Perversity was a thing of the philosophical classes, an aberration of desire brought on by the lax morals of those who had been overeducated, those who had not been privy to conscription and the authority of the armed forces. It was a thing of weakness, a sin, a lewd expression of the body's inherent corruption.
The correct procedure when engaging in intercourse, the natural order by which children were conceived was a matter of enforced policy; sex without consumption was abhorrent, antithetical to the propagation of the species, the continuation of society – and yet here she was, her palms sweating, a fierce streak of jealousy running through her every time she saw this other woman, this scientist, one of the professor's assistants and her interactions with the political prisoner they kept on hand here.
At first she told herself that this was due to envy, that she was simply envious of a path not taken, an opportunity denied to her, but it was more than that, it was something physical, something desirous—something she had been told to guard herself all her life.
Oh, there had been rumours before, of course. Women did not join the Republican Security Forces, not unless there was something unsavoury about their personalities, or that they were, in some way, incapable of rearing families; to join the RSF and to be a woman was to admit to a sort of tolerated homosexuality—and here, at the end of the world, with the fracking of the Earth's core now having unleashed some hideous, primal gas, what concern was there in worrying about the politic and dogma of the establishment?
From across the room, she watched the other woman with intent, blonde hair scraped back into a high bun, her simple white uniform and vinyl boots, and beneath her own uniform, Section Leader Elizabeth Shaw felt the sweat dripping down the length of her back, pooling beneath her arms, staining the dark wool of her uniform with wet patches.
She smiled and quickly turned away, hoping that her amusement was not noted considering the awfulness of the situation; there was a joke to be made there, a comment about being wet, and, at any other point, such would have pushed such thoughts down, suffocated them inside of her. Yet what was the point now, what was the point in anything?
Sweat ran down her face, the roar of explosions in the background, the Brigade Leader pacing frantically, pompous to the last, and she watched how Doctor Petra Williams worked the controls, her nimble fingers pulling at the wiring, and all she could think of was the grand work that those fingers might have done under other circumstance.
She turned the thought over in her mind, imagined the feel of the other woman's nimble fingers inside her, the taste of their sweat intermingled in the heat of the burning world, and she yearned for this, she yearned for another life, for another world… and she knew that, instead, all that awaited was the furnace of the inferno.