Chapter 10 #2
“Hey, that same stricture applies to us, too. Sympathize with Icthian liberation groups, or get too cozy with an Icthian, or deliver contraband to a protected zone? You get locked out for a generation, easy.”
Is that why we lost the war? Because we would not inflict cruelty on our own people like this just to survive?
“Too cozy?” Fia asked, her tendrils glittering with an unintentional display of concern.
That was not the part of the stricture she should have asked Carissa to clarify, but the question tumbled from her lips before she realized it. She should have asked about the liberation groups. But her words fell, and Carissa’s brows rose.
“You don’t know?” She rubbed the space between her eyes with the back of her thumb and grumbled.
“Of course you don’t. Saint Behza bless it, I should have made him put together a pamphlet for you or something,” Carissa set her mug down and faced Fia with a beleaguered sigh.
“If you piss Sol off badly enough, you get registered as a PPR. A ‘Potential Progeny Risk’. The progeny of Earth being all they ever worry about, of course.”
“I hope my presence here does not brand you a ‘risk to progeny’, as foolish a stricture as that is.”
“We call it ‘being peppered’, sometimes,” Carissa corrected with a snort.
Fia felt some of her frustration wane. “Ah. Well, I hope my being here does not result in you being seasoned into sanctions.”
“You’re not just an Icthian, you’re an unbound one. That’s extra spicy pepper,” she said with a deep, tired sigh. “But you have a good enough head on your shoulders, and a wise aversion to the Feds. Just keep a low profile while you go poking around the datastreams, alright?”
“That, I can do,” Fia added with a deferential tilt of the head as she rose from the copilot seat. “I will leave you to your coffee and your campaign planning.”
“Until next time.”
Fia wasn’t more than a step outside of the cockpit before she heard Carissa calling into her comms.
“Alright, which one of you chucklefucks thought it would be funny to try and seduce the minotaur?”
A few days of hard burn and hard work had given Fia scarcely a moment to mull over her upcoming date with destiny on Driska Station. It also hadn’t given her time to linger and indulge in late-night talks with the dark-eyed man that had been snaking into her idle thoughts.
Not that she should do, would do, anything beyond idle chatter. Her newfound awareness of the risk she posed made her averse to testing the waters. And she wasn’t even sure if they were waters she was welcome in.
She knew that sometimes humans had a mixed fascination and fear of Icthians that they couldn’t help. It was the call of curiosity, not intimacy. It made it hard to discern whether there was an interest in who she was, or simply an interest in what she was.
He may just be hospitable and kind. He likely doesn’t wish to risk treason charges to flirt with someone so foreign to him. In all likelihood, he is just pitying me because I am lost and alone.
That thought made her grimace. This was not going the way things had in the past. In the rare moments between assignments on the Fleet where she would allow herself to indulge in intimacy, she never felt hesitation like this.
It wouldn’t even have been the first time she had found herself tangled in that captivating flurry of meaningful glances and stolen touches in dark corners with a human. They were enthusiastic to indulge, but it was never more than a fling.
In fact, none of her dalliances — human or Icthian — went beyond that. Something always came up. Amicable, understandable somethings. Fleet movements, reassignments, new postings, new training. Duty would always arise to sweep her away when things got complicated.
And there is no duty here to sweep me away. So I need to keep this from getting complicated.
Complexity chased after her, against her wishes.
She kept finding out more about him. Details that drew her to the man she should be keeping at a professional, safe distance.
He told her that at one point, he had aspired to be an artist, but he never found his footing.
It just wasn’t enough to make ends meet.
Tinkering and engineering were his back-up plan, but he had never truly left art behind. His schematics and lists all had illustrations in the margins, and he would take time to add delicate filigree designs on his hand-tools. Remnants of the path he once trod.
He was brandishing one of those filigreed tools, a slender pen-sized plasma cutter, when she came in to greet him. She took a few steps into the corner of the cargo bay he had claimed as a workshop, a tidy station that she had already marked with a sticker or two.
“Ooh, what are you working on?” she inquired, peering over his shoulder to glance at the creation in question.
A painful mistake. He was wearing a welding mask, and she was not. The bright flare of light set off alarm bells in her head as she worked to blink away the sting and flurry of dots in her vision.
“I’m working on— Oh, shit, Fi!”
