shri | STATION 72 ; mental link

Which bit? The bit where I called you out for having a soft spot for dramatic, overly principled doofs? Or the bit where I offered to have sex with you?

[ She doesn't think either are particularly noteworthy. ]

The - [ her mouth opens and shuts and - she quite probably deserves this, somehow, for everything she has ever done and - is this what it's like when she does it to other people? ] - latter.

What, you're super hot and regal and shit.

[ Who wouldn't want to...... ]

Oh.

[ Well that's. Something. Good job, Lakshmi. When was the last time she got a compliment from anyone? Not a courtly half poisoned thing, but just - super hot and regal and shit.

This might be easier to process if she were a mark more sober but like any moment of hindsight, it didn't help particularly much in dealing with the consequences. ] Is that how they say that now?

[ She snorts. ]

That's how I'm sayin' it.

[ Well, right, right. She clears her throat, trying to think of how to. ]

I am afraid I am not usually... propositioned, in such a way. By women... [ Wait, that isn't exactly true - ] Often. By women. Who aren't requesting, ah, payment.

I was raised in a girl's school, I pretty much sleep with chicks.

[ Drinking happily, babbling without much thought. ]

I think I was up to... eight dudes, as of Nyx.

[ She thinks about it, for awhile - her dealings as a Queen had been particular, ceremonial. Not that she had the interest truly but - well, if for that same ceremonies purpose, she knew how things were for the tawaifs.

A education that had been furthered, so to speak, after living so long in brothel houses and slum streets. ]

There has only ever been... four men in my life, if that. I simply... did not have the time.

Who's too fuckin' busy to fuck, Rani?

[ Most of what Annie thought about was fucking. All day, every day. Noctis has asked her, in despair, do you ever think about anything else? She certainly tries not to. ]

[ Oh thank god she looks younger than she is, or this would be all the more tragedy. Her laugh is ginger, gentle at the edge, have mercy, Annie. ]

You answered your own question, I'm afraid. I would be taking advantage of most of the women I know - in such a case, with my rank, and men become... assumptive.

[ Men are garbage, Annie, and her ladies either way to take advantage, as Malhari so often did - or could not so no to their Rani. ]

Besides... that is not satisfying to me.

Shit!

[ Annie bursts out eagerly, laughing, imagining Rani taking advantage of her handmaidens. Fans herself. No big deal, this isn't a big deal. ]

Well, you don't actually have any rank on me.

Edited 2017-10-26 03:30 (UTC)

[ That's a vivid image - and she feels the flush of heat up her neck. ]

I would never do that to them. They look to me for their livelihoods, their care, not - [ except, she's thinking about - how many of them... would not have minded? It might have been at relief, in the days of the war. The particular not quite image, not quite sensation, of laying on her stomach, where Sita so carefully dotting the lines of henna on her back, pushing her hair back up her neck and - it was the cool-warm, of fingers bracing on skin to the dot of the paste. ] - not like that.

Besides... what on earth do you even feel for me apart from appreciation? [ It matters, it does not matter. That feeling that sits under her tongue that says - there was never a half ]

Edited 2017-10-26 03:41 (UTC)

[ It is her ardent preference not to feel anything for anyone, but that's incredibly difficult here in the Nest with all of its strings and ties, constantly resonating like a forest strung up with bandit alarms. The booze keeps her mellow and thoughtless, there was a point to it, to all this. ]

I like other soldiers. It's comforting.

[ In all the ways that Rani herself imagined, the comfort of her women, knowing they were at her side. Annie's idea of that subtle senuousness just wasn't so subtle. She liked to be touched more directly, to be battered around in it, to batter others, and come out still whole. ]

I only ask, Annie - [ Her name is not said, it's carved, as she brings herself to look and look properly, at her, at all of her, thick with drink in her mouth. Heavy with the taste of something she can't quite place that sets her shoulders in a roll and parts in her mouth. Hard and sharp and a vulnerability to it, she supposes, so far as emptying herself out like a over turned prayer plate, petals and spices and the fire that burns it all and like she means to do just the same. She carves it out of herself, like she means to carves Annie into her instead.

