Wolf's Rain Fan Fiction ❯ Saved ❯ Chapter Eight: Curiosity Killed the Cat ( Chapter 8 )
[ X - Adult: No readers under 18. Contains Graphic Adult Themes/Extreme violence. ]
By: YoukaiFate 
Warning of language and not much citris.
Anime/Manga: Wolf's Rain Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Suspense / Romance / Hentai / Action | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 11.12.2006 | Pages: 2 | Words: 3.8K | Visits: 577 | Status: Completed
Warning of language and not much citris.
Anime/Manga: Wolf's Rain Fan Fiction | Genre(s): Suspense / Romance / Hentai / Action | Type: Other | Uploaded On: 11.12.2006 | Pages: 2 | Words: 3.8K | Visits: 577 | Status: Completed
Saved
Disclaimer: I do not own any of Keiko Nobumoto/Bones characters or ideas. This story is for entertainment purposes only and not for sale or profit.
A/N: So it’s been way over a year since I last posted a chapter to this fic, but I’m trying to clean up and finish some of my older stories, among many other things. Please let me know if I have any inconsistencies between character and plot development, and I want to thank all the people who urged me for an update. It worked! LOL.
Chapter Eight: Curiosity Killed the Cat
She really had to get back to work, and didn't know how Wolf was going to take it. He was certainly protective. Hovering, almost. Not that she minded---the past three days had been glorious, and not all of their time had been spent in the bedroom. Some of it had been spent in the living room, and in the shower, and...
Marie grinned at herself in the mirror, an almost wolfish grin. Gods, he was one demanding lover.
She loved it.
Forcing back a yawn, she turned on the tap to rinse out her toothbrush. Wrinkling her nose at the image in the mirror over her sink, she quickly finished her toilette for the day---ha, her mother was always on her for not using cosmetics, and for not, at least, trying to use one of the thousands of skin creams she was always bringing over. She idly wondered what her mother, overly prim, would think of Tsume.
Best not to think about that right now...
Easing open the door, she tried to keep it quiet. Her small bedroom was cast in deep shadows. Dawn hadn't arrived yet, and she hoped to make it out of the apartment without waking Wolf up. He hadn't said much of anything during her sporadic explanation about her job yesterday...heck, he probably hadn't even paid attention to what she was trying to tell him, too busy distracting her with his gifted tongue.
She shivered, feeling quite warm over the memory. *What a tongue... *
"Oof!" She muffled her exclamation behind her hand, cursing mentally as her stubbed toe sent signals to her brain that it was not happy about being plunked into her dresser. She darted a look at the bed, where a lumpish shadow of covered blankets didn't stir, like she was afraid it would. He must have been as tired as she, because there wasn't so much as a twitch from the pile.
Thankfully, her closet doors were open, and she was able to worm a pair of heels out of the bottom of the pile. They felt the same, so she was good there. Thankfully, she had a lab coat cleaned and pressed in its bag from the cleaners hanging over the back of her couch, so she wouldn't have to fumble another one out of the closet. She would, however, have to see about replacing her glasses. They had been lost somewhere between the street and alley when she had been rescued by her Wolf.
She cast him a last, warm glance before easing open her bedroom door and squeezing out into the living room. She pulled the door closed softly, sighing with relief that she had gotten out without waking Tsume up.
Her thoughts immediately turned to work, as she hunted up the files she had abandoned three nights before and grappled with the bag of her lab coat. She didn't want to make too much noise tearing it open, so she just slung it over her arm. Tucking her feet into the heels she had smuggled from her closet, she patted her skirt pocket to make certain her keys and ID were in place. Opening the front door, she whispered softly into the darkened apartment, "Sleep tight, my Wolf. I'll be back soon."
She closed the door, careful to make no noise, and fumbled her keys into the lock.
Turning it, she gave a little sigh. She would miss her Wolf, but she really needed to get to work---
"Going somewhere?"
She nearly jumped three feet in the air. She did gasp, and drop her keys with a jangling sound on the carpeted hallway floor. Heart racing a mile a minute, she turned wide blue eyes on Tsume, who leaned casually against the wall, arms crossed over his leather-clad chest, yellow eyes glinting at her over a smug twist of his hard lips.
