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Sam bared his teeth, hissing with effort as, inch by painful inch, he hauled on the line. The wind tore at the massive canvas sheet. He felt it more than saw it, billowing hugely, twisting to escape his grasp like a cornered animal high above his head. The rough rope was abrading his palms nastily, and the cold, thin rain knifing against him did nothing to numb them.
He felt the cords standing out from his neck as he hauled down, wrestling with all his strength for every thankless handhold. Ah, how he ached. Had he ever been warm? Had he ever leaped to a warm and welcoming place in time? He couldn't remember -- but he was prepared to swear he hadn't...
"You did it! You did it!" Other hands were relieving his of the now-bloodied rope, making it fast to a gigantic cleat. Bemused, he looked up, blinking rainy tears away, at the mighty sail filled with the wind, shoving the ship forward ahead of the storm.
He was spun around and clumsily hugged. Who was it this time, who had he saved...? He could barely focus on his surroundings. Was he sure it mattered, since he would probably never remember them?
Yes. It did matter. He knew that. And so he grinned lopsidedly, drunk with fatigue and a sort of triumphant misery, at the pale wet faces framed in yellow slickers that clustered round.
"Captain! You did it!"
He was hugged again, and he leaned into the embrace, whoever it was offered by, luxuriating in just a shred of human contact. Then he felt the paralysis take him, the dizzying sparks shooting out from his vision, the swimming darkness smashing into his thoughts -- as God, Time, Fate or Whatever tore Sam away and thrust him into another life.
****************
...Wherever he was, whenever he was, whoever he was -- he was warm. That much was certain. The warm, silent darkness was so complete that for a mad moment, Sam thought he might have leaped into a fetus in its mother's womb.
No. He stretched out, experimentally, and inhaled through his nose. There was a lightly pervasive scent that was maddeningly familiar -- but its identity eluded him, as did so many other things he once knew.
The silence was not complete, Sam came to realize, after a minute or two had wandered past him in the darkness. There was his own breathing, of course, which always counted as part of any silence -- subjectively speaking.
No, there was someone else breathing in the room.
He held perfectly still, electrified with tension like a startled prey animal. The first minutes of any leap were always the most dangerous, as he struggled with his own displacement and confusion and scrabbled for enough clues to fumble his way into a new role. And though he couldn't remember much about them, he instinctively knew he had leaped into crisis moments, life-or-death moments, before.
But the someone-else was lightly snoring, deep in dreams, lying next to Sam in a warm, wide, comfortable bed. Well, he assumed it was wide. He knew he wasn't touching the other person, and he was pretty sure they occupied the same bed, from the greater warmth on his left side.
And somehow, that was at least half of what made the bed so very comfortable... reckless with loneliness, he inched himself closer to his bedmate, noting absently as his hand brushed against his own borrowed body that he had leaped into a woman.
Slowly, tentatively, Sam slid his hand across the sheets till it reached the someone-else.
His hand made contact much more sharply than he'd intended: a hollow slap! against what could only be, judging by all the hair, a man's belly. Sam recoiled guiltily, alarmed at having so rudely awakened whoever-it-was --
-- but he hadn't, at that. A sleep-thick mumble altered the rhythm of the snores momentarily, but then the rhythm resumed. Muscle by muscle, Sam began to relax. He felt his mind begin wandering on its way down into sleep, examining without curiosity the images tossed up to his mind's eye like flotsam. /a water fountain. / a hair dryer. / a woman's face etched in lines of blood. / a glass of beer. / a noose.../
Sam dimly felt his bedmate turn, felt a muscular arm slide blindly around his waist to gather him into a "spoons" embrace. Reflexively, without thought, Sam snuggled back against this complete stranger as he felt the flotsam in his mind blur into grey motion. Warm, even breaths whuffled over the back of his neck -- the snoring had, of course, ceased the moment the snorer stopped lying on his back. Sam missed the gravelly noises, but he had no time to examine this reaction as sleep reared up and claimed him.
In the darkness, Sam Beckett dreamed.
He dreamed it was finally over. He had made it home. He found himself in the Waiting Room, and he looked joyfully around for Al, for Gooshie, for Verbena, for someone to tell that he was home!
But he was alone. Where was everyone? He tugged open the door and went out into the hall.
Urgency gripped him. He had to find someone, he had to tell them he was home, and he ran down twisting hallways under an endless series of flickering fluorescent lights, calling into every room. Every room was clinically clean, and utterly empty.
