Agent Egret, critical member of MTF Alpha-1, has an existential crisis.
FUCK THE STAPLES OUT OF ME by xexnoncores
Further context on the characters included in this tale: SCP-9660 and Everywhere, NY
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ADULT CONTENT
This article contains adult content that may not be suitable for all readers.
Sexual References: Features sexual themes or language, without the depiction of sexual acts.
Sexually Explicit: Description of sexual acts.
Sexual Assault: Features non-consensual sexual acts.
Gore: Depiction of blood, gore or mutilation of body parts.
Child Abuse: Features severe mistreatment of children.
Self-Harm: Description of self-harm.
Suicide: Description of suicide.
Torture: Description of torture.
Unsanitary descriptions of sex.If you are age 18 or above and wish to read such content, then you may click Continue to view said content.
Covered in the blood of one hundred vampires, Agent Egret asks Dr. Amitha Sanmugasunderam, Grand Archmagus of the Foundation’s Sixth Throne, to fuck her without restraint.
Set the scene as thus: iron as far as the eye can see, twisted into baroque shapes beveled beyond the beginning of being. Deep in the basement of a bloodsucker’s nest lies the mystery behind a dozen unsolved alchemical queries and even more about immortality. They may have been a global hive-mind masquerading as individuals, but the truth was their steps could hardly be anywhere except in sync with at least one other pair.
Egret was the one assigned to deliver the final blow to their livelihood(s). Long had their resources been a thorn in the side of the Foundation, taking on whatever allegiances and fortunes that would keep its bodies sustained, keep it on this Earth, keep it away from experimentation, whether Foundation, PENTAGRAM, or otherwise. This was how it had made its living for the past nine centuries with various other rulers of the world.
It was one thing to kill a creature so readily manipulated by survival during a time of warfare. It was another when they wore the skin of humans and had the same tongues as they did, flaunting the very ideals of containment like they were angels sent from the heavens.
When the question is done, Egret sits up and coughs. Bile and blood dribble down her craggy, crooked fangs, some broken and others overstuffed for the gums Overseer Six shoved into her mouth. A lot of it is splattered across a ripped, patchy hoody, nearly torn to shreds. The bodily fluids staining it are holding it together more than its own threads are.
She can’t close her mouth. No matter. It was useful for breaking the vampires’ teeth.
“…So no dice, huh?”
Egret wipes the residue of bat fur and intestinal lining off her legs. What’s left of them anyway. One’s been torn halfway down at the knee, splattered against the nearby wall. Its skin and muscle are painting the portrait of a tall, dark, and wretchedly handsome woman, with eyes as red as twin suns.
The other leg was eaten in the fight.
Amitha sighs on the other end of their psychic link.
“Egret, please just be ready for extraction. You’ve already cleared them out, so Six’s research team will take over the specifics from there.”
“No fun!” She sticks a tongue out like it doesn’t cut just a little bit. “I can get myself out just fine.”
“Please don’t attempt that,” Amitha replies with a sigh. “Six wants to reconfigure you herself.”
Egret shudders. Her stitched-together DNA means that on a base level, she cannot see this as anything else but just another part of the job, but on a higher plane of her own existence, something else stirs within her brain. Something else stirs within the gray matter Six biologically programmed to be as obedient as possible, using loyalty wards, mitochondrial hymns, and ██████████.
She coughs out more blood. The idea of being touched right now by anyone besides Amitha sends a vague chill down her spine.
More coughing. Ah, her staples are coming undone. If she moves much more, her internal organs are going to spill out.
Egret lays back down, frowning. The vampires somehow went at her healing factor, because otherwise she’d have been skipping around this place by now. That’s only been done twice in the history of her career so far, and she wonders to what will happen to her because of it. To undo a part of Six’s work was to undo a part of herself, a crucial piece of the world that she saw as within total control beneath her thumb.
“…Six wants me all to herself, huh? No fair. You’re the only one I want to see me naked.”
Amitha sighs.
“Egret, not now—I’ve got to switch over to the common link for the Overwatch Command soon—”
“Okay, and? They’re all adults, aren’t they?”
“It’s a public—”
“Didn’t know you were into that, wow!”
