My dearest loves, this is nothing but loving smut and it starts immediately. Obviously I have warnings about being 18+ everywhere on my blog but we’re going to reiterate for this chapter! There’s some kissing, oral sex (both m and f receiving), unprotected p in v and exploration of some (hopefully) interesting differences between their physicalities….we also flip back and forth between perspectives here for the first time.
I have tried to be mindful of not attributing many physical characteristics to “her” beyond the fact that she has hair and is a cis woman. This continues here.
My dearest loves, this is nothing but loving smut and it starts immediately. Obviously I have warnings about being 18+ everywhere on my blog but we’re going to reiterate for this chapter! There’s some kissing, oral sex (both m and f receiving), unprotected p in v and exploration of some (hopefully) interesting differences between their physicalities….we also flip back and forth between perspectives here for the first time.
I have tried to be mindful of not attributing many physical characteristics to “her” beyond the fact that she has hair and is a cis woman. This continues here.
Word count 4.7k
Starman
Chapter Fifteen
Earthling/Starman
She had barely kicked the door to her bedroom shut before she was dragging the material of his t shirt up and over his head, the static electricity catching at his curls and pulling them unnaturally upward in a false display of anti gravity. The tension between them was taut and thrumming, a culmination of desire and deferral and desperation. She all but hurled herself at him, and he caught her easily - his lips meeting hers perfectly and his arm slipping around her waist and up her back, using her own momentum to pull her near and press her close. Her hands were on his chest, sliding up his neck to come to rest in his curls, her fingers tangling in them as she pressed his lips upon hers even more forcefully and swallowing his groan of bliss.
The feeling of purest craving between them was sharp, an edge of delicious biting that cut through the haze of decadent, dizzying, mellow love and made them feel as if they were soaring. Their bodies sought the other, instinctively feeling toward the sheer rightness of being so close together. One of her hands left him and he felt it as a momentary echoing, gaping loss. And then he realised that she was pulling at her clothes, the buttons on her trousers already undone and more of her skin unveiled to him. He shoved his hand at the coarse fabric, helping to push it over the swell of her backside and delighting in the unexplored soft expanse under his fingertips. She sighed into his mouth at his touch, wriggled her hips until the trousers fell from her to pool at her feet. It was a movement that he found simultaneously adorable and immensely arousing. She continued to fumble at the fabric on her body and suddenly her underwear also fell unceremoniously to the floor. He found his thoughts warring with themselves. To break the kiss and to drink in the sight of her, or to hold her tight and continue to run his tongue over hers, to capture her lower lip between his teeth…The need for oxygen decided for him and he pressed his forehead against hers briefly as their breath mingled in the small space between them.
She stepped backward, allowing him to see, inviting him to watch. She was perfect, every inch of her heavenly, and he found that even though he now had the space to take a breath in he didn’t feel that he could, struck as he was by finally seeing more of her body bared to him. She looked into his eyes and held his gaze as she removed her top and her remaining undergarment and finally there she stood - naked, wanting, all for him. She was unashamed and unabashed and he could see the fire within her eyes burn hotter as she watched him watch her and ravage her without touch. She said something that he barely heard over her nakedness crowding his senses and blinked stupidly at her words, his brain too slow to catch their meaning. It was only then that he realised that they had left the translator on the couch, everything except they two quite forgotten about and unimportant in the moment. She seemed to come to the same realisation and her smile was somehow both soft and rapacious as she stepped forward to undress him too, her eyes greedily roving his body and face as she did. He was hard already, had been so since she had straddled him downstairs, since the thrumming pull between them had finally snapped and tipped into deed, since he had felt the now-familiar yet still thrilling zip and tingle of electricity as they touched and allowed his most primal desires to come to the forefront. Touch her, taste her, love her.
Lunging forward, she kissed him again, a harsh and desperate meeting of their mouths as she dragged his trousers off, silently praising the delay in delivery that meant that the underwear that she had bought him online had still not arrived. The hard muscle and warmth of his thighs met her hand as she tugged downward at his clothes, and her fingers immediately slid back upward to cup him, to run her fingers softly up the velvety skin of the underside of his length. He juddered, his cock twitching as his breath caught in his chest at her touch and he pushed himself closer to her, his own hand coming up to grasp at the swell of her breast, her nipple skating over the dry warmth of his large palm. She ran her thumb over the head of his cock, rubbing the wet stickiness down his shaft to begin slowly and firmly stroking him. She wanted to hear every groan, every tiny exhalation of breath, every word that he uttered even if she couldn’t understand them and she pressed her forehead against his own and looked downward to watch herself pleasure him. The glistening, reddened tip of his cock was disappearing in and out of her fist as she moved and he simultaneously fucked himself gently into her hand and the warmth of his lips ghosted over her ear and neck, his breath tickling hot against her skin as he moaned her name. Suddenly she was moving backward as he crowded her against the door, the coolness of the wood at her back a sharp contrast to the heat of his body against hers.
“I love you,” he murmured in breathy, broken syllables against her skin. “Kevva, I love you.”
Before she could respond his hand was upon hers, gently moving it from him. She gave an unintentional whine at the loss of contact and the needy little noise served to quirk his lips into a brief grin before he was on his knees before her, mouthing greedily at the skin of her breast until he took her nipple into his mouth. He could feel her trembling already at the sensations his attentions had bestowed, and he slipped his fingers down over her chest, capturing her other nipple and sliding it between his fingers as he twisted his tongue at the same time. Her skin was divine, soft and smelling of sweetness and something indefinable that was purely her own. His markings on his arm and back pulsated in time with his increased heartbeat and he was extremely aware of his cock too, now neglected and swollen between his legs. But he could wait. He wanted to hear her come, wanted to tease those feelings from her with his tongue and his fingers before he slid inside of her, wanted to see her face as he made her fall apart.
His hand progressed downward, the friction of his fingertips over her torso increased by a thin sheen of sweat. Not just because he was more aroused than he remembered being in a very long time, but also due to the slight itch of nervousness still present in the back of his mind, the desire to lose himself in her pleasure warring with the fact that he had never done this with a mate before. Would it be different than what he had known? For them both? Was the act as he knew it the same for her? They had certainly begun the right way judging by how her hand was once again tangled in his hair and she was pressing him ever tighter against her breast. His fingers drifted further down her body, mindful of her ticklish spots and her navel before he stroked over the wiry curls of her mound and over the smooth expanse of her thigh. He looked up at her and found her bright, beautiful eyes trained on his, saw the waves of desire and pleasure within them.
His eyes were breathtaking, dark pits of love and lust that swallowed her whole as his tongue lapped over her nipple. It had been so long since someone other than her own self had touched her in this way, had been even longer since she felt adoration of this kind and intensity while they had. He murmured something in between kisses that smeared his saliva over her chest, between swapping one nipple for another and beginning to lavish attention there as well. She couldn’t understand him, but his hand was stroking down the muscle of her thigh and back up, goosebumps appearing upon her in its wake. She moved her feet further apart and opened up to him, more from her own unconscious desire to do so than because she thought that was what he was asking, but he hummed in gratification nonetheless and she held his gaze as she felt one thick finger breach her. The noise her body made as she accepted him would have been embarrassing if she had felt any less comfortable in his presence, if she had cared about anything else except this moment right here. She was so wet, so utterly ready for all of him and all he would give, and as he gently rocked his hand into her she gasped his name, her voice unrecogniseable to herself in its whining cadence of desperation.
She was so close already, so ready to let go and have him take care of her. A second finger joined the first and she clenched around him as he pressed deeply within her and moved over something truly wonderful, a place she herself could never reach, that so few ever had. Her orgasm was building, progressing swiftly, but in a different way than she had ever felt before. The tingling crackle between them seemed to be focused on that spot between his fingers and her, and the thought briefly flitted through her mind that he was intentionally makingthat happen before she was suddenly, unexpectedly coming around him, the syllables of his name falling from her lips as her knees shook and her body shuddered against the door. That was…not usual. Not for her. She always needed clitoral stimulation. She had come close without it on occasion, but she always needed that little push over the edge. That he had wrought this was astonishing in the best kind of way and she rested her head against the wood behind her, breathless and full of love and the embers of her glow.
He withdrew, and immediately sucked his fingers, eyes closed and lost in the decadence of experiencing her in this way. The purest nectar flowed from this woman. Her arousal was sweet and salt and opulence and he wanted to lap right from the source. The blissed out satiety on her face was everything he had dreamed and as he stood and took her hand, drew her gently to him to kiss her and shared the taste he was already insatiable for, his hot, thick cock pressed against her stomach and spread his own arousal over her skin, the slight pressure and friction of the movement providing a very brief moment of respite. He pulled her toward the bed, his mind full of visions of her spread out, a banquet, a bouquet all for him. She let him lead her, seemed a little dazed by what had just transpired and just a hint of smugness touched his lips as he spun her gently and pushed her down on to the bed. He stood over her for a moment, allowing his gaze to rake up her body and meet her eyes, where he saw the same hunger he felt reflected back at him. Before he had a chance to do anything else she sat up and kissed the tip of his cock, chastely to begin with, as chaste as such an action can be, and then…the warmth of her breath making him shiver as she slowly kissed all the way down his length and up again. A curse fell from his lips as he resisted the urge to cant his hips forward in search of that exquisite mouth and instead let her do what she would with him. Her lips, so softly sweet and now mouthing gently at the head of him, her tongue brushing feather-light licks against his cock and now travelling down, down the underside, following the ridge of a vein until -
Kevva above, he had to fight not to come there and then, and the thought of her pretty face covered in him made it decidedly more difficult to resist doing just that. The heat of her mouth had enveloped him, soft and firm and wet all at the same time and he resisted every urge in his body to move, not wanting to hurt her, not wanting to overwhelm. But she was still going, still taking him, and now he could feel himself hitting the back of her throat and the squeeze of her swallowing around him. He realised he had closed his eyes in deepest rapture and now they snapped open and he focused on her again, her eyes big and round and full of a smugness of her own at the sound of a shuddering whimper he now recognised as coming from his throat. Her hands had come to curl around his thighs, fingers digging into his flesh and she pulled him even closer, deeper, down to the root of him, her nose buried in the hair at his groin.
He couldn’t…he mustn’t…It might be too overwhelming for her…
He brought his hand to her jaw and cradled her face before gently pulling himself backward. She understood at once and released him, the slightly panicked questioning in her eyes a barb to his heart. She thought she had done something wrong when nothing could be further from the truth. He gazed at her and smiled his joy, trying to communicate without words that he just wanted to pay attention to her right now. And so he bent down and kissed her again, softly stroking the hair back from her face as he did so. He felt her relax into the kiss, felt her tension leave her once again.
She allowed him to push her gently back on to the bed and begin to manoeuvre her. First he put one leg on the mattress and then the other, and she teased him by keeping her legs together as he did so. He kissed the hard bone of her kneecaps, kissed a path down her shins until he was kneeling down again, a supplicant before her. But of course now she couldn’t see him. Unacceptable. She felt only a little shyness as she parted her legs and allowed him to see her fully, revelling in the utter devotion she could see written upon his face.
Silence.
Further silence.
A creeping doubt began to worry at her. Why was he so still? Why had he stopped touching her? She sat up a little way to take a better look, bracing herself on her elbows to do so.
Ezra had been prepared for the possibility of differences, but he hadn’t quite anticipated what he might do when actually faced with one. Her face suddenly came into view fully, embarrassed apprehension written all over her features. He didn’t want her to feel as if he didn’t desire her because quite frankly he had never been this hard in his life, with or without chemical aid. But he didn’t quite understand what he was looking at and he didn’t want to hurt her or do anything wrong. He slid his hand under one of hers and interlocked their fingers. His eyes begged her for guidance as he moved their hands, and she sat up fully, moving with the motion he was encouraging.
What was he doing? He had seemed so sure of everything just a second ago and now…But she could see the markings on his arm, swirling eddies of rainbow colour sliding over the patterns there, could see him jutting upward still thick and leaking for her. His continuing desire was evident in so many ways. So what was…ah. She had been caught out - so wrapped up in what they were doing and finally seeing all of him and having him so close and exactly where she wanted that she had totally forgotten that they were not of the same world. Even his smooth stomach wasn’t a shock anymore. It was just…Ezra. Another part of him that she loved. And everything else seemed pretty much what she was used to…even though he was blessed by any Earth standard. She sat up fully and cradled his face with her free hand, kissing him to reassure him that she understood. Or thought she did. She leant backward once again and opened herself wider to him as her hand wandered the familiar path down her body to where her clit was ready and aching, bringing him along with her.
He could feel her fingers performing a delicate, circular dance upon that part of her anatomy that was unfamiliar to him. The effect was near-instantaneous. Her breathing increased and a sighing moan escaped her as her eyes fluttered shut. He brought his hand back down to his thigh, to allow her space and the better to see what she was doing. He was fascinated - by her beauty, the slick arousal leaking from her and beginning to drip on to the bed, by the movement of her fingers, by the fact that at least one of her pleasure centres seemed to be on the outside of her body. He stared, transfixed by the sublime sight of her playing with herself and squeezed his cock hard just once, just to obtain a small measure of the same. He had an overwhelming urge…
Her pleasure spiked harshly as she felt his teeth graze the inside of her knee. The edge was welcome, needed. With him so close she wanted him to be doing this to her, wanted hismouth,hisfingers,his body. He kissed further up her thigh and bit a little more insistently as he did so. The tiny vein of pain was delicious and she uttered her own curse as she felt it seep into her body, mingling with her gratification and enhancing it, pushing her closer to the edge again.
As he began to kiss over her fingers she stilled her movement. He nudged her hand out of the way, the beautiful prominence of his nose making her shiver deliciously as it brushed over her clit. He inhaled her, breathed her in. Again. Again. Before the wet, strong heat of his tongue licked a tentative stripe where she had been touching herself and she instinctively clutched at his curls, not wanting him to go anywhere except where he already was. He made a noise of satisfaction and his tongue curled and twisted around her, mimicking the movements he had seen her make with her fingers mere seconds before. God, it was incredible. The fog of his breath against her, the hum of desire that vibrated through her core, the breach of his fingers yet again…
Kevva, this was incredible. He had tasted women here before of course, but his tongue had always worked directly in tandem with his hand inside to enhance their pleasures as his fingers brushed soft electrical impulses within them. Now it was like two different movements, but ones that still worked together seamlessly, once he had gotten the hang of it. She was helping him by rolling her hips softly, guiding him in the rhythm she wanted, her voice percolating into his consciousness and through him as she gasped out, her moans ever louder. She was close again, evidenced by the tension around his fingers, the increasing wetness decorating his mouth and chin. Her eyes were closed, her brow furrowed, one hand was in his hair and the other fisting the sheets beside her. And then-
The rush and sparks of light behind her eyes swept her through the galaxy on a wave of joy and love and intensity. Her back arched off the mattress, voice strong and powerful as she cried her pleasure to the ceiling, calling out Ezra’s name in gratitude and wonder as he worked her through. Her body was awash, every nerve ending aflame and all she could do was hang on and accept the crushing beauty of the ferocity of her body’s response to him. He was perfect. Fuck, he was everything-
Her face was seared upon him forevermore in that moment - the slight frown, the sheen of sweat on her brow, her mouth open and gasping his name over and over. And then she opened her eyes to look down at him nestled between her legs and the savage joy and desire he saw within could have seen him through a hundred lifetimes in the Glasshouse.
