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Save Point: Her Old Photographs

When it turns out that Cleo has inadvertantly rescued some of her old photos with everything else in the worn waterproof canvas military backpack that was her go-bag in event of emergency, she makes the mistake of showing them above her hands and there is an immediate demand amongst everyone to take a look.

They're physical pictures, not some some sort of stored media, genuine glossy finish on heavy paper, which is how they were able to be overlooked all this time, slenderly-packed into an inner side pocket of the bag. It seems these ones were special, not to be risked on unhardened devices, but suitable to be taken into combat zones where they might survive pulse surges and other soft electronic countermeasures. Cleo's music player is itself a hardened device, suitable to receive or playback communiques or anything else that might be stored on it, but its stringency of design fails to support a display screen, in favor of solar power, significantly reduced size and a seamless external finish with rounded corners and ruggedized ridged edges. Dropped into a muddy pond, it will continue working for years in a way that something more advanced simply wouldn't.

Eventually, after much pressuring, Cleo agrees that she will show the photos, with the provisio that she can hold some back if she wants to and doesn't have to explain anything she damn well doesn't want to. This seems fair, so everyone bunches up around the fire to see.

~*~

One of the first photos shows Cleo when she was a teenager, with much less pointy ears, smaller but still appealing tits, and a rebellious range of body piercings including a half-ring ending in a cone through the centre of her delicate nose, a conical stud through the middle of her lower lip, and a spiked leather collar. It's all surprisingly tasteful for a statement against authority, like she didn't want to get kicked out of something for going too far. Her hair is still black in picture, so it must have been before she base-wrote the colors.

She's wearing a sort of skimpy bikini top and the plungingly low midriff of a tiny skirt is barely visible at the lower edge of the picture. One hand is reaching to the camera as though to grab it from the photographer or push it away, and the movement combined with the foreshortening makes her gloved hand look unusually large compared to the rest of her.

"He took a photo while I was getting changed after cheerleading," Cleo explains. "That's why I still have the gloves and the skirt, but no top on yet. I'd just put the collar back on to go out shopping with my friends. See that headband thingy just under my fringe? I was embarassed because my muzzle was growing longer and I thought it made my forehead look kind of big, so I made that and matched the colors to my hair and the uniform. Which promptly started a sort of fad and then all the other girls had to have one too. So I gave up wearing it and then I was ahead of the trend yet again. Damn, I was stupid as a kid - and I was a bit of a bitch too."

"I think you look beautiful. Your boy-toy had good taste and was quite the camera-man."

"There's a reason I kept it. I'm all youthful exuberance there. Fast-forward just a little bit and the ears perked up arrogantly and the boobs came on in all full-grown and suddenly I was just a little bit too much woman for everyone without the experience to handle it. But that was back when it was still all good times."

"Next!" demands Sethkill happily.

~*~

She skips several photos when they come up, and shuffles them swiftly back to the bottom of the pack. The brief impression he gets of them is tawny fur color, low light, a sort of casual amateur intimacy as she explores and is explored by someone else, also female, also significantly modified, with lunar-white fur and black-ridged horns. Maybe her masturbation tools, for hot nights in far-away places when there's no-one about to scratch that determined itch. None of them are really surprised and so no comment is made. "I might tell you about this later, if I feel like it," is her only concession.

~*~

Thrill Seekers and Hell Raisers, is what it says on the next image, with the group number for her ADF Special Forces group. He tilts it to see a still young-looking, but visibly older, Cleo with her arms around two friends, making some sort of hilariously indecent hand gesture. Odds are one of them is the friend Mitzi she always talks about, but of whom he's never actually seem a picture. They're in an unidentifiable desert somewhere, all armed with truly huge rifles that load through the shoulder-brace way at the back but still extend up to their waists when planted muzzle first in the dirt as an arm-rest. Someone has added 'Sword Bitches Forever!' to the official logo, trailing across the vacant sky in the empty upper corner.

"Those are some ferocious-looking guns," Terrowne comments. "They must have had one hell of a long barrel on them, for something with a caliber like that."

"They wanted to up the firepower for those of us who had non-standard augmentations, but the guns started to get way too long and the accuracy was rubbish. So they moved the loader into the shoulder brace and incorporated a built-in anti-recoil mechanism that was partially powered by each shot. That way the barrel went the entire length of the gun and you could still get a decent aim. It worked okay if you sort of trailed the shots a bit."