Egret laughs as Amitha sputters. She can practically feel the heels of her Oxfords coming down in huffed patterns—good. Getting to hear her roused was worth looking a bit stupid. Looking stupid in front of her was routine, but sometimes she laughed because of it.
“You—You—Okay, I’m getting off now. I can’t sense any more of them in the lair you’ve infiltrated—I assume you don’t need my help anymore.”
“Wait, babygirl, please—”
Egret stumbles over the second where she is really sure that Amitha will hang up on her. The air is still charred from the raybeams her mathematical logo-magic rained down half an hour ago, but it can’t think about smelling worse than Egret’s trepidation.
“…I’m listening.”
That voice. That voice with such a clear, precise cadence, every syllable enunciated perfectly, pristinely, profoundly.
Egret likes being like this. Likes having Amitha, the Foundation’s thaumic equivalent of a nuclear drone, hovering over her shoulder metaphorically with all of the attention she could give. The attention of a beautiful and powerful magician elevates her from a homunculus bodyguard to something more important, someone more important, and more importantly, someone worth dying for.
She hopes some of the research team will die getting in here. To make it a real memory for them, something more than a simple extraction mission. Six will take note of that, if so.
“…Stay with me. I don’t like the silence. You never know what will come out of it.”
That’s a lie. Egret knows it. Amitha has built twice-over a mental map of this place, built it in what was undoubtedly where she kept all of her magic: that fancy mind palace of hers. If anyone was still alive, they’d have been vaporized, down to their electrons, protons and neutrons.
“…I really have to go,” Amitha says hurriedly, just as some loud clanging in the background burbles over like intercom static. “I will see you once Six has fixed you.”
Those words. Egret wonders if the uneasiness in Amitha’s voice was imagined for her own comfort or if the same kind of fear existed in her. In the silence of a massive, sprawling underground complex, it’s all she can ruminate on as the tracker watch on her wrist slowly begins to blink.
Overseer Six. The Foundation’s ultimate wizard scientist. Whether she was a woman, an alien, a bunch of sentient crystals in a trenchcoat, or not even of this dimensional plane, she was a mystery that getting up close would never solve.
Egret knew that because every time she was slated for reconstitution, something different from Six poured into her mind. Into where her soul would have been, had she been born of a womb and not a test tube.
She wanted that residue to last, once. When she first emerged from nascence, Six looked something like an angel, with seven hands that had ten fingers each, a rainbow aureole glowing around her head as she laid Egret’s soft, vulnerable flesh into a white-padded box.
When she was presented to Amitha like a gift, bound by her hands until she freed herself with her own strength, Six looked like a demon, with a crown of thorns piercing twelve black curved horns.
Amitha recoiled the first time she saw Egret. Basically everyone did. It was normal. The homunculi Alpha-1 program was not popular, but it was brutally effective.
Thinking now, Egret knows that the extraction team will do the same thing. She knows in their white hazmat suits they will still hesitate to touch her, still hesitate to dance padded hands against her grey flesh like they would a normal human, and that’s okay. It’s supposed to be okay. Egret was programmed to take it, her cortisol levels largely detached from social input, as was her adrenaline. The hormones of shame, and anxiety, those silly things that kept humans from operating at peak performance due to overexposure.
But she’s pondering over this as she’s helpless. Defenseless. Unable to access all of her competency, what she was made for, leaving her with only her loyalty, which couldn’t match the weight of the legs she had lost.
The only thing left to do with her loyalty is to wish Amitha was here. It’s to wish she was here to look Egret in the eye and have her chide her sloppiness, her appetite, her appearance after a fight, whatever.
Because Egret knows she deserves it, knows Six will likely do all of that and more.
It’s then that Egret transposes the imagined face of Six onto the white, formless bodies which will be slotting her into another box for transport, not even a chair or something to balance her legs.
Would Amitha hurt her like that? She could get snappy, but only because that was just how she was. That was just how Egret was told she’d be treated by her ward.
But as the years have slipped by, she finds the notion of a box hurting more and more concerning. More and more shameful, more and more childish, more and more humiliating.
Humiliating because she knows even if she cannot feel anything because of it, there are eyes and hands touching her that judge her performance without knowing her, judge her on a scorecard bingo she’s inevitably failing to blackout each and every time, which Amitha does. Amitha always get bingo.
