Tags: Shadowrun, Male cyberneticist doctor / his female triple amputee patient, bondage, forced orgasm, bathtub sex, limblessness


Odessa dreamt of fire. She was no dream analyst, it didn’t take one to know that the nightmares were because she had all too willingly become a murderer to simultaneously satisfy her human need for autonomy and her sexual desire to be in control of her lack of mobility. She felt all too comfortable accepting what she had done. Partly because the hacker had tried to shoot her before she’d done anything violent other than… well, break into her home. And partly because Nite Crawler had given her a hand that could stop a bullet.

She held Penelope, and let her pet walk delicately from false hand to real hand across her palms for a few minutes before she let her walk back under her segment of log to hide in the dark and rest. Odessa closed the tank and shut her eyes. She thought about sex with the man who was the motivation for her to become a criminal, and she wanted more. It wasn’t even a guilty thought, it came as naturally as any other to her, burrowing under her blankets the way that Penelope burrowed in dirt.

Odessa couldn’t be sure, thinking back, whether she acquired a love of the idea of being tied up first, or whether she acquired a love of spiders first. It could have happened in either order, she supposed, far back in her childhood. Spiders had just never been sexualized until she met Nite Crawler.


Under her clothes while she was at work, the orange cable was woven around her body. Not tight enough to cause pain, just enough that when she moved she would have to feel it on her skin. Enough to give her shivers. Her obsessive almost-every-other-day wearing of the cable had done a lot to desensitize her to its effects, especially compared to the first time Nite Crawler had strung her up in his office.

She was interrupted from her work trying to network with a shoe store to secure some kind of publicity deal for them and get shoes for the kids when her co-worker Becky interrupted her by taking a seat on the edge of her desk.

“What’s up?” Odessa asked calmly, disconnecting her attention from the holo screen. She hadn’t grown up with Becky, but Becky had worked for The Orphanarium through most of Odessa’s late teens.

“Who are you seeing? What’s he like?” Asked Becky with a sly eyebrow raised.

Odessa balked. She’d never known Becky to be interested in this kind of chatter, but on the other hand Odessa had never been in the position she was in. “I’m not really seeing anyone.”

Becky got up and pushed her black hair behind her pointed elf ears. “Uh-huh. Sure thing.”

Uncomfortably shifting in her seat and frowning, Odessa returned to her work.


She ran around the block twice during her lunch break. She would have gone for a third loop, but was interrupted.

"Odessa?" A sentimental voice rang from behind her. "Is that the same little girl I gave legs to all those years ago?" 

The young woman skidded to a stop and turned to see her old doctor. A wide grin spread on her face to see him, and she jogged over at once. Dr. Gregory Tipton looked different than she remembered--his old glasses were gone so she could get a good look at his bright hazel eyes and his brown hair seemed to be more of a mess, but that could have just been because he wasn't at work today.

"Dr. Tipton! Hi!" She pushed her hair out of her eye like the shy schoolgirl she had been. Subconsciously she felt younger, as if by seeing him on the street she had been moved back in time to when she had been seeing him regularly. "How are you?"

"I've been well, plenty of clients coming through my doors." As he watched her grin, he could finally comment on her teeth. He’d been wanting to say something since she’d come to his black-lit office. "I see you've finally done away with your braces."

Her cheeks flushed pink at the memory. Despite the fact that she’d had them for several years longer than most kids, Odessa had mostly forgotten about them and their daily hassle. Metal wires in her teeth during her late teens were nothing next to metal legs. Like many things Odessa had, they had been colored yellow.

"Finally got them off a few years ago. I miss them as decoration but I don't miss cleaning them," she said, blushing slightly that he had noticed. But why didn’t he comment on her new limbs? "I uh, I always felt bad I had to stop seeing you. But the orphanarium stopped paying my bills after covering that last session."

The Orphanarium was still a capitalist business, despite its overall benevolence. It worked on a system similar to life insurance--parents of a minor child could insure themselves so if they died before the child was mature, The Orphanarium would take complete care of the kid until they were grown. While expensive, it was worth it if it ever came to pass, especially for families with little savings to pass on to a stranded kid. Odessa’s parents money would not even have been able to pay for her first few years of prostheses--she was lucky her parents had invested in that insurance.

Dr. Tipton had been apprised of her situation before meeting her, had always known that she lacked parental role models.

"Well, you seem to be better than new," he pointed to the new limbs he’d given her. "Looks like you've found a new doctor regardless." Even now when he was supposed to be incognito, he couldn’t help but lustily stare at her. When had self-control become such a chore?

"Well The Orphanarium helped me get in touch with a charity for folks like me who can't really work without cyber parts," she lied. It surprised her to hear how glib she sounded, just like when she had lied to the people in the office. Maybe lying was meant to be as natural to her as murder. Maybe she was always supposed to be a Shadowrunner. That thought saddened her, that perhaps criminality had always been in her stars. "I was in bad shape before, I hadn't had a tune up since I last saw you."

Odessa shifted her weight to her other leg and felt the subtlest change in position of the orange ropes she wore under her clothes. It made her heart flutter, that slight pressure and brief reminder of pleasures past. The left side of her collar moved just far enough that Dr. Tipton could plainly see one of his cables wrapping over her shoulder.

"Well, I'm glad to see that you got yourself all fixed up." Seeing the orange he couldn't help but grin even more broadly, nor could he help the growing in his pants. She really was obsessed with it, maybe even more than he was and certainly it was a different kind of obsession.

She felt air too low on her neck and plucked the fabric of her shirt higher up on her shoulder, adjusting her shirt to hide the orange on one side only for it to become visible on the other side without her knowledge. They were not arranged in Nite Crawler's state-of-the-art knot system, but a simpler kind of tie she had learned from the Net.

"They are really good cybernetics," she said, holding out a hand to show him the palm and fingerpads--they looked metallic and yellow, but had a thin material that covered the joints to avoid pinching anything between them. Odessa’s favorite detail was that the fingerpads and palm had tiny grooves patterned in them so that she could hold things more easily.

