Just Once Before I Die

Posted on Sat Mar 23rd, 2019 @ 12:08am by Major Jacob Asher & Civillian Shae

Mission: The Lost Boys and Girls
Location: P3X842
Timeline: Arrival +9 to Arrival +10 hours, Regression 4.5 to 5 years

After Shae’s initial cry of frustration, she quickly settled down. It had felt good initially, but afterwards she realized that it hadn’t fixed anything, leaving her feeling even more frustrated than before. So Shae wandered deeper into the forest, hoping the walk would help her clear her head. She could still hear chatter from the encampment in the far off distance, her ears swivelling to keep track of where the camp was, but she made no attempt to listen in on what was being said as she wandered aimlessly.

Jake did his best to track Shae. He was used to moving through the woods quietly himself, and he’d had some training in tracking, but while he relied on training, the Kitsune could rely on both training and instinct. Finally Jake gave up trying to outfox the fox girl.

“Shae!” he called out. “It’s Jake! I’d really like to stop wandering around out here looking for you. So if you can hear me, come to me.” Then he waited to see what would happen.

It did not take Shae very long at all to double back to find Jake. She appeared like magic from a dense copse of trees, and her eyes looked wild as she took in the sight of him; recalling the night they kept each other warm in her cabin, she shamelessly started undressing the man with her eyes.

“You called?” she asked, only then realizing that she had been staring at him, so she averted her gaze with an embarrassed blush.

Jake was only regressed about four or five years at the moment, so his hormones thought he was twenty-eight, not that much different from the norm for him. Nonetheless, the wild look in Shae’s eyes and the way she looked at him sent blood in a southerly direction. He cleared his throat. “Ahem. Sorry. Are you alright? Morgaine said she upset you and you ran off, and Ree said that wasn’t the first time today you’ve gotten angry or frustrated and went off to be alone. What can I do to help?”

“We’re waiting to die, how can that be alright or helped?” Shae asked with a moody scoff, then realized that he didn’t deserve such a moody response and she sighed. “I don’t think there’s anything anyone can do to help me. I feel like a stranger in my own skin, and being around so many people wasn’t helping matters, so I had to walk away. And then Morgaine… I think she meant well, but she tried to encourage me to… do something… and it just made my frustration worse.”

“What did she try to encourage you do that upset you so much?” Jake asked. There was something about Shae in this light that distracted Jake. He knew he should tell her about the CDC team, but that would probably make her want to go back to camp, and he didn’t want to share her just yet.

“She said I was a fool for choosing to be alone, that I should just find some human for companionship, as if it could be that simple,” Shae replied, blushing once again. “She thinks that just because she and her partner are from different tribes that she understands what it’s like to be Kitsune among humans. Please don’t misunderstand, you are all truly wonderful, I do care for you all, but outside your mountain I will always be the outsider, never able to truly be myself. It’s not fair, but being alone is simply easier…”

I hate seeing her in so much pain. Jake thought. “Is it?” he asked. “Is being alone really easier? Or does it just make you feel less emotionally vulnerable? What about the night I spent in your home, in your bed? Was that harder or easier? What about the next day with all of your new friends? Was that really so much harder than being alone?”

“I don’t know…” Shae answered, then sat down on the cool moss under a tree, leaning against the tree as she closed her eyes. “I like Jess and Ree and Selyna, but that day they took me out was so exhausting for me. There is so much about your world and your culture that overwhelms me. Even being in the base without the sun, and then all the smells, especially in the medical room, it’s just so much, I feel like I can’t breathe sometimes…” she said, making a point of not acknowledging the night from the cabin.

Jake sighed. He was starting to feel like what Morgaine probably felt like, and he hadn’t even said anything yet. “Shae,” he said as he took a seat next to her on the ground. “I can take you outside of the base, even somewhere where there’s not so much...civilization around to upset you. The offer stands. And you’ve got people who want to be your friends. You’ve got at one person who wants...no...this isn’t the time. Anyway, you’ve got a place off-world, a beautiful place, to go be alone in or to share with your human friends, a place I’m hoping to visit with you again. I realize all of that doesn’t stack up against being with your people again, but at the moment, it’s what you’ve got. But you seem determined to focus on what you haven’t got. Honestly, how does that make you happy?”

“It doesn’t,” Shae admitted, finding herself leaning against Jake without really thinking about it. “But I feel guilty because I’m here with you when I should be out there looking for my people. I feel torn between my need to keep searching and the desire to seek comfort among your kind. Even knowing that helping you may be the best way to achieve my goal of freeing my people, I still feel this way, and I don’t know why.”