She had barely stopped coming before she was pulling him up and rolling in one smooth motion so he was underneath her, kissing him ferociously, tasting herself on his tongue. The overwhelming need was to be as close as she could possibly be to him, to feel him buried deep inside of her and to see his eyes spark full of ecstasy. The golden glow of her orgasm was still thrumming through her, already combining with another wave of impossible exhilaration - feeling the coarse hair at his thighs rubbing against the softness of hers, his thumb back at her nipple, the thick heft of his cock underneath her, wet with a combination of her saliva and their arousal, the thrumming tingle between them, it all came together to pool in the pit of her stomach in a series of sharp jolts, and she briefly wondered if she had stopped coming - if somehow his presence had prolonged her pleasure, coaxing it out over time. She needed him. Now.
She grasped his cock and positioned herself over it. The dual sensations of seeing her head thrown back in pleasure, her mouth falling open at feeling him breach her, along with the grip of her slick, tight heat around him was too much. He was barely sheathed inside when he felt his back crackle, the tension and warmth and bliss travelling down his spine and tightening before he was swelling, growing larger within and pulsing as he filled her. Ragged, desperate groans of her name accompanied his orgasm and he sat up to kiss his way over her chest and neck and lips and -
Something was wrong. Emotions heightened as they were between them at this moment, he could feel it seeping from her, though she was doing her best to conceal it. A touch of disappointment. Mixed with a little pity. Bitter emotions that made him draw back, look at her in puzzlement. Was this not what she had been expecting? Had he done something wrong? His aural translator had been of less use in the face of the communication they had established, but it seemed had been quietly picking up more and more of her language, adapting to the greater reams of speech that had flowed between them because he understood her next whispered words very well.
“I love you Ezra. Its okay. Its a lot for me too.”
What did she mean? It was overwhelming, yes. But in the best possible way. Did she want him to stop? Did she -
His thoughts were arrested by the feeling of her soft lips upon his, her tongue gently probing into his mouth. All else was wiped from his mind as he responded. Her hips canted forward, still seeking him, still wanting, and now he could feel her desire too. He thrust upward gently, a tentative movement to ensure that this was indeed still what she wanted. She moaned softly into his mouth and he moved more strongly, a little faster. She drew back a little to look at him and the amazement and creeping astonished joy on her face was the most magnificent thing he had ever seen.
“Are you…can you keep going? After you’ve already…” she asked, an awed tremor to her voice.
Ezra raised an eyebrow and smirked against her lips as he crushed them to his. Well…apparently here was a very interesting distinction. One he intended to take full advantage of.
His hand slid around her waist and up her back as he began to fuck up into her and she did not have words for how good he felt. She hadn’t minded when he had come so quickly - after all he had made her come twice and she had teased him with her mouth and hands, and God knows how long it had been for him…But it seemed as though his refractory period either didn’t exist, or extended past one orgasm. Either way, he was here, with her, all around her - her hands tangled in his hair, his teeth biting gently at her jaw and earlobe and the pulse in her neck as they established their rhythm together and fuck if that wasn’t the best fucking feeling in the whole universe. Him sliding within her, passing over that point deep inside where sensation coalesced, grew to be something huge and overpowering and he wasn’t stopping, wasn’t allowing her a single moment to breathe or appraise the situation, his love and his scent and his strength surrounded her to reach deep inside and pull the most primal feelings from her. She moaned his name against his cheek in a sloppy kiss, the sound almost a growl as she kicked up her rhythm, her body responding to his desperately and greedily
He felt her clench around him, her body taut as her pleasure peaked and he worked her through it, felt the ripples of her orgasm as her body tried to pull him deeper inside. He carefully flipped her over so that she was underneath him, breathless, glassy eyed, exhausted and the most gorgeous vision he had ever had the privilege of witnessing. He rolled his hips into her and she held on to his shoulders, somehow simultaneously clinging to him and helping to hold him up above her. Her legs were hooked over his and she met him thrust for thrust. Insatiable. Beautiful. His. He looked down at where their bodies met, transfixed by the sight of himself disappearing into her over and over, his cock emerging slicker with every stroke, the hair at his groin messily beautiful with her. He wanted to go slow, wanted it to never, ever end but his body was so demanding, so covetous of hers and he could already feel his spine begin to tingle once more.
He glanced up and even though her head was tilted back he could see the wonderment upon her face and the love he felt for her surged through him again. His muscles and tendons and bones and skin were on fire - electricity crackling through him and burning to nothing everything that had been so terrible in his life in its wake. There was her, only her and she was with him and around him and in him, and Kevva almighty he had never felt as saturated with pleasure as he was at this moment. He kissed over the ruddy flush on her chest before pressing his mouth to her nipple, and her gasp of delight and the rocking of her hips against him tore a guttural, hoarse cry from deep within his chest as he pushed himself deeply into her over and over, again and again.
She felt him come again and he burned so bright in her mind and in her body…her body…it seemed to respond directly to him now. There were no thoughts from her, no direction or commands she could issue. She came with him, a final gentle crowning of pleasure from her exhausted body, as if he had demanded her satisfaction descend from whatever gods were in the heavens. His back was flaring - electric blue along the curve of his spine and bright, bright white from his markings. They formed a galaxy on her ceiling, the stars themselves come to witness their love and give their blessing. She was so full of him, in every way. In her mind and her eyes and her hands and her heart she was full of him. He leant on to his elbow, half collapsed on top of her, and she kissed his brow, little caring that he was as sweaty and breathless as she.
He gazed down at her with purest adoration, still surrounded by her, as deeply buried within the divinity of her body as she was within his heart. She. His eternal life and love.
Starman Chapter Fourteen. Whewwww it has been a journey my friends. And we are starting to see the glimmers of the end. Warnings for patriarchal nonsense and gross sexism and misogyny, murder, incarceration, self harm, one mention of abortion, one mention of rapists, one mention of cannibalism, one mention of torture, extreme age gap marriage and subsequent pregnancy, death, some religious discussion.
I cannot put into words how in love I am with this work of yours. It’s absolutely incredible, the depth of Ezra’s backstory is astounding, the way you describe everything? I can see it, smell it, hear the cries of his cell mates. I BOW TO YOU AND YOUR GLORIOUS FIC.
Thank you so much I’m so glad you found your way to this fic and are enjoying it so much!
Starman Chapter Fourteen. Whewwww it has been a journey my friends. And we are starting to see the glimmers of the end. Warnings for patriarchal nonsense and gross sexism and misogyny, murder, incarceration, self harm, one mention of abortion, one mention of rapists, one mention of cannibalism, one mention of torture, extreme age gap marriage and subsequent pregnancy, death, some religious discussion.
Starman Chapter Fourteen. Whewwww it has been a journey my friends. And we are starting to see the glimmers of the end. Warnings for patriarchal nonsense and gross sexism and misogyny, murder, incarceration, self harm, one mention of abortion, one mention of rapists, one mention of cannibalism, one mention of torture, extreme age gap marriage and subsequent pregnancy, death, some religious discussion.
Word count: 6.8k
Starman
Chapter Fourteen
Starman
Bold, bright midday sunlight streamed through the room, illuminating it in shades of decadent golden honey and cream. Several windows had been thrown open, welcoming the salt-tanged, whispering breeze that was coming from the ocean and causing the curtains to softly undulate as it caught them. He could hear birdsong over the faint background noise of the waves - an arpeggio of startling beauty and delightful simplicity from the unseen creature. Ezra was settled on the sofa once again, and this time he was surrounded by her - his back pressed against her front, her legs caging him either side, one of her calves draped lazily over his knee and the other a support for his arm. She was playing with his hair, her fingers running softly through his curls, causing him to hum in pleasure and lean back to get closer to her touch. It was a still moment of peace and serenity and love and absolutely everything Ezra had ever wanted.
Despite this idyll, he could feel the tendrils of anxiety and restlessness snaking themselves through him. He was apprehensive for several reasons, not least at the thought of what was to come after he had told her everything he had to. After he had departed the Glasshouse he had slept with a few people here and there - faceless individuals that he buried himself into to in an attempt to dull the sharp pain of Rien’s rejection and departure and to try to feel something, anything other than the relentless downtrodden misery that the Glasshouse had sunk into his soul. He had felt no connection with any of them at all. They were a means to an end, a shallow sating of a hunger that ran incredibly deep and could not begin to be addressed by casual sex. But being with her here and now…he wanted her so badly - to feel every part of her, to kiss her all over and make her feel like the most loved being in the entire universe. She wanted him too, he knew that for a certainty now and was relieved about it. But that made it that much more difficult to resist her. And resist he must for the time being. He couldn’t bear the thought of her rejecting him once she knew the whole sorry tale, and the closer they got the more unbearable the prospect of that potential rejection became.
“Its your home too you know.”
Her voice broke into his thoughts and he looked down at the translator he had on his lap.
“Pardon me?” he asked, feeling as if he had come in partway through a conversation.
She pulled him back against her a little tighter and he felt her breasts push against his upper back as he lay flush against her chest. Her chin was resting lightly on his shoulder, her cheek brushing the side of his neck and her arms came to encircle him around his stomach as she spoke again.
“Before. On the beach. You said we should come back to "my home”. Its your home now too.“
He heard the warmth of the smile in her voice as she openly verbalised the welcome he had felt since the very moment he had set foot inside her little house and he closed his eyes and bit his lip against the happy yet still trepidatious tears that threatened to fall. Home. He hadn’t had one since he was a child. Not really. Rien had felt like home for a long time, but there had not been a physical place where he could feel that acceptance and warmth and love for…well, decades. Yet he did feel it here. From her and from Dog in his blanket-strewn bed and from the very bones of the building. It was as if she had suffused herself into the spirit of this place, and he was only too glad to be welcomed into its embrace.
"My life. My love,” he said, a little querulously. “Thank you. It means more to me than you can ever know to hear that.”
She nuzzled her nose softly against his ear before whispering the words he had come to recognise in her language without the aid of the translator. “I love you.”
His chest burned with the cascading feelings at her touch, her words, her proximity and he snuggled himself back against her even more, not wanting there to be a breath of air between them, wanting to be as close to her as he could possibly be. He leaned his head back and felt her mouth trail from his ear, across his cheek to capture his lips with hers. She murmured something against him and for a moment he couldn’t bring himself to look at the translator, hazily drunk on adoration of her as he was. After what felt like several glorious minutes he glanced down to see her question.
“Do you feel ready to talk?” Her tone wasn’t pushy, wasn’t demanding. It was an opening, an invitation to begin what he had insisted he needed to. She wanted to make it as easy for him as possible to get through this. Still, reluctance warred with cold dread within his stomach and he had to force himself to nod softly, rubbing his nose against hers as he did. She kissed him again, and stroked his hair as she looked with purest kindness and love into his eyes. What he had to say was at total odds with his current situation and he didn’t know how to go about it without spoiling the mood between him. She could see his hesitation and brought his hand to her lips to kiss over the back of it and over his fingers. “Your pace, Ezra,” she murmured, echoing his own words back to him. “We don’t have to do this now if you don’t want to.”
It was this more than anything that spurred him on. He couldn’t bear to have it hanging over him, over them any longer. He brought his knees up a little higher to his chest and rested the translator against them so she could see his words more easily as he spoke. He took a deep breath and began.
“The Glasshouse was the most notorious prison in all of the seven systems. Once a moon of staggering natural resources, it had been all but hollowed out over the course of a long-ago century and its shell used to encase those considered the lowest of the low throughout all of the allied planets - political deviants and scholars that insisted that the society that was presented was by no means the only one that could exist, fraudsters and embezzlers, scientists who promised cures for the widespread fertility problems and failed to deliver alongside those who looked like they might actually put forward a viable solution and upset the status quo, providers and seekers of abortions-”
He could hear the puzzled frown in her voice when she asked her question. “What about those who committed violence? Murderers and the like?”
“Oh they abounded within the walls too. The very worst of the worst. Mass killers, serial rapists, there were even rumours of those who had resorted to cannibalism to avoid starvation and had retained their taste for the flesh of their own kind even when other food was freely available. Violent crimes were generally only punished to the degree of the Glasshouse if they affected the higher orders in some way. Or if the numbers or state of their victims were so outside the bounds of what the highers considered "normal” among the lowers as to be unable to be ignored. Some poor unfortunates had committed petty crimes only, but had been made an example of. Still more had been thrown in there for reasons unknown and left to rot, forgotten about and left to die by the decree of those with more influence and money than they. My people, almost all of them regardless of status, have the ability to sense thoughts and feelings. It tends to be a two way connection among mates in most instances, but in a place like that where the despair and grief and devastation is emanating from every living thing within its sphere, you can feel it. All of it. Every single moment of the day. The deprivation of the body is nothing compared to the assault upon the mind and spirit. It….I….“ He broke off, and drew in a shaky breath. Her arms tightened around him, bringing him back to the moment and reassuring him with her very presence.
"If its too much-” she began.
“No!” he exclaimed, more forcefully than he had intended. “No,” he repeated more softly. “I need to do this. And with you here, I know I can do just that.”
He felt her nod of encouragement and acceptance. “Just know you can stop if you need to.” Ezra exhaled deeply and resumed.
The cell he had been imprisoned in was basic in the extreme. A thin mattress on the floor with a thinner blanket on top of it. A bucket for his body’s needs. All else were walls of white translucence - above, below and on all sides. The cubes of the cells were stacked, one on top of the other, one in front of the other, in a seemingly neverending formation that was only broken up by the narrowest of paths between them that allowed the mechanoid guards to patrol all day, every day, and deliver the occasional sustenance to the prisoners. Nothing was soundproofed and the howls of rage and madness and despair echoed throughout the hollow moon constantly, a white noise of anguish to assault the mind. Ezra could see shapes through the semi-transparency of the walls - the unceasing pacing of the person in the cube above, the writhing, twisting madness of the captive to his left as they hurled themselves fruitlessly against the reinforced walls. Sometimes they would make themselves bleed - headbutting the wall until a spray of red would erupt and the guards would attend, binding the prisoner for days at a time until they quieted sufficiently to be released. That neighbour was still more preferable to the one on the right who did nothing but weep. Day after day, hour after hour they would howl and sob and snuffle until Ezra wondered how they didn’t die of dehydration. He shouted at them once, yelling at them to cease, to desist, to shut the FUCK up for once, adding his voice to the cacophony of insanity that pervaded the prison. He screamed at them until his voice gave out and he swore he could taste blood. But when his frustration and rage ebbed into exhaustion, the pitiful noises remained. It hadn’t made him feel any better, nor had it made a jot of difference to the situation except to add to the swirling eddies of fear and pain and lunacy that came from every cell and coalesced to the oppression and animosity and anguish that soaked every atom of this place. He had curled up under his blanket and shed his own tears then, his heart breaking in the face of utter despair.
