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femslashfeteTitle: Miscalculations
Fandom: Warrior Nun
Ship: Jillian Salvius/Mother Superion
Prompt: Irrational
Rating: G
Length: 2267 words
Notes: Post-s2. More on the funny side than not.
Summary: Out of all the reasons why Jillian Salvius would call on her, Mother Superion had not been expecting this…
The drab, monochromatic crowd parts for the nun in all-black. Moses barely lifts her cane for the sea of white lab coats and gray jumpsuits to concede her passage, closing again behind her as Mother Superion advances through the busy ArqTech corridors. The scientists as well as the electricians, plumbers, masons and other sorts of workers stare at her in her dark religious garb just as intrigued as herself, staring back at them.
It doesn’t take long for her to reach her destination. The door opens before she has a chance to knock.
“Ah, you’re here. Hello,” a nervous Jillian Salvius greets her and invites her in, talking with her hands much more than her usual. “Thank you for coming. Please, make yourself comfortable. May I get you anything? You might want a drink.”
Her breathless rhythm is disturbingly reminiscent of sister Yasmine’s rather than her own ritual, pondered prosody.
“Are you implying I’ll need one?” Superion wonders, opting for one of the armchairs.
The head of the bustling company pours them two glasses of fine whisky, its old, wooden odour a testament to its strength, a warning; Mother Superion takes the glass but stalls her sip, waiting for an answer.
“I don’t mean to alarm you but it’s likely you will find use for the alcohol, yes,” Jillian says and then swallows the contents of her own glass in one go before setting it back in its place and taking a seat near Superion.
Hers is a strange image: a patchwork of the public persona the nun had known only through television, newspapers and magazines woven with scraps of the private woman she had shared a few urgent days of her life with, stationed with her girls at Jillian Salvius’ villa while they all tried to save the world. A button-up shirt of immaculate white, perfectly adjusted to her torso, with not a single fold to spoil the smooth surface, makes her luminous and professional; dark, loose trousers and a pair of men’s shoes denounce a need for comfort rather than publicity, while her hair remains in a messy blond bun instead of being carefully curled for the cameras to capture.
Jillian sits upright, crosses her legs and then uncrosses them, unable to be quite still.
Mother Superion does not pretend not to watch her, even though she takes the opportunity to taste her drink at last. It is unusual upon her tongue, better suited for red wine and holy bread.
She takes another fiery sip.
“Well. It’s no use keeping this from you any longer,” Jillian starts, leaning back in her chair, blue eyes seeking as much as fleeing Superion’s own, darting back and forth, undecided. “Let me shock you, offend you and witness your horror already so I can finally be settled and get back to work.”
“Shock and offend me…?”
“Let’s not waste time. I’m interested in you. I’ve never really been taken with anyone in all these years, as there are few women in my field and less still as good at it as I am for good enough of a conversation to flow. As for those of other areas, well, I’ve never much had any contact with them. My work has been too important — and I think you’ll understand that better than most — but the fact of the matter is that you parachuted your way into my reclusive little life and popped that bubble. Then, after we had had all those talks and spent all those nights discussing in ways I never knew were possible, you scuttled your way back to your convent and I find myself completely paralysed and wanting ever since.” She shakes her head slightly. “It’s absurd. I should be mourning my son or using my energy to focus on any of my projects apart from redecorating the whole damn place just to make sure Kristian hasn’t compromised my company any more than we suspect and yet I cannot. My mind is absorbed fully by one subject and one subject alone. I am become functionally irrational, so I beg of you to put me out of my misery, snuff out this feeble, foolish flame of hope and allow me to regain my normalcy.”
Jillian says all this as plainly as can be, drawing arcs big and small in the air with her hands. This is a presentation, a business meeting, a conference in which she shows the world a new species or describes a new virus, perfectly informed and perfectly calm about something that would unsettle the most enlightened, divine-like monk — or anchoress.
Mother Superion studies her but says nothing. With one decisive swig, however, she, too, empties her glass.
Her silence prompts Jillian to proceed.
“Perhaps I should be clearer. See, Mother Superion,” she says, though she knows full well what the nun’s name is, though she has received this gift so few others have, “I have a problem. As long as I yearn and hope, I cannot move on and do all that I must, with the attention it requires. Rationally, I’m well aware that a nun of the Catholic Church has no option, that her reply can only ever be one, if possibly peppered by a handful of inconvenient and prejudiced sermonising. But we’ve established already that I am at an irrational level of thinking. All you need to do, then, is say no and provide me with the irrefutable evidence I need so I don’t rationalise anything and can simply accept that there is no future possible.”
