A Forge and an Iron Heart

by the_sylph_of_mind

Summary:

"After months of constant fear and wanton slaughter from above, the residents of Outpost 3 came to a difficult, grim decision. Everyone over the age of eighteen was assigned a number, and they instituted a lottery. The worker whose number had been drawn was to be sent out to the ferrovores’ lair as an offering, like a metal and silicone sacrificial lamb. The hope had been this practice would placate and pacify the creatures plaguing the bunker, and minimize the death the ferrovores brought down by way of curbing their bloodlust before it grew to proportions only sated by a massacre, as it had so often done. The brutal thing is that it had worked. There hadn’t been a killing spree in years, and all it cost was a single life every time the lunar phases reached their darkest."
...
[In which Uzi's number is drawn]

Notes:

(This was supposed to be a one-shot but I blacked out and when I woke up it was 16,000 words long oops)
(If you're here from my other MD series, SHHHH. I just wanted to write things that the NUzi over there wouldn't be doing)

Chapter 1: Pattern

The mortality rate at Outpost 3 has fallen sharply and dramatically over the past few years, but not for lack of appetite on the part of the ferrovores. No, they are still hungry. The difference is that, like clockwork, their meals now come to them.

The creatures had fallen from the sky, winged and shining, and the workers might have come to think of them as akin to angels—scarcely seen, fierce and beautiful, to be respected and revered—if it hadn’t been for the immediate bloodbath following the moment of awe and wonder at their arrival. Even calling them angels of death is too noble a descriptor. They’re not reapers, not solemn beings taking lives because lives simply must end. They hunt. Take joy in the killing. And they consume their prey.

After months of constant fear and wanton slaughter from above, the residents of Outpost 3 came to a difficult, grim decision. Everyone over the age of eighteen was assigned a number, and they instituted a lottery.

 The worker whose number had been drawn was to be sent out to the ferrovores’ lair as an offering, like a metal and silicone sacrificial lamb. The hope had been this practice would placate and pacify the creatures plaguing the bunker, and minimize the death the ferrovores brought down by way of curbing their bloodlust before it grew to proportions only sated by a massacre, as it had so often done. The brutal thing is that it had worked. There hadn’t been a killing spree in years, and all it cost was a single life every time the lunar phases reached their darkest. Waning crescent moons always hail the start of morbid preparations.  

Everyone’s number has an equal chance of being drawn. Usually, the lotteries are blackly morose affairs, full of digital tears, resolute but frightened faces giving their farewells to loved ones before venturing out into the storm. Usually there are friends and family who fall to their knees when a number they recognize rings out on new moons. Usually the unlucky winner is mourned, honored with a proper funeral, remembered fondly as a brave martyr.

After her stomach drops and her eyes hollow when her name is spoken, and after a small chorus of “who?” ripples through the gathered crowd, Uzi realizes this lottery will not be like the rest. Her folks’ numbers had been called years ago. Mom, then Dad a mere few months later. The only people who would have cried out in anguish at her number being drawn had long since been eaten alive out in the wastes. She will have no tearful goodbye, no memorial, no solemn bequeathing of precious belongings to siblings or best friends. No heartbreaking final kiss with a significant other. Nobody hailing her sacrifice as noble, nobody reassuring her that she is a lifesaver, that her absence will be felt and the survivors will be grateful beyond measure.

She turns on her heel and pushes her way through the crowd, not even sure the drones gathered realize her retreat signals that it’s she whose number had been drawn, and she finds an odd sort of spiteful comfort in it. She’d had as much impact on life in Outpost 3 as a ghost; maybe vanishing like one is only fitting. But, robo-god willing, she has other plans. As harrowing as it is, this is her chance to be seen, for once.

Her feet pound the floor as she marches toward her home, empty save for a few of her belongings, none of which anyone would want once she’s gone, even if she’d had anyone she’d want to give anything to, even if she’d bothered keeping a will like everyone else. Then again, maybe someone would be interested in the thing she’s digging out from under her bed; this top-secret project hidden in a lockbox behind stacks of unfinished sheets of homework, repurposed and full of designs for the weapon she’d been refining for months.

She pulls the railgun from the box, heavy and full of promise, into her hands. She has no name for it; nothing had come to her when she’d wracked her brain for a title that encompasses all it represents. A last-ditch effort to save her own life if and when she won the lottery. An opportunity to take a ferrovore down with her (only one, which makes her grind her teeth against the synthetic adrenaline blooming in her rubber guts. She could never solve the cooldown problem and now she’s out of time, so she has to simply hope only one ferrovore will be home tonight). A chance to show the residents of Outpost 3 that she is and always has been worth their fucking time, if she can march back to them with the creature’s head in one hand and a smoking gun of her design in the other. And, even though they absolutely don’t deserve it, a first step toward saving everyone in the colony. A foothold in a way to fight back. Maybe, if she can do all that, she’ll finally be seen. Appreciated would be better. Befriended would be best. But she’ll start with seen.

She fits a holster over her hoodie and slings the railgun onto her back. She hopes there will be enough power in the plasma cartridge to take out a ferrovore with one shot. She’d had to desecrate the grave of a worker who had ceased functioning before the ferrovore plague to get a fuel cell small and strong enough to keep the railgun from overheating just from powering up, and prying it from the cold, dead chassis had been morbid work. Worth it, Uzi thinks, if it means her gun can kill a ferrovore. If it can’t, well…she won’t be alive to answer for graverobbing.

Chapter 2: Melt

Uzi knows what direction to head. Everyone knows where the tower of past sacrifices is. The bent, spiraling silhouette of oil-drained corpses is unmistakable on the horizon, even from the distance of Outpost 3’s entrance. Why the ferrovores choose to essentially live in a stack of crunched and empty soda cans, nobody can fathom, nor does anyone want to think too hard about it. Maybe it’s meant to inspire hopelessness in the workers. Maybe the creatures enjoy the message it sends. “Thanks for the meal. Keep them coming, or this will be the fate of the whole colony.”

If it’s meant to make Uzi feel resigned to her fate and curl up on the silver platter she’s expected to serve herself upon, she’s far too stubborn and pissed to let it. This hellish altar might stare down other sacrifices and make them cower and fold, but Uzi brought a gun to this ritualistic bullshit and at the very least she’s going to be the most uncooperative meal these killing machines have ever had the displeasure of consuming, if it’s the last thing she does—Well…hopefully it won’t be.

It's so eerily still and silent as she enters the spire, and an involuntary dry gulp spurs her to pull her railgun from its holster. She’d been expecting to be greeted by something, some demon-ceiling-crawling something or other, or maybe a growl and sharp claws cutting into the snow as the things paced a circle around her on all fours, but there’s just nothing. Are they…ooout? Running…errands?

The structure in the center of the tower is a surprise. It’s a landing pod, maybe. That makes sense, Uzi supposes. Though the mythos of the ferrovores popularly paints them as descending like meteors to the surface of Copper-9, all fire and destruction, of course they’re here via conventional means. Uzi quirks a brow. Could they be in there right now? Does she, like, fucking knock?

Her patience is wearing magnificently thin. If she turns and makes an escape, the ferrovores will think their sacrificial offerings have lapsed and will rain hell down on the colony. She screws up her mouth. As of this moment, she’s indifferent to everyone in Outpost 3 dying; she’s invested in the death of the ferrovores. One single point in the colony’s favor is still enough to tip her resolution toward standing her ground and trying to kill these things. Lucky for everyone else. But, if too much time passes and either the angst or the adrenaline wear off, she’ll be terrified, and that’s not how she’s planning on dying. She scoops a disembodied leg from the corpse detritus all around her and hurls it at the side of the landing pod, arming her railgun as a clang rings out, loud enough in the deathly silence to startle even her.

“Hey, shitheads!” She yells from the base of her chest. “Am I not appetizing enough for you? Are you not fucking hungry or what! Where are you!”

The ambient light in the tower, already dim from the lightless moons, darkens further as something scuttles across the threshold of the upper floor entrance to the spire. Uzi clicks the safety of her railgun off, eyes to the ceiling, sharp and hollow, but she doesn’t see a trace of any movement.

“…Up…hhhhere.”

Uzi’s stomach drops, eyes flicking to every shadow, every crevice, trying to find the source of the chilling voice (A voice! Nobody ever mentioned the ferrovores speak…guess because the ones who would know are all currently making up the walls of the tower she’s in). After nearly thirty seconds of frantically scanning the ceiling only to find stillness, she gets the needling sense that she’s being toyed with, being forced into a game of cat and mouse, and oh boy does she not feel like allowing this creature to play with its food.

“Fucking show yourself!”

There’s a whispered growl, an echoed chuckle, and though she’d never admit it, the fans surrounding Uzi’s core nearly vibrate with how fast they’re spinning. The way the ferrovore is attempting to disorient her by keeping to the shadows is not something she can counter. She needs to be able to see it to shoot it. She needs eyes on this thing now.

“If you’re going to waste my time, I’m leaving. Play mind games with what other poor sap they send in my place.” She starts to pace backwards toward the entrance. “You’re gonna go hungry tonight if you don’t stop me now.”

“Hhhungry…”

A bone-rattling chill works its way through her whole endoskeleton at the word, but she scowls and doubles down.

“Yeah? Then come and get it already!” Synthetic adrenaline is making her eyes hollow, her hands shaky, making her cognitive processors pull wild, risky gambits and present them to her as good ideas, and she finds herself grasping at the zipper pull of her hoodie and yanking it down hard enough to break the tab off the end. She discards the bit of metal to the snow and then curls her fingers into the front of her T-shirt, tearing the collar open and baring her thrumming, purple core in a moment of hysterical desperation to tempt this creature from the shadows, to get her a clear shot. “I’m all yours!”

It's then that a bright gold X flickers to life deep in a dark crevice near the rafters of the tower, commanding Uzi’s gaze up toward it. She knows whose arrival that symbol hails. Survivors of those first massacres recounted the murderous X emblazoned on the visors of ferrovores about to strike.

“All…mmmine?”

It’s a growl from low in the chest of the thing, resonant and deadly, but Uzi isn’t equipped to respond to the way the pitch ticks up at the end into a question, so her fear-frayed synaptic relays sputter and blank and all she can think to do is stare down the floating golden X above her and nod.

The next growl that leaves the shadows sounds pleased. With a scraping and clacking of claws on corpses, the ferrovore moves and breaches the dim ambient light of the spire on all fours, clinging to the wall of bodies indeed like a demon. It’s clad in the white casing it came off the assembly line in and nothing else, head tilted at an uncanny angle to keep its X laser-focused on Uzi as it crawls down the side of the space. There’s only the one, thank robo-god (at least right now), but it’s bigger than she thought it would be. Broader. Male? The vicious syringe at the end of its tail curls down and floats like a glowing, deadly insect next to the upturned face of the creature. The wide, fanged grin it sports is dripping cords of saliva down to the snow beneath it, and Uzi’s breath leaves her in a rush, rubber diaphragm tensing as she realizes the thing is appraising her and what it sees is making its mouth water.

“All minnne…” It says again. “You’re offerinnng? You…wannnt mmme?”

Uzi hears the sound of metal sharpening against metal, bladed wings unfurling into a position for an aerial strike. She moves her finger to the trigger of her gun.

“You’re…the ffffirst like thisss…to asssk to be…mine!”

The rush of the last word is what tips Uzi off to the creature’s imminent lunge. She digs in her heels and aims her railgun at the sharpened grin, the shining claws, the wings designed for flight second and murder first. She has time for one and only one steadying breath, and when she pulls the trigger, the railgun hums in her hands, vibrates, glows, and a beam of green proton-accelerated plasma cuts across the space between them like a knife and into the ferrovore mid-pounce. Every haunting, dead, white worker drone face in the tower is illuminated in a flash of searing hot, lime-colored light in a blast so powerful it throws Uzi backward with the recoil.

She tumbles, but she doesn’t have time to be disoriented. She drags her fingers to slow her momentum, digging in and grinding to a halt among the scattered worker limbs, eyes wild, scanning for the creature (hopefully, its corpse). Her railgun sizzles in the snow next to her, displaying a red timer with a cooldown that might as well read YOU’RE DEAD if she’s somehow missed her shot. She scrambles into a sitting position, panting, and nearly screams when the ferrovore crashes down from above and lands only a yard in front of her in a smoking, crumpled, motionless, headless heap.

Uzi stares, open-mouthed, at the wreckage, frozen to the spot and clutching her gun to her chest like a stuffed animal. Sparks sputter from its joints, oil pools under the stump of its neck and stains the snow beneath it black. Does this mean…she’s done it? She’s won? Does this mean her gun works? Does this mean she’s killed a ferrovore?  

