Epilogue Clear Horizons
Dove
Six months, and I still wake up reaching for the edge of the bed.
Not to flee. The running reflex burned out somewhere around month two, replaced by something quieter and more terrifying — the reflex to check he’s still there.
My hand finds warm teal skin, the steady rise of his ribs, the hum of markings that pulse gold in sleep.
His arm tightens around my waist without him waking.
Reflex. Claiming instinct encoded so deep it operates below consciousness.
I used to think home was a place you left. Turns out it’s a heartbeat you come back to.
The station sounds different now. When I crashed here six months ago, the silence was oppressive — one man and one child rattling around in an industrial facility built for fifty.
Now there’s noise. Real noise. Footsteps in corridors, voices in the mess hall, the high-pitched shriek of kids racing through sections that used to be empty storage.
Fifty-three colonists and counting. Kepler Station isn’t a lonely outpost anymore. It’s becoming a town.
Cetus stirs against my back. His temperature runs hotter than mine by fifteen degrees, and in six months I’ve become completely dependent on sleeping beside a furnace.
My last OOPS run, I spent three nights shivering in the Rolling Pin’s bunk, wrapped in two blankets that smelled nothing like ozone and warm mineral earth.
“You’re awake.” His voice, sleep-rough, harmonics barely online.
“I’m admiring my property.”
One eye opens. Gold and amused. “Possessive language. You’ve been reading my cultural database again.”
“Chapter fourteen had some very interesting diagrams.”
“Chapter fourteen is a reproductive biology textbook.”
“Exactly.”
His mouth curves. He pulls me closer — one hand splayed across my stomach, his chin hooked over my shoulder, and the claiming mark on my collarbone flushes warm where his jaw brushes it.
Six months and the bite has settled into permanent pigmentation: purple-gold, the exact shape of his teeth, glowing faintly in the dim morning light.
I catch the scent of it sometimes — that warm ozone signature that broadcasts claimed, taken, his — and my body responds before my brain gets a vote.
“Tavia has a study group at oh-eight-hundred,” he murmurs against my neck.
“And?”
“And she packed her bag last night. Unprompted.”
“That child is frighteningly self-sufficient.”
“She learned from her mother.”
The word lands soft and heavy. Mother. Not a title I asked for. Not one I expected. But Tavia started using it three months ago — casually, like it was obvious, like it had always been true — and every time it hits me in the chest like a fist wrapped in velvet.
The kitchen smells like cinnamon and coffee and the particular brand of chaos that happens when an eight-year-old is simultaneously eating breakfast, texting three friends, and lobbying for a pet.
“The Hendersons have a terraquine,” Tavia announces, her markings pulsing with strategic brightness. “And Mira has two data-cats. I’m the ONLY person on the station without a companion animal. It’s statistically unusual.”
“Statistically unusual is not a valid argument for pet ownership,” Cetus says from behind his atmospheric readouts. One hand rests on my hip as I pass with the coffee pot — absent, possessive, as natural as breathing. He doesn’t even look up.
“Pickles agrees with me.”
“I provided the statistical analysis,” Pickles confirms from the overhead speakers. “I neither endorsed nor discouraged the conclusion. However, I will note that companion animals have been shown to improve childhood development outcomes by fourteen percent.”
“Traitor,” Cetus says.
“I am loyal to data, Specialist Storm. The data happens to support the small person.”
I set a plate of cinnamon rolls on the table — the batch I made for the colonist welcome event this afternoon, minus the four Tavia has already liberated — and watch my family argue about pets with the quiet, fierce certainty of someone who once thought she’d never have this.
Cetus’s atmospheric work earned expanded funding last month.
A real research team arrives next quarter.
His data on Kepler-7b’s atmospheric conversion has been cited in three terraforming journals, and last week he received a commendation from the Planetary Development Committee that he pretended not to care about and then read four times.
My OOPS runs work perfectly. I even have long breaks when the station needs me - like today.
The sector routes loop through Kepler — I’m never more than eighteen hours from home.
Mother Morrison restructured the entire logistics chain to make it happen, and when I tried to thank her she said “Don’t flatter yourself, Foxton, it was a scheduling efficiency” in a tone that meant I moved heaven and bureaucracy for you, don’t make me say it.
