Summary: Baxter repairs Vox after Valentino decapitates him. Vox realizes how many enemies he's made. (Part One of Two)
Tags: Angst, Hurt/No Comfort, Drugging, Isolation, Dubious Consent, Medical Kink, Medical Procedures, Medical Torture, Medical Experimentation, Surgery, Body Horror, Gore, Oral Sex, Graphic Description, Sadism, Restraint, Objectification, Dehumanization, No Aftercare
WC: 9050 | AO3 | Voxtek: Trust Us With Your Hardware!
For the first three days after Vox's meltdown, he sits in Baxter's dark office, with only the dutiful lab techs for the company. They visit him every six hours on the dot to run his diagnostics, make sure his screen is still plugged in, and administer a hero's dose of PainKiller by Velvette. It's monotonous, but surprisingly peaceful. Quiet. Without the receiver in his chest, he can't do anything useful with the signals his antennas receive, which means no emails, no texts, no news, no streaming, nothing besides the data locally stored in his disembodied head.
If Vox wasn't too high to panic, he might lose his mind.
Instead, he stares through the aquarium window above Baxter's desk, squinting into the water for the occasional glimpse of his sharks. The pups grow down here under careful supervision, but before capturing Alastor, Vox typically found time in his schedule every couple of days to visit them if he could. He even failed his sharks.
On the fourth day of Vox's forced isolation, two security staff drag Baxter into the office by digital purple chains. As Vox watches through the reflection in the aquarium glass, Baxter flails uselessly and shouts empty threats until they manage to force him into his office chair. Then the links fasten themselves to the desk, leaving him exactly enough slack to wander the room, but not to leave. Baxter, ever practical, gives up on his showboating the second security disappears behind his office door with a heavy click of the lock.
“Fuck,” Baxter hisses under his breath, wringing his hands. “Okay. This is temporary. If I can find a way to dissolve these chains…”
Vox's voice is fuzzy with disuse when he speaks. “Good luck with that”
Baxter flinches hard enough to fall out of his chair. He looks around his office frantically, from camera to camera with disconcerting accuracy, before he finally notices Vox's screen propped up in the dock meant for Baxter's tablet.
“Mister Vox!”
Despite his best efforts, Vox doesn't come up with anything witty to say in the pause while Baxter gathers his bearings.
“What-?”
“They put me here for, uh, safe keeping,” Vox says slowly. It sounds better than admitting Valentino and Velvette have essentially locked him in the basement like an unwanted stepchild. “And for you to fix. I think.”
Baxter doesn't say anything.
“Baxter?”
“Why the hell would I fix you?” he spits, more venom in his voice than Vox has ever heard. Whatever illusion of niceties they had as a result of Baxter's employment vanished alongside the rest of the goodwill he spent decades cultivating. “You're a miserable piece of shit, you don't own my soul,” he starts counting on his fingers, “you're not the CEO of Voxtek or my boss anymore, you're literally just a head, and I can hear the PainKiller in your voice. I'm not helping you.”
Vox looks back into the aquarium as a shark pup swims past the window. “And why do you think you're here, not dead?”
“It's not my business,” Baxter sniffs.
But after three days in paralyzed silence, Vox can't let go of the subject. “Yeah, now isn't a good time to get on Vel and Val's bad side.”
“Just shut up, Vox.”
Baxter drops himself back into his chair with a glassy rattle of his chains. When he boots up his computer, Vox’s charging cable begins sharing data between him and the lab intranet. It’s miniscule compared to the main Voxtek system, but the access to anything besides his local drives hits Vox like a fresh shot of cocaine. He sifts through familiar files on his past upgrades: the first flatscreen, the claw redesign, the barbed dick, the stronger arms. Each document is hundreds of pages long, detailing the entire design and development process from Vox’s crude sketches to Baxter’s schematics to the techs’ troubleshooting.
A wave of nostalgia washes over him when he rifles through the document on his first proxy mannequin. It was a feat of engineering at the time. Barely fifteen years into the Voxtek empire, and they had already moved from living, breathing biomechanical sharks to suspended, half-alive clones to farm parts from. They keep four on hand at a time typically, gutted of any circuitry and kept viable by the charging cables soldered to the backs of their heads. Baxter uses them to test new hardware upgrades before he brings them to Vox.
“What about the proxies?” Vox asks, opening the file on Baxter’s computer monitor. “A little worse for wear, I’m sure, but it’s a start.”
Baxter unplugs Vox from his computer. “Your next dose is in two hours. Are you going to be this obnoxious the entire time?”
“Hey! My battery-”
“Okay,” Baxter interrupts flatly, sounding so much more himself that Vox falls silent to listen to him type rapidly on his keyboard. “They’re bringing it early so I can hear myself think.”
Vox’s screen flutters with black and white static as he snaps, “Who do you think you’re talking to? I’m-”
His voice cuts out as Baxter mutes him.
“Absolutely fucking nothing,” the little shit mutters to himself.
Then he lapses into silence, clicking his mouse between bursts of typing as he works away on his computer. In the reflection of the aquarium, the sleek blue back of the monitor obscures half of Baxter’s face, but Vox still catches him glancing over every so often in the few minutes it takes for a tech to show up with a prepared syringe of PainKiller. They don’t say a word to Baxter, nor to Vox, as they open his maintenance panel to inject the drugs into one of his cables.
Vox drifts on it for what must be forever. It’s at least long enough to see Baxter finish at his computer and move to another worktable in the lab. Long enough to hear Baxter hum a nonsense tune to himself while he titrates chemicals into sky blue solution. Long enough to taste the ambient electricity in the air when Baxter pours it on his chains in hopes of breaking them. Long enough to smell it burning through Baxter’s gloves and hands when he fails. Through it all, Vox sits mute and blind on the desk without enough presence of mind to be angry about it.
