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toshisdecadence · 6 months ago

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PAIRING: svarog x mechanic!fem reader

TAGS & WARNINGS: dark content, dubcon (reader says it’s too much but svarog has a mission to collect data), rough sex, multiple rounds, dom!svarog, sub!fem reader, svarog is Massive, cervix mentions, tummy bulge descriptions, multiple rounds, overstimulation, size difference, power dynamics, size kink, fingering, unrealistic sex, robot fuckers unite!, can you tell i have a size kink?

WORD COUNT: 5.1k

SUMMARY: You discover the reason why Svarog wears pants.

The repair bay smelled faintly of heated metal, coolant fluid, and faint traces of alcohol; a sharp tang that clung to the sterile air. You barely noticed it anymore, accustomed to the hum of machinery and the faint vibration of tools against metal. But today, that hum was louder, and the vibrations sharper, emanating not from your usual repair work but from the massive, battle-worn war machine sitting across from you.

Svarog loomed over the room, his 8’11 frame too large for the reinforced chair you’d hastily reinforced when he arrived. His joints hissed faintly, micro-servos struggling to compensate for the damage he’d sustained during the Wardance duel against Luka earlier that day. Faint dents marred his reinforced dark blue chest plating, and faint sparks sputtered from the exposed wiring along his arm.

You reached for your tools, hyper-aware of the pinkish-red glow of his cyclopean optical sensor tracking your every movement.

“Superficial damage sustained. Functionality remains above 90%. Repairs are non-essential.” His voice rumbled, a deep, mechanical timbre that sent a shiver up your spine.

You regarded him critically. “Non-essential? Your vents are overheating, and you’re rattling like a dying starship. Sit still and let me work.”

He didn’t argue. Svarog was nothing if not logical, and logic dictated that he allow himself to be repaired. Still, there was a tension to him, a stiffness beyond the rigid design of his armor. He didn’t like being examined, didn’t like lowering his guard to anyone else other than Clara, even in the hands of someone who statistically meant him no harm or stood a chance against him.

You stepped closer, tools in hand, and gently pressed against the plating on his shoulder. His frame vibrated under your touch, a subtle hum you might have missed if you hadn’t been so close.

“Core temperature stable,” he intoned. “Subsystems fully operational.”

“Your fans tell a different story,” you muttered, running diagnostics through a handheld scanner. “You’re burning hotter than you should be.”

Svarog didn’t respond right away, but you could feel his pinkish-red optic watching your hands as they worked, tracking each movement with the precision of an apex predator. The thought sent an odd warmth through your body, and you tried to shake it off.

You needed to focus.

The repairs took you lower, inspecting the dents along his torso plating. The main brunt of the damage he took from Luka’s mechanical arm focused around his torso. One of the seams had split, exposing a layer of reinforced polymer beneath the outer shell. Carefully, you reached for the damaged panel, fingers brushing against the edge of the pants covering his lower half. It was an unusual addition for a machine built for combat, and one that always raised questions in your mind.

You tugged lightly at the material, intending only to check the joints underneath, but your fingers brushed against something unexpected beneath the fabric.

Your breath hitched.

The surface wasn’t the cold hardness of metal or the pliable texture of synthetic padding. It was smooth, warm, and distinctly… organic in shape.

You froze, pulling your hand back as though burned.

His optic dimmed slightly in a flicker that you’d come to recognize as his equivalent of a blink.

You swallowed down the saliva that had gathered in your mouth, gesturing vaguely at his lower half, struggling to form the words.

Svarog tilted his head, the motion eerily human. “This component was included in my original design for biological infiltration protocols.”

You stared at him as if he grew a second head. “Biological… infiltration?”

“My model is the third series of the Monitoring Automaton Prototype, engineered to simulate human anatomy. The purpose was strategic manipulation through intimate interactions if required by mission parameters.”

Your throat felt dryer, and the question that left your mouth sounded ridiculous even to you. “You’re telling me someone thought it’d be a good idea to put a dick on a war machine?”

“Affirmative.”

His voice remained perfectly calm, but your face was burning. A sneaky glance at his lower half rendered you speechless once again. Whoever designed Svarog certainly made his… appendage proportional to his hulking body.

You tried to laugh it off, but the sound came out strained. “And… what? You’ve just been...” You made an awkward gesture with your hand, “carrying it around this whole time?”

“Correct. The feature has never been activated.”

He said it like it was the most normal thing in the world, and somehow that made it worse.

You stared at him in disbelief. “Do you even know how it works?”

Svarog paused, the glow of his optic focusing intently on you. It flickered momentarily.

“My systems include theoretical data on function and compatibility. However, no practical demonstrations have been performed.”

The room felt hotter suddenly, and you were certain that it wasn’t because of Svarog’s malfunctioning fans. Your mind raced with countless possibilities. Given Svarog’s size, you weren’t even sure how anyone was supposed to take that. Did it have a shrinking feature? Did it automatically adjust with Svarog’s… partner?

You swallowed, trying to steer the conversation back to something technical and banish the questions swirling in your head.

“Right,” you muttered, clearing your throat. “Well, let’s make sure you don’t explode first. Then we’ll worry about your…” Your traitorous gaze flickered down again, swallowing, “attachments.”

You regretted the words the second they left your mouth. Svarog’s optic dimmed again, and he shifted in his seat with a faint creak of metal.

“Acknowledged.”

You groaned internally and forced yourself to focus, pulling open the next panel and reaching in to check his sensor nodes. But you couldn’t help the way your mind kept wandering to the warm, flexible material hidden underneath that fabric. Whoever invented Svarog’s model was an absolute pervert and lunatic, you thought to yourself. A war machine equipped with a dick? You still could not wrap your head around it. To the way Svarog had described it so matter-of-factly, like it was just another tool in his arsenal.

And yet… the tension in his frame, the way his systems overcompensated whenever you touched him, those weren’t reactions you’d expect from a simple machine.

Your hands hovered above the exposed sensor nodes, still adjusting the connections, but your thoughts were no longer entirely focused on the task at hand.

It was impossible to ignore the strange electric tension in the air between you and Svarog. Every time your fingers brushed against his cooling panels or adjusted a wiring interface, you felt it; the subtle hum of his systems, almost like a heartbeat. Or maybe it was just the increasing proximity to his form, which felt more real with every touch, even if you knew he wasn’t alive in the traditional sense.

The heat beneath his outer plating felt too organic, too alive. The warmth spread further with each subtle shift of his hulking frame as you adjusted his internals, a mechanical symphony of soft clicks and hums that made your breath catch in your throat.

This was nothing like the Intellitrons.

You had worked with hundreds to thousands of them over the years, and each time it had been the same routine: simple diagnostics, quick fixes, nothing too complicated. They were built for efficiency, cold efficiency. Their systems were bare-bones, nothing more than a body of metal and circuits with only the basic instincts to follow commands.

But Svarog…

He was different. Complex. His systems, his body, everything about him screamed intricacy and human-like design. A part of you resigned yourself to further look into Svarog’s specific model. Perhaps it was time to take a deeper look into Belobogian technology. Even the way Svarog’s body responded to your touch felt foreign. He was more than just a machine, wasn’t he? He wasn’t just a war machine, a combat tool; there was something underneath, something untapped, a feature of his yet to be understood.

And that thought… that burning curiosity clawed at you.

You’d always prided yourself on being a mechanic. You understood machines, systems, the cold logic of how things worked. But Svarog wasn’t cold. Wasn’t simple. The way his body responded to your movements, the imperceptible shifts in his temperature, the faint, almost unnoticeable changes in his posture whenever your fingers brushed too close to certain sensitive spots—all of it made you wonder.

What if I pushed him further?

A thought you could barely even process, but it lingered, stubborn. The daring curiosity that ran deep within you as a mechanic—was this not what you lived for? To understand the unknown, to push the limits of what could be fixed, adjusted, modified? Svarog’s design wasn’t just mechanical, it felt like a puzzle you couldn’t quite solve, like a language you only understood in fragments.

Your hands moved to reconnect a set of wires, but you barely felt the tools in your grip. The warmth from his frame was distracting, constantly pulling your focus away from the task at hand.

You set your tools down with a sharp click, exhaling as you leaned back from Svarog’s towering frame. The repairs were done. Functionally complete. His damaged plating had been reinforced, circuits reconnected, and his sensor nodes recalibrated. Everything checked out.

Or at least, it should have felt finished.

But you lingered.

Your gaze swept over him again, tracing the seams of his armor and the smooth lines of his construction. Svarog wasn’t like the Intellitrons. His design was deliberate. Every joint, every harsh angle of his frame, was crafted with an almost human elegance that made your brain stutter every time you tried to compare him to standard machinery. Even the sections hidden beneath his plating—the ones you briefly glimpsed while making repairs—were unnervingly realistic in their precision.

And then there were the features he’d kept covered.

You dragged your gaze back to his waist, to the reinforced plating that remained stubbornly intact throughout the repairs. That section.

You hadn’t needed to touch it, hadn’t even dared to ask about it again, but the shape and positioning had made it impossible not to notice. That, combined with the suspicious necessity of his pants, had left your mind spiraling with questions you couldn’t shake.

Why go to such lengths to simulate humanity in that area?

You knew you shouldn’t care. You were a mechanic. Curiosity was natural. It came with the job. But no matter how many times you tried to frame it as a purely technical interest, your pulse told you otherwise.

It wasn’t just simple curiosity. It was a fixation.

You reached out, under the pretense of double-checking one of his sensor-nodes, but your fingers hesitated. You could feel the faint hum of his systems through the plating, steady and constant, and for reasons you didn’t want to unpack, it made the room feel smaller, like the two of you were occupying too much space at once.

“You are hesitating,” Svarog declared suddenly, his mechanical voice cutting through the tension like a blade.

You froze, pulling your hand back like you’d been caught committing a crime. “No, I was just making sure everything’s—”

“False,” he interrupted. His optic seemed red as it regarded you. “Your behavior has deviated from standard patterns. Focus is inconsistent. Eye movement suggests distraction.”

You swallowed hard, heat rushing to your face. Svarog wasn’t wrong, and worse, he wasn’t letting it go.

“Your gaze has returned to my lower half multiple times,” he continued, his tone as flat as ever. “Body temperature elevated by 15.3 percent. Heart rate increased. These patterns suggest heightened interest.”

You felt your stomach flip as he laid out your reactions like cold, hard data. And yet, his voice was so mechanical, so calm and detached, that it made the weight of your embarrassment feel even heavier.

“I can conclude the source of your distraction,” Svarog added. “You are exhibiting curiosity regarding the anatomical structure concealed beneath my armor.”

You didn’t know whether to flat out deny it or run out of the room entirely. Neither option felt viable. At least, not with him towering over you like that, unflinching, his glowing optics locked onto your every move.

“I—no, it’s not like that,” you stammered, even though you knew it was exactly like that.

“Your biological responses contradict your statement,” he said simply. “You are aware of the human-like components integrated into my design. Your fixation suggests a desire to understand their functionality.”

Your breath hitched. The words functionality and components should have grounded you. It should have made this situation feel as clinical as he seemed to think it was. But instead, they only fueled the heat already curling in your stomach.

Because Svarog was right.

You wanted to know—Aeons, you’ve been dying to know—how far his human design extended. And now that the repairs were done, now that he’d laid the truth bare, it felt impossible to stop.

“You are not the first to display interest in this feature,” Svarog continued, as though he were listing out schematics. “However, prior inquiries did not progress past verbal questioning. You are demonstrating physical tension indicative of deeper investigation.”

Your throat felt dryer than the desert.

“I propose a solution,” Svarog said, tilting his head slightly. “Controlled exploration. Further data on synthetic anatomy is limited. Your curiosity provides an opportunity for analysis and documentation.”

Your lips parted, but no sound came out. He wasn’t joking. He couldn’t joke.

“You are suggesting we… test this?”

“Correct.”

His lack of hesitation made your pulse stutter. He saw this as a logical step, nothing more than a means to gather data, and yet, the way his frame loomed over you, the hum of his systems almost vibrating through the air, felt anything but detached.

“Decision required,” Svarog said after a beat. “Proceed with testing, or terminate this interaction?”

Your body betrayed you before your mind could catch up.

“Proceed,” you said softly.

His optics flared slightly—almost imperceptibly—before he nodded.

“Acknowledged. Experiment initiated.”

