Chapter Text
Yarnaby tapped the ground four times.
“I don’t have any fours. Go fish,” DogDay told him, then helped push a card off the top of the deck for Yarnaby to drag toward himself with one careful claw. He flipped it over behind the screen of emptied binders DogDay had put together for him. It was a three. A bad draw.
Harley switched cameras to one behind DogDay. He held the rest of the threes.
“Do you recall how long gestation took previously?” Harley asked before DogDay could ask for the last of them.
DogDay set his cards aside and pulled over his dictionary. After looking up the word, he counted on his fingers. “Around two weeks? I didn’t exactly keep track.”
It had been roughly eight days since impregnation had been a confirmed success, so there was time yet to go. DogDay’s abdomen was already distended, even with the looseness of his recycled fabric skin, and he’d unconsciously shifted to more and more activities that allowed him to stay near the ground. “And they weren’t fully developed.”
“I guess. I don’t know what they’re supposed to look like. How does that work for toys?”
“How did you give birth?”
DogDay went silent. Hunched down. A sensitive topic, then. Everything was more sensitive about him, currently. If he wasn’t going to simply explain, then Harley would figure things out on his own.
“Come to my lab.”
“Can I at least finish this game?”
“Fine.”
“Whose turn was it?” DogDay asked Yarnaby.
Before he could answer, Harley said, “It was Yarnaby’s.”
Immediately, Yarnaby tapped the ground three times.
DogDay sighed but handed over his threes. Then his fives, then his kings, as Yarnaby kept going, until he had one card left and no chance of winning. Yarnaby knocked over his binders and slipped on cards as he danced around in victory.
“It wasn’t his turn,” DogDay said as soon as he saw Harley standing beside the examination chair.
“Do you think I care enough about your little games to lie?” he asked flatly. “Unlike you, I don’t have the time to waste with idle entertainment. You should be thankful I didn’t order you to leave immediately.”
“Thank you, sir.” His usual, sullen acquiescence. DogDay climbed into the chair without needing to be prompted.
“I must assume a difficulty forming short-term memories is another symptom of this process.”
Harley tilted the chair back once DogDay was secured by straps. DogDay shivered as he trailed his hand across the mound low in his abdomen.
Now, when Harley unzipped his lower zipper, DogDay immediately went quiet and tense. Everything was hypersensitive, right down to the minute vibrations at his entrance. His thighs trembled, hips twitching with trained eagerness, breath shuddering as DogDay tried to clamp down on any response. As soon as Harley realized just how responsive he could be, he'd begun teaching DogDay how he should react.
Harley had only a passing understanding of pregnancy. It was hardly necessary for his field of research, but he knew the hormonal changes could be catastrophic. When it was a male toy altered like this... Though he wouldn’t admit it, he was glad he hadn’t needed to figure out how to make that work, only reap the benefits.
DogDay shamefully twisted his head to hide as best he could against one fluffy ear as Harley pushed into his passage. Harley had found that compliance increased with stimulation and orgasm. Perhaps he had not been thorough in trying other interrogation methods, but this one was torturous enough to satisfy him without endangering the product. The rush of self-hatred and lingering dismay, once the afterglow faded, was a delightful bonus.
Once DogDay was panting needfully, he stopped fingering him. Pathetically, DogDay continued stimulating himself as much as he could. Harley had made sure he knew it was pointless to fight himself, because Harley was far more patient than DogDay. “Describe the process by which you gave birth,” he repeated.
“I started feeling uncomfortable – tight, overheating, wet. It began to hurt really badly.” When DogDay stopped twitching up against Harley’s still fingers, Harley pushed him toward that shaky edge of climax yet again. DogDay tried to keep talking through it, likely hoping compliance would get it over faster. “CatNap – CatNap drugged me and unzipped me. I don’t really remember – the smoke – they were crawling all inside – CatNap – stop doing that –”
“I highly doubt they were crawling inside of you,” Harley said drolly, as though DogDay wasn’t bucking and writhing desperately. “A side effect of exposure to the Red Smoke. Even those who showed no tendency toward hallucination eventually developed a sensitivity. And you never had any sort of resistance.” Which had made him a particularly poor choice as CatNap’s leash, but nobody had listened to Harley, and they got what they deserved.
“Stop –”
The word was weak, powerless and easy to ignore. “Continue describing it.”
“I don’t like – don’t –” DogDay’s own panting kept interrupting his words. Harley worked another finger inside, thrusting at a shallow angle. DogDay whined.
“Continue.”
Something popped. Before he could identify it, DogDay’s paw was on his screen, shoving him away. Harley stumbled and fell over his own cord.
DogDay instantly turned to freeing his other hand, fumbling at the strap with his cartoonishly thick fingers. Harley dragged himself upright, did a quick check to ensure nothing was damaged or unplugged, then backhanded DogDay. He growled, but stopped trying to escape.
