Work Text:
Wolfwood leans back against the wall, chest rising and falling with phantom huffs of breath. He makes no sound, his artificial breathing is turned off. Has been, for some time honestly. At least since he arrived on this vessel to break out Vash, who had been captured… again. He keeps it off more often than not these days. Vash isn’t concerned with him seeming more human, and Wolfwood has a much easier time sneaking around with it off. The motion of his chest doesn’t always get the memo, though. Rhythmically expanding and contracting based solely on some well buried human instinct. One of the many human glitches that made him unwelcome among the other synthetics. He could still the movement easily, but it would require focus he currently is using elsewhere.
A few slow steps echo down the hall, and Wolfwood pinpoints the location by heat signature. A single guard, patrolling, but they don’t turn down the way Wolfwood went. The guard pauses, flinging the beam of a flashlight carelessly down the corridor, and when they find nothing out of place, continues walking past and down the hall.
Wolfwood remains still, laser focused on his surroundings in a way that used to feel surreal, eyes and ears picking up the smallest sounds and details and quickly logging them into what he affectionately calls his filing system. Weyland-Yutani would just say memory, meaning it in the computer way but secretly patting themselves on the back for the tongue-in-cheek reference to his past humanity. Wey-Yu can go fuck themselves. Wolfwood hasn’t been anything close to human in a long time, and he never will be again.
Luckily the guards here are terrible at their jobs, and Wolfwood safely concludes it’s all clear. He relaxes, letting his systems run as they will, with all their human glitches entwined. There’s no reason to do so, other than he likes to. And he knows it would endlessly piss off The Eye and Knives. It’s the little displays of defiance that make him feel like he’s retained something of himself.
Beside him, Vash watches owlishly. It’s dark in the room. Far darker than any human could see in. Vash shifts his large eyes over Wolfwood's body and they reflect light from nowhere. Or perhaps they glow on their own. Either way, it’s unsettling.
“They’re gone, so you can stop looking at me with your creepy eyes,” Wolfwood grumbles.
Vash pouts at him. It looks ridiculous. His human mouth stretches a bit too much to accommodate his extra teeth. Some of his feathers have sprouted, and his tail swishes languidly behind him. It’s always the tail that slips first, when Vash stops contorting his body to look human, and the feathers follow slightly after. Next is usually his hands, elongating into his natural claws. Then the same stretching for the rest of his limbs. Then his face, breaking and stretching into something unmistakably different than human, oblong and smooth with huge round eyes and a mouth that seems to crack his face apart. It will sit poised on top of his too long body. Last is the torso, cracking and stretching, with wings and bones and goo pushing out of his skin and arranging themselves into the incomprehensible form of some kind of hellscape angel. Be not afraid, it says, cradling you in wings and feathers that move independently like vines, wrapping you in it, large round orange eyes glowing from within, claws scraping at your form, tearing clothes and skin, too many teeth hovering in front of your face, puffs of hot air assaulting your senses, drool pooling around fangs and dripping down to make hissing holes in the floor.
But Vash doesn’t look like that now. Currently, he could almost be mistaken for a human with terrible fashion sense. His red coat billows lightly around him, feathers writhing out of his collar like a feather boa escaping in the non-existent breeze. His reflective eyes are mostly obscured by his yellow tinted glasses. The only thing betraying him fully is his tail, still swaying lightly behind him, bony tip twitching in some sort of agitation.
“You’re hurt,” he says, frowning around just slightly too many teeth.
Wolfwood scoffs. “I’m a robot, Spikes.” Or something like one. Mostly synthetic at this point.
“But you can feel it, right?” Vash shuffles close to him.
His long fingers reach out to brush Wolfwood’s sleeve where his arm is pressed against his own stomach. It's the only thing keeping a good amount of his wiring inside. A stray laser shot across the stomach had singed the edges as it instantly gutted him. The burn damage will slow the regeneration, but, ultimately it’s nothing to write home about. His body will look fresh from the packaging by this time tomorrow. Seamless and unmarred as the day Knives assigned him this suicide mission and shipped him out of the Eye of Michael office at the Weyland-Yutani headquarters. Hell, he could spill his gut wiring, even, and still be fine. Purchased by the head of the Weyland-Yutani conglomerate for a price he can’t quite remember to be remade into a perfect tool. He was built special—using his original human body as a base, fused and outfitted with fully synthetic equipment and replicant nanotechnology. But the wiring wouldn’t fully self replicate the way his synthetic skin would. It’d be a minor repair but he’d rather skip it. Efficiency and all that.
