Let There Be Light: Sc.18


                                            >A cool sea breeze rouses you.

                                            >You’re lying on your side, eyes still closed

                                            >A shift of your shoulder causes some dew to roll off your sleeping bag, onto your neck.

                                            >Right; you slept without a tent.

                                            >Unpleasant, also unexpected, but nothing major; there must not be much left. Later in the day, perhaps, despite exposure?

                                            >Noire blew up the tent, last night.

                                            >Noire…

                                            >Your… mare?

                                            >Whatever.

                                            >Yours now, after the night before.

                                            >What a wonderful thought.

                                            >When you open your eyes, her opals over obsidian are there, staring back at you.

                                            >You mirror her smile.

                                            “Not used to you being up before me.”

                                            >While managing to remain within your shared sleeping bag, she slides two of her legs over your body, then stands, straddling you, looking down at your face as you roll onto your back to follow her motion.

                                            >The she leans down, closes her eyes, and kisses you.

                                            >Deeper than you expected.

                                            >Well, you two had gotten all the “taking it slow” out of the way before you even confessed, didn’t you?

                                            >This surprise, at least, was a much more pleasant one than the last.

                                            >When she pulls her head away, her smile widens. “This time you slept in.”

                                            “Were you just staring at me this whole time?”

                                            >”Your sleep is peaceful, but no. I was thinking.”

                                            “Thinking about what?”

                                            >She collapses onto your chest, with just enough warning for you to tense up to take it. “I had another dream, after we fell back asleep.”

                                            >You wrap your arms around her shoulders and upper back.

                                            “A better one, I hope.”

                                            >”Much better!”

                                            “Good.”

                                            >You lean up to give her a peck.

                                            >Careful; you could get addicted to those.

                                            “Tell me about it.”

                                            >Noire shakes her head. “Not much to say. Just us.”

                                            >She lowers her upper body the rest of the way, so her head and neck lay beside yours, her breath in your ear. “Just like this. This close, this happy.”

                                            >You adjust her body over your chest so her peytral isn’t digging into your sternum so much.

                                            “That does sound nice.”

                                            >You center your head again, looking through her smoky mane as it rose, occasional sparks drifting up towards the partially cloud-obscured blue above.

                                            >As wild as that is, you did discover she was truly flesh-and-blood last night.

                                            >You adjust an arm encircling her so you could get a look at your hasty bandage job.

                                            >You didn’t do that bad a job, really.

                                            >For an amateur.

                                            >Her wound itself is still covered at least, and only a small amount of blood seeped through it overnight; nothing more than a darker stain visible.

                                            “You feeling better over here?”

                                            >You hear and feel more than see her nod, the vaguest of motions in your peripheral rustling the sleeping bag’s lower half next to your ear. “Just sore,” she murmers, “but I will be fine.”

                                            >You adjust your arms so her wounded shoulder isn’t beneath them, then squeeze her in a bear hug.

                                            >You feel her chest tense against you as yours did when she collapsed over you, ribs flexing between your arms, her breath caught in your ear.

                                            >Reminders of her mundane physiology.

                                            >You’re going to be paying a lot more attention to it.

                                            “Good. If we only just got honest with each other, I want to be able to act like it.”

                                            >Her wings drop from her sides, covering your own, from your shoulders to past your waist.

                                            >Her warmth is more than enough to offset the fact she’s essentially holding your sleeping bag open.

                                            >At least your feet are to the shore, several yards away; the breeze isn’t swirling around your pajamas.

                                            “And you’re so warm I don’t feel like getting out of bed just yet.”

                                            >Starting from behind her wings, with your arms covered by them, you stroke her back and flanks.

                                            >You’ve spent enough time in bed together – as if this wasn’t simply the logical outcome of that! - that you’re familiar with her breathing, how her body moves with these automatic motions, particularly their rhythms while she’s resting or asleep.

                                            >But you let your hands play over, across, and through every curve now, tracing the end of her ribcage, curve of her spine, the leading edges of her hips.

                                            >With her forelegs over your shoulders and head beside yours, her body ends just below your belt, with her hind legs bracketing your hips.

