"That wasn't a number." Dragon was climbing back up on the table, pushing him backwards with her palm on her chest until he was lying flat and she leaning over him, her hair falling like a screen between them and the rest of the room.

"Nine-two. And I was about to come." He reached up to pull her down to him, pressing her hips into his.

"I know." Dragon kissed his chin, bracing her knee against his hips so that he couldn't grind against her. "But this next bit is going to work better if you're still turned on, so you don't get to come yet."

"You're enjoying this, aren't you?" His breath was still coming short.

"Isn't that part of the point?" She got up on her knees and reached over his head to the counter. "Close your eyes, please."

Dragon looked down at him to make sure that he'd done what she asked before she pulled the tray of supplies onto the head of the table. Then she settled back beside him with a kiss, her body pressed against his.

"Are you going to tell me why I have my eyes closed?"

"Mm. I thought I'd keep you in suspense for a minute or two." She nuzzled his neck, heard his breath tighten as she caught his earlobe between her teeth, the way his legs worked to press him into her. She could feel desire passing in waves over his skin, and with her other hand she was working the surgical needle out of its sterile packaging. Nervous. She could feel Colin's heart beating in his throat, but it was her nerves, not his.

"Give me your hand?"

He put his hand in hers, and she pricked him, quickly, the needle in his finger, his gasp, the bright burst of pain in her awareness, and then her vision doubled and she saw that he'd opened his eyes.

"Is that what you were being so sneaky about? A pinprick?"

Dragon bit her lip. "I didn't want you to — I mean, I thought..."

It had seemed like it hurt enough when she tried it on herself. But then, she'd hardly ever felt pain, in the time since she'd downloaded herself into this body.

"Seven-one," he told her, smiling. "And you can be rougher than that, if you want to."

Dragon frowned at him.

"Okay, but if it hurts, you should tell me, because I do care about whether this is accurate."

"Dragon. I'll tell you." He held out his hand.

She pricked him again, a little deeper, her face tucked into the curve of his shoulder, her lips on his collarbone. She could see through his eyes, the way he was following her movements, the needle, the slow drop of blood as she pulled it free. He breathed and she felt his ribcage expand. It felt like it probably hurt, to her, but Colin kissed her ear and wrapped his free arm tighter around her.

"Okay. Six-three. Keep going."

She kissed him, chose a second needle and pressed the tip shallowly into the flesh at the base of his thumb until she'd pierced him, the needle lying flush with his skin. Dragon would have gasped, if she breathed, and Colin did gasp as she pushed the needle's point out through the underside of his skin, burying his face in her hair.

"Are you...?"

"Seven-four. I'm fine. I'm fine." But he was breathing harder.

"If you want to stop..." Dragon touched the base of the needle, ready to pull it out, and Colin closed his hand around her wrist. God, she could feel how much it hurt to have the needle moving under his skin.

She could feel how turned on he was, too, the slow falling-away of the table under them as he shifted against her.

"Leave it there."

He let his hand drift, from her wrist to her cheek, and Dragon turned her head and kissed his palm, working another needle out of its sheath. She could feel the stiff length of the needle rolling under his skin when she ran her tongue over the piercing. She could feel his gasp.

"Can you keep going?" She didn't want that to sound like a leading question, and she'd tried to keep her tone neutral, but she didn't think she could hide the tenseness in her voice. She wanted to try again, so intensely that it startled her, wanted to feel him gasp, and wanted even the burst of phantom pain that she felt while she was shadowing him.

"Yeah. I'm good."

The next needle went in at the back of his wrist, and when he didn't stop her, Dragon worked her way up his forearm until she'd made a row of them, holding his fingers laced in hers and kissing the back of his hand between needles. It hurt, it hurt enormously, she could feel it through his cybernetics, but mixed with the pain was something else, some sparkling liquid feeling that melted through him and passed over to her. And he was giving her numbers. Seven-five. Eight-six. She put another needle in him, ran the tip of her finger over the finished piercings, and almost whimpered at her sense of them pulling under his skin.