"They look fantastic. It's a surprise to me that these are charity prostheses--that's some charity." He laughed lightly and brought himself closer to her as he did.

Odessa was focused on her lie, one she was dedicated to maintaining. She had even considered making a fake page on the Net for the imaginary charity that had given her limbs, but had yet to go through with it. "I assume it's all a matter of part surplus and tax loopholes," she said. In the back of her mind she saw the girl with the rainbow hair and imagined her catching fire. These limbs were not free. But she pushed it away.

"Yes, I'm sure," He tried hard to make his smirk into a warm smile. She was certainly doing well with her lie. If he hadn’t known ahead of time he doubted that he would know she wasn’t telling the truth.

She wasn't sure what to say next and asked him, "If you’re free, do you want to get lunch?" She wasn’t certain that was an appropriate thing to offer, but she had been doing enough inappropriate things with and for a doctor lately.

Checking his commlink he nodded. "I think I could find the time." He wasn’t even working that day.

She grinned and beckoned him along with her for sandwiches. "Are you in the same office you were before?"

"Yes, business has been steady since you left, but shortly after you I stopped taking children as patients because it’s just more difficult and better work for specialists, in my opinion."  That wasn’t really his reason. In fact, it was very much the client had come just before Odessa. 

"I guess it's good there aren't that many kids, it wasn’t uh… it wasn’t easy for me to have non-human parts. I was always the odd one out," she said. "I never met kids who had the amount of prostheses I did, either. I mean, I know they’re out there, but I just never ran into any peers. And even then it took me until basically this year to ever... feel comfortable having them."

"It's good to feel normal in your own skin." Reaching into his pocket he pulled out a little wrapped candy. Holding the stick out to her, he offered, "I've got one of those lemon suckers you liked so much, if you want it." 

She took it from him immediately. "I missed these. How'd it end up in your pocket? Forget to give it away?"

"A doctor should always be prepared for such things," There was no coincidence that he ran into Odessa today so it was no wonder that he had her favorite candy on hand.

She smiled. "I thought I was the only one who ate yellow flavor," It was never ‘lemon’ with Odessa, it was  always ‘yellow flavor.’

"Well, I've been giving these out for years--trying to--and I still have a bag full left over from when you were my patient." 

They entered the sandwich shop Odessa had selected for them, and they small talked about Mount Rainier.

“Did you see the mountain out today?” asked the doctor, filling space in their conversation, waiting for their food.

“Yeah,” Odessa said. Rainier in the distance was a fixture, and the mountain’s visibility was a layman’s indicator of the quality and clarity of the weather. “I was up early, it’s been out and clear all day.”

The sandwiches weren’t pre-made, but they came fast. The people who ran the store were good at giving soy certain false flavors and mixing them to make food that tasted as close to legitimate as Odessa could tell.

Dr. Tipton asked her a real question to avoid eating what was, to him, a mash of soy between two slices of soy bread, inedible. "Anyone special in your life? I recall a bright-eyed young girl who only wanted to dance with the boys."

She shook her head, a bit embarrassed. "Not really. Even though I can dance I was never good at it. Boys’ eyes were always on other girls anyway.” She paused, and Gregory Tipton corrected her in his mind.

Odessa did amend her statement. “Well, I have Penelope. But she's a Mexican Red-Knee tarantula. It's just her and me. I have a pretty small place."

"Ah, Brachypelma smithi," He couldn't help but share the knowledge of the tarantula’s scientific name. It was almost reflexive, there was no thinking involved. "Common, great for household pets."

"Yes," she said, smiling and nodding. An inkling started to blossom and bubble in the back of her mind and she began to study his jaw and trace the outline with her eyes, comparing it to brief memories in a very dark room. She tried not to seem distracted. "What about you? Anyone special?"

"No, my work doesn't allow for much of a personal life." Though, he felt as though he were already growing closer with his favorite patient. Perhaps he could find the time.

"That's too bad," she said, now studying his voice. Her sandwich was gone. She was a fast eater and with all the running she did these days with limbs that used the chemical energy in her body it meant that when she encountered food, it never lasted long.

"It's fine. I enjoy my work." He did. He pushed his plate towards her on the table, offering his untouched something-sandwich. “You still seem hungry.”

“You sure?” she asked. She’d gladly take it.

“I’m sure. Go on, Odessa, it’s my treat.”

Yes, he was Nite Crawler. She heard it vividly in the word ‘treat,’ remembered him saying it with his mask open after dosing her with his Orange drug. Of course she would remember that more clearly. She double-checked his chin one last time. Yes, there could be no mistaking it. She stifled her expressions of confusion and amazement by stuffing her face with food.

It was him. She wasn't as surprised as she was... exhilarated. There was a lot to feel.

She knew it would be bad to bring it up in public and held her tongue. That was a fast way to get her arm and legs torn off. Why was he following her in public? Why was he talking to her? What did it mean that he had known her the entire time and been a benevolent force in her childhood? And she’d fucked him?

Best to be quiet. Best to talk later when she saw him again in two weeks.


Nite Crawler tinkered for the next few weeks in his office. There was so much to work on. Treats for Odessa, and tools for himself. He couldn't wait to see her, which was why he’d caved in and contacted her in person against all better judgement.

She showed up a few minutes early and let herself in with a cocky smile. He heard the door open and looked up from his workbench to see her, sauntering over to him. She said, "It was sweet of you to check up on me the other day."

The stunned look that wiped over his face was not visible through his mask. "What do you mean?" He had hoped Odessa meant one of his ever-watchful cyber-spyders like the one that lived outside of her apartment window, or the ones hidden in her workplace, but didn’t think that was it.

"You know what I mean," she smirked and walked close to him at the table. She couldn’t contain herself, she’d been waiting to talk to him about this, to show off to him that she was clever enough to identify him. Maybe it would be evidence that she was thinking like the Shadowrunner he wanted her to be. "Are you gonna make me say your real name?"

"It was the spider that gave it away, hm? The Brachypelma smithi." He turned his head and orange eyes looked to the clear walls on the far side of the room that separated them from his spider tanks and watched the hundreds of neon cyber-augmented spiders weaving their silk into cable for him. "Why didn't you tell me you had a spider before?"

