Work Text:
There are some things, in the storytelling, we omit.
Cold hands against my body, the swell of it inside my mouth.
Penance, terrible, and holy retribution.
*
“Undress.” The creature says.
I do not sleep much these days, or weeks, or however long as time bleeds into time.
But today, I had found a small inn. I am weary, and aching and on the verge of hallucination. I still barely desire rest, fearful of what may happen the moment when my eyes close… So although my body yearns to retire, I must drug myself in order to do it. I had just ingested a partial dose of laudanum, hiding it away as I heard footsteps, but all too late to ensure I would be more sound of mind. I kick myself for my stupidity.
The creature was there, of course, and now we meet once more, peering warily into each other's jaded eyes.
“Undress,” it says again, stepping forward when I make no response, no movement. Its voice is unperturbed and calm, speaking as if it knows intuitively I am nothing but a child, too dimwitted to understand its meaning.
I will make you humble, I hear its voice reverberate inside my head.
“We are alone,” it continues, seeing no other indecency in its offhanded request.
I quickly run out of walking space in the small room, backed now against a wall. It grows closer to me, still.
I am weak and vulnerable, my mind half away on a cloud. My eyes alone are left to communicate my unwillingness to perform for it such an act.
“Is it so wrong I should wish to see you?” It asks me, voice as slow as honey, pantomiming innocence.
I see no such innocence in the shine of its cold-blooded eyes. Perhaps this much makes it human.
“You have done more than see me, creator.” It remarks, almost sardonically. The creature is but a grasp away in distance, which it closes with one large hand, fumbling at the closures of my shirt. I tense, but do not move. I am reliably cornered. There is no point to resistance, no fruition. I am beaten, and seek to be beaten no harder. I am tired, for now, of this chase.
Its fingers are clumsy and cold, but unnervingly benign as it lifts the garment above my head.
You may be my creator, but from this day forward I will be your master.
The words that day flood back to me with a nauseating crack. Is this what it had intended all along?
Its neck cranes as it gazes over me, one of the clumsy-cold hands grasping around my chest. I do my best to remain still. I am not afraid. I shall not appear afraid. The touch drifts over my ribs, as if to count each one, and the contours of the muscle there twitch to life in response.
“You're very warm,” it murmurs, one thumb running circles on my skin.
It puts both thumbs briefly on each nipple, causing me to flinch in a heavy convulsion. Still, my lips remain blessedly shut. I manage to meet its eyes, furious at the tepid violation I've become subject to.
“You are sensitive there,” it notes, placing one hand on its own chest, feeling at the one side where its body matched my own. “I am not.”
Its eyes drift down, something like sadness glistening from behind them. It takes a moment to palpate at its left pectoral, where I had taken the creative license to restore a soldier's blasted torso with a mere blank graft of skin. “Uneven as well.”
A pang of guilt, for shoddy workmanship rather than the creature itself, washes down my throat.
I have said nothing for minutes. The creature seems to take no offense to this, gripping my ribs and palpating gently. It is only now that I realize how much weight I've lost in this senseless pursuit. My mind has never granted to my body many favors, but this latest endeavor has certainly reached new lows.
My abdomen stiffens as frigid hands massage the muscle, running strangely gentle circles down. I hadn't made much note of the horrid tension there until the prodding brought it to the surface of my mind.
I stubbornly refuse to admit to myself that this contact is in any way a positive one, yet I feel parts of me loosen, and despite all odds, a tightness dissipate.
Perhaps it is only my drug-addled mind providing the illusion of release. True acceptance of touch from this mistake of a creation would not come to a sober mind, for better or for worse.
It continues to stroke me with a startling tenderness, patting my waist as if I am a cherished dog. Its face shows no such love for me however; only a blank inquisitiveness, receiving sensory input the way a mechanical instrument might. It jostles with my pants, at all remaining layers, my lack of aid only drawing out the process. It is as annoying as it is humiliating, but I refuse to help. I bite my tongue at both.
Its hand takes time, but not nearly enough, to wander from my hips down to my member. Foolishly, I had hoped at some inborn aversion inside the creature for such a contact. But how could something not a man be wary of the ways in which two men should never touch?