Time meant nothing within the Glasshouse. The lights were harsh and permanently on and emanated from each side of his cubed cell. There was never a moment of peace or quiet. Meal times were intermittent, he suspected that they did not even occur daily. He tried to mark time by monitoring the patrols, but they were so frequent as to be meaningless. He was forever watched, forever surrounded and yet forever alone. After a time he began to understand the incessant pacing, the headbutting. They just wanted to feel something and he too needed to know that he still existed and that what he was experiencing was real and tangible. It first became an escape, then a habit and then pure necessity to retreat into his mind, to reject his current circumstances and relieve his happiest times with Rien. He slept more frequently than he needed to and ate less frequently than he ought, not wanting to engage with this reality if it was all he was ever to know again.
And then, at some undefinable time after his incarceration, Ezra had a visitor.
He awoke to a new sound, a different kind of pounding than the one from his boisterous neighbour. It sounded almost like…knocking. Ezra pulled the thin, stinking blanket away from his face and squinted against the harshness of the light coming from all around. He sat up and blinked rapidly at the scene in front of him, trying to make sense of what his eyes were observing. The front of his cube, the side through which he could usually see the shadowy figures of his jailers and through which he received sustenance and empty buckets, was now somehow fully transparent. Standing there, flanked by two mechanoids and looking calmer than he had ever seen him before, was his Uncle. Ezra rubbed his eyes and shook his head, trying to dislodge the unwelcome vision that had no doubt been engendered by the deprivation of his body and the constant overstimulation of his mind. He was going mad. There was no other explanation for what he could see. His Uncle smirked unpleasantly.
“I see you’re finally with the rats you were so desperate to betray us for,” he said smugly. Ezra said nothing, but stood on wobbly legs and made his way shakily over to the now-clear side of his cube, placing his hands on the reinforced polycarbonate sheet to steady himself mentally as well as physically. His Uncle correctly interpreted the look on his face. “You are not mad. At least not yet. I truly do stand before you.”
“Why?” croaked Ezra, his voice hoarse and rusty from disuse.
“To see you getting what you deserve,” his Uncle said bluntly. “And to give you what news I can of the outcome of your actions. You failed, boy. Your ridiculous uprising failed. And we know all about your theft and fraud. Stealing from your parents is one thing, but from me? You really thought you could get away with it?!”
Ezra half smiled at his Uncle. “Have you come to kill me for that?”
His Uncle huffed a noise of disgruntlement. “No. Much as I would take pleasure in such an act, you will suffer far more through your incarceration. And if I am completely honest, there is a part of me that admires the rapacious audacity of thieving from me right under my nose. You really did grow some balls while you were away. I recouped my losses in part from your parents’ anyway-”
“You’d beggar your own sister?” Ezra said disbelievingly.
“Nothing I do is any of your business, boy,” his Uncle growled. “But that she birthed an insolent, disgusting whelp like you means some part of her is clearly deficient and the more I can distance myself from her the better. Besides,” and here he bestowed a quite hideous grin upon Ezra, “I have recently come into a much larger sum than your parents could claim even before their reparations to me.”
Ezra stayed silent, watching the slightly mad glint in his uncle’s eyes. He still couldn’t quite work out why he was here. To gloat, to rub Ezra’s face in it, yes. But he wouldn’t have made the trip here to this horrific place just for that. There had to be more to it. “Your little wife, boy,” his uncle whispered, and Ezra turned cold at his tone. “She is alive and very well.” A surge of relief flowed through Ezra and he let go of an anxiety he hadn’t even realised he had been holding on to. One less bloodstain on his hands. Even though Rien had been the one to strike her, he had felt more than partially responsible for what had transpired. This time, his uncle mistook his expression. “Don’t think it will lessen the charges against you once you come to trial,” he lectured. “Murder might have been excused, had she not been a higher and fertile. But the fraud! The embezzlement! Those are unpardonable.”
“Is she…well?” Ezra asked hesitantly. He hoped there had been no lasting damage from her head injury and while he agreed with Rien’s assessment that she was part of the problem he still couldn’t rid himself of the feeling that she didn’t deserve the heartache they had dealt out. She was a pawn in the game, much as he had been once upon a time. For all the terrible things she might conceivably do in the future with her wealth and influence, that she was part of the madness of the upper echelons of society was not something she could help and he felt that she shouldn’t be punished before she had actually done anything wrong.
“She is better than well” his Uncle said, and Ezra noted that a lecherous tone had joined the smugness in his voice. “She is pregnant.” Ezra’s mind whirled. How long had he been in here that she could marry again and be with child? Months, then, for a certainty. His Uncle was talking again and he tuned back into his words. “After the…unfortunate…death of my last wife I now have a new one. And I suppose have you to thank” he sneered. Ezra’s skin goosepimpled with disgust. Surely not. Even he couldn’t be that vile. “She was spoiled goods,” his Uncle went on. “No one would accept her even though it was demonstrably proven that you had never had her. None of the respectable families wanted to be associated with the stink of your treachery. So I took her in, poor thing. Her father was really rather grateful to me. And now she’s been successfully bred by a real man instead of some whimpering, simpering upstart.”
Despite the lack of food in his stomach, Ezra found himself wanting to vomit. That poor girl. A pawn indeed. “I bet she wishes she WAS dead.” The words were out of his mouth before he could stop them and he braced himself for his Uncle to rage, to shout, to order the mechanoid guards to beat him to within an inch of his life. The predatory smile his Uncle gave him was somehow worse and far more worrying.
“There are some creatures in life that need to be taken care of. Those that crave structure and the guidance of someone stronger than they being in charge and leading their way. My wife is one such person, though all women fall into that category I have found. But you are also that kind of weakling, boy. And speaking of needing to be led, aren’t you going to ask about your "valet”? Hmm? Don’t you wonder what happened to the man you betrayed your kin for? Who tried to abandon you to take the fall?“
At the mention of Rien, Ezra felt as if he had taken a punch to the gut. The swirling guilt and sorrow and pain in his body was suffocating, refusing to allow him to draw a breath in. His Uncle could see the effect of his words and that triumphant little smirk that Ezra had the overwhelming desire to smack off his face returned. Indecision warred within him. He desperately wanted to know of Rien’s whereabouts, of course. But if his Uncle knew then that meant…that meant….Ezra closed his eyes against the myriad of terrible ends that Rien could have come to. The need to know gnawed at him, burrowed into the very marrow of his bones and the words burst out of him before he could stop them. "What of him?”
Silence met the question and Ezra opened his eyes to see that same smirk upon his Uncle’s face. His eyes were lit by self satisfaction and Ezra knew he had made a terrible mistake by showing his hand, by revealing that he truly had cared about Rien. Icy panic gripped his guts once more.
“The thing about you, Ezra, is that you never learn,” his Uncle declared softly. Ezra was shocked. Not so much by what sounded very much like the beginnings of a lecture, but by the use of his name. He could not recall his Uncle ever using it before and the surprise of hearing it knocked his mind back into sharp wakefulness. He still didn’t know what game his Uncle was playing, but he was suddenly very aware that he was walking a knife edge. That things could potentially get worse for him, worse even than incarceration in the Glasshouse. His Uncle spoke again, still in that same measured soft tone. “There is no real right or wrong. Those concepts are so subjective as to be meaningless. There are, however, opportunities. And if you choose not to take advantage of them when they present themselves then you will lose. Every time. I am here to offer you such an opportunity.”
He could feel his mouth fall open, stood stupidly agape at his Uncle. An opportunity? From the person he despised above all others? From the person who had gotten him imprisoned in this hellhole in the first place? His anger flared, gathering the tatters of his broken pride within him and making it shining and whole for just a few brief moments. A few moments where he truly felt like Ezra van Ione once more. He drew himself up to his full height, the effect spoiled slightly by the way he swayed on the spot from dizziness caused by lack of sustenance. “You set me up to ask about my valet, yet never had any intention to furnish me with information. All you do, you do for your own gain and I do not trust you. I have never trusted you. I refuse your "opportunity”.“
Ezra pushed himself heavily away from the clear side of his cell and began to walk slowly back to his mattress on the floor. He could hear the nasty smile in his Uncle’s voice as he replied. "You see? Before I even set the terms of the deal you refuse to hear me, you refuse this opportunity to better your circumstances and your surroundings. I would say I’m disappointed, but I really couldn’t give a kooka crap about you, boy. I knew you would react this way. You are too stupid to do otherwise.” Ezra half collapsed on to his bedroll, hugging his knees against himself and pointedly staring at the wall away from his Uncle. He heard footsteps and the familiar whirring and clanking that accompanied the movements of the mechanoids before his Uncle spoke again, this time with a streak of cold anger touching his words. “You really have learned nothing. Tell me, has it never struck you as odd that somehow everything is always someone else’s fault? Your parents, me, your wife, your lover? Its never down to you is it? No matter. A little more time here will teach you your new place in the world, will have you desperate to hear my voice again. But who knows if you will survive to do so?”
It could have been weeks, it could have been months. The crier to his right became silent one day and a while after that Ezra could see the mechanoids dragging something out of the cell before a new inmate was shoved in there. This one was a talker. Desperate, hushed pleas reached Ezra’s ears, begging for him, for someone, for anyone to reply, to make them not feel so alone. Ezra could not make himself respond. They were all alone in here, and he doubted this person would have anything of interest for him to hear. When they got no replies from the cells around they began to shout their innocence to the world at large, defiantly and confidently stating that they would soon be free, that it was all a terrible mistake, that they couldn’t keep them here forever. The weeping started up again not long after that, and Ezra felt oddly comforted by the familiar noise, even as the part of himself that still clung to sanity felt disgusted at his reactions. He had to get out of here, he knew. Else he would surely die in madness and sorrow like everyone else here. He had to take whatever opportunity his Uncle could present. And so when he returned, Ezra listened.
He listened to the bragging about how his Uncle knew he could break him, how weak Ezra was, how foolish, how he would die in poverty and pain within the Glasshouse or without and how his Uncle would take the greatest of pleasure in that knowledge and even more that he had been the cause of the just retribution. He listened to how his Uncle had lied to his parents - how he had informed them that Ezra had died in the failed uprising in the wharves and how his body had been desecrated as a traitor’s ought to be before it had been flung into the sea to rot and bloat. He managed to keep his face carefully impassive as his Uncle finally revealed that they had caught up with Rien at the spaceport, had tortured him most hideously before his public execution, how he himself had looked into his eyes and seen nothing but fear and cowardice.
“As all of his ilk are craven,” his Uncle concluded, sniffily. “As you are too, boy. If ever my son were to behave as you have, I would kill him myself.”
Ezra felt the bile of rage reaching up his gullet and swallowed hard in a mouth made sore from dehydration. He kept his gaze carefully lowered as he replied in a soft, bland tone. “What of this opportunity you spoke of?”
“You can be free of this place, boy.” His Uncle’s words startled him and Ezra looked up hurriedly in disbelief. His Uncle’s impassive face stared back at him, revealing nothing. “I can have you out of here in moments,” he continued pulling a sheaf of official looking documents from within his longcoat pocket. “All you have to do is agree to three terms and sign here to that effect.”
“And what are these terms?” Ezra asked, weariness warring with wariness in his voice.
“One, that you relinquish all claim to money, valuables and property held by the family as well as your family name. Two, that you never again attempt to contact or see any member of your family. I have told them you are dead and you will be dead to them in every conceivable way. Only I shall know the truth and believe me when I say that I have no desire to be associated with you by blood or any other means.”
“Those terms are acceptable,” said Ezra in a small, tight voice. It was better that his family believed him dead. With the uprising finished before it had ever really started, there was no way he would ever be accepted by them again anyway. Those bridges had been well and truly destroyed. “What is your last condition?”
“That you work for me,” his Uncle replied, that smirk reappearing on his face. “I understand that you spent some time in the Pierpoint mines before you crawled back to your mother? Oh yes, I dug into your story, boy. And given that my pockets are far deeper than your own, I was able to procure the truth with little difficulty. A new substance has been discovered on a couple of far off moons in the furthest reaches of the seven systems. Aurelac. It is by all accounts incredibly difficult to obtain and thus much sought after and extremely valuable. You will be my own personal prospector. Everything, and I mean everything you procure shall be given over to me. In return I shall furnish you with transport, tools, anything you could possibly need to locate and extract this material, alongside food, clothing, and medical supplies. You shall receive no monetary recompense for obvious reasons. And you can live out your miserable chosen existence out of the way and out of trouble while working to pay me back for everything you ever took. Alternatively you can stay here to lose your mind and lose your life within these walls. It is entirely up to you.”
“I agree,” Ezra whispered as soon as his Uncle ceased speaking. “I agree to your terms and I shall sign your papers.”
“I thought you might,” his Uncle crowed, thrusting the documents into the hands of one of the mechanoid guards and striding away, triumphant.
Ezra closed his eyes and inhaled a deep breath, once more grounding himself in the heady mix of the sea breeze and her scent as she clutched him a little tighter against her and murmured into his ear, her voice broken by sorrow for him. “You did not deserve this. Any of it. You are a good man, Ezra and you did not deserve what happened to you.”
“I feel I did, little bird,” he countered. “I stole from people - their lives, their hope through my falsehoods. Perhaps my penance was just.”
She shook her head. “I cannot bring myself to agree. The man that you are now…I cannot imagine you ever deserving such a thing.”
“I had to go through this to become the man I am now,” he reminded her gently. “And I would not change a moment because all led me here. To you. And Kevva knows I could endure the same a thousand times over if I knew you were awaiting me at the end of my ordeal.”
She kissed the shell of his ear and nuzzled her face softly against his. “I will always be here, my love,” she replied, her voice deep and truthful. They sat in contented peace for a few moments, each feeling the heat of the other’s love emanating from their very souls. Then she spoke again. “I have to ask - and its something I’ve meant to ask before and never found a good time to - but what does that mean?” She pointed at the screen to where he had mentioned Kevva’s name. “It comes up as "translation unavailable” every time you say it.“
"It is the name of a deity where I am from…the deity really, though some believe in multiple gods and others believe in none. I myself lean toward the latter, though since our encounter I have begun to question whether in fact divine intervention played a part in what appears to be our fated meeting. Kevva.” He over pronounced the last word so that she could replicate it.
“Keh-vah,"she enunciated back to him, the vowels sounding harsh and clipped in her accent.
