by Renard, Loki
Tarkan
I have done what no Scythkin in a thousand years has done. I have acted against the high brood, killed members with callous brutality. I stand coated not in the blood of my blood, but in the foul juices of those who made themselves my enemies. And I am not proud, though I want to be. This triumph comes on the back of betrayal which will haunt me as long as I live. I destroyed One’s world. I did it as surely as if I pushed whatever button it was that pulled the thing apart. I didn’t just disobey Reaper, I abandoned him. I betrayed our clutch. I am no longer worthy of being his broodkin. As soon as I hand One over, I intend to sacrifice myself in some way.
One is trembling in my arms. I have to retract my serrated arm ridges so she doesn’t cut herself. She's holding on so tightly, shivering from her terribly wounded head to her freezing cold toes. They didn’t take any care at all to make sure she was at the right temperature. Humans are delicate. They knew that. They also knew that there were none left besides her. And they hurt her anyway. I wish I could kill them all over again.
She has been wounded badly and I can only attempt to cover the hole in her head as I run toward the shuttle bay where my transport is docked - the same ship that the council used to send their envoys to our shuttle and arrest Reaper and I. I cannot risk using the flash transporter with a wounded human, even though it would be faster.
I carry her into the shuttle and set the controls for our ship. We have a matter of minutes, if that, before the council are alerted and we are destroyed as thoroughly as any living creature can be. I don’t care about that. I care about the trembling girl in my arms, the one I would do anything for.
The one who isn’t mine.
I keep her in my arms as I pilot the ship, expecting at any moment to be blown from existence. There’s still the rest of the clutch on board. I didn’t kill all of them. I think I might have left two dozen or so still alive. It’s a really big brood. They’re not going to be happy when they find multiple members dismembered. They’re probably not going to appreciate my having spared them, but then again, I only spared them because I did not want to leave One in their hands for even a moment longer than I had to.
We dock with our ship without incident, and I carry One inside, the pair of us coated in the blood of our enemies.
I am ready to face Reaper, who is no doubt furious. We killed the Scythkin who tried to arrest us together, but I left before we could discuss what we were going to do to get One back. I didn’t want him to risk his life in the rescue. She only needed rescuing because of my betrayal. What I have done is the very least I could do to begin to make things right.
No doubt he will see it as yet another act of insubordination. Ever since we came to Earth, our ordinary order has been lost. I haven’t done a single thing he has told me to do, not in a single way. It’s almost as if we have broken our clutch bond entirely.
That doesn’t matter. Not compared to how much saving One matters. What I have just done has made us outlaws against the entire Scythkin empire. There is no coming back from this. I don’t care. One is the last of humanity, the most precious woman in the entire universe, and I will do anything to protect her. Anything.
I hear heavy footsteps come charging toward us, and then see the massive form of my brood commander flying at us with full fury. Reaper doesn’t know who just came on board the ship, and he’s ready to eviscerate if necessary.
The moment he sees One in my arms, he is transformed. He stops, doubles back on the direction he came at the same speed. He doesn’t need to tell me that there isn’t much time. At any moment we are going to be overrun, and then all this will be at a final end. I follow in his wake, clutching One close to my chest, her fragile form feeling weaker than ever.
Reaper hits the engine drive hard. In less than a second, we have warped a light year away, and judging by the motion of the ship, we are continuing to jump every second after that in a randomized direction for the next minute until we are so far from our original location that the only way we can be found is by pure chance.
When we are far away, if not strictly safe, he turns around. I expect him to spew his fury at me, but instead he only asks one question:
“What have they done to her?”
“They entered her brain and installed a communication node. I can’t see any other damage.”
She is sobbing and clinging to me as if her entire existence depended on it. I keep my arms wrapped around her, sharp edges carefully angled away from her tender skin. I am still so angry, I could kill another clutch before finding the depth of my rage.
Reaper’s expression is grim, but he simply nods as he turns back to the controls. For the next hours, days, weeks… for all time, we will be running from the Scythkin. They will want all of us dead and gone. Us, because we attacked them. One, because she is evidence that they destroyed Earth while it was still home to human life. We are now renegades against the Scythkin, outcast brood who owe no allegiance to the greater clutch. This is the worst possible outcome besides death, but neither Reaper or I questioned our course of action.
I don’t know what he is going to say to me next. I brace myself for the full force of his loathing.
“Good work.”
“What?”
“Good work,” he says. “You got her back. Thank you.”
He stretches his arms out for her, and without a word, I hand her over. The loss of her weight from my arms feels like something very important being ripped away from me. I take a deep breath as she curls up into Reaper’s chest, looking so content.
“I’m sorry.”
He doesn’t hear what I said. Neither does she. I can already see her hand wrapping around his bicep, taking hold of him. They belong together. They were made for each other. No matter how many times I interfere, or what I do, she belongs to him and he to her. It should be impossible. Only Scythkin born in a clutch belong to one another. But these two do.