"Wolf!" She breathed. "How...?" Blue eyes flicked from the closed door and back to the firm apparition who leaned so casually outside the door he was supposed to be behind.
The now-familiar rippling movement of his shoulders as he shrugged was her only answer. She hated when he did that, and no amount of wheedling would ever get another answer out of him, she already knew. Her blue eyes sparked her annoyance with him, until he bent down and kissed her firmly, and thoroughly, on the mouth.
Marie melted against him as his arms came down to circle around her waist. Her annoyance and any other thought she might have had went right out the window, until she was only thinking of him, of his heat and strength and overwhelmingly maddening way of utterly distracting her...
Abruptly ending the kiss, Tsume stepped back and Marie mewled softly in protest as his warmth left hers. She blinked wide blue eyes, dewy with desire, and looked up at him, confused.
Golden eyes were lit with smug satisfaction and Marie suddenly had the desire to slug him.
*Jerk.*
Tsume casually slung a possessive arm across her shoulders, hauling her slighter frame against his side. His breath was warm and tickling against her ear as he said casually, "So. Where are we going?"
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Plucking the glasses from off her nose with a sigh of irritation, Marie used her thumb and a forefinger to massage the offended area. She had been happy enough to find her old pair of spectacles at the back of her desk drawer this morning, but she had forgotten just how tightly the simple metal frames pinched her nose---which was exactly the reason why she had replaced them!
She made a face at the frames that sat so innocently on her desk as that damn, irritating blond curl decided now was the perfect time to come twisting out of its pin to dangle over one eye.
The universe was completely against her today.
With a muttered oath, Marie dragged the stupid curl back up and pinned it into place. She blinked at the red-headed technician---Don---who had glanced up at her muffled growl to pointedly frown at the untimely disturbance. Marie returned his sour look with one of her own, and he quickly bent back to his work with a studied show of indifference.
*What an ass---and I don‘t mean the sexy kind. Jerk!*
Marie sighed, looking at the pile of paperwork that still awaited her perusal. Most of her irritation was actually springing from the fact that she just didn’t understand half of what she needed to. Her assignment was to find errors between particular DNA sequences, and point out the broken links between certain strain compositions, but science---let alone genetics---had never been her strong suit. Her degree was for diagnostic computation and mathematics, not exploratory science and research. She kept getting the feeling that she was missing something vital, and she wasn’t getting any answers from the scanty background information provided with the thousand and one streams of hard data she still had to plow through, sequence by boring sequence.
No wonder she was developing a headache.
If she could just understand what all this crap was for, then maybe she wouldn’t feel as if she was floundering for no real reason. She might even be able to come up with an easier solution in finding the data that the client desired. That was her particular talent, drawing together inconsequential bits of spurious nonsense that others ignored to come up with surprising conclusions that were often better than what those others could conjure up.
*Seeing the trees for the forest, that’s me.* She grinned tiredly at her twisting of an old saying. Picking up her glasses again with a grimace, she bent back over her computer. This time, she ignored the overwhelming screens of consecutive DNA strains she should be working on to go and click open the scanty background link provided with the task. Plowing through sequences, as Don was doggedly doing next to her, had gotten her nowhere. Maybe she could save herself some time if she re-examined what the client was hoping to gain from their work, and thus develop a program that would take all the long man-hours of constant scanning right out of the whole stupid project…
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No matter which way she turned, she ran into the same blank wall. It was frustrating, damn frustrating. Marie tried to keep her snarls to herself as her computer blipped at her once again, a warning flashing across the screen that she didn’t even bother to read, she had already seen it so many stinking times. It was a simple device, the crossed arms of Noble Lord Okum, and a burp about how common access was denied, the site was restricted for security reasons, sensitive information enclosed, blah, blah, blah.
It was just so fucking annoying! How could she get anywhere on this stupid project if she didn’t understand it?
