Sharp. The world tastes like oxidation and blood and your last mistake. Your wrists burn.
"Bring her here."
That voice is sickness and sin, too dark for the spotlight it comes from. Your steel captors pull without finesse, gouging new lines into your skin. If you stumble they will drag you.
A monstrous throne rotates.
You will not look at him. Not like this. There are still roles to maintain. Hatred keeps you from sagging.
The end won't change things, you remind yourself over and over again. It won't change you.
The robots force you to your knees. Your hair is a curtain.
"At last..." he exhales far above you, already drunk on victory. "I have you at last."
You want to drown in waves of muffled, choking silence. Dissolve into pain. Anything else but acknowledge the spoken truth.
"The only thing to decide now is where to begin?"
The streets turned your boots dust-grey. Only a few patches of tan remain. The vague distinction feels vital. Almost otherworldly, as if those spots are narrow rifts in time.
If only— if only—
He steps down, swishing closer. The grating rattles.
"The possibilities are finite, of course, yet they are also deliciously numerous... I've considered each in turn. Have you?"
You spit blood. Specks glisten on the floor, some catching in your hair. You connect the dots, holding onto the numbing task.
"With time and respect," he snarls, suddenly gripping your chin. "You will think of little else as well."
Metal fingers tilt your face up. You try to blur the details away. Blink him out of focus. Try to look beyond his hungry, twisted expression. But those crimson eyes draw. They're too strange amidst human features.
"Never," you promise.
His smile is ice cracking.
"It was not a question."
The vise grip vanishes. He motions to a guard, his metal arm quicksilver-bright.
"Take the prisoner below deck and prepare her accordingly."
▫︎⁃▫︎⁃▫︎
Nothing makes sense.
Necessities are always struggles. Conveniences are luck. Meals are scavenged or hunted. The never-ending task of fire-building is all that keeps you warm at night. Sometimes the rain rinses you clean.
Luxuries are foreign things.
But now steam curls above hot water. It floats heavy against your face, just as the droids hover over your submerged body. Their long arms dangle down to scrub and shear you. Floral notes slowly overtake the smell of you as they work.
Before this there was more food than you've ever eaten at one time, and before that medical treatment. The needle holes still sting.
Nothing makes sense.
The bath ends with rough handling. An android pulls you up by the binder cuffs and bubbles spill over the tub. You're pushed across the shadowy room to stand on a span of softness. It's like fabric grass.
You drip and wait and continue to curse the unforgiving world. Silent tears follow the anger. They feel safer amidst the wash water. Whether they're for yourself or for those you've lost, you can't say.
Clothing does not come. The chill grows persistent, pooling worst at the nape of your neck and your groin. You've never felt dirty and clean in the same moment.
The lights go out.
Time passes.
Shivering slowly gives way to standing aches. Your shoulder blades begin to burn. The cuffs dig into your spine and pull you uncomfortably taunt, like an arched bow.
You shift and fight and finally give in, leaning against the freezing robot behind you.
Somehow, you eventually doze.
Slashing ribbons of pink are chasing you. Chasing your group. Pushing you towards a thicket of darkened division. Left trail or right?
Laser fire slants right, directing, corralling. There is no more time. Desperate now, you choose left. The others follow…
And then— And then—
You wake on a yell, realizing it's your own. Curling in on yourself, you go fetal and frail. Without light, the nightmare echoes across your vision.
You failed them all.
It takes several long, shaking sobs before you realize you're laying on your side. The floor is beneath you. Wispy clothing is against your skin. The cuffs are gone but the muscle cramps remain.
"My, my. What a way to begin one's day..."
You scramble across the floor, away from him. He sounds as if he's been standing over you.
"A pity you won't be well-rested for our first tête-a-tête."
You manage to stand and stumble, orientation blurred. A wall rushes up to greet your outstretched hands. You follow its curve.
Away, away, away—
Movement now, soft and nearing. You've backed as far from him as possible but need to readjust. A sweat drop travels down the ridges of your spine.
"Detain her."
A red-faced ghost animates beside you. It clamps over your bicep before you can backstep. Robots shouldn't be so quick but perhaps you've already gone slow. Exhaustion is in your marrow.
"There are numerous lessons for you to learn, but consider this your first: never run from me."
Fleshy fingers curl around your neck. You gasp and claw with your free hand. He snatches it away with cruel metal digits and a growl.