“The pain is basically just damage feedback. I can turn it off.”
Vash still hovers over him, long fingers closing around his wrist to tug it aside. “Let me see.”
Wolfwood sighs. Loud and unnecessary. Another ghost of his long dead humanity within him. A Nonessential Action notification pings behind his eyes and he dismisses it. He lets his arm be pulled away and leans back against the wall more fully to keep his wiring inside.
Impossibly bright, shining eyes greedily scan the damage. He closes his own eyes. Even if he tried, there would be no possible way for him to physically stop Vash, so he resigns himself to the poking and prodding that always follows this strange mood Vash gets in. There’s no feeling in the area, Wolfwood long since overrode that sensation, but his pressure sensors do still pick up the gentle press of Vash’s clawed hand at the edge of his wound.
The questing claws press along the bottom edge, and slip slowly inside. Wolfwood feels his breathing program stutter.
“It doesn’t hurt?” Vash asks, dragging his eyes up from Wolfwood’s split open stomach to his face.
“No, I turned off the pain receptors there.” Wolfwood feels the twitching movement of Vash’s fingertips dipped into the gash and briefly sends a prayer of thanks to a god he long ago stopped believing in that his robot body doesn’t blush.
Vash hums thoughtfully. Glinting blue eyes drop back down to his stomach. “Can I touch you inside?”
Wolfwood malfunctions for .82 seconds, his brain making him aware of the size of his own tongue in his mouth. Strange. He huffs a laugh instead to cover the glitch.
“It’s not like I could stop you, Blondie.”
That’s the wrong answer. Vash deflates and his fingers retreat out of Wolfwood’s stomach. They hover just above the milky gash, and Wolfwood discovers that is because his own hand is wrapped around Vash’s wrist. Wolfwood swallows, for some reason.
“It’s fine,” Wolfwood says.
Vash looks at him, unconvinced.
“If you want to,” Wolfwood tugs Vash’s hand until his fingers are back in his stomach, “I don’t mind.”
They stay like that for a moment, Wolfwood pressing Vash’s clawed fingertips into the messy gash of synthetic skin and wiring at his center, then Vash’s hand twitches. Claws flex outward gently as they push a bit deeper inside. Wolfwood lets his hand fall from Vash’s wrist.
A sharp tooth glints from beneath Vash’s top lip. The tip of it presses into his plush bottom lip and Wolfwood watches the skin flex around the point to distract himself from Vash’s exploration of his insides. Vash runs his fingers along the bottom edge of the gash before pressing back in and curling his claws around thin tubing. His mouth falls open slightly. Wolfwood can see a second row of sharp teeth have slid into place behind Vash’s elongated first set.
“It’s so wet in here,” Vash murmurs.
Wolfwood laughs quietly. “Well, yeah. It's a lubricating coolant. Can’t have a bunch of wire and metal grinding around in nothing but hot air whenever I move.”
Vash presses deeper between some of his wires and a soft squelch sounds out. It’s a lewd, human sound. A background notification tells him his body is running a bit too warm. That’s a symptom of the loss of coolant that is leaking out of his stomach, surely. They should really get out of here and back to their ship so Wolfwood can start on repairs.
“Hey, Blondie, we need to get-t-ttt—“
A claws hooks around something and tugs and there’s a sharp static bloom at the base of his skull. He stutters around his words and Vash stills his hand. The static is gone as quickly as it came.
“Wolfwood?”
Wolfwood swallows uselessly. It doesn’t undo the knot he feels but doesn’t have in his throat.
“What was that?” Vash’s head tilts to the side.
“I’m not sure,” Wolfwood says, voice hushed and sounding almost breathless.
Vash keeps his large, glowing eyes trained on Wolfwood’s face as he curls his fingers deeper into the wet mess of wiring. A small experimental tug blooms static behind his eyes this time, and his lashes flutter a broken rhythm from some partial code that surfaces with the pressure. Immediately, Vash does it again.
“S-ss-hit,” he stutters out in a glitchy whisper.
It feels good. Strange and staticky, little jolts of input that his brain can’t fully categorize so is interpreting as pleasure. Pins and needles rolling through his sensors reminiscent of part of his old human body falling asleep, still uncomfortable in a way but also just on the right side of satisfying.
“Your knees are giving out,” Vash says, and Wolfwood finds it’s true. He’s slid a little ways down the wall. Vash tilts his head again in the opposite direction, like a dog hearing a strange new sound. “Does this feel good?”
