Archive of Our Own ^beta

“I’m just saying, Doc, you’d have a lot more success getting us to show up for our medicals if you didn’t, I don’t know, basically tell us that it rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.”

Eiffel’s conversational tone, even to his own ears, was a weird juxtaposition to the way he was trying to position himself with a clear route to the laboratory exit. He was clutching a box of dehydrated protein noodles to his chest, distantly aware of the picture he made — Communications Officer Eiffel: hair uncombed; wearing mismatching socks; two months behind on star charting; hugging Goddard-Futuristics-brand ProtiPasta™ like a teddy bear.

Yeah. Not big on dignity.

Hilbert, in contrast, seemed very relaxed. And cheerful; almost offensively so.

“It is just your standard biannual medical, Officer Eiffel! Totally routine.” Eiffel wasn’t sure what device Hilbert was fiddling with, but it kept bringing the word ‘probe’ to the forefront of Eiffel’s mind more often than was entirely comfortable. “There is no need to be concerned.”

None of this was what Eiffel had expected.

Eiffel had expected, upon arrival, to find Hilbert bumbling happily about his lab, humming along to the Generic Mad Scientist theme tune and ready to take receipt of what Hera (liar, traitor, GLaDOS wannabe) had insisted was a emergency delivery of four packs of basic rations. A delivery that Eiffel had to make, according to Hera (traitor, liar, veritable electronic Judas), because Hilbert needed them now for Vital Science Purposes and also Minkowski had pulled rank.

Hilbert had invited him in with instructions to deposit said packs in a storage cupboard at the very back of the lab, with what in retrospect Eiffel thought was a suspicious level of absent-mindedness. Hilbert was about twenty mad scientist tropes at once, sometimes uncannily so, but even he knew better than to let someone like Eiffel float around untethered and unwatched in his precious laboratory space.

Eiffel had propelled himself cheerfully enough to the back of the room, blissfully unaware of the Jaws theme song his memories would later layer over the experience, and it was only once he’d reached the cupboard in question that Hilbert mentioned that Eiffel could just dump the box anywhere. It wasn’t needed.

What followed that statement had been an exercise in confusion, —

(“You… don’t want noodles?” asked Eiffel, openly baffled. Hilbert gave him a kind, patient look.)

—betrayal, —

(“Officer Eiffel,” Hilbert replied gently, “the noodles are not the delivery. You are.”)

—idiocy, —

(“Uhhh,” said Eiffel, in one prolonged moment of mental gears trying to jump tracks. Hilbert waited patiently for him to catch up.)

—and extremely rapid mental calendar management, —

(Eiffel started to connect the dots, slowly at first and then with an increasing panic-powered swiftness, and blurted out, “Oh, is it that time of year again? So sorry, can’t right now, very busy, signals to check, ducts to inspect—” Yeah, the duct in the hydroponics garden was just the right size to cower inside, “—you know how it is, gotta dash byeee.”)

— all in the space of approximately thirty seconds.

Eiffel had then jammed his foot against the cupboard, and propelled himself to the starboard wall to line up for a straight shot to the lab exit. Once he’d turned smoothly in the zero-g, however, he’d found Hilbert had countered, positioning himself perfectly, tidily, suspiciously between Eiffel and the lab door. 

His smile was genial. His hands were folded neatly behind his back.

Eiffel had experienced a sudden animal understanding of what being hunted might feel like, eyeing the space between himself and his exit. He’d had a panicked thought about this being a potential trap minefield of which Jigsaw himself would be proud, and—

Well. He was just saying.

“I’m serious, though, I really have too much to do today,” Eiffel lied, rotating his grip slightly on the wall-mounted positioning handle. “I’ve got four new quadrants to check for incoming signals, I have to scrub the noise from two months’ worth of incoming transmissions, and, and I have to recharge the flux capacitor—”

“I have confirmed with Commander Minkowski that you can be excused work for the day,” interrupted Hilbert with grotesque cheer, but also with eyes that tracked Eiffel’s abortive attempts to escape with a concerning intensity. “The importance of a good medical examination cannot be overstated.”

Eiffel flung the noodles wildly at Hilbert and pushed explosively across to the port wall, trying to move diagonally to cover ground and possibly ricochet through to the lab door. But God, Hilbert was faster than he had any right to be, and Eiffel panic-corrected when he hit the aft wall to stay out of Hilbert’s creepily-strong grasp. Terrifying Soviet space acrobat, Eiffel thought with a baffled anger.

“I didn’t even bring something to bite down on!” Eiffel yelped as he caught himself on the edge of a storage cupboard. His angle was all wrong, he was going to need to make three separate course corrections to even have a hope of bee-lining through the lab exit—

“Oh!” responded Hilbert, looking pleased at solving such a rudimentary puzzle. “That is not a problem. Have many items in the lab which can be used and then sterilized. Should be no problem to find you something for effective pain management.”

“Look,” Eiffel said a little desperately, half-truths and empty promises, “don’t tell the Commander, but I’m further behind on my signal analysis than Mr. Cutter likes. I’ve got a huge backlog to process and it’s due real soon, and whoa, whoa, Qyburn, what the hell is that?”

“This? This is to assist in standard check for infections,” Hilbert told him. He had brought his hands out from behind his back to reveal he was holding, with all the innocence of a true psychopath, a device that looked like its normal use involved cattle and the artificial insemination thereof. In anyone else’s hands, it would have been alarming; in Hilbert’s hands, and with the full knowledge that Hilbert wished to apply it with surgical accuracy to Eiffel’s tender, helpless body, it looked like a very immediate and very personal hell.

“What are you checking for, just the clap or the full round of applause?” replied Eiffel in polite horror, pushing away just enough that he could lock himself carefully into the nearest corner. It gave him several options for trajectories, and he tried very, very hard to decide whether he should feint, or, like, feint feint, double-feint or whatever, but what if Hilbert was expecting that, maybe he should triple-feint—

This positioning, apparently, did not go unmissed. Hilbert propelled himself smoothly to the side of the lab and slapped his hand on a button on the wall, above which was a piece of duct tape labelled ‘specimen containment’ in crabbed black Sharpie. The lab door shut with a swift whoosh, followed by a noise suspiciously like the bulkhead locks engaging. 

Shit.

“Officer Eiffel. I need your blood,” Hilbert said brightly.

“I’m still using it,” Eiffel insisted, looking for options. There was an emergency access panel next to the door, he could probably bluff an old override code (Comms Officer, hell yeah), and Hilbert was going to be slower to react at that angle in the room—

“Now. You know the routine, Officer Eiffel,” said Hilbert genially, as though he wasn’t planning some gleefully-violent remodelling of Eiffel’s entire skeletal structure. He used the Mystery Hell Device to gesture to the centre of the room, where the ever-present metal table attached firmly to the lab’s aft wall gleamed dully. “Take off your flight suit, strap yourself to the examination table, and pray to whatever gods you believe in. I am told that helps.”

“Is that thing safe?” demanded Eiffel, desperate, and nodded at the — whatever it was that Hilbert was carrying.

“I have taken every precaution,” Hilbert protested, giving him a reproachful look, and used his free hand to snap a pair of heavy protective goggles over his own eyes. He gestured to his face, as if in demonstration. “Safety is top priority.”

Eiffel’s nerve broke.

“Parkour!” he screamed, and kicked off from the wall.

The plan had been to use the starboard and port walls to line up for a perfect trick-shot trajectory to the door panel. The plan had been to soar through the air like an eagle in zero-g, grace and precision and the kind of awesome cool that would have had women and professional basketball players swooning. The plan had, in short, involved a lot of a moving pieces but was entirely achievable.

The plan had not accounted for Hilbert, who apparently been predicting this, because the second Eiffel pushed off from the wall Hilbert barked out “Hera! Now!” and then, somehow, Hilbert broke the Universe.

Eiffel figured that out in several confusing seconds when he hit the port wall and jackknifed away, at which point the underlying mathematical principles of the Universe decided to try something new. Instead of hitting the north wall with its door panel, and importantly, door, Eiffel sailed in a twelve-foot arc across the room and collided spectacularly with the aft wall, and narrowly avoided concussing himself on the examination table.

Right before collision, Eiffel thought calmly: really flubbed the acrobatics roll on that one.

Being born falling was a defining human characteristic, Eiffel figured. It’s like, hey, you’re born, congratulations, enjoy your new random assemblage of genes, watch out for boa constrictors and pyramid schemes, and sorry about puberty. Oh, and by the way, you’re going to spend your life in permanent free-fall. The taller, only fractionally less-confused members of your species call it ‘gravity’. Good luck with that.

Like everyone else, Eiffel had spent his life up until a year ago in that permanent free-fall, 9.81 metres per second squared, with only the (admittedly significant) technicality of a planet in the way to stop it. (Eiffel reminded himself of that every time he misjudged the distance between two points in the zero-g Hephaestus — every time he took the longer line less straight, as it were — to predictable Euclidean and medical disaster.) However: a propensity for falling still didn’t explain why, staggered and stunned and drifting from impact, Eiffel’s brain was somehow still spinning, insisting dizzily on motion where there was none. He closed his eyes against it, swallowing convulsively and determined not to throw up in zero-g, he wasn’t cleaning out the air filters again, Hera had never let him live it down—

Hands. There were hands, fast and rough, turning Eiffel around and touching his shoulders, his arms, his chest, and somewhere in the mess was a short sharp noise that was too familiar. By the time Eiffel’s brain had finally decided on a position in his skull, it was already too late.

There was a cold, flat, unforgiving surface pushing insistently against his bare back. Something was fastened tightly (but not uncomfortably) around each wrist, giving him less than an inch of movement. There were hands yanking the rest of his flight suit down his legs, and he wondered blankly about that for a moment until his brain helpfully pattern-matched that earlier noise with the applied concept of the long zipper down the front of his flight suit.

Experimentally, and without being a hundred percent on what space his limbs were currently occupying, Eiffel kicked out a leg. His ankle was instantly caught in a strong, uncompromising grip and pressed hard to what Eiffel gloomily realized was the examination table.

“Please tell me you left my underwear on,” Eiffel muttered, eyes still closed. Falling, falling, why was he falling? He hadn’t hit his head that hard.

“Of course!” said Hilbert brightly, hand still tight around Eiffel’s ankle. It was a strange contrast. “I have no wish to make this deliberately uncomfortable for you, Officer Eiffel.”

“Hah,” said Eiffel, and steeled himself into opening his eyes.

Hilbert was fussing with something down by Eiffel’s feet, moving around the table to — wait, moving around the table — walking around the table—

“Uhh, Doc, I don’t — there’s a floor? You’re standing on the floor,” Eiffel said, altogether too calmly, whilst trying to forget everything he’d ever learned about head injuries and brain bleeds, thank you Pryce and Carter. Bits of his rattled brain came back online and a few pieces of information got flagged up for review. “Why did I hit the floor?” he added slowly.

Hilbert gave him a tolerant look. “Because, Officer Eiffel, I asked Hera to accelerate the Hephaestus for a few hours. The ship is currently experiencing point one seven g on all aft surfaces.”

“So, when I kicked off from the wall—”

“Hera accelerated, and you experienced the perfectly normal consequences of Newton’s law of inertia,” said Hilbert, with disgusting cheer.

“You switched the gravity on,” Eiffel translated indignantly. “Hera! You Doug Judy of an operating system, how could you Order 66 me? Again? Today?!”

“Sorry, Officer Eiffel,” Hera replied, and she had the grace to sound at least mildly chastened. “Orders are orders. At l-least i-i-it was funny?”

“Later, you and I are going to have words about the true meaning of friendship,” sniffed Eiffel. “I just hope there’s enough episodes of My Little Pony in the databanks to really hammer the point home.”