…Amitha always gets bingo.
Amitha always gets bingo because Amitha always gets brought back with grace. Egret has to be forced into a new body via the mouth and out comes a new one.
…Hm.
Egret thinks on this notion for a moment. It has never occurred to her, but now that she is bleeding out for everything that it’s worth, she decides that she does not like it. She does not like it as much as her organs can allow.
She does not like it and she becomes afraid for a brief second that everything about her will collapse, that her doubt will spiral out of control to become some new monster, some new creature, some new thing.
This wasn’t against what she was made for, right?
Why does Amitha get to fix herself?
Why does Six let Amitha come back with grace? Her revivals were painless compared to Egret’s.
Why would she even—
—Egret hears footsteps.
Ah. They’re here.
She curls up, hiding her face and pretending she’s in a cocoon as she used to do. When her lungs were first forming, her brain stem.
When she had no eyes to see, unlike now in which she knows if she opens them, she will see a tranquilizer dart aiming for some vital vein.
The footsteps approach, and someone draws a gun. Egret draws a deep breath, knowing they rarely care to aim it properly.
No matter. It hits without a snag between one of her staples, right along her back, and at that moment all of her intestines spill out with a disappointingly quiet gush.
Lights out.
The operating table is cold. The surgical lamps above it are even colder.
Egret is splayed out naked, her body clamped at every crucial checkpoint. Neck, arms, stomach, just above where her legs used to be and—
Right as she opens her eyes, them too.
Six speaks with her usual voice. The one that sounds like she’s speaking over a cup of tea.
“Reconstitution isn’t an option with the large amount of body mass you still have left. Lift your legs up.”
“Yes ma’am,” Egret replies, as soldier-like as she can muster. She obeys, shuddering.
“What was that for?”
Egret says nothing. Something drags keratin over steel, up and close to her ear.
“Nothing,” Egret replies. “…It’s cold.”
“Your homeostatic equilibrium is undamaged. Your vagus nerve is intact. Unless something is malfunctioning within your guts, do not open your mouth.”
Egret sighs, pursing her lips together quickly. If Amitha were here, she could probably snuggle up to her for warmth. She’d need a blanket first, but she’d have been offered one already.
She’d probably have been able to steal a bit of Amitha’s coffee too, provided the Overseer’s minions didn’t brew it themselves. Amitha likes her coffee with seven espressos and one milk, no sugar. Egret doesn’t know what sugar tastes like, let alone in something like coffee, which she didn’t need to stay alert but also wasn’t allowed to drink for the first month of her life.
What would I look like eating that? she wonders.
She can only think of herself eating it off the floor.
With that, she gives another small sigh.
And for her show of insubordination, something quickly fills her mouth, grabbing her teeth with digits made of a claylike material. Egret has no time to react before her neck is raised so high that it rips her head from her body.
Thud.
Someone screams. The dead body on the floor curdles into sacks of fat and congealed blood. The air bloats with the stench of sweat, rot, and recalcitrant recalcification as Egret’s body is remade from the outline of traitor’s.
Amitha takes an exhale so deep Egret can hear it over the cracking of her bones. When she stands up, she’s not smiling, and she does not face Amitha, merely bowing her head as she goes to the corner to sit.
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Egret replies.
Amitha pauses. “…Egret?”
“I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah, why?”
Amitha’s words taste like concrete. There is no reply. Egret wonders if Six put a tapeworm in her gut again, and if so, how capable it was of reading minds. It would certainly be flourishing because of her diet; is that why homunculi eat organs the way they do? Why they hungered for little else than protein from offal?
“…No reason.”
“Why would you ask me that, Ami?”
Egret does not know if Amitha has ever seen her sulk. Truthfully, she can’t remember the last time she’s done it—she was either too busy chewing on something, killing someone, or on lookout for her ward, even if it was in a way she knew annoyed her.
With a held breath, Egret turns around and slides down the wall, hoping that Amitha would still be there waiting to ask the question again.
She’s not. She’s sitting down on the floor now, drawing out some kind of sigil with copper wire and mashed cicada eggs.
Egret frowns deeper.
