by Alyssa Hope
As though to prove him wrong, the blue one turned and stared at him. ‘Not yours?’ The human wrapped himself around his partner again, and rocked gently back and forth, consoling him.
There was almost an accusation in the puzzled thoughts he was receiving, but he didn’t want these two badly damaged beings to be his beloveds, not for the whole world to know, not just yet. Maybe better for now if the world thought he didn’t really care for them, or maybe that they didn’t even exist?
‘I’ll look after you,’ he promised them, and hoped that would be enough for now. They just stared at him, and then went back to wrapping around each other, rocking back and forth.
‘Maru! What did you say to them?! You hurt them ...’
‘Nothing. Stay out of this, Suki, with all due respect. Everything hurts them right now, and I have to protect them as well as care for them.’
He thought about it and then looked at Suki.
‘Their food. Karo wants them to have small bits of food often, and lots of the nutrition drinks, so we can stock up on those. No-one but the head cooks, Suna and Dasu, are to touch their food, and it is not to be left unattended, even for a second. Maybe their Ivan can help them with this?’
Jevan stared, but Suki nodded.
Maru thought. ‘We’ll transport their food directly from the kitchen transporter to the table here. I would go and get it from the kitchen and check it, but I don’t want to leave them unprotected, and you’re supposed to be confined to quarters. When the traitor tried to kill Caleb, how did he do it?’
‘A false alarm going off, but we didn’t know it was false, and Caleb went to see what it was about, because we were worried for Oki. The traitor ambushed him and shot him.’ Suki wasn’t laughing, for a change. ‘Gods, that was too close.’
‘Fine, no one leaves these quarters for any alarms unless those are confirmed by Oki or Kaji. My team and Nevi’s, I would trust with my life, and with these ones’ lives. No one else.’
He sighed. ‘We can’t prepare for every eventuality, can we, but anything out of the ordinary is a threat right now. Anyone we don’t know, wanting anything …’
‘Maru?’
‘What, Suki?’
‘Whatever you are telling the world right now, these two need your love. Please don’t get so wrapped up in protecting them that you let them wither away and die.’
Maru stared at Suki in disbelief, and then turned to look at the two on the bed. They had curled back up together in the far corner of the bed, and the nutrition bottle they had been drinking from lay half empty and discarded beside them.
‘I’m not even sure they’re mine ...’ It was a hollow protest, he knew.
‘They’re sure, everyone else is sure. We’ll leave you alone with your beloveds and your conscience to think about this. And I am going to go and hug my beloveds, who have never had such doubts about me, although I am blessed with two very stubborn ones …’
Suki looked at Jevan and shook his head. ‘Did yours have doubts about you?’
‘No, mine didn’t. I was scared I wouldn’t grow and they wouldn’t love me, but that passed quickly. Very quickly!’ He smiled in memory, and then shook his head as well. ‘Poor little ones. Stuck with a fool like Maru.’
Suki and Jevan left, and Maru stared at the two. His two beloveds? He sat on the edge of the bed, and then moved slowly along it until he was close enough to touch one of them.
‘Little ones?’
‘Not yours.’ It was a sob.
‘I’m sorry. I’m stupid. I was shocked, and then I thought it would be easier to protect you if I didn’t care about you, or if whoever might want to hurt you thought that. Do you understand?’
‘No.’
He wasn’t sure he understood, either.
‘It’ll be alright.’
‘Never. Never alright again. We are wrong, strange, no good for anyone.’ That was from the blue one, and Maru suddenly felt worse than he had before.
‘I told him, just us, only just us. Now you hurt him again, and I did not protect him.’ There was a great deal of pain as well as resentment in that accusation from the human, and if Maru hadn’t felt bad already he would have then.
And then they went silent, maybe asleep or maybe withdrawn back into a coma. He couldn’t read anything off of them anymore, in either thoughts or emotions, and they seemed to be barely breathing.
He thought about trying to hug them, or even just touch them, but something in him wouldn’t let him. They were so fragile, so far from being the perfect beautiful ones that he had imagined as his beloveds, touching them just seemed wrong.
Despite that some part of him longed to hold them, and to hold them at his breasts and nurse them. His body was already feeling the effecting of the morphing hormones, becoming fully hermaphrodite now that he was with his triad. It was just his mind that was being stupid, he thought with frustration.
He had thought that finding love would be so easy when the time finally came, when he was ready for it, but it wasn’t, at all. And he wasn’t ready! And the images he had seen in their minds, of how they had been treated, made him feel sick. He wanted to kill those who had hurt his beloveds that way. His beloveds? Gods, this was confusing.
‘Maru?’
‘Yes, Kaji?’
‘Do you want a guard in the hall or the outer chamber?’
He thought about it, but only briefly.
‘No, it would only draw attention, to have a guard in the hall, or coming and going. I can protect them. I will.’
Something else occurred to him.
‘Kaji?’
‘What?’
There was a coldness that he hadn’t heard from his team’s commander before, and he winced.
‘The earth humans can learn to mindtalk, some of them more easily than others, and maybe these other ones who were with the slavers can as well?’
