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Waking up was difficult, like swimming through jell-o. Like he was trying to escape quicksand.
Like he’d been in a coma.
It was the kind of sensation that he only got when he awoke from a complete shut-down rather than coming around from sleep mode. It took time to boot up in a situation like this, time for his brain to reconnect with his body and for everything to get moving again.
Why was he shut down? It was a rare occurrence these days – only when Kuseno actually needed to do a major overhaul – something like replacing his core or moving his brain to another body entirely. He didn’t remember going to Kuseno’s. Last thing he recalled, he was checking out an abandoned warehouse on the edge of the city, half hidden by overgrowth from the forest surrounding it.
Had he been so severely damaged that he’d gone into shut-down? He felt okay, but maybe that was just because he’d been rescued and put into Repair Mode.
Genos tried to get his eyes open, but the world beyond was so bright that he had to shut them again immediately. His eyes hadn’t calibrated yet and the feedback from them when exposed to the bright overhead light was painful.
“Awake already?” someone said, sounding surprised. Genos didn’t recognize the voice, “Kuseno really put a lot of effort into you. I only just got your limbs switched off.”
“W-what?” Genos asked through a half-numb mouth. As promised, he couldn’t move his arms and legs, and that was more than a little alarming.
“Your boot-up time is impressive indeed. I can’t wait to get a look at that core and processor.”
Someone touched his right arm. The sensors were still on because he could feel it, a cool hand wrapped in latex, but he couldn’t get the synthetic muscles to respond. “Don’t hurt yourself trying,” chuckled the person. A man, “I switched off your control over your limbs, so you’re just going to have to lie there quietly.”
Genos tried again to get his eyes open and hold them open, and he succeeded this time, despite the spikes of pain stabbing into his skull. He was on a construction table, like the one Kuseno used, a wide array of various robotic arms and tools hanging from the hub above him. Tilted at a slight angle, from here he could see all the way down to his feet, a clear view of how he was no longer wearing clothes. Around his neck and his pelvis, thin metal strips to hold him in place, but no other restraints. No other restraints were necessary, it seemed.
The person touching his arm was a man, but his face was covered almost entirely by a surgical mask, glasses above that and a surgeon’s cap atop his head. His hands were in white latex gloves, white coat extending all the way down to his wrists. He was completely covered from head to toe, no clues as to his identity. Indeed, that must have been why he was wearing that getup – Genos had no bodily fluids that could be considered topically hazardous, nor did he need someone to be disinfected…unless they were planning to do something with his brain or the circulatory system that supplied it.
The thought made his non-existent skin crawl.
“Who are you?” he mumbled almost unintelligibly, “What happened?”
“Ah,” said the man, fitting a small screwdriver into the space just below Genos’ right elbow, “You were knocked out by an electromagnetic weapon, which disrupted your systems and sent you into shut-down. I got you up here on my table, turned off your legs and arms, and you know the rest.”
“Weapon? Why did you turn off my limbs?”
“Well, I didn’t think you’d take too kindly to it if I just asked if I could take you apart.”
Genos stared at him in mute horror as he turned the screwdriver in tiny circles. After a few seconds the man glanced up and their eyes met. A moment passed and his eyes crinkled at the edges in amusement, “Now, now, Genos, don’t be afraid. I’m good at what I do, I’ll keep track of all your components.”
“You can’t just...take apart my body,” Genos protested.
The man didn’t respond immediately, in favour of lifting off the armor on Genos’ right forearm. He made a noise of interest, “Oh, interesting choice of wiring. This seems inefficient, but perhaps your core power makes up for it…” he trailed off as he poked gloved fingers in between the wires running along the interior of Genos’ wrist. When he pressed against the steel tendons, Genos’ fingers curled of their own accord, and he couldn’t help but swallow against the lump that had suddenly formed in his throat. “Is it really yours?” he said a few seconds later, as he fiddled around inside Genos’ arm, “Wasn’t it all given to you by an engineer much like myself?”
“And who are you?”
“We’ve met on a few occasions, Genos,” the man looked at his face again, and clearly smiled beneath his mask, “Metal Knight.”