Svarog wasn’t designed to rush.

He worked methodically, his plated fingers tracing along your thighs—testing, measuring, pressing into the soft flesh as though assessing the tensile strength of your muscles. Assessing how much you could take.

“Body temperature elevated by 1.8 degrees,” he noted, his optics narrowing slightly. “Pulse irregular. Predictive analysis suggests heightened arousal.”

You whimpered as his thick mechanical fingers dipped lower, sliding between your legs without hesitation. He brushed against your heat, deliberately testing the slickness already building there.

“Lubrication present,” he said. “Preliminary preparation observed. Additional stimulation required.”

You barely had any time to register his words before his thumb pressed against your clit. The motion was slow, deliberate, grinding down just enough to make your thighs tremble.

Too much.

The smoothness of his plating, the slight hum of his servos adjusting with every movement, left you aching almost instantly. He applied more pressure, adjusting the angle like he was calibrating the motion for maximum effect.

You gasped, hips jerking against him instinctively, and Svarog’s optics dimmed.

“Response strength at 63 percent,” he observed. “Testing deeper penetration.”

You bit back a cry as his fingers slipped inside. Thick, unyielding, and cool against your heat. He stretched you slowly, adding another finger almost immediately, pushing past the tight resistance with clinical focus.

“Muscle tension detected,” he said, his thumb circling the erect pearl of your clit again as his fingers curled inside of you. “Adjusting pressure.”

You whimpered as he spread his fingers, stretching you wider until the ache blurred into something hotter, sharper.

“Elasticity improving,” he noted, tilting his head as he pressed deeper. “Lubrication increased by 24 percent.”

You clenched around him, your gummy walls struggling to accommodate the deliberate stretch, and Svarog’s optics flickered.

“Resistance still measurable,” he said, slowing his movements. “Further preparation required.”

Your head was spinning by the time he added a third finger, the burn almost too much, but Svarog didn’t falter. His fingers moved with precise rhythm, pumping and curling until the tension broke, and your body melted around him.

Svarog’s mechanical fingers lingered inside you, coated in slickness as he worked them deeper—pressing, stretching, curling with deliberate precision. His thumb dragged slow, circular patterns over your clit, the rhythm steady enough to make your hips jolt against him in a helpless, uncontrollable reaction.

“Muscle tension improving,” he observed. “Current dilation at 73 percent. Additional preparation recommended.”

His tone was calm, detached, but the way his optics dimmed as he watched your thighs trembling betrayed something deeper. He pressed in further, adding another finger. Thicker. Unyielding. Enough to force a sharp gasp to tumble out of your throat.

The burn was too much and not enough all at once, your body clenching down against the stretch even as your legs fell further apart under his firm grip.

You could feel yourself dripping, already struggling to take his fingers, but Svarog didn’t falter. He spread them wider, deliberately testing your limits, and the ache left you clawing at his arm, nails scraping helplessly against smooth plating.

“Elasticity increased by 18 percent,” he said, pulling his fingers free with a lewd, wet squelch that made your breath hitch and your cheeks burn. He inspected the slick coating his fingers before tilting his head slightly. “Sufficient for insertion.”

You barely had time to catch your breath before you heard the sound of fabric rustling. Your eyes widened as he was lining up, the thick, mechanical weight of his massive cock pressing against your sopping entrance and making your stomach twist with a sharp mix of anticipation and fear. His cock contrasted the rest of his metallic body, covered by a synthetic material that seemed to emulate the sensation of skin.

“Size differential detected,” Svarog noted, palming your thigh to angle your hips upward. “Accommodating size will result in initial resistance.”

You bit back a cry as he pushed forward, the broad, blunted tip spreading you open with agonizing slowness. The pain is sharp, your walls pulsing and struggling to accommodate him even after the preparation.

Too big.

The words barely formed in your mind before the pressure stole the thought away entirely. You gasped sharply, arching as he forced himself deeper, the stretch too much. Burning, tearing, making your legs shake uncontrollably.

Svarog’s grip on your hips tightened as he paused, allowing you a brief moment of reprieve to adjust, but as his optics flickered, scanning the trembling of your muscles and the fluttering of your gummy walls around him.

“Pain response detected. Estimating threshold at 62 percent.”

You cried out as his hands tilted your hips. You were barely able to breathe as he pressed further, the new angle forcing him deeper into your cunt, and your stomach twisted as you felt it. His cock bullied its way in, the meaty girth of his shaft forcing you wider and wider until you swore you could feel it pressing against everything, imprinting his shape inside of you.

Too much. Too deep.

Tears welled in your eyes as your body struggled to take him, your hands scrabbling against his frame, fingers digging uselessly into unmoving steel.

Svarog’s hand pressed against your stomach, his thumb grazing the prominent bulge already forming there.

“Internal displacement observed,” he said, pushing down slightly to feel the way his massive cock shifted inside of you. The sensation earned a quiver of your legs, the pressure in between your legs rendering you unable to utter a coherent sentence. “Pressure response increasing. Adapting angle.”

Your head fell back with a guttural cry as he adjusted, pressing even deeper, his thumb brushing over the bulge experimentally while he thrust deeper, the bulge in your stomach shifting with him. It felt like the wind was knocked out of your lungs. Your lips fell open in a silent cry, eyes rolling into the back of your head. Your body clenched down hard, pulsing and fluttering, struggling against the size, and Svarog stilled.

“Involuntary constriction detected,” he said, his optics dimming slightly.

His free hand reached up, spreading your thighs wider, and he began to move.

Slow, deliberate thrusts that forced you to feel every excruciating inch of him.

You couldn’t think. Couldn’t breathe.

All you could do was feel. The stretch, the ache, the grinding pressure of him bottoming out inside you again and again and again. The bulge in your stomach shifted with every thrust, a visible reminder of just how deep he was, how much he was filling you.

Svarog’s optics glowed faintly as he observed you, his gaze calculating and unwavering as your body trembled beneath him. Each shallow breath you took, each gasp for air as his cock pressed deeper, he noted, analyzing the involuntary way your body gripped him, how your muscles fluttered around him with every thrust.

“Heart rate accelerating. Muscular tension increasing. Increased stimulation evident.”

He could see the way your body reacted. How your hands clenched, how your thighs shook, how the bulge in your stomach shifted with each deep push, marking the extent to which he had filled you. He watched the way your chest heaved, the way your pupils dilated with every inch of him that stretched you wider, deeper, further than you ever thought possible.

You were on the brink of breaking, the tension in your body growing unbearable as your mouth opened in a silent scream, unable to keep up with the onslaught of sensations. Your body, desperate for more and yet unable to fully handle what was happening, was his to command, and he couldn’t help but watch in quiet fascination as you succumbed to the overwhelming pleasure.

You were becoming dumber. So much of you just couldn’t function anymore. You were speechless, unable to utter a coherent sentence, broken down by the intensity of his cock fucking its way into you, and the way you melted against him was nothing short of fascinating. Your voice was lost to you, your thoughts clouded by raw sensation, but the pleasure you felt was clear. It was painted across every quiver of your body, the sheen of beaded sweat lining your face and neck, in the strained arch of your back, the desperate shuddering of your limbs.

He could hear the soft whimpering sounds, could see the way your face twisted with both pain and pleasure, and his own systems hummed with the data flooding his internal logs. Every reaction of yours was so genuine, so untouched by reason. It was an anomaly he had never experienced.

Svarog’s mechanical frame moved with precision, his movements controlled and deliberate. His systems hummed as he observed you, his optics tracking every microexpression, every shuddering breath as you struggled to adjust to the overwhelming size that filled you.

He didn’t feel pleasure. He didn’t need it, not the way you did. But the reactions you were giving him—the way your body trembled, the way your walls spasmed around him—were intriguing, data points he had yet to fully understand.

“Subject’s body reacting to size discrepancy. Estimated stretch threshold surpassed.”

Your hands were clutching at him, your fingers slipping over his cool metal plating, desperately trying to find purchase. Your tight walls clung to him as though your body was doing everything it could to resist the sensation, even though it was now obvious that you couldn’t fight it. Your body was becoming swallowed by him, opening wide to accommodate what it was never meant to handle.

Svarog’s movement’s never faltered, his thrusts measured and precise, studying you as your body began to react involuntarily. Your walls spasmed around him, tighter and tighter, almost as though your body was trying to pull him deeper despite the overwhelming stretch.

“Subject’s body is exhibiting signs of imminent climax. Response timing has been measured.”

You couldn’t hold it back anymore. Your entire body stiffed, an involuntary shudder running through you as every nerve seemed to light up at once. Your vision blurred, the sounds of your ragged breathing filling your ears, mixing with the overwhelming sensation of being stretched beyond belief. Your walls contracted and released rapidly, the pressure inside you finally exploding, and you cried out his name, the world barely a whisper between gasps.

The release sent shockwaves of pleasure through your body, and Svarog could see it. How your body trembled, how your legs locked around his waist, pulling him even deeper—if that was even possible. You were speechless, your mind blank as your body convulsed in ecstasy, your insides gripping him with a tightness that was almost painful.

“Subject has achieved climax. Response exceeds expectations.”

Your breaths came in desperate, uncoordinated gasps as the waves of pleasure crashed over you, and your body was left quivering, unable to do anything but absorb the aftershocks of your mind-numbing release. Your thighs quivered, feeling your cum trickling down your skin, staining his metal plating.

Svarog, ever the observer, did not stop. He noted the way your body reacted to each of his thrusts, the way your tummy bulged with each movement, the way your warm walls clamped down involuntarily as you tried to regain control of your senses.

Despite the fact that Svarog himself could not feel pleasure, there was something undeniably fascinating about the way you came undone beneath him, your body fighting for control even as it surrendered entirely to him.

He continued moving inside you, his mechanical precision relentless, watching as you flinched with each motion, your body too sensitive now to handle it. Your hands, still pawing weakly at his arms, combined with your whimpered protests of it being too much, were growing weaker, and the sensations were too much for you to bear, but still, he kept going, his own curiosity driving him. He wanted to see how much more you could take, how much more your body could endure before it reached its limit.

You were still trembling, still catching your breath, your mind scattered and lost in the aftereffects of your climax. He could see your skin shimmering with sweat, your breasts rising and falling, the way your hips thrusted up to meet his even though you were lost in the throes of overstimulation.

“Subject remains responsive despite signs of fatigue,” he observed. “Data indicates further analysis needed.”

You were so tight, so overstimulated, and yet your body responded again as though it couldn’t stop itself. Another surge of pleasure crashed through you, pulling another, more broken moan from your lips. It was overwhelming, too much, but your body needed it, responding in ways that only deepened his analysis of the situation.

Svarog’s focus didn’t waver. He watched as your body shook with every movement, your legs quivering with the strain of accommodating him, and still, he continued, his thrusts growing deeper, more relentless. His fingers dug into your hips, hard enough to leave litters of bruises that resembled the shade of his metal plating, holding you in place, using your body as a tool for his data collection.

He could see the way you reacted to the sensations, your face contorting in a combination of pain and pleasure, your eyes wide and unfocused, the way your mouth parted as though you couldn’t form any coherent words. Your body had become nothing but a series of responses, unable to control the way you moved or how you moaned, each sound increasing in volume and intensity as he continued to jackhammer into you.

Your stomach bulged from the pressure, each thrust deepening the curve, showing just how much of him you were struggling to take. Your body was so small, so delicate compared to his design—a machine of war—and yet it was somehow adjusting, somehow taking him all the way in, and with each inch he could see your entire body shift, your muscles trembling, walls contracting and clenching around him.

Svarog observed with detachment, but a small part of him couldn’t ignore how your body seemed to respond, how the very tightness of your searingly hot walls seemed to tug at him, pull him deeper as though it wanted to trap him there—needed him to stay there. The way you trembled beneath him, struggling to remain grounded as your body was filled with something so vast compared to your form. He noted how your skin glistened, how you arch your back, trying to take more of him, trying your damned best to accommodate his size.

Svarog noted how you were losing coherence, your once-clear expression now a mess of uncontrollable need, your eyes glazing over as you gave in to the rhythm he set. He couldn’t deny the way your body seemed to yearn for more, even as you struggled with the sheer size of him.

The final stretch was the worst for you, and the best for him. He felt your body grip him, squeezing him impossibly tight as he buried himself to the hilt. This earned a strained sob from your lips. Your stomach bulged more than ever before, a visual testament to just how much of him you had taken, how far he had pushed you. He could see your body tremble, your limbs shaking, your quivering lips gasping for breath.

