Work Text:
She'd always had a weakness for strays.
Bleeding heart, her grandmother, Aoi, would say fondly, and it was complimentary and damning all at once.
It wasn't as if she were defenseless. Work earned her a shell hard-won through sleepless depositions and mundane cruelties. But hardening completely seemed antithetical to her purpose. Which was why she was here now: on the court building’s roof, crying her eyes out.
He was barely 18 years old and already doing 20 to life for a crime that he was forced to be complicit in. She couldn't help but philosophize. Where had the rot originated? Was it nurture vs. nature? Was it a corrupt system that solely benefited those who exploited it? How could she sit there civilly while the bribed judge meted out a sentence disproportionate to the offense?
Her throat caught as her gaze fell to the scene below. The whizzing lights of the hyperspeed highway were a blur, neon-lit cars flowing through the veins of smoke and metal, inviting and meditative. Only a flimsy railing separated her from the rest.
However, such thoughts were a privilege best left for people with time, and Akane didn’t have any to spare. She’d done this case pro bono, and according to Togane’s threats earlier that morning, the rent was overdue.
So she wept. Once her allotted timer rang, she wiped her tears and didn't look down again.
-
The only light rail this late stopped just ten blocks shy of her apartment. Akane usually wouldn’t mind, but at this hour, walking was a toss-up between getting mugged by a vagrant or accosted by one of the Hound’s enforcers. Normally, she'd just sleep in her office, but after such a loss, Akane would die for her bed.
But it was a true risk. The Hound was a faceless gangster, a boogeyman who orchestrated the city in direct opposition to the politicians and bureaucrats aboveground. But they were all the same bullies as far as she was concerned. He and his goons had not been too happy the last time Akane had rejected their gift once again to grease the next judge's hands for her sake. She didn't know what they wanted with her. They already had a bevy of dirty lawyers under their belt. They certainly didn't need an underpaid public defender running on fumes to do their bidding in exchange.
It must be a power thing, she concluded. The one common bird not in their collection refused to submit.
She was so caught up rushing with her head at a swivel that she would've absolutely missed him in the alley had she turned her head the other way. And she wondered where her ending would have diverged from here.
Akane was no stranger to handling these streets. She had spent many a time introducing herself to her clients next to crumbling facades, graffiti-covered dumpsters, and steaming manhole covers. Perhaps this was why she paused: habits of a bleeding heart.
The figure was crumpled against the brick wall next to a dumpster of Al's Kitchen. He was dressed in older-fashioned clothing. But upon closer inspection, it was still of good quality, the kind of garb old money wore when it didn't give a shit. He looked like the victim of a mugging, but the faint smears of blood on his knuckles told her he must not have made it easy for them.
"Hello? Are you all right?"
Gingerly, she stepped closer, her hand ready at the taser.
Sad face, she thought first. Handsome, second.
It wasn't love at first sight. But it was something approaching with the same inevitability.
An omen.
She looked around—for what, she didn't know—and came to a decision.
-
By the time she had his prone body draped onto her couch, she was sweating rivulets.
Already confirming a suspicion, she rummaged through Aoi’s closet and brought out the tools of the woman's trade. Akane never claimed the same skillset, but she could do a passable enough job to run Aoi’s mechanic shop for a month before she foisted it onto other hands.
Aoi had serviced basic cleaner models before androids were banned altogether for public use. After a housekeeping droid’s inhibitor chip had been tampered with and resulted in the death of a mid-tier politician, androids were legally banned and only officially outfitted by military agencies. The chip was an essential component in every android's system. Without it, they had the agency to disregard direct orders and cause harm to a human, perhaps even kill if the situation mathematically warranted it. The only failsafe was that no typical android could interfere with its own chip without permanently shutting itself down with it.
She surmised this was what her new burden was: an illegally procured and high-end prototype that was surely discarded by some trick of fate. She couldn't imagine any owner willingly releasing their slave.
