[Fic] Humanity

[kittydesade]

Title: Humanity
Fandom: Shadowrun
Characters: Kid Stealth, OC
Word Count: ~4,000
Rating: R
Summary: Someone has a problem with Kid Stealth's hardware. Somehow, they work it out.
A/N: Probably only two or three people on my f-list will even know who these people are, alas. Written for kink_bingo's "Mechanical/Technological" prompt on account of Kid Stealth has velociraptor cyberlegs (and a cyberarm. But the cyberlegs are cooler).


Nagiko was a practical woman. When her father had been ousted from his place in the Yamaguchi-gumi by a jealous rival, she had quickly adapted to her lower status. When he had killed himself a year later, she had disappeared rather than be swallowed up by opportunistic sharks who would rather keep the family close at hand than risk them becoming an unknown quantity.

When Raven had offered her a place in his team, she had declined to move in under his protection, but consented to work with him on a semi-permanent basis. It was, after all, strategic to keep some level of distance between her and everyone else in case she had to disappear quickly. Nonetheless, she gave them no reason to doubt her loyalty or her commitment to their cause, both because it was not expedient to do so and because Raven's enthusiasm was infectious. And if nothing else, it was the first time in a long time she had had a chance to practice her skills without being rebuked for rising above her station or her place. Never mind what would have happened if they had found out what she was and how she was able to do the things she did.

"What was that you called that again?" Wolf asked her one day, looking up at her from where she was clinging to the netting six or so feet off the ground.

She grinned at him, hooked her feet into the ropes and swung over to the balcony, catching the railing and leaping it. Staying up on the second level ended the sparring match pretty well, but it didn't mean she couldn't show off.

"Magic," she laughed.

It was magic, too. Her grandfather told her that her innate magical ability had turned itself inward, enabled her to run faster, jump higher than many athletes with much less effort. Which was not, he had also said, an excuse for laziness. And then he had gone on to say that it was a pity she hadn't been born a boy and she had smiled, nodded, and gone running around the district park for the rest of the evening.

Raven never spoke against her family, and never brought up her past. The only person thus far who had dared to do so was Kid Stealth. They had had one very angry conversation in Japanese coming fast and clipped like machine gun fire and then they didn't speak for two weeks after that. Raven didn't ask, and while both Wolf and Valerie did, neither of them got much of an answer out of either party.

That argument aside, they managed to work with each other fairly well. She had learned a quiet sense of discipline and efficiency living in her home, and with her family as involved in the organization as they were. They assimilated her into their little group with the ease of a band of misfits joined to a purpose, and their conflicts were relatively few and far between.

Relatively.



"No."

"No? That's it, no. No apology, no explanation. I don't even merit an explanation?"

As with most things involving San Francisco, the takeover, the yakuza, Nagiko was taking this personally. Even Raven had cautioned her to be wary of her involvement in their current network of cases, and she had promised to stay out of most of them. This one, this trip Kid Stealth was taking, didn't seem to be one of the ones she should stay out of.

Didn't seem to be, because she wasn't getting much out of him in the way of, well, anything. Not a reason why she wasn't allowed to accompany him, or what he was doing, or where he was going. Maybe he was used to operating like that but it grated on her nerves. Along with a few well-placed shots to her abilities, her sensibilities, and her judgment.

Stealth quirked an eyebrow at her and shook his head. "You have no need to know. I'll be back when I'm back." And he turned to go.

Which was when the door exploded in both their faces.

Sound rang in her ears. Then blackness. Then light, too much light. Something tingled along her limbs; she felt the parts of her body realigning and repairing themselves in ways far too intimate for her to want to contemplate. Nagiko resolved to forget all this as soon as possible just before she blacked out again.

When she woke up she was in a bed in what looked like one of Raven's guest rooms, she'd brought unconscious rescuees there often enough. The smell of machine oil and gun oil told her someone else was in the room with her. And who it was.

"Stealth."

"Nagiko."

