John wore a t-shirt. It was a little threadbare. It had an angry-looking line drawing of a face with spiky hair. Around the face were the words 'GOD WEEN SATAN.' Not only was John a Chocolate and Cheese kinda guy, but he felt it was appropriate. He'd filled out some through the shoulders since he got it, due to having to push his weight around the vast majority of the time, and it was straining. That was okay. He loved it. It loved him, too. John was in the downstairs bed, a cool Murphy number that was surprisingly comfortable, in a room that had a secret entrance through a sliding bookshelf. An origami red flower had been on the shelf beside his head--he was holding it now between his blood-scalded fingers, twirling it slowly back and forth as he looked up at the ceiling. "You should just go ahead and bring over your own toothbrush," he was saying. He wondered if it sounded as persuasive as he felt it did.

She'd nicked his for the moment, so it was a couple of minutes before she actually answered. "Is that a command or a request, darling?" When she did pad out of the bathroom, it was with a limp and the edge of bandages showing beneath the sleeve of the same white t-shirt she'd used before. The ones on her leg were hidden by the black pajama pants--too long, so she was actually holding them up some to keep from tripping on them.

"Neither." Wearing his shirt and no bra like that turned his head and made him watch as surely as if she'd grabbed his hair and yanked him around. "You're sexy," he mused, and, "please don't ever think it would be funny to wake me up next to an old man or anything."

She laughed, rich and deep, as she sat on the other side of the bed. She'd washed off the blood earlier, taken down the ruin of her hair. Now she ran her fingers through the tangles, careful of the stitches? pull. "Is that the only restriction, John? Or may I take another face if the whim strikes?" And the look she slanted over her shoulder at him was brown and flickering black beneath the blue wash.

How far did he want to push the requests? "You can be anybody you want when I'm awake and I don't think it would bother me." Although...but no, she wouldn't be that cruel. "I'm just asking, no good morning surprises." The crook of his smile indicated how much he expected her to actually comply with any of it. "And...see, the toothbrush is the first step. Then you'll bring a nightgown over because you're tired of holding up my damn pants every night. You want me to brush your hair out?"

"Please. It's a little difficult to lift up my arms that high." A thought came and went in passing like a shadow over her beautiful face. "And I see. Maybe you're right. Maybe I should bring a toothbrush over. At the very least it will keep me from having to use yours so often." She smiled briefly, let her tangled hair fall back down.

No brush in the drawer set into the shelves. Dammit. He worked toward relocating to the bathroom, sliding smoothly from his bed into the chair. Tonight his pajama pants were neon pink and blue striped flannel. "Then I'll have to start stocking the dolmathes and peanut butter cups you like in the fridge." Rounding the bed, he zoomed off to the bathroom. Squeak squeak squeak. The wheelchair had been horribly abused over the last week or two, between sudden hyper-cooling and the rest.

"Mmm--you remembered." She sounded terribly pleased at that. "If you get the feta and phyllo I make very good spanakopita, but I'm really much better at biryani."

"...you can cook?" He'd been wheeling back, but at her statement he stopped dead and stared at her.

"Yes, darling, I can cook. I spent almost six months in the possession of one of the better Mediterranean and Near-Eastern chefs in the world." Her voice was rich with amusement for his surprise. "He never did want to do his own cooking while he was at home."

"That was--" He gestured with the brush, tossed it onto the bed and followed it over. Propping up pillows into a nest, he sat himself up and beckoned her over. "--that was him?"

"Which him, darling?" She levered herself over carefully, curled her uninjured leg beneath the other for balance. "If you mean Marius, no. I was a gift from Marius to Doruk in exchange for certain favors. And when Marius was done with Doruk--well." Her smile was not at all pleasant.

"Who was Doruk?" He felt that smile. Sectioning off a quarter of her hair as best he could, he started working the knots out. He was slow, gentle, a little too careful with it. Should he ask about the favors? Probably not. At least not tonight. "Did you take any more of the analgesic?"