It traces around the soft skin of my phallus with a single finger, eyes intent on observing the flex and bounce of the flesh beneath its touch. It lifts me by the head, observing my underside, the tight pinch of my frenulum. I find I want to sob. I wish now I had dug it up within myself some will left there to fight back.
“N- Nh,” I struggle, gasping for the chance at a normal breath, finally forced into verbosity. “Not-- there-- what are you-”
I will make you humble, its voice repeats inside my mind, I will be your master.
The creature envelopes my testicles with one large hand, the chill alone causing me to bite my tongue again, unable to withhold a pitchy whine. He holds them as if to study the weight, appearing thoughtful and oddly fascinated. I feel nothing but a darkening blank shame. I feel as if I am one of Elizabeth’s pinned bugs, come back to life and conscious of my own observation.
“Very sensitive…” The creature’s brow furrows, and a thought appears to be taking shape.
It is above all things a clinical fondling, which only serves to bring more pain. More memory.
My father's hands using me-- for medical examination. He had always been cold too. Gloved. Disdainful.
I am, once again, as always, an anatomical model.
But I suppose for once I am alone in this no longer.
The creature responds as if aware of my reverie, and its own place as my experiment. It is undressing now, not as if it is hurried but instead, rather determined.
The pelt falls to the ground first, a mild thud. The rest is quieter, mostly tattered rags. It was barely dressed to begin with, really.
I make no protest. I have seen it countless times. I myself had sexed him, with needle and with thread.
All that besides, I have lost all pride there is to lose.
I will make you humble- yes, indeed, you shall.
I do not expect it to wriggle out of the threadbare pants with the amount of grace it musters from those long unwieldy legs. I expect even less what follows, as it stands before me bare.
There is no sudden movement; it nears me instead like a cat inside a trance. Its nose brushes against mine, and I wonder for an instant if it will kiss me like a lover.
It does not.
It simply measures me, inhaling gently, brushing a finger against my hairline. A finger against my lips. Two against my cheeks. The pinned insect sensation returns to me. As if I am being looked at by a strange and inquisitive god.
The calm gaze it casts upon me proclaims us equals. See? it asks. This is where I become the most unsettled.
Equals? Surely it knows it is… superior.
Superior, my mind offers again. Superior. The real reason I have done this all. Superior, the laudanum taunts, my ego washed away with the alcohol. There is nothing you can do to make it smaller, not by flaunting all your intellect, your floral speech, not by crushing it beneath your heel.
It is immortal. You, despite all your efforts in its creation, are not.
You are small. You have done nothing but prove your own small-ness.
The creature's own member is proportionally large, as I intended with all things. The connections were quite delicate to begin with. Whether it retains full sensation, I do not know. I do not know if it could possibly be fertile. I do not know if it may orgasm. I do not know if one so cold could do so much as simply muster an erection.
I do not suppose I wish to know, but my eyes linger there all the same.
The creature cradles at my testes once again, this time with one hand holding at its own. The gesture is odd, but I see that its own scrotum pulls much higher, tighter. A sudden urge to examine this crosses my mind. Merely scientific interest, in an ironic mirror to the creature's own approach.
It is making a comparison.
How does your body move?
It strokes against its cock one time, mild and lazy, while the fingers on my testicles slide back, almost pleasing to the heat of my perineum.
“Careful.” I remark, still watching the creature's other hand, ignoring myself, voice disturbingly clear and steady. “Unclean.”
My brain evokes an image for me now of two dogs in greeting, sniffing at each other's arse.
“All of you is unclean,” The creature nearly smiles. “All of me within your image.”
It kneels before me now, ungainly, unafraid.
Its fingers trace a path along my thighs, thumbs grazing the more sensitive skin: pectineus, inward, adductors, inward, gracilis. The gesture is so prolonged it is almost reverent. He braces my left hip, firm and stable, while his other hand unlaces the prosthetic.
I close my eyes, but make no show of weakness. This creature will not judge my scars, nor find me incomplete. I am no less than him in this at least.
He weighs the heft of my stump in his arm, and to my uttermost confusion, kisses it as gently as a maiden's lips.