It was a losing argument with herself that she would never win. Marie flicked off her screen with a sigh of exasperation. It had been a long day, and right now all she wanted to do was go home and bury her irritation away in Tsume’s distracting arms. Her expression softened as she thought of her handsome Wolf. By the Fates, it felt good to have somebody just to think about, someone so damn hot it made her nerves tingle in anticipation just to think of him…
And thinking of him, she’d better get a move on or he might just be ready to break down the door to the lab. He hadn’t been that happy this morning, when dropping her off. He had growled at her to keep her ass right there, and only there, and he would be by at six to walk her home. He was such an arrogant tyrant, the ass, and normally such high-handed orders would have pissed her off right good, but Marie found his possessive air delightfully adorable. It felt nice to have someone worrying so much about her.
Flipping papers into a folder to take home with her, Marie waved to Dr. Davigny, who only ignored her. Like Don, he was bent like a crab over his computer terminal, his short, gnarled fingers flicking delicately over the keys so quickly that the images on his screen blurred one into another. The old professor must be working on something big if he were obsessing so much about it. It was only with the truly technical projects that the grumpy old man would ignore his student-technicians, his schedule---and everything else, for that matter---to concentrate on the tangled problem before him.
Glancing out of the corner of her eye, Marie noted with amusement that the professor had already absent-mindedly pulled off his lab-coat to let it dangle by one sleeve off the back of his chair. He had even managed to mash a spent cigarette into the half-eaten donut beside him, rather than the over-flowing ashtray alongside it. Knowing him, he’d probably be here all night…
Thank the Fates she, at least, had the sense to know when she was done. Unlike Don, who was obsessed with proving how good he was, she wouldn’t be working through the night until her eyes crossed and she all but fell off of her stool with exhaustion. If Don wanted to prove he could outlast old Davigny, than let him. She, for one, was looking forward to a little time with her Wolf…
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The security technician frowned, and waved the guard-captain on duty over for a second opinion. “Sir, there seems to be a lot of interest in the Lunar Project from this particular computer-link. The user tried to access restricted information multiple times this afternoon.”
The guard-captain frowned as he bent over the sec-tech’s terminal.
“Might be simple curiosity, sir,” the lieutenant supplied helpfully, suddenly uneasy with the guard-captain’s fierce scowl.
Pulling the keyboard to him, the guard-caption ignored his subordinate to tap out a few commands. “Maybe it is, Lieutenant, and maybe it isn’t. Such interest should still be investigated, you never know when it might be something more than ‘simple curiosity’…”
“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant dutifully replied, but he didn’t like how intently his officer was now studying the screen, and the information he had drawn up.
“Degre…” The guard-captain muttered under his breath, his expression unreadable. Too unreadable---it made the lieutenant shiver, and wonder uneasily if he shouldn’t have drawn his superior’s attention to the woman’s particular interest in the Lord Okum’s special project…
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“What is all this?” He asked her, nibbling on her bare shoulder, interest alight in his yellow eyes.
Marie sighed, relaxing back against him and his solid strength. He was always warm, even naked, as he was now. They had made passionate love as soon as they had stumbled through the door, abandoning dinner in favor of satisfying hunger of another kind. Fierce love and been followed by slow love, and then a languorous dinner as she had tried to entice him into eating something other than raw steak. He had tried her microwaved lasagna with disdain, pronouncing it wasn’t fit for wolf or man. Marie had laughed, and abandoned it to attack him once again with something better fitted for wolf and man---or woman, rather.
She had drawn away from him and his too-easy distraction with quite a bit of reluctance, but the questions she had struggled with at work today refused to let her go. Pulling her files to her, she had decided to shuffle through the paperwork she had printed out, hoping to find something that would make sense amidst the vague confusion. Tsume had been content to watch her, his strong hands lightly kneading her shoulders as she relaxed against him.
“Frustrating, that’s what it is.” She replied with a dark scowl at the ambiguous references hidden within the innocently printed papers.
“I have seen this before.” He tapped the small device of the header with casual interest.
“That’s Lord Okum’s personal arms.” Marie glanced at it, uninterested. She had already ferreted out the fact that the Noble himself was funding the Lunar Project. A bit surprising, really. The Nobles, or Lord Okum, specifically, had never shown an overwhelming interest in genetic research before. True, it was his money that allowed the university to function at all, but that was a duty taken for granted by the people of Freeze City, that their Lord would always allocate certain taxes and private funding for educational purposes.