He enters standby mode eventually to conserve power. Without the system to disappear into, his consciousness lulls into hibernation as well, leaving him in a vague state of half-death minus the agony that an empty battery always brings.
On day five, Baxter plugs him back in first thing in the morning after the techs come, and doesn’t comment on the skitter of his computer screen at Vox’s exploration. Vox reopens the folder on the proxy mannequins for him, but otherwise splits his attention between an idle exploration of the intranet and a passive observation of Baxter’s work. The company-wide daily newsletter announces Val as the new CEO, which Vox knows will lead to an epic crash and burn, and his own image has been scrubbed off the banner at the top with a conspicuous gap between Valentino and Velvette. There’s nothing interesting in Baxter’s emails. Every visit from the techs was logged and copied to him, but none of the reports contain anything Vox didn’t already know.
Still muted, Vox opens a textbox on Baxter’s screen to type a message to him. “NEWS? PLAY KATIE KILLJOY. NEED UPDATES.”
All Baxter has to do is reach for the cable between Vox and his computer. The unspoken threat is enough, so Vox quickly dismisses the text and resumes his nondisruptive perusal of the hard drive.
Shock.wav’s files are here too. Those, Vox can sink into like a comforting embrace. He had an active hand in his baby’s design and development and it shows; his own scribbled notes have been scanned in to accompany Baxter’s dictations, and every few pages boast photos or videos of Shock.wav in his infancy. He had been so small. In one image, Vox cups the tiny shark pup in his hands, up to his waist in water without a care for what the salt would do to his suit or his machinery.
It startles him when the door to Baxter’s office slams open, but the second he sees the reflection of bright pink hair, he dims his screen.
“How‘re you two traitors getting on?” Velvette asks, all chipper faux-politeness and overly saccharine perfume.
Baxter doesn’t so much as glance away from his screen. “I refuse to participate in this company any longer,” he says firmly, “and I’d like to tender my resignation.”
Velvette laughs, properly laughs from her belly until it turns into a mean cackle, and Vox abruptly realizes how much he’s missed the sound lately. Not just these past five days, but for weeks, he’s gone without hearing her sound so delighted. Yet another way he let her down.
When Baxter still doesn’t turn around, she falls quiet. Then, she says, “Oh, you’re actually serious? That’s hilarious, babes. Didn’t you read the fine print on your contract?”
The room flashes with her distinct violet magic, but the scroll that unfurls in her hand is on Voxtek Blue parchment.
“You don’t decide when you quit,” Velvette says sweetly. “Your employment can only be terminated by a Vee, and you’re not going anywhere.”
“You can’t keep me prisoner-”
“Wrong again!” She taps her stiletto nail against one of the paragraphs. “Voxtek employees can be scheduled for indefinite shifts whenever necessary. Your shift ends when you fix the miserable bastard.”
She suddenly approaches the desk to lean over Vox.
“Speaking of, someone’s awfully quiet for once.”
“I muted him yesterday,” Baxter replies, managing to sound dismissive despite the telling tremble of his lure. “He was irritating me.”
Velvette snatches the purple chains confining Baxter to his office and pulls, yanking him out of his chair just to sling him into the filing cabinet against the adjacent wall. “Excuse me?”
“Aren't-” Baxter coughs wetly, “aren't you tired of his nattering too?”
“Obviously I am!” Velvette scoops up Vox's screen and turns him around, finally giving him the chance to look at her straight on. Her hair is curly and voluminous today, rich with the afterscent of Val's cigarettes, and her eyes are wide and bright when they meet his. “He's still Vox, idiot,” she continues, tilting Vox this way and that as if there's a physical button to restore his voice. “Who the fuck gave you the right to mute him?”
Baxter wheezes behind her. “Missus Velvette, I swear, I thought-”
“No, you definitely didn't!”
Vox has missed her so much.
“What are you fucking laying there for?” Velvette barks. “Unmute him! NOW!”
Her digital chains drag Baxter back to his desk, holding him down a few seconds too long so he has to struggle against them to get back into his chair. It takes seconds for him to remove the block on Vox's speech.
“Velvette,” Vox breathes the second he can. More than anything, he wishes he had the hands to cling to her silky dress. “My dearest Vel, my brightest star-”
“Cut the shit,” she interjects.
He doesn't have anything else to say. More descriptions scroll through his processors, but he knows they won't land the way he intends them to.
“Still mad at you, you suicidal fucking moron,” she informs him, staring into his eyes like she could hypnotize him. “Have you got any clue how difficult it is to run a business with just Val? I love him, but oh my God.”
A staticky chuckle bubbles through Vox's speakers. “Yeah, I remember.”
“So just… make sure the lab rats screw your head back on straight, arsehole.”
Velvette kisses the upper corner of his screen, leaving a sticky lipstick print on the glass, before she returns him to his charging dock.
“And you!” She pokes Baxter's face with the sharp tip of her nail, drawing fresh blood again. “Next time I see you, you better at least have some fucking blueprints. Val's been sketching nonstop.”
When he doesn't respond quick enough for her liking, Velvette kicks his chair.
“Have you gone deaf?!”
“Right,” Baxter says quietly. “Yes, ma'am, I'll start the schematics. Should we use his proxies?”
Velvette raises an eyebrow. “That doesn't mean anything to me, so I don't give a shit. Talk to you later.” She meets Vox's eyes in the window. “And you behave yourself, Vox.”
As quickly as she arrived, Velvette leaves again, abandoning him and Baxter in the messy office. Despite her reprimand, Vox hesitates to break the silence first lest he get muted again. Talking, to Baxter or himself, is one of the only things he still has the capacity to do.
“I can cobble something together in forty-eight hours,” Baxter says under his breath, opening his email to draft a message to Valentino's assistant asking for the sketches. “If at least one of the proxies is in good repair, we could have it ready by tonight for upgrades. Then integration tomorrow, calibration the day after- I can do this.”