“Hera, medical privacy protocols, if you would,” said Hilbert, cutting off any possible reply.

Eiffel affixed him with a suspicious look. “Why did you want gravity?”

“It is more difficult to handle fluid samples in zero-g,” replied Hilbert cheerily, and that slammed reality right back home for Douglas F. Eiffel.

“OK, OK,” Eiffel told himself, trying to breathe and relax and not look at a single one of the ominous machines that Hilbert was now wresting from the walls and hooking up to long, creepy cables. The gravity, low but unignorable, made the restraints on his wrists and ankles feel twice as present. “I’m here now. No changing that. I guess I’d better just… commit to this. Hey, Doctor Hilbert—”

“Have told you before, Officer Eiffel, surgical drill is absolutely necessary.”

“Oh, come on.”

There was an extended silence as Hilbert wheeled (wheeled, oh man, gravity) monitors into place around the examination table, looking thoughtful and completely disconnected from the notion of a man lying, strapped and immobile, on the table before him. And, well, that had always been Hilbert’s thing, mused Eiffel. Guileless, but not stupid; also mildly crazy, in a well-meaning, only occasionally “whoops the experiment broke free and is terrorizing the villagers” way. It made total sense that would extend to seeing nothing wrong with having to physically restrain any and all of his medical patients.

In turn, Eiffel filled the silence mostly by sweating. The cool air of the lab was very noticeable on the bare skin of his arms, chest and legs. Eiffel felt incredibly vulnerable.

Eventually, and with the weight of the velcro straps around each of his wrists occupying a very large part of his attention, he thought to ask, “Hey, Doc? Today’s medical is, uhh… restrainier than normal. What’s up with that?”

“Today’s tests very sensitive,” said Hilbert, fixing him with a Look. It was a Look that imparted that today was for Science, serious Science, and Hilbert was deeply aware of a) Eiffel’s recalcitrance and b) Eiffel’s complete willingness to break for the exit and hurl himself, half-naked, into the main body of the station without even a moment’s hesitation. “We must control every possible variable — your thrashing around in pain could irretrievably damage test results.”

‘Thrashing around in pain.’ Christ. “Isn’t there paperwork for this sort of thing?” demanded Eiffel, trying to struggle against the velcro in a way that didn’t look like struggling. “Some kind of forewarning? A station announcement? A report, or a post-it note, fridge magnets—”

“No time. I had to fit in your medical examination around your… hrmmm… duct inspections,” replied Hilbert drily, making pointed eye contact, and oh, oh boy, that level of insight into the ways and means (and hiding places) of Douglas Eiffel was not fair.

“Hey,” objected Eiffel, “that’s important work. Don’t insult my professional pride like this. Why. Why are you restraining my ankles. Is it your birthday? Is this what this is all about? Because I’m telling you right now I’m no Anastasia Steele, I don’t have the hair for it ow, OW, OK, fine, the restraints? Absolutely necessary how could I doubt you please loosen off the one around my chest thank you.” Hilbert gave him a neutral look and let a few centimeters of slack back into the chest strap, as Eiffel tried to reinflate his lungs. 

“Doctor Hilbert,” Eiffel wheezed, “have I done something that… upset you? Annoyed you, maybe. More than usual. Try to stick to this week if you can.”

“This is just routine medical,” said Hilbert soothingly.

“Yeah, you said,” Eiffel replied doubtfully, eyeing the strap being tightened just below his waist, “but either I’ve really pissed you off or Dumbledore turned you down for the Defence Against the Dark Arts job again.”

Hilbert sighed. “You have medical twice a year, yes? This medical will be same, will have all the same metrics and sample requirements. Is nothing to worry about, Officer Eiffel. You are fine.”

“Oh, good,” said Eiffel, feeling very, very naked. “That’s… comforting?” 

Hilbert was sorting through several loops of cabling, fingers deftly separating out strands without ever needing to look. In amongst the dangling wires were several square, flat shapes. Eiffel felt his nervousness tick up another notch.

“What’re those?” he asked, in the tone of man not expecting to like the answer.

“They will take your pulse,” Hilbert informed him, pressing the first one to the side of Eiffel’s chest with thorough, businesslike motions. In any other circumstance that would have been a neutral statement, but like this—

“I’d prefer if they left it where it is,” Eiffel tried. A couple of the monitors lit up suddenly with the rapid data influx, and Eiffel watched his own pulse beat on a screen.

“Do not be nervous,” said Hilbert cheerfully, pressing a second and third electrode firmly to Eiffel’s sweaty ribs. “The pain during your medical will be temporary, with only very minor possibilities of major blood loss, sepsis, neuropathy or viral brain explosion.”

Eiffel’s heart rate visibly jumped twenty BPM on the monitor. “You remember what I said about ‘it rubs the lotion on its skin’?” demanded Eiffel shrilly, tugging reflexively against his restraints. “That. That is what I’m talking about. That is some Herbert-West-level psycho drama right here, this is why you have to trap us in your lab and strap us to stuff, that and the ridiculllhhhands in new places,” he yelped, as Hilbert’s fingers pressed an electrode smoothly to a (vulnerable, bare, vulnerable) spot on Eiffel’s inner thigh.

“Problem, Officer Eiffel?”

“Hahahaha,” said Eiffel desperately, feeling wellsprings of sweat popping up over his entire body. He had never felt so unshielded, pressed flat to the cold exam table by the twin pressures of low-g and a climbing terror. “Wasn’t expecting that. Kind of. Ticklish. With all of the fear-sweat.” The pulse rate on the monitor spiked again.

“You do sweat most alarmingly,” said Hilbert, looking contemplatively at one of the now-active monitors. His expression changed suddenly, and Eiffel recognized with (even more) dawning horror that that was Hilbert’s ‘inventive’ face. “Why, would you like me to create special anti-perspirant? Have several samples lying around could use as base material — how do you feel about repurposed napalm? Do not worry,” he added, in what he clearly thought was a reassuring tone, and apparently entirely misconstruing the look on Eiffel’s face. “Can even make it smell minty-fresh. For given value of mint.”

“Or flesh. I mean, fresh,” Eiffel croaked. He could feel, with the kind of hyperfocus associated with pure mortal terror, the sweat on his temple forming into beads and drawing itchy, stuttering lines down to his jaw.

“Just relax, Officer Eiffel,” said Hilbert cheerfully, looking through his implements tray.

“Right. Relax, relax,” muttered Eiffel, trying very hard to settle into the cold, unforgiving metal of the table. A table, he was now noticing, that had what looked like fluid channels. He closed his eyes to block out the sight, and all of the uncomfortable realizations that were sure to follow. “Relax. Calm. Zen. Ahhhhh. I am a leaf on the wind. I am a leaf on the wind. I am a leaf on the wHY. WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT. RIGHT NOW. TO ME. IN ME. WHY—”

What followed, Eiffel was sure, was a protracted, methodological series of experiments whereby Hilbert attempted to destruct-test his own maxim: “You’d be amazed what you can live through.”

Later:

“Hrrmm. Hold still, Officer Eiffel.”

“Sorry, sorry, it’s just the, what did you call it, ocular drill is getting nearer, and it’s making me, uh, really nervous, and I know I’m Officer Eiffel, haha, but I’m going to be Officer Eye-ful in a moment, haha, and it’s freaking me ouAAAAAAARRRGGHH—”

And later:

“There is no way that creepy machine of yours is going anywhere near my face.”

“Not to worry, am simply testing dendritic cell firing response! Best way to do so is through buccal nerve, located in cheek, stimulated from inside of mouth. Open wide, please, Officer Eiffel.”

“No. Not a chance. You know what? I’m done with this. There is no way I’m letting you or little Orin Scrivello here anywhere near mYFLGMMMPHGLPGLMPHH—”

And later:

“Some people would say,” Eiffel said thoughtfully, staring up at the ceiling until the pain level in his spine had reduced sufficiently for his eyesight to come back, “that there are certain places in the human body where electrojacks shouldn’t go. Some people, you understand. Like me. I’m some people.”

“What is it you said at mission launch — we are boldly going where no one has gone before,” replied Hilbert drily, once again far too relaxed about this for Eiffel’s comfort level, sanity, or will to live. He was typing rapid-fire and one-handed on a battered tablet with electric tape holding down one corner of the screen, looking amiably distracted.

“No, Doc,” said Eiffel flatly. “No. You do not get to quote Star Trek at me, I don’t care if Bones McCoy himself appears unto us and bestows upon you the arcane and terrible secrets of how you make a man sneeze out his own brain matter. Check yourself before you Trek yourself. And secondly, I don’t care where you’re going, boldly or otherwise, but electrojacks should have no part in the equation.”

“There is no escape from science, Officer Eiffel, with or without electrojacks,” Hilbert replied, tying on what looked like a wipe-clean rubber apron. This did nothing to soothe Eiffel’s somewhat shattered nerves. “And there is no escape from me. Now, I will need you to bite down on this—”

“Bite down on whaammphhhff?!”

“—gooood, good, excellent. Now take a deep breath, Officer Eiffel. I assure you, the sensation you will shortly experience of your kidneys being stabbed very, very slowly will soon be over.”

And later:

With a careful maneuver that was significantly steadier than Eiffel’s own hands, Hilbert took the gauze-wrapped implement — the handle of a scalpel? — from between Eiffel’s teeth. On principle, Eiffel screamed until he felt better. Hilbert patiently waited until he was finished.

“Why is it,” wheezed Eiffel eventually, feeling like he was trying to breath through several orifices at once, not all of them on his face, “that you are the way that you are?”

“Hard work and education,” replied Hilbert, sounding far too upbeat for a man who was treating Eiffel’s internal organs like an unsolved Rubik’s cube.

“We’re finished,” said Eiffel half-questioningly. “We’re done. Please tell me we’re done.”

“Hm, not yet,” replied Hilbert, smoothing an iodine wipe carefully, assessingly, along the unprotected skin between two of Eiffel’s ribs. “Can you breathe? More than forty percent vision? No sensations of pins-and-needles, chest pain or stroke? Good. You will need to bite down on this again…”

And later:

“Am I dead?” Eiffel wondered aloud. He wasn’t sure which of the possible answers he preferred.

“Not to my knowledge, Officer Eiffel,” replied Hilbert, his mouth set in a blunt line of dissatisfaction as he held the sample bottle up to the lab lighting. To Eiffel’s eye (medically untrained, but now deeply, intimately, hellishly familiar with the day-to-day moods of the station Medical Officer), it looked like something had maybe not gone to plan.

The fresh pain in Eiffel's hip flared with a pulsating, white-hot radiance. Whatever fluid or sample Hilbert had been attempting to extract, it clearly needed a hole with which his boring human body plan had not seen fit to grace him, and he had the distinct sensation of having been hole-punched for filing.

“Am I dying?” tried Eiffel hopefully.

“According to computer readouts, you are going to…” There was a disconcerting pause. “…live.”

“Great. Thanks. If I do die, could you write me a note?” Eiffel said, voice cracking a little on the vowels. His throat was so dry, but no-one could say he hadn’t got his priorities in order. “Commander Minkowski won’t believe me if I tell her I’m too dead to do my morning shift.”

“Do not worry, you will not die in this laboratory, not today. Try to relax.”

“What do you mean, ‘not today’ — hey, hey, what are you doing with that—”

And later:

“Still conscious, Officer Eiffel?” asked Hilbert, with what Eiffel considered a personally offensive level of cheer. He took a few steadying breaths until the urge to gargle with his own stomach acid had passed.

“I'm awake,” he croaked finally. “I can tell because of the pain.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Perforated.”

“That is fair assessment. Time for next sample collection. Do not worry about all these spinning blades, at least fourteen percent of them are for weight distribution purposes only.” There was whirr like several disparate power tools all coming online at once.