"Lesson two: resistance will be met with consequences."
The last is more feeling than word, thick and vulgar on his tongue. It sears into your brain, just as he squeezes your windpipe shut.
Your pulse pounds. It is all you can hear. Breath is humid on your face, coming in close. But there is no air for you, even as you kick and flail.
This isn't so bad, you think as the seconds stretch, slowing your fight.
The pressure eases. Oxygen is both fire and salvation. You gulp it down.
He purrs, "Yes, good girl…"
Slumping in his loosened chokehold, you wheeze, "No… do it…"
It feels like the calmer side of escape, this sudden, clarified notion. Peacefulness may reside in the white halos dancing behind your vision.
Yes, maybe, just die and rest.
The appeal is a startling truth: you want death more than the memories that are beginning to haunt you.
"Kill me." you urge again.
The hand crushing you is suddenly gone. Only the robot holds you, making you collapse away from the cyborg's grip.
He radiates above you like an oppressive slab of heat. Like nuclear warfare.
"Never."
The taunt is a shred of hope catching fire. You see an abyss written there, in that single promise. There will be no quick end for you.
This is the price of failure.
He needs to say it though. You must anchor yourself in a struggle. Realign your vengeance, if there is no quick death to be had here.
Your throat catches on rusty, hateful syllables. "What… then?"
Air moves around your face. Quick, cold bands slide against your cheeks. Crying out is a mistake, but you won't understand that until later.
"Your penance."he breathes, cinching the straps tight. They connect like a harness. An orb is wedged between your barred canines.
There isn't a moment to fight. Your free hand flies to his own, scratching blunt nails against alloyed steel until you find purchase in softer flesh.
Blind to his audible wrath, your mind burns, bleed, bleed, bleed.
You're already caged though, bridled like the wild, surviving thing you are. He yanks at the back of your skull and the rubbery straps contract. Your head follows painfully, teeth clamping against the gag.
"For that transgression," he grates against an earlobe, "I'll allow you nothing but discomfort today."
A pair of stars seem to ignite in the semidarkness. Red dwarfs with blackhole centers. Inches from your face.
He towers again. You come unwillingly with him, drug skyward by machine and man. Protests blur on your tongue, like the words of a drowning woman.
"Restrain her fully."
Shoving, yanking motions. The impenetrable shell of steely strength does not waver against your flailing. Wrists and then ankles, the robot cuffs you without hesitation. Delicate skin bites where you're bound.
A bed. Where was the bed?
It's a dazed thought. A hurried escape into something other. A removal from the reality of comprehending the stretched, sacrificial splay of your limbs over a plush surface. Of only having flimsy clothing against your flesh. The poorest shield.
So soft.
You channel every neuron of attention into your back, feeling the billowy breadth of space beneath you. It's a dream. Another impossible luxury. You slept in sand once, and believed that to be a silky comfort.
"You are the last of them, you realize..."
The atmosphere thickens between your legs. He stands in the span. You try to hold onto fluttering detachment. Tensing against the cuffs, you hope your hands and feet will numb. The red lights watch you, unmoving.
"The last to resist my vision."
Your detachment shatters. A greedy, sucking void is left.
Don't think of the others.
You snap your eyes shut, as two fingers begin to trail.
His touch wanders in shivers, tracing the pad of a foot. The chafed skin of an ankle. The tensed muscles of a calf. Exploring slowly, deliberately.
You writhe, dampening the linens in fear-sweat. You shove imagined veins of electricity into his flesh. Detonate thermal bomb after thermal bomb within the palm of his roaming hand. Visualize all the factories and fuel centers you've collapsed in an attempt to slow his progress.
"For a time," he exhales, voice dragging inhumanly low, "I considered ending you as well. A final solution; a cure for your bevy's needless ravaging. Ruin the leader and then wipe away the ineffective scraps that remained."
Like a starving plant, you want light. Blaring and pure. Sunlight to burn away the amplitude of his crawling, lascivious drawl. It twists deeper and more deranged than you ever estimated. The threatening messages didn't hold this much weight.
Darkness focuses all. It's impossible to ignore the progression of his human hand, skating, caressing, taking.
Your pant legs bunch high. There's the hot heave of his breath. Your knees feel like an unspoken barrier. The last true distinction between an escapable dream and a seeded nightmare.