A purpose that pushes her up - and why should it be any different? Annie asked her as a soldier, like Lakshmi has some line between woman and queen and battlefields in herself. Like she hadn't all fed that into kindling that settles into her fingers, her limbs, in each movement as she leans in close, snatching at the pushed back veils, holding her and holding her and holding her and it isn't a kiss so much. Isn't polite, and maybe that's why she doesn't let it happen often, can't be sure of herself or others, not all turned out. A test that this is - this is something she is doing and then the fact that she is means:

She catches her mouth against Annie's as she yanks her closer, against the corner of her mouth in a thready exhale that when she draws back in she lets fill her like smoke, lets it bleed between the connection. That she won't have comfort, or another soldier - she will have Annie and she will have as much as she can. Turns herself that little more, rolls her shoulders back, pushes herself up a inch, to slant her mouth fully against hers, the hand that runs the edge of possessive in it's need to have, over her shoulder. Her tongue against her teeth, the set of her own in turn against her lip. The way she pushes even when she knows she shouldn't, takes when it isn't her, these things she wants to burn inside of herself.

That when she pulls back and away - it is kept, if barely, inside of herself. ] - because I only know how to play one sort of game.

[ Oh. For all of her ladykiller bullshit, Annie Westwind almost fumbles the drink in her hand as Rani presses on her. It's the dissonance of things: reality and unreality that live inside of her at all times. The shapes and colors she wears as deflection and then the layers of true sentiment underneath. The realness of her words: that she's comforted by others who have been conditioned as she has been conditioned, who have suffered as she has suffered. The unreality where sex solves any of that. The realness of the desire. The unreality of thinking Lakshmi might actually want that.

It exceeds the shape that Annie had made of the Jhansi Queen in her own landscape. She'd thought too small, and now Lakshmi Bai has risen up to show her what she's really toying with. God, it could make a girl's heart catch in her throat.

And then she's not fumbling the carafe so much as no longer finding it important, her hands lift to twist into the front of Rani's robes. ]

S'okay. I won't tell on you.

[ What's to tell? That a burning tiger prowled across her mind, whiskers and claws kissing, sizzling across the landscape? Sounds like Nyx, too full of passion to ever just fucking lay down and be quiet. ]

( Come here, come here. )

[ All the way back in, with or without hands and mouths, come back in and stay, keep me warm. Languid with liquor Annie is perfectly ready to be set alight. ]

[ There is only one, brief consideration to not so much what she is doing - but how she is doing it. It is not so much that Annie is a woman, but that she is - lithe, light. Lakshmi hadn't been purposefully insulting when she spoke of her own disregard of Damon.

She liked her men broad and heavy and set well, she knew that much at least. Liked to feel something broad and powerful in her hands and for all she has seen Annie do, say of herself, the things she has done - she realises, that at least, hasn't changed, simply the form of it has. But who better equipped to understand it then?

Because the form had changed, and she thinks on it. Annie was lean, not just in difference, but in that Lakshmi knew herself, where she curved, where she was slight and then fuller, but Annie was - sleek, fine boned as a racing horse. It makes her feel so light under her hands - over aware of her strength in a particular. But realises at least, she is familiar in a way that Annie, perhaps is not. It takes her nothing in the cover of their tents to unwrap the material around from with hands that don't have to look. To peel her out of layers, without ever raising her head to look at what she's doing. The pull and yank and thread apart, as she finds mouth and then her throat. A drag down over her skin as she pushes veils and material out of the way - barking laughter, in her memories - was this how Gangadhar felt unravelling her from her jewels?

( Probably not - the English were the ones hung up about covering a woman's chest. )

It's a disregarded thought, as she pinches skin between teeth, the steady cover of her mouth over it to suck dark and red on her skin, she doesn't know exactly what she's doing, - but she knows what she likes, and like this, skin to skin, the hive burning the connection of the hive between them - was there a difference in her to Annie to back again? To the deeper breath she takes as she pushes the other woman back. Annie had no harsh lines, didn't have the rigid form that Lakshmi kept herself in that with the invitation that she didn't have to, just not, not for a little while - she spreads like ghee set afire and sweet. Rich as butter could be, the long guttering flame that pushes Annie back, pushes herself up between her legs and covers her as she works at the rest of her clothes.

No middle breath, no moment before the plunge, the thunder of horses and canon in her mind. Front line cavalry charge as she moves her. ]

[ This woman, so grounded in the physical world, rushes over her like a wave; sensations and tastes and smells. There have maybe been moments, here and there, where Annie has wished she could perform that feat. The feat of being present in the world, experiencing it with the fullness of her body-- But she was not her body. She was a passenger inside this humanity, a visitor to the experience, with her mind always elsewhere, refracted into different spectrums. Neither here, nor there. A stratum of void and colors, but never one particular place, never one singular entity.