He smiled at the sound of his language from her tongue and kissed over the back of her hand before continuing. "I spoke to Kevva many times over the years that followed. Sometimes to pray, more often to curse. My Uncle was as good as his word, which surprised me in all honesty. I had expected to be deposited on a faraway moon and left to die and yet still found that idea preferable to the one of perishing within the Glasshouse. I suppose I should not have underestimated the depths of his greed. I was duly provided with the basic materials to perform my prospecting and mining and to survive whilst doing so, but little else. I sent back everything I was able to extract as instructed and found a measure of peace that I had been missing for many years. Life was hard, yes - backbreaking work and strict rations and working in all weathers. But I was alone and I found myself beginning to take joy in the peace that brought. When my outward functions were repetitive and predictable it allowed me to think my own thoughts without intrusion, begin to build myself back up from the mess of my previous life. Aurelac was only found within forested terrain and the greenery too helped to soothe my soul, bring me back to myself. Or the new version of myself that I began to embrace, away from the trappings of my family and all the destruction both they and I had wrought. It couldn’t last. Peace seldom does. Soon there was an influx, a great avalanche of prospectors all wishing to mine as I did. Intitally there was enough space that we did not encroach on each other’s operations. But there is always someone who wants something for nothing, and very soon brigands discovered that they could just as easily kill and rob those who had actually laboured for the gems and achieve the same wealth with minimal effort. I suppose it was the circle of consequence coming back to me, after all I had done much the same to others in my younger days. My uncle began to send the occasional hired "companion” - they were there to protect his aurelac of course, and once more I found myself a killer, this time to protect that which was most precious to me - my freedom.“
He shifted, turning so that he was facing her instead and clasped her hand again as he began to resume his story, slipping his fingers between hers and squeezing gently. "It was then that I met Cee. An accidental encounter, partially similar to our own now that I think on it. At this time I was travelling with a hulking brute who referred to himself only as "Number Two”. While he was extremely blessed with strength and stamina, he was less gifted with common sense and he managed to fry the compressors in our ship-to-moon transport as we landed on a place known only as The Green. We began to think we were stuck until we came across another prospector - Damon. I could tell he was contemptible as soon as I laid eyes on him and he proved my gut correct when he tried to rob us of our entire harvest with his daughter - Cee - as his backup. Number Two shot him, and Damon shot right back. Only Damon’s aim was truer and Number Two died immediately. I put Cee’s father out of his misery - he would have gone slowly and painfully had I not intervened. The girl didn’t see it that way, unsurprisingly. Perhaps I should have been somewhat kinder and performed the mercy when she was not present, but I allowed my anger at Damon’s actions to get the better of me. When I tried to commandeer Cee’s own lander to get us off the moon she shot me in my arm. Right in the meat of the bicep. I attempted to treat it, but the air on that particular moon was so noxious that the flesh surrounding the wound began to die almost immediately. She took me prisoner and during that time we got to know each other she and I. It had been a long time since I had met someone so self possessed and smart. She needed someone to protect her from the darker face of the seven systems - something her father seemed to have been incredibly bad at - and I needed someone to show me that it wasn’t pointless to strive for dreams and goodness and to be better, though I didn’t realise that at first. She helped me to be less cynical, allowed me to be softer without it feeling like failing.“
She reached for his face and stroked the small smile that had appeared there, mirroring it with one of her own. "Its wonderful when that happens isn’t it?” she asked meaningfully and his face split into a true grin as he took her implication.
“It is decidedly so, my love. If I have given you that gift as it was given to me, I can ask for no greater joy.” He kissed her fingers softly before continuing. “As I believe I mentioned before, she saved my life when she took my arm. We escaped that Kevva-forsaken place and went out into the seven systems. She was already well on her way to knowing how to prospect and mine, but I taught her all I knew and she soon surpassed the skill I had possessed with both arms. But the aurelac was drying up, supply was becoming more and more limited, and I was no longer at peace with the notion of dying in the course of fulfilling the contract with my Uncle. I had Cee to think of now, I had her to take care of. There had never been any caveats within the contract I had signed with regards to this particular turn of events. Either my Uncle had assumed the aurelac would not run out, or he had thought I would die before it did. Regardless, I had no choice but to break the terms I had agreed upon. Cee and I roamed, we travelled far and wide attempting to keep our heads above water. But eventually, inevitably, the darkness caught up with us. We ended up on a planet called Padorix - a dustbowl that was rumoured to contain precious ore in abundance. We were just desperate enough to chase these whispers, and of course it came to nothing. We had worked all night and as she fell asleep by the light of the dawn’s first rays I suddenly realised what I had to do. It all became so…simple. The next time we made planetfall somewhere with a big enough settlement, I contacted my parents, and that evening I visited a pharmacy and reverted to my old ways. I drugged Cee and then I went home for the last time. On this occasion I was apprehended and arrested the instant the ship landed - my uncle’s paid thugs physically held me as Cee was turned over to my parents at their insistence. I had told them that she was my daughter you see. And they so desperately wanted to believe it was true that they demanded they take custody of her. It was the only time I had ever seen my mother stand up to her brother and the only time I ever saw my father take her side over his. I was so proud of them in that moment. And after that my last incarceration, my trial and conviction, my encasement in that pod that was supposed to be my eternal resting place. And then you my love. All I could ever want or need. My life eternal.”
She shifted forward so she was on her knees beside his seated form. “And then you, my love,” she echoed. “You may not need to hear this, but I need to say it nonetheless. Nothing you have told me has changed my feelings about you in a negative way .In fact, I have so much admiration for your tenacity and your ability to put yourself back together after you were broken in so many ways. I love you. I love the man you are. And all of those things your Uncle said - you know they aren’t true, don’t you? You are strong, and brave, and intelligent and wonderful. And you overcame everything. Every heartbreak. Every cruelty. And I’m so glad that you did and that you found me. In the whole universe, you found me.”
“I feel that you found me, little bird,” he replied softly. “Somehow you called to me across the stars and I was drawn to you. You welcomed me into your home, your life, with open arms and I am so grateful that you did. Thank Kevva above that you are so generous, so kind, and so wild of spirit that you took a chance on a half drowned, half starved man.”
She leaned forward and pressed her lips softly against his. “How could I do anything else?” she murmured. “When you inspire such feelings in me that I thought were dead and gone?” Her kiss deepened, he could feel how desperately she wanted to know him, to share him, and that same desperation clawed at his heart as he slipped his hand under her clothes to brush against the soft, bare skin of her back. She immediately straddled him, pressing her body against his strongly, almost aggressively with how firmly she was moving. Her mouth never left his, her kisses bruising in their intensity and he felt himself begin to harden as he felt the heat of her over him even through their clothes.
She drew back, her mouth swollen with kisses she had given and those yet to come and her eyes were more fiery and more etherally beautiful than a supernova as she suddenly stood, pulling him up with her by the hand as she led him from the room.
I have nothing to say except that normal service will be resumed next week. And that I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m not a biochemist and my biology education stopped age 16 so forgive any inaccuracies. I have tried to use inclusive language gender-wise.
I also owe nods to both Terry Pratchett and The Walking Dead. And probably a whole host of other things since I am a total hoor for horror and science fiction and the combination of the two.
Warnings for murder, gore, blood, human experimentation, vast discussions of pregnancy and conception, miscarriage, religion, a mention of religious based transphobia and bioessentialism, periods, sperm (but not in a sexy way), non specific mention of rape, suicide.
Word count: 7.8k
Starman
Chapter Sixteen
Professor Caoimhe Alarie
“I don’t…I don’t really know what to say. A lifetime of presentations and speeches and demonstrations, but I can never seem to find the right words for my own private journal. Why to make one at all? I suppose its another tentative reach of hope - that one day future generations will look back on these recordings and at least begin to have an understanding of where they came from. Or perhaps it is arrogance and sheer hubris that makes me think that there will be future generations at all. Who can know? We are so close, so close in so many ways, and yet on days like today I fear that we are still as far from a solution as we have ever been.
This vessel is both a refuge and a dream. An ark, as Caleb so quaintly puts it. He had to explain the reference to us all. I still don’t understand why he delves so deeply into those old philosophical texts, but if that is what brings him comfort during this madness then who am I to judge? Our many gardens are fruitful and the horizons bright - scans show a system mere months away that looks extremely promising. There is one large moon in particular where all signs point to functioning biosystems that we can integrate with. Its associated planet is less hospitable, but terraforming should be possible once we have established ourselves more fully. I just hope that we can land safely and decant in peace. The children that have been born thus far are as happy and healthy as one can expect given that they have never experienced anything other than artificial gravity. They play and learn and we are instilling the importance of our mission and their parts in it. I myself try to devote some time to teaching them. Not biochemistry oddly enough, but languages - I am the only Irish speaker on board, and along with Mssr. Durand I ensure that they know their French too! I want the children to be exposed to as much of the culture of where we came from as possible. I am not alone in this desire, and we are very lucky to have such a diverse team. The children are also picking up Japanese, Igbo, Finnish, Arabic, Mandarin and Spanish from some of the others on board. This too is a kind of preservation.
One of the nurseries is already full again - the shorter gestation experiment seems to have been an overall success, though the rate of parental mortality was unacceptably high in my opinion. Perhaps if we fall back on attempting replication of those results in the Genetic And In-Vitro Alteration tanks only we could save more lives. Though I am aware of a division growing amongst those who were grown in utero and those who came from GAIA. We cannot afford this rift. When we land, we must work together if we are to survive. If we cannot, perhaps we really have learned nothing from this mission. Perhaps we deserve-
No, I cannot think that way. Of everyone on board this ship, I cannot think that way. I desperately wish we could have retained communications with the other…arks…out there. Impossible of course. The whole point of them, of us, is to spread as far through the galaxy as possible. To give us the best chance of survival. But it hurts…the emptiness of simply not knowing how they have fared. And of the certainty that we shall never know of their fate.
The next nurseries have been prepared and are ready to receive, but I fear the consequences of these experiments. The smaller children…the idea was to make it easier for them to pass through the birth canal. After all, when we begin to terraform on a wider scale we may not have the luxury of medically assisted births. We must make it as easy as possible for people to give birth without intervention. I hope these children will not be too small that they cannot survive independently. We have their incubators on standby of course, but given that we are to land on a potentially hostile landscape very shortly…we will need all able bodies, all resources to make that happen and establish ourselves. They need to be strong enough by then. Those who were implanted with multiple embryos worry me even more. If a person can produce several children at once, then of course that is preferable to multiple people with multiple gestation periods for a child that may not even survive in the end. The odds are more favourable to us if there are, for example, five or six in utero. But the cost to the parental body…the labour intensive nature of raising that many helpless infants all at once. Again, we have the luxury of being able to do that here, but what about out there? How can one person survive two or three or four at once? At the moment, bodies are not well designed for such things. Perhaps we should revisit some of the discarded ideas once more…
Every time we make progress I feel like our destiny branches - granting a multitude of possibilities, but with oh so many that bring us closer to regression. We barely escaped our home in time - our environment saturated with poison to such a degree that it had irrevocably changed us as a species. Millions of years of evolution halted in the face of greed and carelessness and lack of foresight. While we were busy trying to clear the floating rubbish that had piled en masse on the land and in the oceans we had already ingested too many plastic particles, too much of the detritus of industry. We fled because we had soiled our habitat to the point that our bodies were permanently chemically altered - our eons old reproductive method of flinging genetic material at each other and hoping it took root no longer viable, natural pregnancy and birth a true rarity. The crisis was so long in the making, and the solution so quick in the execution. I feel for those left behind and I hold out hope, however desperate and futile it may be, that they too find a way to survive.”
Caoimhe hesitated and then stopped recording. All of her journal entries ended the same way. Much as she tried to keep to updates of how the mission was proceeding, how the experiments were progressing, she always, always came back to that anxiety, that hollow feeling of guilt that had pursued her across the galaxy deep into unknown space.
Logically, she knew that there had been little other choice. She was one of the finest scientific minds they had, one of a very few candidates to lead one of the population expansion missions. The hope was that they would scatter themselves among the stars like dandelion seeds, the ships that contained them serving both as pappus and achene, once they found suitable ground to land upon. But they had left so many behind. So many precious lives. The testing and harvesting had taken nigh on two decades. Twenty years to sort the wheat from the chaff, the sheep from the goats - idioms Caleb had so “helpfully” supplied from his religious texts. It had been on a purely voluntary basis, though that was of scant comfort to her now, and those who had donated their eggs and sperm had been well compensated, less generously if it emerged that they were unsuitable candidates for the programme. Caoimhe had been angry at the transactional nature of what had occurred, even as she understood the necessity of it. Even then at the eleventh hour when the crisis was far too large to ignore any longer, money had been the primary motivator for most to act. The chance of salvation, however slim, had been the other. There was only a very finite amount of room on each ship. Storing genetic samples was far less consuming than hosting fully grown people. But they had to take some. After all, if they had merely wanted to replicate humans they could have cloned themselves a billion times over. That wasn’t the objective, though it was still the very last failsafe that they had. Collectively it had been agreed that they wanted to fix what they had broken if at all possible, to be able to reproduce as most mammals do. There had been riots when the populace had figured out what was happening. Cities, governments all burned away in the face of impotent rage and fear. But by that time the chosen fertile few had already been in orbit, surreptitiously ferried up to the stations over months and years, barely a goodbye said to their cradle of life as it fell into chaos and flame below them.
Of course, some had believed that the answer was to give up, to accept the fate coming to them. Extinction - no longer slow and drawn out but imminent and real. Caoimhe couldn’t truly accept that, though. The ever searching, ever questioning scientist in her wouldn’t allow it. The cracking of the human genome had been the first tentative step on the road to manipulating the human genome and that opened up so many possibilities to explore. So much potential for their future. When it had first come about some wild and eccentric experiments had occurred in telepathy, precognition, heightened extrasensory perception, some even decided to see if they could emulate cephalopods and change their outward colours to match their environment or inner emotions. This had been before the true horror of their looming demise had been clear, when some had seen the marketing potential for such things and dreamt of selling superhuman powers to the highest bidder. All else had been put on the back burner eventually, the only priority to perpetuate instead. Those experiments seemed…fanciful now. A relic of a bygone era when whimsy was still to be indulged.
Caoimhe rose from her chair and stretched, pain tinged relief rippling through her as bones finally crackled into their proper position again after hours of being hunched in an unnatural position over her desk. She couldn’t sit here and ruminate all day. She needed to check the nurseries and check in with Caleb. He was responsible for their plant life , every bit as precious as the human for obvious reasons. She had been calling most of the shots on this mission thus far, but had made a point of working closely with him as much as possible. Once they had found their home, his expertise would come to the fore as they began the process of actually bedding in and surviving wherever it was they would end up. She didn’t agree with a lot of what he found fascinating or relevant within his ancient holy books, but then again she understood the need to cling to something - especially something of the old world. As long as it didn’t interfere with the work, she could put up with his eccentricities. She sighed heavily at the anticipation of the stretch of work ahead and exited her tiny personal room.
*** *** ***
“Professor Alarie!”
Caoimhe heard her name hissed softly through the velvet dark of the night. Her brain was slow to react, rising through sleep into wakefulness far too slowly for the liking of whomever was trying to get her attention.
“Professor! Professor Alarie! Caoimhe!!!”
It was one of the lab techs, she realised as she blearily dragged herself from her horizontal position to sit on the edge of her bunk. What was his name? Doug? Don? “I’m awake,” she replied, her voice a little hoarse from dehydration.
