Warning: This story involves two women together. If you’re not fond of such things, don’t read anything else. Thank you!

Disclaimer: I do not own the BSSM franchise. It belongs to the goddess Takeuchi Naoko.

Morning

She woke and felt the sun on her face. Eyes closed, she groped with one hand for the curtain pull and found flesh that was not her own instead. The memories of the previous evening slipped back into her consciousness like notes of a fair melody, and Michiru turned them over in her own private thoughts and smiled.

She could soon stand the press of light on her cheeks no longer. Stretching, she sat up and kept the world at bay a few moments more by hiding behind her eyelids, safe in the cool cavern of her personal construction. When Haruka’s arm fell into her lap and the other woman moaned her protest, the fairer soldier opened her eyes, watching her in faint anxiety. Ensnared by a slumber made deep by what Michiru assumed was little sleep and nightly play, however, Haruka settled and fell quiet, her wild forelocks thrust over her eyes, the bare expanse of her spine burnished and brilliant in the shuttered spots of light flecked through the blinds. Releasing a soft breath that sang desire and admiration, Michiru traced what she could see with careful fingers.

It was hard to look at something so beautiful all at once and realize it belonged to her, so Michiru averted her eyes from her lover at first. She turned her head and examined the room instead. She had seen it once or twice before, a quick, cursory glance while Haruka had gathered wallet and watch. Now she took her time and let her eyes fall in languorous curiosity over the small clock on the bedside table, the little digital teeth of its numbers glowing blue. She flicked her gaze up along the wall, where nothing hung but a sketch Michiru had done some weeks ago of clam and conch shells on the beach. The closet was open, and the woman squinted, biting her lip in surprise. Was that a dress in there? It was! Bright yellow, with a sash—she had never seen Haruka wear it and thought, mouth curving upward in amusement and quiet knowing, that she probably never would get that particular opportunity.

She found the bureau next and blushed upon discovering her bra hanging from one of its polished knobs. Cupping the sheets to the breasts said bra normally kept cloistered, Michiru edged down along the ridge of the futon and, when she was close enough, leaned over to unhook her garment from its brazen perch. Lifting it to her face with one hand, the other still hoisting the sheets upright, she sniffed it. It smelled like blood, like dark things, and she tossed it away immediately, shivering.

To prevent her mind from tracking backward to the previous day’s battle, the fair soldier studied the bookcase next to the bureau. It had a weathered look about it, the corners stubbed and scratched, one shelf bowing in the center. The books that lined it appeared similarly dog-eared and faded; most of them, Michiru was not surprised to note, were automotive manuals. She brushed a fingertip over the heavily creased spines and read their titles, some of which were in English. Others said things she could not read, and that startled her. She struggled through a few in Italian before giving up, and wondered if Haruka spoke the languages of her books or just collected them for the sake of a hidden packrat’s heart.

There were other things on the shelves too. Some made no real sense to Michiru, who had only a vague idea about the workings—inner or outer—of cars and other automobiles. She knew she was looking at models, though she had trouble envisioning Haruka with the patience to painstakingly paint the tiny replicas of the machines she so often coaxed to victory on international speedways. There was a trophy, small and silver and covered in a fine sheen of dust, that said something in Italian Michiru could not read. Shells dotted otherwise empty spaces between books and icons, and the pale woman reached out a finger to touch one gingerly. They had found it together, a broken oyster’s home that curved and pinched at the end like a fox hunter’s horn. Though it was barely large enough to cover her ear, Haruka had pressed it there and said to Michiru, “I can hear the waves in it.”

Unbeknownst to Michiru, Haruka had apparently liked the shell enough to bring it home. It was polished to a high mirror shine on the shelf—unlike the trophy, it sported no overcoat of dust. The subdued, muddy, and mottled rainbows of the shell’s interior winked up at her, a mesh of pyrite-shale shimmer, and she smiled again because she remembered what Haruka had said next, her thumb brushing the sand away: “It reminds me of you.” And here it was, protected and safe in the taller soldier’s bedroom, lovingly tended: just like the real thing.

Michiru thought she was ready. Drawing in a breath, she turned her head back down and sideways and looked at Haruka, who was still sleeping. The other woman’s lips fell apart a little, though she didn’t snore. A smear of angry violet over one eyebrow suggested a vicious right hook, and the tiny staple-shaped stipple just beneath it confirmed all suspicions. Before she could stop herself, Michiru took her hand away from the shell on the shelf and rubbed it against her lover’s brow, just above the bruise. She studied it thoughtfully and with a bit of resignation in her marine gaze.

They were both fast healers and always had been, even in childhood. Michiru had fallen off a slide at a park at age six and broken her elbow—a week later, it had been good as new, offering up only the smallest of twinges when she swung a tennis racket. Her father had blamed his rusty English on misunderstanding the doctor’s diagnosis—“It was just sprained,” he insisted later—but Michiru knew better. Even now, creeping toward real adulthood, she remembered the sickening crackling sound the joint had made hitting the edge of the sandbox. She remembered how the arm had swung at her side like a snapped tree branch: how it had been hanging the wrong way, the fingers trembling twigs, turning her whole side into one huge screaming knot of pain.