There had been a few muttered protests lately that the Lord was taking more and more money and spending it on expensive toys for the War Department, rather than putting it to a better use. But Lord Okum’s word was law in Freeze City, and the protests were few. For the main part, the citizens were quite content with their Lord and their lives as was.
“I just can’t seem to find the connection,” Marie murmured in disgust as she threw the papers down on the worn coffee table and turned in her lover’s arms to lay her forehead tiredly against his broad chest. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she sighed. “It’s just so frustrating!”
His hand smoothed the buttery curls from off her forehead. “Why do you worry about it, woman?”
She looked up at him, and bit her lip. “I don‘t know,” she said, honestly. “It just…I don’t know. It’s strange. Why is he so interested in genetics all of a sudden? What is so important with this particular research that they had to call in outside help---Dr. Davigny and the lab---to ferret out the inconsistencies of those DNA strains? Normally, all of it would be handled by the scientists working directly with the project, not by university techs! It’s like they are working blind, as if they were trying to construct something from nothing---like they’re trying to put a broken vase back together piece by piece, without even knowing what it truly is…”
She froze, her wide eyes going indigo as something occurred to her. Amused by the abrupt change in her mood, Tsume allowed her to sit back on her bent knees, her hands spread on the defined muscles of his wide chest for balance.
“I think that’s exactly what they are trying to do,” she said slowly, wonderingly. “They are trying to make something, create something, and I don’t think they really know what it is. I know it has something to do with some type of flora---some kind of plant. A new kind of indestructible food-crop, maybe? There’s been some terrible droughts lately…”
She bit her lip, a hand coming up to idly brush the dangling curl out of her eyes. She slipped off the couch with little awareness, her mind caught up in the disturbing ideas that were now circling through her thoughts. Skirting the coffee table, she started to pace the small area between kitchen and living room, up and back, up and back, as if it would help her to sort out her wayward thoughts and come to some kind of realization. Tsume watched her with an enigmaticly golden stare.
“It could be a food-crop. It would sure help the farmers out to have some kind of crop that wouldn’t dry up in the fields even as they planted it. The killer droughts of the past few years have made dust bowls out of huge swaths of cultivated land. There are a lot of people going hungry right now because of it. But I just can’t see Lord Okum---or any Noble for that matter---showing any particular concern about it. They’re too busy snarling at each other, and playing toy soldier. Ever since Lord Darcia took Harmona as his wife---instead of the Lady Jagura, who was older and should have been the one he married---they’ve been at each other’s throats. Dr. Creighton in my political science course last spring said that there would be repercussions from that marriage, though none of us really believed him at the time…”
She paused, a finger tapping idly on her pursed lips. “But none of that is getting me anywhere. I don’t think that Lord Darcia’s marriage has anything to do with Lord Okum’s sudden interest in genetic sequencing. I wonder, though, if Lord Okum isn’t trying to create something that he could use militarily. That would make more sense. He is always trying to build better weapons of mass destruction---for defense, he always says, yeah right!---but what the hell does any of that have to do with the moon?”
A muscle in the hard line of Tsume’s jaw twitched. He abruptly sat up from his indolent lounging across the couch’s cushions. His eyes were intent. “What do you mean, the moon?”
She blinked, as if suddenly realizing he was still there. Waving a hand at the pile of papers covering the coffee table, she said, “All that stuff is related to something called the ‘Lunar Project.’ Dr. Davigny, my boss, was asked to look over some research on DNA strains with the goal to finding inconsistent patterns of sequential links that the scientists themselves did not have the time to spare for. I don’t know what the hell it’s all supposed to be about, and that is what was frustrating me. Dr. Davigny always told me I was too curious for my own good. Runs in the family, I guess, because Cher is even more inquisitive than me. She always wants to know not only what, but why, and how, and everything else she can get her little fingers digging in.”
“Cher?” He asked with a frown.
“My sister. She’s only twelve, but she’s already top of her class in primary, and she’s won the Scientific Achievement Award three years running with her homemade experiments, though the damn things drive my mother crazy. Mom has always been so…” Marie made a helpless gesture with her hands, unable to convey her mother’s complicated relationship with both her daughters. She was a good, hard-working woman, but an unimaginative and practical one---which could often drive Marie completely nuts. Her mother could never have accepted something like Tsume with anything but disbelief, and maybe that was what was really bothering her right now…
Marie sat down on the couch beside her Wolf with a thump. “Ah, well, none of that really matters either. I just hope that none of this---” she waved at the papers on the table, “---proves too dangerous for my meddling.”
