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So, obviously, the crew fucked.
When you're a functionally immortal space pirate travelling the universe and witnessing the grand dramas and upheavals of civilizations, there's not much you don't get up to, eventually. The crew of the Aurora got up to fucking each other quite quickly, falling into their first celebration orgy about a week after Dr. Carmilla's unfortunate airlock accident, simply for the joy of it. Sometimes it was only some of them: Ashes and Tim after they returned from Labyrinth, although it was unclear whether this was a job-well-done fuck or if they'd both just been a bit lonely; Marius, Ivy, and Raphaella during the very dull sixty years they'd marked time in prison on New Midgard, waiting for an elder god to twist its way into reality; Nastya, who preferred time with the Aurora herself to anyone less ship-like and therefore less appealing. Jonny generally approved of improving crew morale via orgasm, though he drew the line at the Toy Soldier, whose willingness to follow orders gave it only the most glancing of relationships to the concept of consent, and who couldn't experience orgasm anyway.
(He did wonder, sometimes, why he cared about that. The event horizon of morality hadn't been seen in several centuries at least, so having a line about anything was ridiculous. Maybe he'd had that boundary programmed in. Maybe he simply had tastes and preferences, and his were for sexual partners willing and able to enthusiastically participate. It didn't matter much either way.)
There was only so much they could do, in between solar systems and in between stories, so as a way to pass the time, sex was on the table. And up against walls, and even in their bunks if Marius was feeling really traditional about it. For a while, that was fun, but eventually Jonny did what Jonny always did, and began to find it all boring. They were still at least twenty years from the nearest promising civilization, they'd run out of whiskey ages ago, Jonny had shot his crewmates on seven different occasions for cheating at cards and even that had paled, he wasn't due to argue with the spider queen for like four hundred years, and having an orgasm with someone else present was about as interesting as getting one off alone at this point.
He had to get creative, and creativity wasn't really Jonny's strong suit.
"Ashes!" he said, bursting into the store room where they were inventorying the food for some reason. "What's the kinkiest thing you've ever done?"
Ashes stared at him. "What?" This was obviously a rhetorical question, because they didn't wait for an answer. "I mean, the wax play scene on Agni was amazing, so that, I guess."
Jonny considered this. "Giving or receiving?"
Ashes eyed him. "I'd burn you," they said, which sounded enough like a threat that Jonny began to grin. "My quarters, five minutes, I'm just gonna finish up this inventory first."
There were some people in the crew that Jonny wouldn't take this kind of insubordination from, but Ashes O'Reilly existed in such a similar gravity well of don't-give-a-fuck to Jonny's own that he didn't really care how they spoke to him. Besides, he knew they could tell he was bored, and while some people might get nervous, Ashes would just withhold any excitement simply to be mean if Jonny was too much of an asshole to them. Sometimes that was irritating enough that Jonny killed them for it, but at the moment, the knowledge of how mean Ashes could be made his skin feel tight with the anticipation of something new. He went to Ashes' quarters.
They didn't keep him waiting, at least, turning up roughly within the predicted five minutes. The door slid shut behind them. "Take your shirt off."
That seemed reasonable: Jonny had no idea how to get wax out of shirts. Ashes waited with patient amusement as Jonny unwrapped himself from several extraneous belts before pulling his shirt off.
"Okay," Ashes said, "you'll want to be sitting or lying down, your choice."
Jonny briefly considered the angular metal chair shoved up against one wall and dismissed it, instead throwing himself down among the pile of blankets atop Ashes' bed. "Just the shirt?" he asked.
"Trousers too if you like," Ashes said, shrugging. "But you can keep your pants on; I'm not gonna get hot wax on your junk. It's your first time, so I'll be gentle."
Ashes had never been gentle in their life. Jonny scoffed a laugh, kicking off his boots and wiggling out of his trousers. Ashes' quarters were usually among the warmest on the ship, so even mostly naked he was still comfortable. He folded his hands behind his head. "Do your worst," he suggested.
