CHAPTER TWO: DANOVAN tel’DARIAN

She kissed me—no, I kissed her. We kissed. And that was the moment I lost myself entirely.

I retreated from my childhood bedroom and shot away from her, down the hall, down the stairs, back into the den, dimly lit, a place to disappear. My mother had raised a better man than that: to take advantage of a wounded girl, grieving the loss of her betrothed, an alien on foreign land. I kicked off my boots and dropped down onto the over plush sofa, snuggling down under the quilts my mother had made by hand.

It’s difficult to comprehend, let alone explain: the impulse that drew me close to her is the same one that pushed me away, the same one that knew she needed to be given her space. She was wounded, undoubtedly frightened, and grieving. This was not the time.

And yet…she’d pressed herself close to me and met my fervor; she had clung to me, the fabric of my clothes gripped tightly in her small fists. Maybe I should go back. Should I go back? No. No, I shouldn’t go back—what would I say? Oh, sorry, I made a mistake, let’s make out some more.

That was it. I’d blown my shot.

Which was fine, because the point of our companionship wasn’t amorous. I needed to make sure that I nursed her back to health so that we could continue on our quest to Pyrathas and find out what happened to the Leviathan, and to the GenOriens scientists. There were bigger things at stake than my stupid infatuation. And if I could only keep that at the forefront of my mind, we would be just fine.

~ * ~

I slept fitfully, tossing and turning so that I awakened in a tangle of bedsheets and blankets, my immediate surroundings looking so disheveled that it seemed like I had been literally wrestling my demons in my sleep.

The house was already awake by the time I rose to join it, wiping the sleep from my eyes as I trudged heavily through the den, across the foyer, and into the kitchen. A Galatean kitchen was a large, open-air sun porch with a stone fire pit at its center. Sometimes there was a bubbling cauldron, but today, there was a spit with fresh meat roasting thereon. In a smaller pot, bubbling oats and fresh cut berries. And tea, always tea, plenty of tea.

“Ah, my son wakes,” my mother cooed in our native tongue, circling past my father who sat cross-legged on a pillow by the fire. She cupped my cheek in her hand and smiled a big toothy grin up at me.

“Thank you for your help, mother,” I said, and bent at the waist to press a kiss to her forehead.

“I am happy to help my first born,” came her easy reply.

“Ara isn’t awake yet?” I asked, and she simply shook her head in response before returning to the task of making breakfast for her family.

“Let the child sleep,” my father said between sips of tea. “She must be exhausted down to her very bones. She has had quite the adventure.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” I grumbled under my breath. I was soothed by the familiar smells of this meal, the unharried bustling of these comforting forms. I felt a pang in my gut: would I ever be the master of my own abode? Certainly if I had stayed, I would have mated already. I shook my head to clear it of the thought.

“Your sister is uniting today,” my father said, and I gave a start.

“With whom?” I asked, and perhaps my tone belied my surprise and disapproval. “And do you really think she’s ready?”

My mother tsked. “Your father and I were younger than she when we had you. She is ready.”

“The Gods smile upon us, sending you to us in time to be with family for such a celebration.” My father was right—it was a fortunate coincidence. To unite, in Galatean culture, was much like marriage in human culture, with a commitment ceremony and everything. Except on Galatea, there was considerably less paperwork. Which is to say, none at all.

“Now. Why don’t you take a tray up to the girl,” my mother offered. “And tend to her wounds.”

“Shouldn’t you do that…?” I asked. “You’re the healer, after all.”

“I am, at that,” she rejoined, propping her hands up on her hips, “and do you think I do not have other people who require my attention? Do you think I have all day to cater to my menfolk, is that it? Do you think I do not wish to look my best for my daughter’s commitment ceremony?”

My father wisely focused his attention on his tea.

“No, of course,” I said, smiling faintly.

“Good. You will take up a tray with oats and berries and tea, and you will change her bandages.”

I would happily do as she bid me—she’d saved Ara’s life. She set a few bowls and cups on a wooden tray, as well as a vial of sweet-smelling oil, and sent me on my way. I climbed the stairs slowly, careful not to spill anything, and bumped my old bedroom door open with my hip. I lumbered in laboriously: some nursemaid.