He came at last to a room at the end of a corridor that some rational, unscathed part of his mind whispered didn't really exist in the Project buildings. But he went in, certain that everyone he sought waited just inside to shout "SURPRISE!" and grin foolishly as they clustered round to welcome him home.
But it was another empty room.
In frustration, Sam whirled back toward the door, about to renew his fruitless search. The door had ceased to exist; it was now a mirror, stretching from floor to ceiling.
Fascination threaded through him. What did he look like now? Had he aged very much? Would he even look familiar to himself?
It took a moment before he realized that he wasn't there in the mirror. No one looked back at him. The glass showed him an empty room.
Seized with a sudden frenzy, Sam lunged forward, his palms slapping abruptly against the cold, empty glass. He had difficulty pulling his hands away. The surface seemed greedy for his heat, unwilling to let him go.
He spun away from the mirror --
-- to find the room was nothing but empty mirrors, reflecting each other in a sterile infinity of nothing.
Gasping, Sam felt himself sliding away, becoming translucent, becoming the Nothing he saw all around him.
"No," he shouted, "NO! I exist -- you can't take it away from me. I have a name!"
But he faltered. A mind as clear as water couldn't hold something concrete, the shapes and colors of a name. He was ceasing to be. Fear clutched him like a lover. goodbye, cruel world, i'm leaving you today--
NO!
"SAM BECKETT! MY NAME IS SAM BECKETT!"
A thunderclap. Bits of glass drifted around him like snow...
"Christ almighty, Tina!" rasped in his ear, the arm around Sam's waist slackening. "For the last goddamn time, I do NOT want to play 'what-if-Sam- leaped-into-you'!"
A long, long pause ensued, there in the dark.
"...al?..." squeaked Sam, unable to move.
"What." That familiar grumble, but sulky and tired.
"Oh, boy..."
**************************
Sam waited, every muscle locked, for whatever might be next, but all that happened was that Al detached from spooning with him and rolled away, presumably onto his back, for the snoring resumed almost immediately.
He had leaped into Tina...?
/Oh, boy.../
Sam jumped sideways in startlement; the voice in his head was not his.
/This is really, really weirdsville, Dr. B...hey, hey, calm down! I think I'm the one that should be absolutely freaking out here!/
Sam held his breath, probing cautiously around the edges of his awareness for lurking dementia. He couldn't seem to find any, but he had to grimly acknowledge that if he had finally lost his grip, he would have no reliable way of knowing it had happened.
/Dr. B.?/
That was familiar. It wasn't really a voice, he decided after feeling his heartbeat -- Tina's heartbeat -- slow to something like normal. It was verbal, deliberately phrased as words... active communication.
And he only knew one person who called him "Dr. B.".
{Tina --?}
/Yeah. It's me. /
A pause.
/You could at least have knocked, you know./ There was a mock-scolding tone coloring the words, an effort at lightening a burden by provoking a smile. He remembered so little, but he was sure that this was something Tina could be depended upon for, just as it was with Al.
Sam smiled in the darkness. {I must apologize. Very rude of me. But it seems like this head's big enough for the both of us...?}
/Has this ever happened before? I mean, that you remember? We've always had someone in the Waiting Room./
{I...I don't think so. I'm not sure, though...}
Tina shifted gears immediately as Sam faltered. /Are you in control of my body? I hope you are, because I'm sure not!/
He stretched out an arm, a leg, wiggled some toes. {Yes. I've got control.}
/Well...that's something./ There was a change of tone. He wasn't precisely picking up emotions from Tina, but there was something akin to body language in the thoughts she sent to him -- subliminal clues which he interpreted without conscious effort. She became serious -- coldly, urgently serious.
/Sam... there's something wrong with Ziggy./
His eyes widened uselessly -- there was nothing to see. The room he was in was deep underground. {Something wrong?} He almost added, when isn't something wrong with Ziggy -- but refrained. Tina knew Ziggy better than anyone but Sam -- well, thanks to what leaping left of his memory, Tina knew Ziggy far better than did Sam. Thus, if Tina said there was something wrong, in that break-the- bad-news-slowly way, the chips had really hit the fan.
So to speak.
