“Take off your skin and let me crawl inside you,” Bell, the alien, said as it unzipped its skin-tight bodycon dress.
On the other side of the gutted library, as if trying to hide inside themself, Daisy, the robot, shivered. They’d never had intimate contact with another being, platonic or romantic. As they watched the planes of the other’s skin, they wondered what unearthly confidence had possessed them to answer that Craigslist ad.
Was it the desire to do something more with their borderline NEET existence (which, mind you, they were perfectly fine with)? Or a momentary lapse of judgment inspired by the swan song of their Twenties batteries, which would soon need to be replaced by the Thirties set?
“Um, I don’t know,” Daisy replied, fiddling with the frayed sleeve of their hoodie that gave them a wonderful shapelessness. “I don’t really have skin?”
Bell paused and looked up. A blue sheen winked across its compound eyes, and a heel hung by the straps from one finger. The fuzzy antennae atop its head twitched like a lightly disturbed wire as its melodic voice streamed into Daisy’s wetware brain again.
“You have a chassis, don’t you? Like an outer casing to protect what’s inside? Organic or otherwise, we can still partake in Communion.”
It set down the stiletto and began unlacing the straps on its other three legs.
“Unless you want to do me instead,” it added after a breath. “I swing either way.”
The shoes landed somewhere in the empty room with a thud. And at last, Bell rose to its full height. Its nakedness shone under the moonlight streaming through the painted windows as Daisy’s optical lenses scanned its body.
The blue light crept across the curves of its body like fingers of night seeking a home in the slick shadow of their valleys and edges. Between its thighs and under both sets of arms was a thatch of dark hair that looked soft to touch. In any other being it might have inspired a physical envy, but in Daisy it merely elicited a distant intrigue, as though the object of desire rested behind a sheen of machine gel.
“It’s just, I mean,” Daisy stuttered, “I’ve never done something like this before. On my own or with anyone. Even now I still don’t… well I don’t know what I should be feeling.”
“Chill.” Bell’s mental voice had the quality of a theremin. Stepping closer, it took their gloved hands and smiled with needle sharp teeth. “That’s why I’m here! Remember? I’m like your magical alien mentor.”
On the short walk here from the bus stop it had told Daisy about the planet it came from, and about how it hadn’t known it felt any different about itself in comparison to its family until it came to earth, where, for lack of a better word, it discovered itself. It seemed so knowledgeable of the world and in tune with itself in a way that was so human—more human than Daisy, who had been made in the image of humankind.
Now, however, Bell chuckled nervously. Even its abundant charisma appeared to fail sometimes.
“Was that cringe?” it said, squeezing Daisy’s fingers. There was a shakiness to its starry pupils, which wobbled and glittered like slick rainbow soap bubbles.
“It was,” Daisy said with a loose shrug, “but I get it. I’m already here, I had confidence enough to respond to the ad. I can do this.”
Again: “I can do this.” Trying to convince the anxious orange chemicals that burned through their silicone veins. At the very least, they wanted to attempt Communion, even if it would be just this once.
Stepping back, Daisy gripped the bottom of their hoodie, took a hydraulic breath, and pulled it off. Bit by bit, as if stripping a rusted chassis to replace it, as they had when they were first transitioning, they removed their clothes. It was almost like scrubbing away verdigris, or peeling off a scabrous layer of flaky skin. The core of the body laid bare in sleek metal truth.
Standing nude before the alien, Daisy fidgeted with their hands, hooking ribbed fingers together and pulling them apart with a plasticky sound like a nail rubbing over ruffled machinery.
For a moment, both beings examined each other as anticipation built in the air like a rising wintry chill that turned your breath to clouds.
Where Bell was a construct of quadruple limbs and alien flesh, like a fish bound in wrinkled fruit leather, Daisy was smooth, featureless steel that glinted coldly, fitted machinery put together by inexperienced hands. Both of them were beings whose forms aped humanity, but were distinctly other, having transitioned beyond base sapient definitions. But they were also awkward young adults about to Commune.
