Lodestone TLR-99

Comfort in obscurity

Before either of them realized, it had been a year.

An uneventful year, to be sure, despite the feeling of endless menial assignments and training for... it wasn't clear for what. At seemingly random times of night, calls would come in to Kath and Mehr's double-quarters, asking one or both of them to report to some location somewhere within the 12th MRD's interminably deep building. On a handful of these occasions, they would be greeted by a low-ranking NCO, wielding a clipboard, who would check their watch, scribble down some notes, thank them, and send them back on their way. Sometimes, they would be asked to sit at a desk with a single button, and instructed to press it when it turned red. At one point, the task was to push a two hundred pound steel crate across a concrete floor. Mehr recalled being quite angry with that one, but neither she nor Kath could explain why either of them had been made to do that.

None of the work they'd been doing on base seemed to add up to much, either. Kath's "day job" was manually entering "ping" commands into a computer terminal, and sending the timestamped logs to her commanding officer. But for some reason, the logs needed to be printed out and hand-delivered, and the CO would either highlight random lines on them, or immediately chuck the lot into the incinerator chute. Mehr, on the other hand, was frequently ordered to report to what seemed like a primitive gymnasium, where the only equipment was a strange-looking array of shackles on springs, resembling perhaps an S&M harness that a Victorian blacksmith might fashion. She would be told to buckle herself into it, and perform a handful of movements. On rare occasions she would even be asked how comfortable the movement was, but Mehr was not altogether sure that the person asking was listening to the answers.

Both of them tried their best not to think too hard about it. The Sunnr Armed Forces would not have commissioned an entire research detachment if they weren't doing something useful. Mehr pretended that she hadn't noticed the officer with the clipboard watching them both, as they played some old sports video game in the rec room. None of it was her business, as long as she stayed safe behind the lines, just as Kath promised.

It was hard to tell, sometimes, where Kath's heart was in all of this. Over the past year, Mehr had come to realize that the Kath Niemeyer that she'd first met - the one with the poor impulse control, and the tendency to tease - was only partially the real Kath. She was a woman of many faces. On the one hand, she certainly could lick boots and keep up the kind of military professionalism needed when speaking to certain kinds of superiors. On the other, she had spent many a sleepless night having long, barely-whispered conversations with her bunkmate after lights-out, about all manner of things proper and not-so-proper. Still, Kath hadn't breached Mehr's trust since that first day, and had not tried to touch her in any way. Why Kath had been so interested in Mehr from the start was anybody's guess, but if her goal really was just to make Mehr "comfortable," it was hard to understand what Kath even got out of it. It seemed very selfless of someone at her rank to go so far out of her way for the lowly Reservist. Well... Reservist First Class, now.

"You look fuckin' miserable," Kath said from her bunk, bluntly derailing Mehr's train of thought.

Mehr remembered the line. It was the first thing Kath ever said to her, a year ago. She laid back on her bunk, on the other side of the room from Kath's, and stared at what was still visible of the ceiling after lights-out. "Thinking about life."

"It's not so bad as it was, right?" Kath offered. "You're not waking up at 4 AM for long marches, or getting buckets of water thrown at you by the D.I., or whatever."

"This place is its own unique brand of torture."

Kath sighed. "You're telling me. They still haven't told me what the hell we're researching here. And on top of that..." She swallows her words. "...No, you don't need to hear that part."

"What part?"

"Classified information," said Kath with a nigh-audible smirk.

Mehr didn't like how directly Kath had said it. Almost as if she were being teased about not knowing something. "We're bunkmates, right? We watch each other's backs?"

"Pfft. Maybe we don't wash each other's backs yet..."

"Kath?"

"Oh, keep calling me by my first name."

...Of course. Her impulsive, teasing side. "You are so incorrigible."

"Guilty as charged." She sounded like she was fully grinning now. "You wanna know what I meant, then?"

"You should at least let me in on it."

Kath sighed again, sounding less tired, more relaxed. "Brave words. Sure you're okay with it?"

"...Yeah."

Kath flipped up the wool blanket so that Mehr could see beneath it. "Going this long without getting off is starting to feel like the real torture here." Her other hand, the one not holding up the blanket, was shoved somewhere between her legs; its exact location was unclear in the dimness.

Mehr's cheeks turned red as she looked away. "Oh, Gods, I'm sorry. Should I leave you alone? I can go somewhere else--"

"No. Please, stay here. You don't need to do anything if you don't want to, I just want you to stay here." Her voice was starting to tremble a bit.

Mehr still did not look back at her bunkmate, but it didn't help; it was the sound of what was going on that was getting to her the most. She started to shiver a bit on top of her covers. It had been a while since she'd had time for that, too, but she was too mortified to do anything directly about it.

"I see you crossing your legs over there."

"I-- I didn't do that!"

"Embarrassed?"

"Of course I'm embarrassed, you're... you're... doing that right next to me!"

"Is it a problem? Do you want me to stop?"

"...No..."

"You're sure about that? You're not just saying that?"

"...Don't stop for my sake," Mehr made herself say.

"I like to hear you say that."

"Oh, Gods--"

"That too."

"Shut up or I'll come over and make you."

"Oh, keep going."

Mehr held her eyes shut as hard as she could. "This is the worst night ever," she half-said.