by Lauren Esker
"Ah, you do care."
"I care about having an extra set of hands to help around the campsite, rather than having our hunter get himself killed by going out before he's ready."
"Like you were about to do?" she couldn't resist pointing out.
"I can fly."
"Mm-hmm." She manipulated his arm, checking range of motion. "I can't believe how fast this is healing."
"My people heal quickly."
"So do Tamir's, apparently. Right now I feel like humans are the only people in the galaxy who have to crawl through our healing process one painful step at a time."
"Tamir is human," Lyr said.
Meri snuck a peek at him to see if he was joking. He seemed serious. "Tamir's from Earth? Lyr, I don't know how unfamiliar you are with humans, but I've never seen one that looked like that."
"I didn't say he was from Earth, I said he was human. His people were originally taken from Earth by highly advanced aliens, a very long time ago, and made to look the way they do now."
Meri plunked down on the blanket beside him, staring at him. "You're kidding."
"Not about this. Out in the wider galaxy, Earth is known as Birthworld. Your planet was lost for a very long time and only recently rediscovered. It's why you were abducted for the black-market trafficking trade, because your people's DNA is incredibly valuable on the galactic market as a source of mutation-free genetic material. I was part of a Galatean garrison trying to enforce a blockade on the planet to keep raiders out." He turned to look at her with a faint smile. "This is all coming as news to you, isn't it?"
"Yes," she said. "Yes, it is." She shook herself. "You know what, I really want to hear about this, but maybe not right now. I feel like we shouldn't waste all this lovely, lovely alone time talking about pirates and Galateans and Tamir when, for a change, he's not even around."
"Mmm." It was an agreeing sound; she could tell through the link, especially when he leaned in to open his mouth over hers. "Perhaps," he murmured against her lips, "you could teach me more about kissing."
***
Afterwards, they lay tangled together in the blankets, loose-limbed and relaxed. Lyr's healing injury hadn't interfered with his ability to please her; now, through the link, he could feel her happiness and contentment as she lay pooled against him in a happy puddle. Her fingers brushed through his hair and along the side of his neck.
"You don't have any body hair," she murmured. "Just your head hair and eyebrows. It's so interesting."
"Your people aren't that hairy. It's not such a huge difference." He found her light body hair delightful. It was soft to touch. He liked it.
"You haven't seen some of our men. They're almost as hairy as Tamir. Well, okay, maybe not quite that hairy. They don't have pelts."
The mention of Tamir reminded Lyr that he wasn't back yet. Cautious, questing, Lyr reached out with his mind, as tentative as a blindfolded man feeling his way along a ledge. The abundance of life outside the ship roared like a waterfall in his senses, but it was easier when he was using a familiar mind as an anchor. He used to reach out for Tamir's mind all the time, and he still knew the feel of it, like a bright beacon guiding him in. Tamir was not far off, and still tiger-shaped as far as Lyr could tell. Touching Tamir's mind, as always, was like sinking his hands into warm fur, with hints of woodsmoke and echoes of the adrenaline-laced thrill of the chase.
He wasn't expecting to be discovered, but he was out of practice and didn't jerk away soon enough. *Well, hello there!* came Tamir's response, surprise and pleasure flickering around the words. *I thought you weren't doing this anymore.*
*Don't get used to it,* Lyr grumbled at him.
*She's a good influence on you.*
*Shut up.*
Wordless, teasing amusement came to him, with undertones of affection. He pulled away reluctantly, like trailing his fingers through someone's hand when neither person wanted to let go. It was good not to be alone in his own head anymore.
Meanwhile, Meri's wandering fingers had found their way to the sensitive skin at the base of his horns. When she rubbed at the ridge of skin where horn met flesh, Lyr's whole body quivered, his extended senses snapping back into his skin with a sudden jolt of pleasure.
Meri pulled her hand back quickly. "Sorry! Is it tender?"