“You expect me to just say ‘no’ after the torrent of words you’ve just said? ‘No’ and I just leave like nothing ever happened?”
“Essentially, yes.”
Mother Superion squints at her.
“That’s what you called me here for?”
“I agree it’s exaggerated and unfair but the alternative was going to you and I don’t think you’d like this conversation any more than you do now if we were sitting on a pew instead. So.”
There is charm to her insolence, perhaps because she recognises just how ridiculous it all sounds. Still, the corners of Jillian’s lips tremble all through the confident smiles and her cool pallor had long been substituted by a deep flush.
“… You don’t seem shocked or offended yet,” she remarks at another instant of silence on Mother Superion’s part, made much longer than it actually was by the brimming anxiety that pushed so many sentences out of Jillian in so little time. “I hope I don’t need to be crude in case there are any lingering doubts.”
Superion eyes her with a hint of impatience.
“It’s always better to be direct, isn’t it?”
The provocation isn’t innocent in the least and Jillian Salvius is not a woman to take any provocation peacefully.
“Very well. So that there is no room for ambiguity and so that you may openly mock me if you so wish: I feel attracted to you. Sexually. Biologically, really.” Her face grows redder, as does Superion’s, but once the first words are out the others follow in a deluge of unthinking pleasure. “I’ve not been a teenager for decades but I can’t focus on anything else like one because I cannot stop imagining what it’s like to kiss you, on the lips as well as elsewhere — to touch you and be touched by you, to see you whole from underneath your habit. Now, shall I go on in more detail or will you take pity on me and give me what I want already?”
Mother Superion raises her chin as well as her eyebrow at her, quite obviously affected by all that has been said.
“You don’t seem to know what you want, doctor Salvius.”
“I beg your pardon?” The comment stupefies her. “I’ve been saying all this time, all I need—”
The nun clears her throat.
“What you need is contrary to what you want, or you wouldn’t have sent for me.”
Jillian blinks, shakes her head, waves a hand.
“Alright, fair. But irrelevant. I’d appreciate it if we could avoid skirting around the issue, Mother Superion. You won’t hurt my feelings, don’t worry. Just say what you have to say to prove me right and release me from this torment. One tiny little word.”
Made more solemn by her cane, Superion gets up. She stares down at the scientist.
“No.”
“Thank you!”
“I can’t do that.”
Triumph fades as quickly as it comes. Jillian leans a bit forward, turns her head just right, as if the issue were her ears rather than what she had just heard.
“… I’m sorry?”
Mother Superion sets both of her hands atop her cane, standing firmly on her spot, a monolith in black, unmovable. Jillian gawks at her, fingers digging into the sides of her chair.
“If I tell you what you expect I’d be lying and lying is its own sort of sin — one I’d rather not add to my list when I’m already guilty of so many others.” She shrugs. “You miscalculated. I feel no horror.”
“Suzanne,” Jillian calls at last as she rises to her feet and nears her, coming closer but never enough to touch — not since the miracle. “You cannot encourage me. You must not play with me. No good can come of it. I know it can’t be, that this is just adolescent wishfulness on my part, so just confirm it.”
“Haven’t we seen enough impossible things become possible right in front of us?”
“Yes, but not this. You’re a nun—”
“And nuns are devoid their own say or feelings?”
“You’ll admit it’s not compatible! Nuns, physical as well as emotional attachment, sex — I thought I was the one out of my mind, here, but it appears we’re both… You’re not shocked at all, then? Am I that see-through?”
Suzanne frowns, Suzanne smiles.
“I’d ask whether I was that opaque but then I did make an effort to hide it. It was, as you say, irrational.”
Jillian Salvius, the genius, perhaps the brightest scientific mind of her generation and of many yet to come, opener of portals to other dimensions, pathfinder to new realities, wondrous mother of a completely fatherless child, Jillian Salvius stands frozen in place, robbed of any and all words to properly answer Mother Superion. She is, after all, a woman of science, not scripture — Jillian is very little used to the ecstasies of the purest revelation.
Blind-sided though she is, she remains a practical woman. With a short laugh stuck at the back of her throat, the sound of both disbelief and satisfaction, she pushes forward somehow.