“The new courier’s arriving today,” Tavia adds, scrolling her datapad with one hand and eating with the other. “Pickles says she’s on approach in—”
“Four hours, seventeen minutes. Vessel identification: The Golden Retriever. I have... questions about this naming convention.”
“Save them,” I say. “I need to check the greenhouse allocations before she gets here.”
I lean down and kiss Cetus’s temple as I pass. His markings flare — a quick pulse of gold, there and gone. Six months, and his biology still lights up when I touch him. I hope it never stops.
The greenhouse is my favourite place on the station.
Not because I built it — Cetus designed it, the colonists constructed it, and Tavia claimed an entire quadrant for her xenobotany experiments.
But I filled it. Every seed, every soil sample, every nutrient packet arrived in the Rolling Pin’s cargo hold, hauled across seventeen star systems by a courier who finally understood that delivering things is only half the job.
The other half is staying to watch them grow.
Cetus finds me among the rows of engineered seedlings, standing at the viewport where Kepler-7b’s sky stretches to the horizon.
It’s different than six months ago. The toxic orange has faded.
At the edges — if you know where to look — the atmosphere shows traces of pale green.
His work. Three years of atmospheric chemistry, slowly turning poison into air.
“The conversion rate accelerated again this quarter,” he says, coming to stand beside me. “At current projections, breathable atmosphere in thirty-seven months.”
“Three years.”
“Approximately.” His arm wraps around my waist. I lean into the heat of him. “Dove.”
Something in his voice. The harmonics shift — deeper, steadier. The pattern I’ve learned means absolute certainty.
“Lividian bonding ceremonies are traditionally performed under open sky.”
My heart does something complicated.
“When this atmosphere clears,” he continues, “when this planet can sustain unfiltered respiration — I want to stand on the ground I’ve been building for six years. Under the sky I made breathable.” His hand tightens on my hip. “With you. With our daughter.”
“Cetus Storm.” My voice comes out rough. “Are you proposing marriage on walkable-planet day?”
“I’m proposing permanence under a sky I built for us.” He turns me to face him. Those yellow eyes — God, those eyes. Molten and serious and full of a man who spent three years alone on a dead planet and chose to stay because someone had to make it live. “Say yes.”
“You absolute—” I press my face into his chest. Breathe him in. Ozone and mineral earth and the warm pulse of his claiming mark resonating against my skin. “Yes. Obviously yes, you impossible man.”
His markings blaze. I feel his heartbeat accelerate under my cheek — that rapid double-thud that means his biology has overridden his composure.
His arms lock around me, and for a moment we just stand there, wrapped in each other and the greenhouse light, while the planet slowly turns green outside the windows.
Then his hand slides down my spine. Lower. Past the small of my back to the curve of my ass, and his grip shifts from tender to deliberate.
I know this shift. Six months of studying it like a language.
“Tavia’s occupied for the next two hours,” he says. The harmonics drop.
“Is that a proposal too?”
“That’s a statement of logistical opportunity.”
“You really know how to romance a girl, Specialist Storm.”
His mouth finds the claiming mark on my collarbone and the response is immediate — heat blooming through the bond, sensation cascading from the bite outward in concentric waves that make my breath stutter.
He knows what the mark does to me. He knows exactly what it does to me. And he uses it like a weapon.
“We need to stop having sex in the greenhouse,” I manage.
“You said that last week.”
“I meant it last week.”
“Your biometrics suggested otherwise.”
He’s picked up Pickles’s data habits. I should hate that I find it hot. I absolutely do not hate it.
Here’s the thing about sleeping with a scientist.
He experiments.
Six months of learning my body — which spots make me gasp, which angles make me incoherent, which combinations of touch and temperature and those devastating sub-harmonics reduce me to a shaking, begging mess — and Cetus Storm has turned sex into a research discipline.
He approaches my orgasms with the same methodical precision he applies to atmospheric chemistry: observe, hypothesize, test, refine.
It’s ruinous. I am ruined.
The greenhouse is warm. Not station-warm — alive-warm, the humid breath of growing things cycling through air he’s spent years learning to build.
Condensation beads on the glass panels overhead, and the filtered light of Kepler-7b’s sun comes through tinted faintly green — proof of his work written in the atmosphere itself.
It smells like soil and chlorophyll and the sharp sweetness of the engineered seedlings that line the growing stations.