"I was either distracted by your web or... I didn't think you'd care about my life outside of this." She paused. "It was the yellow too. Painting my new legs. And I remembered your voice from when you had the mask open and gave me that shot."

Odessa used her hands to mime the opening of the mask to him, hands covering her mouth one moment and then spreading apart to show her smile.

Shaking his head he heaved a sigh, walked away from the table. He was proud of her for identifying him, but uncomfortable with her having that shred of power. "Why don't we just start our check up? I've got a surprise for you."

She perked up, bounding after him, pulling off her clothes until she had only underwear on and leaving her garments in a trail to the where she knew to stand. She had goosebumps all over her body in anticipation. "What do you have in mind?"

"I have a new toy for you." He gestured her towards the arms, "Please to step onto my operating table."

As she stepped into place, the large robotic arms wove around her, tieing his very specific weave around her body. She tried to watch and keep track of where the arms moved so she could replicate his system at home, but they moved too fast and were too efficient--their speed in the dark made them seem like they blurred while the orange cables glowed bright.

The arms tightened and she felt a familiar euphoria as cables around her thighs, stomach, ribs, chest all tightened and she lifted into the air.

Once she was in his web he grabbed her face and turned it to look at her cybernetic ear, set into her metal skull plate. It was sensitive enough that it didn’t need a prosthetic ear shape to help focus the sound for the girl, leaving the right have of her head smooth on the side. "I’m going to need to work on that ear."

She groaned at his touch. It felt good. No point in hiding it from him now.

With a click the mouth of his mask opened up. Now that she could place his jaw it made Odessa blush, that this was her old doctor who had known her since she had been young. The contrast was so strange and strong that it blinded her to his flaws, even two weeks after she had put it together. After all, how could she not trust her hero Dr. Tipton?

"We'll have to get you to sleep if I'm gonna work on that ear," he said. Odessa understood why. If she was awake for adjustments to her skull plate and false ear it usually meant for phantom sounds and pains. Once as a child she had hit her head on something and had picked up a punk rock radio station until her next check-up.

Odessa looked at his mouth. He seemed less jolly than when he was a normal man. She lifted her legs and half hooked one around the back of one of his thighs. With his lips in view she asked, "Do I get a kiss goodnight?"

~
Having finished her tuneups in record time, Dr. Tipton looked down at the sleeping Odessa. Her mouth was just barely agape and her lips framing the shine from her yellow braces. He touched her cheek. His cock swelled in his pants watching her, the girl he had cared for for several years, and perhaps he wasn’t thinking clearly.

The doctor leaned in and gently grabbed her sleeping chin and pressed his lips to hers, softly sucking on her top lip. He even slipped some tongue in there while he was at it, but not much.

The doctor sat back in his chair and waited until she woke, tasting her saliva in his mouth.
~

"If you insist," There was a chuckle on his lips as he gave in this time, kissed her cheek, and the syringes pierced her neck. Numbness, paralysis, unconsciousness. She passed out almost instantly with a smug little smile.

He had parts prepared to install. Nite Crawler carefully muted her ear’s sensors before he got to work adding a device of his own. Odessa’s prosthetic ear did not exist because her original ear had been destroyed the way her lung had been punctured and her legs had been crushed, but because it had simply stopped working after her accident. Somewhere in her brain the impact to her head that had also shattered part of her skull had rewired it, and the simplest thing at the time had been to create a new ear from scratch and wire it into the brain to grant her stereo hearing again.

It was easy enough to add more parts. Wireless receiver and wireless transmitter, some of his gifts to her--so they would never need to be out of contact. He had answered her question wrong in the sandwich shop, there was someone special in his life and he would do anything to keep her.

The last step required more care. The real work came with the neural implant he delicately had to put in her brain. A few little nodes on important key points of her brain. Places connected to sexuality, to arousal, places that he could control. His second gift to her.

Nite Crawler waited for the drug to wear off as patiently as he could. In the mean time, he worked before the web where Odessa rested and tinkered with one of his cybernetic pets.

She woke a half-hour later with a small headache and twitched a mechanical leg, swinging very gently on the silk cables. "Nn," she murmured, coming off the drugs all at once.

"How is everything?" Nite Crawler’s right eye shifted from low orange glow to a bright white light that he shined in her eyes, checking her reactions. The last thing he wanted was to have accidentally damaged something of importance, but he was confident in his abilities. Her eyes dilated on cue, and then she shut and shielded them from his painfully bright light and complained in a high whine that didn't suit her.

"Anything out of the ordinary?" He showed genuine concern, but he simply didn't want to mess her up when she was so close to being the perfect patient. His eye transitioned back to dim orange.

"Ear volume's up," she commented, a little annoyed at how his voice seemed to be right in her ear.

"It's not, but you have a feed of my voice now." His voice was crystal clear, no static. Her left ear heard him naturally. Her right ear transplanted his voice into her brain with no sense of his location around her. Odessa didn’t like it. It was invasive. She hadn’t asked for it. She opened her mouth but words wouldn’t come. How to reject this peacefully?

"Here, I'll turn it off for now." Odessa felt no shift when her hearing back to normal, he walked around and made the arms twist her and turn her until he was looking her her upside down, her legs hanging so her knees were against her, folded against her chest while her arms and hair hung down. She was eye-level with Nite Crawler, and he kept speaking. "I made some other changes while I was working on you too."

"Wait, what did you do?" she asked, hoping for a proper explanation. She was plainly anxious. She wanted to scream at him for invading her ear and putting himself in her brain. A line had been crossed.

"A little treat for you." Reaching up he plucked at the ropes where they held her body. "How're your bindings? Snug?" 

She was held rather speechless. Too nervous, too distracted to be in love with hanging upside down like she would have been otherwise.

"Now, I've said it before, I'm not one to give out suckers after my appointments in this particular office, but you have been such a good girl, I think you deserve a little reward. Let me show you what I made," he purred, reaching for her face to touch her cheek. Through the plug at the back of his head, his brain commanded his mask and saw through the eight cameras. Wirelessly he gave a command to the tiny installations in Odessa’s brain. ‘On.’