Watching Amitha work was a lesson in tedium most of the time, a lesson she didn’t need to learn and one which she physically could not understand, even if she wanted to. Egret had recognized what she was working with always, but only on a base, instinctual level, one which weaved through her bones but not her hands or her mind. When she needed to perform for her, it was always a summoned memory, a summoned muscle which told her how to carve the ritual knife.
The equations Amitha worked with were also physically blocked out in Egret’s mind, tangled together through a web of loyalty oaths stitched into her hippocampus.
She thought once the numbers had antimemetic properties. That was a credible explanation for why everything just became black when she saw what was clearly light flashing beneath Amitha’s palms.
Now, she stumbles upon the realization Six just made her that way watching Amitha draw a symbol in dripping cetacean guts. Made her incapable of looking at numerals without a supernatural blockade in her mind.
Six made me stupid on purpose.
Egret sits with that thought as she watches Amitha quietly ignore her like she always does. Her hands fly over incandescent ink that leaves behind a residue of eye sockets. Little gaping holes that exist for a moment in abyssal darkness, and are quickly gone when wiped away.
Soon, she is loading the ink into a vial filled with golden ichor, blood without its ruby hue. Likely from some kind of fae, but there’s a good chance it could have come from the bone marrow of a vampire too. The Overwatch Command did just come into a plentiful supply of them because of Egret’s efforts.
But those efforts don’t matter to her at this moment. What matters is how her heart flutters watching Amitha’s hands work the apparatus, how her lithe little fingers turn each and every knob to the most precise of angles.
When she’s pressing buttons, she’s doing so with purpose, in some kind of pattern, obviously. Egret knows by memory that Amitha’s favorite patterns were found in something called “set theory”, which Egret has not asked her to explain because she knows she will hate it. Amitha is not a teacher, she did not learn mathematics to teach, she learned it to kill people and it was perhaps the best tool in the world to do that.
The best tool in the world because Six does not punish Amitha. She does not punish someone who is irreplaceable; she can rule over them by fear and force, still. The threat of death is enough to put most people into line, and Egret knows this all too well.
This does not make her dependent, because it was good to grow good tigers. They kept the dogs in line.
Egret considers this one of the only things she knows for sure. One of the only things she can say she was smart for figuring out, even if it was a very basic fact of life.
She has never told this to Amitha, because Amitha must have figured that out long ago.
“…Amitha?”
No answer. Just like a lot of other times, but today it seems to sting a little harder than usual.
“Babygirl?”
Still nothing. That’s gotten Amitha to fuck her before, but it didn’t always work. She was more liable to just scoff, turn her head, or click her tongue, whatever she was feeling like. After firefights, it usually got Egret a firm “stop it”, even though she knew Amitha didn’t really want that.
Second thing Egret knows for sure: Amitha doesn’t want her to stop saying that. By now, what was once annoyance with her homunculi bodyguard coming built in with an adoration affection to her was now a subtle acceptance of what that could mean, what they could mean, how they could mean.
Egret doesn’t know the answer to the last one. Every time Amitha has sex with her, she feels like something inside of her is being fulfilled. Filled as it was being fulfilled, if she wanted to get filthy about it.
But then it stops, and they have to go back to work again.
“…Sweetie pie?”
Amitha stops for just a second before resuming her routine. Egret knows she can’t afford to lose much time; she’s being asked to kill so many people and be the operational cornerstone for many a sites’ security.
Egret smiles, but only for a second. Does Amitha love her? Is she capable of being loved? Six made them both to kill, but only one of them got a personal one-on-one session once a month. Only one of them got a performance review straight from the horse’s mouth, the big horse that made all of the rules.
Egret would question the Overseer if she wasn’t a formless mass capable of recycling her soulless husk into someone new, a new shiny plaything Amitha would probably fuck all over again because she was lonely. They only had each other.
Is that something Egret can say she knows?
That Amitha is lonely?
Can you say that when Six was always watching?
What did loneliness feel like?
…
Egret pulls her legs in, biting down on the thick camo of her pants.
What would Six think if she knew she was thinking like this? If she knew that the dog she created was looking up at the doctor and wondering why it couldn’t be that too?
Why couldn’t Egret be irreplaceable like Amitha?
