Omega Moon

by Noah Harris

  “I guess so, sure. But mostly I just didn’t think about you. I thought you were smart and funny and smelled good, and I liked looking at you. But I had a future to think of, that’s why I was at Flight School in the first place. You just seemed so complicated. I already had Darius, and he was easy. We clicked. But if I’d followed through and tried to be friends with you…”

  “The whole thing would fall apart. You were living in a house of cards.”

  “And you were a hurricane. I was petrified of you. You didn’t care, or maybe just didn’t grasp, what anybody thought about you. How excited and curious you were, about everything. I was at Flight School because I was a legacy. It was just dumb luck that I loved it, because it’s where I would have been no matter what. But I wasn’t like you. You were in love with it.”

  Julian nods, a thoughtful cast to his eyes, then grins. He seems happy to remember that.

  “In a dark time, it seemed like just a parachute out of the omega blues back home. And when I got there, everything was fascinating just because I’d never been anywhere. But it’s nice to remember it’s also my passion, too. I like that you noticed that.”

  “Darius always said he could go anywhere. He’s never cared about anything like I cared about Flight School. But compared to you, I was like him. Aimless. So, I took that electric feeling you gave me, the danger, and I made it a dare. Inspiration. I decided to think of it as a competition, and that way it stayed safe.”

  Julian bursts out laughing at that. Obviously, he’d done the same thing. How long could that have gone on, for Pete’s sake? What if it had ended at graduation? What if we’d both gone off into the world, better for having known each other…but still unfulfilled. Forever.

  “That’s the difference between alphas and omegas, right there. Because you were able to attract people to you from everywhere, become a leader, impress the teachers, all that. And I just stayed quiet and worked on doing my best, because that’s what omegas do. Do you see?”

  “Oh, I happen to think you’re pretty magnetic,” I rumble, pulling him in close. But he goes stiff in my arms, and I get nervous again. Until I realize what I said, and then get a little mad. This again.

  “Is this the thing about how I’m not really in love with you?”

  “I want that. I want you. I want it more than anything. But you have lot to learn about shifters before you can make a statement like that. And it’s a really inconvenient time for us to figure out if it’s real…”

  I’m suddenly beside myself, anxious to just shut him down, shut him up. Anything to make him stop. It feels like nails raking my skin. I grab a handful of crotch through my jumpsuit, shaking it heavily in my hand.

  “This is real. This is yours. What are you talking about?”

  “Trust me, I’m aware. But Alden, we need to get to Tiptree as quickly as possible.”

  “Don’t change the subject!”

  “I’m not changing the subject. This is very much the subject. Because whatever else the moon did to us, or is doing to us, I’m also rapidly approaching my heat. We’ve already seen some of the before-shocks. They’re nothing compared to the main event. It can get brutal if we’re not prepared.”

  Something wounded in his voice tells me this is one of the places in him that hurts, so I try to respect it. But so many of his worries have turned out to be nothing. It’s hard to believe.

  “I need to be locked up. And so do you. For just a while.”

  This time, I do laugh out loud. Angry and hurting. “Go ahead and try!”

  Julian just shakes his head, sweating with stress. He looks like he’s being torn apart in there, and for the first time in what seems like eternity I can’t see why.

  “You’re going into heat, huh? And we’re thinking it might be a full moon soon. Well guess what? Both of those things sound wonderful to me.”

  He blushes, shaking his head.

  “So, explain it to me!”

  Julian looks at the floor. He’s passing his anxiety and shame onto me and he knows it. He nods. He closes his eyes, for bravery.

  “Mating in heat is a complicated thing. It’s a ritual. Very old, very deep. It does stuff to your brain. Our brains. Stuff you can’t walk away from. Commitment.”

  It sounds serious. Sure. But I feel serious. It burns me that I can’t show it. He breathes, deep and slow. Why does this part hurt him so much?

  “There’s not a human equivalent, so it’s going to be hard to explain…okay. We can fuck any time.”

  To lighten the mood, I clap my hands over my head like we’re at a football game. “Hell, yeah we can!”