Ara’s eyes were open, but she was still abed when I came in, heavy, no doubt, under the oppressive weight of our gravity. “Good morning,” I said in low tones. “How are you feeling?”

“I’m all right,” she said groggily, forcing herself up on her elbows. “Thank you.”

“I’ve brought you some breakfast, and mother says I’m to tend your wounds.” I realized, then, how odd I sounded, how formal. It was a challenging shift from Galatean to English: Galatean was such a formal language in comparison.

“It smells amazing,” she said, and I could see her trying to smooth out her unruly halo of red curls as I took a seat on the edge of the bed, cradling her tray in my lap. “What is it?”

“Ah, oatmeal and berries, essentially,” I said, and she forced herself up to sitting. As the blankets fell away, I could see that she was clad only in a white tee shirt and underwear, the bandages on her thigh fully exposed to the morning air. I tried not to stare.

She took the tray from me and sat beside me on the edge of the bed, drinking deeply of the tea despite its steaming heat. Then she ate to hearty spoonfuls of oatmeal and hummed her satisfaction. “Mm. This is amazing. It tastes like oats and honey and walnuts.”

I plucked the spoon from her fingers and tried a bite myself, giving a nod of my head. “Close—those are caperberries and plean nuts. And, yes, honey. We import it by the ton.” I smiled, and she snatched the spoon back and kept eating. I couldn’t help but chuckle a little. “It seems like you really are feeling better.”

“Yes,” she confirmed. “Much. Though the burns hurt.” She paused, glancing up at me from behind a forest of thick lashes. “About last night…”

I swallowed hard. “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have—”

“No, I didn’t mean—”

“It wasn’t…I mean, I did mean it, but—”

“Just—just stop talking for a second, would you?” And I did so, happily. I could see her cheeks color with her embarrassment and felt grateful that my skin wouldn’t similarly betray me. “I wanted to say…I’m glad. That it happened, I mean. I…if you thought I was, like…angry? I’m not. I’m not angry.” She laid her hand over mine and I think I was smiling.

“Good,” was all I managed to eke out.

“Will you look at my burns, then?” She asked after a silence threatened to become tense and strange. I was grateful for something to do with my hands, somewhere to point my attention.

“Of course.” I took the tray and set it aside before asking her to recline where she sat. I watched her as she moved, still slow and weary, but with a bit more of a spark to her than I’d seen since we escaped the Leviathan. I saw a smudge of clay that I’d missed when I’d cleaned her face the night before, but she was beautiful even then, in the early light of morning, unbathed and reclining.

I reached for the small vial of oil that my mother had placed on the tray alongside a bowl full of fresh gauze and set about the process of unwrapping her. She parted her legs only slightly and I caught a glimpse of the shape of her sex beneath the thin fabric of her undergarments. But it was the reality of her injuries that captured the full breadth of my attention: they were deep and irritated, bright red and screaming in the midst of her otherwise flawless white flesh.

“How do they look?” She asked as I swabbed them with the oil and set about re-bandaging them.

“I’ll want my mother to look at them before we leave. But they certainly don’t look any worse.”

With my task finished, I allowed myself to catch her eye. She was examining me closely in an open and unabashed way that made me feel totally exposed.

“So…” she muttered, reaching up to tuck an errant curl behind her ear. “Your family home is very beautiful.”

“Thank you.”

“Your parents seem nice.”

“They are.”

“It’s too bad that, um…I couldn’t…” She trailed off, and I watched her closely, smiling a crooked smile right along with her.

“What?”

“This is just all so absurd. This entire situation.”

“What do you mean?”

“My entire world has been utterly obliterated,” she said, her smile seeping away. “My fiancé has been killed. My friends, employees, colleagues…gone. And I’m the only human in an alien village.”

“Not the only one, probably,” I muttered.

“And all I can think about…”

“What…?” I urged her on. “What are you thinking about?”

But instead of answering me, she shifted and sat up, grabbed me by the front of my shirt and tugged me toward her. It felt as natural as two magnets coming together when our lips met, an echo of the previous night’s expression of desire.

