Happy Monday my lovelies!  Time for another cheeky Monday read. Today we go straight to Fury’s Heart – not a journey for the timid.  If you have just arrived and would like to start at the beginning of Piloting Fury, follow the link, and enjoy!

Piloting Fury

“Win the bet and Fury’s yours. Lose the bet and your ass is mine.” It was a no-brainer. Rick Manning’s slightly inebriated offer. If he’d been sober, he’d have remembered indentured pilot, Diana “Mac” McAllister never lost a bet. All her life she’s dreamed of buying back her freedom and owning her own starship, and when Fury’s ne’er-do-well, irritating as hell captain all but hands Fury to her on a silver platter she figures she can’t lose. She figured wrong. That’s how the best pilot in the galaxy finds herself the indentured 1^st mate of a crew that, thanks to her, has doubled in size. Too late, she finds out Fury is way more than a cargo ship. Fury is a ship with a history – a dangerous history, and one that Mac’s been a part of for a lot longer than she thinks. And Rick Manning is not above cheating at poker to get her right at the center of it all, exactly where he needs her to be.

Piloting Fury Part 58: Fury’s Heart 

At first I thought we were both screaming, but it was hard to tell above the howl of the wind that hit us the second we were pulled into the vortex. We were tossed about with such force that I feared there would be broken bones, and then I figured it wouldn’t matter what was broken because we couldn’t possibly survive this. From somewhere far off, I thought I heard Fury’s voice, and then it was no longer far off, but inside my head, then inside my whole body, full of pleading, full of worry. “You must go deeper. You must go to the center.”

I don’t know how! The thought filled my head like a desperate scream, but I made no effort to speak because I hadn’t enough breath. Manning and I clung to each other in a tight bear hug. I had wrapped both legs and arms around him to keep from losing him, and yet I could feel the power of the wind pulling us a part. Each time we approached Fury’s quicksilver core, we were battered about like ships in a solar storm, the pressure so intense that even drawing breath became torture, I felt a rib crack and pain shot upward into my diaphragm. Manning went limp in my arms as he lost consciousness, and without his returned efforts to hold on to me, the pull of his body against my rib was agony, as he slipped with each battering effort we made.

“Fury!” I cried out in my head, “tell me what to do!” Manning slipped still further and I grabbed onto the back of his shirt with my fist.

“Let go, Diana Mac. You must let go. Your journey is not Richard Manning’s journey, nor his yours. You must let go.”

With the last strength I had, I forced a kiss against Manning’s lips. “I love you Richard Manning,” the thought filled my head and my heart, and I wasn’t certain if it was mine or Fury’s, and I wasn’t sure it mattered as I opened my arms and released him, and instantly he was gone, just disappeared, as though he had never been. Before I could cry out to Fury, the wind rose to a fever pitch, then everything went black and silent.

If I passed out it was only for an instant. I came to still surrounded by the silence, but the light around me was like reflections dancing off water, and I knew that I was there at Fury’s center. Manning lay naked sprawled on his back next to me, one arm thrown over his face. I was equally naked. It was only then that I realized I was looking down on both of us.

“You are me now,” Fury said. “Inside my skin, inside my heart, open to all that I am as you are to me.” It was then that I realized I had spoken the words. All that Fury was lay open before me. I felt his strength, his intelligence, his humanity, his vulnerability, his deep, aching need to be joined with Diana McAllister, with Richard Manning. I more than felt his need. His need had become my own.

I recalled the moment of penetration the first time Fury made love to me, the moment when I knew the ship intimately, the moment when I saw his inner workings and, for a split second understood everything, or at least I thought I did. For the first time it occurred to me how strange it was that it had not happened again, though Fury had made love to me many times on our long journey to Pandora Base.

“It is not strange,” came his response. “It is not strange at all. I was frightened to show you more of who I am. I did not want to overwhelm you and, as I have mentioned, I am at my core, male with an ego that is somewhat more fragile than those of female SNTs, therefore, I was not yet ready. But I am ready now, Diana Mac. I am open to you and you may take what you want. You may ravage me and take all that I am, all that I am hungry for you to have.”

It was only as I came into his arms that I realized that I had become Fury, and he now embodied me where I lay next to Manning. I found command of physical form and touched my own flesh as he had touched it each time we made love. His fluid molecules became flesh and cupped my breast and stroked Manning’s penis, which I noted, with pleasure, was erect, as was my own. In Fury’s essence, I also explored the flesh he had created for himself, powerful muscular arms that had embraced me, hard flat abdominal muscles that expanded and contracted with a gasp as I caressed the penis and testicles that had penetrated me, that had penetrated Manning, the physicality that had loved us both with such tenderness, with such wild abandon that my heart race at the thought and my own body, which I now mantled, writhed with physical desire. I ached with the need to pleasure him as he had me, to offer my love to him. As I kissed and caressed the flesh that had been mine, that I knew Fury now inhabited. I felt the powerful racing of male hormones, of male flesh full to bursting, needing to penetrate, needing release, I realized that it wasn’t just my own flesh that now housed Fury. He had somehow expanded his essence to embody Manning’s flesh as well.