It braces me once more, harder, to examine my one remaining calf. My thigh is placed atop its shoulder. Its hand clasps around my ankle, rubbing at the hard protrusion there of bone.
It shifts my thigh and rises now, pinning me to face against the wall.
“Your back,” it says, spreading both palms against me. The cool touch feels oddly pleasant on the muscles there, and the firmness of it eases at whatever pains our relentless chase, and the creature itself had now created.
It runs a finger down my spine, straight down, trailing slowly. Each bump tingles at the touch of its cool, smooth hands. The two stop thankfully, mercifully, at the cleft of my ass. I puff a deep sigh of relief.
My face feels hot and flushed. Without my prosthetic it takes the strength of all my body and my arms to keep me held upright on the stone of the inn wall.
Of course, I have thanked the stars too soon. Without warning, its thumbs press me apart, again with the nature of a machine. It is not hard enough to cause me pain, but enough to remind me it is entirely unfamiliar with my sensitivities.
“Stop.” I whisper, only to reassure myself I tried.
“This does not hurt you,” it answers, factual. Its hands do not slow, digging deeper into my muscle, kneading.
“Not my- my body, no.” I breathe out shallowly.
It scoffs. “Your mind, then?” One finger brushes against my anus, eliciting a response from my body and lungs I can barely understand, let alone control.
There's a stinging sort of pressure as it pushes harder, the tip of one digit partially inside me.
I cover my mouth with one hand and nearly lose my balance, my one leg straining desperately under the full weight of me. I shudder to imagine the exploring hand propping me up, as if I am a puppet.
“Where was this concern for myself, creator?” Its finger presses deeper, and it is less painful than I expected, only raw and mildly sore. This time there is nothing to buffer the small whine with which I exhale.
“You did not expect me to think.” It says, rooting inside me. Its breath runs hot on my neck. “I am surprised to learn that you feel.”
As its index bends, I lurch forward, crying out.
“...Things other than hatred,” it expands, joints flexing after a long beat and again hitting the spot I can only assume is my prostate gland. The contact sends a shockwave through me and I do lose my balance, groaning helplessly as my monster catches my side. It is with such embarrassing ease that I may as well be a feathered pillow.
“Is this somewhere you receive pleasure?” The creature asks, entirely unashamed. If I thought it fit to assign such a complex emotion to it, I would think it smug.
“No.” I snap back, too quickly to seem true or sure, betraying the possible nature of my animal noises.
“I see.” It hums, wrapping its hand back to my cock. “But this is?” My body jumps again.
It releases me, and I am freed on my backside now, the foreign intrusion relinquished. I feel a pang of shame for how it throbs.
“Yes,” I snarl, bile creeping up my throat. “And you may as well remove it while you're here, lest I ever manage to smile once again.”
It turns my body on a dime, grabs me harder, the cold vice of its hand confusing to my senses. Could one ever be aroused without true warmth?
“Show me.” It growls in my ear. “Show me how.”
“No.” I shake my head. “No.”
“You are in the world, but not of it.” The creature looks at me with an emotion remarkably close to pity. “Is that how it is?”
I stare at it and shudder once, involuntarily. I've grown chilled now.
“You will touch,” it steps forward, scooping me like a child in its arms, “or I will touch you.”
It drops me on the cold hard mattress, sitting in one of the small wooden chairs to either side.
I swallow, and do not agree, but hold my penis in my hand. I feel myself begin to cry.
“Creature,” I say softly, but expecting little mercy, “No one has ever-- no one past my childhood…”
“I do not know what you have seen, out there in the world…” I choke back, unable to overcome this sudden wave of misery, “but I am not of it. You're correct. I've never known a woman's touch.”
I will only ever be your father.
It's an absurd thought, and grotesque.
“If it's pleasure that you seek, I am not the man to show you.”
“It is not pleasure that I seek,” the creature repeats after me. “It is merely your…” it struggles with the word, enunciating awkwardly, “idio-sync-cracies…”
My heart almost, for an instant, breaks. It is a strange amount of intimacy, of thoughtfulness-- one which perhaps had not been afforded me since my mother.
“There’s something in the pocket of my pants,” I nod, surprising even myself with these words. “A drug, it… helps me to relax.”
