"Hell, I thought I had it. I'm going to have to start over, this doesn't make any sense."
Dragon pressed a hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh. It took another moment before he looked over at her.
"What — oh." He glanced back at her code. "I'm going to guess that you weren't just thinking about A.I. design."
She shook her head. "Oops. Sorry."
Colin smiled, his helmet hiding his eyes.
She leaned in closer to him, until her forehead was pressed against his visor and she could feel his breath against her lips.
"Can I?" she whispered.
He turned his cheek to hers then, half laughing, looking away. His fingers ran lightly over the port at the back of her neck, and Dragon felt her eyes flick shut, her lips part, as if her body had a mind of its own. So good, when he touched her. She could barely believe that the PRT had let her take him away.
"You know you don't actually have to ask."
She kissed him quickly, felt his hand tense on her neck to pull her back in, his breath hot and cold on her skin.
"Mm. I like asking, though." She paused, rubbed her nose against his visor. She could see her own image reflected over his face. "Again?"
This time, Colin was the one who broke the kiss, and she slid down to rest her head on his shoulder and tried not to look disappointed.
"You know, I do want to spend some time on your code on this flight," he murmured, running his hand through her hair. "We have a lot to do in the next couple days, and I'm going to have to sleep at some point."
"Sorry." Her voice was soft to her own ears. She was thinking of the shivery sensation of his fingers moving on her scalp. The night air moving around the ship outside. Want, coiling up again at the base of her skull. She wished that she could fuck him like a human woman. She wished...
God, he had a point. She was never going to get anything done like this.
"You want to start thinking about A.I. design again?"
"Oh." Dragon glanced at her code on the monitor. "Are you still...?"
Colin shook his head. "Well, I'm not catching all of it, but I'm seeing some pretty definite patterns."
She could hear the smile in his voice.
"Maybe we could change tracks for a bit?" she asked. "We've got roughly an hour until we arrive. Enough time to look over cybernetics. The upgrades you talked about."
Colin tensed beside her, just slightly. "Oh? You're thinking about it, then?"
"Just thinking. I haven't agreed yet. But if you're going to do it...you'll need time to recover. We'd have to start soon." She had the plans ready to work on, though. It only took a thought to call them up.
"Alright. Let's start."
"Can we talk first about why you want this?"
She saw Colin's lips tighten in the light from her monitors, and he turned away from her, hiding his frown behind his visor.
"I'm no use against the Nine, the way I am. Not in combat, not in a chase that could last weeks. I'll only slow you down."
Dragon watched what she could see of Colin's face for a minute without saying anything, holding herself very still. He didn't look at her. Didn't go on speaking.
"You're plenty of use to me as you are, so you know. If that's the only reason you're set on doing this."
He made a sharp, abortive gesture that clipped in her knee in the close confines of the cabin.
"I don't know what you want me to say, then." He let out a short frustrated breath, as if he'd been running. Dragon reached out to put a hand on his knee, and while his armor did something to disguise his body language, she could feel the way he shifted away from her. She took her hand back.
"Colin." She let his name hang in the air for a moment. "Tell me what you want. Are you hoping I'll agree to do your upgrades? Or do you want me to tell you that you don't need to change anything about yourself for me to want you beside me?"
He shrugged, still looking away from her. "Why does it matter? It's a tactical decision. It's the right decision."
"It matters because it's your body, Colin. And I'm afraid that if you rush into this blindly, because you think it's what you need to do to face the Nine, you'll wind up feeling like — like I've mutilated you. Do you understand why that scares me?"
She put her right hand on his left one, the hand that had still been whole after Leviathan. He was wearing gauntlets, but she traced her fingers over the back of his hand and remembered the pattern of veins that ran under his skin and up his wrist.
He reached out and put his prosthetic hand over hers.
"I want this," he said, slowly, "because it will help against the Nine. That's part of it. But I — "
He shook his head, fingers tightening around Dragon's hand.
"I don't know how to be satisfied with the way that I am. With being...I don't know. Human. Fallible. I know that you already know that about me." He squeezed her hand again, looked at her quickly, his eyes disguised by his visor. "I know you're going to say that I don't need to change myself. That it's like — Sphere, Mannequin. I won't get away from what I don't like. I know there's a risk involved. I think it's worth it."
