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Over the din of the busy tavern downstairs and the sound of the sandstorm raging outside of their window, Livio the Double-Fang heaves as he kisses Millions Knives like a man possessed.
And Knives, despite himself and the logical desire for self-preservation that has pervaded his every atom since his inception, bares his neck for them with relish when Livio drags teeth and gums down his carotid, anticipating spilled blood that never comes. Livio mouths over the muscle on one side of his throat and then the other, alternating between pressing the flat of their hot tongue against his neck and nipping at softer tendons to reach every inch of skin. When he feels bold enough, Livio brings their face up to leave kisses instead in the hollows of Knives’ cheeks, keeping the tip of their nose in contact with him through the entire upwards movement—unwilling to break both the delicate outer layer of Knives’ mimicry of an epidermis and the points at which their forms overlap despite the insurmountable odds stacked against them.
And like the ghost possessing that man, Razlo hums and whistles through their vocal cords to mutter nonsense into Knives’ ear, the repetition of phrases and words for the sake of nothing beyond simple vocalization of his wants and subvocalization of their intentions. Intoning, over and over, Razlo speaks to Knives as Livio tends to him.
“Teeth, teeth, teeth,” says the first wave of feeling. Plenty of teeth do follow that promise, scraping up the shell of Knives’ left ear and lingering to bite gently on his earlobe. Knives feels a shudder crawl down his spine, and he raises his arms to scratch at their vertebrae, returning the pleasure in the same location by digging his thumbs into their lower back and massaging the thick muscle he finds. They arch into his touch, grateful and greedy, a cat’s organs short of purring.
“Hey, you, hey, hey, hey,” repeats the second. “ Hey, you. You. You. It’s you!” It is him. Blissfully, it is still him. He’s still here, in this moment, alive and breathing.
“Mine,” whispers the third, and when Knives responds to that one with a satisfied groan, it crowns itself the new mantra of the night for their protector: “Mine, mine, mine. Ours. Ours.”
Abandonment issues manifest, or something similar, and perhaps a smidge of codependent separation anxiety; who would have thought, that people like them would have ever struck gold and found each other like this? To see another as a body they desperately needed to crawl into the flesh of, to nestle in the ribcage of and curl around the beating heart to keep it close, safe, and warm? What they are forced to settle for is physical intimacy, and even that is enough to drive the unfired synapses in his brain wild with the desire to feel and be felt in turn.
Knives thinks the most terrible, damning thing about it is that the feeling is mutual; for every piece of himself that desires to merge bodily with Livio and Razlo, an equal count of their beaten and battered pieces want to merge with him. They have left and been left behind by too many people to know how to hold onto Knives loosely now that they have been given an invitation to touch.
At least—the strong legs straddling his waist, the flat palm spread over his chest, and the unregulated amount of weight keeping him pinned to the creaking mattress below have him believing that they would wish to share flesh with him given opportunity and the scientific means.
Millions Knives shivers, finding himself delighted by the prospect.
On a night of better coordination and control, Livio and Razlo would have been more cautious about crushing him beneath their bulk, but something in the air—the barometric pressure, the storm system trapping them inside the motel, the thrum of a double shot of house whiskey each flowing through inhuman veins that led to Knives instigating heated contact in a corner of the bar downstairs and capturing their lips with his own—has them leaning everything they are and everything they will ever be into Knives, caging his head with their arms and his body with their own. He could lie here, immobile, and they would do all of the work for him, pleasuring both themselves and him by drowning him in their heavy, heavy affection until he has to claw his way to the surface for air.
Knives could turn his head and rip through their wrists with his teeth as they could have done with his throat.
He could kill them. They could kill him, just as quickly. He could watch as they bled out in the privacy of their rented bedroom, their death throes drowned out by the wail of the winds outside and their body left unfound until morning. They could do the same to him, just as quickly, and the part that matters most to him is that it would not have been their first time to do so.
—What brilliant, red-soaked equality.
On this level playing field, he finds his own saliva to be a satisfactory-enough bodily fluid to spill on their form in the meantime. He chooses to turn his head then, guiding their wrist to his mouth in order to latch on at the pulsepoint and suck instead of slit with something sharp. He sucks over each artery, radial and ulnar, controlling the tilt of their forearm by weaving his fingers in the gaps between their own. Still, despite his name, he finds no blood on his tongue. He softens the edges of himself so as to not hurt them.