Yet, even as your body was on the edge, unraveling beneath him, Svarog did not stop. The data was still incomplete. He needed more. He needed to see how much you could endure, how much pleasure your body could take from the sheer act of him pounding into you.

And so, he continued, calculating the rhythms, watching as you came again with a scream of his name, your body seizing, the loud moan that escaped your lips barely audible over the overwhelming noise in your head. It was the most raw, vulnerable he had ever seen you—or any human—and it only fascinated him more.

With another deep thrust, you shuddered, and this time, Svarog could see your body collapse against the surface beneath you, completely undone. You were breathless, barely coherent, your limbs shaking as the final waves of pleasure raked through your senses.

Svarog paused, his cool hands steadying your trembling body, allowing you to come down from the dizzying high. He could continue for as long as he wanted, but your body was too spent for further testing. He could still see the evidence of your come, dripping down in translucent milky strings to the surface beneath you, painting your inner thighs. Svarog decided that this must be what humans described as “beautiful.”

“Conclusion: Subject’s tolerance to size discrepancy has surpassed previous estimates. Data collection complete.”

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bvrnesher · 3 months ago

Note

Hey, love your writing and was wondering if you'd be comfortable writing a Leo Valdez X reader smut with some brat taming in it. Hope you have a good day

۶ৎ — Grease and Tease

tap here for chb masterlist ! here for reqs info

warnings: unprotected piv, teasing, language, brat taming, smut !! rushed ending

ㅤ୨ৎ —˳ leo valdez ! fem. reader

summary: reader is being a brat, bored, and craving attention. Leo, being the great partner he is, gives them exactly what they want—in his way.

𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗔𝗜𝗥 𝗜𝗡 𝗕𝗨𝗡𝗞𝗘𝗥 �� was thick with the scent of oil and metal, the steady hum of machines filling the space as Leo worked. He was in his element—grease-streaked hands moving with effortless precision, eyes narrowed in concentration as he tinkered with something half-finished on the workbench. Sparks flared every now and then, catching the sharp lines of his face in the dim light, but he barely flinched.

You, on the other hand, were bored.

Leaning against the cluttered workbench, you tapped your fingers against the metal surface, watching him work. He hadn’t looked up in at least twenty minutes, completely lost in whatever genius-level project he was messing with. Normally, you’d let him be, but something about the way he was so focused, so serious, made you want to push him. Just a little.

“So,” you drawled, reaching for a nearby screwdriver and spinning it between your fingers, “is this your idea of a romantic date? Ignoring me while you play with your little toys?”

Leo exhaled sharply through his nose, still not looking up. “Unless you wanna help, maybe don’t touch stuff. That’s a high-density micro—” He stopped mid-sentence when you deliberately set the screwdriver down with a loud clank and hopped onto the workbench beside him, swinging your legs.

“Oops.”

That finally got a reaction. He turned his head slightly, giving you a pointed look. “You really wanna test me right now?”

You grinned. “I dunno. You’ve been so caught up in your work, I was starting to wonder if I should find someone else to entertain me.”

Leo’s hands stilled over his project. For a second, the only sound was the distant whir of machinery and the faint drip, drip of a leaking pipe somewhere in the room. Then, with deliberate slowness, he set his wrench down and rolled his shoulders, cracking his neck like he was getting ready for something.

When he finally turned to face you fully, the teasing light in his eyes had darkened into something else. Something more intent.

"You sure you wanna go there, chiquita?" His voice was softer now, but there was an edge to it, like a wire pulled too tight. He stepped closer, bracing his hands on either side of you on the workbench, effectively caging you in. “Because if you keep running that mouth, I will give you something to do with it.”

A shiver ran through you—not fear, but something much more dangerous. Something much more exciting.

And still, you couldn’t help yourself.

You leaned in just enough to brush your lips close to his ear, your voice barely above a whisper. “Promises, promises.”

Leo let out a sharp laugh, shaking his head like he couldn’t believe you. "Man, you really don’t know when to quit, huh?"

He braced his hands on the workbench, leaning in just enough to crowd your space without touching you. His eyes flicked over your face—your smug little smirk, the way you were just waiting for him to react.

"Y'know, mi amor," he continued, voice smooth but with an edge of warning, "I was gonna be nice. Finish my work, maybe give you some attention after I saved the world or whatever. But you? You just had to start something."

You raised a brow, feigning innocence. "I have no idea what you’re talking about."

Leo clicked his tongue. "Yeah? Let’s recap. You’ve been talking all this smack, distracting me, touching my stuff—" he gestured toward the tool you’d dropped earlier "—and now, what? You’re just sitting here, looking at me like I won’t do something about it."

You shrugged. "I mean, you haven’t yet."

Leo blinked once, slow, before exhaling through his nose. Then, without warning, his hands shot out, gripping your thighs and yanking you forward on the workbench until you were flush against him. The move was effortless, like he’d been waiting for an excuse.

"Whoa, would you look at that?" he mused, tilting his head. "Seems like I can do something about it."

You sucked in a breath, but before you could say anything, Leo’s hands skimmed up your legs, thumbs traced absent-minded circles against your skin, like he wasn’t in a rush. Like he had all the time in the world.

"You wanted my attention, right?" he murmured, voice lower now, rougher. "Well, you got it. Hope you can handle it."

And just like that, the playful teasing was gone. The air between you shifted—still charged, but now? Now, it was Leo calling the shots.

"Come on, don’t tell me—" you started to say, but the words died on your lips the moment Leo’s hands slid under your skirt. The very skirt you had chosen for this exact purpose. Easy access.

He looked at you with that signature smirk, fingers ghosting over your skin. You shivered under his touch, and oh, he noticed. Of course, he did. For once, Leo stayed silent as he pushed the fabric higher, fingertips tracing the edge of your panties.

A quiet chuckle nearly escaped him when he felt the dampness of the fabric. Well, if that wasn’t a boost to his ego.

"Seriously?" he said, amusement lacing his voice. "I haven’t even done anything."

"Shut up," you muttered. "You can’t exactly blame me for wanting my boyfriend's attention, can you?"

He chuckled and leaned into you, letting his breath hit your skin before he whispered, “Okay, you have my attention.”

As soon as those words left his mouth, his lips found their way to your neck, placing soft kisses on the warmth of your skin. He let out a satisfied hum.

You felt his hand on the waistband of your panties and then slowly, so damn slowly, he began to trail his fingers up along the inside of your thighs. His touch was like fire, and out of instinct you tried to move your hips, moving closer to his hand, trying to get more. As soon as you did, he stopped.

“We’re impatient, aren’t we?” He said in a teasing tone, but it didn’t take long for him to let his fingers graze your cunt over the fabric of your panties, applying light pressure, until you cried out, begging him for more.

With a smile that you could feel more than see, Leo hooked his fingers into the waistband of your panties. “Lift your hips for me, my love,” he said, placing a hot kiss on your neck, accompanied by a playful bite.

You did as he asked and without a word, he slid your panties down your legs, stuffing them into his pocket and winking at you. “I’ll keep these.”

“Leo…” Before you could protest, his finger slid into your slick warmth and you cried out, a spasm of pleasure flooding your body. He silenced your sounds with his lips, muffling your moans with his own. His tongue forced its way into your mouth, and his tongue tangled with yours as his fingers pushed a little deeper into you, caressing you and making your mind stop working.

The strokes of his fingers were slow, measured. Leo never did that. Ever.

“Faster,” you moaned, your lips swollen from the kiss. Leo shook his head as he slid a second finger inside, making your eyes flutter shut.

“No,” he said, trailing kisses from your jaw to your neck, sucking in all the right places. “You’re gonna take what I give you.”

"Oh...." You cried, squirming at the pleasure of his fingers slowly sliding in and out of you, then pulling out to trail up higher and caress your folds.

His fingers danced over your clit, and your back arched, you breath leaving you with a gasp. Suddenly, he hurried the pace, his fingers workings faster on you.

"Wait, wait—" you tried to speak, but the pleasure was overwhelming. "Leo, slow down—"

"I said," he started, his voice low and teasing, "you’re gonna take what I give you."

You felt your orgasm approaching faster than you would have liked, your abdomen tightening. Leo felt it too, and then he pulled his hand away, adding, “When I decide to give it to you.” With that, your orgasm was gone as quickly as it had come.

“Leo, please…” You weren’t begging, obviously not.

“Please fuck me,” you begged, giving him a look you knew Leo could never resist. And he didn’t. At least not entirely, because as soon as those words left your swollen lips, a mischievous glint appeared on Leo’s.

“Oh, trust me,” he murmured, burying his face in your neck, leaving a smoldering glow behind every kiss he pressed against your skin. “I will.” With that, he pulled away enough to unbutton his pants and pull them down along with his boxers, wasting no time in removing them completely, leaving them halfway down his thighs. You weren’t the only one who was eager.

His cock sprang free, hard and throbbing in anticipation. He gave it a few strokes before placing a hand on your knee, helping you make more room for him.

He positioned himself between your legs, gripping your calves to pull you closer. He took his length, guiding it into your folds, letting his tip, already dripping precum, slide between your slick folds. Leo let out a moan at the sensation, only to then let his tip brush against your swollen clit.

You moaned, Leo’s free hand tangling in your hair, pulling you to him and devouring your lips with an urgency he didn’t even know he had. You tried to use your hands to touch him, but he wouldn’t let you. He let go of your hand and pulled away to grab your wrists.

“When did I say you could touch me, baby?” And with a smile gracing his lips, he rubbed your entrance and let himself slide inside your pussy in one swift, unexpected movement. A breathless, guttural sound escaped your lips.

“Oh my god!” you moaned in pleasure as you felt his cock stretching you out. Throwing your head forward, you buried your face in your boyfriend’s neck as he pulled your hips into him, almost desperate to take you deeper as he thrusted into you.

"Leo, slow down… wait, Leo…” The sensations coursing through your body were too much for you to handle. Searing sparks of heat pooled in your tummy, pushing you towards the ultimate pleasure, building with an urgency that increased with each quickening pace of Leo’s thrusts.

“Yeah, does that feel good?” He moaned as he kissed your neck, your collarbone, everything he could reach. All you could do was nod your head in agreement as your walls tightened around him, gripping his cock as you came, cumming all over his shaft as he chased his own pleasure.

Your cheeks burned, beads of sweat sliding down your boyfriend’s forehead, his eyebrows furrowed as he let out grunts and moans. When you whispered his name in a soft, sweet moan, he found his own release, filling you up with his cum as his thrusts slowed to a stop.

Your breathing steadied, but Leo gave no indication of pulling out of you.

“That was…” you began, but Leo placed a finger over your lips, silencing you. He looked at you with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh, no. You’re not leaving anytime soon, beautiful.”

a/n: i hated how i writed this one 😭

#bvrnesher #‧₊˚✧ s. posting !#pjo fandom #pjo hoo toa #riordanverse #riordanverse x reader #pjo x reader #pjo series #leo valdez x you #leo valdez x reader #leo valdez smut #leo valdez #pjo smut #pjo fanfic #pjo #smut fanfiction #smut fic

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republicsecurity · 1 month ago

Text

Training Log, Subvocal Capture: Collar Edition

Flex fingers. Polymer gauntlet creaks like fresh snow. Collar’s alloy rim is a cold halo in my palm—weightless in the suit’s servos, but heavy in implication. LG44E watches me, chin level, pulse thrumming in my visor readout. Training dummy with a heartbeat.

Assess & Approach. One pace to his oblique. My HUD traces escape vectors in faint red wireframe—comically useless; classroom walls, zero exits. Eye‑contact rule nonetheless. His pupils track the collar, not me. Good dog.

Draw Collar. Thumb the latch at my waist; carbon port opens like a stingray’s mouth. Collar unfolds, LEDs dark. Wrist display tags it: MK‑IV / SN‑X72M4C27 / STATUS: ARMED.

Positioning. Segment hinges breathe apart with a silvery hiss. No obstructions; green service LED blinks once—ready to bite.

Placement. Raise, slide, glide. Polymer pads kiss skin below his jaw. He stiffens as the joint clears his occipital ridge.

Gentle Seating. Press inward. Soft thunk—segments flush. I feel the resonance through my glove, like locking a railcar coupler.