She stared at him with wide and confused eyes, waiting for him to do something that she could see when she felt the surge of arousal inside of her and her body tensed. It was an unnatural feeling, getting turned on out of the blue with no triggers for it that she was aware of. 

"Ahh!" she cried out, more from confusion than anything else, looking into his main orange eyes. Normally the ropes would be enough to turn her on further, make her squirm as they pressed at her breasts and on either side of her vulva wrapped around her thighs. But the wave of forced sensation that followed later was confusing and nonsensical, she didn't understand it, and convulsed nervously in the web like there was something in the air she was trying to avoid. "Wh-what is that?"

"Pleasure. I added a bit of a small neural enhancement, normally the chip would be able to be controlled by your own thoughts, but instead I took the pleasure of causing this reaction." A light crackle started in her ear just before his whispers came in clear as day again. "Until you finish your next Run, I’m going to hang on to control of the pleasure implants. We’ll have some fun, Odessa."

On a primal level, this was terrifying. She did not want him to have this kind of control when he already had enough power to easily get her to kill people--she kept flinching away to her left to avoid the voice in her ear. "I don't get it," she said, panting. "I don't get... why..."

“This is what you like.” His whisper was sadistic, but playful. He moved the ropes to tug and toy with her as he sent surge after surge of pleasure through her body and stroked her cheek with his thumb while he held her head. “Hanging in my web like the first night you were here, twitching because you couldn’t control yourself.”

"I want to get down," she told him through heavy breaths while beads of sweat formed on her body.

"Why? You seem to be enjoying this quite a bit." He commented as his thermal vision showed the heat in her groin growing and growing. Besides, the pleasure that he gained from watching her so aroused was better than any orgasm he could have given himself.

"I'm really scared," she admitted to him in a cracking voice. She wasn't sure if that was a good idea to tell him, but he must have known that already. "I don't... want anyone in my brain."

"It's not just anyone in your brain." He spoke directly into her head. He felt hurt, insulted that this work had been for nothing and she didn’t want it. It wasn’t like it was difficult to construct, half his Shadowrunning clients had some kind of pleasure-augment, it was that Odessa was unhappy with his gift. This bitter rejection was new. "It's me, you trust me, don't you? You trust I'm only trying to give you what you want." 

She kept visibly flinching from the noise while she tried to catch her breath from arousal. Upside down, hot, bound, it was impossible for her to think completely straight. She felt like she was being fingered by a ghost, her clit throbbing and vagina occasionally contracting in anticipation of orgasm. Odessa pulled her head away from his hand. "Please let me down," she whined, trying to reach for the floor with a few sweeping grasps of her arms.

"There's one simple way to get down from there," His mask showed no expression, but he frowned. Another heavy jolt of pleasure coursed through her. "Come."

She did. Her entire body shuddered, tensed, gave in to an orgasm that she felt him pushing her into. What was most frightening to her was that she had no response to it, no way out--she couldn't force herself to think unsexy thoughts and just push away what he was doing. When he turned her on, she was unable to do anything about it. Odessa wailed, sounding very displeased.

"Thatta girl." The ropes loosened, lowered her to the floor. She laid on the floor, still tangled in the webs, looking shaken and altogether unhappy. Her eyes were wet and she looked up at him, wondering if he just thought of her body as his playground. She would have done anything he had asked her in order to keep her parts, but to have him take without warning her was something from nightmares. How far did his influence go? What else had he slipped into her head? Tears slipped out of her eyes.

Looming over her his orange eyes were practically the only thing that she could see in the darkness. “Don’t worry about paying for this, it’s my treat.”

She looked up at him and wiped her eyes. She had never cried in front of him before, in her entire life, and struggled and failed to get to her feet when a cable somewhere interfered with another and kept her tangled. She blamed this sudden lack of dexterity on having been upside down for too long, and when she tried to extract herself she only made her problem worse.

"Please," she gasped. "Please Doctor Tipton. Please. I don't understand. I don't understand why you did this."

He didn’t respond to her use of his name. "Because you need this. You like this. Your pleasure is something that kept you coming back to my web."

She shut her eyes and a few tears fell out of them. "No. You kept me coming back to you. I need you for… so I can just live life like a normal person." she told him truthfully.

"You'll learn to like it." His voice was still so calm. "It's just a way for me to give you pleasure. It's no different from having sex and you seemed to enjoy that plenty."

"It is different," She didn't sound angry when she spoke, just hurt. "If you wanted sex you could have told me. You have no idea how shitty it feels to not be in control of your own body. You have your original arms and legs and anything else you have you put in yourself. You have no idea what it's like to rely on another person to help you walk and do anything and how weak it makes you feel."

She sighed. "I don't like feeling weak, Dr. Tipton."

"You're not weak. You're anything but. I've made sure of that." His voice was stern, correcting her on her false claims, pacing in front of her now because he couldn’t bear to stand still. "I've given you legs more powerful than any other human, even those with so-called state of the art artificial limbs from corporations that specialize in them.” 

“That arm?" He pointed. "It has the reflexive capability to catch a bullet. Your last one couldn't even block one properly." 

The voice that came next was almost soothing. "You're not weak. You're stronger than ever thanks to me. And now, with your new enhancements you can have pleasure whenever you wish. But you don’t want that."

"But none of that matters," she explained to him. "Because they're yours, not mine. I have nothing without your technology. And having to ask your permission to use it is... embarrassing. Being controlled by you is worse. I want to be able to control my own body and I can't even do that."

"Then you should have gone to a proper doctor." He said flatly, dismissively, "Instead of looking for the easy way out by coming to a Shadowrunner."

This was what she deserved, she figured. She thought about the hacker girl. "This is what I deserve, then?" she asked softly, as if for confirmation. But she had already accepted it as karma. "Bad things happen to bad people."

"Don't bring karma into this. There was nothing you did that made you deserve this. You took the easy way out and now you have to live with the consequences." He was irate.