“Bofoy?!”
“Yes, yes, that’s me. Now, hold still,” he chuckled quietly at his own joke and indifferently wrenched out a wire. Genos felt it but it must be nonessential because no alarms went off in his diagnostics panel. Bofoy continued to dig around in his wiring, poking at the flame throwers there, but must not have found anything interesting because eventually he moved on to the upper arm.
“What are you doing?” asked Genos. His mouth was working properly now and his eyes had adjusted. He’d finally booted up, but his system was currently unable to access any weapons or movement.
Bofoy got his upper arm armor open, and with a few well-placed prods, suddenly the entire limb turned and opened, exposing all its innards, “There we go,” he said and, pulling a nearby tray table towards him, he began selectively loosening and discarding components, “I already told you that I’m taking you apart.”
Genos felt sick. His stomach had gone cold. He could hardly breathe, “Why?”
“Just to see what you have in there. You’ve had some recent upgrades which I find very interesting. I’ve been very impressed with what Kuseno has managed to do, despite his limitations,” he seemed to take notice of Genos’ face, “Don’t worry, your brain is of no use to me. You can keep your fleshy parts.”
Keep them in what? Genos wondered but didn’t say. A jar atop his desk? It’s not like Bofoy was going to let him go now that he knew who he was. He was still hoping that someone was about to burst into the room to come to his rescue. He couldn’t have been the only one to get a call to come to this warehouse, right? Someone else must have been given that information?
His hand was scrutinised, bent back and forth, fingers pulled apart and yanked hard. The only place he had more sensation receptors was his mouth and it was a little painful having his digits manhandled in such a way, especially when one of them was twisted too far and the joint casing cracked.
“Stop breathing so much,” complained Bofoy, apparently done with his hand and arm and now moving onto his legs. Genos was gasping through his nose, big, shuddery breaths, and Bofoy’s fingers drifting over his thigh plates weren’t helping.
He was scared. More scared than he’d been in a long time.
In battle, being torn open was a necessary risk. Every time he left the house he knew that he might not be coming back with the same parts – or not coming back at all – but that never bothered him because it was always on his terms. And usually he was helping people. Making a difference. Becoming stronger. Helping Saitama. That was worth a little damage.
But this, the feel of unwanted hands clicking open his outer plates, fingers crawling over his inner circuits and pulling and shifting the things inside him? That was terrifying. Was this how he was going to die? A slow death, being taken apart piece by piece? It seemed ironic, given his usual everyday activities.
“You’re not going to put me in repair mode?” he asked eventually, breathlessly, hoping that Bofoy just hadn’t realised it existed. At least in RM, he would hardly feel what was going on, no pain and the very base level of sensation. Enough to know that something was happening. Not enough to feel the drag of the latex gloves against his parts.
“Why? I won’t get accurate responses from your system if I do.”
Genos felt his heart sink and let it sit there in the pit of his stomach.
Bofoy was working in his inner thigh. Genos wished he could get up and leave, of course, but were that not permissible, he wished he could at least cover his face as it began to blossom bright red.
“Why do you cyborgs have such a false sense of modesty?” Bofoy mused as he unscrewed the plating there as well, “Robots don’t have this problem. They accept that their bodies are functional collections of artificial components. You seem to have some sort of misplaced diffidence,” he grunted as he finally popped open the thigh plate and Genos’ leg expanded, “Everything you are was built by someone else. It’s not like it belongs to you.”
Genos didn’t say anything. Bit his lower lip.
Bofoy rolled his eyes, “Don’t start crying now. It’s not going to help you.”
He began unplugging and moving things much as he had before, collecting Genos’ parts on a new tray that was labelled ‘right leg’. Occasionally he would make notes to himself out loud, which Genos assumed was being recorded on some sort of hardware in this lab. When he ripped out Genos’ kneecap, the cyborg couldn’t help but make a noise of pain.
Sounding surprised, Bofoy commented, “Oh, Kuseno programmed you with too much sensitivity.” Then, with a snort, “I’m guessing he wanted you to feel or some other trite nonsense?”