“This scenario was certainly absent from any of my predictions. Frankly, I’m not sure of what to do now if you also…” Her attitude, mostly confident up until the nun’s confession, becomes awkward; she fidgets, she sways slightly to the sides, painfully conscious of how close they are to one another and with consent to boot, yet she doesn’t make a move. “But you’re the one with the real impediment between the two of us. What do you propose? It’s not too late to agree on burying all of this, though it will certainly be ten times more difficult now I know there is reciprocity of feeling—”
“Praying for it to go away didn’t do me any favours.”
Jillian gulps. Now it is Suzanne who speaks with authority, sure of herself, dependable, knowledgeable.
It’s always wisest to follow those wiser than we…
Still, she hesitates. The problem has all been wholly exposed, thesis and antithesis and synthesis, the conclusion clear. Perhaps for that very reason, thanks to such careful methodology meant to contain the so-called irrationality of passion, passion itself is denied its place: it looms over them, tickles them, pricks them, pushes them, yet neither crosses the glass border of the test tubes inside which they have both been placed for analysis.
“… Are you suggesting we act on it?”
“I am not allowed to.”
“Ah. Yes.” Jillian deflates with a knowing smirk. “Hence my concern and my hopes that you would—”
“But I’ve also never been the most obedient of servants, God forgive me.”
And, before Jillian can parse the message, her lips receive Suzanne’s own — clumsy, hungry, even a bit painful from the shards that came from breaking through their invisible prisons.
None of this had figured in doctor Salvius’ well-wrought hypotheses. Her model had failed entirely, incapable of foreseeing these particular possibilities even if they were those she preferred — perhaps due to her own desires. Her bias had played its part regarding her own faith (or lack thereof), for she did not guess it could all lead to this, she could not truly believe it would ever end in her fiercely kissing the woman she felt so drawn to, enraptured, in the middle of the room where it had been meant to end before it began.
Now they are beyond that. Neither of them have charts or plans, neither of them has signed on any dotted lines or considered their guarantees, their safeguards. As Jillian had feared, thinking had been thrown out the window and the future, the near future, even, when they were to break their kiss apart for a breath, would hold plenty of problems for them to solve which passion and impetus alone could not fix.
But then the taste of that kiss, those lips, that mutual longing at last fulfilled, the sensation of another body pressed against her own, desiring her as she had desired, proved that blasted irrationality had its myriad merits — and maybe it could go on undisputed for just a few more minutes (or hours) more…
Fandom: Warrior Nun
Ship: Jillian Salvius/Mother Superion
Prompt: Irrational
Rating: G
Length: 2267 words
Notes: Post-s2. More on the funny side than not.
Summary: Out of all the reasons why Jillian Salvius would call on her, Mother Superion had not been expecting this…
The drab, monochromatic crowd parts for the nun in all-black. Moses barely lifts her cane for the sea of white lab coats and gray jumpsuits to concede her passage, closing again behind her as Mother Superion advances through the busy ArqTech corridors. The scientists as well as the electricians, plumbers, masons and other sorts of workers stare at her in her dark religious garb just as intrigued as herself, staring back at them.
It doesn’t take long for her to reach her destination. The door opens before she has a chance to knock.
“Ah, you’re here. Hello,” a nervous Jillian Salvius greets her and invites her in, talking with her hands much more than her usual. “Thank you for coming. Please, make yourself comfortable. May I get you anything? You might want a drink.”
Her breathless rhythm is disturbingly reminiscent of sister Yasmine’s rather than her own ritual, pondered prosody.
“Are you implying I’ll need one?” Superion wonders, opting for one of the armchairs.
The head of the bustling company pours them two glasses of fine whisky, its old, wooden odour a testament to its strength, a warning; Mother Superion takes the glass but stalls her sip, waiting for an answer.
“I don’t mean to alarm you but it’s likely you will find use for the alcohol, yes,” Jillian says and then swallows the contents of her own glass in one go before setting it back in its place and taking a seat near Superion.
Hers is a strange image: a patchwork of the public persona the nun had known only through television, newspapers and magazines woven with scraps of the private woman she had shared a few urgent days of her life with, stationed with her girls at Jillian Salvius’ villa while they all tried to save the world. A button-up shirt of immaculate white, perfectly adjusted to her torso, with not a single fold to spoil the smooth surface, makes her luminous and professional; dark, loose trousers and a pair of men’s shoes denounce a need for comfort rather than publicity, while her hair remains in a messy blond bun instead of being carefully curled for the cameras to capture.
Jillian sits upright, crosses her legs and then uncrosses them, unable to be quite still.
Mother Superion does not pretend not to watch her, even though she takes the opportunity to taste her drink at last. It is unusual upon her tongue, better suited for red wine and holy bread.