“No, thank you,” said Eiffel in a very small voice. “No, that’s fine. I’m good, I’m fine, thanks.”

“Do not worry,” repeated Hilbert. Eiffel was going to end up with some of the weirdest traumas from this — every time Minkowski said “don’t worry” from here on out, Eiffel was going to reflexively jettison himself out of the nearest airlock. “If it helps,” Hilbert added, resettling his protective goggles with his free hand, “the danger this device poses to you is probably less than the danger it poses to me.”

“It does not help,” Eiffel informed him, with 100% accuracy. “It does not help at all.”

And later:

Well. Eiffel was pretty sure it was later. At that point it was hard to tell; his relationship to lucidity was a nodding one at best, his awareness washing in and out in unpredictable cycles of temporary blindness and a throat too raw to scream.

Regardless, he was pretty sure that time had passed. He was absolutely sure that pain had happened. He was also very, very convinced something had gone weird here, some darker turn taken off the beaten track. His hip, left eye, maybe 30% of his ribs, his abdomen, and various other places around his body were in full agreement. Loud agreement. Screaming agreement, in fact.

Eiffel coughed, or at least tried to. He was in the peculiar position of needing to clear the blood out of his throat, but his throat was too dry. Instead, he opened his eyes and blinked hard a few times to clear his vision, and when that didn’t work, just sort of gave it a minute until the worst of the grey haze had cleared.

“Doctor Hilbert,” he said, or at least he tried to. What came out instead sounded more like “D’c’r H’lb’t,” not even enough sound to croak rather than speak. Eiffel swallowed and felt his throat click, bone dry. He tried again. “Doctor Hilbert.” Better. He could even hear himself this time, even if he did sound like a poorly-maintained vinyl recording circa 1890.

“Yes, Officer Eiffel,” responded Hilbert, and Eiffel tried not to resent the genial tone of his voice. Eiffel squinted, trying to locate him; the lab-coat-shaped blur about three meters away seemed like a promising candidate.

“This isn’t a routine medical, is it,” Eiffel said hoarsely, shivering. He was so cold. His head rang. 

The blur was starting to fully resolve by this point. Hilbert approached him (thankfully empty-handed) and put a warm, comradely hand on his shoulder, squeezing gently as if to comfort him. “Officer Eiffel,” said Hilbert kindly, making sympathetic eye-contact, “it is just routine medical. I promise, it is nothing out of the ordinary. We have done this before.”

Bullshit. “It’s not,” he insisted, but God, he wanted to believe Hilbert, he really, really did, because why would Hilbert lie, because believing him might mean it was over soon, because believing him might mean everything was fine and nothing hurt quite as much as he thought it did—

But—

But.

Eiffel remembered losing himself mid-thought, turning into liquid in a furnace until enough pain had boiled off him that he could think again. There were windows of time he just… lost, came back to find himself breathing like he was hacking at the recycled air for oxygen (hard and sharp), the sound of the air in his throat like a scream all by itself. It was like waking up to a stripped-down throat and a thin wetness under his eyes that streaked down toward his ears, slow and ponderous in the low-g. And yes, Eiffel was familiar with the deep well of personal discomfort that Hilbert had expertise in tapping, thank you Goddard Futuristics Medical Plan, but this—

“It’s not,” he croaked again, more firmly.

His insistence got him a reaction from Hilbert, anyway; Hilbert’s usual mild expression, his absent smile, faded a little under the line developing between his eyebrows.

“It will be over soon,” said Hilbert, and oh, that voice, Eiffel knew that voice, that was Hilbert’s Lie To The Patient voice, and that was. That was a bad signal. Eiffel stared at him wordlessly, frozen. Hilbert appeared to take this as an encouraging sign, because he patted Eiffel briefly on the shoulder and moved back to — oh. Moved back to fiddling with a hauntingly-familiar mains-powered machine that looked like the unholy union between an oil-well drill and industrial stapler. Eiffel’s hip throbbed harder as if to remind him exactly why it was familiar.

I can’t get out of this, he thought, with the very, very high clarity of a man whose entire body felt like a skin-suit filled with firecrackers of varying sizes and legalities. I can’t get out.

Dimly, and with faint resignation, Eiffel realized he was panicking. For a moment it was blind and all-encompassing; Eiffel pulled against his restraints reflexively and in bursts, uncontrolled. The adrenaline riding roughshod through his bloodstream was janky, dirty, oiled with raw terror and whatever the hell had been in the twenty-seven syringes with which Hilbert had stuck him so far. Pain aftershocks arced off his bones, lit up from the inside with the charring and smokeburn of his nervous system self-immolating. Tremors ricocheted through his muscles, seismic and uncontrollable, and his breath left his lungs in staggered stops and starts. 

God, thought Eiffel hysterically, what was it about the dizzy horror of panic? To be so firmly rooted in your own skin, and yet so desperate to claw your way free of it?

“I need,” he managed to choke out, “I need it to not hurt any more, Doc.”

“You know the lab rules,” replied Hilbert, without looking up. He was swapping out what looked like drill-bits. God. “Anesthetics alter the test results — cannot accept adulteration of findings, will ruin whole medical. You are fine.”

Eiffel stared blankly at the ceiling above him. Tears escaped from his unblinking eyes, joining the streaks of sweat rolling down his face until it was all so much salt water, pain and terror both. He swallowed once, hard, and tried to grip the table, but his hands had detuned to static and wouldn’t respond. His skeleton felt very sharp, knife edges along every length of bone as though one wrong move would make ribbons of his flesh from the inside.

Doc,” Eiffel repeated, forcing his voice to be low and unbroken. He failed miserably. God, he couldn’t get enough air. “Doctor Hilbert. I’m done. We need to stop. We’re done now.”

That got Hilbert’s attention. Eiffel heard the brief click of something being put back into the implements tray. Eiffel kept his eyes focused at the ceiling even as unwilling tears forced him into a wavery tunnel-vision, but in his peripheral vision he saw Hilbert pause for a long moment, looking his way, before turning to stare at the two nearest wall-mounted monitors.

“Hrrm. High sympathetic nervous system response, shock, panic,” muttered Hilbert. His voice was uncharacteristically gruff, and he sounded irritated and a world away from the cheerful mania Eiffel was used to from him. “Within acceptable parameters… though extreme levels of norepinephrine, epinephrine and cortisol may potentially affect readings of D—” Hilbert cut himself off there, instead turning his head and skipping his eyes over the monitors above and behind Eiffel’s head. 

Eiffel’s experience of Hilbert over the last few hundred days aboard the Hephaestus had been that of a genially-cheerful medical genius, pressingly keen to contribute, Dr. Phlox-esque in the way he was a little untethered from the concept of other people’s pain. In this, Hilbert had always been very consistent; frighteningly competent, frighteningly brilliant, and occasionally (as in, like, since Eiffel had arrived at the lab circa betrayal o’clock) frightening, though not to any appearances malicious. But now, Hilbert looked — to Eiffel’s watery, spotty vision — like a completely different person. His usual amiable smile was nowhere to be found. His face was drawn and a little dark, his mouth set in a long, tight line, motionless and very focused. 

Hilbert made a short sound low in his throat, grim and almost aggressive, and his gaze lingered on the monitor to Eiffel’s left for a long few seconds. It showed a graph line that was still climbing, jagged and ominous. Eiffel didn’t know what it meant, but the threatening red color wasn’t a good sign.

What if he doesn’t stop, whispered Eiffel’s brain, treacherous and quiet. What if he doesn’t stop. What if he just… carries on.

Eiffel slammed his eyes closed against the sick wash of dizziness that followed that thought. Pain throbbed through him and he had to hold his breath against it, so powerful it made him nauseous. I won’t throw up, he told himself firmly. I won’t throw up. Or pass out. I won’t throw up or pass out. Princess Leia could handle being tortured by a space dictator with fancy gadgetry. So can I.

He took a moment to try to get his breathing back under control. When he opened his eyes, he noticed two things: firstly, the jagged line on the graph had spiked alarmingly again. Secondly, Hilbert was moving up the exam table to Eiffel’s waist level, walking slowly and carefully (almost comically so) in the low gravity. He was carrying his lab stool in one hand and what might have been a small bottle in the other. He locked the stool’s magnetic clamp into place on the floor with a deft twist and seated himself carefully, motions precise. He spent a moment then, hunched forward and just looking at Eiffel.

Eiffel had the distinct sensation on being on the wrong end of a microscope.

Hilbert’s expression was… weird. It was blank, not quite neutral, his brow drawn down somewhat, watching Eiffel with a certain hard assessment. He held a clear glass bottle between both hands, the contents compressed into place with the thin membrane designed to contain fluids in zero-g. The white sticker aligned neatly on its side was hand-printed with a heavy, blocky Cyrillic script. The cap, Eiffel could see, had ominously been marked with a big black X. With the curious immediacy of attention that exhaustive panic provided, he saw that it must have been done when Hilbert was preoccupied with something else; the second stroke of the X had a bend in it.

His body was strung out, his nerve endings a mess of misfiring neurons and locked-open synapses, pain signals firing off in a steady cacophony that made it hard to hear anything else. But this — Hilbert’s weird serious blankness, the delicacy with which he handled the bottle — that focused Eiffel’s attention like a laser.

“I have… a drug,” said Hilbert slowly, turning the bottle around carefully, absently, between his hands. His voice was also a departure from the Hilbert that Eiffel knew; he spoke in a grim, careful monotone, far removed from the amiable sociopathy he was used to. “A new chemical I have been working on. It is… untested, experimental, but it should be safe. It will help manage the shock, the pain, and will not contaminate the medical results or test samples.”

“Not that I’m complaining, Doc,” Eiffel said between his shivers, “because I am one million percent on board with you setting me up with some of the Zydrate in your little glass vial, but what about your Count Rugen policy?”

Hilbert didn’t even raise an eyebrow; he just looked at Eiffel, expression flat and ungiving. Weird.

“Your No Anesthetics In This Workplace deal,” Eiffel clarified, curling his fingers helplessly against the metal of the table. “Your whole schtick — ‘Anesthetics have their limits’? ‘Certain kinds of pains are beyond the comforting embrace of narcotics’? Which,” Eiffel paused for breath, “by the way, rude.”

Hilbert did not react, expression as dark and unmoved as his voice. “It is not an anesthetic, it is not a painkiller. But it will make everything… hurt less.”

Pain made people do stupid shit — Eiffel would know, this didn’t even come close to the dumbest thing he’d ever done — but right now, this? This thin, opaque promise of not being in pain any more? Seemed like the best idea in the galaxy. He twisted his arm within the restraints to offer up the inside of his elbow, even as something pinged against one of the four remaining functional brain cells he now owned.

“Wait, if it’s not a painkiller, how does it—” Eiffel coughed around the dry blood in his throat, and tried again. “What does it—”

“There will be pain,” said Hilbert quietly, “but it will not hurt.”

That was enough of a non-answer that Eiffel tried to file it under his mental “Nancy Drew This Shit Up” tab, but there was raw pain setting up screaming distortion along the long networks of his brain cells, and somewhere en route to long term storage the signal got snarled, twisted, burned out of recognition. He watched, fixated and desperate, as Hilbert drew a needle from his lab coat pocket, removed the safety sheath, and used it to draw maybe a quarter-syringe of clear, colorless fluid from the bottle.

“Hit me up, Nurse Ratched,” Eiffel said instead.

The needle went into and out of the crook of his elbow with the sting of pinpoint entry and all of Hilbert’s familiar deftness and default competence, and then—

Nothing.

Eiffel waited for one shaky breath, and then two, and three. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch.

