Faint Touches
It was already deep into the night when Kitana finally settled into bed after a nice, warm bath. She lied on her stomach and clutched at her downy pillow. It was so late and yet it felt as if sleep was escaping her tonight. And if that was the case, then her body was going to pay for it by the morning.
She rolled over onto her back, eyes drifting towards her nightstand. She pursed her lips for a second before reaching over.
Mileena's gloves.
Kitana held them gingerly in her hands. They were different in fabric than the ones that Sindel gave to Kitana many, many moons ago, yet similar in texture. If one didn’t know any better, one could guess that Kitana’s own gloves were also made of Outworld's finest materials.
She inspected them closely, an odd curiosity running through her.
Mileena never took them off whenever she was at work—except for tonight. The clone was known to work late into the evenings for days on end whenever she returned from one of her regular mission's, hoping to prove to herself and others that her life being spared was worth it.
Other than Mileena, the Palace staff cleared out usually on time with only the guards left around. Kitana, usually one of the only ones left in the place by the time she decided to retire for the night, was taken by mild surprise the first time she saw the warm glow of a lantern coming from the Clone’s room.
Sometimes, Kitana directed her gaze back to the hallway leading back to her room, content to let the clone continue to work as she pleased. After all, it was not her responsibility to tell her when to stop, to take care of herself more, to not wear herself down to the bone. Besides it's not like she wasn't built for it.
Sometimes, that same line of thought would bother Kitana more than she liked to admit. She was not the competitive sort, but Mileena seemed to have that effect on her. And so Kitana would stubbornly march right back into her office to continue her work until Mileena’s lantern finally flickered off.
It worried her, admittedly a tiny bit, that Mileena was so ruthless with how she treated herself in the face of that same indomitable work ethic.
Kitana pursed her lips.
She wasn’t sure what possessed her to take the damned things to begin with. When she found them sitting on the grand table of the Palace dining room, it was easy to recognize who they belonged to—Mileena stayed behind long after the afternoon lunch to continue her sewing project that she had babbled to Sindel about. Kitana spotted the pair of purple gloves left carelessly behind on her way out of the hall.
Kitana picked them up, intending to bring them back as soon as possible. But by then, the door to the clone's room was closed and locked.
Really, the best course of action would be to drop them off to a servant with a note. Surely Mileena must have noticed that she left the dining room without them? And what if she did return later in the evening to gather them, only to find them to be missing from the exact spot that she left them?
Kitana rubbed at the glove’s fingertips. Under the right light, Kitana could tell how worn they were, from the way the metal claws had been removed. The fingertips along with the palm being nearly worn out. It was no wonder why Mileena always had her hands covered. The wear-and-tear on her gloves was telling. From the state of them, Mileena’s hands would most likely be full of blisters and calluses.
Did she not have the time to replace them? For someone that liked to shop so often for extraneous and unnecessary goods, Kitana figured Mileena would have thrown them out by now. Was she attached to this particular pair?
Kitana sniffed at the air.
The longer she held them, the more she noticed that lingering scent—like a sweet fresh tea. Mileena spent most of her free days inside her room drinking tea alone so the smell stuck to her regularly. Around the Terrace, the clone used some sort of light spritz of lavender that mixed with her natural musk as well; it was especially noticeable after she spent her morning training back and forth between her room and wherever she needed to go.
The smell of it was so very distinctly Mileena. It was hard to describe; Kitana had encountered a countless number of unique smells, but for some reason, it was Mileena’s that seemed to stick in her memory the most poignantly.
She shivered, despite feeling her body starting to warm.
…The more that she inhaled that faint scent of musk and lightning, the stronger that peculiar tingle buzzed in the pits of her stomach. Stronger and stronger, like a spreading wildfire, reaching her abdomen and torching her body ablaze. It continued, lapping at her nerves. Lower and lower—
She paused when a full-body shudder overtook her.
There was a devil in her ear.
And it sounded so, so much like the monster she so, so despised.
Kitana swallowed thickly.
Then she slipped the gloves on.
Hands dragged down her sides, then running back up by the fingertips with an agonizing slowness across her stomach and the rest of her torso. Higher and higher—eliciting a trail of goosebumps in their wake—until a hand palmed at the swell of breasts, exposed to the slight chill of the room from her loosening of her bathrobe. A breathy moan escaped her, louder than intended. The material really was soft.
“Shhh.” Mileena’s voice was a harsh whisper. “Not too loud. Keep your voice down.”