"The chef. And a scion of the Siyah Dağ Aile, one of the Turkish underworld leaders. He was valuable, until he wasn't. And I learned to cook." She hadn?t answered his question about the analgesic. "Can you cook, John?"

"A lot of Italian, a little Irish, bachelor food. My repertoire is pretty limited." He tilted her head to one side with a swift hand on the nape of her neck, went on brushing. "Your hair doesn't burn like your skin does. How old were you when you were with him?" His tone had slid, at some point, into a calm and quiet intimacy at odds with the rest of the evening and the fretful, itchy ache that crawled restlessly over him in her presence.

"Marius had created me just over a year before, maybe a little less than that. But I told you, darling, I was constructed at this age." She moved under his direction, and pursed her lips at the little tidbit of information he'd slipped in there. "That's odd. And my blood--that burnt you physically, too. Stages of contact, maybe?"

"Maybe. Maybe I should look into lead-lined condoms." He tossed off the comment casually, followed it up with, "To me, you were born seven years ago. That's the reference point for your age." He'd finally finished the first section. Please excuse him while he rubbed it against his cheek, sighed into it, and let it go. "You want me to call you thirty, fine, I'll call you thirty. But it's not the same thing."

She laughed, rich with humor and tinged with more. "I'm not radioactive, John." But when the laugh faded away, it took all humor with it, leaving her voice very serious. "Then, if that's your reference point, I was just over a year old when Marius gave me to Doruk. Why, darling?"

"I'm just curious. Did you have any choice in it?" He finger-combed his way through a brushed-out lock of her hair, let the thick silky black strands drift down, down. Then he reached for another.

Her headshake kept the next section of hair from his grasp for a moment longer. "No, of course not. I'm a construct, John, and Marius made me to be used for whatever purpose he needed. It's only since I've come to Rhydin that I've had any autonomy at all, really."

He was silent for a minute or two after that. It would have been safe, at that point, for her to assume that slavers weren't high on John's Christmas card list. Then he wanted to know: "What's the first thing you remember?"

There was a long pause, filled with a frown of concentration turned inwards. "Being aware. Truly--a sensation of being me. And then rather a lot of pain. I don't think it usually hurts a construct so to be created, but...well. Marius was playing with more than he should have." She talked about it impassively, with a sort of cool detachment in her tone.

"I'm sorry." He trickled a fingertip down the inside of her arm. "You make my legs hurt even when I'm not mobile. It's like a phantom itch or something, only worse."

"Really?" She sounded interested and she half-twisted to look back at him with her eyebrows arched up. "I knew I could trigger the nerves if I wanted to, but I thought it needed effort." Black and red were flickering behind the blue, an aurora borealis. "Do you feel it all the time, as I do you?"

Morana, the cuddly scorpion. Thanks for the reminder, he thought, as if he'd needed it. His expression was briefly closed, outwardly wry. "It never stops." He spun his finger at her: turn around. "I'm not...it's not getting better. But it's getting easier to fall asleep next to you, if that makes any sense." The tip of her nose, the faintest beginnings of a wrinkle etched around the corner of her mobile mouth, the fine bones of the elbow nearest him: he noticed them all the same way a connoisseur of art might pick out the nuances of a particularly fine Matisse.

"I think it does." She answered thoughtfully before she turned back around and let him go back to brushing her hair. "I wonder why that is."

"Acceptance of a personal dogma of masochism." An absolutely deadpan riff. "Gold or silver?"

She laughed at his deadpan. "I did tell you about the masochism." She paused at his change of subject. "I really prefer bronze over either, but of the two I prefer gold. It depends on my form and what I'm wearing, too. You?"

"You're so contrary." His chuckle had been taking lessons from her laugh: it was deep, throaty, private. It made promises it couldn't keep. "I prefer gold." As evidenced by the crucifix that hid inside the Ween shirt that very instant.

Her lips curved up in a smile while she reached down and ran her fingers along his thigh over those hideous pajama pants from knee up toward his groin. She watched the twitch of reaction carefully. "Mmm. I'll keep that in mind. Summer or winter?"