She accepted that as true as well, but didn't buy in to his dismissal of karma. What goes around comes around, and she had done unforgivable things. Odessa started trying to get out of the webbing again, but her head felt like she was in a fog. “Now what?” she asked, expecting his monthly assignment.

“Live your life how you want it,” he said. There was a bitterness in his tone at first, but it faded away to tiredness. “You deserve a rest, don’t worry about running tonight.” 

He knew that would make her happy, she never seemed to enjoy the Runs, but that was the price she had to pay for coming to Nite Crawler.

“Really? I can just go home now?” 

“If you wish,” he nodded. “But know that I’ll come to you later for a job when one of your skill level shows up. A deal is a deal and I can’t give you your check-up for free.”

He squatted down to where she was trying to reach behind her to undo a knot and pulled a favorite scalpel from his chest pocket. Odessa froze at once and let him cut her out of the bonds, trusting him not to cut her with the stainless steel blade. There were a lot of knots to undo and the spider silk didn’t cut especially easily. She waited patiently, knowing this wouldn’t have been so difficult if she hadn’t flailed.

"What do you really think of me?" she asked. "All the time I was your patient before, were you just... faking being nice to me?"

"Dear, sweet Odessa. No." He placed a hand on her back to steady and comfort her. “I wanted to help you. I wanted to make you strong."

She was still frustrated. "You did help, and then you... you put a thing in my brain to control me. How does that help?"

"Control you? Don't be ridiculous." These words actually hurt him, which came as quite a shock to him as he was unsure that he could even be hurt in such a way. "It's just a little boost, everyone has mental augments nowadays. Most of my patients ask me to put something in their brains."

"But you didn't ask," she murmured. Ah, that. That was the source of pain. A flicker of a memory crossed her mind, throwing the incendiary grenade. He'd made her a murderer, but what bothered her was that he could make her orgasm without asking. With that attitude, maybe she really, truly did deserve to suffer.

"You seem to forget that I'm not most doctors. I don't need to ask permission to install my experiments on my night-time patients and I didn't think you would mind this augment considering our intimate relationship."

Intimate? "I thought that you would ask because we were intimate. I mean, I know you... you're Nite Crawler. But I also just thought it might be different because you knew I liked you and then after I found out you were Dr. Tipton… I thought we might get close. But I feel the opposite."

"You may feel that, but I feel closer to you than ever before." As close as he had always dreamed when she had been young. He lifted her from the ground into a sitting up position and held her by her shoulders, looking into her eyes. "So much closer."

Still indignant, bitter: "You hurt my feelings. Bad. People who are close don't do that."

"It was not my intention to do so. I thought you'd enjoy my little gift seeing as how we're lovers now." The word ‘lovers’ fell as easily from his mouth as if he had called her his patient.

"We are?" she asked him timidly, and frustration gave way to curiosity. Well, they’d had sex. After a moment of silence where she heard his scalpel finish slicing through the cable she made an important decision to do everything she could to feel powerful. When he was her boss who provided her limbs, he controlled her. If she was his lover, she could, potentially, control him. She was thinking like the Shadowrunner he wanted her to be.

She said "I didn't think you would want that. Being so... obsessed with work."

"Having made love already, I don't think you really have a choice in the matter."

"No, I'm... I'm fine with that. I’m just surprised you saw it that way." Odessa reached for a metaphor she thought he'd understand. "I thought you'd be more like a spider. Do the deed and then go."

Why would she see it that way? For almost half of her life all he wanted was to have her at his side, feeling the warmth of her skin as she was pressed against him, much like she was now. Perhaps it was purely a lust, but for Dr. Tipton that was practically interchangeable with love. "Male spiders only do that because they fear the female, but it's quite the other way around here, isn't it?"

"But here the danger is in leaving, not staying. I'm no idiot. I’d never give up these prostheses and I would never betray you."

Nite Crawler helped her to her feet.

"You could never leave." He leaned in, his mouth right next to her ear and his fingers guided Odessa’s chin to turn her. The office was silent, not even his spiders dared to shift so that even they could hear his next words that fell to an affectionate whisper. "Because you're caught in my web."

She pushed her agenda delicately. "Could we at least be normal lovers when... when we're not working?"

"You mean you want to be tied up more often in my office?" He said, cocking an eyebrow beneath his mask, tilting his head sideways.

"I mean that if this is a relationship you should treat it like one," she said, though she had little experience with what that would entail outside of fiction. She wasn’t sure what she wanted out of a relationship with him other than sex and control over her limbs and life that she had previously traded to him. "And not only come skulking around at night or following me in daytime."

"Alright, but you can't simply come by unannounced as I might have clients." He was of course talking about this black lit lair. "And you certainly can't visit my office on the thirty fourth floor in case a patient there asked how they can get limbs like yours."

These were acceptable terms. Fair. Odessa considered that if he didn't keep her any more under his thumb than he already did, she could probably live very happily with this arrangement. And the working limbs he would keep providing her with for the rest of her life.

“Alright, that sounds good.” Despite her previous fear of him, she was actually happy with him, but still a tiny thread of fear still lingered. “We’ll figure something out.”

He nodded while she gathered up her clothes and pulled them on. “And I’ll come talk to you when I have a Run for you.”

“Of course,” Odessa sounded a little saddened, but was otherwise compliant. She should have known she wouldn’t be completely free from his Runs even if they were lovers.


Odessa removed her limbs to take baths. They were watertight and built so she could safely swim or shower in them, even in salt water or chlorinated water, but even a week after her last visit to Nite Crawler she was overly aware of the control he had worked hard to establish. When she unplugged them the best she could do would be crawl, but she at least felt entirely Odessa.

She settled comfortably enough in the water and searched for soap.

The lights in her bathroom shut off and with the wave of unsolicited sexual pleasure that coursed through her there was no question who it was that turned off her light. She jolted in surprise, splashed water out of the tub onto the bathroom floor, and slipped briefly under the surface before pulling herself out of the water with a gasp. “Miss me?” Nite Crawler’s voice rang in her ear through the system he had installed.

