by Noah Harris
Tiptree’s just the first colony. It’s where all the theories are tested, the initial step in giving the moon permanent life. An atmosphere, green spaces, a livable outside eventually. I never got to see Julian’s passion for that part of the project. To be honest, I’ve never been that interested. It seemed so far away. But when he talks about it, and he can talk and talk about it, I can see it. Through his eyes, I can see the moon as home.
His enthusiasm is sexy in a different way. Ordinarily what I want to touch and taste, possess, has to do with the bend of a muscle, the curve of a supple thigh or hip. It flares up when I learn a new way that he smiles or laughs. Or when he surprises me with some fresh idea or joke I’d never have found on my own.
But this passion, this creative force within him, is a hurricane. It’s something entirely different, and I want to get lost in it. I’m a leader, but Julian is an artist, and I want to carry his burdens. Carry him, once I’m strong enough again. Wouldn’t he just squeal at that?
He turns at my lusty chuckle. I’m thinking about him, outraged, over my shoulder. Wearing his lithe, quick little body like a Julian-shaped backpack. When I don’t immediately offer a reason for my laughter, he just smiles and finishes packing up.
I want to just jump and let the weak gravity carry us down. Julian would never allow that, so I don’t even bother asking. I’ve never known him to be cautious. Quite the opposite, really. But death has followed us ever since we left Earth, and he’s become a lot more aware of danger.
But I can still grin, and imagine our son launching himself over the balcony, 16.6% of his Earth weight falling slowly, beautifully. Our daughters turning pirouettes and flips as they ride the breezes down. An army of cubs, or pups, or whatever they’re called. I have a lot to learn.
It makes my heart race, thinking about gathering them all up in my arms. How I’ll look into his eyes, and say, “Look what we made together.” For now, I offer him an elbow, we pick up what we can carry, and set out.
The first human steps, into the darkness of a world about to be born.
I lose count somewhere around our first hour on those never-ending stairs, the clang-clang echoing in the darkness. It’s not physically tiring, we still don’t have real gravity, but it is mentally grueling. Julian stares out at the crisscrossed steel catwalks we can see filling up the space as our eyes adjust to the darkness.
“I feel like Jack. Up the Beanstalk.”
I laugh, realizing I was thinking much the same thing. Like a toddler, surrounded by things he can’t see over. Like a couple of sci-fi heroes who got hit by a shrink ray.
“Honey, I Shrunk the Werewolves.”
He nods appreciatively, winking back at me before he goes back to it. Clang, clang.
Once we’re into the city, the blocky buildings gradually give way to more fanciful designs. Pagodas, minarets. A garden of delicate filigree, tree-like shapes big enough to house whole families in their branches. All of it still glittering, chalk-white. Like a whole world was spray-painted by some overdramatic artist.
I’m careful not to mention our children, even though they’re mostly what I think about. Even the smell of him, rich and powerful, beautiful and alive, is starting to smell like ‘family’ to me. Not just sex, something else. Something new. New life.
If my body’s changing to accommodate his heat, if my wolf thinks I’m ready to be a dad, I don’t necessarily need Julian to know that. Or at least, I don’t want to jump the gun. He already feels so pressured, and it wouldn’t help anything. But it’s filling in the blanks, now that I have some sense of it in my own body. And it means that as we walk, I get to imagine them on my own. Julian kneeling there, between the trees we’ll plant, with his arms open wide. A couple of cubs jumping into his arms, as two more pull me toward him by the hands, screaming and laughing. Pulling our heads down ever lower, for their flower crowns. Painting butterflies and stars on our faces, glassy eyed when they finally fall asleep in our laps. Stretches, yawns, mumbles.
What we made. What we gave to each other.
Suddenly, I’m so overwhelmed with joy and excitement that I take Julian’s hand and break into a run. He’s right there with me, always.
