Warning: These stories involve two women together. Don't like? Don't read.
Commentary: More flickers! Just two this time, and uber-quick ones at that at fifteen minutes apiece. Thank you, shetan83 and Lakitutankhamun, for the words behind them. =)
As always, I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Disclaimer: I do not own the BSSM franchise. It belongs to the goddess Takeuchi Naoko.
Word One: FINGERS
Haruka limped into the living room, sat down in the middle of the floor, and pulled her left foot gingerly into her lap. She tugged off the sock as carefully as a surgeon might put a knife to a patient, her lips bitten from the inside, her eyes narrowed in abject concentration. The tea kettle ticked in the kitchen—fabric slithered, slid free. The tall woman lowered her head and studiously examined the space beneath the shelf of her toes. She balled the sock up in a fist. She sighed. She tossed it away.
Michiru, who had watched the whole event unfold with great interest from her station on the couch, shuffled her homework over her knees and asked, "What's wrong?"
"I," said her best friend disgustedly, "have a splinter." She wiggled her toes in Michiru's direction. "A huge one."
"How did you manage that?" Michiru queried around the thoughtful tap of her pencil to her lips. The lead in it made low tk-tk noises.
"I have no idea. I think it might have come from the balcony." Haruka drew the aggravated appendage back into her possession. She frowned, picked at it. "It hurts."
"Stop that," Michiru scolded. "You'll get it infected if you mess with it." She dumped her homework gratefully on the neighboring cushion. "I'll go get the tweezers. I'm sick of that anyway."
"Tweezers?" Suspicion crept into Haruka's voice.
"Yes. You know, those little things I keep telling you to use on your eyebrows after you shower." Michiru made pinching motions with her fingertips.
Haruka scowled. "Those little things that hurt like hell, you mean."
"You," Michiru opined, "are a big baby. It doesn't hurt that much. And if you'd pluck like I told you, as often as I told you, it would hurt even less."
Haruka grumbled. Smirking, Michiru disappeared down the hall and returned moments later with the dreaded set of mini-forceps in hand. Kneeling on the floorboards before her partner, she gave the tweezers a businesslike click and said, "Your foot." Her fingers unfurled in the space between them, expectant.
Instead, Haruka took the tweezers from Michiru's grasp and insisted sulkily, "I can do it myself."
Michiru smiled, shrugged, and slipped back to the couch. Snapping her textbook open once more, she dropped her gaze to the formulas therein and professed, "I have complete faith in your skills, Haruka, make no mistake. I was just offering my time. My patience. My touch…"
"Your sharp little nails. Your death-tweezers," Haruka corrected. Providing Michiru a silent raspberry, she turned herself toward the square of sunlight beneath the balcony window and set to work on the splinter. Soft grunts and growls marked her efforts.
Michiru hummed, toneless and occasional. She made a note in her textbook, affixed a colored tab to the edge of the page. Her nails drummed down the linear lines of her algebraic blueprints. She soon flicked her eyes upward. She watched the twitches and tremors of Haruka's shoulders under their ugly maroon blazer, both admiring and amused—she waited. She counted. She lowered her gaze demurely mere milliseconds before Haruka sighed, looked back at partner, and admitted,
"Michiru, I need your fingers."
Michiru allowed herself the smallest smirk of victory. She shoved her homework aside again and eased to her hands and knees beside Haruka, penciled proceedings left behind in a scatter over the couch cushions. "I'm sure you do," she teased. She wrapped her arms about the other woman from behind and tucked her face into the available crop of close-cut locks, heaving a sigh of pleasure. "I don't get to do this often enough," she informed Haruka quietly. "You're so tall…"
"Can't help that," murmured said tall soldier. She laced her hand over both of Michiru's and leaned gingerly back into her partner's curves, unused to the sensation of her person eclipsed by the shadows of another. Michiru's curls trickled down her neck, brushed her cheek. She felt her partner breathing in the low press of breasts to shoulderblades; felt her beating too, a slow snare set to echo through the center of their shared heart. Haruka closed her eyes. She relaxed.
But, "…tweezers," Michiru murmured into her temple. She dropped a hand over Haruka's shoulder, flexed it. Haruka pressed the requested apparatus resignedly into Michiru's anticipant palm.
They shifted. Haruka ended with her foot in Michiru's lap, and the smaller woman guided the limb to a patch of sunlight wherein she had a prime view of the offending splinter. She made an impressed sound low in her throat. "It is a big one."
"Told you."
"Don't worry, I'll get it," Michiru assured her partner. She clicked the tweezers for the second time in so many minutes. She made to lower them.
"Ow!" Haruka complained.
"I haven't touched you yet."
"…oh."
"Big baby," reiterated the violinist. She frowned. "Stop fidgeting or it will hurt. Mm? Yes, there."
She settled the tweezers against Haruka's sole. She pressed her thumb too just beneath their silver-jawed glitter to better access the wound site. Haruka shifted again, anxious—Michiru's thumbnail skittered down the seam of the taller woman's foot. Haruka yelped. Jerked.
Kicked.
"Oof," Michiru opined as Haruka's heel sank into her belly. She canted backward. The tweezers flew from her grasp and she collapsed sideways to roll in startled agony over the floorboards, arms buckled about her middle, mouth a dark ring of surprise.