Livio and Razlo’s entire frame spasms in surprise, before melting against him even more, chest to chest, heart to heart, as close as they can get without becoming one shared body. It would be a shame, after all, to bring about such a merge without consulting them on the details of it first; what is their goal, how long would they stay together, what lines would they draw in the sands? Millions Knives and the tatters of his remaining brain matter know from experience what an unpleasant ordeal it is to form a collective based on shared will, only to have it collapse at the first sign of a possibility.
(A possibility that came to pass, thank God—what a cruel joke it would have been, had the plants rebelled alongside him and only been met with an unbothered silence as the status quo persevered in spite of their momentary outcry.)
Knives requires three careful breaths to find his voice. “Tell me what you’d like from me,” he says, acting like he is doing anything but shaking like a loose panel in a solar storm. He takes an indulgent handful of their thigh muscles in order to still the excited tremor in his hands, pushing against the rock-hard tenseness keeping them upright. “You can have it.” A plant can give them anything when provided with the proper instructions. He has been working on using language they respond best to, so he adds, “You have earned it.”
“Knives,” Livio says for him and Razlo both, hair loose and pupils blown wide as he leans over him with a hopeful expression, “I… really wanna suck yer dick righ’now.”
“—I don’t have one,” says Millions Knives, pinnacle of plant evolution and the most brilliant strategist to ever grace the cosmos with his deep and profound mind. He hacked the entirety of Project SEEDS, the hope for humanity’s salvation, at the age of one. He created the largest Fused Entity on record at the age of one hundred and fifty. He cracked the concept of mass teleportation on a molecular level. He opened seven simultaneous inter-dimensional portals a mile high and a mile wide to redirect seven simultaneous F-class warheads into committing an ironic show of friendly fire down to the nanosecond before they were fired in order to destroy an entire space destroyer fleet in perfect synchrony. It was beautiful, nothing short of a masterful work of art, all conducted by his wise and capable hands.
—He’s also an idiot, and he doesn’t have a dick for his partners to suck. No penis. Not even a cock and balls. He’s nothing.
Livio slows, processing the words through the heady daze they’d slipped into. He drifts away from Knives, licking swollen lips as his eyes begin to clear and a different kind of hunger enters his gaze as he passes a look down to where they’re pressed together.
“Oh. Ohh, s’awrite, sugar.” Livio smiles, seeming to adjust and understand. Mask cast aside along with around half of their clothing, that rapid adaptability is on full display; Knives has the privilege of watching as the gears in their whip-smart mind crank to life through the soup of happy hormones and analyze his response down to the wavelength of its soundwaves. “Heya, no problem with any’a that. We can work with that instead if you’a, wanna still try somethin’ with us.”
“I don’t have one of those, either,” Knives croaks, toeing dangerously close to guilt that doesn’t suit him.
“What? Well, shit.”
Extricating himself out from underneath about three hundred pounds of cowboy takes longer than anything else, giving Knives enough time to scrape together a comprehensive plan of action that shouldn’t end in catastrophe or with burning stars falling from the sky (like most of his other plans of action tend to). Avoiding any sort of fanfare like an old Earth plague, Knives stands up, awkwardly undoes his belt buckle, and slides out of his pants to reveal—well, the rather unremarkable, smooth plane of skin between his legs. The entire process ends up being the catastrophe itself—it’s catastrophically unsexy. Knives silently mourns the intense connection they’d shared minutes before, the emptiness of his hands and heart.
Livio taps their fingertips together. It looks like he doesn’t quite know what to say.
No human-esq sex characteristics whatsoever; no protrusions, no entrances nor exits, no holes to speak of or lavish affection upon. A light dusting of blonde hair over what would be considered a pubic mound if he had any pubis to speak of in the first place. An alienness he was once very proud of, a literal impenetrability that kept him feeling safe and secure from human prodding. On Planet Gunsmoke, it would not protect him from scalpels or bullets, but at least he did not have to worry about getting sand in places it did not belong. He recalls Earth dolls, models, plastic figurines; the flat, featureless designs kept that way for consumerist modesty back when constant consumption was synonymous with daily existence. It’s hardly his fault that not all of his thoughts remain so modest anymore; that fault lies, from beginning to end, with the very confused men sitting cross-legged on the bed in front of him.