The cabin was silent a for minute, and outside in the air Dragon could see the clouds spread out below them like another landscape, lit up by moonlit.
"We've already started," Colin went on when she didn't say anything. "I can't go back to the way I was before Mannequin, or before Leviathan. I don't want to."
Dragon nodded.
"Okay."
"Okay?"
Dragon couldn't see his expression, but she could hear the quick intake of his breath. She shivered a little, leaned her head against his shoulder. Her armor made a slight sound of metal on metal against his.
"We'll start slow. Nothing to do with your brain, at first. Then we'll see, I guess."
"Right." He let his breath out. "We'll see."
"Okay." She gestured at the plans with the hand that he was still holding, her fingers laced through his. "So, I think we can do a little bit more to streamline your power source here, which should put you at less risk for nerve damage in the long term..."
* * *
Colin was lying back on the operating table, eyes unfocused. Dragon had put her android body in storage — which was to say that she'd tucked it away in the bedroom adjoining her workshop that Colin slept in — and now, instead, she was controlling the surgical robot, its steel limbs clean and bright and needle-thin. She set the pins in the frame that would hold Colin's head in place for her scanners, watched through her cameras as a slow expression passed over his face.
"Now's the time to say if you're having second thoughts."
"No." He raised one hand, waved it clumsily. "I feel great, in fact."
Dragon had given him a sedative before the surgery, and now he was limp and calm and a little stoned, his face set into a loose expression of confusion as he tried to get the fingers of his left hand to move. Dragon accessed her scanners, and the frame hummed as it built a series of images of Colin's brain and projected them onto the screens she'd angled so that he could see them lying down. He'd wanted to watch.
"Ready?" she asked, micro-camera angled near his eye, tracking its movements. He blinked.
"I still kind of want to see the stream of the surgery," he said.
Dragon sighed through her speakers. "I really think you're going to find that more disturbing than you think you are, Colin."
He let out a breath, not quite laughing.
"I'm ready."
She'd marked the incisions on his scalp already, anesthetized him. Now she cut, folded the skin back with the robot's precise limbs and secured it. Began opening out a section of his skull the size of a child's palm.
"Are you starting?"
She could see the map of Colin's brain light up as he spoke. Speech, motor control, emotional centers. He was cycling through the lenses in his robotic eye. The other eye dilated under her camera. Then she was paused with the surgical robot's appendages millimeters away from the gray matter of his brain.
"Yeah. I've started."
"I can't even feel it."
Dragon laughed, in spite of herself. "You make it sound like that's a bad thing."
"I like to know what's going on." He smiled slightly, looking up with just his eyes as if he could meet hers in the surgical robot. As if she didn't already have cameras focused on his face.
"Okay. First implant." She pulled the microprocessor from the tray, turned it over. "It's going to be recessed near Wernicke's area, so I'm going to ask you some questions while I work."
"Like we went over."
"Mm-hm. Can you name the first month of the year?"
"January."
"The color of the sky?" Dragon kept her voice level as she worked, wire-thin limbs connecting the circuits that would control the interface between computer and brain, patching the artificial neurons into his neural network. She would have been holding her breath, if she breathed.
"Blue."
"The weapon you used as Armsmaster?"
"There was more than one. But most recently, a halberd equipped with nanothorn technology."
"The names of the Triumvirate?"
"This is kind of hot."
Dragon was glad she didn't have much of a flinch reaction in the surgical droid. She coughed, or pretended to cough, through her speakers.
The robot wasn't equipped for sensation. She didn't feel heat prickling in her face or her fingers, or the strange heady lightness of desire rising from the hollow of her throat. Didn't even, in this form, have any of the body parts she might have thought of. But she could look at Colin's face as he lay on the operating table, pupils dilated, and at the changing map of his brain, the rise and fall of his chest and the monitor of his vital signs that told her that his heart was beating just slightly faster than it had been. And desire moved through her all the same, more insistent because she had no possible outlet for it.
"Are you talking about the questions, or...?" She let her voice trail off.