There's the wiry little body kicking beneath Lakshmi, pressing bones to bones, and then there is the slosh of some slimy water-dwelling thing that lives in her mind, that has been wallowing quietly in liquor and mud. Stirred to wakefulness by the stampeding of hooves and the biting of teeth. Its touch is a sickening cascade of color and light, intangible, indefinable.

That's the rest of Annie Westwind, a sprawling mess of every other potential.

Sex, at least, is something to put that formless energy towards, to disperse the most frenetic, molten layers into the air, like a body breathing out carbon. A lure down into the small body she was born into that is not quite hers, to make it focus and feel, burn and tremble. A machine performing a function it was made to perform in satisfaction, rather than daydreaming about an enormity which eclipsed suns.

Annie opens up, prismatic, making room for thundering horses, for pillars of fire, for strings of jewels. For Rani, who she had not thought would turn to her at all, but since she has... there's a girl in the body. Someone willful, lonely, hurting, struggling on as she has always struggled on, who would benefit from the outpour of someone much the same.

She loops her arm around Lakshmi's waist, possessive of what's there to share, of what's to be forgotten for a moment or two: what's been lost, what's been wounded, what's been scarred. They've already seen all of each other's scars, it's not the looking, not even the fingertips in the grooves of it all. The intimacy is in the willingness to expose an unease and take comfort for it. To be angry and sorrowful, in triumph. ]

[ Her mind feels like Holi - bright and rich, too much, for anything else - and maybe if she didn't know how to wash her own skin in that colour, it might be too much for her as it.

But in some small way, that brightness, that revelry could become like sickness, was like home. A brief pause between the kisses that colour like bruises, the heavy breathes that stain like light. Face upturned and bright and the gold that hung from her, slightly askew. She was warm, and rich, and drunk - yes, on something between between here and there that is not - she knows herself, and the mistake is that somehow that formless fire isn't warm and it is destructive - but something that is Annie, stuck to the back of her teeth. The mistake always, how the things she burns will stain the smoke. Tesla had told her, that it was the chemicals that made the fire. The copper for green, magnesium for white.

It's in part to check, once she has pulled her clothes apart, knew at this - perhaps, but she knew that steady heat, where her knee pushes up deliberately between Annie's thighs. A heavy, solid weight. That grinds up slowly, hard from the riding she did, the battles she fought through. She pulls up, to gauge the reaction as her hand moves steadily - flat palmed over her breast, steady in it's killing, rough with its kindnesses, over the curve of her ribs, to count them in a low in drawn breath. To mind the scars that they had shared, lowering her head to know them like her own as her mouth curves murmurs of affection in a breathless Hindi against her skin.

This is not slow, but for a moment, she can pretend she knows how to be. She doesn't know how make beautiful things, but she knows what it is when it is in front of her and in that she does as she always does, she watches, she looks in. She observes it as a whole and leans back in again to kiss her. Not less, for the meticulous way she leans in, her hand coming to Annie's hip, the stiff sore muscles under Annie's hand stretching out as she kisses her again with that fullness. Open, and nothing less - as she revels in that bright light, that separation and togetherness that is Annie, to let is seep into all of her scars - than to know it for the beauty than it is. Her fingers sliding around and under her to press her hips up at the angle to encourage her to rock back. ]

[ In plumes of color, her regrets light and disperse: her longing for Nyx, her regret for ever tasting his fire, her horror at what she had said to Asuka and Murphy, her misery for what she had almost done to Noctis. Not so much forgotten as enshrined in fire, blazed into the mind's eyes, but the weight of it removed. Replaced only with the leaden, persistent pressure of the queen, who takes it all up in demanding hands and refuses to relinquish her terrible grip. It's unusual to Annie, to be manhandled so thoroughly, all dominance and control wrestled out of her without so much as a shot fired.

She has permission here, to be a mewling thing of need, to let her lips bruise and her hips rise.

It could be terrifying, to lose that much control in so fell a swoop, but in this moment it is a relaxation. Floating hopelessly, without any goal of her own. Nothing to prove, nowhere to be, no one to save. Drunk with a lack of purpose. She plays with the draping of fabric around shoulders, the loose folds at the hips, finding more places to skin to meet, carving out a cocoon of rough fabrics around the tangling of warm limbs and fallen hair; humid, glossy.