Jake smiled when Shae leaned against him. “Maybe you’ve just been alone and lonely so long, carrying all of your burdens by yourself for so long, that letting people in and letting people help is so different that it’s really uncomfortable for you. Painful, even. Here, try this. Without thinking about it, do this with your hands and fingers, just as you would naturally do it, the way you’ve probably done it every time you’ve done it.” Jake held his hands out in front of him, palms together and interlaced his fingers.

Shae was confused, but did as he instructed, interlacing her fingers together, but then he did something seemingly innocuous, he unlaced his fingers and then reclasped his fingers offset by one so that different fingers were atop each other than before. It seemed simple enough, but when Shae did the same, her ears stood upright with a discomforting surprise: it felt so unnatural and wrong to hold her fingers like this!

“Uwa! That feels so strange!” Shae exclaimed with a shudder as she shook out her hands to help dispel that feeling of wrongness.

Jake chuckled. “Sure it did. I bet it felt uncomfortable, wrong even. But that’s only because your whole life, probably from the first time you figured out your hands could do that, you’ve been doing it the first way. If you were to practice going from hand to hand like that over and over, before long the second way wouldn’t feel all that strange to you. You’ve been alone a long time Shae. You’ve been hunted. You’ve been on the run. You’ve been carrying the burden of the loss of your people by yourself for a really long time. Now you have people you can trust, who want to help you, who want to be your friends, and it probably feels really, really uncomfortable. But like that trick with your hands, it only feels uncomfortable because it’s different.”

“You’re probably right,” Shae relented with a sigh and leaned against him once again, and with that sigh she breathed in his scent, and he smelled so good… “Not that it really matters if we’re just going to die in a couple of days… I don’t doubt the competency of your medicine people, but this puzzle has been left unsolved for 2000 years, it’s not unreasonable for me to fear the end waiting for us and wishing for things to be different. In the years I’ve had available to me, what have I been able to accomplish? Not nearly enough, and I’m feeling cross with myself for not having done more.”

Jake slipped his arm around Shae’s shoulders and gave her what he hoped was a comforting squeeze. “Don’t be so hard on yourself. Your people would be so proud of you! And we just got one step further from dying out here. Apparently General Wolf convinced our Centers for Disease Control, doctors who specialize in treating diseases...not exactly like this one, but not that far off, to send a team to try and help! I know it’s not much, but Shae, these guys are really good at their jobs. Our chances of getting out of here just got better. I know you’re worried, Little Fox. So am I. But our chances of getting out of here alive just got better.”

Shae wanted to accept his optimism, she wanted to have hope, but she was too afraid to truly believe right now. Instead, she took comfort from their closeness, breathing in his scent once more to help find a sense of calm.

“You smell really good,” she said, only to immediately blush crimson at the realization she had said that aloud. “Sumimasen! I did not mean to say that!” she said apologetically, pulling away and leaning against the tree again.

Jake sighed. “You don’t have to pull away every time you speak your mind, you know that, right? I mean, you’ve seen me in my underwear and we spent a night in the same bed keeping each other warm. I’d like to think we don’t have to be embarrassed about being honest with each other.” Shae was smelling pretty good herself, causing Jake to shift position a bit. And she was looking… better than ever.

“Oh don’t worry, there’s still plenty for me to be embarrassed about,” Shae said uneasily. In fact, she could feel one of those things creeping up on her now, and she closed her eyes to try to resist the urges she was feeling. But why did she have to fight it? Being alone was all she knew, but she was so desperately tired of feeling that way, and Asher said that he and the others were here for her, and they were going to die in a couple of days anyway, so what could be the harm?

“Asher,” she started to say, but then her mouth went dry as she suddenly grew nervous about what she wanted to ask. “Can… Can I be with you? Like lovers? I do not want to die without knowing what that is like…”

Jake had to close his eyes and take a deep cleansing breath to try and get himself under control. Shae now smelled so good his head was almost spinning, among other distracting problems.

“Shae,” Jake said, his voice a little hoarse. He pulled her into a kiss, a real alpha male kiss this time, not the mamby pamby kiss he’d given her before and held her there a long while before releasing her and resting his forehead against hers. “We are not going to die here. When we get back, not if, but when we get back, if you still want me, then I’m yours, because I’ve wanted to be with you since about the first moment I laid eyes on you.” But he didn’t let her go. He held her close.