“He’s losing the child,” came the panicked tone and at that Caoimhe was now fully awake. Fuck. She dragged her clothes on and flung the door open, chasing the young man who was already halfway down the sterile white corridor and heading toward the surgical ward.
They had landed on the habitable moon three weeks ago and were prepping to make their first tentative steps out onto that world. Scans had shown bird and insect life, but no large land or marine creatures that might pose a threat to their safety. Both she and Caleb had agreed to take it slow - better to sit tight within the walls of their ship for a while and make absolutely sure they weren’t going to be paid a visit by something or someone that they couldn’t handle. Some were finding the pressure hard to take - after so many years in space, they were desperate to find a home, somewhere to set down, breathe non-recycled air, walk on real dirt. The FTL drives had enabled them to skip across the galaxy of course, had negated the need for cryostasis while ensuring that the on board community could continue to work toward their goal. Even so, it had been a long time since they had come across any kind of potential place to live and the mood on board was tense, uneasy. The feeling of a knife edge permeated everything.
Caoimhe had hoped that some more successful live births might well raise the spirits of all, remind them of the much larger stakes than their own personal comforts. Several of those without natural uteruses had volunteered to try to bring babies to term in simulated wombs that had been surgically implanted within them, hoping to take the pressure off everyone else, to be more than living storage for sperm. The well documented and seemingly irreversible degradation of the Y chromosome appeared to interfere with these simulated uteruses however, and the weakness of the Y spermatozoa in comparison with X spermatozoa seemed to provide some insight in to why those bodies could not support life as well as others. But there was no time anymore, no time to investigate and experiment and find out exactly why there was such a high rate of failure to try to fix it. Caleb tried to quote some idiocy from his texts at her - something about certain bodies being “designed” for certain purposes. All nonsense of course. Biology was a messy thing and could rarely be viewed in such black and white terms. But whatever the outcome of tonight, she would put a stop to this particular branch of research. They had lost two foetuses and one parent and they simply could not afford to lose anyone else. Besides, medical intervention was usually a necessity in these cases. And they needed to move away from that avenue. She had hoped for a few more healthy children before she called time, but it couldn’t be helped.
She washed her hands, shoved a surgical gown over her clothes, put a mask and gloves on and entered the theatre.
*** *** ***
“Well…um. I don’t know what to say. Again. These…these past few weeks have been incredible in many ways. And heartbreaking in others. We managed to save the child. Barely. She was born at twenty eight weeks. A true twenty eight weeks, not via accelerated growth. She has been doing well since. He did not survive. We had to make a choice. And he insisted we choose his daughter. It was the right thing to do, I know that. And we have stored his organs and his blood and his sperm. He will live on and will assist others through his passing. But still the guilt is relentless. How much more death must we witness to perpetuate life? It seems the height of cruelty.
But on to brighter subjects. Most of the multiple births have gone extremely well. A total of thirty four infants were born to eight adults. We only lost two babies. Heartbreaking though it is, that ratio gives me hope. The smaller children are doing well too. Twelve from twelve and only four incubators needed. They are sturdy and healthy, which is what matters. Next…I have some ideas. I went back to the very start of my research, the earliest concepts I drew up. Some are ethically questionable, some medically improbable, but some…some might just work. I am interested in making conception itself easier. Perhaps through manipulation of menstrual cycles - regularly allowing more than one egg to be released at a time, or perhaps shortening the cycle so that eggs are released more frequently - although frankly I am loath to make that particular ordeal any more unpleasant if it can be avoided.
Which brings me on to the male refractory period. Why have one at all? If the need for that could be removed, wouldn’t the chances of conception be greater, even if the sperm was somewhat degraded? I will need to do some research into this. But the test subjects we brought were all chosen precisely for their child making and bearing potentials, so the chances of their ejaculate being of poor quality is low. I wonder if any of the technicians would volunteer. After all, it hardly seems a terrible gift to bestow…but human trials would be quite a time away and I would need to put this forward to the others on board to hear their thoughts. We cannot start down unethical paths so soon after landing on our new home.
And what a home! The other delight of the past couple of weeks. The moon is lush, temperate, seemingly perfect for us. There are several large freshwater lakes. We have tested the waters repeatedly, filtered and boiled and distilled to make it as safe as possible. When we drink it, there is a tang of something…something distinct. It doesn’t taste like any water we have ever known. There is a tiny hint of…well, it tastes to me like eucalyptus. It is quite delicious. Perhaps its just because I am finally drinking something that hasn’t already passed through hundreds of kidneys! We have been drinking this water for a week with no ill effects. I am daring to hope once again.
We still do not go outside without full environmental suits and helmets on. All scans point to breathable air - the composition percentages slightly off what we are used to, but nothing that will cause us harm. Deconstruction of the outer parts of the ship has now begun. The hold was made overly large for this very purpose. Now we have arrived, we have begun to transform it into the hub of a habitation area. It will connect first to some sleeping quarters for those who are working on construction, then our galley and then to the hydroponics bays, arboretum and plant nurseries. The arboretum seems almost redundant. The trees here are enormous - beautiful. Trunks metres across, yellow and green leaves far above, thick, twisted branches all the way down. They look so inviting, like we should be climbing them. The primal, genetical call of our distant ancestors across time. And while I keep referring to "we”, I personally have not explored, merely viewed the footage taken by others and observed what I can through the viewports. My work keeps me firmly tied to the labs and surgical wards right now, and neither of those will be moving from the core structure of the ship any time soon. I do envy those who can go out. I will have to earn that particular luxury. But my time will come.
The GAIA tanks are almost ready to be decanted. I debated simulating a navel with the next batch, in an attempt to further integration. If they can’t tell who was grown in the tank and who was grown in the womb, perhaps there will be less tension on board. Personally, I find the scars on their backs quite beautiful. They’re all non - functional marks anyway. Who cares what they look like? People get hung up on the most inane things.“
*** *** ***
"It has been several months since my last entry. Work has been frantic, unceasing. When I am not in the lab I am in the galley and when I am not in the galley I am sleeping, though those occasions seem to be few and far between. I have not had a breath to think of anything else except what must be done. I presented my idea for the refractory experiment to the other scientists on board and they too saw the potential that I had. We worked tirelessly and very shortly the mice we experimented on were able to survive the physical change. Admittedly we rushed human trials, as everything is rushed now. We um…well I hadn’t counted on the psychological effects of such a change.”
Caoimhe halted, shook her head at the horrific memory of what had transpired.
“The first volunteer…he…he went insane. His desire took over and he…killed himself in the end. He couldn’t switch it off, it was as if because he could continue he had to, regardless of how exhausted he was. Or how willing his partners were. We isolated him for his crimes. This isn’t a prison ship, we had nowhere truly suitable. We thought he would calm, that we could give him drugs, therapy, something to rein him back. But by the time we came to see him the next morning he had torn strips from his bedding and-”
She ran a shaking hand over her tired, puffy eyes and swallowed thickly before continuing her voice low and defeated.
“They dismissed my other ideas out of hand and called an immediate halt to the experiment. But I know it has merit. If I can just tweak it in the mice, I know we can make it work. There are so few unmitigated successes in Science. Surely they must know that. I just need time. More time. And then, when I am successful perhaps they will revisit my other ideas. I must go…I must get back to it. I can feel it begin to consume my mind. Obsession is knocking. Perhaps I will take a trip outside soon. Just to have a break from those cold, white walls and glaring lights. In fact-”
She broke off again and sat, pensive. When was the last time she had been in any other part of the ship? Was there even a ship anymore? How were the habitation sections coming along? She hadn’t even seen Caleb for…days? Maybe weeks. She shook her head, trying to dislodge the bleary fog of weariness and the seesaw feelings of hope tipping into despair tipping into hope. She needed a break. And she was going to get it.
*** *** ***
“Caoimhe, I’m so glad you could join us!” Caleb’s soft voice cut through musings she didn’t even realise she was dwelling upon as she approached the locker room next to the airlock.
“Join you?” she asked, perplexed. Caleb’s smile faltered to a frown as he took in her slightly disheveled state and her quizzical, not-entirely-present look.
“We are going out for a little botany jaunt,” he said gently. “Everyone who wants to come is welcome. Many have been outside and returned unharmed and we are finally satisfied that the atmosphere is breathable and there are no lurking surprises out there fauna wise. Environmental suits are still necessary, but you don’t have to wear a helmet. I er…I messaged you about it. Several times. You haven’t responded to any of my missives for a while.”
“I’m sorry Caleb,” she said sincerely. “I was so caught up in this latest round of trials that I forgot…well…everything else. I decided to come out today because I feel that my focus is tipping into an unhealthiness of mind. I need a break.”
Caleb nodded, relief visible in his eyes. “That’s good,” he replied, his tone soothing. He leaned closer to her and lowered his voice conspiratorially. “I heard about what happened. I just want you to know that no one blames you. You are under such pressure and these things can never be so precise…its why we conduct tests and experiments after all. At least we know it not to be a viable avenue. We can move on from it.”
A flare of anger surged in her chest at his words and at the tone she now felt was patronising in the extreme. What could he possibly know about her work? Or how much pressure she was under? He who grubbed in the dirt day after day while she was trying to save an entire species? She suddenly saw the afternoon stretch ahead of her - Caleb bleating about his philosophy, about how God had blessed them with such a place…what had he taken to calling it? Eden? Elan? Something he had picked up anyway. They would walk and he would want her to talk about what she was working on and want to talk about what he was working on and the dozens of people out with them would all be exclaiming over the place and making noise…Caoimhe could feel the beginnings of a headache just at the imagining of it all and her energy left her at precisely the same time as her enthusiasm for this walk. She wanted to be alone. She would go out when the shine had begun to wear off for everyone, when she could be at peace out there. Until then…well it wasn’t as though she didn’t have enough to do.
Caleb had continued to talk when she had not and she broke into his speech, not caring how rude it was.
“I’m sorry Caleb, but I feel a little unwell,” she announced. “I will defer this time. But I will go out very soon. I just…I need to lie down.”
She vaguely thought she heard Caleb try to say something as she departed, but by that time Caoimhe was back in the well of her mind, her thoughts already turning to the myriad of problems they faced.
*** *** ***
It started slowly, an insidious oozing. Seeping that began to saturate. Trivial arguments that should have been resolved and forgotten about. Clashes in personality that had previously been amicable enough and now seemed insurmountable. Long term partners suddenly separating, citing irreconcilable differences and moving into different spheres of the habitat. Lively chatter and laughter replaced first with sullen silence and then angry words. The cloud settled upon the settlement and no one realised the mistake that had been made until it was far too late.
Certainly not Caoimhe. After her interaction with Caleb she had locked herself away again in her lab, this time bringing a supply of ration bars, water, and setting up a makeshift bed within the rooms so she could throw herself into her work ever more intensely. A part of her realised that she was in too deep, that she should try to find her way back to others, but the greater part was still grieving the loss of her lab tech volunteer. She had done that to him. And she owed him and everyone else to put it right.
Besides, she knew there could be a breakthrough, they were so close, she could almost taste the victory…She spent most of her time with her headphones on and laptop close, blocking out the audible and visual of everything except her tasks. Those few times a message notification flicked up she ignored it. Ignored too the multiple missed call notifications that appeared one day after she had fallen asleep in front of the screen, headphones blaring the soothing sounds of long-dead oceans into her mind. If they really need me, they’ll call back.Or come to visit, she rationalised as she returned to her projects.
When she finally surfaced back to her surroundings it was only because she realised she had run out of water. She glanced at the date on her computer and was shocked to discover that she had closeted herself for eight whole days. She stood, her legs protesting at their lack of proper exercise. It was definitely time to step outside of the lab again. She had made excellent progress, but her mind was beginning to falter and she needed a change of scenery. She briefly wondered why she had received no visitors in that whole time - no Caleb, no lab techs, no happy parents with newborns - but she quickly realised that they must have thought her upset, sulking over her failure. The fact that she had ignored all attempts at contact couldn’t have helped, nor had the way she had been so dismissive of Caleb the last time she had seen him. Shame flooded her as she realised that she owed him an apology. He had always been her friend, despite their differences. He hadn’t deserved being brushed off that way.
The door to her lab opened with a sprightly tone as it always did and Caoimhe halted in the face of something peculiar. A gurney had been pushed up against her door. She peered out into the corridor, first one way and then the other. There seemed to be nothing else out of place. She pushed it gently out of the way, over to the opposite wall. Someone’s idea of a prank maybe? There wasn’t a whole lot of room down this corridor though, and it would have taken someone unnecessary effort to get it there from the surgical ward. And it was a poor prank at best. Her door slid open sideways, there was no chance of either it or her colliding with the gurney. She set off down the corridor toward the hydroponic bay, a tickle of unsettled feeling at the back of her skull.
That tickle became a trickle down her spine and into her gut as she progressed. Something was definitely wrong. Where was everyone? Why was it so quiet? She passed a viewport without really seeing what was beyond as her mind ticked over, then she froze and very slowly walked backward to look through it, her eyes wide in shock. Parts of the cannibalised cargo hold were still recognisable. Work had apparently progressed well, and several branching corridors had been constructed from that main atrium - five that she could see. Only two of those ended in actual rooms. Two were still open ended, coming out into the lushness of the moon itself. One led into a partially completed room and it was this that had caught her attention. It was like a stage play, a sliver of incongruous modernity and soulless technology against a backdrop of verdant, green, overwhelming natural life. A tiny opening into a different world, inviting her to observe a moment frozen in time.
The endless sterile white that she had come to expect, and she now realised took for granted, was sullied. Heavy sprays of black that she knew had once been red decorated the walls like an abominable Rorschach test - one where death was all that could be deduced. Three bodies lay heavy and unmoving on the floor, the breeze softly rippling through hair and clothing. One still clutched a welding tool, the stain at the tip clearly visible against the (mostly) white of the tiling even a hundred metres away as she was. She couldn’t tear her eyes away, and the more she looked the more she saw. There a hammer, a puddle of gore surrounding it incriminatingly. There a table turned on to its side, presumably an attempt at defence given how battered and bloody the top of it was. There an arm, apparently ripped from its socket and flung clean across the room, though she could clearly see it was extraneous, given that all three bodies already had a full complement of limbs…
She gasped, air unable to fill her lungs, bile rising heavily through her gullet, dry mouth, pounding head…she bent over and retched, the small amount of rations consumed hours before coming back up to stain this pristine floor too. When she straightened, she realised she was no longer alone. Caleb was ahead of her in the corridor, watching her as she might observe a vaguely interesting yet not unexpected chemical reaction. He had an extremely large, extremely sharp pair of shears in his hand. Caoimhe’s eyes flicked from them to his face and back again. She felt as if she were frozen to the spot, waiting for him to make the first move, for him to dictate if the moment would descend into a madness of the sort she suspected had occurred out there.
“Caoimhe.” His voice was hoarse, as though he had been silent for too long. Or screaming came a distinctly unhelpful voice in the back of her mind. “At last.”
“What’s happened, Caleb?” she asked, her voice soft with fear and sorrow.