He bridges the line swiftly, grabbing instead of stroking now. Your thighs try to clench. His fingerprints become permanent memories, staining you with destructive force.
Your eyes fly wide. Arching painfully high, you plead. No, no, no, no, no, no! Stop, stop, stop, stop...
He pauses. It's insanity, to see a sliver of hope in his shrouded features.
In reprimand, the illusion dissolves. There's a glint of metal in motion.
His arm whirs into mechanical madness, a single fingertip igniting crimson. It smolders like a coal. Already near your ankle. You feel its crackling promise of power.
Burning heat.
You know there is no reprieve but you surge against the restraints again. His voice is far-off thunder.
"Do you know what saved you?"
There's no way to answer. No way to spit flammable, ignitable vitriol. You can only imagine again.
You track the point of red ruin.
The coal lowers, hovering close, closer, and then it sears against your ankle.
You bolt away, cinching your skin sharply. The cuffs are blunt blades.
But then you feel less.
A refocusing: a compensation for what you've believed and what is truly real.
The coal is steady, visible. Not pressed against your flesh.
It's only the frigid touch of an alloyed knuckle, resting against your skin.
"The vision of you, like this, was all that stayed my hand..." he murmurs, metal finger crooked upwards.
It begins to ghost up your calf.
You shudder so forcefully you think your muscles might snap away. Bones rattling as the remnant of you. A corpse to join corpses.
If only, if only, if only—
Fabric catches. Smoke follows. It's too bright and fast. A line through the pant leg, orange and crawling. The material cleaves like a parting curtain.
His human hand grips your calf steady. You try to wail. The gag is an obscene barrier. Molten material slithers over your skin, almost burning before falling aside.
Facets of him are illuminated now. He's a focused amalgam of technology and enormity. The very worst of both, poured into one entity.
You find you finally fear him.
At your hip bone, his burning finger hooks above the waistband. It rips upward in a final slash of hot destruction. Fabric flutters aside.
Your leg is prickling and exposed. The embers allow you to briefly regard him, regarding the new expanse of flesh.
"You have earned yourself nothing but pain so far," he hums in the renewing dim.
The drag of his skin against yours is too soft. Too hesitant. Too kind.
"Perhaps you're eager to feel it now, in light of your continuing resistance?"
The steel clamp is vicious in its return. Your bare knee is pushed outward. Far enough to keep the limb immobile.
The coal point floats and dips. It's a falling meteor. The impact will send shockwaves. An earthquake of pain.
You don't mean to freeze: it's just the frantic, temporary stasis of anticipating agony that changes you. You go branch-rigid.
Again, he pauses.
His devil gaze rises to your own, impossibly aware in the dark. You see as much as feel the glow of destruction above your inner thigh. Hovering, a breath away. A crimson pool against skin.
"Perhaps not," he whispers appreciatively.
Quicker than before, he opens a burning zipper up your other pant leg. The inseam melts away. He tugs the smouldering remnants from under you and they fly across the room, like a conquered flag.
It's a riotous shock. Possessive and final.
You're now fully exposed.
Underwear nonexistent.
Folds tender and quaking.
Seen as no one should ever be unwillingly seen.
Despite everything you've vowed, shame builds.
His rough exhale is a poisonous bite. Reptilian and hungry.
You cannot realign. There are too many fucked up, inexcusable things. Too little space to hold the horror.
All you have left is a shallow escape. A self-serving betrayal.
He wants you to allow this.
He wants you to want this.
The last will never be. You vow it and vow it and vow it. You will repeat it like a curse, in the time ahead.
But if you allow…
No, not allow.
To just be here. Inescapable and reticent.
To be nothing at all. Unresponsive in every way.
As he steps closer, you decide it could be so.
You visualize a blooming tree of fire and smoke: the last facility your group destroyed. You can still hear their whooping pride. See their cheering, soot-stained faces.
A new brush of fingers.
He traces the dip of your sides, lifting your billowing shirt higher. Excruciatingly slow.
You hold onto the acrid burn of smoke filling your lungs, the harsh taste of another momentary victory—
The fabric catches on your nipples, holding for a moment before bounding away. Metal and human hands roll and tuck the excess material above your neckline. It's somehow worse than being wholly stripped.
"Too flawless to waste…" He says, more to himself than you. "If only you had been more compliant, at our beginning."