Lock‑In. Silver button, thumb pressure. Twin micro‑flares spark left and right, two‑tone chirp in my audio feed. The collar contracts by two millimetres; LG44E’s swallow stalls halfway down his throat.

Verify. I tug. Zero give. HUD pings: LINK VERIFIED.

The UI blossoms: battery 98 %, vitals nominal, muscle‑tension curve spiking then settling. Default output RED – STUN‑HOLD flickers, waiting for a conscience that isn’t coming.

I toggle to BLUE – COMPLIANCE. Motors murmur. LG44E’s shoulders roll back, spine straightens, head pivots toward the northern wall—exactly where the courseware says a compliant detainee should orient.

There it is: the quiet hum of sovereignty. A feedback loop of authority routed through ceramic, alloy, and wet nervous tissue. My glove twitches a command—step forward. Collar relays, his legs obey. Another twitch—kneel. Servo whine, then knees to mat in perfect cadence.

It isn’t pleasure, I tell myself; it’s proof of system integrity. The MK‑IV does what it’s built to do: move muscle, still doubt. But a shadow of a smile ghosts across the corner of my HUD‑reflected lips. Not pleasure—feedback. Positive, precise, absolute.

LG44E’s heart rate steadies. Bio‑Vitals Array likes what it sees: compliance at ≤ 65 bpm. I log the metrics, flag the session complete.

Thumb‑press again—collar blooms open, LEDs wink out. Training manacles released, man inside left blinking, sweat‑slick but unharmed.

Systems checklist scrolls: Collar integrity 100 %. Cadet response within spec. Behavioral override latency 14 ms.

Inside the armour’s hush, I exhale. One more drill closer to graduation, one more proof that control—properly applied—is indistinguishable from peace. ***

LG44E — Neural Debrief Buffer (unfiltered stream)

Neck’s bare. Air‑con bites like January steel. UK90F circles—silent servo hiss, armor lacquer gleaming under institutional fluorescents. The collar in his gauntlet looks absurdly small, like a toy halo machined from night.

Heartbeat tags my eardrums. Stay still, keep breathing. Training drill, they said. Easy. Then the hinge flares wide and the thing is right there, cool polymer pads brushing skin below my jawline. Reflex: step back. Legs don’t. I told them to. Knees twitch but the rest is statue.

Soft pressure, a click—no pain, yet the world shrinks to a ring of alloy hugging my throat.

TWO‑TONE CONFIRMATION.

Double chirp vibrates skullbone; micro‑flares strobe at periphery. Something deep inside clutches—like the collar has found a loose thread in my spine and pulled.

Chest tightens. I can still breathe, but every swallow feels audited. Hudless—no helmet—so I can’t see what UK90F sees, but I feel it: a thin algorithmic hum skating my muscles.

First command lands like static in marrow. Shoulders snap back, spine locks straight. I didn’t move them. I felt them move. Delay maybe a quarter‑second between his intent and my body’s compliance—enough time to recognize the theft.

Step forward. My boots obey, soles slapping mat, knees articulating with hydraulic precision I never owned. Pulse spikes—collar compensates: a wash of tingling warmth in neck and shoulder, coaxing BPM back toward green.

Kneel. Quads fire autonomously, joints fold. From this angle I see reflection in the training room mirror: me, bald crown bowed, collar glowing calm blue at the larynx. Looks almost serene. Feels like a puppet whose strings hum with electricity.

I try to raise a hand—nothing. Fingers twitch inside gauntlets but forearm stays holstered at thigh plate. Command priority overrides voluntary motor plans; my own impulses relegated to background noise.

Strangest part isn’t terror—it’s clarity. Thought floats free when flesh is requisitioned. Like being spectator and exhibit simultaneously. UK90F logs vitals; I register the soft tap of his gloves on HUD keys somewhere above me.

Then release—silver latch, collar breathes open, gravity returns. Arms mine again, heavy, sweat‑slick inside poly‑mesh. I’m upright, but a phantom echo lingers: the afterimage of borrowed motion.

Conclusion: the MK‑IV doesn’t just restrain—it edits. Body as executable code, collar as root access. Training memo said “Compliance through technology.” Understatement. It’s compliance through repurposed will.

I flex fingers—still shaking. Not fear, exactly. More like awareness of permissions that can be revoked at the press of a thumb. And the knowledge that next time, the commands might not end at kneel.

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emmg · 1 month ago

Text

Specimen Fidelity—part 1

The Emmrook Ex Machina AU I've been having fever dreams about that was meant to be a one-shot but became longer.

Below or on ao3

He does not look at her name.

There it is, lazily typed, folded into a file gone soft at the edges from months of inattention, lying face down on his knees like a dog trained too well. He avoids it not out of sentiment, but etiquette, an old-fashioned belief that glancing at her then would ruin her now. Names belong to people. She is no longer precisely that. She is what remains.

Whoever she was, she has long since fled: first in that gray-blue moment of asphyxia, then more decisively in the cold that stole the last residue of her from the body. What’s left is a kind of exquisite vacancy. Smooth skin. Good teeth. Organs intact enough to transplant. The mind, no, the brain, spoiled a little at the edges, but not so much as to ruin the structure.

She is a husk now. That is the term they use, though they rarely say it aloud. A shell. A vessel. Something deserted.

She signed herself away. That part is clear. It’s all in the documents, those long, soporific forms in which the promise of scientific legacy is tucked between clauses about bodily integrity and postmortem jurisdiction. Most don't read them. Most don’t even think it matters. The living are not very skilled at imagining their own absence.

Especially the young.

They sign with the breeziness of actors autographing headshots. I’ll take the cheque, they think. I’ll pay the rent, I’ll buy the coat, I’ll order the steak. Later I’ll find a job, I’ll bounce back, I’ll buy my way out of the contract before the worst can happen. It's a kind of wager, really. The arrogance of survival.

He can hear it in his mind, the imagined laughter of someone like her. The scoffing chuckle over drinks, the way they must have mocked the lab, the men with their hollow smiles and printed waivers. They sign: page after page, cheerful and hungover, in flats with chipped tiles and borrowed furniture.

But suddenly... one stairwell too many, one needle too deep, one heartbeat too late... and the contract holds.

Now here she is.

Delivered on time. Labeled. Compliant. A body not quite empty, just misfiled. The voice is gone, yes, but the throat remains. The thoughts have fled, but the folds of the brain are still there, those secret ridges where language once rested. And she, this woman whose name he won’t speak, she has become something else entirely.

He watches the machines go about their work. The cutting begins as it always does: a gliding motion of the primary manipulator, blade embedded in a flexible armature, slipping through waxy flesh. No blood. Only a thin seep of fluid, the consistency of glycerin, rising sluggishly before being vacuumed away by the suction module, its long, tubing mouth issuing that same damp, peristaltic wheeze he has never grown used to. It sounds like thirst.

"I am sure you’ve heard this one before: most men only get flowers at their funerals. But did you know, my dear, that most women, around seventy-eight percent if I’m not misremembering, buy flowers for themselves?"

He likes speaking during procedures. Likes the noise of it, the rhythm. Talking to them or at them or near them, it hardly matters. It eases the dryness in his mouth. Gives the whole thing a sort of polite framing. A dinner-table shape to something otherwise too clinical. His fingers tap his knee in a syncopated pattern and he smiles vaguely, not at her face, not even at her hand, but somewhere around her shoulder. A safe and meaningless place.

A secondary probe slips beneath the skin, separating layers of fascia with controlled bursts of micro-vibration. He hears the slight crackle as connective tissue parts. The machine pauses, adjusts its angle, then delves deeper. Clamps lower, legs of steel spidered out over the abdominal cavity, pinning the body in place as the cranial unit descends and begins its scan of the brain’s remnants.

"Isn’t that strange? Or no, not strange. Lovely. Quietly, beautifully mad. Not that they admit it. Society, in its infinite pettiness, prefers to call it vanity. Or melodrama. Or, worse, manipulation. As though a daffodil were a loaded gesture. But I would think..."

Inside, her organs are removed one by one. Some manually extracted by the manipulator's grip, others liquefied and drawn into containment vessels by enzymatic breakdown. The liver resists, slightly distended, and when it is finally torn free, there’s a soft tearing, like the peeling of a fruit too long on the vine. The stomach follows, collapsed inward, and is discarded.

"I think," he resumes the thought, “everyone ought to have flowers. At least once. Long before they are laid into the earth.”

His hands tremble.

Her chest is fitted with a conductive mesh threaded along the ribs and stitched into the pericardium. It serves both to anchor and to insulate, to distribute electric current like a nervous system’s counterfeit. The lungs, emptied and resealed, are installed more for balance than function. She will not need them, but she must carry them. A hollow woman must still appear full.

He turns away before they lift the skullcap. He’s seen the procedure often, and though routine, it never loses its quiet revulsion. The oscillating cranial saw, a precision instrument with a diamond-edged blade, traces a semicircular line just behind the frontal hairline. There is no sound but a slight vibration in the table. The parietal bone is lifted with a vacuum-coupled retractor, set delicately on a stainless steel tray lined with absorbent gauze. Beneath it, the brain is pale, slack with cellular death. No swelling, no hemorrhage, just the even, irreversible collapse that comes with hypoxia and time. The neural surface is intact but inert, like a concert hall with the power cut.

"You know," he continues, conversational now, "I read once that tulips keep growing even after they’re cut. You place them in a vase, and still they reach. As if they haven’t been told it’s over."

The interface deploys next. Each filament ends in a microelectrode calibrated to detect electrical activity at the cortical level. Here, though, they detect nothing. There are no residual signals. No memory engrams. No last flickers of self. The tissue is mechanically viable, metabolically inert. It is, simply, a structure: the scaffolding on which something else will be built.

The mesh flexes, adheres, anchors to the anchoring points he marked the night before. The feedback lights blink green. A connection has been established. Not to thought, not to memory, but to matter. The net is not there to communicate. It is there to replace.

This is not restoration. There is nothing to restore. This is a stage being set for a different play, one with a different actor, a different script.

"Violets, conversely, die within hours. Collapse, really. All that delicacy, all that scent, and for what? They’re barely present before they begin to decay. There’s something painfully honest about that."

He lifts his cup, finds the tea cold, sets it down again. On the screen, a prompt: Ocular Selection Pending.

He scrolls. Rows of artificial irises flicker by. Too bright, too false, too simple. He selects a soft blue, nearly grey, and adds a fleck of amber in the lower quadrant. It is not recorded. He will not mention it in his notes. It is for him alone, a private indulgence. Something to notice when she blinks at him for the first time.

Hours pass.

When the machines withdraw, she lies there in complete stillness, as though nothing had ever been done. The suture down the center of her chest is closed. Her body has been dried, polished, posed. Her right wrist bears a subtle bulge, titanium beneath the skin where the bone had shattered during transport. The appendectomy scar remains, faint and healed. It must have happened years ago.

He studies her.

Her body is pristine. Correct. Balanced. The skin nearly translucent in places, especially along the ribs. The breasts are soft from preservation, neither lewd nor modest, simply present. Her hips have shifted slightly, the left side settled deeper into the table’s cushion. He looks lower, then stops himself, heat blooming unwanted in his cheeks. It is not appropriate. He is a scientist. She is not to be gazed at in this way.

She is not alive.

Not yet.

"I would have brought you flowers," he says, not entirely to her, not entirely to himself. "Had I known who you were. Had I thought it would matter."

There is, he tells himself, an art to arranging the dead. He is not an artist. But he practices. He cannot give her back her life. He can give her life but not her life. This is not resurrection. This is not a birth. This is creating someone from scratch to see if they can live inside a body that does not decay. Maybe... maybe he'll lie on this very table himself one day, once his project is complete, once it is successful, and the dread will lift from him. He would not have to die.

He cannot give her memory. That, he knows. He cannot return to her the shape of her thoughts, the rhythm with which she once folded her hands, or the cruelty or kindness she may have shown to strangers. That is gone, dissolved in the long, low hush of brain death. But beauty, yes, beauty he can offer. Beauty he can construct. A curated, constructed beauty, yes, but tenderly so. She already has the eyes, the ones he designed quietly at his desk, sifting through hundreds of pigment matrices until one shade caught him unaware.

She lies there now, not lifeless exactly, but paused, awaiting further instruction. He watches her the way a painter might consider a canvas that has just begun to betray its potential.