A manic grin begins to split her face, fueled by thoughts of triumphantly returning to Outpost 3, dragging the mangled body as proof she’s worthy of a place among the other workers, as proof she’s worthy of their camaraderie. She’s invented a way to protect and defend her colony against the ferrovores; let’s see them all ignore or dismiss her, now! Nobody will ignore or dismiss her accomplishments or her after this; gone are her days of feeling like a ghost haunting the halls of the colony; gone are the hours spent alone in the dark, having nobody to reach out to for company or reassurance; and fucking gone are those needling thoughts that she’s not valuable, that if she were worthy of attention, let alone recognition, let alone friendship, let alone validation, she’d have had them this whole time, and therefore she must be a freak who doesn’t deserve kind words or meaningful touch or intimate bonds. She’s just become somebody valuable—she’s just become deserving. Gone are her days of hating herself—

The body in front of her twitches. Then it stands.

Uzi watches it, uncomprehending, as it reorients itself with uncanny, disjointed motions, and the space where its head used to be begins to fill with something—oil?—black and warped, steam hissing from it as it shapes itself into a rough silhouette of a head. The ferrovore’s tail flails like a firehose and Uzi scrambles backward from the wild movement and promise of melted titanium. Its wings shudder, metal feathers clinking against each other like grim chimes, and it falls forward onto all fours. A sensor array bubbles out of the top of the oily outline of a head and blinks on, one bulb at a time, as silver hair blooms and fans out from beneath it, bleeding down into the shape of a visor that hardens into glass and then displays a rebooting symbol.

Uzi understands what’s happened when the golden X returns to its display and its mouth falls open to reveal razor fangs. Uzi understands that the ferrovores can regenerate. She understands now. There’s no fighting them.

Every ounce of courage, anger, every boastful bluff and determined scowl, every wistful, yearning thought of being seen or liked or loved, everything she is—it all drains down, top down from her head, taking her resolve with it as it passes through her core, leaving a pit of numb anguish as it washes past her stomach, rushing through her limbs and siphoning away the last of her strength as her railgun falls from her hand into the snow at her side. She’s left completely hollow, just a corpse-to-be as the ferrovore inhales sharply in front of her, alive again and just as capable of killing her. Dying as she lived, alone and of no consequence, like a ghost.

“Wh—yyyou…I wwwas—yyyou shot—but, hhhow…?”

Uzi doesn’t have the wherewithal to react to the thing speaking instead of murdering her immediately, but her head of its own volition tilts bemusedly at the ferrovore’s first display back from the dead being one of baffled curiosity. It paces forward and circles her once on clawed hands and feet, like it’s studying her, then nudges the railgun at her side with a talon.

“You built thisss?” She knows her expression must be faraway and fuzzy. Her head certainly is. She nods, though. Yes, the gun is her design. It sits back on its haunches in front of her, so close to her it’s nearly in her lap, but she can’t summon any feelings at all, let alone fear at its proximity. “That’sss a fffirst…I’mmm…impressed…” It tilts its head, skeleton grin muted and reserved, like it’s considering something. Like it’s considering her. “Yyyou’re different. Braaave…” Then the sharpness returns to its smile and it adds, “Feisty.”

Uzi finally, finally starts to sink back into her brain, the shock and resignation reluctantly loosening their clutches on her cognition. What…is happening, here? The ferrovore…what did the ferrovore call her? It sits forward again, this time pushing into her space, clawed hands braced on either side of her and peering into her eyes, bright yellow X narrowing, like it’s squinting at her. Again, she can’t summon more than a surprised blink, and even that’s an accomplishment.

“Whyyy?”

“Why…why what?” Is that her voice? It’s so far away. Everything happening is fully beyond her grasp. The ferrovore nudges the gun at her side again.

“Nnno others hhhave fought back,” It lifts a hand from where it’s braced next to her and points a claw out, touching a tip to Uzi’s chest above her core, above where she’d torn her collar away. She’s…almost cognizant enough to be terrified, but not quite. “Whyyy did you?”

Uzi brings a shaking hand up to scrub down her visor, unfocused eyes dropping to her legs as she distantly replies,

“I just…wanted to do something…cool.” God, her motives sound so lame when she can’t be more articulate about how lonely and unnoticed she’s felt her whole life. The ferrovore huffs out a chuckle and it almost rubs her the wrong way, but she doesn’t get the chance to gather enough feelings of indignation to properly react before the claw gently lifts away from her chest and the flat side is suddenly pressed to the point of her chin.

“Cool.”  Its tail waves in a lazy arc behind it as it tilts Uzi’s face up and levels her eyes to its X. “Are you nnnamed?”

“I’m…U-Uzi?”

Its grin widens.

“N,” It moves its claw from under her chin and brings it to its forehead in a loose but honest-to-robo-god salute as it introduces itself. The movement is unnervingly normal. Shockingly disarming. Like the creature over her isn’t about to kill and eat her…isn’t it?

“Uzi…” It pushes further into her space, and she has to fall back onto her elbows to keep any distance between their faces. “Yyyou do seem cool. Cleverrr...fffearless…”

The neural pathways that had been flooded with synthetic cortisol have finally drained to the point where thoughts can traverse them more or less properly, and apparently that means it’s rush hour in Uzi’s brain as she listens to the ferrovore (N?) list off…compliments. About her. She feels her brows climb up her display, not rattled by the proximity of the ferrovore actively crawling toward and over her, but by the…the praise. It makes every racing thought blurry, difficult to identify or examine, and she’s bewildered to find the inability to think straight amidst the words is not unpleasant. N tilts his head a little, and paired with a pointy smile, a blush appears under the X on his display.

“…Prettyyy.”

“Ha!”

The incredulous bark of a laugh escapes Uzi reflexively, defensively, and N’s grin pulls down at the corners at that. He lifts a claw and places the flat side under her chin once more.

“Pretty.” He says again, insistent.

Uzi actually feels flustered. Nobody has ever called her that. Not even her mom, she doesn’t think, although, there are large chunks of her childhood she can’t really remember well, but this is different. It’s also coming from a ferrovore, but, if she can look past that, if she can put that aside…this guy…on top of things like brave and cool…thinks she’s pretty? Really?

Something weird is happening in her brain. Her toes are curling up inside her boots and she suddenly can’t look N in the eyes…in the X. He hums in…amusement?...and her faceplate heats. He hasn’t stopped inching closer, hovering over her to the point where she’s almost laying flat on her back. She hears him inhale, and though her gaze is averted, she knows he’s bearing a sharper-than-she’s-comfortable-with grin by the downward pitch in his voice when he says,

“And yyyou smell ssso nice…” She feels a claw brush a strand of hair away from her throat, and a flutter of fear reminds her where she is and what she’s dealing with. She flicks her gaze back to find the line of N’s mouth now a little hesitant, body a little tense. He shifts over her, like he’s debating what to say to her…or what to do to her.

“…You sssaid you’re all mmmine?”

Oh, right. She’d willingly offered herself up to the ferrovore as a ploy, and he had liked that idea quite a lot at the time, hadn’t he? It seems to still be an attractive thought. And she still doesn’t want to be eaten alive.

“I…I don’t—”

At her hesitation, he leans in and down and his face is only an inch from Uzi’s. The back of her head hits the snow under her and she finds herself bringing her hands up, palms flat against N’s chest, not holding him away or pushing him off her, but ready to. Or ready to try, at least. Pinned under him as she is, if N decides to kill her and ritualistically drink her dry in this moment, there’s nothing she can do to stop him. He’s nearly double her size, probably nearly triple her weight, with a mouth full of fangs designed to rip her to shreds and a tail sporting a lethal injection. And though her railgun had technically worked, he hadn’t stayed dead. The only reason she’s alive right now is his curiosity about and investment in why she’s comporting herself in a manner distinct from all the previous sacrifices. She’s at his mercy, like any other offering, like any other life he’d taken in the past.

But then he says, in nearly a murmur with breath ghosting over her collarbones, hot and gentle,

“I couldnnn’t kill…a guessst so pretty.”

A blush of all things bursts over her display. Somewhere in the back of her mind, she knows she’s having a reaction to the wrong part of this sentiment, but…if…if a killing machine thinks she’s too pretty to kill…well then, goddamnit all, because her code is singing and she can’t help it and it feels nice. Good, even.  

“But…hmmm. I am hhhungry...” N’s wings flex in a movement that reads to Uzi as restraint. She feels the thrumming of his yellow core beneath where her palms are pressed against the white casing of his chest, smooth and just on this side of overwarm. Nerves and fluster tie her guts into a hopelessly complex knot as she tries to interpret his meaning in a way she can believe is correct, and it takes a hot second, because the conclusion she comes to is particularly insane and she tries to reason around it, but her math checks out upon revisitation. If she’s right, it’s that…N is…asking? To? Drink? Her oil? With the intent to not kill her? Because he thinks she’s clever and fearless and pretty? She flounders and has to restart her response a handful of times before settling on:

 “You…you don’t wanna kill me, so you’ll—” Little metal butterflies clog her fans, but she pushes on, “…t-take only what you need? Right?”

“Onnnly what I nnneed.” N nods, voice nearly a whisper, disarming in its reassurance.

“I-I…I believe you.” And it’s insane and there’s some part of her that is screaming why the fuck, but it’s the truth. “But…I’m f-f—” A little scowl digs between her brows and she grits her teeth. Saying it intrinsically feels like she’s acknowledging a personal failure, even though she knows that’s absurd. Regardless of her individual hangups, the fact of the matter is that, compared to him, this is also the truth, so she huffs and confesses: “I’m fragile, okay?”

N tilts his head, considering, then shifts and sits back on his haunches, giving Uzi space to sit up.

“Sssmall,” He says with a nod full of sage understanding, and Uzi prickles, but now is very not the time to get riled up about being called out on her diminutive stature. N brings his claws up to scratch at the back of his head in another uncannily normal mannerism, doubled down by a gold blush lighting his visor beneath the X as he hesitantly adds, “I…could ssstop…whennn you sssay.”

She fidgets, unconsciously bringing a hand up to rub at the silicone joint at the crook of her neck. N hums, X flicking to the side and seemingly equally flustered at the prospect of handling her attentively and gently (not to mention the harrowing and looming certainty that is small talk afterward, she thinks). He probably hasn’t ever had to grapple with enjoying the company of his food, since apparently nobody the colony had sent his way previously had ever stood out or piqued his interest enough to warrant any restraint. Uzi had, though. And he wants to exercise temperance for her. Only her.

N shifts on his knees, claws flexing…not impatiently. Feverishly?

“Um,” It’s the first filler word he’s voiced, and it stacks up neatly on top of the other perturbingly ordinary gestures and mannerisms he’s displayed. “What wwwill earn…yyyour trussst?”

What would get her to trust a ferrovore enough to believe he won’t accidentally or purposefully kill her when he’s taking the oil he craves from her; enough to believe that she’ll utter a safeword and N will pull his teeth from her throat, true to his promise? It should be a nigh impossible threshold to reach, but just by virtue of him asking what he can do to make her more at ease, she’s amenable to considering demands he could realistically meet. Nothing is stopping him from just biting her anyway, even if he really doesn’t plan on killing her. And he hasn’t killed her yet. What other vote of confidence does she need, really? Not to mention the…nice things he’d said about her, still tingling and warm in her abdomen. She rubs a hand over her flushed visor.

 If they’re at this stage of negotiating, though, couldn’t Uzi simply plead with him to not drink from her at all? If he likes her (likes! Her!) enough to not want to scare or seriously injure her, let alone kill her, she could probably bet on him allowing her to leave completely untouched and return to the Outpost.

Return to the Outpost…where she’ll continue to just be a shadow, maybe somehow even more of a pariah for shirking her sacrificial duties, nobody praising her or her accomplishments as noteworthy, let alone exceptional. The Outpost, where she’ll continue to be isolated and lonely and…completely untouched. Her heart sinks at the thought. At the finality of the solitude should she turn and leave now. At how deep and black a pit it digs inside her, swallowing even the echo of the word “untouched.”

N’s question still hangs in the air between them, and an answer poised to cut it loose is beginning to become unavoidably obvious in Uzi’s head, but it’s so embarrassing to even think, let alone say. She worries at her lower lip with her teeth and N’s X follows the movement. The ghost of the flat of N’s claw still clings, chilly, to the point of her chin from when he’d tilted her head and leveled their gazes and insisted “pretty.” She inhales.

