al genina
She took him outside that afternoon, holding his arm and walking him all the way, smiling when he tried to argue: she looked so little and breakable, was all, but she smiled at him and told him she was stronger than she looked, and she turned out to be. It still gave him chills, thinking about her as one of those things, and he tried not to most of the time. It was a nice, sunny day, and he was sort of surprised by how quiet the little clearing in the woods was, with trees shifting and rustling in a circle overhead and paths stretching away with just butterflies passing over them. You'd never know how close the city was, if you didn't know already.
He sat on one of the crumbled-up chunks of stone and watched her clear the weeds out of the gutters and oil the hinges on the huge church doors. He'd never seen the place from the outside before; he'd been passed out on the way in. It was really coming apart. She must be the only one who'd even come here in ages, apart from those two weird kids, but she treated it like a home or something. She had to stand on her toes to reach the top hinge, and the whole time there was this strand of hair that had come loose from behind her ear and was curling onto her cheek, and he couldn't stop looking at it, half-thinking about how if it weren't so damn hard for him to get around he could maybe pull it back into place for her, maybe touch the spot it had touched. Then he tried to look somewhere else, but all that got him was looking at the way her breasts lifted under her big dumpy Realian dress when she raised her arms, and he finally had to give the whole thing up and look at the half-patterns of the ivy hanging between the chunks of stone.
He tried to keep telling himself it was all crap. Worse than that -- pathetic crap. Like checking out a hologram -- well, no, he'd been in the Navy since the second he could, and didn't have a girl back home or a face much worth looking at, and he guessed he'd done worse than check out a hologram. Maybe more like an A.G.W.S., or a U.M.N. terminal. But it wasn't like that at all, and in the end he didn't even need her to tell him that. All she had to do was smile at him, and all of a sudden he didn't understand how anything worked. It was like she took all the answers right out of his hands, made everything less simple. It pissed him off, but it scared him, too, scared him even more than the berserk ones in the first descent had, in a way. At least those you knew what to do with.
The broken-off arch where the cross stood cut out a curl of blue from the sky, stark and flat and too real against all that bright. Thrumming squalls of black birds burst out of the valleys in the roof now and then, and landed up there or flew away, chattering. The sound of their wings made hollow echoes off the stone.
Back inside, his skin kept the warmth from sitting in the sun, and the coolness was a little shocking, like jumping in a lake. The black parts of her dress still felt hot with it where she touched his arm and back to help him walk. She was close, and he could touch that spot on her neck now, he guessed, if he wanted to, but he didn't. Didn't touch it, that was.
"Do you want me to take you back to bed?" she asked, breaking through the stillness. He glanced at her, and then away, almost as fast.
"Nah, I'm fine. Nice to get out for a while."
The roof of the nave was pocked with holes, most of them just peppery little things but a few big enough to see more sky through than just a little gleam. They let in light in dusty beams and dapples on the floor. He lay on his back in one of the pews, stained dark in long rotting lines from the rainwater they must've let in too, wanting his hands folded behind his head but knowing what it'd cost his ribs, and looked up; that way the holes looked like blue stars in the dark rafters. She took the broom from the corner and started sweeping the floor in front of the altar, and he let his eyes half-close and watched her.
"Where's that kid today, anyway?" he finally asked, and she looked up at him with eyebrows raised and a tiny smile. He could never quite help wondering if expressions like that were programmed into her, or if she just put pieces of information and snatches of feeling together on the fly into responses: surprise, pleasure, reproach. ...Put that way it was almost like a human, really.
"Shion? She'd be at the hospital today." She turned back to the space under the steps, but he thought he saw her smile going away before she got all the way there. "Her mother's very ill."
"Yeah? ...And you feel sorry for her, huh?" He decided to try one arm -- the one on the uninjured side -- for a pillow, and it pretty much worked. Hurt a little, but what didn't? "You must pick up a lot of strays."
She neatened dust and splinters into a pile, and started working under his pew. She was smiling again now, at least. "I don't think you're a stray, Luis. And I'm sorry that you're hurt, but I don't feel sorry for you. You're very strong."
He didn't bother answering that, just let out a breath through his teeth and turned his face toward the wood to hide his twisting mouth. "So her mom's at that big U-TIC hospital? They fixing her up there?"
She didn't say anything for a little while. "There's no cure for her condition. Mrs. Uzuki will probably never wake up." Did she look troubled while she was saying that? He could never tell for sure with her. Hell, he couldn't even know if she even felt things like 'troubled,' at least like he would. Maybe it was just the light.
"...Oh. Man, that's rough."
