Andrek
Ihad not wanted to talk about my past life for a long time.
I never considered silence on personal matters to be a deficiency requiring correction.
My crew had understood this about me within the first year of my promotion to captain.
Rethis, who had known me longest, stopped attempting to extract personal information through direct inquiry.
Instead, he developed a system of oblique comments delivered at irregular intervals, which I found considerably more manageable and had never told him was effective.
But I watched Dani’s face in the corridor while Pip settled between us and saw her relief when I said I had no mate to mourn. While it was the truth, I owed her the full background.
That evening, after Pip had eaten and read to and had conducted her usual prolonged negotiation about the arrangement of her sleeping blankets before conceding to sleep, I found Dani in the common room. “I’d like to explain about the bonding marks.”
She looked up from the book she’d been holding but not reading. She set it aside without pretense. “You don’t have to,” she said.
“I know.” I looked at my hands. The discoloration on my wrists was faint now, years faded, visible because I knew where to look. “But, I’d like to.”
She tucked one leg beneath her on the seat and turned toward me. “Whenever you’re ready. I won’t push.”
“Her name was Ereth,” I said. “We went to school together as children and served together in my second year of commission. We were compatible in superficial ways.”
“Did you love her?” Dani asked.
I considered her question. “I believed so, but I was young and had nothing to compare my feelings to.” I looked out the window.
“Among my people, bonding happens early. It’s cultural.
We’re oriented toward partnership, toward the building of a unit.
There’s no shame in waiting, but there’s a considerable ambient expectation.
By the time I was twenty-three and hadn’t formed a bond, my family had developed opinions. ”
“Opinions,” Dani repeated. “Yeah, I get it.”
“Extensive ones. Ereth resolved their more extreme opinions. We entered into a formal promise-contract, not yet a bonding, but the precursor to one. The marks indicate intent.” I looked at my wrists. “She wore them as well. We intended to complete the bonding when I finished my tour.”
“What happened?” Dani asked.
“The tour extended as they do. I was offered a captaincy earlier than expected. It was a junior assignment with a small patrol carrier on frontier routes, but a captaincy.” I paused. “I accepted it.”
Dani was silent for a moment. “Without talking to her.”
Her voice held no judgement. “I told her, but I didn’t discuss it with her.” I sighed. “She requested that I decline the position, or at minimum defer it. She had her own trajectory in mind.”
“Oh?”
“She wanted a stable posting, a cycle closer to core space, the beginning of the life we’d promised each other,” I paused. “She wasn’t wrong to want that. I understand that in retrospect, and I understood it less clearly then.”
“You went anyway.”
“I went anyway.” The way I said it, didn’t paint me in the most flattering of light.
I’d made peace with my decision over time, but the facts remained.
“Ereth dissolved the contract within two months. I received the formal documentation in a dispatch packet between two mission reports.” I thought back to the moment where I stood in the dispatch bay, and the ordinary smell of it, the complete prosaic normalcy of the moment in which something ended.
“I went to the medical bay, took the marks off and I kept serving.”
Dani said nothing. The quality of her silence was not the kind that required filling.
“I want to be clear,” I said, “that I am not recounting this as a male grieving. Ereth made the correct choice for her life. I made a choice for mine, and it cost something, and I accepted that cost. I remained in service for eleven more years, and I found it sufficient.” I looked at my hands again.
“Sufficient is not the same as whole.”
“But I managed it.”
“Alone,” Dani said.
“Alone,” I confirmed.
“And when you brought Pip home…”
“There was considerable commentary in my former social circle,” I said.
“Cross-species adoption is unusual. Doing it without a bonded partner, as a single military veteran in frontier territory, is, well,” I paused, “my family used the word ‘eccentric’ before settling on ‘concerning.’ Several colleagues in the transition housing where I first stayed with her made it clear that they found the arrangement inappropriate. That I was not a suitable primary caregiver. They reminded me over and over that a creature like Pip required a family unit, a conventional home, not a solitary captain with poor domestic qualifications who had, by their accounting, already demonstrated an inability to sustain attachment.”
“They said that to you?” she asked, a look of horror on her face.
“Some version of it. Multiple times from multiple sources.” I looked at Pip’s closed door down the corridor.
“I was aware they might be right. I had not previously maintained a home of any kind. I had very limited experience with dependent creatures. I had… I had a significant amount of evidence in my own history suggesting that I was not well-constituted for the kind of sustained presence that attachment requires.”
Dani was quiet for a long moment. “But you kept her,” she said.
“I kept her.” I thought about Pip in the dispatch bay, tiny baby Pip in Rethis’s cargo bag, because I had not yet owned a carrier.
Rethis provided the bag with joy. Pip’s face appeared over the edge of it and looking at me with those large, assessing eyes, and that’s when I made the decision.
“She needed a home. I was capable of making one. So I did.”
“And you’ve been alone in it,” she said. “Until…”
“Until you,” I said. “Dani,” I said. “I’ve told you the obstacle that didn’t exist.” I held her gaze. “Now tell me about the ones that do.”
She looked away in a swift motion, her eyes darting to the window. “It’s not,” she began. “There’s no simple way…”
“Try,” I said.
She looked back at me. “It’s too much,” she said.
“What?”
“This.” She gestured, a small, helpless motion that encompassed the room, the corridor, Pip’s door. “You. Pip. The way it feels to want you both. I’ve wanted to feel needed and loved for years. Things I want this much have a history of disappearing on me.”
“And so you began removing yourself before it could be removed,” I said.
She looked up at me. “That’s…yes. That’s it.”
“In a way I fulfilled your belief when I reviewed contract termination clauses,” I said.
She laughed once. “You did.”
“I did it in my study with the door closed so you couldn’t see what I was doing.” I held her gaze. “We have both conducted ourselves somewhat poorly.”
“Somewhat,” she agreed.
The wind moved across the roof. Pip made a brief sound from her room and then went quiet again.
At some point during our conversation, I moved closer to her, and she had done the same, inching closer to me.
My tail moved and curled around her ankle.
“What’s your tail doing?”
“It’s a Torzi sign of affection.”
“What does it mean?”
“It’s saying, I’m here. I’m staying.” I smiled. “It’s something we do with our potential mates.”
She looked down at it. Then up at me. “Huh. Interesting.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “And I don’t want you to.” I held her gaze. “That’s the answer to the question I was asking. I’d like yours.” I reached out to take her hand in mine. “Dani,” I said, “why have you really been pulling away?”
“Because," she said, “if I let myself love you and then you disappear…I don’t know how I would come back from that.”
I looked at her for a long moment. “Then we don’t let it go,” I said. “We hold on tight to each other.”
“Andrek.” Her eyes gleamed with unshed tears.
My tail still curled around her ankle as I leaned forward to claim her lips.