“Down,” he commanded sharply. DogDay pressed himself closer to the chair. Harley yanked off the ruined strap, found the weak point that had snapped had been the buckle, not the welded loop on the table, and grabbed three from a box of spare supplies. Two on one arm, a second added to the other. No groveling or apologies, like DogDay knew they wouldn’t work. Harley disliked this constant conflict of how he expected DogDay to react and his actual response, which was generally far less satisfying to witness. But no matter, DogDay wouldn’t catch him off-guard again.
He shoved his fingers back into him. The roughness of his actions made DogDay jerk.
“I don’t know anything else!”
“I do recall there being an internal zipper,” Harley said as he dragged DogDay back toward that shaky unraveling, ignoring his continued protests. “When you begin to feel cramping and pain, I imagine I’ll just unzip you and scoop out whatever you’ve produced.”
Harley reached for the rolling tray and let his fingers dance over a sundry of surgical tools. He clicked on the cautery unit and picked up the pen. The filament on the tip almost immediately began to glow white-hot. He didn’t need to explain why this was happening. Bad dogs knew when they’d been bad, and toy dogs didn’t have the goldfish memory of a real dog to not recall what they’d done.
DogDay groaned and twisted futilely away from the tip, but there was nowhere to go. Harley waited until he orgasmed, trembling and jerking spasmodically against his fingers, then jammed it into DogDay’s thigh. He had to imagine the smell of meat cooking, of synthetic fur producing acrid smoke as it shriveled and melted. Harley dragged it down his leg, watching the narrow path of destruction with an almost hypnotic focus. DogDay howled.
Harley pulled the cautery pen away and removed his fingers. They glistened with mucus-thick fluid.
“What’s wrong with you!”
“Lick,” he ordered, holding his hand to DogDay’s face. The fur was damp around his eye socket, wicking away the tears before Harley could truly appreciate them. His tongue lapped at Harley’s fingers. The response time was faster now, though he doubted DogDay realized how well he was being trained. “What do you think would happen, if I returned you to 1006 when I was done?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Will you let him use you for his breeding project? Could you even tolerate 1188 fucking you, now? Or will you just think of me?”
“What?” DogDay asked pathetically, ears downturned.
“You were only successfully bred once. He’ll demand more of you. You have toys to feed, after all. So will you submit?”
DogDay produced only faint static, confused by the quesion. Harley let him stew and turned his attention to the mess of his leg. More delicately now, he dragged the cautery pen along his thigh. DogDay’s muscles twitched. His pain tolerance was far better when it wasn’t jammed deep into the meat of his thigh. “I – I’ll tell him I don’t want to.”
“Like you told him you wanted to?”
“It was necessary for the others –”
“So can you tell him no, or must you submit to 1006’s whims out of necessity? Much as you allegedly don’t need to eat, yet have to provide food for the others. Both can’t be true.”
Harley stepped back and studied his work. On the off chance DogDay escaped, now it was clear who owned him, and who he should be returned to. Property of Dr. Sawyer, burned into his leg.
“Why do you hate me so much?”
Harley turned off the pen and set it aside. “Don’t flatter yourself. I hate all of you toys. You’re disobedient, unruly, sophomoric –” He paused. “I suppose you do embodiment of all those traits. So yes, I do hate you in particular, because I have the misfortune of actually getting to know you.”
He sprayed alcohol on the wounds but made no further effort to ensure their cleanliness. “Though given your current state, I suspect nobody else would even want you.”
DogDay didn’t ask for clarification. He was breathing carefully again, leg trembling with pain. Not listening. Harley had given him a lot of very obvious facts to mull over.
Harley opened him up, which got his attention locked back onto him. “What –”
“We’re doing a full examination.”
DogDay whined. The artificial womb was swollen like it was riddled with cancer. It indeed did have a zipper, shiny stainless steel smeared with poppy gel, likely to account for the lack of muscle to truly birth a newborn. Under more careful scrutiny, Harley could observe it pulsating with life. How much or what form that life took, he couldn’t begin to guess with the resources on hand. In a week or so, he’d have his answer.
He took some measurements of DogDay’s canal, inside and out, measured the growth of his womb, then zipped him back up. Nothing weird or lingering. He even released him from the chair. DogDay sat there, gawking uselessly, waiting for something worse to happen.
“Well, get out of here,” Harley prompted. That got him moving.
DogDay collapsed, mutilated leg giving out as soon as any weight was put on it. He twisted to look at the damage, studied it silently, then growled.
Harley knocked him upside the head, and the growl cut off abruptly. “Be grateful someone wants you.”
DogDay pulled himself unsteadily to his feet and snatched up a roll of bandages before limping angrily out the door.
Yarnaby delivered DogDay to Harley’s door several days later. He was curled up into a ball and bleeding from various claw and teeth marks on his lower back and legs.
“How did that work for you?” Harley asked when he opened the door and DogDay just lay there, an impediment as usual. Harley made sure to step on him when he exited the room to reward Yarnaby with pets. DogDay groaned. It was his own fault for blocking the doorway like that.
