What are they going to say? No?
His fingers go to the zipper of their flightsuit, pulling it enough to expose a deep slice of their chest. The cold air of the port crashes against their skin, making them jolt as he peels it off their shoulders, and they make a mental note to check that their CCCD's temperature sensors aren't faulty because the goosebumps can't just be his fault.
His stubble buffets 621's skin as he lays his mouth against their neck, languidly sucking at their jaw, their pulse, the curve where their neck meets their shoulder. 621 runs their fingertips across his chest and feels another pulse of heat press against their thigh as they drag their nails bluntly over his nipples, revelling in how his cock twitches when they touch him.
"Want you," they nip at his ear, feeling his breath stutter against their collarbone, knowing it's obvious but also knowing it's easier than miss you and gets the point across. That cotton blend comes up over his head and stops existing in 621's world. They anchor themselves to him by the tangle of their fingers in his hair and the chill of their prosthetic naked across his shoulders. "Now."
O'Keeffe slides his lips back to theirs, deliberate and deeper with each pass. They kiss him, all heat and force and desperation, translating all their formless anxieties into the language of sex and pouring it all into him, because O'Keeffe doesn't match their urgency but lets them push, and pushes strong and unhurried back against them, like he wants to swallow everything they're giving. Like he can take it.
Like he's used to it. Maybe, like he missed it too.
O'Keeffe kicks, and it unbalances them just enough to make them stagger backwards, except there's nowhere to stagger to. Their leg bumps the bed and sends them tumbling downwards — and if he's going to put in the work to get them on the bed, they're going to put the work in to make sure he comes with.
621 locks their legs around him and they crash into the mattress with a bounce of residual momentum, teeth clacking, because 621 still hasn't let go of his hair and still hasn't let him have more than a half-breath between the volleys of opened-mouthed kisses. They roll their hips up against him, and he grinds back down into them, and they stay on that rhythm for a while, a buzz better than any trigger pull coursing through them from head to toe on every lick of friction and the hard press of his cock against their sex even through the too-many layers of clothes, because for some fucking reason they've both still got their pants on.
621 frees his hair to fix that. They snake their hand down to the hem to feel the thick line of him and suddenly remember how big he'd felt, forty years and seven lives ago, and feel themselves contract impatiently around nothing. O'Keeffe groans into their mouth and pulls back, taking all of the heat and mind-obliterating pressure with him.
621 whines, and then O'Keeffe is hoisting them by the thighs to the edge of the bed, and then they don't mind anymore.
There's his stubble again, delightfully rough against the soft skin of their chest, tongue licking hot fire over every inch of skin he pulls free from the long zipper of their flightsuit. They feel it at the edge of their ostomy port, along their hips and down, their muscles jumping and shuddering with each swipe. 621 props themselves up on their elbows and tilts their hips to give him better access as he pulls the flightsuit down, naked gaze raking them over the horizon of his glasses for what they know is only a second but feels entirely too fucking long, intent and focused, watching every sensation as it travels across their face.
Freed of their flightsuit, O'Keeffe sits back on his heels for a moment, and they can see his jaw tighten. They only get the inhale of their intended assurance out before he slips his glasses off and sinks between their legs.
Then he licks them in one long strong, tongue flat and firm, before circling once around their sex and sucking. 621 bucks and only his grip on their thighs stops them from dislodging him, the raw tear of their voice embarrassingly close to a howl and smothered instantly by their hand over their mouth. O'Keeffe doesn't stop working them, tongue gliding along the length of their arousal and the wet heat spreading across it, but he shifts so he can pull their hand away.
"Let it out. Who's gonna catch us?"
It's hard to make arguments to the contrary with his nose right in the curls of their sex, so they don't. 621 lets their hand drop away, letting their thighs fall a little further open too, moaning appreciably when he goes back to using his mouth to ruin them instead of making words. Somewhere at the edges of their awareness there's a soft, plastic click, and then O'Keeffe's gliding his hand along them too, mixing the wet of his mouth with the wet of their arousal and the wet of the lube (water-based, the smell tells them) until 621 can't tell where one ends and the next begins.
None of it is particularly intense on its own, but the steady, certain lap of his tongue and the diligent wrap of his lips around them stokes an unbearable fire in their veins, made higher and hotter by how he gently slides a finger inside them. They moan, their whole body contracting around the single digit barely knuckle-deep, and O'Keeffe moans with them. The sound vibrates along their bones and threatens to deatomise them right then and there before they've even really begun.
He splays his free hand across their stomach, holding them down with the same unhurried, unyielding pressure he does everything else. It resists them as they twitch and roll and buck against his touch, two fingers now, and they can't spread their legs for him anymore than they already have and he's patient working them open for what's to come but that doesn't mean they don't want it now, now, now. They grasp at the sheets, at him, threading their fingers back into his hair to tug him closer insistently, grinding up into his waiting mouth. They hope it hurts a little bit. He hisses, and they know it does, and those two fingers curl inside them in a way that makes stars explode behind their eyes.
