(Fic) Natalis Solis Invicti

[black_sluggard]

Title: Natalis Solis Invicti
Fandoms: Almost Human
Rating: PG-13
Genre: Science Fiction, Angst, Romance
Warnings: Mild references to abduction, disfigurement and suicide,
Details: Slash, wing!fic, transhumanism, biohacking, body modification, super science, cybernetics, body horror, loss of identity, dissonance, dysphoria, unbetad.
Characters/Pairings: John Kennex/Dorian, Rudy Lom.
Wordcount: 2,732
Summary: Some things simply defy easy definition...
Notes: Anyone who knows me knew that my writing for this fandom was inevitable. Still, this wasn't quite the fic I'd imagined would be my first.
Written for isiskitsune's wing!fic prompt on almosthumantv. I have never written proper wing!fic before. I hope it's enjoyable. :)

They were... Beautiful, actually. Exquisite. A work of art. Rudy had all but had an orgasm examining one of the feathers beneath a microscope. At a reduced scale they didn't look like natural feathers at all—the structure was more crystalline, iridescent, shifting between translucent shades of copper and warm green. Yet to the naked eye they appeared a brilliant, faintly luminous gold-white, and to the touch were just as cloud-soft as they looked. Objectively, even John was forced to admit that they were beautiful...

Though it didn't soothe the part of him that wanted nothing more than to tear them away from his spine.

According to Rudy every feather was a solar receptor, drinking in energy from the sun to power the whole apparatus, from the strong bones of ultra-light carbon-microstructure to the fine, fragile-seeming web of circuitry that had invaded his body like kudzu, digging deep into his flesh to claim a home for itself. Its tendrils had woven into the vulnerable spaces of his spinal column, anchoring in honeycomb holes bored into his bones, interfacing almost seamlessly with sophisticated elements implanted in his brain-stem and inside his skull. Nerves to wires, it was the most delicate work of cybernetics the technician had ever seen. The technology could have revolutionized multiple fields, but instead its perverse architect was now serving fifty-to-life. For abduction and wrongful imprisonment, for unlawful human experimentation and unlicensed surgery, for aggravated assault on a police officer—

For the feat of depraved genius, the masterpiece of scientific art that had been inflicted on John against his will.

The prognosis was one of permanence—the hardware ran far too deep to be removed, not without killing him. Rudy's sole attempt to dismantle the external components had unleashed a relentless frenzy of chaotic error messages that his brain had interpreted as blinding pain. The damned things were now a part of him, and would be for the foreseeable future, probably until the day he died. Possibly longer.

It was very possible they would still hold claim long after the rest of him had decayed off the bone.

There was no escaping the abomination of science shackled to his flesh. In bitter resignation he was forced to appreciate their design—alarmingly strong but very light-weight, and brilliantly articulated. Each feather is independently mobile, enabling the enormous wingspan to compact itself to a remarkable degree. Folded together against his back in a posture reminiscent of prayer, the wings are almost small enough to be hidden. Almost, but not quite.

They didn't want to be hidden.

John knew he shouldn't think of it that way. The program driving the wings wasn't an AI—it did not possess a consciousness, or wants, or an agenda. It had needs, though, and it was insistent about them. The machine needed the sun with a hunger that gnawed at his nerves. Too long in the dark and it began to fail, dragging his health and his coordination down with it.

Every morning he was forced to expose what he would prefer never see the light of day.

The feathers were a snowy, swan-white, but in form the wings were elliptical—the low aspect ratio, slotted pinions of a bird of prey. They drew the eye like a beacon. The rooftop of the station was the safest place—open to the sky yet hidden from most eyes, and room enough to spread them wide and welcome the sun inside of him.

And the greatest indignity—the most damning by far—was how good it felt.

There were sensors on every feather, and through them he could taste the wind. Pressure, direction, speed, humidity, temperature—the program crunched the numbers in the background, feeding raw data into his brain as simple awareness. That awareness had an insidious way for worming past whatever barriers John put up to try and ignore it. And in some unnamed, primitive part of him, it whispered seductively of the thermal winds over the city, and how to ride them with an ease like natural born instinct. Because that was another thing it wanted, somehow, without wanting...

Every morning, as he stood with their full span outstretched in the sunlight, the wings ached for the sky.

But for now—for right now—the sun was enough. Just enough. It tingled and hummed in his blood, suffusing his bones—natural and synthetic—with a glowing warmth. And the blissful, buzzing heat lit his mind with a bright euphoria that left him feeling as volatile as it did weightless and insubstantial. Excited, overstimulated—

Electric.

The sensation always sent a shudder down his spine. His feelings about it were too complex to fully identify as either ecstasy or disgust.