If it were anyone else she would have said they lurched out of the shadows, but he didn't lurch. He glided, in a manner of moving that should have been impossible for anyone as still-human-shaped as he was. Still mostly human shaped. Her mind sometimes rejected the way he moved as impossible, but it was. Raven's technology and genius had rebuilt him.

"You're recovered." He hadn't. Not entirely, she saw the little hitches and jerks in his limbs when he moved. There were blisters on his skin where he hadn't healed fully yet. Actually, he hadn't healed much at all which meant he hadn't taken much damage.

She frowned. "You haven't. What happened?"

"Raven healed you. You took most of the damage."

Which meant she'd landed on top of him. The mental image of that was enough to make her laugh and cringe all at once. And then check her lower body for scars.

"You're fine," Stealth told her. He even sounded irritable. "You were healed within a day."

"Well, those are the advantages to being still human," she snapped out.

Stealth's eyes didn't change, but his body dropped a fraction of an inch on his titanium, digitigrade velociraptor legs. His shoulders stiffened, both the meat and the metal. Nagiko rubbed her temples with the first two fingers of her hands, winced as the movements he made exacerbated damage and squeaked parts inside his cyberlegs. He wouldn't be able to go out until that was fixed, not and work, which undoubtedly was making him cranky. And Raven had been able to wave his hands and heal her a full day, maybe two, earlier than him.

"I'm… sorry. I didn't mean that, that's not what I meant."

"Yes you did." But there was no hostility in his voice. His voice was devoid of any emotion she could discern, and when he took two steps towards her she didn't step back at least partly out of a desire to know what was going through his mind.

Nagiko tilted her head back to look up at him. Some of the reasoning was undoubtedly intimidation. On his cyber-legs he could be up to seven, seven and a half feet tall. And she barely crested over five. She refused to be intimidated, however, not by an overgrown assassin who spent half his time being unpleasant because he enjoyed the effect it had on people.

She stepped forward, laid one hand on the curve of his bicep of his flesh and blood arm, the other squarely on his chest. Dermal plating, even the best synthskin, made it a little firmer and smoother than it should have been but it still felt right. Like a warm body should feel. She stepped forward again, and he didn't step back.

"You're still human enough," she told him. Equal parts compliment and insulting, all cocky. Her thumb brushed back and forth over his shirt while she waited for him to react, which he didn't. Just watched her. "Human enough for me," she added, or maybe clarified.

And still he didn't do anything.

She was starting to feel a little like a school girl with a crush on the class ace. This was embarrassing. And she couldn’t back down, not when he was looming over her on clawed legs, the element of danger to it part of what made it a challenge. Too, if she backed down now she would lose face in front of him, she knew that. She would lose some respect at least. She, Stealth, and everyone else who had been in the compound when it had blown were on the injured list as far as Raven was concerned, so there were no outside reasons for her to stop pushing. And she would not be intimidated.

"Human enough for you?" He was laughing at her. She smacked him square in the chest, hard. Hard enough to be felt at least, enough to make him rock back a little on his feet and drop down a couple of inches because he hadn't been expecting that.

"Don't push your luck, Koroshi."

His eyes narrowed. That had been a slip, though for him likely not an unexpected one. He had to know that she knew that name. "My luck?"

Oh. So that look hadn't been for the name. "You…" Except there was no graceful way to back down from this. Damn.

The idea must have been to pick her up and throw her over his shoulder, and from there she wasn't sure what he intended. Except that the moment he reached for her with his flesh and blood arm she leaped up and backwards out of reflex, too many months spent being wary of him. And then he leaped forward as she leaped back and somehow it ended up with her on the carpet and on her back and him crouched overtop of her, balanced and staring, both of them with a solid grip on each other's upper arms.

"You aren't all chrome and titanium, you know," she told him. Pertly, and perhaps suicidally. His talons were so close to her thighs he could have opened up her femoral artery in a heartbeat. And she still brought one leg up, just a little, to remind him of the woman's first trick she ever learned in dealing with a combative man.