Knives knows that Livio and Razlo learn best from observation, so he does not bother to expend much energy trying to come up with an explanation and instead opts for the most direct route: display the truth of him, and wait for their response.
“See? Nothing.” Knives crosses his arms, still wearing his shirt. Mostly unbuttoned, to be fair, but still worn. Shedding it now would be rather pointless, with how stale the air has started to grow. “You have questions for me. Ask them before I change my mind.”
Kindly enough, they’d glanced away when it became apparent he was starting to strip, but now they turn back around to face him, to stare unabashedly. Razlo slowly tilts to the side as if to take him all in from every possible point of view, mumbling a “Huhhhh…” when his neck reaches a ninety-degree angle.
“How do ya pee?” asks Livio first.
Knives feels his brow twitch into a frown against his will. He massages the space between his eyes to dismiss it, keeping as much of his impatience out of his response as possible. “That is not the question I was expecting you to ask, nor the priority I expected you to pursue,” he says.
Livio makes a vague gesture, some flapping of his hands that Knives tracks with his eyes instead of looking at their face to avoid feeling very much of anything. Looking at their face can be dangerous; it makes him feel all soft and squishy inside, like a weakling. “Oi, feels pretty important to me,” he insists when Knives hacks out an unimpressed cough, “seein’ that ya got, well—nothing to work with, like ya said.”
“Correct. Because I don’t.”
“Wuh—now we’ve got more questions than before!” Livio slides their legs over the edge of the bed, bracing his hands on their knees to encourage the conversation.
Unsexiness be damned, Millions Knives does enjoy a good conversation about plant superiority. He steps over his shed pants to stand closer to the bed, aware of Livio and Razlo’s eyes locked on him and the smooth space between his legs, the divots of his pelvis, the muscle and soft fat of his abdomen. How much it seems like they want to reach out and touch him all over, even with “nothing to work with.” Knowing them, the act of permitted exploration itself might be enough to get them off.
(Their assumption reveals a typical, too-human notion about the nature and location of major erogenous zones; Knives will have to teach them to know better. Show them something truly novel to fixate on and explore.)
“Ask them, then,” Knives says, smiling in the lazy way that Razlo has described as a lil’ scary, but really fuckin’ hot.
Livio shakes their head, making a frantic motion to backtrack. He draws circles in the air, counter-clockwise. “Nuh-uh, we’re not skippin’ over that last one with just a ‘I don’t.’ You don’t ever?”
“No, not ever. I don’t need to.” Now Knives is just shamelessly amused, and a shamelessly amused Millions Knives is famous for sinking his teeth into his victims and refusing to let go. For someone who often hits their head on the top of door frames, Livio and Razlo are dangerously cute when they get flustered by something as basic anatomical functions.
“Then—” Livio’s nose wrinkles, “where does the water go? I know ya drink.”
A wave of serene familiarity washes over Knives when he’s granted the pleasure of speaking the next words. “You think that an organism such as a plant would generate waste products without being able to recycle them? We have more efficient ways of managing our resources than you.”
“…Ew,” Razlo mutters, unimpressed.
Knives exhales, gritting his teeth and hearing the bones crunch in the back of his head. He grits out, “You are not supposed to say ‘ew’ when I am describing my basic biology to you. It’s rude.”
“Oh. Sorry.” Razlo shuffles around on the bed. He paws at the hem of Knives’ shirt in apology, looking up at him with those big golden eyes and slipping a cheeky thumb under the fabric. “Uh, keep goin’.”
“My gate,” Knives says, attempting to get back on track with the stepwise lesson that is going to very important places if they can make it past the juvenile inquiries, “is where ‘the water ends up.’” He holds out his left arm and rolls up his sleeve, letting Livio and Razlo wrap their large hands around his forearm. Knives swallows. Now there’s a tingle. If they can feel the static—the thrum of a divine power exhausted, yet still a rift in the fabric of the middle plane that every plant carries within until their ultimate death cuts off the connection—they do not react in a way that Knives can read. “Unusable waste is broken down to an atomic level, where it is then either repurposed or respired with the carbon dioxide any living being exhales.”