She pulls out one of her own hands to look at. Her skin is the color of the traitor’s, mottled grey with staples that shine dully in the room’s ambient yellow bulbs.
Recycled. Trash. Re-integrated back into the system, reconstituted from old parts.
This was how Six referred to her when speaking to Amitha.
Egret looks at Amitha’s back and casts her gaze down to the floor.
There’s nothing to do now. Egret’s forcefully quaint well of knowledge has been exhausted, sapped dry from these new discoveries and revelations which she will now be unable to do anything with. They simply exist in her mind, alongside her self, the drive to protect Amitha, the closest thing she can call love.
Is that what Egret wants to call this?
There are too many things going on now.
Six made you stupid so you wouldn’t be better than the doctor she wanted to give you to. So there wouldn’t be two mouths to feed, two people to tutor, two distractions from her work.
Egret tries to picture the number two and fails.
When she fails, she stops watching Amitha work and blinks away black tears from her eyes.
—
Amitha is done an hour early. There are two hours left in her day.
She only needs to sleep an hour. Six mandated this, gave her runes which collapsed a full night’s rest into a single span of easy time, time in which Egret does not rest either. She rarely rests, she does not need to; she has no circadian rhythm and cannot dream.
Another thing Six took away from me, she thinks, not realizing Amitha also cannot dream. She gave that up a long time ago with most of her memories when she became the Archmagus of the Sixth Throne.
Amitha taps her awake. Egret wipes her eyes and looks up.
“…Why are you crying?”
Egret takes a breath. “Does it matter?”
Amitha steps back. “…You don’t usually cry.”
“I don’t usually do a lot of things.”
Amitha shudders.
“…Egret? Are you…okay?”
A pause. “I’ll be fine. Normal, once you go to sleep. Don’t worry about it.”
Amitha does not move. She is frozen still, with a very wide look of shock on her face.
“…Please, smile for me again.”
Egret complies. Amitha relaxes.
“…What was that for?” Egret asks this question softly, like someone was rubbing a blister.
“…I just wanted to know if you were functional. Six did not create you to have emotional lows for very long.”
That word. Functional.
I am not a dog.
“Six also made me unable to picture what the number nine looks like, so I think it’s safe to say there’s a lot of me that isn’t particularly functional. But it’s okay. You can—”
Egret thinks about ordering Amitha to go to bed and doesn’t. It feels wrong on the tongue. Feels wrong in her brain, making her do something she didn’t want to.
“…What?”
Amitha backs up.
“You heard me,” Egret says.
“That’s why you’re moping? You don’t know what a number looks like?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of stupid when I know someone like you, isn’t it?”
Egret can't see Amitha's face at this moment. She doesn’t want to; there’s a good chance she’s stumbled upon the same conclusion she has, so it’s best not to share the misery.
If…Amitha found that miserable in the first place.
Egret peels her head up to watch Amitha pace around, taking her suit off to put on a sheer nightgown. She wears underwear that matches the color of her hair.
“…Well?”
“Well what?” Amitha pulls her hair up into a ponytail; it’s messy from a lack of being combed over the past five days.
“…It’s not a shame or anything?”
“You not knowing numbers? Six told me about that a while ago.”
Egret’s jaw drops to the floor.
“You…knew and you didn’t tell me?”
Is there anger rising in her voice?
“It wasn’t important,” Amitha replies coolly, sitting on the bed. She is very skinny, just a tad underweight. Egret knows this and knows it’s how Six likes to keep her body; it was easiest to care for her this way.
She also likes this. When Amitha is on top of her, Egret’s heart swells full of pride that she can grab all of Amitha in her arms.
“Not important that I don’t—that’s a whole part of the world I just can’t understand!”
“You don’t need to.”
“But what if I want to?”
“Why?”
Egret contemplates.
“…I don’t want to be replaced.”
Amitha pauses. “…I don’t want you to be replaced either.”
“She could do it really easily!”
“I know, Egret.”
Egret stands up.
The entire room stands on its axis towards her. Metaphorically, obviously, she couldn’t have a thaumic bone in her body unless she ate one.
“Does that not bother you?! That she gave you someone stupid?!”
Amitha sighs, pulling the covers over herself. “It is what it is, Egret, you and I know better than to want to change anything about it.”