“I—”

A clatter and a series of chattering growls cut her sentence short, and N whirls around to face the source of the interruption. Uzi’s stomach drops at his reaction, lightning fast and crouched low and defensive, and she quickly connects a series of dots. If this is N…then the rest of the alphabet is probably nearby.

Two new ferrovores descend into the spire, landing hard on the legs of the landing pod and sending it creaking and sinking an inch deeper into the snow. They have matching yellow Xs burning across their visors, and they’re hunched and hissing, grins wide as they start to prowl closer to N. To Uzi.

N pounds a line into the snow under him as he paces on all fours between Uzi and the interlopers, gaze trained on them, a menacing, shuddery rumble resonating from deep in his chest. He digs his claws into the ground and flares out his wings with a sharp, bright sound of blades ringing out against blades, baring his teeth toward his fellow predators in a display that, despite the language barrier, is simple to interpret.

Mine.

Uzi’s little robot heart flutters.

Chapter 3: Pour

The two ferrovores drop their predatory smiles. They’re smaller and sleeker than N, but still plenty deadly to Uzi, and now incensed. They’re female, if Uzi can guess by their statures, and she knows enough about pack dynamics to gather that these two are mean, maybe even by ferrovore standards. The bared fangs and higher-pitched snarls put the ice straight back into her barely-thawed oil lines.

It's when the skeleton grins return to their faces that Uzi realizes they’re taking N’s display as a challenge, and one where they like their odds. She barely has a moment to scramble backward before the pair lunge in tandem at N, blurred by speed and snarling, and then there’s snow spraying and mouths grabbing onto errant limbs in a whirlwind of metal and oil so frenzied and violent Uzi can hardly track who is biting whom or which yelp of pain is echoing from whose throat.

N is outnumbered, but Uzi can parse enough of what’s happening to know that he isn’t outright outmatched. It’s N’s claws that drag over the visor of the ferrovore with shorter hair, wrecking her display and eliciting a screech that makes Uzi reflexively press her palms over her ears. It’s N’s teeth that sink into the forearm of the one with pigtails, driving a shoulder into her chest and pulling her arm clean off her torso, the oil bursting from the empty socket like a fountain accompanied by a guttural shriek. Similarly to when Uzi had shot N’s head off, though, the black spurting from the stump wavers and warbles and gathers itself into the rough shape of a ferrovore arm and she’s right back into the melee far too quickly.

Someone’s teeth close around N’s tail and pull it free from its housing in the base of his spine and Uzi’s stomach drops at the piercing cry that escapes him. Someone tears at the space between his shoulder blades with vicious, repeated strikes of her claws, and one of N’s wings sparks and falls limp to his side before snapping off at the joint, broken under someone’s pointed foot stabbing down hard and cruel onto the strut. The shorter one with shorter hair is raking her claws in broad swings in front of her, swiping at N’s chest as he tries to both dodge the blades and hold the line between them and Uzi, and the other uses N’s limited movement to get in close.

 She clamps her jaws around N’s neck, black spraying from the shredded silicone, and the howl that leaves him is drowned and muted by the oil flooding into his throat from the inside.

A yell doesn’t burst from Uzi’s mouth because it gets lodged somewhere in her chest under the weight of a terrible realization: She’s in the way. N isn’t going to be able to best two of his kin in a lawless brawl and keep her from harm. He’ll be too hurt to defend himself soon, if he’s not at that point already.

Her railgun beeps and displays a green message: READY

The thought isn’t even fully formed before she’s acting on it. She swipes the gun from the snow at her side and scrambles to one knee, bracing the length of it against her bent leg, looking down the barrel to the tumultuous mass of metal and oil and fangs and gritting her teeth together, hissing in a steadying breath before calling out:

“N!” Her voice cuts through the din of snarls and tearing titanium, clear and commanding like a bell. N hastily throws his gaze over his shoulder to meet hers, levelled down the length of her railgun. “Dodge!”

The weapon hums in her hands, vibrating and glowing, and, though strained and blackened, N’s grin returns to his face. He frantically kicks the pair of female ferrovores off him and disentangles himself from the melee, charging toward the space to the right of Uzi and skidding to a stop just behind her as, for a second time, a green bolt of light sears across the space, this time toward new targets.

Snow sizzles and vaporizes under the heat of the beam, blinding and powerful as the previous shot, but this time, when the recoil hits Uzi in the chest and sends her reeling backward, her careening is immediately stopped short by a solid, heavy body behind her. She blinks away the residual overexposure to her optic sensors and tilts her head back, finding the underside of N’s chin. He’s perched over and behind her, bracing her against the recoil, though his X is trained forward on the aftermath of the blast. Uzi’s heart swells with something in response to N anticipating her disorienting tumble and positioning himself to intervene, chest flush with her back and claws loosely gripped at her shoulders, but she shakes off the encroaching fluster and refocuses, following his gaze. The hiss of steam coming off both the snow and the two other ferrovores is the only sound for a moment aside from N and Uzi’s ragged breaths aligning, and the moment it clears enough to get some visual on the pair is the same moment a guttural snarl rings out from a mangled silhouette.

The short-haired one is clutching the stump of where an arm used to be, oil pouring between her claws, teeth gritted and growling. Half of her optic halo has burst, bleeding yellow down the side of her visor and obscuring the warped display, and one wing is in pieces, feathers split and scattered, some errantly stabbed into the snow and the wall of corpses behind her. The joint of one of her knees has fused from the heat at an odd angle and she’s staggering backward with an uneven limp, but the other ferrovore is far worse off. She’s completely destroyed from the waist up, legs leading up to a gruesome splatter of oil and sparking wires.

N huffs and repositions, bloody and battered but carrying his head high, on one knee with his one good wing stretched out between Uzi and the remaining ferrovore. The clicks and chirps and seething growls that pass between them in the air over Uzi’s head isn’t something she can translate, but the intent of the female is crystal clear as she hisses and squares up. They’re both still standing, and Uzi guesses that’s enough for her to want to continue the fight in the hopes that N gives up his prize (Uzi, a prize), but he doesn’t budge. She bares her fangs and reaches the claws of her remaining hand down into the snow, retrieving something half-buried by her feet.

N tenses, but she’s already hurling the object toward him with all the strength a half-beaten predator could muster. Uzi doesn’t even have time to clock what the thing hurtling toward them is, expecting N to dodge or deflect it, but instead he sweeps her into his chest and rolls both of them out of the projectile’s trajectory. As it whizzes past, Uzi catches a glance of glowing yellow, sailing along a black cable, and she realizes with a churn in her stomach that the other ferrovore had thrown N’s detached tail, needle-first. N is still clutching Uzi to his chest with one arm when he comes out of the tuck-and-roll as his severed tail skids to a stop in the snow behind them, but before Uzi can reorient herself, there’s a second flash of gold liquid in a glass syringe, this one attached to the female and arcing with the speed of a whiplash toward her face.

It seems like the only thing N has time to do is throw Uzi out of the way, but he isn’t quite fast enough to spare her the whole of the injury. She feels a streak of searing pain, white hot and malignant, along the hook of her jaw as she sails through the air away from the re-instigated and doubly-vicious battle, and the wind is knocked out of her as her back hits the snow fifteen feet away. While struggling to drag air through her fans, she instinctually presses a palm to where the pain is blooming and biting along the joint between her silicone neck and titanium faceplate, only to jerk away as the searing transfers, contagious, to her hand. She watches, hollow-eyed and with breaths ragged and uneven, as the metal plates of her palm sizzle and bubble yellow, surely mirroring what is happening along the edge of her face.

The terrifying violence taking place so close to her clamors for her attention, though, and Uzi shifts her gaze from her palm, refocusing onto the two predators ripping each other to shreds, though that might not be a fair commentary. N is positively possessed, snarling and biting and tearing into the female, ripping whole sections of silicone from her throat and pulling cables and wiring out with his teeth, snapping and sparking, and the ferrovore is screaming under him, whether in rage or fear, Uzi can’t tell. It’s when N closes his teeth around the curve of an exposed metal collarbone and hurls her like a ragdoll against the side of the landing pod that there’s a decisive shift in the dynamic between them.

As the gong-like sound finishes reverberating through the vessel, she gets to her knees, breaths rattling and shoulders tense and shaking, locking Xs with N. The wing that had been obliterated by Uzi’s railgun is beginning to regenerate (as is N’s), but she’s panting hard enough to exhale little black sputters of oil through the gaps of reforming material where N had torn into her throat, and her limbs are shuddering so much she can hardly keep her balance, even on all fours. Uzi wonders distantly if maybe there’s an upper limit to their regeneration, wonders if there’s some toll on them, and that’s the only reason this fight could draw to a conclusion at all and not spiral into perpetuity.

N stands, bipedal and towering, as his wing finishes regenerating, and he unfurls the pair to their full span, placing himself once more between Uzi and danger. His tail snakes out, the shape of the vial shifting from black to gold as it solidifies into a glass and metal lethal injection, and he brandishes it in the female’s direction with a bark of a snarl. The exchange is clear. She exhales sharply, wrathfully, but submits.

She crawls toward the still-half-a-corpse of her companion, X never leaving N as she grips her newly reformed claws around the (dead?) ferrovore’s knee joint, dragging the remains unceremoniously out of the spire and leaving a streak of oil in their wake. N continues standing tall and rigid until the sound of wingbeats signals the one-and-a-half ferrovores retreating to some other place, and only when the metallic flapping is lost in the sound of the storm outside does he wilt. He shudders and nearly buckles, but shakes his head and turns to move quickly to where Uzi is crouched in the snow, holding the wrist of her hand that’s blistered with acid. He falls to his knees in front of her and hurriedly reaches for it, but she pulls away. The corrosive had already smeared elsewhere from her jaw, it could get onto him as well, couldn’t it?

“I can fffix it,” N pants, voice thin but words clear as he holds his claws out to Uzi in a gesture very unambiguously asking her to give him her hand. He doesn’t have a full expression to read, exactly, but brows are peaked over his X. “Trussst me. Please…”

She swallows dryly, synthetic adrenaline from the violence she witnessed still thrumming through her, but not so densely that she’s unaffected by a ferrovore begging her to let him help her (he could have been begging her for anything and it would have taken root in her stomach and bloomed in her ribs, but this especially seems to be causing an overgrowth around her core). She shakily places her hand, palm-up, into N’s claws, and the line of his shoulders visibly loosens.

“Sssorry…” He mutters abashedly, and Uzi is about to draw breath to ask what for when N opens his mouth and runs his gunmetal grey tongue over the burn on her hand. A shiver—a neutral one, she thinks?—rattles through the titanium bones in her arm up through her chest and out the top of her skull, but any further reactions to having him lick her are nipped in the bud as the burning in her palm immediately abates. She pulls her hand gently from N’s grasp to bring it to her face, watching the split and blistered metal closely as it seals over and settles into an ordinary worker drone palm, without so much as a mark to indicate there had been an injury.

“…Huh.” Is the response she summons in a moment of profound astuteness.

N lifts a claw to the edge of her face, not touching but drawing her attention to the acid-laced cut there, tilting his head. A question. Uzi swallows and another damn blush works its way up her visor. She raises a hand and pushes back the hair peeking from under her beanie at the hook of her jaw, holding it out of the way and nodding to N, eyes anywhere but on him. This time, as N leans in and presses his tongue to the seam where her faceplate connects with her throat, the shiver than runs through her is not neutral. Any fear that might have gripped her at the proximity of a ferrovore’s mouth to her neck is muddled up and lost in the leftover adrenaline from the deathmatch that had unfolded in front of her, so it’s almost like she’s…not afraid of him at all? And her brain is instead diverting focus to the other feelings in this moment in relation to his proximity. On him tending her injuries. On the quiet exhale in her ear. On the strands of silver hair brushing the corner of her mouth. The shiver worms its way down into her rubber guts and stays there.

N leans back, X squinting as he appraises the cut sealing over, and as the burning passes Uzi lets out a shuddery sigh (of relief, surely). Her gaze flicks around, suddenly finding their knees mirroring each other in the snow very interesting.

“You, um…really went to bat for me, there. Against the others.” Uzi fidgets with the cuff of her hoodie. “Nobody has ever done anything like that for me. Not even close.”

She feels the flat of N’s claw under her chin again and she allows him to lift her gaze to his.

“We’re evennn. A fffirst…for a firssst.”

Uzi huffs out an exhale paired with her smirk, core thrumming. N gives a lopsided grin in return, and seems like he’s about to add something, when his words are superseded by a sharp gasp and all at once he’s crumpling forward, a hiss slipping out between grit teeth. His wings shudder, metal feathers clinking like icicles, before they withdraw into his body, retreating and collapsing into a housing in his back she didn’t realize was there. The claws that had just a moment ago been gently held under her chin rattle and fold and disappear as well, deadly blades sliding away into his conical forearms and replaced by…hands, identical to her own, three-fingered and perfectly harmless.