“Yes,” gasped Genos, “To be as human as possible.”
He’s human, isn’t he?
A derisive snort as Bofoy looked over the kneecap, “No need to program someone with pain,” and then, dismissively, dropped it in the bin by his feet, followed by a bunch of wires which had come loose during the process. He was ripping out parts he wasn’t even going to keep, throwing them out, which was somehow even worse than the neatly organized rows laid out on the tray. Genos bit down harder on his lip, feeling his cheeks bunching up as his mouth pulled back. He really was going to cry. How embarrassing.
As he had with his hand, Bofoy took his time with Genos’ foot, pushing all the joints back and forth and bending the whole thing as far as it would go in every direction. He disappeared for a few seconds and then, to Genos’ dismay, came back shortly with what looked like a soldering iron. “I just want to test something,” he said and then touched the tip of the red-hot metal to the base of Genos’ big toe.
It took a few seconds for the heat to sink in. That hurt. It hurt! “Ah,” huffed Genos, “Ah! Stop!”
“No reflex movement, interesting,” Bofoy moved the glowing metal to the arch and held it there, dragging it down slowly after a few seconds.
Holy shit that hurt! His hands and feet were so flexible and sensitive that he had to take special care not to have them injured if he wasn’t in battle mode. Having an arm ripped off completely was less painful than breaking a couple of fingers because there was so much sensitivity mapping in his hands. Bofoy held the soldering iron there, doing much more damage to the stuff contained beneath the exoskeleton than the top metal itself.
“Nngh,” groaned Genos desperately, willing his legs to come back online so he could kick Bofoy in the face.
“Feeling human indeed,” said Bofoy with a chuckle, and finally pulled back the blisteringly hot metal.
Genos was feeling very vulnerable, very human right now. Exceptionally so.
“So no overrides at all on the limb lock-out, not even severe damage to a joint,” said Bofoy thoughtfully, placidly, like he hadn’t just melted part of someone’s foot. He wandered away and putting the tool down somewhere behind Genos’ head. It sounded like there was a table full of who-knows-what there, like this was some sort of high-tech torture chamber and his body was being interrogated for its secrets, “That’s an easily exploited weakness for you if someone knows what they’re doing.”
Even Genos didn’t know how Bofoy had turned off his control over his arms and legs, so it was hardly a common threat. By far the more dangerous weapon demonstrated today was the EM Weapon that had put him offline in the first place. An enemy wouldn’t need to take his limbs offline after that, they’d only need to rip apart his unconscious body. He shivered miserably, shaking the upper parts of his limp limbs as his torso jerked them. Bofoy ignored him, pushed hands up over his torso now, skilled fingers finding all the hidden switches to open his chest compartment.
“Oh, yes, you can eat, that’s right,” he said thoughtfully, roughly pulling out the tubing contained within his stomach. Genos had to look away, it looked like he was being disemboweled and the feeling was too visceral as his guts were pulled out of his body.
“Hmm,” said Bofoy, reaching up to his plethora of tools hanging from the ceiling. He plugged in one cord just above Genos’ core, the other just below it, and then disappeared again.
This time he was gone for quite some time, the only sound in the room the quiet clicking of someone typing on a keyboard. Genos lay still for the first few seconds, listening to his own shaky breaths, willing his limbs to come back online so he could make an escape. Bofoy was close enough to his core now that he was in danger – his backup power for his brain was very limited and if the core were removed from his body, he would die within a couple of hours.
He tried reloading his diagnostics, but the limbs didn’t come back online, and his processor wasn’t letting him switch to Battle Mode. Could he reboot himself somehow? Would that even turn everything back on?
“Oh shut up,” complained Bofoy again when he returned, commenting again on Genos breathing, like the idea of him being alive and afraid was offensive. With an irritated look, he reached up to yet another arm, “Suppose we might as well do this now, just to stop you making so much damn noise.”