"Yes. Shion's been very brave, though." And just like that, he could see her smile again. He had to admit it was pretty. "She loves those flowers. They're all she talks about most of the time."
He laughed, in spite of himself. "Yeah. I noticed. She's kinda... not right, isn't she?"
Feb shrugged, sweeping the pile from under the pews together with the first one. "She's different. It's not really right or wrong." She glanced up at him, aiming that smile, and he had to look somewhere else. "But I guess I see things differently. Shion's a lot like Cecily and Cathe in some ways; they always got along so well."
"Your -- sisters, right?" She nodded, although this time she didn't look at him. "Where are they? If you don't mind me asking."
"I can't tell you that," she said softly, looking at the floor. He blinked, lost his balance for a second.
"All right. ...Sorry, never mind."
"No, it's not like that." She bit her lip, something that surprised him for no good reason, and as some clouds that had been shifting overhead finally dimmed down the sunlight, he was hit with a sudden uneasy feeling in his stomach: hot and too heavy and dark. Looking at the tiny divets her perfect front teeth had pushed in her perfect lip. "I mean I can't. I'm not allowed."
"So -- what? They're in some kind of top secret project?" She nodded, clutching the broom, and he sighed. "Are they okay?"
She hesitated (debating? processing?) and then shook her head. If she wasn't actually miserable it was the best damn programming he'd ever seen.
"...Crap. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said anything."
"It's all right." She was looking at him again, but he couldn't look back, not even with the clouds making everything shadows. "I guess they've been very brave, too."
He didn't want to push it, didn't honestly think he wanted to know, but -- "Will they hurt you too?"
"I don't know." She said it so calmly the next weird feeling he got was sudden rage, hot and nasty boiling up under his ribs. It made him almost as nervous as the first feeling, and he bit his tongue and scowled at the ceiling. Shit, she was a machine. Nobody should say something like that and sound like they didn't mind either way. "I don't know what's going to happen. They might not have time."
He didn't have anything to say to that.
The clouds passed, and then there was more sun for a while, and shadow again. Something blowing in, he thought. It might rain tonight. That'd be good for the crazy kid's flowers, at least. She worked her way across the front of the church, and he pretended he wasn't watching, the way he always did.
He'd told her some about himself, clumsily, here and there, mostly on the couple of nights she'd stayed here when he'd woken up sweating and groaning and she'd come with a candle and a glass of water, and a nanospray for the pain. He drank the water and sat still for the spray and didn't tell her it'd mostly been more nightmares, and didn't tell her to stay with the light until he went back to sleep, but she had anyway, sitting up by the side of the bed and keeping him out of the dark. So in the jittery shadows he'd tried to ignore her for a while and then ended up talking, about growing up back on Keltia in all those tiny little apartments like endless beehives, his dead brother, joining the Navy like his old man, wanting to see everyplace there was. Finding out that once you'd been in the military for a while everyplace looked pretty much the same. He couldn't remember what all he'd told her, and he always winced later, thinking about some of the crap he'd let come out of his mouth. She must think he was some stupid kid who couldn't even shut up, if she thought anything at all. And in all that time he'd somehow never even thought to ask about her.
He didn't tell her everything, though. He didn't tell her about the first time he'd shot somebody, or what he'd seen in the city in the fucking first descent -- what kept jerking him awake in the night, sick and soaking and sure he was back there, he was back and he'd have to do it all over again -- about the Realians, the one he'd seen stand with its foot on a little kid's chest who'd fallen down, some kid maybe four years old who was running screaming for his mom or something and had tripped and knocked himself out, and this thing that looked like a blond-headed college boy put its foot on his little chest and turned that giant beam cannon it was carrying down at the kid's head, and fired while it was still looking thoughtful and calm, like somebody'd told it an interesting story earlier but it couldn't work out the bit about the priest. Or the female-type one he'd seen sitting cross-legged on top of a police cruiser, the top of its uniform ripped raggedly off at the waist to show bare, pert little breasts splashed with dry blood, pulling on its bicep with its other hand so that it could reach to take huge bites out of its own flesh on the upper arm. It was really getting them, too -- there were little rivulets of blood squirting out around its teeth every time it bit down. He'd been in his A.G.W.S. and couldn't see if it was actually eating what it pulled loose, or just biting it off and spitting it out. And he couldn't watch for very long anyway.
