A/N: Uh. Yeah. It's Vera/Alan smut. A warning for blood and deviant behaviors thar be, as one is wont to expect of Vera/Alan smut. If you came for a plot, you're in the wrong place. Shoo, shoo. Obligatory disclaimer being that I do not own Big O and it's a damn good thing, too.

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Organics

He hummed a merry, nondescript little tune to himself, making up the notes as he went along, the tile cold and gray against the soles of his feet. In the corner bounced a surplus of happy red balloons, bobbing off the walls and ceiling to the simplistic song he'd composed. It was like a big, colorful S&M fairy-tale. He smiled.

He was also stark naked, bound by the thick rope hooked firmly to a beam overhead. In hindsight, even he'd been a little surprised when Agent 68 intercepted him down here, instructing him to strip as he tied his wrists above his head before departing with the wan smirk of a man who knew only too well. 68 didn't touch his mask, didn't look twice; he understood that some things weren't meant for removal.

"Agent 12 wants you in the basement," 340 had said, but she knew not of what she spoke. Still she had the most precious face: curious, tentative, and weighted with subconscious and morbid understanding.

There had been a pretty girl he'd picked up before the last of the operations. She was either royalty or a whore; he couldn't remember and it didn't really matter anyway. But all the implants in his body and brain had left him strange and disconnected inside, and it hadn't been enjoyable. An understandable shortcoming, but Alan wanted nothing if not to have his cake and eat her too. Frustrated, he wrapped his hands around her delicate neck. He'd been smiling at that time, too.

Eight months, three weeks, five days, forty-four minutes and nine seconds ago he sat strategizing with Agent 229. Then 229's tie disappeared and his teeth clamped around mechanical fingers and it was all a very enjoyable blur after that but the door hadn't been locked or closed and though he was a good boy and would have taken care of it 229 wasn't in a good position for anything other than what his position was for. 301 got an eyeful that day.

The door behind him swung open with a clatter of weathered mechanisms and he heard the click of heels. Alan saw without seeing. Alan saw-without-seeing a lot of things.

"Agent 271," said she, "do you know why you are here?"

"Do tell, Agent 12," he cordially replied.

Vera folded her arms. A dark little smile lurked in that voice, poised, keen, and something thick hissed against her sleeve. So Alan heard. Felt her predatory eye, knew what she knew: that Agent 271 had his uses. Since and even before the changes he had undergone, he'd begun to make a name for himself. He was skilled.

And highly obedient. "Good."

He was arrogant. Perhaps not rightly so. Vera was professional. Alan was still more man than machine. Vera sensed this as truth, and would prove it. It was not simply an action born of caprice—

"Permission to inquire, Agent 12," Alan's voice rang out, "as to what you intend to do with me today."

He felt her trace the thin surgical scar running down the length of his spine with a pointed fingertip, but more than that, he felt her stare. She replied in a coarse purr that he had almost never heard from her before.

"Permission denied."

It was interesting.

Without preamble, that hand snaked around his waist and closed, harshly, authoritatively, around his cock. Oh, but he was too quick for her, his senses too refined; he gave very little reaction, save for a faint broadening of the smirk on his face. It displeased her somewhat, caused her to hum her disdain, but there was absolutely no reason why he shouldn't disappoint her. Vera was arrogant.

Not any clash of wits, no, this. Rather, the invigorating pleasure of her ire. This rush. A tenuous and invisible tug-of-war reciprocal to the tug-of-man.

The room was silent, and her hand worked efficiently, and Alan. Alan, Alan. Warmth flowered inside of him, tissues expanding, signals firing between synapses, glands secreting substances. An ugly thing, and Alan was beyond it, synthetic and organic parts flexing against their confines, hard and with creaking rope and a want for something yielding and yet…

Then Vera retracted, so Alan said her name.

He choked on his words as a white-hot sensation snatched the air from his lungs and blocked out the sharp crack of leather tearing skin. The sensors around each optic nerve worked valiantly to compensate, but his vision returned to him 1.47 seconds later spotted and grainy. But before even that, a poisonous growl shot past his ears.

"You do not have the right to refer to me in such a way!"

"Yes, sir," he replied, trying to grin through the burning, throbbing pain that mushroomed through his back. "Forgive my impertinence."

Lowly: "That's what I like to hear."

She stepped a bit closer to examine the thin strip just below his waist, admiring its angry scarlet glow against the whiteness of his skin. A trace of cologne rose and mingled with the cool and bitter salt scent of damaged tissue hovering around his body. The touch of her fingers broke him down first, their clinical chill against the lesion's edge barely making him jerk away. It was enough. It was good.

"What is wrong, Agent 271? Pain is the highest form of perception. I would have thought that you, of all people, would know and be aware of this."

Vera did think, and she knew her place too well to be afraid.

Alan thought his wordless grin a proper reply and he was wrong. Vera countered again and turned more white to red, seconds ticking away and never to return, until Alan's back and arse and thighs were candy-striped and thin red trickles collected prettily on the edges. She stepped in, then, and ground her tongue and breath against his shoulder blade. Alan salvaged a smile but not his silence, breathing out a hiss with hips twitching into nothing. Vera scraped her teeth against the raw underlayers of skin and let out a patronizing purr at the throaty sound that issued from above.

After a pregnant pause, she circled around and bit down on a nipple. He drew away. She followed. She pursued him until his cock pressed into her stomach, and he would have run her clean through with it if he could. A bit of blood hit the floor with a pat sound

"Memorize this moment, Agent 271," she said, grasping him once more, stroking quickly and smoothly and without effort and watched his head fall back only slightly but perhaps that was the only thing needed now. "Let it serve to remind you continuously of that which you are and are not."

"A memory," 271 offered, a rough cast to his voice.

"A memory."

"A memory—"

He jerked within her grip, mouth grinning, body taut, and came obediently in her hand. With the last swell of pleasure-pain ebbing, his last unguarding, Vera reached up and tore away his mask like lightning, had just enough time to catch the horror in false and colorless eyes before he choked on a snarl and twisted away.

"Vera."

"Insubordination!" And a cruel raking of nails down his shredded back.

"Vera."

But 271 did not frighten her.

Vera whipped the semen off her hand and onto the vicinity of Alan's thigh. "You are finished here," she spat, and breezed out without looking at him again.

Alan straightened his right hand, shifted, and cut himself down.

fin