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Halmarut clutches his soft plush body close to her breast and it is the warmest Calyx has felt in centuries.
He is acutely aware that he lacks a sympathetic nervous system nor thermoreceptors to even feel such a thing. But as his soul possesses this absurd velvet-and-cotton form, his mind conjures explanations out of purgatory. He can feel the ground beneath his two stubby legs just as he can feel Halmarut nuzzle his worn velvet fur and breathe in his scent. She squeezes him tight against her ribcage, drawing her knees up to her chest as she dozes in the alleyway.
How different really were their bodies to one another? Halmarut treats her Auri body as if it were another set of clothes she'd donned for the occasion, but even she admits she was very fond of her jade scales. Unwittingly so was he, finding himself entranced in the way they caught the dim lanternlight.
He did not require a cardiac system to feel his heart skip a deathless beat when she smiled down at him.
Calyx is painfully aware of all the frailties of the human body—and more so aware of his own mortal body's foibles. He knew how to insert an intravenous drip without flinching, and could even perform minor surgeries on himself with detached coolness. Whenever his physicians asked him to look away from a procedure, Calyx would always lean closer, going so far as to take notes when he could. It was the only way he could detach himself from the pain and the despairing helplessness of his situation, and place himself back in control of his fate.
He is, however, almost entirely unaware of the frailties of plush.
Halmarut turns him this way and that in her arms, delicately pinching the edge of a frayed thread with her fingernails. "Oh Calyx," she sighs. "Your stuffing is all coming out."
Calyx reaches up to his neck at once, instinctively seeking to stem the bleeding. But when he looks at his stubby hands, there is only cotton fluff drifting on the slight breeze, falling to the rain-damp cobblestones beneath them.
"You have to be careful," Halmarut insists. "I could throw you from a building with little to no damage, but you aren't invulnerable. Not by any means. You can't wrench your body this way and that."
"Even if all my stuffing comes out, I will still maintain this corporeal form," Calyx counters. "Is that not the definition of immortality?"
"You will be an articulate pile of cotton and formless fabric," she corrects patiently, "and of no use to anyone. I suppose then I could collect you in a bag and carry you around. But let's not be maudlin about it. It's an easy enough fix."
She digs in her dress pockets and produces a small embossed leather case, which she delicately opens in her lap with the same carefulness as a surgeon with their scalpels. Sharp, thin needles, various colored flosses, a knobby thimble and pins; thus were the implements of her work.
"You're lucky I've kept this little hobby of mine," she tells him with a little twinkle in her eye, like it's a secret kept between them as she unravels the seam attaching Calyx's neck and shoulders. He could feel the thread unspooling between the stitches and struggles not to shiver. But her hands were warm and patient on him, as they always were. It was the only reason he could suffer her touch at all.
Calyx's head comes off easily in her hands. She cradles it gently and sets it to the side as as she unspools silver thread.
"You could have been a surgeon," Calyx says, eyeing the way she expertly threads the needle with unshaking fingers and knots it with a few deft twists. His headless body sits with legs akimbo, squat and lifeless. Cottony viscera gushes out of its neck in little drifts onto the cobblestone. Already he did not think of it as his own. Inside of himself, he still had a sense of his body as it once was, that eternally juvenile flesh, even through data encoding and transfer. Alexandrian scientists thought the soul resided in the brain. If he thought it was his heart, would he be in his torso still, with no eyes to see and no mouth to speak?
She shudders. "I think not. That was always more of Fandaniel's expertise." But she did not seem displeased by the compliment. She picks him up again, situating him in the cradle of her bent knees along with his lower half. He stares up at her now in full, brows furrowed in concentration, hair falling a little into her eyes. She twitches her spectacles so they fall off her nose, the chain swinging as it caught on her neck.
"Does this hurt?" she asks tentatively as she begins to sew him together.
"Usually doctors say, this will hurt, or lie and say it won't," Calyx retorts. "But for the record, it does not."
"But do you feel it?"
He can feel her warm fingers holding him still, the cold needle threading its way through the fabric around the base of his neck attached to his head. He cannot, for the moment, feel it in his torso. He tells her as much, and the crease between her scarlet brows deepens.
"Fascinating," she breathes. "It seems you only feel sensation in the parts of your body you define as belonging to you." She looks at him with the scrutiny of someone taking him apart, piece by piece, and analyzing his components. In that moment, he wonders what it would be like to be vivisected by her, if she were to take all of his stuffing out of his head, and his body, and each of his limbs, and invert his fabric to examine the stitching inside.
Calyx had been cut open in such a way, once. It had been necessary to achieve immortality. He'd undergone the procedure awake, feeling only vaguely the sensation of his rib cage being cracked open, of his organs gently removed and set into their respective metal dishes and weighed by the surgeons. It had been a long, arduous, last resort to save his life.
They had not been half so gentle as Halmarut is as she reattaches his head, and for that, he is grateful to the Ascian.
She pulls the thread taut, all the stitches coming together from the tension. All at once, Calyx feels sensation in his entire body once more. If he had breath, he might have gasped, but he only shudders a little between her knees as he flexes his stubby limbs. Her breath washes over him as she turns him this way and that, turning him onto his side to better examine the stitches. He does not need to see them to know they are even and perfect from lifetimes of practice.
She rubs his ears absently. "There." She knots the thread off, then cuts it off with a tiny pair of golden scissors. Satisfied, she sits him upright in her lap. "All better?"
Thank you sits in his throat, unwilling to be lodged. It was the right thing to say. His head very well may have rolled off his shoulders without her intervention. Whatever is writ in his expression causes her to smile, an uproariously beautiful expression that only further lodges the words like a clog in an artery.
She hugs him to her chest, the warm velvet of her robes rubbing his cheek. She has the smell of plant matter about her, as if she were fresh from digging in freshly tilled spring loam. It puts him to mind of green, growing things. Allergens and pollens set to disrupt his circulatory system, enflame his organs.
"Your intervention is noted," Calyx finally mutters into her breast.
"And note it you shall. Come. The Warrior of Light moves." She sweeps him into his arms and takes off down the rain-damp alleyway.
She might have stolen his breath, if he had breath to steal. The sentiment is enough to warm his cotton-stuffed heart fractionally.