/You mustn't say a word of this out loud. And you can't tell anyone that you're me. I mean, that I'm you...oh, you know./ Tina skirted around the impossibilities of the situation with the fine single-mindedness of a scientist. /Because Ziggy is getting...I mean, she's...Sam, if Ziggy were a person I'd say she's just going crazy./
{...crazy?}
/Paranoid. Defensive. She babbles about bananas and kangaroos and she spies on people. In...in a threatening way. She listens in on everybody’s conversations and supplies appropriate music. She's got us all scared, Sam, and we don't dare even talk about it, because she can hear anything in the Project. Even in the bathrooms./
This last was accompanied by a twinge of outrage, as if Tina regarded the Ladies' Room as an inviolate inner sanctum. Sam tried hard not to think about how many times Al, as a hologram, had helped himself to a view of blasphemy.
Sam needed details, and Tina gave up on trying to verbalize them. She opened up that quiet, intense part of her mind, the place where concepts were the national language, and directed pure thought to Sam, who absorbed it with swift efficiency. He found himself torn between two reactions: growing awe and respect for Tina Martinez-O'Farrell's ruthless brain, so cleverly camouflaged by her appearance and demeanor; and mounting horror at the damning catalogue of defects that had possessed Ziggy in the short span of two weeks.
It was, in fact, something of a miracle that everyone on the Project was still alive. But then, he was used to miracles.
/Believe me, I've been up to my elbows in code -- Gooshie has, too -- and we think the problem is organic. Something's gone wrong with the nerve tissue -- we're, like, really pretty sure,/ she protested as he grimaced, unconvinced. /But Ziggy won't let anyone at her.../ There was a quicksilver, jerking feeling in his mind, somewhere between hiccups and hysteria. It was, he realized belatedly, a giggle. /...her 'private parts', she says.../
{It isn't funny,} he thought crossly, distracted by the enormity of the problem. He was trying to see the problem in his head, to fit the floating pieces into a perfect whole. But there was so much missing. Dammit!
/Uh-oh. Don't flinch!/ Tina's warning was phrased imperatively enough to grab Sam's attention as Al, still partially asleep but awake enough, turned onto his side and scooped Sam against him again to cuddle...a little more meaningfully this time.
{tinayouhavetogetmeoutofthis!!}
/Sam, I can't! CALM DOWN. Listen to me! No one must suspect you're here. Not Al, not anybody! Ziggy is listening, Sam, and you've already yelled out who you are once tonight!/
{Yeah, and I had a very interesting explanation for that thoughtfully provided!} shot Sam, shivering as a most practiced hand slid across his silky- smooth hip.
/So, some people have, like, some imagination, Mr. Vanilla!/ she retorted with such heat that he was silenced. /Sam. This is my room. I invited Al here tonight. We were both too tired to make love before, and we haven't had a chance in weeks. If you try to put him off now, he's gonna wonder, and he might even guess, and if he says anything Ziggy is gonna come down on us like a ton of bricks. / A pause, and then a crunchy, grumbly rattling around the edges: Tina was annoyed. /...been weeks, too! now I get to be, like, a friggin' square-dance caller instead of on the floor.../
{Tina. I'm sorry. But I'm not sure I can deal with this...} He could not keep the plaintiveness out of his mental voice, and it rose to a near-shriek of panic as warm, agile lips nibbled at the back of his neck...on what was obviously, for Tina, an exquisitely sensitive spot. Despite himself, he felt his breathing change, his back arching...
She took pity on him instantly, obviously feeling waves of distress reeling from him. /Oh, poor Sam...just try to relax. He'll take cues from you. If you stay passive, he'll take charge. He's very good that way./
sp; The quicksilver giggle again, ricocheting through Sam's mind as he was turned and kissed with astonishing intensity. He was prepared to swear he could feel it all the way to Tina's lacquered toenails.
/You'll find out./
***********************
/If it helps,/ she added, as Sam found his lips persuaded to part for the kiss despite his resolution, /don't think of him as your friend. Think of him as your lover.../
Yes. Yes, that might keep him from snapping, at that. He understood that he had to go through with this -- Tina had been quite clear, and what's more, she was right. He understood, too, that this was a woman's body he had temporarily usurped; he wasn't certain, but he assumed he had to have been in a situation like this before.
Well. Not quite like this.
No, Tina was right again. This was not -- not his best friend. This was a lover, a lover in the darkness...but he teetered between acceptance and leaping up from the bed to run screaming down the corridor.
/Sam,/ said Tina, very quietly in his head. /You're absolved of responsibility. It's all right for you to feel. With all the strangers you meet, and all the strangers you are -- isn't there some pleasure for you here -- where you know there's love...?/
She did not elaborate. She sensed that she had said enough, and fell silent as Sam surrendered, pinned between Tina's logic and Al's touch.
