A Prince's Duty

by Lily Anton

  The refined Thranidite and the THRANO cores that each individual ship contained, had been the primary reason for her team even coming to Viconis. The element was rare, and thus made it a key selling or trading good.

  The doorway of this particular ship in front of her was wide open… its airlock missing entirely.

  She wasn't sure that she wanted to see what was inhabiting it, not without the safety of her fellow squad members as backup.

  The Nagarren, who had been leading her with a firm grip around her arm, finally let go, sitting down next to her with an audible huff, looking up at her almost…expectantly.

  Slowly, with a muffled groan, she sat down, apparently taking too long as the alien beside her growled in mild annoyance.

  "Okay, Okay," she grumbled, unsteadily sitting down, eyes narrowing when the Nagarren raised an eyebrow.

  The fucker looked like he was amused by her struggles to sit down.

  They sat side by side for some time, Satina unsure of exactly what she was supposed to do, and didn’t dare risk making any movement that would indicate that she would leave.

  Quick glances to her side revealed the man in a shredded uniform, the upper half of it slashed through in several places. His face appeared unmarred, and she wasn’t surprised considering what she knew about their health regeneration.

  “Are we just going to sit here forever or…” she grumbled under her breath, her patience wearing thin despite the fact that she could be killed at any moment.

  “Considering I saved your life, you’ll give me a moment to recover.”

  Satina jerked in surprise, the Nagarren’s speech perfectly smooth and without difficulty.

  Only those that were in the upper echelons of Nagarren society or those that held diplomatic positions took the time to learn other languages.

  As a whole, the species was rather insular.

  So to find a bi-lingual Nagarren that was off-site with a crashed ship and no support?

  The situation was getting stranger by the second.

  “Oh” was all she could think to say, trying to quickly come to terms with the surprising turn of events. “Yes, well…thank you.”

  She heard him sigh and caught the slight shake of his head.

  “I need your help.”

  Satina’s head jerked up at that, realizing that she must have dozed off as she looked up to find the Nagarren towering over her.

  Slowly she stood, following behind him as he led her through the bowels of the ship, the lack of lighting making it rather ominous and filling her with dread.

  The ship was larger than she had expected it to be, and despite the ship being extremely worse for wear, it was rather elegantly furnished and did not have the usual aesthetic of a military or trade vessel.

  The fact that this ship had belonged to someone of high rank amongst the Nagarren was not lost on her.

  She kept the thought to herself; the entire situation was too many shades of fucked up to count and she honestly didn’t know how she was still alive.

  A fact which was only amplified when she found what she could only assume to be what the Nagarren had led her here for.

  Lying in a bed that was in one of the ship’s private chambers, was another Nagarren, this one with gray scales covering its torso and arms, the size of them tapering off around the nape of his neck.

  She watched the rise and fall of his expansive chest, noting the slight struggle to breathe.

  If this Nagarren had not been able to heal himself, then he was definitely in bad shape.

  His pants bore a familiar symbol which Satina couldn’t place in that moment, but she filed it away for later, moving to approach the bed.

  She knew she ran the risk of getting her face torn off by the conscious Nagarren who was watching her closely.

  The sooner she got it over with, the better.

  Satina cleared her throat, taking slow, cautious steps towards the unmoving form and bending over his unconscious figure.

  She swallowed, ignoring how appealing the alien looked even as he was obviously in critical condition.

  Now was definitely not the time to be thinking about a dangerous alien’s level of attractiveness.

  She didn’t have a full medi-kit with her, but the little she did have she tried to use.

  In the dimmed lighting of the ship's dead interior, its full features were hard to make out, prompting her to hesitantly reach out to take the Nagarren’s chin between her thumb and forefinger to tilt its face towards her.

  She squinted, her head cocking to one side.

  "Soft," she muttered almost subconsciously.

  Taking him by his shoulders, she jostled him gently, his head lolling lifelessly to one side, and Satina may or may not have felt her heart sink.

  The Nagarren was frustratingly good-looking, taking into account that Satina may or may not have had a strange fascination with all things extraterrestrial, and a preference for species of nonhuman descent.

