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The Baroness welcomed Victor as she always did. The suite held just for him seemingly stood apart from the other rooms, existing in a dimension where time stretched and contracted according to the hotel's whims. This was his only safe haven thanks to his pact with The Doorman. He sat upon the bed. hands sliding over the sheets
He inhaled deeply, allowing the smell of the suite to fill his lungs, wondering which parts of him appreciated the aroma of the luxurious woods. Were his lungs from a perfumer? A chef? Or perhaps a smoker whose organs had been cleansed in death for Victor's unwanted rebirth?
Victor's stomach cramped suddenly, a vicious spasm that bent him forward. The adhesions in his digestive tract twisted against each other like fighting serpents. He breathed through the pain, waiting for it to subside as it always did, leaving a dull ache in its wake. His stomach was particularly troublesome. It was a sensitive thing that rejected as much as it accepted, as though still fighting the body it had been forced to become part of. He curled into himself, pained grunts being wrung out of him. His long blue tail tucking between his legs.
The opulent bed beneath him felt almost obscene against his scarred skin. The silk sheets and velvet coverings caressing the crude stitches that held him together. The contrast was not lost on Victor; the Baroness offered luxury to a being who was the antithesis of refinement. Yet the hotel accepted him, perhaps recognizing a kindred spirit? The both of them existing between worlds, neither fully one thing nor another.
The pain in his gut subsided, replaced by a different ache. There was a longing for connection that never truly left him. The Baroness might hold him in her spectral embrace, but it wasn't the same as human touch. No matter how many parts of humanity had been stitched together to create him, Victor remained apart, observing life through a patched up quilt of a body that would never truly belong to him.
Victor's fingers moved to the seam where his neck met his shoulders, he contemplated the void that existed within him. Not just the physical hollow where a soul should reside, but the absence of memory, of history. Each piece of him had once belonged to someone with dreams, fears, loves. Hell, lives cut short and repurposed into his unwanted existence.
"Who were you?" he asked his right hand, studying the way the fingers ended in claws rather than nails like those on his left. The hand didn't answer, wouldn't reveal the name of the man who had once used it to hold a lover or child, to create or destroy. It was supposedly his now, obeying his commands while carrying the muscle memory of another.
He often wondered what his eyes had witnessed before they were his. Had the blue one seen oceans? Had the brown one gazed lovingly upon family now lost to grief? He would never know. His search for answers had yielded nothing but more questions, more closed doors. Multiplying and multiplying.
Victor leaned back, feeling the pull and stretch of his stitched flesh. His body was a constant negotiation between parts that had never been meant to work together. Living in this body was a full-time occupation, leaving little room for anything else.
He ran the hand through his lustrous black hair, the only part of him that seemed to flourish anyway. It flowed past his shoulders, a stark contrast to his pale torso's flesh. "Everything else around me is always beautiful," he murmured to the watching shadows. The suite, the hotel, the world beyond. They all possessed a natural coherence that he lacked. Even in decay, natural things followed patterns. "Not me though."
A thought struck Victor like an electric jolt. His eyes fell to his hands again. "What if..." He dug his fingernails under the staples above his right shoulder. It hurt. His heart. No, someone else's heart that now beat irregularly in his chest actually quickened its pace. The idea gave him some promise.
He tore off his ixian forearm and grinded his teeth at the sudden nerve-sting of the air burning the exposed muscle fibers, tendon, bone, and nerve. He wielded the arm in his left. Then he felt it. The hand at to his face, allowing himself to caress his cheek. Gentle at first, then more insistent. Victor looked in astonishment. A soft sound escaped his lips. “Ah…” He closed his eyes and leaned into his own touch. A stranger touching him. One he didn’t know the name of. They stroked his cheek and gently wiped at a tear that had formed. He melted into his own caress like watercolor on paper.
The blue hand moved down. A whisper against his skin, tracing the prominent ridge of suture at his neck and adam’s apple. Without sight to remind him of the truth, the sensation was transformed to intimate at once. Victor held his breath as those fingers explored the hollow at the base of his throat, where a pulse fluttered irregularly beneath. He gasped, the sensation both familiar and utterly foreign. It was his hand, and he knew its every scar and callus, yet the disconnect made it feel like someone else's caress. The paradox was dizzying, exhilarating.