“You scared me,” she complained. She hated it. She hated having him in her head. Her hand made a fist and if her right arm had been plugged in it would have too. But she desperately wanted to stay on his good side. If he thought that adding things to her brain was a gift, she didn’t know what he would do to her if he came to dislike her.

“I apologize,” his orange eyes came into view into the bathroom door and his voice was doubled in her mind and in her left ear.

Odessa squinted at the array of eyes in the dark, wishing he’d quit broadcasting his voice into her brain when she could hear it naturally. “Did you find a Run for me? Or did you come to just uh… hang out?” To cross boundaries because he knew he’d get away with it? Knowing who he was, coming to understand that he thought of her in some affectionate sense, she recognized this as a kind of escalation.

“I just wanted to see how you were holding up.” Truth be told he simply couldn’t wait to see her again. Even in their new relationship, his obsession with her did not stop, and as Odessa feared he felt now that he had carte blanche to visit as he pleased.

The young woman didn’t understand the deep depths of his obsessions. She managed a smile in his direction. “Take off your mask.”

The light came on and Nite Crawler was standing beside the tub, looming over Odessa with one hand still hovering by the ancient switch built in to the wall. Reaching behind his head he pressed the release of his mask. The data jacks released the mask from his neck and he promptly pulled it off. And there it was, the shining smile of Dr. Tipton. He set the mask on the counter next to her toothbrush.

It was definitely more comfortable and less threatening this way, but still strange to see his head on Nite Crawler’s shoulders, above the black and dark blue suit. In the light she could see a few dark stains to the fabric that had been invisible to her before in his dark office. At least with the mask unplugged, she thought, he couldn’t fuck with her brain.

“You look like you could use a hand.” Smiling at his own joke, he had begun to unbutton his shirt.

She cringed. “Because I dropped my other one, hah. I hate that joke.”

“Well, if you don’t want my help in the tub, perhaps I’ll just go.” But of course he didn’t actually leave, he just kept unbuttoning his shirt. 

“You’d hate it too if you heard it all the time when you were a kid,” she said, not reacting to his threat to leave. He wouldn’t, of course. She found the soap under the water and started covering herself in it.

“Fair enough.” He shrugged his shirt off. The muscular skin beneath it was covered in symmetrical surgical scars both on his chest and arms. Odessa was the first to see these scars apart from the doctor himself.

She paused her soaping up and squinted at him curiously, leaning the dripping upper half of her torso out of the water to look. He was bulkier under the clothes than she had imagined, but that was because he always wore clothes with plenty of room to move around. It only made sense that he was fit though, most successful Shadowrunners were. The fine lines stood out because they were stark white and because of their arrangement--looking at the way they contoured his muscles she concluded that they were probably artistic, but that didn’t quite fit her perception of him.

Starting on his pants he opened his fly and slid down his pants and boxers at once, his flaccid penis flopped out and he slid down the pants and kicked them aside, farther away from the puddle of water. Then he stepped into the tub behind her.Odessa slid away from him to give him space to settle down in the water. Her hair was plastered over the left half of her face, the rest of her pale body was dripping and sudsy.

As she moved away he reached around her and pulled her in close to him, pressing her back to his chest. She was slippery to hold, and with the limbs off she couldn’t have weighed more than seventy pounds. 

She wasn’t discontent in his arms. He didn’t mishandle her and she was still attracted to him despite her better judgment. She was only frustrated that she had managed to transition from working for a psycho to having sex with a psycho to being in a relationship with a psycho in the span of a few months.

“You know those limbs are waterproof, why don’t you just take a shower with them on?”

Slipping and sliding in his grip, Odessa grabbed the side of the tub to try to stay steady again. “I take them off for stuff like this. If I don’t take them off every once in a while then when they need to come off it’s a shock and I keep trying to move parts that aren’t there.”

Odessa paused and waved her right arm. Of course nothing happened--she had no right arm because it was lying on the floor, disconnected. It was a strange sensation, moving a body part that didn’t exist, because she sometimes felt like there were ghosts of limbs still attached to her that she could move with a thought but not use to interact with the world.

“A good reason to disconnect every once in a while.” In fact as a doctor he often suggested that to his patients after several complaining about that very problem. Not his Shadowrunners though, no, when their parts got removed he wanted it to be a shock. Pulling her ever tighter to his chest, into his lap his hands slid up her body and grabbed her slippery breasts.

Odessa inhaled pleasantly at his warm hands sliding up over her soapy chest, her soft ass resting on his lap. He was comfortable to rest on, and she let her head loll back on his shoulder, her hair dripping water down his back. In her mind she coiled her legs up against her, but her hips were empty and only her abs moved her hips. His erection was quickly growing beneath her and he couldn’t help but groan as her ass rolled against the hard shaft. Odessa felt it and rubbed against him a bit more aggressively, teasing him. If he was here just to check up on her and not give her work, she knew what he would want. She wanted it too.

“Getting rather frisky, aren’t you?” He commented despite his his arousal at her anticipation.

“Isn’t that what you wanted?” she asked.

“It is now,” he grinned.

She let go of his shoulder and twisted to try to reach for a surface that wasn't slippery so she could turn herself around to face him, but struggled to do so. Seeing what she was trying to do, Dr. Tipton lifted her up and turned her towards him with ease. With no legs it was a much easier task that it would have been otherwise.

Odessa huffed slightly at being picked up and manipulated like a doll or some other toy in his arms, but it was easier that way.  She lay against his chest with her breasts pressed comfortably on his warm skin. "Are we going to live together? I've never... done any of this before." Let alone with a super villain. Though she suspected he wouldn’t like to be called that. She had been machinating for the last week, trying to decide where to push what little power she had, not realizing just how much power she had over him.

"Well, this place is much too small to fit all my medical equipment." There was a touch of disgust in his voice. "But if you want to leave it behind and live with me I wouldn't be opposed to that." 

There was nothing he wanted more than to see her every day and have her whenever he wanted. Waiting between appointments was torture, had always been torture. "Though, you'll need to make yourself scarce when clients arrive." 