Sam leaned into the kiss at last, his attention undivided for the first time since he had leaped in. He realized that he occupied a graceful, lithe, responsive body (Tina harrumphed, but declined any distracting remarks), and felt a curious frisson as he settled into it, his awareness diffusing like smoke along every nerve ending...there seemed to be so many!
He was unwilling and unable to pinpoint the moment when he began to kiss, rather than simply be kissed. Disjointedly, he remembered Tina's mouth as lush and full, what some would call "bee-stung" -- but her lips moved as if they were his own, nibbling gently, tongue making delicate forays into his lover's warm mouth, making electrifying contact.
A rumble of pleasure, and a disorienting flurry of unseen motion tilted the axis of Sam's world.
"Baby," whispered the well-known voice into his mouth, "I feel like I've been waiting forever for this..."
There was a glittering ripple from Tina, swiftly suppressed. Sam ignored it with haughty stoicism, attempting to mask his brittle grip on relaxation. He usually thought to himself in fully-formed words, an internal dialogue with himself -- to reaffirm his Sam-ness in the face of yet another foreign identity. And in his head, he could say what he wanted to say -- his own private subtitles.
But here and now, someone else could read his subtitles, and this was too volatile a situation, too close to the bone. He retreated from words, climbed down from the complex crow's nest of his (or Tina's) cerebrum.
It's all right for you to feel, Tina had said. And it was all he dared do, arching his neck back as a trail of nibbling kisses ignited this body he was in.
/God knows, my pilot light's always on,/ he dimly sensed Tina musing in a dreamy tone. /But nobody can match this man for barbecue. Kiss the cook, Sam!/
No more words. He reached for his lover and wrapped his arms around, left hand sliding up across shoulder blades, up the neck and into close-cropped hair, simultaneously soft and prickly. His whole body sang with contact, and his movements were instinctive and graceful, hips rising and falling like a dreamy, unself-conscious sea.
This kiss was even more intense, hungry and urgent, and something changed in the room. A metronome, swinging faster. An appetite too long neglected to bother with table manners now.
He could not restrain a whimper of protest when his lover slid backward from his embrace. He was even less able to withhold the cry of startled delight when that tongue, warm and wet and shockingly agile, began knifing with exquisite delicacy at the tightening point of radiation which he suddenly realized was Tina's clitoris.
/It's yours just now,/ whispered Tina. /I feel it, but only through you. Ahh --/
"Ahh--!" as fingers spread him wider, exposing more tender, hypersensitive flesh to be ardently worshipped. So this is what it was like! It was an epiphany. As good as it felt in a male body, there was nothing to compare to the rich intensity of this pleasure, building and building toward completion.
The epiphany shattered into fragments. Everything in the world was falling away from him. The insistent rhythm of this maddening pleasure relieved Sam of rational thought as he writhed and cried out, frenzied past the point of knowing he did so. Ahh, so close, so close, he wanted it so badly and it was all around him but he wasn't there yet and ahh, yes, yes, like that, don't stop, please, please --
and he teetered there, suffering in the bliss of anticipation, pinned down in time by the tireless tongue of his lover in the darkness --
/ohh Sam here it comes he's gonna --/
A delicious sense of invasion as a finger thrust in, and automatically Sam drove back against it, frantically impaling himself on it. It wasn't enough --
He felt lips close on the tight, straining bud, suckling firmly, and he nearly arched off the bed in astonishment as the seeking finger inside rubbed against --
DETONATION.
He was screaming. Ah, the pleasure of it, rolling on and on and through him like thunder, every nerve firing and firing continuously till he thought he'd shake himself (and Tina) to pieces.
Finally, trembling, his ears ringing, he slowly began to relax once again, panting for breath and nearly in tears from the raw intensity of what had just happened to him.
************************
/Mmmmmmmm,/ Tina luxuriated in the ripples of pleasure spreading from the center of Sam. She seemed closer now somehow, less a voice in the darkness and more a presence standing next to him, yet joining and intersecting him. /Oh, that was the best...feeling you feel it, Sam, and you'd never felt it before, and you were so surprisedand it felt so goooood.../
Sam lay panting. There was some rustling and crinkling and swift quiet cursing close by in the darkness. His life was gently whirling around him in a widespread, porous vapor of thought and sensation, as aftershocks from the holy-mary orgasm he'd just had twitched through his nervous system, making him arch and wrenching sounds from him. His awareness was merging with Tina's, threading through like vapors mixing. Strange combinations of thoughts and feelings and disjointed memories kicked up tangents like electrons, orbiting the perimeters of Tina's skull.
