Dani
The morning after the storm, I woke before my alarm and lay in the dark for a few moments before I realized the empty stomach feeling wasn’t my own.
Pip was hungry.
My stomach was fine, still half-full from the dinner I’d eaten while Andrek was being treated at the medical center.
I was out of bed in seconds, reaching for the light cardigan I left on the chair beside the door. Ready to go.
The bond hummed in the back of my mind like a second heartbeat. It hugged me like a warm thread, connecting me to Pip regardless of the walls and distance between us.
She grew impatient.
“Alright, alright,” I murmured to the empty room, and went to grab her and start breakfast.
Andrek was already in the kitchen when we arrived.
He moved with care, his left arm wrapped in a medical sleeve that kept the wound from the storm sealed and medicated.
His movements were slower than usual, compensating for the restricted mobility.
Despite his limitations, he set out Pip’s favorite bowl and was measuring grain mixture with one-handed precision.
“You felt him wake up,” he said without turning.
“Hunger,” I confirmed, strapping Pip into the seat before moving to the warming unit and taking over the preparation without discussion.
Andrek stepped aside for me. Mere days ago, our interactions in this kitchen had been a careful negotiation of space.
Now we moved around each other as if we’d been doing it for years.
“That will be one of the first consistent signals,” Andrek said, settling onto one of the high stools. His posture told me his ribs were still sore. “Hunger and fear are the strongest broadcasting emotions in young Yxians. You’ll learn to distinguish them from background noise within a few days.”
“And the others?”
“They take more time.” He picked up his tea with his good arm, watching me work.
“Joy is next. You’ll feel it as a lightness.
Contentment is warmth. Curiosity feels more like a buzzing?
” He took a sip. The Yxian word for it is,” he made a sound that vibrated at the back of his throat, “which roughly translates to the feeling when something catches light.”
I repeated the word to the best of my ability.
The corner of his mouth moved. “Better than your first attempt at the harmonics.”
“The bar’s in hell.”
“I know.” This time he smiled.
Pip’s impatience spiked through the bond, and I picked up the pace. The bowl was warm and ready a few minutes later.
When I turned, Pip reached out - not for food. For me.
“Good morning, little star,” I said. She pressed her forehead to my cheek in the Yxian bonding gesture, the equivalent of a hug. Through the connection between us, I felt her good mood like sunlight.
The first challenge of the new bond arrived on day three, while Pip was napping.
I made the mistake of stepping outside the house to check on the storm damage to the garden, thinking distance and walls between us would be enough. I was examining a toppled trellis when a sudden, sharp spike of distress hit me.
I pushed open the nursery door to find Pip awake in her sleep cushion, crying, arms reaching for me with a desperation that made my heart clench.
“I’m here,” I said, scooping him up. “I’m right here. I wasn't far. I was in the garden looking at the work we need to do.”
But Pip’s distress didn’t ebb for nearly ten minutes. She clung to my shirt, hiccupping through his tears, while I sat in the creaking rocking chair and sang under my breath and felt, through the bond, how large and frightening my absence had been to him.
Andrek found us there when he came to check on the nap.
“She panicked,” I said, keeping my voice soft so as not to disturb Pip’s slow return to calm. “I was only outside for a few minutes.”
“The bond is still new,” Andrek said, leaning against the doorframe.
His voice was low and careful, the tone he always used around Pip during fragile moments.
“Until it stabilizes, she’ll need you in close proximity.
Her nervous system is still mapping you.
When you disappear, it registers as a disruption to his sense of safety. ”
“That's a lot of pressure to put on one person,” I said, and regretted the words. They sounded like a complaint. A precursor to leaving.
But Andrek didn’t react with alarm. “Yes,” he said. “It is. That’s why the Yxian live in communities, not as individuals, the weight distributed.”
“But Pip only has us.”
“Pip only has us,” he confirmed.
“Then we’ll just have to be enough,” I said.
Andrek was quiet for a moment. “Yes,” he said at last. “We will.”
He started teaching me to shield.
“You can’t absorb her emotions with no filter,” Andrek explained, sitting across from me in the garden while Pip slept and a breeze moved through what I’d started calling the silver trees.