  He smiles, nodding. “I hope we do. But when an omega goes into heat, it can hit the nearby alphas hard. If they’re unmated, it can get pretty violent.”

  I feel sick, offended. “I would never hurt you, cadet. That’s really gross.”

  He shakes his head. “No, I’m saying it wrong. An alpha will go into what’s called a rut. Like a walking erection. You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, you stay hard no matter how many times you come. It can be torture, okay…”

  “That sounds pretty intense, yes. But it also sounds like what I want to do anyway. Just kiss and fuck and do all those things you were talking about before, for as long as we’re up here. I mean, doesn’t that sound wonderful to you?”

  He closes his eyes, breathing deep, and I know he can smell my arousal.

  “It does sound neat. It sounds great. That’s not at all what I am talking about. An alpha in rut and an omega in heat, that goes past the body, into the soul. And there’s this like, knot that forms…”

  He grins a little at my dropped jaw, realizing there’s something he forgot.

  “Hold up, what?”

  “Your penis, it goes into this sort of…”

  “You mean, like a dock? That thing dogs do?”

  “Well, sure. But also people. If those people are shifters.”

  “But that would make it so I have to keep fucking you until it…”

  “That’s the evolutionary purpose of it. But it would only come out if we were truly mated. Meaning, for life. Otherwise we just keep fucking. Maybe until we do some serious damage to ourselves.”

  I shake my head. That’s ludicrous. That’s not us. My body says absolutely not.

  “Well, I love you. All that doesn’t matter. You want to mate? Let’s mate. I’m yours forever and ever. I’m down on one knee, on the moon.”

  “Of course, you’re going to say that now,” Julian laughs sadly. “That’s what you’re supposed to say. But it doesn’t work like that.”

  I can’t move. Julian’s hands press against my chest, warning me from getting closer.

  “I’m serious. You think I laid in that bed with Darius for going on ten years and nothing happened because I had no feelings? I didn’t get turned on? No, I did it because I loved him better, in other ways. The truth is you’re the first person I have ever wanted. It was enough to make me crazy. It’s making me crazy now. What else do you need to know?”

  He turns away, voice gone quiet. I think he’s crying and doesn’t want me to see.

  “Okay, Julian. It’s not that simple. How can I make it simpler? How do I prove myself?”

  “You can’t. That’s what sucks. I love you…”

  “And I love you!” Now I’m crying, too. I can smell us all over each other. The room’s not big enough for my desire.

  “But I can’t believe you, not under these circumstances. And I don’t want us to get hurt.”

  “So, stop hurting me!” I startle us both, barking in a near-scream, and Julian jumps back.

  He’s not terrified, just wary. I can smell that too. And I know how brave he’s being. What did they do to you?

  “Oh,” I say, ashamed for scaring him. “You mean like that.”

  “Like that times a million. You don’t know enough to be scared, but you have to trust me. My pack’s not the best-trained. They don’t shelter kids from a lot of what goes on. So, I…�
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  I don’t want my sorrow to show on my face. Or my anger, my need to protect him. I want to turn this rocket around and go to Earth and find his people. Lay them all out, under the moon.

  Whatever innocence Julian’s been able to hold onto, that’s what I’ve been banging my head against. It feels almost like he was trying to say it all along. I don’t need to know more. I just need to help. My body, my wolf, need him to feel safe and protected. So, I just open my arms wide, fixing my eyes on his chest.

  “Well. Get in here then, cadet. You need to be held. I want to hold you. Please.”

  He flows to me across the floor, in the low gravity, and I hold still as he curls himself in my arms. I can feel every bone in his body, somehow. He’s never seemed so small.

  He’s never seemed so tough, either. I want my hands, my body, to feel like magic on his skin. Like they did upstairs, in our little bed. I want to stoke and yet quench that desire at the same time. It feels like holding a butterfly. Strong enough to keep it safe, gentle enough not to crush it. Julian wraps my arms around him tighter, stroking my biceps, tracing my fingers. It feels like he’s putting on armor.

  “My…where I’m from, they say the moon pulls on the tides, but the tides pull on the moon, too. They keep her from getting lost out there. That’s how you make me feel.”