Genos clamped his teeth shut at the approaching object. He’d done this before, willingly, with Dr. Kuseno, but that was where he felt safe. He wasn’t going to open his mouth now, not even as Bofoy pinched at it fruitlessly. A human hand was not going to be able to unclamp his metal jaw. “I could always cut open your cheek to get to your jaw mechanism,” a pause for thought, “Or just go and get a hammer and chisel.”
A few seconds of silence where Genos considered what to do. From a damage mitigating standpoint, he should just open his mouth now, but in terms of delaying as much as possible in the hopes of a rescue, it would be better if he kept his mouth shut. Bofoy seemed to run out of patience quite quickly and stormed off behind him, reappearing with a scalpel and something that looked like an Allen key.
“Are you going to open up now?”
Mouth still clamped shut, Genos shook his head.
So of course, Bofoy sliced unapologetically into his cheek where his lower jaw connected with the remainder of his skull and slotted the crank in to the circular rotor which allowed him to chew. Then he began turning the key, and to Genos’ horror, slowly but surely his mouth began to open. Bofoy cranked it as far as he could, and left it there, letting Genos’ mouth gape.
“See, no point in making things difficult. You’re a machine and machines can be manipulated.”
His fingers pressed down on Genos’ tongue, then caught it in a firm grip, yanking it as far forward in his mouth as possible. His hands tasted like latex and the grease from Genos’ own innards. “Very good moisture in the mouth. Excellent strength and flexibility in the tongue. Some good work here, realistic. Reminder,” something from the computer above them beeped, “Remove tongue, salivary glands and the roof of the mouth when disassembling head. End reminder.”
Another beep and then an automated voice, “Reminder set.”
Genos felt cold. He really was going to get completely taken apart. Was he actually going to end up little more than a brain in a jar?
“Not usually part of my field of interest,” mused Bofoy, pressing two fingers down into Genos’ mouth until they touched the back of his throat. No gag reflex, but the motion felt bizarre, “But there has been a lot of interest in sex bots recently and I could use the cash infusion to buy new materials.”
He chuckled, running his fingers over Genos’ teeth, and pushing them out into the soft curves of his cheeks “Maybe I’ll make a novelty model that looks just like you. That should sell well, given your popularity.”
Illegal, Genos was pretty sure. You couldn’t use someone’s likeness unless they had signed it away.
…Who was he kidding? Bofoy was basically about to commit murder by slowly taking apart his body. Even if his brain was still alive, that was no use to him if he wasn’t conscious.
This wasn’t a man who cared about rights to likenesses.
A noise akin to a sob bubbled up in his throat, muffled by the hand jammed uncomfortably into his mouth. What did he do to deserve this? Both of them were heroes for fuck’s sake, this shouldn’t be happening.
Bofoy removed his hand at long last, reaching over his shoulder and pulling the last robotic arm from the hub above them down towards Genos’ face. Without resistance, he slid it into Genos’ mouth, guiding the curved black tube down across his tongue and into his throat. Hollow, it extended all the way down to his collarbone on the inside and had several uses. It could check his lung capacity and breathing systems, keep oxygen supplied to his brain if those systems were to get shut off at some point during a repair. It could also hold his neck still without any external restraints, because the tube was rigid, and as wide as his esophagus could stretch.
His head was held stiff now, by the unyielding material in his mouth and throat, and he could only watch as Bofoy undid the restraint around his neck and slid his hands up the lines of the silver tendons running from jaw to collarbone. “I can take out the lock on your jaw now,” he said, sounding smug, and turned it down a few notches before releasing it. Genos’ mouth closed only a couple of millimeters as his teeth sank into the hard metal of the tube.
It did the breathing for him, rhythmically inflating and deflating his chest and he was no longer able to hyperventilate. Had no control over anything much now, just his eyes, and the few muscles in his torso not disconnected when his front was wide open.
Bofoy rummaged in his chest, hands in his core containment unit.
Saitama-sensei would come and save him, right?
He had to believe that.
He had to.
He –
-- powered back up.
“Hm,” said Bofoy, carefully balancing the core on the palm of his hand, “Seems your reserve power boots you back up quite quickly after an abrupt disconnection.”
