Chapter 156 – Success. Victory.

"Some storms ask to be cradled, not extinguished."

– Lo! This olde Bla-Bla for thee who wouldst fain sound right noble and refined.

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As obscenely captivating as Tinea was right now, keeping her like that—her simmering heat, challenged by her desperate care and fear of harming Leah in a moment of uncontrolled strength—just so Leah could stay the center of her attention, reeked of narcissism. Leah didn't want to be so selfish that she'd put her own fantasies ahead of her girlfriend's wellbeing.

No, that'd be hella wrong.

But…what to do?

Leah hadn't a clue about handling veterans fresh from a firefight and she suspected that Tinea's condition would be highly unusual even for them. Full of an intense cocktail of unshed emotion that probably made it difficult to control her strength. Or so she thought.

Well, the first step was probably to get Tinea interactive again. To let her find an outlet for all that pent-up energy. Maybe the girl would figure out herself what else she needed once she'd had a chance to catch her breath.

"What's up?" Leah asked quietly as she intertwined her arms behind her girlfriend's neck. She didn't miss how Tinea carefully, carefully, kept her shaking hands off the vulnerable Leah-side of her shoulders, no matter how inconvenient that made it for the samurai to hold on. It was kind of intoxicating to see how strong she was, that such an uncomfortable posture didn't even seem to register. A kind of strength that wouldn't ever die.

The question, somehow gunshot-loud above the cabin's quiet hum, caused Tinea's breathing to stutter, but she didn't answer.

Yet. But we'll get there, Leah thought.

"Is it okay if I tell you what I'm seeing, love?"

There. A new fire had spawned in the high-strung woman's eyes, and it wasn't just another piece of extra pressure on top of everything else—this felt more like a fundamental shift in attention.

The moment had lost all the subliminal heat in the process, but then they'd have no trouble at all bringing that back later, would they? Leah giggled to herself.

Case in point, she mused mirthfully, when the giggling caused some jiggling that drew her lover's gaze for a moment. Though it probably shouldn't come with that screaming desperation for an outlet.

"Just so we're on the same page?"

Tinea's gaze jumped back upwards as she twitched once more, hard enough that another crack shattered the quiet, this time from one of Leah's artificial arms. The girl hastily withdrew the offending hand, but Leah just bent the damaged limb a few ways, testing its functions.

It moved fine. No creaking, no whining servos. The damage was purely cosmetic.

"See? It's fine. It didn't hurt, and I can keep using it. And even if I couldn't…I wouldn't care, Tinea."

The woman in question drew a shuddering breath, and then nodded jerkily. And then carefully put her hand back in the same spot.

Leah couldn't help but smile widely. Progress!

"Okay. Let's talk, shall we?"

After another shaky nod, Leah continued, "Alright… Here's what I see, love.

"You're still carrying all that fight. It's still right here—" she tapped Tinea's chest with a fingertip, careful and delicate. "You've got a hella high riding you, and you're terrified it'll spill over and hurt me. Especially 'cause you chose to meet me anyway. Right?"

She felt Tinea tense again, and Leah's arm cracked properly this time. An alert from her Polylaterality implant warned her that her right arm was catastrophically damaged and had ceased operations to prevent further damage.

Leah pressed on all the same.

"You didn't cool off out there 'cause…because you thought this should be how you'd challenge yourself. And you're still here, because you still think so."

Leah reached up, and the only reason she was able to brush over the curve of Tinea's jaw to feel the tremor there, were her longer arms. The no-longer-lonely brunette's eyes were swimming with tears, even as her speeding breathing picked up yet more.

"I think… I think you're stuck staying in fight-mode 'cause this situation is completely alien to you. It makes you feel out of your depth, doesn't it?"

Briefly, Tinea's eyes went way wide. Then she collapsed bonelessly on top of Leah, like a puppet with her strings cut. It took a moment for Leah to feel her start shivering—but, so she thought, from a different kind of energy.

The girl was, just, utterly relaxed. Completely, all the way down. Not a twitching muscle anywhere and she breathed slowly and deeply. Might've even fallen asleep, Leah wasn't sure.

Success. Victory.

Warm, glowing satisfaction flooded Leah as she started stroking her functioning hand down Tinea's curls, and she figured she must've been carrying an expression very similar to the one Tinea had shown after her own battle. She didn't quite know what kinda success they'd just had, or if it was enough, but something had shifted. Something important had changed.

They'd probably need another talk to figure out what, but meanwhile, Leah quieted herself as well, and her gaze rested on Tinea's back. This was actually the first time she got a proper good look since she'd had the wing arms speedgrown.

At Tinea's neck the sinfully fluffy collar met Leah's every stroke, followed by a bomber jacket made of a net of technological parts that covered the upper third of her back. It was a stylish piece, jewelry, almost, except one could watch the metal scapulas and the pauldrons craft ordnance stockpiles even during standby.