The rumbling missive is so close now, breaking like a rock slide over your chest. Gooseflesh gathers, every nerve ending sparking with injustice.
He straightens again and suddenly the swell of his middle presses overtop your mound, persistent and trapping. A harder heat follows, nudging at your entrance with no hesitation.
Despite your decision for brutal disengagement, you tilt your core away. The head of his member juts against bone, momentarily defeated.
He huffs out a threatening laugh, "In time, you will beg me for this. I have designs to make it so. But for now, feel the clarity of your flesh. How it's already mine."
His steel claw digs into your thigh and bottom, spanning a wide arc of skin. The anchor point stings, tethering you to complete stillness. You feel the knuckles of his other hand fisting and adjusting. A battering ram realigning. Notching itself between your folds.
"Feel every plunder I take and remember..." He groans, pushing, pushing, finally gouging inside you.
It's been months since you've—
"Remember, you deserve this."
He jerks the final inch, settling too-tight hands around your waist and rocking forward fully.
The burn is a hollow throb, like he's bore a tunnel too far inside you with that blazing fingertip.
You hate, hate, hate that your walls are clenching. It's an unconscious, uncontrollable response you try to end. You chuff heavy breaths around the gag.
There is no way to pretend you're elsewhere.
Yes, this is what I deserve.
You endure the raw, suctioning tug of your flesh as he draws back. Feel another blaze as he slams forward. You try to retreat into the new well of discomfort and name it your ally.
This is where I'll live now, you decide, gathering brutal memories for later retribution.
He pumps a ragged pace, slapping his flesh against yours, and your channel slowly gives way. Offering an unspoken surrender. Growing slick and swollen. You want to scream for its betrayal.
"Yes…" he moans above, red eyes narrowed to snake slits. "You've wanted this, haven't you? Wanted to pay for your trespasses… good girl..."
He leans forward, settling more weight on your stomach. His palm engulfs a breast, thumb circling the nipple like a clock hand. Mechanical and designed.
The pebble hardens. Thoughts of past lovers sucking at you flicker. Tongues laving and teasing—
You shove the memories away with enough violence to shift his hold on you.
"You will submit everything to me," he grates, kneading you cruelly. "With time and appreciation, you will want this more than your own breath..."
You wish the word never was burned across your eyelids. Scrawled on the map of your naked torso.
Never, never, never, never—
The smacking weight of his thrusts pushes you up the bed. Against the cuffs. You meld your focus to the sting, trying to recreate gravity. The tilt of the world is too ominous for comprehension.
His moans become waves, crashing and copious and uneven. The ebb and flow of his storm is where you can't be but you still find yourself there. Hateful and wondering. A rock on the shore.
Was there ever a clue to this? Could I have known?
You know there wasn't anything but a chase towards violence. Know that even if there was some warning, you would have still blown his grey monstrosities apart all over again.
Only, without the help of your group.
They never deserved—
He slams forward with a sharp reprimand, human hand slithering up to your neck again. "...Eyes open."
When you disobey he squeezes, retracing previous aches. You find yourself hoping for another bout of blackness, and keep your gaze seared shut.
Thu-thump, thu-thump, thu-thummp, thuu-thuummmp…
He ravages you and growls more warnings while you float. It's chaos below your waistline and near-peace above. A star-flecked fog of light amidst darkness. If not for the constricting straps around your skull, and the blaring realization that you can barely breathe, you'd slip away entirely.
Maybe he'll kill me after all, you hope beyond reason.
The wavering veil drops.
His fingers are gone and your lungs are taking in air, headless to your will. Oxygen burns through your nose.
"Unless you would like to revisit video of your last foray," he snarls, looming like a panting incubus, "Open your eyes now."
It's the main incision. The start of a wakeful, rushed surgery.
How he's cut to the bleeding marrow of you, with so little effort...
You blink and blink again. Feeling the traitorous tug of tears. At least they blur your vision. At least you now know that they are shed for the people you could have saved.
If only you'd yielded at the start.
He swipes a drop from your cheek, using it to paint along your inner thigh. His savage rhythm slows, as he reaches between you.
"Hush now and surrender… Pay me the price of your guilt..."
The wet pad of his thumb sweeps, searching through the shortened curls of you, trapped beneath the ungodly heft of him. He manages to find your crest in a moment of dread so acute, you shudder and bolt.