Wolfwood closes his eyes. The synthetic skin of his face feels hot. He didn’t know he could still experience embarrassment like this. Or maybe it’s a sexual subroutine in his programming. There’s never been a quiet time for him to explore that kind of thing, always too busy doing work for the Eye or Wey-Yu. He was a custom ordered unit, so he doesn’t really want to look too far into it. Unsure if discovering Knives ordered him with sexual capabilities would be more unsettling than the possibility that he’s simply malfunctioning.
“Wolfwood?” Vash’s fingers are tangled in his wiring now, loosely fisting a collection of inputs and thin tubing and cords.
“It-t…” Wolfwood quickly runs a general diagnostic and comes up with no errors aside from the hole in his stomach and the foreign object that is Vash’s insistent hand inside it. His voice jumps and wavers occasionally, as if Vash is tugging on the wire directly responsible for the sound. “It feels good.”
Vash hums again. It’s deeper and more rumbling than it was previously, and Vash is taller than before by a suspicious few inches. His feathers writhe at his neckline, and some have sprouted at his temples as well. Wolfwood raises a hand to brush against the feathers at his neck and they quickly latch onto him, twisting around his fingers and pulling his hand deeper inside the plumage until he feels the cool solidity of Vash’s body pressed beneath his palm. The bone structure and musculature do not feel human. Too angular, too wiry.
“You’re getting fluffier, Spikey. What if someone sees you like this?”
“There’s no one around right now but you,” Vash says with a certainty that Wolfwood cannot confirm with his sensors. He’s not picking up any other heat signatures or sounds nearby, but he suspects he’s not performing at full capacity right now either.
Coolant rolls down his stomach in rivulets as Vash presses his hand deeper inside. Hard claws swipe gently across his spinal cords, and then Vash’s impossibly long and bony fingers wrap fully around the bunch of them. Wolfwood’s head thunks heavily backwards and a loud moan rolls unbidden from his throat. Vash’s knuckles drag along the skin of his lower back but from the inside. Wolfwood is overcome with the want to see it. The way his skin looks with Vash’s hand writhing directly beneath it. His cooling system isn’t working, he’s getting multiple overheating notifications. Vash slides his fist an inch up the bundle of cords he has loosely gripped within it and Wolfwood makes a high whining sound from somewhere in his chest cavity.
“Wow, you really like this,” Vash breathes out, breath cooly puffing against the overheating sensors in Wolfwood’s face.
“Shut up.”
“You could have told me,” Vash murmurs, “You never let me do anything for you.”
Vash’s tail is slowly whipping large arcs side to side. Feathers have appeared from his temples back through his hairline, scattered through his hair and swaying slightly. The shape of his face and skull has elongated. He braces himself against the wall next to Wolfwood’s head with his unoccupied hand.
“Well, asshole, no one has ever fondled my guts before so I wasn’t particularly aware.” Wolfwood’s free hand grips at the edges of Vash’s coat that has fallen open to hang around him.
Vash’s eyes flash with something and he trills happily. His hand runs back down Wolfwood’s central column, letting his claws catch gently on some of the wiring. Something like pleasure zings across multiple systems as pressure sensors activate and react like neurons firing in a glitched out feedback loop. Wolfwood sinks further down the wall, shoulders planted firmly against it and the only part of him remaining fully upright. Vash crowds over him, tail curling lightly around one of Wolfwood’s ankles. The claws brush his spinal column again and his eyes squeeze shut as he stutters out a glitchy sob. Repeated warning notifications flash behind his eyes. Warning: Foreign Object Detected in Lower Torso Region 4. Warning: Spinal Relay System Damage Detected. Warning: Movement Capacity at 76% of Standard.
“Do you think you could come like this?” Vash breathes over him.
“I dont even know if I’m capable of anything like an orgasm,” Wolfwood bites out.
“Oh,” Vash’s hand slows a bit and Wolfwood doesn’t need to open his eyes to know that Vash is considering something. “Let’s find out.”
Claws glide down a ribbed tube, catching sharp tips on raised edges in an inconsistent staccato. Wolfwood’s leg shakes. He can barely keep up with notification dismissal. Is there a way to turn them off? Is that a terrible idea? Vash could rip him to shreds in less than an instant if he so wanted, so self-preservation seems irrelevant. Is it something in his programming that makes it so he’s almost hoping that’s exactly what Vash does? Rip him into tiny pieces. Claws and teeth and hands tearing into him, and anything, anything to bring this insistent buzz to a crescendo.