Ashes hummed a vague affirmation, sitting down on the edge of the bed. They were holding a fat candle, of the type that allowed wax to well molten under the wick, and a lighter. As they flicked the lighter on, wick igniting, they said conversationally, "Typically for this sort of thing you want a paraffin candle with a good low melting point. Doesn't usually top 65 C at its hottest. On Agni that was the usual, but you also got the proper fanatics, the ones who wanted the burn scars. It was like worship for them." Their voice had gone a bit dreamy. "For that, you need something with a higher melting point. Microcrystalline can get up to nearly 95 C." They gave Jonny a tender smile. "You're not ready for this."
They dripped a few hot spatters of wax onto Jonny's chest.
Jonny screamed. He'd been shot and stabbed uncountable times, and blown up more than once, and had even, memorably, been decapitated. Being blown up didn't actually feel like much of anything, but all the rest had hurt, much more significantly than this did. This, though, wasn't the pain of meat being ripped apart, but of meat burning, and it felt very different. It was so hot it was cold again. It made his whole body shake in a way that didn't feel entirely in his control. It was so easy to scream through. It was wonderful.
Ashes dripped more wax, in a trail of burns down his torso, then paused. Jonny blinked his eyes open -- he didn't actually remember squeezing them shut, and he was vaguely shocked to discover that his lashes were wet -- and stared at them impatiently. "What?" he rasped. "I'm fine."
"You're writhing," Ashes informed him coolly. "Hold the fuck still or I'll tie you up."
Jonny had the momentary urge to lunge across the bed and bite them for that. The urge passed. He laced his hands together where they were folded behind his head, gripping tight, and said, sarcasm dripping from every word, "I'll be good."
The look Ashes gave him was deeply skeptical, but they continued: another spatter across his shoulders, a few very carefully aimed drops on his inner thighs. Jonny did hold still, because he knew that Ashes hadn't been making an idle threat. His body was still twitching involuntarily, trying to flinch back from the burning and sending little confused flares of panic through his nerves when it didn't stop, but bodies tended to do that.
Every place the candle had dripped onto his skin still hurt, the hot-cold first shock of the boiling wax slowly morphing into a throbbing red haze, building and building and turning his brain fuzzy, except for the moments when Ashes poured more wax, and everything went momentarily very bright. Jonny was relaxed far enough into the pain that he wasn't inclined to scream anymore, and in the absence of his own voice he fancied he could hear the quiet sizzle of his flesh boiling. Ashes' small quarters smelt more strongly of hot wax than of either burnt hair or cooked meat, a blessing on one hand and a bit of a pity on the other.
He was an absolute fucking genius for asking Ashes about this. This was much better than just trying the same old sensations and hoping they'd feel new again. He wasn't even really aroused, though he thought with dreamy anticipation of digging his fingernails into the burns while getting himself off later. Right now, this was about something else.
"I've never been properly burned before," he told Ashes. His voice sounded far-off and blurred.
"I can tell," Ashes said fondly. "Isn't it lovely?"
"Yes," Jonny sighed, and convulsed happily as they dripped more wax over his ribs.
Ashes' wax carried him easily through the next month. For a few hours directly after, a good deal of Jonny's skin was covered in second-degree burns, red and blistering, once Ashes had briskly ripped the wax away, not paying any mind to the bitten-off noises Jonny made. He knew that they would have let him stay in their quarters until he'd healed, but there was something wonderful in dressing again, belts and all, and feeling all that cloth and leather scream across his skin. The journey back to his own quarters was endorphin-fuzzy, and as it turned out, Jonny didn't even need to get his fingernails into the burns: he simply shoved a hand down his trousers, paid vivid attention to the drag of cloth on painful skin, and came so hard his vision went funny and glittering. After that, whenever he started feeling restless, Jonny reached for the pristine memory of that hour on Ashes' bed.
He knew it would eventually fade; he might even ask Ashes for another round, though there would be a diminishing return, a little of the shine worn off now that it wasn't the first time. Meanwhile, after the success of his first inquiry, Jonny was properly chasing the high of another new experience.