‘Yes?’
‘So maybe when we speak privately some of them can hear it, or at greater distances than we think they can?’
There was silence for a minute. ‘Good point. We will be more careful. And if the scanners outside those doors go down for even a second and we lose the visual we will investigate.’
‘Thank you, Kaji.’
That was interesting. There were no scanners, but maybe now someone would be looking for them, and Kaji would be looking for that someone? If the consequences weren’t so serious this could be an interesting game.
Chapter 3.
He sat on the bed and stared at his two, sorting out the tangle of purple-blue and tan that were their arms and legs and torsos. They were brave, protecting each other still, and they had survived what would have killed many.
He shuddered again as the pictures he had seen in their minds came back to him. Even before they had been sold to the last set of traders they had been slaves for most of their lives, since they were children. Life must have been a constant struggle for survival, and on that ship it had only got worse. How had they even managed to live?
They had been beaten, whipped, raped, forced to do many things, yet through it all they had each tried to take all the pain for themselves, to shield the other. And when they’d had the chance they’d escaped, having kept their wits about them enough to have noticed where the escape pods were, without even knowing where they would be going.
They had survived for each other, and he was sure that if they could have each of them would have given the last breath of air in that pod to the other. He wondered again about what he wanted from his beloveds, and started thinking that he was being a child, just wanting a pretty toy. These two were ones that he could trust his life with, trust their young ones with, who had more courage than many warriors he knew.
He eased back on the bed and looked at them more closely. The one who was of his people, who was still more purple now but would probably be blue again when he was healthy, was nicely formed underneath all the scars, and would be strong, although probably never large. More like Suki th
an Oki, and there was nothing wrong with that clever one. Maru’s little one was starting the final stage of morphing from androgynous to become a full hermaphrodite, too, just as Maru was. The little one’s body knew they were a triad, even if Maru’s mind was having trouble accepting it.
Karo would have sent off the DNA sample already, and they would soon know his name and his family group. His family would be happy to see him again, so matter what he had been through. They would just want him back. Maru thought about that, and then felt very small.
With the human, it was harder to tell what he would look like when he was healthy. The earth humans he had seen tended to be tall and lean, without the natural healthy roundness of his own people, but this one was especially thin, much like Karo’s beloved Tad had been when they rescued him. Tad had filled out nicely, and they thought that he was bearing now as well, a sure sign of health. This one’s skin was a nice tan in color, darker then Caleb or Tad or the other humans that Maru knew on the ship, and this was visible even covered with scars and the dark marks of bruises that were just beginning to heal. He seemed to have even more scars than his blue partner. Had he always been trying to protect him?
How long had they been in the pod? Maru tried to count back but lost track of time since that raid. However long it had been, Karo could do a lot, but not work miracles. These two still had a lot of healing to do, from a lot of abuse. Time and love, as Karo had said.
The hair on top of his human beloved’s head was a soft brown, just a little bit darker than his skin. The glimpses he’d had of the human’s eyes had been of a warm dark brown, not black as were those of Maru’s people. He would be beautiful, Maru thought with surprise, indeed he was beautiful, just the way he was. They both were.
Karo had warned him privately that there was internal damage as well, and that he was to refrain from coupling for now, as though that was even a possibility. Maru shuddered at the thought of hurting these sweet ones by doing something like that to them. How could even the thought of mating bring anything but terror to these two? They couldn’t even stand to be touched. And did Karo really think that he was that selfish and stupid? It wasn’t a pleasant thought.
Maru wondered who the human was, and where he had been to become a slave as a child. The earth humans didn’t seem to keep the same kind of genetic records as his people did, possibly because there were so many more of them, scattered over so many different planets now. They might never even know his name if he didn’t remember it.
He moved over a bit closer to the pair and gently ran his hand over one shoulder and then the other, and carefully down a blue back and then a tan one. He waited for a reaction, any reaction, but didn’t get one, and then realized that both of them were holding their breaths. Were they expecting him to hurt them? He wasn’t that much of a fool, really he wasn’t, and he hoped they knew that.
‘Sweet ones, I won’t hurt you…’ Not physically, anyway, and never deliberately.
‘No, we trust you … we think. You won’t hurt us, probably, maybe … There is something between us? Just not sure what this is. It feels … good? Caring? Is that what this is?’ That was the human one, who wasn’t feeling the bond as much and needed an explanation.
‘Yes, little ones, it’s good. We are all one, a triad, that’s what you’re feeling. Touch with caring is good, even if I am an idiot.’
An idiot who felt like crying. He didn’t deserve these two.
He picked up the nutrition bottle and put it into the nearest hand, and wrapped the fingers gently around it. He didn’t say anything, just waited.
The tan colored hand moved the bottle to dark blue lips, and that one sipped cautiously before pushing it back towards red lips. Always looking out for the other one. Maru slipped off the bed to get another bottle, and when both of them had bottles and were drinking he relaxed again and let himself caress their heads. The hairless head of the blue one, which should have been so soft, was covered with lumps and scars, and he massaged those gently. The strange hair on the head of the human was softer than he expected, and he ran his fingers through it carefully, again finding wounds – too many wounds - in various stages of healing.
