Hekate's Call, Chapter 17

The week's training was cancelled and all the machines had to be refitted and tested as the Gestalt and Gravity finally started making active preparations to continue its journey. It wasn't Velia's passport that had held them at port for so long, but Kyrnn's documents. Krystyn had taken the nice break to lay in her dark room alone and wallow in shame.

That red mark on Ilina's face and those deadly eyes haunted her more pleasantly than the rest of the night before. She enjoyed it. Lunging at Krystyn's belt the way she did was probably the single best proof of it.

They probably think I'm a fucking queer. I was just doing what I was told. Or, I guess I wasn't. That was kind of the point, right? Those women were so much more awful than Manya had ever been, and Manya was mean.

The door chimed, dreadfully cheerful. Was it Kyrnn or Crater? Velia probably wouldn't come calling directly, instead sending for her through other people as an extended show of power. Seems like the kind of thing she would be into.

Krystyn forced herself up and checked the door's display. A bruised Ilina shifted from one foot to the other, hiding her tool kits behind her back. Now what could she want?

The door slid open and Ilina slipped in, wordlessly.

Krystyn closed the door behind them with that slight hiss they had. There was the smallest shiver from Ilina that made her heart stop. Oh, she was still thinking about it. Fuck. Move things along, girl, don't just stand behind her ominously. Say something.

"Hey, so," Krystyn stammered, suddenly self-aware of what this situation could feel like, "what did you need?"

"Can I service your weapon?"

Wow. What a euphemism. Certainly forward, this girl. Except, Krystyn wasn't build like that.

"What are you blushing for, pervert," a small grin cracked across her unreadable face. "Sidearm. Give it here."

Krystyn drew it and handed it to Ilina with no ceremony. More bewildered by the request.

Gosh, and what a wondrous little pervert she was, too. Whenever the girl was away from Morian and Velia she just came to life in such odd ways. The way she cradled the pistol and carried it to Krystyn's desk was disgustingly tender. She slid the magazine out the bottom so gently and placed it aside. The chamber was empty, but she checked anyways.

"Can we, ah," there was a bleak little chuckle in her voice, "can we do that again sometime?"

"Didn't seem like Velia was pleased with me," Krystyn huffed.

Ilina placed the first of her little tool bags on the table. More of the things she'd picked up at the market, but filled with different tools. First she laid out a little mat to protect the desk, and then began work unloading the bullets and lining them up precisely in one corner of the mat and disassembling the handgun.

"But I was."

The emotion seemed to die in her throat as she spoke. Too focused on the task in front of her, that she was doing agonizingly slowly. It certainly felt perverse.

"Thank you for letting me do this, by the way. It means a lot to me." Her hands didn't pause even once while she talked. She examined every single part, every screw, taking note of every little sign of wear and usage. It was important to her in some profound way that Krystyn hadn't begun to really grasp.

"Why?" She probed. Ilina probably wasn't one for a long conversation, but there was something charming about this.

"Do you promise not to laugh?"

"I swear on my life."

"Lives are cheap," she muttered, "but that's enough, I guess."

Krystyn serviced her weapon regularly. She wasn't as meticulous about it as some people were. It was a killing thing, a tool designed with singular purpose. Some people had a weird reverence for them. Ilina wasn't like that, though. She didn't seem to be.

"Trust," she said. "You rely on this to keep you alive. And you're letting me take it apart and do the maintenance on it. You trust that I put it back together properly. That every part of it will work exactly as it needs to when you are in danger. You're going to pull the trigger trusting that it will fire."

There was a deeply fucked intimacy to the way Ilina spoke of it that planted a fear she'd never had before in her years of military work. It made her want to double-check her work the second she was done. Wait. Wouldn't that be extremely rude? Didn't that betray the vulnerability in this exchange?

God below. She'd been pulled into a fucked up sex thing without realizing it.

"It's the same with bootblacking," she continued, somewhat in a daze. She had proceeded to start brushing the inside of the barrel to remove any unburned power with the care of a precision watchmaker.

"Manya called it that," Krystyn chimed in, eager to learn more about this little freak. "What is that?"

"It's just advanced care. You take your boots to shoe-shiner if you want it cleaned and polished. You take them to a bootblack if you want them attended to by a pervert who cares about them more than you do."

"Where did you learn to do it?"

For the first time in the conversation Ilina hitched, momentarily. "You can't tell anyone. Ever."

"I won't tell a soul, living or dead."

She returned to working at all the tiniest crevices. "I learned it from my mama," she said softly. "I don't have many memories of my parents. It felt like they never got along, and they fought about me a lot. That's why they both left me."