He tilts his head back from where he’s curled inward to level his visor to Uzi’s, giving a weak grin of reassurance as his display starts to flicker and glitch, X warping and collapsing and then, with a blink, N is meeting Uzi’s eyes with a pair of his own, brows drawn together over a set of gold ovals.

“Wh-what? What?”  She stammers, shock doing wonders for her articulation as she stares open-mouthed and hollow-eyed at the wholly mundane, absolutely normal expression. N gives a shaky laugh, paired with a loose gesture to himself.

“Too hhhungry…and tired…to hunnnt. Ssso,” He chuckles, but there’s a tightness across his brow that betrays the shame and anxiety in his admission when he says, “…prey mode.”

“Prey mode?” Uzi splutters, taken aback. “Prey for what?”

“Othersss.”

“Other ferrovores?”

He nods, wincing, and the line of his shoulders slackens, voice forlorn when he breaks his gaze away from Uzi’s and murmurs,

“Now isss your channnce.”

“Chance to what?”

N gestures to the entrance to the spire.

“What elssse?”

Uzi feels the rings of her eyes grow bolder under a furrowed brow, an inexplicable and unexpected weight settling into her chest at his intimation. When she speaks, her voice is taut with wounded disbelief.

“You…you want me to leave?”

N lifts his head at her tone, quirking a brow, and his eyes flick between hers for a moment before a little light comes back into his expression. One corner of his mouth trepidatiously raises as he asks,

“You wannnt to ssstay?”

The words hang between them, sucking the air from Uzi’s chest in a whirl of realization. That is what she had implied, isn’t it? And…it’s more than an implication, isn’t it?  She rubs her hands over her arms, feeling A Decision forming, mouth dry and insides hot and mind made up in a moment equal parts stubbornness and empathy, informed by her lifelong, keen over-awareness of undeserved indignities.

“How do we get you out of prey mode?” She glances away, knowing the answer. N makes a startled sound, his turn to stare, slack-jawed.

“…Why do you wwwant that?”

Uzi blushes and scrubs her hands down her visor, embarrassment and edginess swelling back up to reclaim where adrenaline and shock had squatted until now, and it’s with an angry glare that she spits out her response.

“You asked how you could get me to trust that you wouldn’t kill me. Whatever answer I had before doesn’t matter, not after you fought tooth and claw to keep those others away from me.” She puts her fists to her temples and presses, eyes squeezed shut and choking the words out. “You’re a ferrovore. A predator. This prey mode thing is absolute certified grade-A bullshit and I won’t let you be punished for just being tired and hungry from taking all that damage for my sake. So,” She huffs, flushing notably harder but sliding comfortably into her familiar stubbornness. “How do we get you out of prey mode?”

N is staring hollow-eyed at Uzi for a solid ten seconds before a grin cracks his expression wide open and an airy chuckle of disbelief and gratitude that could be mistaken for a worker drone’s rings out from him like chimes. He stands, a little shaky but tall and at-ease, and offers a hand to Uzi. She only hesitates for a half-second before placing her hand in his and letting him help her to her feet.

“I knnnew I liked yyyou.”

Uzi’s knees wobble right as she goes to stand and N has to catch her weight in the crook of his arm.

“…Sh-Shut the hell up.” She grits out, flush on her visor redoubling yet again.

Chapter 4: Solidify

The inside of the landing pod is…not what Uzi would have expected.

She’d suggested they not be out in the open, since they are essentially two prey bots at the moment and have no way of knowing if or when other ferrovores would come to the spire. N had bashfully communicated that he’d have preferred to fly her to one of the many alcoves in the upper floor, but his wings are well and truly locked away until murder mode gets reactivated. Uzi had swallowed dryly, choosing not to bring up how they’re about to address this issue and instead mumbled something about how she’s less partial to being surrounded by corpses of her kin anyway and that the landing pod is preferable. N had just let out an “Ah,” and a tense chuckle and showed her to the crude metal rungs leading to an entrance hatch on the top of the thing.

The inside of the landing pod is not what Uzi would have expected because it's comfy. There isn’t anything to indicate the shuttle had been piloted, not even a terminal, and in lieu of chairs or stations, the space is packed with blankets. Generic and grey, unbranded, but clean and poofy.

“You guys, uh…didn’t strike me as the type that enjoys a high thread count.”

N huffs out a chuckle and gestures to the ceiling, where there are a handful of crisscrossing beams bolted together to form a grid.

“In cassse we fall.”

“…You…sleep…hanging. From the ceiling. Of course you do,” Uzi rubs a hand over her forehead, eyes unfocused and expression neutral as she absorbs this new fun ferrovore fact. “I’ll just…add that to the list of things I’m comfortable with, now.”

N’s tail—the only part of his predator physiology that remains, unless Uzi counts his weird reverse knees—curls restlessly behind him, unblinking eyes trained on her. She fidgets under his stare.

“Uzi,” Hearing her name catches her off-guard. “What was yyyour answer…befffore? How wwwould you trussst me?”

Uzi’s visor has run out of pixels she can allocate to blush marks. She’d been actually very relieved to have dodged divulging this since N’s hyperviolent protection of her against the other predators had handily and wholly convinced her to trust he wouldn’t kill her, and maybe sensing how cornered she feels at his question, he doesn’t press her on it. Instead, he folds his legs under him, sitting back on his haunches in front of her, and holds out a hand, patting the blankets in front of him with the other.

“Sssit with mmme?”  

She exhales, running a hand along her opposite arm and shifting her weight before she caves, folding her legs under her as well and putting her fists on her thighs. She could choose to not answer, sure that N wouldn’t push the matter, but…it couldn’t hurt anything more than her pride to let him know how else he could reassure her before he...does what they’re here to do. She sighs roughly, looking anywhere but at N as she mumbles,

“I just…wanted…arrrgh,” She drags her hands down her visor, mustering the willpower to admit that: “Before you b-bit me or whatever, I wanted you to just, like, hold me? For a while? M-Maybe keep saying things l-like—ugh! It’s stupid. I was being stupid, but…you were saying all these nice things about me, and, it…m-made…me…hhhappy. Okay? And then I thought, y’know…” She has to hide her display completely behind her hands before she can continue choking out the confession. “I thought you t-touching me, like—rrrgh—gently, before you, y’know—I thought it would help pacify my lizard-brain coding because you’d be close to me but not hurting me and maybe I thought it would feel nice too. Gah.”

She glares up between her fingers, the sappiness blistering against her edgy nature and corroding it away to reveal a stupid, stupid, soft, vulnerable Uzi that nobody has ever seen—not even herself. But N has, now. He tilts his head, eyes searching hers for long enough that she almost walks back her incriminatory admission of squishy feelings when he holds his arms out to her, smile warm and offering no explanation.  

“You’re sssmart. Feisty,” He begins. Understanding dawns and Uzi scoots forward into his arms and buries her face against his chest just so she doesn’t have to bare her damningly flushed visor to him. The proximity isn’t new or weird—he’d nearly been laying on top of her out in the snow once his head had regenerated and he’d begun his line of curious questioning; he’d clutched her to his chest when he’d tucked and rolled them both out of the line of fire, and he’d used his body to brace hers against the recoil from her railgun during that hostile clash. If anything, N hugging her is the most unremarkable contact they’ve shared until this point. A normal hug. Uzi adds it to the list of ordinary things she’s witnessed from a ferrovore today (Do hugs usually feel this nice? Or is this an N-specific feature of an embrace?).

He continues to speak gently, hold her gently, listing the other adjectives he’d ascribed to her before, and then he begins introducing new ones like “Fffunny,” and “Cute,” and “Genuine,” and her insides ball up into a tighter and tighter tangle until a high temp warning blips onto her display and the threat of tears—tears!—dances too close for comfort. Then he says “Ssselfless.” She pulls back, a crease forming between her brows over a searching expression.

“What makes you say that?”

“You’re hhhere. Fffor me. You don’t…hhhave to be.”

Uzi’s eyes flick away. She doesn’t have to be here, that much is true, but for N to think of her presence as selfless is a misread. Easy misread to make, admittedly. She’s his prey. It’s odd to think of this as being for her, as well, but Uzi is, for the first time in her life, not lonely, and—dare she say—even feeling good because of someone else. Because of him. He should know as much. So she trepidatiously corrects him:

“I-I want to be here, though. I didn’t before, obviously—but it’s not pure altruism. You’re…you’re saying things that make me feel like I’m worth something. And I want to feel more of that.”

“How much mmmore?”

Though she’s not sure he meant for the words to do so, they resonate in Uzi’s stomach. The prospect of N continuing this (loving) treatment until she has to tell him to stop makes a little violet droplet appear on her temple along with a redoubled blush.

“…U-Uhm…hah. I, uh…don’t know where the upper limit would be.”

Though he’s in prey mode, the grin that overtakes the small surprise in N’s expression is sharp and mischievous and every bit a predator’s. Wolfish, it clicks as the right word surfaces.

 “Wannnt to fffind it together?”

Uzi audibly gulps around an inhale and it resembles a choked gasp dangerously closely. She’s shocked she doesn’t soft reboot with the way her vital processes all have to resurface from the sea of error messages into which they’d dunked themselves. Once she’s pulled her rattled executables back into proper order, though, she’s staring down the barrel of N’s flirtation (Flirtation! That is what that was, right? Nobody’s ever flirted with her before, how would she know?). The breath that leaves her is forcibly measured, systems running correctly but mind a whirl.

The question N had posed would have normally caused her to recoil, to squint and search for malicious intent. Normally though, it wouldn’t have been posed by a ferrovore, and more importantly, one that she’s trusting enough to willingly allow his fangs to slip into her main oil line. She’s not sure what the equivalent vote of unconditional confidence for one of her own would be, but she can’t say she’s ever felt this comfortable or esteemed with any of her worker drone peers. Nowhere near. So…does she want to…find her limit for tolerating (accepting? Relishing?) all this kindness—with N?

And what if there isn’t an upper limit? What does she do then? Him being a ferrovore won’t give her mushy mind much pause if he starts getting serious and doubles down with the…is adoration too strong a word? She...She can’t start extrapolating that hypothetical right now. She’s got to start with something smaller, which, counterintuitively, is letting N drink her oil. She fiddles uselessly with the cuff of her sleeve, eyes down as she asks,

“…Could we fix the prey mode thing first?”

She hears his amused exhale and the cool joint of his knuckle pressed to the point of her chin coaxes her to make eye contact with him.

“I fffigured we’d ssstart there,” And then, voice softening, he adds, “You’re doing amazinnng.”

The serrated edges of her thoughts, usually sharp and painful like shrapnel, melt into soft corners under the heat his words ignite in her cognitive processors, and the warm and airy feeling filling her chest eclipses entirely the knee-jerk reaction of searing embarrassment when she breathes out,

“Holy shit. Yes. That. More of that.”

He smiles fondly and brushes her bangs away from her forehead, then trails his fingertips down the curve of her face, gently pushing her hair back and away from the silicone casing of her throat. The pleasant bubble in her chest instinctually wobbles and it must show in her expression because N runs a thumb soothingly along her cheek.

“You’ll be okayyy. I promissse.”

“Just…if it…if it hurts, or I get scared, just…just touch me. Hold me.”

“Are you ssscared now?”

“…A little.”

“Come hhhere, then.”

N leans forward and scoops Uzi handily into his lap, pulling their chests flush together and bringing his arms around her. She lets out a mortifying little squeak which N must think is endearing, because he chuckles into her hair, and his following breaths are laced with his smile. He takes a moment to adjust how her legs hook around him so she’s not in danger of brushing a foot against his unconsciously wandering tail, and then his mouth is pressed to the place just under the hook of her jaw, no teeth—yet. She stiffens involuntarily and N brings a hand up to press softly against the back of her head, cupping the curve of her skull and running his fingers through the hair poking out from the hem of her beanie. He’s holding her. Touching her. But it’s not quite enough.

“Yyyou’re shaking…” N murmurs into the side of her throat, and his tone is colored at the edges with concern as he pulls Uzi into a tighter hug.

“I’m sorry—I-I want to do this, it was my idea…I don’t know what’s wrong.”

N moves his mouth away from the vulnerable silicone, resting his chin on her shoulder and humming thoughtfully.

“Want to ssstart with something elssse?”

“Like what?”