There were a few Mechanisms Jonny was not going to ask: the Toy Soldier, for obvious reasons; Nastya, because he absolutely did not want to know; probably not Drumbot Brian, who to Jonny's knowledge hadn't participated in any crew orgies, though he was a little curious what Brian's answer would be. Everyone else was fair game.
His first stop, simply because it was nearby when he had the thought, was Ivy's library. Jonny rapped on the doorframe, not out of politeness but because it was highly unlikely that Ivy would even register his presence otherwise. He had to rap again, louder, before she looked up from the floating nest of books in which she was currently enmeshed.
"Hi," Jonny said. "Kinkiest thing you've ever done?"
Ivy blinked. "I don't know. I mean, first we have to define 'kinkiest': are we measuring in a metric against the social taboos of the civilization in which the act was performed, or how personally transgressive I found it, or whether I found it the most erotically exciting relative to other kinks I've experienced? Unless I have a specific set of parameters from which to base--"
"Forget it," Jonny said, and fled before her pedantry could get worse.
Marius was in the med bay, doing whatever doctor things it was he got up to when left to his own devices. Jonny vaguely wondered if Marius was about to tell him he had a medical kink, and whether he was hungry enough for something new that he'd tolerate ridiculousness from the not-Dr. von Raum in the key of, say, latex gloves and a fake examination. If Jonny was lucky, that would be too much like what Marius actually did when he was pretending to do medical nonsense, and he'd be interested in something a bit further from work. If Jonny was really lucky, it might be a medical-adjacent kink like vivisection. One could probably lead up to asking one's ship's doctor for some sexy vivisection. "Hey, Marius," Jonny said, "what's the kinkiest thing you've ever done?"
He'd clearly interrupted something: Marius looked up with a flash of annoyance. After a moment, malicious amusement crossed his face. "Ah, what else!" he said. "A candlelit dinner, rose petals on the sheets, concluding in tender lovemaking as my partner and I looked deeply into one another's eyes."
Jonny recoiled. "You have ruined a century of moods," he said.
Marius winked at him. Jonny didn't have to deal with this, so he took out his gun and shot Marius dead. So much for the sexy vivisection.
He took several half-hearted potshots at the octokittens to relieve his feelings as he did his best to turn a controlled float down a corridor into an annoyed stalk. None of the octokittens died, but they did scatter in alarm, which was satisfying enough that Jonny felt mostly mollified by the time he'd traversed the central body of the ship.
He rather thought he might run into Tim or Raphaella, but Jonny first found Drumbot Brian, on the bridge. As far as Jonny knew, Brian had neither the equipment nor the inclination for his inquiry to be relevant, but what the hell. He drifted up next to Brian, observing the imperceptibly-moving stars outside. He couldn't fathom watching this view for hours, let alone years, and still finding it interesting without at least a few explosions to liven up the scenery.
"So," Jonny said, in lieu of a greeting, "what's the kinkiest thing you've ever done?"
"Suspension," Drumbot Brian said without missing a beat.
Jonny rolled his eyes. He didn't know what he'd expected. It would be pointless to shoot Brian, though, so instead he said, "Have you seen Raphaella or Tim about?"
Brian looked at a few display screens, possibly because they were actually giving him information or possibly because he liked display screens. "Looks like the lab and the armory respectively."
"It would have been nice," Jonny said, less to Drumbot Brian than to the universe at large, "if everyone could have been in one convenient location, so I wouldn't have to run about the ship asking everyone separately."
"Why are you asking?" the Drumbot inquired.
"Bored," Jonny said. "Also, Ashes had a good answer."
"Well," Brian said, "let me know if you ever want to be suspended somewhere."
"Hang yourself," Jonny told him without rancor, and made his way to the lab. Raphaella was there, doing something or other. It looked science-y. By this point, Jonny was feeling rather gloomily that perhaps Ashes was the only other person aboard who had both taste and sense, but if anyone was going to share his enthusiasm for new experiences, it would be Raphaella. "Question," Jonny announced. "What's the kinkiest thing you've ever done?"
Raphaella looked up, an abstracted expression on her face for a moment before she registered Jonny and the question. Jonny waited impatiently while she considered. "I once hooked up a guy to a bunch of electrodes," she said, "and fucked him, and while I was fucking him, I stabbed him through the heart, and then I ran a current through the electrodes."