“Are you sure this stuff works?” he croaked, trying to blink away the fresh wet haze in his vision as every part of him sang a discordant harmony in one huge cacophony of pain. Hilbert looked at him expressionlessly, eyes narrowed. Against every expectation Eiffel had, Hilbert brought one hand up and pressed it against Eiffel’s bare chest. 

“It just needs time. Breathe, Officer Eiffel,” he said quietly. His hand was dry and very warm. “Push against my hand. For three breaths. One.”

Eiffel breathed in, wet and shaky and pushing his shoulders back into the table. He let it out with a gasp that he refused to admit had a sob in it.

“Deeper. Breathe again. Two.”

Eiffel opened his mouth and breathed in until his lungs couldn’t hold any more, and paused at the top of the inhale for a long, trembling second. Hilbert’s palm pressed into his sternum with light, grounding pressure. This time, when he exhaled it came out steadier, smoother, and the heat of pain in his hip, his ribs, his eye, his everything, sort of… receded a beat. Became less all-encompassing.

“Oh,” he said, surprised, and relief bloomed through him.

“Good. Again. Three.”

Eiffel drew in a controlled breath, feeling his breastbone press up steadily against Hilbert’s palm. He metered out the exhale, tipping his head back against the table, and something… something flipped, changed, moved from one state to another. His body still hummed with pain, a tight vibration in his bones sending out constant high-level distress signals, shocky and unsettled. But now, it was like — it was like he was sitting in front of his comms panel, reading power and voltage and current, and he could just, gently, turn the transmission gain control down. Signals were still being received, but quieter, less intrusive. And, like a constant background sound, Eiffel found he could just… not think about the pain any more. Could think about something else. And, oh, a side effect: that freed up, like, vast amounts of brain-space. The effect was deeply weird. Eiffel found he very distinctly did not care about a lot of things, and this was also coupled with a bright attentiveness and awareness of the room around him; movement, color, shape and texture, both within his own body and without.

“Ohh, this is trippy,” Eiffel breathed as Hilbert took his own hand away. Eiffel focused very intently down to the sensation of a padded velcro cuff around his right wrist, to the complete exclusion of everything else. He rubbed his finger tips against the ball of his thumb, and the sensation was...

Value-neutral intense, he decided, after thirty seconds of his attention pivoting on that one, tiny feeling. It didn’t hurt, it wasn’t directly pleasure; not good, not bad, just a lot. Signal to noise, he thought absently. Receptors tuned differently, recalibrated signal receivers.

“Doc. Doctor Hilbert. My man,” said Eiffel distantly, trying to map his own neural circuits with the raw power of his mind, “this is the stuff. I mean. Goddamn. Please feel free to break bad with me any and all times you invite me to come up to the lab and see what’s on the slab.”

“This is just the first stage,” Hilbert informed him. His expression was still strangely drawn, voice still low and rough. Eiffel would have puzzled over that, but—

“What’s the second stage?” asked Eiffel, genuinely interested even as his various punctures throbbed with a steady warm heat, and then he was hit by the sensation of falling, and falling, and falling. “Oh, OK. Right.”

(In a day characterized by falling, he figured, it only made sense.)

The experience was what Eiffel imagined Hera’s meditation module might resemble, if he’d ever put actual thought into taking it with any degree of seriousness. There was a long, slow moment, where the muscles of his upper back unwound in a single slow, steady push, like exhaling. The cords of his neck were next, the tension melting out of him in phases — the small of his back, his tightly-curled fists, the muscle connection points under his collarbones and down the insides of his thighs.

Eiffel took a very long, deep, shaky breath, and let it out carefully over five seconds. His lead lolled, tipped back and unsupported, and the next breath swept even more of the tightness out of him, the stale backflow of adrenaline dissolving from his tissues, washed clear. His shoulders, having spent however long cranked up to his ears, settled back down.

The ceiling was in a sort of fuzzy focus through half-lidded eyes. Movement drew his attention, though slow and lazy; what little he could see of the graphs on the monitors around him were changing, slowing and sinking to calmer colors in a variety of smooth, falling waves. The monitor graphing his heart rate was starting to look less like a broken etch-a-sketch. Eiffel didn’t try to look too hard; this was the most relaxed he had been for months, throat exposed and limbs restrained in Dr. Hilbert’s lab, and wasn’t that the weirdest combination of facts he’d ever heard.

Hilbert was tracking the monitors with a furrowed brow slowly easing, the thin line of his mouth tipping out into satisfaction.

“Much better,” he said approvingly, “much better. How are you feeling now, Officer Eiffel?”

“Doc,” Eiffel said hazily, warm and drifting on the solar tides, “I don’t know what the hell that stuff is, but I stand by my previous statements. Please feel free to lead with it in the future. God. I think I’ve achieved the Avatar state.”

Hilbert took Eiffel by the chin and stared very intently into his eyes, expression assessing and serious. (Eiffel would have been weirded out by that if his mind hadn’t been occupying a peaceful orbit around the planet where he kept his complete lack of fucks.) He frowned and turned Eiffel’s chin to the left with exquisite care.

“Pupils dilated, parasympathetic nervous system reacting to new chemical,” Hilbert muttered gruffly, absently, and moved away. Eiffel got the distinct impression that he wasn’t talking to him so much as talking near him, thinking out loud, and wondered if he should be doing something with that information. “Pulse dropping toward resting baseline, blood pressure… hrmmm. Lower than normal. To be expected.”

“That’s… good?” hazarded Eiffel, feeling the words roll out of him with ease. Hilbert didn’t appear to notice; he was too busy pulling on heavy rubber gloves and a fresh wipe-clean apron. Eiffel took another deep breath and tipped his head peaceably back against the table.

Eiffel had been expecting to maybe go all fuzzy-headed — that thinking would be hard, or that he’d be viewing the lab through a thick protective layer of cotton wool. (They’d given him the good shit once in the immediate aftermath of the car crash, and the experience compared to this one wasn’t totally dissimilar.) This, however, was qualitatively different. Eiffel was freakishly aware of everything going on around him: the velcro of the restraints pressed firmly into his skin, ungiving but not uncomfortable; the way his heart seemed to clip itself against his ribcage with every steady beat; the slow draw of air and the dumb relief in exhaling it again; the quiet background traffic of blood moving along arteries, the steady hum of nerves at rest. He didn’t feel foggy or distant but incredibly present, high tight clarity in every thought.

Hilbert himself was a series of steady, controlled movements, focus switching unerringly between his report tablet, his tray of medical equipment, and a small machine doing unspeakable things to Eiffel’s… liver, maybe?

And Hilbert was right, the sadistic weirdo — there was pain. Titanic volumes of pain, huge and amorphous and (in theory) all-consuming, but Eiffel just turned down the gain on it a little further, feeling it recede away. It became a background noise, an unwanted signal he could entertain or discard, floating gently in the half-twilight of the lab, weirdly aware of every micrometer of his own skin. His attention kept shifting — had he ever really felt the muscles under his shoulder blades before? Or the ones on the inside of the arch of his foot? Or the way his wrist bones pressed out against his skin? — moving steadily from place to place in his own body with the aimless focus of a daydreamer.

Eiffel stayed like that for a while, gently turning the dial down on the pain whenever it threatened to break through. There were moments when his body did stuff without him — at one point, Hilbert pressed a button on something and Eiffel’s entire body jolted without his conscious input at all — but it wasn’t so much distressing as irritating, so he thought about something else. He burned a chunk of time by trying to decide if The Lord Of The Rings counted as a road-trip movie (eventually: yes), and then got side-tracked into deciding who would win in a fight between Batman and Superman (answer: Wonder Woman). At some point, whatever Hilbert had been doing with his liver (up to and possibly including extracting it) seemed to have finished. The warm tides of pain washing up Eiffel’s body were going back out again, reducing from waves to dull ripples, omnipresent. Eiffel felt it go as though from a long way away. 

Maybe he’d turned that dial down a little too far though, because he refocused back to the reality outside his body to find a blinding light in his eyes. It was more uncomfortable than actually unpleasant, and Eiffel blinked in a kind of slow flinch, tilting his head away from the brightness. Against the yellow afterimages, he could see Hilbert stood right next to him, looking mildly irritated and holding a — oh, a penlight.

“Hrmmm. Am checking pupillary responses, nothing more.” The hrmmm noise Hilbert made (and not for the first time) had been… it had been low and rough, something bone-deep and intense. Eiffel found himself thinking distractedly of carnivores and open hunting plains as Hilbert’s warm fingers slid carefully, deftly under the right side of Eiffel’s face. Hilbert held Eiffel’s head steady with his fingers aligned along Eiffel’s jawbone, and oh, oh yeah, skin, skin contact, that was good, that was nice. Eiffel’s eyes drifted closed on a sigh and he turned his head into it, feeling the ridge of his cheekbone pressing against the bars of Hilbert’s fingers, skin-heat good and steady against his face.

Hilbert went very, very still.

“Officer Eiffel,” he said after a long moment, and there was that low, dark monotone again, thick and rough-edged, the smallest inflection containing multitudes. “Eiffel. Are you awake.”

Eiffel gave a bare nod on a long, slow exhale. “Yes,” he said, so quietly he could barely hear himself in the total silence of the lab. His lips hardly moved against the skin of Hilbert’s open palm.

There was another long, unmoving silence.

“Eiffel,” said Hilbert eventually, very quietly, remaining motionless. 

“Mmmm?” Eiffel replied, his eyes shut. He felt the sound draw out of him (much like its owner) long and lazy and effortless.

“We are not yet finished.”

“Figured.”

“Later on,” said Hilbert, and his tone was too level to be anything other than completely controlled, “there will be the… sample of sensitive nature. You recall. The measurement of health of reproductive system. The one I give you sample container for, and you return within twenty-four hours.” The fingers pressed against Eiffel's face flexed minutely.

“Yeah,” said Eiffel, eyes still closed. That sample was probably the least-invasive part of the whole thing, he figured mildly. 

“I have… alternative suggestion.”

“Sure,” Eiffel said agreeably. He was still floating on the blissful waves of skin contact and whatever happy juice with which Hilbert had shot him up, but a broken shiver wanted to roll up his bones. Eiffel got the feeling there were links to stuff — conclusions he ought to be drawing — from this conversation.

“There is the matter of…” and Hilbert made that sound again, like hrmmm but also it had teeth and acid in its eyes, a monster frustrated, a growl, it could never have been anything else, “… of consent.”

Eiffel blinked his eyes open to look at him, eyelashes moving a little against Hilbert’s palm, and waited patiently.

“You are… drugged,” said Hilbert, and his voice wasn’t exactly — OK, it was quiet in the most technical sense of the term, as in low in volume, but, Eiffel thought, with his weird drifting clarity, that it sounded low. It was the kind of low that he’d heard in those nature documentaries, a sound found on the edge of the teeth of predators, an apex sound with nowhere to go but your throat. He half-expected to feel the vibrations of it through Hilbert’s open hand.

“You are drugged,” Hilbert repeated, as if to hammer the point home. “You are not capable of what some p—” Hilbert stopped, growled again. “You are not capable of what Commander Minkowski would say is ‘informed consent’. She would say you could not agree to anything I suggest. But.”

“But,” Eiffel parroted back, a little transfixed. 

“But,” repeated Hilbert through his teeth, and yeah, Eiffel was sure he’d never seen this expression on Hilbert before — focus, and determination, and grit, and… something, something dark and unnameable, something linked back to restraints on his wrists and a tablet full of data Eiffel couldn’t see. “The pre-planned method for… acquisition of the sample… leaves room for confounds, for contaminations, for unreliable data. It would not offer the unique opportunity to monitor your changing hormone levels in real time. Collecting the data myself would… be of extreme usefulness.”

