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He’s strong, Sensei is explaining, and that’s part of the problem, but he’s also modular.Neither of these things are actually problems for Genos, of course. He needs both of them to fight. And they’ve both been true for long enough that they’ve become a part of his proprioception, how he understands himself. His limbs are accessories the way his uniform is an accessory: sensate, to a degree, and useful in his tasks, significantly easier to have than not have – but ultimately replaceable, non-integral. When he perceives damage or impending damage to most of his body, it feels like a tear in his uniform or a frayed wire in one of his kitchen gadgets. Damaged property. Nothing that doesn’t approach damaging his head, his spine, or his core hurts. Nothing makes him afraid in the way he used to be afraid when he was made of meat.He loves it.It’s only now, with the retrospective pity of the posthuman, that he can appreciate the fragility of the human body; its lossiness, its inefficiency. He’s not indestructible but sometimes he feels indestructible.Which is why Sensei is showing him what looks like a spider-thing made of thick cables, heavy-duty, shielded like nobody’s business, intersecting in what looks like a control pad and each ending in a heavy cap bristling with sockets and wires. It’s a sinister-looking wind-chime as long as his leg, and he almost expects it to scuttle out the window when Sensei puts it down on the table. “I had the Doctor help me make it,” Sensei is telling him. “He agrees with me that you’re being cocky, careless with yourself. We designed this to teach you to be more careful.”“Yes, Sensei,” he says quickly, because he does, he does want to learn what Sensei thinks he needs to be taught. Sensei’s made of meat, says a little voice in his head, it’s meat you have to be careful with, but he quickly squashes it and says “What do I need to do?”“It plugs into your shoulders and hips,” says Sensei, and comes around behind him where he’s sitting cross-legged on the floor. “Give me your left arm.”He does, and is startled when Sensei dislocates his shoulder with a smooth twist, lays his arm behind him on the table. He twists around to look quizzically up at Sensei’s dispassionate face, but Sensei only holds out his hand for Genos’ right arm.Hesitantly, Genos holds it out, and Sensei twists it off and lays it beside the other, then picks up the cables and kneels behind him. Sensei’s acting weird, and it makes Genos nervous. It’s only Sensei and the Doctor that know all of his weak points, know how to detach his limbs in a way he can’t fight, know all the ways to break him. “Sensei –“ he says, a half-hearted protest, but Sensei doesn’t answer and just fits two of the four caps over the bare wires and sockets of his shoulders. The machine hisses and whirrs as it begins to engage, plugs meeting jacks, information and electricity beginning to dance between its circuits and his exposed wiring. After a moment, he starts to feel funny, and then he feels himself start to topple sideways.He’s falling – he can’t catch himself – he lets out an involuntary yelp – and then Saitama’s hands catch him and ease him to the floor. “It’s temporary,” he says calmly, and Genos, who is trying to make himself move and finding that he can’t, finds his shock a little abated by how completely unfazed his Sensei is. “The device has to disable your muscle control while it calibrates, or you’d break it or yourself. Once the interface is complete, you’ll be fine.”He kneels over Genos’ prone body – Genos’ eyes, the only part of him left unparalyzed, rolling wildly – and undoes his chest plating, then positions the control box at the center of the cables on his sternum, just under where his collarbones meet. The thing puts out little feet and drills down through his flesh into the center of him and he screams.No sound comes out, because his vocal apparatus is as frozen as the rest of him, but it’s ricocheting around the inside of his head He feels every millimeter as the machine’s claws penetrate closer and closer to his core, warning chimes starting to fill his ears and alert messages scrolling wildly across the bottom of his vision. Sensei is at the very bottom of his field of vision, barely visible, and is watching intently as the thing embeds itself into the flesh of his chest and starts to talk to his programming. He feels everything, even though he can’t move, so he feels Sensei’s hands close around first his left thigh, then his right, and he feels the heavy thunk and pneumatic whisper of his legs separating from his hips.“You see why you had to be still for this,” says Sensei, his voice even, vanishing outside of Genos’ field of vision as he carries his legs away. “And when it starts to hurt, you’ll be glad you can’t move.”If he could breathe, his breath would be quick, frantic. The perfect calm in Sensei’s voice, how that calm makes Genos sick to obey, it’s so at odds with the way he wants to writhe and jerk out of Sensei’s hands as he settles the machine’s other two caps over the places where Genos’ legs thighs connect to his hips. The machine is splayed over him, cupping the stumps of his limbs and burrowed into his chest, holding him motionless and whispering unknowable things to his deep wetware. What is it doing to him? What can it be doing?He feels oily drops trace from the outside corners of his eyes down his temples and into his hair, followed by Saitama’s fingertip.“You scared?”He can’t answer, Sensei knows he can’t answer, why is he doing this?“I’m glad you trusted me to let me do this,” he says. “But you’re right to be scared. I want you to know that you’re breakable.”That’s when it starts to hurt. It feels like wedges of electricity are sliding under every centimeter of his skin, flaying him slowly, creeping outwards from the control box on his chest and sliding around his torso to surround him with this slow, implacable mercury burn. The pain is blinding, it turns him inside out, it seems impossible that he is lying silent and still while this inferno is sliding down his spine. He must be thrashing and howling, his skin must be dripping from his bones, he must be falling to pieces. All he hears is Sensei’s quiet, untroubled breathing as his body is a schwartzchild radius of pain, collapsing in on itself for what feels like forever.And then it stops all at once and he’s reverberating like a struck bell and sees that Sensei is tapping keys on the control pad and all of a sudden the paralysis is gone and he’s twisting and gasping on the floor with just the echoes of the pain. “Sensei –“ he whimpers, “Why –“Saitama does something to the control pad and Genos feels a low purring vibration pour from where the machine is touching him, a subsonic tremble that fills him with something strange and hungry and wonderful. “You’ve been inhuman for too long,” he says. “You think that pain and pleasure are human things, that they don’t apply to you. You need to remember them.”