Vox suppresses the urge to snark at him. “So in two days, I'll be back to normal?”
Baxter hums noncomittally.
“Hey, you know, there's an ethernet cord in here somewhere,” tries Vox. “You don't use it for your computer, but I have a jack.”
“Yes.” Baxter receives an email back from Valentino's assistant with at least ten files attached. “I put it there when I built your head as a back up in the event your receiver was damaged.”
The first of Val's sketches to load is a full-body figure drawing, hasty charcoal compared to Val's usual smooth painted strokes. At the top is Vox's head the way Val always draws him: smooth and smiling, with his hat almost off-center and a heart sketched in the sparks between his antennas.
Beneath that, it doesn't really look like Vox anymore. The proportions are wrong, too short and too leggy, missing the sharp edges of his usual body and posed with such salaciousness that Vox thinks for a moment it's the image of some whore with his own face plastered onto it. His reaction is visceral, pulling away from the computer so quickly as to send a burst of pixelated color across Baxter's monitor. He needs to call Val. Whatever that is, he can't- he won't tolerate it.
“So, connect me, then?” Vox manages through a static squeak of feedback. “I have a company to run.”
“No, you don't.”
Baxter continues clicking through Val's sketches. Vox needs to know what they are, but at the same time, the thought of the first makes his mind churn like Velvette's potions.
“I could help speed up the process. If you let me access the system, I can check the proxies for the best candidate, and I can start the software upgrades- don't need hands to type.”
“Vox,” Baxter warns.
He doesn't stop talking. “No, really! And you can get back to whatever it is you do outside of work. It's a win-win situation. Trust me!” He edges back into Baxter's computer enough to look through its camera, the red light behind the lens glowing like his eyes. “Come on!” He encourages. “Neither of us want to be here, do we? This way, we both get out faster.”
But Baxter doesn't look convinced. Instead, he appears to be on the verge of losing his patience with Vox's talking. Frantically Vox searches his internal memory for any other tactic he could use. He knows Baxter is a traitor, but the why is fuzzy, coded in an off-body hard drive because he can only store so much information in his head at once. Vox scrabbles through jumbling memories of Lucifer's brat, tangled into the panic of being muted for the first time and the adrenaline of Alastor tearing Vox apart with his bare hands.
“Baxter, please,” he tries, plucking out the soft tone Princess Morningstar uses with the residents of her hotel. “It's like being half blind and half deaf. My system is made for a constant flow of data in and out, and I can't think, and-” he makes himself inhale, even without lungs or gills to process the air, “I'm going fucking crazy here. Just connect me to the system. Let me do something, anything.”
Baxter doesn't seem to buy it. His face twists between anger, disgust, and pain, all tugging at him to the point Vox can't pinpoint which one is winning, if any.
“You're a despicable excuse for a man,” Baxter tells him. His tone is unbearably calm compared to his expression. “You should have been killed by that idiotic cannon, Mister Vox, and I sincerely regret that you survived it.”
“Oh.”
He doesn't know why that matters. Baxter is still just another employee under the Voxtek umbrella, and he knows they all kinda hate him. But it's different, hearing it outright like this, from the scientist that's supposed to fix him.
“What I suggest,” Baxter says, pulling Vox out of his thoughts, “is that you use this time to reflect on whatever went wrong in your programming to cause all that. The software RND team will be curious to know.”
Vox can't take Baxter's detached rage anymore and pulls away from the camera.
Back in the intranet, Vox begins reading through his last couple dozen maintenance reports to compile a list of parts borrowed from the proxies. They discarded one recently after taking its screen for Vox's repairs and have yet to grow a replacement, but the other three are mostly intact; one is missing its arms, another is short a kidney and a liver, and the last is so new that they keep passing it over for spare parts to give it time to grow. Its development stalled out a few inches short of Vox's height with a handful of miswired circuits that the techs have been too busy to correct. They might be able to cobble something workable together from those parts, but it would be too painful for Vox to sit awake through integration or calibration, and the edge in Baxter's affect makes him uncharacteristically nervous about the prospect.
At least, he's nervous for a couple of hours, until the techs come by with Vox's next dose of PainKiller and a vending machine sandwich for Baxter. Some of them are new, Vox thinks; he never pays attention to their faces, but he knows the cadence of their footsteps, and it's easy to hear any that fall out of its pattern.
“Has everyone been briefed?” Baxter asks around a mouthful of bread while a tech presses a fresh wave of fog into Vox's thoughts.
“Yes, doctor.”
Baxter hums, pleased. “Excellent. We're working double time, but precision is still the utmost priority.” He shoves the rest of his sandwich in his mouth as he opens a dataset computer screen. Vox doesn't dare make his observation known. “Missus Velvette was very clear that we continue to treat Mister Vox with the utmost respect,” he continues, as if he's been concerned with such an issue himself, “and that includes respect for his time.”
On his monitor, Baxter clicks through the readings from all three proxy mannequins.
“Unsuspend Proxy Theta Twelve,” he instructs. “Run diagnostics, report back, and then we can begin upgrades.”
Then Baxter switches tabs, returning to Val's drawings and Velvette's running list of tasks, which scares Vox off of watching him. Some of the techs crowd around his chair to look as well, and the seamless rhythm of it strikes a chord in Vox. Their perfect synchronicity was never for him. It simply happens as a result of so many hours, days, decades they've spent running the same steps.
“Chest Beta Four, I think,” Baxter suggests, his computer mouse scraping across the desk as he points. “That was Mister Valentino's favorite. All necessary inclusions are stored with it.”
Vox didn't know they were working on something for his chest.
“Hmm. Get a new right hand from Proxy Theta Ten, the wiring isn't fixable on this one.”
