He's half groggy when he starts to blink, but he's fully awake by the time he's done. "What'd you do to me? I had a perfectly good blackout going."

"Just a shot from the HAIROFDOG. You'll thank me for it. There's another problem in sector fifteen. Sounds like a the Hair Rid-ians are striking again."

"Let Manservant Neville handle them. Or let everybody go bald." The Middleman stands up and adjusts his jacket, leaving his pants unzipped. "I don't give a rat's ass."

"You'd look terrible bald." Ida reminds him. "Of course, you look terrible with that hair too."

"Girls think bedraggled is sexy."

"Since when do you care what girls think?" Ida holds up her hand. "I know. I know. Since Tyler died."

"You make is sound like we had something going on."

Ida just raises her eyebrow. "You said it, boss, not me."

"You know, if you're going to be insulting, can you be beautiful doing it, so that I at least feel like I deserve it?" He readjusts his jacket then tugs it off, tossing it aside. After a minute, he discards his shirt and tie and stands there in his undershirt. He taps his foot impatiently as Ida sighs and adjusts her programming, her body contorting and condensing until she's a buxom blonde with marginally more brains that tits. "That's better."

"Tyler died and you turned into a pig."

"If you don't quit bringing up Tyler, I'm going to shut you down permanently and drink myself to death." He waits for a beat as if willing her to say something, but Ida's job is to keep The Middleman alive as long as she can. "All right. Better. Go get me a beer."

"I'm sorry, what did you just ask me?" The one advantage of this incarnation is that Ida can be as bitchy as she wants and no one will call her on it.

"Okay. Make it a scotch." He sprawls in one of the chairs, his pants still undone. "In fact, make it a double and make it on the double." He scratches himself and gives her a look. "And come back wearing something skimpier."

"You're an ass."

"Yup. I am what they made me." He watches her go, slapping her ass as she walks by. "Yee-haw."

Alcohol doesn't affect her but he has access to the things that do, which is the only way she can explain why she's sitting on his lap with her skin-tight pants shoved down to her high heels and his fingers inside her. She didn't anticipate foreplay, but she figures that some things are hard to break a good man of, even if everything else in his life has fallen by the wayside, so she's not going to complain, especially when he adds another finger in, his thumb brushing over her clit.

"O2STK. O2STK."

"What the hell?" He murmurs against her breast, the sweater she's wearing shoved up to her neck, close enough to her nose that she's tempted to sneeze.

"Closest thing I've got to God,"

He laughs, and the sound overloads her circuits, because it's the dirtiest thing she's ever heard from him. She feels the first orgasmic contraction, and thanks whoever made her for giving her this, for whatever reason they did. He keeps thrusting his fingers, riding out her orgasm until she's gasping, her breasts heaving like something out of a romance novel. It doesn't take him long after that to shift his cock free and tug her closer, kissing her with booze soaked lips as he guides himself inside her.

She knows his history, even better than he does, because she's got it all in her data banks, so she knows what he's capable of. She also know he's not that man anymore, though it's hard to keep that thought in mind when he's holding her hips tightly, his palms against her thighs, thrusting up into her like he's desperate. He probably is because it's been so long, days and nights and months and years of deprivation that come spiraling to an end as he finds her neck, sucking on the realistic skin composition, thrusting desperately inside her.

Her hands thread through his hair - past regulation length and, despite all her haranguing, insanely sexy - and she pulls his mouth back up to hers, surrendering to a few forbidden fantasies of her own. Her knees dig into the chair and mechanics beyond his imagining drive her to tighten around him, stroke him, take him as deep as he can go. She meets every thrust with one of her own and his head rolls back with a choked sob as he comes.

Ida eases off of him as soon as his hands relax at her sides, readjusting her clothing and regulating her body's processes so she's just as neat and clean as she was before any of this started. She considers switching back to her regular self - so contrived so that no Middleman would be tempted, thanks a lot, guys - but something tells her that, whatever it was he was looking for from that, it wasn't what she gave him.

He stays there for a long moment, his eyes closed and his breathing slowly coming back to normal. "I'm going out."

She nods and moves over to the HEYDAR, plugging herself in. It's an easier way to distance herself from him, and she wants to transform back into herself, but knows that, for whatever reason, her protocol won't allow her to do so without his okay and she know, whatever it is that's eating him alive from the inside, it isn't anything that's going to allow her to be his conscience.