Crude Exaggeration (explicit) (wk exosuit)

28 July 2024

He hadn't put it away.

It was the logical progression of things, leaving the suit behind. The nanites were neutralized, best as they could be; he'd had Holiday and Salazar and their teams double check, even if apparently a sixteen year old kid was their best expert on the matter. Somehow the pages of incomprehensible readings that they'd dropped on his desk hadn't especially soothed him. He was in no position to petition to their meager funding opportunities that neutralized wasn't enough, that any nanite was a danger; money couldn't exactly be siphoned away from rebuilding and repurposing the entire organization so that he could have another clean room. Much though he wanted it. Or didn't want it, both. Having the matter out of his hands was, in a way, a blessing, same as it was a curse.

More convincingly, once they had resettled in headquarters, Six had knocked against the shoulder of the exosuit and said, "It's about time to get you out of this tin can, partner."

It was a decision he'd already made. He couldn't afford to spend more time in his own head about it, laboring over how triggering the sequence to power the exosuit down in the first place had taken hours of gritting his teeth and reasoning with himself. It was already done, and he had already left the thing empty and dark in the corner. He hadn't put it away; the finality of disassembling it or putting it in the back of a closet made his blood go cold. In the nightmares he was soft like clay, sliding apart without an exoskeleton, wet mounds of skin sloughing away. He left it out.

The suit stood quietly corpselike where he had left it. The first day he'd watched it half-warily for a long stretch, almost expecting to blink and be back inside it, and then he'd been swept into a mess of blood tests and immunology panels and press conferences and he didn't see the inside of his own room for a full 18 hours, and when he'd come back it had been a shock of horror and longing to see it still standing there. Unmoving, trapped inside this office, a thought which almost made him laugh except for how it almost made him sick. That night he dreamed that he could reach a hand inside himself and pull away globs of muscle and fat like wet handfuls of snow. He pretended it wasn't there; he pretended that it didn't catch his eye every time he moved and the light shifted over its glossy surface.

He wasn't especially good at pretending. The thing felt like a solid weight in his peripheral vision. White Knight tried to work - he had so much goddamn work to get through - and he could feel the place behind him burning for attention. Too long without looking at it made his skin prickle. He started noticing the way air moved over the hair on his arms and how the arms of his chair dug into his skin. He noticed the stick of sweat to the polished surface of his desk. It itched. And inevitably he turned to look and it was still there, frozen and empty, the space carved out for him left hollow.

He reasoned with himself that the day he put it to rest would be the day he needed it again, so he didn't put it away.

—

Six came into his office, uninvited, the way he always did: not there one moment and there the next, quiet enough to make White Knight jump. He always found himself with a headache when Six had words for him, the post-exercise sore of trying to keep up with whatever mental obstacle course Six set for him. White Knight couldn't claim to have ever understood him. It was worse, now, knowing he could almost reach out to touch; the distance between them stretched out nauseatingly.

Six fixed his eyes on the suit before he even said a word. Always with the damn sunglasses and White Knight still knew right where he was looking, coolly judgmental. "Do you know what time it is?"

"Too late in the day for you to be pestering me." Six was looking past him at the exosuit, so White Knight didn't look back at him, staring at the half-finished work on his screen. The banter came easy, but it never came quite right anymore. Six hummed a noise, and he at last looked away from the suit, gaze narrowing down on White Knight, but he stayed quiet long enough that White Knight almost relaxed. Nearly, anyway. Close enough to it that he got some work done, even with Six still there in the space with him.

"You know the door opens, now," Six said when he finally tired of waiting for - whatever it is he was waiting for. "You don't have to stay in here forever."

"I haven't been," White Knight argued, but Six only looked up over his shoulder at the suit and said, "Sure," before he left.

It took White Knight a good ten minutes to realize Six had left something on his desk - a takeout container from the mess, steam condensed into water droplets on the lid. It was past 6 pm; he hadn't eaten since morning.

Eating in his office felt, somehow, simultaneously, more lonely than it had for years and more under scrutiny than it ever had before.

—

He was standing in front of it again. The suit: a little taller than him, a little broader, eerily still and dark. When he wore it, there had always been a faint yellow glow, a light he had come to associate with living another day. Now that the light had gone out he couldn't help but think of the suit as dead, and when it died, he was meant to have died, too. No glow, no quiet pulse of gears and electronics, his armor failed. White Knight's hands flexed uncertainly.

