Chapter Fifteen #3
I blinked the burn of tears away. It’d be no different if I had slept around and surrogated some alpha seed about. “You are their Ota. I am Affa. From your body they came, and from their hearts they will go.” I’d studied a lot of Naleucian lore surrounding child-rearing.
For a long moment, I held Roan’s hand and he bit back a sob. “Does he sing for you, like the other sings for us?”
Zurok and Liru nodded, and their tears poured in abundance.
“Is it because I left their side?” Roan choked the question out as I stroked over the shell of our firstborn egg.
“The bond between child and parent is powerful. There are only two of you, and it’s a great strain on an egg who cannot acclimate.” Liru stared at the swirled egg, and Roan bit back a soft sob and held him up, letting Liru and Zurok take it as one.
“This isn’t because we can’t handle two children. It’s not because we can’t afford it. It’s not because I am lazy or don’t want him!” Roan’s snap made the egg in my lap quiver in sadness, that I soothed away with gentle strokes to his soft shell.
Zurok and Liru held their breaths, almost as if they knew what he was going to say but feared those words wouldn’t come, that he’d change his mind. I snuggled in closer to Roan, holding back my own sadness as the tiny new bond drifted away from us by its last thread.
“His egg looks like the patterns on risel.” Zurok stroked the shell with his open hand, marvel and wonder in his bright eyes. The yellow omega next to him leaned down to kiss the top of the egg with a shuddering breath.
Risel were a species of little lizard bird-type things they called Strix, donning silvery-purple feathers and intricate patterns.
The males were amorous little things, preferring not to mate but rather to spread their seed about ambivalently.
As such, they were show-offs and offered their elaborate mating displays to anything that stood still long enough, even their own reflections.
Roan shuddered as he gathered the words in a shaking breath. “If a child has two omega fathers, what do they call them?”
Zurok and Liru didn’t speak.
“Oh, Progenitors’ sake, you two wouldn’t shut up about it a few weeks ago. Ota and Ofa, isn’t it? Zurok is Ofa rooted from the alpha parent because you represent yourself as an alpha, right?” Doc stared Zurok down, who flinched, a bright flush staining his cheeks as magenta as his scales.
I knew that Zurok wore clothes like an alpha and exerted dominance, but I didn’t know he identified as one.
Perhaps having met alphas, he understood his proclivities more.
For his part, he stared at Doc with teary eyes, tail screwed up and writhing in a comforting curl with Liru.
Grief, sadness, hopefulness, angst, all rolled up into one gesture.
“I think Risel has chosen you as his parents.” I spoke the words that Roan couldn’t.
“Little fucker jumped ship the second he felt how much you two wanted him.” Roan laughed, a sob caught in his throat. “Please don’t keep them from me.”
As if he’d said the one thing they didn’t want to hear, Zurok and Liru froze, faces falling.
“Let me visit them? I want to know them and love them, even if they aren’t mine.” Roan choked through a breath. “And don’t tell a fucking soul I’m this weeping hormonal mess.”
Confusion hung in the air before Roan took a deep breath and a snort, taking our second-born egg from my lap and holding on to it.
“Zurok? Liru? Will you nest with us at least a night or two so I don’t go insane?
I don’t want to part just yet. There’s a reason the universe gave me two eggs, not because I needed two but because someone else needed one. ”
Liru and Zurok sobbed loudly, their tails curling and swishing with joy and pain. Not breeding had been hard for them. Adoption would be a long time off, before there were enough children born to make the feat easy, enough samples of gametes distributed. “Are you certain?”
“If you’d asked me an hour ago while I was pushing him out, I’d have scratched your face off, but I’m certain.” Roan shook his head in a happy sort of grief.
“Your home borders another that has yet to be assigned…” Zurok cleared his throat. “Liru and I have kept humble housing because we did not want to be above any other, but if we moved into the house next door… You could see them every day. We could raise them together?”
And before I knew it, I curled in against Roan and sprawled amid the other two omegas and the egg that they wanted more than life itself, and the egg I needed and wanted more than anything else.
I would have been just as happy with two, I told myself.
But I was happier knowing I’d be close and involved.
“Friend Wallace, may I call you kin?” Zurok stared me down from his place at my feet with his mate.
“I know what friend means, but not kin.” The title had a different concept of family and blood to me.
“It means one who will take my eggs in the event of my passing. A friend will nest with you, but kin will protect your bloodline.” Liru smiled. “We will call you My Roan and My Wallace. Instead of friend, that is.”
I liked that. Zurok stroked the shell and rubbed his head against my leg affectionately in the most platonic of ways, yet intimate. “And our young will call you Ota Roan and Affa Wallace, acknowledging your role, but in name alone.”
I smiled. Roan sighed in utter relief. “This is the hardest decision I’ve ever made, and the easiest one.”
“Ew.” Doc rolled his eyes as he stared at us. “I’m calling Sarge to come escort me before you make me want another.”
“Gorm would be happy to aid you in that.” I threw the comment out as Doc gave me the finger and left, his tail swishing happily.
I never knew curling up with other men so platonically was possible, but such was being a creature of Paradise, I supposed.
Joy blossomed in my heart as our little egg sent out a single thought, wordless and like a flicker in our minds.
Family.