                                            >The proportions feel very natural in a way you can’t really place.

                                            >Maybe something carnal.

                                            >You can’t remember your own life; you don’t really know if you’ve enjoyed any women, and if you had, how they felt physically in relation to you in contact like this.

                                            >And the spooning thing in bed, the few times you end up like that, can get a little awkward with the anatomical differences.

                                            >This feels right though. Maybe she proportioned herself for… comfort? In times like this.

                                            >And after you two had devoted yourselves to each other, last night, you don’t have to be so embarrassed about morning swelling around her now.

                                            >Not that mapping her body with your fingers is going to make it go away any faster.

                                            >She’s literally resting her hips down on it; not like you’d be able to hide it if you tried.

                                            >She doesn’t seem to pay it any mind, though.

                                            >…

                                            >Ah well. Maybe another time, little guy.

                                            >You do run your hands around the back of her hips though. Just for future reference.

                                            >As soon as someone invents coinage, you’re sure you could bounce whatever they mint back there.

                                            >Unf.

                                            >Returning your hands to her back, you knead some of the muscles around her spine.

                                            >It’s a little difficult with her on top of you; pressing on her back is indirectly pressuring you, interrupting your breathing, making certain angles awkward.

                                            >But she does hum her pleasure at your attentions into your ear.

                                            “You’re still pretty tense, you know.”

                                            >Her hum of pleasure turns into an inquisitive note.

                                            “All back through your, er, back. Has something been bothering you? Maybe caused that nightmare?”

                                            >Her wings slide along your arms a short distance, the most half-hearted shrug you can imagine. “Maybe. Nothing more than what I have told you.”

                                            “Maybe just travel fatigue. You got a load off your chest last night-”

                                            >-She presses her chest down on yours a little more, for just a bit-

                                            “-but you feel like you still have a load on your back.”

                                            >You continue massaging the length of her back.

                                            >She really is powerfully built, despite her lightweight and slender frame.

                                            >You can feel every bundle and connection between the different parts of her body, feeling out how her wings connect to her back, so close to her shoulders, a structure you’re sure is utterly alien to anything on earth.

                                            >She had to, you realize, devise entirely new physiological arrangements like this, for every creature you arranged different than back home; winging it where her reference to what anatomical knowledge you had, combined with analogy to your own body, failed.

                                            >She can’t seriously hold against herself that some ponies don’t fly so good, can she?

                                            >Pegasi didn’t even exist at all, back home, and only now that you’re digging your hands into the base of her wings do you realize just how complex an arrangement she had to devise.

                                            >She did say that, if anything went wrong, she could retroactively repair it at the moment of creation, once she rejoined her larger timeless self.

                                            >The chronological implications of Greater Noire still being out there, doing whatever she had to do to make you and your mare’s work… work, still hurt your head a little.

                                            >But that too is your Noire.

                                            >You suppose it would be a Noire with knowledge of everything you’ve ever done, since her memories would re-integrated.

                                            >So maybe she’s thinking about this moment, what would be a memory for her even as it’s still happening.

                                            >The thought gives you a sense of existential vertigo.

                                            >Who you have now in this moment is on top of you.

                                            >The rest is for her to figure out some other time.

                                            >So you’ll keep working these muscles, give the gal after all is said and done something to look down on at this moment and remember fondly.

                                            >This one here is very much flesh and could really use this workover.

                                            >Judging by how knotted all these muscles are.

                                            “You know, we really should have been more honest with each other earlier.”

                                            >”Hrm?”

                                            “I could’ve been giving you so many massages and stuff. Maybe your peaceful moments even moreso. You relax well but you gotta RELAX sometime.”

                                            >She nuzzles your cheek. “If I knew what your hands could do, I would have asked you to make such use of them sooner.”

                                            >You close your eyes to better focus on what you’re feeling.

                                            >As you work, Noire’s breathing slows, becomes more regular.

                                            >You time your motions to it, working in time with her breathing in and out, in and out.

                                            >Almost hypnotic, in a wa-

                                            >Something flips inside your head.