He kept finding himself here. Any lull in his work and he'd pick himself up out of his chair and come to this spot, staring into the depths of the machine. Seeing it empty still caught him by surprise, like trying to take an extra step at the top of a flight of stairs, the swoop in his gut as he realized his reflection didn't move to match him. If he tore his eyes away from the oddity of seeing the inside of the helmet, he could imagine being someone else, seeing him, seven or eight months straight of him glossy white and untouchable. There was something magnetic about the wrongness of being outside of the exosuit, the same way as putting your tongue in the hole of a missing tooth. It ached but he came crawling back to the ache every time, craving the phantom weight, the sense memory of crowded warmth.

There were fine, barely-visible scratches in the paint on one arm. He thumbed over the spot, the glossy smoothness giving way to a rough patch that caught at the pad of his fingers, and the touch shocked upward through him. Is this how it had felt, outside of himself - having to tip his head back to look into the core of the helmet, touching the shape of his body just for it to feel cold and unyielding - White Knight wrapped his hand around the suit's wrist and his fingers couldn't quite meet. The armor pulled heat out of his palms when he slid them up its arms. Sometimes, when they had been at the plant, Six would rest a hand on his shoulder or back - had it been warm, then, nearly alive? Or cold like this, the inhuman metal offering no purchase? Had he felt small the way White Knight did now?

His head swam. He spread a hand over the breast of the suit as though he expected a pulse. When he touched it he expected to feel that touch on himself, to have his senses doubled, the faint pressure he'd come to associate with human hands. It had been over a week that he'd shed the suit, a strange cocoon, and aside from the clinical gloved hands of the medical team he hadn't touched anyone, yet. Just this. The suit, a mimic of his form, himself made greater. He set his hands on its waist, tucked against the seam that bordered its pelvis.

He was close enough his breath could fog against the armor. It was the safest he had felt in days. White Knight pried himself away and shook the odd embarrassed burn out of himself and went back to his work.

—

That night he took himself in hand and fucked his fist too-dry and too-fast and didn't, very carefully didn't, think about how it was the first time he had touched himself in months and how when he closed his eyes and curled into it he could only picture the massive looming white of his exosuit, the pale yellow of his visor, the sense of being too small and being too grand. Of course he thought about it. Of course it haunted him, remembering how it felt to be untouchable, remembering days he had gotten hard and his cock had pressed into the unforgiving solidity of the armor. He missed it. He missed it. He thought about smooth metal warming under his hands and the harsh silence, empty of mechanical sound, and the week straight of feeling himself pour apart like sand every time he tried to sleep, and the crushing open atmosphere and the nanites still crawling -

He went to sleep still hard, teeth gritted, and he dreamed of rough skin being peeled off of him to leave him small and raw and new.

—

He didn't care to get much closer to the Petting Zoo than the observation room, neutralized nanites or otherwise. As it was, he was standing near the wall of windows pretending that he hadn't taken a good forty minutes this morning working up the nerve to come back into the throngs of people, the rush of activity that he had been told would 'benefit' from his presence, that he would 'improve morale' for being part of. Those had been Six's words, but he'd said it in the way that suggested to White Knight that they'd come from Dr. Holiday first. He supposed they weren't wrong, but it didn't make him particularly happy to acknowledge that.

Down in the Petting Zoo, some dozens of nanobiologists and visiting zoologists were weaving through each other like a swarm of bees. Providence had been prepared to care for the huge number of feral EVOs housed in the Petting Zoo, but they were neither equipped nor legally permitted to keep the wild animals that they became after the mass cure. (Then there had been the few humans who had escaped their detection in EVO form; they were fortunate there hadn't been any serious injuries.) Thankfully the majority of the work in solving this problem had been handled by Providence's scientific teams, aside from one wayward call with a nature reserve that had made its way up to White Knight and left both parties generally irritated. Now it was a matter of rounding up some unending amount of animals and shipping them cross country to whatever zoos and shelters and exotic vets had the space. Well, the minute they left Providence property they were out of White Knight's hands, which was as far as he cared.

Even up in the observation room, there was too much bustle. White Knight stared down at the simulated nature below to keep his focus off the movement of bodies and breath. He was going to have to make a decision about how they would repurpose the space soon; his only, deeply far fetched idea so far was to hand it over to Salazar and let him run wild. That was asking for trouble.

"Not too late to cancel all this and use the Petting Zoo to turn a quick buck. Thirty bucks a pop, call it an 'immersive wildlife experience.'" Calan leaned up against one of the metal dividers between the windows, arms folded across his chest. He glanced sidelong at White Knight. Everyone he crossed paths with gave him that same surprised kind of look, like they'd forgotten he could be there, physically, human.

"Providence policy is to try to avoid unnecessary lawsuits when possible," White Knight answered him. He nodded in greeting. "Captain Calan. Didn't expect to see you here for this."