“Not indefinitely. It will exhaust you. Worse, it will destabilize you, and she’ll feel that destabilization and respond to it.
You need to learn to receive the signal without being overwhelmed by it. ”
“Like turning down the volume?”
“More like learning to listen. You cannot stop the bond. It doesn’t have an off switch. But you can develop a kind of a membrane.”
“A membrane?”
“A layer of awareness between her emotional state and yours.” He paused. “Close your eyes.”
I did, feeling ridiculous sitting cross-legged in a garden on an alien planet while a man with wings and a tail instructed me in psychic self-defense.
“Now find where the bond sits,” he said. “Not where you feel her emotions, but where the connection itself lives. Look for the thread, not the signal.”
It took me a while, but I found it. “Okay. I feel it.”
“Good. Now imagine a gauze. You want something permeable because you want, no, you need to feel her, especially alerts. But it creates a layer of separation between her experiences and yours.” He paused. “Breathe.”
I breathed.
“You’re not trying to block her,” Andrek continued, his voice steady. “You’re just reminding yourself where you end and she begins.”
It was harder than it sounded. With practice over the next few days, through multiple attempts, many of which ended with me frustrated and Pip cranky, I got the hang of it.
I gained the ability to feel her hunger without becoming hungry myself.
I sensed her fear without needing to deal with my own panic response.
“Better,” Andrek said one evening a few days later. “You’re improving faster than I expected.”
“Is that a compliment?”
“Yes. I believe it is.”
I laughed, surprised, and the sound startled a small creature from the silver trees, something like a bird, but with iridescent scales instead of feathers.
It shot into the sky and caught the last of the amber light before vanishing.
Pip, sitting on the garden blanket between us, turned to watch it go with hands outstretched, a look of wonder on her face.
“She likes the flying ones,” I said.
“She’s always liked them,” Andrek said. “Even as an infant. Her mother,” he stopped. “Her mother had a garden, and many creatures like that one lived in it.”
He didn’t elaborate, and I didn’t push.
Mornings in the garden were Pip’s favorite and therefore became non-negotiable.
She’d toddle along the paths between the silver trees that made her look like a miniature scientist when she paused to examine rocks and fallen leaves.
If a creature crossed her path, they also became a subject to study.
I followed three steps behind, close enough to be felt through the bond, far enough to give him the autonomy Andrek said was essential for healthy Yxian development.
“They need to explore,” Andrek had explained. “The instinct is deep. A young Yxian kept too close to their caregivers becomes anxious and dependent in ways that are hard to undo. Let her wander.”
“While staying close enough that she doesn’t panic when she looks up.”
“You got it. It’s a balance.”
“You make that sound simple.”
“Nothing about this is simple,” he said, “but you’re learning.”
Afternoons became lesson time for both Pip and me. I took notes and asked questions till Andrek told me to stop because I was overthinking. I made mistakes and corrected them.
But the evenings turned into something I hadn’t expected.
The evenings were mine.
Pip’s dinner and bath became my favorite part of the day.
I loved the way she slapped the water with all her hands and looked up at me with an expression of absolute glee.
After the bedtime harmonics, which I was improving at, I’d put her down for the night.
After all of that, Andrek and I would find ourselves in the kitchen together.
It had just happened the first few nights, both of us gravitating toward the same space at the same hour, and then continued happening until it became our routine.
Most nights, he cooked. He found cooking meditative.
I’d grown up in a world of nutritional supplements and automated meal dispensaries.
Ingredient-based cooking was still foreign to me, but thanks to Andrek’s infinite patience, I was learning.
I stood at the counter while he walked me through the steps.
His hands moved with effortless precision.
And oh, those hands. The first time I noticed them was during the fourth evening in the kitchen, when he showed me how to break down his favorite vegetable.
It looked and tasted like a pomegranate mixed with a parsnip.
Its shell required a technique to open without losing the juice inside.
His hands were large and capable; fingers longer than human proportions, and they moved with such careful sureness that I stopped paying attention to the vegetable.
“Dani.”
At a shortened version of my name, I looked up to find him watching me with an unreadable expression.
“You’re not watching my hands.”
“I am,” I said, which wasn’t a complete lie. I was watching them, but my mind wandered elsewhere.