I scooped her up into my lap, careful not to disturb her new bandages, and held the back of her head gently in my hand. She shifted where she sat and tugged at the fabric of my shirt atop the base of my shoulders; I assisted her in tugging it off over my head and relieved her of her own shirt so that she pressed her full breasts against the plane of my chest.

I broke from her mouth and trailed kisses down along the line of her neck, settled into the cup of her clavicle then moved down, down. I took one of her nipples between my lips and suckled gently, and she arched her back to make room for me. And she made room for my fingers as they moved between her thighs, pressed against the thin, white cotton of her undergarments. I hooked the cloth to one side and found her sleek, wet center. She moaned, and I grew hard at the sound.

But the spell we’d cast together was broken when I heard a knocking at the chamber door. “Danovan?” It was my father. We broke apart and she covered herself with the blankets even as I rose to standing and threw the door open.

“Yes?”

My father’s brow was furrowed in his concern, and I could see the lines around his mouth deepen as he frowned. His skin was the same color as mine, but the sun and age had spotted it with small dots of brass and copper. He looked old in that moment, older than I had ever seen him before. “You will want to come downstairs to see this,” he said, “and bring your lady.”

He had spoken in Galatean, but I looked back at Araceli, and her own expression mirrored that of my father’s: she had some notion that whatever it was he was saying couldn’t be good.

After Ara had wrapped herself up in the robe my mother had given her, we descended the stairs arm-in-arm, her leaning all her weight on me so as to take the pressure off her injured leg. We joined my parents in my father’s study where they had the newsfeed running, something my mother always hated, but this time she it held her rapt attention.

Ara saw him before I did, and it was her gasp that drew my attention to the glowing screen above my father’s desk. There, in vivid color, was Christian Ward, alive, injured, and speaking at a podium with the GenOriens logo lit up behind him.

“…unfortunate turn of events,” Christian was saying into the microphone. He had lacerations over his right eye, deep and red, and the eye itself was swollen and purple. I could see that his right arm was in a sling as well, and wondered at the extent of his injuries, and how he had made it off of the Leviathan. “We will be releasing information as we receive it, but presently, we are simply trying to learn all that we can about the attack on the Leviathan and who is responsible for it. The Earth is sending a contingent of military vessels to orbit around the planet in order to help protect GenOriens technologies, but for the time being, we are enlisting the assistance of our Galatean brothers and sisters. We will be setting up a temporary care station for the survivors of the crash, the coordinates of which will be posted to your newsfeeds.”

As the coordinates came up on the screen, I looked over at Ara, whose jaw hung slack as though she had seen a ghost.

“We thank you for your continued patience as we update the survivor logs. We are scanning through our automatic roll call system, but we’ve found that many systems did not function properly during the evacuation, which sadly caused even more lives to be lost.”

“I need to sit down,” Ara muttered, and I helped her into a chair. She slumped down low, never dragging her eyes away from the screen.

“There’s just one more thing—” Christian Ward turned to speak to someone off camera, muttering urgently, arguing over whether or not he should say the next thing he wanted to say. But this was Christian Ward, and his jaw set a resolute line when he turned back to the camera. “On a personal note. My fiancé, Dr. Araceli Cross, is missing. She hasn’t been logged into any formal roll call system, nor has she registered at the care center. Nor has…” he cleared his throat, “nor has her body been found. If you have any information about her please—” he was cut off, then, by the same person with whom he had been arguing off camera, and all we could make out were a few garbled words before Christian turned back to the camera.

“Of course we’re concerned about all survivors,” he said, without the same fervor he’d used before. “And if you have any information about any of the survivors, please do contact us. The information on how to get ahold of us is in your feed.”

As Christian stepped out of view of the camera, I turned to look at Ara. It dawned on me, then, that they had dubbed over his voice in Galatean, and she had heard only her name. Everything else, save for a smattering of Galatean words that she understood, had been lost to her.

“What did he say?” She asked tentatively.

“Only that they were trying to collect survivors at a care center near the crash site,” I said. “And…that he is looking for you.”

She gave a slow nod of her head, hugging herself tightly about the waist, a palpable weight descending over the lot of us. We could all feel it, and my mother and father shifted uncomfortably underneath the heavy air.