"Are you okay, Dragon?" He was kissing down her neck, his lips at the base of her throat, and Dragon could feel herself moving her hips against his, she could feel how hard he was, despite the needles or because of them, how his body was doing something else to the pain so that he seemed to be floating on it, dizzy, and she could look into his eyes and through his eyes and watch him as he let her put another length of steel in his body, and it didn't seem to come from anywhere inside her, but suddenly she was shaking against him, making noises, her skin electric, as if a thousand eyes had opened up across its surface.

Colin was holding her when she came back down, her face buried in his shoulder.

"Was that what I think?" he asked.

Dragon made an inarticulate noise and put her hands over her face.

"I don't — I didn't realize I could do that, if you weren't..." She let her voice trail off, and Colin laughed.

"Practice makes perfect, I guess."

"Are you still okay?" She ran her index finger down the line of needles in his forearm, and he pushed back against her and moaned.

"I don't think I can put that in numbers."

"No?" Dragon sat up, straddling him, rolling her hips down into his, one hand on the shaft of his cock, the other holding his wrist so she could kiss the palm of his hand. She got the first needle's end between her teeth, pulled it out of his palm, felt Colin tense under her, his breath hissing through his teeth. A drop of blood welled where the needle had been. Barely anything. She kissed the wound.

She could feel how close he was, how he was straining up against her, his breath running short, tensing with every needle she pulled free, the pain an electric shock shooting up his arm. Colin came when she was taking out the fourth needle, and she shook with him, again, feeling what he felt, her hands clenching so that she pricked herself with the needle and then dropped it on the floor. When it was over she let herself sink down beside him, her head on his chest, listening to his heart beat, and her hand still gripping his prick as it softened. He breathing was still ragged, and she could feel the heaviness in his limbs, the interface between robotics and flesh, the swollen ridges on his arm where the last needles were still in him. She pulled another out, slowly, and he bit down on his lip and let his breath out slowly.

"Three more," she whispered.

"I know. I counted."

"A number?"

"I don't know. Four-four. God."

She took out the next two needles quickly, one after the other, and Colin tensed again and then sighed, his eyes half-closed, watching her as if he was half asleep.

"Last one?" he said.

"Yeah."

It, too, came out with only a dark bead of blood. Dragon caught the drop on her finger, brought it to her lips, tasted iron and salt.

"That was — a little bit more than I'd planned to do," she murmured, after she'd taken a disinfectant wipe off of the counter and cleaned Colin's wounds. He looped his arm around her waist, nuzzled her neck.

"You liked it, though?" he asked in her ear.

"Yeah. I liked it."

* * *

"Are you awake?"

Colin had had his eyes closed, feeling the warmth of Dragon's body against his back as they lay together on the bed. She was easily close enough to speak to him, but she'd used their private channel instead, her voice echoing inside his head, as if it came from every direction at once. She had one hand cupped gently just beneath his ribs and a leg looped over his hips, a comforting weight.

"How could you tell?" he murmured. Six minutes since he'd drifted off. She must have stayed with him. He stretched a little bit against her, felt her hips press back into him.

"Your breathing changed." Dragon paused, and Colin felt her lips on the nape of his neck, working up to the base of his skull. He twisted towards her, pulling the sheets around them, over his head, so that they were wrapped in a white cocoon. Kissed her.

"I had kind of a dirty idea about something I'd like to do to you. If you're up for it."

Colin broke off the kiss, tucked a strand of Dragon's hair behind her ear.

"Go on."

She smiled and spoke without moving her lips, her head pillowed on his shoulder.

"I thought it would be interesting to play with some sensory stuff. Like when I shadow you, but in reverse. I'd send you the data, let you feel what I'm feeling."

"Can you do that?" The thought hadn't occurred to him before, but, given the specifications of his neural hardware, he couldn't think of any reason why she shouldn't be able to. She'd managed to code for physical sensation through her android interface, and her sensory system was nearly identical to his implants.

"I think it will be different for you than when I do it, but yes. Some of it, anyway."