“Shall we begin?” Bell said, stretching out a hand. It was neither demanding nor forceful, simply an invitation.
Daisy gulped, webbed cooling vents fluttering at their neck like gills. Then they shuttered their optical lenses, opened them, and took their partner’s hand.
They had never been in water before (they didn’t even know how to swim, a personal shame), but as they pressed a hand between Bell’s breasts they felt soaked. Like they were a turgid overflowing cell brimming with water.
Harder, they pressed. Harder and harder until their palm slipped through the meat of Bell’s chest. Metal swam through blood the colour of Baja Blast to find purchase around a living, beating heart. The organ was slick like a large piece of gum, and just as malleable beneath Daisy’s hand as they felt through their partner’s chest cavity.
“Is this…” they began in a tremulous tone, “is this Communion?”
“Not yet,” Bell sighed, voice bandying between Daisy’s ears as the rush of chemicals thickened in their veins.
Curiosity and anxiety waltzed down the length of Daisy’s arm alongside glowing, green-blue lines. Blood dripped down to the mildewed carpet that had yet to be ripped out, leaving the abandoned library in a liminal state somewhere between a nonentity and fertile ground. In this lacking space, the pair were about to make something glorious. Something of an other kind.
“Like this,” Bell instructed, jutting down a mouthless face to direct Daisy’s hand upward to a spot just behind its clavicle.
From the inside of the slick cavern, Daisy was guided to a protrusion like a zipper. They hadn’t read much about Communion, too apathetic or averse to do much more research beyond lightly skimming one of those HealthSense articles that alleged it was fact checked by a professional. They knew one partner was to be the source while the other was the solution, and that it could take anywhere from five minutes to five hours. However, it wouldn’t have mattered because literature on Communion could never compare to the sensorial nature of one’s partner opening wide enough to slip inside.
The bone zipper that split Bell apart trailed down between its breasts, its stomach, and the perineal gap that spanned its four legs. Its physical form was a xenopsychic dream, an alien materiality that many like Daisy wished they could transition themselves into. Metal could be melted, but it could not be fully moulded like clay, so Daisy had substituted reshaping for refitting.
Actually, it was almost a bit like refitting to peel Bell’s flesh flaps apart. Each move felt like instinct. As if programmed deep within Daisy were the instructions to this most intimate of rituals.
“How does it feel?” Bell asked brightly. The lower half of its face was shadowed such that a pair of glittering eyes were all Daisy could make out. Pupils pulsated like a heartbeat, expanding and contracting in opposition to the heart next to Daisy’s knuckles.
For a moment, Daisy was at a loss for words, awed and incredulous. “Shouldn’t I be asking you that?” they said before reaching up to cup the delicate structure of bone that framed the seat they would soon take.
“I mean, this is your first time,” Bell replied. When it leaned back, the slick sheen of blood on Daisy’s fingers caught the light like sea across the top of unsteady waves. Daisy’s own artificial heart-substitute felt much the same, drumming their inner chassis with anticipation.
“Ready?” it said, opening its forelegs to welcome Daisy inside.
Come in, the firmity of the xenic skeleton wet with blood seemed to whisper in Bell’s own mental voice.
Enter me, the malleable, supple meat of the body—the connection—seemed to entice with threadlike sinew and cloudy fat not unlike a lace bridal veil.
And, like the hand Bell stretched out at the start of all this, Daisy took what was offered. The bone creaked, adjusting to the space they were taking up inside it. When they slipped between the sensitive organs, Bell loosed a strangled moan sounding half-pained, half-pleased.
Daisy stifled a gasp at the overwhelming sting alighting their sensors like a spray of quills. It wasn’t what they’d expected when they answered the ad. Not in a million years had they thought Communion would be so visceral. So wet and slimy, seeping into the seams between the plates of their self-made synthesis. Sticky liquid clung to them in a warm coat, a foreign sensation sinking low to their core.
