5. Magnolia
5
MAGNOLIA
E ven within the cozy confines of Garrek’s bracku-hide tent, sleep was neither deep nor comfortable. I didn’t have a true sleeping bag or bedroll like the other two, and my shiny thermal blanket wasn’t big enough to completely wrap myself up burrito-style. The result was that heat was constantly seeping out of me, sucked into the ground like a warm drink through a straw.
Halfway through the night, I sat up and decided to give up on sleeping for a while. I took off my silk bonnet and slipped into boots. Tugging on my jacket over top of my pink pyjamas, I quietly opened the tent flap and looked out.
Cool, fresh air kissed my face. For a moment, I closed my eyes and just breathed it in.
Then I stepped out.
I stepped on a lump.
The lump hissed. And then it moved.
“Oh… Oh!” I yelped as my balance deserted me. Fr om the darkness came a muttered curse, and then the snap of something hard but flexible, cord-like, curling around my waist. The cord tightened and kept me from falling.
I looked down to see Garrek sitting up in a bedroll at my feet. The dark blue line of his tail was fastened around my waist. Garrek violently kicked away his bedroll and stood, keeping his tail where it was. I shivered as tingles of sensation sprang outwards from that point of contact.
“What are you doing?” Garrek growled.
For a moment, I found myself incapable of answering him. In the darkness like this, he loomed like some sort of demon from an Old-Earth tale, imposing and surreal. He wasn’t wearing his vest, and his bare chest and shoulders looked like something carved from stone. Warm stone, apparently. I could feel the heat radiating off of him. I had to stop myself from leaning into it.
Garrek didn’t have nipples. It struck me as odd that I hadn’t noticed this yet. I’d been around multiple shirtless Zabrian males already. But it was only now, with Garrek standing in front of me without his usual vest, that I became aware of that odd little difference of anatomy.
Of course I noticed your eyelashes. When the sun hits them, they cast shadows all the way down to your cheeks .
Garrek didn’t have eyelashes, either. If he did, they would have been aglow with the light from his eyes, as if dusted by moonlight.
“Why do your eyes do that? ”
Garrek inhaled sharply, then closed his eyes. Everything was suddenly so much darker. With what seemed like a monumental effort, he opened them again. They weren’t glowing anymore.
“What are you doing out here?” he asked me again, a note of impatience clipping his words.
“You didn’t answer my question,” I replied.
“And you haven’t answered mine.”
Silence stretched between us. My belly buzzed pleasantly from the pressure of his tail around me.
A little too pleasantly. I cleared my throat and took a tiny step backwards. Garrek jolted, as if he’d only just remembered he’d left his tail there, and snapped it back behind him to its hook.
I tilted my head to look up at him. The hulking demon vibe was gone now, largely due to the fact that Garrek wasn’t wearing his hat and instead of lethal black horns he had the typical cartoonish, cutie-patootie ears that all Zabrians seemed to come equipped with. Those adorably rounded ears at the top of his head were an absurd contrast to the look on his face.
“You know,” I told him, unable to hold back a small smile, “if you really want your scowl to have the full effect, you should do it with your hat on and cover up your ears.” I flapped my hand up towards the top of his head where the ears in question had just twitched. “It’s like being glared at by a Terratribe II fieldmouse. Or a beaver.”
His scowl deepened. His ears twitched again.
“What is a beaver? ”
“It’s an industrious little forest creature!” I told him. “Very fuzzy. Very cute.”
“Fuzzy,” he repeated in disbelief. “ Cute .”
“Yup!” I said cheerily. “Just like those ears of yours. Anyway. It’s just a thought. Just trying to give you some pointers on your whole salty cowboy schtick. You can’t scare me when you’ve got a frown like the Old-Earth devil himself but the ears of a child’s plush toy.”
He stared down at me in silence for so long I half-wondered if he’d decided the conversation was over but just hadn’t bothered to move his body out of my way yet. But then he finally grunted, “My translator must be malfunctioning because I barely got any of that. Salty cowboy…”
“ Very salty,” I emphasized helpfully.
“And what in the blazes is a plush toy?”
I blinked at him.
“You guys don’t have plush toys for children? They’re like stuffed animals.”
The three moons were bright tonight in the cloudless night sky. They clearly illuminated the disturbed and disapproving slant to his dark eyebrows.
“Human children use dead, stuffed creatures as… as their playthings?”
I burst out laughing at his interpretation. I almost wanted to let him go on believing it. Maybe he’d think I was a little tougher, a little more interesting than I was. Maybe he’d even let me go pee by myself if he thought I was badass enough to carry around a dead cat or rat or something as my best childhood buddy .
“No. No, definitely not,” I said, still chuckling. “They’re made of fabric and beads and buttons. Little toys meant to look like animals. For children to keep in their beds.”
“Oh.”
“So you don’t have those on Zabria?”
“No.”
That struck me as incredibly sad. Between my five younger siblings and me, our house back on Terratribe II had teddies and toys spilling out of every corner of every room. I’d even gotten into the habit of sewing and crocheting custom ones for my siblings by hand. Last Christmas my youngest sister Robin had asked for a set of anatomically realistic Old-Earth dinosaurs.
“I could make you one,” I offered. “Maybe if you saw one you would understand.”
“What would I do with it?” he asked, cocking his head. “I don’t need a pretend animal taking up room in my bedroll.”
“You just… I don’t know. Hug it. Or talk to it.”
“I don’t know what ‘hug’ means. And I don’t talk to fabric,” he said, as if the very idea were pure lunacy. “If I wanted to do that, I’d talk to my hat.”
“Message received,” I murmured. I mostly ignored the sassiness of the second part of what he’d said because I was so startled by the first.
I don’t know what “hug” means.
So Zabrian children didn’t get hugs and they didn’t get stuffed animals. Or, at least, Garrek and Killian didn’t.
Well. Poop. Now I wanted to cry .
Was I just being an ethnocentric asshole? Maybe Zabrians truly didn’t care about softie shit like that. Maybe Zabrian children really wouldn’t want a stuffie to cuddle at night. Maybe they were completely different from human kids.
But I thought of Killian. With his big eyes and his skittishness and his gentleness towards the animals.
And I really didn’t think so.
And suddenly it was all too much. Thinking of Killian, or a young Garrek, quietly and secretly wanting to hold something soft but not really knowing how. The eldest daughter-turned-nurse in me wanted to fix things. To find solutions and help and heal.
But sometimes…
Sometimes you just couldn’t.
“I came out here to just look up at the stars, I guess. And the moons,” I said, an abrupt shift in conversation back to Garrek’s original question. “I’m really sorry that I stepped on you. But I didn’t expect you to be sleeping right here.”
I pointed down at the ground where Garrek’s abandoned bedroll was crumpled directly in front of my tent’s opening.
“Where else should I sleep?” he harrumphed. “This way if you get the asinine notion to wander away from camp during the night, hopefully tripping over my sleeping body will at least knock a little sense back into you.”
“Hey! I wasn’t planning to wander away! Despite what you may think, I don’t actually have a death wish. And I’m not stupid! ”
Garrek went still. And then, softer than I’d ever heard him speak before, softer than a man with a scowl and a jaw and a body like that should have been capable of, he murmured, “I know you’re not.”
“Well… Good. Glad we’ve got that settled.”
I turned around and went back in the tent.