Teeth to Flesh

When Jenassa finally ripped the wolves off of Alecto, after sliding her blades in between their ribs and pushing until their blood and pearled intestine emptied out of their bellies, after using her leather-booted feet to kick right in their greasy and painted foreheads, she could see the damages. The high grass plans swallowed her cracked-glass screams for help, and Jenassa didn't even flinch.

"What, what wolves, Jenassa," Alecto finally gasps, blood cakes into her eyes and around her purpled nose; crushed against the rough granite in the struggle. "They grabbed me everywhere, w-with their claws."

The hired mercenary does even reply, her aged face creased with worry, and squats over the bodies of the animals. She wrinkles her nose over the stench of piss and shit.

"They weren't wolves, my patron."

It takes a long time to get Alecto better. Jenassa notes how she refuses to believe what happened. It's wolves, or sabertooths, or even ash hoppers ("All the way in the valleys of Skyrim?").

Dripping the pink thick liquid over the scabbed wounds is especially gruesome. Even for Jenassa, who often would cut down her enemies with a swiftness her employers came to appreciate. She never had to heal someone who's attacker botched the job.

Alecto's hips are a blurred bruised mess and blood sticks everywhere. Her neck and thighs are marked and one nipple had gotten caught in her armor. The bruises and bent bones on her face probably hurt the most. It keeps being assumed that the Forsworn weren't out to rape her, because nothing oozed out of her besides her own blood. But the way it looked... it did look horrific. But luckily Alecto knew minimal healing spells and silenced the artery that had been screaming inside of her thighs.

The sheets of inn's bed are absolutely ruined. They are stained beyond repair and fold stiffly, and Jenassa always realizes how she's swathing Alecto in the filthy blankets after changing her bandages.

The healing potions splatters over the cuts on her hips. Healing magic would do this in a pinch, to work on what's underneath the bone in Alecto's thigh is aligned properly yet. The Bosmer grips the sheets, and lets out a soft cry, her eyes slamming shut. How strange, to see the dragonborn as a whimpering little girl, with black bruises and cracked bones such as this?

The way Alecto holds the thin sheets with her fists through the pain, as her muscles spasm and her lower hips complain at the curling movements. She kicked them off a week into her recovery Jenassa glanced at their shared coin purse, praying they'd have enough to pay the innkeeper for perhaps another few days. Just until she can get Alecto in motion and they can run again into the forest. Sweat travels in little rivers along her nude body, pooling at the top of her collarbones and skimming past her brown nipples. The veins in her tanned skin press taut, blue and sensitive.

The mercenary runs her thick-skinned thumb down one of them along her wrist, where the skin is already stretched as thin as it is. The blood vessel feels much like a fragile insect, the pulse echoing through Alecto's body matching that of fluttering wings. Jenassa feels an ache to press her lips to the skin, to nip until beads of blood glimmer like pearls in the faint candlelight.

And then and there, Jenassa sees her as a womer. Not the knock-kneed blushing girl who shockingly deposited the sack of rusted coins in her palm. A grown Bosmer who has several lovers lying around somewhere along the provinces. One who wore slippery dresses out to pubs; or had brushed her hair to appear like a fragile maiden.

But now that the Dunmer thinks about it- Marcurio from that tavern in Riften. He was slack-jawed, at the Bosmer who smiled and sweated into her plain dress. Alecto had left her heavy armor upstairs- just wanting to be a normal mer for once. One who's tales strayed from bloody encounters from draugr and dragons alike. She sat beside him on the rickety bench, and they talked and laughed together, alongside the rough crowd.

Jenassa had wished to tell her patron Marcurio wanted one thing, he was must mirroring her awkward personality. But Alecto wanted one thing from him, as well. His thumb grazed her scarred knuckles. She looked down through her eyelashes at her hands, and stuttered back a reply. Jenassa turned, feeling out of place, and wished they were back in a old military fort, slashing at skeevers.

"Could you go down to the smithy and see what he can do about my broken sword?" Alecto's chapped lips parted and spoke; her voice slurred from the honeyed wine that Marcurio and she slipped down her throat. The Dunmer's eyes met her wet ones, and nodded, sagely.

They were going to have sex.

Fuck, make love, and seeing their happy grins told that it would be blurry mix of both. After all, the rumor was elf womer were insatiable.

It wasn't like her to feel envy. How long had it been since she'd make furious and bloody love with anyone who'd have the time to do so? Alecto hadn't even been a teenager then. But the path of a artful assassin was tough. No sane person wanted to touch a middle-aged mer with a perchance for violence. The minute she'd bring up her profession their bodies would become pinched, turning away from her. Unless they were touched in the head, that was. But they were fun to fuck as well. Much more fun to kill, though.

On the way, trying to hear the wheezing of a forge and the squeak of a grindstone; she finds her fingers at the delicate part of her throat, brushing the surface. Jenassa fights the urge to take in a shaken breath, and want blooms in her chest like a flower. Everyone was sick for passionate and mewling and soft love-making, as well. She herself had only a handful of times to call her sex life that, and it was only when she was in what could be considered a relationship. It was more comfortable to do the task and leave, quickly.

She's up. Alecto lets out a cry, reaching out to grip Jenassa's toned arm for strength with her sweaty palm. Her fingernails pierce the weathered flesh, creating delicate half-moons. The said Dunmer had been dozing in a chair, not chancing sleeping in the same bed as her squirming patron.

"Ye-"

"Help me get to the chamber pot. Please!" Her voice is needy, her other tanned hand gripping over her lower abdomen, moving despite the feral pain in between her thighs. Her two ponytails lay limply against the back of her wet neck.

Jenassa drags her to the stinking pot and helps spread her legs- her palms on either side, just above the knee. Alecto's bony ass rests just above the lid; the pot looks so ancient and over-used it could collapse under her weight.

Alecto braces her fingers into Jenassa's shoulder blades, feeling the bone and muscle tense underneath to better support.

"You could leave anytime, you know? I hate making you feel responsible to help me piss." Her voice is low whilst tired. Circles hang under the Bosmer's eyes.

"It's nothing I haven't seen before." The mercenary replies, blood-red eyes look into Alecto's before glancing back at the wall behind her.

Her knees tremble under Jenassa's fingers, and quietly she strokes her insensitive thumbs across the thin skin. There's a steady trickle of urine, rather disgusting; but was nothing compared to what they'd seen together.. Alecto lets out a soft sigh at the feeling tickling across her network of intricate cells and tissue. The bony thumbs- with the nail cut with a dagger, had a certain comfort to it. The Bosmer fought the need to lean into the older mer for more than support.

Whenever they were traveling in the forests or the plains or the tundra, they rarely spoke to once another. Sometimes Jenassa would speak a comment about their surroundings, and she didn't need a response to know that Alecto had heard her. The wind would hide a reply or rain would swallow up the birds tweeting and the wolves howling. Sometimes they'd remark on how the leaves are showing their pale bellies, it must be raining soon.

After Alecto is helped back into bed, the threadbare sheets wrapped around her frame, and her head rests limply against the pillow; Jenassa sits back into the rickety chair. Despite dozing off earlier, she feels wide awake. She instead unsheathes her sword. Averting her eyes off the sleeping form, the Dunmer returns to running a scrap of cloth down and up the weapon.

She feels so uncomfortable, now. Her own heart shivers her body and Jenassa has no idea whether to stab the girl in her sleep now or press a kiss to Alecto's sweaty temple.