Reaper
Tarkan and I have both committed crimes today. Crimes we will never be forgiven for. I do not need any official edict to know that we just became fugitive from the law of the Scythkin, outcasts from our own kind. From this moment forth we will be hunted as animals are, relentlessly pursued for the return of the human female.
It is all worth it to have One back with me, alive and safe, if not entirely unharmed. She is trembling in my arms, clearly terrified by her ordeal. They hurt her, and that means I failed her.
“One.” I say her name softly as I use a warm cloth to wipe away the blood which has dried on her forehead. “Can you understand me?”
She nods and sniffs. “Yes.”
The feeling which runs through me is almost impossible to describe. Joy. Relief. Pure elation. It is not the way I would have done it, but the chip implanted in her head allows me to finally communicate with the woman I have loved from the moment I first set eyes on her.
“How are you feeling?”
It’s such a banal, benign question, especially to someone who has been through everything she has, but I have to start with the simple ones. There is too much complexity going on to do anything else.
“Sore,” she says. “And scared. I want to go home.”
“You are home.”
“No. I want to go to my real home. The cave.”
I take a deep breath. This was, in many ways, so much simpler when she couldn’t talk. She was little more than a sweet, delicate creature to be looked after, protected, and taken to my bed. I could sink myself inside her and make myself feel better, but right now I don’t think copulation is the answer. Now I need to say all the things I have wanted to say, but couldn’t.
“We can’t go back to the Earth,” I tell her. “I’m sorry, but it’s gone.”
“It can’t be gone. It’s the Earth. It’s really big.”
“It’s gone, I’m sorry.”
“But it can’t be.”
I stop talking. Silence is preferable to explaining the inexplicable to this simple girl who needs
to be cleaned and then healed. That wound in her head has to be attended to. They simply banged through her skull and pushed the chip in. I don’t think they intended to keep her alive once they had the information they wanted. She wasn’t even worth it as a curiosity.
“Reaper?” She says my name softly.
“Yes.”
“I want to go home.”
She’s stuck in a loop. She wants to go home. She can’t go home. There’s no home and there may never be one again. I pull her close to me and hold her and hope that the closeness of my body gives her some comfort. I’ve waited what feels like a very long time to speak with her, but there aren’t words to make her feel better.
“They hurt me,” she whimpers.
Those three little words fill me with a protective rage which makes every part of me bristle. They hurt her. I should have hurt them. But I let Tarkan do the hurting. The only killing I did was of the two who tried to take me in, and that was of necessity.
She lets out another little whimper, and I realize that my wanting to kill does not help her at all. She doesn't need a monster to wreak vengeance on her enemies. She needs a male to look after her, to help her heal. She needs to be protected and nurtured.
My spikes, ridges, and fangs begin to recede, folding into the spaces in my body where they almost never go. Scythkin stay alert and battle ready at all times - but not now. Not now she needs me.
One
I feel hollow. Lost. Alone, though I am enveloped in the strongest arms I have ever felt wrapped around me, there’s something missing. A planet sized hole that I can’t contain.
He presses his lips to the top of my head and makes soothing noises. His intent may be sweet, but the wounds is too fresh and I can’t help the hissing sound that escapes me as I pull away.
“Sorry,” he says. “Let me treat that.”
“No.”
“No?” He seems confused.
“No, I don’t want anything to happen to me. I don’t want anything to change. I want to keep the hole.”
“You’re not making any sense,” he says, his voice soft. “You’re wounded. You need to be healed.”
“I’m keeping the head hole!”
* * *
He does not let me keep the head hole.
He carries me to the medical bay where he and I first coupled and he sits me on the bed. I don’t want to let him do anything to me, but he is still a massive alien who is hiding massive fangs almost well enough to stop me from seeing the very tips of them, two sharp little reminders of the beast which lurks beneath, the beast. There are so many layers to this monster, I wonder what he is capable of if pushed to the extreme limits. I wonder why he didn’t come for me. Why was it Tarkan? What was he doing?
“Sit still,” he says. “I need to give you some pain relief, clean out the wound and replace some skull.”
“I don’t want new skull. I want my old skull.”
“Well, your old skull was bored out by your Scythkin captors, so we’re going to put in some synthetic bone.”
“I don’t want synketic bone.”
Reaper takes a deep breath. “Synthetic bone,” he says. “And you need it, to stop space bacteria from setting up a colony in your brain.”
“What if I want space bacteria…”
“One,” he sighs. “I need you to settle down and let me treat you. I know you’ve had a very hard time. You were taken from Earth, mated by an alien, attacked by something related to the legendary Cthulhu, you had a language chip installed by hostile aliens, and the world as you know it was destroyed. It’s been a hard Tuesday.”
“Tuesday?”
“By our calculations, it was a Tuesday.”
“I don’t know what that means.”
“That’s okay. It doesn’t matter. The week was a human construct, and I guess it fell out of favor.”
“You’re distracting me!” I curse as I realize he is poking something into my head hole.
“Yes, and it worked. I’ve sealed your skull wound. Now we just need to put a sonic stitch in the skin and we’ll be done.”
“Well I’m not letting that happ…. you’ve already done it, haven’t you.”