“What do you mean?” Tsume growled, not liking anything that he could not protect her from.
Marie looked at him, soberly for once. “It was curiosity that killed the cat, you know.”
Disclaimer: I do not own any of Keiko Nobumoto/Bones characters or ideas. This story is for entertainment purposes only and not for sale or profit.
A/N: So it’s been way over a year since I last posted a chapter to this fic, but I’m trying to clean up and finish some of my older stories, among many other things. Please let me know if I have any inconsistencies between character and plot development, and I want to thank all the people who urged me for an update. It worked! LOL.
Chapter Eight: Curiosity Killed the Cat
She really had to get back to work, and didn't know how Wolf was going to take it. He was certainly protective. Hovering, almost. Not that she minded---the past three days had been glorious, and not all of their time had been spent in the bedroom. Some of it had been spent in the living room, and in the shower, and...
Marie grinned at herself in the mirror, an almost wolfish grin. Gods, he was one demanding lover.
She loved it.
Forcing back a yawn, she turned on the tap to rinse out her toothbrush. Wrinkling her nose at the image in the mirror over her sink, she quickly finished her toilette for the day---ha, her mother was always on her for not using cosmetics, and for not, at least, trying to use one of the thousands of skin creams she was always bringing over. She idly wondered what her mother, overly prim, would think of Tsume.
Best not to think about that right now...
Easing open the door, she tried to keep it quiet. Her small bedroom was cast in deep shadows. Dawn hadn't arrived yet, and she hoped to make it out of the apartment without waking Wolf up. He hadn't said much of anything during her sporadic explanation about her job yesterday...heck, he probably hadn't even paid attention to what she was trying to tell him, too busy distracting her with his gifted tongue.
She shivered, feeling quite warm over the memory. *What a tongue... *
"Oof!" She muffled her exclamation behind her hand, cursing mentally as her stubbed toe sent signals to her brain that it was not happy about being plunked into her dresser. She darted a look at the bed, where a lumpish shadow of covered blankets didn't stir, like she was afraid it would. He must have been as tired as she, because there wasn't so much as a twitch from the pile.
Thankfully, her closet doors were open, and she was able to worm a pair of heels out of the bottom of the pile. They felt the same, so she was good there. Thankfully, she had a lab coat cleaned and pressed in its bag from the cleaners hanging over the back of her couch, so she wouldn't have to fumble another one out of the closet. She would, however, have to see about replacing her glasses. They had been lost somewhere between the street and alley when she had been rescued by her Wolf.
She cast him a last, warm glance before easing open her bedroom door and squeezing out into the living room. She pulled the door closed softly, sighing with relief that she had gotten out without waking Tsume up.
Her thoughts immediately turned to work, as she hunted up the files she had abandoned three nights before and grappled with the bag of her lab coat. She didn't want to make too much noise tearing it open, so she just slung it over her arm. Tucking her feet into the heels she had smuggled from her closet, she patted her skirt pocket to make certain her keys and ID were in place. Opening the front door, she whispered softly into the darkened apartment, "Sleep tight, my Wolf. I'll be back soon."
She closed the door, careful to make no noise, and fumbled her keys into the lock.
Turning it, she gave a little sigh. She would miss her Wolf, but she really needed to get to work---
"Going somewhere?"
She nearly jumped three feet in the air. She did gasp, and drop her keys with a jangling sound on the carpeted hallway floor. Heart racing a mile a minute, she turned wide blue eyes on Tsume, who leaned casually against the wall, arms crossed over his leather-clad chest, yellow eyes glinting at her over a smug twist of his hard lips.
"Wolf!" She breathed. "How...?" Blue eyes flicked from the closed door and back to the firm apparition who leaned so casually outside the door he was supposed to be behind.
The now-familiar rippling movement of his shoulders as he shrugged was her only answer. She hated when he did that, and no amount of wheedling would ever get another answer out of him, she already knew. Her blue eyes sparked her annoyance with him, until he bent down and kissed her firmly, and thoroughly, on the mouth.