He laughed, and it wasn’t his usual bird like trill. It was deeper, less free, more knowing. “What indeed? And where have you been throughout might be a more pressing question.” He advanced a few steps and she retreated in kind. He hesitated and then looked down at the shears in his hand, seeming to notice them for the first time. A succession of emotion passed over his face - surprise, sadness, fatigue and finally determination as he looked back up at her. “Where have you been, Caoimhe?” he asked again, his voice now low and menacing.
“I was…In…In my lab,” she mananged to stammer out, still shuffling backward in increments she hoped he wouldn’t notice.
“Your lab,” he echoed flatly. “Your lab?! And you didn’t notice anything?”
“Notice what? Caleb, please. You’re scaring me!”
“Where. Were. You?” he asked again, advancing further.
“In my lab! I told you! I was…I was working on the refractory problem. We were so close…I thought If I could just try again-”
“You didn’t hear the running? The screaming? The attempts at communication? Is that what you’re expecting me to believe Caoimhe?”
“Yes! Goddamnit Caleb, yes!” she yelled, desperately. “I was in there for over a week! Listening to notes and music, typing, conducting tests…I lost track of everything. You know how it is when you get hold of something like that, its as if the rest of the world fades! I spoke with you that day about going outside and then I grabbed supplies and I locked myself away. And when I got out today someone had wedged a gurney against my door and I’m seeing DEAD BODIES outside and your behaviour is quite frankly alarming and I don’t understand!” She stood there, chest heaving, her eyes desperately searching Caleb’s face for a single clue - either about what had occurred or about what his next move would be.
He stared at her for several seconds then seemed to wilt, semi collapsing against the wall, the shears still clutched in his hand and his head bowed. “Going outside,” he mumbled bitterly, his voice so quiet that Caoimhe had to strain to hear him even over the ringing silence that had fallen. “That was the beginning of it.” He straightened with visible effort, leaning against the wall fully now, his head tipped toward the ceiling as if he couldn’t bear to look at her while he spoke. “It seems so long ago now…but your little tantrum saved us both,” he declared colourlessly. “After you left, I didn’t much fancy a walk either. My enthusiasm departed with you and instead I found myself worried about whatever it was you were going through. I decided that I would go out with a later group - send someone from hydroponics in my stead to scout for potential edible vegetation.” His head lolled to the side, finally meeting her gaze and his eyes were now expressive - full of sorrow and a gathering of tears. “Whatever is out there, our scanners can’t detect it,” he whispered. “Its in the soil, or the pollen, perhaps even the air itself. Samples upon samples upon samples have been taken and tested in every conceivable way and they are all perfectly normal. But they weren’t - those who went out without their helmets I mean. They weren’t normal when they came back. They were…fidgety. Restless. Dissatisfied. Spoiling for arguments. Those arguments quickly turned violent. Fatal. Well you’ve seen-” Caleb gestured vaguely over his shoulder at the viewpoint behind him. “We couldn’t stop them. Couldn’t reason with them, couldn’t even contain them. Everyone who tried ended up dead. They just went beserk, no limit to their strength in their madness. We realised the correlation fairly quickly. Disinfected the airlock. Burned the suits that had been used and decontaminated the others. But eventually we had to separate people. Those who had been out without protection and those who hadn’t. It…it degenerated so quickly. Everything just…fell apart. Thankfully, whatever it was and however it worked it seemed contained to those who had been in direct contact with the outside. There was no cross contamination. We cut off the habitation side. Shored it up. Welded everything shut. And then we listened to them tear each other apart.” His voice broke on the last sentence, tears fully streaming down his face now.
She could feel how slack her face had gone. The scientist in her was screaming questions about viruses and if there was a possibility that this was not a natural occurrence but some sort of weapon and how on earth this was going to impact their projects. But only one question emerged from her, one terrible question that she could barely get out past the lump in her throat and the quivering of her lips. “How many?”
“Between those who were directly affected and those that they killed…we lost about two thirds of us,” Caleb confessed quietly, and Caoimhe gave a loud sob and collapsed against the corridor wall too. Two thirds. There hadn’t been that many of them to begin with. More than half of their precious cargo. More than half of their numbers.
“The children?” She forced the question out, needing to hear but not wanting to know the answer.
“They’re fine,” came the reply, and a knot she didn’t even realise had been there loosened in her chest allowing tears to fall freely down her face for the first time in many years. Thank God. Thank God they were fine. Caleb appeared in front of her and she was so loose limbed and exhausted from the weeks of unending toil and the catastrophic news she had received, she couldn’t even find it in herself to respond with fear to the shears that he was holding.
“I won’t tell you that it’s okay,” he said bluntly. “It’s not. But we have the labs and the tanks and the hydroponics. Most of the ship is still intact. We can leave, get away and-”
“No.” Caleb looked at her quizzically. “We can’t,” she elaborated. “At least not yet. I have too many expectant parents…At least…at least I hope I still…”
Caleb nodded and touched her shoulder reassuringly. “They’re safe too,” he confirmed. “We kept them with the children and babies, kept them away from everything.”
She nodded numbly, tears still streaming down her face. “Then they can’t go through takeoff. I won’t risk them. We need to do the best we can here. Use the tanks as much as we can. Teach and nurture. Prepare and grow our numbers. Then when we have a crew again we can leave, find somewhere better. Ensure that this doesn’t happen again.”
“Caoimhe-” he began, but she interrupted him.
“Please Caleb,” she begged. “I can’t lose anyone else. And I don’t think you can bear to either.”
He stared at her for a few moments, then nodded in clear resignation. “Come on,” he invited. “Let’s go to the nurseries. The children and remaining parents are left inside. The expeditions were supposed to be staffed by crew only, not civilians. But some of them just…they just wanted to see…” His voice trailed off, hopeless with grief.
They began to walk in silence - back down the corridor toward Caoimhe’s lab and onward to where the tanks and nurseries were situated. As they passed her room, Caoimhe heard her voice speak as if coming from miles away. “How did that gurney get against my door?”
Caleb made a noise that could have been a hiccup or a snort. “I put it there,” he confessed. “When the chaos began to descend, of course I tried to contact you. I pounded on your door, rang the bell, tried to guess the code. Nothing. I assumed that you had found your way out after all and gotten caught up in what was happening. At the very start we attempted to treat the afflicted. The gurney was part of an abandoned attempt to bring someone into the medical bay. When we realised what we were up against, we collectively made the decision that we could not allow those people anywhere near the children. That’s when we herded them, sealed them into the habitation section. When I next passed this way I made another attempt at entry into your lab and when I could not I placed the gurney against your door. I don’t even know why. A marker, perhaps? So that if your door ever did open and someone emerged, I would know. It worked too.” A wan shadow of Caleb’s old smile flitted across his lips. “The movement of the gurney drew my eye to the screen monitoring outside your room. It’s how I knew to meet you here.” She opened her mouth to ask a question, but he continued, correctly anticipating what she was going to say. “A lot of equipment was damaged in those first few days. Including the monitoring equipment that had already been transferred across to habitation. Some of the recordings from the past six weeks were corrupted or destroyed and we don’t have an entirely accurate picture of what occurred. That’s why we don’t have a true account of exactly who was sealed inside, who fled through the forests, who killed whom. All we have is a head count of those left on this side, and a personnel list. I’m glad I can add you to the tally of the living.” He gave another watery smile which almost immediately translated into a grimace as his chin began to wobble. “Perhaps its better that we don’t have the footage,” he added with a shudder. “I’ve already seen so much that I never…I can’t…”
He trailed off, his face pinched and weary. Caoimhe took the hand that didn’t contain a weapon and squeezed it, a message of silent solidarity and comfort.
*** *** ***
“Its a life we’re rebuilding. Of sorts. I’m sure there are people worse than us out there in the vastness of the universe. But we have all had to make sacrifices. We have all had to erase those boundaries that we swore were immutable. Morality cannot exist in a vacuum, cannot exist when we face such a grim reality as this. Some chose their deaths instead. They couldn’t live with what they had witnessed, the loss of those dear to them, the notion of potentially never leaving what is left of the ship again. Of course, we have salvaged what we can of them to assist us. Nothing is ever wasted here.
All that exists is the work and finally my ideas have been met with greater enthusiasm than I could ever have predicted. Two distinct wombs within one person. A revival of some of the more supposedly frivolous genetic manipulations with chameleons and cephalopods so that there is a physical manifestation upon the skin when someone genetically compatible is near. Making all female presenting genitalia internal, so that there is more room to give birth vaginally - after all a few extra centimetres can be life or death without medical intervention. These experiments are currently in progress, with varying levels of success. And all it took to make it happen was the near-total destruction of our little corner of civilisation.
Caleb and I have taken charge as joint leaders of the rest. They need to be led, shepherded if you will. Their primary purpose now is to perpetuate. And while a part of me is disgusted about reducing whole people to this one act, that part is small and growing weaker. I find my thoughts flinty these days, my heart like granite. And since we cannot be sure what caused the madness within us, I cannot be sure that it is not an offshoot of the same. Or perhaps it is merely pragmatism. Regardless, I cannot find it in myself to care about those moral judgments as much as I once did. It is an irony that I have begun to find some comfort in Caleb’s religious texts while he himself has outright rejected them, unable to maintain faith in the face of what he has seen and done. We still get along well. I am glad that here, at what feels like the end of all things, I have a friend such as him. His child is strong, healthy, growing within me day by day.
I say me…
Secrets abound, even now.
I took it upon myself to keep back a few of the GAIA tanks for my own use. Caleb is the only one who knows what they are truly for, though we will be unable to keep it hidden forever. The third batch of clones are coming along nicely and these ones are the most precious of all. I have attempted a basic memory transfer, which seems to have been well received. No longer will we have to spend years teaching them what I already know - they shall be born with that knowledge and can pick up the work immediately. Caleb had no interest in physical intimacies and so his sperm was matched with an egg donor from our database and implanted into one of the first set of clones, the ones with the physical modifications I have begun to perfect. I do not wish to experiment on anyone unnecessarily. Thus, my clones seem perfect. After all, they are me and I give my consent. And we are so few now…the babies and children outnumber the adults by some margin. Someone has to take care of them all. And someone has to begin rebuilding the ship. I already have plans for batch number four. If the memory transfers are successful this time around, I shall take the transcriptions and logs from the engineers that we lost and attempt to upload them into the next few mes. From my limited understanding of these things, it seems that the FTL drives are still working perfectly and with a little tweaking we can get the core of the ship back to being space-worthy.
Caleb is right. We cannot stay on this death trap forever. We cannot live with the ghosts of our mistakes forever. We must be bold, soldier on. Away into a future with a brighter prospect.
My loves, I apologise for this late running but Starman Sixteen will be coming tomorrow, not tonight. I am so close to finishing it and if I stayed up till midnight it would be done. But I have to be up for work at 4.30am and I gotta be on the ball for that. So I’ll be putting it out there tomorrow sometime.
Ordinarily I’d give you a little teaser of what’s to come, but honestly that would just spoil the surprise!
Edit: it’s already run to 7k words and there’s more to come. It’s a big chapter ☺️
My lovely! Thank you so much for taking the time to comment on this! I know you’ve been busy with the frankly incrediblethreeway work I’ve seen from you recently!
You’re wonderful and I adore every part of your analysis of my work and thank you so much! I hope you enjoy the next parts as much!
Oh man. Warnings for gross patriarchy including far-too-big age gap marriage, virginity as a prized asset and talk of breeding in a non kinky and very unhealthy way, mentions of drugging, drug abuse and drug addiction. Murder, war, classism imprisonment, animal bites, injury. There’s a wee nod to Common People by Pulp too, as true today as it was 30 odd years ago.
✨I would like to say that I don’t judge people for taking drugs. That part of the story is drawn from personal experiences and is based on how I ended up feeling after almost a decade of trying unsuccessfully to self medicate.✨
I was so completely absorbed while reading this, and to see that there’s still more torment to come, that Ezra is not finished with retelling his past! It sounds like the worst suffering is yet to come. Bring it on! Dying to know what happens next! Ahhhh there’s so much to say about this chapter! Allow me to blab.
As one of my greatest champions of this fic, I’m so happy you’ve enjoyed this chapter I was nervous about it since there’s a lot of exposition. Obviously there is more to come for our poor bby Ezra (I am very cruel!)
Next chapter (as far as my plans ever go to plan) will be a little interlude from the grief and heartache. Maybe
Oh man. Warnings for gross patriarchy including far-too-big age gap marriage, virginity as a prized asset and talk of breeding in a non kinky and very unhealthy way, mentions of drugging, drug abuse and drug addiction. Murder, war, classism imprisonment, animal bites, injury. There’s a wee nod to Common People by Pulp too, as true today as it was 30 odd years ago.
✨I would like to say that I don’t judge people for taking drugs. That part of the story is drawn from personal experiences and is based on how I ended up feeling after almost a decade of trying unsuccessfully to self medicate.✨
Oh man. Warnings for gross patriarchy including far-too-big age gap marriage, virginity as a prized asset and talk of breeding in a non kinky and very unhealthy way, mentions of drugging, drug abuse and drug addiction. Murder, war, classism imprisonment, animal bites, injury. There’s a wee nod to Common People by Pulp too, as true today as it was 30 odd years ago.
✨I would like to say that I don’t judge people for taking drugs. That part of the story is drawn from personal experiences and is based on how I ended up feeling after almost a decade of trying unsuccessfully to self medicate.✨
The ending began with greed and fear, as so many endings do.
Ezra’s childhood education had not been entirely on his own terms. When he had developed his interests in the universe and the physical and chemical world, he had been allowed to study them at will so long as he did not neglect his other subjects. These included what he would eventually come to realise was an extremely biased and untrue history of the seven systems and the families that presided over them, law and politics, and economics, business and accounting. The latter, along with his insider knowledge of his father’s investments and the increased freedom he had been granted to strike business deals once he had proven he could turn a profit meant that he could secretly siphon off a decent haul into several private accounts that were locked behind false business fronts, all the while making it seem like profits were healthier than they were in the supposedly legitimate side of the business. Rien’s intelligence, charm and his deep understanding of people’s psychological make up were invaluable resources and he conducted many of the face to face meetings that these business opportunities necessitated under the guise of being a legal advisor. Not only did this free up Ezra’s time to meet other, less licit contacts, but it had the added benefit of divorcing him from the subterfuge somewhat, gave him a veneer of plausible deniability should anything go awry. The fraudulent businesses masked the true face of what was occurring, the movement that both men believed so passionately about in part due to the violence and deprivation they had witnessed and endured.
The first few explosions were dismissed as accidents. After all, mining and prospecting were notoriously dangerous occupations, and these kind of things were the accepted risks of such business. Besides, there were more than enough workers to replenish those who had perished. But after a while it began to be noted that more guards than miners were dying in these explosions, and when reports of an abandoned mine that contained a mass grave populated exclusively by overseers emerged, whispered rumours began to spiral out of control.
“Shot in the back and left to bleed out in the dirt is what I heard,” Ezra’s uncle announced gleefully over dinner a few weeks later. “Pierpoint has lost control. Got a saboteur on his hands. Now is the time to try to poach any assets we can of his and publicly bring them under new management. Show these upstarts that we can keep a tight leash.”