“I want to go home.”
“Despite your general idiocy, I know you can read. Did you miss the signage indicating you attempted to escape through the trash chute? That will just drop you down into the trash pit, where the toys that managed to be more disappointing than even you would rip you apart. You should thank Yarnaby for his quick action that saved your ungrateful life.”
DogDay pushed himself up. His stomach was disgustingly distended. As it had swollen, DogDay’s behavior had become more erratic. Fighting with Yarnaby, refusing to cooperate, breaking things Harley made him then fix at threat of pain. Blood draws had shown sharp hormonal fluctuations, proving that toys were little more than base animals at the mercy of their own chemicals. He didn’t make eye contact with Yarnaby when he muttered something approaching gratitude. Yarnaby petted him indulgently, if clumsily, with one gigantic paw, like how Harley rewarded him for good behavior.
“I’ve been working on several projects to make enduring your existence easier and reincorporating organic matter into my form,” Harley continued like DogDay hadn’t nearly escaped. If not for Yarnaby literally clawing him from the chute while he screamed and kicked and generally made a horrible fuss, Harley would have wasted a lot of time he didn’t have on this little experiment.
DogDay didn’t prompt him to explain further, despite that he was the recipient of all Harley’s work. This was the first stage in Harley getting his body back, and he didn’t even have the courtesy of feigning interest!
“Well, come along.” Harley gestured for DogDay to follow him. Yarnaby immediately popped up. “No, Yarnaby, not you.”
Sadly, Yarnaby settled. DogDay used him as support to push himself to his feet.
While DogDay followed as slowly as he could get away with, Harley explained his plans. Cultivating living tissue, steeped in poppy gel, growth catalyzed by electrical currents. Nerves, muscle, vessels… The resources that went into such a small creation were intensive at this stage. If Harley could reverse engineer the incubator the Prototype had created within DogDay, his work would progress so much faster.
It was all wired up, the last step was slotting it into place and locking in the connection points. Given that it would be attached to Harley, he needed DogDay to perform those final steps so he could monitor from his body.
He presented his work, suspended in a tube feeding it the necessary ingredients to maintain its current state.
DogDay was less than impressed. “It’s a penis.”
Harley reached up and hit him upside the head. “Don’t be so reductive. It’s a multifunctional extension. If it works, it should cover the senses I am lacking. And, once the trial run is proven successful, I’ll begin work on a frame to support more specialized tissue in far greater quantity.” His head tilted toward DogDay’s stomach.
“So it’s a prototype.” DogDay laughed, until Harley hit him again.
“Surely that’s sacrilegious?”
“I didn’t bring my dictionary.”
Harley waved his hand dismissively and climbed onto his stage. “I’ll monitor from here as you install it. If you intentionally do it incorrectly or damage the extension, your punishment will be severe.”
DogDay stood very still as he weighed the pros and cons of damaging it and accepting his punishment. Harley could practically see the gears turning. Instead of rebelling, he obediently drained the tube and removed the extension, then knelt before Harley as though in penitence.
He placed one hand atop DogDay’s head. DogDay’s movements slowed as he looked up at Harley. He really was ugly and offensive to look at, absurd and exaggerated, like a badly designed costume not a toy. There were far better designs to mimic the characters he was inspired by, but they’d had the original DogDay’s skin already available, and it would be pointless to change the design at that stage and break the coherency of the group.
DogDay connected one of the ports and Harley groaned as it locked into place. “Keep going.”
Another port connected. His fingers tightened around the base of one of DogDay’s ears. Cold air. The occasional, teasingly light brush of fur. The third port connected. Vanilla, lubricant, and heated plastic perfumed the air.
DogDay yelped as Harley yanked his ear, urging him forward. Briefly, he fought back, before accepting his fate and taking Harley’s dick into his mouth.
He gagged when it flexed, tangling with his wet, warm tongue.
“I told you you were being reductive,” Harley sighed. The nerves were sending signals perfectly. He relaxed his stranglehold on DogDay’s ear and petted it as DogDay acclimated and began to suck and lick with a practiced familiarity. DogDay tasted like vanilla, too, and mixed with some deeper, organic flavor. “Oh, I am a genius.”
DogDay spoke but Harley didn’t hear and it wasn’t important anyway. The vibrations of his words were like electric zings along his wires.
An alert popped up on one of his external monitors that his system was overheating. Harley ignored that, too.
He didn’t need to breathe, but his speakers crackled with simulated gasping from a body long lost. DogDay’s wet whimpers sent delightful new shocks all along his circuitry. Harley gripped him tight again with both hands when he tried to pull away again. DogDay’s paws curled uselessly against the metalwork of Harley’s thighs, everything immovable and heavy when locked into his stage.
“Stay – “ He ordered sharply, length undulating in DogDay’s esophagus as he choked on it. “Suck – Good boy – Very good -"
The world plunged into endless, insensate darkness.