She couldn’t see him, but she heard the clatter of him dropping his work. Then she felt his hands cupping the sides of her face. That warmth would have been exhilarating if she weren’t experiencing the sensation of her retinas sizzling.
“You know, that is entirely my fault,” she responded with a pained chuckle. “I should have known that helmet you were wearing was important.”
He sighed out what seemed like relief, and she felt his thumb skate over a tear that had slid down her cheek.
She wasn’t weeping sorrowfully like the night they had shared on the loading dock, but the gesture tugged at that memory and burned with a white-hot urge to lean forward and press her lips to his.
Fortunately, for the sake of the boundaries she was resolute to keep firm, she couldn’t even see where his lips were.
“C’mon, sit down, try to stare at the floor for a bit. You poor thing.” His tone was both chiding and lighthearted as he helped guide her to the stool to sit. “You can’t interrupt a man while he’s making you a present, anyway. That’s illegal interference.”
“A present? I would say you should let me peek, but I think that is impossible now.”
“Oh, you’ll be alright in a minute. It’s, uh, it’s not quite done, but … here. Hold your hands out.”
She obliged and felt something metallic set delicately in her grasp. It was a light, circular band. She could feel what seemed to be a brooch opposite a gap in the circle.
“Is this a … tiara?” she asked, blindly setting it atop her head. “You have honored me, an accessory worthy of my title of pirate princess.” She grinned widely, fiddling with it to get it to balance. It was much too small, but it brought out a laugh from him watching her fuss with it.
“No, no, no. It’s a, uh— Oh man. This is going to sound so bad out of context.”
She frowned, pulling it back into her lap and guiding her fingers along the band again. A gap, a semicircle, and then a plate. Diamond-shaped. She felt a lick of indignation flare up through her throat and scorch her gills immediately.
“You are correct.” She breathed out a slow and controlled hiss of air. “What context am I missing that would make me grateful to have a Pactbind?”
“It’s inert!” he insisted, and she felt his hands guiding her fingers to the diamond-shaped anchor that would sit at the nape of the neck.
“Feel that. Normally, there’s some sadistic, spiky, corkscrew-looking thing that goes here.
” He made a harsh swallowing noise, and she hated that she couldn’t see the motion.
“The, uh, the part that anchors into the brainstem? I’ve removed that part entirely and put in a little signal repeater.
So, if anyone gives you the ol’ scan to make sure you’re compliant… ”
Her fury quelled. His fingers were still on hers. Holding her steady. He made this. For her. Without being asked. Just for her, to make her life easier.
“I misunderstood. I—” She blinked a few more times, the dotted lights fading enough for her to see his arms in front of her, holding her hands.
He had rolled up the cuffs of his work shirt, and his deep-toned skin glittered with what must have been shavings from working on the golden material of the cursed thing.
There were a few defined trails where his sweat had beaded, fallen, and left a clean swipe through the metallic dust, and she reached forward to touch along one of those trails thoughtlessly as she spoke.
“This is a very kind thing. You did not deserve to be snarled at,” she smiled, only partially cognizant that she was drawing little circles on his forearm all the while. “You made me something that can keep me safe in the outside world.”
“I was hoping this might make you feel less stuck, let you get off the ship. Help you feel less alone, maybe make some friends outside of the two of us.” His voice was gentle. Understanding.
“I’m sorry. I have a habit of doing this,” he continued.
“I try to solve things that nobody asked for help with. It’s …
Uh, well, the word I’ve heard is ‘overbearing’, but I prefer to think of it as poorly aimed gestures of—” He bit off his words, pulling back from her and clearing his throat. “Hospitality, or something.”
Hospitality was not the word he had been chewing on. Fia wanted to know what word was on the tip of his tongue. She wanted to press her own tongue to his, to pull that word from his very mouth and show him her carnal gratitude in kind. But that was complicated. And she was avoiding that.
“If you’re feeling less blind in twenty minutes, want to take it for a spin?” he asked, his voice a notch brighter than before. “We’ve got one more batch to load up, but then we’re free to meander until our departure window in … oh, what, four hours?”
“Shore leave sounds delightful.”
“Alright! I’ll meet you dockside in twenty, then!”
Her vision had finally cleared, and she could see his smiling face, framed with rowdy coils of dark hair that she fiercely wanted to rake her fingers through.
Complexity. So much complexity.