The thrum fades away and Genos presses his lips together. He wants to ask Sensei to turn it back on, but he’s embarrassed at the idea that he might be right.“It’s important to me that you try to avoid being damaged. That you understand the difference between being good and being bad.” The words fill him from the cradle of his amputated hips to the top of his head and a tiny sob escapes him, but Sensei is still talking.“What you are made of is no less susceptible to pain, to pleasure, to damage, to destruction, than what you were made of before.” His fingers are moving on the keypad and Genos hears his own voice, “No – no – no, please, Sensei, please, no –“ as the claws in his chest move and separate and he feels himself being torn open, feels the protective coverings around his core being levered apart.“Feel this fear. Feel this pain. Know that you are real. You are not human anymore but what you are can feel these things.”In a swift motion, Saitama straddles him, and he’s writhing mutedly under his weight, unable to get any leverage without limbs, whipping his head back and forth, the word “no” becoming a thin keening. He doesn’t want to feel it, doesn’t want to have to, doesn’t want to be able to. The palms of Sensei’s hands come down on either side of the keypad embedded in his chest, pinning him to the floor, and then Genos freezes in horror as Sensei’s fingers enter the hollow of his chest, slipping into the space forced open by the machine. The wiring inside is delicate, he knows that, he knows one wrong move by either of them could disable his power source, could break him. He’s immobile as if paralyzed again, not even breathing enough to make a sound, staring mutely and with wide unblinking eyes at the unshakeable concentration on Sensei’s face. When Sensei’s fingertip brushes an unshielded wire, it sends sparks cascading through him and he can’t stop himself from gasping the way a human would gasp. The breath pushes his chest up and brings the wire into firmer contact with Sensei’s finger and it feels so good he doesn’t know how it’s not destroying what’s left of his body. There’s a little smile on Sensei’s face as he pinches the wire between his thumb and finger, follows it to its source, and moves it minisculely back and forth in its jack, and Genos lets that breath out in a strangled yelp. “You know what happens to you if I pull this out,” Sensei says to him, stroking the pad of his thumb along the underside of the wire, and Genos, trembling, does. “But it feels good, doesn’t it? Tell me.”Just enough air for the words “Yes, Sensei.” He’s holding so still. He’s so afraid.“And this one.” Fingers close around another wire and an entirely different sensation shoots through him, vastness and hunger as if the whole of the roiling ocean were suddenly inside him. It comes in waves as Sensei moves the wire in its socket and the contact ripples. The arousal and the revulsion wash over him until he’s the memory of nauseous with it. “Please,” he whimpers, though he’s not sure what he’s asking for.Sensei moves his other hand on the keypad and suddenly the pain is back, radiating from the caps on his shoulders and hips like knives meticulously separating his flesh from his bones, and without the paralysis there’s nothing to stop him from screaming.“Please, what?” Sensei’s voice is still even, quiet enough that Genos can barely hear him, and he sobs and tries to stay still under his fingers and finally when he can’t bear it, he can’t, he knows another second of it will be the end of him, he chokes out “Please – please don’t break me, Sensei, please.”Before the words are out of his mouth Sensei has switched the pain off and it’s replaced with the vibration, the delicious humming that saturates his tortured circuits and it’s so good, the delicate wires in his chest trembling in Sensei’s grasp, that he thinks for a moment that he wouldn’t care if Sensei closed his hand around everything inside his chest and wrenched, if only he would let the vibration stay. He’s breathing enough to moan and while he’s still terrified that the motion of his chest will make Sensei break him, he wants something, anything, and he’s not sure he cares if he survives it.“You want more,” says Sensei, and it’s not really a question, but Genos is making little whines, each hitching gasp pushing the tangle of wires around his core desperately against Sensei’s hand, and one of the little whines comes out sounding like “More, Sensei, please.”Sensei obligingly plunges his fingers into it, separating the wires, twisting them, kneading them, and Genos howls. The vibration, and Sensei’s hold on the deepest parts of him, it’s building inside him, something is building –And then Sensei’s hand stills, and Genos hears him say “Look at me,” and Genos moans, opens eyes nearly glued shut by oily tears, and does.With both hands, moving slowly and with infinite tenderness, lower lip between his teeth, Sensei parts the wires, holds them open to expose his luminous core. Bared to the air like this, its material transmits a miasma of information and sensation to his brain. He’s never been opened like this – he shouldn’t be opened like this – Sensei is breaking him and he never wants to be put back together –“Nobody is allowed to break you but me,” Sensei tells him, and spits into his chest. It lands squarely on the light of his core, hisses against the heat of it – Genos is shorting out – spraying sparks and seizing in some kind of impossible climax – under the unforgiving hands of his Sensei – and before everything fizzes and goes black, he feels it, he feels it.