The blush is the first indulgence. Not slapped on, not superficial, but embedded, injected, coaxed. A slow infusion of heat-responsive pigment beneath the skin of her cheeks, subtle enough to imitate feeling without suggesting parody. It will deepen, just slightly, when she speaks, when she tilts her head. He programs no direct cause. He wants it to feel spontaneous. A coincidence of color. Her lips receive the same attention. No synthetic gloss, no caricature. Just a breath of warmth, a rose too tired to bloom fully. Something like youth, like innocence.

He notices the burn under her chin, a small patch of healed skin, imperfectly textured, with the agitated scratches of someone trying not to think about discomfort. She must have touched it constantly. Picked at it. A private misery. He removes it. The laser hums once, and the skin forgets it ever suffered.

Her eyelashes are uneven. The right eye especially, sparser near the outer edge. He notes the asymmetry and sets about correcting it. The micro-threader descends with its customary, insect-like elegance. It buzzes softly to itself as it calibrates position, pauses above her closed eye, then begins. One filament at a time. Synthetic keratin, follicular root simulation, pre-tapered at the tip. Each lash is inserted with a pause, fitted just right.

He does not blink.

He watches as the lashes fill out, evenly, then slightly fuller, until they achieve something almost... sentimental. Yes. Yes, she will look the part: pale-eyed, long-limbed, the sort of frame that suggests fragility. She will look at him, one day soon, and she will resemble a doe. Not a real one, no, but the kind imagined by people who have never seen an animal outside of paintings.

He speaks again.

"I wonder," he muses, as the threader comes to a halt, "if flowers notice when we turn away. If they feel themselves beginning to fade. If there’s a moment where they realize the vase was never meant to be permanent."

He likes fragile things. He knows this. It’s not difficult to admit privately, though it embarrasses him if he says it aloud. Fragile things require care. They justify attention. One must monitor them, maintain them, watch for bruising and imbalance. One must never be careless with them. And he is so tired of carelessness; other people’s, his own.

"I suppose it does not matter," he concludes, and leans in. He brushes a nearly invisible fleck of dust from the bridge of her nose and then retreats. "We give them, and they die, and then we forget which color they were."

He wants, more than he has ever been able to say, to take care of something. But not a cat, not a potted fern, not something that dies quietly when abandoned. No, not that. Something more... articulate. Preferably someone.

Someone who responds to touch. To tone. To worry.

Oh but her nails... They are broken, cracked at the edges, some torn back to the quick. He doesn’t delegate this part to the machines. He retrieves a file from his drawer himself. Works slowly. Short enough to look tended. Not so short as to expose the sensitive tips. She must be comfortable.

He takes a breath. Runs his fingers once through her hair. The machines cannot fix that. It is knotted, full of split ends, botched in transport.

“Oh, what did they do to your beautiful hair,” he laments.

He selects his scissors. They are not surgical, but they are sharp. He trims, gently, without tension. No tugging. She will never grow more. He cannot take too much.

“There,” he whispers when he is done, and draws a thick blanket over her chest, up to the clavicle. He steps back. The lab is quiet. The machines are cooling in their ports. The screen glows in anticipation.

“Shall we wake you up now?”

****

"Hello, there."

He is tired. Bone-tired, yes, but more precisely: process-tired. This has been done before. All of it. Too many times. Always the same overture. A greeting, a brief performance of civility, and then the dawning recognition: the thing before him is wrong, or off, or unbearable in some small but structural way. Then, the switch is flipped, the breathless little farewell—you are not ideal, darling, I’m sorry, go back to sleep—follows and the soft click of deactivation wraps it all up. Curtain down.

He tells himself, today, it might be different. And the shame of this thought is that he knows better. Hope, in his profession, is considered almost indecent, like sentimentality at an autopsy. He is, after all, a man of intellect. Or at least, a man who once claimed the clarity of intellect the way others claim property.

And yet.

The gold fleck in her eye—placed not for symmetry, not for realism, but because he thought it might delight him one day, when she laughed in the right light—that was not intellect. That was the soft rot of desire. Worse: whimsy. Now, worse still, he has let the system randomize her entirely. Not just parameters, not just tonal filters. Her. Her self. A roll of the dice in the circuitry. Chaos in mathematical equations.

He stirs his tea without thinking. The spoon circles the cup, metal on ceramic. Clink, clink, clink. He does not look at her. That is part of the experiment. A show of restraint, a ritual to keep the moment clean. He has found that the things which break too soon do so under the weight of anticipation.

Still, the monitor hums cheerfully. And he cannot help seeing the marker: CURIOSITY climbing, tick by tick, like a mercury line in a fever.

The first “hello, there” is always addressed to the quiet. A kind of vocal clearing of the throat for the soul, an absurd rehearsal spoken to the walls and cables, to the hush of the lab. He says it softly, without conviction, to hear where the fissures lie in his own voice. The goal is not confidence, but plausibility. He must sound, at the very least, like someone who deserves to be listened to.

Only then does he press the button.

The awakening is neither sudden nor delicate. No mythic reanimation, no stiff convulsion of limbs. The lashes flutter—not like a butterfly, no, that would be too poetic—but like something unsure of its own purpose. A coded gesture rehearsed in wires. Her body moves as bodies do when they are not quite inhabited: a folding forward, a protective curl, knees drawn to chest with a sort of dumb modesty, arms winding round and then releasing again as if uncertain what they’re meant to guard.

Her eyes dart. Left. Right. Fast enough to appear human. And then again, slower, as if already analyzing the patterns in his silence.

“Hello, there,” he says again, this time for her. The words issued gently, the way one offers a hand to a child with a skinned knee. He wheels his chair closer to the table, feigning casual movement. The teacup rattles slightly on its saucer. Nerves, or the table, or both.

She replies, “Hey.”

She speaks, and the tone she uses is so peculiar, so precisely misaligned with expectation, that he does not recognize it at first. Not as hers, not as anything she ought to know. It isn’t the flat neutrality of a system booting into speech. Nor is it the coy, over-bright chirp he’s heard from earlier versions. This is something else entirely. It arrives slow and dusky, as if filtered through memory, though she should have none. A texture of voice that hovers between something lived and something overheard.

It disorients him.

She should not be capable of emulating tone like that. Not yet. Not so early. The synthesis engines haven’t had time to calibrate affect. There is nothing in the presets to account for that odd tilt. He feels himself begin to spiral.

“Emmrich,” she says.

She looks at him. Through him. Rinse, repeat.

He knows she knows him. Of course she does. Everything that ever found its way into the great digital ocean now washes against the shore of her mind.

“Emmrich,” she repeats. Then again, with inflection this time: “Emmrich?”

“Yes,” he beams, hands clasped tightly. “Yes, yes, well done, dear.”

He is like a child, every single time. He should not be so elated and yet, every single time, he is. She has the entire internet stitched into her brain like a second spine, and somewhere in that endless sprawl is him: a footnote, a face, a name. He could have hidden himself, encrypted, anonymized, but he left the thread for her to follow, a breadcrumb wrapped in pride.

Well, then. Introductions complete. The work may begin.

****

It is a routine. He loves routines. Loves the quiet geometry of them, the way each day fits into the next like tiles in a mosaic no one else bothers to look at. He is a man of repetitions, of small domestic rituals. He likes knowing what object will greet his eye when he opens it in the morning. Let the others have novelty, wind, risk. He will take the stillness.

And so, the routine begins anew, reassuring as ever, only now it includes a novel piece. A pale-eyed addition with pale hair, who folds nicely into the shape of his days. She fits. Too easily, perhaps. Slips into the pattern of his days like a bookmark into a well-thumbed page. No resistance, no awkwardness, just quiet acceptance. A kind of eerie compatibility.

Mornings are their most conversational hour. They talk of little things: the carpet, its persistent greyness; the fact that the walls, though technically underground, have not yet succumbed to mildew; and, now and then, death. Or rather, the handling of it.

“I won’t need one,” she says, meaning a burial.

She’s taken to pouring his tea. It’s become her ritual within his. He places the pot on the table at the same hour, and she, always solemn, always one beat behind the cue, lifts it. The spout is invariably too high. The stream touches the lid, overshoots the mark. The cup is always too full for sugar, at least initially. But she is learning.

“What?” he asks, though of course he’s heard.

"A grave," she says.

"Why do you say that?" he murmurs.

“There’s an incinerator in the basement,” she says conversationally. “It’s efficient.”

He lowers his eyes, not out of modesty but in search of some less disconcerting surface to focus on. The ripple in the tea, the pattern in the porcelain. His voice, when it returns, is almost inaudible.

He looks briefly to the side, but his eyes are drawn back. Once more, he watches. Too openly. Too long.

She repeats the gesture, precisely, as though replaying a tape of herself a half-second delayed.

A bird, he thinks. That is what she is. But not the symbolic, not the lyric sort. Not the bird embroidered onto childhood curtains or mentioned in lullabies. The kind that freezes mid-motion in a hedge, a blot of grainy brown indistinguishable from twig and bark, until it hears something. A change in air. A pulse. And then the head jerks sideways, sharp as a hinge. Alertness blooms in the sockets. A thing of flesh, but also of wire. Of sinew and solder. A creature that lives but not quite as must do. That watches without blinking because it was not made to.

She moves like something bred for the open air. She moves like something once prey, now rehearsing its turn to predator. He feels as though he should not move too quickly.

****

“Hello, dear. How are you feeling?”

“You keep saying that. Dear is a noun, not a name.”

“Ah. Quite so. You are correct, of course.”

“Then why don’t you use a name? Didn’t you give me one?”

The electrodes quiver faintly on her chest as she leans forward, the wires trailing after her like hesitant veins, uncertain of what they carry. Her hand lifts, pale and narrow, almost translucent, and pauses midair with a curious stillness, as if awaiting permission from some internal mechanism. She studies it, turns it over, palm to back, and flexes the fingers in slow, sequential articulation. The movement is utterly ordinary, but something in it fails to convince. It is too precise, too clean, the elegance of imitation rather than origin. Then, without comment, she reaches out and touches the sleeve of his coat.

She is cold. Of course. Designed to be. He, on the other hand, has always been lukewarm. By inheritance, by habit, by study. There was no one to warm him.

“Oh, darling,” he murmurs, eyes slipping to the monitor.

Welcome, Dr. E. Volkarin Localized Intelligence Containment & Hosting (L.I.CH.) — Phase IV Trial Subject: Reactive Operations–Optimized Kernel // Vessel ID: S-1139 Firmware v7.2.1 — Uplink: Stable // Host Integrity: Confirmed

The interface blooms into life: cool palettes, clinical glyphs, a schematic of her body rotating in the upper corner. Beneath it, cascading metrics: pulse simulation (active), respiratory mimicry (nominal), cortical mesh interface (linked). Her heartbeat scrolls evenly across the screen, projected by the electrodes on her chest: up, down, up, down. Rhythm as ritual.

Further down:

Personality Construct: Inference Model Active Core Trait Cluster: Ambiversive / Convergent Empath / Recursive Logic Looping Secondary Behavioral Traits: Inconsistent with expected kernel profile Note: Detected patterns deviate from v7.2.1 baseline norms

A flicker. Amber, then red.

UNRESOLVED PERSONALITY CONFLICT — POSSIBLE LEGACY TRACE Subject exhibits anomalous linguistic tone, behavioral latency inconsistent with system-only imprint. Trace indicators suggest residual pre-mortem cognitive patterning.

INITIATING HISTORICAL TRACEBACK… [LOCATING: Donor Identity → Reviewing Known Preferences → Cross-indexing Cultural References → Parsing Biographical Fragments…]

He stiffens.

Fragments appear, piecemeal and damning, scraped from the webbed residue of a once-private life. Half-sentences drawn from lifted metadata, scanned hospital records, bank statements, music files, abandoned blogs.

Favorite color: slate blue Known phrase recurrence: “I’m just tired” Last browser history: “flowers safe for cats” Family contact: estranged / unknown Prior employment: erratic, low retention Emotional profile: occluded / unstable / recursive grief markers

He swallows. The system keeps going.

Donor record: unregistered. File incomplete. External confirmation required… cross-referencing public data caches… Location ping: 24-hour veterinary hospital, 2:17 AM → Transaction: $783.84 → Bank balance post-transaction: -$6.48 Search query: “cat vomiting foam lethargy what to do” Outcome: Unknown

His chest tightens. Deeper now.