Eiffel thought briefly, clearly, about Hilbert hunting him down around the Hephaestus’ medical lab; about Hilbert strapping him to the table; about Hilbert attaching electrodes to unexplainable parts of him; of Hilbert watching, and recording, and listening, unmoved, to his patient’s screams. He thought of Hilbert looking at a pre-labelled sample bottle, meant to be taken from the lab, taken away from his eyes and his meticulous lab procedures, and the specific cant to Hilbert’s mouth that followed that thought.

Of the dark, very dark way Hilbert had said ‘unreliable data’. 

“What would I need to do?” Eiffel ventured, looking guilelessly up at Hilbert. Hyper-clarity and emotional distance were a weird place to be, he decided; he was absolutely sure there was a particular response he ought to be having to this entire discussion, and at some appreciable degree of volume, but it just… didn’t seem important.

Hilbert made that noise again, this time more of a sigh than a growl. “You would need to do nothing, Eiffel. Absolutely nothing. Think on it for a little while, yes?”

Eiffel nodded.

“I am going to attach passive electrodes,” Hilbert continued, still in that strange, low tone. “I need you to lie still, make no movements.”

“Sure.” It wasn’t exactly going to be difficult.

Hilbert gently tipped Eiffel’s chin up until the weight of his head was no longer in Hilbert’s palm, and drew his hand away with… with odd care, like Eiffel was something dangerously fragile, delicate and fissile. It took Eiffel a moment to reorient himself without the fresh heat along the side of his cheek, and he took a deep breath into the weird, charged silence that followed.

Hilbert, possibly because of his faultless competence, had always been very good at narrowing down Eiffel’s world until it was just the two of them. Eiffel had figured it was because he’d spent a lot of his professional encounters with the man trying very hard to run away, or maybe because mind-stripping pain tended to tighten the orbit of anyone’s focus to the immediate situation. It was hard not to feel like the only two people in the entire universe when Hilbert was fixated on trying to remove Eiffel’s gall bladder through his ears or whatever. But this, this was different; where Hilbert had always seemed split between several tasks — data collection, sample analysis, planning and deciding on the next test, always six steps ahead — now he was zeroing in down on Eiffel, on his body and the long lines he made, strapped onto the laboratory table.

It was. Intense. Eiffel swallowed.

Hilbert removed the old electrodes briskly and with measured practice, and then smoothed the new ones onto Eiffel’s body with firm precision. Each motion was considered and thorough, passing his hand briefly over Eiffel’s skin to ensure the electrode was stuck fast before moving to the next, patterning them over his body with a design Eiffel couldn’t interpret. One of them went under the strap restraining Eiffel’s chest; Hilbert simply removed that restraint and did not reattach it, combing his fingers carefully though the long electrode cables to stop them from snaring on each other. His fingertips dragged lightly along Eiffel’s skin as he did so.

Eiffel was still operating in the zen presence of calm, feeling every part of his body with an intensity that could only come from the extreme exclusion of every other stimulus. But this was like pressing his face into Hilbert’s hand, this was like the broad tingling warmth of skin contact but narrowed down into the unpredictability of Hilbert’s careful, capable fingers, and something sparked a little at the touch. It was a very weird feeling, that absent-minded pressure on his skin — Eiffel was at this point too familiar with the (deeply) invasive contact from the machines that the lab housed, and the contrast by itself was enough to focus him instantly down to the firm pressure of Hilbert’s fingers against his collarbone. This was all of Hilbert’s deftness and precision in a direct skin-to-skin communication and, for a second, Eiffel lay in the sudden sharpness of surprise.

For the last electrode, Hilbert carefully rotated Eiffel’s forearm in the velcro restraint, palms cupped above Eiffel’s wrist. He used both hands to smooth the electrode against Eiffel’s skin, thumbs moving in mirrored sweeps against the adhesive backing.

The skin contact was mildly electric in a way Eiffel felt he should have been expecting, and hadn’t. A few disparate neurons abruptly lit up in one luminous chain and, for reasons he couldn’t identify, Eiffel had the instant, vivid recollection of: Hilbert grabbing him and, with his weird wiry strength, manhandling him toward the examination table, fingers unyielding but not punishing on his bare wrist; Hilbert’s ungloved hand on his chest, pressing down with a steady, grounding pressure against the force of Eiffel’s panic; Hilbert’s exposed palm against his jaw, Eiffel’s cheekbone pressing into uncovered skin; and just now, half a minute gone, Hilbert’s thumbs pressing carefully and unstoppably into the electrode backing on Eiffel’s vulnerable skin, his hands squeezing lightly against Eiffel’s unprotected forearm in a way that made every inch of his hyper-focus zero down on it. Eiffel wasn’t entire sure how it was possible, but he felt that firm pressure down to the bone, steady and stable like a paralytic.

Maybe there was some third stage to this drug that Hilbert had entirely neglected to mention (Eiffel wouldn’t be surprised), because the low-level comfort was washing out of his muscles even as something sharper, something unanchored and messy like junk-data, crackled up his bones. His brain felt fizzy. 

Eiffel took a moment to marvel at how he could be both hyper-aware of and incredibly separated from his own body — shit, the street value of this drug must be off the chain — and then Hilbert turned back to him holding… well, considering Hilbert’s track record of these things, Eiffel tried not to look. Whatever it was, it was small, vaguely T-shaped and made from faded white plastic, trailing a long grey cable.

Hilbert pressed the flat head of the mystery device against Eiffel’s side. That was ominous enough by itself, so Eiffel let his eyes drift close on an exhale and got ready to spin that pain dial right down to zero—

Something shocked through Eiffel, like a jolt with the sharp edges sanded off. It drew a tight jagged line into the muscles of his side, something bright and tingling, and Eiffel jerked violently in response.

“Shit,” he said involuntarily. Hilbert paused whatever he was doing and gave him a narrow-eyed look.

“Officer Eiffel—”

“Sorry, sorry Doc. It, uh, caught me surprise.” It hadn’t been painful, no; it had been shocking in more ways than one, but what had caught Eiffel so off-guard was the pain-free intensity. Weird, sure, but there wasn’t any actual sting to it. It had been more like... a signal check. Huh.

“Comms testing?” Eiffel ventured. 

That got him what might have been a smile from Hilbert. It was far cry from the genial curve of Hilbert’s mouth that he was used to seeing — instead, this was tight and crooked and faintly unwilling, somehow bitterly honest — but it was something.

“Not bad, Communications Officer Eiffel,” replied Hilbert, and his slower, more gravelly tone made it sound like half a threat, despite the pleased expression on Hilbert’s face. “This is a nerve conductivity test. It measures the ability of your sensory and motor neurons to conduct the electricity they need to function. Yes, I am testing your body’s ability to communicate with itself.”

“Huh,” said Eiffel, and he opened his mouth to say guess you touched a nerve, I’m here all night, tip your waitress, but then Hilbert swept the device high on Eiffel’s ribs, and triggered it again.

Eiffel managed not to squeak, though it was a close-run thing. Instead, the gentle jolt of it made his back arch, his hips and wrists pressing hard against both the restraints and the table to which he was bound. It took him a moment to reset, breath caught in his throat, and felt some sort of aftershock sweep over his skin, subtle and shivery. That sensation lingered long past the point of reason, and Eiffel felt his breathing cycle up just a little.

If you can’t manufacture your own home-made Sith lightning, he thought a touch hysterically, store-bought is fine.

“Wh—” Eiffel began, but Hilbert, either uninterested or actively invested in shutting Eiffel up, swept the device across Eiffel’s upper chest and did it again. The shallow shock arced through Eiffel again and he jerked his shoulders up and back, trying not to buck into the restraints like before. The backwash of this one was different, though; it swept through him as before, liquid and glittering off every nerve ending, but it took longer to fade. His skin felt hypersensitive, a little damp from a fresh round of sweat.

Eiffel tried to take a moment to recover from that one, feeling a lot like a landed fish. He met Hilbert’s assessing gaze with a baffled one of his own, opened his mouth to ask is this normal, and then—

Hilbert triggered the device again, this time right over his solar plexus. Eiffel slammed his eyes closed for a second but couldn’t stop the gasp that ricocheted out of him, feeling the line of his abdomen tighten and let go as the recoil skittered right up and down his spine.

“That is deeply weird,” Eiffel said, his voice very uneven. There was no pain for him to spin the dial down on, just unrelenting intensity of sensation. He was more than a little rattled, his skin feeling tight and hyper-sensitised. “Can we j—”

Hilbert hit him again, just to left of his navel. Eiffel felt his back and neck arch, completely uncontrolled, and the noise he made was punched out of him. The static backwash rolled through him, thickly expected, and Eiffel rode that wave until it crashed and left him spun out and dizzy, blood carbonated. This was… too much, too high an intensity after the recent sense-memory of extraordinary pain, and his logic gates were shifting the sensations through to the only brain regions that could make sense of it.

So now there was a creeping heat settling low in Eiffel’s gut, a completely new kind of shiver working its way up through the dense muscles next to his spine. It felt… it felt good, subtle and warm and a little breathless.

Eiffel tried to restrain a dizzy, involuntary moan. He wasn’t entirely sure he succeeded.

“Hmmm,” said Hilbert, after a long pause. His voice was thick and low. Eiffel swallowed, trying to breathe carefully and steadily through his nose. His palms were incredibly sweaty.

“Okay, look, so,” Eiffel began, focusing very hard on keeping a level tone of voice. His skin felt conductive — a passive medium for the electricity, obliquely dangerous, traveling through his muscles. “Not that this low-budget Frankenstein recreation doesn’t have anything to recommend it, but it feels mega super weird, Doc, I’m not gonna lie, I know this is a sorta nerve communication test, but my nerves would very much like to communicate to you that it kinda feels like you’re punching me. In the, uh, nerves. And—”

“Eiffel,” said Hilbert, and oh, that growl in his voice had extra reverb, what the fuck. “It appears it is impossible for you to be quiet. I would like to ask that you try very, very hard to do so.”

“I don’t know how you expect me to be quiet,” said Eiffel unevenly, “when you’re turning my entire brain inside out like this.”

“You are… sensitive,” said Hilbert. “Some… response to that is to be expected. I am referring to your non-stop talking.” Eiffel knew himself to be some kind of high, OK, there was no doubt about the fact a quarter-syringe of Hilbert’s slapped-together No-Ouchie Juice had gone direct into his actual body, but there was definitely… something, warm and a little affectionate and not entirely kind, in Hilbert’s voice. Underneath all that gravel, anyway.

“I’m not gonna apologize for that,” said Eiffel frankly. “You knew exactly what you were getting into with me, it’s in the name even, Communications Officer Doug ‘Motormouth’ Eiffel at your s—”

It was nothing short of intentional when Hilbert dragged a single finger down the paltry raised length of Eiffel’s v-cut.

Eiffel was aware he had muscles, in a dim, entirely theoretical sense. There had to be something anchored to his bones, some mechanical facilitator of the push/pull that let him actually move his body. His muscles were a technical reality, a quirk of genetics shared with the species. To say Communications Officer Douglas Eiffel had muscles was a biomechanical certainty. 

However, in a more immediately-relevant, culturally-specific way, he did not have any muscles whatsoever. Eiffel had always been a long thin handful of a human being, and any pretence to being shredded was just too-low body fat over unremarkable, very unworked muscle tissue, unhelped by a Goddard Futuristics™-approved nutritional plan and the low resistance of zero-g.

So while he was not ripped, per se, he did tend towards the pointy, muscles deceptively clear under thin skin. Which is to say, when Hilbert touched him — when Hilbert drew a deliberate finger down the inside of his hipbone (iliac furrow, he would later see labelled on an anatomical diagram, staring fixedly and recalling the sensation with near-perfect intensity), hooking into the band of his boxer shorts as it travelled downwards — he felt every micrometer of the movement. And oh, and then Hilbert smoothed his thumb firmly over the muscle again but horizontally, running out underneath the blade of his hipbone, and entire chunks of Eiffel’s brain dropped right out of functionality. The heat flared up in him, hard and sudden. Eiffel, mid-gasp, slanted his eyes over to Hilbert, who was watching him with a steady intensity.