One of the techs types the orders into their tablet, loud in the silence between each to come.
“And ribs two through six, from Proxy Theta Eleven. Both sides. He'll need the extra support. Oh, and please, conduct a thorough exam of the spinal cord during diagnostics; I don't want any surprises. Flush the gills too.”
Baxter's keyboard sounds different, heavier, and his fingers fly across its keys much faster.
“Let's do Genital Pi Two, since Pi One went so well. Any questions?”
When the techs have none, Baxter makes a dismissive sound and they file out of the office, leaving him and Vox alone once more.
Vox doesn't think they've ever spent this much time together without maintenance and lab techs to fill the space. The longer it goes on, the less he likes it, and the more he sort of wishes he was alone with the aquarium window again, if only because he can't help peering into Baxter's notes exactly long enough to make himself nauseous despite his lack of a stomach. The continuous loop of PainKiller has built his tolerance. He'll have to tell Velvette, he realizes, because he doesn't think Baxter cares.
He kills the next few hours watching videos of Shock.wav on Baxter's computer to avoid wallowing in his thoughts. Every so often, Val or Velvette appears in the background of a clip, though they're never as enthused as Vox. He sees reality for what it is now: they indulge him, and he always wants more. Now it's blown up in his face. Like his cannon.
“Mister Vox,” Baxter prompts him, startling Vox into a scatter of grey static. “Would it be faster to text Missus Velvette or e-mail her?”
He has to replay the conversation twice in his memory to fully process the question. “Uh, Melissa reads her e-mails, but she checks all her texts immediately.” Vox abandons his video of Shock.wav to delete Velvette's email address from Baxter's draft. In its place, Vox types Velvette's business number. “Here's her personal line.”
A beat later, he remembers to ask why.
“I can't work on your body from here,” Baxter tells him, “so she needs to remove my chains or transfer them to the main lab.”
Less than thirty seconds after Baxter fires off his text, Velvette's face appears on his computer screen in a request for a video chat. He answers it without hesitation.
“Why can't you do it in your office?” Velvette snaps instead of a greeting.
Behind her, Val poses for an array of dazzled paparazzi with a sloppy, stumbling Angel Dust hanging off his arm and a heavy fog of his smoke lapping at their calves.
“My office is not an operating theater,” Baxter replies, “and wouldn't fit the exam table, let alone the rest of Mister Vox's hardware team, the equipment necessary to monitor and repair him, the parts-”
“Okay, shut up, shut up!” Velvette squeezes her eyes shut for a moment to massage the place between them where a nose bridge would be if she had one. “I don't have time for this. Go.”
She hangs up, and seconds later Baxter's chains begin to drag him out of the room with a yelp. He's lucky Velvette decided to open the door instead of yanking him through it. But it leaves Vox alone again, tempted by the abandoned email template. The intranet only allows him to reach other Voxtek employees, but himself, Val, and Velvette have always been under that umbrella, and for as much as he wishes he could talk to them, he finds himself at a loss for words. Nothing he says would be enough to make up for his failures.
A tech comes back for Vox before he can make himself type anything and he's silently grateful for the respite. They carry him gingerly, with both hands, his screen pointed away from themselves so he can see the path to the main lab.
Baxter and the rest of the techs have gathered around the observation table Vox always occupies for maintenance, though there are several additional trays of spare parts littered around it like the rings of Saturn. He tries to make sense of them, eyes darting from tray to tray, but from the low angle of the tech's embrace, the shapes are unrecognizable.
Only after Vox is set on the table, a few inches from the proxy, does he notice they've already strung an IV drip into its left arm with both PainKiller and blood. Neither are strictly necessary. He appreciates the comfort measures nonetheless.
“Start with two,” Baxter instructs as he pulls fresh gloves onto his hands. “The more cooperative he is, the better, but I need Mister Vox conscious if possible.”
Vox doesn't even register the needle going in. He simply stares up at the ceiling, at Val's painting, trying and failing to see the details at such a distance when his eyes won't focus. It's hard to think of anything or anyone he hasn't failed recently. But maybe, if he's lucky, this upgrade will give him the fresh start he needs.
If nothing else, it's buying him time while Val cools down.
“Plug him in,” Baxter orders. “His software has been buggy; I hesitate to trust his verbal observations. The vital output is our guideline. Understood?”
The techs murmur in assent as they angle his head up enough to plug the thick diagnostic cable in. Data flows through it at a trickle: binary code, barely a bit a second, and too complicated to save to his limited memory bank, let alone process.
“I'm going to open your screen casing, Mister Vox. Stay still.”
Small hands join the techs’ on Vox's screen, but they skim to the seam where the frame meets the back of his head. When his fingers press to the half-healed indent from being decapitated, a quiet whimper escapes Vox's speakers.
Baxter hesitates for a split second. “You can-”
Then the pressure increases, and this time Vox's screen jitters before he makes a garbled sound of complaint. It's like pressing the flat of a knife into a fresh wound, dull but still sparkling, and Vox doesn't have a way to get away from it.
“You can't feel that.”
“Hurts,” Vox whines. He doesn't recognize his own voice. It's all feedback, or something like it.
Baxter's lure swings over Vox's face as he stares into his glitching eyes. “You're alright, Mister Vox,” he assures in an unconvincing lilt. “You have a double dose of PainKiller in you and no renal system to speed up your metabolism; it doesn't hurt.”
His thumb presses into the wound and it splits open, bleeding oil onto the table. Another shudder races across Vox's screen. The overhead speakers squeal. He might reboot. None of the input he's processing makes any sense and it comes to him in bits and pieces.
“He can have another half, but no more afterward. I don't want to overdose him.”