He shifts and pulls back, matching flushed gazes with Uzi before a sweet but toothy and mischievous grin replaces the taut line of worry on his lips. He leans in, slow but sure, and nearly presses their foreheads together as he softly murmurs,

“I wwwonder…do preyyy kiss the sssame as us?”

“…O-Oh. Hah, um…”

Well, that’s certainly something else they could start with. Uzi hasn’t ever kissed anyone, obviously, and the premise makes her just as nervous as N biting her, if in a very different way. But…it feels…nice to be wanted like that. Just like it’s felt nice every time N has let a sweet word of praise slip between his teeth. Just like it feels nice to have him hold her to his chest. How could kissing him feel anything but? She hesitantly bumps her burning forehead against his.

“That’s…a bold suggestion. But, um…is it sort of, y’know. Like, uh,” She swallows and tilts her chin up and presses a tiny, tiny, chaste kiss to N’s mouth. She can feel the indents of his fangs through his lips. “…Sorta like that?”

N rubs his forehead against hers, exhale full of affection.

“It’s usuallyyy…rougher,” Uzi’s breath stutters. “But…I like yoursss. Sweet. Soffft. Like you.”

She huffs at that, but it’s mostly to cover her little appreciative shudder.

“I am neither sweet nor soft.”

“My missstake.” N leans in and presses his lips to hers again, holding it for a moment longer, and Uzi can hear his tail dragging against the blankets in a contented arc back and forth behind him. It’s very cute. He pulls back, humming. “Could hhhave fooled mmme, though.”

“I thought you said I was feisty.”

N shrugs.

“Multitudesss.”

Uzi snorts, and a little of the nervous tension in her shoulders loosens. When she touches her lips to N’s again, a soft, content sigh escapes her. N’s mouth on hers feels nice. N’s arms around her feel nice. N holding her flush against him in his naked lap feels...it’s definitely not not nice. It hadn’t occurred to her to consider it before but they’re kissing so she’s considering it now. She slides a hand from around N’s shoulders and sits back a little, clearing her throat and fiddling with her bangs, voice shy when she asks,

“I don’t have a ton of practice, or like, any at all, but…could we maybe keep doing this?”

N rubs his forehead against hers again.

“I was hhhoping you’d asssk.”

She smirks and gulps, again floored at the ease with which he can summon charm so antithetical to the predatory species she’d come to fear. She sweeps her hand through her bangs and pulls her hair back to bare the side of her throat once more.

“…Cool.”

N shifts her in his arms, pressing a line of reassuring kisses from the corner of her mouth down the column of her neck, and the unprompted adoration in the soothing gesture nearly makes her hiccup around her tightening chest.

“I’ll taaake onnnly…what I nnneed.” He murmurs against her, lips ghosting over the vulnerable joint for the second (third?) time, and the shiver that rattles through her is borne of both apprehension and gratification. He clutches her tighter in response, humming loose words of validation into her ear, slurring just a little, like he’s intoxicated on the oil yet to cross the threshold of his teeth. Like he’s drunk just on her. She melts deeper into his lap. “Braaave girl,” Her breath hitches, neck prickling under the vibration of the praise. “Give the wwword.”

She’s wary of the tightness in her throat, N’s rush of molten affection filling the empty cast of her heart so quick it feels like it will burst, and she’s wary of what trying to speak will do to the joins in the mold housed in the cold forge of her ribs. So in lieu of a reply, she opts instead to unhook one of her arms from around N’s shoulders and press her hand into the silver hair at the nape of his neck, pulling his mouth harder against her. N groans, the unintentional consequence sending electricity from the point where his mouth is pressed through her chest and down into her guts, and squeezes her a little tighter before she feels him pull his lips back and bare his fangs, softly pressing down and smoothly piercing the large oil line that runs just under the silicone flesh.

Uzi had watched N rip his fellow ferrovores to literal shreds with these same teeth. Previous sacrifices had met the same fate in doubtlessly much the same brutal manner, if perhaps a little more gleefully. When would N have ever had cause to use his fangs with deftness and control and nearly reverent calm before? Never, Uzi thinks. So…she must be the first. She’s the first to inspire him to make every effort to minimize the fear and pain he inflicts on his prey, which means…to him, she’s exceptional.

A little sob slips from her mouth, more from tamping down an overwhelmed release of something than from fear (it does hurt a little, but at the notion of N holding her in exceptional regard, the line of code responsible for imitating a burst of synthetic dopamine almost completely negates the adrenaline borne of the cutting sting), and N responds to her little vocalization of stress by softly cupping her jaw in his hand opposite where his mouth is pressed, running a thumb along her cheek and pulling her closer with the arm still looped around her waist. Uzi’s eyes are half-lidded, unfocused, body buzzing and mind nearly completely silent, blessedly silent as it melts under its own heat, mouth open only enough to let slip tiny gasps, small whimpers, reflexive, instinctual, but wholly unreflective of a prey’s fear of being clutched in a predator’s grasp. Whether N realizes the truth of the little sounds escaping her, she’s not sure, but he continues offering soothing touches regardless of if he thinks she’s afraid or not, and that just makes Uzi’s throat tighter, makes her grip his shoulders harder.

N shifts from her neck, not pulling back fully but enough to free his mouth and let out a thick, shuddering exhale, wilting forward as a series of mechanical whirrs emanate from his spine. Uzi watches a little fuzzily, chin hooked over his shoulder, as white panels retract and slide in and away, and N is allowed his wings again. They unfold with a crisp, lovely movement, and he sighs in relief into Uzi’s hair, flexing them out as far as he can within the relatively compact space of the landing pod. His voice is slurred from more than just an apparent innate difficulty enunciating language when he mumbles against the oozing silicone of her throat,

“Little mmmore…Y’re doing…ssso good. So good fff’r mmme, prettyyy girl, sssweet thing, all mmmine.”

A high-pitched chuckle escapes her, processes emulating brain chemistry whirling at full tilt through her programming.

“I-I bet you say that t-to all…all the g-girls,” She chokes out something like a joke reflexively, defensively, because if she doesn’t, it’ll all overflow.

“Mm-mm,” He hums his earnest response against her neck. “Only yyyou.”

As he closes his mouth over the punctures in the side of her throat once more, she loses her prolonged battle against the threat of tears. They prick onto her display, chest aching with something she has no name for, something long forgotten and cold and covered in dust, but holding its shape and waiting for purpose, and in N’s sudden outpouring of warmth into the cold hollow, it’s forced to expand too quickly, shaking, cracking, but glowing from the heat.

His wings flex languidly, matching his tail in a seemingly unconscious, content, idle movement. There’s another hum, twinned on either side of Uzi, and N pulls his hands from where they’d been planted against her as his claws extend once more, precise and deadly in their restorative flourish at the ends of his conical forearms. It’s paired with another sigh of relief, and he presses a series of kisses into her neck in what could only be affectionate gratitude. The tears that had been welling in Uzi’s eyes slide down her visor, knocked loose by the actual little flustered giggle that escapes her. N pulls back and fuzzily takes in her expression, brows drawing together just a little as he struggles to focus on the violet streaks running down her display.

“Nnneed…a break?” He manages, nearly drunk. On her. Uzi swallows hard.

“I-I’m good, but, do you…do you need more? Aren’t all your…predator…y’know, features…aren’t all those back up and running?”

N’s gaze flicks to the side, and there’s a blush and a series of hesitant expressions that cross his visor. His signature murderous X hasn’t returned, now that she thinks about it. He must need more of her oil, must still be falling short of a threshold to kick him fully out of prey mode, but to what other ferrovore features aside from his wings and claws had he been denied access?

“There’sss…one mmmore.”

“Okay, well…what’s up? What’s the…y’know...”

She trails off and shifts in his lap. His evasiveness is weird in the way seeing a teacher outside of school is. He doesn’t wear uncertainty well. N exhales a little shakily, sobering suddenly, and goes to cup her cheek, catching himself as the weapons at the base of his arm cross into her vision. The line of his shoulders wilts as he settles for cautiously bracing her shoulder in his bladeless palm, claws held carefully, curled but not cutting. Uzi finds her heart twinging.

“Cannn I…kiss you mmmore…fffirst?”

He’s dodging, but Uzi can’t argue with the flutter in her core and the blush climbing up her visor at the request.

“I-I, uh…I figured the plan was to get you all the oil you need before, um, circling back to…y’know. Making out, heh.” A bashful grin slips onto her face, not quite embarrassed (her brain is a little too mushy from all the soft words and attentive touches to really be embarrassed). “But I don’t mind getting some in early.”

N’s smile takes all the tension from his shoulders, and it’s lopsided and honest and full to the brim with affection and it makes Uzi’s eyes water the same way they would if she were looking into the sun.

“Nnneither do I.”

He nuzzles his forehead against hers before tilting his chin and catching her lips, and at once Uzi notes this kiss is set apart from the previous few by the tang of her own oil and the little edge of want both present in N’s exhale against her cheek. Want? Uzi gulps under the kiss. Want for what? For her oil, surely, obviously. Right? But…he has her permission to take that. He doesn’t need to want for it, it’s his. What is it that he’s wanting from her if not what she’s freely given him already?

“I’m sssorry that I…” He murmurs against her mouth between kisses. “I cannn’t…touch yyyou…like thisss.”

Is that what the yearning in his breaths is for? Did he get as much enjoyment out of pressing a palm to her cheek or running his fingers through her hair as she did? Uzi mentally knits her brow. Now that she thinks about it, why would he ask if she wanted to kiss in the first place if he hadn’t been sort of craving that kind of touch, just like her? She hadn’t been expecting to be the one doling out the comforting gestures but…the idea of doing for him what he’s done for her—of reciprocating—is appealing. Attractive.

She inhales against his mouth, steeling herself and bravely, shakily bringing a hand up and hesitantly threading her fingers into his hair, carding through and lightly dragging her fingertips along his scalp, and Uzi is shocked rigid when N makes a sound at the soft contact that’s just on this side of a moan. It pours onto her tongue and down her throat, hot like liquid metal and filling her ribcage to the point of bursting. Before she can brace a hand against the naked plating bound around his powerful frame and gently push away to ask what the hell that was, he leans in harder and presses a very unchaste kiss—uncoordinated, wet with saliva and oil and laced with dizzy breaths—onto Uzi’s lips. She lets a little surprised sound slip into his mouth and at that he pulls himself away, seemingly with enormous effort, breathing heavily when he says,

“Sssorry, jussst…couldn’t hhhelp myssself.”

Uzi unconsciously darts her tongue over her lips, clearing them of whatever shine N had left on them, and N’s eyes flick down to track the movement.

“It’s f-fine…I, um, g-guess you like to be touched, too?” She nervously chatters, another high temp warning blinking onto her visor, which she ignores as her hand finishes sliding through N’s hair and gingerly lingers on his cheek. He leans into her palm, nuzzling his mouth against her wrist and humming so contentedly it’s nearly a purr. Maybe it is a purr.

“Guess ssso,” N grins drunkenly and he offers the inside of her wrist a little nip. Affectionate, not enough to draw oil, but unexpected enough that it makes Uzi squeak. Chuckling, N runs his tongue over the prickling joint, like a little apology, but she still huffs and flicks her eyes to the side, frowning around a begrudging blush.

“Don’t laugh, you surprised me. I wasn’t expecting bites anywhere but my neck. Which, are you gonna get back to the task at hand or what?”

N chuckles again and brushes the blunt backsides of his claws against her cheek.

“Immmpatient?”

“N-No, no, what? No!” She feels her flush redouble traitorously, and N just laughs more.

“Yyyou’re…ssso cute.” And he covers her mouth with his again. Uzi growls indignantly in spite of the fuzzy feeling the praise elicits, but is quick to let it go as N begins retreading the line of kisses he’d pressed down her neck to the blackly weeping bite mark, waiting for him to return to his ministrations, and her eyes slide shut. N seals his lips over the punctures in her silicone once more, slowly and reverently drawing oil from her mainline, and it pulls a warm sigh from deep in her chest as she cards her fingers through his hair, mindful of the line of bulbs across his crown. N lets little whines vibrate against her at the touch, some abruptly cut short where he swallows her oil down around them. She’s pulled tighter against his chest, caged in the crooks of his arms around her, and the frequency of the hums from their cores, pressed flush together, gold on violet, begin to align.

Where their hips are slotted together, where Uzi is pressed up against N as she sits, held carefully and closely in N’s lap, there’s another little shift, a little whir of a latch unlocking, of a mechanism being allocated to N’s control once more. He pauses in his drinking from her, stiffening just for a half-second, just enough for Uzi to notice, before he carefully pulls his mouth from her throat, giving the wound there one more little lick and leaning back. A gold X greets her, paired with a smile that’s…a little tight? Uzi cocks her head.