Okay, well I didn't need to know that part.

"But it's one of the memories I do have. Every week Mom would be sitting in the nice chair while mama knelt and cleaned her boots," there was a soft reminiscence in her voice. Ilina needed to stop being so weirdly adorable. It was gross.

"I asked her to explain it to me once. Mom wasn't happy, but mama was so excited to tell me about it. How she could tell if mom had been in the office or the field that week, and where in the field she'd been, all by the kind of dirt lodged in the little places. How you could tell that she'd broken her leg as a child by the way the sole wore down unevenly."

Ilina looked up with that little mischievous grin and locked eyes with a mildly horrified Krystyn.

"I'm an adult now, I'm not stupid," she giggled. "It was absolutely a sex thing. But I learned a lot. I like learning about people."

Sure. Okay. People had two moms, it wasn't weird. It sure was weird to involve your kid in your kink! What the fuck kind of de-- No, no, no. Those were the bad thoughts and the bad words. Irresponsible parenting. That was the way to say it.

"Knife," Ilina held out a hand after she had finished reassembling the gun. She was quick but precise. She had loaded it and put it to the side.

Krystyn reached over to her boots and pulled a knife out of the sheath, handing it to Ilina carefully. Once again there was that perverse little contentment in the girl's face as she examined every detail. The weight of the blade, the wear on the grip, and the edge itself. After a few moments she pulled out a sharpening kit and set it up on the table. Her hands were incredibly precise and confident in each action. No doubt her stupid little knife she picked up for cheap at some stall on FN-4-06 was about to be the sharpest knife on the whole of the Gestalt.

Earnestly, and perhaps a little too eagerly. "So, have you learned anything about me from all of this?"

"You buy cheap bullets with low grade powder that doesn't burn properly. That's why it keeps jamming, by the way. There's more wear on the trigger than the guard, so either you only draw when you're going to shoot or you have poor trigger discipline. No scratches on the rails means you don't use attachments."

"And the knife?"

"Stop using it to hack at things, it's not an axe. It's also not a hammer -- get a better knife if you're going to use the butt like that," Ilina turned and smiled, handing the knife back, "you still haven't answered my question."

Krystyn took it and put it back in her sheath. Was she supposed to say yes? It was great, with the exception of everything before and after. "Did Velia ask you to do this?"

Ilina was quietly packing up her first tool bag. The second one was on the ground still. It was the one for her little boot fetish. Didn't she tell that shop person she'd never clean Krystyn's boots?

"Morian and I are going to be shipping off for something," Ilina ignored her question, "so, I'm going around and letting people know. I just wanted to do something for you for last night, before I go." She brushed the bruise on her neck briefly, with a fond little grin.

That wasn't a no. But it implied a no. These girls got Krystyn in her own head tumbling in circles. It probably wasn't that deep. But she also hadn't heard that the two of them would be shipping off.

"Can I ask you to look after Velia, while we're gone? It'll be a few weeks."

Velia didn't seem like someone who needed looking after. But it was hard to deny that Ilina being worried about someone else was cute. Just if only she could worry about anyone else but that woman.

Ilina bumped into Krystyn, resting her head on Krystyn's shoulder. "I'm worried Crater or Manya might try something while she's alone. She also has to take her shots while we're away, and I know she can do them by herself, but I've always done them for her. Sometimes she has nightmares too, and it might help having someone around who can calm her down."

"You told me she was a good person."

That creeping emptiness entered her voice for a moment, "I love her."

Was she physically capable of saying anything bad about Velia at all? Would she paper over any flaw, any crime with those words? Did Velia and Kyrnn brainwash her the way Elisabet did the dog or something? Whatever it was, it was creepy. If there was any way to keep Ilina away from the two of them she would do it.

"Yeah, fine," Krystyn relented, "I'll do my best to look after her while you're out."

Life returned to Ilina's voice all at once, "Do you want me to do your boots? They could use a better touch-up than that shop."

She couldn't help but match that grin of hers, "Ah, I think only the soft, delicate touch of a pervert will do for my boots, from now on."

Ilina dragged Krystyn over to the desk chair and had her sit. She knelt down in front and started unpacking her little bag full of brushes and bottles and other boot pervert accoutrements. There was an excitement in Ilina's expression that was too genuine to be real. Absolutely, disgustingly adorable.

"Hey freak," Krystyn said, almost too quickly, "tell me what you're doing."

