Answer for Thea part two

[feldman]

Little Acorns; the angry sex scene with commentary

Through her ragged breathing, Aeryn hears a shoe scrape against the floor. She lifts her face from her hands and blinks her eyes clear. She'd been coming to the natural end of the crying jag, so she welcomes the distraction.

One of the things I love about this character is that when she cries she doesn't hide it; she speaks past it, she lets it roll through her. Once she's decided that showing emotion is not inherently shameful, she doesn't discriminate among the emotions, she lets them happen and doesn't stop them up or hide them.

"I...heard a noise, I didn't realize..." Stark bends in a bow and turns to leave. "I'm sorry."

Aeryn dries her face on her arm and hand. "I'm alright. Just sometimes I cry. Makes me feel better." She shrugs good-naturedly and stamps down the sob that wants to wriggle out of her chest. She saves it for the next time. "Clears my head."

Stark's glance is cast down at the tear-splattered datapad on the table in front of her, but there's nothing that interesting in the wiring schematic for a Prowler's atmospheric scrubber. "Grief is a difficult process."

Aeryn manages to nod politely, as she has done for all of the platitudes flung at her since her wedding.

See? She can be polite.

Stark continues in the same pitying vein. "I wish there were something I could say..."

"What can be said beyond sorry? Nothing. But everyone keeps trying anyway." Aeryn scrubs her tears back into her loose hair and regains the shreds of her diplomacy. "I didn't mean to snap at you, I'm sorry."

"We make allowances for each other in times of loss," Stark murmurs, sitting on the bench opposite her.

More or less. Well, good enough for government work, anyway.

"Think nothing of it. Take your solace and release wherever you can find it."

Aeryn tries to put it into words, probing at the ache like a medtech examining an injury.

She'd been remembering her mother. Not the woman, but the image she'd lived with since childhood, less of a memory, more of a dream that her life kept reinterpreting for her.

This is something I've wondered--before she was ejected from the PKs, how much did she really think about that encounter with her mother? Was it an anomaly she glossed over, or was it a hidden fantasy that she nurtured, like some kid thinking that her "real" parents are rich and wonderful and will come rescue her one day? How did her personal memory differ from the actual event once she saw it on the chip? Was it worse to be a PK and know she'd been illicitly-bred, or to find out later on that Xhalax had regretted the decision enough to try to ruin her child's life? Damned plotbunnies are everywhere these days.

She'd been thinking about her own daughter, who never even had that much from her. "If I could have talked to Zola, even once...told her how much she was loved and wanted."

Stark shakes his head slowly. "This is not Valldon, and the dead do not speak to me anywhere else." He raises his eyes to meet hers. "But they do echo."

She watches him loosen the buckle on his neck. He pauses and she nods.

He lifts the edge of the mask.

Light bathes her face in warmth and soaks under her skin. Comfort and reassurance permeate her and it's like being held, like what she dimly remembers feeling before Zhaan wrenched her back into an awkward body stiff with cold. There is no place, and no time, and no pain.

She comes back to herself slowly. Stark regards her with an empathy that for once doesn't make her feel inadequate, but instead makes her feel sacred. She reaches her hand to his face and sets her fingertips against his cheek.

His palm slides down her wrist, hot against the skin of her inner forearm. She can smell a faint spiciness from his clothes. She realizes that 'stykera' is an old Banik word for 'bridge', spanning the chasm between life and death, an easy passage between.

His hand drifts up, fingers catching in her hair, the contact tingling her scalp and making her breath deep.

Poor Stark's been dealing with much the same side-effects as Aeryn, but the only comforts he has are Rygel and a ghost who won't haunt him anymore. He's wound damned tight by now, so even though he truly wants to help Aeryn, things are going off the rails pretty quickly. For instance, just now when Aeryn was reeling from the light, he disabled her comm.

Death is gloriously indifferent to life, and life strives for the same indifference. She comprehends for the first time how Stark is both flesh and light, and never to be a whole of one or the other. His mask is loose, and his flesh infuses with the light that pours from his face, seeking her again as if to pull her to that place once more.

"Nice."

Ah, John. This is gonna suck.

The voice slices through the haze in her head, bringing with it a wave of outside input that disorients her. The gravity is fluctuating and Moya is filling her with need. Stark's hand is tangled in her hair, his face denches from hers.

"I've been calling you but you shut your comm off."

