terrible job to have.

For starters, the kinds of mistakes that AI coders make are the hardest mistakes for human reviewers to catch. That's because LLMs are statistical prediction machines, spicy autocomplete that works by ingesting and analyzing a vast corpus of written materials and then producing outputs that represent a series of plausible guesses about which words should follow one another. To the extent that the reality the AI is participating in is statistically smooth and predictable, AI can often make eerily good guesses at words that turn into sentences or code that slot well into that reality.

But where reality is lumpy and irregular, AI stumbles. AI is intrinsically conservative. As a statistically informed guessing program, it wants the future to be like the past:

https://reallifemag.com/the-apophenic-machine/

This means that AI coders stumble wherever the world contains rough patches and snags. Take "slopsquatting." For the most part, software libraries follow regular naming conventions. For example, there might be a series of text-handling libraries with names like "text.parsing.docx," "text.parsing.xml," and "text.parsing.markdown." But for some reason – maybe two different projects were merged, or maybe someone was just inattentive – there's also a library called "text.txt.parsing" (instead of "text.parsing.txt").

AI coders are doing inference based on statistical analysis, and anyone inferring what the .txt parsing library is called would guess, based on the other libraries, that it was "text.parsing.txt." And that's what the AI guesses, and so it tries to import that library to its software projects.

This creates a new security vulnerability, "slopsquatting," in which a malicious actor creates a library with the expected name, which replicates the functionality of the real library, but also contains malicious code:

https://www.theregister.com/2025/04/12/ai_code_suggestions_sabotage_supply_chain/

Note that slopsquatting errors are extremely hard to spot. As is typical with AI coding errors, these are errors that are based on continuing a historical pattern, which is the sort of thing our own brains do all the time (think of trying to go up a step that isn't there after climbing to the top of a staircase). Notably, these are very different from the errors that a beginning programmer whose work is being reviewed by a more senior coder might make. These are the very hardest errors for humans to spot, and these are the errors that AIs make the most, and they do so at machine speed:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

To be a human in the loop for an AI coder, a programmer must engage in sustained, careful, line-by-line and command-by-command scrutiny of the code. This is the hardest kind of code to review, and maintaining robotic vigilance over long periods at high speeds is something humans are very bad at. Indeed, it's the kind of task we try very hard to automate, since machines are much better at being machineline than humans are. This is the essence of reverse-centaurism: when a human is expected to act like a machine in order to help the machine do something it can't do.

Humans routinely fail at spotting these errors, unsurprisingly. If the purpose of automation is to make superior goods at lower prices, then this would be a real concern, since a reverse-centaur coding arrangement is bound to produce code with lurking, pernicious, especially hard-to-spot bugs that present serious risks to users. But if the purpose of automation is to discipline labor – to force coders to accept worse conditions and pay – irrespective of the impact on quality, then AI is the perfect tool for the job. The point of the human isn't to catch the AI's errors so much as it is to catch the blame for the AI's errors – to be what Madeleine Clare Elish calls a "moral crumple zone":

https://estsjournal.org/index.php/ests/article/view/260

As has been the case since the Industrial Revolution, the project of automation isn't just about increasing productivity, it's about weakening labor power as a prelude to lowering quality. Take what's happened to the news industry, where mass layoffs are being offset by AI tools. At Hearst's King Features Syndicates, a single writer was charged with producing over 30 summer guides, the entire package:

https://www.404media.co/viral-ai-generated-summer-guide-printed-by-chicago-sun-times-was-made-by-magazine-giant-hearst/

That is an impossible task, which is why the writer turned to AI to do his homework, and then, infamously, published a "summer reading guide" that was full of nonexistent books that were hallucinated by a chatbot:

https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

Most people reacted to this story as a consumer issue: they were outraged that the world was having a defective product foisted upon it. But the consumer issue here is downstream from the labor issue: when the writers at King Features Syndicate are turned into reverse-centaurs, they will inevitably produce defective outputs. The point of the worker – the "human in the loop" – isn't to supervise the AI, it's to take the blame for the AI. That's just what happened, as this poor schmuck absorbed an internet-sized rasher of shit flung his way by outraged social media users. After all, it was his byline on the story, not the chatbot's. He's the moral crumple-zone.

The implication of this is that consumers and workers are class allies in the automation wars. The point of using automation to weaken labor isn't just cheaper products – it's cheaper, defective products, inflicted on the unsuspecting and defenseless public who are no longer protected by workers' professionalism and pride in their jobs.

That's what's going on at Duolingo, where CEO Luis von Ahn created a firestorm by announcing mass firings of human language instructors, who would be replaced by AI. The "AI first" announcement pissed off Duolingo's workers, of course, but what caught von Ahn off-guard was how much this pissed off Duolingo's users:

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/05/25/0347239/duolingo-faces-massive-social-media-backlash-after-ai-first-comments

But of course, this makes perfect sense. After all, language-learners are literally incapable of spotting errors in the AI instruction they receive. If you spoke the language well enough to spot the AI's mistakes, you wouldn't need Duolingo! I don't doubt that there are countless ways in which AIs could benefit both language learners and the Duolingo workers who develop instructional materials, but for that to happen, workers' and learners' needs will have to be the focus of AI integration. Centaurs could produce great language learning materials with AI – but reverse-centaurs can only produce slop.

Unsurprisingly, many of the most successful AI products are "bossware" tools that let employers monitor and discipline workers who've been reverse-centaurized. Both blue-collar and white-collar workplaces have filled up with "electronic whips" that monitor and evaluate performance:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/02/despotism-on-demand/#virtual-whips

AI can give bosses "dashboards" that tell them which Amazon delivery drivers operate their vehicles with their mouths open (Amazon doesn't let its drivers sing on the job). Meanwhile, a German company called Celonis will sell your boss a kind of AI phrenology tool that assesses your "emotional quality" by spying on you while you work:

https://crackedlabs.org/en/data-work/publications/processmining-algomanage

Tech firms were among the first and most aggressive adopters of AI-based electronic whips. But these whips weren't used on coders – they were reserved for tech's vast blue-collar and contractor workforce: clickworkers, gig workers, warehouse workers, AI data-labelers and delivery drivers.

Tech bosses tormented these workers but pampered their coders. That wasn't out of any sentimental attachment to tech workers. Rather, tech bosses were afraid of tech workers, because tech workers possess a rare set of skills that can be harnessed by tech firms to produce gigantic returns. Tech workers have historically been princes of labor, able to command high salaries and deferential treatment from their bosses (think of the amazing tech "campus" perks), because their scarcity gave them power.

It's easy to predict how tech bosses would treat tech workers if they could get away with it – just look how they treat workers they aren't afraid of. Just like the textile mill owners of the Industrial Revolution, the thing that excites tech bosses about AI is the possibility of cutting off a group of powerful workers at the knees. After all, it took more than a century for strong labor unions to match the power that the pre-Industrial Revolution guilds had. If AI can crush the power of tech workers, it might buy tech bosses a century of free rein to shift value from their workforce to their investors, while also doing away with pesky Tron-pilled workers who believe they have a moral obligation to "fight for the user."

William Gibson famously wrote, "The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." The workers that tech bosses don't fear are living in the future of the workers that tech bosses can't easily replace.

This week, the New York Times's veteran Amazon labor report Noam Scheiber published a deeply reported piece about the experience of coders at Amazon in the age of AI:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/business/amazon-ai-coders.html

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is palpably horny for AI coders, evidenced by investor memos boasting of AI's returns in "productivity and cost avoidance" and pronouncements about AI saving "the equivalent of 4,500 developer-years":

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andy-jassy-8b1615_one-of-the-most-tedious-but-critical-tasks-activity-7232374162185461760-AdSz/

Amazon is among the most notorious abusers of blue-collar labor, the workplace where everyone who doesn't have a bullshit laptop job is expected to piss in a bottle and spend an unpaid hour before and after work going through a bag- and body-search. Amazon's blue-collar workers are under continuous, totalizing, judging AI scrutiny that scores them based on whether their eyeballs are correctly oriented, whether they take too long to pick up an object, whether they pee too often. Amazon warehouse workers are injured at three times national average. Amazon AIs scan social media for disgruntled workers talking about unions, and Amazon has another AI tool that predicts which shops and departments are most likely to want to unionize.

Scheiber's piece describes what it's like to be an Amazon tech worker who's getting the reverse-centaur treatment that has heretofore been reserved for warehouse workers and drivers. They describe "speedups" in which they are moved from writing code to reviewing AI code, their jobs transformed from solving chewy intellectual puzzles to racing to spot hard-to-find AI coding errors as a clock ticks down. Amazon bosses haven't ordered their tech workers to use AI, just raised their quotas to a level that can't be attained without getting an AI to do most of the work – just like the Chicago Sun-Times writer who was expected to write all 30 articles in the summer guide package on his own. No one made him use AI, but he wasn't going to produce 30 articles on deadline without a chatbot.

Amazon insists that it is treating AI as an assistant for its coders, but the actual working conditions make it clear that this is a reverse-centaur transformation. Scheiber discusses a dissident internal group at Amazon called Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, who link the company's use of AI to its carbon footprint. Beyond those climate concerns, these workers are treating AI as a labor issue.

Amazon's coders have been making tentative gestures of solidarity towards its blue-collar workforce since the pandemic broke out, walking out in support of striking warehouse workers (and getting fired for doing so):

https://pluralistic.net/2020/04/14/abolish-silicon-valley/#hang-together-hang-separately

But those firings haven't deterred Amazon's tech workers from making common cause with their comrades on the shop floor:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/19/deastroturfing/#real-power

When techies describe their experience of AI, it sometimes sounds like they're describing two completely different realities – and that's because they are. For workers with power and control, automation turns them into centaurs, who get to use AI tools to improve their work-lives. For workers whose power is waning, AI is a tool for reverse-centaurism, an electronic whip that pushes them to work at superhuman speeds. And when they fail, these workers become "moral crumple zones," absorbing the blame for the defective products their bosses pushed out in order to goose profits.

As ever, what a technology does pales in comparison to who it does it for and who it does it to.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

[reasonsforhope]

"When bloodstream infections set in, fast treatment is crucial — but it can take several days to identify the bacteria responsible. A new, rapid-diagnosis sepsis test could cut down on the wait, reducing testing time from as much as a few days to about 13 hours by cutting out a lengthy blood culturing step, researchers report July 24 [2024] in Nature.

“They are pushing the limits of rapid diagnostics for bloodstream infections,” says Pak Kin Wong, a biomedical engineer at Penn State who was not involved in the research. “They are driving toward a direction that will dramatically improve the clinical management of bloodstream infections and sepsis.”

Sepsis — an immune system overreaction to an infection — is a life-threatening condition that strikes nearly 2 million people per year in the United States, killing more than 250,000 (SN: 5/18/08). The condition can also progress to septic shock, a steep drop in blood pressure that damages the kidneys, lungs, liver and other organs. It can be caused by a broad range of different bacteria, making species identification key for personalized treatment of each patient.

In conventional sepsis testing, the blood collected from the patient must first go through a daylong blood culturing step to grow more bacteria for detection. The sample then goes through a second culture for purification before undergoing testing to find the best treatment. During the two to three days required for testing, patients are placed on broad-spectrum antibiotics — a blunt tool designed to stave off a mystery infection that’s better treated by targeted antibiotics after figuring out the specific bacteria causing the infection.

Nanoengineer Tae Hyun Kim and colleagues found a way around the initial 24-hour blood culture.

The workaround starts by injecting a blood sample with nanoparticles decorated with a peptide designed to bind to a wide range of blood-borne pathogens. Magnets then pull out the nanoparticles, and the bound pathogens come with them. Those bacteria are sent directly to the pure culture. Thanks to this binding and sorting process, the bacteria can grow faster without extraneous components in the sample, like blood cells and the previously given broad-spectrum antibiotics, says Kim, of Seoul National University in South Korea.

Cutting out the initial blood culturing step also relies on a new imaging algorithm, Kim says. To test bacteria’s susceptibility to antibiotics, both are placed in the same environment, and scientists observe if and how the antibiotics stunt the bacteria’s growth or kill them. The team’s image detection algorithm can detect subtler changes than the human eye can. So it can identify the species and antibiotic susceptibility with far fewer bacteria cells than the conventional method, thereby reducing the need for long culture times to produce larger colonies.

Though the new method shows promise, Wong says, any new test carries a risk of false negatives, missing bacteria that are actually present in the bloodstream. That in turn can lead to not treating an active infection, and “undertreatment of bloodstream infection can be fatal,” he says. “While the classical blood culture technique is extremely slow, it is very effective in avoiding false negatives.”

Following their laboratory-based experiments, Kim and colleagues tested their new method clinically, running it in parallel with conventional sepsis testing on 190 hospital patients with suspected infections. The testing obtained a 100 percent match on correct bacterial species identification, the team reports. Though more clinical tests are needed, these accuracy results are encouraging so far, Kim says.

The team is continuing to refine their design in hopes of developing a fully automated sepsis blood test that can quickly produce results, even when hospital laboratories are closed overnight. “We really wanted to commercialize this and really make it happen so that we could make impacts to the patients,” Kim says."

-via Science News, July 24, 2024

[scoupsakakitty]

Please Don’t Leave Me pt.2 | idol!Mingyu x Reader | fluff

The phone buzzed against the car's dashboard, but the call went straight to voicemail—just like all the others before it. Mingyu let out a sharp exhale, gripping the steering wheel tightly before pressing the phone to his ear as the familiar automated message ended.

"Y/N, you're leaving me no choice," his voice was hoarse, exhausted. "I'm on my way to your dorm. I can’t keep waiting for you to answer. We need to talk. You can be mad at me, you can yell at me, but you can’t ignore me. Not anymore."

With that, he hung up and started the engine, his heart pounding against his ribs as he sped off towards the university. The rain drizzled lightly, the city lights blurring against his windshield, but he barely noticed. His thoughts were consumed by her. By them. By everything he was about to lose if he didn’t do something.

When he arrived, he parked haphazardly, not caring if he was in a student-only parking zone. He stepped out, pulling his hood up to shield himself, but it was useless. The moment he walked through campus, he could feel the weight of eyes on him. Whispered voices, subtle gasps—some had recognized him. But he didn't care. He had one goal.