“Ezra has said much the same,” his father replied.
“Has he now?” said his uncle appraisingly, redirecting his attention accordingly. “Perhaps there is some hope for you yet.” Ezra forced a smirk to his lips and gently raised a glass in acknowledgment to his uncle. He swore he could feel a piece of him die as he did it and he swallowed his bile along with the expensive wine.
When his uncle heard Ezra had returned he had taken his personal hovercraft and arrived with all possible speed at the house. After he had all but kicked the door down and barged his way inside, he had sought out Ezra in the library and trained dual antique hunting muskets on to his chest, advancing on him until the muzzles were pressed directly against his head, one at each temple. Heedless of his sister’s frantic pleas he had barked the same sort of questions that his father initially had. Somehow, Ezra had kept his head, both metaphorically and literally. He did not doubt that his uncle would pull one or both triggers and happily go home for tea afterward. In this face of this imminent danger, he had forced his voice to almost bored calm, looked his uncle directly in the eye and informed him that if he were to commit murder, then he would follow him into the void extremely shortly and at this signal Rien appeared seemingly from nowhere, his blade pressed silkily against the skin of his uncle’s throat.
“If I am to perish, why should you not be my companion in death?” he had asked in a low, even tone. “My valet is willing to die for me. Are you?”
His uncle had looked at him, eyes gleaming with malice and hellfire before he had huffed a barking laugh and put his guns down. “Finally grew some balls, did you?” he asked rhetorically before roughly pushing Rien aside and stamping back out of the room. In the intervening weeks between that day and this dinner, Ezra had done his best to ingratiate himself with his uncle by adopting a similar sneering, slippery persona as him when he was around. The fact that he was apparently making the family an obscene amount of money didn’t hurt at all and he felt he was on the cusp of having access to at least one of his uncle’s businesses too. He just needed something extra…some way of demonstrating his loyalty to the family beyond all question, and the answer came sooner than he had imagined it would. After dinner his mother retired to bed, and after another glass of wine his father had dozed off in the large comfortable lizard leather chair by the fire. His uncle chose this moment to broach a subject Ezra thought dead and buried.
“If you wish to stay here you will still need to perform your other duties you know,” his uncle offered perfunctorily and without preamble. “If you can bear to unstuff your valet for a night or two and stick it into a girl that is.” At seeing Ezra’s alarmed face, his uncle chuckled darkly. “Its not exactly a secret. I see how much leeway you allow him. Any valet of mine that lax would be lucky to merely lose their job. And I saw the footage from the first day you arrived, or did you forget about the cameras trained at the door? No servant touches their employer in that way unless they’re fucking.” Ezra forced himself to keep his gaze steadily trained on his uncle, but said nothing. “Let me be clear, boy,” his uncle continued. “I don’t care about you or what you do in private. You could be fucking the kookas for all I give a shit. But if you took a wife, publicly joined yourself to another house…don’t you see the business opportunities that could flourish from such a union?”
Ezra forced himself to swallow. His mouth was suddenly very dry and his tongue felt like it was three sizes too big. “Do you have anyone in mind?” he asked in a falsely casual tone.
His uncle gave a serpentine smile. “In fact I do. Her father is a high stakeholder in the Pierpoint mining corporation. Or was. His investments are looking less and less secure these days. So he’s begun to parade his daughter a little early instead. Passably pretty. Young. Demonstrably fertile according to the family physician.”
Ezra started to feel nauseous. He had to ask this question. He really didn’t want to ask this question for fear of the answer, but it was necessary. “How young is young?” he enquired, hoping that his voice was still airy and light.
His uncle leaned forward, his smile now descending into decided lechery. “Put it this way,” he said quietly, “Perhaps your youthful mistakes have served you well in this incidence. While the other men of your age are now saddled with their fading blooms you can take an unspoiled thing for your very own. She has bled, and would have been put forward to other families within the next year. That should tell you that she is old enough to bear for you.” He shuffled forward on his seat, coming even closer to Ezra who had to fight against every instinct not to recoil in disgust and his voice was low and conspiratorial when he spoke again. “In addition, if you take a younger wife she will be more easily moulded to your own whims, your own desires. And she cannot possibly object to such a longstanding…arrangement with your valet now can she? As long as you breed her successfully and are discreet in your assignations, the rest is your own business. We have always preached this. And when she is with child, all of her energies and attentions will be directed toward bringing the pregnancy to term anyway. You will be free to do as you wish once your seed takes.” Ezra forced a smile and prayed to anyone that might be listening that it did not appear as queasy as he felt.
“I should be delighted to meet the young lady,” he acquiesced, his voice sounding faint and reedy to his own ears.
“Excellent,” proclaimed his uncle robustly as he took another swig of the foul spirits that were in the hipflask permanently affixed to his belt. “I shall arrange everything.”
“And when the day comes I’ll bring you down hardest of all,” Ezra promised himself, a hot streak of rage flaring through his abject disgust.
A few short weeks later on a large balcony that overlooked the van Ione gardens, the wedding took place. Hasty though the planning had been, it went off without a hitch and -
She shifted in her seat, twisted to look at him and her hand came to rest on his chest above his heart. Though the electricity had been restored to the house, they had not bothered to turn on any lamps as they sat together, and by the small and flickering light of the fire he could see the consternation in her features.
“Wait, you actually went through with it? You married her?!
"Indeed I did. It was necessary for the deception and to ingratiate myself back into the familial bosom. I kissed her cheek after I spoke those vows and from that day I never touched her. Not once.”
Her gaze eased from shock to trepidation as she asked “So, how old was she?
Ezra swallowed hard. "Sixteen,” he said, the word soft with pain and regret. She blew out her cheeks in an exhalation of shocked disbelief. “Her seventeenth birthday was two days before we wed. The poor girl,” he continued. “She wanted to please so badly. Clearly her parents had made it known just how much was dependent upon the success of our union. She was shaking with nerves the whole day of the wedding and It couldn’t have helped that I was twice her age. I took her father aside and told him in no uncertain terms that while I was intent on providing the child that everyone so desperately wanted, I would not force the matter and would not take her to bed until I thought her willing and ready for such a thing. I hoped to buy some time before the inevitable decision that had to be made.”
“And how did you get around it?” she asked. “And what happened with the money and the sabotage at the mines?”
He smiled sadly at her impatience to get to the crux of a matter that still pained him so much, and kissed her forehead. “We shall get there my love,” he promised.
Throughout the whole rigmarole that he and Rien were perpetuating he had been constantly surprised, as what he had anticipated would be difficult tended not to be and vice versa. The actual theft and fraud for example, was easy. Even when they managed to expand their scope of deception and begin stealing from both Ezra’s uncle and his in-laws, the combined abilities of the two men were such that they were able to maintain the necessary facades. It helped that no one suspected that anyone would have the audacity and capability to do such a thing, let alone the only child of two of the most respectable people in the seven systems and his lower class associate. While the family believed all lowers to have a propensity toward criminal behaviour of all kinds, they also did not believe them to possess the mental faculties to plan and perpetuate something of this magnitude. The men were walking a wire, but the longer they got away with it the more bold and expansive their plans became.
What they were stealing was channeled into weapons and sabotage but also into education, and programs to assist workers to remove the spirit-shattering drugs from their lives that had successfully ensnared both Rien and Ezra as well as millions of others over the years. This last was a much harder sell than merely picking up a gun and shooting. Both Ezra and Rien knew well from personal experience that oftentimes the only beacon of hope that lit the dark, backbreaking, miserable days was the thought of the comfort that certain substances provided once their weary bodies collapsed into their bedrolls. But the cycles of despondent misery that followed these indulgences allowed people to bow their heads to the supposed inevitable, to give up in the face of the enormity of relentless misery. There was a reason that the drugs were so cheap and readily available and why the overseers were spectacularly disinterested in doing anything to stop the trade. From the redirected profits of the lowers’ labour came a wellspring of guerrilla war that trickled through several of the most industrialised and poverty stricken planets. One that the higher orders neither took seriously nor saw the immensity of until it was too late. The Pierpoint mines were just the beginning, and the desire of the other families to protect their own businesses and money from that end at all costs - even if that meant abandoning their peers to their fates - worked in Ezra and Rien’s favour.
Ezra found that the hardest part was the maintenance of pretence - both as a devoted son and dutiful husband, and even that became somewhat easier over time. But soon after the wedding he realised that the girl would begin to cause a fuss and draw attention to his distinct lack of interest in her if he did not at least attempt to make a show of desire. She had been given her own bedchamber within the household - the reasoning being that once she was pregnant, she would need her own space. On their wedding night Ezra had sat delicately on the edge of her bed, reassuring her that he knew how overwhelming this must all be for her, that he would not touch her until she was ready and that he wanted them to stay in their respective beds until that day came. She pleaded with him that he must be mistaken, that he was her husband sworn and she had no other desire than to take him fully in every way.
“I can see in your eyes that is an untruth,” he had said gently. “And I do not judge you for it. I am sure you are aware of my…unconventionality as regards to my own presentations when I was your age. We will take this at a slow pace. Surely any child that comes from us should be made as lovingly and tenderly as can be to give them the best chance at life?” He felt a pang of guilt that he was giving her false hope of a child that would never be, but that was swiftly overruled by his knowledge that he was sparing her more grief and misery this way. She acquiesced to his wisdom initially, but soon grew impatient and instead began to come to his chamber in the middle of the night in billowing, gauzy nightgowns that barely stayed on her shoulders and were slit far too high, pleading to sleep in his bed to stave off the nightmares she was supposedly having. Her clumsy attempts at seduction did nothing but remind him of how young she was. Words were no longer enough to delay what their families were so fretful about. And so he and Rien took on the roles that had gotten them back here once again - Ezra stealing some of his mother’s sleeping pills and Rien concocting his pharmaceutical wonders. Her evening wine was drugged and a marriage bed hastily fabricated. All it took was a tiny pinprick on the back of her thigh. Something that could so easily be attributed to an insect bite, but whose red blooming over the bedsheets would be hailed as proof positive that Ezra had indeed finally performed his husbandly duties.
“Why don’t you just fuck her, Ez?” Rien had asked as they had artfully arranged the covers and cushions to give the impression of a night of passion. “She’s pretty enough, she’s certainly willing. So why not?” In the face of the casual air of Rien’s question, Ezra’s voice deserted him and his chest felt like it had been hollowed out. They had never really verbalised their relationship and certainly not mentioned any kind of exclusivity. In fact they had actively both fucked other people, sometimes together. But there had been love between them, the others merely an aid to their already good time. What had started as hedonism and fire and lust had grown into something softer, more generous and understanding. More of a necessity for them both. And so Rien’s question wounded him, brought him right back to that knowledge that he was withdrawing from Ezra emotionally for some unknown reason. Ezra wanted to cling, he wanted the rock of Rien right beside him as he had been for so many years, was desperate for more than just the shape of his physical presence. More than that, this girl was a proverbial line in the sand that he would not cross and he didn’t know if it was her age or her innocence or both, but he was appalled at the idea of actually going through with it. Before he could try to formulate a reply Rien was in front of him, running a delicate hand down to Ezra’s crotch and stroking a finger over his cock “I wouldn’t mind watching you fuck her if that’s what you’re worried about. It doesn’t matter to me that she’s your wife-”
Ezra pulled away from Rien’s touch, and answered with an indignant bite to his words. “I’m not worried about you watching. Its just wrong Rien. She is barely more than a child and I will not be her first foray into physical intimacy when it is all based on lies,” he hissed. “At least once its all over they can prove that I never touched her, and she will have a chance at a truly successful marriage. She is an innocent, I will not break her more than I have to.”
Rien paused then laughed, a reaction that did not entirely reach his eyes. “You’re too good Ezra,” he purred. “That’s your problem, too full of a subjective morality that no one else subscribes to. How can she be an innocent? She perpetuates the misery that they inflict upon us by her very existence and will continue to do so once she does manage to birth the next generation of these leeches.”
Ezra had no good answer to that truth, so he merely shook his head and repeated darkly that it was wrong and he would not do it. Rien had shrugged and they had slept in their respective beds that night, the fact that Ezra’s wife was taking up space in his the excuse rather than the reason.
The delight and celebratory mood that spread through the house the next day was proof in Ezra’s mind that his family had instructed the chamber-servants to tell them immediately they suspected consummation had taken place. Nothing was said out loud of course, they were all far too refined for that, but Ezra’s father clapped him heartily on the shoulder when he arrived for breakfast and his mother airily mentioned to the room at large how they might best decorate a nursery. After the breakfast things had been cleared, Ezra’s wife surprised him by asking him to join her on a walk around the gardens. Not wanting to arouse suspicion, he agreed immediately, shooting Rien a look that clearly told him to also accompany them at a distance.
The day was full of a yellow tinted mist that had drifted from the nearby sea, the tendrils of cloud muffling all sound and lending a slightly eerie feel to the gardens as they strolled, while the heavy moisture in the air occasionally made it difficult to breathe freely. She didn’t seem to notice any of this and slipped her arm through his as they walked through the grove of enormous everleaf trees, making pleasant small talk by observing the small animals darting around and trying to identify the bird calls that they could hear. Ezra could feel a tension emanating from her every time they fell silent - a spectre hovering over the conversation. He paused, extricated himself and turned to her.
“What is the matter?” he asked, bluntly. “You can tell me. Whatever is on your mind, I would prefer to know.”
She startled at his candour and her eyes slid from his face to over his shoulder where he knew Rien was lounging against a tree, mostly out of sight. When she spoke it came out harshly and in a rush, as if she were forcing the words past her lips, and she was no more subtle about it than he had been.
“Is it true? Are you in love with your valet?”
Now it was Ezra’s turn to be taken aback. “Would it make a difference if I was?” he asked gently. “He is not my husband. I am not making a child with him.”
Her face fell, crumpled just for a second before she regained her composure. “And what of me?”
“What of you?” Ezra frowned in confusion.
She visibly steeled herself before answering, her hands twisting in absent minded anxiety in the lush silken material of her skirts. “I was given to understand that at the very least I would be sore after my first time. The blood on the sheets would certainly suggest as much. Yet I feel exactly the same as I did yesterday and the day before.” Ezra’s scalp was beginning to prickle uncomfortably and an icy drop of sweat ran down his back as he began to realise that she was more astute and less reserved than he had given her credit for. “I confess, I remember little of last night,” she went on. “I thought…I thought I would remember more-”
Ezra placed his hands on her shoulders and they all but swallowed her small, girlish frame. “You were inebriated,” he told her. “You came to my room and we had wine and talked for a time. And then you reached for me and while I did not want to take advantage of you in that state, you were very…persistent.” Her eyes dropped from his face and a hint of shame and embarrassment tinged her features. Its made him feel slightly ill to lie to her like this, but he ploughed on. “You do not ache because I prepared you well to take me,” he said softly. “I told you before, it is not in my interest to hurt you or attempt to make this child in any way other than through love. And if it does not take this time then we shall try again-”
She looked up sharply, appraisingly. “Husband, we should try again as soon as possible,” she said, a slightly panicked edge to her voice. “The window for conception is now. We should take every opportunity while it is open.”
