Stahma Tarr is no one's fool (noonesfool) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2016-11-29 01:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, natasha romanoff (black widow), stahma tarr |
Who: Natasha and Stahma
What: Stahma's dreams take an unexpected turn. Then the discussion turns towards lighter subjects.
When: Recently
Where: Stahma's home
Warnings: Mentions of limb severing, cannibalism, and terrorism
The dreams had long been something Stahma hated. She’d gone from mafia queen to terrorist, and now she was a widow. She’d been cooped up inside her home more often than not. Inside her home she didn’t have to deal with the hatred and insults directed at her. T’evgin was her only ally left, and he came to check on her. He’d bought her flowers, blood lilies to be precise, and just for being present, she’d been insulted by the shopkeeper. T’evgin, however, had defended her and the two had continued to walk through Defiance during which he’d asked her to come with him to Australia to help acclimate his children to a peaceful way of life. Stahma hesitantly agreed to think on the offer, but further discussion was interrupted when the Votanis Collective arrived with an unexpected guest: Stahma’s husband.
Datak was alive and Stahma was overwhelmed with emotion to see him alive. Though shortly after their reunion, Amanda and the Vice Chancellor of the Votanis Collective came to ask Stahma to use her influence with T’evgin to get him to the party that evening to discuss peace. Initially having resisted wanting to talk to him because of the offer for her to go to Australia with him, and knowing his nature would dictate he’d take her by force, she eventually did go speak with him.
She was genuinely afraid, the fear of the Omec never having quite left her despite her intimate relationship with T’evgin. He threatened her, but she found it within her to stand up to him and to remind him of how he had come to view Defiance, and Earth itself. She attended the party with him, though fear renewed itself when Kindzi suddenly showed up, threatening to eat her. T’evgin told her to go home, barricade the doors and windows and not let anyone in until he came for her later.
At which point she woke with a start. She immediately sat upright and glanced around the room as if she expected Kindzi to jump out of the shadows and devour her right then and there. All thoughts of Natasha being there were far from her mind.
The dreams could bite Natasha’s nice ass. She was tired of civil wars, of the people and families she’d built falling apart. It seemed like an inevitability. It made her want to push people away and she had to fight extra hard. Between lunches with Wanda and coming to visit Stahma (among other things), Nat hoped she was trying hard enough.
“Bad dreams?” She pushed herself up on her elbow, the sheet falling away from her naked body.
The voice startled her and Stahma flinched a bit, her head snapping to look at Natasha. Her heart was pounding a hundred miles a second and she forced herself to try and calm down. “You could say that, yes,” she responded after a moment. She didn’t have a care for her own naked torso being exposed. Though her hair was long enough that it was partially covering her. She reached over and flipped a light on, her eyes doing another scan of the room before she looked back at Natasha. “I am sorry for waking you so rudely.”
Nat put her hand on Stahma’s stomach, rubbing it lightly. “It’s okay. Are you all right?” She knew paranoia when she saw it and it was putting her own nerves on edge. She itched to grab a gun.
She took a couple slow breaths as Nat’s hand lightly rubbed her stomach. “I am unharmed, yes.” She responded, finally convinced that Kindzi only existed in her dreams. Stahma laid down on her back, setting a hand over the one Natasha had on her stomach. “It was an unsettling dream.” She had a lot of emotions over it, all of them unwanted ones.
“I’m sorry.” A lot of dreams could be unsettling but she’d rarely seen Stahma this upset. She scooted closer so she could put her arms around her and hold her tight. “Do you want to talk about it, or forget about it?”
Normally, Stahma kept her emotions close to her chest, always presenting a calm and cool exterior. However, there were times when she dropped that mask, either willingly when with someone she explicitly trusted, or unwillingly, such as currently when fear and shock got ahold of her so strongly. She closed her eyes for a moment as she snuggled into Natasha’s embrace.
“It began with T’evgin finally coaxing me out of my home. He wanted me to stop mourning and begin to live my life again. Though it is difficult when the city hates my very existence. We walked through the market and he bought me flowers, though when the florist saw me, he insulted me. It was something I deserved given what I had to the people of Defiance.” Stahma knew she deserved worse than simple insults, but she wasn’t about to say that. “After we walked further, I asked T’evgin if I was still in danger from his daughter, Kindzi. He assured me no one was in danger from her. He then wished me to come with him when he took his people to Australia, which was uninhabited in my dreams. He wanted me to be a mother to them, to help guide them to a new way of life. T’evgin no longer wished to carry on his people’s legacy of terror. After seeing life in Defiance, he had come to see coexistence was a better option, but his children would need time to acclimate to a peaceful way of life. Despite Defiance hating me, I did not wish to go with him, but I promised him I would think about it.”