She just wants to come screaming into Lakshmi's neck, with little preference about how she finds herself there. She could do it like this, gripping hard at the other woman's ass the bring the solid presence of her thigh tight between her legs. She could do it with her own fingers, with a warm arm draped over her, warm breasts pressed into the narrow planes of her shoulder blades. She could maybe even just think herself into it, a swarm of mouths and hands only possible in imagination. It all blossoms equally, luscious and sticky, from her mind. Flesh and longing and the deep spasmodic clutches of lust that strike like lightning on them as her excitement heightens. Dizzying, breathless, wanting. ]

Rani--

[ Queenie, Queenie, Queenie; don't stop. ]

[ What she doesn't know, the symbiote fills in the gaps - about where Annie wants to be touched. Asking, learning, knowing, down in the same breath, an unforgiving push that she feels her shudders as her own, a dance done in reverse for once. She matches what she gives, her fingers part from skin only to rake that terrible mess of her bound up hair free, the gold of her tikka, the heavy ornamentation of her veil discarded in an easy devesting pull. Unraveled and determined as she catches Annie under her knee, hooks her leg to push it up and back. Pushing to the angle that she can as she shifts down her body further, her mouth flushed with the own heavy press of the way she drags from mouth to neck, not giving her the space to move. A helplessness of her own situation that turns to easy dictation.

Because she has no preference either except in the need that defines so much of herself, to give and give and give, until the fire could find quiet for while, to hold and hold and hold until she could hold onto the things she lost over again.

With it, she grips hard, against her thigh, pushing into her with a steady rock of her hips as she rolls to her knees, that cut battle tense line of muscles that holds herself just above, dragging over her throat, clavicle in a sharp, red staining, kiss. Pushing against that want without giving back anything of the ground she took. ]

[ Like touching herself, she slips her palm between Rani's legs, the heel of her hand flexed to create its own pressure on the sex that mirrors her own. Lust-drunk, that bead of flesh is the most important, most central, thing in this moment. Hot and full, desirous for contact and sharp, inevitable relief. A two-fold thing, two bodies amplifying into one another; weather fronts colliding into a cyclone of electrified nerve endings.

The wet slit of Lakshmi's body against her fingers is as good as her own, and her hands find their way there past those last layers of trousers.

It is all the same, they are one thing, swollen and red and slick, tasting of musk and want. Annie arcs her back with a hum, a moan, a panting breath, gripping the woman's shoulder as leverage. That's all they need now, just leverage to rub and rut, time to build and the patience to breaker. ]

[ In a shudder and a rough mouthed gasp, those carefully lit ties of oil lamps, sent crashing to the floor, the rich material caught and set a light in a fever heat. She doesn't waste time returning the favour as she gets Annie's hips free so barely of her clothes. Not a lot, but more than enough.

( Even if there is a pause, ragged in her movements as she catches Annie's wrist where it slips against her - words that beget feeling beget action in a seamlessly without explanation - no, not some sweet slide, she wants it hard, she wants those fingers up and curling in, she wants the heat of her palm just so - she wants her relief, and she doesn't want it mercifully given, she wants to feel and be felt and curl hard around something solid so deeply inside of herself she can't undone - she is tired and full of teeth and hanging onto her kingdom-body-woman slipping out from that hold and she hangs on in return like the ugliest of her truths - she never learned the art of letting go well, though she has a gift for self denial she would never admit too. )

A denial that she uses now even if she does nothing but shudder, her reaction sharp and quick, before she pulls up again.

Her fingers return quickly to her task, finding her slick and easy and she chuckles breathlessly - appreciatively. How easy this all is, against the bitter aftertaste on the swallow. But she can't care or have a want to know what that regret truly is. Which is appreciated, held up ugly to the light and then discarded like she always does.

She has better things to do when her fingers - one and then another - slide up in return to Annie, and she has a strict purpose here as she heaves herself up. Letting her get the angle she wants as her wrist begins to work her, quick and hard. Her own self disregarded to the want to watch her, bear down over her - gauge how she jumps and reacts, as her speed stays there, elbow planted by Annie's head. Letting her hold fast as she needs to, giving her the caged space to fall apart. A shield of hair falling free over her shoulder, pressing her up by shove of knees to push her easy apart. Because she will have every bit of her, exposed and open and wanting. ]

KALI She Who is the Great Destroyer ; She Who wears a Garland of Skulls	LAKSHMI She Who Believes in Truth ; She Who is the Mother
DRAUPADI She who was Born of Fire Sacrafice;	DURGA She Who is perpetually endeavouring to protect the weak and the poor and remove their misery.

STATION 72 ; mental link

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