Egret bolts to her side, grabbing Amitha’s hand about as forcefully as she can muster. Amitha gasps, squealing, and Egret lets her go as soon as she’s realized what she’s done.
“I’m sorry—”
“Agent Egret, what has gotten into you?!”
“Don’t say that!”
“Don’t say what?! your designation is what it is, there’s no changing—”
“I DON’T WANT TO BE YOUR DOG ANYMORE!”
Amitha stops. Egret puts her head in her hands.
The two freeze collectively as Egret meanders over her own thoughts, her own feelings, over what is real and what isn’t. What should be real, if she was a human person, what that might even feel like. Is sadness supposed to be all sticky like this?
Is it supposed to want to kill you?
“…Amitha, I’m very stupid, just like a dog,” Ehret begins. “Six made me that way, and I’m lesser because of it.”
“You’ve kept your identity as compared to the rest of the homunculi on your task force—”
“Don’t care! What does any of it matter if just the mere—the mere—”
What does she want to say?
Something to do with…Six just having…something on her, able to…
No. That’s not it.
She covers her face with her hands, sobbing softly as her teeth shred cuts into her fingers. Amitha’s teeth are all nice and straight. Nobody would complain about them.
Wow, what’s gotten into you, Egret? If you keep this up, the Overseer will kill you.
I know! I didn’t ask for this, I didn’t ask to be made!
“…Six is always looking at me. I didn’t ask for that,” she says quietly. “One day they’re gonna replace me with an identical copy, and you won’t be able to tell the difference. You’ll be loving someone else, and won’t miss me at all.”
Amitha clasps her hands together diminutively.
“…How would I know if you’re alike in memories and behavior?”
“You’re saying you wouldn’t mourn me.”
“I wouldn’t know I’d need to.”
“Would you be allowed to?”
“Egret—”
“Answer the question.”
Amitha doesn’t.
Silence fills the air as Egret’s eyes well with tears, black staining her eyes. Everything stains, from her hands, to her clothes, to her cheeks.
Amitha gets up from the bed to cradle Egret’s hands in hers.
“…I’m sorry. I don’t have the words.”
“Bullshit,” Egret spits. Her mouth is filling with slobber as she continues to cry. “You have something for everything.”
“Not this,” Amitha rasps, grabbing ahold of Egret in a way which she doesn’t register at all.
“Six is going to kill me. She hates my existence.”
“She needs you,” Amitha says calmly.
“She needs my fists, and my teeth, which she can make more of at any time. No, I’m just a—”
Amitha pulls Egret back onto the bed and holds her, shaking against herself, with wide brown eyes looking up towards the ceiling and down towards the floor. She shuffles Egret’s feet off the metal tile onto the bed, as ragged as it was—it was still the softest thing either was allowed to be on.
“H-Hey—!”
Amitha does not let her go. “Please, stop.”
“No!”
Amitha holds her tighter. Egret doesn’t resist.
“…Don’t say such things,” Amitha whispers, carefully, quietly, nauseatingly, as if she’s trying to avoid some great omen.
Egret faux struggles against her. “I will if I want—”
“If Six wants you gone, I will make her go through me first.”
Silence.
“Liar.”
Amitha stiffens. “I know.”
Egret lowers her arms and recognizes now the sensation of touch again against her shame. She hugs Amitha back, who is now practically clawing into her.
“…I have no other comfort to give you,” she responds carefully. “Six could replace you a dozen times, torture you for fun each and every round, and give unto me a new make of you as much as she wants—I don’t know if she’s not done it already. There would be no way to know.”
Egret shudders. “…You think she has?”
“She knows what we are.”
“…Is she going to make us stop?”
“I don’t know.”
Amitha nestles her head into the crook of Egret’s neck, her lips brushing up against small slices of cold metal. Egret lets herself be pushed down, and she relishes how Amitha’s nearly naked body feels against her clothes.
“…I wish I could be rid of these staples,” Egret says quietly, as Amitha kisses her neck gently. She is always so stiff when she does this, but neither cares. “Get rid of a little bit of what Six put in me.”
“Please, don’t say that,” Amitha begs.