“You are sensitive,” repeated Hilbert, slowly, so slowly, voice with echo and reverb and the caustic quality of patience worn down to the finest cutting edge. He enunciated each word with perfect clarity and a care that could mould whole mountains into shape. “So far, using that information has been the only way to keep you quiet. I suggest you remember that.”

“I’m not that kind of girl,” Eiffel croaked a little rebelliously, feeling the beds of his nails and the roots of his hair tingling. Hilbert’s hands had direct current access to Eiffel’s nervous system, apparently, and Eiffel wondered if being electrocuted to death would feel this good. “This is clearly second base, not even dinner and a movie, I’m feeling very used right n—”

With the bare minimum of pressure, and as if to make a point, Hilbert scraped the edge of his thumbnail down the middle of Eiffel’s entire abdomen. 

Eiffel had experienced kinder electrocution from mis-wired radio receiver equipment. He snapped his head back on the table, reflexive, and had no idea how to categorize the noise that broke out of his open mouth. There were lots of things he couldn’t categorize, actually, which included the shivery feeling in his chest cavity, the way the muscles of his stomach felt ionized, bristling with alien charge, and the floodgate crash of his brain dumping neurochemicals with all the subtlety of — well, the ‘subtlety’ of what was happening, observable and unprotected, in his shorts.

After a long moment, Eiffel swallowed, the click of his throat loud in the suddenly silent room.

“Good,” Hilbert said levelly, who had taken to looming over Eiffel with his hand braced on the side of the exam table. He didn’t look like he was getting off on this the same way Eiffel, faintly, figured he himself probably would if this kept up, but there was some strange deep intensity rising in Hilbert, in the way he was leaning over him, right into his space, his shoulders held perfectly steady. He seemed to have forgotten his other hand on Eiffel’s abdomen, his fingers pressing lightly but entirely unyieldingly into his patient’s skin.

“On a related topic,” said Hilbert slowly, after a moment, “I need you to make a decision. Eiffel, do you wish me to collect the sample we have talked about.”

Hilbert’s expression was dark and low, set in something less than empathy and laser-focused on Eiffel. There was heat in Eiffel’s stomach and electricity crackling, contained, in the space under Hilbert’s palm. Eiffel floundered wordlessly for a moment, stuck between whirling confusion and the dizzy heat in his skin, as he blinked up at him.

“The last sample,” prompted Hilbert, and his voice was low and urgent. “You would allow me to collect it myself? Now. Here. Like this.”

The heat won out.

“Yes,” Eiffel gasped out, with every inch of his skin wired to the mains. “Yeah, sure.” He had a hazy memory of the last medical: being mortifyingly embarrassed right into the face of Hilbert’s forthright cheer, taking the empty specimen container and leaving with a maximum of babbling and the absolute rock-bottom minimum of dignity. It was a memory that seemed very far away and only tenuously linked to the present circumstances. Eiffel felt nothing other than grateful, and desperately relieved, in the here-and-now.

“Thank you,” said Hilbert, and oh, that was a growl, no two ways about it. He moved around Eiffel with quick, steady efficiency, pulling a single blue latex glove onto his right hand. Eiffel watched him, feeling present and reckless and dizzy with possibility, even as the station’s steady low gravity gripped him directly by the bones and kept him pressed firmly to the examination table.

Falling, falling. Always falling, Eiffel reminded himself, with the clear-cut sensation of tipping himself directly over a cliff edge.

Hilbert returned Eiffel’s stare with his own non-stop, unbroken intensity — not necessarily eye contact, but like he was mapping all of Eiffel, numbers and calculations spinning out into the shape of Eiffel’s body under his hands, joints and flesh and blood and all the minor miracles that made up Eiffel’s restrained form on his examination table. 

It was a deeply intense look. It was not a kind look. Eiffel wasn’t sure he even registered as a person under that look. There felt like there was grim honesty to that somehow, a few gut feelings adding up to a much larger, much more dangerous truth, but Eiffel didn’t investigate it any further because what was Hilbert doing, w— oh, that was lube he was smoothing over his gloved palm, why would Hilbert have th— oh, right, duh, medical officer—

And then Hilbert, dark-eyed, hyperfocused Hilbert, slid an ungloved finger into the band of Eiffel’s boxer shorts and tugged them down his thighs. That would have been enough to shake Eiffel out of the hot, anticipatory shock he was swimming in, maybe, but there wasn’t even a pause as Hilbert closed his hand around Eiffel’s half-hard dick. He grasped him firmly and precisely, and carefully drew his hand down.

Eiffel didn’t know why it felt so unexpected. Reflex had him slamming his eyes closed and arching his back into it, breathing in sharply through his teeth, even as the straps across his hips and wrists pressed him firmly to the table.

“Eiffel,” said Hilbert instantly, with a certain hard caution, hand pausing.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Eiffel gasped out, trying very hard to restrain all of his natural reactions (buck, moan, beg, goddamn, he knew it had been a while but this was ridiculous). “I’m OK.”

Eiffel heard Hilbert let out a controlled breath, and then his hand was moving, and—

Yeah. He wasn’t half-hard for long.

The sensation of the struggle against his restraints was weird all by itself, feeling muscles work but not flex, static and stretched, as Eiffel sought unthinkingly to get a grip on the table, on Hilbert, on himself. The sensory flood of the first few seconds eventually settled, and what had been great arcs of electricity settled down into a steady crackle — lower voltage, but enough to shock, to overwhelm. Eiffel could think in more-or-less straight lines, but mostly what he was thinking about was the staggering, borderline overload of Hilbert’s hand. Hilbert, in turn, was watching Eiffel’s reaction with a fixed dark intensity. 

Fresh sweat prickled along Eiffel’s hairline. He was pretty sure there were things he should be thinking about, all with a varying degree of exclamation points, and even more importantly there should be things he was feeling. Maybe it was Hilbert’s super-secret science drug doing all sorts of merry and untested things to Eiffel’s brain, or very possibly the incipient feeling of primal desperation clawing its way up his bones, but Eiffel found himself devoid of shame or embarrassment over the situation. Since lunchtime, his very vulnerable flesh had been poked, prodded, broiled, aerated, punctured, drilled, rattled, jabbed, stabbed, winded and electrocuted. Eiffel’s ability to feel shame had apparently evaporated along with whatever might have remained of his dignity, and this felt like a drop in the bucket of a) embarrassing things he’d done this week, b) embarrassing things he’d done this month, and c) the literal torrent of bodily fluids Hilbert had already extracted from him in one day — what was one more sample?

Instead of shame, blissful pleasure crackled up the nodes of his body. The hot liquid wash of neurotransmitters passed pleasure from neuron to neuron, unscrambled and transmitting in the blind.

Oh man, this drug was the best.

“I can make this quick, if that would be… easier,” said Hilbert, quiet and sudden in a silence broken only by Eiffel’s panting for breath and the soft, slick sounds of Hilbert’s moving hand. Hilbert sounded… he sounded careful, choosing his words with some delicacy, in direct contrast to the way his closed fist was methodologically obliterating every clear thought Eiffel was producing. It was certainly a phrase that seemed to fly counter to Hilbert’s pin-the-torture-device-to-the-patient attitude thus far into the day.

“Why do you care?” rasped Eiffel, surprised and completely beyond artifice.

“You consented to this… optional procedure… for science,” said Hilbert, grave and sharply intent. “You are making a sacrifice. I am… grateful. For that.”

“It’s not exactly a sacrifice from where I’m standing.” Eiffel tried very hard to keep his voice steady and unaffected. He wasn’t even going to try to tell himself he was successful.

“Hmmm,” said Hilbert, and there was that tight, acidic smile again, small and foreign against Hilbert’s teeth. “Do you know, Eiffel, what the word ‘sacrifice’ means. Originally.”

“You know I don’t,” Eiffel informed him, wheezing. Hilbert was not letting up, and frankly was lucky that something 1. coherent and 2. relevant in context had come out of Eiffel’s mouth at all. Apparently in acknowledgement of that, Hilbert’s hand slowed, keeping Eiffel ticking over whilst restoring enough brain function for him to partake in the conversation.

“It means,” Hilbert said, unperturbed and with careful gravity, “to make holy. From latin, sacer. The Greeks derived their word for healing from it, from the concept of sacrificing to their gods.”

If only Eiffel had known, in his teenage years, that the way to get him to attend to dry academic facts was a hand around his dick, he’d have gotten a lot more homework done. He bullied his brain into action. You’re a signal analyst, C.O. Eiffel, make some connections here.

“So what you’re saying, all of this…” Eiffel said slowly, trying to concentrate past the yes-good-more. “The medical, the wonder-drug, the — this — you’re, what, healing me? ‘Sacrificing’ me?”

Hilbert’s harsh grin ticked up on one side of his mouth. What was so funny?

“In more ways than one.” 

“I’d agree with that,” said Eiffel, feeling, peripherally, the vague pounding of his various puncture wounds, all below the waterline of his artificially-adjusted pain threshold but very much present. “You’ve made me holey alright.”

Eiffel was pretty pleased with that, especially considering most of his more complex brain functions were trying desperately to flatline. Hilbert, evidently, did not agree; he let out a long, frustrated growl, said “Do you never cease these puerile jokes, Eiffel,” and—

And then pressed the finger of his free hand, almost delicately, into the fresh, extremely sore hole on Eiffel’s hip. 

Eiffel’s brain just.

Shorted out.

Oh, this was not fair, this was not fair, because now the pleasure had something more against which it could be calibrated, something to make sharper the divide between the pleasure and the pain. The pain was big and sharp but the pleasure swallowed it up, made it more acidic, hotter, corroding his veins, and Eiffel felt dizzy with it, falling again, falling falling falling. He gasped something inarticulate, something frantic and half-formed, hands half-fisted and pulling unthinkingly against the restraints. Blurrily, he could see Hilbert watching him, and the look on his face was rapt, attentive, information-gathering at frightening speed. 

The wash of intensity was weird; it was like before, when the pain had swallowed him whole, that same level of total wipeout, functionally indistinguishable. His brain felt like a series of fuses were steadily being blown, short sharp shocks rattling down his nerves with explosions at each synapse in rapid-fire synchronicity.

Ah, Eiffel thought vaguely, so this is what the forcible extraction of his living daylights felt like.

Hilbert took his ungloved hand away from Eiffel’s hip with the same steady gentleness he always used, and then Hilbert was skimming his palm up Eiffel’s lower abdomen, careful and purposeful, gentle and almost kind. His thumb found the wider wound from whatever he had been doing with Eiffel’s liver and, very gently, pushed against it.

The straps were the only thing that kept Eiffel from jackknifing instantly. His hip hurt with a dull roar; this hurt with a blinding immediacy that was barely subcritical, and oh, the noises that came out of his mouth then were punched and desperate. If the pain was a scream, then so was the pleasure, and Eiffel’s entire brain dissolved in the mix of it for a long few seconds. It seemed impossible to believe that he wasn’t coming like this, but no, as he clawed his way back into his own body, Hilbert was still working him with steady, confident strokes.

There was definitely wetness on his eyelashes, and Eiffel tried very manfully to pretend it wasn't there. Yes, he, Eiffel, well-known paragon of masculinity, was not reduced to whimpering over the tactical nuke currently being slow-motion detonated inside his nervous system.

Eiffel made an attempt to firm his jaw. “D—” he started, and Hilbert instantly did something quick and clever with the wrist of his gloved hand, so Eiffel drew in a long, shuddering gasp of air instead.