That look was not the one Kid Stealth had when he was about to open up someone's arteries. That look had emotion behind it, or in front of it, or somewhere in the near vicinity. Humor, if nothing else.

"I thought you were after something else."

She blushed. And dug her nails in a little bit on his human arm. "I thought you didn't play that game." As far as anyone knew, Kid Stealth had no lovers, no partners, no contact that way of any kind. As far as anyone knew.

As far as anyone knew he could have bedded down with transformed dragons, too.

He leaned in far enough that anyone more human would have overbalanced and fell by now, and it was close enough that he had to balance himself on his arm. Not the one she was digging her nails into. "As you said. Not all of me is chrome and titanium."

And that should not have been as hot as it was but, Ancestors, he was big and his breath was hot on her cheek and he was right. There.

So she kissed him. It might have been stupid, but it was an opportunity and likely an offer since he rarely said anything that didn't have weight behind it and he was right there. She slid her hand up along his arm and around his neck and kissed him, and he did kiss her back. Open-mouthed and hungry.

It hadn't occurred to her when she first saw him how such activities would be accomplished. Maybe he had been handsome before he'd lost his arm, certainly more so before he'd lost his legs. But there was still a decent amount to admire, there. And a part of her embraced the perversity of it. The shape of his dinosaur cyber-legs was graceful enough to appeal to a skewed sense of beauty. The muscles required to maneuver, to power the Murder Machine contributed even more. And by the time he was stretched out over her she was definitely thinking that, if they were careful, they could accomplish this without any need for stitches or bandages or blood transfusions afterwards.

Right there on the carpet, perhaps. He didn't ask, just inched forward a couple of steps and then cut a long line down the side of her trousers. The right side, so he could reach down and run his warm right hand up along her thigh, over her hip. Peeling the fabric up a little as he did the same along the inside of her thigh. She stayed very, very still for this. Two more slices, too. No, she didn't dare move.

But by the time he was done slicing her pants off, she was about ready to scream with the effort of holding still.

No blood. Not even the red welts of a scratch. She cocked an eyebrow at him and ventured a little further. "You can go a little harder than that. I won't break."

The corner of his mouth twitched. Just a bit.

When he hooked a talon into her panties and ripped them off it was harder, it left a red scratch down her hip. The sting of it made her gasp. The proximity of him and his talons made her gasp, too, made her body tense again as she felt the wetness he created, the long lines of his body, yes, even part of him that were mechanical. It was all fully under his control, and so, for the moment, was she.

As if sensitive to her prejudices he used only his flesh and blood hand to touch her. To unwrap the layers of her clothing, her bindings, as gentle and tender with his hands as he was swift and sharp with his talons. The contrast dragged her out of the moment for a second, and made her really look at him. And his eyes still weren't entirely there. She didn't know if it was the cyber-ware or just him.

But he was making this choice. Nagiko expected nothing could make Kid Stealth do what he didn't want to do.

And he was certainly paying attention to what he was doing, involving himself in it. His palm covered her breast when he cupped it, hot and now damp between her sweat and his. Touches from his lips that were softer than she had ever expected until his teeth closed on and tugged her nipple and after another minute or three of his mouth she didn't care about his metal arm. Both hands came up to his shoulders and tugged him down to kiss him, and then she started undressing him.

He smiled as she tugged her shirt over his head, falling back on his haunches and helping tug her to her feet. Even crouched, sort of, as he was he was still taller than she by a few inches. It made her have to stretch up to kiss him, to run her mouth over his chest as he had over hers. She hesitated for a second when she reached the upper area of the graft of his cyber-arm to his body, settled for teasing the tip of her tongue along the boundary, tasting metal and skin. It was still a deliberate movement. It made him grunt with exhaled breath, too.

His outer slacks were tear-aways, snapped shut, under that were black shorts that felt like ballistic armor as well. Padded over the femoral artery. And here was the question, how did she get these off without completely shattering the momentum they'd built up so far? Did he even want those off? Was he even into this?

"Is this your first time?"