/never gonna be enough memory to hold all of/{how can I be doing this how can i can't think about it}/ohh, he's always so good about this, get that thing on quick baby! need it so bad/{if the nerve tissue is mutating chemically, it must be mutating on a surface level impacted by the ratio of}/but if it's not actually mutating, but degenerating?/{soon? more soon? i want more}
Warm hands pressed his thighs apart, gently but inexorably. A thumb trailed over finely-furred folds, then retreated.
{degenerating, why?}/say please, sam.../{if it's integrated enough to be working at all -} /say please, sam!/{then -- what?}
Whispered in the darkness, low and thrumming with heat: "Say please."
He paused only a moment. Tina went very still.
"...please..."
"Yes, baby."
{then the tissue should be thriving. Ziggy would}/yes, but it isn't, it's like/{_aaaahhHHHH_ --}
This feeling, this feeling was so much more intense than from the invasion of a single finger - much more shocking, and vital, thrusting into whimpering hungry flesh...
/like it's, I don't know, bored!/{isn't the multiprocessor keeping up with the shift cycles?}/or pining away for something.../{so good so good don't stop, please}/ /oooohhhh --/
It was elemental, it was flawless, every stroke seeming to come from his own mind, so intuitive was his partner. He spread wider for the driving rod, wailing in astonished delight as the delicious torment of fullness was given and taken back, given and taken back again. His muscles gripped at the intruder hungrily.
They were meshing even further. They were being pinned together by sweet pleasure. Sewn together with a needle...
He was crying out full-throat now, feeling the coalescing of sparks that he now knew preceded orgasm twisting patterns along his skin, Tina's thoughts roiling into his own in effortless intimacy as he reached out blindly to touch his lover, to grip the muscular shoulders, to thrust up against the cock that drove and drove him to eager madness.
{/Have to spread wider. Wider, and push back, get it in harder, get it in deeper, feel it and feel it and ahhhh oh god oh god/}
and the moment of terrible clarity, of perfection, of completion, hit and held as Sam exploded into coming, coming like the end of the world, and Tina entered into it and became it and came and the thrusting was harder and thicker and faster and Al was howling and the clarity persisted, the heart of the matter, the delivered-with-style clue from God.
{/Union./}
And then collapse, and sweaty nestling, and oblivion.
Sam slept dreamlessly, exhausted and fulfilled. He had the answer now.
And a few more questions he suspected he'd forget before he ever went to ask them.
**********************
He woke. It was still dark. Something had changed. Had he leaped in his sleep?
There was sleeping going on here, but it wasn't him. Dream moments slipped by him like turning the dial on an AM radio. Al's dreams.
There were bits of Vietnam in there, Sam could tell, and himself as well, though he just wasn't fast enough to grasp any of the images streaking by. He felt, too, that he was not as snugly seated in Al's mind as he had been in Tina's. There were places where they could not meet flush, as it were -- lost places. It was unsettling, but Sam quickly learned to ignore it as Al jerked free of dreaming sleep and froze, aware of some invasion.
< wha...? Hey! HEY! >
{Just me, Al,} sighed Sam. {Sorry about this. I was just in Tina...}
Al had just started to relax, but he froze again.
< So was I,> growled Al. < But I guess you know that. >
{Tina and I were...together in her head. Like this,} Sam tried, groping for emotional response like rummaging in the darkness for your Chapstick. Al was lurking around the edges, as far from Sam in his own mind as possible. Trying to discover what Al was feeling was exactly like probing for a lost tooth with his tongue.
< You should've told me. > The thought flared bright in the darkness. < I can't believe that you, you goody-two-shoes, went through with that...that...without a week of soul-searching and a permission slip from God... >
{Al, for God's sake, Tina had me by the scruff of the neck the whole way through, telling me about Ziggy turning into HAL from 2001. But I figured it out! Something -- at the end of -- well, when we all -- merged...Al, it became so clear to me. Union. The nerve tissue I used, the samples from you and me. It's just a simple environmental change, placing the two strains together instead of segregating them.}
Al had become interested despite his outrage. < So you have to get into the nexus lab?>
{Yes. It's simple -- okay, it's not really very simple, but it's just a string of commands on the terminal -- and I can only do it from the lab computer.}
< Then what the hell did you leap out of Tina and into me for? >
{I don't know,} mused Sam, relieved that Al seemed to be leaving the issue of morals alone for the time being. He was having a little trouble with it himself just now. {I think it's a mistake. I think when we, ah...}
< 'Merged...' > mimicked Al. < Tango for three... >
{...when it was over something got a little confused, and I went with you rather than with her. How am I going to get back into Tina? I need to be her to do this. She understands the problem now, too, but she doesn't have the codes for the nexus lab computer.}
< Well, Sam, I bet to get you back into Tina, we'll have to get back into Tina. >
That took a moment to sink in. Sam thought about the indescribable sensitivity of the beautiful body he had so recently occupied.