"Well, did he come back to life?" Jonny asked.
"No," Raphaella said, shrugging. "His dick stayed functional, though, so it wasn't a complete waste."
If Jonny had been asking about the crew's kinks in the abstract, or maybe as a competition to see who had the wildest answer, Raphaella would have just won. Unfortunately, Jonny wanted answers with concrete applications, and while it would be perfectly possible for Raphaella to stab him mid-fuck and carry on once he revived, that didn't have any appeal. For one thing, Jonny knew what being stabbed felt like, and simply combining sex and stabbing didn't feel especially innovative. For another, Jonny was intimately aware that bodies tended to relax in unfortunate ways when they became corpses, and Raphaella could do what she wanted with a corpse but he didn't want any part of it, even if it were his.
"Well," Jonny said, "that certainly was an elucidating answer."
"Why?" Raphaella asked.
"Oh, just crowdsourcing," Jonny said, and left her for the armory. Surely Tim would have an interesting answer; Tim's head was full of interesting things, most of which manifested as violence, which Jonny found very relatable. Surely Ashes couldn't be the only one to offer anything worthwhile.
Tim was indeed in the armory, where Drumbot Brian had said he would be. He appeared to be napping, suspended in zero-g, surrounded by a halo of loose bullets that had come free of a nearby cartridge and were now gently orbiting Tim like a very small planet. Jonny drifted over, batting the bullets aside, and gave Tim's shoulder a soft squeeze. It was even odds whether Tim would wake up screaming, but if he was woken with care, the chances lessened slightly.
Tim jolted awake, his eyes performing a wild, rapid-fire mechanical scan of the room before resting on Jonny. His shoulders relaxed. "Hi," he said.
"You left your bullets out," Jonny said.
"Ah, so I did." Tim pushed off the nearest wall and began floating swiftly about the room, herding the bullets like they were very small stray octokittens. "So, what's going on?"
"I'm fucking bored," Jonny said, "so I've been asking everyone, what's the kinkiest thing you've ever done?"
Tim pondered this, tucking the rest of the bullets back into their box and shutting it precisely. He set the box on its shelf and looked over at Jonny. "Bored and you want to know scintillating details, or bored and you want to try it?"
"Both. Either."
"You're probably asking the wrong question, though," Tim said. "I've done some stuff but I might not recommend it." Jonny opened his mouth to point out, crankily, that everyone on this ship was a fucking pedant and only Ashes had the thimbleful of brain necessary to understand that obviously he was asking about kinks they'd enjoyed, when Tim went on, "Maybe the question should be, what's the kinkiest thing you've never done that you want to try?"
Jonny went still, staring at him. That was a better question.
"So?" Tim said. "What is it, then?"
Obviously Jonny didn't know, or he wouldn't have gone around asking everyone else, looking for inspiration. He thought about Ashes with their candle, carefully making sure that each new drip of wax was unexpected and new. He thought about how much he'd liked the red, mounting pain of it, that endorphin rush which got harder and harder to hit the longer he lived. He thought about the brief hope that Marius might cut him open, in a more careful and ritualized way than he was used to being hurt, and how annoyed he'd been when Marius had made a fucking joke before he could even ask for it. He thought about the way that the whole mood of a story depended on its context, and that every new experience was reliant on context too: a familiar sensation could become entirely new if its place in a story changed.
Tim's inclination was more towards ordnance than knives, but fuck it, why not.
"I have the start of a thing, I think," he said, "but it's missing something."
Tim settled himself in midair, leaning back against the armory wall, his hair floating about his face, and waited. That was something Jonny appreciated about Tim: he was the fiercest fighter of the lot of them, but outside a warzone he tended to be quiet, not trying to be the biggest or loudest presence in the room like the rest of them. Jonny could properly think around him, rather than simply planning the next riposte.
"I'd like to make something ordinary new again," Jonny said. "I'd like to remember how it felt when any kind of violence was still a surprise. It could be almost anything, if I could figure out how to change its context."
