Neon Rush {M/M} ❀

Ch. 15.1 Generational Punch in the Dick

It takes a long time to reconnect with reality when he wakes up because Zef earnestly didn't expect he would.

The room he's in isn't recognizably anything. It looks both clean and like the carapace of a mechanical bug. Tech and instruments—half medical, half torture chamber—pile up on a table and cart nearby. Corrugated sheet metal makes up the walls, but they're absent of rust and everything smells like bleach.

Adrenaline shoots him upright, only two things prevent it. The first is that he's strapped there under a layer of starchy sheets. The second is— Oh, yeah. He took a fist through the chest. Pain shoots through him in an ungentle reminder. He groans, lays back down, but the strain of his aborted attempt to move makes pain come in waves, mounting in pressure. Nausea spirals hot and soupy in his guts.

"Hey, hey, easy," says a voice, both strange and familiar. It's velvety smooth and deep. Deeper than when Zef last heard it.

He looks to the side and sees Dee. Only, not Dee. The pronouns that come up on his HUD have changed from she/her to he/him. Still tall and sharp-jawed with a shaved design on the side of his head, but very notably—

A man.

Both in the sense that Dee changed his pronouns and, physically, became a separate entity from the person Zef met in the industrial quarter. His shoulders are broad and muscular, his hips absent of the curves that had been there before, and his face?

Like he goddamn shapeshifted overnight.

Zef is jealous and confused and still in a lot of pain.

He is also not eloquent enough to say more than, "What the fuck?"

"You can say that again," Dee agrees.

"I thought I died."

"You did. Sort of. A hundred years ago there'd have been no saving you. The wonders of technology, innit? Got to you just in time, but you were, like—" He holds his fingers millimetres apart. "—this close." He rolls closer on a wheelie chair and shoves a thermometer in Zef's mouth. Sticks his fingers under his chin. Some implant Zef doesn't recognize lights up beneath Dee's brown skin with electric blue circuitry.

Zef pats at his chest and winces. It's sore but whole. He speaks around the thermometer. "How did you fix me?"

"Not just anycunt coulda done what I did, but luckily I'm fairly spectacular with tech and medicine," Dee says modestly. He takes the thermometer, examines it and nods, satisfied. "Learned a lot from some old friends. Might not be the aesthetic you wanted. I had to scrounge up some parts that would patch you up, so it's all a bit of a Frankenstein job."

"So long as it's flat," Zef says.

"Of course. I'm not a sadist."

Zef has other questions bubbling up through the near-death-experience fog, some of them giving him a stomach ache. He foregoes asking them to say, "Thanks, Dee."

"Actually, figure it's time we gave up the ghost on them pseudonyms. My name's Damo."

"Damo," Zef repeats slowly. "How are you so manly, Damo? I mean, how did you transition so fast? I mean—"

"Good to know the painkillers are working." He rolls away, spinning across the floor, and picks up a repulsively chunky, green smoothie. "I'm an android."

On the list of things Zef expected, this answer hadn't made the cut. He feels like there must be a lagging loading symbol whirling above his head. "Come— a—gain?

"How well do you know your history, sweetie pie?"

"Like, vaguely? Didn't Bionic Capital stop making you, like, a hundred years ago?"