  But a dead, good-looking Nagarren, was still a dead Nagarren.

  A frown marred her face as she drew her eyebrows together; she could practically hear the little voice in the back of her mind warning her against developing any sort of attachment, telling her that she was insane for looking at it with anything beyond a cool, clinical interest.

  A high frequency screech coming from the speaker of her comms unit shook her from her reverie and had her blinking rapidly to clear her thoughts.

  "S----tina!" the device stuttered before being overridden by sharp static.

  Satina frowned, backing up again to sit on her haunches as she grabbed the device and listened carefully. A hard smack to the side of it proved to be enough for Kandann's panicked voice to cut through to her again.

  "Satina! Dammit Satina, come in!"

  "Hey, Kan-“ she began, frowning when the man in question cut her off again, "Sat! Thank fuck! Are you okay? Are you injured? Where are y-"

  "Calm down, calm down," she urged with a sigh, taking a deep breath when Kandann quieted.

  "I'm fine, just relax. You're working yourself up over noth-"

  "Over nothing?!" he screeched indignantly, and Satina just narrowly fought the urge to roll her eyes. "Do you even know what the success rate is for missions carried out on Viconis? 30%, Satina. That's fuck-all. You could have fucking died!"

  Satina sighed audibly, massaging at her temples before attempting to placate him. "Okay, okay. Just breathe, Kan. I understand, alright? We can talk about it later."

  "Where are you?" she could hear the resignation and concern in his voice- and she almost felt bad. Almost.

  She pointedly decided to omit the part about her falling off of a cliff and nearly getting her head smashed in.

  "I'm in a broken down ship, I'm sending you my location now. Let me know if you see it."

  "Got it."

  "But, there’s uh… there's a little bit of a problem. I won't go into detail right now, but there may or may not be a… huge Nagarren outside, and before you freak, it might sound pretty insane, but it intentionally brought me here."

  She was met with a few extended seconds of silence.

  "For what?"

  "There's this…" Satina paused, rubbing at her temples, as she felt a headache coming on. "Look, you're gonna need to see it for yourself. We'll need more than two people over here. Is the team is okay?" she asked carefully.

  "They're fine," he answered, response clipped.

  She could hear how pissed off he was in those two words alone.

  Satina grimaced.

  "We're on our way now," came another voice. "And, Sat, get your communications unit fixed already."

  CHAPTER 2

  "Is it…Is he…dead?" she asked with a small bit of concern, chewing on her lip.

  "No," Kandann answered succinctly, from where he was inspecting the Nagarren on his examination table. "He has a heartbeat."

  They'd made port in Rivainir: a major trade hub which also happened to serve as their home aw
ay from home.

  The port was divided into several sections, with each respective section focused on a unique purpose and function.

  After docking in one of the several residential districts, they'd transported the creature Satina had happened upon, as well as the other Nagarren, who’d come along willingly and had surprisingly not tried to kill any of them on the journey.

  As a medical practitioner and practiced surgeon, Kandann owned and operated his own- albeit small- clinic, with a very short list of patients due to his erratic schedule.

  Currently, Satina's random find (just as unconscious and unmoving as he had been in the wreckage of his spaceship), was laying on the examination table.

  Prior to leaving that hot and human planet, Satina and her team (along with their Nagarren ‘friend’) had searched the ship for anything that they could possibly bring along with them that belonged to its occupants.

  They’d found several sets of clothing, devices, and what appeared to be a storage unit filled with pressurized, thermally-insulated canisters of pure liquid hydrogen.

  "Oh."

  "If you're going to just stand there, please leave," Kandann murmured, tone gentle enough that it didn’t sound as harsh as usual.

  "What am I supposed to do?"

  "Help me get him out of his suit."

  The dark material was thick and smooth, stretching easily beneath two sets of hands. It was reminiscent of an armored wetsuit in feel, but Satina had reason to doubt that it shared the same composition, and was unique in design.

  The legs, in particular, were quite odd- appearing almost seamless, but being split in six different ways, as though designed to easily come apart.

  Each seam was bound by what felt like thin lines of silicone, making it adhesive but not wet or sticky to the touch: a material that only could be bound to itself.