"Anything?" Tim asked.
"Maybe?" Jonny ground his teeth. "I don't -- it's not my job to come up with things! Earlier I was thinking that vivisection might be fun, but I've already seen my insides loads of times, and I can't manage to make the leap to something new--"
"What if I ate you?" Tim interrupted.
Jonny's words tripped over themselves and halted. His mouth had gone dry. Obviously he'd eaten plenty of people himself, from curiosity or necessity or boredom, and most of the other Mechanisms (at least, those ones who had to eat) had as well at some point. But they'd never eaten each other. It wouldn't have occurred to Jonny if he'd racked his brain for centuries. It was the very definition of making something ordinary new again.
"Alive?" he croaked.
A slow smile spread across Tim's face. "More fun that way," he said.
"Only if I can eat you too," Jonny said. He was vividly aware of his pulse, of the tick-tick-tick of his heart, kicked into higher gear in a way it almost only ever was when he was learning the story of someone or something gone terribly, grandly wrong.
"Sure," Tim said. "Whose quarters?"
That was a practical consideration. There were many activities that could be done in zero-g without much mess or fuss (or without Nastya fussing at them about the mess) but blood did tend to form little orbiting globules and splash unexpectedly into one's face, so the crew quarters, with their obedience to gravity, were the better option for something like this. Tim barely used his for anything besides artillery overstock, and Jonny's, though full of an ever-rotating magpie collection of interesting artifacts from a thousand worlds, was a little low on steak knives.
"Marius's," Jonny decided. "He has a whole pile of knives under his bed." He was also, as far as Jonny knew, in the med bay, possibly still dead and unlikely to interrupt them, though if he did turn up, he was welcome to join.
They stopped by the canteen to pick up some plates and a portable stove, as by mutual agreement they felt that they'd be tastier cooked than raw. In Marius's quarters, as expected, were the knives, many of them nicked from the Marquis de All the Knives. Jonny and Tim rummaged among them, Tim emerging with a beautiful serrated knife half as long as his forearm, Jonny finding a thick butcher's knife with a truly wicked edge. They sat on the floor, with the camp stove at an angle between them. "First cut to you, Tim," Jonny said.
"Leg," Tim said, so Jonny tugged one boot off and rolled up his trouser-cuff. Tim cradled his ankle, examining his calf from one angle and another, before nodding quietly to himself and beginning to saw through the muscle.
Jonny held very still, screaming through his teeth. This was already just as good as taking Ashes up on their wax had been. He'd been stabbed; he'd been eviscerated; he hadn't been thoughtfully, meticulously carved. The methodical sawing meant that there wasn't even a moment's reprieve between each new jagged flash of pain. Tim was going quite close to the bone, he noticed with delight, already feeling dizzy with blood loss.
Then Tim was holding a good handful of meat. Jonny watched hazily as Tim skinned it, enjoying how carefully Tim was handling it, this bit of him that wasn't his anymore. He didn't bother looking at the bloody mangled mess of his own leg; he'd seen that plenty of times before. The pain was already becoming a familiar one, the throbbing itch that accompanied flesh regrowing and reknitting itself whole, but that was fine. The pain wasn't really the point this time.
Tim leant over to place the meat on the portable stove's grill. It sizzled satisfyingly. "Bet I'm fucking delicious," Jonny said.
Tim surprised him by leaning across the space between them and kissing him. It wasn't as though they never kissed, but usually their physical encounters involved Tim writhing on whatever convenient surface Jonny had pressed him down on while railing him, so this was a bit different. Tim pulled away, smiling, before Jonny could properly kiss him back.
"Comparing tastes," he said.
Jonny lunged back in and kissed Tim's lips bloody, because he couldn't very well let Tim get away with saying things like that, it made him want to tear Tim to shreds, it tipped what he was feeling from interested to affectionate and that -- that was a feeling so old it also came round to new again. When he let Tim go, Tim pulled back looking disheveled and lovely, his mouth a crimson smear. He licked his lips, gave Jonny a rather more feral smile than the last one, and turned back to the stove, transferring Jonny's cooked bit of leg onto a plate.