She takes another fiery sip.
“Well. It’s no use keeping this from you any longer,” Jillian starts, leaning back in her chair, blue eyes seeking as much as fleeing Superion’s own, darting back and forth, undecided. “Let me shock you, offend you and witness your horror already so I can finally be settled and get back to work.”
“Shock and offend me…?”
“Let’s not waste time. I’m interested in you. I’ve never really been taken with anyone in all these years, as there are few women in my field and less still as good at it as I am for good enough of a conversation to flow. As for those of other areas, well, I’ve never much had any contact with them. My work has been too important — and I think you’ll understand that better than most — but the fact of the matter is that you parachuted your way into my reclusive little life and popped that bubble. Then, after we had had all those talks and spent all those nights discussing in ways I never knew were possible, you scuttled your way back to your convent and I find myself completely paralysed and wanting ever since.” She shakes her head slightly. “It’s absurd. I should be mourning my son or using my energy to focus on any of my projects apart from redecorating the whole damn place just to make sure Kristian hasn’t compromised my company any more than we suspect and yet I cannot. My mind is absorbed fully by one subject and one subject alone. I am become functionally irrational, so I beg of you to put me out of my misery, snuff out this feeble, foolish flame of hope and allow me to regain my normalcy.”
Jillian says all this as plainly as can be, drawing arcs big and small in the air with her hands. This is a presentation, a business meeting, a conference in which she shows the world a new species or describes a new virus, perfectly informed and perfectly calm about something that would unsettle the most enlightened, divine-like monk — or anchoress.
Mother Superion studies her but says nothing. With one decisive swig, however, she, too, empties her glass.
Her silence prompts Jillian to proceed.
“Perhaps I should be clearer. See, Mother Superion,” she says, though she knows full well what the nun’s name is, though she has received this gift so few others have, “I have a problem. As long as I yearn and hope, I cannot move on and do all that I must, with the attention it requires. Rationally, I’m well aware that a nun of the Catholic Church has no option, that her reply can only ever be one, if possibly peppered by a handful of inconvenient and prejudiced sermonising. But we’ve established already that I am at an irrational level of thinking. All you need to do, then, is say no and provide me with the irrefutable evidence I need so I don’t rationalise anything and can simply accept that there is no future possible.”
“You expect me to just say ‘no’ after the torrent of words you’ve just said? ‘No’ and I just leave like nothing ever happened?”
“Essentially, yes.”
Mother Superion squints at her.
“That’s what you called me here for?”
“I agree it’s exaggerated and unfair but the alternative was going to you and I don’t think you’d like this conversation any more than you do now if we were sitting on a pew instead. So.”
There is charm to her insolence, perhaps because she recognises just how ridiculous it all sounds. Still, the corners of Jillian’s lips tremble all through the confident smiles and her cool pallor had long been substituted by a deep flush.
“… You don’t seem shocked or offended yet,” she remarks at another instant of silence on Mother Superion’s part, made much longer than it actually was by the brimming anxiety that pushed so many sentences out of Jillian in so little time. “I hope I don’t need to be crude in case there are any lingering doubts.”
Superion eyes her with a hint of impatience.
“It’s always better to be direct, isn’t it?”
The provocation isn’t innocent in the least and Jillian Salvius is not a woman to take any provocation peacefully.
“Very well. So that there is no room for ambiguity and so that you may openly mock me if you so wish: I feel attracted to you. Sexually. Biologically, really.” Her face grows redder, as does Superion’s, but once the first words are out the others follow in a deluge of unthinking pleasure. “I’ve not been a teenager for decades but I can’t focus on anything else like one because I cannot stop imagining what it’s like to kiss you, on the lips as well as elsewhere — to touch you and be touched by you, to see you whole from underneath your habit. Now, shall I go on in more detail or will you take pity on me and give me what I want already?”
Mother Superion raises her chin as well as her eyebrow at her, quite obviously affected by all that has been said.
“You don’t seem to know what you want, doctor Salvius.”
“I beg your pardon?” The comment stupefies her. “I’ve been saying all this time, all I need—”
The nun clears her throat.
“What you need is contrary to what you want, or you wouldn’t have sent for me.”
Jillian blinks, shakes her head, waves a hand.
“Alright, fair. But irrelevant. I’d appreciate it if we could avoid skirting around the issue, Mother Superion. You won’t hurt my feelings, don’t worry. Just say what you have to say to prove me right and release me from this torment. One tiny little word.”