There are hands on his screen, wiping his tears and petting his cheeks as if to comfort him, but it only makes him feel smaller. He should have told Velvette about the tolerance. This high is bad, getting worse by the second, and Baxter hasn't so much as paused in his efforts to pry the wires of Vox's spinal cord into the open.
“We can't give him any more. Just hold him, the nerves are almost prepared.”
Vox tries to say Baxter's name, to beg him for relief, but the only words he manages are “Hurts, fucking hurts, it hurts, hurts,” over and over like a broken record.
Sure, Vox typically likes some pain with his pleasure. But this is different. Wrong. Like Baxter's hands are pulling him apart at a cellular level and he's powerless to escape. It hits him that he's alone with a bunch of techs who would happily see him permanently dead, and Valentino and Velvette hate him, and the rest of Hell has spurned him, and he lost his entire empire in a matter of twenty minutes, and he kind of regrets surviving his failed scheme too.
All while the overhead speakers echo his own pathetic cries back at him.
“Could be a tolerance issue. I still don't want to give him more- we're almost through the worst of it.” Baxter taps the side of Vox's screen with his blood slick hand to get his attention. “You should get ahold of yourself, sir. This is unbecoming.”
Vox can't calm himself down when he can feel the pads of Baxter's fingers separating the fibres he's pried out of Vox's head to connect them to the proxy. The drugs must be doing something for it to be possible without a deadly defensive shock, but they're nowhere near enough to address the way each point of contact is like a white-hot poker pressed against the inside of Vox's brain.
Hurt doesn't begin to describe the sensation. It's just the only word he can fit into his quivering mouth.
“Hurts, hurts, hurts-”
At last, Baxter releases the nerves from his overzealous grip, splaying them on the observation table so he can reach for the connections in the neck of the proxy. They usually knock Vox out for this part.
“Baxter,” Vox slurs through his twitching, unstable mouth. “Ba- axter, please. Hurts. Fuckin’ hurts, please…”
His voice cuts out when Baxter plucks out one of Vox's wires to solder to the proxy's matching part. The newly forged connection finally triggers a self-preservation process deep in Vox's code, jerking the proxy's limbs like an unbalanced marionette in a vain effort to escape the agony, but the techs are far more prepared for the motion than him. Before it comes anywhere near Baxter, they have him pinned.
“Vox!” Baxter chastises sharply.
When he clicks the next cord into place, the resulting surge of electric-sharp pain makes Vox break. “I can't,” he cries, his voice still playing back at him from the overhead speakers. “Hurts. Hurts. Want Val, it hurts-”
“I cannot concentrate over your useless chatter.” Baxter straightens up so he looms over Vox, his silhouette cutting through the bright lights pointing down, and fixes him with a flat, unaffected expression. “If you want a new body, you have to calm down. Do you understand?”
“It hurts,” Vox whimpers.
Baxter tuts disapprovingly. “You're maxed out on PainKiller. It can't hurt that much. You're working yourself up, Mister Vox, and if you-” His words die in his throat when the main elevator doors swish open.
Valentino and Velvette are already speaking to and over each other as they come off the elevator, both snapping like they've been working for days without rest.
“I'm not falling for it,” Val insists in a low growl, “and you shouldn't either, babydoll-”
“But he's really not that good an actor!” Velvette bites back. “And it doesn't sound like the kinda thing he'd broadcast-”
“Well, blowing up all of Hell, us included, didn't sound like something he'd do either-”
“God forbid we check on your fucking boyfriend after he calls for you-”
Baxter clears his throat to interrupt them, one of his hands still loosely curled around the wires coming from Vox's neck. “Mister Valentino. Missus Velvette,” he greets. “Come to see his progress?”
Val enters Vox's field of vision first, leaning over his face through a cloud of sweet-smelling smoke that sinks into Vox's processors. His expression hides behind his glasses. But his touch, his hand gently resting against the side of Vox's screen, is like a balm to the raw edges currently scattering his thoughts.
“He's broadcasting to the whole tower,” Velvette says. “I think he's actually in pain. So, tell me, how come you haven't given him anything for it?”
“I did.”
When Baxter connects the next cord, another spasm runs through the proxy as Vox's speakers crackle with more feedback. He can't stop himself from crying, still: repeating that it hurts, like saying it enough will change something. Knowing it's necessary doesn't lessen the suffering.
“He's been on a timed dose of PainKiller for five days,” Baxter explains without looking away from Vox. “I think he's built a tolerance, but the proxy hasn't, and I assure you this is preferable to an overdose.”
Val sucks in a breath through his teeth. “Yeah, okay- I do remember his last OD. It was nasty. And not in a fun way.”
The next connection Baxter makes triggers vital functions. On the table, the proxy trembles as it comes to life, but Vox's system can only process the sensations that are already familiar. The burn of unoxygenated lungs. The ache of an unmoving heart. The shiver of untested nerves. He needs a software update if he's meant to live with this new body but it's still too soon, and Vox can only wail through his speakers as code flickers across his face.
“Heart's on,” a tech informs. “BPM 145, respiration 24.”
“See?” Baxter implores, “Vox is fine. That's elevated, but well within normal range for maintenance.”
He reaches for the next cable, but Val smacks his hand out of the way before he reaches it.
“I don't care about the why or the how,” Velvette says slowly, “but you need to figure something out. This, the screaming, is fucking distracting.”
Then her hand, plastic and smooth, comes up to smear the lipstick print she left this morning off Vox's screen.
“And Vox might be a bastard, but guess what?”
Velvette grabs Baxter by the front of his coat, yanking him into a deep bow that brings their faces together without her stepping onto the table.
“He's still your fucking better,” she enunciates. “And you're dead wrong if you think that his little crash out gives you an excuse to forget that.” When she glances down at Vox, he swears the tilt of her eyes is close enough to pity that he can pretend it's affection. “Leave the torture to Val, would you? I'd hate to ruin these shoes putting you back in your place.”