"No, don't stop. Yes, it is, but ..." Lyr touched her wrist and guided her hand back. "... not the way you mean. I was just startled, that's all."
"Well, in that case ..." She went back to idly rubbing around the base of his horns. Lyr curled into her, contentment flowing through the link.
"It's so quiet here," she murmured, her voice a breath against his neck. "I used to go camping, but it was never like this. I never camped far enough from the highway not to be able to hear cars and other campers."
It didn't seem quiet to him. To his sharp senses, physical and telepathic, the world was so full of life that it seemed to vibrate. But compared to a city or a starship, he could see what she meant. It was certainly lacking in the kinds of noises that people made.
"I mean, eventually I'm going to want, like ... showers," she went on. "And Starbucks. And I can't say I wouldn't mind not having to look both ways for killer dinosaurs before leaving the house. But I do kinda like this place."
"I find it pleasant as well."
"Mmm." She nuzzled against his neck and kissed him, languid and slow.
His chest felt warm and full, not hollow and empty. He just wanted to lie here, holding Meri, kissing her occasionally—never wanting to let go.
He had to, eventually; his injured shoulder was starting to cramp up. And he was hungry again. He got up and got another ration pack. Meri shook her head when he offered her one.
"So you said earlier you can't get me pregnant." She was sitting with her arms slung loosely over her knees, a gorgeous study in light and shadow. "What about STDs?"
"STDs?" he asked, genuinely confused.
"You know ... diseases that I might catch from you, when we have sex."
"No, our species are too different. Germs that affect humans don't affect me, and vice versa. As for pregnancy, I'm quite sure we aren't cross-fertile." He sat down beside her and she leaned against him, warm and soft. "It is a well-established scientific fact about our two species. We reproduce quite differently."
"How differently?"
"You give birth to live young. We do not. We aren't mammals."
Meri looked up at him with a skeptical frown, as if she suspected him of having her on. "What are you, then?"
"We reproduce only in our dragon shape; we are not fertile at all in the bipedal form. It might be possible for the two of us to have a child in a test tube, if you wanted to, but not to produce an egg as my people do."
"Wait, what. You ... hatch out of eggs?"
"And I'm glad of it," he said, amused. "I've seen how the human peoples of the galaxy reproduce. Your women must carry babies in their own bodies until you are enormous and uncomfortable. Then your baby is born more helpless than the newest hatchling. We have nurseries, warm and quiet, with soft lighting and soft music. Eggs are carefully tended and parents come to check on them and talk to them until they hatch. It's believed that the young can hear their parents' voices in the shell ..."
His voice drifted off, and instead of trying to tell her, he opened his mind to her and showed her the nursery caves, all graceful curving lines and hollows in the rock filled with opalescent colors, each hollow lit by its own gentle glow with the egg backlit against it. The attendants wore soft, flowing robes. Nothing was harsh or loud. There were no sharp corners. Everything was soft, gentle, beautiful. Music hummed through the corridors, piling echoes on echoes until the entire world sang with it.
"What's that sound?" Meri asked quietly, squeezing his hand.
"It is the music of the nursery. The attendants sing for the children. Music fills our lives, from the earliest days in the shell."
Parents coming to visit their unborn children walked softly and
spoke in quiet voices. They led their young children by the hand, bringing them to meet their new baby brothers and sisters. It was through the eyes of such a child that Lyr shared the nursery with Meri, because that was how he had seen it, when his parents had taken him to meet ...
"You have a sister?" Meri's voice was startled and soft.
He hadn't thought about her in years, had tried desperately not to. Now it felt strange to say her name, hearing the soft liquid sounds spoken aloud for the first time in decades. "Cerivel."
Memories drifted into their connection at her name. He remembered touching her egg, feeling how warm the pearly shell felt beneath his fingers. Baby dragons were in their dragon forms in their egg, so all each baby needed was the warmth and light of its hollow to grow and grow. When Cerivel crawled from the egg as an awkward baby hatchling, tottering along on her little legs with her wings wet and crumpled on her back, she had toddled to him first.