Rubbing at Stahma’s back, Nat listened and let her talk. Most of the time when this kind of thing happened it was better to just let it go through. She tried to imagine Austrailia as uninhabited, and wondered if they wildlife wouldn’t kill the non-humans. Since those in particular were basically cannibals she wasn’t bothered by the idea. “And then something happened?”
While Stahma had an odd relationship with T’evgin, she didn’t want to see him die. Kindzi and the rest of the Omec? They could die. “The Votanis Collective arrived in town, the Vice Chancellor at the helm. They came wanting peace with Defiance, and they had brought someone with them. Datak. He wasn’t dead as we’d all believed. He had somehow escaped the explosion that had killed Rahm Tak and his men.”
“I don’t know how I feel about. Did that make you happy, seeing him?” She was just a little jealous. Just a little bit. Okay a lot. “How did he survive?”
“In the dream I was beyond happy to see him. I ran to him, even.” Stahma’s relationship with Datak in the dreams had grown to be better before they’d been outed as terrorists and he’d ‘died.’ “He’d cut his own arm off and ran, leaving his forearm that had the homing beacon in it behind to draw the explosion towards it. Datak had made it far enough from the blast that he had survived.” It made Stahma feel uneasy. Thus far, her ex-husband in this life wasn’t making any moves to even try and reconcile with her, and she was fine with that. But some of her dream emotions were bleeding over and she was definitely not fine with that.
“He cut his own arm off.” Natasha shook her head in disbelief. But she’d heard of worse and honestly she’d have done the same thing if she had to. “That takes courage. I’ll give him that. And that’s the only thing I’ll give him that’s not a bullet.”
“Courage, yes, though it was also his will to live. Datak will always find a way to get out of any situation he can. Even one that would result in his death it seems.” Though Stahma couldn’t fault him for wanting to live. Who really wanted to die when it wasn’t even their idea to begin with? He saw a way out and took it. “He returned home in the dream, and I saw his new arm for the first time. He’d worn a glove to hide it, but I ended up making him let me see the mechanical arm the Votanis Collective had given him. It was...very strange. It did not look like the typical mechanical arm you think. It looked more like his actual arm with some metal parts braced along the outside of his skin.”
“Kind of cybernetic?” Natasha asked. It sounded like something grown in a vat and then modified with technology.
Maybe someday she’d tell Stahma about her own enhancements. Natasha’s arms tightened around Stahma’s waist.
“Kind of, yes. I am rather certain the technology used in the arm was created by Indogenes.” Most of the Votan technology was created by the Indogene race. Stahma trailed her fingers along Natasha’s arm. “Not long after Datak and I reunited, Amanda Rosewater and the Vice Chancellor of the Votanis Collective came to our home to talk with us. Amanda wanted me to convince T’evgin to attend a party she was hosting that evening to hold peace talks with the VC and with T’evgin. I declined at first, but Datak somewhat convinced me to see T’evgin despite the complications of my relationship with the Omec leader.”
“Why do I feel like that’s not going to end well for anyone?” Natasha shivered, lowering her head to kiss Stahma’s shoulder, in hopes of keeping her in the here and now, and not this strange future.
“Because it is the way of my dreams.” Stahma drew in a slow breath. “I went to speak with T’evgin, and when I turned down his offer of going to Australia, he went into a rage, though he never lifted a hand to me, he did start showing me his true form. I did, however, talk sense into him and he did finally agree to attend the party with me. Not long after we arrived, however, Kindzi appeared as well. She leaned close to me, telling me she’d brought her appetite. Obviously she was threatening to eat me then and there. Once she moved away, T’evgin told me to go home and bar the doors and windows and not to let anyone in until he came for me later that night.”
Natasha frowned. She didn’t like that at all. She didn’t trust T’evgin and she didn’t trust this Kindzi either, for obvious reasons. She pulled Stahma into her lap, starting to play with her long, long hair.
Stahma slid an arm around Natasha’s neck while she brushed the fingers of her other hand through her hair. “I did as he told me because I wanted to be as far away from Kindzi as possible. And that is where my dream left off.” She didn’t know what happened at the party after she left, but she didn’t quite care at the moment either. She had other things to worry about.
For some inexplicable reason, Natasha started to braid Stahma’s hair. She wondered what a very long braid would look like, in this snow-white hair. She frowned. “I think that’s probably safe. With a gun.”
She didn’t mind the braiding at all. Stahma couldn’t remember the last time she’d braided her hair in its entirety. She had a tendency to put smaller braids in it for some of her hairstyles, but that was as far as it went. “I have several of those.” She wouldn’t think twice about killing Kindzi. Sure, Stahma still had a healthy dose of fear of the Omec, but she wouldn’t just roll over and be a meal for one without putting up one hell of a fight.