Stopping in front of her dorm room, he knocked. No answer. He knocked again, harder this time. "Y/N, open the damn door." His voice was firm, unwavering. "I'm not leaving until you do."

A few seconds passed, and then—

The door swung open so fast he barely had time to react before Y/N’s hand gripped his wrist and yanked him inside. She slammed the door shut behind him, her eyes wide with disbelief and frustration. "Are you insane? Showing up here like this? Now people will definitely know you’re here! And then you knock like that? Desperate much?" Her voice was laced with panic.

Mingyu took a deep breath, stepping closer. "You left me no other choice. If you had just picked up the phone, if you had answered even one of my thousand messages, I wouldn't have had to come here."

She crossed her arms, her expression hard. "I don’t have to answer just because you call."

His jaw clenched. "Then I have to show up."

Silence settled between them, heavy and unyielding. Finally, she sighed, rubbing her temple. "What do you want, Mingyu?"

His brows furrowed, disbelief flickering in his eyes. "What do you mean, what do I want? Isn't it obvious? I want you. I want us. I can’t do this without you."

She scoffed, turning away. "Mingyu, wanting something doesn’t always mean you get to have it."

He ran a hand through his damp hair, frustration evident. "I talked to my management. I told them I want to go public with our relationship. I don’t care about the consequences. I don’t care about the fans who won’t support it. If they love me, they need to accept that I love you. That I can’t live without you."

Her breath hitched, but she remained silent.

"You’re not happy without me, Y/N. Just like I’m not happy without you. I know it. You know it. So why are we doing this?" His voice cracked, raw and pleading.

She hesitated, her fingers tightening around the hem of her sweatshirt. "Mingyu... the stress, the sasaengs, the threats—it’s too much. Even if we go public, that won’t change overnight. And you’re always traveling. I barely got to see you before, how will it be any different?"

"I’ll take you with me." His answer was immediate. "We’ll talk to your university. My management has connections—we can figure out a way for you to do your studies online. That way, you can be with me. I can protect you."

She shook her head, tears brimming in her eyes. "I can’t afford online tuition, Mingyu. I can barely afford my fees as it is."

His heart ached at the helplessness in her voice. Slowly, gently, he reached for her chin, tilting her face up to meet his gaze. "That’s what you’re worried about? Y/N, come on. How many times have I offered to pay for your tuition? Let me take care of you. Let me give you the life you deserve."

"I don’t want to be a burden to you," she whispered.

"You're not a burden. You're my life." His voice was thick with emotion. "Stop finding reasons for this not to work. I can and will fix everything, but I need you to fight with me. For us."

For a long moment, she just stared at him. At the exhaustion in his face, the desperation in his voice. He looked like he hadn't slept in days. Like he was drowning.

Finally, she exhaled shakily, placing her hand over his chest, feeling the steady, desperate thump of his heart. "Okay... you’re right." Her voice broke. "I’m sorry, Mingyu. I’m so sorry for making us suffer like this. Please forgive me."

A choked sob of relief escaped him as he pulled her into his arms, lifting her off the ground and spinning her around. "You won’t regret this, I promise."

She let out a watery laugh as he peppered kisses all over her face—her forehead, her cheeks, her nose. "Mingyu, stop! You're acting like a puppy."

He grinned, setting her down but not letting go. "Now that I finally have you back, I’m never letting go again."

His eyes flickered around her room, taking it in for the first time in person. "So this is your room, huh? I’ve only seen it on FaceTime. Cozy. I like it."

She rolled her eyes, nudging him playfully. "It’s small, but it’s mine."

"Not for long," he mused. "Once you start online classes, you’ll be moving out. Either to my dorm or, better yet, our own place. And when I’m on tour, you’ll stay with me. We’ll share hotel rooms, wake up together, fall asleep together. Doesn’t that sound perfect?"

Her heart swelled at the thought. "I always wanted to go on tour with you, to be honest."

Mingyu’s lips curled into a soft smile. "Then it’s settled. From now on, we’re always together. No more secrets. No more hiding. No more distance."

He cupped her face, his thumb tracing her cheek. "I love you, Y/N. More than anything. And I’ll spend every single day proving that to you."

Her heart melted as she whispered, "I love you too."

And as he kissed her, sealing their promise, she knew—this time, they were going to make it.

[odoraful]

𝑯𝑬𝑳𝑷𝑰𝑵𝑮 𝑹𝑬𝑷𝑨𝑰𝑹 𝑯𝑰𝑺 𝑨𝑹𝑴 ᯓ 𝑪𝑨𝑳𝑬𝑩

⟡ content: gn!reader ; established relationship ; honey petname hehe ; minor hurt/comfort (which i didn't anticipate honestly, but it seemed to just go in that direction :O) ; 1.5k wc

⟡ a/n: i watched a clip where pepper potts helps tony stark replace like the tech in his heart and my brain went straight to caleb! also i don't know bionics at all so pls suspend disbelief at my descriptions of tech because its definitely all baloney HAHA also still figuring out how to write for caleb so it might be ooc..,, ANYWAY I DIGRESS i do hope it's an enjoyable read!! <33

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It was beyond you why Caleb chose to entrust you with this task, and equally incomprehensible that you agreed to it. Sure, you knew your way around certain weaponry and gadgets—a skill every good Hunter needed to have—but you were certainly no biomechanical engineer. Yet here you were sitting in the living room of Caleb’s home, his bionic arm fully revealed to you and a set of tools being laid out on the table.

“Isn’t the maintenance process… automated?” you asked, voice quivering with trepidation.

Caleb finished arranging the equipment in front of him. A neat array of screwdrivers and wires.

Comparably, there was no indication of hesitancy in his voice when he spoke.

“Yes, it typically is,” he answered, sitting back down on the sofa. He flexed the fingers of his right arm before flashing a smile at you, “but this isn’t one of those typical times.”

His usually comforting smile did little to ease you. You sat down, observing his arm as he continued speaking.

“One of the wires here—” Caleb pointed to the area at his elbow, “—has loosened for some reason. It just needs some reconnecting and I’ll be right as rain.”

He was right. Upon closer inspection, you could see the wire now beginning to detach from the small, round metal piece it was connected to. Occasionally, a tiny spark of electricity flashed from within the empty hole. If this was left unchecked, it would certainly lead to some kind of malfunction.

You squirmed in the cushion. “Wouldn’t telling the Fleet be better? Don’t they have technicians to do this exact thing?”

Caleb's lips quirked upwards, betraying the stiffness he suddenly felt.

Yes, it would be protocol to let the people responsible for this arm know (whether that was the Fleet or not he would never admit the truth of to you), but it was far too bothersome to have them inspect and diagnose for such a minor issue. And then, there was the pain of it as well. Caleb was very familiar with gritting one’s teeth and baring it, but the soulless nature of the Professor’s rooms made him always feel so alone. Despite the bright, sterile lights and the group of masked technicians in white coats attending to his arm, it was always just him and the pain and the desire for everything to be finished already.

Things were a lot different now with you here, finally here with him.

“Oh, your touch is much gentler than anyone in the Fleet, trust me,” he replied.

Though he hadn’t actually answered your question, the line was enough classic Caleb charm to disarm you. He looked fondly over at your expression as your shook your head, trying to stifle your laugh.

“It’s not a full maintenance repair, just a simple replacement. I’ll walk you through every step, don’t worry.”

He patted the space right next to him and you shuffled over.

“Caleb… will this hurt you?”

You couldn’t help but recall the pain he was in when his arm was hooked up to that machine. Your chest grew tight at the memory.

“Not at all, I swear,” he quickly responded. “Like I said, it’s just a replacement.”

He reached over to pick up a screwdriver. Turning his right arm around so you could see his elbow clearer, he used the tool to point out a small screw on the round metal pieces where the wire was being held.

“So, all you need to do is turn this a little to the left, and it should loosen the wire enough to remove it.”

Caleb then reached for the table to pick up a wire the same as the one in his arm. Though, the metallic conductors could be seen emerging out from the ends of the black casing.

“Then, all you need to do is just need to replace it with this.”

You repeated his words over in your mind. Loosen and then replace.

Exhaling a nervous breath, you took the screwdriver. You placed a hand against his arm to help steady yourself. The metal cooled your sweaty palm. Moving closer, you inserted the tip of the screwdriver into the screw, turning it slowly as possible. Afraid that any quick movements might have an adverse effect.

Just as Caleb had said, once the screws were turned, the metal pieces widened and the wire was freely hanging, only held to the arm by its conductive metal.

So focused on making sure your hands weren’t shaking, you didn’t see Caleb’s eyes scrunched shut, taking in deep breaths through his nose.

“Ah!”

Your head snapped up hearing him wince. His eyes peeled open, a weak but sheepish expression on his face.

“Caleb! You promised it wouldn’t hurt you!”

At your accusatory look, he chuckled wearily. “That was nothing! Just a little—” he sucked a sharp breath in “—buzz that’s all.”

Panicked, you put the screwdriver down. “W-what do I do now?!” you stuttered out, holding your hands away from the exposed area.

“Take the old wire out and put the new one in the same spot.” Despite his discomfort, Caleb tempered his voice. His composure kept your fear at bay for the moment. “Don’t worry about me, I’ll be alright.”

You nodded. Moving you hand closer again, you held onto the wire delicately. You pulled slowly. Thankfully, it released without any tugging needed.

“Mhm, there you go. You’re doing great,” Caleb reassured.

The conductive wire unfurled as if aware it was being replaced. You picked up the wire Caleb had held previously in demonstration and lined it up in the empty space. Similarly, the wire reattached itself.

“Now tighten it with the screwdriver.”

Turning the screws once again, you felt the round metal pieces tighten around the wire, holding it securely in place. The repair appeared successful.

You let out a long sigh, relief washing over you. You looked at Caleb’s face, hoping you wouldn’t find him pale and stricken. Instead, he was smiling. He turned his bionic arm around, bending his elbow and wiggling his fingers. It looked like it was back to normal.

“Look at that,” he beamed. “I knew you could do it, honey.”

Your laugh was filled with disbelief at his complete faith in you. “Please don’t ask me to do this again.” You were still slightly delirious by everything that just happened.

“What if I don’t have anyone but you?” he responded.

You knew that statement wasn’t true. There were plenty of people he could rely on to assist him with this. He was the Colonel of the Farspace Fleet after all. Yet, there was a softness in his tone and a distance in his eyes as he spoke. He really believed that to be the truth.

You looped your pinkie finger around his (still hesitant if your craftsmanship had fully worked). Caleb glanced down at your movement. He saw your tenderness and there was a phantom sensation of warmth right where your fingers connected. Though, he knew it was all just his brain and its sensory signals trying desperately to reconstruct a feeling he once had.

“But what if I messed up a-and something bad had happened? I just don’t want to hurt you.”

Caleb enveloped his hand around yours. His touch was cold and metallic, but his words were anything but.

“Nothing you do could ever hurt me.”

The color of his bionic arm began to change. It flickered in the same way a holographic screen did when you put your hand through it. His arm was recalibrating to project the perfect color, and to mimic the feeling of real skin. As fast as you could blink, it returned to its usual appearance.

Caleb squeezed your hand. “See? Right as rain.”

The sudden mixture of your fear and sadness made you crave being in his hold. You pulled him into a hug. Wrapping your arms around his neck, you buried you face into his shoulder.

“Hey, it’s alright,” he soothed, rubbing your back. “I’m still here with you, arm fully functional.”

“I know…” you remained glued to his shoulder, voice muffling.

“Nothing bad will happen to me,” he said, coaxing you gently both in speech and touch as he grazed his finger against your cheek. “Could I see you? Please?”

You lifted your head up, leaning back. Your eyes were glossy with tears and Caleb felt as though he’d been stabbed in the chest. He kissed you on the forehead. With his thumb, he carefully swiped at your bottom lashes.

“I'm sorry, honey. I don’t know what I was thinking wanting you to do this,” he murmured, his warm breath tickling your skin at his closeness. “You don’t have to do this for me next time.”

“It’s okay,” you sniffed, shaking your head. “Now that I know what to expect, I think I can help you if this happens again.”

The shock soon passed. Feeling the rise and fall of Caleb’s chest grounded you. You both held each other until the pain faded, talking to each other quietly in the embrace.

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[jjungkooksthighs]

Zenith

♊︎–Pairing: (X-02) Caleb x fem reader

♊︎–Genre: Angst, fluff, and smut

♊︎–Rating: 18+/ nsfw (mdni)

♊︎–Word Count: 17,200 words (31 pages y’all are in for it)

♊︎–Summary: After being torn away from you, your lover finally comes home to you after a mission alone and without you. You soon realize he hasn’t been taking care of himself in his separation from you and take it upon yourself to fix that in the ways that only you can. 

♊︎–Warnings: Possessive!X-02/Caleb, obsessive!caleb, soft dom!Caleb, sub! reader, mentions of blood, slick and pre-ejaculatory production, scenting, dirty talk (lbr I love that shit), praising, handjob, grinding, cunnilingus (oral f), creampie, breast worship (just a tad), breast/nipple play, nipping, sucking, begging, muscle kink, scratching, cum eating, manhandling, cursing, wet and messy sex (he’s hungry alr), size kink, face riding, pinning, lots of marking, fucked against the wall 

♊︎–A/N: I humbly present my first offering to fellow LADS and Caleb enthusiasts that was made with excitement following his myth release and then horniness when I started ovulating this week. I was extremely horny and this…well, this happened. 

The ticking of the clock, once a sound that elicited excitement in the promise of his return, now grates on your ears like the engines of the spaceship that has become a prison rather than a home to you. The clock’s sound, after years of longing fiercer than the sun, was harsh and unforgiving in its continual, ceaseless passing that waited for no one. 

Least of all the love of your life. 

It had been a blue moon the last time you’d been separated from him, but this mission that the higher ups had given you both had been unlike anything either of you had been assigned.

It had come after your paired scouting of the ruined planet of Philos, the life and greenery of the planet now a wasteland of death and scraps. 

You both had been tasked with discerning if the planet were habitable after years of quiet desolation, and after only a single moon on Philos, you had determined that the anger and sorrow of the system had harvested too deeply into the very soils to sustain more than the weeds that grew sadly from the split, fractured soil. 