A choked sound wheezes out of Baxter's throat before he speaks. “Yes, Missus Velvette. But- but I can't give him more PainKiller, I can't change the-”
“Give him something else, then.”
Velvette and Valentino share a look directly over Vox's face so he can stare up at them. He isn't sure when he forgot how much of his drive for decades was to provide for them, to be everything they needed, to make sure they never went without, but it resettles in his programming now like a comforting embrace. For a moment, the pain fizzles into the background. It's not as important as his Vees.
“His new body,” Val starts, gesturing toward the half-connected proxy as he takes a drag of his cigarette, “has a lower tolerance for drugs, right?”
Baxter hums. “Proxy Theta Twelve had an anomalous development. It was still the best option available, but yes, there are certain disadvantages. I intend to inspect its renal system closer another time, but it's my understanding-”
“I don't have all day!” Velvette interjects.
“Right. Uh…”
On Val's next puff of smoke, he lets it spill from his lips onto Vox's screen. The haze makes it harder to see him and Velvette, but Vox can still make their shapes out above him. And that's the only thing that matters.
“Might I suggest Mister Valentino's toxins, then?” Baxter asks. “They have a different method of action. Yes, Mister Vox would still be in pain, but the endorphins provided would change how he interprets it. The secondhand smoke has already helped tremendously.”
Val doesn't even pretend to consider it. “Just give him Love Potion. I'm busy running his company.” He flicks one of Vox's antennas petulantly and smirks at the weak arc of electricity that chases him. “You're lucky I came to check on you at all.”
“Love Potion has other shit in it,” Velvette argues. “It's got almost as much Ketamine as PainKiller.”
On Val's next hit off his cigarette, he leans in so his face is only a couple inches from Vox's before he exhales. Vox's lungs seize around its thick concentration, but his groan of discomfort barely crackles through his speakers, leaving the overhead ones silent and empty.
“Val,” he snivels, wishing he could cling to him, “and Vel, ‘m sorry, ‘m sorry Val and Vel, I didn't mean it,”
Velvette steps out of his line of sight.
“That's- alright, I guess that's an improvement on the fucking screaming,” she sighs, already on her way back to the elevator. “I can't deal with the melodrama. Just stay here until they're done operating.”
Val stomps one of his heeled boots on the ground indignantly. “I was in the middle of a shoot-”
“Don't take that fucking tone with me-”
“-but I’m the CEO now, so I'm in charge-”
“-Val, you literally needed my help to log into Vox's email this morning-”
“I'm going to get back to work now,” Baxter says firmly, just loud enough to be heard over Valentino and Velvette's bickering. He tugs on Vox's cables to connect the next one and rolls his eyes when Vox's screen shudders. “Unless anyone has further objections?”
Velvette snorts as she flounces away, leaving Vox between Val and Baxter. “I'll leave you boys to it,” she calls over her shoulder. “Later!”
Val mutters something rude under his breath, but sits on the edge of the table so he can cradle Vox's screen in his lap.
But his presence, and the waves of smoke emanating off him, settle Vox back into the comfortable dissociation the PainKiller is meant to deliver. He's usually not susceptible to Val's toxins in the same way, but some combination of his self-contained head, the incredible amount of drugs already in his system, and the flaws in the proxy body make it potent. It still hurts. And yet Vox's processors are content with the pain, filing them away as an ache, not unlike when Val grabs Vox over the same skin he's bitten to a bioluminescent bruise.
With Val, pain never feels quite right. Under the influence of his smoke, as besotted as any nickel-and-dime whore, Vox could almost interpret it as a similar burn to the stretch of Val making Vox take his cock to the hilt. Even the fireworks of Baxter's fingers manipulating and soldering his spinal cord register as intimate pressure in parts of him not meant to be handled.
“He's bleeding,” Val says overhead. “Like, a lot. Is that normal?”
Baxter nods. “We're connecting the circulatory systems. Unclip the blood bag and start at 50.”
Carefully, Val lifts Vox's head enough to adjust his posture. When he sets him back down, Vox can feel the twitching bulge of Val's dick against the back of his casing.
“It’s colder than usual, too. Is he supposed to be cold?” Val's upper set of hands drop to the biceps of the proxy, but Vox hasn't upgraded his software yet to feel the touch. “Oh, shit, he's fucking freezing!”
“Mister Valentino, please, relax,” Baxter says. “This is all normal. The proxy has been in suspension, and the colder temperatures keep it fresh. We're giving him warm blood- here, feel.”
He takes one of Val's hands to hold it against the bag of blood dripping into Vox's arm.
“I know what I'm doing.”
Val returns his hands to Vox's screen, simultaneously petting over his antennas and wiping away his tears. “Yeah, whatever. Can you just do it faster?”
“If you want it done poorly,” Baxter snaps, “then yes! But you cannot rush perfection.”
For reasons Vox doesn't understand, Val accepts this as easily as Velvette's order to stay: with barely audible complaint but undeniable compliance. He settles as much as the metal table allows and blows a fresh dose of smoke into Vox's face.
“I don't like seeing him like this,” Val confesses.
The techs follow an unspoken signal to move the proxy, dragging it up a couple of inches so its neck can be attached to the casing of Vox's screen.
“I'm not finished,” replies Baxter. “The proxy is just a base. After I fix his hand, I'm going to install-”
Val cuts him off with a cluck of his tongue. “Not what I meant, Doctor.”
They lapse into silence while Baxter meticulously stitches Vox back together. His system has started the process of upgrading, rewriting lines of code here and there in its desperation for sensory feedback, but it still only grasps familiar sensations. Pain. Pressure. Penetration. Each bite of the needle punishes his heart with an extra beat that makes his proxy jerk. If he had a dick and the blood to fill it, Vox realizes he would be hard.
