When anyone asks Al, he denies sensation. He can't feel in this metal body of his, he says. Hearing is tinny, vision is awkward, he has no taste or smell at all. So he says. And it's true enough.

He wants to feel like flesh again, wants to put his hand on his arm and feel it warm, lightly fuzzed, wants to feel it dimple against his fingers. He wants to reach out, wrap his arms around his brother, hold close the only kin he has left. He wants to own what is his, his own body.

He doesn't.

It's true enough to say he doesn't feel, even as he does feel, but what he feels is nonsense. It doesn't make sense, it has nothing to do with sense.

He will be walking beside his brother, carrying a bag, and feel hands reach around him, touching him with sticky fingers. They cover his mouth, gaggingly, sweet-flavoured, children's hands that've had too many candies. They cover his eyes and for a moment he stumbles, blind.

"Al? You okay?"

"Umm," he says, and nods. "It must have been a rock on the road, Brother."

They wrap around his torso, stroke teasingly over nipples he doesn't have anymore, start an ache up in a groin he lacks. They're ropes around his belly, holding his innards in, hot and aching, and he writhes within their touch.

He lies awake at night sometimes, not fitting in a bed, unable to feel the blankets under him, and hangs in the air by ropes that are arms, by hands that stick to him and pull him left and right, up and down, that shift all over him. He stares at the ceiling and suffers orgasms he's never had, has little fingernails draw nonexistant blood from a nonexistant chest, has nothing fingers dig in nothing wounds in a nothing place where nothing exists and nothing really matters.

He writhes, and there's nothing there to let him do so.

"I want to feel again," he tells his brother, who rolls over in the other bed, watches him with sympathy.

It is better to claim that he does not feel these things, to deny all sensation. They don't make sense, they don't make sense, and so it is better not to feel them at all.

He thinks he might be going mad.