Work Text:
Guatemala, 1978.
Everything drips. Water and blood, but mostly water -- sweat, condensation, rain. Rivulets trickle from every leaf and building, from the tips of his hair and down his back. Blood drips from his hands and his uniform.
His mission is complete, but jungle conditions mean extraction won't be expected for several hours. The weapon begins peeling off his tattered leather jacket. Shrapnel ripped through his armor, and his skin will close over the wounds in the time it takes him to be recovered. His body may or may not push out the shards. Infection is not a concern, but the technicians will use an electromagnet to extract the embedded metal. He doesn't like the magnet.
Has been alone in the forest for a week with no backup. The swath of devastation he cut through the green still smokes in the downpour: the acrid burn of wood, the greasy billow of piled bodies. He doesn't like leaving corpses to rot where they fall if he has to camp among them. He's been out for a week, and he knows he doesn't like this, knows he can act accordingly.
What he likes is the hunt. This is his territory, his natural habitat. The hunt is what the weapon is made for, and he's good at it. The mission is effortless and nothing is confusing, he is useful and he is good, he has executed his mission to satisfaction. The high of victory still courses through his veins and his heart rate is elevated. The weapon is made for the hunt, but now the hunt is over, and he almost wishes
(no he doesn't).
There's a hut he crouches beneath, inside. The dead occupants have been removed, two walls are blasted off -- architecture exploded outwards in a frozen bristle of cane and thatching -- but it has a card table and a couple folding chairs and it is shelter. His jacket is draped over one of the chairs, he sits in the other and digs shards of metal from his chest. The last scrap plinks to the floor, a crooked nail fished from his hip.
He looks at his red-stained hands. Most of it comes from him, he estimates.
The weapon knows the touch of others: dead meat going still under his blade, preludes of thrashing and the panicked cling to life, resistance. The cold grip of technicians maneuvering him into position. Utensils, needles, knives. He knows. He knows ripping and impacts, punctures, cuts. Tendons dance under his weaker wrist with each motion. Sever them to incapacitate the hand without resulting in death, he knows.
Instead he traces two metal fingers down the inside of his forearm, palm to pale crook of elbow. Soft. Does it again because of the way it feels, because he can. He cocks his head.
How strange that this body is capable of touching -- and being touched -- without hurting. He touches his mouth, the vulnerable line of his carotid arteries. But no pain comes, he doesn't destroy anything. The weapon has been out for a week and he can make something besides destruction if he wants. He can.
He explores the curve of his collar bone and the scar tissue casing his shoulder, watches with remote interest as a nipple hardens of its own volition under his colder, stronger hand. His torso is a series of repetitions, he observes, fingers trailing the arc of each rib and cut abdominal, the twin furrows along his hips where muscle attaches to iliac crest. His attention keep wandering here, lower, where a few veins make themselves visible.
A sigh gusts out of him, and he sprawls deeper in the chair, stroking the line of damp skin along his waistband. Benign skin to skin. Closes his eyes. The oppressive heat of the jungle wraps around the hut and crawls inside, air so thick it might as well be liquid. Breathing in is a struggle against drowning. Everything drips.
His thumb runs compulsively over the trail of fine hair below his navel. It feels. It feels strange -- an agitating sort of drowsiness that leaves his lower body tender and hyper-sensitive, especially between his legs. He sighs again and shifts around in the chair.
Then freezes. It suddenly occurs to the weapon that he may have missed a piece of shrapnel lodged in his pelvis or an inner thigh. And he feels drugged.
Explosives spiked with psychotropic compounds? Rare, but not unheard of. Several native species produce likely toxins, though his metabolism should have taken care of any poison. Throbbing suggests a nicked artery: pulse beating too hard in his crotch, internal bleeding. The memory of a punctured liver spilling in time with his heart, but that had been far more unpleasant. This ache brushes close to agony while being everything but.
His pants are tight, and when he looks down it's no wonder. His cock is swollen enough the outline pressed along his thigh is obvious even through the canvas material. For a moment all he can do is stare at the inexplicable bulge in his fatigues.
Also unexpected: when he touches himself there, he sucks in a ragged breath and one knee jumps hard enough to knock over the card table. The swelling is almost too sensitive to bear. Almost. He sucks in more humid air and makes himself rest a palm against the tent in his pants. Then squeezes. A sound forces its way out of him like he's been wounded, badly.
The weapon doubles over and slips from the chair to his knees, then to his knees and elbows with his forehead against the cane floor.