You try to sleep, the dark canvas of space and array of stars offering you their respects in the dim, slow blinks of the white balls of light that colored the endless expanse before the glass panes of the viewport that act as bars between you and the limitless freedom of darkness beyond. 

That damn ticking. It doesn’t stop. Doesn’t even muffle itself in apology when you throw a pillow over your head as your thoughts fly to the terrible, cold abyss of the worst that could have happened to the only person who held your heart in his hands. 

You toss and turn, body sore and aching from being launched too hard into the metal of the training room walls when the training bot, who had taken the form of a large, mechanized Hoartfrost Wyrmload, had taken advantage of your momentary lapse of action when your lover’s face, twisted in pain, had flashed through your mind when you’d let it wander.

Had it not been for the powered exosuit you’d worn, you surely would have had bruises, much less broken bones. 

To punish you for your failure to clear the training floor unscathed as Ever’s most finely crafted and battle-hardened weapon, you had had to fight for hours in that fluorescently lit room, the loud clangs and broken whirrs of the bots slicing through the air as the black, blade-like extensions of your power cut them through. Sent out in waves, it had been relentless monotony, but you’d had no choice. 

The  organization’s manipulative, calculating leader would never allow you to see your lover-much less protect him from their malevolent experimentations-if you did not do their bidding. 

Only after 202 monsters and a decapitated Wyrmlord had the thick, heavy automated door risen and you’d all but run to your chambers, heart racing in excitement. 

Asta, the ship’s commandant and head of Ever, had told you that the he who your heart desired would finally, finally be allowed to rendezvous with you there after he debriefed the highest ranked officers on his mission that he’d been sworn to keep hidden even from you.

It’s been 2 days, 20 hours, and 2 minutes since his departure and each second feels like a decade in the excruciating torment of his absence. 

You curse under your breath, the sharpness of worry curving your nails inward toward your palm as the blanket your other half had made for you slides from your shoulders when you rise from your bed. Its warmth fails to offer even half the amount that your lover does, but you still cover your shoulders with it, imagining that it is him that envelops you as you pad forward toward the biggest of the translucent panels that overlooks the infinite space of the darkness. 

The brightest of the hot, white orbs of light of the stars looks like two joined stick figures, forever together in each other’s embrace as the two twin bodies who you’d named Pollux and Castor study you. 

It is the Gemini constellation– one that you find your attention drawn to in your lover’s absence. You press your hand against the glass, peering up at the star sign he was created under and praying to it to watch over him while you cannot. 

You liked to think that the stars knew when your lover was near and tried to commune with you in your bottomless worry whenever you were apart from him, for the glow of their light always seemed so much brighter when he was near. When he held you in his arms under them and spoke sweet, wonderful promises into your ear that he always, always kept. 

Right now, Castor and Pollux flare fiercely, almost as if to mock you in the biting, gnawing loneliness that only your lover could soothe. 

His name flits between your lips like an atom through space–quiet but there, refusing to be relinquished. 

The quiet of your chamber soon steals his name, its taunt loud in the seizure of it. 

You pull your blanket tighter around your barely clad body, the thin, short nightgown of black you’d worn to match your sinking spirits leaving much of you exposed to the prickling chill of the chamber that never was warm unless he was in it. 

“Hurry back to me, Caleb,” you whisper to the stars, hoping they will hear your plea, “I miss you.” 

The figures of light nestled within expanse of the endless sky of ebony twinkle as if to tell you they’ve received your wish, and then the only door admitting entry to your chambers directly behind you opens, all the way across the room, makes reverberating rumbling noises that grind your ears in their unpleasant din. 

The clock continues to chip away at time as if you aren’t enslaved to it. 

He’d have come to you by now if he were on the ship, and so you don’t bother to look away from the stars when you grouse, “If Asta has sent you to examine me out of concern for my performance, you can shove that bullshit up your ass.”

You’d become well acquainted with combat, your own code rewritten by Ever over and over again in their pursuit to make a heartless warrior capable only of doling out death and destruction. But your hardwiring had changed the moment your lover had laid his lips over yours, had professed his love so tenderly that it disassembled the walls around your heart and tuned it just to him. 

Footsteps sound from behind you, the thud of heavy boots not lifting a hair of fear on you. Their wearer moves with purpose, never standing still as they cross the open chamber toward you. They do not cease their magnetic pull toward you until they stand behind you, still and unmoving as the planetary systems before you. 

So absorbed in the memory of his smile that brought more light to your world than any moon and in eyes that have entire supernovas swirling within them, you don’t even notice the way your body has already begun to seek the one to the back of you. 

“I was told that it is good manners to speak when you’re spoken to. I don’t need an examination right now. Leave, because no one except X-02 may touch me.” You adjust the soft velvet blanket closer around you, wishing with the might of an entire galaxy that your lover was here with you. “You can tell Asta I’ll execute whatever Wanderer that Ever wants dead in two seconds flat if he just gives me the word. I’ll terminate it in exchange for what I really want.” 

Silence. 

A heart’s beat passes before strong, familiar arms encircle you around your middle, and instinctively, you let their bearer bring you against him. 

Were it anyone else, your impulse to fight would already have rendered them unconscious and in a heap on the floor. 

But you know this embrace. You’ve been swathed in it many, many times before.

Then, with a voice smoother than honey, “And what is it you really want, huh, pip-squeak? Surely it must be me.”

From the very first word he speaks, your entire soul seems to ascend, your attention uncontrollably tugged into those familiar, warm discs of nebulae that make a ring where irises should be that are of purple and pink. 

“Caleb…” You say his name like he’s a cosmos that has bewildered you, gazing up from where he stands over a head above you as one of your hands rises so your fingers can explore him in a gentle orbit along his cheekbone as if to prove to yourself that he’s here, that he’s not some holograph you unwittingly conjured up. 

The usual black visor he wears is gone, the same powered exosuit of black covering him from his neck down. It was the garb that most shook in terror upon seeing, but for you, it inspired only the weightless feeling of joy and joviality. 

. 

The sunset of his eyes bask you in their tenderness as he leans into your touch, a long, drawn out breath falling from between his lips as he relishes in the feeling of softness that only you can summon in a universe so twisted and cruel. 

“I’m sorry it took me so long to come back to you, pip-squeak.” He apologizes, the guilt caging each syllable while he tilts his head down so their sin is left at the crest of your forehead, his arms coaxing you more insistently into him so that not even the air can come between the two of you. “You were in my every thought whether I was awake or in hypersleep. Every second I spent away from you, I wanted to be by your side. I wanted to be with you in any way I could.”

His larger hands that rest on your abdomen move around the atmosphere of you, around each side of your waist, urging you to turn and face him. He rotates you as if you’re his very axis, and the truth of his confessions utterly disintegrates the sadness that had begun to pressurize between your ribs— that had begun to make even breathing a hard thing to do. 

In its undoing, however, the bottled up emotions you’d kept so carefully contained spiral out of control, overwhelming you such that you–without even a fraction of your strength–strike your fist against where his heart throbs for you. 

“You stopped responding to my messages and calls exactly at hour and minute 22:02. I thought something had happened.” Your eyes start to burn with the tears that threaten to escape, your fingers finding the edge of his jaw before you take his chin between them. He crumbles at your touch, his expression shifting to one of shame over his err as he lets you maneuver him closer like you’re the center of his gravitational field. “You aren’t allowed to do that to me, Caleb. I…I-” your voice deserts you, the tight lump that has formed in your throat forcing you to try to swallow past the worry that had been gripping you with the intensity of a thousand hands. 

I can’t lose you. 

His dark brows stretch toward each other, concern shooting through his eyes in their versions of meteorites before he rests his forehead against yours. “I’m here now, pip-squeak. It’s alright.” His fingers dig possessively into the soft flesh of your waist as if you might disappear if doesn’t hold onto you tight. “I want you to know that I lost contact with Ever when I went too far past the protofield protecting the ruined kingdom of Philos. It somehow fried my communication systems, pip-squeak.” His voice cracks under the weight of being alone, of being ripped away from you while he’d been able to do little but be Ever’s volatile weapon who it kept from exploding by using you as its collateral. “I couldn’t contact you no matter how many times I tried. When I returned, I demanded to see you, but they threatened to hurt you if I didn’t brief them on what had happened down there.” 

“You of all people know that I can handle myself,” you sniffle when the first tear falls, his irises tracking it as it descends down your cheek. Long, metallic digits of his right hand find it before it can douse his foot in your sadness as you croak, “I can handle anything so long as I am with you.” 

Your sadness, surely, is his Roche limit in how cataclysmic it is to him. Enough to make him want to collapse everything until only the two of you remain. But there was no escape from some gravitational phenomena. Phenomena like Ever that had invaded every corner of the universe and would never cease to persecute you until he tore it all down for you.

And to do that, he needed to get stronger. No matter what it took.

“I know, honey. I know that better than anyone. But I have to be Ever’s dog to keep you safe. You are their prized possession–but more importantly, mine.” He adds after a pause, irises locked onto your next tear on the other side of your face. He catches this with the same hand where no sensation kindles his receptors any longer–with the knuckle in the middle of where a human finger would have been– the cool wetness of your emotions putting his systems into alert. “Do you remember what  I told you when we went down to the remains of Philos together, Y/N?”

You nod against him, too choked up to answer beyond that even if you tried. 

You both had crash landed on that planet, only his metallic wings and the tortuous pain they caused him saving the both of you when your cruiser’s engine had failed. He’d become unconscious after using his body as a shield against terrain that had slowly been doomed to death by a planet that’s energy source had abandoned it. It had been your kiss that woke him, the distraction of your tender lips almost enough to negate the agonizing pain that stabbed into your every cell like pointed icicles from where your palms had been connected through the transfer port in your mechanical suits.

You’d felt the grimace and contorted expressions against your lips while you’d siphoned the sounds of his suffering into you, wishing with every fiber of your being that you could have taken all of it into yourself. 

So many times you had been forced–trapped– in the experimental glass pod, unable to do anything but watch while the only person your heart longed for had suffered, his heart-rending bellowings unfathomable and unescapable even when the prickling syringes and needles tried to erase your memories. 

Always they remained and lingered, just like the name you’d given him.

And his pain… it was beyond anything any creature should have been capable of bearing—an unholy force that consumed every part of him, twisting his insides, grinding his being into pieces. It wasn’t a simple ache or throbbing wound. It was as if every nerve in his body had been frozen and shot with ice, each pulse of agony a jagged shard of frigidity, carving deeper and deeper until he could no longer tell where anything was. 

But he never failed to recognize you and he had not hesitated to hold you close in his arms, cradling you there as if you were the most precious thing in his eyes as you both careened into the landscape of decay and desolation. He’d willingly taken the brunt–or rather, the entirety–of the fall for you, the idea of any harm coming to you more horrifying to him than his own death. 

His unconsciousness had become his enemy, his worst nightmare exerting itself upon him in a reaper’s scythe that brought only your sharp screams and wails, your lifeless, broken body in a heap while he’d held you against his chest. His own sorrow had flowed forth like a waterfall in the stream of crimson tears down his face, the grief and suffering breaking every part of him into pieces that attacked and impaled themselves into each other over and over again. 

He’d only escaped that haunting, horrible hell of darkness and cold worse than any winter was by following your voice that beckoned him back towards the soothing, warm light of life that he only found meaning in when you were the his moon that drew the waves of being forth, his very epicenter attracted to your beautiful, gentle core. 

In what once had been a lively, vibrant meadow rested nature’s cemetery. Only the sickly, warped weeds sprouted beneath him where you’d somehow managed to drag him against a dead trunk of a tree that had been split in half by the sickness  that had ravaged this land. 

But there you were, on your knees between his with your kind, nurturing lips planted between the part of his hair as you’d hummed the remains of the song he’d sung for you since you were children whenever he needed to calm you down. 

It was a song only you knew. A song that needed no words when your eyes could speak them so much clearer than any letters could hope to try to describe the meaning of. A song that, like a black hole, called forth everything that you both were to each other. It channels it all together before transforming, evolving, changing it into something so much more than any word could express. 

He’d confessed to you there, in that meadow on Philos–a once human inhabited planet that required massive amounts of energy, power, and sacrifice of one sovereign for many–what both of you had been held captive from admitting for so many years prior, your memories chipped and chaffed by the needle of Ever’s scientists that, until he’d grown strong enough to serve as a better candidate, had stuck into you. 

In effort to find a way to contain you, to control you, the head of Ever had assigned only one person to ever be your partner when sent on missions meant for bloodshed and annihilation of the monsters it had created. 

And oh, how hard he had fallen for you. It was as inescapable as trying to free himself from gravity. 

You grounded him. Enveloped and surrounded him in every sense of the word with your cute laughs, your pretty smiles, your glimmering eyes, your voice of silk that, even when you told a bad joke, still trilled softly and dulcetly in his ears. You were everywhere in his head and yet, so far away, as untouchable as the clouds in the sky up until that fateful day in the meadow. 

There, he’d let the confessions burst through his chest like some supernova, the bond you’d built together with him birthed anew under the crushing weight of what had been–and what could be–when he’d pierced through the deep space of the forbidden and uttered, the undeniable and undisputable.  He’d only ever wanted to be in your world, for he’d for so long yearned for a place beside you that was not one of imagination or observance from a distance. 

After all, he had been doomed to that tortuous fate before becoming your hunting partner when he’d been stuck behind that horrible glass wall with you trapped on the other side. 

And when he’d coaxed you close in that meadow, those same arms–one cold,  rigid, and bionic while the other was warm, pliant, and fleshly– led your front against the strong, chiseled chest covered in the dark fabric that lovingly clung to what little of his human body remained,  he’d declared a different kind of need–one that wanted to devour you from where you’d sat atop of him. 

You’d never forget the way his mouth had sought your ear, his breath hot against the shell of it as he’d said something that would lay eternally with you every time you closed your eyes. Every second that was spent in the shivering rigidness of his absence. 

“I want to feel your warmth, your heartbeat…Everything…I want you to stay with me…Forever.”

When he’d nuzzled his cheek against yours, coveting every moment of touch that made every single one of his receptors charged with what felt like electricity zipping through his body, you’d let him, the obsessive flare in his eyes sparking something baser in you that only ignited deliciously more when he touched you like you were his entire world and looked at you like you were a celestial creature descended from the sun, the moon and the stars. 