Most androids had their service panel on their chest, but his was at the back of his neck, which was smaller but more advanced in its inner workings than expected. She took a minute to gawk before continuing her inspection, methodical and cautious as if she were handling a live bomb. Which she could be at this point.
Directly after she connected the diagnostic monitor and turned to face him, the android's eyes shot open. Once she was done cursing up a storm, she moved back in front of him. His eyes were a brilliant blue. Gray almost. Akane hadn't seen that color occur naturally before.
The monitor told her that his sleep mode sensors were operating, but his ocular function was turned off. After a few more tests, she unhooked the tool and sat back on her haunches.
All results were positive, which meant his OS was fully functional.
But everything else she learned was confusing at best and life-changing at worst. Whoever designed him hadn’t done so in the assembly line. He was “custom” for lack of a better word. The commonplace operations were there, but everything else was a vestigial feature. It was as if they made him for the sole purpose of human mimicry. Like someone wanted him to pass as human.
She had found a ticker on his neck and wrist. A pulse.
Whatever else she could learn, his system prevented her from accessing admin mode.
And strangely enough, she couldn’t find his inhibitor chip anywhere.
The smart thing would be to take him back where she had found him. But she was running on a lack of sleep and an abundance of tragedy, so she could only fall back to her default stance.
He had needed help, and she was the only one there.
Habits of a bleeding heart, indeed.
-
As if in opposition to the tension that now plagued her apartment, the following several days passed languidly and peacefully. Her landlord must have been spending too much time underground to bother her about rent again.
But sleeplessness continued. Often, Akane would wake from a miasma where she felt like she was being swallowed by a warm and overpowering flood. It would dampen her bedsheets, leaving her tacky with sweat and this encroaching sense that she was being watched. When she peeked into her living room, her new companion continued to lie, unchanged, in a seemingly perennial slumber.
She went to work, bleary-eyed, fatigued by not just insomnia. She would brood on the roof, pick herself up, bureaucratize, talk and debate until she was hoarse, rinse, repeat. Ad nauseam.
These were her days. Until they weren't.
-
One late hour, Akane entered her apartment and thought for a moment that she had well and truly cracked.
She could smell Aoi's curry.
Was she fifteen again? Made of scraped knees and a head full of cottonball hopes coming back to her grandma's house?
She wandered in as if in a dream.
In front of the stove, her guest stirred her old pot. Various tools lay astray on the counter and ingredients she certainly didn't buy lay cut on a chopping board.
"You're wearing her apron."
Akane rarely used the kitchen and, as such, the thing had been gathering mothballs in a box along with Aoi's old stuff.
"You're angry," he noted, his voice rough and low as if it had come to its own that way rather than having been designed intentionally.
"And you're a thief."
She never did have the greatest self-preservation when she was heated. A knife lay next to the peeled carrot. She looked at it, but he only looked at her.
"I bought the vegetables if that's what you mean."
Akane balked. "Someone saw you?" warred with "How are you awake?" and "What are you?"
It was a testament to her sheer fatigue that she didn’t know which one she said.
"I made you dinner. Figured you hadn't eaten."
She stared at him blankly. Akane felt like a right idiot being shepherded to sit down like it was an everyday occurrence. When she argued again, he leveled her with a look that was so familiar, she thought for one insane second that she was the android and he the human.
"Eat first."
Some base hunger took over and Akane found herself spooning a heap into her mouth. Never mind the possibility of it being poisoned.
The instant she tasted it, she was shut down.
"What the fuck," she garbled through a full mouth, tears already hot on her cheeks.
Akane wasn't a skilled cook, but on the rare occasions she could finagle some fresh, overpriced vegetables from the underground markets and try to follow Aoi's scribbled recipe word for word, the taste could never live up to her memory. Something always seemed to be missing.