Shae was taken by surprise by this kiss, and it was such an unfamiliar act for her that for a moment she felt lost. But he smelled so good, and she shivered with delight when she felt his tongue probing her mouth. Before she really had a chance to react or respond to his advance, he stopped and rested his forehead against hers. His words were kind and gentle, and while her mind appreciated that thoughtfulness, her instincts were in an uproar and did not want to take no for answer! He had kissed her and even admitted that he wanted her, but she was not a savage monster or slave to her instincts, she had learned to control herself years ago, she would not lose control now! She issued a small growl of frustration as she held him tightly, not knowing what to do, because it was getting harder and harder to ignore what her body was telling her to do!

Jake was also struggling. Some part of his mind, not one with a lot of blood in it at the moment, was thinking that a) the infection had Shae’s hormones all out of whack and b) if she was feeling this aroused, it was possible she was giving off some kind of pheromones designed to attract a mate. If that was the case, the pheromones were working, he was attracted. He tried to force his body to disengage from hers, but he couldn’t quite get it to obey him. He pulled Shae into his lap so that she was astride him and pulled her into another powerful kiss! His head was spinning he had to… had to… stop. But he didn’t. He continued to kiss her but went no further, unsure of what to do next. It was a conundrum almost unique to men. If you’re available, and an available woman offers, or in this cases asks for, sex, you say yes. Saying no isn’t an option.

Shae was losing the battle against her instinctual need to mate. In some recess of her mind, she knew that Asher had been right, if they were going to be together they should wait until they were cured, but she was drowning in the scent and taste of him, unable to hear that small voice of reason. Although being in his lap wasn’t all that comfortable… “Your rifle is poking me,” she said when they broke for air.

Jake chuckled despite himself. “My rifle is leaning against the tree.”

Things progressed as one might expect in this situation: clothes were shed and things were getting physical, but just when it started to get really good, something rather unexpected happened.

Quite suddenly, Shae pushed him away and tried to crawl back away from him, but she didn’t make it more than a foot back before she gasped and winced, trying to hold back the change that threatened to take over. Fur began to cover her body and her features started to change, but with a frustrated growl of determination, she dug her claws into the earth and tried to force herself to change back. For a moment, it looked like she was succeeding, her fur began to thin out, but then she looked at Asher and she looked so afraid.

“Sumimasen, sumimasen,” she said softly, then with another gasp she let go of her human shape and within seconds an exhausted white fox lay on the ground before him.

Jake’s head was spinning and it took him a moment to realize what had happened. He wanted to curse, but he restrained himself. He let himself relax, which wasn’t easy. He pulled on his shorts, then went over to pet Shae and said soothing words to her. It clearly wasn’t her fault. He really hoped he got the chance to try again and that she wouldn’t fox out on him again when they did...at least not before he finished, he thought, a little selfishly.

“Shh…” he said. “I’m here. Just rest. I’m going to get dressed, and then I’m going to sit here with you as long as you need me to.”

Jake gathered his clothes and gear quickly and set himself to rights. He stopped now and then to pet Shae and say something comforting. He knew she was probably mortified and he didn’t want her to think he thought less of her over something that hadn’t been intentional. When he was all dressed, he gathered and neatly folded her clothing, then sat next to her again and just pet her, trying his best to soothe her.

Shae just lay there for a while, still breathing heavily from the strain of trying to hold back her transformation. It had hurt! The first time she’d felt the urge to mate when she was younger, she had felt the need to revert back to her fox form, and over time she’d learned how to remain in her human shape without feeling any discomfort, so feeling pain now had taken her by surprise more than the transformation itself. She didn’t feel any pain now, thankfully, but she wasn’t trying to change her shape either. After a while her breathing began to level out and she moved closer to Jake and rested her head on his leg, taking comfort from the gentle petting and his soft soothing words.

Jake smiled when Shae rested her head on his leg. Their sexual intimacy may have been cut short… for him anyway… but Shae hadn’t run off, so they could still be with each other and just enjoy being close. Jake took that as a sign that, while she might be embarrassed, she might have the courage not to pull away from him once they were back at PND. Maybe she’d even take him to her home again, or let him take her to his, so they could be alone and figure out what to do next. Jake hadn’t been lying. Heartbreak was waiting for him if she pushed him away when they got back. He would be an adult about it. He would be a professional. But his heart would be broken nonetheless.

“Thank you for not running away, Little Fox,” Jake said. “Thank you for staying here with me.”

It was kind of a good thing that she was in her fox shape now or she would have admitted that she wanted to run. Not that she wanted to run away from him, she was just feeling beyond embarrassed, humiliated even, and a good hard run helped her to burn off her frustrations, but she was too exhausted to run right now. Although she was feeling quite thirsty, almost ravenously so, and slowly she rose and started to pad away from Jake to go find a water source. Even she realized that for her to walk away after he said what he said would look bad, but it couldn’t be helped; she couldn’t explain herself and she was just so thirsty...