"Where is she now?"
"I don't know." He'd last seen her when they were both teenagers, Lyr just on the cusp of young adulthood, Cerivel still all awkward elbows and gawky knees, her mane short and bristling in a low-on-top, high-in-back cut that was popular with adolescents their age.
He showed Meri how Cerivel had learned to shift, ending up in all kinds of goofy-looking halfway steps between a plump-bodied dragon hatchling and an equally plump-bodied little girl with tiny nubs of horns on her forehead.
"She'll be grown now," he said softly, wonderingly. "She might be visiting the caves herself now to sing lullabies to her own children."
"Tamir told me that you—"
She broke off quickly, but she didn't have the control to hide a swirl of thoughts. You're a hostage. You can't go home again. Your people wouldn't take you back. Sorrysorrysorry—
He wasn't able to hide the pain that stabbed through him, and he felt her flinch, both mentally and physically.
"I'm sorry," he said, at the same time she said, "I'm sorry," and then she gave a small laugh and Lyr even managed to smile. He turned to wrap her in his arms and ran his hand down her bare back.
"I should have told you."
"We shouldn't have been talking about you behind your back."
"I don't blame you for being curious." He didn't even feel angry at Tamir for telling her. It was odd ... all that anger he'd been carrying around with him wasn't gone, exactly, but it was no longer simmering just under the surface, making him lash out at everyone. Instead it had faded and mellowed, like a healing bruise. "I suppose it's easier if you already know."
"I can't believe they would blame you for trying to escape from the people who made a hostage out of you."
"It was my duty to my people."
"What about your duty to yourself?"
"That doesn't matter."
"Doesn't it?" Her voice was so quiet he heard the words as much through the link as through his ears. "You know ... I told myself for years that I didn't deserve to be happy now that Aaron was gone. As if I could honor his memory by making myself miserable for the rest of my life. But I was wrong, Lyr. I do deserve to be happy. And so do you."
Guilt twisted inside him and he turned his face away.
He couldn't see her, but he felt her move against him, slip an arm around him. "Lyr, what's wrong?"
"What's wrong," he said harshly, "is that I'm the last person to deserve joy, or peace, or forgiveness. Every faith that has ever been placed in me, I've broken; every person I've meant to protect, I've failed."
"I know that's not true," she murmured, running her hand down his arm. "You protected me. You saved Tamir."
"I failed my siblings," he gritted out. "Every last one of them."
"What happened?" she asked gently.
"They died." He took a breath. "No ... that's too gentle a word for what happened. They were killed."
He didn't mean to let the memory slip through, but it did.
The chaos of battle between the stars. The swift darting battlepods of the Galatean advance guard, the dark knifelike Kk'rek ships, the glittering arc of interstellar dust against the distant pinpoint of the sun in the system they were defending.
He had often fought in these battles as a dragon, his collar reconfigured each time to allow him to shift unimpeded. For the first time Meri was able to see, through his mind, how his people were meant to be. He couldn't reach his full size in a planet's atmosphere, with the atmospheric pressure itself interfering with his ability to shift to his fully mature shape. In space he was huge, his bronze wings spreading wide against the stars, his spikes and blades glistening.
He had worn two plasma cannons, one under each wing, and a high-powered shield that glittered down the length of his body, giving him a greenish sheen in the starlight. He was more maneuverable than any ship, all but unbeatable close up. He let the shield drop so he could use his claws to rip the enemy's small fighters open, exposing their pilots to space; he twisted and darted around their comparatively sluggish ships, firing ship-slaying plasma bursts from his cannons.
His mere presence was a major part of his effectiveness in battle. Dragons were rarely seen outside the Well of Stars, but tales were told of them throughout the galaxy, blown up in the telling until dragons became fearsome monsters the size of interstellar cruisers, taking on whole fleets singlehandedly. He couldn't do that, of course, but merely having a lone dragon wreaking havoc among their fighters was enough to damage the enemy's morale.
