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.
