Moving On
For the living, death is a sad thing. But for the dead, it can mean reunions that bring them great joy.
This story was written for Riddle as part of my "Between the worlds" themed Patreon Request Day. <3 It contains sexual acts between consenting adults, and intimate spookiness. :3
Moving On
One last breath.
One last beat.
Then, silence. Peace.
Jane was dead, and yet... she remained.
The panda stood up, no aching muscles or weary bones to hold her back as she rose from the intangible and invisible ground beneath her bare feet. She pulled herself upright, no arch to her back, no slump to her shoulders. She was still an old woman by all accounts, ninety and change, but she felt like a teenager again in fitness. Her body may have been plump and yet sagged in its flesh, but inside it felt vital and strong.
"You look just as beautiful now as you did the last time we saw each other."
A voice addressed Jane, and though this form in which she now found herself was incapable of shedding tears, she felt like welling up. She span upon the spot with a strangled sob, and threw herself headlong into the arms of the younger vixen suddenly standing before her.
They clung to one another, weeping, embracing, revelling in the contact of their shining, ethereal bodies, until at last the most potent aspects of their grief, their joy, and their relief had been spent. Only then did they draw back, hands still clutching at the other woman's own, and peered, sniffling and whimpering with elation at the woman they loved.
"Victoria. I... I always knew..."
It sounded dumb even as the panda said it, and the vixen's smirk showed that she agreed.
"No you didn't. Nor did I, not until I found myself here, anyway. But... we really are soulmates, Janey. I waited. I watched. I was patient, a-and now... now I don't want to be patient any more. I don't have to be."
The female fox flung herself forward once again, and this time she didn't just embrace the other woman. She kissed her. Their lips met, and as hands began to roam through glowing hair, then up and down the trembling length of their ethereally shining forms... the years fell away from the panda, winding back the clock to how she had looked, and how she had felt, on those last few times she had been able to hold, kiss, and make love to the woman she adored. Flashes of memory united them, and though their figures did not grope or reach for one another in any overtly sexual manner, fevered moans broke through their lips between smooches as they recalled life back then.
The seventies hadn't been the easiest time to be gay, but they'd lived in relative peace. Their neighbours hadn't said anything about the two women in their forties living together in a one bedroom apartment, and they in turn hadn't said anything about the smell of pot that frequently drifted up into their home as they shook the walls of their room with unabashed lesbian love-making. How many times in those years had they screamed in orgasm to See My Baby Jive? How often had they slipped fingers between trembling, welcomingly open legs to ABBA or Bowie ringing out from their bedside radio? Hell, chances were they'd eaten each other out with Kung Fu Fighting as the soundtrack on more than one occasion, and they'd loved it. All because they'd loved each other so very, very much.
The spirits whimpered and pressed themselves closer, tighter together as their glowing forms began to shift again, and now both of them found themselves younger, skinnier, back to the fifties ideals of beauty that they had so idolised in the first few years of what then had been a deeply taboo and secretive relationship. There was no hiding how they felt now though. The spirits moaned and whimpered as they looked down at their youthful and perky bodies, barely into their twenties. Back then the wallpaper of what would one day have been their shared home was new and crisp. The rooms were bare and uncluttered by decades of accumulated possessions, and it was with promises to their boyfriends that they were just going to be spending a girls night in, talking about fashion and the latest Marilyn Monroe news that they had locked themselves away in Jane's apartment, giggling and blushing as they embarked upon what had at the time been disguised as little more than a fling... certainly not a romance. Certainly not love, no matter how it made their hearts race just to look at the other woman.
That had been the very beginning of their lives together. The start of almost seventy years of unceasing love to bring them to where they were now. Although... for Jane, whimpering and clinging to the glowing figure of her soulmate, it had been a much longer and more winding rode.
Their bodies aged once more as they stopped kissing, but remained locked in a tender embrace. Their eyes met, and Victoria nuzzled and licked reassuringly at the panda's face while Jane shook her head and whimpered in sorrow.
When Victoria had died... when the cancer that had crept into her bosom and spread throughout her sweet and kind body had claimed her, and stolen her away, Jane had wished she could have joined her. But, she hadn't. She couldn't. And thus... she'd lived on.
Other women had come and gone. Into her home. Her bed. Their bed. And now... knowing that Victoria had always been there, Jane shook with the sheer force of her own shame.
"I'm sorry. I... I'm so sorry..."
Time was strange here. It existed, and yet so obviously didn't. Some silences, some of their embraces seemed to stretch out for millennia, while other moments the two women wished they could have clung to passed by in the blink of an eye. Never had a longer moment passed however, then the amount of time it took for Victoria to respond to Jane's breathless, shameful apology for the life she had led following her soulmate's death. The hearts she had let into her own. The new memories she had forged, and the new promises she had made.
"Don't be sorry. It's okay. It's all okay. Jane... I... I've been here for decades. I've watched. I've seen everything. Your best and your worst, in ways I never could have when I was alive. But that's okay. I don't care that you fucked other women. Hell, I'm glad you did. You moved on. But... you never forgot me. You let others into your heart, I know. But you never let anyone try to replace me, and you sure as hell never tried to find a replacement yourself."
Stepping back, pulling away from the panda's embrace for the first time, Victoria gestured to the glowing emptiness all around them.
"If there's one thing that this place is good for... it's clarity. Here, you have the time to look back. To remember. To study yourself and the life you led. Not so you can cling to it... but so you can understand it, recognise why you did what you did, good or bad, and either way... so you can make your peace with it, and move on."
The vixen smiled as Jane shivered at those last two words, and glanced around them. She nodded.
"Yeah. This isn't... it isn't it. It's more like the waiting room."
Jane looked at Victoria in wonder, then at their infinite surroundings once more.
"What's it like, Vicky?"
Her eyes widened as she saw the fox smirk, then shrug.
"Not a clue. I've... I've never been. I wasn't sure if you could come back or not, and... I wanted to wait. For you. For this. But now? Once you've taken the time you need here... once you've figured things out, and made peace with the life you led? We can move on. We can move on to whatever lies beyond... together."
Jane whimpered softly.
"What if I'm ready now? W-what if... if I just want to move on, to go with you right now? You've already waited so long, Vicky. If what's on the other side is heaven? Paradise? I... I don't want to keep you from that. I can't. We should just go, now."
Again the vixen chuckled and shook her head. She stepped forward once more, and with a cry of relief the panda sprang back into her arms, the larger woman lifting Victoria clean off the ground with the force of her embrace.
"That's not how it works. You go when you're ready. When you're at peace. Not when you want to. If you've got lingering doubts or questions after all... it wouldn't really be paradise now, would it?"
She heard Jane whimpering again, and gently stroked both cheeks of her lover's beautiful face with her delicate fingers.
"But... don't worry. Until then? I'll be here. To help guide you. To help answer those questions, and figure out how to move past those doubts."
Still the panda was shivering with nervousness, and whimpering under her breath. But that was understandable. It had taken years for Victoria, albeit alone, to come to terms with her own death and begin to work on figuring out her life both before and beyond it. To expect Jane to do so in the first few hours, speaking purely in mortal terms of course, was ridiculous.
And yet...
"You'll be here. God. Just hearing that... knowing it's true..."
Jane kissed Victoria lightly upon her glowing muzzle, then again, deeper. The two women moaned softly, and once again a flash of memory changed the empty, eternal space around them back to their seventies apartment. To their bedroom full of knick-knacks and disco, and their bodies writhing, moaning, screaming as they pleasured one another night after long, wild night.
"...k-kinda already sounds like paradise to me."
By Jeeves
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