  I shiver with pleasure at that. Something unwinds in me, and I’m suddenly peaceful enough to feel guilty about it. Surrounded by death and wreckage, our oxygen running out on an unlivable alien world, to feel at peace is profane. His warmth is my gravity, keeping me still and centered.

  “For what it’s worth,” he speaks into the mass of my chest, just as I’m on the edge of sleep. Like he needs to hear it out loud. “I do absolutely love you. Mating you would be the most beautiful thing I can imagine. I want to give you sons, and daughters. Just thinking about it makes me hard as a rock. But not yet.”

  Soon enough, his tipped-back throat issues a quiet snore, just barely audible. It only happens when he’s truly worn out and it’s like music to me. Just one of the reasons I know how unquestionably deep I’ve fallen. How perilously, madly, drunkenly, proudly, powerfully this little omega has taken command of my heart and my body.

  I can wait forever. I can wait until the end of the world. I trust him so completely that I want him to lead me down this path. Even if I’m blindfolded and I don’t know where the steps are. He knows.

  That feels like the sun coming up over water. It feels like those tides, pulling at the moon.

  I’m going to make the walk to the base while it’s still partly in shadow. It’s bright where I am, but Tiptree is east of us, so the shadow’s creeping closer to us. That feels safer, somehow, even though the cold is just as deadly as the heat up here.

  Julian’s still sleeping, wrung out by his bravery. I touch his cheek, wondering if I should wake him up or just let him sleep. What a strong guy he is.

  My body has felt like an alien beast at times, certainly. The wolf in me. The part that always wanted men. But to be raised that way? To think these awesome secrets are somehow disgusting. How do you do that? How does an entire people do that? Even a single pack?

  Nothing so beautiful, so exquisite and fine, so fresh-faced and clever, should ever suffer. It’s offensive. I’m caught again by my desire for vengeance. Probably not the best way to meet the in-laws.

  But I can’t help being grateful, too. When I think of my wolf, chained up inside, now given a voice. That wolf pacing within me now feels something like love, and something like truth too.

  I’m not crazy anymore. That was the last thing I thought as I was falling asleep, and the first thing when I awoke. I held it to my heart, a morning’s gift to myself. That pure, sweet place where the burden resided.

  The second my feet touched the moon’s surface, she rang like a glass bell. And the wolf woke up happier than he’d ever been, even since smelling Julian and learning what it meant. A kind of peace I can feel, even with the grief and fear on top. But even with that, it’s something my family could never have prepared me for.

  To be sane and in mourning is just being a soldier. And I’ve got a civilian to care for now.

  We crashed about four hundred miles southeast of Tiptree basecamp. Or, “the far side of the Sea of Fertility from the Marsh of Sleep,” as the romantic Julian would prefer we say.

  “Superman jumps, remember? You can clear miles at a time when you weigh 16.6% of what you’re used to. I am literally the strongest man on the moon. So, I’ll bunny hop to Tiptree in my suit, bring the roller back in a jiff, and before you know it we’re turning the lights on for a whole new phase of humanity.”

  Julian coughed in shock a little bit when I showed him how far I’d be going, but we both knew how easy the bunny hops would be. We’d been bouncing around in reduced gravity for hours now. And I’m no slouch with the math. If I say it’ll work, then Julian trusts his alpha completely to do just that.

  It’s a little sad to think about how this would have been the ultimate fantasy trip in our boyhood, and now it’s just another thing to get through. Hopping toward our last hope, leaving my beloved behind in a rapidly deteriorating shelter in a hostile environment. Both of us pretending things aren’t as dangerous as they appear. I don’t have time to think, dream or even look around. Nothing but the most direct path. It’s like long-distance running, in the Corps before Flight School. Eventually you move past thinking about it, into doing it, and then past that, to where there’s no you at all. Just running. Eclipsing you, turning you transparent. Making you into just breath, muscle and purpose.

  Maybe that’s the problem with the last hundred miles. I can see what I think is the dome over Tiptree, across the airless waste, but it never seems to get closer. I’ve got about an hour of oxygen left before I need to be inside again, and a little bit less than that in power.