She turns her head and the look on John's face clears through the remnant of fog. It's unmistakable in the set of his mouth, his shoulders, his hands, the way he stares at Stark and can't look at her for more than a microt: he seethes with jealousy. She realizes what it must look like to him, and gently knocks Stark's arm away from her head.

"John." She pulls away from Stark and stands, her manner slow and still colored with the warm comfort of a moment before. "Stark was simply showing me something about the other side."

While the trigger is mainly the sexual jealousy of finding these two almost kissing when the ship's put her into a compromising state, there's also the hurt from the way she's been grieving *apart* from him, not alone, but with everyone *but* him. And really, the stuff they're gonna work out here has been festering since the beginning of the story; the trigger is just an excuse to let it out.

"Yeah." Cold mirth crinkles the corners of his eyes. "First stop on the tour I'll bet."

Stark surreptitiously buckles his mask and rises to his feet, his other hand held out in front of his body. "I should go."

Aeryn expects John to leave as well but instead he draws his pulse pistol. "You do that."

Oops, didn't see that coming, did she?

The barrel tracks Stark all the way out the door, and John stands for a moment, jaw clenched as tight as the arm that still aims the pistol into the empty corridor.

He's making sure that when he turns, he doesn't aim it at her. He's not sure yet, so he keeps pointing it toward the door.

She's been here before with him, with the other him. Part of her is relieved that she's encountered something familiar, that she's finally making progress with him like working the codes of a sequence-lock.

Another part is frustrated. She remembers the way he closed himself off, pouted, refused to acknowledge that he had any claim on her affection or love. She steels herself for the delicate maneuvers of reassurance.

"John--"

The barrel swings in her direction, followed by his gaze.

Hey now, didn't we plan on *not* aiming at her? No matter how satisfying it felt?

He lowers his arm and walks up to her, so close that Aeryn can smell dentic on his breath. He looks at her, bristling with a barely controlled anger that brings Aeryn up short.

This is not what she was expecting.

Smell the dentic, babe--it wasn't what he was expecting, either. On the other hand, *I'd* been writing toward this for months. The seed of this scene began when I was writing the part right after she fainted, when they're in bed and he's so careful with her, when he kisses her face, her eyelashes and lids, because he loves her so much it aches but he can't really talk to her. That's when I felt this visceral need in him (this is also right before the shower scene, and as I said, his proposal is when I started to lose tight control over where the story was going), and it took me a while to parse all the stuff that I imagined he was feeling: desperation, anger, hurt, need, relief, despair. As for Aeryn--she needed to face the fact that this John was a different man. This is a confrontation of those pent-up emotions, the hurt and the need, as well as a concrete demonstration that his responses are not familiar. For example, he doesn't storm off to pout as in GEM--he claims what is (or should be) his.

"You got a thing for bad boys, Aeryn." His voice is low and deadly. "First Scorpius, now Stark. You're gonna get in trouble one of these days."

Caught off-guard, she responds with heat. "'Get in trouble', that means falling pregnant, correct? Didn't you decide that I'm not to be trusted with your precious babies?"

She strips off her gloves.

"Aeryn--" He reins his control tighter. "You can't deny that Moya's affecting you, and I don't want to see you suffer any more because of it. That's why we need to be careful for now."

He tries not to be baited.

She unsheathes the unspoken assumption. "You think Moya killed Zola when she terminated the feeble offspring."

She socks him in the gut with a fist wrapped around a roll of quarters.

His hesitation proves it to her. "I just don't want to take any more chances. It hurts, Aeryn, that there wasn't anything I could do to protect her."

"You think I allowed her to die."

"That's not what I said." The response is immediate, but it takes him longer to clarify, arranging his thoughts while he rearranges his fingers on the pistol at his side. "I know you can't control what's happening to you."

Seeing it through the filter of what Grayza did to him, wanting to protect her from that kind of experience.

"Which is why you're here." She tucks her arms across her chest and the sarcasm doesn't quite conceal the hurt. "To keep your rutting tralk out of 'trouble'."

He tries for a light tone but the teeth he bares aren't a smile. "Your orgasm, hot and fresh in five minutes or it's free."

This line, delivered with menacing sarcasm, is the first thing I wrote for this scene.

"You needn't bother. There's no point." The last thing she needs is another soporific session of cadet-style recreation, honing the appetite but never satisfying it. "If I wanted a pale substitute I'd use your fresher."

