by Rosette Lex
Until, at last, the transport slowed to a stop and the hatch opened. Once again, Vivienne was pulled along like someone’s mutt, but she did her best to take in the new setting as they walked.
In the distance, she could see the silhouette of a city that looked like it consisted entirely of towering spires and streamlined edges. The more immediate surroundings, though, were a bit less elegant.
Hard lines, sharp edges, jagged corners, and everything was the same mottled shades of black, green, and brown, faintly glimmering in the dimming sunlight. The only conclusion Vivienne could come to was that maybe they were on some sort of military base.
“Where are we?”
Que spared her a glance, one eyebrow arched, but he said nothing and continued to lead her, into one of the slightly less hostile looking areas of the base.
She was led to a bedroom, where at last her wrists were freed as she was pushed into the room. Que stood in the doorway for a moment, watching her contemplatively. And then he lifted one hand, caught her chin to tilt her head up, and kissed her.
Vivienne made a sharp, muffled noise, somewhere between a gasp and a squeal, and she thrashed away from him. She suspected that it was only because of his surprise that she managed to wrench herself away. She backed up several paces to watch him warily as she scrubbed the back of one wrist over her mouth.
Que stared at her for a moment, eyes slightly widened in shock. He recovered his composure quickly, though. His eyes narrowed and one corner of his mouth ticked up in a smirk. And he laughed.
“Sleep well,” he bid her, before he stepped back into the hallway, and the door slid closed almost immediately. It refused to open again no matter how Vivienne shouted or pounded on it.
After twenty minutes, she gave the door a final, fervent kick and gave up. Finally, she turned to take in the room.
It was small: maybe seven feet from the door to the back wall, and maybe five feet across. A narrow bed and a small table took up all of the wall space to Vivienne’s left, barely leaving room for the bathroom door in the back corner, and to the right there was a dresser and a mirror.
They all looked fairly normal, though the bed’s blankets seemed to ripple like water, but she couldn’t tell what any of them were made of. Even the mirror looked slightly off, as if someone had decided to make it out of crystal, rather than glass.
The walls were grey. The floor was grey. The ceiling was grey. Vivienne felt a bit like she was getting sensory deprivation just staring at the room. The view out the window—slightly odd, just like the mirror—wasn’t helping, as all she could see was the side of a different transport.
Nothing in the room was light enough for her to be able to throw it at the window, and trying to break it with her fists would most likely only result in broken knuckles.
She dropped down heavily on the edge of the bed, and shifted awkwardly as she adjusted to the strange cloth. With a heavy sigh, she scrubbed at her face and ran her hands over her hair. She was exhausted, hungry, and emotional wrung out. With a final huff, she lied down on the bed, her arms tucked close to her chest and her knees drawn in close.
At first, she thought that surely she would never be able to get to sleep that night, but she was proven wrong within a few minutes.
She dreamed of him that night. Of Que. Of the way his skin seemed to shine in the fading sunlight. Of the way his eyes gleamed. Of touching him, kissing him, being touched by him. Frantic movement and panting breath, grunts and gasps and growls because there was no room for words between them.
Vivienne woke to find a damp patch on her shorts, and despite her isolation, she found herself blushing. Whether it was from embarrassment, excitement, or some combination of both, she couldn’t tell, and she wasn’t looking forward to analyzing it too closely.
Someone had been in the room while she was sleeping. She didn’t know if it was Que or someone else, but they left a change of clothing, a glass of water, and a plate of food on the dresser.
Considering the state of her shorts, Vivienne got dressed first. The clothing was enormous on her, and she felt like a small child playing dress up in her father’s closet. The shirt’s short sleeves came down past her elbows, and the pants encased her feet and came past her toes by several inches. To preserve some of her dignity, she tore the pants off at her knees, ripped the excess fabric into strips, and knotted the strips together into a belt, keeping the pants from falling off and cinching the shirt in at her waist.
She still looked like she was practically drowning in the clothing, but she at least didn’t look ridiculous. As an after thought, she used the left over fabric to wrap her hands as a kick boxer might. After all, she had no idea what she was going to encounter.
From there, she investigated the food. The water, at least, was simply water, and she drank it quickly. She supposed oxygen and hydrogen couldn’t exactly change, no matter where in the universe she was, and that thought was more comforting than it probably should have been, but she held onto it regardless.
The actual food, however, was another story. It resembled a sandwich in the same way a hockey puck resembled a slice of bread. The “bread” was round, doughy, and thickly crusted, and the meat between the slices was thinly cut and an abnormal, pale gray-green color, and Vivienne found herself wondering if she shaved or plucked any of the animals if they would all be that color underneath. But it smelled innocuous enough, other than the smell of some sort of spice she couldn’t identify.