“Heart rate,” a tech warns, “170 and climbing.”
Baxter doesn't even pause. “Lower it by sixty, and adjust as needed. I want it in the one to one-twenty range. And Mister Valentino, if you'll give him another dose? We're about to open his chest.”
This time, Val leans down to spit in Vox's open mouth, following it with a kiss before Vox has the opportunity to take offense. And Val's tongue is as dangerous as his cock, just as long and clever, bullying its way into the strange space that makes up Vox's mouth until he has to swallow aphrodisiac venom to avoid choking. His tongue, his saliva, is warm enough to heat Vox from the inside out.
His chest heaves as his heart races exactly long enough to be slammed back into rhythm by the techs.
“Enough for now,” Baxter orders.
Val reels his tongue back between his lips, but stays close enough to kiss. His hands are still all over Vox's screen without a care for what the static electricity does to the fine fur covering every inch of his body.
Vox would sell his soul to be able to touch him.
“Sir, can you help restrain him?” prompts Baxter, reaching for Val's arms. “He's glitching, and I need him to stay still.”
When Val pulls away, a short whine bounces between Vox's speakers and the ones overhead.
“Can I at least get my dick out first?”
Baxter doesn't dignify that with a response, which Val takes as permission. He's barely dressed to begin with, so he simply pulls his panties to the side to free his cock. It wastes no time seeking out Vox's screen like it remembers him, squirming against the glass and smearing sticky precum in its wake.
The only warning Vox gets is Baxter's cold demand of “Scalpel,” before the blade digs into his sternum.
His breath stutters, in, in, in, but Vox still lacks the motor control to escape the unyielding pressure of the cut. Val doesn't give him the room to move anyhow. Between his hands on Vox's shoulders and Baxter's gloved fingers flaying Vox's chest, Vox feels held. Owned. His programming writes this into place twice before a short-circuit behind his eye sends a tremor through his body.
An actual sob wrestles its way out of Vox when Baxter curls a hand around one of his ribs. First, he dislocates the delicate bone. Then, he slices through the connective tissue connecting it to the others. Third, he pulls the pale blue rib up and out high enough for Vox to see it in his limited field of vision.
“Gross,” Val comments, like his cock isn't drooling precum across Vox's face.
Baxter huffs and drops the bone into a metal receptacle of some kind. “Necessary,” he counters. “Rib L2, please.”
Replacing it is a much calmer affair; after positioning the new rib, Baxter must only tack the remaining tendons in place before moving on to the next. By the time Vox is allowed up off this table after his updates, his regeneration will have settled the bones as they're supposed to sit. He still cries wordlessly at each adjustment.
Through it all, Baxter is remarkably careful. Despite the flutter of Vox's lungs in the open air, he doesn't touch them, nor does he prod at Vox's arrhythmic heart. He even goes as far as to wrestle Val's dick across Vox's screen to keep it from pointing toward his chest cavity, tainting his fingers with pearls of fluid that make him frown and change his gloves.
“Don't contaminate the surgical field,” Baxter says sternly. “Not every orifice is designed for your genitalia, Mister Valentino.”
“Never stopped me before,” Val sniffs.
Nonetheless, he reluctantly keeps hold of himself, grinding into the friction of Vox's face while keeping his dick aimed away from the mess of blood and innards spilling from Vox's open chest. His toxins are the most concentrated straight from the source; both his dick and his pussy seem to be endless fountains of aphrodisiac, and the added dose coating Vox's teeth further serves to twist the pain of surgery into something he could almost call pleasure.
“Ribs R3 and R4, please.”
As Baxter works, Val's dick finds its way into Vox's mouth, cutting off his primary airway so that his gills flare to compensate and his throat reflexively swallows anything Val gives him. Vox can't think or breathe straight but he relishes in the distraction from Baxter's manipulations. It's familiar. It's real. It's processable. After so many years together, the weight of Valentino's cock on his tongue is an anchor in Vox's code when the rest of the world is indecipherable.
“Excellent work, Mister Valentino,” Baxter praises.
Val thumbs another sparkle of tears off Vox's screen and makes a noise of agreement. He often luxuriates in anything he can possibly interpret as a compliment, but his half-hearted response gives Vox the impression he wasn't entirely listening.
“L5, now- we'll be closing Mister Vox's chest soon, sir. He seems to be at an effective dose of toxins at the moment, so I suggest-”
“He can't overdose on it,” Val defends, “and he's- he seems calmer. Let me come down his throat, please, he needs it.”
And Vox does. He needs to stay wrapped in the warm, distant high of Val's toxins if he intends to survive the rest of his upgrade.
“Be careful. Don't break him.”
Val trills low in his chest as he shifts, adjusting the angle of Vox's head in his lap enough that he can press the last couple inches of his cock into Vox's screen. It doesn't make much of a difference to Vox--he still can't breathe or speak around it, still can't see past the lavender haze of Val's body above him–but the breathy moans on each of Val's exhales sink into Vox's system like a reward.
“Keep him still,” reminds Baxter, arranging the new ribs in Vox's chest like there isn't room for them all. “I can't have him moving while I close his chest, Mister Valentino.”
“Got it,” Val mutters half heartedly.
He's never this gentle with Vox under normal circumstances. Even when he's ostensibly playing nice to get something he wants, Val is mean, sharp and selfish, with little regard for the wellbeing of anyone on the end of his cock. If Vox didn't know better, he would assume it's someone else cradling his screen, wiping his tears, and cooing at him like a pet as they fuck his mouth.
Then again, Val has always been good at surprising Vox.
After Baxter finishes with his ribs, two techs pull the split skin together over Vox's chest. Where the stitches had been painstaking, the staples used to repair the chest incision are blunt and fast, pressed into place by a handheld dispenser, and deep enough to secure muscle alongside the skin. The first one lands so close to Vox's heart that he keens around Val's cock and struggles with the reflexive urge to push Baxter off him. Between Val's restraint and the techs’ hands on his chest, he makes no progress.