His people were hairless all over, but the earth humans had hair in the oddest places. Maybe odd for him but normal for them? They all seemed to have more prominent ear lobes and facial features as well, with large ears and noses, and hair above their eyes and lips, as though to emphasize those. Very strange. Maybe because they didn’t recognize each other by instinct and needed the extra cues? He wondered if he could ask Caleb about that, although Caleb didn’t seem to have trouble recognizing any of the hundreds of individual blue people on the ship.
This human beloved of his had the same soft-looking brown hair that was on his head around his genitals, and Maru longed to touch it, and the penis that rose out of it, but didn’t dare. The humans, he remembered, were fully developed at an early age, and didn’t recognize their beloveds the way Maru’s people did. How had this human known that their little one was the one for him? Would he ever let Maru into their relationship?
Maru found that he wanted to be able to touch them both that way, all over. Maybe one day he could, and they would both feel free to touch him? He was surprised by the thought, and then realized again that it was the morphing hormones kicking in, as his body began to change and mature sexually. He tried to push the thoughts away. It would be a long time, if ever, before he could touch his beloveds in that way. They would have to take the initiative, and he would have to exercise the famous patience of his people.
Karo had given him some salve to rub into the wounds and scars, and once they had dealt with the possibility of evil ones hiding amongst them they would be able to go to the bathing pools as well. The soft mineral waters would help their bodies heal, and in the safety of that warm water maybe a little bit of gentle touching would be welcomed?
Maru debated having the baths and the halls between the two areas closed down so they could go there now, but decided against it. It would be a little bit too obvious to any who were watching, and leave them vulnerable while they were travelling back and forth. Once these two trusted him a bit more, he would at least be able to use the salve.
He breathed deeply, made himself relax, and went back to gentle massaging, stopping anytime they tensed up, and then gradually moving further down their necks again when they relaxed. They were in perfect synchronization. If one flinched the other did, if one relaxed the other did. He worked his way back and forth from scalp to scalp, neck to neck and then down to shoulders, but then both of them froze up and started to curl into each other again, so he stopped.
‘Little ones? How does that feel? Does it feel a bit better?’
‘Yes, little bit.’
‘I don’t want to hurt you, I’m just stupid sometimes. I’m sorry.’
There was silence, which he knew he deserved.
‘I am Maru. What are your names, sweet ones?’
There was no response, but the nutrition bottles were almost empty and his two beloveds seemed to be half asleep, so he moved carefully to wrap one of Jevan’s soft blankets around their shoulders, and then settled back beside them to wait for whatever would happen next.
He must have fallen asleep, because he woke up with a start when the connecting door between the two living quarters opened, but it was just Suki. He had moved over, he realized, and had an arm around his two little ones, and they were both asleep and leaning into him.
‘You can protect them like that? What if I’d been ...’ Suki stopped and laughed when Maru flipped up the blanket that was over his free hand to reveal the gun he had ready.
‘I’d have burned a hole in Jevan’s soft blanket, I think.’
Then he remembered.
‘Did Kaji warn you, to make sure we shield any mindtalk very closely?’
‘Yes. I just wanted to let you know that there is a meal coming in, and to make sure that the table is clear. This is fun, I’ll get to hand fee
d you.’ Maru drew back a bit at the thought of being hand-fed, inadvertently waking his two little ones as he did so. Suki laughed. ‘It’s a nice change. Oki would have me tied to the bed and be feeding me.’
The two little ones tensed, and Maru smiled softly down at them. ‘Tied up because he is bearing and Oki loves him very much and is protective of him and the baby, little ones. Not really tied up.’
‘Ah. I’m sorry, little ones. Not the whole world is as you’ve known it. I was a slave, too, before Oki and Caleb found me, as were both Jevan and Tad before Karo found them. We understand a little bit of what you’ve gone through, although I think you’re had the worst of it of any of us. But it gets better, much better.’ And he patted his rounded belly happily.
Maru didn’t know what to think of it when his two little ones looked at Suki’s rounded stomach and then at each other, and then touched each other’s flat bellies with puzzled looks.
‘It gets better in here?’
They looked at him, and he smiled, trying not to laugh.
‘Maybe one day, little ones, within the bond. Our people can only become bearing within the triad bond, did you know that? Seed from both other partners is needed for one to become bearing, so we need all three in a triad…’
They obviously had no idea what he was talking about, although the human one was beginning to look suspicious.
‘Suki has a baby in his belly.’
They were still staring wide-eyed when Suki brought the tray from the outer chamber over to the bed.
‘What? Maru? What did you tell them?’
‘The truth. That you have a baby in your belly, and that’s why you’re so happy.’
Maru watched Suki’s face as the Captain’s clever beloved was about to ask if he’d explained how the baby got there, and then realized that any explanation about that probably wouldn’t seem very funny to these two right now.
‘Right, yes, a baby.’ The look on Suki’s face promised Maru a talk later. ‘Love makes babies happen, little ones, love with our beloveds.’