He hopes Vash would like it. He wants Vash to like it. To use Wolfwood to satisfy any passing whim he might have. To give a better, more preferable purpose to his creation than serving Knives and his fucked up viewpoint of a disposable human race. Vash was nothing like his destructive maniacal brother. He was kind, he loved humanity. He did everything in his power to save people. He’d let Vash tear into him again and again if he wanted. If it helped him at all, if it satisfied an urge he so clearly constantly represses even to his own detriment. A xenomorph with an independent will was previously unheard of before the twins. A xenomorph choosing any form of kindness over destruction is wholly inconceivable. They’re biologically designed to rend entire civilizations, to breed and bite and wreck and claw until whatever was previously there is in tatters, no life remaining, ground salted and unusable. But Vash denies himself that instinct continually. If Vash should ever want to destroy something, Wolfwood hopes it would be him. He’ll offer himself up gladly. Should synthetics even be capable of this kind of desire?
Pressure, warmth, and the sharp prick of claws fraying more delicate wires. Vash’s elongated hand rummages through his chest cavity with a gentleness he shouldn’t be capable of. All his limbs have stretched out, his other hand has slid down the wall. The claws carving long gashes into the coated steel, bits of the chipped coating and paint rain down over Wolfwood's shoulder. Glitch, hot, pressure. Vash’s claws have done so much damage to the hard metal of the wall and the other one is sunk deep inside him, gently threading through cords and wires. Overheated, warning, error. Vash grips a coupling that rests up closer to his ribs and gently squeezes the silicate between the pads of his fingers. Wolfwood produces a glitched out whimper. The press of everything inside him feels fried, sparking constant bright pinpricks of sensation that is overwhelming his capacitors. Pressure where there shouldn’t be, sensation where there shouldn’t be. It feels wrong, but good. It hurts, but that’s not quite right. Pressure, pressure.
Something wet drips onto his face and sizzles. Wolfwood opens his eyes and looks up into a terrifying maw, lower jaw cracked out of Vash’s barely human shaped face and filled with teeth and drool. There’s blood along his lip from where his teeth have punctured his skin, and it mixes with his spit before sliding as thick globs down his chin. One has dripped off Vash’s jaw—hinged open as he breathes heavier than Wolfwood has ever heard a xenomorph breathe, quiet pants into the scant space between them—and the glob landed on Wolfwood’s face. The acid in it burns through his synthetic skin in an area where he still has full feeling. It stings fiercely, growing to an insistent hot pain across his cheek before he shuts it off. Vash is drooling. Vash is drooling and panting over having Wolfwood broken open beneath him.
“Oh-oh-h fuck—Vash-h-h,” Wolfwood’s moan is embarrassingly glitched, but he registers the creak of steel above him as Vash’s free hand claws deeper gashes down the wall.
“Come on, Nico,” Vash coos, his usual voice undercut with a clicky rasp. “I want to see it.”
Wolfwood is on the floor, still crowded with his shoulders against the wall, legs pushed apart so Vash can crouch between them. The tail around his ankle lifts his leg and rests it over Vash’s thigh. Vash is curled above him, large and bony and feathered, his open coat hanging from his body and draping around Wolfwood. The hand still fisted in that red fabric shakes. If anyone were to stumble across them, Wolfwood would be completely hidden from view. There’s a violent hiccup in his breathing program.
Vash moves from pinching at wires to slide his hand deeper, pushing into the back of ribs to grip around Wolfwood's spinal column again. His knuckles stretch against the synthetic skin from the inside, stroking down the bundle of steel supports and twisted wires. A violent glitchy noise is wrenched out from somewhere deep in his chest components. Wolfwood can feel each knob of Vash’s knuckles pressing underneath the skin of his back. There’s a claw caught and pulling at something as Vash slowly slides his hand up and down. It pulls taut once, twice, then snaps under the sharp edge and slow movement of Vash’s claws and the sound Wolfwood feels leaving his throat is long and drawn out and tinny, like the protest of a dying computer.
“You sound so pretty,” Vash says, almost unintelligible through the hissing and clicking of his voice.
Wolfwood wants to tell him to shut up but all that comes out is a pathetic electronic whine.
Vash coos and clicks something at him that’s actually incomprehensible this time, before gripping tight around the base of his spine—right around a much thicker convergence of wires—using it as a handle to roughly pull Wolfwood towards himself. Wolfwood feels their hips collide, feels his head hit the floor as his shoulders slide the rest of the way off the wall. His mouth hangs open and some amalgamation of Vash’s name and stuttered aborted moans crackles out of his mouth. Feels the pressure, the overheating, there’s too many warnings, Error, Error, Emergency Reboot Protocol.