The creature paws at the fabric on the floor. “Opium?” It asks, before his hand ever touches the bottle.
I find myself frowning at the creature's knowledge. “Laudanum, it's… essentially opium, yes.”
To my surprise, I hear the creature ask me, “May I try it?”
*
We indulge together, some sort of backwards, twisted camaraderie. In my delirium I imagine us as friends inside a tavern, entwining our arms to take a swig of mead.
Sitting beside each other on the bed, the one cushioned object in the room, I wait for my medication to take increased effect. I doubt the potency for my companion here, but as more and more moments pass, I feel a strange radiating warmth from it. My thigh, where it brushes his, does not feel the odd loneliness I had always associated with its presence.
I rest my fingertips on its back. I pull away as if burned. It feels as if blood rushes through him for the first time.
“You're warm… You're,” I take his hand in mine, flipping the palm over and over again in disbelief, “sincerely… very warm.”
The creature puts his hand across his cheek, though surely it feels the change, he is looking at me with sincere doubt.
“Is this pleasure?” The question is more naive than tortured, which makes it all the worse.
“For some, yes.” I nod, voice cracking slightly.
“And what for you?”
I clear my throat. “I've told you I feel little of it, but--” I still look away from the creature in order to smile grimly. “I feel relaxed with this. I dream better, I sleep well, and I,” I shift, moving my phantom limb, “feel less pain.”
The euphoria is very much secondary.
The creature nods. “I feel less in pain as well.”
“But- do you feel good?” I ask.
My inhibitions are much lowered. My self control unbinds like a broken corset. There is curiosity now, in places I once felt fear.
“Can you feel good?” I ask.
The creature looks at me with such complicated emotions that I almost whimper in horror at the thought of what it was I had truly done to it. I will forget the magnitude of this feeling when I am no longer high.
I was supposed to make you feel good.
There was a time where I wanted you to feel good. Even if that time itself was all too brief.
I kiss him on the cheek: on the corner of his lips. I feel like a bearded Elizabeth. I have taken too much Laudanum.
I take his scarred up face into my hands, staring with newfound wonder.
The creature leans into my touch so innocently, somehow, that I feel my cheeks grow wet as I pull away. “How it would feel to love you…”
The creature takes a few pauses to turn his head back to me and speak.
“I want so badly to be loved.”
I do not answer with words, but I drop my head into his lap. Supplicant. An ironic sort of prayer pose.
My face is near to the base of him. My hand falls between his thighs. I close my eyes. Behind them, it is both my angel, and my creation. My creation has an angel's face.
“Can you touch yourself?” I ask quietly, my breath hot against his groin, cutting the conversation across.
“Me?” For once, the creature sounds totally bewildered.
“Yes.” I sit up, nodding my head in a strange burst of energy. Perhaps not strange, as it does hold dialogue with my laudanum. I knew this when I ingested it.
Sometimes I merely long to be set free from myself.
“Yes, I've decided that I want to see. I'm curious to see it.” And it's true. I had wondered about it before, I had wondered about it earlier this night and-- well, can he? Does this walking corpse make any life?
“I do not…” The creature shows little shame in anything, but his confusion about this act grows close.
“I- here.” I tap his thigh, gently, as I had done with perhaps two boys in school, before my understanding had sunk in. “You hold it like this.”
I gently grab him by the base of his shaft, and he looks at me with some great wonder I cannot quite interpret. Laudanum pollutes the eyes.
“It’s--” I move my hand up and down, “a sort of flicking motion.”
I spit on my hands out of some forgotten instinct, a once-upon-a-time.
When I touch him, he starts to run all on his own, constant, like a faulty tap. Clear discharge spills overtop my knuckles.
“This isn't,” I stretch out my covered hand, lips parted, the fluid draping between my fingers, “strictly average, I wouldn't say.”
I gasp as I readjust my grip, his once-dead flesh supple and smooth and wet inside my palm.
It is the most delightful feeling I've experienced in possibly my entire life. My hands have purpose, and they could chase this, possibly for hours. It is absurdly erotic, my own blood pumping harder. Erotic to me, who has known barely a stir from the moments I thought-- with Elizabeth…
The creature makes no sound, yet I find myself motivated blindly, hotly, to continue. Is there an end to this?
