thesis defense

Nilou was still seated in his lap when the verdict came in, flushed and honest, hips giving the occasional helpless little roll around the cock she had just finished introducing herself on.

“She did not oversell you,”
she told Candace, bright even wrecked.
“If anything she was conservative. The well-side version was missing the part where my legs stop belonging to me.”

Candace’s mouth twitched. She did not say I told you so. She also did not look away.

Aether kissed the dancer once, lifted her off him with a wet sound that made Dehya snort, and set Nilou into the guardian’s reach like a returned borrowed thing. Then he turned his head.

Collei had been patient the entire time.

Not still — patience on her looked like a held breath. She sat where he had put her, hands knotted in her lap, eyes doing the guilty circuit they always did: his face, his cock, the windowsill, the vial. The unholy little creation waited in exile, stopper back on, smelling faintly sweet even from here. Every time Nilou had bounced, Collei’s gaze had flicked to it as if the glass might volunteer an order on its own.

“Collei.”

She straightened so fast her braid jumped.

“How much is left of your brain since the last time we met,”
Aether said. Not unkind. Not joking.
“Since the Akademiya. you stayed there to train, not to cook your own head into soup.”

Collei’s mouth opened, closed, then committed to the report the way she committed to a bad idea: all at once, too much detail, no sense that any of it should have stayed in the lab.

“I am… functional.”
A glance at the vial.
“Mostly. I feared I would already be empty. You feared that too, I think. It was close. A few times.”

She counted them on her fingers without noticing she was doing it.

“After I close the laboratory I test. Daily. Different dosages. I write them down. I wanted a curve. Resistance. A body that can take the high and still have a person left inside it.”
Her ears went pink.
“Sometimes I used a dildo until I blacked out. Dragged myself off the bench by my elbows. Woke up on the floor with the notes smeared. Sometimes I did not need anything in me. I would lie down in bed and the leftover sensitivity from the afternoon batch would make me useless. Just sheets. Just breathing. I would come until I could not remember why I had stood up.”

Nilou made a small sound of fellow-feeling. Dehya muttered archons. Candace looked at Collei the way she looked at villagers who walked into sandstorms on purpose.

Aether kept his eyes on her.

“And it still was not enough.”

Collei’s face did something raw and young and completely unashamed.

“It was immense,”
she said.
“I will not lie and call it weak. It is like being wrapped in an oversensitive blanket. Everything touches everything. You drown in it. You lose hours.”
She swallowed.
“It is not what I am looking for. With you it was not a blanket. It was… scrambling. Directed. Like someone reaching into the part of me that used to want to be eaten and rewriting it. The mixtures cannot do that. They only make the volume louder. They do not aim.”

Her eyes flicked to the vial again, hungry, hopeful, the dog looking at the thing on the counter.

“Please.”

(https://im.ge/i/QQoKtsf)
(artist: kkoi)
The word came out small and then she forced it into a proper plea, because Collei had never learned to want quietly. “Fuck my brains out one more time. Not as punishment. As a test. I have been building the tolerance so I can show you. A meager three-times multiplier. That is all I am asking for the demonstration. I can stay coherent. I can. Afterward I will still be able to worship your cock. I will not be a wrecked mess who cannot think. That was the whole point of staying behind. To come back able to take you and still say your name.”

Aether looked at the windowsill, then at the girl who had once begged him to kill her with it and now wanted a controlled burn instead.

“Three,” he said.

Collei’s whole body leaned toward the number.

“Three,” she repeated, already halfway to standing.
“Not a hundred. I remember the rule. I remember why you took the last one away. This is only to prove the work. If I start to slip I will tell you. I will not hide a blackout to impress you. That would ruin the data.”

Dehya rubbed her face.

“She talks about getting her skull fucked like it’s a thesis defense.”

“It is,”
Collei said, utterly serious, and looked at Aether with the same devotion Lynette had worn carrying her own sale.
“Please. Let me show you I am not the girl you had to stop from climbing a plant. Let me take the dose, take you, and still be useful when my legs start shaking.”

Aether reached out, hooked two fingers in the front of her collar, and pulled her off the chair until she was standing between his knees, the vial still out of reach, the plea still hanging in the air with Nilou’s agreement and Candace’s silence.

“You get three,”
he said.
“if you go blank, I stop, and the experiment is over. If you can still say my name when i am done with you, i concede.”

Collei nodded so hard her braid hit her shoulder, eyes shining, already wet from waiting through a dancer and a lecture and the smell of her own work on the sill.