No amount of testing or experimentation on you could erase that memory. He’d made sure of it, hiding that, among what remained of your memories with him, inside a small pocket of a void in your mind that even Ever could not touch after many attempts spent honing his power for your sake. 

Only two months and two days have passed since then, but he’d turned your world upside down and become the equator of your system far, far before then. It was as if your kiss had been the unavoidable calamity that had made his desires collide and converge, their amalgamation too powerful for him to resist in your magnetic pull whenever he saw you, smelled you, thought of you. 

And now, as he stands before you as solid as the glass at your back, that same reaction, set off by every atom that made you up, has you repeating those words he’d spoken to you by the remains of that charred yet living tree stump on Philos. The same stump had had the beginnings of moss attached to it, the two bodies of alternate forms helplessly clinging to each other even after their environment had been unforgiving to them. 

Under the intensity of those nebulous eyes powerful enough to make you fall to your knees, you repeat what your lover had professed so ardently to you, his yearning dressing the guilt that is draped under his eyes. It is enough to take your breath away when his long, mechanical fingers wrap around your wrist where you had been dragging your own digits down towards his lips. 

He leads your digits to them, the pads of your own fingers steered along the edge of his mouth before they follow the outline of his lower, fuller lip. It has become cracked in the aridity of whatever planet he’d been sent to, and you wet your own as you stare, unabashedly at his. 

Embarrassment that had once perched heavily over your shoulder at the very thought of him no longer does in the nest he’s made in your chest, and so the words fly free when he draws your digits over and along his thinner upper lip to his defined Cupid’s bow. It, too, is dry and begging for the nourishment only you can give. 

“You are dehydrated, Caleb. You weren’t taking care of yourself again,” you whisper, the nerves in your still human digits crackling with sensation when he pilots them so they catch and carry the plumpness of his lower lip down, his saliva seeking you before the pink of his lip returns to contain it after your fingers have been conducted toward the corner of his jaw so you can hold him there. 

Your touch sends sparks down his spine, and he relishes in the warmth of you that no sun could ever hope to emit as he closes his eyes, nudging into your hand while he utters, “That does not matter to me when there are more important things that require my attention.” 

The meaning of that is not lost on you, and you knew well the lengths he would go to shower you in every iota of his devotion as vast as space itself. His calibration had, for a long time, been warped in its centering all around you, and so descript was it that he often forgot to attend to his own needs as long as yours were. You’d since figured out a way to navigate that, for it burned you to see him neglect himself for your sake. 

“I’m thirsty, Caleb. Carry me to the kitchen, will you?” You ask, affection flowing forth like water when he gives a smile that could light up any room at your request. You encircle your arms around his neck, needing this closeness just as much as he does after being away from you too long. 

“You don’t have to tell me twice, pip-squeak,” his hands travel down from where they’d been resting on your hips, ginger and gentle as they glide from your sides downward past the curve of your backside to their destination on the backs of your legs. 

When he’s wound his fingers around the underside of your thighs, it takes little effort for him to hoist you up against him, your legs automatically wrapping around his waist like he is your own charging port. Unlike you, part of him has been fused with metal, his right arm lost to Ever’s unassailable greed for perfection in creating life that was as dangerous as it was perfect. 

Created to serve as your precursor–your corrupted guardian and watchdog–your body had been spared over the trials done on his so that you could be the organization’s angel of blood and slaughter. 

With you held closely in his arms, he crosses the distance of the open concept chamber complete with a long, rectangular coffee table made entirely of glass that is accented by two black leather couches in front and behind it. On the far side of it are two lounge chairs, one smaller than the other, arranged next to each other and facing the viewport with its wide view of the stars and dark sky. The larger one is worn and has small tears in its armrests from where he’d gripped them so hard during many dawns and dusks spent either with you in his head, on his lap, or between his legs. 

On one end of the parlor is an impressively sized bedroom, grand bathroom, and boudoir, the last of which he’d built himself using his Evol, his sweat, and his hands. On the other end of the sitting room, there is a sleek kitchen of chrome appliances, grey cabinets, and a sizable island of white marble that looked like the moon’s dust had settled across it. 

It is here that your lover brings you, unwilling to let you go even for a moment as he strides to the refrigerator and waits patiently for you to open it. 

In the short time he’d gathered you in his arms, you’d been swept astray into the whirling domain of his eyes, and when he arches a brown brow upward in a teasing move that gets your pulse quickening, you pry your sights away from him. 

Like he is your own force of momentum, your inertia is swift to alter its state and you open the refrigerator door, quickly procuring the pitcher of apple juice he’d prepared for you the morning he’d left. The note written on a sticky note still remains stuck to its side, the words ‘Made with love for my special, beautiful girl whom I miss dearly’ smudged from the oils on your fingertips as you’d held it.

 Only a quarter of the amber colored liquid remains, for you’d been unable to resist the sweet taste that reminded you so much of him when it fell across your tongue. He doesn’t question your choice of drink when he notices the bent edges of the sticky note that must have been anxiously fiddled with by your fingers while you’d waited for him. 

Instead, he teases you once again as he turns to place you on the island behind you. “Missed me, didn’t you, pip-squeak?”

“You taught me that missing someone is wanting them to be with you even when they can’t be. And every minute you were away, I wished for you to be here with me, by my side.” You confess, the frigid and hard stone under you a stark contrast to the calefaction he radiates. Not wanting to let him go, you ask, “By the way, can you get me the glass I left at the edge of the counter? My arm isn’t long enough to reach it.”

Your admission has his blood rushing to his face, a grin that even Cupid would have been jealous of crossing his face. 

“But of course, my lady,” he bows his head in obedience, the playfulness jumping off each vowel tugging at the chords of your boundless feelings for him. “One glass for the pretty girl coming right up.”

As if every second of your touch had charged him up, he dutifully reaches around you for the apple-shaped glass you’d left out earlier. The small action has him leaning forward, his hot breath fanning against your lips. Like this, you can tell that the usual lively color of those lips of his that are vibrant like a flower’s petal in spring had lost some of their vivid pigmentation, the lack of proper nutrition stealing it from him. 

It makes your stomach twist, even the basic tenets of self-care eradicated from his mind when all but you dwelled in it during the times he was separated from you. 

With the cup in tow, he rises back to his full height, oblivious as usual to his malnourished state that only befell him when he was away from you.  Anger worms its way through you, an anger that would bury itself in you until you’d found a way to save him from the assholes that sent him on that godsforsaken mission and did this to him. 

“How much do you want, pip-squeak?” He inquires, taking the pitcher from you and pouring the sparkling juice forth from it. 

His voice cools the ire that had been slithering inside your stomach, but jealousy over a damned cup that had apprehended his attention away from you makes you possessively squeeze him between your thighs where he stands. 

He makes a surprised sound at that, the sound making you ascend as it tumbles from his cracked lips. 

Your resolve hardens as you watch him selflessly tend to you through the stream of juice that conforms to the shape of the cup he’d crafted for you. 

“Give it all to me.” You tell him, impatient for his attention again to be attached to you. 

The burbling stops, and finally, those eyes of his rush toward yours like fucking meteorites.

“I told you before, pip-squeak,” His fingers constrict around the neck of the pitcher, the glass cracking under the pressure of him as he sets it down, “If it’s my unique scent you want,” with his other hand, he brings the cup of juice under your lips, “a uniform filled with memories,” he tips the cup just the slightest bit toward you, your mouth parting to accept the cold, tart liquid over your tongue, “or even the authority to command me,” the last few words siphon something hungry in you despite the liquid that is beginning to fill your mouth, the slender, metallic digits of his other palm slipping around the back of your neck to tilt your head back so more of the juice can spill between your lips with its sweet tinge, “I’ll make sure you get everything you could ever ask for.”

You hold eye contact with him like he might vanish if you don’t keep him held under the whirling pressure of you, tipping your chin back more as he encourages you with the hand he holds you with while he keeps you close, just as unwilling to be too far away from you. 

The sight of you–your legs spread with him nestled between them and your wet, soft lips accepting what he feeds you as you let him lean you back, willing and pliable for him–makes the still-fleshy organ in his netherregion harden where he’s confined in his powered exosuit.

He observes you with captivation starring the corner of his purple-pink orbs, watching the honey-colored juice disappear into the cavern between your lips as it pours forth into you. Each mouthful of it down your throat has him feeling as though his internal temperature has begun to overheat, a different kind of steam demanding to be let out when the last of the contents of the drink flow into the chamber of your mouth. 

You don’t swallow this one. 

Rather, you lift one of your hands, making a come-hither gesture with your finger while intention–magnifying and polarizing–harnesses him to you like a magnet. 

He knew you more intimately than you knew yourself, and so the realization that dusks over his countenance casts you into the heatwave of his fierce, intense emotions once reserved only for his mind. 

As tall as he is, his shadow shades you in the soft light of the moon that sits in the distance of the dark realm outside as your lover’s front falls forward, one of his hands closing around the edge of the counter as he husks. “You’re a bad liar, pip-squeak. You can’t fool me. You want me to drink from you that badly, huh?” the glass he’d been pressing against your lips is put down, his irises dipping from yours to your mouth before his index comes upon one side of your cheek where his thumb spans your other, his other knuckles urging your chin up so that you can’t escape the all encompassing gravity of his affliction for you. His hot breath fans your lips as he draws inevitably nearer, “You can be such a silly girl, and yet-”

Waiting for him to come to you is an eternity you can’t possibly bear, and when finally he closes the distance between you– two masses of matter inextricably colliding and crashing together as you seek each other’s every molecule in a searingly passionate kiss–the natural release of the liquid you’d been storing for him is diffused into the chasm of his mouth, his groan short-circuiting you as he deepens the kiss, the fusion between you expelling reason and logic until all there is is him. 

More you give and more he takes, his long tongue flitting over yours while he explores you like it’s the first time.   

Against your mouth, he breathes, “You’re irresistible to me. I can’t stop myself from falling for you. Every. Single. Time.” The words are passed between voyages of his mouth as he returns, over and over again, to his origin point of you, fire licking up at you from where he’s connected to you. 

His fingers depress themselves into your flesh as if you are the foundation he needs to stay afloat in the depth of his all consuming weakness for you, the slight pressure that action imposes on you making your lips pucker against his where you feed the still crisp juice to him. Stray trails of it dribble down your chin, your neck and then between the valley of your breasts that strain against the low v-cut nightgown hardly even reaching past your ass. 

You’d chosen it knowing it was his favorite of the many he’d stitched and sewn himself just for you. He’d taught you a great many things about feelings, emotions, and that little thing called desire, and you’d begun to see just how much-with the tiniest of actions or words- you jumbled his impulses and want that only you could rewire, rewrite, and reshape. 

“Caleb,” you grapple for the leather strap overlaying his powered exosuit below where the amber colored crystal is embedded at the base of his neck, his mouth claiming yours as you pull him closer, needing him everywhere and anywhere you can have him in the visceral summonings only he can make well up within you. Your shallowing breaths and spit swirl together in the clash of your tongues and teeth, neither of you able to resist the other.

He swallows what makes it past the ring of his lips, hungry for more even when your lungs begin to burn from lack of air, and in their enviousness,  rip you away from him. 

Like the wane of a moon, his eyes have gone dark when he breaks the seal of his mouth over yours, the string of saliva bridging you to him refusing to snap until he straightens, his index smearing the remains of his own essence over your upper lip as he utters, “My name isn’t a safe word, pip-squeak. Saying it won’t make me stop.” His hand slides into your hair while the other now has the counter in an iron-grip as he battles to control himself, his lips coursing toward the edge of your mouth where his finger had been. The pink of his tongue slips from between them to lap up in a long, wet stripe as he collects the pleasing, saccharine remnants of apple juice that had escaped. “You just make me want more.”

Your eyelids flutter at the sensation, his words making heat bloom in the apex between your thighs that you hadn’t even realized you’d begun to rut against him in search of friction where they are still wound, with the rest of your legs, around his waist. 

“Y-you made it spill,” you stammer when that knowing muscle betwixt his lips is brought under the edge of the other side of your own. There, he leaves the slick of his saliva from his tongue’s travels downwards as he gathers the taint of sticky, sugary remains on you there, too. 

“You think that was an accident, baby? It wasn’t.” His hand slinks toward the back of your head so he can take a handful of your locks and gently guide you down until your back meets the hard plane of the counter. Reduced to a weightless mass in the omnipresent skies of him you could forever exist within,  you can do little but wait for him to maneuver you, your own digits holding on tighter to the leather strap below his neck where he hovers above you because somehow, someway, you needed to keep yourself by him, the void of space observing you from outside the glass walls of your chambers both a hope and a curse. 

“Mmm… Thank you for feeding me. That was good,”  He hums, the transparency of his yearning there in his eyes, showing the basest part of him sequestered in the far reaches of his orbs while he continues his devoted descent, the passage of his mouth one that follows the winding paths of the existing tracks of liquid that had traveled south along your throat and chest from earlier. Each time his soft lips land, the hot of his tongue is there to scavenge for your taste that has become deliciously mixed with that of apples. Between them, he tells you, “I missed you so much, pip-squeak.”Craving more of you, he keeps driving his mouth to the ocean that is you, the wet sound of his kisses on your flesh and devoutness of his touch making everything else sink away. 

Before they can completely desert you, you need him to know something. You hardly stutter his name out in a poor excuse for his attention, but it is enough for him to pause, his mouth ghosting the spot between your collarbones where’d he’d been laving the pink muscle along the trails of the sweet liquid that had converged into one before dripping down your chest. 

“What is it, my sweet girl?” He questions, tilting his head to the side so the ebony of his bangs falls just over the one eye that he usually sweeps free of his fringe. “Did I do something wrong?”

“You’re not allowed to leave me like that again. It felt like one half of me was missing. Like there was an empty hole in my chest the entire time you were gone.” You tug him down with you, the metal of the roboticized fingers of his right hand bracing him by one side of your head while his other cradles the back of your skull. His breath hitches when you confess, “It was like that hole sucked up all of the happiness and good in my world because you were not in it.”

Before him, you’d been a stranger to all but death, your swords sharp and your orders from the scientists at the lab unforgiving. But despite missions of bloodshed and piercing, terrorizing screams, everyday you’d both watched each other from behind the see-through wall of your glass cages. You’d listened to his stories and musings raptly while inextricably drawn to his side like he was the center of all gravity, your palms separated by the barrier between you when you weren’t trapped in your glass pod. 

