"Good." She smiled with his mouth, and then she took him down so that he was kneeling on the concrete floor of her workshop, beside the stationary bulk of the Uther. She peeled his bodysuit down to his waist, let his fingers, under her control, dip just a little lower, tracing the line of hair that ran down to his cock.

"Can I, Colin? I want to hear you say it."

"Yes."

He closed his eyes, and Dragon wasn't sure if the shiver that ran through him was him or her, but he moaned softly, for her, and she made a little answering gasp through his cybernetics. She could feel him getting hard inside his briefs, although she hadn't even touched him, hadn't let him touch himself, and she could feel the pressure and the warmth of his hands on his own body, running over the smooth muscles of his chest, the surgical scars that were still livid pink and shining. He fought her for control a little when she touched them, muscles tensing in his biological arm, breath short.

"Talk to me? I want — "

It was new, and at the same time it was familiar. Dragon knew what it was like to have his hands on her android body, to have him work his way with his mouth from her wrists to the skin under her ear, until her entire being felt like it was buzzing with anguished, unsatisfied need. Hovering so close to release she thought she ought to be able to taste it, push herself over that final edge and let her consciousness spill out, unravel, reform.

"I need you. I want to be — all of the way under your skin."

Dragon gave him his hands for a moment, and he slid them down into his briefs to grasp his cock, stroking himself harder so that she gasped with him. Then she took control, stilled Colin's hands on his prick, hips shaking as he strained into the air, fighting her.

"Not yet. Not yet, Colin."

She wanted to freeze him there, his cock pulsing under her touch, alien. Familiar. She tightened his hands around his shaft, gasped inside his head.

"Dragon." He whispered her name, pleading.

There was a little twitch of frustration at the back of her mind, always. If she could pilot him and her android body at the same time, then she'd be able to take him in her arms now, kiss his lips, his neck, take his cock in her mouth while he fought her for control of his limbs. His cock was hard under his hand, her hand, and she could feel every stroke building towards — towards — but she still wanted more. Wanted everything, all at once. Too much. She took Colin's hands back from his prick, stripped the rest of his suit off, feeling him fight her for control in earnest now. He got his biological hand back in his power, moved to touch himself, and the pleasure of the touch sang through her, too, but she locked his artificial hand around his wrist and pulled him back.

"Oh, god, please, Dragon." He was panting, or she was. "Please."

"Not yet," she whispered. "Not yet, not yet notyetnotyet..." Until the words were just a singsong chant, stripped of their meaning, and she couldn't stop herself from touching him, right hand on his cock, left sliding back to press fingers against the opening of his asshole — and he moaned, jerked his hips reflexively. She thought she saw white, and then he tensed, shivered, cried out —

— and he was on his hands and knees on the concrete floor of her workshop, gasping, and at some point her private, whispered refrain to him had changed to, "Colin, Colincolincolin..."

She let him go, and he eased himself down until he was lying on his back, looking at the ceiling.

"Are you still there?" he asked, after a moment.

"Yeah."

"Did you — was that...?"

"I — yeah. It was." Was what? She could feel his body singing. Each nerve. He let his eyes slide shut, dimming her view of ceiling lights.

"We should get back to work," he murmured, without opening his eyes. "Really soon..."

"Mm-hm." She laughed in his ear, in the voice that only he could hear. "Soon."

* * *

Colin was sitting on the floor of her workshop beside the Azazel suit, a side panel open to show its inner workings. Dragon had been following his progress through her link to his cybernetics, absentmindedly, watching through his eyes, but now she jumped down the last steps from the elevated walkway to ground level and knelt behind him, hands on his waist, resting her chin on his shoulder. He'd let his hair grow slightly since the last round of surgery, two days ago, and she could feel the bristles of his beard against her cheek.

"You ready to take a break?"

"What time is it?" He stretched, raising a hand to rub his neck.

"Twelve after three. It's late."

"Not that late." Colin turned, hooked his arm around her waist, and Dragon let him pull her into his lap. She tapped into his enhancements, and her senses doubled, the warmth of his hand between her shoulder blades, the weight of her naked legs draped over his lap, metal panels gleaming. He slid his hand up between her legs, and she felt the movement through his palm and smiled.