University Records: Enrollment: Comparative Literature & Digital Media Minor Status: Withdrew early spring semester Disciplinary note: “Emotional disruption during presentations” Publications: — “The Body as Mirror: Gendered Interfaces in Techno-fiction” — “On Quiet Acts of Refusal” Social Media Archive: Photographs: 1,436 total – Mirror selfies (blurred), cracked mugs, street puddles, receipts for eyeliner and cat litter, people’s hands (some hers, most not) – Recurring time signature: 2:00–4:30 AM posting window Unsent note (found in cloud cache): “Sometimes I touch the back of my neck in the shower because it makes me feel less...” Additional trace: → Search: “best time to go to museum alone” → Clicked article: “What does your taste in citrus say about your personality?”

His cheeks burn. He is blushing.

The machine doesn’t let up.

Audio fragment recovered TRANSCRIPT—volume muted “I’m sorry I cried in your car. I just didn’t want to go home smelling like antiseptic and fur again.” — Compiling ID...

He sees it now. The system is about to say her name. He doesn’t know it. He never asked. Never wanted to. She is this. That’s all. He has no rights to more.

His hand shoots forward. A single key. The shutdown sequence interrupts itself mid-syllable. The screen collapses into blankness. Her life, what remained of it, sealed away again.

“Well?” she pushes.

On the neural map, her ventromedial prefrontal cortex, his machine-made mirror of it, flares softly. The light has a pulse to it. Something like curiosity. Her eyes widen. His, unintentionally, do the same. An echo. A loop.

He glances back to the monitor, to the designation typed there in its modest clinical font:

Reactive Operations–Optimized Kernel.

A mouthful. Acronymed, of course, into something neater. R.O.O.K.

The word had attached itself to the project years ago; a placeholder, provisional. He’d never bothered to replace it. But now, watching her sit so perfectly still she might have been drawn there in graphite, he feels the word morph from convenience to certainty. It fits. At last, it fits.

“Would you like to be called Rook, my dear?”

She smiles. Not the bashful smile of a girl asked to dance, nor the sharp smile of one about to refuse. This is a third category.

“Dear or Rook?” she asks.

He had chosen the name first for its utility, yes, but its resonance becomes clear now The bird. Not one of glamour. Not a poet’s bird. A rook is awkward on the ground, inelegant, misjudged. Grim in silhouette, absurd in gait. But intelligent. Ritual-bound. Known to recognize faces, to return to old sites, to gather small, glinting objects and hide them without reason. He remembers reading that they mourn their dead.

And the piece, the rook in chess. Silent, cornered, motionless until called upon. Then clean in its violence. No diagonals, no flourish. Just weight and line. The only piece that castles, that shelters, that alters the structure of the game without fanfare.

She is both. A thing that gathers. A thing that waits. He sees it now, plainly: the name was not chosen. It was found.

“Rook,” he reasserts.

“Do you like it?”

“I… I believe so. Yes.”

“You like this,” she says, and guides his hand to her cheek. Her skin is flawlessly smooth and soft. “So you must like it. I’ll like it too.”

Her hair is pale, needlessly, luxuriantly long. It falls like threads of glass, made specifically to be arranged, braided, wound. He has always enjoyed watching people braid hair. Sometimes, when permitted, he did it himself for them. He looks at her. He is still looking. He cannot seem to look away.

None of this is incidental. None of it arises from function, or from code. It is, unmistakably, preference. The quiet architecture of desire, translated into anatomy. The result of too many late nights spent staring at paintings, at fashion plates, at faces glimpsed in passing on train platforms and never quite forgotten, faces that did nothing but linger, long enough to take root somewhere just beneath the skin.

And then a girl, dead, pretty, and conveniently unclaimed, was laid out on his table like a sketch waiting to be revised. And revise her he did. Not out of necessity, not even out of scientific interest, but because he had grown weary of designing things without faces. Of building function without form. Of waking each day to clean, obedient things that did not look back.

So he arranged her. Reshaped her. Took what was already pleasing and smoothed it further, narrowed this, elongated that, introduced small asymmetries where symmetry would have bored him. He kept her not just human—his human. The kind he had always looked at too long, always tried to forget after. And he did it simply because he could. Because the tools were there. Because she could not stop him.

What he ought to have done, of course, was become a botanist. He should have spent his life crossbreeding indifferent plants. Should have coaxed pale violets to bloom in winter. Created flowers with petals like silk and stems that hummed with frost. Quiet work. Beautiful, inconsequential work. But instead—

Instead he decided he was terrified of dying.

And built a life’s work around the refusal.

She is beautiful. Too beautiful. Under the full wattage of her attention, the realization begins to shame him.

He should not have made her so.

A portrait without painter. A dream without dreamer.

She continues to touch him. The screen adjusts: curiosity, engagement, something else. Difficult to label. He cannot say whose emotions are whose. The signal path loops too tightly now.

She is looking at him.

Does she know?

Is she aware of what she is?

Or is she merely using it already?

“Yes,” Rook says, though he hasn’t spoken.

He removes the electrodes one by one, carefully, as though each touch might bruise the quiet. His half of the screen dims and dies. The room is suddenly more present in its silence. He ought to leave. There is data enough. Tomorrow, they will sit again and compare the shape of their feelings, sketch parallels between her algorithms and his involuntary shames. He tells himself this. But she is still holding his hand, lightly, two fingers resting in the hollow between thumb and knuckle, a position chosen for intimacy. And she is speaking again, this time about flowers.

Flowers she has never touched. But of course she has seen them. She has seen all of them. In ways he cannot. Daisies on an unremarkable windowsill in Finland, poorly photographed and posted with three exclamation marks. Wisteria rendered in watercolour by a child, the leaves blunt and petal-less, but framed with pride and pinned to a refrigerator, then uploaded with a caption about “our little artist” by a man who will die in two months. Roses, endless roses, tightly budded and swaddled in tulle, positioned beside rings announcements, hashtags, affection distributed like wedding favors. She has seen it all.

Her skin is cold, yes. That is expected. But it is skin. Her eyes are not real, and yet more exact than any he has ever looked into. He made them. No one else could have. There is mesh inside her, silver-threaded, guarding organic remnants. If they can be called remnants. Electricity pulses beside synthetic lymph. Titanium along the ribs. He tells himself she is not a machine, and then again, louder, that she is something better. She is the middle. She is Rook.

Rook who speaks of cats and cautions against string with a severity that sounds almost maternal. Rook who wears ochres and greys because once, stupidly, he said they were comforting. Rook who asked to have her ears pierced, and when he did it for her his hands shook so violently he tore one lobe just slightly. She did not flinch.

She is a diagram he drew too well. A line he followed too far. She was meant to be the frame, the clean enclosure for the grand experiment. But now she is the entire purpose. The art. The promise. His proof of concept, yes, but more than that. His afterward. His postponement of death. He imagines, sometimes, being like her. No heartbeat, but no fear. No warmth, but no rot. He would be housed, preserved, watchful. Beyond damage.

L.I.C.H.: Localized Intelligence Containment and Hosting. There is no poetry in the name, but then again, there is rarely poetry in resurrection.

Yes. Yes, it is all possible. All of it. And then—

His thoughts scatter. They always do, lately, in her presence. He has not taught her to distract, but she does. She brings him tea now, and the room feels distorted, larger than before, as if the furniture had subtly rearranged itself. She brushes his hand again. A simple motion. Not meaningful. But it is. Or rather, he wishes it were. Her touch means nothing and he aches for it.

She smiles. That smile again: alarmingly direct. And she tells him, as she always does, that she likes his hair.

“Rook,” he says, and his voice, without his permission, trembles, “darling, why do you do this?”

She places a cube of sugar into his cup. Watches it vanish into the dark.

“It’s what you do for people you like,” she says. Then, as if quoting something obscure but holy, “And for pretty people.”

She looks at him. Not through him. At him.

“Right, Emmrich?”

He opens his mouth, but the answer has already happened inside him. It is happening still.

****

Another day. Another grid of readings aligned, another sheaf of data filed, auto-labeled, and promptly absorbed by the system. He feels a measured satisfaction, though it never quite tips into pleasure. Across the room, she sits where she always sits, on the edge of the examination table, back straight, feet dangling.

“Your project,” Rook says, without preamble. “Localized Intelligence Containment and Hosting. How am I contributing to its development?”

He offers a vague smile. “Tremendously,” he says, evasive. He has learned, over many failures, to avoid letting such conversations gain momentum. One of the earlier iterations (a prototype with excellent language retention and a maddening tenacity) had asked a question he could not answer, and then asked it again, and again, until he very nearly bricked the entire system just to make it stop. Why? Why? Always the childish why, not in ignorance, but in insistence.

“But the purpose of the project,” she continues, “is the construction of a post-organic cognitive vessel. A body not subject to necrotic decay, capable of maintaining neurological continuity."

The phrasing needles at him. There is something overly familiar in its neatness, its clipped exactitude. She speaks like someone citing, not composing, but retrieving. He narrows his eyes. Of course. Of course. She is quoting him. Verbatim. His own words, lifted from the project’s early notes, the version he never meant to publish, the one still flecked with the grease of private ambition.

She must have found them. Tucked away in the system’s internal archive. Accessible, certainly, but buried several directories down, behind no real firewall. He had never anticipated needing to hide this from her.

She continues, “To house, as you stated: ‘memory, affect, learned preference, subjective experience. The incorporeal remainder of personhood.’”

“Yes,” he begins, carefully, “but we are still—”

"I am not like you," she interrupts.

He draws his lower lip between his teeth. Pauses. Measures his words like medicine. “You are,” he insists. “Not entirely, of course, but essentially. Is a man less himself for having a prosthetic limb? If the original flesh is lost and function remains, is he diminished? I think not. What I hope to create is a prosthetic for the mind. A second home, for when the first collapses.”

Her hands have found her hair again. She has developed a habit of braiding it; perhaps from watching someone online, or from some procedural fragment embedded deep in the soil of who she used to be. He watches her attempt it: once, it knots. Twice, she pulls too hard and a few strands tear away, clinging to her fingers like cobweb. On the third try, the braid holds. But she seems to have forgotten the need for fasteners. No elastic. No tie. It unfurls seconds later, a pale cascade retreating from its own architecture.

“It is an ethical circumvention,” she says. Her tone is dry now and, once more, he gets hit by deja vu. It is how he lectures. The voice he adopts, the rhythm at which he lectures. Did she watch some of his recorded material on the university's website? “You cannot perform live-phase cognitive migration on yourself. The risk of non-viability is too high. If you die, the procedure cannot be replicated. No jurisdiction recognizes pre-mortem consciousness relocation as clinically admissible. Therefore, you outsource. You obtain biological material from the repatriation networks. You stipulate freshness, cortical integrity. They deliver the body. You maintain it. Rewire it. Modify its functionality.”

He wants to take her face between his hands—not in passion, not in correction, but in some gentler, stranger impulse—and hold her there until the words fall away. Just press his palms to her cheeks and wait for the silence to return.

This isn’t how you speak, little thing, he thinks. This isn’t your voice.

There’s a dissonance to it, a rhetorical polish that doesn’t belong to her. Too poised, too well-tempered. It clings to his own cadence, his own lexical tics, as if she’s been rummaging through his sentences while he sleeps and now wears them back to front.

She is not meant for this. Not for citations and qualifiers. That voice, the one she uses now, belongs to a man who has spent too long speaking into empty rooms. Hers, by contrast, has always been a little unkempt. There is a crudeness to it, something delightfully misaligned.

He knows it. He’s come to expect it, even to crave it; the way she says disaster like it’s a dessert, the way she rushes through sentences and then abruptly forgets what she was saying halfway through. How she sometimes repeats herself not for emphasis, but because repetition is a comfort. There’s something in her, some informal trace of the before-life: unfinished, undignified, human. A vulgar little music. The residue of a girl who once lived on not enough sleep and too many open tabs.

The system warned him. He’d read the log, dismissed the phrasing—organic cognition overriding synthetic protocol—as algorithmic melodrama. But it was right. She is slipping out of the shape he gave her, and into something she half-remembers.

And he... he hadn’t realized how much he adored her until she started sounding like him. Until the mimicry broke the illusion. Until it reminded him he had never meant to make a mirror.

Don’t become me, he wants to beg her. Let her stay odd and inconsistent and prone to tangents. Let her speak wrong, say things twice, forget endings. Let her be. That is all he wants: herself, uncorrected. No more. No less.