“I don’t mean that in a—” Egret remembers the body she was revived in. “…Naughty way, I just want someone else besides her over me.”
“You’re malfunctioning.” Amitha kisses her shaking.
“I don’t think so,” Egret replies. “My objective is still clear: serve the Foundation, and protect you. I can put those two things together without Six, right? Right?”
Egret pulls Amitha close to her like she’s looking for an answer again.
“…I suppose,” Amitha replies. “But you shouldn’t.”
“I don’t hate her.”
“Nobody hates Overseers, Egret—not without consequences—”
“You don’t think I know that?”
“You do, I just, I just—”
Amitha sighs and curls up on her, palming Egret’s chest and arms.
“I know you know that. Just please, don’t tempt Six the way I do. You’re more perfect when there’s no expectations from you besides the base and bestial,” Amitha replies, with nothing else to say.
“…Expectations?”
“Six wants me to move the world most of the time. It’s exhausting.”
Egret flops her over on the other side of the bed to look at her. Both of their hair is messed up heavily.
“You asked for this.”
“I love what I do.”
“Do you think you can love me?”
Amitha considers this for a moment.
“I suppose so. You’re all I have after all.”
All you have, Egret thinks.
She’s reminded of then, cradling Amitha’s face in her hands, of the time again when she was presented to her for the first time.
Once Egret freed herself from her box, Six made Amitha get on her knees. Egret was instructed to avert her eyes and get on the floor, but she had stolen a holy glance in those first moments.
Amitha’s face was smeared in some kind of glowing yellow paste, across her cheeks, forehead, and lips. Six did this in sigils of delicate, ornate flowers that grew from this fertile soil, poppies, roses, irises, all black, stained black, dripping red, crying white—
She doesn’t know what all of that was for, but she knows that Amitha was made sacred, somehow, because of it. That her soul, accepting this eternal gift from her Overseer, was now bound by a golden thread, which could make her bleed as easily as it could heal.
Egret kisses Amitha thinking of that, knowing it will never happen to her. But she supposes she can take this bridal gift away from Six, just for a little bit, pull her down into the mud, to filthy and defile herself, because Six isn’t watching. Right? If she is, let her, because it doesn’t seem like she has any power when it comes to this realm of existence.
The lowest of lowest sin—no Overseer would dare defile themselves in this except to create something worse. Living it was an entirely different experience.
“Amitha.”
“Yes?”
Egret smiles. “Can you fuck the staples out of me?”
Amitha pauses.
“Why?”
“It would be an honor. To come undone by your hand, more than Six ever could ever unmake me.”
“Egret, I can’t possibly—”
“You’re a doctor, aren’t you?” She slides her hoodie off and tosses it haphazardly on the floor. “Just fix me up afterwards.”
“I’m not going to—”
Egret leans up and bites at the air near Amitha’s ear. Her blood would taste like O positive, salty and slightly stringent.
“Fuck the staples out of me, babygirl. Get inside of me, so I can know what it’s like to feel smart for once.”
Egret can feel Amitha’s face heating up. Her mouth twitching, her muscles tensing, her heart beating in double-time.
Without another word, she leans up. In the ambiance, she looks radiant, glowing, a sun ready to implode into a black hole.
Amitha slips Egret’s pants off, revealing a set of genitals which are functional enough, surrounded by a halo of sharp, angular staples.
There is nothing said between them as Amitha’s trimmed nails waltz around each tiny metal face. Each seam of skin held together so precariously, so smoothly, so snuggly.
It tickles. Egret’s skin is tight.
Yes, Egret feels tight. She spreads her legs, smiling widely. She imagines what will spill out if Amitha goes further, how warm it’ll all be, how hot it’ll all feel upon her skin, her very very unblemished skin—
Amitha settles down on top of her, kissing her. Her lips find the base of knotted canines, her nose pressing up against where there’s a seam stitching Egret’s cheek together. It takes all of Egret’s restraint to resist clamping her muscular legs over Amitha’s own.
“Do you like the teeth now?”
“I’m just glad your breath doesn’t smell fetid,” Amitha whispers, kissing her again, this time near her ear. Egret growls, proud that her new habit of stealing perfume from corpses and eating it seemed to be working out. It tasted like hell, but it got the mystery offal stench out.