"Are you really wearing this?" He'd hooked his fingers under the hem of her t-shirt — the only thing she was wearing, in fact.

"I thought you'd think it was cute." The shirt was from an old line of Protectorate merchandise, and had Armsmaster's logo printed across the chest.

"It's a little...embarrassing." He shook his head. "I mean, I used to get fan girls wearing these when I'd do public appearances."

Dragon grinned and stretched against him, following Colin's look as the shirt rode up over the cybernetics in her stomach.

"Why's that embarrassing, again?"

"You're not exactly a cape groupie."

"Mm. But I am a fan. Also, I ran through your designs again and I wanted to warn you before you got any further that there's a kink in your power source. You need to get the heat distribution working right, or it's going to disrupt the nanothorn generator."

"What?" He squinted at her. "No, I fixed that issue, it's..."

"Still not going to work." Dragon pulled his diagram up on his tablet, with her notes attached, and Colin made a frustrated, inarticulate sound somewhere in his throat.

"Ugh. Well, I guess that's my plan for the rest of the night, then." He sighed, shifted his weight under her. Dragon smiled.

"You should read the rest of my notes first, because I fixed it for you." She kissed his cheek, and Colin shook his head.

"Of course you did. Where would I be without you?"

Dragon swung one leg around so that she was straddling him, leaned in and kissed him, feeling the metal of her own body under his palms as he slid his hands under her shirt.

"You'd still be in Protectorate custody, for a start," she murmured through their private channel, and he replied with a wordless noise that might have been agreement.

"But," she said, pulling back from the kiss, "just because I solved your problem does not mean you get to take the night off. We need to do some tests to make sure your enhancements are working properly, and then you need to sleep for at least six minutes."

Colin sighed. "The prosthetics are working fine, Dragon. I'll tell you the moment they stop."

"Good." She stood up, stretched. "We're still doing the tests."

"Do we have to do this now, though? I could be working on..." Colin's gesture took in the Azazel suit, the tablet, Dragon herself. "I mean, if nothing else, I could be spending the time getting into your code. If we're hoping to face the Nine while they're still in Brockton Bay..."

Dragon rolled her eyes and found that the expression was strangely satisfying. Another thing her body could do that she hadn't experimented with.

"Seriously, Colin? Do you really need to make an issue over the fact that I'm concerned for your wellbeing? It will only take an hour, anyway."

She didn't mention that she'd been thinking up a way to make the whole process pleasant, which she suddenly felt might be a strike against her, now that Colin was in the mood to weigh everything they did against the pressing necessity of going up against the Nine.

Hell. Probably he'd think she was procrastinating, but it was important. He was already thinking through more self-alterations after the last round. She wasn't going to let him barrel ahead without any regard for his safety.

"Okay." Colin sighed, ran his hands over the short length of his hair. "It's fine, I can stop for an hour. Where are we doing this?"

"Medical bay." Dragon turned and walked in front of him, watched him follow through the cameras, still feeling a faint prickling of frustration on her skin.

The lights burst into life as Dragon entered, followed by the screens along the walls for imaging. She'd put down white sheets on the table where she'd done his surgeries and opened it out to its widest, flanked by her medical robots. Colin waited in the doorway, his arms crossed.

"Now if you could take off your clothes and get up on the table." Her voice came out cool, and she turned towards the screens and tried to summon a feeling or at least an expression of professional disinterest as Colin toyed with the zipper of his bodysuit.

"Dragon." She saw him move through her cameras, heard his footsteps behind her. "This isn't maybe an excuse to get me naked, is it?"

His hands came to rest on her shoulders, lightly.

"No!" She shrugged him off, caught the disappointed look on his face through her cameras and felt a hot ripple of embarrassment run through her. Oh, damn. "I mean...not unless you want it to be?"

"And if I did?" He reached out to her again, touched her hair tentatively, and Dragon shifted and put a hand over her face.

"It is important, medically. I just thought that it could also be fun."

"Okay. I'm not complaining, you know." Colin cupped his hand under her chin, smiled. "So. You need me to strip?"

"If you don't mind."