He had always been the only source of sensation or sentiment, and in him, you’d found what only he could give: home. 

He can feel the vulnerability that has locked your muscles in place, so he croons, “I’m here now. Nothing will take me away from you ever again. We will always be together.” 

“Promise me,” you don’t let his words drift away from you, the echo of a vow made when you’d both been much smaller surfacing in the back of your mind, “Promise me again, Caleb. I won’t forgive you if you break it.”

Something flickers behind the window of his eyes. The tenderness that colors his voice dulls everything but him, even the clock’s ticking muted when he answers, the blizzard of the air pushed away when the summer of his breath blows along your chin from where he looks fondly down at you, “I promise, my one and only.”

When you relax beneath him, your ligaments freed from their invisible chains, you use the grip you have on the leather strap to lead him to your waiting lips, the sincerity of his words tangible in the featherlight brush of his lips over yours that makes your heart skip a beat. He must hear that,  because he deepens the kiss as if he can circumfuse all of his love into you through that action alone. Insistence takes over, and you relish in it when he slots his mouth harder into yours, not willing to release you from the endless expanse of his ardor for you until oxygen–the damned nuisance–tears you away from him once again.

His breaths are short and shallow while they coalesce with yours, his chest heaving above you where your other hand–the one not already clutching the thin strap below his throat–rises so your fingers can carefully trace the outline of his lips that are fine and fair, almost like satin. No longer are they dry, the sheen of your spit there, embracing them in your care for him while he stares lovingly at you. His lips are so malleable, so nimble as your digit glides across them, his mouth pursuing your hand as if to forage for more of your warmth. 

“Affection?” You pose the question, a fledgling still to the ways of showing the indescribable ways he makes you feel when you’d spent so much of your life behind a glass case. 

His orbs soften under the silver light of the moon that all but makes him glow when he affirms, “Affection. Do you need me to shower you in affection, my one and only?”

Your fingers gravitate down his chin, his throat, the upper plane of his chiseled, muscled pectoral where his own heart pounds fiercely and quickly, like it, too, is trying to reach for you; like it, too, preens happily under your touch and attention. Your own thrums against your ribcage to the same hurried rhythm as if in a dance of passion, neither able to step away from the other. 

Swept into that symphony of sensation that only he could orchestrate, you don’t hesitate when you answer, “Yes. As long as it is you, the answer will always be yes.” 

You watch his veiled control crease his thick brows and diverge his lips, a fragmented breath leaving him when the hard, cool, robotic fingers of his right hand circle around your forearm to direct your open palm up, the sculpted realm of his body hidden by the mesh of his suit where his chest is before the rigidness of alloy encases his throat and shoulders. 

At the base of his throat that alloy is carved out to contain a golden crystal, and it is here that he lets your fingers hover, waiting for you to tap it so you can press the series of holographic buttons only you know the right combinations to. 

“Humans show affection in many ways. But there are ways they do it that are only done when they have found their other half…their one and only.” The metal of his hand ascends up your arm until his palm is pressed against the back of yours, the interconnected phalanges of his fingers bending around yours as he tells you, “Kissing is one way of it. But to let the one person you share the deepest of bonds with feel and see you–all of you– so they can accept and welcome that, too…that’s another way. And I want you to do that with me, my precious girl. I want you to accept every part of me.” 

With his digits wrapped around yours, your index lightly pushes against the crystal nestled between the two notches of his collarbones, the familiar amber light of the holographic panel coming to life before you. You don’t need to look down at it anymore, opting instead to glimpse the nebulas of his eyes that glint intensely at you while your fingers move with practiced ease over each of the three symbols amid the pyramid displayed before you. 

After you’ve hit the final one, there’s a series of chinks and chimes, the nanotechnology embedded in his suit fluorescing in particles of purple that ripple outwards from around the crystal, the flow of light extending outward from it as the black mesh and alloy disintegrate everywhere the light falls like a tide of violet over the glorious sculpture of his body.

Inch by inch the canvas of him is bared to you, neither of you hearing the thud of the abandoned crystal hitting the ground beneath you when the art in front of you captures all of your attention, the polar pull too strong for you to resist even if you wanted to when your eyeline veers down his body in a mouthwatering view that has both sets of your lips slickening. 

Years of modification, missions, and maintained training regimen had corded every bit of him in muscle, his abdomen etched into six defined, sharp blocks across his middle. Framed by two more below, he’s a well-made mosaic of a human being. Even his pectorals are cut seamlessly in their curvatures that cling to the rest of him, his broad, strong shoulders accenting it all where the left arm connected to them looks as if it has been stroked entirely with thick thew from his bicep to his forearm. From the back of his hand, thick veins branch out, the raised lines offshooting up his forearm. 

Where flesh and that same muscle should have wound down his other arm, the metal of a robotic replacement remains. Like a restoration piece, it attempts to match its mirror in the sinuous, sinewy make that no longer can receive feeling beyond pain. 

He senses the subtle squirm of your fingers where they now rest against his sternum, your basest receptors  within itching to rediscover him. 

 “Go on, pip-squeak. Feel me,” he implores, trailing the hand of yours that he still holds down across his pectoral until your palm rests just over the strong, erratic palpitations of his heart, “This is all yours. It always has been.” 

The beat of the organ beneath your hand pushes your own along, your fingers becoming curious travelers that wander along the mountainous range between his pectorals, the smaller pads of each of your five fingers crossing along, under, and around every contour and curve of him upward from his defined collarbones to the blocks of muscle lining his abdomen. Somewhere along the way, his hand detaches from yours, his knuckles turning white where grips onto the counter so you’re pressed between the pleasing warmth of his body and the cold foundation of the countertop. 

Each stroke of your fingers along the plains of his chest has his breaths deepening like each touch both satisfies and starves him, and when your fingers roam down a little too far past the slabs of thew settled over his stomach, that’s when he nestles his nose into the crook of your neck, his balmy breath sweeping over the sensitive area on the side of your throat as he inhales the essence of you before he checks, “You want to go there, my darling? Are you sure?”

You had never cared to know what pleased a man before him. But years of tension and longing for this man before you had built up inside you and made you overflow and fucking brim with want that could only be fulfilled by him. 

No one had ever asked what you wanted, much less if you were clear on what it was you even thought you wished for in the first place. 

But he had. He always had. 

That is why your own digits drift downward until they amble along one side of the impressively large shaft standing at attention between his thick, muscled thighs, fingers skimming along the ridges of his proud cock. 

“Fuck,” he curses when you reach his base, only able to get half of your hand around him before ascending. “You really did miss me, didn’t you, my sweet girl?”

“Can I show you?” You turn your head, lips searching for his where they linger along your sternocleidomastoid muscle lining the side of your throat. You peer at him with innocent doe-eyes that are enough to make him into your slave if you wished it. “I know how because of you.” You squeeze him lightly–deliciously– under the bulbous head of his cock, transfixed by the way his eyes become hooded while your hand descends down back to his engorging base just the way he’d taught you to.

Unable to ever deny you when you look at him like that, he breathes out, “You know you can do whatever you want to me, pretty girl.” His handsome expression contorts into one of contained pleasure, his brows pulling together and mouth falling open when you handle him just a little faster, your thumb spreading the newly rolled beads of pre-cum over the mushroom-shaped tip of his length that made your own mouth and sex cry out of need for him. 

“This body is yours, baby.” He emits a long, drawn out sound of pleasure when you stroke him there and back, your other fingers brushing at the swelling bulbs of his balls beneath his sumptuously sized cock. You feel, fascination pooling in your core, the way the veins that wrap around his member have begun to jump excitedly under your touch, and gods, did the man in front of you look delicious when in the throes of rapture only you could bring. 

Watching him was addicting. It was like a drug that you could never, ever, stop taking, your brain and very blood now so dependent and entrenched in the sights, sounds, sensations, and thoughts of him that it could no longer fire correctly unless your fix was with you–or inside you. 

“Mine.” You repeat, your hand picking up the speed you rub him up and down with, your other fingers curling around one of his engorging balls and massaging it before giving the same attention to the other. He inclines his head as if in deference, irises loyally bowing down to yours, for he is utterly weak to your ministrations. 

Your voice and touch are his aphrodisiac, and in his absence, he’d become so very starved for you. 

“You’ve become so good at this, haven’t you? You’re going to make me cum for you if you keep going like this, pretty girl.” He pants laboriously, concentration painting its way across his face when you tighten your grip around him, the vice of your hand making the top of of his length weep, its wetness drawn down by you every so often when you wind and twist your hand around his large, fleshy head before dragging it back down. “Feels so fucking good, pip-squeak. I taught you too well, didn’t I?”

“I had a very good teacher,” you agree, your legs securing around him harder in your keenness to bring him closer because as near as he is, you need him more than the air that hovers between you while you rub at his testicles with one of your hands and other, becoming a vice around his cock, gropingly glides along his length without pause–without abandon– your joined flesh making obscene sounds of his slick and wetness as you please him. 

His breaths become heavier the faster you go, knuckles going whiter than snow as he fights to contain his release that he can feel quivering in the base of his balls all the way to the curving arc of his cock that reaches for you in its beautiful, long curvature. 

He’s so fucking close. He’s just at the fucking edge of the precipice of his release, but that end that suspends itself over him now is not the one he had envisioned upon his return to you. The appetite he had for you made him hunger for another, more carnal means. One that only you could parch the cavern of his mouth from. 

No, he needed you in a different way. He could wait. He was no stranger to that when it came to you. 

“Yeah? Well as much as I want to cum for you, pretty girl,” both of his larger hands seize your wrists, pinning them above your head, his cock pressing against the wailing apex between your legs as he tells you, “You did so well to feed me earlier, and now I want more. I’m so hungry, pretty girl. And only you can satisfy me.”

“Hungry?” You moan when he gives a purposeful roll of his hips into you, the tip of his fully erect cock a little ways under his belly button yet the rest of him sliding deliciously along your folds. 

He chuckles low when you moan at the way his cock slides against the button of nerves above your folds when he undulates those toned hips of his again. 

“Yes, baby. Starving.” The space around your arms shifts and invisible streaks erupting through it before the colorless, leaden matter set alight by embers shoots down around your forearms and hands, his Evol over gravity tethering you in place so his hands can wrap around your thighs, pulling them over each of his broad shoulders so he’s got your ass resting against his sternum and your sex inches from his waiting mouth.“I told you before…I want everything you are willing to give me. That includes your sweet, delicious honey.”

You don’t resist him. You’re exactly where you want to be right now while his irises lower to where you’re bare for him. He sucks in a breath, staring like he’s looking a fucking meal, “You left yourself bare for me…what a needy girl. But you know, I like my girl needy for me. That’s hot.”

He inhales deeply through his nose, your intoxicating scent making his eyes roll back before those heavy tendrils of his power, receptive to his hunger, pull at the edges of your nightgown. They slowly tug it up your body, each sliver of skin you present to him making his salivary glands water as he swallows around a suddenly dry throat. And between his legs, his cock hardens impossibly more when the fabric of your nightgown crests over your perfect, pert breasts, the peaks of which are stiff and demanding of his attention. You’re already glistening with wetness for him, the evidence of your arousal evident in the sheen of it that coats your cunt from your earlier illicit activity. 

“pip-squeak…you’re so beautiful.” It’s a remnant of his usual voice that comes out, for you’ve stolen his ability to breathe not for the first time, and certainly not for the last. “Please let me have you right here on the counter in our kitchen. I’ll make you feel good just like I always do. I’ll take such good care of you, baby.”

Ever mindful of you and your wishes, he gives you the chance to decide. And ever the light to his shadow, you could sooner reject him than the moon could halt its wayward journey around the solar system. 

“I’m all yours, Caleb.” You muster, your own words rushed under the current of his eyes that garner every bit of your attention. 

“Do you have any idea what you do to me when you say that, my sweet girl?” The pink of his tongue peeks from between his lips, stretching and elongating before it gently passes itself along the slit of your sex, licking up in a long, wet stripe before it curls back into his mouth, the thick glaze of you covering it before it disappears between his lips. “You make me want to please you so fucking much. I won’t be able to stop until you’re a moaning, writhing mess for me.” His eyes darken as the essence of you spreads itself across every taste bud, his fingers coiling harder into your thighs. “I’m going to eat you out until I am satisfied, my sweet girl. Until you fill my fucking mouth with your precious come.”

He doesn’t give you time to respond after that, for he attaches his mouth to your cunt like a man starved, his mouth becoming a circle of searing suction that demands everything you have. The tang of you is unlike any savory substance he’s ever had across his palate, and mixed with the sugary drippings of apple juice that had coursed down from your breasts to your belly to the thin thatch of hair that his nose is now buried in, you’re a mix of delicacy and sin that he will never tire of supping. 

“C-Caleb…ah-” You stutter when that expert of a tongue of his sidles between your folds, lapping you up like he’s a dog. 

“Mmm, you taste so fucking delicious, baby,” he hums against your sex, the metal of one hand glinting in the silvery moonlight as he slides it up the supple curves of your body until his fingers are wound around your breast. There, he kneads into your flesh, loving the show of expressions dressed in your satisfaction that you bear to him while you are made the receiver of his gluttony. “Your tits are so perky and perfect just like the rest of you. I love how they fit in my hands, pretty girl.” The strong muscle that he glides between your labia there and back makes a sweltering heat begin to pool in the basest part of you, the fingers he has on your breast running over the dusky bud of your areola before they roll it between them. “I can’t wait to put my mouth on them later.”

Your spine arches at that, the beauteous arc of that making him ache between his legs as he ravenously suckles you like you’re a meal he’s happy to wolf down, your very essence slathered across his tongue where he flattens it between your soddened lips, dragging it up and over your hole that clenches around nothing while he consumes you with the vigor of a man drunk on the high of you. 

“Yes, fuck…more, pretty girl. Feed me more,” his words are muffled with his mouth still swathed around you, the flat of his tongue splaying itself over your hole only to twist around it in frenzied rotations to draw out more tears of your need from it. “You’re so fucking good.”

Freer than water over the brim of a cup, your voice spills from your throat, “P-please, Caleb…Please.”