“Do not try to talk,” said Hilbert gravely. His voice wasn’t a growl, exactly, but it was that weird, flat growl-adjacent tone from before. Eiffel swallowed, trying fuzzily to remember how many limbs he had as he pulled unthinkingly against his restraints. In response, Hilbert moved his other hand higher up Eiffel’s side, and gently pressed his fingertips into the punctured skin between two ribs.

It felt like being electrocuted, a sharp and unignorable pain lancing through him like live wires touching — uncomfortably close to the metaphor, actually, because the pain shot through him in specific, branching lines, earthing itself in his elbow, a few more ribs, and his right collarbone. Eiffel was pretty sure those were connected nerve-endings. This didn’t calibrate the pleasure. This just hurt.

And his dick throbbed harder. Eiffel felt his hips curl without his consent, trying to press into Hilbert’s hand.

“Getting some very mixed signals here, Doc,” Eiffel gasped, with absolute accuracy. His fingers flexed uselessly in on themselves, in and out, in and out, stymied.

“Pain and pleasure are both… intense stimuli,” said Hilbert, still in the same low level voice. “It is easy for the brain to confuse them, after a certain threshold is reached.”

“Crosstalk, feedback signal,” tried Eiffel, using familiar language to hold desperately onto his last threads of sanity. Hilbert barked a single laugh, and it was evidently as much of a surprise to himself as it was to Eiffel. Eiffel felt the corner of his mouth crook up into smile, and oh, the base of his brain was tingling, this wash of pleasure top-down and effervescent.

“Yes, Eiffel. If you will not be quiet, tell me how it feels.”

“For science,” Eiffel responded, panting, not quite a question.

“Yes,” and oh, that was definitely a growl. Eiffel shut his eyes and shuddered, overstimulated.

“It feels,” he said thickly, “Like you’re setting me on fire, but in a good way.”

“Hmm,” said Hilbert, very clearly taking mental notes, and — was that a reward? — he twisted his gloved hand in a slick, sinuous movement. Eiffel responded with an inarticulate gasp. A tremor wracked its way from his hips to his collarbones, tectonic and sudden. And, of course, Hilbert took the moment to circle the thumb of his other hand carefully over the puncture wound in Eiffel’s abdomen.

There was no language to describe the way he was overstimulated by that; he felt thermonuclear, ready to split apart, atoms held together only by his tenuous self-control.

“Eiffel,” prompted Hilbert quietly, mildly chastening.

“If feels — goddamn you, Doc — it feels like, like —” He scrabbled desperately for meaning. “Like it’s noise, and it’s signal, and I can’t work out the ratio, and it’s in my bones and my skin and my brain and it hurts and — don’t stop—”

Hilbert’s hand tightened and slowed down, changing the waves of pleasure into a steady rolling intensity. Eiffel tried not to cry again, but that was just another signal getting lost in the static shock of literally everything else.

“Kinda overloading my brain,” he managed.

Hilbert gave him an unreadable look and skipped his eyes across several of the monitors. Whatever he saw there met with approval. His hand slowed again, moving steadily, predictably. Eiffel felt his shoulders settle back down the table, working his lungs and coming back down to — hah — Earth, away from the bright intensity of the edge. He took a deep, shuddering breath, feeling an awful lot of tight muscles loosening off, and wondered crazily if this was some fourth stage of the drug. Walter White, eat your heart out.

“Hmm,” said Hilbert again, and turned that laser-focus back to Eiffel. Once more there was the distinct sensation of there being mental lines, diagrams and points of interest being superimposed over the image he made, values tracked and correlated. Eiffel was vaguely aware that he was going to end up with some of the weirdest turn-ons after all this was over, but the concept was significantly less important than the hot waves of pleasure washing up him with all the deceptive strength and inevitability of the tide. His wounds felt like they were lit up from under this skin, bright white shocks that calibrated and redirected the liquid pleasure, sending it spinning up into a focused vortex or crashing wavelike over his whole body.

Eiffel shut his eyes for a moment, grappling wildly for some self-control even as his hips yearned upwards into Hilbert’s unrelenting hand. He felt like he had a pretty good idea of how the Nostromo felt with two minutes left on the timer.

“I don’t know how much more of this I can handle,” said Eiffel unsteadily. Hilbert’s response was another of those smiles, needle-sharp and about sixty percent meaner than before.

“Do as I say,” said Hilbert in a thick rumble. “Exactly as I say, Eiffel.”

Eiffel nodded. Hilbert pressed his hand into Eiffel’s chest, fingers and thumb spread wide. His other hand never faltered.

“Breathe,” Hilbert said, and OK, Eiffel had done this already today, he knew the drill for this one. He breathed in and in and in, forcing Hilbert’s hand up and feeling his nerve ends oxidize and spark with hot pleasure. The sensation of breathing out, carefully if unevenly, felt almost religious.

“Again,” said Hilbert almost aggressively, sliding his hand up to press against Eiffel’s collarbones as he turned his head toward a new monitor. It was weird, like that — there was less resistance for Eiffel to breathe against, but the pressure of Hilbert’s hand felt more present, more grounding. In, out, easy. Eiffel felt his fingers uncurl from his palms.

Hilbert’s hand moved again, sliding proprietorially up Eiffel’s throat until his fingers and thumb were wrapped against the sides of Eiffel’s neck. Eiffel unthinkingly tipped his head back to give Hilbert a better grip, the flat of Hilbert’s palm firm but not obstructive against his trachea. Nothing remained of the uncertainty, even as Hilbert’s eyes narrowed, looking down at Eiffel as though surprised. Eiffel could feel his own pulse beating heavily against the thumb Hilbert had tucked just behind his jawline.

Hilbert’s eyes lingered on Eiffel’s hand-covered throat and then, with the expression of a scientist, he dragged his fingers across Eiffel’s neck and under his chin. His thumb curled lightly against Eiffel’s lower lip for a moment, moving it away from his teeth as his fingers kept Eiffel’s head tipped back, throat exposed. 

You should be feeling some kind of way about this, whispered a thin voice in the back of Eiffel’s mind. Another deft stroke of Hilbert’s gloved hand obliterated the voice. Eiffel blinked back at Hilbert, feeling completely guileless and a little like the entirety of observable, objective reality existed solely in a ten-foot radius from his bound body.

God, Eiffel had never needed to come this badly in his entire life.

“Open your mouth, Eiffel.”

Eiffel did, without hesitation. He thought briefly, crazily, that Hilbert was going for the sore spot on the inside of his cheek, or hey, maybe that Orin Scrivello reference earlier had been a little too on the money, but instead Hilbert slid his thumb carefully, consideringly, against the sharp edge of Eiffel’s lower incisors. Eiffel found himself waiting through it with an acceptance that could almost have baffled him, were he not feeling so utterly split between brain-melting zen and body-melting intensity. Eiffel closed his eyes and breathed out in a long, shuddering exhale, and opened his jaw a little wider.

Hilbert’s thumb slipped over the barrier of Eiffel’s lower teeth and carefully pressed into the flat of his tongue. Operating in the hot instancy of the moment, Eiffel pressed back against it, tasting nothing apart from the faintest lingering traces of what might have been hand sanitizer. The slipperiness of it all felt obscene and a hot pulse slammed down Eiffel’s spine, putting a deep, intractable crack into what remained of his self-control. He swallowed hard, feeling his own tongue flex, and looked back at Hilbert, who was staring hard at the monitors across from him and apparently tracking several graphs simultaneously. 

“Tak vot chto nuzhno, chtoby zastavit' vas zamolchat',” said Hilbert softly. His eyes slid toward Eiffel once more, another of those acid grins curled tightly around the edge of his mouth. Eiffel didn’t try to reply against the pressure of Hilbert’s thumb against his tongue, and Hilbert’s grin stretched even wider into the silence, private and a little nasty. “Nearly finished, Officer Eiffel,” Hilbert added a little louder, soothing and with an amused faux-courtesy. “You are a most compliant patient. Breathe deeply for me.”

Eiffel inhaled steadily past Hilbert’s thumb and held the breath as long as he could, his brain effervescent in the thick wash of oxygen. Hilbert slowly withdrew his thumb as Eiffel breathed out, leaving a thin trail of saliva across his bottom lip and chin.

“Good,” said Hilbert softly. Nearly finished, he’d said, and Eiffel felt the desperately hopeful promise of orgasm, a thick wave getting closer. He opened to his mouth to — to say something, probably to beg or to plead, but the words wouldn’t form. It wasn’t even a case of a downed line between his mouth and his brain; the problem was definitely the source, heat charring up the long lines of his neurons and burning his words right out of him. For a man who had words for any situation (words which existed in a perfect negative correlation between appropriateness and the seriousness of said situation) this should have been alarming, but the part of his brain dedicated to actually thinking had experienced critical failure some time ago. Eiffel felt like he was at the centre of a closing vortex of Hilbert’s attention, a turbulent storm closing down on him with a steadily inevitability.

Hilbert leaned right over Eiffel and his expression was once again dark and strangely intense, a little cruel, committed to and chasing an endgame that for once both he and Eiffel had in common. Even through the thick wash of his own arousal, Eiffel couldn’t read the same physical desperation in Hilbert, but Hilbert was rapt and attentive and, just, consuming something from Eiffel with a raw fervor that made him think once more of apex predators and home turf.

Hilbert dragged his gaze slowly up the length of Eiffel’s body and pinned Eiffel in place with an eye-contact more absolute than his restraints, or his machines, had ever managed. Eiffel felt fissile under that gaze, ready to break apart into his component atoms, one chain reaction from insanity. In the same moment, Hilbert’s gloved hand sped up and his other hand smoothed across Eiffel’s hip again, pressing into the deeply sore spot against the bone.

Eiffel jerked almost immediately. The restraints bit into the soft flesh at hip and wrist in particular, and he shot a desperate look at Hilbert. Something hot and dark and dangerous flared across Hilbert’s entire face at that. It felt like claws scything down to the bone.

“Whenever you are ready,” said Hilbert softly, almost solicitously.

Eiffel choked on a sob. There was wetness on his eyelashes. God—

“Douglas,” said Hilbert at the very bottom of his register, and he tightened his hand, growling that deep thick hrmmm as he did so, and orgasm rose up instantly inside Eiffel, and he—

Eiffel just—

The metaphors broke down.

Before, Eiffel’s body had been as a row of dials on a switchboard — gain, noise, amplitude, a variety of signals laid out and observable. Eiffel would later recall vividly the sensation of dialing down the gain on the agony, rocking down the signal until it became noise, a hiss in his headphones rather than a scream. He tried to fit his orgasm into the picture of that switchboard, the clean separation between his body and his mind, and it was beyond impossible. It was like sticking his hand directly into a rat’s nest of stripped, unshielded wires in the switchboard console itself, feeling everything blast through his cortex unfiltered and raw. It was undifferentiated white-hot data all at once, like being hit with noise that could kill.  

There never had been a separation between the switchboard and the Eiffel, and that’s what it always had been, really, the fantasy of the switchboard nothing more than a lie he told himself. Everything was a lie in that moment beyond high intensity: he went nova, the universe went nuclear, the noise obliterated the signal, he exploded, he broke apart—

The lie closest to the truth was this: Eiffel just… went somewhere else for a moment, somewhere bright and very white, dim black stars on the horizon. Coming back down felt like falling (falling, always falling) and landing back into reality hard enough to break bones. He trembled all over, sipping for breath in short sharp bursts with his eyes closed against the slowly-easing spinning of his balance.

The first thing he heard as a newly-returned denizen of the physical plane was the hollow scrape of screw threads being tightened, plastic-on-plastic. There was the soft, clinical touch of something on his stomach and groin, damp and cool, and then the draw of a waistband being dragged back up over his hips. Some part of Eiffel’s brain pinged back clean-up.