"Gee, honey, that hurts." His face is right in hers, and all pretense of rational discussion is gone. "I thought *I* was your pale substitute."

We've gone past the no-gloves and are now using broken beer bottles.

"Frell you Crichton."

He smiles, but the emotion wrinkling around his eyes isn't as pleasant. "You wanna frell?"

He cuts off her answer by slamming his pulse pistol onto the table and sending it sliding down to the other end. "Then frell your husband."

He catches her shoulders hard and kisses her, like the sparring kind of encounters she's only had with other Peacekeepers. It isn't sensual and tender. It's ruthless and willful. It sparks something in her.

Seeing this from Aeryn's POV is essential, because otherwise her consent would be in doubt and that's so far from her experience it's something I didn't want the reader to even idly question. I wanted this to have the surface appearance of an alley-frell, quick and hard like the way she started out with Velorek, but just as that encounter isn't what it seemed, this one isn't the rough fuck she thought it would be either.

She knocks his hands off and lets her lip curl. "What happened to 'safety first'?"

"Got the news today." He snatches her waistband and pops the fastener of her leathers as he jerks her body against his. "I'm as safe as they come."

She didn't want to make love anyway.

She drops her weight suddenly, pulling him off balance and then coming back up just as quick, shoving against his chest as her shoulder knocks against his mouth.

He's not the only one nursing some hurt anger.

She ducks back to take her body out of his arm's reach but his fingers still clutch a front flap of her leathers. He yanks her down against the table and pins her with his weight.

Suddenly they aren't sparring.

Panting, he shoves her shirt up her back to bite and suckle at the skin,

The raw desperate need of this always makes me kind of sad. He's done all he can think of to cleave her to him but it doesn't fill the empty spot, there is no surety, and in part this is about taking what he needs from her (touch, skin, comfort, affection) in the only way they've worked out so far: sex.

his weight pushing her belly and breasts against the table. The mound of her sex rides against the rounded table edge.

And how wound-up must she be at this point, that this doesn't make her wince or push back?

His hands slide under her loose leathers, grasping her ass, tugging the pants down to mid-thigh for access. She knocks the datapad to the floor as her hands search for purchase on the table.

This is going to be PK-style; intense, effective, every man for himself. Heedless single-minded sex, a pure expression of lust and nothing else. She's missed it.

Nothing between the two of them is ever that simple or easy.

She arches her lower back, angling herself against his hardness in offering. He braces one hand on the back of her neck and unzips his fly. She feels his knuckles and then the heavy heat of his cock against the cheek of her ass.

Yes. Her eyes close and she grinds back, rocking between the fingers gripping the base of her skull and the fingers slipping into her sex. She spreads her arms and catches the table edges in her hands, and anticipates the tightening of pleasure.

His fingers delve but any friction on her clit is accidental, only in the service of spreading her wetness. Her growl of frustration is answered by a fierce slap on her ass, his wet hand leaving a sting on the skin.

His grip on her neck presses, his weight shifts, and he's pushing inside her roughly. The onrush of sensation hits her like a drug in the vein. She braces her legs, arches her back between the hands pinning her neck and hip, and lets him drive each thrust into her, balls deep and furious.

She's so wet it's nearly frictionless but she can feel the shape of him as if he were in her hand or in her mouth.

Ever since the first time she saw it she's been enamored with the emphasized ridge at the head of his cock. She's idly wondered if that flare was a human trait or a personal variation.

It's just the fact that he's circumcised--I don't blame him for not explaining that one.

Now she wonders if she can endure the sensation of it, each backstroke notching the sensitivity of her body ever higher.

This has nothing to do with cut vs. uncut--she's just so wound-up that she could probably map his veins to boot.

Hand wrapped in her hair, shoving her face down, he frells her hard enough to shift the table. She has little leverage to thrust back but what overpowers her is the violent euphoria of pleasure. The approaching orgasm has the taste of impending doom.

Too much fuel in the pulse chamber; it won't burn, it will explode, but it's too late. She seizes with the brilliance of the orgasm, it flashes and consumes her, every nerve she owns catches the spark and burns bright and fierce. Her shouts become sobs as her body comes back from a state of overload.

Yet another reason why we need to be absolutely certain that she's exactly where she wants to be--it looks bad enough, with the fighting and the brutality of the frelling, but that kind of sobbing release wouldn't be describable from the outside without half a page of caveats.

His thrusts lose precision, gain emphasis and speed, and with grunts that whimper at the edge he grinds his orgasm into the ashes of her own.