He didn’t know what to say, didn’t know how to get out of this mess he had managed to land himself in and the excuse he came up with sounded appallingly weak even to his own ears. “I must attend my other duties too. I have several meetings-”
“Do I not please you?” she whispered, unshed tears gathering in her eyes. “Have I not waited in vain for you to come to me every night since our wedding? Have I not tried to be appealing and beautiful for you? Do you only like men? Is that it?”
“No!” Ezra protested, and then sighed his resignation to the partial truth he was about to give her. “No, I enjoy both women and men. But you are still so young, a child to my eyes. I cannot lie freely with you in all good conscience. It feels…wrong to me.”
Her gaze hardened and her jaw came forward in an expression of displeasure. “I am old enough to bleed and bear,” she said, the words a recitation of what she had clearly been coached to over many years. “I am your wife and if you can’t bring yourself to love me, I will at least have your seed. Your family and mine both wish it and I will perform this duty willingly. Can you do any less for them?” Ezra grasped for an answer but before he could her voice and eyes narrowed to sharpness. “I will attend your chambers tonight and this time there shall be no wine, no outside influence.” She threw another dark glance over at Rien before she continued. “This time I shall remember every moment.” She marched off through the grove back toward the house and Ezra ran a hand through his hair in frustration.
“Fuck,” he said softly. “Fuck”
“No, that is the problem beautiful boy. You won’t.” Rien came up behind him and slipped a hand around his waist, resting his cheek on Ezra’s shoulder as they watched the girl depart. “And if you truly can’t bring yourself to then we have to get out of here.”
Ezra spun and turned to face Rien, an incredulous look on his face. “But…but we are so close to a tipping point, so near to-”
“We have a lot of money stashed away, Ez,” Rien interrupted. “We should go. Disappear. Join the fighting on the ground and leave them here to burn when their time comes.”
Ezra hesitated. He knew the wisdom of Rien’s words, knew that the longer they stayed the greater the possibility of discovery. But they had done so much good already, and he was loath to give that up, not to mention the deeply satisfying feeling of deceiving these horrendous people right under their noses. While he felt tension and anxiety at the prospect of getting caught, the thrill of what they were doing together was every bit as heady as some of their more hedonistic days, and he suddenly realised that it reminded him of how they had used to be in the early months - eager and excited and full of fire. Before imprisonment and drugs and unending, unyielding labour had broken his youthful exuberance. He was just about to speak, to try to talk out a way through the mess that would allow them just one more week to siphon off what they could, but he had been silent too long and Rien’s face darkened.
“You are too comfortable here,” he stated dully.
“Excuse me?” Ezra replied incredulously.
Rien folded his arms and cocked his head appraisingly at Ezra. “You are too comfortable,” he repeated. “After all the stories you told me about how miserable you were here you have embraced this life more readily than I thought you could. You share your scraps with me, your leftover food and wine. And the scraps of your attentions also. You dismiss me from your mind when I am not in your line of sight. You shy away or tense up when I try to touch you. Perhaps being here has made you realise that you are not so different from them after all. Perhaps this is where you are supposed to be.”
It felt as if Rien was punctuating each sentence with a punch to the head. He was so appalled, so outraged, and so desperate to inform Rien that it had been him withdrawing his affections and not Ezra that he just stood there staring, struck silent by the unfairness of it all. Rien huffed a noise of disbelief and shook his head. “Tonight, Ezra. I am leaving tonight. Come with me or don’t. It is time to make a choice.” And with that ultimatum he stalked back through the grove, leaving Ezra distraught and alone once again.
Ezra made his choice. There was no real choice to make.
And so he found himself in his room at twilight after the evening meal, cursing the fact that his skill with measuring powders and liquids and pills was decidedly less impressive than Rien’s. Since she had specified no wine and tonight would be the last time he would have to stoop to this deception, he had surreptitiously put the crushed up pills into a cup of herbal tea, telling her it was an old family recipe that was both aphrodisiac and aid to conception. He too partook of a cup and then begged a moment to clean his teeth. He waited in the bathroom for a few minutes and when he returned he was relieved to find her fast asleep on the chaise lounge, her head resting on her arm and her feet tucked underneath her long silken robe. He covered her with a blanket before moving to his wardrobe and resuming packing his bag.
He was almost finished when a quiet, yet urgent knocking came at his door. The beat was rapid but he recognised it as one of his and Rien’s private codes and he uttered a silent prayer that the man hadn’t left without him. Rien had been right about one thing today at least. They should leave. Disappear underground and assist in the struggle in a more immediate way. And hopefully when it was just the two of them again they could rekindle how it used to be - revive the love that they had for one another without politics and history and his family getting in the way.
He opened the door and Rien immediately hurried in, his beautiful eyes bright and sparkling. “Its happening, Ez. Its happening now. The servants are all muttering about a disturbance among the wharves and there are rumours that the docks are alight. I have managed to secure us a flight offworld but everything is so volatile that we have to go this instant!”
Ezra nodded his agreement and had just shouldered his pack when he heard the distinct sound of a pistol being readied to fire. He spun to find his wife staring at him wildly, a dazed look to her face and when she spoke, her words were slightly slurred. “I knew'wit,” she muttered. “I knew you wer'gon’ drug me again. Didn’t…didn’t swallow it all. An’ now you’re leaving? No. No.”
Ezra raised his hands in a placating gesture. “I’m sorry,” he said sincerely. “I am not the husband you need, nor the one you deserve. I have never touched you, you have to know that. You can still be matched with-”
“Don’t care ‘bout tha’,” she said fiercely. “You won’ shame me this way. You won’ shame my family.”
“We don’t have time for this!” hissed Rien.
“An’ you,” she said with derision, her attention and the gun both landing on Rien. “You’re the problem. Why…why do you get to share his bed when his seed is so useless to you?!” With every sentence, her voice was growing both clearer and louder and Rien and Ezra exchanged a desperate look. “If you weren’t here it would have been fine,” she continued, moving closer to the two men. “If you weren’t here it would have been good-”
“I told him to fuck you, you stupid girl,” Rien spat. “He refused. Too good for the likes of you and for me I guess. Just let us go without a fuss and you can live your life with some empty headed rich boy like you were always destined to.”
“I don’t want-” she began, and too late Ezra realised the trap Rien was about to spring. She had grown careless, walked too close to him and he leapt upon her, muffling her cry of alarm with one hand and wrestling the gun from her with the other. At least that was what he intended, he told himself as he relived the moment in slow motion a thousand times in the years afterward. In fact, as he moved toward her, she dropped the gun in her fright and her hands fumbled for it. Which meant that instead of clapping one hand across her mouth and his other over her arm, Rien’s aim was slightly off. He struck her hard across the jaw with the heel of his hand and she spun on the spot, her head colliding with the wrought metal bedframe of Ezra’s bed as she fell. The thump as she hit the floor was the loudest sound Ezra had ever heard in his life and he found himself biting down hard on his knuckles to keep the cry of shock and horror from leaving his lips.
There were several seconds of total and complete silence. And then Rien pulled his pack on to his shoulders. “Come on,” he whispered in a hoarse voice. “We have to go.”
“Rien,” Ezra whispered. “Oh Rien. What have you done?!” He knelt down beside his wife, her body suddenly looking even smaller than he remembered before. He turned her over gently, so that she faced the ceiling and cradled her as he put his face next to her mouth, desperate to feel her breath on his cheek and when he could feel nothing, his heart ached and tears blurred his vision.
“For fucks sake Ez, we have to go!” Rien grabbed Ezra’s shoulder and roughly pulled him to his feet. “How much worse will this be if they find us like this?”
“She was a CHILD-”
“She was one of you!” Ezra staggered back from the venom in Rien’s words like they had been a physical slap. Rien shook his head and set his jaw and when he looked at Ezra again there was no trace of the man he had once loved. “Coming back here was such a mistake. How soon you forget the misery these people inflict when you are living among them again-”
“How fucking dare you! I have risked everything to get us to this point,” Ezra hissed. “And its happening, right now. Everything we have worked for is happening and we are a part of this-”
“No, Ezra,” Rien retorted, now calm and collected as ever. “You can moralise all you want about what’s wrong and what’s right, but all it does is expose you for who you really are. There is no true peril for you, not while you can still run back to your parents’ mansion if you say and do the right things to gain their approval. You’ll never truly understand what its like to live as we do.” He moved to the door, opened it and stepped through.
“Rien!” Ezra begged, the plea and sorrow clear in his broken voice. He was incapable of saying anything else, his heart reeling with rejection and his mind paralysed from fear from all possible futures - both with Rien and without him.
Rien paused, looked back and met his eyes and seemed to stare into his very soul for the last time.
“Goodbye Ezra. I really did love you, you know,” he said, the tremor in his voice the only betrayal of any emotion. And with that, Rien vanished.
Ezra’s senses blurred - his vision and his hearing and his sense of touch, they began to shut down - all around him became dulled and muted and only snatches of his experiences over the next few hours were able to penetrate the painful hazy fog of his mind. His blind panic as he ran from the dreadful scene. The howling alarm of the gate as he belatedly realised his father must have acted on his barbed advice and changed the code from his mother’s birthday. The scrape of bark and brick under his palms as he attempted to climb the blood ivy instead. The searing pain of animal teeth in the meat of his calf. And the triumphant, sneering face of his uncle above him as he lay breathless and defeated on the lawns of his childhood home. The next time Ezra came to with any kind of clarity it took him long, painful moments to understand where he was, to make sense of the howls of pain and suffering around him.
The Glasshouse…the-the Glasshouse-
Her warm hand caressed his face, gently turning him toward her. Tear tracks that mirrored his own streaked her cheeks and she pressed her forehead against his before cradling his head against her chest and holding him close, his hand coming around her back to cling to her as he choked out his sorrow. She murmured something, and the rumble of her voice as he felt it through her chest was the most comforting thing in the world to him. He glanced down at the translator, the words across it seen through the blur of his tears.
“No more, love. No more tonight.”
She held him for long minutes in that way, stroking his hair, planting soft, sweet kisses against his forehead until he quieted, regained control of the panic and grief that had gripped him as he relieved his darkest of days for her. The fire was down past its embers and emitting almost no light anymore, and she poked at it to check it was fully extinguished before holding her hand out to him in silence. He took it and followed her up to her bedroom once again, Dog trailing in their wake. The room was warm, dark, full of her scent and so welcoming. She deposited the translator on the table at her beside, leaning it up against the lamp that was there so it could more readily be seen.
She closed the curtains against the black void of the ocean in the distance and then lay fully clothed on her bed with her head propped up by one hand, patting the space next to her in an invitation for him to follow, which he did without hesitation. The tender sadness of her beautiful smile as he moved to join her was enough for his eyes to begin to prickle with tears again. She manoeuvred him so that he was lying on his side, so he could see a portion of the now-clear and magnificently starry sky through the small window set into the roof above him. She pressed herself against his back, her arm wrapped around his middle, her nose rubbing softly at the back of his ear and the curls at the nape of his neck. He felt her soft breath, felt her inhale him and take joy and comfort from that simple yet most intimate of gestures. Her hand slipped under his shirt and stroked lightly over his stomach, the small shiver of the feeling of their skin connecting still so new and such a delight. Her body at his back and the aura of her presence warmed him inside and out and he found himself full of gratitude once again that she was here with him and that she would not send him away. He felt the mattress dip a little as Dog jumped up to join them and settle himself between their feet with a small sigh of contentment. In the grand scheme of the strangeness of the past few days this was a small moment, but it was one that Ezra had dreamed of many times, when he was lonely and heartsick and wondering if there was something truly wrong with him that he could not find a mate like so many others. To be here, completely present in this moment of solace. With her.
The words appeared slowly across the screen of the translator, chasing her soft words from at his back. “I want to know the rest,” she said. “But its a lot to deal with emotionally.”
“I know, my love and I’m sorry,” he interjected,. “I should have given you more of a warning-”
He felt her shift against him, felt her move up his body a little until her chin rested on his upper arm, and when she spoke next her voice was full of pain “Not for me, Ezra. It was too much for you. I could feel it coming from you. The sorrow, the anguish, the guilt and regret. You don’t have to relive those things for me. I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to ever hurt again.”
He turned slightly so he was resting more on his back and gazed up at her with eyes that slowly filled with tears in the face of her compassion and care for him. He opened his mouth, moved his lips but no words that could come close to adequately explaining how he felt in this moment made themselves available to him. She shushed him gently and stroked a light finger over his cheek. “Its okay. I’m here. You’re here. And that’s all there ever needs to be. You never have to be alone with these things ever again.”
The tears began to stream freely down his face again and she kissed him softly, his lips trembling against hers in his grief. “My life,” he sobbed shakily. “My heart. I thank whatever happenstance or deity conspired to bring us together. I do not deserve your kindness-”
She kissed him again, stifling his negativity about himself with her lips. “You are a good man, Ezra,” she proclaimed. “And you deserve happiness and kindness and gentleness.”
“You have yet to hear all,” he warned. “There is still more-”
She stopped his words with her lips again, and this time he was more able to respond in kind, his kisses growing more fierce as his heart urged him to capture her, to keep her. “And I will still be here to hear it,” she promised. “But for now, you need rest. You’re still recovering from your time in the pod, and tonight has been so intense in so many ways. Just…let me be close to you. Let me hold you as we both sleep.”
She kissed his forehead, his nose, his mouth, and then buried her face in the crook of his neck again to pass her lips gently over the slightly ticklish skin there as well. After everything he had confessed to he was initially unsure if he would be able to sleep, or if the faces of all he had left behind would haunt him when he closed his eyes as they so often did. He stared up at the night sky, at the smattering of glowing lights that were so familliar yet arranged so strangely to his eyes. But then she began to sing softly and he allowed her voice to soothe the very core of his soul. As his eyes began to flutter shut and fight against the sleep that would claim him, they were drawn down to the burning imprint of the words she was uttering into the dark as they appeared across the screen.
Starman Chapter Fourteen. Whewwww it has been a journey my friends. And we are starting to see the glimmers of the end. Warnings for patriarchal nonsense and gross sexism and misogyny, murder, incarceration, self harm, one mention of abortion, one mention of rapists, one mention of cannibalism, one mention of torture, extreme age gap marriage and subsequent pregnancy, death, some religious discussion.
I have nothing to say except that normal service will be resumed next week. And that I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m not a biochemist and my biology education stopped age 16 so forgive any inaccuracies. I have tried to use inclusive language gender-wise.
I also owe nods to both Terry Pratchett and The Walking Dead. And probably a whole host of other things since I am a total hoor for horror and science fiction and the combination of the two.
Warnings for murder, gore, blood, human experimentation, vast discussions of pregnancy and conception, miscarriage, religion, a mention of religious based transphobia and bioessentialism, periods, sperm (but not in a sexy way), non specific mention of rape, suicide.