Nat remembered those hairstyles. She turned Stahma around so she could focus more on the hair. “We’ll find out, good or bad.” She hoped good. What happened if someone got eaten alive in their dreams? She’d met Stahma after she’d been stabbed and Nat had more than one scar from hers. Along with nanites.
“Yes, we will.” Stahma doubted that it would be for good. While she could count on Datak to protect her, how could he protect her from an Omec? Or multiple Omec if Kindzi got her way and started a Dread Harvest of the Earth? She shuddered at the thought. Stahma didn’t want to know if she’d suffer injuries related to being eaten alive or not. Her stab wound had carried over, which had left a scar on her stomach not far from the scar of the stab wound she’d gotten from Svetlana. “A lot seems to be happening at once, and I am filled with an intense anxiety over it.”
“Lets talk about something else.” Nat was about halfway done with the braid now, and she kissed Stahma on the shoulder. “Do you have plans for December?” She didn’t know what holidays Stahma celebrated and it wasn’t like Christmas had been a part of Nat’s upbringing.
Stahma closed her eyes, focusing on Natasha and trying to push the dream crap away. She didn’t want to deal with any of it any longer. “No, I do not. Do you celebrate any holiday?” Typically, Stahma enjoyed celebrating Christmas, but if Natasha celebrated a different one, she wasn’t opposed. While she was religious, these days she tended to pray to Rayetso more than she did the Christian God.
“Not really. I appreciate the decor and festiveness, and that whole message of actually being kind to each other, but I’ve never really celebrated.” Beyond trying to get the grumpy men in her life to dress like santa to benefit some kids. Nat was all for that kind of thing.
“I do enjoy the spirit of the season, and while I typically celebrated Christmas in the past, my religious beliefs have shifted to those of my dreams of late.” There were celebrations and such in the Castithan religion, but there were none quite like Christmas.
“I’m sure those celebrations are interesting in their own way. Probably vastly different.” Every alien culture was different and if they were anything like humans they had dozens of their own cultures throughout their history, too. If not hundreds. “Do you want to do something? With yours?”
“Some of them are, yes. And certainly different.” It was difficult to describe the difference sometimes. “We do not really have anything quite like Christmas. There are celebrations to honor family and ancestors, however. Some of them I would not care to uphold.”
“Sometimes family isn’t worth celebrating, and ancestors can be right out.” Natasha’s family didn’t exist. They were all dead. The family she’d built had been taken apart and destroyed in both sets of dreams, too, and she had yet to really connect the way she wanted to here. But Bucky didn’t know her, Steve had yet to remember her. She and Tony had never been super close. And some of the others were missing entirely. She could fill in the gaps, though. There were Wanda and Clint, and Stahma. Jemma and Laura. Logan. Cosima.
Maybe found family was better than blood.
“Indeed they are not. Especially in a society that puts emphasis and males.” Stahma had stopped following some Castithan traditions, and she’d taken over Datak’s business after he’d gone to prison, then she out-right ousted him when he’d punished Alak for letting her take power. Earth was a new world, and traditions did not always need to survive. Stahma was not opposed to adapting. She was just not in the majority of Castithans in that tendency.
“Perhaps a new tradition is needed. For both of us.” Stahma didn’t quite phrase it as a question, but she was curious how Natasha would take the notion.
“Some traditions need to be drowned in the tub,” Nat agreed. She finished the braid and looped it around her hand and fingers. “So that there’s room for new traditions. You know what would look good with this braid? Something silver…”
“Precisely so. Sadly, in my dreams, I am in the minority of my people to think that way.” Stahma did hate that about Castithans, how they clung to tradition. She’d been told by one woman that they must honor the women who came before them by following in their footsteps. Stahma believed they should honor them by becoming what they could not. It had made her a social pariah before the terrorism had thrown her into being the ire of all of Defiance, not simply the Castithan community.
Stahma looked at Natasha over her shoulder. “I believe I have something that could work.”
Nat would have agreed with Stahma, over that woman. It was dishonor to not go forward, and to say otherwise damned others to the same fate. No advancement. “Something silver? Or an idea for celebrating a new tradition?”
That was the Castithan way, to not change, but honor what came before and not stray from it. The argument that the Castithan race had survived because of preserving the old ways had been used against her. Stahma, while desiring change, was subtle about gaining it. She used her pragmatism to the utmost as she went about getting it. “Something silver, though I may have an idea for a new tradition.”
Stahma slid out of bed and moved over to where she kept her jewelry, certainly not caring about her naked state of being. It had been years since her hair had been braided like this. She sifted around in a drawer for a moment before she found a few silver clips and a silver ribbon, then came back over to the bed, handing them to Natasha as she sat back down.
There was an argument to be made that preserving the old ways might have led to the situation that had them trying to survive on Earth. Natasha turned the clips around in her hand, then moved to put them in Stahma’s braid. The ribbon she used at the end of it, then trailed her fingers down her spine. “You’re so beautiful.”