Marie melted against him as his arms came down to circle around her waist. Her annoyance and any other thought she might have had went right out the window, until she was only thinking of him, of his heat and strength and overwhelmingly maddening way of utterly distracting her...
Abruptly ending the kiss, Tsume stepped back and Marie mewled softly in protest as his warmth left hers. She blinked wide blue eyes, dewy with desire, and looked up at him, confused.
Golden eyes were lit with smug satisfaction and Marie suddenly had the desire to slug him.
*Jerk.*
Tsume casually slung a possessive arm across her shoulders, hauling her slighter frame against his side. His breath was warm and tickling against her ear as he said casually, "So. Where are we going?"
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Plucking the glasses from off her nose with a sigh of irritation, Marie used her thumb and a forefinger to massage the offended area. She had been happy enough to find her old pair of spectacles at the back of her desk drawer this morning, but she had forgotten just how tightly the simple metal frames pinched her nose---which was exactly the reason why she had replaced them!
She made a face at the frames that sat so innocently on her desk as that damn, irritating blond curl decided now was the perfect time to come twisting out of its pin to dangle over one eye.
The universe was completely against her today.
With a muttered oath, Marie dragged the stupid curl back up and pinned it into place. She blinked at the red-headed technician---Don---who had glanced up at her muffled growl to pointedly frown at the untimely disturbance. Marie returned his sour look with one of her own, and he quickly bent back to his work with a studied show of indifference.
*What an ass---and I don‘t mean the sexy kind. Jerk!*
Marie sighed, looking at the pile of paperwork that still awaited her perusal. Most of her irritation was actually springing from the fact that she just didn’t understand half of what she needed to. Her assignment was to find errors between particular DNA sequences, and point out the broken links between certain strain compositions, but science---let alone genetics---had never been her strong suit. Her degree was for diagnostic computation and mathematics, not exploratory science and research. She kept getting the feeling that she was missing something vital, and she wasn’t getting any answers from the scanty background information provided with the thousand and one streams of hard data she still had to plow through, sequence by boring sequence.
No wonder she was developing a headache.
If she could just understand what all this crap was for, then maybe she wouldn’t feel as if she was floundering for no real reason. She might even be able to come up with an easier solution in finding the data that the client desired. That was her particular talent, drawing together inconsequential bits of spurious nonsense that others ignored to come up with surprising conclusions that were often better than what those others could conjure up.
*Seeing the trees for the forest, that’s me.* She grinned tiredly at her twisting of an old saying. Picking up her glasses again with a grimace, she bent back over her computer. This time, she ignored the overwhelming screens of consecutive DNA strains she should be working on to go and click open the scanty background link provided with the task. Plowing through sequences, as Don was doggedly doing next to her, had gotten her nowhere. Maybe she could save herself some time if she re-examined what the client was hoping to gain from their work, and thus develop a program that would take all the long man-hours of constant scanning right out of the whole stupid project…
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No matter which way she turned, she ran into the same blank wall. It was frustrating, damn frustrating. Marie tried to keep her snarls to herself as her computer blipped at her once again, a warning flashing across the screen that she didn’t even bother to read, she had already seen it so many stinking times. It was a simple device, the crossed arms of Noble Lord Okum, and a burp about how common access was denied, the site was restricted for security reasons, sensitive information enclosed, blah, blah, blah.
It was just so fucking annoying! How could she get anywhere on this stupid project if she didn’t understand it?
It was a losing argument with herself that she would never win. Marie flicked off her screen with a sigh of exasperation. It had been a long day, and right now all she wanted to do was go home and bury her irritation away in Tsume’s distracting arms. Her expression softened as she thought of her handsome Wolf. By the Fates, it felt good to have somebody just to think about, someone so damn hot it made her nerves tingle in anticipation just to think of him…
And thinking of him, she’d better get a move on or he might just be ready to break down the door to the lab. He hadn’t been that happy this morning, when dropping her off. He had growled at her to keep her ass right there, and only there, and he would be by at six to walk her home. He was such an arrogant tyrant, the ass, and normally such high-handed orders would have pissed her off right good, but Marie found his possessive air delightfully adorable. It felt nice to have someone worrying so much about her.