Made more solemn by her cane, Superion gets up. She stares down at the scientist.
“No.”
“Thank you!”
“I can’t do that.”
Triumph fades as quickly as it comes. Jillian leans a bit forward, turns her head just right, as if the issue were her ears rather than what she had just heard.
“… I’m sorry?”
Mother Superion sets both of her hands atop her cane, standing firmly on her spot, a monolith in black, unmovable. Jillian gawks at her, fingers digging into the sides of her chair.
“If I tell you what you expect I’d be lying and lying is its own sort of sin — one I’d rather not add to my list when I’m already guilty of so many others.” She shrugs. “You miscalculated. I feel no horror.”
“Suzanne,” Jillian calls at last as she rises to her feet and nears her, coming closer but never enough to touch — not since the miracle. “You cannot encourage me. You must not play with me. No good can come of it. I know it can’t be, that this is just adolescent wishfulness on my part, so just confirm it.”
“Haven’t we seen enough impossible things become possible right in front of us?”
“Yes, but not this. You’re a nun—”
“And nuns are devoid their own say or feelings?”
“You’ll admit it’s not compatible! Nuns, physical as well as emotional attachment, sex — I thought I was the one out of my mind, here, but it appears we’re both… You’re not shocked at all, then? Am I that see-through?”
Suzanne frowns, Suzanne smiles.
“I’d ask whether I was that opaque but then I did make an effort to hide it. It was, as you say, irrational.”
Jillian Salvius, the genius, perhaps the brightest scientific mind of her generation and of many yet to come, opener of portals to other dimensions, pathfinder to new realities, wondrous mother of a completely fatherless child, Jillian Salvius stands frozen in place, robbed of any and all words to properly answer Mother Superion. She is, after all, a woman of science, not scripture — Jillian is very little used to the ecstasies of the purest revelation.
Blind-sided though she is, she remains a practical woman. With a short laugh stuck at the back of her throat, the sound of both disbelief and satisfaction, she pushes forward somehow.
“This scenario was certainly absent from any of my predictions. Frankly, I’m not sure of what to do now if you also…” Her attitude, mostly confident up until the nun’s confession, becomes awkward; she fidgets, she sways slightly to the sides, painfully conscious of how close they are to one another and with consent to boot, yet she doesn’t make a move. “But you’re the one with the real impediment between the two of us. What do you propose? It’s not too late to agree on burying all of this, though it will certainly be ten times more difficult now I know there is reciprocity of feeling—”
“Praying for it to go away didn’t do me any favours.”
Jillian gulps. Now it is Suzanne who speaks with authority, sure of herself, dependable, knowledgeable.
It’s always wisest to follow those wiser than we…
Still, she hesitates. The problem has all been wholly exposed, thesis and antithesis and synthesis, the conclusion clear. Perhaps for that very reason, thanks to such careful methodology meant to contain the so-called irrationality of passion, passion itself is denied its place: it looms over them, tickles them, pricks them, pushes them, yet neither crosses the glass border of the test tubes inside which they have both been placed for analysis.
“… Are you suggesting we act on it?”
“I am not allowed to.”
“Ah. Yes.” Jillian deflates with a knowing smirk. “Hence my concern and my hopes that you would—”
“But I’ve also never been the most obedient of servants, God forgive me.”
And, before Jillian can parse the message, her lips receive Suzanne’s own — clumsy, hungry, even a bit painful from the shards that came from breaking through their invisible prisons.
None of this had figured in doctor Salvius’ well-wrought hypotheses. Her model had failed entirely, incapable of foreseeing these particular possibilities even if they were those she preferred — perhaps due to her own desires. Her bias had played its part regarding her own faith (or lack thereof), for she did not guess it could all lead to this, she could not truly believe it would ever end in her fiercely kissing the woman she felt so drawn to, enraptured, in the middle of the room where it had been meant to end before it began.
Now they are beyond that. Neither of them have charts or plans, neither of them has signed on any dotted lines or considered their guarantees, their safeguards. As Jillian had feared, thinking had been thrown out the window and the future, the near future, even, when they were to break their kiss apart for a breath, would hold plenty of problems for them to solve which passion and impetus alone could not fix.
But then the taste of that kiss, those lips, that mutual longing at last fulfilled, the sensation of another body pressed against her own, desiring her as she had desired, proved that blasted irrationality had its myriad merits — and maybe it could go on undisputed for just a few more minutes (or hours) more…
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Date: 2024-12-26 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-12-27 01:11 am (UTC)