Lookit you, Major, and it’s a sneer coming off Tin’s lips. Real threatening like this, arentcha? Goddamn.
Because it’s Fray and it’s Tin and it’s the wires trailing out of Fray’s spine, each one an intrusion into a different part of the transfigured mating of flesh and technology that he calls his body. He sits limply on his knees, arms dead at his sides, a marionette the puppeteer has grown bored of. His head feels so crowded and foggy. Is this just how it feels to have some of his implants deactivated? Does something flood his brain to mask an awful pain, or the sickening feeling of a missing limb? Did Tin deliver a virus? Or did Tin just get him surreptitiously-but-not-that-surreptitiously high? again?
The main problem is that it feels good.
Tin, pacing before him. Tin looking him over. “You’re downright suggestible right now, kid, aintcha,” he says, and then he tells Fray to stand. Fray does. Kind of. He falls once, and Tin lets him. No move to help him up. Fray very much wants to stay on the floor, but his body is following orders. Dimly he thinks that might be a problem.
He gets up, though his legs shake and he must cling to the rusting shelf he’s effectively chained to. Tin makes A Noise. *God, you’re easy. This is just your fucking debug setting! Did you know you were signing up to be a programmable drone when you let them cut you open?
“No,” says Fray, and then he whines suddenly. He hadn’t meant to say that.
“Figures. Stupid fucking kid. What’re you, eighteen?”
“Twenty-five.” He can’t stop, he can’t not answer—
“Christ, that’s worse somehow.” Beat. “Tell me every offensive and defensive capability you have.”
And Fray fucking does it. He rattles off his sword and his shield and the way in which he was trained to wield them. He mentions the long-range option he never reveals lest he need the element of surprise, the hard light crossbow. He names the hand-to-hand training, firearms training, psychological resistance training—
“No wonder you’re so fucked up,” Tin hisses. But he grins wide and wicked. “You didn’t want to tell me any of that, did you?”
Fray’s voice is a pathetic whisper. “N-no.”
“Poor little brainwashed killer. We’re going to have a real good time tonight.”
Tin slides his hand through Fray’s hair as he says it. Fray can’t make himself look back; he knows it will be in fear. At least not until Tin tells him to, and then it’s like someone drags his head up by the hair.
He’s in an override mode, remember? Tin’s uncomfortably close to Fray all the while he speaks. Tin can give him any command that won’t cause him to harm himself or someone else and the technology implanted in his body will compel him to obey. His weapons are disabled. The advanced filtration systems that clean his toxified blood dropped their efficiency, leaving him sluggish and confused. He has no defense.
“Goddamn dipshit kid,” Tin says. “You aren’t going to get half of what you deserve but hell. I’ll try.”
He slides a hand into Fray’s hair. He yanks it back until Fray’s head is craned enough for Tin to lean down and bite at his lips. Calling it a kiss would be to reveal a severe misunderstanding of kisses as a general concept, like perhaps believing them to be a form of mental warfare. Tin lays claim to his mouth through tooth and tongue. He nips hard and sucks long enough to make Fray’s lips numb, and all the while he’s running his hands up and down Fray’s sides. Taking his time. Taking it slow.
He says tell me you like this and Fray groans and shivers and does his damnedest to resist and it’s worse than useless. He wants to is the thing. The flood of satisfaction, of job-well-done, that he gets for just giving in …
Tin growls and repeats himself. Fray won’t look at him; he’s silent until Tin slaps Fray across the mouth.
The moan that results could have sprung straight from a brothel. It makes him feel filthy and ruined and hot. Yes he whines and yes what? says Tin and Fray feels sick with something like hunger. “I like it,” he says, and it’s the truth. He does like this, even though part of him is panicking more and more. He does like to be made helpless and be bullied. To be at this abominable man’s mercy.
(It’s the least he deserves.)
“Say you like being my pretty little toy.”
Fray might choke. He looks despairingly at the machine bringing him all his woes. l-like being your toy is all he can manage in the end, face ablaze.
“Show me,” Tin instructs. “Show me how much you like it, boy, show just how grateful you are to be my puppet.”
His face says you know what to do. And Fray does.