With your pleas drawn forth from you, thirst saturates his orbs as he sucks you between his teeth, the sounds of his slurping causing an even fiercer wave of desire to engulf you as your sex sheds even more slick for him. He catches it all onto his tongue with fervor, the resulting sigh of his satisfaction joining the filthy sounds of your passion that you make together.

“You want this tongue inside you, baby?” He mouths from where his mouth is melded to you, “What my sweet girl wants is what she will get.” His last word is swallowed by your cunt when the tip of his tongue slips into your hole, and he slowly sinks into you inch by delicious inch. You keen at that, and when he flicks it against your walls side to side, it makes the warmth of bliss surge up through your fucking veins from where he’s fixed to you with each devastating flick of it along your plush, velveteen insides that welcome him eagerly. 

There’s nothing languid about the way it writhes along the soft cushion of your walls, the movements of it wild and fevered like he can’t get enough of your addicting flavor as he uses the possessive grip he’s got on the pillow of your thigh to impel himself deeper inside you while you tighten around him. With his tongue still lodged within you, he mumbles, “Be a good girl and wrap your legs tighter around me, baby. I want to feast on you as much as I can. Can you do that for me?”

The vibrations of his voice are carried along his tongue and straight into the bundle of nerves nestled deep within you. You barely manage to comprehend his request, your brain malfunctioning under the burrowing of his tongue farther into you so you’re stuffed unbelievably with the wet length of him while he palms at your breast, twiddling your nipple between his thumb and index while heat coils in your core.

In the absence of your mind’s input, your walls constrict around him and your body obeys him, your thighs closing around his head to keep him lodged between your legs, your ankles crossing over each other so your heels can secure and lock him in place.

“There you go.” His words are smothered by your cunt as he dines on you, “That’s it, pretty girl.” He guzzles you between his lips, tongue grazing and gliding over each and every edge and lineation of your silken basin until no part of you has not been left lathered in his saliva while his other hand joins its counterpart so on your neglected breast. 

You feel those familiar tendrils of his Evol holding your hips in place, even his own power refusing to relinquish you while his hand cups the underside of your tit, thumb dragging itself along your nipple while his artificial palm fondles your other. 

You cry out at the series of sensations that don’t pause or let up, his eyes misting over in the haze of his desire that demands every bit of you as he breathes in your inebriating aroma that drives him fucking mad. 

You call out his name, begging for him once again, and it earns you another twirl of his tongue around the tunnel of your pussy as he intones, “I know, pretty girl. I’m making you into a desperate little mess. But don’t worry, I’ll make you come soon, baby. I want you to cream all over my face just as badly as you do.” He draws in a deep breath of you at the same time that vulgar tongue of his swivels inside you, his fingers playing with the buds of your nipples while you moan loudly as the coil in your core tautens. “You’re getting close already, huh, baby? It makes me feel so good to be able to listen to you sing for me while I pleasure you. Shit...I just can’t get enough of you.”

You entice him even nearer with your legs, squeezing him between your thighs by way of answer, your words lost to the pleasure that steadily begins to wind around your lower abdomen all the way to your brain. Your hips try to buck against him in search of more friction, but his Evol keeps you in place, unable to move while he tongue-fucks you, swallowing every now and again the taint of your own appetence. 

He notices that small movement of your hips, listens to your resulting whine when you are halted from that endeavor, because then the tendrils of his Evol that had been binding you still from above and below your waist start to conform to your shape, the makeshift digits acting as hands that support you down your back and ass rather than tethering your hips in place. 

“Ride my face, pretty girl,” he instructs as the hot length of his tongue penetrates the tight ring of your hole, immediately striking you frenetically along your walls while he’s swaddled in the vice of your cunt that clenches around him. “Remember what I taught you.” 

His encouragement fires the sparks of your action, and you immediately follow his directive. Your hips roll into him, the border of your lips catching on his nose and just barely hitting the edge of the bundle of nerves crowning your cunt while his fingers gently trace the pebbling outline of your nipples. Your mouth soon falls open to emit the wanton sounds of your blissful rhapsody. 

Headiness makes the air heavy between you, your back bowing at the tantalizing thrill that he arouses in you while he continues to flit his tongue in rampant, gyrated motions inside you while you grind yourself against his face like he’d told you to while he praises, “Just like that. You’re doing so well for me, baby. You’re so nice to suck on while you’re using my face to feel good.” 

Over and over you oscillate your hips against him, for each time producing a faster, fevered rhythm in the back-and-forth of the hot muscle of his tongue against you while he swills your piquant quintessence into his mouth. His hands never stray from your breasts, devoted to the peaks of your tits that have peaked under his constant attention. His irises smolder you in his zealousness, and you can’t escape the wildfires they make you burn with as he lavishes his love on you. 

Inevitably, the coil of need that had been building inside you threatens to burst, and he knows it, because when he buries his face even farther into you, angling his chin in this way and that so he can lave his tongue up the far end of your walls before pivoting it provokingly at places you didn’t even know existed in the trench of you, he feels the way you grip onto him harder, your sex contracting harder around him while he coos, “Yeah, fuck, I’m so hard for you, baby. Keep going.” 

Your hips hasten their pace, chasing the ecstasy that twines itself tighter in the base of your belly with every sway of them along the lower half of his nose, cheeks, and mouth. Your breaths have become shallow, barely a figment of what they once were where you whimper for him. The globes of your breasts heave up and down even with his hands still covering and rubbing at your rigid peaks while you rock yourself shamelessly on him, deliriousness spewing into him as you careen toward your end. 

“Tell me how good I am, baby.” His voice is smothered by you, his tongue drowning most of the syllables in the depths of you, “Tell me I’m the only one who can make you into a wet, dripping mess that wants no one but me. Let me hear your voice, pretty girl, and I’ll give you what you want so badly.”

You grind like a craven creature  along the bridge of his nose all the way down to the end of his chin, the gleam of your taint left in your continual passage atop of him, your entire system flushed with the same frenzy he takes you with. 

Coherency has forsaken you now, its forebear of wantonness left to overwhelm you in its place. 

It is why you moan out, “You’re so good to me, Caleb. So, so good. Better than anyone could ever be,” you throw your head back, and he sees the whites of your eyes when his tongue streaks faster than a comet back and forth within your plush galaxy that he could spend years exploring, words slurred from your efforts as you soddenly cant your hips astride him while avarice incarnate churns your core and cunt. “No one can fuck me like you, touch me like you do, or kiss me like you do. No one, and absolutely no one, can love me as you do.” 

The words are but echoes of a chant he’d been your maestro for, aiding and directing your notes of enthrallment for him while he’d pitched you into an impassioned  dance your body had responded only to him with. 

Your answer activates something feral in him, his pupils blowing wide and nearly absorbing the circlets of compressed morning dawn in them. Metal fingers take your chin between them, maneuvering your attention back to him and all you can see are the dimmed nebulae of his eyes as the space above where you both have become one distorts and distills. The tendrils of his Evol divaricate and break through it, reaching down until-

“Only I can have you like this. Now look at me when I make you cum, baby. I want you to remember this memory of me between your legs and never, ever forget it. You’re going to recognize me by sight, smell, touch, sound…everything.” Your eyes snap open and latch onto him when the cumbrous, corpulent striations of his Evol, all at once, press down on your clit in a feeling akin to hundreds of tiny palpitations and pulses against the bundle of nerves as he manipulates gravity solely for you. Your gasp is garbled and your hips jerk and jounce at the sudden flux of sensations, and then his other hand is there, on your hip, to help you keep going while his tongue makes schlepping noises where he fervently frisks it up and down in rapid succession within your clinging walls. “Such a good listener you are. I need you to cum in my mouth now, pretty girl. I need you to feed me your honey.” 

Your mouth falls open in an ‘o’ shape, the sonorous scream that resounds from you making even the walls tremble in its volume as your body obeys his directive and your world goes white with the shattering of the tension he’d founded in you. From its springs a fierce, fiery pleasure that floods you from he’s fused with you, the torrid, intense waves of it washing over you from the tips of your fingers to the ends of your toes that cramp and curl behind his back. 

He fucks you through your orgasm, the ribbons under his control winding down your sex slithering around and between his lips before they nuzzle the flowerbed of nerves buried far into you. The hot length he threshes about in your silken channel moves with an inhuman speed as the other hundreds of tendrils of his Evol ruinously ravage your clit over and over again while you wail and whimper for the man beneath you, your cunt cinching and spasming around him. 

Your essence gushes forth like a lewd stream into his anticipating mouth where he’s still got it moored to you, groaning deep and low where he receives you before he’s relaxing his tongue and opening wider to thirstily drink up the saccharine juices you have made for him. 

“Keep coming. Fuck, keep coming for me. I love your taste. Need it every fucking day,” he sloppily swallows your slick down, “Give me every drop, baby. I want your taste to linger in my mouth forever.”

You don’t have to be told twice, the tendrils ceaseless and unabating in their pressure as they depress themselves over the most sensitive parts of you without pause. They leave no area unclaimed, rushing and lapping at you everywhere over and around your clit and g-spot in their own kisses to you that make their master jealous.

Their master, who pushes his hips into the counter, halting the small undulations they’d been making into it while he observes your euphorically erotic performance just for him. Their master, who squeezes himself between the counter and his body where his cock splutters with pre-cum, a pervasive twinging of an ache declaring its longing for you even when he stifles it with the small, constringing threads of his Evol that force his orgasm down into the base of his balls. 

More you spill into his mouth as if a dam had been broken between your legs while he guides your grinding pussy there and back along his nose to his chin, the reservoir of his mouth receiving your release while you gush uncontrollably between his lips. 

“Such a tasty cunt,” He drains you like you’re the fountain of his very life, each movement of his Adam’s apple bringing with it the sound of his gratification in the low groans he lets out. When the flow of your juices begins to slow, each of those colorless ribbons of his power disintegrate,  his tongue retreating into his mouth so he can sip on you again and again– insatiable for you as an emaciated, famished male who hasn’t fed for weeks. 

His want is there, each time he draws you in, and it writhes in the irises that dilate and expand as he besottedly ogles the blissed, fucked out expression that has you mewling, the unbelievable intensity of your climax leaving you feeling as if you’re suspended entirely in some astral dimension that only your lover could augment before you. 

“Thank you,” he says it in some kind of daze, like the tart twang and tangy scent of you have clogged his mind of any reasonable thought while he languidly cleans you up, “Thank you so much, my love.”

Fondness makes your heart swell for him, and you’ve forgotten that the ribbons of his Evol still keep your arms tied down and entirely too distant from him. 

“Caleb,” your voice is hoarse from your earlier outcries, “I want to touch you. Can I?”

Your plea has the tendrils binding your arms to the counter dissolving and releasing you, your request brushing past the brume of the trance that you’d put him under while the other strands of his Evol encasing you around your pelvis diffuse into thin air. 

He cleans you with his tongue, entreating whatever remains onto it, your thighs slackening and opening around his head in the feeling that has been sapped out of you.

Once he’s sure he’s devoured every last morsel of the dinner, lunch, and breakfast that he’d made of you, his hands return to your sides to carefully ease you back down onto the counter so you’re laid against it once more. 

“You do not need to ask me that, my love. I love it when you touch me,” He licks his lips, the lewd daubing of your taint embracing the wet length of him as satisfaction morphs his handsome features when the last of you is lathered across his palate. “I live only for you, anyway.”

His confession makes your cheeks flush a shade of red even rubies couldn’t hope to compare to, and it only becomes a mightier shade when you blink up at him with those long, obsidian-like lashes of yours while he uses the back of his artificial, roboticized hand to wipe away the glistening sheen of your essence that still sullies his chin and nose before the pink muscle in his mouth slips out to relish in that, too. “I would do anything for you because I love you. You know that, don’t you?”

Familiar heat simmers between your legs, and you extend your slightly shaky arm toward him, fingers outstretched in effort to make contact with him while you answer, “You would never let me forget.” As tall as he is, he’s too far away even though he’s stood against the countertop, your own legs now dangling on either side of him. 

You whine at his unwanted farness despite your thighs that tremblingly try and fail to clamp him between them, and the resulting chuckle of amusement makes wings take flight in your chest as he responsively tilts his front forward, head lowering a little so you can dotingly cradle his cheek in your hand.

“What do you want, pip-squeak?” He rests his head in your hand, his knuckles of his other hand tenderly trailing down the underside of your arm to feel more of your smooth skin while his other, bionic one braces him against the counter so his chest hangs closely above yours. 

“You.” Your answer is fetched forth by the attracting force that is him, the debris of hesitation eradicated under the nebulae in his eyes that spin with adoration and devotion solely to you. 

“You have me, sweet girl,” he coos. “You always have.”

You’d never been good with words. Still, he made you want to be. 

So you try to show him what you mean another way, bending one elbow under you so you can surround yourself in his musky, masculine scent of iron and grass. Like this, you can’t miss the fully engorged, painfully erect member between his thighs that’d he’d left neglected out of his devoutness to you. 

You whine at the sight of him, fingers twitching impulsively at the sight of him as he tells you, “I know that look in your eyes, pretty girl, but I won’t last if you touch me there right now. I need you too much right now.” 

An emotion your language simply didn’t have a means of expressing makes the whole of your heart twinge and pang for him, your fingers drifting down from his cheek so they can maunder down his neck to where pliant flesh meets rigid, hard metal. The daintiness of your touch makes him shudder, and his carefully shrouded vulnerability exposes itself in the shadows within the corner of one of his eyes as your fingers nimbly meander down the dark plating of iron where his receptors can’t feel you anymore–nonetheless, you don’t stop until your palm lays against the back of his. 

“You once said that humans who love each other can mate their souls together if their vessels become one.” Your digits curl inward, filling the space he’d left open for you between his metallic fingers while his other digits reverently follow the curve of your shoulder blade to the dip of your spine. “I want that with you.”

His breath is snagged away by you, and he still sounds so very winded whenever the imaginings he’d had of you are replaced with the reality that is so, so much more beautiful than anything his mind could conjure. 

“Are you certain, my one and only?” He asks breathlessly while you bring the artificial phalanges of his iron hand to your lips, kissing each where human joints would be in the middle of every single one of them. 

Ever considerate of you and your own will, his question only whisks forth the truth of many moons and suns spent basking in the rays of his care and affection. 