"Me and some of the boys are treating it like something of a send off," Calan told him. "Sending out the old Providence and bringing in the new and all that. Not gonna be hosting any EVOs anymore, after all - save for the one, I guess." He looked out over the distant mob of scientists, squinting at the excited buzz. "I ought to be saying that to you, anyway, sir. Not a complaint, but I was starting to think… well."

White Knight allowed him not to finish the sentence. Not least because he knew, precisely, how it would end, and that he certainly wasn't the only one to assume White Knight would be back to the old routine, only this time voluntary, holding himself hostage in his new office. "I've just been busy," he half-lied. "There's a lot of work involved in rebuilding after a coup."

"It's good seeing you out and about like this, sir." Calan pushed off the window, turning part way toward White Knight, tapping his fingers against his thigh. The murmur of voices below them, and clearer behind them, almost made White Knight want to wince for how loud it was compared to the cool silence of his office, the quiet back at the plant. Calan looked at him keenly, something sharp in his eyes. The captain had never been especially ambitious, but he was clever, which made him all the more dangerous. "I know it's a little up in the air right now, but whatever becomes of Providence, if you've got room for me, I'll be there. Me and the men, we'll have your back."

He reached out, then, like to clap a hand on White Knight's shoulder, the palm of his hand surely rough and warm, the touch surely casual and inviting, and White Knight flinched away, pulling out of his reach. Panic started to stir in his gut. Six, nearly seven years, and it would collapse down to this point, this sudden first touch, human contact, neutralized but not erased -

Calan, to his credit, dropped his hand smoothly, tucked it into a pocket. He looked away from White Knight, back at the crowd in the Petting Zoo. "Hope we see more of you, sir. When you're not so busy."

It hadn't happened. They hadn't even made contact - but the almost-touch sizzled on White Knight's skin for the rest of the day, like the churning static of a sleeping limb, the broken promise of it clinging to him.

He went back to his office.

—

Maybe there was a breaking point. He was tired, worn thin, starved. Everything in Providence was a moving part that he had to track, a hundred hundred pieces for him to keep his eyes on, to reinvigorate, to find new purpose for. White Knight kept himself up late and woke himself up early. Maybe it was that, exhaustion and exertion. Maybe it was the creeping realization of himself amongst many others, only another man, softly human. Sometimes he woke up in the morning and looked a long while at the ceiling, sweat-damp from another nightmare, and wondered if he had made the right choice.

He stood in front of the suit again.

He missed it. He couldn't lie even to himself about it. Seven months straight of being more than human, more than flesh and blood; the exosuit had been a cramped prison and he missed it, achingly, every day. He leaned forward against the chest of the suit, his forehead pressed against its armor. He had taken himself out of the cage and locked the door behind him and only realized now, too late, that the cage was a kennel, sweet comfort. This was weakness. Damn it, he was a pathetic mess, kept up by bad dreams and nervous energy because he couldn't play god in his stupid suit anymore. White Knight lifted a fist and thudded it against the thick metal of the suit's chest, the sturdy build not even flexing.

Somewhere deep there was an odd click, like a light switch being flicked in the next room. He saw the glow, first, yellow dappled with shadows, seeping out across the pale metal, and he heard the faint whir of moving machinery, and he didn't have time to so much as lift his head before the cold fingers closed around his wrist. Panic shot through him, upward from the base of his spine - the suit was supposed to be keyed to him, biometrically, only activating if he was inside it, so who could have - and how - he jerked back, but its grip was solid steel, and when he looked up (head tipped back, small compared to it, malleable) the visor had drawn across the helmet with yellow light but it was empty, inside, only the padded interior of it staring back at him. It was just the suit. Its hand shifted, pressing a thumb into his palm.

He thought for a fleeting second this is a ghost and it was the stupidest thing he had ever thought. White Knight pulled at its fingers with his free hand and it caught him by that wrist, too, strong and unyielding, and he must have been asleep, now, a new nightmare, he must have had the mental break that had been creeping up on him six years ago, because when he tugged at his arms and was given no quarter it felt unsettlingly close to relief. The empty shell held him there, held him, almost a year it had held him and it held him again, unwavering. It brought his hands together; its own hands were big enough that it could take both of his wrists into one. He had stood in front of it time and again touching it like he could sink inside it that way and now it touched him, as though it was trying to remember him, the hand it had freed skating over his arm, his shoulder, the prey animal flutter of his pulse in his throat. It touched his cheek. Its hands were warming, the live electronics inside blooming soft heat.