She was genuinely curious what went into it. And Ilina was more than willing to share, evidently. Though the details were lost on Krystyn. Too enamored just watching Ilina's quick little hands and listening to her voice. The way it went dead when she was focusing, or slowed down while she performed some small detail, to the way it got breathy and weird and obscene when she was talking about some interaction between a type of polish and the type of leather and how to properly apply it for some effect.

It was getting her deeply uncomfortably hot under the collar. Between catching the scents of last night, the bruise she left on Ilina's neck, and that absolutely disgusting trembling of excitement in the girl's voice. She was about to fucking lose it.

She couldn’t though. Krystyn had to keep it together, because the process was slow and deliberate. And she could hear Ilina muttering findings under her breath. However Krystyn felt, this was far more important to the little floor pervert. Respecting that was important. More important than throwing her down on the bed and taking her.

“I didn’t realize you had a limp,” Ilina paused while working on the second boot. She got back to it right away, but asked, “What kind of injury was it?”

A limp? Krystyn thought for a second, “Oh shit. During the war I had a piece of rebar through my thigh for a minute. Had a limp for a bit, but it’s since been patched up and I’m back to full motion.”

“You still favor the other leg,” Ilina adjusted, squeezing the boot hard between her thighs. “It’s really slight. Must have been a long time ago.”

Gods below, “you fucking degenerate,” Krystyn panted, almost moaned, through her hand.

Ilina looked up, a flash of annoyance being replaced by something else. Those eyes from last night. “I really don’t think you’re in a place to talk,” she sneered before going back to work.

After another agonizing ten minutes or so, she finally announced, “Okay, I’m done. It took longer than it normally does because I had to figure out what to use. The next time I do it, it’ll be much faster.”

Krystyn leaned down and undid the laces, “can you help me get them off?”

And she did. Loosening the laces all the way down and pulling them off smoothly. With the same care she showed to them before. She was at the end of her self control, just about. Yeah, she needed Ilina bad.

”Can I kiss you?”

Ilina looked up, a bit shocked by the bluntness of the question. Those little freckles across her face traced a line across her face. The ponytail with the two front parts that hung around her face like little dog ears was decidedly feminine in a weird and deliberate way. It made her just too adorable to handle. Oh, she was getting it real bad.

“Sure,” Ilina grinned and waited patiently, staring into Krystyn’s flushed face.

Krystyn leaned down and locked lips with Ilina, one hand on her back. Then she scooped Ilina with the other one. She was light and convenient to carry around. In the next moment they were on the bed, Ilina smiling up from under her.

“Velia’s gonna know.”

“I’m not planning to do anything,” Krystyn smiled. She wanted to do so many things to this freak. Something else had come over her though. She had so many feelings and she couldn’t tell if any of Velia’s drugs were in her system either.

For now she was content to roll Ilina onto her side and lay next to her, holding her close like a teddy bear. She leaned into Krystyn and giggled something. Ilina had a pleasant scent about her. That always struck her as odd, since the thing was always so covered in dirt and grease from helping out the mechanics. But it was calming.

“Queer.”

“I am not,” Krystyn sat up abruptly.

Ilina didn’t turn over to face her, she just laid in the exact position she had been laying. “You were huffing the back of my neck like a pervert,” she laughed. Not a loud, raucous one. A cute and soft one that slipped into her voice. “You just like the smell of boot polish and sweat that much?”

Krystyn settled back in and controlled her breathing this time. She wasn’t, right? There was nothing wrong with queers. Ilina was just different.

“What does Velia even want from me?” Krystyn squeezed Ilina for an answer. And to hear a little giggle.

“I liked last night,” Ilina sighed. The good kind of sigh. “If she implied otherwise, it was just to hurt you.” Much quieter, "I'm sorry I was shaking for so much of it, though. I wasn't sure what I should be doing."

It was such a shame that Krystyn was so adamant about keeping her word, especially when it was about helping or protecting someone. Otherwise, Velia would not be on the Gestalt and Gravity when Ilina and the doctor returned from their little trip. If she was going to make Ilina an accomplice to anything, she should have read her in on the plan. Just throwing the girl into the fucking viper pit without warning was beyond the pale in so many ways.

After a few minutes of a much more pleasant silence, despite the building anger in the pit of Krystyn's stomach, Ilina wiggled free and clambered over her and grabbed her bags.

"I'd stay, but I need to go ask Vigil if she can help look after Velia," Ilina apologized.

Her eyes darted to the tool bags. There was a feeling there. She didn't like it. What was it?

"Are you jealous?" Ilina teased as she headed towards the door.

Yeah. Krystyn didn't say that though. She kept that to herself.