He turned the core this way and that, and it took a couple of seconds for Genos to realise that it wasn’t attached to him anymore. “Mmph!” he said, in alarm, suddenly feeling the world spinning around him.
Bofoy laughed, wandered over to another table and set the core down, pulling a cord over. Genos tried to look down, but he couldn’t angle his head and all he could see was the edge of a thick grey wire protruding from the chest cavity where his core, his heart was meant to be.
“Now this is what I’ve really been curious about,” he said, turning it so the output jack was on the top, “Your core is small, considering your firepower, so it must have an exceptional output capacity, and yet it is able to power the systems necessary for your brain with presumably low risk of electrocuting your organic components.”
Genos was actually starting to feel a little bit faint, though whether that’s because of what he was looking at or because he was being provided much less power, he couldn’t say. He wanted to tell Bofoy not to do that, that there was a risk of setting off the self-destruct function, but he couldn’t talk. Couldn’t move. Couldn’t even breathe on his own.
Bofoy inserted the plug into the core, causing its hum to increase in intensity and volume, and for the light to grow steadily brighter until it was almost like there was a miniature blue sun in the room. The man looked at it for only a couple of seconds before turning back to Genos and adjusting his gloves. “The computer will have the readings on your core in a few minutes. In the meantime, I did also want to remove your processor. I’m extremely interested in how it works in tandem with your organic components. You might have difficulty coordinating your senses once that’s removed, I imagine the unfiltered inputs will be confusing.”
“First, let me just have a look at your optics, so I can re-examine once the processor is out,” of course, there was no moving as Bofoy’s gloved fingers peeled open his eyelids, holding them back as his other hand reached down. Genos tried to close his eyes, tried not to see, but he could only close the left eye, and he had to watch as the fingers loomed into his vision, the thumb in one corner, the middle finger in the other. They pressed in, slowly, sliding around the orb of his eye and then – pulling, just enough to remove it, to disconnect the delicate wiring connecting to the back of his eye.
That side of his vision went black and he was left in blessed darkness.
Blessed darkness as an alarm started to sound, as Bofoy cursed and ran to where Genos’ core was burning so bright he could see it as a white spot through his eyelid. Darkness as he tried to unplug it and howled as the electric shock burnt his arm and the sound of sizzling flesh rose into the air. Darkness as finally something that had been rattling stopped, and in its place, an explosion and then a thud, a flash of hot air and rain of debris. A splatter of something warm landed across Genos’ cheek.
He opened his remaining eye. The core was in cool-down, blue light flickering down until it glowed softly atop the table it had been set. The console that it had been connected to was what had exploded, which was a lucky thing because the self-destruct function of the actual core would have easily taken out this whole building and everything in it, including Genos.
As it was, it seemed the exploding console had one victim. Genos could just about see Bofoy’s arm stretched out across the floor from the corner of his eye. What had splattered on him must have been blood. He couldn’t inhale through his nose for olfactory evidence, but the man wasn’t moving or making any sounds, so he was either unconscious or dead.
Which one would be better?
Genos couldn’t decide.
Couldn’t do much of anything right now.
So he laid still, and waited.
Time stretched on, lab quiet but for the hum of the machines and the even pace of his own assisted breathing.
Eventually his diagnostics informed him of a problem with his ‘core;’ there was too little power and he would end up going into emergency shutdown if an adequate power source could not be found. Whatever he was plugged into wasn’t strong enough to power his normal functions, forcing him to siphon the difference from his reserve power cells. He was eventually going to turn off for good, once his reserve power was depleted.
He shut his eyes again and tried to stay calm. Tried to think of something nice in case these were his last couple of hours on earth.
He tried to imagine that reason he couldn’t move was because he’d been destroyed, but that Saitama-sensei was on his way to pick him up and take him home, like he had on so many other occasions before. Imagined how it felt when he was held close in that embrace, wrapped in those arms – the only times teacher ever really touched him. Imagined the warmth of his body, the sound of his breathing, the gentle sound of the fabric of his cape as he moved.
He would come to save him.
He would.
He –