They hadn't shown that shit on the news, you could believe that, and most of the people who'd been there to actually see it were dead now. It might just be him now, playing it back a billion times behind his eyes when he shut them, but he still couldn't tell her. He didn't think he'd ever be able to tell anyone, and especially not her. On the one hand it was hard to connect her with those things, and on the other hand it was a little too easy: she was a U-TIC Realian, they'd made her right here, she'd told him so. Were they going to make her go crazy too? He didn't think so, he was pretty sure she was made for something more important from what that snotty little teenager who looked after her'd been saying, but what if it was actually something worse? What'd happen when he rejoined his regiment, and had to get back to whatever they needed him to do from now on? If he ever even made it that far?
He needed to go back. He probably should have gone already; he was more or less all right, and they could treat what was left better behind his own lines. But more and more what he found himself trying to think of was some way to just leave the whole thing behind. Take her and leave the whole thing behind, more to the point. Save her, maybe, if that wasn't wandering into seriously weird daydream territory. Just grab the girl -- the Realian girl -- get out and never look back.
Like she'd saved him, he guessed. But thinking about that -- and more specifically about what it had left inside him -- always made him feel kind of weird now.
At the end Feb pushed the dust over toward the side door to sweep it outside, keeping the pile neat and together while she moved it. When she was nearly there, he braced his hands on the pew and pushed up to a sitting position -- then actually got up and crossed the front of the nave, working his way along sort of slow but without too much pain, all told. He could walk fine on his own, he'd known that but it still came as sort of a nice surprise; the way she babysat him you'd never know it, he thought, and his mouth twisted up at the side and then twisted back down before it could give him away. He didn't even really know what he wanted to be over there for, to open the door for her or to show her he could move on his own, or just to be where she was, in her space, breathing her air, letting her know he wasn't gone as soon as she turned her back, but all that ended up happening when he got close enough was that his eyes fixed again on that spot on the side of her neck, where her hair curled right under her ear like it had been made just to do that. Hell, for all he knew, maybe it had. Part of the design, drawing people's eyes to how delicate the skin was there. Soft and fine and delicate, and if something in the back of his head was remembering at the same time the pale, regular areolae of the berserk female-type's nipples, under the flecks of blood, he wasn't even going to spare the time to listen. It wasn't all the same, even if it was.
She'd opened the door for herself, anyway, and the dust skirled out in a grey shower over the littered grass, bits of it catching a little on the air and floating away. The light that came in wasn't bright, though; the sun was behind the clouds again, and there was a cool bite in the air that made her frown out the door, clasping both her hands around the broom handle.
"It smells like rain, doesn't it?" she said to him, turning her head halfway back over her shoulder, her eyes staying fixed outside. Of course she'd known he was there.
"Yeah," he said, and found his voice sounded more like a half-assed croak, but it was still around, at least. "Probably be pouring by tonight."
"I hope it isn't hard on the roof," she said, and then he had put his hot, unsteady hand on the side and back of her neck, cupping his palm around the curve where it smoothed into her skull. A surprising amount of it fit in his hand. He pushed it up, under her hair, catching it and drawing it away, pulling that one curl around from the little patch of skin it was maybe designed to highlight, like that hook of blue sky the half-broken arch had picked out underneath its cross like a grave for a cloud. Her hair was smooth and silver, not a real person's hair color, it poured over his hand like a waterfall of grey silk, and he leaned in and groped his other arm around her waist and bent his head to press his mouth against that place behind her ear, that place that was actually, with her hair out of the way, no different from all the rest of her skin.
She just stood still for a minute, and then reached out of his arms to take the iron ring of the side door and pull it shut. She dropped the broom and it fell against the wall, and slid there to a drunken propped angle, while she turned around in the circle of his arms to face him. Her eyes were downcast, not looking at him. He thought she looked sad. He didn't know if she looked anything. He didn't know, didn't know, he didn't know anything.
So he took her chin instead of her hair and lifted it in his hand and he kissed her, and she stood and let herself be kissed, her arms at her sides, not touching him, but when he cracked his eyes open hers were closed and she was as warm and pliant as no stupid doll, no robot ever would be in his grasp. He took her by her waist and pulled her close to him, and she went, her body was small and soft against his, her little breasts on his bare chest and bandages, her narrow hips under his hands. He couldn't even think, she was so small, so soft. Somewhere in him his body was feeding blood and oxygen to flesh that had been inside her before, not even knowing it wasn't its own, and he broke off kissing her and held gasping with his forehead bent down against hers, his hands cupping her head with hair pushed up in their fingers, too big next to her, drowning her.
"Luis," she said, and her voice was a little sigh, like she was mourning him.
He kissed her again, and this time she kissed him -- tilted her head up into his mouth when it came to hers, parted her lips so they fitted together. She put her small, cool hands up on his chest. And then he was gasping, almost groaning, it was embarrassing but there was nothing he could do, and he was pulling her back by her waist, practically falling, to the pews so he could sit and he could pull her down onto him, her wide skirt pooling out around his thighs in a covering drift.