A week later, following miserable summer nights of itching and clawing at a cast, she had played a double with a friend and won.

Haruka had mentioned similar events during her own tumultuous and detached upbringing: broken bones mending at a superhuman rate, cuts and bruises disappearing from flesh like blotches of invisible ink. The fact and the proof together left Michiru with a sour taste in her mouth and an unwelcome clench in her stomach, deep down low where it really mattered. They had been made for battle from the start, warriors from birth—there was no denying it.

Haruka’s wounds from the previous day would be gone by sundown, Michiru estimated. Still, that didn’t leave them the option of going to school, where such marks would be noticed, documented, and questioned. Mugen’s administrative officials might even seek to contact Haruka’s parents—or Michiru’s, since the pair was inseparable both off the campus and within its carefully manicured borders. The fairer soldier’s elder family were off somewhere in Europe, enjoying their money and the sights it brought them; Michiru assumed Haruka’s possessed a similar agenda, given that the woman rarely spoke of them but had, on occasion, used an international calling card to exchange a few quick minutes of conversation.

The other woman’s hair flowed in silken ribbons through her fingers, short and fine save for behind the ears, where it was long enough to reach the nape of Haruka’s neck if Michiru pulled it a little. A hint of wickedness in her smile, she set to work on braiding what she could pull up, and soon a short stiff wick, finely woven, fell down a centimeter or so along the sleeping soldier’s throat. Its end puffed out like a candle’s flame, stubborn and angry somehow, and Michiru giggled. The sound bounced off the walls of the quiet room and she instantly slapped both hands over her mouth, watching Haruka with wide eyes.

When she refused again to stir, the paler woman rolled her eyes and determined that she, at least, was going to get up now. She rose, popped both knees, stretched, and looked ruefully down at a series of stippling dents that throbbed near her ribs. Bitemarks—but pleasantly gotten ones, at least. Leaning down, she rearranged the blankets over Haruka. Because she felt a small thread of wickedness wind off its spool in the dark corners of her heart, she brushed a thumb over the peak of her partner’s breast. It was an arrogant little tweak made over the rasp of the sheets, and Haruka groaned and kicked out one long leg in what might have been drowsy protest. Giggling and breathless and just a little bit wild, Michiru fled the bedside.

She stole into the bathroom soundlessly. After peering at the dials in the shower, she turned them, got the right temperature, and stepped into the stall with the smallest of shivers. She had just taken one the night before, but it had not been a thorough thing—and besides, she thought smugly, there had been sweat and heat over flesh in the night, and she could use another soaping.

She reached for the ivory bar and, when her fingers found it queerly shaped, took a closer look at it. Scuds of willing suds were already making crescents under her fingernails, and she had to press a thumb down hard to keep the naughty little thing from shooting out of her grip like a foamy missile. Rivets had been cut into the sides of the soap bar, though, by what looked like small pipes, and it took Michiru a moment to understand that someone before her had grabbed the waxy oval and squeezed it. Squeezed it hard enough to make it change shape.

“Haruka,” she sighed. The word echoed over the porcelain, soft and fond and faintly scolding. She tucked the bar of soap, however deformed, into a washcloth and rubbed it under the fingermarks melted away. Not even a twinge of guilt occurred to her when she used both the cloth and a coin-sized dollop of Haruka’s shampoo, ensconced in a purple bottle, to scrub herself free of the night’s last remnants. Her fingers skipped over the bitemarks. They were tender.

Once finished and standing, aglisten, in the midst of the silent stall once the water was off, she squeezed the excess water from her cascading fall of aquamarine hair. She had to snatch at a towel on a bar across the small room—Haruka could probably reach it with one careless swipe, but it took Michiru two or three calculated grabs before she seized fabric. She dabbed herself dry, wound the towel around her hair, and went shivering and naked back into the bedroom.

With a guarded glance back at her partner—still sleeping—Michiru pawed through the woman’s open closet, came to a light blue button-up shirt, and took it carefully from its hanger. She pulled it on over her head without having to unhook even the first button. It bunched and pulled faintly at her breasts but swallowed her the rest of the way down, and she eyed herself in the mirror that was tacked to the back of the closet door.

She looked like she belonged to someone else, and she liked it.

Tightening the towel-twirl on her head with an expert tug, she left the bedroom and Haruka and went down the hall to the apartment’s kitchen. There was a stacked refrigerator, a two-burner stove, a hotplate (perhaps to make up for the lack of other burners), a microwave that possessed a crooked handle, and a coffeepot. Michiru approached the first, took out of an eight-pocket carton of eggs she found on the first shelf, and then examined the last with a mouth that twisted at the corner. She was not fond of the taste of coffee, but liked the smell—and she was certain, for a reason she could not explain, that Haruka would want it. Executing a bit of guesswork, she rifled through the kitchen’s helter-skelter lower cabinets until she found a skillet, and therein she cracked open four of the carton’s eight eggs. Only when the membranous clear film around the yolks of the impending breakfast had begun to crisp white did she shift her attention to the cabinets surrounding the coffee pot.