“We’re almost through here,” Baxter tells him, steadying Vox with a palm against the base of his neck, “You’re alright, Vox. Your heart is fine. Your respiration is fine. You’re taking Mister Valentino so well.” He squeezes Vox’s throat lightly. “Ten more.”
“You can do it, Papi,” Val adds.
When the next staple goes in, Val pushes down on Vox’s arms to keep him from surging away from the puncture. Static fizzles across Vox’s face and through his speakers in retaliation but he can’t move, not even to pull away from the increasingly frantic thrusting of Val’s cock in his mouth. He’s never felt so powerless before. But Val is talking to him, telling him he’s doing well, and Baxter is unflinching in his work, keeping a steady pace that takes him moments to complete.
Baxter releases Vox’s throat as he leans away to hand off the staple gun. “Perfect. Prep his wrist.”
“Fuck, hold on.” Val’s hands slide up and under Vox’s back to support his upper body while Val rolls his hips into Vox’s face. “Just give me a second, I’m close-”
“I’ll work around you, sir.”
While Val pulls Vox’s head into each thrust, a tech urges Vox’s right arm to extend away from his body, stabilizing it at the wrist and elbow while his other is allowed to lie limp against the observation table. At the first press of a fresh, razor sharp scalpel to the back of Vox’s wrist, he sobs, making Val’s wings flare out around them. A few of the techs are knocked back, but their indignant complaints disappear behind the way Val growls Vox’s name.
Like always, Val comes like a flood, finding its way down Vox’s throat and warming him from the inside out. He hadn’t felt cold before, but now more comfortable, he relaxes into the table and turns his face into the sweet caress of Val’s silk-gloved hands.
“Fuck,” Val murmurs, twitching with aftershocks. He’s still coming in waves and fucking his cum into Vox’s mouth. “So fucking good for me, Vox, shit.”
Vox’s speakers crackle around a half-formed sound.
“I know,” Val hums, “but you can take it a little longer.”
Baxter works much quicker on Vox’s wrist than his chest, easily disconnecting the nerves and tendons at their natural junctures rather than hacking through them as he’d needed to for Vox’s ribs, and ignoring the muscle spasms that run up Vox’s arm when he pulls too hard at the cables. Better yet, it doesn’t seem to draw or repulse Valentino’s attention. He simply watches Vox’s face, stroking his screen and occasionally sneaking his fingers in around his dick to feel the points of Vox’s teeth.
One of the techs interrupts by holding their tablet out for Baxter’s attention. “The software team sent the update. Should we begin the install?”
Baxter shakes his head. “No, I don’t want to overwhelm his system.” He sets Vox’s finally dismembered hand aside and takes the replacement from another tech. “He can update after integration is complete.”
At the same time that Baxter connects the first wire of Vox’s new hand, Val brushes his fingertips across Vox’s antennas to tease the electricity sparking between them. “You’re almost done then, right?” he asks.
“He’s mostly repaired,” Baxter agrees. “After I finish connecting his hand, it’s a simple matter of his attachments, and then he can rest while his software updates.” He takes the soldering iron from one of the techs to ensure the connected cables don’t come apart down the line and ignores the hiccuping whine it pulls from Vox’s speakers. “We’ll calibrate him tomorrow- you might wish to assist with that.”
“I’ll think about it,” replies Val airily.
He continues his comforting caresses of Vox’s head and screen, but doesn’t pull away from him enough to give Vox a reprieve from the steady stream of toxin-laced cum. Occupied and acclimatized as he now is, Vox hardly feels the fresh ring of stitches around his wrist, nor does he fully register the hand that slips into his slack, blood-soaked one as soon as the techs release his arm.
“You’ve done remarkably well, Mister Vox. Give me five more minutes, and then you can rest.”
Vox doesn’t have the wherewithal to respond, but Val makes an approving hum on his behalf. Compared to the surgical upgrades and alterations, this part is easy: Vox’s genitals were designed to be interchangeable, and connecting an attachment to the proxy is far simpler a feat than welding together a new nervous system. Still, Baxter lingers long enough for Vox’s speakers to eek out a questioning burst of static, but doesn’t explain the delay. He’s more efficient with whatever attachment has been designed for Vox’s chest, connecting it to both ports on Vox’s nipples before smoothing the seams of the silicate skin.
“Nice,” Val praises, hands tightening around Vox’s screen like he’s fighting the urge to move them.
Baxter chuckles in agreement. “Nice, indeed.”
Then he hops down off the table, shedding his soiled layers of protective equipment as he gives his next set of orders to his team.
“Remove both drips, clean him up, and begin installing the software update. It should take around eight hours to download, six to install, and another eight to boot up the entire system.” Baxter pauses while the techs get to work. “Shall I wait for you tomorrow evening, Mister Valentino?”
Val steadies Vox’s head with the assistance of a tech while he eases his dick out of Vox’s mouth, and leaves the casing entirely in their hands once he gets back to his feet with his wings wrapped around him. “Text me before you start.”
He doesn’t say goodbye to Vox before his heels clatter away, but the mere fact he stayed so long continues to lay over Vox’s anxieties like a warm duvet. Even without Val, his aphrodisiacs keep Vox’s system calm as well, allowing him to relax into the gentle washing from the techs.
Once Vox wakes up after his software update, he’s bound to feel like his old self again. He’ll be repaired, connected, sharp, and steady, the way he’s meant to be. He’s always been able to trust Baxter with that much. As more and more of his processing power dedicates itself to the new incoming code, Vox relaxes into the void of unconsciousness, and assures himself things will be better when he wakes.
Trust Me with Your Prompt!