"Michiru! Shit!" Haruka rocked onto her knees and crawled over to the slumped, wheezing form of her partner. "Are you all right? I'm so sorry, damn it, I didn't mean to—"
"Ticklish?" Michiru grated out painfully, cheek thrust to the floorboards still. "You're ticklish?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I guess I—"
"Did I get the damn splinter?" Michiru interrupted. She worked a shivery elbow beneath herself. Ginger, she eased aright.
"What?" Haruka blinked. "I'm not su—"
"Check."
Cowed, Haruka did. She agreed seconds later, "It's gone."
Michiru nodded. Massaging her belly, she made to stand. "Good," she hissed. "Start running."
Word Two: MAPLE
The daimon flings Uranus into a tree. Normally this would not concern Neptune—after all, she and her partner have the unfortunate habit of encountering the business bits of various and sundry foliage on a regular basis. This time, though, her partner's head hits the trunk of the maple with a dull, scuttering whut. Neptune watches the other woman's stormsquall eyes roll up to the whites. Watches her drop, boneless, down the embankment behind the tree. There is a canal there, and Neptune watches too as Uranus rolls toward it.
They have fed the ducks at that canal before, eaten popsicles in the shade of the willows on its banks. Fury fills Neptune as she remembers her partner's low, lingering laughter and the gleam of crimson cherry-sugar on her lips.
She runs at the monster. She reaches it—digs an elbow into its ribcage. As it shrieks in pain and rage, she drives it down sidelong, using all the strength in her slender body, and slams her free hand into its face. She burns that face away with superheated seawater. The monster screeches, pleas, begs for mercy—while it still has a mouth from which to beg—and Neptune studiously ignores it, her heart hammering, her throat a stranglehold of sheer fear. She flicks her gaze over her shoulder.
Uranus does not reappear above the embankment.
When the beast blusters back into a salt-encrusted carburetor beneath her gloves, Neptune jerks to her feet and rushes for the tree against which her partner was fleetingly crucified. She slams her shoulder carelessly into it. She looks down the embankment at its back—cries out, "Uranus!" She expects—hopes, prays—to see the other soldier staggering back to her, disgustedly picking leaves and fen detritus from her fuku.
But no.
Neptune's stomach clenches. She rushes down the embankment as quickly as her heels afford her progress, following a trail of broken sticks and disturbed sod. She reaches the edge of the canal. Her heart shatters and the blood drains out of her face and her soul screams, screams, screams.
Haruka's body bobs gently in the canal's sunset shadows. Her fuku is gone—facedown, she lists in the slow, seeping tide. Her jogging suit ripples and shimmers and one sleeve of it waves like a come-hither banner, fallen away from the limb it might otherwise hold.
Neptune feels like she is racing through syrup. It takes her centuries to splash into the canal: millennia to get a grip on her partner's slippery form. The water is cold and runs into her gloves and soaks her skirt, and she loops her arms beneath Haruka's. She lifts her, pulls her toward the bank. She struggles, nearly drops her—Haruka is long and heavy and Neptune is so afraid that her hands threaten to fall nerveless. The zipper of the jogging suit bites into her palm.
She manages to drag the taller woman partway from the canal's questing currents. She rolls Haruka over and water floods from the stricken soldier's nostrils in clear rivulets. Neptune grapples with her, shakes her. The sodden blonde head drops back into the bower of her elbow like a basketball, and Neptune is seconds from panic.
"Haruka," she pleads. She gives her partner—her friend, her friend, oh God her friend—another shake. Beads of water in the other woman's lashes gleam like starstudded sequins. "Haruka! HARUKA!"
Her shriek echoes across the empty evening park, accompanied by no more than a lone starling's surprised twitter.
A sodium-arc streetlight overhead blinks to life. It sends electric viridian rills over the surface of the canal. In its effervescence, Neptune sees that Haruka's lips are a kind of filmy, November-sea blue.
Haruka is not breathing.
Neptune drops her. Haruka hits the sand of the bank and her head bounces a little and the collar of the jogging suit rucks up around her chin. "No," Neptune says. And once more, fractured, "No." She lifts her hands away from her partner's still form and presses her fingers to her cheeks, disbelieving, and the starling twitters again and Neptune—
"NO."
—remembers that she has spent countless hours poolside, and seaside, and—
"NO."
—her instructors taught her what to do, and how to do it, because water is her power her presence her prison and it is so dangerous—
"NO."
—and it might have her but it can't have Haruka too, no, no no no no NO—
Neptune clamps her fingers over Haruka's nose and forces open the woman's mouth. She welds her own to it. She breathes: for, into Haruka. Once. Twice. Thrice. And—
The bronze arm free of the jogging suit claws skyward. Haruka's jaw snaps under Neptune's and her spine arcs and their teeth click together. Haruka knees Neptune in the kidney. Haruka chokes. Haruka breathes.
Neptune breaks a little bit. Her fuku melts into her school uniform. Her gloves disappear. She clutches Haruka's head and sobs weakly into her plaster-spire hair and tries to say something, say anything, but Haruka beats her to it and asks, puzzled,
"Michiru?"
Her mouth moves in the hollow of Michiru's throat. She thinks about something. She squints in the glow of the streetlight. She ventures, raspy, "Why am I wet?" She pauses. She surveys—as well as she can—the vice in which she is clasped. She lifts a trembling hand to touch Michiru's cheek. "Oi," she realizes, "what's wrong?"
"Nothing," Michiru replies. It's true. For now, it's true. "Nothing. Nothing—" But she tightens her arms and dissolves anyway into helpless, horrified tears.