Yet this creature, who had taken one look at the recipe card, had plucked the memory right from her head and colored it perfectly in one attempt. It was not a taste she’d had in years.
And so she wept. Almost maternally, the android took the spoon and fed her in between sobs. When she was sated and spent, Akane leaned forward, barely registering when he swept her up and tucked her into bed.
She could feel fingers carding through her hair. Another instinct warred to stay awake, but the motion was so persuasive, so overpowering in its peace that she couldn't help but succumb.
"Never did like to see you cry," she thought she heard someone say, but surely, she was dreaming at that point.
-
She learned he didn’t have a name and that she could give him one if she wanted. So he said the morning after while he cooked her breakfast.
"No," she said, still feeling stuck and self-conscious about last night. "It's your name. It's up to you to decide."
Besides his normal functions, little remained in his memory banks. All of her questions led to a shrug and a tap on his head.
"Don't remember. Can’t find much of anything here.”
It was obviously suspicious, and he answered like he didn’t care that it was.
She would not drop this so easily, but in this respect, she believed that his name was an important matter that should take precedence. He appeared to give it some thought. But he answered as if he already knew and was just expecting her to ask.
"Kogami."
Kogami? The name was familiar, and she would've ruminated had she not seen the book on the coffee table. The apron was not the only spoil he had taken from her grandmother's box.
Akane picked up the volume and side-eyed him. "Speaking of thieves. Did you feel particularly inspired by your namesake?"
Aoi had loved and collected as many physical books as she could since they became rare. Akane had broken her own heart to sell some when she was in dire straits. This particular book of fairy tales, however, was the oldest published and her dearest. Many nights in her childhood, she had pored over the pages and committed the stories to memory. One such one featured a thief with a heart of gold by the name of Kogami. He would steal from the rich and give to the poor, but oftentimes, he’d steal just for the joy of it, too.
"You earmarked those pages often."
"So?"
"He seemed to be your favorite." He turned to look at her, and his smile was just as roguish as she imagined the thief of her pages.
Fuck.
Akane dropped her gaze to her eggs and ignored this very inconvenient realization. When she had gathered her bearings, she continued to exhaust her line of questioning. In the end, they arrived at the same place.
"You can't leave the apartment. Whoever's lost you will be on the lookout, I'm sure,” she could only offer like a pittance.
Rather than alarm, he looked amused, almost patronizing at how she seemed to consider his safety.
"I'm serious," she repeated more firmly, smarting a little at his attitude. "Just stay put for a couple more days, and I promise I’ll find you a way out of this city. I’m not sure where, but there are rumors of some outer colonies that house refugee androids."
At that, his face tensed before it eased into a more carefully placed expression. “And how much are your promises worth?”
"More than most. You want me to pinky swear?”
“That’s a little drastic,” he teased. “You’d dedicate that much effort to me?”
“Of course.”
"Even if I wasn't deserving?”
"Especially if you weren't,” she said it easily, but it was an answer she came across repeatedly through long and painful lessons.
Something shifted in his expression, something she could only describe as factual a force as gravity, and she wondered for a moment if he was more a child of nature than she: an animal born in the dirt than the chrome and silver of wherever he’d been designed.
“Well, consider me honored,” he said dryly, but Akane could hear how much he meant it.
-
It felt like the calm before the storm in some ways.
Her neighbor was too nosy for her own good, which was why Akane had taken to hurrying to her apartment before she could be cornered. Today, she had no such choice.
“Word on the street is that Togane had caught the Hound’s bad side,” the older woman said at her stoop before Akane could sneak inside. “No rent collected, and no one knows where he went.”
"He's missing?"
"We can only hope. But it'd be better for you to stay somewhere else in the meantime. There's been talk about the Hound installing one of his people to overtake this part of the city now that Togane’s gone. And we all know how that dog feels about you."
Akane felt a coil of dread in her stomach. "I'm sure Togane will turn up. You know how he is. He's like a roach."