< The one you're in ain't so bad, either,> grumbled Al. <You seemed to like it just fine a little while ago. >
{Al, drop it. Please,} Sam begged. {Let's just get it over with.}
< Ain't that a kick in the butt? > snapped Al, turning in the dark toward Tina as she slept, trailing light fingers along her spine. < Not only does Jiminy Cricket have to be a peeping Tom while I make love to Tina, but he wants to 'get it over with'. No way, Sam. Some things aren't meant to be hurried. >
A pause.
< Especially so soon after something so intense, > Al added, almost nonchalantly, as he applied his tongue like a sable brush to the planes of Tina's shoulder blades, eliciting soft, slurred sighs.
Sam couldn't acknowledge the compliment, but knew Al could feel the warm stain of pleased embarrassment spreading through his skull.
{I'm not really a goody-two-shoes.}
< No shit, Sam. >
{She's so sensitive,} Sam mused a bit later, when Al had finally reached the small of Tina's back. Tina's breathing suggested she was awake now, but she seemed disinclined for conversation. There was surely a great deal going through her mind. Sam knew all about it. {She feels everything. She can feel the *air* against her skin.}
< Show me. > And Al turned control over to Sam, effortlessly, as if it were something he'd been trained for. Sam surged into the places Al withdrew from without trying to: nature abhors a vacuum. It was like passing the salt while carefully not touching hands. But there were still places neither of them occupied. Horse latitudes...
Sam found Tina's smooth, warm, silky skin beneath his tongue. He drew back a little and blew gently on the spot just moistened by Al's mouth. Tina rewarded him with a whimper.
< Keep doing that. > Al left Sam painting and cooling intricate designs on Tina's back as he regained control of his hands. Tina was beginning to arch her back as Al smoothed his palm down, cupping her bottom, then sliding blithely between her thighs to coax them apart. She complied instantly.
Tag team! Sam found himself manning the hands that had just begun delicately stroking the innermost creases of Tina's thighs, teasing (as well he knew!) intolerably gently, so close to the source but not touching yet. She whimpered again, a little louder.
{You have to reward her for that,} chided Sam. {If you had any idea how patient she's being...you drive her absolutely crazy, Al.}
< Hrmmph. > Al suppressed a retort -- Sam felt him do it as clearly as if he had caught an illusionist fumbling his sleight-of-hand. He always could. But this bsp; time, Sam didn't press for a replay.
*********************
Tina twisted silently onto her back, a mute demand. One of her hands pounced from the darkness to hold Sam's hand, while the other, he could feel, gripped the back of Al's neck. The urgent ripple that followed told Sam that Al was every bit as sensitive as Tina. Perhaps more so.
It was not the same feeling of sharing that he had had with Tina. This was less stable somehow, though he had a clearer sense of what Al was thinking -- he had read Tina's emotions only, and what she chose for him to hear.
But Al -- Al had been tortured. For years they'd beaten and used him, and Sam guessed Al had gotten used to someone living inside his head.
So it seemed only natural that there were closed places, things Al had locked away against invasion. But, absurdly, it hurt somehow not to be able to somehow make him magically whole...especially when there were so many times Sam could have spared Al pain, but could not, or did not...
< I'll tell you what you didn't do, Sam, > muttered Al , < you didn't leave me to die at the bottom of Lover's Leap. You didn't have to leap for me. You could have just stayed here with -- >
Another closed place loomed suddenly before Sam's mind's eye. He flinched back involuntarily --
<...could've just stayed here, I wouldn't have blamed ya, Sam, I really wouldn't...I'm there with ya, I know what I'm talking about! >
If he was tired...how tired was Al?