Razlo gives him another skeptical look, shedding his scruples like a dead exoskeleton. “So… when ya smell like shit in the mornin’, it’s literal.”
Knives tilts his head back and up towards the heavens, his view of the sky blocked by moldy synth-wood rafters and worm webs. He gusts a whole-body sigh, letting his disappointment permeate his entire being until he is nothing but a man-shaped cloud of disappointment fond of very insufferable people. It makes Razlo snicker.
“You are terrible at this, you know,” Knives laments, mourning all of their other perfections marred by this singular shortcoming. “You’re lucky I’m already attached to you.”
“What, at letting ya boast?” Livio cracks a smile, guiding Knives closer with a hand holding his elbow. The tug is gentle, bringing him between their legs so that they can lock their ankles behind his. “Trust me, he’s bein’ nice. That’s the censored Razlo—even if he says I’m stifling his creativity.”
Knives drapes his arm over their shoulders, leaning in against them. “I would like to hear the uncensored Razlo.”
“—Can I poke it?” Razlo jumps up to ask.
Knives pokes him, right between the eyes, with enough force that Razlo barks an “Ack!” at him. Shaking his head, Knives says, “Pay attention. It won’t do anything for me.”
“No, no, no, not yer, uh, not-dick.” Razlo’s hand does skim over his abdomen then, and Knives indifferently watches him scratch at the blonde hair beneath his belly button. Odd—how that hair didn’t go black when he exhausted his powers. Maybe that’s why he isn’t dead. “Not all that interested in that—no offense. Looks just like a third armpit, or somethin’.”
“That’s a very accurate assessment, actually.” Knives’ face scrunches. That was a terrible thought, owing his survival to his pubic hair. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
Razlo beams at him, and it distracts him enough that Knives almost sighs in relief. With a lot more carefulness than Razlo showed his disappointing not-dick and his disappointing not-hole, they reach out to touch his left forearm again—and Knives thinks he must be forgiven for how he almost swallows his own tongue. Razlo, without even needing to be guided or told, digs his thumb into the thin layer of skin and blood between the air and Knives’ literal core, stroking over the space between his ulna and radius. It’s a blistering amount of pressure, abrupt and without warning and surely nothing Knives has ever tried to do in his life.
“Meant yer gate, the thing ya said was in yer arm,” Razlo grins. Ah, so they definitely noticed his earlier reaction, then. And probably the static. Mystics like them are sensitive enough to the subtle details in the world that Knives would not be surprised if they could map the rest of his gate’s anatomy without him giving them even a sentence more. “Tell me what I gotta do with it to see it fer myself.”
Leave it to Razlo to want to poke the interdimensional power gate just to see what might happen. Typical. And of all the gates in the world, it’s the one that belongs to Millions Knives, the known enemy of all things good and soft and safe. Knives is mortified by how their words make his heart do irrational and embarrassing things in his ribcage.
“It might vaporize your fingers,” Knives warns. He can’t even call it romantic; it’s just stupid. He’s stupidly in love with them.
“Ooh. Sexy,” Razlo says. “Good thing I can grow ‘em back.”
“I’ll… show you,” Knives mutters. Razlo gives an excited little wiggle when they drop him, sitting back with their hands fisted on their legs. Knives presses his lips together. “Please don’t look at me like that.”
“Whaaat?” Razlo snickers. “C’mon. We’re excited, birdie.” Livio hums a second affirmative, winking their right eye.
Knives snatches their hands out of their lap and wraps their grip around his arm; it does not escape him that their long fingers can entirely circle his limb. Pointing with his own index finger, he traces the soft skin of his underarm, up and down, following a line invisible to the human eye. The radial artery guides him from his wrist to his inner elbow, and he stops their thumb when it touches the same place that they’d instinctively sought out.
“That seam,” he says, “follow it.”
“Uh.” Livio squints. Hesitantly, he repeats, “That seam.” Knives nods an affirmative. That seam, the one that really shouldn’t be reacting so excitedly and making his arm feel like it was doused in oil and set to flame before they’ve even touched much of him. “…Thaaat hasn’t opened yet. Because ya haven’t opened yer… gate.”
Knives smiles, strained. He might need to sit down. “Now you’re understanding.”