Dorian often watched him as he took the sun inside himself. John had objected in the beginning, but it had since become just another part of his life that the synthetic man had invaded without invitation—which was, itself, a list of whose items he had long lost count. And John would have chosen to count those moments among his rare blessings—they were, after all, the only time the android was quiet. Yet as aggravating as he so often found Dorian's needling, there was something about his watchful silence that was indescribably unsettling. John wondered sometimes what the android was thinking. Did the sight of the wings captivate him the way it did for everyone else? Was he on guard, set to defend John's dignity from gawkers? Was there maybe a part of him amused by the sight of a human being forced to recharge?

Or was it simply an expression of his protective programming—his concern—against the possibility that John might jump?

John had entertained that particular worry himself, and more than once. The impulse was there. There was even a part of him that wished it really was some kind of self-destructive response to the latest disfiguring trauma that was devouring his life whole. But it wasn't and John knew it. The urge to jump—to make that first, tempting leap of faith—was growing stronger with every passing day, and John felt like he was losing ground with terrifying speed. Losing pieces of himself—

And there were already so very few left to spare.

If it had been a rough battle relearning who John Kennex was after his coma and the loss of his leg, he was damned if he knew that man now. He was beginning to despair that he ever would. The experience had changed him—was still changing him—both inside and out, in ways too many and too strange for him to track.

He hardly recognized himself in the mirror anymore.

The draw of the sun had left its own marks on his flesh—like an external reflection of the corruption working within—deepening his tan and setting threads of gold in his hair. Dorian had joked about it only once, suggesting he bleach the rest of his hair to match. John hadn't laughed and he doubted Dorian had expected him to, but the gentle quirk of his partner's lips had kindled a very different kind of warmth, touching a part of him that had otherwise lain cold since the scalpel's first cut.

John hadn't laughed, but it had been the most human he had felt in a very long time.

A few days later, he had almost asked Dorian why it was he came. Why he watched. John had almost asked, but as the sun rose the shadows had peeled away from his partner's features, revealing that same, soft smile—and suddenly he didn't have to ask, he knew. And Dorian knew what he knew the moment John knew it himself—

He must have, because Dorian chose that instant to close the space between them.

They soon stood far closer than they normally would face to face. To an unwanted observer it would hardly have seemed extraordinary, but for John it was an impossible detail to ignore. Dorian had been testing John's boundaries for as long as they had worked together—practically from the moment Dorian had opened his eyes. Every playful jibe, every pointed question had been a means for Dorian to test how far he might go—how much John would let him get away with—and always, previously, the android had pushed only to the point where he pushed back. But over the course of their partnership Dorian had managed to work his way under John's skin, subtly and completely. And John knew—and had known, though for just how long he could hardly say—that they were well past the point where either one of them could function profitably without the other.

At this point attempting to extricate the DRN from his life would be just as hopeless and as agonizingly unthinkable as severing one of his limbs—wanted or unwanted, synthetic or otherwise.

All the same, as Dorian took that step toward him, John knew there was still one line there that had yet to be crossed—a line that he knew was about to be crossed, into territory from which they were both acutely aware there might be no turning back. Dorian stood motionless before him, his statue-like stillness still somehow palpably animate in a way no other android ever managed. Eyes locked, for the longest time neither of them dared to speak. Finally, after uncounted seconds of galvanic tension, the moment was broken by a flicker of Dorian's eyes beyond John's shoulder...

And then Dorian reached out his hand.

The movement was slow and deliberate, each part of the gesture telegraphing his intent—John could easily have stopped him, and perhaps he should have. But though his heart had started to pound like it wanted to break out of his chest, any apprehension he might have felt was swallowed up cleanly by another feeling altogether...

Anticipation.

Until now, John hadn't let anyone touch the wings except for Rudy, and then only because it was necessary. And ever since Rudy had given up, declaring their removal an impossibility, no one else had even seen them but Dorian. That exception had never struck him before as being suspect—it was Dorian's job to have John's back when he was vulnerable, and John never felt more vulnerable than when he was forced to let that which had been done to him lie exposed. Only Dorian was allowed to see him like this—to see the horror of humanity and inhumanity—of flesh and tech—juxtaposed with a brutal, artistic flare that he spent every other moment of every day trying so desperately to banish, as much from his own thoughts as from sight.

Only Dorian had been allowed to see, and now it seemed that John was prepared to allow this as well.

The touch was light and cautious, just the barest brush of fingertips, but there was an odd feeling beneath it—bright and sharp, like warm needles prickling gently against the sensors in the wing. Dark synthetic skin against white synthetic feathers, the touch of Dorian's fingers sent currents buzzing below the surface of John's skin, running through circuits and along his nerves, and John's eyes slid shut as it drew an involuntary shiver.