If she weren't so exhausted she'd laugh. She was wrong about it being PK-style. Even a hard alleyway frell is all tied up with emotions.

He opens his hands slowly, releasing her bruised hip and the fistful of hair. His voice is hoarse and sick. "Oh God…"

She twists to look over her shoulder and sees that a sizeable chunk of her hair has caught in the ring on his hand and pulled out of her scalp.

I wanted the reader to maybe recall that part of "Unrealized Reality" when he comes back with some of ChiAeryn's hair in his fist; I didn't realize until much later (when he tells her about killing ChiAeryn; when he starts to show her flashes of that last deep layer of fear and shame) just how damned sick he probably feels right now.

"Aeryn..." He looks from the strands threading through his knuckles to her prone and ravaged body. His face is sweaty and flushed, the features twisted with self-disgust. "God, Aeryn I..."

Anger pours back into her and she grips the edges of the table.

Her thighs are hobbled by the leathers but she bends her knees and rolls them inward, rotating her legs at the hip to splay her calves outward. Did he really think that Peacekeepers could be used so easily against their will?

Awkward as hell, but this move can be done. Not sure how effective it would be, but she's a commando, I'm sure it's all in the technique.

She slots the toes of her boots behind his weak legs and sweeps him off his feet. Arrogant bastard.

She stands. Her legs quaver from the orgasmic equivalent of starburst but her self-possession has returned. He's sprawled where she dumped him, staring up at her.

"So I take it that *was* consensual..." he lifts up on one shaky arm, "...just really fucked up."

Yes, on both their parts. I wanted her to see the most selfish aggressive needy facet of him and take that in, take it in stride, take it away with her somewhere to ponder. I wanted him to see her accept that part of him; meet it head on and reciprocate it.

She reaches down to clean the residue from herself, gathering the fluid in one hand before she tugs her leathers up with the other. The biochemistry is eerily similar, this Human stuff the same as that of a Sebacean man, same as that of the other John.

When chakkan oil degrades, the color darkens and the resulting pulsefire burns red. There is no difference that she can detect in the semen, no sign of the damage he's done to himself because he couldn't trust her.

The pondering begins already.

She turns her study back to the man, currently bleeding from a split lip and trying to stuff his softening but obstinate penis back into his leathers.

I was aiming for a "cleaning up after the storm" feel. So many times you get a really intense sex scene and it ends at orgasm, as if nothing important could happen after the characters have gotten off. This act wasn't a consummation so much as a clearing of the air--they've laid a lot of hurt, anger, guilt, need and chagrin out on the table with this fuck and acknowledging that aftermath is integral to making the fuck work. They each have a new set of needs now, just as imperative as the sex was a moment ago; he needs to demonstrate to her his gentleness and regret (he needs her to acknowledge it), she needs to go off somewhere alone to think.

He absently smears the blood from his lip and winces. "Aeryn, can you give me a hand up?"

She wipes her hand on his shirt before offering it to him.

A bit of a rejection there, being as she's still angry about the venikka (the contraceptive he began taking without her knowledge).

He sighs, grips her wrist and pulls himself to his feet.

He shadows her as she searches and finds the datapad, hesitating as he asks, "Aeryn, are you okay?"

Her gaze is on the wiring schematic but her brain is too full to take in the information. "I'm fine, just a little tired." When she looks up, the strangeness of him startles her.

He slowly reaches toward her chest, and with a tap she can barely feel, turns her comm back on.

The slow gentleness is a way of seeking consent, but it's still a possessive/protective gesture, making sure she's available but also ensuring that she's safe, that he's just a call away.

"Oh...right." She clears her rough throat. "Thank you."

He examines the datapad in her hand, but if he notices the schematic or the dried tears marring the screen, all he does is murmur, "At least it's not broken."

"It's tough." She doesn't have the strength for this kind of coded conversation right now, all she wants is to go someplace quiet and figure out what the frell it all means. "I have things to do today."

He nods, looking down at his hand idly skimming the edge of the table. "Yeah, I do too. Laundry, for one."

Dude's got a bloody lip and spunk shirt. Despite his wave of guilt, he's the injured party here.

"If I don't see you in the mess, I guess, I'll see you tonight?"

Aeryn tries to repeat this closing exchange in a later scene after she snorts the lakka, but he doesn't play next time.

"Yeah, uh, definitely."