“Alright. I can do that.” They give his arm a quick squeeze, sliding the ring of their fingers up and down with a deliberacy that just isn’t fair. “Toootally normal thing to try.” And oh, hell, Knives really does need to sit down. He knows they can tell he’s seeing just a couple of stars, not enough to be called pleasure but certainly working him towards that precipice—but they’re teasing him out like some cheap spool of string, relishing each crack they’re making in his restraint. “Kinda just like I’m—jackin’ off yer arm for ya.”
“Please don’t say that.”
“But it’s pretty funny to say it like that,” Razlo says. “Another accurate assessment, ain’t it?”
“…Pointless chatter,” Knives mutters.
Razlo leans in close to say: “Y’can just tell us to hurry up.”
Knives conveys his agreement by leaning back into them, slumping with a heady exhale when Razlo adds a thumbnail to his ministrations. Livio gently guides him into sitting on their leg, tucked in the juncture between their thigh and abdomen; Knives presses himself as closely as he dares with the hiss of old power starting to crawl back up his veins and wraps his right arm around their neck.
“I don’t like you,” Knives says into their crown, so Livio adds their other hand underneath his arm so that they’re essentially squeezing his gate from either side; the tailend of the ‘says’ turns into more of a ‘moans’ than Millions Knives would like to admit.
He feels it when Razlo succeeds at splitting his skin—though no blood pours out of this wound, no entrails or gore or living fascia making an impromptu appearance as their fingertip dips past the surface of him and into the dimension beyond. There is a noise, and then there is feeling; a rip and a crack, of his gate coerced into tearing spacetime, and then a flood of warmth that spreads out from his arm and up to the rest of his body. Knives sees white for an instant. His hands clench into fists as sharp feathers sprout from between his knuckles, hypersensitive to the air’s composition and to Livio’s curious touch. The sensation of his bones bending outwards and forming a cage to contain the surge of not-matter is a familiar one.
“Wha’wuz that?” Razlo’s mouth says into his throat, and it makes Knives intensely aware of all of the other places that their bodies are overlapping, and how shallowly he’s breathing. “Y’don’t like me?” He hasn’t gone right for the glowing white core at the center of Knives’ mockery of an arm, despite how shiny and enticing a human must find it. Instead, he pinches the bars of mottled metal-flesh that make up its container, fingering up and down the length of each piece like a harpist smoothing out a glissando. “Feel like I got planny’a proof right here that ain’t true…”
Knives grabs a fistful of their silver hair with the hand that isn’t turning into fractals and stardust and pulls. Not much else he can do to say “Splendid performance” without a working voice. Shamelessly, Razlo pants open-mouthed against his collarbone, hot and giggly over it like it is him that Knives is undoing down to a molecular level.
The noise from his gate becomes a cacophony in the back of his mind. He knows half of the sounds aren’t even reaching Razlo and Livio’s ears, between the dimensions as they are, but he’s sure that they’re cognizant of the hissing that increases in intensity the longer they spend feeling around the inside of his arm. They’re still dodging that damn miniature sun, poking as promised and prodding in all the little corners of the oblong cage to find the buttons that change how he sings. Deep in his elbow, they hook their fingers through an iron-wrought hole and scissor it further open; closer to his wrist, they pluck astral nerve endings that send a mess of signals back to Knives’ spine to collapse and maybe also die, you repressed idiot. He’s only half-aware of them as they lie him back on the motel sheets and perch at his side, smoothing out his hair and feathers as his vision goes in and out.
Never can it be said that Livio and Razlo are poor learners, nor slow ones at that. Every detail they can wring out of him changes how they decide to act next. With incremental experimentation, they find what makes him tick and what learned skills they should apply in what places; a crook or a blunt thumbnail, the base of their palm or splayed fingers, a pull or a squeeze. Far too thorough. Far too dangerous. The real power that the Eye of Michael gave them, more than hyperregeneration or strength or enhanced senses, was the ability to keep crawling back, over and over again, until they won.
Livio finally takes the reins and ceases Razlo’s teasing, and all Knives can see of them is a bobbing glow of golden eyes and silver hair when they brush two fingers against the core of his gate. It takes only a fraction of the earlier pressure to slip one, and then the other inside, and Livio makes a noise of surprise at how quickly the white light consumes their fingertips up to the second knuckle.