All of them are in low-cut singlet tops marked with the ADF logo and light military pants covered with the pixellated dazzle of digital camouflage. They look happy. He guesses it was probably after some sort of training exercise that didn't require full armour, just basic ammunition belts to carry their supplies while shooting at things out in the middle of nowhere. "Better times, huh?"

"Yeah, better times," agrees Cleo, without a hint of a joke. Her cynicism about the military only set in after Mitzi got eaten in friendly territory and they wrote it off like it was nothing. Here, her best friend is still alive and lives on in memory.

~*~

From more recent times, there's a copy of the photo spread that appeared in a magazine and was censored slightly as an enormous liquor advertisement down the side of an entire waterfront skyscraper, Cleo leaning back on rumpled sheets in a feline curve, about to chug down something pricey direct from the opened bottle.

"My high-water mark," Cleo declares proudly. "It was just pure coincidence that that there was an open bottle on the bedstand when they came in to take the pictures. I played with all sorts of stuff for them, everything that was lying around handy, but damn that one came out good. They didn't even have to ask permission, the company that made it paid them for promoting the product. For a couple of months I was legitimately famous."

~*~

More tricky to place is a picture that shows her, all muscular and mostly naked, climbing up out of murky blue water with ripples that scatters the reflection of whatever's in the background. For some reason she has on the shoulder-plates from a suit of motorbike armour, but apart from a sort of thin-strappy underjacket thing ending in buckles, which seems to be designed to hold all the pieces in place yet is wide open at the front around her tits, she doesn't having anything else on. She's making an expression of feigned mock-horror at the camera and she's holding her arms wide above the water like wings. Her nipples are stiff and the deepening water just barely covers the pinkness at her crotch.

"Do you have any photos where you aren't half-naked?" teases Mariel.

"In case anyone is wondering, this was on a very cold morning just after dawn, when one of my buddies managed to drunkenly drive his jump bike off an old and mostly abandoned wharf. I had also had a few, as indeed had everyone else. At which point someone remembered that I had once been on the swim team, so they demanded that I be the one to go in and get it. I kind of wanted to not freeze, but I also didn't want to get dragged under, and I had some sort of vague drunken idea that I might need the shoulder-pads to push against the bike from underneath and lever it up and out from under the water. Which is why I got most of my gear off and waded in."

"Damn, that must have been cold."

"There is nothing quite so sobering as submerging your crotch in iced water under the cold light of day. Which accounts for my startled expression in this picture. Like a bunch of slightly drunk guys weren't going to take as many pictures as they could of a hot lioness girl dunking her pussy. They sent me a copy of this one later on because it was the best, but they got me from about ten different angles. I was almost a meme on social media."

"Did you ever get the bike back out? Lifting something that heavy single-handed seems a bit of a stretch, even for you."

"No. He'd gotten way out from the dock, I have no idea how. It was getting deep out there and the tide was going out, even with the coastal barrier wall slowing things down. It was pulling the bike slowly out with it. I managed to recover a few things from the saddlebags, but that was about it. We went for a pancake breakfast right after everyone had used the excuse of rubbing me down to warm me up. I was so freaking cold I didn't even argue with them, I just let them do it. Never have I enjoyed hot pancakes so much in all my life."

"What, not even the ones we made that time?"

"No."

~*~

There are lots of other photos of course, it's a set that she's added to and subtracted from over time and has had reprinted once or twice, but those are the ones he remembers. They seem to say something about her as a person, although he can't say quite what, only that it's there.

"You have good photos," Terrwone tells her, and gives her a light kiss on the side of the muzzle, as a little reward for sharing despite herself. "You can tell me about the rest some other time."

She nuzzles up against his shoulder and leans up against him, but is very careful to recover all the photos, stacking them together tidily like she was dealing a card game. "I've memorized what they all look like, of course," she explains, "but it's not like I can reproduce them again if they should get damaged. And then how could I show them to you, or to anyone else? I want to show them all to you, just maybe not right now."

He completely understands, so he relinquishes the last one outstanding, Cleo as hot teenage cat with dark hair. It's a sight he is grateful to have seen. "You looked good with dark hair."

"I didn't like it."

"You still looked good."

She doesn't say anything in reply, just huddles closer and enjoys the casual fire-warmth of his company, still thinking of her memories.