"Wait," she paused and processed what he'd said. "You live in that office? With the black lights? Where do you sleep?"

Odessa shook her head a few moments later and didn’t wait for his answer. "That doesn't work for me. Too dark. Penelope would be fine but it would kill my eyes."

She flexed her abs to reposition her hips, trying not to drive the hard edges of her sockets into the doctor’s skin uncomfortably.

Leaning in to look at her eyes he brought a thumb under one and pulled down the skin to examine the eye as a doctor would. "I could give you new eyes that would adjust to the dark if you'd like. It would be like living in a perfectly lit room." In his mind, there was nothing that couldn't be fixed with cybernetics.

She pulled her head back and shook it in a panic. "No. Please. Don't. I want as much of my humanity as I have left. Please, no more changes."

Odessa looked him in the eyes and her worry was clear. She put a few things together then. "Is that why you don't wear your glasses anymore?"

"I only needed them for one eye." Pointing he indicated his right eye, nearly indistinguishable from his other, merely a bit darker in shade, a bit less natural of a color. It was a fake.

She examined it, impressed. Now the difference was noticeable, though hard to pin down. She shifted as best she could to trace her fingers over the scars on his arms and torso. "And… did you do these? What are they?"

"Ah!" Excitement poured over his face. This was his crowning achievement and he had always wanted to share that with someone. "I’ve been dying to tell someone. I've been replacing my ligaments with the very same material my cables are made of, spider silk. It's not only lighter than actual muscle it's also much stronger."

She looked shocked. How was that possible? But she wouldn't bother trying to question it or understand his mad science. He was a genius. She couldn't deny that. Instead she looked again at the scars, and how some were very old while others were much newer. "Were you Nite Crawler when I was a kid?"

"Why do you want to know? Did you have fantasies of being tangled in some mad doctor's web even back then?" Deflection. He knew exactly what he was doing in avoiding answering her question.

~
As a young Odessa blew out her candles, surrounded by the other orphans there was a shadow lurking high above the building, but his eyes could count all thirteen candles. She looked so happy, so content. Nite Crawler hoped that one day he could be the cause of that happiness, perhaps the only cause. "Happy Birthday, Odessa." The doctor whispered beneath his mask.
~

She blushed yet harder. "You were always my hero back then," she explained, thinking of her affection for him. She had been young enough that it had started platonic and mostly stayed that way. "I may have had a few odd dreams here and there when I was dealing with puberty."

"I can imagine what they might have been like." Just hearing that she dreamed of him was enough to cause his member to swell and throb, it was a thing of his fantasies. "Perhaps you had a dream of me washing you when you were having trouble doing it with just the one arm." 

He pulled a loofah up from the soapy water he began to run it over her skin. She shuddered at his touch and realized his excitement. How long had he been this interested in her?

"You liked me as a kid too, didn’t you?" she asked hesitantly. That was creepy. But as far as she knew he had never wronged her when she was young. She had always trusted him and never had any troubles. "How much do you want to know what my dream was about?"

"Tell me everything." His cock throbbed beneath her in anticipation.

His interest, obsession, love was her power and her opportunity. Being close to him would give more chances to control him, and while it seemed distasteful to use a man’s feelings against him, it wasn’t half as bad as the things she’d done that he’d told her to do.

She leaned in, feeling his eagerness. "How badly do you want to know?" she asked him, teasing. She slid down his torso so that his erection was pressing gently against her vulva.

She wiggled her ass to try to rub herself against his cock. "The dream was set in your office," she told him. "And you were going to swap out my lung, so I had no shirt."

He couldn't help but reach his hand up and place it atop the sealed plate on her chest, cupping her breast as he did. She took in a ragged breath of pleasure and surprise. Today she was more developed than she had been for the dream, but it was functionally close enough. "You played with my breasts while I sat on your work table. Then you played with my clit and I loved it... I woke up wet. But that's not the best part."

"Oh?" Raising his eyebrows he smiled as his eyes moved up from her breast to her eyes, "What's the best part then?"

She squirmed and pulled herself up to eye level, and lean leaned in and pecked him once, quickly on the lips, claiming it for herself and taking initiative. "You kissed me."

Sliding his hand upward, his fingers brushed past her neck and moved to the back of her head. Without any more warning, he pressed his lips to hers, giving her a real kiss. His lips caressed hers and his tongue began to invade her mouth.

She wrapped her arm around his neck and kissed back, nipping occasionally at his tongue or lip, daring him to chase her own tongue or bite her back.

Never breaking the kiss, he slipped a hand beneath her legless ass and lifted her up ever so slightly then slid her down onto his cock.

It surprised her that she had become so wet without noticing it merely because of his presence, and though she was a tight fit, she slid down onto his cock easily enough. Odessa moaned into the kiss, her lips vibrating his while he stretched her out.

He lifted her up again and dropped her on himself once more, letting gravity do most of the work. Once she met his base, he groped at her ass, without her legs it was much easier to grab a handful of the squishy flesh. Her fingernails dug into his body. Her ghost legs wanted to move hard and push her back up off of his cock, but with her legs on the other side of the bathroom, she was at his mercy to decide when to thrust, when he would be inside or outside of her. Her round ass was his to grab. He couldn't help but notice the tiny twitch from where her legs should be. So, finally pulling his lips from hers, he took her ass in both hands and began lifting and dropping her at a steady pace.

She panted. This was part of the exchange now. He gave her autonomy. She Ran for him. She killed for her body parts. And they would be lovers, or something like that--some kind of fucked up relationship. Odessa could cope, she could even be happy with it, with being fucked thoroughly by this terrifying madman so long as she could maintain a sense of control in her life. The tantalizing promise of possibly gathering power over him fluttered in the back of her mind.

The woman squeezed around him as hard as she could every time he slid her down like a sleeve around his cock. She wanted him to know she was doing what little she could to please him. A few stifled grunts fell from his lips as he bounced her atop his lap. The water around them sloshed about, nearly spilling over the sides. As she tightened around him he could feel her hips move and tighten as she would to flex the muscles in a leg. She imagined that she was squeezing him with her thighs, looking at his face, thinking that this was probably the most honest his expressions could be while he let out his animal sounds.