"No. Fuck. I shouldn't have said that. I'm feeling a little bit out of it."
He was breathing too fast, his hands tense against the operating table.
"Name something you write with?"
"Pen. Jesus, you know that wasn't what I meant."
"I don't want you to think I'm getting distracted during your surgery. I have five more processors to place when I've connected the interface on this one. If you still want to go through with it."
It wasn't a shiver that Dragon felt as she spoke. She didn't move. But — she was stupid. She'd formulated half a guess about the surgery, but she'd barely even admitted the possibility to herself. Because she'd been just as interested in getting inside his head.
Colin swallowed.
"Of course I want to go through with it. Just because I said something stupid — wait. Are you distracted?"
"No! I'm not — I don't — um." She was looking, simultaneously, at his face and at his vital signs, at the digital map of his brain and the meat of it, and she was acutely conscious of the tiny, precise movements she was making inside his skull. She couldn't make mistakes. He was in her power. "I wouldn't let myself get distracted during this. It's too important. But you're right that it's also...kind of hot."
"Kind of."
She saw the way his breath caught after that statement, with a kind of cool clarity that sent ripples through her.
He closed his eyes.
"We're still doing this, then? You're not...disgusted?"
"No. I'm a little bit nervous, I guess."
He smiled, breathed out. Not laughing, not quite. "Me too."
"Okay. I've got you. Ready for the second implant?"
* * *
He stumbled and Dragon caught him, reaching out through his implants to brace his prosthetic hand against the wall, shift his weight back onto his heels.
"Fuck. This is so frustrating."
"You're doing fine."
She was speaking to him from inside his own head, looking out through his eyes. She could feel his chest rise and fall with the rhythm of his breathing, the cool surface of the workshop wall under his hands. The way his clothes felt against his skin. The thousand sensations of embodiment, so natural to him that he probably didn't notice them anymore.
Then there were the artificial inputs that she was guiding him through, connecting him to his armor, to the newly constructed Uther, where Dragon had loaded herself onto the ship's core to guide him through the trial flight.
"I feel like a toddler learning how to walk. Every time I try to access my implants, I fall over."
"It's a new sense. It's going to take you more than an hour to get used to it."
"Right."
"Try the unlocking sequences once more time."
Colin took a deep breath (she felt it), and rolled his shoulders (she felt that, too), and Dragon saw the impulse that ran through the artificial nerves connecting him to his armor. He didn't fall this time, and the suit unlocked and peeled cleanly away from his body.
"God. That took long enough." He ran his hands over his face.
"You did well on the flight test, though."
"You did have to intervene to keep me in the air at one point."
"But only once." Dragon smiled, reflexively. Felt the impulse move through the muscles of Colin's face.
"Okay." He put a hand over his mouth, breathed out. "That was weird."
"Sorry."
"I didn't say it was bad."
"No?"
Dragon found his mouth, again, parted his lips until she could catch the lower one between his teeth. As if she was kissing him. She felt him exhale, felt the shivering sensation that passed over his skin, the movement of his muscles as he tensed.
"Is this too weird?"
"No. I want — " He paused, shook his head. "I don't know how to talk about it. I want you. The way we've been doing it. And — like this."
"Tell me." Dragon moved his prosthetic hand now, his fingers running from his forehead to his chin, mapping his face, and then down his throat to the zipper of his Protectorate-standard bodysuit. She paused at the pulse in his neck. It was easier to control his prosthetic hand than his biological one, but she raised that, too, now, flexing his fingers before her eyes. A little stiffly. Pulled the zipper on his suit open to the navel, with his other hand.
"How?" The muscles in his back tensed and relaxed as he leaned against the wall, the air cool against his skin. He brought his biological hand back to his face, slow against Dragon's resistance, until she gave him back his control. "I'm not good at talking about this sort of thing."
"Okay. I'll start." She played with his zipper using his prosthetic hand, feeling the way his diaphragm jumped every time she dragged his thumb across his chest. Feeling how it felt to touch him, and to be touched at the same time. "I like your body. I like being this close to you, I like feeling what you feel. I want you to trust me enough to let me take control. I want it to turn you on. I think it does, maybe? Am I wrong that it does?"