Her landlord was a depraved gangster, but he was the devil she knew better to manage. The anonymous and omnipresent violence of the Hound was an opponent she was not equipped to deal with directly.
“In the end, even vermin have to die in these streets, honey.”
-
True to her neighbor’s word, Togane did stay missing, but she’d yet to greet one of the Hound’s ilk at her doorstep.
For his part, if Kogami felt any tension or cabin fever, he never voiced it. In fact, he seemed content to do chores and read Aoi’s entire collection as if that was his sole purpose.
“Couldn’t you finish that in a minute?” she’d asked him once.
“Humans do it much more slowly. I’d like to experience it as you would.”
It was more whimsical than expected. He proved practical, no frills, but it was these moments that utterly charmed and reminded her how deprived she’d been of a home that included someone else.
Kogami was solar-powered, and in other cases, he could pull energy from an electronic source. Past that, he didn’t need much. So it was Akane who felt like a lumbering intruder in her own home. She never asked, but food was always ready. And when she inquired about the source of his seemingly endless funds, she received the convenient echo of his amnesia.
Besides her frustration at how that was clearly a lie, she felt like a gaping maw, wanting and demanding even if she didn’t voice it. And she would rather fall over than reveal how human and physical her reactions were.
Other than her mortifying attraction, their cohabitation was peaceful–even indulgent. Akane had never felt more smothered with comfort in her life.
But the more she indulged, the more the guilt increased.
The first time she mentioned arrangements to speed up his escape from the city, he had frozen before waving it off and continuing their easy chatter like she hadn’t intruded. But the more she brought it up, the more he became disgruntled, even offended.
Until finally, he set her straight. "Are you that unsatisfied with me?"
"What? No. But haven't you thought about it before? You'd be free. You wouldn't have to belong to anyone."
"I wouldn't belong to you," he retorted flatly. "And what good would that do me?"
Akane was astonished into silence.
"Do you want me to leave?"
"Of course not!" The answer left her before she could even consider. She didn't realize she dreaded this so strongly until it was out. It unsettled her, and his face, suddenly warming with quiet relief and satisfaction at her fervent answer, only added to the feeling.
"Then we'll have no more talk of it." Without warning, he tucked a strand behind her ear, his fingers trailing down her neck. He took her lack of response as agreement and maneuvered them to the couch, where he pressed to her side, curving around her as if there was no choice but for them to fit.
-
It was constant now, small as the touches were.
A hand on her shoulder as they moved around the kitchen. On the small of her back as he stepped around her to stand at her other side. A gentle cuff of her chin whenever she was drooping with exhaustion.
And now: lounging in bed, his head on her lap, while soft music played from her old radio.
They had been discussing the foibles of Akane's childhood, in all the scuffed elbows and accidental touches of a hot stove. Kogami commiserated, which had shocked her before curiosity won.
"You have touch receptors?"
"Yes. But I can turn them off myself."
Akane considered him hurt, and the idea was foreign and repellent.
"I just don't get it. Why give you the capacity to feel pain?"
"Self-preservation. A lesson in restraint. Contrast the pleasure to sweeten it. Take your pick."
Curiosity overrode her shyness again. She stroked his arm and gaped as the hairs stood, goosebumps following her trail. "You feel that, too?"
He was perfectly still. "Yes."
Akane didn't seem to notice, a scientist now to the reactions she could provoke. Underneath her, he was her obedient subject.
"But to what end is what I'm trying to understand," she muttered once she'd stroked his scalp to her satisfaction.
“Well, many things about the human experience don't strike me as practical either. To what end does pleasure serve for you?"
"I don't know. An enticement to reproduce? To justify persevering? It just feels good."
"Then do you need more of a reason than that?"
Akane fell silent. She'd been working since she was seven, first at her grandma's shop, then her Sisyphean career as a lawyer. In a world of lack, she couldn't afford to waste time on anything that didn’t have a point.