“These past two cycles without you made me realize that there is only one thing that has any meaning to me in this place, Caleb, and that is you,” You profess, turning his hand over so you can intertwine your fingers with his. He interlaces his with yours, each fitting perfectly next yours like they were designed just for this purpose. All the while, he admires every bit of the spread of red dusting over your cheeks while you say, “Make love to me until our spirits mate for life. Until we can’t remember what it was to be without each other.”

The kindle of your voice sets him alight with pining that refuses to be doused until his very being is joined in the heat of passion with yours, and he stiffens unbelievably more between your parted legs while the bulbous head of his enlarged, swollen cock leaks his pre-cum that has you wetting your lips, your tastebuds secreting saliva at the delicious sight of him. 

“As you wish,” he faithfully utters before using the union made by your hands to help you sit up. His other digits faintly course down your spine, pebbling your flesh as they go. The soft pads of his fingertips don’t disappear until he reaches the small of your back where the globes of your ass hide you from him. “My moon and my stars,” those calloused digits fasten around your thigh, “My one and only in this life and the next.” 

You watch him bring your intertangled hands to his mouth, the shape of them pledging themselves to you in the fleeting, deferent kiss he impresses upon the back of yours before he ensconces it over the corded thew of his shoulder, doing the same to with your other.

“However you’ll have me, I’ll come to you. And I will make all your wishes come true. Every single one of them,” His bionic, metal hand joins its counterpart along the home of the backs of your thighs so  he can entwine you around his toned torso one leg after the other. While he does this, he angles his head to the side, the hotness of his breath blown against the shell of your ear while he murmurs, “I made a promise to you that I’d bring you to a paradise that is just for us. Whether it is my body or being that takes you there, my sweet girl, you’ll find it with me.” The torrid territory of his mouth skims the cartilage of your ear as he admits, “After all, you have been my Eden from the first time I looked upon you in that garden of tubes, glass, and monitors.” 

“Take me, then. Make me entirely yours so that we can always be together.” You declare, wrapping your legs and arms resolutely, unwaveringly around him. 

His control snaps, and from its remains, his want takes over. 

“Finally,” The word is hurried, rushed from the base of his throat when he easily lifts you up against his body and turns to hastily trudge away from the counter, his mouth tangling with yours in a mess of teeth and spit, the wet smacking of your lips all that you hear past his groan when you move your hips against him, your sex skirting along the tip of the several inches of his infatuation with you before your spine hits a wall, an untamed intent rearing in his eyes when he surfaces for air to husk, “Take it off for me, pretty girl. You won’t need that little nightdress before, during, or after what I’m going to do to you.” 

You heed him, peeling it off your body where it had been bunched atop your breasts and discarding it somewhere behind him unceremoniously while his irises roam and ravage your completely exposed form to make heat ignite everywhere they raze. 

“Caleb,” you whine, entranced by the unbridled, unadulterated lust that conflagrates in his orbs, stoking you in his desire. 

“You looked so pretty for me when you were getting off on my tongue earlier, my love. I would have come against the counter just from watching you, but I couldn’t let myself. Do you want to know why?” He mutters, adjusting and raising you up before the streaks of his Evol quickly clamor around your lower half so he can release you with one of his hands to take his massive, veiny and girthy length into it. “One: you were so beautiful while you enjoyed yourself on that countertop. I couldn’t bear to stop when you looked so tempting. Two: I wanted to come home. I wanted to cum inside you.”

Possessiveness has him slapping his head against your core to sodden you in his own essence, your pussy contracting around nothing while you shed more tears for him there. 

He exhales shakily,  prodding at your entrance with his tip. “You’re so wet for me, pretty girl. My spit and your juices look so pretty on you.” He lines himself up with your drenched hole and he sighs satisfactorily at the way you gaze at him from under a fan of dark lashes, “I’m going to fuck you until all that you know is me, my love. Until all that you can think about is me. Until all you can remember is me.” 

You clasp your arms around his neck, touching the bridge of his nose with yours, “That sounds like paradise to me.”

With your consent, his Evol bears you down onto his cock all in one fluid motion, the delightful fullness and friction from him bottoming out within you making your eyelids flutter while the both of you elicit the vocal sounds resonant of your rapturous union. 

“Fuck,” he curses, “You feel like a dream.” He husks, the invisible tendrils under his control holding your hips in place and turning you weightless while he nearly draws himself out of you only to bury himself back into you to the hilt nice and deep. “No, you’re better than a dream. And you’re all mine. Say it, pretty girl. Say you’re mine.”

“Y-yours,” you stammer when his warm, wet mouth encloses you where your shoulder meets your neck, sucking you between his teeth hungrily as the blood that rushes beneath it is coaxed to where he mars you while he thrusts debasingly into your pussy. 

“I have to remind you that I belong to you, baby, and leave traces of me all over you. You’ll look so gorgeous with my marks all over you.” Up your neck he travels, leaving flowers of red and pink in his wake while he crosses the orchard of your neck to the other side, the veins of his cock brushing against your walls caressingly as he picks up his pace needfully. “When you look at them, you’ll see that I chose you. That I’d only ever choose you. ”

Your walls embrace him tightly at that, and it earns a long, drawn out groan from where his mouth captures yours, teeth gnashing and tongue thrashing against yours in his insistence.

“I want it. Want you,” You mewl into him, your head falling back when his skilled maw descends to dote on your chest, the hot length of his tongue licking around and then over the pliant area of your nipple. He draws a line of spit with it to your other, taking it into his mouth so he can taste you while he plunges powerfully into you with his bulging cock that rubs deliriously against you.

“I’ll give it to you, pretty girl. You’re taking me so well. You feel so good,” He grits his teeth at the divine and damning sanctuary of your body, hastening the drive of his length into you even through the denial of his own end and continual shunting of it with his Evol that swells his balls and member to the brim in the buildup of his captivation for you. “I was made for you, pretty girl. And you were made just for me.” 

Through the haze of your lust that he fills you with, you can vaguely ascertain that he’s fuller than usual, that the network of veins and ridges constellating his much thicker cock pulsate sporadically while he tries to mask it with a bite onto your tit, teeth sinking into you that will surely impart a series of crescents there in the shape of him. 

“Caleb-” You barely get his name out before he shoves his throbbing member harder into you so every bit of him is seated in you, his pace quickening with each purposeful drive of his cock inside your willing and waiting cunt that clamps around him as if to keep him there. 

The slap of his heavy balls against your ass are obscene even to your own ears as his tip kisses your cervix with each quickening thrust, each one turning your thoughts to mush while his eyes flash feverishly up at you from where he’s got your tit bound between his lips. 

“Command me,” he orders, teeth territorially leaving their impression over and around the peaked bud of your other breast while he slams his length into you even faster as he sets a brutal, merciless rhythm, your whimpers wrenched from your throat while he drools around you, spit gleaming licentiously in its viscous venture down your belly. “Command me to let go for you, baby. Tell me to give the seed of my love to you that you’re going to carry inside this pretty pussy of yours.”

You can’t even think anymore, your words lost to the unwavering, relentless pistoning of his pulsating, swollen member that knocks against your g-spot each and every time he pounds into you to make the heat that has spread in your core smolder and flare with an intensity that even a wildfire would fail to contain.

Fingers of steel that can no longer detect sensation grab your jaw in an iron-grip, the manic glint in his eyes sending you deeper into the flames of felicity while his other hand flattens against your belly to feel himself where he protrudes against you while rams himself into your silken channel. “I said,” he punctuates each word with a lurid lurch of his hips, “Command me.”

His order summons your voice from the bowels of your body, your baser being temporarily avulsed from the depths of yourself as your mouth falls ajar when the palm against your stomach turns so the pads of his index and middle fingers can zealously stroke the cluster of nerves of your clit, the heel of his hand pushing into the sensitive area just above the thatch of hair overlying your sex to make his intrusions even more decadently depraved. 

“Let…l-let go for me, Caleb,” you incoherently babble, “W-want your…want your seed inside me.”

His eyes darken, and then he hums, “Mmm, I knew you would listen. You’re such a good girl. I’m going to ask you to do one more thing for me. Can you do that?” 

You nod, not trusting your voice to last with how he splits you apart until you don’t know where you start and he ends, tits jiggling and jostling where the colorless striations of his Evol don’t pin you in place against the wall while his fingers render aberrant patterns over and on your sensitive bundle of nerves cresting your cunt. 

“Fall apart on my cock and succumb to me, baby. Milk me fucking dry.” His fingers push down along your engorged nub while several invisible streaks of the power under his control stretch around and between his digits to consort with him like extensions of his own hand, brutally impelling themselves against your bloated button of nerves in tandem with the catastrophic whirl of his fingers against it. ”Show me how much you love me while I fill you up with mine.” 

You dazedly watch his lips move, the meaning of them slow to find you while he ravishes you with his cock with a final, fatal, calamitous blow that hits you in all the right places, not a single part of you devoid of his length as your body obeys him. Your walls spasm and convulse around him as you let out a piercing cry of his name and hot, blinding, white pleasure uproariously makes you its fortissimo. 

He’s bewitched by you as you move like a melody caught in slow motion, each breath a note drawn out, deliberate, aching with anticipation. The rhythm built inside you–a private symphony–pulsing low and deep like bass beneath the velvet sky of the dark. You were the strings of a musical instrument and he the composer, your body arched in perfect sync with the rising tempo. When your climax comes, it is a full crescendo–raw, electric, soul-deep–the kind of moment where the world falls away and only the music remains, echoing in your bones long after the final note fades. You don’t just feel pleasure–you become the song, and in that instant, you and he are infinite.

Your voluminous, glorious orgasm sends him into his, and he fucking bursts, shooting his molten seed inside you with a reverberating rumble of groan that sets your blood afire. 

“That’s right, pretty girl,” he encourages, “You’re so gorgeous when you lose yourself on top of me, my love. Keep going. I won’t let a single bit of me out of you.” 

You do as he says, even your labored breaths clinging to each other as he ruts his hips into yours, helping you to ride out your orgasm until your walls have stopped fluttering around him in a euphoric ballad while his mouth secures itself to yours, mingling his saliva and breath with yours in a messy string of kisses that don’t cease until his fingers find the backs of your thighs so he can languidly summon his Evol into the ether just to hold you nearer against his chest. 

Still he fills you, each white spurt lovingly caressing parts of you that you didn’t even know you had. 

So stuffed full of his cum, a sliver of it slips down your thigh, but several streaks of his power push it back up inside your cunt, keeping it all there while you try to hold the rest of his release within you. 

Your limbs tremble from the intenseness of your illicit activities, but it is a pleasing kind of numbness that is left in his wake while your hands dangle from the back of his neck, fresh red lines made from your nails now adorning him there that he wears proudly.

He waits until you’ve caught your breath until he asks, “Are you okay, pip-squeak? Was I too much?”

You smile at him, a different kind of feeling flittering through your chest when his eyes light up at you while you say, “There’s no such thing as ‘too much’ with you. I loved it…and you.” You attempt to card your quivering, jellified fingers through his tousled, mussed hair and he preens at the action. 

He croons, his own smile reaching his eyes when he rubs his nose against yours, “That’s what I like to hear. I love you, too, you know.” He gives a soothing squeeze to your strained and still quaking muscles along your thighs, “ Do you need me to give you a massage? You may not be able to use your legs for a little while, pip-squeak.”

Your cheeks burn at that last part, the inclination to hide your face in his neck where he’s shining with the sheen of sweat awfully provocative right now. “That does sound appealing, but you have not properly eaten yet. You need to.”

He arches a brow, and incredulous, he retorts, “What are you talking about? I just did. And it was delicious.”

Impulsiveness wins over your still recovering rationale, and you claim his Adam’s apple between your teeth while you challenge, “That’s not a real meal, mister. I’m not going to let you starve because of me. I love you too much for that. You can make us both something and we can eat together. I’ll tell you about the dreams I had of you while you were gone. How does that sound?” 

That piques his interest, and then he’s heading toward your bedroom with you tucked safely in his arms while he offers, “Sounds good to me. But I think a shower is in order after that. I need to clean you up.”

He watches your irises dip down where you’re both still connected, chuckling to himself when you give an inquisitive look. “And you plan to keep that inside me while you do?”

“Oh, pip-squeak,” he muses, “There are many ways to make sure it stays where it belongs. And if you lose any of it,” He takes the bottom of your earlobe between his teeth, “I’ll just make sure you give you some more.”

Familiar heat stirs between your legs, and you playfully nip over the notch of his Adam's apple while you say, “You’re insatiable.” 

“Only for you, my love,” He passionately professes through a pleased grunt, “So, what do you want me to make for us?”

“Anything as long as it is made by you. You can choose for me. You know what I like better than I do.” Your answer honestly as your lids grow heavy, and when you lay your head against his chest, you can hear how his heart is tuned to the same beat of yours. “My only request is something with apples in it. They remind me of you.”

“And what is it about them that reminds you of me?” His tone is the timbre of music in its peaked curiosity, the plop of his feet against the floor a soft backdrop against it as he peers amorously down at you. 

 Crisp where he needed to be, soft where he allowed, with a tartness that showed when life bit too hard. The scientists and commanders of Ever thought they knew him after one passing, scrutinizing glare, but they missed the way he carried seasons in his soul– the sunlight, the storms, the long patient ripening. And like an apple, he held your truth at the core– not always easy to reach, but real, and worth it.

You confess the musings you’d long harvested in your heart, they flow easily when he looks at you like you’re his entire universe. Each word nurtures in him a happiness that beams from those brilliant eyes of dawn and sunset that are merged together in them, and he effuses that comfortable warmth through your every bone, cell, and atom, your body fusing itself to his in a manner of seeking that went far beyond the flesh and mortal coil. 

Hours pass and he never drifts from you, unable to leave his moon and stars. Time is but a poor construct in his presence, because he instills and imparts in you the rich, vibrant wonders of life that manifest down to his every breath. 

When your bellies have been sated and he’s carefully washed you of the sweat, spit, and slick you’d unconditionally made for each other,  he takes you to bed. There, his fingers–magnetized to you–lulling each tensed, overused muscle of yours into relaxedness from where he’d lain you atop of him before tracing the outline of your every curve while whispering sweet nothings into your ear where it had been nestled into the crook of his neck. 