He held my gaze for a moment too long, then looked back down at the vegetable.
After that, I was more careful about where I looked.
Though not always successful. Andrek enjoyed rolling up his sleeves to display powerful forearms. I’m pretty sure he didn’t know what he was doing to me.
Living alongside Andrek was different from working for him.
In our quiet moments together after the day ended, I noticed things about him, and my body reacted.
Late at night, I practiced wrapping the gauze around my thoughts and practiced a forbidden ritual on Earth.
I touched myself in the most intimate places and thought of Andrek, wishing it was his hands on me instead of my own.
Not only did I appreciate strong arms, but his wings. Oh, his wings.
I’d been aware of them since our first meeting.
It was difficult to be unaware of them, given the sheer scale, but in the early days on the estate, my attention focused more on Pip and my own failures to pay attention to those sexy wings.
Now, the bond settled, and with a tentative peace established in the house; they were back on my radar.
Andrek kept them mostly folded against his back indoors, a practical consideration given the ceiling heights.
But in the garden he’d sometimes extend them, and when the afternoon light caught the membrane, it did something extraordinary.
The surface appeared dark at rest, a deep charcoal, nearly black.
In the right angle of light, they revealed themselves to be layered with color.
Violet beneath the charcoal. Iridescent green at the leading edge.
I’d been watching Pip who tried to catch a scaled bird for the better part of twenty minutes, finally gave up and threw herself onto the garden blanket in a dramatic imitation of defeat. I felt her frustration through the bond and smothered a laugh. When I looked up, Andrek was watching me.
Not Pip. Me.
He looked away, back to whatever notes he had on the datapad he brought outside. His ears moved in a subtle shift adjacent to embarrassment.
I looked back at Pip, who had recovered from her dramatic collapse and was now studying the blanket with focused interest. Through the bond, I felt her curiosity catch.
I loved Pip, and I was falling for her father. Stars above, my heart was doing something inconvenient.
“You’re happy,” Andrek said one evening, maybe three weeks after the storm.
We were in the kitchen, the remnants of dinner pushed to one side, Pip having gone to sleep an hour ago in the way she always did now our bond was stable. A pot of something warm sat on the heating unit. Andrek described it as a traditional Yxian winter drink, and I held my cup with both hands.
“Are you surprised?” I asked.
“About a month ago, you seemed to reconsider every decision that had brought you here.”
“I was.”
“And now?”
I looked around the kitchen. I smiled at the clutter of Pip’s things on the shelf by the door, the datapad with my notes beside the window where I studied while Andrek cooked. The house stopped feeling like an employer’s residence and started feeling like something else.”
“Now,” I said, choosing my words with care. “I find I’m not thinking about the past very much at all.”
Andrek looked at his cup. His tail, once resting along the floor behind him, made a slow movement. “Good,” he said at last, and left it there.
We sat in silence for a while. Through the bond, Pip’s sleeping contentment hummed at the back of my mind. The two-moon light shone through the window; the colors competing on the kitchen floor.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
Andrek raised one eyebrow.
“The night of the storm, before you got to us,” I kept my voice measured. “You said managing alone was manageable. But when you came through that shelter door you looked…” I searched for the word. “You looked scared, and not because of the storm.”
He was quiet for so long I thought he might not answer.
When he spoke, his voice was low. “I heard Pip screaming,” he said.
“Through the walls, through the debris. I couldn’t get to her.
I couldn’t get to either of you. And I…” He stopped and pressed his thumb along the rim of his cup.
“I have lost people before, Dani. And I am aware of how quickly things can be taken away.”
“We were fine,” I whispered. “Pip was fine. Your song helped, actually. Hearing you sing to her before the storm happened,” I paused. “It gave me the idea. When I couldn't do what you do with the frequency, I figured out what I could do.”
Something shifted in his expression. “My grandmother’s lullaby became your grandmother's lullaby.”
“Something like that.”
“Hmmm.” He reached to touch my cheek, but moved his hand back as if he’d thought better of the idea. “Goodnight, Danielle.”
I raised my eyes to meet his. “If you want, call me Dani.”
“Goodnight, Dani,” he whispered as he disappeared down the hallway.
I thought about it for a long time after I went to bed.