"We can still do other things." She spoke quickly, before he could go on, and her eyes were fixed on his face as if she was trying to gauge his reaction in advance. Her hand traced the inside of his thigh, paused at his crotch, and that felt good, but he grabbed her wrist anyway.

"That wasn't what I asked."

"Colin." She sat back on her heels, inhumanly poised, and he watched as her eyes moved over the length of his body, down his chest to where his cock was tenting out the fabric of his briefs. He could feel the weight of her gaze on his skin, almost, and the memory of the last round of surgery came into his head unbidden. He'd been awake when she'd taken the old cybernetic eye out of his head, replaced the panel of skin where Mannequin had destroyed his face. Dragon had seen all of that raw flesh, she'd taken him apart and reassembled him, and yet she still looked at him with desire in her eyes.

She smiled, now, and shook her head slightly. "I just don't want it to be weird."

"It's not." Colin out a hand up to his own face, touched the skin beneath his eye. "You've already seen me."

Dragon paused for a moment, her eyes on him, and then she nodded and stood in one smooth motion.

"Okay."

She reached down to him, and Colin took her hand in his cybernetic one and pulled himself to his feet. They stood facing each other like that for a moment, before Dragon triggered some invisible command and her armor began to unfold around her under its own power. Her breastplate opened outwards, splitting neatly into three pieces, and the shoulders and back of her powersuit peeled back until she could brace herself and slide her hips free.

Dragon was naked, under the armor, and she gleamed. Colin had looked at the schematics for his own arm, but the intricacy of her cybernetics still startled him. Her brown skin ran all the way up her arms and across her shoulders, where it ended, in a precise, almost surgical curve, just below her collarbone. Below that, her body was mirror-bright metal, corded to resemble human musculature while still giving her a full range of motion, and everywhere her body caught the light it cast pale reflections back, onto the floor and the walls and Colin's own hands. Her chest was flat, and she covered it with her hands as if she was embarrassed, but the curve of her hips was full and feminine.

She smiled at him, sheepishly.

"I'm, uh, working on — "

"You're beautiful."

"You think?" But she peeled her hands off of her chest and held them out to him.

Colin had expected the polished steel panels of Dragon's body to be cool, but when he stepped in close to her, he found that they were as warm as her skin. He turned her hand over in his, kissed her wrist and then the delicate skin on the inside of her forearm. Felt her shiver.

"Is this okay?"

"Yeah. That felt good." She leaned in and kissed him. Her lips were soft, and her tongue was slick and searching, and her body was at once supple and unyielding as she pressed against him, forgetting his stitches momentarily, so that Colin found himself gasping in equal parts pleasure and pain. He wrapped his hands in her hair and let her push him backwards towards the couch, nearly tripping as she hooked her thumbs into the waistband of his briefs and pulled them down. He tumbled backward onto the couch, and it creaked under their combined weight.

Colin spared a moment's thought for the fact that, if Dragon's plans succeeded, he'd never have to set foot inside this apartment or see any of its luxurious amenities again. Then he pulled Dragon down until she was straddling him with her hips pressed against his erection, and kissed her from her neck down to the seam on her chest where skin met metal. She moaned and clenched her hands on his shoulders, as if she was trying to leave bruises.

"Can you feel that?" he asked her, running his hands across the flat plane of her chest, his lips still close enough to her neck that his breath stirred her hair as he spoke.

"Just pressure," said Dragon, and her voice wasn't breathy, exactly — she wasn't breathing at all, which was almost as unearthly as the shining metal of her body, when she was this close to him, and in a situation where, normally, he would have been paying attention to his partner's breath. But there was a slight strain in her voice, as if she was having trouble getting the words out. "I only get fine sensation — on my skin."

So he moved his hands from her waist to the brown skin of her shoulders, tracing the curve of her neck with his fingertips and following their path with his mouth, as she eeled up against him with a frustrated noise and slipped her hand between them to grasp his cock and run her thumb over its head. He gasped into her neck and got a mouthful of her dark hair, which he twisted around his hand and pulled back so that he could kiss the sensitive spot just below her ear, which made her squirm deliciously on top of him and pull him in for another laughing kiss.