When we finally fall into a heap, sweaty and aching under our packs, we’re still giddy. His laughter makes my body relax. It’s like when we finally got to the moon, everything started to make just a little bit more sense. We’re wild, but we’re not crazy anymore. If we ever really were.
“Because it’s home,” Julian nods, sipping from a canteen. We stand on a cliff, looking out over what will one day be a lake.
“This is who we are,” I say, whispering for some reason. “When nobody’s watching.”
“Do you like us?” Julian wrinkles his nose, to show he’s joking, and I grab his waist like a flamenco dancer, pulling him to me with all the heat I can muster.
“I love us. I love you. I’ve never been so happy in my life. It makes me feel guilty, to be so happy, but then I can’t feel guilty for too long because I’m too happy,” I’m babbling, and that makes it even funnier. I feel like a kid. Maybe I never got to be one, maybe I’m just catching up. Maybe that’s why everything feels so good, and new.
I throw my hands up like a wolf’s paws, casting giant lantern shadows on the buildings behind us, and do a little jig. Big as a giant, stretching up to meet the dark. Creeping along like a burglar, a Tyrannosaurus Rex...
“Is it…are you a squirrel? Are you doing the mashed potato? What are you…”
Julian’s confused by the shape, watching me hop around. But by the time I growl and pounce, pulling him down to me there on the cliff side, he’s figured it out.
“You are very beautiful. And when you’re carefree too, it’s like looking at the sun. You did such a good job hiding your stress. I used to think you were just…cold.”
Julian sits astride me, running fingers across my chest and face, drawing pictures in the lamplight. He stops for a moment, thinking, and then hops up.
“Hang on.”
I close my eyes, breathing him in.
This is enough, I tell myself. This is pleasure. Being with him feels so good, I don’t want anything else. I’m not dying of desire. This yearning, like a ravenous beast, isn’t prowling closer every hour. Just get to the generator and you can marry the guy. Just hold tight.
Julian returns, after a little bit of crashing around, with an emergency flare.
“We won’t need it, and nobody would see it if we did, and there are five left.”
He’s made up his mind, and I have no objections, so he cracks the flare and tosses it a few yards away. Dancing in the red flicker of its flames, he looks like a fairytale elf. A nature spirit from some legend, like Puck or Peter Pan. We’re free. And whatever we are, it’s natural, wholesome and good. I know that, from watching his body move in the sparks.
Just hold tight, just hold tight.
Self-discipline should feel good, Father would say. It reminds you how strong you really are.
I try to find that place in myself where it feels good to stay in control. It’s getting harder to find. And growing fainter. But for now, I can hold tight.
Written across the glass door of the generator room it reads GENERATOR in eleven languages. If you look past all the writing, you can see screens and instruments twinkling in our flashlight beams, ready for us.
“I just realized, I’ve honestly been imagining a giant red button you could just push. Let there be instant light.”
Julian laughs, pulling out a campfire cooker, and pats the floor next to him just outside the glass.
He likes to watch me do things, he says. “Especially if it’s something where you have to concentrate, like when you’re cooking. So precise and intense, like an eagle watching a mouse.”
“I’m so happy right now,” I say carefully. “With you, and this. And I’m so sad, too. I feel like there needs to be a moment. Of silence. Or talking. Or something.”
Julian stares up at
the tall hub, past the generators and up into the darkness. “Like a speech?”
Something in his forlorn voice cracks me up, and I clap him hard on the knee. “Don’t worry! No speeches.”
I dish out some of the stew I’ve made from our last fresh-food supplies, and Julian sips at it for a moment, thinking.
“I remember the first time I saw Captain Harbaugh, on campus. I thought he was somebody’s dad, somebody’s hot dad. And then I thought he was our age, and then he was close enough to shake my hand. He knew my name. I didn’t know who he was, but he knew all the students on sight, even the new kids.”
That’s the captain, all right. I smile brightly, proud of him.