  But I don’t need power for what I’m doing now. And Captain Harbaugh always said you can’t borrow trouble. So right now, I’m fine, we’re alive. That’s really all we need to know.

  As the distance starts to close, I try to stay focused on gratitude, and relief. Soon, this part will be over. The next part will start.

  I’ll drive up to the shelter in the roller, eighteen feet up, the thrum of that helium-3 engine under me like a motorcycle. A knight on a giant silver horse, half tank and half four-wheel ATV.

  Julian will gasp when I enter and smile that secretive smile of his. And he’ll shower me in kisses, and I’ll twirl him around in our joy. Then we’ll pack up the roller and come home.

  The helmet’s blinking and screaming to keep me alert when I finally think to check my suit. I can’t be so bad at math that I’ve stranded myself. But then as I raise my arms for a full scan, the suit starts to scream. A pinhole, probably somewhere under my arm, from when we dropped out of the sky.

  Clasping my arm tightly to my side, I keep dragging forward. Breathing as little as possible, and no more bunny hops. These systems give you a very long lead before you’ve got anything to worry about. Between Flight School and growing up under severe psychiatric evaluation, I’ve learned plenty of ways to keep from hyperventilating. Panic’s something I’ve never really understood.

  Until now.

  Now it’s a hawk in my head, flapping great gusts of wind over everything, taking away thought and hope the second they’re born. The dome is closer, closer…but how close? It wavers in the haze, no roller in sight, sometimes just a few kilometers away and other times barely visible.

  The moon doesn’t have an atmosphere. Whatever mirage effects the dome is giving off, they’re not happening anywhere outside my suit. I think I can hear Julian screaming for me now, far behind me on the sands, and that’s when I know it’s not real. Julian is ahead, in every way that matters. What’s behind me is worthless as fear, until I reach that roller.

  Fear. That’s it, isn’t it? Everything I do is fear. Fear and shame are my reasons for everything. Fear of my shame, shame about my fea
r. Father, even the captain, always watching me. Always hoping I wouldn’t disappoint them. And Julian, so tender he wouldn’t believe it’s even possible for me to let him down.

  I know what this kind of thinking is. I’ve fought it before. It’s dark and shadows and pain. I’m thinking about my pain, hurting myself with that instead. Wanting to be stronger about not being stronger. It’s a losing game. Change it.

  From my heart, from my pride, my love, there is a much brighter strength. Stamina floods me, as I imagine it. All the people I love cheering me on instead. Even my voice in that crowd. Not letting them down but letting them lift me up. Not a tide pulled along by the moon, but a moon, held in space by the tides.

  Like the great wolf of the sun, shining with such brightness and heat that you could burn up in it. That’s my love now. So much more powerful than any drive fear or shame had ever offered.

  Part of me knows it’s just muscle memory propelling my body forward at this point. But I do hope, dimly, that I’ll remember this feeling forever. When I survive, when I’m myself again, my love for him, our bond is a much more worthwhile reason to move forward than anything I’ve let motivate me before. If that wonderful creature loves me, I’m worthy of love.

  Julian and fear can’t coexist in the same heart. Julian and shame can’t live in the same body. There’s only us. And up above, smiling down, the great wolf of the sun.

  When I was a kid, all I wanted was for magic to be real. Before I got hard and cool and beautiful and became a soldier. But now I know magic’s real. I have it in myself. I’m magical, somehow. Julian is magic, and what we have is magic. Dealt out at the beginning of time, Julian said. Forced to find each other, again and again and again. It’s a challenge, but I no longer think it’s cruel. As the light dims around me, I’m sure of that. No god, no moon or sun, would be cruel enough to give me Julian and then take him away again. It’s just not a reasonable proposition.

  But I keep Julian’s name on my lips, just in case. Legs forgotten, back behind me somewhere, as I crawl the last few yards toward the dome. The crunch and grit of the sand against my sidewinder belly. I say his name, louder and louder. Pray to whatever wolf gods watch over shifters. Romulus and Remus, handing out our other halves.