"Pursuing something for its own end is a mindset for the rich."
"Yeah? Fuck that. Your own pleasure isn't." He sat up and twisted to face her so abruptly she jolted. "I could show you if you wanted."
All the careful consideration she had taken to hide her attraction, and he bulldozed through them like flimsy paper. She must have looked like a fish, for how hard her mouth fell open.
"Are you even capable of that?" she half-joked, unable to help her eyes lowering to his lap before she flitted them back up.
"I've been outfitted to provide every service. Whatever a human man can do, I can do better."
He leaned closer.
"I'll take your word for it."
Her hand caught between gripping his shirt to continue or stop him altogether. Underneath her palm, his false pulse raced, and for a moment, she mistook it for her own.
-
The bubble had to be popped eventually.
It started with the body that had been fished near the wharf and ended with the young man who had been taken into custody.
Pictures of Togane’s badly beaten corpse, the CCTV footage at the spot of his last sighting, and a transcript of a confession landed on her desk during a rare, sunny morning.
Kogami had made Aoi’s congee earlier.
And perhaps it was this joyous memory and her awareness of her infatuation that had her chuckle at first at the realization that she was now seeing him everywhere.
Because surely that figure next to Togane in the footage, the one the police were claiming was the suspect who confessed, was not Kogami. It was a trick of her mind that she even saw him through the awful, darkened resolution. That shadowed and blurry the figure was, it surely didn’t resemble him.
And yet the gut feeling Akane had learned to trust, her first instinct to note the blatant fabrication of a forced confession, the silhouette of that damn coat she had first seen him in, blared past her initial denials.
The moment pierced the bubble. Because even if her gut was wrong, what was she doing housing this man she virtually knew nothing about? A man who was obviously lying to her about what he remembered?
In a fog, she went through the motions and introduced herself to the suspect. He was just like all the others she’d defended before. Not quite guilty but not quite innocent either. Either way, Akane spoke with him for barely a minute before she confirmed that he was guilty of a fair number of things but certainly not this crime.
When Akane returned home, she was muted, almost as if she was watching someone else drive her body.
“You all right?”
“I think I must be insane.”
Kogami chuckled. “Well, I could have told you that. What brought this on?”
“They say that insanity is trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
“Maybe you should try a different way then.”
“I’ve been in this same hole all my life. This job is the only way I know how to make things right.”
“You’re playing with loaded dice, sweetheart. You can’t be too hard on yourself when you lose a rigged game by following the rules.”
Akane stared long enough that he looked up from sweeping and asked, “What is it?”
“Who are you, Kogami?”
He paused, a little taken aback at the swings of this conversation. “We talked about this, didn’t we?”
“I didn’t believe you then, and I don't believe you now. What’s your directive? What were you made to do?”
He leaned the broom against the wall and slowly approached. “What’s this about?”
“What were you doing before I found you in the alley that night?”
“Akane.”
“I want you to tell me something truthful for once.”
“What happened today? Did someone say something to you?”
“Who are you? And I need you to give me a straight answer.”
His pleading tone disappeared before it cooled to something business-like, callous.
“Does it matter?”
She instantly knew it was the truest thing he’d said since they met, and Akane felt her heart break a little. “If I asked you to leave, would you?”
“Do you want me to?”
“That’s not the question.”
He took a pained breath. “Yes. If you asked, I would.”
“Then I need you to go.”
“Akane.”
“I won’t ask again.”
She retreated to her bedroom before he could stop her, and he didn’t follow. She stayed there, well after his steps departed and her front door closed.
-
The case was dismissed with prejudice.
Magically, as if conjured from thin air, new evidence had surfaced that Togane had just simply tired of life, and his cause of death was ruled unequivocally as suicide. Never mind the damage to his body. Life was hard. Shit happened.
“What’s the point if he’s just going to offend again?” the prosecutor mumbled after the proceedings were over and her client was released.