Her first bite was slow and hesitant, and then her stomach reminded her of how hungry she was, and she devoured it in a few bites.
She sat on the bed for a few minutes, just long enough to be sure that the food wasn’t going to cause her to spontaneously drop dead. Once she was sure that she was fine, she got to her feet and tried the door. Unsurprisingly, it failed to budge.
“Hey!” She pounded one fist on the door.
“I know someone is out there, and you need to open this goddamned door, or I swear I will cut off your—“
The door opened abruptly and her fist collided with a muscular chest. Blinking, Vivienne stared up at Que.
“Do you ever stop yelling?” he groused.
“For fuck’s sake, you’re like some sort of monster shrieking in heat.”
Chapter Three
His name was Que-norr-hey-my-at-nee. Or…something to that effect.
“I’ve been thinking of you as Que,” Vivienne informed him flatly.
“If it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll just stick with that. I mean, I’m assuming my manners here don’t really make a difference to what happens to me.”
He rolled his eyes and motioned for her to follow him.
“If you are to be here, you will know something of our world,” he stated.
“Considering I’m being held hostage and I don’t want to be here, why does it matter?” Vivienne asked, emphasizing the word hostage. Perhaps that wasn’t a big deal to Que, but to her, it was a rather important detail.
Que scoffed. “You don’t know your own importance,” he replied.
Vivienne’s stomach clenched, and she thought back to that last, fuzzy memory of mission control.
“Your mission is so much more important than you know.”
She knew for a fact that Earth had never had any contact with extraterrestrials, at least none that anyone was consciously aware of.
So how was it that she was so important to both worlds? Was it all just some horrible coincidence? She almost felt like laughing at the idea.
“Then explain my importance,” she snapped, her hands on her hips as she glared up at him.
He sighed in exasperation.
“If you would stop making noise for a few seconds, you would know that I intend to. There are other things you must know first, for any of it to make any sense.”
They passed other people as they walked, and each and every one of them made Vivienne feel as if she was drowning in testosterone.
“We are mono-gendered,
” Que stated simply.
“Not just my people, but every creature on this planet. Males, to your people, though the words male and female have no true meaning to us.”
…Well, that explained a lot. But despite that rather odd bit of biological trivia, there was another part of that statement that stood out to Vivienne.
“Wait. You know about Earth?” she asked.
“About humans?”
Que scoffed incredulously.
“Of course,” he replied. “We are not as limited as your people. We first began observing Earth decades ago.”
Vivienne wanted to say that it was impossible, but she couldn’t. They all looked exactly like humans. Eerily attractive humans, but still. While people might swoon if Que walked down the street in New York, no one would start shouting at him that he was an abomination.
“Why?” she asked instead. “Why bother, if we’re so limited compared to you?”
Que snorted. “For the same reason you Earthlings shoot messages into the stars and strap golden records to space crafts. We were curious. We didn’t bother to make ourselves known because we would gain nothing from it.” He sighed.
“Or so we assumed. It wasn’t until after we discovered Earth and left that the prophecy came to be.”
Vivienne’s eyebrows slowly rose.
“Prophecy,” she repeated flatly.
“We do not reproduce as you do. For us, it is known as replication. Any average inari can manage it, but it is not birth as you know it.” He shrugged.
“The prophecy itself is more easily explained by someone other than me.”
He led her into a room lined with consoles and monitors, and he keyed in a quick command. One of the monitors brightened, and a recording of an aged man began.
His skin was pale and smooth, with only the faintest of crow’s feet around his eyes, and his hair was only just beginning to go grey. But his eyes were clouded with age, staring blindly past the camera. He spoke in an even, monotonous tone, as if he wasn’t fully aware of what he was saying.
“From one inari comes another, like stagnant copies, steel soldiers marching in a line. But it is not the only way. He who takes a female bride, he who implants in her the seeds of a natural birth, shall rise above the tides of rigid masses. Like mighty Uthenarilini above, he who achieves a natural child shall rise beyond.”
The aged man fell silent and then shook his head quickly, an expression of confusion settling over his face. He opened his mouth, as if to ask a question to the man behind the camera, but the image cut out before he could.
Vivienne stared at the blank monitor for a very long moment until Que broke the silence.
“I could be king with your help,” he said, remarkably casual.
Vivienne laughed before she could help herself. It was a sharp, humorless sound that ripped harshly from her throat, and she bit out, “You mean you could be king if you fuck me.”
“Yes,” he replied, nodding once. “You would be queen.”
Vivienne laughed again, harsher than before.