Oh. Right. The sample.

Eiffel felt like maybe he was still falling, maybe there was something harder and less forgiving to crash-land into than reality. He was heading into a spiral at a fast clip and leaning away from the sensation with dumb horror when a hand, warm and a little rough, smoothed along the side of his face. A thumb rubbed gently under his eye and smeared away some of the damp there, and Eiffel could breathe properly for the first time since coming down, the whirlpool of anxiety breaking up and melding into a warm, tranquil sea. Eiffel pressed back blindly.

There was a long, still moment of total peace.

“You did well, Eiffel,” said Hilbert eventually. His voice was very quiet. “Thank you for this.” Eiffel shuddered, and lay still; and if he leaned a little more into the touch in that long, quiet moment, well. Hilbert was gracious enough to say nothing about it.

Gradually, Eiffel let himself come back to his body piece by piece, just breathing in the easy silence, comfortable and unmoving. Every moment felt like a good one, a warm sleet of endorphins and high-clarity pleasure, slick hormone backwash, like a wave running warm back to the sea. Eventually, long after his breathing had evened out, Eiffel felt like he was fully present in the room once more. He felt his eyelashes flicker against Hilbert’s fingers.

“Doc?” said Eiffel eventually, his voice a low, rasping murmur in the quiet of the lab. “You have the weirdest hobbies.”

He heard Hilbert let out a short breath, possibly even (shock horror!) a laugh, and Hilbert gently withdrew his hand from the side of Eiffel’s face. For a second, just a second, Eiffel felt mildly untethered from the station. It was as though it was spinning on around Wolf 359 without him, and he was unmoored, asynchronous, like he might drift absently through the hull and be swept by light solar tides into space.

Then he breathed, and the low but persistent gravity of the lab reasserted itself. 

Eiffel opened his eyes to Hilbert undoing his wrist restraints with his usual faultless care, his expression neutral and his lips pressed firmly together. When Hilbert had finished with his ankles, though, his expression was more familiar — calm and genial, though a little cautious. Eiffel’s inner ear, unused to gravity, was trying valiantly to make him dizzy; must be that, he figured, that had made the look on Hilbert’s face before so… calculating.

“How do you feel.”

“Uh.” There were a million answers to that. Eiffel settled on, “Lightly scrambled.”

“Hm.” Was that another laugh? “That is to be expected. Try to sit up, please.”

Sitting up, it turned out, was definitely a joint endeavour. There was a weakness constantly threatening to turn into trembling just inside Eiffel’s muscles, and even the low gravity was a little more than his under-worked, over-sensitized abdominal muscles could handle. Hilbert propped him up by a hand to the shoulder as Eiffel swung his legs over the side of the table, seemingly unmindful of the tacky residue on Eiffel’s skin — OK, wow, yeah, that was not a good smell, Eiffel decided. Hilbert had not been kidding about the ‘sweating most alarmingly’ thing.

(And if Eiffel’s attention zeroed down to the skin contact, mild and unassuming that it was, as a distant prickle — like an aftershock, maybe — forged down his vertebrae, well. He wasn’t going to think about that for a while yet.)

“Your flight suit,” said Hilbert, and yeah, that friendly smile was definitely recognisable. “It may be easier to dress in gravity. Acceleration has ceased, and we should be back to zero-g within a few minutes.” 

“Sure,” said Eiffel, still a little lightheaded. He got the feeling that re-dressing would indicate that he apparently had all the grace, co-ordination and dexterity of a lobotomized praying mantis, but that wasn’t so terribly far from the norm. He set to the ungainly task of pulling his flight suit on.

He was still waiting expectantly for the shame or embarrassment to hit, but the longer it went on, the more it seemed like he was going to spared that particular indignity. Oh, Eiffel was under no illusions that there wasn’t going to be some kind of crippling identity crisis in his medium-term future, but that was a problem for Future Doug. Present Doug felt pretty calm, breathing in the heady hormone backwash of post-orgasm lassitude, and wasn’t about to let Future Doug (that jerk) ruin it for him.

By this point, there was definitely more of a float than a falling feel to the way his legs touched the exam table, and Hilbert, who had turned back to him upon hearing the zip, needed to move with the wall grips more than walk back to him. The look on his face was… cautious.

“Officer Eiffel. I appreciate what you have done today. If you feel I have treated you… unfairly,” oh boy, thought Eiffel, here we go, “we can have a discussion with Comm—”

“No,” said Eiffel. There was a familiar, white-labelled bottle with a crooked X on the cap strapped neatly to the zero-g drugs rack above Hilbert’s work bench. Eiffel eyed it for a moment. Yeah, today could have been a lot worse. An orgasm, slightly awkward aftermath and all, was decidedly not in the negative column. “No, I don’t think you did.”

That got a blink from Hilbert, and then another of his familiar, friendly smiles.

“You will need to sleep, Officer Eiffel,” he said gently, eyes crinkling. “Your body has undergone… hmmm. Many things today. You will feel drained, perhaps, a little shaky until the last of the chemical has cleared your system. Keep the testing sites clean and dry. Stay hydrated and sleep as soon as you are able.” Hilbert reached out and squeezed his shoulder for a moment, solid and reassuring.

Yeah. Sleep sounded amazing right now.

It was probably just as well the gravity was pretty much gone; Eiffel wasn’t sure he’d trust his legs to carry him. Instead, he pushed himself carefully off the table, catching a hand on one of the wall grips, and paused by the door.

Hilbert had already turned back to his work bench, floating absently in the microgravity and hyper-focused on several of the slightly ominous-looking sample bottles secured to a testing rack. (Eiffel was uncomfortably certain that these were the samples that Hilbert had, recently, removed from his body with an alarming degree of pain and also puncture wounds.) It was the look of a man wholly, genuinely committed to to the test in front of him, Eiffel already mostly (if not entirely) disregarded.

‘For science’, he said, thought Eiffel, and resolutely ignored the thin tingling wash that filtered down from the base of his brain, the last dregs of adrenaline.

“Doc?”

“Yes, Officer Eiffel,” said Hilbert, glancing at him. He sounded like his attention was a thousand miles away and also about two feet to his left. 

Eiffel let his gaze linger on the bottle, X-marked cap and all, strapped to the work bench. Hilbert followed his line of sight for a moment before looking back, cool and assessing, and nodded once.

“Thanks,” said Eiffel finally, and headed for his berth.

Hera refused to call what she was doing ‘hovering’. She was a fully-sentient-class AI, OK, aboard an extremely important deep space scientific mission. She did not ‘hover’. She just… devoted a chunk of processor power to monitoring Doctor Hilbert’s locked-down lab, like a good AI. Setting up a custom function to monitor the status of the privacy protocols was prudent, OK? It meant she could do other things, switch her focus elsewhere. Like re-reading the entirety of Officer Eiffel’s medical records.

AIs don’t worry, she told herself, as Eiffel emerged from the lab door.

He looked pale. Pale and a little wobbly, dark smears under his eyes highlighted by the stark desaturation of his skin, and his movements were sluggish. Physiological shock, probably.

Hera sent off a sneaky ping to Doctor Hilbert’s medical-tracker protocols for Officer Eiffel, which returned a few readings normal in their lack of normalcy. His bone density was a little low, and there were some mild heart function abnormalities — all due to life in zero-g, and all expected. More immediately, there was an entire mess of catecholamines in a range Hera labelled as ‘high-but-falling’, which wasn’t totally unsurprising; a few hours in Doctor Hilbert’s lab did all sorts of wacky things to the fight-or-flight chemicals in her crew’s bodies, and Hera wasn’t entirely sure she blamed them. His serum albumin and blood sugar were both low, but judging by the data files even now being dumped to Doctor Hilbert’s main medical server, Eiffel had exited the lab with more holes on his body than when he went in. Also par for the course.

An alert popped up in Hera’s processor queue, flagging a few more readings, and these ones were… unusual. Straight-up so. Hera would have expected a large neurotransmitter crash — dopamine and serotonin, in particular, tended to take the brunt after Doctor Hilbert’s oh-so-tender medical care — but the levels were… stable. Low, sure, but they weren’t troughing the way she’d expected. There was also an unusual pattern of activity in the androgens, particularly testosterone, and… oxytocin? Prolactin? 16ng/mL and falling, still technically in the normal range, but…

Huh.

“Officer Eiffel,” Hera said, quiet and a little hesitant. Eiffel blinked in the corridor, looking up, as he always did. “Are you OK?”

Eiffel appeared to have to think about that one for a moment.

“Yeah. Yeah, I think so,” said Eiffel, slurring slightly on the edges of the consonants. “I’m just… tired. I’m gonna crash, OK, Hera?

“Yeah,” Hera said softly, tracking him as he made his way towards his quarters. She made sure her voice followed him through the corridors and up through the access port. “No problem. Do you want me to do anything for you?”

“Nah,” he returned in a mumble. Definitely shock, she decided; there was a very long pause before he strapped himself into his berth, hands unmoving for a moment on the chest harness. “G’night, Hera.”

“Night, Officer Eiffel.”

She didn’t hover, she reminded herself, even as she fixedly tracked Eiffel’s EEG signals. He dropped immediately into theta-wave activity and then went down through sleep stages like a rock, crashing hard into slow-wave sleep within an hour. Eiffel wasn’t just out, he was out. It was the most stable sleep pattern he’d had in months.

Still. Officer Eiffel wasn’t the only person she was curious about.

Data upload on Doctor Hilbert’s server was nearing completion for the first batch of input. Hera sidled into the memory banks and slipped idly through the records, steering well clear of any marked with a Goddard firewall. Those firewalls were extremely polite even as they made you regret all of your life choices, and experiencing total system spinlock was not a price worth paying for trying to access the data anyway. Plus it itched.

Curious, Hera flipped into the now-accessible optics feed for the medical lab, and then paused there for a little while, observing.

Doctor Hilbert was strapped into his lab stool, seated at his work bench. There were fresh biological samples spinning in the centrifuge, but where Hilbert would normally have moved onto another task, instead he was staring at something held carefully in his hand.

Doctor Hilbert was frequently a different person behind closed doors, but that wasn’t unusual; from what Hera understood of human beings in general, the idea of a public face and private face was pretty common. The Commander had watched Fifty Shades Of Grey (as far as Hera could ascertain, entirely non-ironically) on no fewer than sixteen occasions since mission launch, for example, and that was information that never, ever passed beyond the bulkhead of her quarters. The fact that Doctor Hilbert tended to be more gregarious and cheerful in person with the other crew members, whilst being significantly more taciturn and focused in private, had never been cause for concern.

This was weird, though. Generally, Doctor Hilbert worked almost compulsively, inventing wildly when there were no projects with high-enough priority to interest him, so this stillness was a data point out of true. An outlier.

He stared at the item in his hand for a few minutes, unmoving. Hera was usually pretty good at reading facial cues through the optical network, but Hilbert was a masterclass in poker face; his lips were pressed down into tight line and his eyebrows were low over his eyes. It could have meant anything.

Curious, Hera zoomed in. The item was a clear chemicals bottle with a neat hand-printed label in heavy Cyrillic script, and a black X inked on the cap. One stroke of the X was a little crooked.

After a moment, Doctor Hilbert selected a marker pen and wrote carefully, steadily, below the bottle’s label: ‘Только для офицера Эйфеля.’ For Officer Eiffel’s use only.

Hera didn’t need to translate the Russian any more than she needed to translate the English. It all went through her language compilers and was ultimately flipped into binary in any case, with no more effort than would be needed for any other linguistic input. 

The label itself said, in incongruously ominous letters, ‘Солевой раствор’.

Saline solution.