When he opened them Dorian's own eyes were focused directly on his.

There was an intensity in that gaze that left John dry-mouthed and shaken. And that simple, gentle touch and the whisper of energy flickering behind it shouldn't have felt like a kiss—certainly no one on the outside would have mistaken it for one. Yet John couldn't have denied for even a moment that the look in Dorian's eyes—transparently anxious and utterly absorbed—told him quite clearly that, somehow, a kiss was exactly what it was.

It was as disarmingly intimate as it was shockingly inhuman, and John didn't know which was more frightening.

There was no clear moment in which John decided to act, it just happened—like reflex, like instinct. He had needed something more familiar—something he could understand—to keep him grounded, and John couldn't have stopped himself from taking the relief offered him any more than a man nearly drowned could have stopped himself from taking an offered breath.

Dorian's lips were cool and smooth, and firmer than they looked, yet they allowed John's tongue past with no resistance. The inside of his mouth was dryer than a human mouth, his tongue and teeth damp with something mildly astringent and of a vaguely mineral flavor. Whatever it was John assumed it was harmless, otherwise Dorian would have stopped him—

At the speed with which the android could react, Dorian could so easily have stopped any part of it. And if John had still suffered even a whisper of doubt whether his partner actually wanted this, it was evaporated utterly when Dorian's mouth began to respond fully to his own. Almost it seemed to John that the more exotic connection between them deepened as it did—he felt like every part of him was being lit up from the inside out—though it could just as easily have been the unfolding of his own very physical and human arousal.

Though perhaps it didn't matter, for it was all but impossible to tell where one ended and the other began...

Dorian was electricity, John's body the wire, and he understood with surpassing intimacy why a closed circuit was called complete. It wasn't a connection John could have experienced with another human being, but Dorian wasn't human. Yet neither was he simply a machine—at least, not any more than John himself was still just a man.

When he had first been forced to confront the permanence of what had been done to him, that had been the hardest part to accept.

Struggling through the task of reassembling his life for a second time, John had been forced to accept that a key piece of the puzzle had been warped irrevocably out of harmony with the rest, and that that piece was him. While he could fit himself back into place within that picture—return to his job, his home, to what he had that passed for friends—the fit would never quite be the same. The world he had lived in was built too solidly on a foundation of contrasting labels and definitions, and John had fallen too far short of existing categories to ever comfortably be a part of it.

Neither broken nor truly whole, neither fully human nor yet entirely machine, his state forced people to make too many allowances—to leave too many instinctual questions unanswered—for most to ever truly be at ease. In a sense he now occupied instead some uncertain, twilit area between those classifications as they had once been understood. And to John it had seemed such a terrifying and isolating place to be—

A lonely place, but what Dorian's touch—the kiss-in-abstract of his partner's circuits—had proven to John more than anything was that it wasn't a place he occupied alone.

Sometimes human vanity outstripped its wisdom, and that tendency showed itself in Dorian. His creators had desired to make the DRN model as human as possible, and in their own success they had failed him. In the end the DRNs had simply been too unpredictable—too whimsical, too moody, too human—to be judged suitable for the purpose they had been designed for, and Dorian had nearly payed for his creators' hubris with what might otherwise have been called his life...

Because Dorian's existence entailed uncomfortable questions also—and many would have preferred to see him destroyed or forgotten than risk finding out the answers.

And it seemed almost impossibly miraculous that two broken beings such as they might have found each other. By happenstance or design—or perhaps a little of each, equally—their reciprocally defective and unacceptable natures made them uniquely suitable to the other. True even before John's alarming transmutation, it had become even truer after, when all too often their unique dynamic and Dorian's unapologetically transgressive behavior had been the only things keeping him sane.

They were like aliens on this Earth—like occult figures from ancient mythology, ripped from its tales of strange metamorphoses and creations brought to the blush of animation.

The wind shifted northeasterly as their lips part, warm with the sun's heat rising from the pavement of a nearby street. The humidity was high, and there was a faint updraft prophesying thunderstorms later in the day—but for now the sky was mostly clear, the sun blessedly warm, and the faint taste of ozone on his tongue was from Dorian's lips alone. And as he looked upon his partner's face—all sky-blue eyes and crooked smile, lightning dancing beneath his skin—John found that he felt not one ounce of regret or uncertainty, or even his usual fearful longing for the sky. Though John realized that he could keep his feet on the ground for the rest of his life and it would never really matter...

In his heart, he had already leapt.

---

Author's Note: So, we all remember when Karl was Cupid, right?

(I feel old...)

Also, I'm not sure when this story ran away from me. Originally I'd intended to base the imagery on Eros and Psyche, then on the myth of Icarus...then at some point I apparently just gave up and ran with whatever seemed like it was working at the time.