Not thinking. Not about her or him or the first descent or Miltia or U-TIC or his regiment or anything else at all. You couldn't think at times like this. You'd eat yourself alive.
That was crap. There were no times like this.
She touched the side of his neck, really kissing him now, they were really kissing, and he caught her wrist and pulled it away. Didn't seem quite right, too easy to think things about strangling, stronger than she looks -- he wove his fingers into hers instead and that was fine, that was better. He remembered hearing about a case the supreme court was going crazy hassling over, about a Realian who'd had to go through all these arcane channels and proxies to bring up charges that she'd been raped, and how he and a couple of the guys had laughed about that for a while after it was on the news: you think that's bad, now my holosim says she's got a headache... He wanted to feel sick about it now, wanted to wonder if he could have been looking at a crazy woman's bare breasts while she hurt herself, but he couldn't feel anything but her. Not her. Feb. Feb had a small sweet smile and a funny little curl in her hair behind one of her ears. Feb had wanted to save an enemy soldier's life, not for any tactical reason or because she thought it'd make her look good, but just because she'd wanted to. Feb, dammit, not a thing, or if she was a thing, the prettiest thing he'd ever had in his arms. ...No, one way or another, he didn't want to think anymore.
There was thunder now, very dim and very distant, and her mouth was small and soft and wet, lips open for his tongue. He hadn't kissed all that many people and he was pretty sure he was mostly making a slobbery mess of it, but even if so it didn't seem to bother her. She held his hand and held her hand around his shoulder, and when he fumbled his hand, lost, up to cup its palm over her breast, she didn't push it away, just let him, and let him. He lifted it in his hand, rubbed his thumb across it, and she made a little murmured sound he couldn't quite make out, but she didn't stop him, she didn't stop anything. She was always like that.
He didn't have any damn idea how that dress was supposed to work -- he was just taking it on faith that it was supposed to work, hell, and only because all the alternatives were too disturbing -- and it didn't seem like he was going to figure it out now. He put his hand on her knee, where the skirt wasn't, just thin dark hose over her skin, and swallowed, breaking out of the kiss and then back in now and then like a counterpoint to the intermittent thunder. His hands just kept dwarfing all the parts of her he touched, making him feel half-crazy careful, like he was trying to carry around an egg under his arm. He pushed his palm up her thigh, and she shivered. Finding her mouth, her throat, the lobe of her ear with his lips, whenever he thought to move them again, but mostly feeling the heat through slippery fabric under his hand. Until his fingertips just brushed her hip, and even then -- just drunk on the smell of her on every inhale, on what he might be able to get away with. Sick and shaky and sweet. He wondered if they'd be able to feel the rain fall in through the roof when it started.
Slow, he thought, slow, and not (like a real girl), and breathed in deep, and pushed his hand up from her waist, over the elastic band of her hose and onto skin, soft belly and ribs. It was hard going, going at it like this, it was tight inside the closer-fitting upper part and he could only reach so far before the dress's waist caught in the crook of his elbow and held him back, but with her on top of him he could at least reach her breast. His fingers caught too hard on her nipple at first, he could tell from the way she jumped, and he mumbled something that was probably close to an apology into her shoulder as he felt around more carefully. He couldn't see her, and the shape of his hand making a lump under the material was somehow too disturbing, so he just shut his eyes. Leaned on her shoulder like he was tired and going to sleep. He was tired, come to that. He was better but he still wore out easily.
She was so soft, and it was dim and still: just shadows and skin and whispers of breath, the wind picking up outside with the coming dusk and maybe storm. Her breast was smooth and small and perfect as the rest of her, the nipple an invisible little pebble between his too-big clumsy fingers. She moved on his lap, made a tiny wet sound in her throat. He let go of her hand with his other one (trying to pretend not to be holding his breath when he gave it back but she only put it on his other shoulder, one on each) and slipped it instead under her skirt too, moving blind, not thinking about feeling out a corpse under a sheet in the dark or even teeth in skin on a dirty blasted street --
His hand cramped by elastic, buried under fabric, it was an impossible relief to find her wet.
She put her face against his chest, under his chin, and it startled him alert, opening his eyes up to the holes in the roof. Now they were grey, and whatever starriness they'd had before was gone. He worked his fingers in a little twist and she shuddered, and he didn't ask if she was all right, too afraid she'd say no, too afraid she wouldn't say no even if it was what she meant. Maybe she couldn't, even; the thought had honestly never occurred to him before. He shut his eyes again and tried to chase it off. It wasn't like seeing was helping him anyway.