“I was spinning out, this one time. Terrified I hadn’t aced a test. Absolutely sure I was going to get yelled at or expelled. Both seemed equally bad. I was already picturing my dad’s face when I washed out and came home. I imagined I would have to take a taxi from the airport, because he’d be too ashamed to be seen picking me up. And I didn’t want to talk about it, I couldn’t talk about it. Not even to Darius. He didn’t understand this particular mood I got into sometimes.”
Julian nods. He knows the one, from afar. It never would have occurred to him to reach out, of course. But he did pay very close attention, I’m learning.
“I saw Harbaugh coming and I just thought, this man is going to make me cry. He was going to say something sweet, or insightful, or make me laugh and the dam would break, and there I would be, crying in front of Captain Dean Harbaugh, again. Practically once a month, the first three years.”
Julian’s jaw drops, and I have to look away. I’m exaggerating, but not by much. We were so young back then. It wasn’t that far in the past, but it was a lifetime ago.
“But he didn’t make me cry that day. He didn’t say anything at all. He barely even looked at me, so I guess he knew how naked I felt. He just pounded me on the shoulder, tossed my running shoes in my lap, and waited for me to lace up. And then we ran.”
My hand finds its way into Julian’s. He squeezes once, softly.
“He always made us run laps, you know, but I never really saw him run himself. It was beautiful. He was the fastest, strongest thing I’d ever seen. And I just wanted to...be him, in every possible way. Strong, but soft. Commanding, but kind. Everything my dad wasn’t.”
Julian nods, looking at my hand in his lap.
“I wanted to follow him around and take notes. Match his breathing as we ran, even just his feet hitting the asphalt. I wanted there to be a pill or a beverage I could chug and become him. I wanted to get amnesia, so he would be the first man I ever knew.”
Julian smiles quietly when I look into his eyes, unsure if he should say anything. I’m not quite sure where to take it from here, and I’m grateful he’s got something to say.
“When I think about having kids, which is a lot, I used to worry about my pack. Roseland isn’t kind to its children, and I didn’t want to bring pups into that world. But I also felt afraid I would turn into them. The kind of men I grew up around. That I would make my own kids feel that way.”
He swallows, grief passing like a shadow over his face.
“And it made it easier to accept that I probably wouldn’t ever mate anyway. The fear that I would mess them up. It would be a lot safer to just pitch in with everybody else’s kids. That way I couldn’t taint them with whatever was wrong with me.”
It brings tears to my eyes, but he talks about home so rarely I’m grateful to hear about this side of him.
“But around the end of our first term, I saw the captain take somebody aside, some guy in another grade, and whatever he said to him…that guy just melted. And for a second, I was so mortified, even just seeing somebody break down like that made me feel angry and scared. And in front of a teacher! It was a nightmare.”
His horror is comical, but I already know what’s coming.
“But Captain Harbaugh reached out and grabbed him so hard, and held onto him so tight, and just…let him cry. I never saw anything like that. And I thought, that’s how I want to be, when I’m a dad. Like you said. Strong but soft. I didn’t know you were allowed to be both.”
I cry for the captain, then. And Margot and Pippa. But we’re crying for each other, too, at the end of the world. As much as I’ve gained on this journey, life, love and magic, we’ve lost just as much. Nobody back on Earth will ever really understand what this was like. What being afraid around the clock does to your dreams. Nobody, maybe not even another shifter, will understand what it was like to get closer and closer to the moon. To feel her lighting up even the darkest places inside, until you knew you were losing all control.
Julian arches back to kiss me and moans, half-asleep, and my muscles unknot as I flow into his kiss. Always like coming home, every time. He smiles against my lips and settles into my lap, arms around my neck, looking deep into my eyes.
“I love you, Alden Armstrong. I love you and it feels like being taken apart in a storm. I hope it never, ever ends.”
It feels like being blessed. I have to close my eyes for a moment, like I’m looking at a sun that’s too bright. I do feel like I’m breaking apart. That’s what it is.
“I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t come into my life. I was moments away from dying, I think. I was so close to the end of my rope, and I didn’t realize it. I didn’t even think about it until the shuttle, and then it was all I could think about. And you saved me.”