“You good?”

“…Yyyeah. Jussst…I’ve nnnever been in preyyy mode. Coming fully ouuut of it, there’sss…some wwweird sensssations ramping up.”

“Weird bad?”

“No, no. I fffeel…um…” Then, effort to soften the crease in his brow apparent, but softening nonetheless and bumping their foreheads together, he says, “…Reallyyy good. Thank yyyou, Uzi. Can I…fffix you up?”

Uzi touches a hand to the still oozing silicone beneath the hook of her jaw, pulling back oil-stained fingertips. She suspects N will have to utilize the syringe at the end of his tail and that does make her a little nervous for the burn, but it’s better than freely bleeding until she can find a patch kit, especially since she’s only three-quarters full now and any more oil loss will start affecting her cognition. She pulls her hair back once more with a nod, and N brings the tip of his tail around, taking the glass syringe in his claws. Uzi is expecting him to drag the needle over the punctures in her neck, followed by whatever magic trick his spit can do, but he instead brings the point of it to his own lips.

“Let mmme…sssave you the burn.”

He puts the needle delicately into his mouth. She sees a miniscule little shift in the level of liquid in the vial, and when he pulls his tail back, he nods wordlessly to her throat. She cocks her head, obliging whatever the hell this is. It couldn’t matter less. He won’t hurt her.

When his mouth closes around the punctures, teeth held carefully away, his tongue runs over the pierced silicone slowly, languidly, wetly in the sealed space created by the cavern of his mouth and the side of her throat. Uzi gulps under his lips and she knows he feels it because he inhales sharply and stiffens under her. The dull ache in her neck is resolving under N’s tongue, under the pre-neutralized nanites he created so she wouldn’t have to endure the burn from the acid again. Such a small gesture, but the attentiveness, the care for her comfort makes her heart squeeze and her core heat. She unconsciously brings her hand up to anchor her fingers into his hair and lovingly hold his mouth in place against where she can feel the last little cuts sealing over.

Once she threads her fingers into silver locks, once she contentedly pushes N more firmly against her throat, she doesn’t get the chance to make any other tender gestures because like a lightning strike, abrupt and startling, there’s a sudden tension that pulls N’s spine straight, his legs unfolding under her, and she finds herself all at once under him, caged against the blankets covering the floor of the landing pod. He’s heavy, and the weight would feel grounding and calming if it weren’t for N pulling his mouth from her neck to ravenously meet her lips, pushing his gunmetal grey tongue past her teeth with a low growl from deep in his chest. The neutralized acid tingles against the soft rubber tissues of her mouth, seeking to repair damage that hasn’t been inflicted and succeeding only in making her salivate under the faintly bitter citrus taste of it.

A startled vocalization escapes her and N gulps into the kiss, hissing in breaths and digging claws into blankets, only able to pull himself away from Uzi’s mouth with a shudder and a sound of immense exertion, like parting from her is physically painful as he lifts his weight off her and crouches over her on all fours. She looks dizzily up to the flustered visor and is caught off-guard by a salivating mouth beneath his blush. Behind him, his tail is curling in on itself, twisting and untwisting with a frenetic energy that starts to vibrate through the rest of N’s frame. He hurriedly lifts his weight from one arm and drags the back of his bladed palm over his lips before anything could gather densely enough behind his teeth to drip in cords down onto Uzi’s chest. He inhales sharply and gulps before choking out,

“I’m sssorry, I—that fffelt—” N struggles, hips shifting and claws flexing, rustling in the grey blankets on either side of Uzi’s head. “In preyyy mode…touch fffelt dulled, annnd…as I am nnnow…ssso close to yyyou when yyyou…pulled mmme in, it fffelt…I…I couldn’t hhhelp myssself.”

“…It’s okay,” Uzi responds, just a little breathlessly. “I was just surprised, I didn’t, um, I didn’t really mind the tongue. At all.” She flicks her gaze once down N’s body and back up. Squirming just a little at how much bigger than her he is as he looms over her, she fumbles for banter and blurts, “Did you have to throw me off your lap, though?”

Brows peak over his X as N searches for words before he lets a held breath escape him, forced through his teeth.

“I wwwasn’t really…thinnnking…about hhhow I’d been hhholding yyyou…until that finnnal thinnng re-ennngaged. It…wwwas…” He grits his teeth, tense like a liar at a confessional against his will. “…ffferrovore…coupling hhhardware.”

A blush bursts onto Uzi’s display. How they’d been intimately interlocked hadn’t really pinged on her fluster radar either until they’d started kissing, so it makes sense to her that N might have something similar going on in relation to his dual sets of OSes, but she’d been straddling him when those executables had re-engaged and prey mode begrudgingly removed the apparent chastity lock from his pelvic plating. She chokes on a nervous chuckle and tries for a joke,

“I thought prey mode was bullshit before, but you can’t even fuck?”

N shifts over her, frame still taut like a wire, but an anxious half-grin worms its way onto his features at her candor.

“Ifff I’m too tired…annnd hhhungry to hunnnt…what ennnergy is there fffor fucking?”

“Still. The indignity. Glad I could rectify that injustice.” Uzi swallows dryly, fans around her core picking up speed at the thought of N over her, fully fueled and firing on all ferrovore cylinders. She nervously toys with the edge of her torn collar and tries to keep her tone casual when she asks, “But, um, does this mean that you don’t want to keep, you know…making out?”

N whines, and Uzi is taken aback by the torment and desperation in its pitch.

“Uzi…I hhhave…ennnergy to ssspare now. Annnd…doing that…wwwill make it hhhard…to override the commannnd to exxxpend it.” The line of N’s spine curves inward with the tension of restraint. Uzi gulps, watching a war take place between N and the drive of his ferrovore programming. A war he’s likely never fought before….but he’s doing it for her. The tremble of strained willpower in his voice is in stark contrast against how hungry the words he speaks are, brows desperately furrowed over his golden X as he chokes out, “…I sssaid…I’d take onnnly what I nnneed from yyyou. I…donnn’t nnneed that. I jussst…want it.”

Uzi’s insides thrill, equal parts nerves and fluster, carried on a wave of need she didn’t realize she could feel rising to match N’s.

He’s a ferrovore. He’s also the only one to ever make Uzi feel seen. He’s the only one who ever made her feel cared for. He’d held her so gently, like glass, like it mattered if she broke. Nobody else would have cared if she broke, let alone admire the light shining through her, fractals in the sun spilling like diamonds that every untrained eye couldn’t recognize as the precious things they were. But N had recognized them. He’d made sure she knew he saw her shine. It’s all she’d ever wanted. And he wants her.

He wants her.

He wants her.

He wants her.

Her inhale shudders, but her voice is certain.

“What if I need it?”

N startles, a disbelieving, tight, hopeful exhale puffing from his chest, corner of his mouth trepidatiously lifting when he replies,

“You…mmmean it? I…I wwwas gonna eat yyyou, rememberrr?”

Uzi chuckles, and the sound is full of ease and contentment, full of trust.

“Are you still gonna eat me?”

N blushes, and the other corner of his mouth ticks upward to join the first in a cautiously optimistic grin.

“…Nnnot planning onnn it, no.”

Uzi gulps, the whirr of her fans thunderously loud as she carefully reaches up to cup N’s face in her hands.

“What are you planning to do with me?”

N actually balks at her forwardness, and there’s a little tiny version of Uzi that triumphantly pumps her fist somewhere in her brain, but she’s not awarded the time to be outwardly smug about the brief shift in the power dynamic she accomplished because the surprise in N’s expression is immediately and totally eclipsed by a hungry, fang-filled smirk.

“Expennnd energyyy.”

Chapter 5: (Appendices)

Notes:

Several requests were made for illustrations breaking down ferrovore anatomy. As this is more of an infographic than an illustration, I thought placing it here in a non-diegetic insert might be helpful for visualizing the...activities...that take place in the final chapters. Drop questions if you have any down in the comments! I'm revealing all my kinks here so I'm trusting everyone to be cool about it kthxbye

Notes:

https://postimg.cc/Hj0RJJ8D
^^^ direct link to image

Chapter 6: Strike

              N’s gunmetal grey tongue slides through the sharp center of his grin and runs over one of Uzi’s wrists, still close to his mouth as she cups his face in her hands, leaving a light sheen on the joint. He leans into her palm, a sustained, resonant sound building in his chest that Uzi realizes now is more than just a contented hum, it truly is a purr. Of all things, the ferrovores purr. He nips at her wrist again, and the noise it draws from Uzi this time isn’t one of surprise, but of enjoyment, which bleeds into a flustered giggle she has to babble something over to reflexively save face.

              “Is nibbling on me like a ferrovore courtship thing?”

              “Hhhow’d you know?” N grins like a demon, nipping gently down her forearm, each little harmless sting sending jolts through Uzi’s rubber guts, along with the thump in her core at N’s easy admission of intending to court her, exercising even more restraint than he already has been. Her heart squeezes again and she stutters out, blushing, tone bristling with semi-feigned semi-annoyance,

              “I-I was joking.”

              “I’m nnnot.” N mouths against the inside of her elbow joint, expression softening as he leans his head down to press their foreheads together. “It wwwould feel wrong nnnot to. Let mmme. Please?”

              Uzi’s heart collapses in surrender under the soft plea, under the promise of care given to her, of N standing on ceremony for her even though he doesn’t have to, even though she’s not a ferrovore. Gulping, glancing away, gathering courage, she replies,

              “Alright…just, remember I’m—hhhh—f-fragile.”

              N hums an amused acknowledgement against her bangs, then presses a quick (but still very hungry and eager) kiss to her lips, before nuzzling up under Uzi’s chin and nipping a little line down the side of her throat. Uzi squirms under him, fingers flexing into the blankets at her sides.

              “I wasn’t expecting foreplay.” She anxiously blurts.

              “This isn’t ffforeplay,” N murmurs against the dip between her titanium collarbones, placing a gentle bite and little lick just below each. “Thisss is courting. Ffforeplay is laterrr.”

              Uzi nearly swallows her tongue and scrambles for banter or a joke, anything to slow the rapid increase in temperature of her internals.

              “Wh-What happened to all that carnal need? You were barely holding back a second ago.”

              “Yyyou think…doinnng thisss to you…does nothing fffor me?” He replies smoothly, taking the torn edge of her t-shirt’s collar in his teeth and softly pulling the scraps away from the black and violet diamond in the center of her chest where her core is housed. Uzi shrinks a little.

              “You’re not gonna bite that, right?”

              “Mm-mm,” N hums and leans down, bending at the elbows to lay his body flush with hers, heavy but making an effort to keep his weight from crushing her, and presses the underside of his chin to her core. His grin is slick and pointy, tail languidly swishing behind him as he begins to purr again.

              A sharp gasp leaves Uzi’s mouth, and N’s grin just gets wider. The vibration through her most important, intricate component is invigorating, like the bassline at a rave reverberating between her titanium ribs, making her breath short and her power cell feel electrified. She feels the speed of her fans adjust, matching the frequency of their hum to that of N’s purr pulsing through her, creating a resounding feedback loop that lights up neural network pathways she didn’t know she had.

              “Th-That sorta tickles, heh.” She says, voice just a little too high to convincingly play it cool. N huffs affectionately, breath warm against her collarbones, and she knows she’s fooling no one. She blushes, eyes flicking around when she admits, “…I like it. It…sort of reminds me of syncing.”

              “Then I mmmust be doinnng…a good job.” N smirks and lifts his weight from her torso, shifting and placing gentle bites along her silicone waist through her shirt. Body buzzing and alive from the vibration through her core, she shivers under the points of his fangs pressing into her middle, even dampened by the fabric. When he continues mouthing down Uzi’s thigh, she can’t help the way her spine tenses and her knees squeeze together.

              “Wh-What is the purpose of these bites?” She sputters through another high temp warning. “If not foreplay?”

              “Pheromones.” He answers easily, and expounds no further as he nudges Uzi’s leg up with his chin and places a nip and a lick to the soft spot on the back of her knee, drawing a mortifying little squeak from her.

              “I-I don’t think I have those, you know.”

              “Oh, yyyou do.” N’s voice pitches downward and Uzi shudders under him.

              After a final bite to the slope of each of her calves, N hums, seemingly satisfied, and moves to stand on all fours, taking a pace back and giving Uzi room to sit up. His wings flex out as far as they can within the walls of the landing pod, and not unlike any trained quadruped, he bends one elbow and dips into a bow. The bulbs on his head glow brighter, casting gold over his silver hair, shining like an ethereal crown, and Uzi would be lying if she tried to say that it didn’t take her breath away a little.