Flipping papers into a folder to take home with her, Marie waved to Dr. Davigny, who only ignored her. Like Don, he was bent like a crab over his computer terminal, his short, gnarled fingers flicking delicately over the keys so quickly that the images on his screen blurred one into another. The old professor must be working on something big if he were obsessing so much about it. It was only with the truly technical projects that the grumpy old man would ignore his student-technicians, his schedule---and everything else, for that matter---to concentrate on the tangled problem before him.
Glancing out of the corner of her eye, Marie noted with amusement that the professor had already absent-mindedly pulled off his lab-coat to let it dangle by one sleeve off the back of his chair. He had even managed to mash a spent cigarette into the half-eaten donut beside him, rather than the over-flowing ashtray alongside it. Knowing him, he’d probably be here all night…
Thank the Fates she, at least, had the sense to know when she was done. Unlike Don, who was obsessed with proving how good he was, she wouldn’t be working through the night until her eyes crossed and she all but fell off of her stool with exhaustion. If Don wanted to prove he could outlast old Davigny, than let him. She, for one, was looking forward to a little time with her Wolf…
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The security technician frowned, and waved the guard-captain on duty over for a second opinion. “Sir, there seems to be a lot of interest in the Lunar Project from this particular computer-link. The user tried to access restricted information multiple times this afternoon.”
The guard-captain frowned as he bent over the sec-tech’s terminal.
“Might be simple curiosity, sir,” the lieutenant supplied helpfully, suddenly uneasy with the guard-captain’s fierce scowl.
Pulling the keyboard to him, the guard-caption ignored his subordinate to tap out a few commands. “Maybe it is, Lieutenant, and maybe it isn’t. Such interest should still be investigated, you never know when it might be something more than ‘simple curiosity’…”
“Yes, sir.” The lieutenant dutifully replied, but he didn’t like how intently his officer was now studying the screen, and the information he had drawn up.
“Degre…” The guard-captain muttered under his breath, his expression unreadable. Too unreadable---it made the lieutenant shiver, and wonder uneasily if he shouldn’t have drawn his superior’s attention to the woman’s particular interest in the Lord Okum’s special project…
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“What is all this?” He asked her, nibbling on her bare shoulder, interest alight in his yellow eyes.
Marie sighed, relaxing back against him and his solid strength. He was always warm, even naked, as he was now. They had made passionate love as soon as they had stumbled through the door, abandoning dinner in favor of satisfying hunger of another kind. Fierce love and been followed by slow love, and then a languorous dinner as she had tried to entice him into eating something other than raw steak. He had tried her microwaved lasagna with disdain, pronouncing it wasn’t fit for wolf or man. Marie had laughed, and abandoned it to attack him once again with something better fitted for wolf and man---or woman, rather.
She had drawn away from him and his too-easy distraction with quite a bit of reluctance, but the questions she had struggled with at work today refused to let her go. Pulling her files to her, she had decided to shuffle through the paperwork she had printed out, hoping to find something that would make sense amidst the vague confusion. Tsume had been content to watch her, his strong hands lightly kneading her shoulders as she relaxed against him.
“Frustrating, that’s what it is.” She replied with a dark scowl at the ambiguous references hidden within the innocently printed papers.
“I have seen this before.” He tapped the small device of the header with casual interest.
“That’s Lord Okum’s personal arms.” Marie glanced at it, uninterested. She had already ferreted out the fact that the Noble himself was funding the Lunar Project. A bit surprising, really. The Nobles, or Lord Okum, specifically, had never shown an overwhelming interest in genetic research before. True, it was his money that allowed the university to function at all, but that was a duty taken for granted by the people of Freeze City, that their Lord would always allocate certain taxes and private funding for educational purposes.
There had been a few muttered protests lately that the Lord was taking more and more money and spending it on expensive toys for the War Department, rather than putting it to a better use. But Lord Okum’s word was law in Freeze City, and the protests were few. For the main part, the citizens were quite content with their Lord and their lives as was.
“I just can’t seem to find the connection,” Marie murmured in disgust as she threw the papers down on the worn coffee table and turned in her lover’s arms to lay her forehead tiredly against his broad chest. Wrapping her arms around his waist, she sighed. “It’s just so frustrating!”