"You never answered my question. Were you always Nite Crawler?" she asked him again, more breathless now. "Even when I was a kid?"

'I've been Nite Crawler for a long time." 

Pushing forward, he laid her on her back, letting her float gently in the water with a hand on her back to support her. Now kneeling in the tub he pulled her towards him, her legless stumps slamming against the tops of his thighs.

Odessa reached up to hold his head when he lay her back just in case he let her sink enough for water to get in her nose or mouth. The metal ports at her hips bumped into his upper thighs every time he thrust, and because her ears were submerged, all Odessa heard was the sloshing water and her own moans.

His speed greatly increased, thrusting and pounding her down onto him. She was so easy to manipulate with her missing limbs. If he’d had his mask plugged in he would have been sorely tempted to activate the nodes in her head, but that would be more trouble than it was worth. She didn’t like it and if he pushed his luck he feared he’d lose her in some emotional capacity that would complicate things.

Her hand closed in his thick hair, holding a handful. "C'mon," she groaned when he picked up the pace.

Dr. Tipton’s eyes met hers and he simply nodded as if he was giving her permission to orgasm.

She held his gaze for a moment and took a few shuddering breaths before her eyes shut tightly and her arm clenched, lifting her a few inches out of the water. Odessa came with him inside of her, squeezing his cock while she gasped and groaned.

The sensation of her quivering walls was enough to make him come. Bursting forth within her, even in the warm water she could feel the warm fluids inside her.  Remaining inside her, he slowed his movements to a standstill and waited for her to calm down.

She quivered, tired, and let go of his hair to try to sit up out of the water so she could hear him and talk to him. Odessa looked at him a little bashfully, cheeks and nose red.

“Let's get you into your bed." Grabbing her wrist, he pulled her arm over his shoulder and scooted a hand beneath her legless ass. She squawked at being lifted and handled in such a way, feeling small and clinging to his shoulders tightly. As he stood from the water the doctor carried the girl with ease. He tossed one of her own towels over his shoulder on the way out of the bathroom.

"Careful!" she said reflexively, not because she thought he might drop her so much as because she thought she might fall. One-armed, she had no balance.

"Don't you worry." Stepping carefully from the bath and stepping over his clothes and her limbs he made his way to her bedroom and tossed her on the bed. 

She made another sound of concern at being tossed onto her bed, but once she had landed she realized that she had never had a reason to be worried and she rolled over onto her stomach and crawled to the edge curiously to wait for him. Odessa smiled and used her arm to lift her torso up slightly to look at him with a gentle, tired smile. He seemed much more harmless naked and holding her yellow towel than he ever did with his mask under the black lights.

Kneeling beside the bed, he slipped the towel around her and rolled it over her wet, limbless body. There was a contented silence between them. And once she was dry he dropped the towel and embraced her, getting her wet all over again.

Odessa was surprised, but she returned it immediately--or as much as she could with one arm--holding him tightly. He couldn’t see the look of wondering confusion in her eyes.

There was a sense of longing for her, he held her tight and was afraid to let go. Was this love he felt or was it simply a strong lust? Not wanting to take any chances he spoke up, despite not know if his words were true or not. "Your limbs may belong to me, but my heart belongs to you."

That shocked her even more, but she did her best not to show it. Her heart raced while she tried to think of what to say in response to that. She blinked out a few confused tears and sniffed at his words. "I don't know what to say to that," she said softly. He had handed her the keys to his car, admitted that she could control him now.

His words now tasted bitter in his mouth, like a pill that has lost its coating. "Perhaps it was a mistake to say." He released her and began to pull away from the bed.

"Wait," she lifted herself up on her one arm. "Wait. I just... I was surprised because it was so sweet."

She pushed herself as close to him as she could. "I didn't expect it, since... since before you'd threatened me and stuff." Odessa meant these things.

When he gave no more response she tried to move the conversation onward, back to emotional, intimate things. "Can I uh, can I call you Gregory now?" she asked.

"You can, but you should know that despite our intimate status I'll still take those limbs back if you wrong me." His voice suddenly grew serious.

She sighed, looking at him. "I wouldn't betray you," she assured him. 

He eyed her, and nodded.

She didn't like the sudden wall he was putting up after she had felt so close to him. "I wouldn't do that to someone I cared about, who has done so much for me."

Odessa asked him, "Please, don't leave." Among other things, he had left her limbs in the bathroom and she didn’t want to crawl to get them.

"Don't leave?" He peered around her at the bed, "You want me to stay here?"

She nodded to him. "I’ve never slept in a bed with anyone else before."

"Nor have I." In fact, he had rarely slept in a bed and much preferred the comfort of being strung up by the cables in his office, sleeping in his own web.

He seemed uncertain, even concerned about the bed. "What's wrong?"

"I don't really do this sort of thing, especially with former patients." Even in his fantasies there was never something about sharing a bed with Odessa for anything other than sex. The idea was simply something that had never occurred to him, a man so far removed from a healthy sleep cycle that he hadn’t slept for more than four hours at a time since he had been a student.

"We had sex," she said flatly. "You said we were in a relationship. I don't get it."

She pulled his arm a bit more. "I don't have fleas or anything."

"I never said I wouldn't, I'm just trying to explain my hesitance." And nervousness, he thought.  Did she actually expect him to sleep?

Sitting down beside her, he was taken aback by the firmness of her bed. 

She pulled her way into his lap, a bit awkwardly for lack of three limbs. In the dark it was difficult to make out every detail of his face, but from a certain angle she saw a reflection of light through his false eye's artificial tapetum lucidum, and realized he must have been able to see her clearly

"Lie down," she told him, pushing on his bare shoulder. "Even spiders lie down."

He did, groaning like a child told that he was up past his bedtime. "I'm going to have to be up early for work." 

"That didn't stop you from breaking in," she said more boldly, feeling comfortable in challenging him. In that moment Odessa was powerful, finally, and she didn’t need his limbs to have control of her life. She tried out his name. "Gregory."