              “You’re…really pretty like that.”

              N tilts his chin back to cheekily meet her gaze, smirk broad under his blush.

              “I’mmm definitely doinnng a good job.”

              Uzi chuckles and rubs her hand over a flushed cheek.

              “So…how do I indicate that I’m sufficiently impressed with you?”

              “Yyyou’d…returnnn the bow.”

              Uzi swallows just a little dryly. N is waiting on her signal. And once she gives it, she’s going to have her first time (something she hadn’t spent a whole lot of energy longing for, but had resigned herself to never having nonetheless) with a ferrovore. It’s…hm. Uzi distantly considers her life up until this point, and realizes, it’s…strangely fitting. She’d never felt like she belonged among her kin in the Outpost. She’d never found her people; nobody else seemed other enough to want to give her the time of day. She’d never in her life accomplished any connection half as meaningful as what she’s found with N in one evening. It…it’s almost like she’d been looking for companionship in the wrong place. She’s always felt like an outsider; it makes sense that only another (literal) outsider could match her frequency in an opposite but equal wave.  Only another other, like a ferrovore, like N, could be an intimate partner for her.

              She moves to get to her feet, then pauses and instead shuffles onto all fours, and she hears an appreciative and affectionate little hum from N. Blushing, but brave and eager, she mirrors N and bends an elbow, head dipping low to the floor with her weight supported on one hand. N growls and it’s a pleased sound, and Uzi glances up to see him pacing closer to her. She sits back onto her knees and reaches her hands out to cup N’s face, which he places into her open palms with a hungry but contented sound, offering the tip of her thumb a languid flick of his tongue that makes Uzi shiver. He lifts a claw and carefully slips the hooked edge under the remains of Uzi’s ruined collar.

              “This immmportant?”

              “Fuck no.”

              “Excellennnt.”

              He drags the hook down through the fabric, slowly, less like he’s slicing the shirt free and more like he’s ripping it. Uzi fuzzily wonders if he’s being so mindful about the blade because her core is right there or if he’s trying to be tantalizing. Maybe a little of both. Her T-shirt falls into halves under her hoodie, which she bashfully shrugs her shoulders out of, both layers softly crumpling around her hips.

              She’s not as lovely to look at as N. Her titanium plating is duller, greyer. She has visible rivets holding together the planes of metal around her torso. The housing of her core doesn’t glow as brightly. She’s never really considered her body against any standard of beauty (not like anyone was looking), but now—

              “Pretty.” N murmurs. Uzi’s breath hitches, looming new worries snuffed like N breathing the word had extinguished a flame poised to burn her.

              “…Not so bad yourself or whatever.” She begrudgingly huffs, mouth straining to hold back a grin and failing. N chuckles and leans in to press a kiss to her lips, and as he takes her bottom lip between his teeth and nips, gently, so gently, it draws a sound out of Uzi that she’s never made before, filling the cavern of N’s mouth. Uzi dares to thread and anchor her fingers into his hair again and is rewarded with his purr cutting off into a choked growl. His expression is a little harder to read without the gold oval eyes on his visor, but the look he gives her, paired with how his body tenses like a spring, is very easy to interpret: Do that again.

              Uzi smirks and drags her fingertips over N’s scalp before unfolding her legs and leaning back, cupping the curve of his skull and pulling him down onto her. N crawls forward with a growl, caging her under him against the blanketed floor and mouthing up her throat to her lips. She feels a claw hook under the waistband of her shorts, and at that, a fuzzy thought manages to float to the front of her brain and she has to pull back from his kiss.

              “Whoah, wait, wait, don’t tear these. I like these. Lemme just…” She goes to draw the zipper down, eyes falling to her hands, and just beyond she catches sight of what N had been keeping a literal lid on until now. She feels her eyes hollow into rings.

              Porn hadn’t ever really interested her a ton. She’d still looked a handful of times, out of curiosity, and/or out of self-imposed pressure to do what other normal teens did. What she’d seen hadn’t really ignited her. Drones she didn’t care about doing an activity that everyone else seemed to consider far weightier than she did, with a level of theatrics that made her cringe (Not to mention the fact that drones making and/or watching anything, let alone porn, was deemed a priority leagues above finding ways to fight back against the ferrovores made her feel like she’d lost her fucking mind, and she didn’t need to seek out extra stimuli for that reminder). Thanks to her handful of dives into X-rated sites, though (and a traumatically awkward health class), she’s at least aware of what a drone opposite her sex should be sporting below the belt.

              Not so for N.

              A hatch in his pelvic plate opening and sliding away for a big reveal is worker-drone-normal enough, but the shape of the jack that protrudes isn’t what she’d been prepared to see. It’s tapered in a way worker drones’ aren’t, thicker at the base and studded with rows of tiny copies of the gold bulbs he wears on his head. And, she can’t be positive without staring really hard, but she thinks it’s at least a little prehensile. It’s sort of…fancy. Her port doesn’t glow or anything. She flushes, fingers fidgeting on her waistband.

              “…You’ve…done this before?”

              N’s eagerness dials back a little at her tone.

              “I hhhave.”

              “…I haven’t. Plus, I’m a worker drone. So,” She feels her chest twinge, remembering the pair of ferrovore females, ferocious and powerful and unbreakable as N. And here she is, so damn fragile. “I probably won’t compare well.”

              “Uzi,” N leans down and catches her mouth in an unexpected, soft kiss, pulling back just enough to say, “I’ve done thisss befffore. I’ve never beennn so exxxcited to do thisss before.”

               Uzi’s brows disappear into her hairline.

              “Wait, really? Why?”

              “Nnnever had to be gentle befffore.” He nuzzles his forehead into hers. “Hhholding you, going ssslow…mmmade me wwwant it mmmore.” Then pressing his mouth to her ear, he murmurs, “Want you mmmore.”

              A shy, flustered giggle bubbles up from her chest, warmth blossoming and pushing away the chill that had been creeping into her ribs.

              “…Lots of firsts all around today.” She brushes her bangs from her visor. “Um. Right. Where were we.” Uzi clears her throat and unbuttons her shorts, shimmying out of them and dragging her underwear along with them, awkwardly toeing her boots off while wreathed with half-shed clothing around her knees. Her core is pounding with nerves and excitement as she kicks the articles away, but when N cocks his head and goes to examine what Uzi just unveiled, she still shrinks and covers her face with her hands. “Please don’t say anything.”

              “Not evvven ‘prettyyy?’”

              She melts and then grumbles about melting.

              “…If you mean it.”

              “I do.”

              “…Fine.”

              Uzi feels the flat of N’s palm on the space just above her own drawn hatch, claws gently tipping down to brace against the silicone bound around her waist. She pulls her hands away from her visor at the unexpected touch and sees N hovering just above the join of her legs, smirk sharp and smug.

              “Prettyyy.” He murmurs, bending at the elbow to lower his weight, broad shoulders gently pushing her thighs apart. Uzi thrills and reflexively hides her face again, ecstatic and terrified, expecting that gunmetal grey tongue to drag over her open hatch and drowning in a hundred half-formed worries about how she tastes or if she’s shaped weird, but N silences all those sudden fearful thoughts by resting the point of his chin next to his palm on her pelvic plate, pressing not his mouth to the protective silicone surrounding her port, but the soft material of his throat. Uzi peeks between her fingers, brow trepidatiously cocked, about to draw breath to shyly ask what he’s doing, but the answer becomes immediately crystal clear.

              N starts purring.

              Uzi’s spine tenses and bends and her hands fly away from her face to fist into the blankets at her sides. Her visor quickly runs out of pixels it can allocate to blush marks, eyes wide and head thrown back in shock and delight and mortification and unexpected pleasure.

              “Wh—! You—! I-I, hah, um!”

              N grins like a demon perched at her hips.

              “Hmmm?”

              “Y-You—could have warned me!” She chokes out, pitch laced with an incriminating wobble.

              “Annnd miss out onnn seeing thisss?” He speaks, purr persisting without so much as a hiccup between his words. If anything, his murmurs add to the vibrations against the softly rounded halves of Uzi’s silicone port protector.

              She’d only ever owned one sex toy, and she’d built it herself in a manic fit of trying to understand what the big deal was. A handful of hollow and disappointing orgasms later she’d shelved the stupid thing. After that, she’d given up the sexual exploration ghost entirely, convinced that since she seemed to be the only one who couldn’t see the appeal, despite her best efforts, then she must be somehow broken.

              Trying not to actively writhe and wiggle away from N under such a quickly compounding stimulus, Uzi realizes the piece of the puzzle she’d been missing. The toy had been only a little less intense than the sensation N is providing (she’s not an engineer for nothing), but it had just been an object. To experience and enjoy any sort of indulgent, carnal pleasure, Uzi needs—has always needed—a person.

              She keens under him.

              N chuckles appreciatively.

              “Cute. Ssso cute.” He murmurs, syrupy and sweet, under his purring. “Sssuch an ammmazing girl…sssaving me in the fffight…letting mmme…drink fffrom you…wwwanting me back…mmmaking me fffeel innncredible. So perfffect for mmme.”

              “H—Holy hell, N, I-I…” A hysterical, overwhelmed giggle worms its way into all the lascivious sounds and half-formed expletives tumbling out of her mouth. “I c-can’t handle all that at once!”

              “No? Frommm where I’m sssitting, you…ssseem to be doinnng…wwwonderfully.” Uzi has to drag air through her fans after both hearing and feeling the words N lets slip deliciously from his throat.

              She bites down on her bottom lip, heart swelling and tears pricking under N’s loving attention. He’s only been teasing and praising and purring against her port for a minute or two at most. What the hell is she going to look like, sound like, when he’s inside her? Her limbs tense under a sudden anticipatory pull, like the sea retreating from the shore before a tidal wave crashes down, and here she is, without an anchor and being swept away.

              Her hands scrabble in the blankets at her sides, lifting, hovering toward N’s hair, wavering, reaching, wanting. N’s expression lists away from teasing affection and toward needful hunger, and he brings his tail around to lightly interrupt Uzi’s fingers from curling into their silvery quarry. Uzi nearly sobs.

              “Careffful, there.”

              “But I—! That’s not f-fair! How come I c-can’t—can’t touch you back?”

              N’s mouth thins and he gives a measured exhale before rubbing his chin lovingly against the flat plane of her pelvic plate next to his palm. Uzi hiccups at the touch.

              “Do yyyou want mmmore? If yyyou do that…” A little growl undercuts the purring against Uzi’s port for a half moment. “…you’ll get mmmore.”

              Uzi almost comes completely undone under the purring and the promise of his words. She grits her teeth against the near-compulsion to grip onto N anywhere, his hair, his wrists, she’d take clutching the black cord of his tail currently barring her hands from seeking the contact they yearn to give.

              “I want to touch you!”  She nearly snarls the response out, but the edge in her demand seemingly serves to only fuel N’s fire, the X on his visor narrowing into a predatory focus over his sharp grin.

              “Hhhold on tight, thennn.” And N moves with a hungry decisiveness, repositioning and shifting forward and giving Uzi no chance to realize what he’s doing before he’s already doing it, before he’s already covered the entrance to her port with his mouth.

              A choked cry bursts from Uzi’s throat and her hands shoot out reflexively to tangle into N’s hair. She’s not meaning to pull, but with the first broad stroke of N’s tongue over the rounded halves of protective silicone, the matter is quite outside of her control. His mouth is hot and wet and packed full of sharp teeth that he’s exerting so much caution to keep clear of her sensitive and delicate components, and it’s equal parts this and the sensation of his gunmetal grey tongue eagerly and expertly finding the sensory input node just above her port that interrupt her precision motor functionality relays and cause her to fist her hand into N’s hair with an exclamation of shock and pleasure.

              N rears forward, a growl bordering on a snarl ripping through him and resonating against her, and there’s a moment where Uzi is worried she’d overstepped; actually pulled hard enough to hurt; fucked up.

              “H-Hey, sorry, I didn’t mAUGH!”

              N throws Uzi’s legs over his shoulders and sits back onto his knees, palms on her hips dragging her along with him and positioning her with her back resting on N’s thighs, curved in his lap with her calves hooked over his shoulders, beanie long gone and hair a violet halo spilling over his knees and onto the grey blankets beneath them. She can feel N’s tentacley jack pressing up between their bodies, and with a wiggle, it’s seated along the silicone covering the ridges in her spine and confirmed prehensile.

              “Yyyou’ll get mmmore.”