“The two of you have become one in me as I have become two in your flesh.” He spoke from my lips as from Manning’s body, he reached out to me. “Make love to me now, Diana Manning and make us all whole.” It was only then that I realized Manning and I embodied Fury together, merged into his intellect, his essence, his powerful uniqueness, and what we could see together from his essence was far greater than my simple glimpses of Fury’s inner workings. Had we not been at his heart, had we not been under his protection, I’m certain the understanding that we shared, the vision of all that Fury was, or at least what he knew of himself, would have destroyed us in its vastness, but he contained it all, just as he contained us, just as we contained him, and our desire for him for each other, could scarcely be contained in the three of us. Enfleshed in Fury’s essence, Manning and I parted my legs, opening my physical flesh and thrust into the depths of what now contained Fury. And somehow, I don’t know how, and yet if I had to do it again I could, Manning and I together became two, as though Fury had divided. While I penetrated my own flesh that Fury now occupied, Manning straddled his in flesh that was curvy and full-breasted and ready to be penetrated.

“We are one, and we are many,” Fury spoke through Manning’s physical lips. “That is the source of our power, that is the source of our bond.”

And then no one spoke. Passion rose like the spiraling mist that surrounded us and boundaries dissolved, with it all that contained us flashed bright as we climaxed together and rose and circled the spiraling flow of Fury’s heart until all that existed was simply us, and we were one.

It was the afterglow of lovemaking as I had never known it before, even in all of the times the three of us had come together in our journey to Pandora Base. And when my mind was able to focus on more that the physical bliss, I was once again Fury, but this time everything physical had dissolved and his mind was open to me as clearly as if it had been my own. I could no longer separate my thoughts and memories from his. I had the memories of his traumatic birth, of the agony he felt at seeing me and being separated from me before we could even know each other. I felt his pain as though it were mine because it was mine. I felt the memories of his loss and despair at knowing his brothers and sisters faced destruction and that those who survived – if any, would face the same loss and loneliness he bore. I felt his innocence, his need, his efforts to keep Manning alive, not just because it was the SNT primary calling to protect and advance humanoid culture, but because he couldn’t bear to be alone. I felt their joining, the moment when they both embraced what would be their new life together. I felt their agony at my suffering. I saw their scheming and planning to rescue me. I experienced their joy when I came onboard Fury a free woman, and I felt their disappointment at not being able to tell me. As for the camaraderie we shared and the sense of connection I remembered, I wasn’t sure whose memory that was.

I was not only Fury, but I was Manning. I recalled his memories of the destruction of his ship, his despair and his sense of guilt at the lives lost. I remembered his struggle to survive the indentured labor camps, fueled by his anger at what had been done. I recalled his scheming and planning to find a way of escape and the physical agony he went through onboard the Pegasus in order to be free of the shackle. I remembered his anguish when he realized that without Fury’s tether he was dead. I felt his battle to find his way back to meaning, and it was only in knowing his memories as him that I came to understand what a crucial role I played in his learning to accept his new life. Both of their memories were overlaid with the love and respect they had for each other.

All of their memories were laid bare before me, and it was only when I heard their anguished cries that I became aware that just as I was them, they were now also me, and they had my memories as well.

I don’t know how long the astounding process of embracing three lives as our own went on before we returned to our own skin, but it seemed to me that I lived the lifetimes of the two men I loved. Time to linger was not a luxury afforded us, and yet it felt like three lifetimes.

When I came back to myself wrapped in the arms of both the men I loved, the memories were hazy, and they felt like the stories someone else had told me.

“It is best that way,” Fury said. “You will always be able to recall what you need, and we will always be linked in the most crucial of ways at the most crucial of times, always relying upon our joint strength, for we are unique — even more so than I am among SNTs. No SNT has ever had two compliments or even ever could have. But in our triad, the need for our own thoughts and our own privacy is crucial when our boundaries are so permeable and we are constantly in such close quarters. Such privacy is essential to our mental health.”

Manning chuckled lazily. “You mean we’d drive each other crazy.”

“Yes.” Fury’s reply was without humor. “Boundaries are permeable, but they are still essential to our bonding.”