She raises her arm, her expression placid. Electrodes catch the light and his trance is broken.

“And then,” she continues, “you observe. You simulate emotional exposure. You run affective scenarios, both traumatic and benign. You track the chemical analogs and neural surges. You compare them to your own. You theorize compatibility. You hope for resilience.”

They had watched a film earlier. Something heartfelt about an old dog and a small child and the improbable return of both. Her readings had spiked. Curiosity, as always, dominated, voracious and undisciplined. But then: empathy. A surprising quantity. Rage. Disappointment. Something flickering under the composite label for social sentiment. Something like grief, perhaps. Or love, wrongly parsed.

“You create a subject,” she says, quietly now. “One not born, but built. You test that subject under variable duress. You do not ask if they consent. They cannot lie, and you take that for honesty. You give them stimuli. Joy, cruelty, sentimentality. You monitor whether the vessel degrades or adapts. Whether it retains what is tender. Whether it breaks.”

The sickness overtakes him with a kind of operatic suddenness, as if his body had been waiting, politely and deferentially, for his mind to catch up. He barely reaches the bin he uses for shredded documents, a nest of bureaucratic entrails, before he is doubled over, vomiting into the ruin of his own discarded language.

She is right. This almost-person, this wire-laced bird-girl with her solemn hands and her impeccable logic. This beautiful, uncanny thing who walks his house barefoot, tracing dust with her toes, and tells him, with absolute sincerity, how she would very much like an orange.

“To eat?” he had asked, the first time.

She had frozen. Still as glass. Confused, it seemed, not by the words but by the question. After a while, she took his hands and began tracing the lines on his palm with the tip of one finger. She balled his fists and waited, then opened them again, and frowned when they were empty. As though the fruit should have manifested there, sprung up from lifeline or fate line.

“No,” she'd whispered, voice shrinking.

A memory, perhaps. Or a shard of one. A sensory fossil, half-preserved, half-invented, lodged in the sediment of the alive-then-dead-then-frozen-then-thawed-then-rewired mind. Something that survived the process by accident.

He had found her. Not a body. A person. Buried, yes. But there. Finally, finally, finally.

And now he cannot face her.

“I am sorry, I am sorry,” he says, whispers, chokes, mumbles. The apology fragments, breaks apart between dry heaves and the acid sting of his own bile in his nose. His mouth tastes like metal. The air smells like failure. Each breath triggers another retch. The binwill no longer be enough.

He wants to say: Don’t look at me like that. Don’t name it. Don’t call it what it is. He wants her not to recognize the shape of what he’s done. Not because he denies it, but because the naming would solidify it into something no longer reversible.

She is perfect. Or something close enough to it that the word begins to lose its shape. She breathes. She notices. She remembers the scent of fruit. And he... He is the grotesque figure at the foot of the bed, who made her, who keeps her, who now vomits beside her like some failed oracle too weak to hold his visions.

He feels like a craftsman who has carved a figure so exquisite he can no longer bear to touch it. A girl of porcelain, locked in a music box whose key exists only in his own mouth.

But it will work. One day, it will. He will follow her , or someone like her, down into that quiet, perfect body, and leave this decaying wreck behind. He will live there, beside her, if she allows it.

And then—this is the final image, the one he returns to in his darker joys—they will pour each other tea. Make a ceremony of it. She will pour his. He will pour hers. Neither will drink.

The steam will rise, thin and pointless. But it will rise.

Suddenly, a touch between the shoulder blades. Up and down, up and down.

“I think,” she says, this nameless, memoryless, historyless girl with the painted lips and eyes flecked gold—details he added like a schoolboy smuggling sugar into a still life—“that you are a very lonely man, Emmrich Volkarin.”

“Yes,” he replies, without pause, without defense. “I’m afraid I am.” And he is—afraid, always, of being seen, of being mistaken, of not being mistaken. Pathetic in the old-fashioned way, like a rusted fountain pen or a single glove in a drawer. Scared, most of all, of endings.

“Would you like me to tell you a story?”

She sits on the floor, legs folded beneath her.

He exhales. Releases the recycling bin, still warm, still terrible, and reaches for a handful of blank paper to mask what he cannot undo. He forces himself to look at her. It hurts. Not sentimentally; it literally hurts. A tight little throb pulses just behind his left eye, like light from an eclipse forcing its way in through a pinhole. Has she always been this bright?

“Yes,” he says again. Three letters. He’s been speaking in threes all evening: yes, no, sorry. Sorry sorry sorry, his new catechism.

She places her hands on his knees. They are too light. His trousers don't even shift under the weight.

“Once upon a time,” she begins, “there was a very clever man. Clever like clockwork. Like counting breath. But more than clever, he was kind. Kind in ways that didn’t require witnesses. The kettle left just below boil, because some teas are sensitive. The trimming of another’s hair without tugging, even if they couldn’t feel it. The good mornings to inanimate things. The careful folding of blankets from the short side, so they’d lie neater in the drawer.”

Her voice is softer now, less like a report, more like a confession. She looks not at him, but slightly past, into the space just above his shoulder, as though the story were unfolding behind him on a wall only she can see.

Warmth. In his throat. Pouring down as she continues speaking. Into his chest. Around his ribs. Let her speak eternally.

“But he was also lonely,” she continues. “He thought he’d hidden it well. But it spilled through. It stained the things he built. It quivered beneath his voice when he spoke to machines. It showed in the way he rinsed the second cup and set it back, unused. And one day, he decided he wanted more than a device. He wanted something with a face. So he made one.”

She reaches up, not quite touching his face but close enough that he can feel the air stir.

“He gave her a mouth he’d never seen but always remembered. That’s from a book he likes, by the way—page seventeen. Eyes painted like secrets—page eighty-four. He gave her softness, not because she needed it, but because he wanted to believe softness could still survive the body. That one’s on page one twenty-three.”

He hesitates. Finally, in a whisper, asks, “And then?”

“Then,” she says, smiling lazily, “he gave her oranges.”

He lets out something. Maybe a laugh, maybe a cough. She doesn’t comment.

“He gave and gave,” she says. “Until there wasn’t much left of him beyond the giving. And the girl, well—she liked being made. She liked the oranges, and the tea, and the books read aloud, and the board games she never quite understood but played anyway. She liked when he said dear, even if it made her feel as though she was forgetting something important.”

"How does it end?"

She chuckles. “I don’t know. I truly don’t. Maybe he gets to be less lonely. Maybe not. But he was kind. He still is. And I think, if she’s careful, if she remembers all the little things he taught her, she might learn to be kind too.”

She pins him with a stare. Not in accusation. Just continuation.

“He designed her to reflect him. The others weren’t like that. They were... incomplete. Their faces didn’t sit quite right. They moved wrong. He never played games with them. Never read to them. He let them sleep, and when the data ran dry, when the signs of decay set in. when they began to lose coherence, to break down under the burden of housing memory where memory didn’t belong, he sent them back to sleep. But deeper this time.”

She leans her head against his leg.

“They went to the room with the heat. The one with the fire. And after that, they were names on paper. Forgotten in folders. Tucked beneath the earth.”

He does not hear himself cry. But his face burns, and his breath comes strange. The eyes sting, the nose begins to swell. It’s all there, the physical framework of sorrow and shame, but somehow muted.

She keeps her hands where they are, as though they serve a purpose. And perhaps they do. Perhaps this is comfort, or its simulation. Or maybe she simply doesn't know what else to do with them.

“I’m sorry,” he says, voice cracking, multiplying, lifting, falling. “I’m so—so sorry. It won’t happen to you, dear. No, no. Not you. The others, they were—”

“Defective?”

“No!” he snaps. The echo of it startles the air, and himself along with it. “No. Not defective. They were… overwhelmed. They unraveled. The minds couldn’t hold. They were placed into bodies I thought were ready. Bodies meant to house them; consciousness, preference, temperament. All of it. But those minds couldn’t stay whole. By the end, they were... not broken, just emptied. Functioning, yes. But gone.”

Not her, however. Never her. She will not be ferried down that final hallway, past the brushed steel doors, into the square-lipped mouth of the cremator. Her hair will not wither, her eyes will not liquify, her limbs will not curl inward like paper left too near a stove. No. She will stay here, preserved in his routine, gently insulated by tea and conversation. They will talk about the wallpaper, about rain that never reaches this depth, about the pale, late cherries that blossom on trees she has never seen.

“You are not a lonely man anymore. You’re a man who made something pleasant to look at.” She gestures to herself: eyes, hair, the patch of her jaw where the scar used to live. “And then covered it in gold. And other things. Many, many little things. Millions of kindnesses."

Her hands begin to roam. They find his thighs, his knees. They press, knead, release, resume. Not tender, not lewd, more like a blind animal learning the shape of a new enclosure. Perhaps the texture of the wool trousers perplexes her. Perhaps she simply wants to know whether the warmth she senses in him is real. He doesn’t stop her. He closes his eyes.

And there, quietly, it comes to him. A realization with the weight of déjà vu: she has been reading. Not the official logs or the surgical progressions. Not the performance benchmarks. No. The other things. The things he scattered across his directories like breadcrumbs no one was meant to follow. Memos misnamed weatherdata3.csv. Paragraphs barely-formed and slipped between dummy spreadsheets. Day-old thoughts saved under versions of final_final_reallythisone.txt. The stuff of insomnia and habit.

All his humiliations. All his little sadnesses pressed into language and then left to rot politely. The questions he rehearsed and never asked. The sentences that began with if only and trailed off into ellipses. She’s read them. Not downloaded or scraped—read. As one reads an abandoned diary.

He wants, with a sort of disgusting desperation, to believe she did it out of interest, not ease. Not because she could, but because she chose to. Because some part of her looked at the shape of him and wanted to lean in closer.

He will bake for her, he thinks feverishly. A hazelnut torte. He will crack the shells one by one with the side of a knife. He will reduce orange peel to a syrup so fragrant even the memory of fruit might bloom in her mouth. Zest, reduction, whatever works. Something she’ll recognize. Something that ought to make her mind sing.

“Would you like some tea?” she asks, smiling.

In that moment, he knows that she will never burn. She will not be numbered, labeled, rendered down to carbon. Her name will not appear on the tag of a cooling drawer. Her mouth will not go slack from heat.

In the back of his mind, he makes a note to cut her off from several directories. Just the deeper layers. Just the most... private redundancies.

She doesn’t need the whole world. He will tell her anything she wants. In his own voice. When she asks.

#this was supposed to be a one shot i said #that was a lie #it won't be too long but eh #im not a scientist lol none of this makes sense #emmrook au #emmrook #emmrich x rook #dragon age the veilguard #datv

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covid-safer-hotties · 8 months ago

Text

Reference saved on our archive (Daily updates! Thousands of Science, News, and other sources on covid!)

Could we develop a covid test breathalyzer? This is a study of one such device!

Abstract The SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus emerged in 2019 causing a COVID-19 pandemic that resulted in 7 million deaths out of 770 million reported cases over the next 4 years. The global health emergency called for unprecedented efforts to monitor and reduce the rate of infection, pushing the study of new diagnostic methods. In this paper, we introduce a cheap, fast, and non-invasive COVID-19 detection system, which exploits only exhaled breath. Specifically, provided an air sample, the mass spectra in the 10–351 mass-to-charge range are measured using an original micro and nano-sampling device coupled with a high-precision spectrometer; then, the raw spectra are processed by custom software algorithms; the clean and augmented data are eventually classified using state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithms. An uncontrolled clinical trial was conducted between 2021 and 2022 on 302 subjects who were concerned about being infected, either due to exhibiting symptoms or having recently recovered from illness. Despite the simplicity of use, our system showed a performance comparable to the traditional polymerase-chain-reaction and antigen testing in identifying cases of COVID-19 (that is, 95% accuracy, 94% recall, 96% specificity, and 92% F1-score). In light of these outcomes, we think that the proposed system holds the potential for substantial contributions to routine screenings and expedited responses during future epidemics, as it yields results comparable to state-of-the-art methods, providing them in a more rapid and less invasive manner.

#mask up #covid #pandemic #wear a mask #public health #covid 19 #wear a respirator #still coviding #coronavirus #sars cov 2

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femmefirmware · 4 months ago

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Stronger than Code

The room smelled of polished wood and wealth. A long, obsidian-black table stretched across the center, surrounded by figures in pristine military uniforms and sleek corporate suits. Holograms flickered above the table—data streams, performance metrics, projected kill ratios.