"Oh yes, that's what you've wanted… that's what you could have… learn to please me, and I may reward you justly..."
He massages you quickly, pushing your bundled nerves into a tortuous frenzy of colors and spinal sparks. You can almost feel the malicious tilt of his smile.
The will of your body is a curse.
No, no, no, no, no—
You can only imagine the universe has imploded suddenly and that you're being sucked towards its center. The jagged shards of your beliefs orbit around you, just beyond your reach, in a constellation of broken morality and past memories.
Pain would have been better.
His ministrations stop. Two hands settle below your ribs. The steel fingers are spider-like and frigid; the human fingers too-hot and needy.
"Watch me… or watch the end of them…" he grates, rocking into you with new vigor.
It's the start of an avalanche, you realize. The beginning of his end. An unsteady, hurdling frenzy of male motion.
In spite of every unvocalized rejection, your core pulses with each brutal misuse. Cervix assaulted to the point of confusion, it tugs the most sensitive strands of your being towards a nightmarish, reluctant pleasure. It's a virus taking hold and multiplying.
The gag and the darkness and the cuffs and the pain have narrowed your worldview to only the ravaged space between your legs.
You understand now, that this may have always been his intent.
You thank the Mobian demigods that you will not make it there. That you will not find your release.
Never, never, never.
For fear of the horrendous threat, you keep your human eyes blurred on the cyborg's imitation of his own.
The glowing orbs flicker, like low-powered landing lights. His breath steams over you, each ram punctuated with a deep grunt of satisfaction. It's a minor blessing, to be denied whatever lewd expression is crawling there.
Finally, he loses all sense of his brutal rhythm. He pumps, stutters, pumps, pumps, and mashes against your swollen lips, growling low obscenities and hitching you too firmly against him. Bruises will well later, in the flare of your hips.
"...take everything… yes…"
The micro spasms are almost worse than the spending. You feel the filth of him coating your insides. He rocks and growls into the new slick. A feral madman.
You imagine an oil spill: a field of scorched stretching earth, turned black and ruinous by the progression of his war machines.
The memory is better than the unwanted charges echoing within you, urging you towards the impossible.
You mind-scream for him to slide out, out, out, out!
"You enjoyed that…" he whispers instead, continuing to nudge your insides with the remnants of his malice.
As soon as the bridle and bit are gone, you will spit out how wrong he is. You'll erase his self-assurance with laser-cut denial. Your tongue will be diamond-edged and wicked. Your hate will be supreme.
You prepare to string the sentences together, seeing them smolder in the lulling dark.
His hips retract, vacating you with deliberate ease. He smears your thigh with a wet thwack, cleaning himself there. Deadly metal fingers skim down your stomach.
He traces your entrance and you quake to have the weaponized piece of him so near. He chuckles at your fear.
After a single slide of the steel inside, he leaves you hollow.
You didn't think the debasement could extend further.
The gathered moisture is painted across your lower lip, filling your nostrils with salt and musk. You try to snap your head away but have already been marked. He holds your chin tightly for a moment.
"A prelude to our next meeting. I'll have every rebellious part of you..."
The scarlet glow of his gaze fades. His hands and hips vanish as well. Only the echoes remain. The rustle of returning things.
When you hear him speak again he's far across the room. A detached warlord: the part you always equated with humanity's downfall.
No, there are worse parts of him.
"Release her fully when I've gone. Detain her again upon the arrival of the attending droids."
A channel of light expands on a wall face, making you blink and adjust. He turns for a moment to look back, the obscenity of him in pitchblack profile.
"Until tonight, my dear."
The universe goes dark again. A robot hums into motion, unlatching your slumping form with sharp efficiency. Releasing you from the temporary binds that no longer matter.
Never have you felt so lost.
This can't be my new existence. This can't be…
▫︎⁃▫︎⁃▫︎
Sometime later, in a miasma of enduring shock, the droids scrub you clean. Low lights glimmer above. A medi-droid applies salve and pricks new holes. Floating, sluggish liquids course through you.
You are carefully dressed. An illogical banquet is laid out. You consume and drink without tasting.
It's an engraved pattern, you realize. An age has already been written. A galaxy has been birthed and destroyed overnight, without color, sound, or shockwave. It will happen over and over again.
You waver towards sleep later, finally accepting.
This is only the beginning.