  The rest of the suit was composed in a similar fashion: the seams running down the middle of the front and backside easily peeling apart, dividing the article evenly into two separate halves.

  In their galactic location and line of work, Satina saw lot of interesting things…and beings.

  Some sapient, and some not, but sentient all the same.

  Still, on occasion, one came across things that they found befuddling, things they hadn't yet encountered, or didn't understand.

  "Interesting…" Kandann murmured, eyes roving over the creature's prone form.

  The creature's distinctively blue veins stood out in sharp contrast to his pale and partially scaled skin.

  Although the medic had deemed it safe for the creature to be left by itself after being transported into a cot, its body blanketed by a dense, wool-like material to help raise its disconcertingly low body temperature, Satina's wayward sense of moral obligation prevented her from leaving the room for anything longer than a quick bathroom break.

  While she could rationalize that she really held no responsibility over their unconscious guest, she couldn't help but feel like fate was what had--

  In actuality, her curiosity had gotten the better of her.

  She was intrigued, excited, and on the edge of her seat…hyper-focused on the creature she'd found just barely alive.

  She wanted to know more.

  She supposed that if she sat there long enough, she'd be there to interrogate him when he rose from the dead, despite Kandann cautioning her against being invasive and pushy towards something that she didn't understand. Insinuating something along the lines of how it wouldn't end well if or when she did.

  But Kandann had to know that Satina wasn't going to listen to him, right?

  He'd left her there by her lonesome, entrusting the Nagarren into her care, albeit barely. If he had really wanted Satina to stay away, he would have forced her to leave.

  Initially, she had intended on simply watching over him and simply waiting in complete silence, with absolute patience, even if she knew that all of those things were infeasible.

  Satina's intentions, as a rule, never tended to get her very far.

  So as the minutes and hours dragged on, it became increasingly more and more difficult for her to sit and remain still, her brain switching gears and predictably, her curiosity took the reins.

  The Nagarren laying there was irrefutably good looking.

  She tried not to let her mind wander too far as she knew she'd very easily get carried away, and that while she usually held no such reservations, even Satina could tell that now really wasn't the time.

  Regardless, she supposed there were far, far worse things that could happen than a human simply getting hot and bothered by a good-looking (yet lethal) Nagarren

  It couldn't hurt to touch.

  ‘Only for a second’, she told herself, as she reached out to gently lay a hand down on his shoulder, her eyebrows arching when the skin immediately turned an almost reddish, healthy hue beneath the heat of her palm.

  His skin was soft, and smooth…even the scaled bits, just as it had appeared to be.

  One second quickly morphed into several; curious, wandering hands stroking over the parts of his body that she could reach, fingers leaving long trails of red in their wake.

  She pushed it.

  Of course she pushed it.

  How could she not, without anyone there to monitor her or her actions? Freedom was something to take advantage of, which is why she found herself peeling back the blanket covering the creature's body, eyes roving over his form.

  Before thinking better of it, she felt her hand itch to touch the scales around his hips that barely peeked over the waistband of the medical garb Kandann had put him in.

  At least, that's what she'd intended on doing, before a hand shot up to catch her arm in a tight, bruising grasp.

  What followed thereafter happened too quickly for her tired brain to process- but from one second to the next, Satina went from being on her feet to being on the floor, back pressed against cold linoleum, with the nameless Nagarren pinning her down.

  She smacked her skull against the ground in the process, but that was the least of her concerns.

  The first thing she took note of was how his eyes were emitting a faint glow, eerily visible in the dimness of the room, and narrowed into thin slits, mouth pulled into a firm line; an expression otherwise betraying nothing.

  The second, was that in the process of being knocked clean onto her back, her legs had fallen open, allowing the alien to naturally situate himself between them; large hands effectively engulfing her wrists.

  His entire body was dangerously close to hers, and Satina could only swallow dryly and pretend that her gaze wasn't flitting downwards and that she wasn't appreciating the sight above her.

  She wasn't very convincing as a visible, faint flush rose along her cheeks and neck.

  Admittedly, Satina had a distinct lack of self-preservation instincts or sense of danger. She acted on a whim and rarely put a lot of thought into her actions.