His hands were on the hollow of his neck, moving downward. She followed them with her eyes, knowing what it felt like to direct his movements, to be inside his skin. She could shadow him again now, feel the drag of the fabric against his skin as he stripped off his bodysuit, but it was still a little embarrassing, how much it turned her on, even knowing that he — that it was mutual. Colin let his suit fall to the floor, looked up and met her eyes, and she could feel the heat in her throat, her face, the phantom ache between her legs. That she hadn't felt before they'd experimented with him under her control.

She knew it was petty of her to wish that their plans against the Nine allowed her a little bit more leisure to focus on finishing her android body. Particularly given all of the other things that they could do together. Had been doing.

"What's this?" he asked, as she retrieved a tray full of wireless microsensors from where she'd left it on the countertop and began attaching them to his skin.

"They'll read electrical impulses from your nerves — how you react to touch. Then I compare that data with what I get from riding along in your cybernetics, and your own verbal responses. To confirm you're not suffering any long-term degradation to your nervous system, and to help me, um, calibrate sensations on my own body, once I get to work on that again. Yours, too, if you end up going much farther with your enhancements."

Colin nodded. She could feel the seams between his natural and artificial skin, the way his original skin was breaking out into gooseflesh in the slight chill of the room. She inched closer to him, turned up the heat of her body just a little.

"What do you need me to do?" he asked.

"You're going to rate any physical sensation on two scales of ten. The first one represents pleasure, the second one, pain. So a slightly pleasant sensation would be one-zero, an intensely painful one would be zero-ten, and anything that's mixed, you'd rate accordingly. Um." Dragon paused, turning a microsensor between her fingers.

"I don't want this to be unpleasant for you, but I do need to check your responsiveness to minor pain. If anything feels too intense, or if you get uncomfortable, just say so, and I'll stop."

"You think I don't know that?" He raised his eyebrows at her, brought his hands to the back of her neck and kissed her. "Mm. Are you warmer than usual? You feel like you're running a fever."

"I thought you seemed cold." She leaned against him, felt the doubled sensation of her body and his again, her leg pressed up hot between his, his cock at half mast against her. She was shadowing him now, recording his responses so that she could sort through them later. For purely medical purposes, of course.

"You realize that this building has its own thermostat, right?" he murmured, so close his lips brushed hers.

"You're supposed to be concentrating on giving me numbers, Colin." Although it was encouraging that he'd picked up on her adjustments.

"Oh, we're starting? I thought you'd gotten distracted. Six-zero."

Dragon smiled. "I told you I was going to make it fun. And I think you're inflating that number a little bit."

"Fine. Five-zero, and can you take that stupid t-shirt off now?" He was already lifting up its hem, the calluses on his hands catching slightly on the seams between the panels of her stomach.

Dragon put her hands on his wrists. "Next number?"

"Two-zero."

The t-shirt came off. She pushed Colin back towards the table.

"Two-zero, four-zero, four-two, and that's my foot you're standing on. Mmf." He sighed as she kissed him, deeper this time, leaning back against the table. "Six-zero."

"You're rounding up again."

"I swear I'm not."

She pushed him back onto the table, straddled him, kissed from his neck down the line of his sternum, his hands buried in her hair. His cock was hard now, and she knelt on the floor and ran the tip of her tongue up the length of his shaft, opened her mouth to suck its tip, feeling the heat of her mouth through his skin, his body her own.

"Seven-zero. Eight-zero."

Dragon grinned. "You're going to run out of numbers soon."

She didn't give him time to answer before she opened her mouth for him again, took him to the base of his cock and then drew back agonizingly slowly, feeling the way his breath shook his body, learning, again, what she could do with her lips and her tongue that would make his hands clench in her hair and that sting of electricity run up his spine.

"I'm not hearing any numbers, Colin."

"You'll laugh if I say ten, won't you?" he asked, breathlessly, as she looked up and met his eyes.

"Obviously. The point is of this is accuracy, not flattery."

"God. Nine, then. Nine-zero."

Dragon worked her mouth over his cock, prompting him for numbers at intervals, until she could feel his gasping, the muscles of his stomach tightening in time with the rocking of his hips. Then she pulled back, pressed a kiss just below his navel, feeling the sharp pressure of her teeth through his skin.