You’d given in easily into the tantalizing tug of sleep, for he’d enticed all of your energy and ability to move properly, the devout worship of his digits–both of metal and of flesh–too divine not to surrender to. 

When your even, measured breaths brush at his throat and your eyes have fallen closed, that’s when he presents his mouth against your temple, surreptitiously delivering a vow of his fealty, loyalty, and faith while you sleep peacefully–blissfully– in his arms. 

“Rest well, my one and only. I promise to you that in life and in death, we will never be apart.” 

Your peaceful expression lures him into his dreams, wanting to be with you there, too. 

The black void of space soon swarms him, his body robbed of its weight as he falls toward a scorched, scarred planet iriscable in the flame of its doomed fate. He’s been torn away from you again, and when he attempts to move, to try to find you, his appendages each fail him, each bereft and depleted of strength. 

Dismembered drones, Wanderers, and synthetic droids plummet past pieces of what once were cruisers, the lone, untouched ship of steel above him an abandoned refuge to the holder of his heart who dives toward him unflinchingly and determinedly as you cry out his name. 

Your kindling touch, when you furl your arms around his neck, restarts his every nerve and it’s all he can do to warn you of the imminence of his decay, your consuming connection corrupted by the same source that made you for each other of which he’d been trying to protect you from.  

There’s nothing but conviction in the pools of your eyes when you confess that this–being with him– is where you want to be. That the world being wrought in disastrous destruction is not scary, but losing him–going on to exist in a place where he is not– that is a nightmare you could never bear. 

There, in the pit of space, he makes his final promise to you, sealing it with a deep and devouring kiss that even the sun and moon commit to memory in the passionate profession of your love to the galaxy beyond. Then, the powerful intensity that your souls burn with for each other finally, fatally combusts into an inferno of light and matter. 

Like two stars that can’t be contained in their destiny to be together, the spark of your connection explodes, and then, he knows only you as the brilliant phosphorescence your union creates swirls and whirls around you, a supernova of destructive proportion coupling you with him forever that is felt through the far reaches of space. 

Subconsciously, he ensconces you in his arms just a little tighter from where you both lie with each other in your bed, your name spoken as a servant addresses their goddess. 

And unknowing yet just as perceptive to him, you press yourself against him just a little more insistently, his name a pleading prayer as it flits past your lips while you slumber on in the solace only he could ever bring.

[logansdoe]

imagine hannibal comforting a reader who'm accidentally killed someone.

I'm all for the dramatic hysterical so imagine reader crying non stop, coming to Hannibal's office with her clothes stained in blood, crying because she doesn't know what to do and the guilt is like consuming her from the inside

Hannibal can see that she's guilty, but like instead he assures reader that she did nothing wrong and that she only did all of it to protect herself.

Idk what else to say or how to continue this is pretty cringe aaaaa😵😵😵

guilty.

You could see everything. The blood, wounds, his horrified expressions before his eyes rolled back.

You did it. you. . did it?

Panic settled in your core. Chest heavy, making it unbearable to breath. All you could see was black spots in your vision. The smell of copper and the sight made your stomach churn.

Your tears started to cloud your vision. Taking a few steps back as you watched horrified. Horrified of the lifeless man. Horrified of the blood that coated your hands. Horrified that you did not hate it.

Steps led you to your car. The low hum of the engine started as you sat in the car. Trying to get your mind to work but nothing came up. Only one name was etched into your mind. Like it was whispering in your ear.

Not thinking twice as you start to pull out of your driveway. Your brain not working as your hands drive the route likes it's been automated to do.

Hastily parking. Thankful to the empty streets. The snow was a mocking white compared to your bloody hands. You could hardly walk. Every step felt ten times heavier than the last.

Stumbling infront of Hannibals doors as you ring the bell. Hoping— no, praying he was home. You did not care for the time. The muffled footsteps could be heard. A second later, the soft click of the door unlocking as it revealed him.

As if a wave of relief washed over you. Your knees almost pleading to fall against the cold stone but you stayed upright. His lips part to speak but his eyes were faster to look over your state.

"H—Hannibal. . .", voice quiet. Almost afraid he would shut the door in your face. Maybe he didn't wanna be involved in your messy matters. And this was, specially, messy.

He didn't acknowledge it. Nor did he say anything. One hand, firm, held your forearm as he pulled you inside. His arm wrapping around to keep you close. The half dried blood getting on his silk robe that he did not care about at the moment.

Letting go of your arm as he closed the door. Bringing it closer to you after to brush it against your hair, "shh—", holding you close as he swayed slightly. His hand brushing softly at the back of your head.

Tears prickled your eyes as the situation dawned on you. Realization settling in. You killed someone. You actually did. The words leaving your lips, "I— I don't know, I didn't. . didn't mean to. It was a mistake—", words broken with sobs.

His hold remained the same. His breathing soft and like a whisper. The soft murmur of the classical tunes he often showed you played in the far room. "He c—came to me and tr—tried to hit me and I couldn't— I couldn't help myself", you cried. The dark stains on his robe stained from your tears and blood.

He listened. "Calm down, darling", he could hear your breathing get heavier. Sobs choking you. If he let go, he was certain you would fall to the floor. Like crumbling pieces. He sighed.

He loosened his grip on you but you held tighter, "don't—", it wasn't a warning. It was a plea. Hannibal felt sympathetic. You looked pathetic, much more to him. He didn't take his hand away. Walking you towards his bedroom, opening the bathroom door.

You seemed so pilant. Anything he would tell you to do, you would. Without a thought. His hands slowly pried your hands away from him with gentle words. Slipping your jacket off. Blood staining the fabric.

Dropping it in the basket, his hands traced the small skin showing under your tshirt before his hands delved inside pulling the shirt off. You looked up at him. His actions, his grip, his eyes. None were lustful. They were gentle. Tears still fell down your cheek.

His thumb occasionally coming up to collect them and dry your skin until it became wet again. Slipping you out of your clothes as he made you stand in the shower, him close by. The water warm, like his touch. Washing the redness off.

You closed your eyes, did not want to see it. You didn't want to remember it. The floor splayed with pink liquid. His touch, so gentle and lovely.

His hands helping you slip into his clothes. A glass handed by his with a smile. You drink it. It tastes good. You did not realize how parched you were, until the liquid hit your throat. Soothing the soreness.

He laid you down. Hand in his, his free hand brushing some of the damp hair away as he kept close. "I'm here. Rest" , he whispered. And as he assured, rest started to consume you. "It was. . a mistake", you whispered.

"you didn't do anything wrong, love. Rest, now", his rough hands brushing your cheek. And those were the last words you heard.

Seeing your sleeping figure, pained Hannibal. He may have planned this sooner than you were prepared for but it was needed. He needed to have you. Close and trusting.

His hand slipped from yours as he walked towards his closet. Opening it to rummage through his clothes. It was time to take care of the remaining mess. Just so, you stay. Close and trusting.

a/n: this took longer than necessary. 😞

[gravedwe11er]

Got hit by a Mecha AU Swerve angst idea in the middle of the night, and I had to put it down on a page. Based on the @keferon Mecha AU and inspired by all the amazing Swerve/Blurr art I see around (seriously, yall are giving me so many ideas and I love it).

More often than not, nowadays, Swerve feels like an imposter in his own frame. His time spent as a human was so short, just an insignificant speck compared to the eons of his real life, his real lifespan, and yet...

Those few scant human years are the realest he can remember feeling.

The medics said it took fifteen cycles for anyone to knock on his door, to even notice his absence. And when someone eventually did, it was just- his boss. One of the engines was giving them trouble, and they needed all servos on deck. That's all.

None of the bots who he talked to every day, the ones he’d worked side by side with for years noticed he was gone. None of the people who would laugh at his jokes and drink with him at the bar had a single thought to spare for him. Nobody missed him, until they needed him for something.

Glum thoughts in the dead of night are one thing. It’s another thing entirely to know, without a shadow of a doubt, that it’s all true.

So of course Swerve figured out the holoform thing again. Sure, it’s still kind of risky, but now that he’s actually doing it on purpose, he’s been taking a few precautions – a good recharge, a full fuel tank, and an automated message to be sent off to the medics after a set period of time, in case he knocks himself out again. Actually, he nearly managed just that, the first time he tried it, overtaxing himself almost to the point of shutdown. The keyword being nearly, though! It did little to weaken his resolve, and after a few more tries, he now has a whole system figured out, one that won’t damage his processor.

Or, it probably won’t, anyway. He’s not about to go ask; someone higher up might order him to stop, which-

Yeah, he’s not doing that.

On this ship, Swerve’s got nothing. He might as well be nothing - he’s a trained metallurgist working as a common mechanic, amongst people who barely even know he exists. On Earth, he’s- well. It’s not like he was exactly a social butterfly, but people invited him for shitty cafeteria coffee, a few pilots liked to stop by for a chat sometimes, and if he fell asleep at his desk, someone would come shake him awake within an hour or two.

On Earth, he has Blurr. And that’s not something he’s willing to give up.

Swerve shutters his optics in his tiny room on the ship, and surrenders gladly to the pulling sensation overtaking his processor as his holomatter generator struggles to cross such a vast distance. Then, with a crackle and a fizz of static across his neural net, he’s gone.

When he opens his eyes, it’s to the sight of Blurr’s expansive private hospital suite, with the man nowhere to be seen. He’s been hoping for that, though- as a general rule, he tries to catch the pilot between press conferences and physical therapy sessions, so nobody starts asking questions about the dead man loitering around a celebrity’s rooms. Blurr has enough problems as it is.

Luckily, he doesn’t have to wait for long. Soon enough, Swerve hears several pairs of footsteps approaching the door, and he ducks into the bedroom, keeping out of sight. “Again, thank you so much for the well-wishes,” carries through the walls, barely loud enough to be audible – Blurr’s voice, he thinks. The ‘business’ voice. “But I really have to go now. The doctor will be visiting soon, you understand.”

There are polite sounds of assent, an exchange of a few more pleasantries before the steps retreat back down the hallway, followed by the quiet whoosh of the front door opening. Cautiously, Swerve peeks out of the bedroom.

Blurr stands in the doorway, back straight, with a bright, practiced smile on the visible half of his face. The other, the one with scars and still healing skin grafts, is covered by an elaborate mask, shaped to look like his mech’s helm. He gives the people outside one final wave, and clicks the door shut.

Then he turns around, notices Swerve and slumps.

Now wobbling slightly, the injured pilot leans his back against a wall, gingerly peeling the mask off of his face to revealed reddened, irritated skin. The smile he turns on Swerve is completely different from before, small and tired and slightly pained.

To anyone else, it would look like an insult. To Swerve, it’s a precious thing, a gift the star shares with very few people in his life - honesty.

“Swerve, hello!” Blurr greets him, sounding slightly out of breath. He’s getting the best care money can buy, but even that only goes so far- recovery will slow and painful, and not everything will go back to how it was. There are some scars the pilot will carry for the rest of his life, and just the thought makes Swerve’s holographic heart ache.

“Hi,” he answers enthusiastically, crossing the room to go help the injured man, only to get waved off.

“Thanks, but I’m good. I need to build up my stamina again.”

Swerve frowns a little, but steps away again. “Alright, if you’re sure. Just be careful! You can lean on me if you need to, yeah? I don’t want you to hurt yourself, so if-“

“Swerve!”, Blurr laughs, interrupting his awkward rambling, and he can feel his holoform’s cheeks going red. “It’s fine, really. I’ll ask you if I need help, alright?”

“Alright,” he mutters into the collar of his shirt and follows after the man, ready to support him if he stumbles. Blurr leads them to his bedroom, laying down on the mattress with a pained grimace, once again waving off any of Swerve’s offers to help. Instead, the man pats one side of the bed in clear invitation, and Swerve does his best to pretend his face isn’t looking like an overripe tomato as he sits, their hands almost touching. Judging by Blurr’s teasing little grin, he fails miserably, but- it made Blurr smile. He’d say that more than makes up for it.

They talk, for as long as Swerve’s holoform generator allows and perhaps a little bit beyond that. He asks after Blurr’s recovery, listens to the pilot bemoan the weakness of his atrophied muscles and endless physical therapy sessions. Learns more about the constant press releases, the pressure from command to return back to duty and perform his star pilot act once again.  They talk about anything and everything the man wants to share, from the important to the mundane.

In turn, Blurr asks him about his life, his day, his work on the ship. Which, here’s the thing- he didn’t really notice much it before his coma, but nobody else actually asks about him. Swerve talks a lot, and sometimes, other bots will even listen, but they never ask.

Except for Blurr. Blurr always asks now, and Swerve always talks and talks and talks, and the pilot never seems to mind. Sometimes, he wishes he knew how to express it, to show the man just how much it means to him, but- in a rare twist of events, the words never manage to leave his mouth.

Doesn’t make it any less true, though.

Every small, honest smile, every real, slightly ugly laugh he gets out of the man makes Swerve’s holographic heart beat overtime. He feels so happy, so at peace when by the man’s side, and he never wants to leave.

But he has to. Eventually, it’s always time to go, his systems warning him of impending shutdown and he hates it, he hates it so much, but he says his goodbyes. Blurr’s understanding about it, of course, and the pilot’s cheeky little wave is the last thing Swerve sees before he closes his eyes and disappears.

When he unshutters his optics, it’s to the sight of his empty, windowless habsuite.  Getting up from his berth, he feels a fleeting stab of vertigo – some echo of his human self’s instinct, warning him of a dangerous height, which, huh. That’s been happening more and more often. Something to ask the medics about, perhaps.

Then again, why bother. It’s not like he doesn’t know what the answer would be.

He misses Blurr already. Misses the warmth of Earth’s sun and the warmth of companionship, the warmth of a soft human touch. Misses his false life and false body, and the very real joy it brings him.

Sometimes, he wishes he never woke up, instead living out his fake human existence in blissful ignorance until his spark eventually guttered from the strain. Occasionally, he wishes he was human. Actually human, not just the holoform- muscle and bone and sinew, just like the rest of them, just like Blurr. It’s clear he doesn’t belong amongst his own kind, so… maybe it’d be better that way.

Most of the time though, he just wants to be on Earth; true frame, fake body, it doesn’t matter. He wants to hold Blurr in his servos, wants to feel like he matters to somebody, wants to-

He’s not really sure what he wants, exactly. He just knows it’s not this.

[alsaurus-loves-dean]

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