There was a huskiness to that voice in her head that somehow settled into Kitana's ears. Its words are one of warning, yet dripping with a honey-like temptation that was hard to deny. Like an aphrodisiac, Kitana slowly relaxed into the sound of it and felt herself melting into the touch of the hands on her chest.
She rubbed in delicate, circular motions around her hardening nipple while the other hand continued to roam freely across the expanse of her skin. Kitana pursed her lips tightly into a thin line to stifle herself but it became more and more difficult to do so when she tweaked at her own chest. It accomplished very little though, with Kitana’s moans spilling out as barely contained whimpers.
She was smirking, her unseemly mouth twisted smugly. Even with her eyes closed, Kitana could tell that she was from the low timbre of her voice.
“Didn’t I just tell you to stay quiet?”
A thumb roughly brushed over a stiffened nipple then pinched.
Kitana gasped sharply.
“Again? After I had just warned you?”
Electricity ran up her spine. Kitana's back arched.
Her touch was starting to wander. Kitana's offered little resistance to its journey, first to undo the knot of her bathrobe then lower and lower to the growing wetness of her guilt between her thighs. A finger teased at her folds, gathering and dripping that wetness onto her thighs. Despite being in the privacy of her own room, much too far away from any one could ever hear, Kitana flushed red with embarrassment regardless.
“Do you wish to heard so badly? To be exposed of our indecency so ardently?"
Kitana answered to no one with a moan tumbling clumsily out her lips. She didn’t bother to try hiding it anymore when a gloved finger easily slipped inside, thoroughly coated with her own arousal. “M-Mileena.”
There was a terrible peril in that voice that filled Kitana with a certain thrill, allowing it to easily string her along towards the edge of her impending release. The tone of it sent another addicting wave of arousal straight to her core.
A thumb rested on her clit, unmoving. Kitana's body was buzzing with pulses of electricity and heat and anticipation, even as the gloved finger inside her continued to pump with small, controlled strokes. Not deep enough to satisfy and not shallow enough to completely withdraw. Her thighs squeezed tightly together, trembling, but it did nothing to stop the motions of her hand in between her legs.
She was just so wet and aching because it simply wasn’t enough. She whimpered loudly, but it sounded almost like a pant.
“A-ah,” Kitana rasped. “More, Mileena pleas—”
An indignant huff echoed dully through the haziness in her head. Kitana recognized it and has heard it a million times over; Mileena always heaved a heavy sigh to mask her annoyance at her whenever she felt that Kitana asked one-too-many questions or disagreed with one of her points.
Always, always. Even though it was Kitana herself that constantly made the outlandish remarks or disrespectful jabs first, Mileena would rather swallow her anger then let it get to her. As if to prove herself above what she used to be and what she'd always be, a monster.
A surge of anger passed through Kitana and she channeled it directly into a strong thrust of her wrist. A long moan bubbled out from her and this time the hand cupping her chest flew upward to her mouth. Kitana quickly bit down into the junction of the thumb and index finger to stifle the sinful sounds, reveling in the briefest jolt of pain and pleasure jumping up and down her spine before lowering her hand again.
It glided down the column of her throat and over the ridge of her collarbone. Her hand skated across the heated valley of her chest, reaching her other breast. Above it, her heart pounded wildly against her ribcage and there was an unbidden sliver of her heart’s desire—wishing for a wish denied by no one other than herself—that maybe, if Mileena was here—maybe, just maybe, her heart would be racing just as fast.
The thought was quickly dispelled by another rough pinch of the peak of her nipple, then a roll between deft fingers by a silken hand. The texture, still so very smooth yet had just enough friction to elicit another heated groan from Kitana when the sensation was too much for her aching, hardened nipples.
Her thumb found her clit again and began to rub at it gently. Kitana shuddered sharply, toes curling, as she moaned uninhibitedly and drunk on the rapidly mounting pleasure. She grew even loudly when she twirled around her clit together with another firm pump of the rest of the fingers.
“More?” Mileena chuckled, something dark and dangerous. Without warning, she plunged two more fingers into her, stretching her fully. “Very well. If you so wish to be heard, then so be it. Cry for me, then. Let them all hear how badly you crave my touch, how depraved you are to become so debauched.”
Her chest heaved and her breaths ragged; Kitana's lungs struggled to balance the gasps for air and the muted gasps of arousal. Her voice quavered like a leaf as she pumped in a gradually quickening pace. The hand palming the underside of her breast fell to fist tightly at the sheets. She thrusted roughly, knuckle-deep then withdrew nearly all the way out before driving her fingers back, falling into a steady, merciless rhythm.