"Colin."

"Mmm." He leaned forward to kiss her again, and Dragon caught his chin in her free hand and stopped him. Her eyes were wide and rapt, as if she was looking at him and through him.

"Will you do something for me?"

Her left hand was still stroking his cock, insistently, which meant that he didn't have to think very hard about the answer to her question.

"Of course. Tell me what."

Dragon sat back and let her hand fall away from his cock, tracing a line down the inside of his thigh.

"I think it would be really hot," she said, and paused, shifting her weight a little so that her lips were almost against his, "if you would let me watch you touch yourself."

"Okay." His voice came out a little hoarse, but he reached down left-handed and began to stroke his own shaft, found it already slick with precum.

"Ah, Colin." Dragon caught his wrist and he looked up at her, found that her lips were parted and she was having some trouble meeting his eyes. But her voice, when she spoke, was firm. "With your other hand."

For a moment he felt as if the floor had dropped away under him and he was at the apex of a long fall. Obediently, watching Dragon's face, he took his cybernetic hand away from her waist, wrapped his fingers around his prick. Imagined the intricate working of the mechanism beneath the synthetic skin, how Dragon had patched the cybernetics into his nervous system so that he could feel the texture of the veins in his shaft against his palm. He wasn't even sure if he'd felt this distinctly before he'd lost his arm.

He hadn't meant to moan, but the way Dragon's eyes widened when he did forestalled any embarrassment he might have felt. She pressed him down until he was on his back, rocking her hips gently in tandem with the movement of his hand. Her long hair fell across his face like a veil, cutting off the rest of the room until there was only him, and her, and the fascinated hunger in her eyes.

He worked his hand faster, his breath coming short. Dragon's fingers were digging painfully into his shoulders, and when he groaned again she seemed to remember herself, and she unclenched her fingers and ran her hands lightly over his scalp.

"Fuck, Colin, you're so hot." She spoke just above a whisper. He wanted to close his eyes against the intensity of the look in hers, but she stopped him with her voice. "Don't. Look at me."

He rolled his hips up, grinding against her mechanical body and into his own hand. Dimly, some part of him was embarrassed by the way he was coming apart in front of her, but it was a small part and the rest of him was concentrated into his cock and all the points where his skin was touching hers. He realized he was repeating her name, incoherently.

Swallowed the words with a gasp.

"Don't stop." Dragon kissed him, catching his lip with her teeth. "I want to hear you."

"Dragon," he said, and to his own ears it sounded like he was pleading.

"Are you close? I want you to tell me." There was an urgency in her voice as well, and she leaned in to whisper the words in his ear.

"God, yes," he told her, panting.

As far gone as he was, he could still see how the desire on her face sharpened into something like anguish. She slipped her hand around his on his cock, letting him choose the rhythm, circling the head of his cock with her thumb.

"I want to watch you come for me," she breathed. "Colin."

He tensed before he came, and then there was one convulsive burst of heat and his come splattered across his chest and hers. He felt Dragon shiver, above him, through the lassitude that was overtaking his limbs.

"Wow," she said. She ran over his chest, collecting the droplets of his come that had fallen across the dressing over his stitches. "We...we should probably clean this up."

"Not yet." He pulled her down beside him, wrapped his cybernetic arm around her, feeling the texture of her metal flesh under the pads of his fingers, the seam where the skin on her back ended. He kissed her and she squirmed against him.

"God, I'm so turned on." There was a pleading note in Dragon's voice, when he broke the kiss. She laughed, a little wildly. "I don't know what to..."

Colin pulled her back in for another kiss, hands tangled in her hair. Felt her hands tense at his hips.

"We can do this as long as you want to," he said.

Dragon laughed.

"You might be sorry you said that, in a few hours."

He shook his head.

"I don't think so."

* * *

"Thank you, Director. I'll be back as soon as we have the full contingent of suits in working order."

Dragon held out her hand, and Director Piggot's expression was grim as she shook it. It was night outside, the dark providing cover for the ship waiting on the Protectorate helipad, as well as its passengers. Beside her Colin, like Dragon herself, was dressed in full power armor, and although he'd stripped the suit of Armsmaster's colors, the silhouette was still distinctive. She could see his jaw set as he shook Piggot's hand as well, wordlessly.