"If you don't," they start, and then their voice leaps an octave and shatters as he sucks hard on their sex. Fucking cheater. "If you don't take your fingers out and put your cock in me right now, O'Keeffe—"
He stops like he's considering it, but it's performative and moreover 621 has seen him do it before. He hums, mouth coming off them just long enough to press a soft kiss into the ridge of their hip bone, leaving a wet smear across it. His face glistens from nose to chin in the pale light of the by-the-hour room.
"You don't change," he says. There's no warmth to it, something stormy behind his eyes, and the contrast is so stark it stretches the sudden lack of intimacy taut.
"Retrograde amnesia precludes that," they bat back with a casualness they don't feel. They can feel this whatever-this-is slipping away and fight to keep them suspended there, floating in something as iridescent and fragile and dependent on tension as a soap bubble.
And then he's tearing a foil open and they don't have to fight for it anymore.
When O'Keeffe comes back to them, he nudges their legs a little more apart, balanced on his knees with one hand braced on the mattress beside them.
When O'Keeffe comes back to them, 621 nudges him with their leg, so they're flipped and 621 is balanced on their knees with one hand braced on the wall beside them.
They hesitate, disoriented by the contradictory position of limbs, and Coral flares red and snowy behind their eyes. The room tastes red. 621 reaches down to wrap their hand around his cock with that potent not-thinking-about-it urgency, and that motion's at least the same, and so is how he groans and 621 keens as they guide him inside them. The so-good ache hits them twice and their exact orientation stops mattering in comparison to the single point of congruency that is him stretching them, the luxurious drag of his thick cock along their walls, how their muscles flutter around him, pleasuring him invisibly.
When he pulls out, they pull him right back in with their knees locked around his hips, not wanting to let go and
When they pull up, he pulls them right back down with his hands locked on their hips, not wanting to let go and
bottoming out on the second stroke. They feel O'Keeffe's cock jolt up against that spot inside them and their whole body tenses, moaning incoherently against the open air. Every push of his length rocks deep into their nerves and wraps around their spine, supplanting the Coral thrum there, until their head falls back and they close their eyes and drill down on the tight hot heat mounting inside them.
And, look, they were never much of an endurance person to begin with, especially when O'Keeffe is moaning and fucking into them with mindless, rhythmless thrusts,
dipping his head
rising
to bite at 621's neck, laying curses and bruises there in equal measure.
They run their free hand along the length of their sex and press their thumb in tight circles against the most sensitive part, working themselves to a sharp frenzy as he drives into them. 621 turns to slot their mouth against his,
He runs a hand along the length of their sex and presses his thumb in tight circles against the most sensitive part, working them to a sharp frenzy as they drive onto him. O'Keeffe turns to slot his mouth against theirs,
sloppy and wet and swallowing each other's sounds. 621 feels the heat of O'Keeffe spilling inside them, the twitching, uneven thrusts,
and when he surges forward against that spot again
and when they surge downwards against that spot again
621 falls apart too, clenched around him and jerking against
their
his
touch, soaking the space between them with sex and sweat and lube and some saliva, too. They lose track of which one of them drags their fingers slow and firm against them, only that it serves to draw out their orgasm, the long, bright line making their hips stutter until every last bolt of pleasure's left them.
They can feel the two flushes of their skin, both sets of boneless and limp limbs, merge back down to a single sensation as the two of them settle against the mattress. They think to ask him if that splitting is something he knows about, if that's some late-developing symptom of gen four that the literature discredits or a problem their past self has already encountered and solved, or if they are just actually losing their mind, while they're still riding the aftershocks and brave enough to ask.
But then they catch O'Keeffe's gaze, face pressed against the hammering cage of their chest, who always looks the least wrecked of the two of them simply because there's not usually enough of him to wreck. Who's sweat-slick hair is sticking to the lines of his augmentation scars and who's looking at them. Just looking. And bringing that stormy expression with him, churning beneath and through and alongside the pleasure-haze, the cold front of what they can only name as suspicion makes them feel brittle all over again, gallium to aluminium.
621 can't meet that gaze anymore so they don't. They wrap their arms around him, pulling him close enough to bury their nose in his hair. Citrus and sweat.
"What do we do?" they ask.
About this, they think.
About Vogelwerke, they think.
About us, they think.
O'Keeffe shrugs. They can feel his eyelashes dance over their skin, the brush of his lips as he speaks. "Live. It sucks, but there's nothing else left."
They don't respond. They just sit there, back in the scorched field of their grief, and O'Keeffe says live but it sounds like give up and something howls inside them and that howl says no.
The bubble pops.
"I don't know if I can do that," they say. It's stronger than they expected, and so is how they push the two of them apart, sitting with legs curled beneath them. "Maybe the me I don't remember being could. Maybe my memory will come back and I'll make peace with it. Maybe in thirty years I'll have figured out how to pull out the knife like you did. But knowing how the chips fell on Ganymede, seeing what's happening on Rubicon..."
Their hands clench, meat and metal alike. They see their own hands. They see Kabuki's hands.
"I can't let it happen again."
O'Keeffe doesn't respond. Just stands, picking up his glasses as he does, and moves to the bathroom.
Hesitates in the door.
"I know."