White Knight jerked his face away from it sharply but he already felt the humiliating burn of yearning. This was touch, too, nearly human, so familiar that it felt like a wound in his gut. The suit held him close enough that when it adjusted its stance its leg came between his, thigh sliding against his groin. It forced a shock of arousal through him. He was half hard already, for no reason - no reason but his desperate starvation for touch and the startling sensation of safety in this machine's arms and the flash of white metal in his mind's eye as he'd gripped his cock that night. The suit loomed over him, a pale guardian.

When it put him on his back over his desk - it picked him up, as easily as if he weighed nothing, a show of power he couldn't process - he had to reach back to sweep the surface clear, pens and paperwork and the mouse for his computer clattering to the floor - he thought for a delirious moment that it was going to fuck him, somehow, that its metal would split smoothly open to show something he never knew was there. He pushed himself up onto his elbows to watch in disbelief while it levered his thighs apart, stepping between them to press the hard curve of its body against him. The suit fit a hand under the bend of one knee and the other traced down his side, unerringly careful, so strange a touch that White Knight flinched away from it until it curved around the bone of his hip and splayed firm between his legs. He sucked a breath in between gritted teeth. The heel of its hand dragged up the length of his cock - his body flexed, trying to arch up into it, but its steady weight kept him against the desk - fear and desperate lust shivered through him. He dropped back against the desk so he could fumble with his belt, the fly of his pants, shoving them just out of the way enough to pull his cock free so that the suit's smooth fingers could close around it.

He should have been afraid. He was afraid, breath coming in short stutters while the suit fisted his cock just in the side of too tight, leaning close over top of him, but the alien allure overwhelmed it. At this angle he could only either stare into the gut wrenching emptiness inside its helmet, the perfect mold of him that sat empty and somehow alive, or else down between their bodies to where its mechanical hand wrapped around him. There was no looking away. It wrapped his thigh around its hip to brace that hand on the desk near his head, cornering him there, crowding him into the limited space, like he was something small, helpless, like it could protect him there, wall him in with its body. White Knight caught a strangled noise in his throat, grabbing at its wrist to try and slow its pace, and when it showed no interest in loosening its hold on him he gave in and scrubbed his palm over the head of his cock, savoring the push-pull sting between their hands, the immovable weight of the suit. He grabbed at its shoulders with his other hand, fingers fitting into the join between plates of armor, nails scraping over the scrapes and scratches left from battle against EVOs and men, warped and bubbled paint where an energized whip had once wrapped around his body. His head spun. His hips twitched upward, knocking against the suit's pelvis, up into the twist of its grip.

The orgasm felt like it was dragged out of him, like the suit reached into him and pulled it out in its fist. The suit jerked him through it, short tight strokes with a precome-slickened grip, White Knight clenching his jaw against the broken sound that threatened to spill out of him, his own hand still wrapped around the head of his cock. He shook with it, months of waiting winding tight in his belly, this fucked up moment of the exosuit pressing his cock down against his body, come spilling out from White Knight's fingers to drip across its knuckles, and, fuck, he realized in a distant haze he would have to clean that out, if this was real after all. If this wasn't some bizarre wet dream that he would wake up from shaking and hard. The suit squeezed at his cock again and a low keen escaped him.

It stood over him a long while after, the eerie emptiness of its skull staring down at him, long enough that White Knight started to worry he would have to find a way to muscle its weight off of him. But it finally stood, stiff and robotic, fingers sliding away from his body, and stepped back to that same spot where he had left it originally, against the wall. Leaving White Knight alone, breathing hard on his desk, wet with his own come.

Fuck. He felt dizzy. The dream should have ended by now, or the nightmare, or the fantasy. Without the exosuit boxing him in, the room felt huge and overwhelming. The thing itself perched like a gargoyle at the edge of his vision. And worse - worse, after long desperate untouched months he was still hard, even with his breath heaving and sweat beading on his skin and his come cooling on his fingers. He curled his fingers around himself again helplessly, already remembering the perfect comfort of the suit's power over him, the sickeningly soothing familiarity of its weight. He fucked himself like that until he came a second time, unable to keep himself from groaning weakly, now, come oozing out over his stomach. He pressed the heel of his clean hand against his eyes. He had to be going out of his mind. Or else he had made the worst mistake of his life letting Salazar work on the suit, months ago, or - fuck, what did it matter.

White Knight pulled himself up, legs shaking, head starting to throb. After this, by all means, he should have taken the suit to pieces, folded it away into storage.

He didn't put it away.

—

Six came into his office, uninvited, and he fixed his eyes on the suit before he even said a word. "You've been in here for the better part of a week. Listen, Knight–"

"I've been busy," White Knight said, lying too easily, and though he wanted, deeply, to ask Six to stay, he didn't.