              His voice is dripping with lust, words charged with a kinetic energy that needs to find release, and Uzi wants to curl up in the bottom of N’s chest cavity with that tone and pitch surrounding her and reverberating through her until she orgasms just from that. She shudders and wilts into his lap, hands reaching, wavering and needy, to wrap loosely around his wrists, thumbs running over the backs of his palms pressed into the divots of her hips, claws held straight and splayed over her abdomen and crossing in the middle in a fashion she’s sure is meant to keep them steady so he doesn’t accidentally hurt her. She dizzily smiles up at him.

              “I’ll hold on tight.”

              A grin, slick and sharp, crests over Uzi’s port. N gives her inner thigh an uncoordinated, affectionate lick before he dives back into her center like a bot starved, and Uzi does indeed have to hold on tight for this ride.  

Notes:

Not me needing to keep adding chapters to this thing

Chapter 7: Extricate

N could stay here like this for hours.

He had needed to be so careful and gentle with Uzi; she couldn’t withstand damage greater than what his teeth could inflict with a single, shallow bite, and the thoughtful touch and intimate closeness she’d gifted him as he’d delicately held her core-to-core and consumed her oil—freely given—made it impossible to write off or ignore the realization: He’d been looking in the wrong place.

Sex is—or, had been—a frenzied, antagonistic, sometimes violent affair. Nearly every act of intimacy he could remember (if it could be called that) had been streaked with oil from both parties. Any touch sat more comfortably in his core than none, though, and the other ferrovores in this territory would only suffer him to address instinctual courting and coupling protocols—which was supposed to be enough for him, as well. But he’d craved touch, so he sought it out in the only fashion he’d be granted it: fucking hard and fast and impersonally. He hadn’t known there was any other way…until Uzi spiraled into his orbit.

Another ferrovore couldn’t—wouldn’t—anchor her fingers into his hair and pull him into a deeper kiss. Another ferrovore wouldn’t cup his face in her hands and run her thumbs over his cheeks. Another ferrovore wouldn’t giggle and gasp and blush as he courted her, wouldn’t vocalize her soft, quiet pleasure at his touch.

Uzi had cracked his conception of what a sexual encounter could be wide open, spilling across his path possibilities of caressing and of…of aching tenderness, of a sort of longing for thoughtful touch, igniting his insides with a type of slowly burning desire he didn’t know he could feel. It’s a warmth sustained, something that he can curl up within and feel for days afterward, rather than the flash-and-burn of previous experiences, always leaving him cold and not really understanding why.

But as delicious and fulfilling as a low flame feels rippling over his CPU in little blue ringlets, the fuel thrown on the fire when Uzi grabbed onto his hair for her life still left him helpless to curb the roaring flare of the sudden blaze. Luckily for him, it seems Uzi can handle (or even welcome?) just a little more heat than he’d given her credit for.

Uzi is clutched tight against him, ridges in her spine rubbing along his jack and spurring him to taste her deeper, make her arch harder against him. There’s a possessive feeling crawling up from a dark corner of his predator brain that wishes Uzi had been sexually involved with worker drones just so he could ruin them for her—like how she’s ruining ferrovores for him, just by being who and what she is. He growls and pushes his tongue harder against the sensory input node he’s grateful is in the same place as on a female ferrovore, intent to bring more pleasure to a coupling partner than he ever has, especially one who has only ever found it in him. All his.

“H-Holy shit, what—!” Uzi trails off into a string of whimpers and half-finished thoughts. N smirks against her port, pulling back just enough to speak, lips still pressed to slick silicone.

“You’re ssso cute like thisss.”

Uzi sobs, which bleeds into a flustered sound, something between a scoff and a giggle.

“Wha—What g-gives, jumpscaring me with praise?” She crosses her arms, and it’s silly and endearing, seeing her huff indignantly while held nearly upside down and being drunk from like a chalice.

“Sssorry,” N smirks. “Wwwould you prefffer if I jussst—” He runs the flat of his tongue over her port, pressing down and letting a mischievous and content hum escape him when Uzi keens, legs twitching over his shoulders.

“F-Fuck, not wha—not what I meant b-but I have no complaints,” She chuckles giddily and reaches for his forearms, running her fingers over the smooth, conical plating, then scrunching her face up and adding, “Well, I guess I don’t have good reach from down here, though.”

Surprise flits across his expression as N feels Uzi lock her ankles together and brace her heels against the spot between his wings. With a little sound of exertion, she curls at the waist, sitting up and climbing her hands up from his forearms to his shoulders, doing a crunch and looping her arms around his neck and pulling him into a clumsy kiss. N hurriedly unhooks his claws from Uzi’s hips and moves his palms to her back, supporting the folded-in-half drone against his chest. She threads her fingers into his hair again, and if N’s visor had still been displaying prey mode’s golden oval eyes, they’d be rolling back at the gentle tug, at the drag of fingertips against his scalp. All too soon, Uzi pulls back just enough to break the kiss, grinning a little dizzily.

“Okay, now I have no complaints.” She bumps her forehead against his, maybe a little harder than she’d meant to, but N couldn’t care less about the momentary dull throb in his visor, not with Uzi cupping the back of his head with one hand and running a thumb over his cheek with the other.

“G…Good t-to hhhear.” N manages, leaning into her palm, needing more of her touch, needing to feel more of her against him. He squeezes her a little closer to his chest and her thighs press harder into her abdomen, forcing a little exhale from her. His mouth thins a bit. “Is…it uncomfffortable…being hhheld like thisss?”

“Maybe a smidge,” Uzi concedes with a bashful smile, and N feels her unhook her ankles, sliding her weight down so her thighs rest in the crooks of N’s forearms instead of over his shoulders, righting herself in his grasp with her arms still looped loosely around his neck.

As she settles her weight into a more comfortable position in his arms, N actually finds himself gulping at the way she’s oriented herself to be splayed in his grasp. If he stood, he could pin her to the wall and slide into her, easily, exactly how she has chosen to be held. Does she realize? Was that intentional? Is fucking her against a wall what she wants him to do? If she’d been a ferrovore, he probably would have done so already, but that’s the kind of brutal treatment he doesn’t necessarily want to give to Uzi…

For the first time in his life, N is unsure during coupling. It must show on his face because Uzi tilts her head and considers him for a half-moment before she leans in and places a calming peck in the center of the X on his visor, but it doesn’t calm him—in fact, he feels his fuel tank positively flip.

“Didn’t mean to derail you, sorry.”

“Do that againnn.”

“Hm?” Uzi blinks at him. He’d never been kissed there, never been shown that sort of patient affection. A little whine builds in N’s throat.

“Do that againnn,” He leans forward to bump his forehead against her mouth and she lets out a muffled sound of surprise. “Please.”

He feels Uzi’s little puff of an exhale displace the sections of his bangs, laced with bemused shock, before she acquiesces to his plea, seemingly kindly and full of understanding. She cups his face in both her hands and plants another soft kiss on his visor.

N’s heart collapses under the tender treatment like a tower of matchsticks. His body is close behind. He crumples backward, letting Uzi’s weight settle onto his lap just as it had as he’d drank from her, the differences being few in number but heavily weighted: Uzi isn’t clothed, and N’s jack is aching, pressed flush between their stomachs.

“Whoah!” Uzi reflexively grips onto his shoulders as he suddenly shifts under her to unfold his legs and lean back against the wall of the landing pod. She slots into his lap easily, just as before, but the blush redoubles on her visor and she stiffens in his arms, doubtlessly feeling the pressure of the lines of sensory input nodes along the underside of the appendage pinned between them. She chews on her lip and brings a hand up to fiddle with her bangs, glancing to the side, voice just a little thin when she asks, “Is…is a forehead kiss…like, extra erotic for ferrovores?”

“It’s…nnnot supposed to be. There’sss…the directive to court annnd couple, but…hhhaving a drive to…do annnything like bonnnding isn’t ssstandard programming. But I always fffelt…well…nnnot normal.” The line of his shoulders wilts and he finds his words suddenly with a raw edge to them when he says, “I, um…think I mmmight be…broken.”

When Uzi is silent for a beat too many, N flicks his gaze up from where it had fallen and been fixed at her shoulder. She’s…wearing an expression that’s a little inscrutable, brows softly peaked over violet ovals just this side of misty, but bearing a muted, warm smile. It’s not the reaction he’d been expecting upon confessing to always feeling like coupling fell short of fulfilling, and of being alone in this dissatisfaction, which made it something he could do nothing but ignore. It’s not the reaction he’d been expecting upon admitting to being broken. The breath she draws to reply is soft.

“I’ve got some coupling-related quirks that aren’t standard programming, too.” N blinks, and it’s his turn to cock his head and stare for just a second too long. Uzi shrugs before he can inhale to reply and says, grin listing from affectionate to wry and mischievous, “Aren’t we a pair?” And covers his mouth with hers.

Something cracks open inside him. Something spills over.

He’d been looking in the wrong place. He’d have never found what he sought. How would he have? It needed to find him.

Aren’t we a pair, she’d said.

The crack widens, the spill becomes a rush. His chest fills, euphoric.

More. He has to touch her more. He has to find a way to touch her more.

The OS for prey mode is in a hidden folder secured behind an admin lock, inaccessible to a ferrovore functioning as one should—that being routinely hunting and killing worker drones and consuming their oil. The key—clandestine lines of code—is revealed and the switch to prey mode is executed when a ferrovore’s hunger reaches a certain threshold, but prey mode isn’t typically something that’s reversed. Once engaged, it’s meant to be only a matter of time before the unlucky ferrovore is cannibalized. So, N wonders, flexing his claws out as he kisses Uzi breathless, why program a lock to be reuseable when the lid conceals a dead man’s trigger?

He dives desperately into his permissions and directives, navigating through tree menus and rifling through prompts, searching for the admin folder he’d never known the location of and—until this moment—had hoped he never would. But, god, he has to find it now, because he has to know if it’s locked again. He has to know if he can fold his claws away at will now, because he has to touch her more.  

His breath hitches when he scrolls through a dropdown menu and there’s one more downward click than there had been previously. Uzi stiffens against his mouth and breaks the kiss, sitting back a little with a small, hesitant crease in her brow.

“Are…is everything good? You sorta seem…I dunno. Distracted?”

Speech already isn’t the strong suit of ferrovores, and with the excitement and anticipation and fear of disappointment, N’s breath is more labored than it should be. To answer, he opts to show her, hoping desperately that it works likes he thinks it might—that it works like he needs it to. He unhooks his arms from around Uzi and brings his claws into view, curled loosely, palms upturned. He trepidatiously selects the formerly hidden menu option, throat tight with the closest thing to a prayer a ferrovore can offer.

His claws fold away with a sound sharp as the blades themselves, and the relief and excitement that flood him as their replacements appear are so complete and acute they make his vision tunnel.

It’s a wholly alien sensation, having fingers. It also feels so right in this moment, so right as Uzi takes a sharp breath in, violet eyes wide and fixed on his experimentally flexing articulated knuckle joints. She opens her mouth to speak, maybe to ask if something is wrong, if somehow he’s slipping back into prey mode, but he can’t bring himself to give her the chance to ask any questions, because he can’t bear to waste a single second more to an explanation when he could be touching her. Holding her. He opts to show her. He cups her face in his hands—in his hands—and he nearly sobs into the kiss he presses formlessly over her lips, thrilling at the freedom of claws replaced by digits that can run over Uzi’s arms and through her hair and do her no harm, fingers that can feel the heat from her processors and the hum of her fans’ efforts to cool them, thumbs that can press delicately onto her soft lower lip and coax out a wet flick of a warm tongue.

Ferrovores aren’t supposed to want touch like this, need touch like this. They aren’t designed to give or receive it. N’s claws were never meant to be instruments capable of intimate tenderness, and his claws were all he’d ever known. Until Uzi spiraled into his orbit. He fell into prey mode because of the events that unfolded only by virtue of her presence, and only by virtue of her presence did falling into prey mode lead to not a death sentence, but something to be treasured. She unlocked that admin folder. She’d gifted him the capability of touch, and by god, he will make his gratitude inarguably known.

Ferrovores aren’t supposed to want touch like this. He’d used the word broken. But running his thumbs over the hooks of Uzi’s jaw, trailing the flats of his palms down her neck and chest and slipping his hands around her waist, dipping a finger past her pelvic plate and over the slick silicone of her port protector and hearing her gasp into his kiss as he presses deeper, he’s never felt more whole.

Notes:

Jumpscare N POV
Do you ever just get tenderly kissed on the forehead by a demisexual and the chemical shift inside you unlocks like four new kinks and inspires you to reinvent how you show love?