Julian smiles, a little sad, and runs his fingers through my hair.
“Forever and ever.”
He bends, diving deep into a kiss that gets steadily hotter as it goes on, until our bodies are moving against each other without ceasing. I growl softly into the night, nipping at Julian’s ear, and he shivers.
Are we getting too close to the heat? Is it already too late? I want to back off, but everything in my body says it’s time. And something starts to change.
Slow at first. The sweet, salty smell of his hair is no longer simply lovely. It’s overwhelming, choking my nose and mouth. It smells like sex, sweat, and fear. And something new, a sharp iron stickiness underneath that sends my cock rod-straight and steel-hard faster than I can process my arousal.
“Jules?” My voice is thick, slow like molasses.
It could just be the heat, and my answering rut, that makes even the air around us feel so sensuous and warm. I hate not knowing. And I can taste it in his kiss, in our bond, that he hates it too. He’s so much closer to not caring. He aches to feel me inside him, and I shudder beneath his hands. I need a moment, a breath, before it’s all too much. And so does Julian.
He leans back, smiling sweetly. But there’s something in my eyes that terrifies him.
He’s seen it. He knows what I am, how much I want. How far I could go. Not even lust, or hunger, something beyond that. Brutal and mindless. The beast.
The rut. I know it now.
It’s gone the second Julian gasps, flailing backward, desperate for distance.
“Jules? I didn’t…I’m not…”
But I did. I was. For just that tiny moment, he knows with complete certainty, I wanted to rip him apart. The wolf inside me, too long caged and starving, has no idea where he is. The heat is driving him into a frenzy.
Julian was right, all along. This is no way to start a life together. This isn’t romance. It’s animalistic, frightening. There’s no love in it, just need. The kind of need that wouldn’t let us go until it was done with us and wouldn’t care what scraps it left behind. The most beautiful thing in the world shouldn’t become ugly so easily.
I jump to my feet, desperate for a place to hide, to get away, to cage me up. Under the sour, hateful smell of Jules’ fear, there it is again. That delicious, mesmerizing musk of his desire, driving me far too wild for anything sweet to remain.
I shove Julian to the side and step inside the clear box of the generator room, closing the door behind me before Julian realizes what’s happening.
/>
“Input a new four-digit code, Jules. Something easy to remember.”
Julian, still dazed in fear and longing, does as he’s told. I can hear the locks engage.
“Alden, what just happened?”
I’m too ashamed to look at him. My erection is painful, so hard it’s almost numb.
“You were right. I can’t handle it. I don’t know enough about us, what we are. I should have paid more attention and trusted you. And now it’s all ruined.”
Julian laughs, tapping at the glass until I finally look up. His smile is sweeter than ever.
“Nothing is ruined. You scared me a little bit, yeah. But only for a second, and then I got worried for you. Alden, listen to me. Nothing in you will ever push me away. Okay? We’re on the same team. Your problems are my problems. There is no monster in there.”
I shake my head. “We don’t know that yet.”
He didn’t feel it. It didn’t repulse him, through our bond. So, he doesn’t know. My fists clench, rubbing my cock through the jumpsuit right there in front of him, too desperate for relief to be ashamed.
Jules shrugs, and I can see him touching himself, too. God, if heats are even worse than this, I don’t know how he lives.
“Okay. If you turn out to be a monster after all, then yes, I will dump you. But I can’t imagine you hurting me, so…”
It makes my cheeks hot and my eyes narrow just to think about it. He nods.
“Then we’re not going to worry about it. We’re going to ride this out. Give ourselves some time to think.”
I put a hand to the glass, unsure what else to do. Julian matches it, palm to palm, before disappearing into the dark.
Not long after, I begin to howl. And then to roar. But now it’s just me and the glass, and the lantern on the ground outside, lighting me up in shadows, a monster in a box. A beast at the end of the world.