All the while, he had divided his attention to help his sept-siblings—lending them support, alerting them to incoming fighters they might have missed. He connected the entire sept into a whole that was greater than the sum of its parts, a network of eyes and ears and weapons.
But they had died. One by one, they'd died. Until it was only Lyr and Rook and Rei, and then that battle happened, a little more than half a standard year ago.
He still remembered with stark clarity the sudden winking out of Rook and Rei's minds, the slip of the last two tethers that held him to the family he'd gained and then lost.
"Oh, Lyr," Meri whispered.
"There weren't even bodies," he murmured. In the depths of space, there wasn't much left of a battlepod after the enemy's cannons hit it.
He became dimly aware that he'd partially extended his spines, and pulled them back in with a force of will. But he was rigid and trembling in Meri's arms.
And now he couldn't stop thinking of Rook and Rei's last moments. That instant when he'd felt Rook's mental presence leap in surprise and then wink out. And then Rei flickering off their mental network moments later, leaving him alone, alone ...
He had tried to die, then. Dragons could flame but a few times in their life; each time they tried it, they burned up part of their life force, shortening their lifespan and risking self-immolation. The rumors about dragons being able to take out whole fleets were wrong, but a dragon's white-hot plasma flame could actually take out a cruiser-sized ship, or a significant portion of a smaller fleet. He'd tried to do that, and he still remembered the searing pain of the flame burning him up from within—
—only to wake days later in the medbay, covered in the sticky net of a life-support web, with an exhausted-looking, grief-worn Tamir looking down at him, and nothing but cold darkness in the corner of his mind where his sept used to be.
From that day forward, he had done nothing but hope for his own death.
And now ...
... now, he felt the grief and guilt pressing down on him, but it was different, somehow. When Rei and Rook had died, he hadn't been able to see beyond the instant of their deaths. There was no future for him without them.
But now ... now, he could see an "after." He could see a future for him without Rook and Rei and the others, a future with Meri.
He could see that future and it terrified him. He didn't deserve it. If he stayed here, frozen in this moment of grief, of guilt, of loss ...
"It wasn't your fault." Meri's voice came to him, murmuring into his ear, while her mind p
ut out a steady flow of warmth and love and calm ... and her own guilt and grief, as well. "It's not your fault, any more than Aaron's death was mine. We can't live in the moment of their deaths forever. They wouldn't want us to."
She was right, and yet, he found himself wanting to stay there, because it hurt, it hurt, but at least he wouldn't have to acknowledge that he—
—that he had a future.
That he deserved a future.
In her arms, he trembled in the grip of a grief so vast it had no name, a grief he had not allowed himself to feel until now.
Meri's grief blended with his, and he felt her tears wet his neck. And he realized slowly that not all the grief he felt was for himself; in fact, not even the largest part of it. He felt for her, and in that realization he began to see his own despair cast in a larger context. He was not the only person who had ever lost someone; he was not the only one who'd ever felt that emptiness or that lack of future.
He hurt for Meri as much as he hurt for himself.
There was a selfishness to grief, he thought. An understandable selfishness, the mind's instinctive urge to protect itself. But a selfishness still. It made a person turn away from the world, turn inward, wall themselves off from all that was good and kind and worth living for.
Meri was right. Rei and Rook and the others would never have wanted this for him.
He couldn't save them, any of them. But there was one last person he could save: himself.
He could do it for them. And for Meri. And maybe, someday ... for himself.
***
All Meri could do was hold him, cradling him against her.
And she cried: she cried for Aaron and for herself, she cried for the children they never got to have, and she cried, too, for this family of Lyr's that she never got to meet, and for Lyr himself, who had deserved so, so much more from life than he'd gotten.
She wept herself to weary stillness, and after that, they just held each other and rocked slowly together. When she looked up at last, opening wet-lashed eyes, she saw Lyr looking down at her with eyes that reflected her emotions like damp silver mirrors.