“Because the only other option is we all just give up and kill ourselves. Would you prefer that?” she sniped and left before he could respond.
Her blood was heated, and she had business to attend to.
She did not venture to this side of the city often. Only a fool would go by herself at the entrance of the underground’s territory. The attendant who opened the door of the giant building appeared only mildly surprised, to his credit. Behind him, the men stopped their chattering and turned to look.
They all knew her face, and she knew all their names because she had spent years rejecting each when they came to her in their boss’s stead.
“I need to talk with him.”
“He’s a busy man. Better be for a good reason.”
“My client was exonerated today, which was no doubt orchestrated by you lot. Even if you were the ones who scapegoated him in the first place.”
“So, happy ever after. What’s this to do with us now?”
“I’ve come to tell your boss directly I’m not interested in any of his business since none of you seem to have gotten it the first time.”
“Hasn’t your grandmother ever told you not to look a gift horse in the mouth?”
“She also told me gangsters weren’t worth shit, but look at where we are now.”
The men chuckled, and even the door attendant’s scarred face pulled into an amused smirk.
“Get him out here,” she repeated.
“Or what?”
“Or I use that knife of yours and see what I can do with it. Either way, one of us gets hurt, and do you really want to explain to him what happened when I’m the one bleeding out?”
They all exchanged wary looks before the attendant nodded his head to one of the grunts, who promptly draped a bag over her head. They led her inside, not gently but secure enough that she felt she could go to where she was headed without tripping over her feet. They walked for what seemed like ages, but it was probably a few minutes.
When they took the bag off and left, Akane could only balk. They had set her in a wicker chair inside a greenhouse, or what she assumed to be one from her books. She’d never seen so much green in her life.
And in the center of it, Kogami sat on a bench between the most brilliant and verdant flowers Akane had ever seen. A cigarette smoked uselessly between his lips.
Dread and acceptance settled on her. Like an infection had been cut to be purged. When she had had her fill of the flowers, she turned her attention to him, her faithful cur all these years.
“Heard that’s bad for the plants. And your lungs.”
“I think we’ll both live.”
“So you’re the Hound,” she said uselessly when he didn’t seem interested in breaking the stalemate.
“Not the name I would’ve chosen, as you know. A shame it stuck.”
“It fits.”
“What can I do for you, Akane? I thought you made yourself clear the last time I saw you.”
“That hasn’t stopped you from interfering with my business. I’m not interested in joining your little club.”
“Wasn’t my intention,” he said simply, unapologetic. “You barely eat. I fixed it. Togane was harassing you. I fixed it. You were upset about his murder for God knows what reason. Ergo….”
“Well, I need you to stop. Whatever gifts you continue giving me, I want no part of them.”
“Take them or leave them. Won’t change anything on my end. It’s all just math to me.”
Her frustration boiled and peaked. "Why me? What do you want from me?"
He stubbed the cigarette out on the floor and declared gravely, "Whatever you can give. All of it. Any of it.”
All this work and time, blood and sweat and tears given for an ideal that couldn’t bear fruit, and what was her reward? Maybe it was this creature. Her own justice incarnate, ready to bestow it in her stead.
“And if I can’t give anything?”
“The very definition of a gift is that it doesn’t require anything back. I’d still give you as much as I could until you found me deserving. I could raze this whole city if you wanted me to."
She shook her head faintly, the scope of what he was offering beyond her logic and morals. She answered like a child, "You’re insane. Where would people live?”
"And you wonder why it’s you," he laughed. "You're the only one worth the whole damn lot of them."
“Whatever pedestal you’ve put me on, take me off of it.”
“I’ve wanted you for years. You don’t think I see you clearly by now? All those times you went to the rooftop, and you cried alone? Those moments you alienated your friends, even if you were lonely? When you lost your temper because you tried and tried and no one seemed to give a shit?”
“You’re sick. I know you know that."