Being inside another person in this way was… heavy. It brought oil to their optical lenses as they looked through Bell’s skull, saw through Bell’s compound alien eyes.
They were it; it was them; both were faer. Xe was a twining rippling mass of steel covered in skin that danced under the full moon, dribbling blood across the floor from hir bloated mass of malformed creation. Metal screws protruded from zyr back like a rail of rigid spinal bone, two legs trailed loosely behind ær in the sad imitation of deflated balloons, and through wheat curls twined synthetic hair pulled through a tender skull as if it were the head of a modified doll. A doll—yes, that’s what this new thing was—born, made, in the image of a human being, e was something different—not more. Just different.
So this was Communion. The handmade apotheosis from a single form to a multiplicate other. Communion could be done on your own but was made easier with the body of another in which to cloak yourself. For the both of you to meld into something higher—or perhaps more depraved, depending on the angle you looked at it from.
Even in the midst of entwining, the person wasn’t sure what xe was feeling. Curiosity? Confusion? Just plain old horniness? They probably couldn’t ever articulate it. All they knew is that it felt good. Better than they expected after reading those fragmented accounts of Communion on old school blogs and hidden in Tumblr tags beneath heaps of x reader posts. It was like touching grass, if the grass was another person’s entrails.
This, what-was-once-Bell said.
Feels, what-used-to-be-Daisy-alone replied.
Strange, the-thing-that-was-both-Daisy-and-Bell finished.
Fae dragged a metal hand up the ragged seam that stitched faer centre and kept the steel core wrapped within while a flesh hand traced the raised scars that framed faer chest like an Old Masters’ painting. The being had no illusions that the being was perfect or appealing to anyone but the individuals that made up the being. But that was all that really mattered. There was a reason Communion was done in private. In stolen moments hidden. In alleys beyond the reach of golden, feathery light. In the corners of gatherings, shying away from charismatic peers before slipping out early and rushing through the rain, letting it soak through to the marrow and turn makeup into dark streaks.
Time turned slick. Slowing to molasses, rebounding elastic as moments blurred into each other like conjoining streams. Each was a river, the flesh Tigris and the steel Euphrates.
By the time Daisy-Bell blinked, hours had passed. Ey tilted eir head back. A longing sound wriggled up a merged esophagus and escaped from a bifurcated mouth. The carpet was soaked through from a mixture of bloody oil, wetness squishing between and flowing over clawed toes.
At last, the metamorphosis sighed as the tight ball behind their navel unravelled in a sudden burst of satisfaction. Gripping the edge of an upturned shelf, it embraced itself, the part that was Bell embracing the part that was Daisy. With one final shudder, they splintered in two, peeling open to let the slick robot within fall out as the alien exterior zipped close with a juicy slurp of skin.
Harsh panting filled the air. Leaning against the shelf, legs splayed, Bell sucked in a breath. It clutched its chest and grinned at Daisy.
Spirals swirled in Daisy’s dazed optical lenses, gears whirred, buzzing in their ears as they struggled to come back to being a single person. After a heartbeat, they flashed back a wobbly, blood-spattered smile.
“So…” Bell trailed off as it shimmied back into the scrap that paraded as an excuse of a dress. “Same time next week?”
Daisy laughed—and covered their mouth. Surprised to have let out such a loose expression of authentic emotion around what was essentially a stranger. Their face warmed. They quickly tucked themself back into the safety of their many layers. The vulnerability of nakedness had become too much to bear, though underneath the hoodie, sweat was still cooling on their warm chassis.
They hummed, shifting from foot to foot and tugging at the strings of their hoodie. They turned an answer around in their head before answering.
“Um, probably not next week,” they said with a tentative smile. “I don’t think I have the social energy to do this again so soon. But next month, maybe?”
The alien’s responding giggle was answer enough, wafting through Daisy’s head like the gentle perfume of dirt after spring rain.
“Next month, then,” it agreed.
The pair left the ruined library and parted ways with a final hug. Above, a single cyclopean eye watched, the sole witness to their communal self-discovery.