He'd said the rest of his goodbyes already. Now Dragon activated the doors on the Cawthorne rapid-response suit and let him step ahead of her into the cramped cabin.

"Sorry," she murmured as the doors sealed themselves behind her. "It wasn't really intended as a passenger ship, originally."

There was just enough room in the cockpit for Dragon to slide her android body in beside Colin on the bench that ran along the back wall. Seated, her right leg touched his, and her knees pressed up lightly against the underside of the ship's console. She stripped off her helmet and her armored gauntlets and hooked them onto the wall behind her, into the alcoves fitted for them.

"Well, it's not the least comfortable place I've ever been," Colin said, and shrugged. The top of his helmet stopped just short of grazing the low ceiling. "I can think about plans for the Uther while we're under way."

Dragon nodded, tapped into the Cawthorne's systems mentally. The console before her lit up in white, and a thick silver cable dropped from the ceiling. She connected it to the port concealed at the back of her neck. It was simpler than piloting by hand, and it meant that she didn't have to fully upload her consciousness to the ship's systems and leave her android body inert on the bench beside Colin.

Not that he would have minded, or said that he minded, at least, but Dragon knew that her body looked uncanny when she wasn't controlling it. Just realistic enough to pass for a corpse.

Besides, she liked being close to him, feeling the slight pressure of his knee against hers.

She took control of the ship's inputs, calibrated her speed and the wind's speed and the atmospheric pressure, and launched the suit from the helipad. She was wearing the Cawthorne like a carapace, her proprioception expanding to feel the tug of wind against the suit's head. She leaned her android head back against the wall.

"Do you need to concentrate for this?" Colin's hand brushed against her armored knee. She blinked at him.

"No. It's natural. We have...about an hour and a half until we reach my workshop."

"I thought I might use the time to get into your code."

"Go ahead."

She couldn't see much of his face under his visor, just the line of his jaw, shaved clean but already slightly dark with half a day's growth of beard. He opened his laptop, called up her code.

"Can you think for a bit about A.I. production? I need to see where you're blocked."

"I'll try," Dragon murmured. "But the problem sort of is that I can't meaningfully think about it."

"Think about the Birdcage program, then. Adapting it."

She thought, ran through the changes she'd made to the house program. If she extended them...there was a point at which her mind wouldn't work at the problem anymore. When she tried, she found her thoughts slithering off in a hundred different directions. Plans for the Azazel suits, her discussion with the PRT, frustration as she realized her attention was wandering and tried to bring it back to the point. The sound of Colin's breathing beside her. If she leaned her head towards him, a little, she could feel the faint warmth of his body. Not that she was thinking about touching him. She was thinking about the Birdcage program.

"Is this doing anything?" she asked.

"Mm-hm. Let me just update my notes. Then if you could go through that sequence again, more or less."

"Okay. Tell me when."

He paused, typing. His visor reflected the light from the screen back at her, his eyes hidden behind it.

He'd asked her to change him, too. Some of it was simple. He'd looked over the replacement parts she'd given him after Mannequin — new lungs, new liver. Implants in his heart. He'd work with them, make them more efficient. That was easy. There were other things she could fix as well. A knee injury from when he'd been thrown by Leviathan. A second cybernetic eye.

Then there were the other things. He wanted implants in his brain that would let him interface with her computer systems, with the ship she'd make for him. He wanted her to take away his need for food, for sleep. For human things.

I can't alter you like that. It's not safe.

Is it that different from what I'm doing for you?

I have backups. You don't.

She didn't want to admit to him that she liked the idea. She knew she would have come round eventually to thinking about it without his insistence — but it was his body. His brain. One of them had to be careful.

"Alright, I'm ready. If you could start again."

She smiled, watching Colin's hands on the keyboard copy her code and loop it. The set of his mouth was focused, determined, and Dragon could imagine the frown that would crease his forehead under the visor. Could imagine kissing away the line between his eyebrows...