The silk of the gloves were already smooth and only became smoother still while drenched in her own slick. But when she pressed her fingers into her walls and dragged, she could feel the slightest bit of texture along with that delicious friction and pressure that pushed her closer to her peak.
“Will you beg for it, in front of the people that revere you so much? Beg for me to take you over the edge?”
Kitana resisted momentarily, in a fit of rebellion like a dim beacon shining through the fog of her lust, but her resolve quickly crumbled at the curl of fingers deep inside of her. She opened her lips only for her voice to catch in her throat and she snapped her jaw shut again.
It was not enough to continue on like this. The steady motion for fingers was enough to keep Kitana building and climbing to that peak, but she needed even more to tip over it.
Words failed her again—they tangled with the moans on her tongue and fell apart as soon as they left her lips. Her hips answered for her with a desperate roll against the hand on her cunt and collecting even more of her sopping wet arousal into the soaked fabric of the glove. A part of her refused to give in—to beg and simper to no one, especially not to her—and it was probably the only thing preventing Kitana from that sweet, sweet release.
Then, suddenly—everything stopped. It left Kitana teetering at the precipice of her climax and without relief. Her lips drew together in a hard, thin line to suppress a low groan of mounting frustration and to endure the heady fire licking at the nerves of her core, begging for release.
Cruel. How cruel can her other half be—
“Kitana.”
Mileena was staring at her, her feline-like eyes searching and yearning, but behind that and the heat and the lust—there was something else unreadable.
Kitana searched for a hint of their meaning within herself and reflexively tensed. Internally, she waited for the inevitable dig at her fall from grace for an artificial half-tarkatan, her own blood, for the mud to be flung at her honor for her blatant display of debauchery. She expected it.
Because there was certainly a part of Mileena that despised her in the similar vein that Kitana did her. Kitana knew it.
And yet—
Mileena kissed her.
Kitana kissed the woman whose origins she so slandered and disrespected. She kissed Mileena with a passion and longing that stole every fiber of her anger and her distrust.
The image of Mileena treating her so tenderly and ardently, so unlike the way usually imagined her in her invasively sinful dreams and daydreams—rough, curt, teasing, angry— was enough.
Kitana cried out loudly into the night, one hand clenched desperately into the bedsheets and the other whose fingers still knuckle-deep inside of her. She writhed, grinding into the silken palm as she came thickly into it. It spilled from her hand and leaked off the inside of her wet thighs and onto the sheets. She rode the cresting waves of her arousal with gentle motions of her fingers to draw out the most of her pleasure.
She heaved heavily and clenched at her own fingers for another numbing wave of pleasure. Her mind was reeling, hazy with bliss from the intensity of her climax.
Slowly, she withdrew her fingers, taking care not to aggravate her sensitive body. She shivered nonetheless.
The hand unhurriedly trailed up to right below her navel, streaking her lower abdomen with slick. Kitana shivered again when it quickly grew cold against her heated skin.
Behind her half-lidded eyes, Kitana could still make out that odd expression on Mileena's face in her mind’s eye. She lingered on it, unable to banish it away.
She gazed at her, unusually warm and unmistakably kind.
Because Kitana also knew that behind the arguments and the slander and the foolish naivety—Mileena was a very kind person, she was nothing more than a someone who craved being loved.
She basked in that illusion of warmth.
“Kitana.”
Another ghost of a whisper caressed the shell of her ear. There, but not.
Real, but definitely not.
Because the real Mileena would never whisper so sweetly at her like that.
“M-Mileena,” Kitana murmured out weakly, tinged with guilt and regret and the painful yearning. She did not even have the strength to refute when she felt the fatigue begin to settle into her muscles.
She removed the gloves.
Her voice again, soft and sweet.
“Sleep well.”
“Did you…” Mileena rubbed the silk between her forefingers, inspecting them closely. Kitana forced herself from wishing that it was her breasts in her hands instead. “Did you wash them?”
Kitana’s heart nearly stopped, in a disconcerting mix of distinct mortification and morbid anticipation. She licked her lips and discreetly pressed her thighs together slightly. “I did.” Scrubbed so hard to remove all the evidence. “They were… Dirtied. Stains.”
“Stains?” By the flat look on the upper half of Mileena's face, Kitana could tell that she was completely unconvinced.
Stains of my undoing by your voice, whispered as if there was a devil by my ear.