“Oh, yeah, that’s a great consolation prize, coming from a man who’s already acknowledged that the word queen has no meaning on this planet.” She dragged her hands over her hair.
“I wouldn’t be your queen, I would be your fuck toy. Especially since you’re utterly clueless!” Her voice rose to a shout by the end.
“Clueless?” he repeated, clearly affronted. His eyes narrowed and his brows drew together.
“You would do well to watch your tone,” he warned her. “Besides.” He gestured to the monitor.
“What else is there to know?”
Vivienne groaned. “Shit, it’s like talking to a fourteen-year-old boy.” She covered her face with her hands.
“Pregnancy isn’t magical. It doesn’t just happen the instant you stick your dick in a vagina. It’s not guaranteed to happen the first time.” She breathed out a blustering sigh and uncovered her face to instead plant her hands on her hips, her weight shifting to one side.
“Besides, on Earth, we have this word. Rape. And…”
“I know what it means,” Que interrupted sharply.
Vivienne’s expression closed off, evening out to neutrality.
“And you don’t care,” she guessed. “What happens if I…”
She didn’t get a chance to finish her question, though. Que breathed out an impatient breath through his nose, seized Vivienne by her shoulders, and slammed her back against one of the consoles.
He pinned her to the console and kissed her, his lips moving against hers in a way that could only be called possessive. He bit at her lower lip and pushed his tongue past her lips, ravaging her mouth as if he was trying to claim it as his own.
Vivienne stood stock still at first. Some part of her simply wanted to melt into the kiss and let him get away with it. Another part of her felt sickened, both by the kiss and by her own reaction to it.
She wrenched herself away, using Que’s distraction to free one arm, and she slapped him across the face. Que reeled back, less because of the impact and more because of the shock.
Vivienne glared up at him, chin raised and shoulders squared. “You can go fuck yourself,” she growled.
“You’re apparently well-versed in it.”
He tried to pin her again, but Vivienne ducked under his arm and spat, “I said no,” as she backed towards the door, never taking her eyes off of him.
“No?” Que repeated incredulously, as if he had never even heard the word before. Then again, maybe he hadn’t. How utterly gobsmacked he looked would have been funny in any other circumstances. But at that moment, it was just ridiculous, and slightly terrifying.
“You heard me,” Vivienne snapped. “No.” She backed up another step, and the door slid open behind her.
Not wasting another moment, she turned and bolted into the corridor. She loped down the halls, until she got back to the room she had been locked in.
She was almost surprised when the door slid open for her, but she supposed there was no sense in locking the door to an empty room. She stepped inside and the door closed, but she couldn’t figure out how to lock it. She gave up after a moment and set to pacing back and forth across the room.
What next? An earthquake? A meteor strike? A volcanic eruption? A forest fire? How was the situation going to get worse?
For an hour she paced the room, from the door to the window and back again, pausing periodically to look at herself in the mirror. The entire situation was just too much. She was even starting to think she looked off.
After an hour, Que still hadn’t shown up. Perhaps he got the point, at least for a little while. Vivienne wasn’t going to delude herself into thinking that would be the end of it, but it seemed like she had a respite, at least for a short while.
She dragged her hands over her hair and sat down on the edge of the bed. She was still trapped. There were other people on base, and she was positive that none of them would let her just walk out the door and be on her merry way. Her situation hadn’t changed in the least; she just had a better idea of what the full extent of her situation was.
Que never showed up. No one showed up, even hours later. Whatever her meal that morning was, it was evidently going to be her only meal for the day. That was good to know; if she pissed off Que, his pouting would lead to attempts at starvation.
She sprawled out on her back on the bed and stared at the ceiling, her arms crossed tightly over her chest.
She had to stay calm. She was already in a mess. Freaking out about it wouldn’t make it any better. If she was so damned important, they weren’t exactly going to let her die, so she didn’t need to worry about that. She just needed to worry about…everything else.
She didn’t remember feeling tired as she lied there, but within a few minutes her eyes were closed and her breathing was evening out as she drifted off to sleep.
She dreamed of Que again. Of being pinned to a wall as his mouth ravaged hers. Of being claimed and do
minated. Of bronze skin gleaming with sweat. Of her body being worshipped like a prized possession. Of being fucked until she was begging.
She woke up before she could get too excited, though, so her pants were thankfully still dry and clean when she woke up. That was good. She would take any good news she could get, no matter how small.
The cause of her being awake was not so good. Someone pounded on the door, jolting Vivienne back to wakefulness almost immediately, and then the door slid open.
A man stepped in without even acknowledging her, and he left a glass of water and another plate of food on the dresser. Vivienne didn’t move, staying on her back on the bed until he left, and only then did she sit up.