“Mhm,” he stands back, looking all big and muscly and pleased with himself. I put a hand to my head and feel… nothing. I guess the painkiller is working really well. There’s not even a mark where the hole was. He has put me back together again.
“You fixed me?”
“Well, I mended the damage they did.”
“Can you do the same to the Earth?”
He shakes his head. “I’m sorry, One. But the Earth is more complicated than a hole in your head. I can’t put it back.”
“Why not?”’
“Because it has been removed.”
“So then make them put it back.”
He gives me a look which is sorrowful and pitying. “I’m sorry, One. I really am, but some things can’t be undone. What has been removed can’t be unremoved.”
I don't understand what he's saying. My life has been dust and dirt and rodents. It has been sitting alone in a safe little hole, sipping drops of water and hoping that a predatory beast doesn’t come for me. And then it did. And now the world is gone. Everything. Gone.
“I don’t think I can breathe…”
He puts his massive hand on my back and massages me. “You’re panicking,” he says. “Just breathe slowly and try not to think about anything.”
“Try not to think about… anything?” My voice goes all high and pitchy. I don’t know how to think about nothing. Nothing is the problem. The big nothing where the planet used to be.
I’m sure I can’t breathe. I’m going to suffocate out here in all this space, where there is no sunrise, no sunset, no ground to walk on, no water to drink. How could there possibly be? What will I eat? What will tell me when it is day and when it is night? I am getting dizzier and dizzier, feeling as though I am falling down and shooting upwards all at the same time.
At that moment, the door opens and Tarkan walks in. He takes one look at me and frowns.
“Everything alright?”
“She’s panicking about the loss of her home planet,” Reaper explains.
“Oh.” Tarkan says flatly.
“That’s all you have to say? Oh?” Reaper seems annoyed by his response.
“Ah,” he shrugs. “Is that better?”
“If you're not going to help, you can leave us alone.”
“How do I help? Put the planet back together? It’s gone. Forever. I ran an analysis as to what happened in the moments after the Earth disappeared.
“And?”
“As you thought, it was a relocation detonation. In an instant, every atom in the planet was disintegrated into protons, neutrons, and electrons and then transported great distances in all directions.”
His description is making everything so much worse.
Reaper growls. “Why would you think she needed to know this?”
“Well, energy cannot be created or destroyed, only changed from one form to another. A human was the first one to work that out. So I wanted to know what the energy from Earth was transformed into. It wasn’t heat and light like a primitive explosion, that would have destroyed the Scythkin fleet as well as us in an instant.”
“So what was created when Earth was destroyed?”
“I want Earth back,” I sob softly, leaning into Reaper. I don’t want to hear these horrible cold facts which describe the loss of everything that ever mattered to anyone.
“You say you do, but I think you might change your mind.”
I sniff and wipe a tear from my eye. How can anything good have come from this callous act of pure destruction? It’s not possible.
“As I said, the atomic particles that formed Earth have been spread across the entire universe. I found undeniable evidence that many of them, a surprisingly disproportionate amount, in fact, have been siphoned cosmically into the creation of…” he holds up a picture of a sma
ll fluffy animal with big soulful eyes. “Puppies!”
“Puppies?” I repeat the word blankly.
“Yes,” he says with more enthusiasm than I like. “And they’re ADORABLE.”
“Tarkan!” Reaper snaps. “Stop it! You're not helping.”
“I’m just saying, if you tried to put Earth back together, you’d have to kill thousands of adorable space puppies….”
“OUT! NOW!” Reaper thunders.
Tarkan sighs and retreats, leaving me confused and no less upset than I was before, though he has distracted me from my panic. I do enjoy the way Reaper and Tarkan interact, something about the rough and tumble of their camaraderie is comforting. Reaper’s natural dominance, Tarkan’s rebellious nature, they are always in conflict and yet they’re also utterly inseparable.
Reaper sighs, just as Tarkan did, though I would bet for a different reason, and sits me up on his knee. “I’m going to try to make this better,” he says. “Even though there’s really no way to do that.”
He is silent for what feels like a long time. I end up sitting there, waiting for him to speak, calmed by his lack of words, but still feeling that horrible emptiness. Maybe it’s better to be silent. Maybe there aren’t any words that can change anything.
“Earth still exists,” Reaper says finally. “Not physically in space, but in you. Your bones were made from that world, your blood flows like the rivers of that place. Even the smallest bacteria in your gut is preserved from the planet…”
“Gross!”
“Life is gross,” he rumbles. “The point is, One, though much has been taken from you, much remains. And though we may not be a fleet of Scythkin capable of returning the particles of your world to their original place, we are bold spirits who will sail among these stars from now until our last breath. It may be that we are taken in battle. It may be that we will be caught in currents and eddies and dashed against far worlds. We may see our ancestors yet, and you yours. Time may make us weak. Fate may turn against us. But you will be ours to the end, and you will always have the kind of home that is indestructible, one made of love. I love you, One. I love you more than anything, and I will always, always keep you safe.”