"Any for you?" Tim asked.
"I'm going to devour you," Jonny said.
"Sure, in a minute." Tim sawed through a bit of the meat, stabbed it with the tip of his knife, and ate it, slowly and thoughtfully. Jonny watched him do it, still feeling ... fucking affectionate, like something inside him had tenderized when Tim carved him up, and now, watching Tim eat him, he was overfull of ravenous warmth. "Decent," Tim pronounced. "Under-seasoned, but that's on me, really, not you." Jonny tried to reassemble his face into proper indignation at this slight on his tastiness, but Tim added, "You are delicious, though."
"Idle flattery gets you nowhere," Jonny told him. "Give me your arm, whichever one you don't feel like using while you eat the rest."
Tim held out his arm readily, which was another thing Jonny liked about him. He didn't ask pointless questions, and he trusted Jonny, even though that was patently dangerous, so maybe he trusted Jonny to be interesting.
Jonny took his hand, gauged the angle, and chopped Tim's arm off just below the elbow in two efficient hacks. Tim recoiled in on himself, screaming long and thin and wavering, which Jonny ignored except to idly enjoy the sound of it. He'd done Tim a favor, really, starting with the arm and chopping off the hand second. "Want this back?" he asked, waving the hand, when Tim paused for breath. Tim shook his head, building up to another keening wail, so Jonny tossed the hand aside and got to skinning the arm.
By the time he'd put the arm on the stove, Tim had subsided. "You sure you don't want to try some of you?" he said.
"All right, I'll have a bit," Jonny said. He leant forward and bit the provided meat off the end of Tim's offered knife. It tasted the way humans usually tasted, though there was a frisson of satisfaction in knowing it was him. "Good choice of cut, at least."
"I thought so too." Tim resumed eating, his unblinking eyes trained on Jonny. "Seriously, the whole forearm?"
"I want to eat it like a drumstick at a fair," Jonny said. "I suppose I could've kept it attached, but then you'd still be screaming."
"Distracting," Tim agreed. "So, what do you think?"
Jonny didn't answer right away. He rotated Tim's arm a few times, to give it an even cook. While the meat cooled, he thought about it, nudging at the tenderness at his center like he might prod at a closing wound. By now most of his calf was back, thin sheets of skin closing over the muscle, so he couldn't really blame his mood on some kind of physical resonance. He picked up Tim's arm, met Tim's lovely mechanical eyes, and tore into the meat with his teeth, with a welling of warm pleasure at being able to devour him like this. The meat itself was fine -- it tasted the way humans usually tasted, just as he had -- but it was Tim, and it was, for a moment, absolutely perfect.
"Fucking excellent idea," Jonny said. "You and Ashes will be my only stops next time I'm bored."
"I don't see why," Tim said cheerfully. "Most of the crew is edible."
"Mm, good point. Depends on if they'd hold still long enough."
Tim laughed. "Some arm for me?"
They swapped. They ate. Several times more Tim leaned forward to kiss Jonny ("for comparison," he insisted) and Jonny felt fucking fantastic. It was all so delicate and good and new. It was going to be a memory that would require gentle handling, like tissue paper that might crumple or rip with carelessness, but that only made it better and more unique. He could live for years on this.
The door to Marius's quarters slid open, and there was the good Baron von Raum himself, staring. "Why is everything covered in blood?" he demanded, even though the answer was obvious.
"Would you like some Tim?" Jonny asked, holding up the half-eaten arm. Marius could deal with the blood; he was good at getting blood out of things.
"Or some Jonny," Tim volunteered.
Marius's mouth worked for a moment. Then he stepped inside. "Yeah, all right."
He was in a better mood than he'd been in the med bay, especially after he had something to eat, so Jonny proposed the sexy vivisection after all; shame to let all the knives go to waste. Marius and Tim were both game, and it provided all of them with some hours of entertainment, through which Jonny laughed and screamed and faded in and out of consciousness several times, and they made even more of a bloody mess for Marius to deal with later.
That was good, too, though not as new as the rest had been. Still, as dessert courses went, it was perfectly satisfying.