Beneath that bomber jacket, Tinea wore a black and discretely glittering leotard's top. Leah's fingers told her that was what the floof was connected to. The top painted itself across every rise and dip of dorsal muscle and vertebrae. It was a very pretty back, sculpted and graceful. Classy. More delicate than her own, she thought, for all that the girl was physically much stronger.

In the middle third of her back rested the top-most pack of the Second Wind. There was nothing special to it—it just followed the same aesthetics Tinea had given most of her gear. A simple black with a bit of diamond dusting to refract the light. Beautiful, if simple, since there weren't any patterns.

The Second Wind was attached to Tinea's rear extremities, and Leah finally had a moment to study them properly. She nudged the jetpack's connective webbing aside to uncover the bigger pair's roots, where the scales transitioned from skin—and where they were smallest and most delicate.

So fine, that Leah had to use her fingertips to feel their beginning. They were quite frictionless—even if she'd had fleshy fingers, she didn't think they'd be doing any stick-slipping.

That held true as she went further up the biceps, which she tried to wrap her hand around. It was too big. She supposed they had to be quite strong to carry one Tinea, plus any equipment she might be wearing, all through aerial combat maneuvers. Sculpted gracefully like all of Tinea's muscles, they did copy a human's upper arms sufficiently enough to avoid being uncanny.

That struck Leah as rather important, considering how deeply integrated these alien limbs were, and how quickly Tinea had gotten them. Most samurai didn't show such overtly inhuman changes until they'd had years of getting used to thinking and experiencing life beyond human limits.

Yet it had taken Tinea all of two weeks, and she'd gone for wings—not something that could just be tacked on an otherwise human body. If she'd had to deal with a sense of uncanniness about her own body from badly designed extras, it might've ruined her mental health.

"Say, Ypsi, wouldn't it be really difficult for her to get rid of these, if she decided she didn't like them?" Leah whispered into the quiet.

Tinea's antennae still twitched and fluffed sleepily at her face, much to Leah's amusement. The feathery touches had become an intimate symbol of companionship, something that Leah had come to appreciate greatly in the days since her kidnapping. Some body parts apparently came with emergent value, not just inherent.

The wing arms weren't there yet—they hadn't really been part of their interactions so far—but Leah did wonder what it'd be like once Tinea had her wings. They were going to be massive and in the way a lot until they'd learned where to put them.

"Nope, not very difficult at all! It's easier to unmake bio-changes than to make them! Usually."

"Usually?"

"Usually, yup! The more human you still are, the easier it is to go back to being all human. It's only when you've gone really far that the journey back is long! Long enough it's a problem for some."

"But it remains possible?"

"Yeah! And safe. Just slow, and maybe expensive."

Leah hummed to herself. She let her fingers drift down towards Tinea's back again and started kneading the area between all the wing appendages' bases. It possessed an interesting structure with shoulder blades hidden beneath, recognizable—if alien in shape—with muscles arranged in a way that preserved the contours one would expect from a human back, presumably without limiting the arms' range of motion.

"But, don't worry. Tin-Tin isn't showing any signs of psychosomatic rejection!"

"Well, that's good. It'd suck if she'd come to hate her new body too."

"Mhm! I think it has to do with her past."

"The dysphoria thing?"

"Yup. It's like she grew up dissociating from her body, so she didn't have a fixed picture of what living in her body should be like when she finally got a chance to experiment."

"Huh."

"I'm just guessing, though, and the way she goes all undissociated when she's fighting really messes up my theory!"

Giggling softly, Leah replied, "I'm sure Tin-Tin and I will talk about that, and more, once we've finally gotten to settle down."

"Yeah!"

Tinea's left bottom wing arm twitched.

It did again, when Leah scratched the same spot once more.

Twice more.

Leah bent forward to put her lips next to her girlfriend's ears, and whispered, "Forgive me, for I know exactly what I'm about to do."

"Whuh?" asked Tinea, looking up and blinking confusedly. She had indeed dozed off. Leah paused for a moment, wondering if she should be waking Tinea up prematurely, if the woman didn't need the rest with her brain shut off.

But as the second ticked by, she realized that the confusion in Tinea's eyes was already clearing up. She was coming to wakefulness either way.

So, Leah grinned, and curled her finger again to scratch the magic spot. The limb jerked. Tinea hiccuped and her eyes widened.

The ginger's fingers strummed across the spot and the sudden kicking of Tinea's wing arm matched the tempo. In no time flat, she was whining and giggling and flailing all her other limbs to escape the tickling.

Leah gave no mercy. Her girlfriend was strong, after all, far more so than she, and she'd have to go all in before she'd get wrestled down and have the favor repaid. Especially because she didn't have as many limbs suitable to tickling—at least not at the moment.

Inevitably, Tinea turned the tables on her, just as Leah knew she would.

She found herself desperately sucking down air past a whole lot of involuntary wheezing and laughing while the brunette skillfully dodged her arm and kept teasing her sides with her stupidly dextrous digits.

If she weren't already heads over heels for her, the fact that Tinea so attentively avoided restraining Leah's limbs, especially after all the crap she'd gone through chained to that bed only—what, three days ago?—would've made her completely and utterly fall for the girl.

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