"Yes," he whispered to the empty room, to the hand that both was and wasn't his. The word escaped on an exhale that carried his loneliness. In the darkness behind his closed lids, Victor constructed an identity for his invisible companion but not a specific face or form. Just a presence that accepted his collaged existence without revulsion or pity. Someone who saw beauty in the meticulous craftsmanship of his assembly rather than horror in the fact of it.
The hand moved with deliberate slowness, as if memorizing the topography of his fractured form. It glided along the curve of his collarbone, fingertips pressing just firmly enough to send shivers cascading through nerve endings that had never quite learned to work in harmony. Victor's head tilted back slightly, offering more of himself to this phantom touch.
The hand pressed against his stitched torso, fingers splayed across the surgical seams that mapped his creation. Cupping a seam on his chest where one man began and the other ended. It lingered on the corner of his autopsy’s scar tissue, thumb circling the raised flesh with a gentleness Victor had never experienced before. A sound escaped him. Half sigh and half moan as the fingers dipped into the hollow between two ribs
He flexed his fingers, watching in fascination as the hand at his side actually responded, tracing the ridge of a particularly prominent suture line. The touch sent shivers through his frame. How long had it been since anyone had touched him with anything other than clinical detachment or disgust? How long had he yearned for a caress that wasn't tainted with horror or pity?
Victor's skin came alive under the touch, electric currents running just beneath the surface and the coils and bolts sparked. The chronic pain that normally dominated his senses receded, overshadowed by this new stimulation. His chest expanded with deeper breaths, stretching the stitches that held disparate parts together.
The disembodied hand continued its exploration, tracing the ridges of muscle beside his ribs. Muscles that had once flexed under another's will, in another's life. Each muscle group responded differently to the touch, some hypersensitive, others dull, creating a symphony of varied sensations that played across Victor's consciousness.
"More," he breathed, not knowing if he spoke to himself or the phantom lover he'd created from his own flesh.
Obedient to his desire, the hand splayed wider, palm pressing flat against his abdomen where the skin pulled taut over organs that had never been meant to work together. After all, they had decided to remind him of it just moments before. The warmth of that touch seeped deep into him. His breathing quickened, his chest rising and falling more rapidly as the hand slid lower, finding the ladder of stitches below his navel. The fingers traced each stitch like a musician playing scales. The lower the stitch was on his body, the better it felt.
As the hand moved, Victor timed each caress in his mind to mimic what he imagined real intimacy might be like. The hand would pause here, press there, circle back to a sensitive spot. All in the effort of following the rhythm of an encounter between what he imagined lovers would do rather than the mechanical exploration of his own curious fingers. He imagined warmth and breath accompanying the touch. He imagined a presence hovering close enough that he could feel their heat against his cool skin. In his mind, lips followed where fingers led, pressing tender kisses to the scars that mapped his making. The thought was almost too sweet to bear.
"Please," he murmured, the word carrying all the longing of his isolated existence.
The hand responded by trailing lower still, fingertips brushing the edge of his waistband where black fabric met stitched flesh. Victor's breath caught in his throat, anticipation building in his veins. The fingers traced the line where different sections of skin had been joined just above his hip. Blue skin to pale this was a particularly sensitive seam that sent jolts of sensation straight to his core. His lips parted in a silent gasp as the thumb pressed more firmly against a spot nearby, discovering a pleasure point he hadn't known existed.
The phantom hand drifted even lower, following the dark trail of stitches that disappeared beneath the waistband of Victor's black pants. His breathing grew heavier as those fingers brushed against the growing hardness confined by the fabric. He allowed the hand to cup him through the cloth, a gasp escaping his lips at the sensation of being touched in a way no one had ever dared.
Victor's hips rolled forward instinctively, pressing into the palm that both was and wasn't his own. The seams along his waist and thighs strained against the motion, pulling at nerves that fired conflicting signals of pleasure and discomfort. Still, he persisted, chasing the unfamiliar warmth blooming within this body.
With fumbling urgency, he tugged at the fastenings of his pants as best as he could until the cool air of the suite kissed newly exposed skin as Victor's erections sprang free. Fingers wrapped around the base of his shafts and he surrendered to the touch.
"Yes," he hissed, the word escaping through clenched teeth as he stroked himself with increasing vigor.