Jake rose and picked up his carbine. “You want to be alone? Or can I walk with you?”

I’m talking to her when she’s a fox… well, she’s always a fox, but in this case she’s literally a fox! How the Hell is she supposed to answer that question?

Shae stopped, looked back, and waited for Jake to follow. Jake grinned and started to walk with her.

“Lead the way, Little Fox,” Jake said. “And your loyal companion shall follow!”

If she had been capable of laughing, that would have gotten a small laugh from Shae. She walked along until she came to a small stream that fed the nearby pond, and it was blessedly cold as she stepped in. She drank her fill and then some, and when she was done she lay down in the water, letting the cold water flow around her with a small groan of relief. She was definitely in heat, she realized, and she was utterly miserable.

Jake crouched by the pond and splashed some water on his face to wash the scent of Shae off of it. Even a non-Kitsune would be able to smell what he’d been doing if he didn’t. He drank from his canteen. When it was empty, he filled it up and dropped a purification pill in it, then closed the canteen and shook it up. By the time he needed another drink, it would be safe. He sighed. He was still feeling… frankly he was feeling randy as Hell and kind of wanted to strip and go swimming in the cold water for a while and see if that would settle him down. Damn. If Shae changed back right now and stood there before him naked, he’d… nope. Best not to think of that.

Shae watched Jake from where she lay; she couldn’t speak, but she had no idea what she would say once she could speak, she was just so embarrassed. At least he seemed to understand that this had been out of her control. Once she had cooled off enough, she pulled herself from the water and gave herself a good shake. Not knowing what else to do, she trotted over to Jake and lay down beside him.

Jake lay down on his back and lay his head on Shae’s middle, basically using her like a pillow. He closed his eyes. “Wake me up if anyone comes looking for me, would you? Or if something large enough to eat me shows up.”

Shae groaned; like she could answer him! She gave him a fwap of her tail to let him know that she’d heard and understood him, then closed her eyes as well. She would probably have to move away from him soon and stay away once he returned to camp because she didn’t want to attract any wild animals, but for now she was too tired to care.

An hour later, Shae was woken from her light nap to hear something in the forest. Whatever it was, it was still some ways away, but it would be a good idea to wake Asher and have them move. Hoping this would wake him, she began to wiggle out from under his head.

“Mmmmm…” Jake said. “Okay, I get it. You want me to get up.” Jake rolled to his feet. He picked up his carbine again. “Should we go get your clothes before we move on?” He laughed. “I have no idea how you’re supposed to answer that. I guess run back towards your clothes if you want me to bring them to camp.”

Shae couldn’t care less about the clothes, she just wanted to make sure her bow and arrows were safe, so she trotted off towards where they had left her clothes. She could hear a number of creatures in the forest now, what sounded like some sort of pack, no doubt drawn to them by the scent of her, so once Jake had collected her belongings, she headed towards camp and this time at a much more swift pace.

“You know,” Jake said. “If I didn’t know you weren’t doing this on purpose, I might get jealous of all your gentlemen callers that seem to be following us. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not completely helpless out here.”

Shae groaned; of course she couldn’t help what was happening, it’s not like she could stop attracting all the nearby males… She was just hoping that said males wouldn’t want to come near the camp, because she certainly didn’t want to endanger the Tau’ri or the Lost Children. Although, it was that very thought that made her hesitate as they approached the camp; should she stay here or should she just lead this wild pack away?

Jake stopped when Shae did. “Nope. I can already see what your thinking. Nuh uh. Not happening. Forget it. I realize that you’re used to taking care of yourself, and that you know more about being an animal than I do, but even I know that you’re trailing scent. If you lead them away, and they don’t catch you and gang rape you, you’ll only lead them back here again when you double back, but by that time Crow and Ree will be useless, if they’re not already. Actually… Hawk is up at the altar. Look, let’s lead them there. Hawk is my age, so he’s not feeling the effects as badly as Ree and Crow, and Jessica is armed and Salara is fighting off the disease for her. We’ll make a stand up there. And just so we’re clear, whatever is going on between us just got put on hold until we deal with this. For the moment, I’m your team leader and you can consider my suggestion an order.” Jake was surprised he was able to maintain the tone of command in his voice. He didn’t like talking to Shae like that.

Shae sighed. The pack would follow her scent here and investigate the camp anyway, so she might as well let Jake and the team do what they do best. Nodding to her leader, she continued walking, changing course to take them to the Altar. But damn, it was so utterly humiliating to return like this...