                                            >You’re not looking at her, like the last few times this happened.

                                            >Instead, you see her in your mind’s eye, rather than your real ones.

                                            >You can imagine her cosmic form, laid out over you like this.

                                            >Bands of dark matter and starry span criss-crossing her body, where the muscles you’ve been working lay.

                                            >The structures underneath them, backdrop to your labor, those stretches of golden fire filigree.

                                            >Her peytral, still on her chest, a vast expanse of solid gold framing three gemstones of such enormous size that they sparkled with the light of entire galactic clusters.

                                            >It’s nothing like when you saw her, actually, now that you really analyze the vision in your mind.

                                            >Before the patterns that formed her body ran in arcs and curves and spirals, fractally branching the harder you looked at them.

                                            >This, however, is most definitely an imagining of what you are feeling across her body right now, with these efforts.

                                            >But it gives you that same sense of awe, even as you can work it in your mind as well as on her body over you, plucking at strings where taut muscles run, pulling on bunches of tissues to  loosen them.

                                            >Vast nebulae arc away to the sides of your vision where her wings are, the drifting sparks of her mane replaced by a tumbling cascade of new stars as you guide your hand up to the trunk of the vast spiral arm they spin out of, smoothing it, aligning her neck better, even as it passes the side of your head to where you know hers to be.

                                            >Whether this is entirely your doing or something she has somehow opened in your mind, you can play this image of her – and thus her real body – almost like an instrument, since you can see through her to identify specific points.

                                            >The more your hands find, the more the image fills in, crafting on the fly a body of shimmering rainbow light.

                                            >Unlike the dread and irrelevance you felt before, you find you love this image in your mind, you couldn’t open your eyes if you wanted to, nothing to dash this scene before you from your head.

                                            >Maybe it’s the contact; you can feel yourself in the depiction, underneath, you know where your body is touching hers, even this cosmological depiction of it.

                                            >You’re as big as the universe that is her, now, for just this moment.

                                            >No, you’re as great a part of it as she is.

                                            >Doing your own metaphorical work of creation, aligning it and unfolding it and ordering it into perfection and symmetry.

                                            >Is this what creation feels like? A nudging of all things into their proper places?

                                            >You can even see when something needs no further prodding; light races up and down the astral spans of her musculature, telling you yes, all is good here!

                                            >She said, awhile ago, that from an outside perspective it was hard to see the true artistic merit of what she made, that she could only notice it when forced into a limited mode of view.

                                            >But you were born with that, and you have taken it here; your mental model of her shaping this image even now.

                                            >She truly is beautiful, in both a mundane and transcendental way.

                                            >And now, you realize as you notice your pace of work has slowed, probably asleep.

                                            >Your hands were so entrained to her breathing they had worked slower and more deliberately as her breathing calmed.

                                            >With one last consideration of this wonderful form, you finally lift your lids.

                                            >The image before you explodes into a white and blue sky, marred by drifting pseudo-smoke punctuated by embers.

                                            >This, too, was beautiful though, despite – or maybe even because – its familiarity over the months, even if not from this precise angle or composition.

                                            >Her wings still surround you, shielding you from what wind lapped around your bedding.

                                            >You run your hands down her back one more time, slowly and smoothly to not wake her.

                                            >She does feel a lot more relaxed than even her sleeping self the past few nights.

                                            >For all her power, she’s still inconvenienced by the banal limitations of living meat.

                                            >But, as with her efforts of creation, that’s what you’re here for. The mortal’s touch.

                                            >You have the experience with all this, after all.

                                            >You two compliment each other in a way that, you realize, no other pair of living beings on this planet may ever experience.

                                            >That’s… sad, in a way.

                                            >You will have to let her know, sometime, that you hope she will find a way to impart such joy to your creations as well.

                                            >But for now…

                                            >You close your eyes, conjuring the image of your love in starlight once again.

                                            >And feel yourself drifting through it, now that the activity of your hands and fingers compel you, now just resting on her barrel.

                                            >You can sleep a little longer, before you two have to leave for your next destination…