But it wasn’t enough. He wanted more. He stopped to reattach his arm. Taking his staple gun and thumping the metal point-blank into his flesh. It wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t even. Each staple fucking hurt but he didn’t stop. His erections throbbed. The pain was good.
There.
He rose his hands to his neck, fingers finding the line of stitches that secured his head to his body. With trembling fingers, Victor began to pull at the threads, unraveling the careful work that held him together. Each loosened stitch sent a jolt of sensation down his spine, a dangerous tingle that hovered between pleasure and pain. The stitching gave way. The sensation was extraordinary. With a gentle twist, Victor separated his head from his neck entirely. The world spun wildly for a moment. The gradual disconnection that should have been horrifying but instead felt liberating. He should have died right then and there. Would have died had he been fully mortal but his creator had built redundancies into his system precisely for such contingencies it seemed.
Victor's head settled heavily into his own lap, his lustrous black hair spilling across his thighs like dark water. From this new vantage point, he stared up at his own headless torso. The sight should have been macabre, but to Victor, it was merely another configuration of his impossible existence. Fluid beaded at the clean separation between head and body, forming a thin crimson line around his neck. The vital fluid didn't gush or spray but merely seeped.
From his position in his own lap, Victor had a perfect view of his twin erections, the blue ixian flesh against the dark backdrop of his partially removed dark pants. his lips parted, allowing his tongue to dart out and moisten them as he learned to control his arms from this new and strange angle. His headless torso responded as if it were still connected though with some latency. His lips finally managed to press against the tip of one of his own cocks, an impossible feat made possible by his separation. The sensation was electric. The soft warmth of his mouth against the hypersensitive ixian flesh. The seams at the corners of his mouth stretched as he parted his lips wider, taking himself inside the wet heat of his own mouth. The other erection pressed against his cheek. Embalming fluid bloomed at the corner of his mouth where the strain pulled at his stitches, adding an acrid tang to the experience.
His headless body began to thrust in time with the electric jolts surging through his body and coils. Each shock sending a jolt through his irregular heart, forcing it to beat more confidently and strongly.
He hollowed his cheeks, using his tongue to create suction around his own cock. The dual sensation was overwhelming. To feel both the giving and receiving of such intimate attention. He sought to drive himself deeper into his own mouth. Cock tip exiting the stump of his severed head’s neck. He saw his ribs expand as his body drew in a deep breath for him. He face fucked himself hard enough to cause him to close his eyes. To fuck inside a mouth and frot along the side of his own face with the other. Balls slapping on his chin and the scent of his groin at his nose. His hips rocked forward with increasing urgency while his head remained mostly passive in his hand’s grip, receiving rather than pursuing. The embalming fluid began to trickle more steadily from the corner of his mouth as the first stitches ripped apart from the strain. But Victor felt no concern because his body had always somewhat leaked, bled, and seeped at the seams. It was the nature of his imperfect assembly.
Victor's decapitated body tensed, the muscles going rigid as pleasure peaked. He tried to swallow despite the current situation. His load shot past his severed neck’s hold and toward his knees. He didn’t even get to taste it. The other’s into his hair by his ear. Despite everything. Despite being from different origins, every part of him had unified toward this one single purpose. He knew he would have moaned if he could but all that came out from his body’s exposed throat was something like a harsh sigh.
The final tremors of pleasure subsided, leaving Victor sprawled across the rumpled silk sheets like a marionette with severed strings. His head remained in his lap, cradled by the strong thighs. With a sluggish movement, his body rose upright. Sitting. To reattach his head to its neck. He could feel his hot breath at the base of head as he settled it into place. The connection made and the breathing began to flow in and out through his mouth in heavy pants. He still had to properly affix it though. The staple gun was his only option here. Metal to soft skin, staple legs piercing with little resistance. He coughed when one caught his adam's apple. Agony, a tired throb between his legs. He yanked the staple out and then felt around the circumference of his neck for any places that might need another staple.
Victor's eyes grew heavy which was an unusual sensation for one who rarely slept. Perhaps the expenditure of energy though pleasure had drained him more than he realized. Or perhaps the Baroness herself was lulling him toward rest, offering the gift of temporary oblivion to her strange and fractured guest. His eyes closed and he found himself curled around himself once more. “He is going to hate these staples…”