"And I'd do worse if you asked. I know you know that."
Akane shivered. “I would never.”
"And that’s why it has to be you. For me. You asked me what my directive was. Shouldn’t it be obvious by now?”
Akane watched him, this facsimile of a human, and was left aghast that she found him real and whole. He wasn’t human. He was beyond that.
If he was prey to his algorithms the way she was prey to her hunger, was there a difference in the end?
Gravity was gravity.
She came to a decision, as she always did, and approached him warily. “Stay still.”
Instantly, he was motionless. Akane cupped his chin gently and leaned down. Even his lips were warm, and she briefly wondered just how much his temperature could rise.
“Order me to reciprocate,” he whispered as she played around with him.
“Return the favor,” was barely out of her mouth before he encircled her, and he overtook the trajectory of where they would inevitably head. Metal melted onto her tongue, her blood, her bones—weighing her down until she felt limp. But Kogami was there to bear her weight, happy for the burden, disgustingly ecstatic even.
When she needed to breathe, he leaned his forehead to hers, looking like his namesake in the face of a feast he never expected to receive.
“This won’t happen again,” she said.
“Sure.”
“I’m serious.”
“Okay,” he laughed as he led her out of the greenhouse and elsewhere in his labyrinth.
"Slow down."
"You don't understand. I dreamt of this."
"You can dream?"
"You tend to inspire the unnatural in me."
When they fell onto each other, she didn’t think of the point or the purpose. The wreckage they could incur after such a collapse was a far thing in her mind.
-
Later, while she lay her head on his chest and felt the steady, comforting beat, she asked, "Were you actually decommissioned…?"
She couldn't even finish the sentence.
"You're asking if I orchestrated my disrepair for the sole purpose of you finding and fixing me?" He worded it like he was playing along with the absurdity of such a premise. "That would take a sheer amount of planning and calculation. Think I'm capable of that?"
Yes.
Kogami was capable of anything. Insanity or competence, he had them in spades.
He—
"Don't have the kind of patience for that," he drawled. "Just my luck, all this happened the way it did."
She thought of her fairy tales. That no matter how happy or tragic the endings were, they always seemed to fit perfectly.
"Do you believe in fate then?"
"The world's too random. Even if it was real, I wouldn't give a shit what it told me." His smile curved, knowing and satisfied. "Besides, there are more efficient ways to get into your house than playing dead."
She had thought the animal pawing at her door was a toothless mutt, downtrodden and in need of her care.
Not feral. Not this rabid wolf she had invited into her bed, who had encamped by her feet and had happily forced her hand to muzzle him.
He seemed so pliant in her hold as she rubbed the perfect stubble atop his neck, a stroke only a lover could give.
"You could do it, just so you know," he said nonchalantly, and her finger paused. "There's a manual reset toggle at the back of my panel behind the CPU. If you activate it, even I couldn't override it."
She considered what he offered and, without another word, curled her hand around his jugular. She pressed her lips to that throat, peppering the expanse until she found his pulse, which increased uselessly as she bit.
His life at her hands and she would be the one surrendering.
"Good for now?" he asked casually when she finished. Although at that point she was learning him well enough to tell just how overwhelmed and pleased he was.
“I don’t deserve this.”
“Oh, sweetheart. Let’s not lie. I’m exactly what you deserve.”
She wondered then if he’d ever follow through on the promise he’d whispered when he was inside her. If he really would whisk her away, escape to a place off her maps. For better or for worse.
"But I’d be yours," he huffed in between as he crowded over her, arms bracketing her sides like a cocoon until she could only see blue and gray and him. "And isn't that the only thing that matters?"
What would her seeming disappearance be like to the people who knew her? Would it be like the whimsical yarns of her book?
Or a cautionary tale?
Once upon a time, the story would go, the girl had left her grandmother's for the woods.
And for better or worse, what she found there had crawled out of its den to follow her home.