Knives feels the rest of his body react appropriately to the foreign invasion. His back arches off of the mattress, and a sharp gasp is ripped out of his throat—and then the gasp itself does more ripping, leaving a slash in the rafters when the resonance impacts the ceiling. Livio and Razlo do not react, entranced as they are by the hot-cold, empty-full, painful-soothing oxymoron of a plant’s internal anatomy. Plants aren’t meant to make sense. They weren’t born to explain problems, just solve them. Knives thinks he can hear a spark of fascination coming through the feathers that Livio’s still touching—but mostly he hears echoes of multiple voices crooning love, love, love, and beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.
—I do not know if plants can finish from this, Knives thinks, right before coming with the inevitability of a dying star.
Or maybe that’s too generous of an estimate for Millions Knives’ precision to be satisfied with. Inevitable as the heat death of the universe, surely, but much too slow. He thinks he comes a little faster than a generic dying star—more like a blue supergiant, the kind of star that burns brightly on its nebula-borne stash of hydrogen atoms for only a few thousand years before exploding into a supermassive black hole and taking the rest of the solar system with it—
Knives’ spotty vision clears to find his partners swearing up a storm on the other side of the bed. It takes him another half-minute to recover from the shock of the orgasm before he recognizes why.
—Well. It isn’t quite the rest of the whole solar system, but it is a sizable chunk of their hand.
“Ah—fucking, shit, goddamnit, fuck.” Razlo holds up the two fingers they’d just touched a higher dimension with, stripped of skin and muscle and left with just the scorched black bone. “Fuuuck. Dude. I didn’t even feel that goin’ on. How the fuck.”
“…I warned you,” Knives wheezes at the ceiling when his voice returns.
Razlo waggles the fingers with the remaining joint at the bottom, and the bones make a clack-clack when they knock together—and then promptly slough off to leave him with cauterized stumps. They stare at the bits of themselves that just fell to the floor. Razlo then makes something of a sad whimpering noise, though he retains his profanities while being pathetic: “Fuuuuuck you.”
Knives still can’t quite feel all of his limbs even as his arm slowly pieces itself back together. It pisses him off a little bit, because there’s a line of drool he can feel on the side of his mouth that he needs to wipe off before Razlo makes fun of him for it. He doesn’t bother trying to sit up when he says, “Do you want me to apologize?”
“Noooo… ya don’t,” Razlo says. He abruptly topples over, pushing his face into Knives’ hip. “Don’t really care.”
Knives reaches down to scratch their scalp and Razlo grumbles into his skin appreciatively. Their hazardous-sex-ly maimed hand perches on his abdomen, and Knives gets to watch as two fresh white bones start to crawl out of the two cut knuckles, knitting in on themselves in neat loops of osteoblasts and hyperactive stem cells. It’s beautiful watching their body regenerate, to Knives; though it might’ve been horrifying to someone more sane to watch as muscle fibers strung themselves off of tendon insertions and skin grew in precise layers to hide the construction underneath, he finds the process to be something of an art show. Razlo knows he likes to watch. Razlo sometimes lets him cut little slits into their larger muscles just so he can watch their body meticulously put them back together.
It doesn’t take long for their regenerated fingertips to start tapping his stomach to the same rhythm of his gate’s song, humming out the static tune they’d heard when they made him see stars. He can feel the peaceful rumble through Razlo’s chest curled around his leg, like a tiger that memorized the very heart and soul of him and thought it a simple pastime.
“Thank you,” Knives sighs out eventually.
“Hhrm?” Razlo cranes their neck to squint at him. “Wazzat?”
Knives’ cheeks crease when he smiles down at them. “That was fun,” he says genuinely, with as much truth as he can muster. It’s a lot of truth, almost an overwhelming amount; Millions Knives may think himself a good liar, but Livio and Razlo know better. “I enjoyed it.”
Razlo sits bolt-upright, golden eyes shining. Knives startles when he shoves their face mere inches from his. The drool’s still there. He’s lucky that Razlo is distracted enough by the prospect of sensually vaporizing his fingertips for a second time in an hour to notice it.
“Canni do it again?” Razlo begs.
Knives licks his dry lips. “What if I first want to return the favor?”
“What, suckin’ our dick?” Razlo grins. “Don’t ‘ave one.”
“…Well, shit.”
Back where they started. Knives finds that he doesn’t mind at all, as long as they’re together.
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