Tackling Spacetime From the Bathtub
The Continuing Story of Triumvirate
It’s been a long day. We’ve signed the contracts that the Council presented to us, just as we knew that we ultimately would. It didn’t keep us from pouring over them and talking it all out at length though, but we signed in the end. We’re due to start the mission in a couple of hours, but in the meantime, I want to take a nice hot bath. This may be our last chance for relaxing, intimate connection for a good long time. I’m looking forward to their touch, but also just to the pleasantness of easy proximity. We’ve known each other for forever, and there is a certain comfort in that.
Tors and Micah and I have been together for who knows how long; maybe thousands of years, maybe tens of thousands. We’ve kind of lost track at this juncture. We are lovers but more than that we are a team. We incarnate together, time and again, for specific reasons; whatever the Council wants us to do basically, and also for our own evolution. Well, Micah and Tors aren’t lovers, but they are both my lover. My name is Skoari.
In any case, we go together and we always have. All for one and one for all! I’m looking forward to the few moments of peace and the languid, sensual connection before we launch into the unknown again. What we do is always challenging, but this next one is going to be a real bear. That’s the term we use for difficult people or circumstances that we’re going to have to face. We joke how there’s always bears of some sort, and since Micah looks a little like a Bear, with a preponderance of dark hair and a broad chest, we tease him a bit around that. Well, it’s mostly Tors who teases him. I smile and laugh about my bear-taming skills, but in truth, Micah is mostly a teddy bear unless he’s got his sights set on some aspect of our work. But I wouldn’t want to be on his wrong side either. Micah knows how to tame me right back. I’ve got a lot of Fox in me; astute and perceptive, I’m also prone to a sometimes disruptive amount of intensity and over-thinking. Tors is a pretty good fox wrangler, himself. Maybe that’s why we work so well together. There’s a lot of synergy and we understand each other, but also keep each other in check.
The hot water is heaven after the long day bent over the paperwork. Tors rubs my feet and I begin to relax a little bit. There isn’t an inch of my body that his hands don’t intimately know how to touch and I respond to them instinctively. I sigh in contentment and lean my head on Micah’s shoulder. He is a deep touchpoint in a sometimes chaotic Universe. I could kiss him for years, but sometimes just laying my head on his chest is all that I need. Micah puts his arm around my shoulder to pull me in closer and his dangling fingers idly trace my nipple. There’s not going to be any full-on athletics today. We don’t have time and are too preoccupied with what comes next, but it’s lovely to feel their hands on me, and tired as I am, it engenders a little erotic buzz that courses through my body.
“Tors,” I say while his hands work the reflexology points on my toes, “remember that time in the Wald when the boar gored you in the thigh? By the time I got you cleaned up and bandaged, you were ready for amorous activities. It didn’t matter that your leg started to bleed again or that the cave was damp and musty, there was no deterring you. When Micah finally found us, he couldn’t believe we were fucking.” I say it with a laugh, shaking my head at the memory. Tors’ sexy, playful vibe is one of the things that always helps me make it through the hard times and it’s nice to invoke it now.
“Well,” Tors replies with a wink, “we were younger then, and to be fair, you did a really sensual job with the bandaging. I had to take my pants off anyway so you could get to the wound. I had all that adrenaline going from getting skewered and you looked so fetching all covered in dirt and blood. It just seemed like the next logical thing to do.” We chuckle and think about the times when we weren’t quite so tired. Still, we’ve got a lot of fight left in us, and a lot of love too. I lean over and give Tors a slow, deep kiss, before putting my head back on Micah’s shoulder and turning my face up to meet his for our own languorous kiss. In this moment they are my whole world!
Micah brings us back to the task at hand. We might not know all of the details, but we know enough to see that this one will challenge us more than usual. Micah says, “Don’t forget that we can renegotiate if it gets too rough.” He’s pointing out that the contracts aren’t static for the duration. We can renegotiate mid-way in if it gets too hard. I don’t like to think about that; about not being able to complete as originally planned, but the fact of the matter is, sometimes it’s necessary. He’s wise to bring it up.
Corporeal humans tend to experience time as a linear thing, where the past is behind, and the future is out in front and can’t yet be accessed. The fact of the matter is, in a quantum universe, spacetime is actually a spiral and you do have access to both the past and the future if you know how to do that. We know how to do that.
We can go on our mission and appear to never leave the bathtub. Did we stand up, towel each other off, and dress? Did Tors help me into my jacket, giving my shoulders a little squeeze and my ass a little pat before we launched? Of course, but years later, here we all are — back in the same bathtub as if we’d never left.
By some mechanism that even I don’t quite understand, the water in the tub is still hot. “That was a crazy one,” Tors says, scooting down so that more of his body is under the water! I’m leaning a bit against him now and I simply nod. I tickle Micah a little with my toes. It was a crazy one indeed! And we did need to renegotiate the contract partway through. But sometimes it makes sense to work smarter and not harder, and so I didn’t end up feeling bad about it after all, although I wasn’t initially very happy about it.
This isn’t a hierarchy; even when one of us takes the Sagittate position, it’s still a team of equals. We’re each strong, smart, and well seasoned. Sometimes we have slightly different ideas about the best way to handle something, and that can get magnified if and when we work from different locations, as we did this time. The trick is to know when to hang on and persevere and when it makes sense to surrender to the realities. We interface both on the timeless level and the temporal one. It sometimes takes trial and error to figure out which element to focus on and even that can change, depending on the needs of the moment. The whole thing is a great big dance, ever fluid and ever-evolving. We just have to figure out how to go with the flow each time and sometimes that means changing expectations or tactics mid-stream.
Just as we don’t really remember here once we are there; once we come back, the details start to get a bit fuzzy. Back here, sitting naked between them in the hot bath, I’m starting to forget a lot of it already. All I know is that we did our jobs and we did them well. We worked diligently and we had a lot of fun too. Nobody came back with any significant scars and we are due some R&R before we deploy again. After we get a bit rested, I’m going to show them a new little trick with my tongue and wear them out all over again.
