Based upon the Voyage To The Bottom Of The Sea episode "The Mechanical Man", in which James Darren appeared as an android.
Flesh and Blood
"This day it had goldness in the upstairs. As I know when I looked at it my eyes hurt. After I look at it the cellar is red."-Richard Matheson, "Born Of Man And Woman"
Don't speak.
He lost him for six days.
Six days in which they'd had time to take Tony, to strap him down and inject drugs into his bloodstream not enough to kill him, they'd been careful of that, and paralyze him with a laser beam not enough to put him under, only to make him immobile while they worked. Six days where they'd rewired a human being into a sacrilege of flesh and blood, a lifeless shell of metal and bone.
He didn't even know who they were besides the guard who'd broken his neck when he hit him, the others having left long before he ever arrived. He didn't know why they'd done it, why they'd taken Tony and not another, why they'd destroyed him.
Don't cry.
He'd found him there, in the laboratory, standing in front of the computers. He'd spoken his name, reached out and touched him. But Tony had turned away from him and he'd seen his back, the wires and metal implanted within the skin and bone, threaded through muscle and nerves, every cell in his body tuned to the hideous plate of artificial humanity.
He hadn't had time to register the emotions of shock and horror, only the sickening taste that surged up in his throat as he choked, holding it back. He hadn't even been able to fully comprehend what they'd done to his friend before Tony had turned back and calmly, so calmly, put his hands around Doug's throat.
He was stronger than Tony, always had been. It wasn't hard to break the hands free and land a punch to his jaw. Tony had landed in a crumpled heap against the computer, body jerking as the electricity tore through him. Somehow Doug grabbed him and ripped him away, caught him and lowered him to the ground.
He doesn't know long he knelt there, holding him, fluid from the single ruptured wire bleeding on his hand, blood trickling from the skin he'd torn on his knuckles when he'd hit Tony, the two of them and not another living soul, the silence so oppressive he could feel every second slice into his chest, cutting through his lungs. And then he'd gathered Tony up into his arms and walked away.
Don't feel.
He keeps Tony in a special room of the house he bought. Doug has a job with a military laboratory now, one so like his former job that he can't help but see the irony of it all. They're only fifteen years into the future and two cities away from Project Tic-Toc, and he thinks that one day he might be out walking and bump into Ann or one of the others. There would be no need to say anything because fifteen years ago, in another time, another place, they already know.
He takes care of Tony.
The shock and damaged wire has made him docile, responsive to commands that he carries out without questioning. Doug has to lock him in the room when he's gone in case the radio signals he hears constantly in his mind mention suicide and he throws himself off the roof.
He's gotten away from him only once, the once he took him to a discreet doctor who examined him and asked no questions. Somehow while the doctor's back was turned Tony slipped past him and out the door. Doug found him sitting on the fourth story fire escape, knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped around them. Goosebumps had stood out on his bare skin but he hadn't shivered, unable to feel cold or heat since that day. Doug had led him back with little effort, standing stoically, a hand wrapped around Tony's wrist as the doctor sadly shook his head and told him he could do nothing.
He'd already known the answer.
Doesn't hurt.
Some days he wants to rip the circuits from his skin, tear them out piece by piece, and see if Tony is still in there, buried beneath the twisted wires and the hollow metallic flash of his eyes, the eyes he can't bear to look at anymore. But he can't. Because the circuits that they implanted into his back are as much a part of him as his heart and his lungs, every tiny bit of light and metal interwoven with flesh and blood, and he doesn't know if the slightest twist, the smallest tangle in those wires could snuff out all his other organs like a candle in a breath of wind.
In the cruelest mockery of all, Tony's body still behaves much like a human's. He eats and drinks - but only when Doug orders him to, falls asleep every sixteen hours - to the second, and every once in a while he even blinks, lashes opening and closing like the snap of a metronome over unsearchable eyes. Somewhere inside his chest, between flesh and metal, two lungs still draw in air with the timed regularity of a machine, a heart still beats out a pulse, an empty rhythm. Bones still rest beneath the layers of skin and muscles and now useless nerves.
But he doesn't speak, doesn't utter a sound. If they'd implanted a voice within the circuits it was never switched on, or perhaps, Doug wonders, whether it was the severed wire, the one he can't find a function for, a twisted metal thread that silently whispers meaningless words in darkness.
Don't scream.
He holds him, sometimes, the way he used to when Tony was hurting and injured, all those times when they'd been miles from care and he could do so little for him. He'd learned then, sensed in a way, that Tony needed touch, craved it like flowers need the sun, as if some long buried memory of his parents' love only surfaced in times of pain, that there was a hunger to cling to something to block out the loneliness.
He holds him like he'd held the child Tony had been at Pearl Harbor, speaks quietly to him, words like an adult soothing an infant. He doesn't know if he understands, only that Tony seems to respond to the comfort, that the only time he seems like Tony, the fiery, devil-may-care Tony he once was, is at those times.
But Doug can't look into his eyes because he can see it all in those moments, a thousand tears and a million voiceless screams buried inside the blackness, a hundred questions he can never answer, Tony trying to claw his way out and failing, tumbling back down into the darkness, deeper by the day, while he begs for a way out he can't find, cries and pleads within his eyes, flesh and blood against the metal in his spine.
And for all the commands Doug can give him, the simple, vapid words that tell him to eat, to drink, to brush his teeth, he can't make himself say the one he should, the command that sticks in his throat and tears him up inside, the command he can't even give himself. He can't say it because it would hurt too much, rip him wide open and let the rage spill out, the blinding anger at whoever and whatever allowed this to happen, and the desperation he feels when he knows he can do nothing to change what's been done, to make it better. So he says nothing for fear he'll open his mouth and say the words.
The words that command Tony to scream.