He kept his hand on her breast while he worked the hose down, doing it one-handed, pulling the elastic down over one hip and then fumbling over to the other to make it match, shaking so bad he kept losing his grip and it was all he could do to keep it from snapping back on her. Again just when he'd convinced himself she'd just shut off completely on him she pushed herself up fully on her knees to help, knocking his palm off her breast and back down her belly but making it so he could pull the hose free and down to mid-thigh, and then she'd moved side-saddle across him so he could finish the job, past her feet, pushing her boots off somewhere, he didn't care where, and when she came back she ended up with her thighs wrapped around his waist. She was on him, she was heat pressed against him. It was all he could do to get his dick out, without just coming in his pants first like a pimply little virgin.
He didn't look at her face when he pushed inside her. He didn't dare.
Rising wind. Deepening shadows. Everything the same, just hanging in suspension. He moved in her and she let him; that was all. Once or twice she gasped: little hurt-animal sounds that made him freeze, waiting for it to be safe to even breathe again, his pulse spinning in his head and making him panicky and nuts, making him want everything and nothing all at once. Then she pushed down on him and he could feel her pulse in the clasping wet muscles holding his cock, fluttering like the stupid butterflies out over the path, and he breathed again on a groan, almost a shouted groan, into her shoulder. She was hot and good and wet, warm wetness turning suddenly cool as it dripped down to the fork of his thighs where he'd just barely pushed his clothes out of the way, her bare thighs pulling wrinkles in his pants around the outsides of his legs every time they moved. Her hands still sat light on his shoulders, not squeezing, careful of the bandages. He didn't even have the presence of mind to fight with her dress again for her breast so he just clasped his hands around her back, dug them in, trying not to hurt her but trying to hold her so tight the universe would get the message and everything would just back off, and go away, and they could go safe and free.
So quiet. Yeah, it was gonna rain; the air was electric, frayed out with storm, everything so crypt-still. He opened his eyes once, and saw the empty church, the empty pews, that huge white statue staring out at nothing with cracked marble blank eyes, a sweet, meaninglessly genial smile for the whole world, a mother's smile that said mother still loved you no matter what you'd fucked up. And you just knew she knew everything, too. He shut them again, against all of it. These people were fucking lunatics.
Finally, after some impossible time of mostly stillness, she shuddered into him -- a twitchy sort of arch, sort of, more uneasy distant thoughts of the berserk models floating through the back of his head -- and pulled away one hand to reach behind her, grabbing his hand in hers. She pulled it back around to the front, in her weirdly strong grip, and in the same fierce move pushed it up between her thighs, pushing his fingertips in to find her clit and rub against it, rubbing in a steady circle getting steadily faster, letting a high cracked breath out as she ground into his hand -- burying her mouth against his neck, stiffening, softening and wettening and then tightening inside -- and he had just enough time and enough inexplicable misfires going on in his head to wonder if Realians actually jerked off or if this was something he should maybe be worried about before the pulsing shudder of muscles all along the length of his cock made him yelp and grab her hip with his free hand, pulling her down, pulling her on, pulling him in, just in and in and in and she was Feb and she was the crazy one with her bleeding arm and she was the one who'd been raped and she was the eyeless white statue and she was something he couldn't even imagine or touch, some gleaming endless forever of delicate spiderweb strands, something gorgeous and terrible and glowing in an unfathomable darkness --
And then the wind was blowing outside and he was just breathing, leaning his forehead on her shoulder, his arm around her back so far that his fingers had caught in her hair.
They stayed like that for a while, everything spreading and diffusing, everything coming apart. When she slipped off him and out of his arms he didn't even have the strength to argue, just slid back against the back of the pew and closed his eyes. The dark and the cool were pleasant, and he drifted a little. It felt good just being here. It always had.
She came back a little later, with a wet cloth, neatened up so much he could barely believe anything had ever happened, that he hadn't just imagined the whole thing. She sat next to him, and set to putting him back together, but by then he found he could rouse himself enough to do it on his own, and so she sat back and let him. When he reached out blind for her she caught his hand, and held it, and kissed it, and that was good, but then when he looked up at her she was looking down, and he couldn't see her eyes. He thought again of asking if she was okay, and then again didn't. Just touched her cheek; and when she looked up at him she smiled at him, her same old Feb smile, and that was enough. He hoped that was enough.
He stretched out on the pew next to her, and put his head on her leg, and she put her hand on his hair. It was getting dark by now. They stayed like that and after a while they talked, and kept their voices low, under the eyes of the white woman statue. It was only an hour or so later that the sound of gunfire started coming to them from the city, carried on the wind of a storm.