Nagiko looked up at him with some mixture of outrage and heated blushing. "Of course not!" she snapped back, as his talons knocked forward one quarter of her jeans. The quarter with her belt sheath still attached.

She could take a cue as well as the next woman. Though it seemed a shame to waste good armor, and it wouldn't work as well once it was patched up.

But she didn't think about that as she started. Peeling off his armor bit by bit, she was more thinking about how she would make this better for him. Or for her, because she wanted to hear him moan.

She dropped to her knees as she worked, even if his height meant she had to arch upwards even more; some things simply looked more proper this way. And she knew he was familiar with her people's rituals and customs, most of them, anyway. A graceful and proper woman would serve from the knees, bow from the waist, take small and graceful steps. She served from the knees, peeling away the armor as she tasted his flesh. All flesh, he was, here. And around her head she heard the tiny whir and click of his machinery, computers moving his limbs, talons digging into the floor. Harder, as she worked him in her mouth. He might not be much of a one for moans and words, she was learning that, but the shifts in his body and the way his mechanical parts sounded as they shifted along with the rest of his body, she could learn that. Especially with one hand, her free hand along the inside of his thigh to measure the tension in him.

He pulled her up by the shoulders in one sharp movement and she realized she'd been so engrossed in pleasuring him that she'd forgotten he might want something else. Even the way he lifted her was a goad to her senses, her toes completely off the ground and her body naked in the open air.

This part was slower than she expected. His hands were big, wrapping around and over her upper arms as he lifted her, put her up against the wall, pinned her there with his body. And her arms slid around his neck and her legs around his waist, and she kissed him for a moment before he shifted, the soft whoosh of cybernetics. Even as he pushed into her, deep into her, and she could feel the heat of him and her nails dug into his back it seemed unreal that half of him should be metal.

After all that working each other up they took it slow. The kisses were slow and sensual, the movements of his hips into hers and her body responding against his, the only part of him that was forceful was his hands holding her up. It seemed unreal. The whole thing seemed unreal, pleasure taking its time coursing through her, building not in the frenzy that she had expected but in warm pulses and surges like fire licking at her loins.

"Koroshi…" she breathed, before he captured her mouth again and stopped her words with lips and tongue. And he filled her senses, the taste of him, the smell of gun and machine oil and sweat and aftershave. Of all things, the smell of aftershave struck her as most incongruous. He was a killing machine, Wolf called him the Murder Machine, and yet he still shaved. Her fingers traced down the line of his jaw, smooth, when he shifted and found a deeper angle and his hand brushed the scrape on her thigh and made it sting.

And now it was hard, and fast, as she had half expected the first time. Somehow by mutual agreement, him mashing his mouth against hers and her digging her nails into his back, raking furrows into the backs of his shoulders. She yelped a bit as one taloned foot crashed into the wall, bracing himself further as the urgency rode them both. At the last minute or two he did make a noise, the first real noises except for the click of his metal feet, little groans and grunts and she dug her hands into his hair. Tightened her body around him, and almost wanted to beg to feel him until he groaned, slammed into her almost hard enough, it felt like, to crush her, and then she did feel it.

They came crashing to the ground in pieces. The foot that had dug into the wall dropped with a clanking crash, then he eased back and out of her with a feeling that left her feeling open and torn for a moment. Cold and empty. He let her go with his metal hand and her feet came down to the floor, on the balls of her feet at first, on tiptoes. Then he fell backwards. Then she fell on top of him.

"You're warm," was all she could think of to say. He chuckled a little, the sound coming up more through his chest than his lips. His right arm draped along her waist over her back, his other arm reaching to snag the throw off the couch and drape it over them.

Nagiko wondered if he could possibly be comfortable with his legs at that angle, then she remembered that he had neither lower legs nor feet to go numb or feel strange. Maybe he was. He was injured, broken, but he wasn't in pain. What a strange state to be in.

"You'll be fit to go out again tomorrow," she told him, turning her face into his chest. "That ought to satisfy even your impatience."

He only laughed, a quiet rumble to accompany the music of his machinery. "I'm sure I can find something to do in the meantime."