He's flushed with feedback and hormones, struggling to sort out the unfamiliar ones from his usual stress responses, but it’s... His skull and skin are full to bursting, and he doesn't know where it comes from. From outside himself, from another time, a softer world of brownstone where a brick hides the key to a cramped bedroom, to holding hands. Or a world of gunfire and trenches, and chemicals pouring from glands instead of needles, making his heart thump instead of slowing his brain. Either way, these reactions don't belong to him here and now.
And yet. His right hand is already back working -- kneading and rubbing through the fabric -- while he whimpers into the metal of his left wrist. He didn't tell his hand to do this but all his confusion is secondary to the need to stroke himself, and he can't not, and more wound-sounds are coming out of him.
He flips onto his back. The new position feels better, but his pants are still in the way. Boots get shucked off. Mud- and blood-soaked trousers get kicked to the corner in a tangle, and his dick lurches free from his clothes like it's trying to escape. The organ is so engorged it stands erect from the rest of him, flushed and leaking at the tip, foreign. The weapon splays his fingers in the dark thatch of hair at the base and wills his breath to even out. Squeezes his eyes shut and swallows hard. His other hand is on his chest holding himself down, is still. He holds himself. That he can do this gives him pause.
Then his fingers venture back down in feathery, experimental touches. Slow, slowness takes effort. The length of him is stiff and feverish, slick with fluid, but it doesn't hurt. He tilts his head back. More than anything it doesn't hurt. He makes a fist around his hardness.
The wanting in him is the shape of a dendrite, a nerve. It is a complex arbor of firing signals connected at a single junction. Heat travels down to the root of his shaft and branches into his belly; tingling explosions blossom in his gut in slow motion, they swell and break in waves, travel back down until his cock is twitching inside his grip. The skin there is so velvety he can't believe it's a part of him. Velvet and warmth over iron. He brings his other hand to his lips in wonder -- so many soft places of himself he had forgotten. Feels his lips part to release soft sounds from his throat. The sounds make him harder.
He should stay silent, he knows. Stay silent so he doesn’t bother anyone, doesn’t draw attention. This could be a test. A trick? The weapon isn’t allowed to make unnecessary noise, but the storm outside blows thunderous through the hut, and no one is here to give punishment and more pain.
He moans openly. His spine curves up when he cups the tender swelling of his balls, now pulled taut, and his weak hand pumps his shaft. The weapon cries out when he circles the weeping tip, but he can’t stop jerking himself. The warm and cold hand alternate; the hand with no pulse can still feel the isolated flutter of his own life blood rushing through his flesh. He rocks into the metal fist, whimpering.
Something is building faster than it can escape. The little explosions in his belly and thighs are too much, they’re going to crack him open and spill him everywhere. He’s afraid, that’s familiar. But this is unfamiliar and whatever control he had earlier is gone, and he's bucking and moaning on the floor while lightning rips across the darkening sky. His gasps are erratic sobs, then he stops breathing altogether.
The world goes white behind his eyes. He arches off the floor, teeth bared in a silent scream, then he's spilling and spilling and spilling in convulsions. Ejaculate ropes over his chest and belly, releasing again and again with each snap of his hips. Release turns him inside out. It tastes bitter.
After, it feels like ... nothing he can name. But he can almost remember. Safe and melting, softness. He touches his lips again. The weapon sinks into the thrum of the storm and drowses for a while.
When he rolls blearily to his side after an unknown time, the hungry little creature between his legs has gone back to sleep. Satisfied for now, he thinks. The mess on his chest and abdominals is half-dry and starting to itch, but even that feels good, like the sweat of exertion that hasn't tipped into exhaustion.
A huge yawn stretches his jaw. The rest of him stretches in a lazy, luxurious arc. He crawls upright and one leg almost buckles and he has to catch himself. Logically he knows he should be more concerned about his body’s unexpected behavior, but he’s too loose-limbed and floppy to put much effort into the analysis. Neither does he register the overturned furniture and strewn battle gear littering his shelter. Thunder rumbles from the sky, through the village, carries across the valley and forest.
He steps off the edge of the hut's broken platform and walks naked into the jungle.
Rain sluices over him. Gore, sweat, semen, and mud are washed away. Even his wounds melt to nothing in the water: delicate new skin, pink and unbroken, appears under the dissolving crust of dry blood. Clean. He stands barefoot on wet leaves, and the roar of bird and frog songs and a million caressing drops is near deafening. Green life smells rise from the earth to drown out the reek of char, carry away the stink of gunpowder and smoke. The world reorients to feel-taste-sound-smell more like itself.
None of these details are mission-relevant. It's all going to be taken away from him. The not-a-weapon tilts his face up into the warm rain and closes his eyes and everything rushes through him and out of him and he is here for at least right now. Right here.
This is how the extraction team finds him two hours later.