I find my interest piqued, and my brain pleasantly buzzing. There is nothing but good sensorial input. The world is quiet there inside me, for once.
“You're so…” Alive? I ask myself. “It feels good.” I say, knowing that for certain.
The look I'm given is devastatingly ingenuous, and too childlike for comfort. I swallow and begin to pull away, only to feel a hand tug on my hair. Hard. This is the true force of the creature, who doesn't know its own strength.
It pets me now, stroking at the dark strands as if to make up for the sudden burst of strain. It looks over me again, searching with a cautious, watchful eye.
It is not naive. It knows pain. In some horrible, hideous way, it knows me like no other.
I reach out in return, twining a soft lock of his hair around my finger, watching its dangerous eyes watch me.
In my mind, I see briefly: our mouths interlocking, but not touching, breathing into one another's mouth, sharing oxygen, panting. It hardly makes sense to me, but I do think of it.
In my body, I do not close that distance.
“The… Lau-danum.” It struggles with the three-syllable word, looking away from me. “Is there more?”
I almost laugh, my mouth slightly ajar with the unexpectedness of the oh-so subtle request.
Normally, for any two others, I would fear an overdose. But it is not, exactly, as if either of us wish to live.
Yes. I nod emphatically.
*
The world grows murkier, but my senses more intensely overwhelming.
I know not quite how my mouth ends up here, at the root of my creature's thighs. As I have only grown colder, it has grown warmer still, so blessedly warm against my cheek.
I rub my face into the heat I find there, ardent and detached from any sense of possible consequences. There is only this moment, this feeling; no more lifetime of pain. I forget where I am, who I'm with, I kiss blindly and fully. I suckle like a child at its mother's breast.
I feel submerged somehow, skin humid, mouth thrumming and full. I am surrounded. This lasts innumerable and incalculable moments, yet is all too short. My jaw smarts, and the skin of my face burns as if it is stitched atop a too-tight skull.
One fleeting thought brings me back to myself before I fall asleep.
Despite my strongest willed efforts I have been bested by this-- this strangely beautiful thing. My monster. I do not know if it may ever reach a point of climax, but this is not something I myself will accomplish nonetheless.
It is an uncharacteristic moment before I realize my maker has been taken quite violently by sleep.
His mouth slips delicately, slowly, from the aching warmth between my legs.
I see a peaceful sort of glow upon his closed eye smile, and for the first time this encounter am moved towards an emotion of profound grief.
I trace the outline of his swollen nose, harsh where I have broken it. He is still beautiful, despite my impetuous, frivolous attempt at making it no longer so.
He is dead-weight limp, opium unconscious, and I hoist him like a sack of grain between my arms.
In this state, I may hold him, and pretend our relationship is one of care.
I lay him down upon the mattress. I warm him with the new, confusing heat of my body. I see that his lungs still rise, that the heart still beats. He will rise another day. Perhaps this is one he will not remember.
I smell him, rubbing my face against his backside, the crook of his neck and hairline. He is of ash and sweat, a deep and robust bitterness to him; nothing sour or unpleasant, but nothing sweet besides.
My member slots carefully between his legs, with a sort of mind on its own, guiding my body in a tender sway.
I pursue something now which I do not understand, doggedly, the way I have read about hounds and foxes.
My body catches briefly on the skin where the two halves of his body meet, where my finger had been, where I had made him wince and cry. I long to force myself inside again, to gain three times the friction of two thighs…
Yet this much is an impropriety I will not perform. It would likely wake my creator in a burst of unimaginable pain and violation, the way I'd seen it done to girls and recoiled in great horror.
In certain moments this thought may still have been attractive to me, but it was not currently so. My rage has subsided with my chill, it would appear.
I imagine it anyway, how it might feel to take him like a woman thus, tight -- perhaps throbbing like his heartbeat -- all around me.
My entire body shudders, and a scalding wave silences any further thought. I relax into the bed, as limp as my companion.
After a beat, I feel his body twitch against my back.
“Victor,” he murmurs in his sleep, “you… are my most beautiful creation.”
I know not to which Victor he refers.