And then there’s nothing.
Wolfwood comes back online to the whirring of his processors as he recovers from total shutdown. He’s still lying on his back on the floor. Both legs are thrown over Vash’s thighs, and Vash is still kneeling between his legs on the floor. He has Wolfwood gripped lightly by the bare hips with human looking hands. Cool air registers on his sensors, and he notices his work jacket has been fully ripped open. There’s a thin nanomesh covering his wound, the edges of which are no longer burnt from the laser but are now jagged as if something has shredded away the burnt flesh. He looks up at Vash, who is no longer showing any signs that he is anything other than a normal guy, with hair falling over his face a bit on one side and coat a little disheveled. Vash is watching Wolfwood watch him with a guilty smile on his face.
“How long?” Wolfwood asks. Good, his voice is no longer glitching.
“A few minutes,” Vash says. He rubs a thumb over the edge of Wolfwood’s half formed skin.
“Jesus.” Vash’s thumb keeps kicking off notifications from the newly repaired area. Diagnostics Report All Systems Nominal. Wolfwood sits up and Vash lets him, hands falling away after squeezing his hips once.
Vash looks bashful as Wolfwood brushes against the edge of his ruined shirt, looking for buttons to close it. There are none. Wolfwood shrugs and lets it hang open.
“I had to, uh, open it. Some of your neural wiring got disconnected and I had to fix it.”
That instantly makes Wolfwood nervous. Diagnostics Report All Systems Nominal. Neural Connections at 100%. Time Until Full Dermasilicate Regeneration: 98 minutes.
Weird. That’s faster than the previous estimate by two hours. He looks down at the thin reforming skin, the barest layer covering the gash to keep it closed. It’s thin and shiny, like he’s been shrink-wrapped.
“Would you look at that? Accurate too. Are you some kind of robotics expert, Spikey?”
Vash rubs the back of his head with one hand. “Something like that.”
As if that flimsy excuse is enough to keep Wolfwood from prying later. He rolls his eyes once he knows Vash is looking at him and dismisses the instant unnecessary action notification. He really needs to turn that off once he discovers which subroutine that is. He could pull up his full protocol list back on his ship.
“We need to get out of here,” Wolfwood says as he looks around. A nearby door has a room number and he cross references known ship schematics. They’re in the deep levels of this mining vessel. Mining vessel? Why would Vash be on a mining vessel? “Actually, why are you even in here?”
“They got me,” Vash shrugs.
What does that even mean? What was Vash doing to get “got”? Why was he in this sector anyway?
“You could easily break out on your own,” Wolfwood says instead, looking at Vash and raising a brow. He’ll have plenty of time to ask his questions later.
“Yeah, but if I melt through too much metal I could rip a hole in the hull.”
Of course he didn’t break out because it might compromise the safety of the crew. Wolfwood doesn’t roll his eyes only because he doesn’t want to dismiss another stupid notification. He busies himself with standing instead.
“Well, having me break you out is risking holes in my body. This thing wasn’t cheap, you know.” Wolfwood straightens up fully and waves his hands over his body in emphasis. Not that he really knows how much it all cost. How much was his former human self paid for this? He hopes the amount was at least fucking worth it.
Vash perks up when he hears Wolfwood mention holes, eyes bright. Wolfwood takes a step towards the hallway and Vash scrambles to stand and hover behind him. No heat signatures detected. He hears nothing besides rustling behind him from Vash brushing a few stray feathers off his coat sleeve. He still looks vaguely excited, and his eyes flick down Wolfwood’s bare torso once.
“No,” Wolfwood says.
“But I didn’t say anything!” Vash pouts.
“You didn’t have to!” Wolfwood throws an arm up in exasperation. One of his stupid protocols registers the movement as extraneous and Wolfwood dismisses the notification with vitriol. Damn programming never wants to let him be dramatic. “Just because you think dial-up sounds are sexy doesn’t mean I'm going to go around getting holes blasted in me for you to play with.”
Vash frowns and kicks at nothing on the ground. His brows furrow a bit. Then he’s looking back up at Wolfwood with his impossibly large gleaming eyes and tilting his head a bit to the side in that dog-like way that Wolfwood definitely doesn’t find endearing because he’s a synthetic man made of literal steel and silicone.
“What’s dial-up?”