“My fingers,” Your fingers, inside, fucking me. There was heat building in her bosom and she hoped that the red of her shame didn’t rise above the collar on her neck. Despite it, she could feel how her cheeks warmed. “When I picked them up, I didn’t realize that I still had ink on my own hands. The ink transferred from my gloves to yours.”
“Is that right?”
“Yes.”
No. A lie.
But the wicked imaginings that continued to plague her thoughts? Kitana wasn’t sure if she wanted to find out.
Mileena knitted her eyebrows and Kitana sucked in a breath. Then she sighed, relenting. “Whatever. In any case, I appreciate that you cared to return them to me.”
Kitana blinked. “You’re not going to toss them?”
“Why would I?”
“They’re ruined.” In more ways than one.
The sheen of worn silk was more noticeable after Kitana washed them not-so-delicately in her bathroom sink. She watched as Mileena flipped the gloves over in her naked hands, giving them another once-over. Mileena's hands, as Kitana predicted, were riddled with callouses and healing blisters. Very unlike the dainty hands one would expect from such a beautiful, young princess. Far more fitting for the monster Mileena was, is.
“They look completely fine to me. These things still have more mileage in them, if that’s what you mean. Just because you got a stain or two on them suddenly doesn’t make them worthless,” Mileena said. She seemed almost impressed. “That being said, I’m surprised that you managed to successfully remove ink off these. It’s practically impossible.”
Kitana huffed, keeping her blank face . “It was nothing special. Merely an Eldanian concoction.”
Mileena's face dropped. Suddenly, she was back to her same moody self. “Ah, of course,” she grumbled. Under her breath, just low enough for Kitana to hear, she added: “Because they have a solution to practically everything, don’t they?”
Kitana clenched her jaw, feeling her molars grind up against each other. One of her hands stopped toying at her sleeves and came to rest at the back of her wrist, restraining it in case Kitana felt like winding it up. She didn't, of course; her professionalism was like a tempered steel forged from thousands and more years of practice. Mileena, however, always knew the right way to chip away at her patience. A pause, then Kitana willingly took the bait like a fool. “Will that be a problem, Mileena? That your gloves were salvaged through Eldenian means?”
“No,” she denied quickly, evidently so by trying to keep her voice even. “Not at all. Even if you couldn’t get the stains out, I’d still use them until there were holes at their fingertips. It’s wasteful otherwise.”
A tense moment later, Mileena inhaled and exhaled heavily, as if to expel some of her irritation. “Look, I don’t want to get into this again right now. Regardless of whatever method you may have used to treat them, I am genuinely grateful that you returned them to me.”
With that, Mileena slipped her gloves back on.
And just like that, Kitana felt the guilt of her shame from last night washed through her like a large wave crashing onto shore. Kitana swallowed a painful lump in her throat.
Her expression must have twisted into something strange because Mileena also seemed to have lost even more of her wind too. Even from the first time they met, Kitana knew how honest of a person Mileena was, to naive lie correctly the rare occasions that she chose not to voice her honesty out loud, it instead all reflected in the depths of her dark feline-like eyes.
Right now, Kitana thought she saw the beginnings of regret pool in those depths.
“Kitana, I—”
“Mileena, I—”
Another moment passed. A chance for a truce, for reconciliation.
Neither took it, not with their prides in the way.
They spoke nothing of it.
Mileena did an abrupt about face. She tugged at her gloves. “There’s some paperwork that I gave to one of your assistants when I was passing by earlier. Review them and send me your response as soon as you are able so I can send it to the Queen for further consideration.”
“Of course.”
“I’ve got an upcoming expedition to the mines near the boundaries, slated at the end of the week. All the preparations that I requested from the others must be taken care of, copied, and sent to my desk before I leave. Could you please do that for me?”
“yes of course.”
“Thank you.”
Kitana nodded and they held each other’s gaze for another, long moment. Mileena searched within them, not knowing what exactly it was she was searching for. What could she hope to find in those deep, blue depths?
The answer to her own blasphemy?
(A reflection of the same yearning that Kitana could catch glimpses of in the mirror when she looked into her own reflection?)
Then, without further preamble, Mileena walked away.
Kitana squashed the thought down and swept it aside.
She unclenched her fist. Inhaling deeply to the crisp air permeating from the nearby gardens and that particular tingle of lightning, she gathered herself before turning the other direction, doing her best not to listen to Mileena's clipped strides echoing further and further away down the corridor.
Kitana slammed the door to her room.