Soon she had coffee brewing too, the thick, heavy aroma wafting through the kitchen and permeating the rest of the apartment’s rooms. A faint clank from the door signaled the arrival of the paper, but Michiru made no move to retrieve it. Sometimes The Asahi Shinbun had stories that reported witness sightings of strange occurrences in local parks and public places: young women that lit up from the inside and wore short skirts, and went after lumbering monsters with oozing orifices and snapping, gnashing teeth. Sometimes, oh horrors, these stories made the front page. There were never pictures with them, or at least not yet, but Michiru knew that someday, a photographer might grow a pair of iron testicles and get close enough to score a candid shot. Her henshin stick provided a vague disguise, but not one that couldn’t be broken with a digital camera and a macro lens. She was a famous violinist in Japan, a musically-inclined native daughter of whom the government and many social groups were extremely proud. Someone would recognize her. She had no desire to pick up the paper and find a picture of herself staring back at her.

The eggs crackled and simmered in the pan, but needed a few more minutes before Michiru could turn them. She sat down at a chair at the table—there were only two—and toyed absently with the salt and pepper shakers, shaped respectively like Fujiyama and Godzilla. With no task immediately at hand, she was free to think about whether there would be other mornings like this one. She was accustomed to waking alone in a silent and spacious apartment, the floorboards cold beneath her feet, the piano downstairs covered in a fine film of dust that looked like a shroud at sunrise. No one lived in the units on either side of her; if she was lucky, she might catch the distant gurgle of a toilet flushing in the next building over.

“This is nice,” she whispered, even though she was certain her voice would not carry all the way down the hall to the bedroom. And it was. It was very nice. There were no lingering feelings of loneliness, and the crushing weight of the quiet at her own home was replaced here by the stutter of the coffee pot and the eggs in their skillet, cooking for two people. Smiling, Michiru tilted her head. A single blue curl escaped from the towel and fell down next to her ear, and she picked up the Godzilla pepper shaker and shook it.

Turning it on its end for no particular reason, she watched as the King of Monsters expelled a dark plume of spices from his ceramic mouth. She was almost finished making a black ring around the base of the crystalline Fujiyama when bronze arms encircled her, chair and all, and tipped her back slightly. She yelped. The pepper shaker fell from her fingers and landed on its side in the silted pile of its own making. One painted yellow eye glared in baleful accusation up at Michiru, who paid it no mind and turned her head up to Haruka, who was grinning at her.

“Look at that,” she said. Her tone took on a chiding note and Michiru felt a rill of heat ripple down her spine because of it. “You’re making a mess.”

She was naked. Michiru leaned sideways in the chair and Haruka shifted too, so that the paler woman rested with her back not against wood, but bare flesh. “I got bored waiting for you to wake up,” Michiru tossed back. She found herself admiring the line of Haruka’s throat where it rose and met her jaw—in fact, she mused, she liked that too. She wanted to kiss the point where they met, throat and jaw, but Haruka’s arms kept her firmly in place. She finished, “The mess is your fault.”

Haruka’s grin widened. The flash of her teeth was perfect and delightfully sinister, and she lifted Michiru from the chair, spun her, and settled her on the edge of the table. The smaller soldier felt her cheeks heat, and when Haruka leaned in to kiss her, she felt the warmth returned in the press of the other woman’s brow and hands. They parted a while later with the sound of reluctant suction and a faint growl, though Michiru wasn’t sure if it came from her chest or Haruka’s. Hooking a hand that had wandered into a fist in her partner’s hair, she whispered, “I gave you something no one else had ever touched, Haruka.”

The taller woman paused. Her fingers lingered at the top button of Michiru’s stolen shirt, quivering. Their eyes met and Michiru heard her say, “I know.” Her gaze was glass-green and wonderful and electric, and she licked her lips and seemed to be struggling with something. With her free hand, Michiru cupped and caressed her, trying to be comforting, wanting to drag her closer. “Me too,” came the admission at last, a chip of pride cast away.

Smiling then because they belonged to each other, something she had suspected all along but now knew for certain, Michiru wrapped her legs around Haruka’s waist and brought them together. As her partner laughed, startled and pleased and hungry in a way that breakfast could not satisfy, the smaller soldier arched under Haruka’s questing fingers and begged, “Go on.”

The last button came undone and the shirt fell open some four minutes later. The eggs were burning. Neither woman noticed.

Notes: Whew, that was fun! But is it over? What do you think, readers? Shall I keep going or leave it here? As always, I adore critiques, comments, and fluffy hats. I hope you all enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

—Bainaku