Eventually, my father broke the silence. “You stay,” he said in his broken English as he gestured between Ara and me. “You stay for the dinner tonight. You stay to celebrate sister.”

I blinked, furrowing my brow and looked between my mother and father, wondering how they could possibly think of celebrating at a time like this. My mother chimed in in Galatean: “We have not had the chance to tell you yet,” she said to Araceli, moving forward to take her by the hands. “Dinervah has found a mate.” I translated for Ara.

I smiled a little and found that the fact of this was like a beam of sunlight breaking through the clouds. Perhaps it would be good for us both, Ara and me, to enjoy ourselves, even if only for a night. “Ah, my sister is engaged,” I explained to Ara, although a human engagement was not the same as a Galatean one. “Tonight is their, er…wedding?”

It was a commitment ceremony. Our government did not encroach upon a union with legalities and paperwork. This fact had its advantages and its disadvantages, but our society had yet to crumble as a result. I broke away from my mother’s grasp and turned to face Ara, who was curled uncomfortably where she sat. “We can go,” I said quickly.

“No, no.” She asserted with a wave of her hand. “No. Your sister’s wedding—we have to stay for that.”

“Are you certain?”

“Of course.” She forced herself up to standing and proffered a small smile as she locked her eyes on my mother, my father, then back on me. “I would be honored to accompany your family to the celebration. The whole point of my work is…life, Danovan. Life and propagation and family. My work—the work we were doing on the Leviathan and at the GenOriens base—means nothing without days like this one.”

I smiled faintly, and turned to my family, informing them in a string of enthusiastic Galatean that we would stay for the celebration, that we would care for Ara’s burns throughout the day and make our way to the care center near the crash site come morning.

“Marvelous!” My mother exclaimed in Galatean. She took Ara’s face in her hands, gently smoothing her unruly curls away from her forehead, and peering down into her eyes. Blue to blue, my mother smiled at Ara, murmuring something to her and pressing a kiss to her cheeks. “It will be you and my Danovan one day,” she said in Galatean, “I can tell.”

“Mother,” I protested weakly.

“What did she say?” Ara asked, and I cleared my throat and scratched absently at the back of my neck.

“That she will find a dress for you to wear and that I should draw you a bath.”

My mother took her by the hand, and she stood up, and I watched as she ushered Ara out of the study and deeper into the house. My father’s expression remained a somber one as he sipped from the ever-present cup of tea he cradled in his hands.

“You love the girl,” he said in low tones. But I shook my head. “But you will bring her to that man on the Newsfeed.”

“Of course I will,” I said plainly. “All I wanted from the very beginning was to help her. Help her find answers, help her find her people. And now it’ll be much easier to do that. We’ll find out who perpetrated this crime, we’ll get her back to work. She’ll probably want to return to Earth to continue her work there. And I can help her do that.”

“What is this work of which you speak?” He asked.

“She’s a scientist. A geneticist, actually, studying human and Galatean genomes to see what a hybrid species might look like. They had just begun their human trials when the Leviathan was attacked.”

“So, she is in the business of creating a new species,” he remarked, his tone pensive and subdued.

“I suppose so, yes.”

“Then it is a difficult path she is on, and you along with her.”

“What do you mean?”

He set his mug of tea aside, and moved around the desk to sit behind it, folding his hands neatly in his lap. “There will be those who oppose the idea of creating a new species of Human-Galatean hybrids. On both sides of the equation.”

“Are you saying you think the Leviathan and the GenOriens base were attacked because there are people who don’t like the idea of a hybrid species?” I perched myself on the edge of his desk and peered down into his eyes, dark and intense, like mine.

“That is precisely what I’m saying. So take care as to who you share your ideals with, son. There are plenty of Galateans who oppose the mere thought of one of us mating with one of them, let alone propagating an entirely new species.”

I don’t know why it hadn’t dawned on me on precisely those terms. Leave it to my father to understand the depths of what I’m going through more accurately than even I do. I nodded slowly, feeling a dull ache in my gut that was either hunger or despair, but likely some combination of both.

No matter—the reality of the situation didn’t change anything. Dr. Cross would be my guest to my sister’s commitment ceremony that night, and the following morning we would set out in search of the man that would make her his wife.