She grabs Amitha’s leg and squeezes. A perfect mixture of fat and muscle layered against each other.
Egret’s mind flares with Amitha’s lower half filled with her—
“Fuck my staples off,” she hisses into her ear. “Do it now.”
Amitha gasps as Egret pulls her down onto her chest, the height difference about a foot and a half.
When her rough hands claw off Amitha’s silk, Egret feels a warmth surging her crotch.
Amitha flings the staple aside, looking not at it but Egret, who is slowly beginning to buck into her.
“You know me so well, Amitha—”
That was one of the most crucial ones. The one carrying three seams’ weight at the same time.
Egret’s blood is blue. A bright, shiny, sapphire blue. A single bead of it wells upon her skin as Amitha picks off another one, higher this time, kissing her. Her eyes are pricking with tears now.
“Faster, Amitha, faster—!”
And Amitha obliges. Without looking at her handiwork, staple after staple pops off, the squelching of intestines, fluid, and blood spilling between their stomachs.
Egret moans deeply. She pulled Amitha’s ass up so her crotch could find the hot pillow of her small intestines peeking out of her now like a breast would a too-small bra.
Amitha grunts, but she takes the invitation and moves Egret’s hand to tear her underwear off. It peels with ease; good—because Egret was drooling so deeply that she was nearly losing herself.
“Puhhhhhlease—”
She giggles, knowing now there’s a timer until she passes out from blood loss. Her head was already fogging from ecstasy, from imagining how the fat from Amitha’s legs would move around her large intestines and bladder.
Again. Another staple. And again. More blood, more guts, more spilling vessels. Maybe even a nerve if they were lucky and Egret’s spine got exposed? Higher her hands go, unleashing more of her guts upon her naked body.
This is heaven. This is desecration. This is happening because it’s a perversion of Six’s beautiful creation, made not to love but to harm. Now she is mixing those two things together in a blissful matrimony.
Amitha huffs as she rubs a bloodied clit against Egret’s muscular leg. That was the most common way for them to get off together.
“Egret—this isn’t going to—”
She’s right. Neither is going to climax like this.
But bad sex can be good love too. Egret kisses Amitha, spitting up blood into her mouth as she coughs a little bit of vomit too.
One minute now.
Egret leans back, huffing deeply. There’s not a lot of nerves inside of smooth muscle tissue, so the only pain she’s feeling is from where her epidermis is exposed to the open air.
Despite everything, Amitha leans up and kisses her again. She mixes her naked torso with Egret’s serous fluid, her breasts smeared with blood. The fat is delightful, and the other thing besides skin the two can definitively say they feel against each other.
“You’re a lot smarter than you give yourself credit for,” Amitha whispers into Egret’s ear.
“Oh yeah?” Egret’s voice is delirious with the heavy weight of herself unleashed upon the bed.
“I’ve wanted to rip you apart since I first saw you, first thought of you as annoying.”
“Haha, you can take my mouth apart if you wa—”
Without another word, Amitha yanks the staples off Egret’s tongue with her own teeth. She mixes their drool together like she’s drinking water, pressing her nose against Egret as she takes her bloody tongue onto her own and—
Swallows.
Egret would have cum right and there if her clitoris wasn’t somewhere else in this mess.
And with that, the world goes dark.
Twenty-four hours later, she wakes up in Amitha’s bloody bed again with the biggest smile on her face.
There’s nothing else to say between them. It was a filthy act, and Amitha is all cleaned up. Six is nowhere to be found, they both have their bodies, their soul husks, their blood.
“Do you think Six knows?”
Amitha doesn’t say anything. She’s working.
Egret considers this and now, is happy the doctor is hers. All hers.
The Foundation may have been stuffed into the both of them, but Egret outsmarted Six for just a second to bring down her creation into filth and love for a beloved moment.
That belief is what Egret holds, regardless of its truth. It’s what she considers her axiom, her meaning for that minute, extending into more.
Her belief was justified by the fact Amitha would do it again if she asked.
“…If she did, I’d have to congratulate you on doing one of the few things that could possibly make her stomach turn.”
Egret stares at her in disbelief for a moment before pumping her hands in the air with the giddiest laugh she’s had all her artificially-created life.