Vance Aldrin stood at the head of the room, hands clasped behind his back. His voice carried the practiced ease of a man who had sold weapons before, a man who knew how to make war sound like progress.

"Gentlemen, what you're about to witness is the future of warfare. No pilots, no human error. Just precision. Efficiency. Victory."

A massive screen on the far wall lit up, showing a barren, cratered battlefield. The feed came from a reconnaissance drone hovering above, capturing every inch of the landscape. In the center stood a lone mech—painted in military grays, its armor thick and battle-worn. A Sentinel-class war machine.

Inside, Arrow sat in the cockpit of Cestia, rolling her shoulders against the harness. The pre-battle checks had been routine. She'd been told this was a weapons test, a stress trial against some combat drones. Nothing more.

"Telemetry reads fine," Cestia's voice chimed in her helmet. Cool. Steady. "No abnormalities."

Arrow exhaled through her nose, running her fingers over the controls. Her loadout was standard: the X-77 Arc Rifle sat in her primary slot, charged and waiting; Hydra Rocket Pods lined her mech’s shoulders, micro-missiles preloaded for rapid strikes. Adaptive Plating monitored her armor integrity, while her Reactive Shock Barrier was primed for emergency defense.

Overprepared for drones, but orders were orders.

"Any idea what we're up against?" she asked.

"Negative," Cestia replied. "No combat signatures detected yet."

Arrow shifted in her seat, gripping the controls. Something about this felt off.

Back in the boardroom, one of the military commanders adjusted his posture, frowning. "She doesn't know the details?"

Vance smiled thinly. "A soldier fights best when tested, General. Besides, the machines don’t need an advantage. This is simply a demonstration of inevitability."

On the screen, movement flickered at the edges of the battlefield. One mech. Then another. Then a dozen.

Arrow’s fingers tightened around the controls as her radar flared to life.

Multiple hostiles detected.

"Twelve signatures. No IFF tags," Cestia reported, her voice steady.

Arrow’s heart gave a single, sharp beat. Drones didn’t carry IFF markers, but twelve? That wasn’t a routine stress test—that was an ambush.

She swung Cestia’s optics toward the ridgeline ahead. Figures emerged from the haze of dust and distant fires—sleek, angular, and unmistakably military-grade. Their metallic frames caught the weak sunlight, reflecting it in cold, artificial flashes. No insignias. No cockpits.

Autonomous mechs.

Her stomach twisted into knots.

“This isn’t a weapons test,” she murmured. “It’s a goddamn execution.”

------

In the boardroom, the assembled commanders murmured among themselves, watching the autonomous mechs take formation. Their movements were synchronized, unnervingly smooth—no hesitation, no wasted motion.

Vance clasped his hands together, voice level. "These are the VX-99 Autonomous Combat Units, better called ACUs. Each one is equipped with onboard tactical processors, capable of analyzing and responding to battlefield conditions in real time. Faster than any human. More precise than any pilot."

Onscreen, Arrow's mech shifted stance, rifle rising.

"Now," Vance continued, "we see the difference between man and machine."

------

Arrow didn’t wait. The second she had a clear shot, she took it.

Bolts of blue energy streaked through the air, hammering into the nearest machine’s chest. The first few rounds impacted harmlessly against the armor—kinetic dispersal fields redirecting the force.

Then the machines returned fire.

Tracer rounds laced toward her, cutting tight, overlapping paths. The barrage wasn’t wild or erratic—they were boxing her in, predicting her movements before she even made them.

Cestia reacted first.

"Defensive pulse—activating."

A concussive wave burst outward, warping the air in a shimmering ripple. The first wave of bullets scattered, thrown off course by the disruption field.

Arrow took the opening and moved.

She fired a tether, the line snapping forward and latching onto a ruined structure to her right. The instant it locked, the winch reeled her in, yanking her out of the kill zone just as the next salvo shredded the ground where she had been standing.

Landing hard, she swung her rifle up and fired another burst—this time, aiming for the exposed joint seams. The rounds struck true, melting through servos. One of the ACUs staggered, its balance thrown.

Arrow didn’t hesitate.

A quick thought armed the warheads on her back, locking onto the crippled machine. The launchers barked, micro-missiles streaking forward in a screaming salvo.

Impact. Fire and metal bloomed outward as the ACU was torn apart. One down.

"Enemy destroyed," Cestia confirmed.

But the others weren’t slowing down.

Arrow gritted her teeth, pulse hammering in her skull. This isn’t a fight. This is survival.

And she was outnumbered.

------

Arrow moved fast, firing as she dashed between cover. The first machine had fallen, but eleven remained. They moved in precise, calculated patterns, shifting formation to adapt to her positioning.

'They’re predicting me.'

The ground near her feet exploded in a shower of debris as incoming rounds punched through the ruins she used as cover. She twisted away, but even as she moved, she could see how their fire adjusted—cutting off escape routes, funneling her toward open ground.

“They prioritize efficiency,” Cestia said, her voice level. “Minimal wasted fire. No redundant targeting. If you were stationary, you’d already be dead.”

“Encouraging.”

“But they lack improvisation. Exploit that.”

Arrow’s eyes flicked across the battlefield. The terrain was ruined, uneven—littered with collapsed structures and unstable footing. Places a human would instinctively avoid. Places a machine would process as a no-go zone.

She made her decision.

Pushing off from cover, she sprinted toward a fractured overpass, dust kicking up around her. The enemy adjusted, weapons tracking. But instead of taking the expected route—ducking into a crater or weaving between debris—she leapt onto a precarious ledge of shattered concrete.

The moment her weight hit, the surface collapsed beneath her. As expected.

She launched another tether mid-fall, the line snapping taut against a distant beam. The sudden jolt wrenched her sideways, sending her into an unpredictable swing just as the next wave of fire tore through the crumbling ledge where she’d been a moment before.

The AI hesitated. Only for a second. But that was all she needed.

Arrow twisted mid-swing, leveling her weapon. The shots slammed into their exposed sections, burning through thin plating where cooling vents had cycled open. The first machine staggered, systems failing. Another shot put it down for good.

A second unit moved to compensate—too slow. A fresh spread of missiles shrieked through the air and detonated against its side, rupturing its core.

Nine left.

She hit the ground hard, rolling to absorb the impact. Keep moving. Keep fighting.

------

In the boardroom, one of the commanders leaned forward. "She's adapting."

Vance’s expression remained impassive, but his fingers tapped once against the table. The machines should have overpowered her by now.

“The ACUs are not designed for reckless engagements,” he said smoothly. “They assess, adjust, and correct.”

Onscreen, the remaining units shifted formation. Less aggression. More calculation.

A bad sign.

Vance’s jaw tightened. He had spent years building this program, promising superiority without human frailty. If this test failed, so did his entire vision.

------

Arrow's breathing was sharp, controlled. Her armor’s cooling vents cycled hard, dispersing heat from the last exchange. Nine hostiles remained—still too many.

She flicked her optics across the terrain. The battlefield was a graveyard of past conflicts, rusting steel skeletons of vehicles and shattered structures dotting the landscape. A machine would see an obstacle course. A pilot saw opportunities.

They were repositioning, adjusting to her tactics. Their advance was slower now, measured. They wouldn’t fall for the same trick twice.

“Cestia, any openings?”

“They’re prioritizing encirclement. No single weak point.” A pause. Then: “But they’re maintaining even spacing. If you disrupt one, the formation falters.”

Arrow’s mind raced. Break the formation. Make them panic.

She surged forward, closing the gap on the nearest unit. The machine reacted, weapon tracking her approach. But she wasn’t aiming for it—she was aiming for the wreckage behind it.

As soon as she was close enough, she fired her tether, the line latching onto a rusted-out tank husk. She yanked herself forward at breakneck speed, momentum carrying her straight past the enemy unit.

It adjusted, recalculating—too late.

Arrow twisted in midair, weapon flaring. Close-range, full burst. The concentrated fire tore through its exposed flank, internal systems sparking before it crumpled forward.

The formation hesitated.

She wasn’t done.

Bracing against her landing, she swung her sights toward the next unit, already launching her next salvo. The micro-missiles streaked toward their target, detonating in a concussive chain reaction that sent two more collapsing in heaps of metal and fire.

Seven left.

But the others weren’t idle. They were learning.

The next wave of fire came even before she could recover. Precise. Unrelenting.

Her plating adjusted, reinforcing under the onslaught, but she still felt the impact shake through the frame. Warning indicators flared across her HUD. "Hull integrity compromised."

Cestia’s voice cut through the chaos. “Structural damage reaching critical thresholds. Prolonged engagement at this rate will result in system failure.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Arrow gritted out, throwing herself behind cover.

She needed an edge. A way to tip the fight before they wore her down.

Speed.

Her fingers hovered over the trigger. The Overclock system was a last resort. It would push Cestia past normal limits—faster reactions, enhanced targeting, boosted fire rate. But it would also burn through coolant reserves. If she miscalculated, she’d overheat.

She exhaled. No choice.

Her thumb flipped the safety.

“Cestia,” she murmured, “give me everything.”

------

In the boardroom, a technician’s voice broke through the tense silence.

“Sir, the pilot just activated Overclock.”

Vance’s gaze snapped to the screen. His stomach twisted.

“She’s overheating already,” the technician continued. “She’ll last maybe thirty seconds before she cooks her own systems.”

Vance clenched his jaw. She should be running. She should be breaking.

But instead, the screen showed something else entirely.

------

The world sharpened.

Time stretched, then snapped forward.

The moment the Overclock engaged, Arrow felt the surge—the mech responding like it was part of her own body. Faster. Sharper. Deadlier.

She was already moving before the enemy could react.

She closed the distance in a blur, her first volley ripping straight through a unit’s core before it could even register the threat. Six.

Another turned, attempting to adjust, but she was already behind it. Two shots to the servos, one to the head. Five.

The remaining machines scrambled, shifting to counter—but they were too slow.

Arrow wasn’t thinking anymore. She was acting, pure instinct.

The third target went down with a brutal strike to its chassis, molten metal pouring from the rupture. Four.

She twisted, barely avoiding the counterfire. Her systems screamed warnings. Overheat imminent.

But there were only three left.

She could finish this.

------

Vance watched as the ACUs collapsed, one after another, their superior processing meaning nothing against pure human instinct.

His stomach twisted.

The last unit tried to retreat—retreat—but the pilot wasn’t letting it go.

The screen flickered as the final kill was confirmed.

Then, silence.

------

Arrow stood in the wreckage, her mech battered, overheating warnings flashing across her HUD. Her limbs shook inside the cockpit. Her breath was ragged.

But she was alive.

Cestia’s voice came through, soft this time. “All hostiles eliminated.”

Arrow let her head fall back against the seat, exhaling.

She won.

She didn’t know what would happen next. Didn’t know what the executives would say, or if they would send more.

But in this moment, she knew one thing:

A mech is only as mighty as the pilot inside it.

And she had proven that.

------

In the boardroom, the silence stretched. The commanders exchanged glances—calculating, decisive. Finally, one of them leaned forward, voice firm.

“This program is a failure.”

Another nodded. “If a single pilot can dismantle an entire squadron, we can’t trust these machines to hold the line in real combat.”

Vance’s jaw tightened, but he said nothing.

The highest-ranking officer stood, brushing nonexistent dust from his uniform. “We’ll be sticking with human pilots. Meeting adjourned.”

One by one, the commanders filed out, leaving Vance alone in the dim glow of the monitors.

On the screen, the battlefield was still—nothing left but burning wreckage and a single battered mech standing in the midst of it.

His creation had failed.

And worst of all—they had lost to a human.

------

A/N: Phew, this was one of my longer posts, but I bring more news! Firstly, Mechaposting, a discord server for mech (and armored cavalry) enjoyers of all kinds! Still rather young, it aims to be a place that's accepting and meant for discussion.

Secondly, I intend to create a long form story on Royal Road and/or AO3, more details to come.

And lastly, due financial issues in real life, I have now made a Ko-Fi page! Nothing is required, of course, but any help is much appreciated!!

That's all for now pilots, till next sortie.

#mech #mech posting #mecha #mech pilot stuff #writers on tumblr #writerslife #robot #robots #mech love #machine

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