His hand smoothed the buttery curls from off her forehead. “Why do you worry about it, woman?”
She looked up at him, and bit her lip. “I don‘t know,” she said, honestly. “It just…I don’t know. It’s strange. Why is he so interested in genetics all of a sudden? What is so important with this particular research that they had to call in outside help---Dr. Davigny and the lab---to ferret out the inconsistencies of those DNA strains? Normally, all of it would be handled by the scientists working directly with the project, not by university techs! It’s like they are working blind, as if they were trying to construct something from nothing---like they’re trying to put a broken vase back together piece by piece, without even knowing what it truly is…”
She froze, her wide eyes going indigo as something occurred to her. Amused by the abrupt change in her mood, Tsume allowed her to sit back on her bent knees, her hands spread on the defined muscles of his wide chest for balance.
“I think that’s exactly what they are trying to do,” she said slowly, wonderingly. “They are trying to make something, create something, and I don’t think they really know what it is. I know it has something to do with some type of flora---some kind of plant. A new kind of indestructible food-crop, maybe? There’s been some terrible droughts lately…”
She bit her lip, a hand coming up to idly brush the dangling curl out of her eyes. She slipped off the couch with little awareness, her mind caught up in the disturbing ideas that were now circling through her thoughts. Skirting the coffee table, she started to pace the small area between kitchen and living room, up and back, up and back, as if it would help her to sort out her wayward thoughts and come to some kind of realization. Tsume watched her with an enigmaticly golden stare.
“It could be a food-crop. It would sure help the farmers out to have some kind of crop that wouldn’t dry up in the fields even as they planted it. The killer droughts of the past few years have made dust bowls out of huge swaths of cultivated land. There are a lot of people going hungry right now because of it. But I just can’t see Lord Okum---or any Noble for that matter---showing any particular concern about it. They’re too busy snarling at each other, and playing toy soldier. Ever since Lord Darcia took Harmona as his wife---instead of the Lady Jagura, who was older and should have been the one he married---they’ve been at each other’s throats. Dr. Creighton in my political science course last spring said that there would be repercussions from that marriage, though none of us really believed him at the time…”
She paused, a finger tapping idly on her pursed lips. “But none of that is getting me anywhere. I don’t think that Lord Darcia’s marriage has anything to do with Lord Okum’s sudden interest in genetic sequencing. I wonder, though, if Lord Okum isn’t trying to create something that he could use militarily. That would make more sense. He is always trying to build better weapons of mass destruction---for defense, he always says, yeah right!---but what the hell does any of that have to do with the moon?”
A muscle in the hard line of Tsume’s jaw twitched. He abruptly sat up from his indolent lounging across the couch’s cushions. His eyes were intent. “What do you mean, the moon?”
She blinked, as if suddenly realizing he was still there. Waving a hand at the pile of papers covering the coffee table, she said, “All that stuff is related to something called the ‘Lunar Project.’ Dr. Davigny, my boss, was asked to look over some research on DNA strains with the goal to finding inconsistent patterns of sequential links that the scientists themselves did not have the time to spare for. I don’t know what the hell it’s all supposed to be about, and that is what was frustrating me. Dr. Davigny always told me I was too curious for my own good. Runs in the family, I guess, because Cher is even more inquisitive than me. She always wants to know not only what, but why, and how, and everything else she can get her little fingers digging in.”
“Cher?” He asked with a frown.
“My sister. She’s only twelve, but she’s already top of her class in primary, and she’s won the Scientific Achievement Award three years running with her homemade experiments, though the damn things drive my mother crazy. Mom has always been so…” Marie made a helpless gesture with her hands, unable to convey her mother’s complicated relationship with both her daughters. She was a good, hard-working woman, but an unimaginative and practical one---which could often drive Marie completely nuts. Her mother could never have accepted something like Tsume with anything but disbelief, and maybe that was what was really bothering her right now…
Marie sat down on the couch beside her Wolf with a thump. “Ah, well, none of that really matters either. I just hope that none of this---” she waved at the papers on the table, “---proves too dangerous for my meddling.”
“What do you mean?” Tsume growled, not liking anything that he could not protect her from.
Marie looked at him, soberly for once. “It was curiosity that killed the cat, you know.”