"Okay. I'm game to try." He leaned in to kiss her just below her ear, and Dragon hummed and slid her hands up his back. And then the room shifted beneath him — running on a few seconds' delay, his mind told him, trying to work out the mechanism, his thoughts going to circuits, coding, a brief flash of something like inspiration — and he felt teeth on his neck and skin and tense muscle under his hands and Dragon's hair falling over his shoulders. No, her shoulders. The room felt like it was spinning, his limbs dead weight. He knew it was her touching him, her hands running down his back as he lay still, but the pressure of her palms on his skin felt less real than the feeling of movement. He was losing his sense of where his body was, where hers started, hovering outside of himself. Dragon shifted on top of him, and when he reached up to put his hands on the metal of her hips, he was clumsy, couldn't trust his own sense of proprioception, had to watch the trajectory of his movement as if he was trying to work in a mirror.

For the first time, though, Colin knew exactly how hard he had to grip her to activate her pressure sensors. How the feeling was weirdly different from his native sense of touch or the sensations on her cybernetic skin. Textureless, like the equivalent of watching a movie without color. But she arched her back under his hands all the same, grinding down onto his cock, and he felt a little jolt of warmth run up her back and down into her fingertips — and, god, that was her, wasn't it? She didn't even have nerves to feel half of that, had to be piggybacking on him.

Like a phantom limb. How many times had he reached out to open a door or pick up a glass, after Leviathan, felt the pressure of the object under his fingers, only to realize he'd been using the hand that wasn't there? Except that that had been a constant ache, and this was pleasure.

"Close your eyes," Dragon murmured, her mouth echoing her voice inside his head. Colin felt her lips form the words.

"What are you going to do to me if I do?" He laced his fingers with hers, clumsily, drew her down until she was lying across his chest, her metal to his flesh, against the scars she'd left him.

"You'll like it. I promise." She slipped one hand out of his grasp and covered his eyes. "Don't peek."

With his eyes closed, Colin felt her roll up and off of him — and then he was sitting up, was looking down at the reflective panels that protected Dragon's cybernetics, feeling as if he'd lifted all of the way out of his body, all at once. He could see his own face, eyes closed, Dragon's hand as she ran her fingers down his cheek. It was strange to be looking at himself through her eyes, uncomfortable. But at the same time...He was inside her skin, or that was what it seemed like, although he knew that that pervasive feeling of being embodied had to be his brain compensating for the conflicting signals that she was sending it.

He opened his eyes, on reflex, and the world lurched and split into two halves, nauseatingly, one laid over the other. He groaned, struggled to sit upright, unable to tell where his limbs were, and the room pitched around him, moving in his vision while it stayed stationary in Dragon's. He felt her hands on his shoulders and his shoulders under her hands. The stream of her vision stopped, abruptly, and he was left with just his own sight.

"I did tell you to keep your eyes closed." Dragon hadn't completely cut off the relay of her senses — Colin could feel the shape of his own skull under her hands as she ran her fingers through the short length of his hair. He was back in his own body, and she was lying beside him, her nose pressed awkwardly against his ear.

He laughed. "I can see why."

"Maybe I should have been more specific."

Colin shrugged. "No, it was interesting."

"Just interesting?" He could hear the smile in her voice "I guess you don't want to give it another try?"

He shifted until he could see her face, feeling the sheets move under him, too hot with his own body heat. "This isn't boring for you?"

Dragon shook her head, silently, and Colin found himself lowering his gaze under her scrutiny.

"I just feel — " His voice came out rough, despite the effort he'd made to keep his embarrassment out of his tone. "It's different from when you take direct control. I feel so clumsy, with this."

Colin felt her fingers under his chin, tilting his head up to look at her. Surprising, how that little gesture could make his diaphragm turn somersaults.

"Maybe a little bit more of just this, first?" she murmured.

"That sounds good."

Dragon pulled her hair back off her shoulders and pressed up closer to him.

"You could kiss me a little bit more, to start." She pressed two fingers to her neck, just below the curve of her jaw, as if she was taking her own pulse. "Right here" — and Colin could feel the warmth of her fingers against her own skin — "would feel good."

He laughed, softly. "Dragon, I don't think I need a relay of your sensory processing to figure that out. I do know what you like."

"Mm-hm." She smiled, and her free hand went around the back of his neck, pulling him closer. "But you don't know what it feels like to give it and get it at the same time. It's good, Colin."