***********************
Sam began to understand why Al had been so offended at the idea of "getting it over with". The patient single-mindedness Al devoted to pleasure was almost meditative: hands and mouth flickered back and forth between his control and Sam's in a deep rhythm like a heartbeat. They roved over Tina slowly and thoroughly, as if none of them were in danger of their lives.
Al had a habit of concentrating most on areas not ordinarily considered prime erogenous zones: the inside of her elbow, just outside the blade of the hip, the bridge of her nose...Sam reflected that for someone whose vocabulary contained so many startling euphemisms for "breasts", Al didn't pay excessive attention to Tina's.
Al snorted silently. < C'mon, Sam. Can't help noticing them, but there are so many more goodies than that. Hear those little noises she's making in the back of her throat? God, I love that! Her nervous system is strung like Christmas lights in a planetarium. > He nuzzled Tina's armpit, then gently helped her turn over. Sam found himself nibbling the nape of her neck, and he could clearly feel her silky skin through Al's fingers as they traced spiralling patterns along the backs of Tina's thighs.
Pleasure spiraled like a tenuous, swaying web between the three of them, though the fact that it was only strung for two made Sam dizzy. He perceived that his presence in the mix was threatening the balance. Blindly Sam reached to blend into Al the way he had before with Tina.
But Al jerked back as if he had been burned, a wordless shout of negation echoing in Sam's mind's ear. The heartbeat-rhythm faltered and dispersed, and Tina stirred beneath them, murmuring in reaction to the loss.
Sam felt himself trapped in amber, appalled at the violence with which Al had shoved him away. He could barely sense Al's presence now: for a moment of blind panic he thought his best friend had pulled away so hard he'd snapped out of his own head and...gone where? Down the hall into the Waiting Room, to Sam's unconscious body? Tina? Or...oblivion?
< I'm here, > growled Al, and his tone brought to mind a dog Sam had seen once, backed into a corner, half-mad with fear and hunger. < What'd you go crowding me like that for? Jesus, Sam. >
Sam, who seemed to be in control of Al's body at the moment, was too preoccupied with Al to move, and he scarcely noticed Tina wriggling out from underneath him.
A sense of dreaming that had been absent during his nightmare assailed Sam. What had happened? What had he done? Why was Al shivering in the corner of his own mind as if --
Ah.
{Al,} Sam sent, carefully. {I don't know what you thought I was doing. But it wasn't an attack on you. I'm sorry it upset you.}
A snort from Al, but no comment seemed forthcoming. Sam pressed his advantage as the growling-cornered-dog feeling began to subside. He groped for a "place" midway between them and clung to it, not venturing any closer.
{Do you know what I was trying to do?}
< Felt like --> Al blurted, but he would not finish.
{I was trying to do what I did with Tina -- or what she did with me. I'm not sure which,} Sam went on, patient and calm. There were questions shouting to be answered, but now was definitely not the time. Someday, perhaps. {She and I kind of blended together just before -- just before I leaped to you. I figured we'd have to do the same, to get me back to Tina. So I can help Ziggy, Al. So I can leap out. Oh, God, Al, I'm so close to being home, I'm just down the hall -- }
Patience and calm left Sam as if he had never known them, and he began to tremble.
He struggled not to cry, holding onto some vague notion that it would give him away to a listening Ziggy -- Al was not known for teary scenes. The trembling intensified.
< Sam, it's all right. Sam, stop -- >
The trembling became vibration, a discordant tremor that mounted in intensity until it felt like an earthquake in progress, threatening to shake him right out of Al. He scrabbled for purchase, felt Al flinch involuntarily.
Then both of them froze, startled, as they were seized by Tina and flipped over, down onto the bed with a startled "oof!"
What she did next caused Sam and Al to gasp aloud in unison -- and that was it. They merged into one, without effort, scarcely noticing, as soft hair spilled across his belly and soft lips nibbled with maddening precision along the rapidly-hardening length of his cock.
Sam/Al inhaled sharply, and he reached down to plunge his hands into Tina's hair, caressing her skull reverently as she suckled him. There was no more time or room for conversation. They had so fully merged that it seemed natural to ignore each other's secrets. There was only Now -- there was only He and She in the darkness.
Oh, he could feel -- now there was more than enough mind to pay attention to every nuance from every nerve ending. It was, in its way, rather like being a woman. Half of him snorted in disbelief at the thought, but half stubbornly insisted that he knew it was true, and then the whole thing was forgotten as those lush lips nipped and nibbled at him.
