Da Capo al Fine (Heat 11 excerpt)
Story by dark end on SoFurry
This is a little excerpt of my story Da Capo al Fine which was published in Heat 11. Originally I put this up on my other account as a preview just before the release, but now the volume has been out a while. (We're hard at work on issue 13 now.)
Although it is hard to tell from the snippet included here, the story will be feature an f/f pairing, references to BDSM relationships, and a porn studio!
I hold my body between Angel and the camera, the bright directed light casting my dark silhouette over her skin. In order to give the illusion of tastefulness, my raised arm hides her breasts and my curled tail obscures her sex. The director has told us to be still, but I can't resist the urge to graze a fang along her nipple. She shivers, she dances, she protests with whines and whispers; but I know she loves it, and I know the camera will gobble it up.
* * *
Helena jerked backwards and balled her fist, driving claws against her palm. It hurt, but that was good. The fingers were the wrong length, but that was good too. If she was distracted by her hand, then she was not lost in her memories of the photo shoot.
The naked breasts of the human woman before her were held out expectantly, breasts that looked so much like Angel's had under those bright lights--No! She shook her head. She had to focus on the differences. These breasts were larger, squatter, with nipples and areola taking up far more of the breast, and this woman probably wouldn't like it if Helena's fang ran over them. This was reality. This was now.
The woman exchanged a quick look of concern with her husband. She had the hem of her shirt held up near her neck, while he held out a marker, a permanent marker. Helena had a job to do. She reached out, but froze before taking the marker, her eyes going wide.
"Are you all right?" the man asked, holding the marker out a little more.
"I..." Think of something quick, the border collie told herself. "I just remembered. I'm supposed to be minimizing my contact with humans: I've been very sick recently."
"Oh, I'm so sorry. You look awful, darling." The woman dropped her shirt, shifting from porn show fan girl to doting mother in seconds. "Don't worry about us. We'll be here all week. We can get your autograph later when you're feeling better."
And just like that, the couple vanished around the outer wall of the studio, leaving Helena alone with Christie--bubbly, bright, bouncy golden retriever Christie, who stopped being bubbly, bright, or bouncy the moment the humans were out of sight. "Why didn't you sign?" she asked quietly.
Helena held up her hands and tried not to stare at the marks her claws had left on her pad. "I was reaching with my right hand. I'm supposed to be left-handed." She curled the fingers of her left hand as if to hold a pen, mimicking how she had signed posters and glossies two years ago back in--
* * *
Sydney's massage loosens my stiff fingers from the position they locked into after hours of signing autographs. "I think we're officially a success," the tiger says. Her smile is fleeting, and her voice becomes grave. "They'll want to renew the show for another season. They'll want us to be stars."
"If it comes to that, we'll manage. We can fool most of them easily," I say. I look at Angel on the far side of the room: she is surrounded by the human crew of Erin's Exotic Erotics, sharing in their laughter and cheap champagne. "But we'll need to tell her."
"When?"
I count down silently in my head. 500 days left. "As late as possible."
500 days until I die.
* * *
The floor seemed to lurch under Helena's feet as the memory was wrenched away and the present reasserted itself. Christie had to hold her up. "I got you," she said. "Don't worry. I got you. You'll be fine once you've got your bearings."
Easy for her to say, Helena thought. Christie wasn't fighting every familiar image, sound, and sensation that wanted to suck her into a whirlpool of past experiences. No one else was. Helena was an experiment. When metas are born, they are infused with memories from the previous generation of metas. To prevent complications, metas receive memories from at least two other metas and a body different from both of them. Or they should. Helena was the first meta in decades to be a direct clone of one of her memory-donor parents, carefully crafted to have the exact same height, weight, build, fur pattern, and even the same floppy left ear as the previous Helena. The only physical difference between her body and her mother's body was that the fingers on her right hand were almost imperceptibly shorter, a production anomaly.
Helena was not meant to be a mere copy of her mother. She was meant to be her mother...
The rest of this story can be found in Heat #11 published by Sofawolf Press.