It was a valid argument, especially for the Castithans that had been born and raised on Earth and had no memory of life on Casti. Stahma remembered Casti, and sometimes she missed it, but she’d come to the view that this was a new world, a new lease on life. And after seeing human women have freedoms that Castithan women did not have? Stahma finally had the courage to take the freedom she wanted, tradition be damned.
She shivered lightly as she felt those fingers trail down her spine. It was still somewhat strange to hear such compliments. Datak never gave them to her, in either life. He’d tended to say things like he’d ‘married well’ which was the truth until he’d thrown her away. She turned to look at Natasha, a smile on her face. “Thank you.” She wouldn’t placate Natasha with things like ‘You flatter a poor woman’ the way she’d done to Datak in the dreams. No, she could say things straight with her. Or at least as straight as Stahma could ever be. Luckily, they both understood the language of vague nuance.
Natasha smiled at her, no teasing or taunting in her eyes or the curve of her lips. Just a genuine smile. “I love..the way your hair feels in my fingers.” She scooted closer, the red of her hair contrasting with the white of Stahma’s skin.
Reaching out, she twirled some strands of red hair around her finger. She did love the contrast of Natasha’s hair to her skin. She smiled in return, lilac eyes focused on Natasha’s. “I like the feel of yours as well, and how the color contrasts to mine.”
“I spent my whole life trying to blend in,” Natasha said. “I can appreciate a little bit of contrast.” She stared back at her, then got off the bed. There was a chill in the air and it made her skin pimple. She straddled Stahma, and looped her arms around her neck. “Quite a bit, actually.”
As Natasha straddled her, Stahma smiled, fingers gliding up her thighs, then up along her sides. “I am pleased to hear that because there is quite the contrast between us.” There was a playful tone to her voice. There was still some contrast when she used her disguise. The jet black hair and dark brown eyes contrasted nicely to Natasha’s. However, there was just something about that curtain of red hair splayed over snow white skin that was enticing.
Stahma was beautiful either way. A woman like Natasha could appreciate the beauty both natural and in disguise. She’d lived her life as one cover after another. Even her life here was partly a cover in some ways that she kept to herself. “Two sides of a coin.”
“A very beautiful and exotic coin,” Stahma added with a smile, fingers brushing along Natasha’s ribs. “I am happy we met, though it could have done without my being wounded.” It was said in a jovial manner, though she really did think that situation could have done without her bleeding. But it had brought them together, as it were, so she couldn’t complain about it. Stahma then leaned in, nose a few inches from Natasha’s throat and she took a deep inhale of her scent.
Natasha had an intriguing scent. She didn’t smell like other humans that she’d been able to smell since turning into a Castithan. And she found that she really liked the way Natasha smelled. This went deeper than simply smelling someone’s natural scent, the perfume they wore or the soap they used. This went to a hormonal level. There was something different about Natasha, she just wasn’t one to prod about it. She figured her lover would tell her in time.
“That’s the best kind of coin.” It wasn’t the first time Natasha had been called exotic. She exuded a mysterious air when she wanted to. But this context was different. It flattered her and made her feel something. Natasha’s voice was throaty. “Honestly, I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’ve met most of my lovers through some form of stabbing or another.”
Stahma chuckled softly, hands trailing around to Natasha’s back. “At least I did not break the pattern. It would be attention-grabbing to be injured like that.” She leaned in and placed a kiss at the base of Natasha’s throat in the dip of her collarbone.
Shuddering, Nat tilted her head back. Stahma’s lips were that special kind of soft that only a woman could really pull off. While Nat enjoyed roughness, she also enjoyed softness. Just don’t tell anyone. “I suppose I have a type. I like dangerous.”
There was a time and a place for roughness and for softness. Luckily for Natasha, Stahma also enjoyed both. She nipped at her neck as she pulled her closer against her. “You are not the only one who likes dangerous.” Natasha was dangerous. Every muscle in her body was a testament to that. And Stahma loved every bit of it.
Sometimes, a voice could cut. Stahma was like a knife at her throat, that split second before action, when adrenaline rushed through. Natasha suddenly pushed Stahma onto the bed, leaning over her, lips seeking Stahma’s out like a bullet.
It was like a rush, being around someone dangerous. One scarcely knew what to expect at times. Such as when Natasha suddenly pushed her back. Her breath caught as her back met the bed and Natasha leaned over her. Her lips caught Natasha’s in a sudden, crackling kiss, like the aftermath of a lightning strike.
They could both burn, Natasha thought. Each other, and everything around them. Maybe that was what was needed. Maybe they could tear it all down and damn the consequences. But what ‘it’ might be, not even Nat knew. She deepened the kiss, and let the lightning spark the fire.