Now that his attention was undivided, pleasure once again became paramount, and the shining web returned -- tendrils spiralling like a little galaxy, and so hard and urgent, and the teasing tongue-tip dancing at the tiny opening, ahhhh...
He coasted a plateau of pleasure, moaning at the excruciating tension, deliciously urgent as her mouth drew him in and in and out and out. He spread his palms flat to the bed to either side, arching up to meet her, taut with heat and power.
The rhythm built toward a peak. Tina, caught in the web, felt it too, and he could feel and hear her writhing against the blankets rumpled between his open legs.
The three of them spun and surged, tethered together around the hub of hunger. She moaned low in her throat, and he felt the vibrations thrumming low around him, tightening and caressing him toward another detonation. She gripped his hips, pinning him in place as she worked him, her tongue rolling around the engorged tip of his penis every time she drew back her head.
He clenched the sheets, moaning continuously now. The shared awareness rendered every pleasure so intense as to be nearly painful.
There was no postponing it, now. He was going to come, or he was going to die.
Tina knew the signs. As his thrusts deepened, striving toward ecstasy, Tina's fingers began to stroke and dance along the very center of the underside of his scrotum, then pressed there lightly with just the pads of her fingertips.
Well, he wasn't going to die.
The fuse reached the powder. His breath hung suspended in his throat as he pulsed, twisting up off the bed. Still she held him, unrelenting, as he came, spurting into the tight heat of her mouth.
The force of it spun Sam, reeling with disorientation, clear from Al in a painful snap. He had so quickly become accustomed to that sharing, and as it was rudely snatched away from him he throbbed with a fresh spike of grief.
Then he felt Tina reach for him through the web, like a mother cat grasping a kitten in her mouth, and
union
dissipated slowly, pulsebeats thundering in Sam-and-Tina's ears. He had been passed to her in the throes of orgasm, and when she took him back it triggered her own patient pleasure. They resonated like two notes from one cello, lingering smoothly in a honey-rich harmony of ripples.
Al panted, almost sobbing, next to them in the dark. But he said nothing, and eventually he curled against them and slept, one arm around Tina-and-Sam, warm hand flat on Tina's belly.
Sam-and-Tina were silent for some time, though wakeful. When they felt sleep threatening them at last, they made several decisions about Ziggy -- and prayed they were the right ones. Sam furnished Tina with the passwords. His eidetic memory had always made for good security. He told them to her, first verbally and then in the same direct, conceptual way she had explained Ziggy's problems to him. But she sighed inside and admitted that she just didn't have the kind of memory to recall forty-two prime numbers in backwards skipping order without mixing them up somewhere along the line. Not when she had only one chance to get it right before Ziggy was alerted to the attempt.
They tried to anticipate conversations, phrases to soothe the pride of a mad supercomputer. But fatigue and pleasure together are the most potent soporific, and soon there was only warm darkness once more. Then sleep, and dreams.
*****************
The lights in Tina's room came on automatically, at half-brilliance, waking Sam-and-Tina at once. Al still slept, tangled in the bedclothes, face mashed unceremoniously into one of many plump pillows. Tina's eyes lingered on Al's sleeping form for a moment, but Sam turned them to the room at large. He had awakened with a need to get out of this dangerously intimate triumvirate, to make things right with his brainchild and leap the hell out of this.
There was a large digital clock on the bedside table; its display was obscured by a pair of silky black panties. He reached up and pulled them away. It was six o'clock. The numbers glowed a bright turquoise blue, and he reflected that they would have shed a great deal of light on what happened last night.
/Too bad we can't risk you going back with him,/ remarked Tina mournfully, with another glance at Al. /We have to get to the nexus lab. Now, early, before the day shift begins. I'd rather endanger the smallest number of staff./
{Yes,} Sam said, and let Tina cope with dressing, while he wished he'd had just a little more sleep --
No, if he had to be completely truthful, he didn't wish that.
/Attaboy, Dr. B./
He'd just had enough time to glance back at Al when Tina paused in the doorway.
/Hey -- hey, I got it! The numbers in the code. They go *perfectly* to the tune of "All of Me" -- isn't that funny? I can remember that.../ One more quicksilver giggle and then Sam felt, in astonishment, that he was about to leap.
/23, 17, 13.../Tina giggled, /...can't you see, I'm no 7 5 2.../
{It wasn't supposed to be a song,} protested Sam. {It was just numbers.}
/Strength in numbers,/ whispered Tina, and kissed his mind's lips goodbye as he leaped.