"I used to like to run in the mornings during the winter. Fewer people on the streets because it was so goddamned cold out. Now...I don't know. I'll take a page from your book and say fall." He watched her watching him, and kept brushing. "Spit or swallow?" He managed to ask it with a straight face.

She tracked her fingers back along his leg, and her full lips curved up into a slow, slow smile. "Swallow, darling. Of course." Her face wasn't straight at all, painted with sin and thwarted desire.

There went another twitch. "I start losing sensation right there," he indicated, when she hit a spot about two inches south of midthigh. "Not a lot of muscle control below my hips. Makes it hard to sit up without something to lean against." He took one look at her face and hastily returned his attention to the handful of hair he was finishing up. He was going to cry like a fucking baby otherwise.

"Mmm. So... you do have feeling above this point, though?" And 'this point' came with a tap on the dividing line he'd pointed out before she trailed her fingers back up to within an inch his hip. And then, as calmly as if she'd been doing no such thing, she spread out her arms and arched her back in a stretch, keeping her head fairly still. "I would ask cats or dogs, but all things considered--"

He snorted, followed the movement of her arms and thanked God for the distraction. Because he already knew what would happen. She was a sound sleeper, sometimes. "You didn't take anything, did you."

Her brows pulled together in puzzlement and she had to twist again to look at him. "From what, or who?"

"The NSAIDs I asked you to take. For the pain and inflammation." His own brows were tied in a big knot.

"No. I didn't." Her voice was perfectly calm.

He pulled a piebald hand out of her hair, rubbed at his right eye with the heel of it. "Okay."

"Why, darling?" She lifted her less-injured arm, ran a testing spread of fingers through her hair before she stifled a yawn into her hand. "Did you want something?"

There was a distinct pause. "Just you." Which was the truth sliced so fine as to be indistinguishable from a lie. Another rub. "I was gonna ask you if you'd ever had anyone baby you, but you probably had--have--men falling all over themselves to do whatever you want. Does anybody beside me and Sarah know your name?" Truth or lie, there was no jealousy in the comment about babying, which may or may not have been interesting to her.

"No. Not even Marius. He thought he was summoning... something else. He asked for lies and deceit in his conjuring, but he wasn't specific." There was introspection again, and a faint frown as she tried to piece together those earliest memories. "As for babying--darling. Of course I have men--and women--who would do whatever I ask, in hope of a smile." She said it completely without arrogance. "I don't ask."

"Okay. Just so you know, I won't give it up." The brush rattled against the shelf. He sank down into his nest of pillows. "Can you be summoned?" That was edging onto dangerous territory, and he knew it.

She shifted, unfolded her leg and crawled up to the open spot beside him on the mattress. And eventually, she answered. "Yes." She slid under the sheets and curled up, and promptly discovered that her usual side-curled position was a bad idea. Breath hissed out through her teeth.

Maybe he heard it in the tone of her voice before the stitches pulled, or maybe in the silence before the answer came. "When I work," he murmured, quiet and low in reassurance, explanation, apology, "I do a lot of prep beforehand." Clearly he wasn't talking about life in the lab. "Scouting and research. I like to have a game plan." He offered her pillows and support as needed to make herself as comfortable as possible in the circumstances, to wit: one fiery Benandanti in bed with her, and upward of fifty stitches in her pretty dark flesh. "This is the same thing. If something happens to you, I want to be able to diagnose the problem and have a solution ready as soon as possible."

"Doctor." Gently mocking. With his help and by not moving a whole heck of a lot she was able to find a fairly comfortable position. From there she turned her head and slipped a smile his direction. "Not everything has a cure." She was no more talking about the physical than he'd been talking about his labwork. "I'm about three seconds from falling asleep."

"I'm going to find a way." He eased over onto his side to face her. He could have been talking about anything. He probably was. "Sweet dreams," he whispered, and kissed the corner of that smile, a brief touch like a priest's benediction.

"Sleep well, John." The corner of her mouth he'd kissed twitched up while her eyes slid closed. And it wasn't more than a breath later that she was asleep.