19. AHANE

He didn’t push about her finishing her paste. He had made it with a little more water and passed it through the blender before serving it to her what she would consider lukewarm. But he doubted that her willingness to consume it had been because she had found it more palatable.

Her teasing about not knowing who he was had put him in a foul mood. She did not appreciate how difficult she was to read, or acknowledge his frustration with not being able to figure out her true feelings or intentions about their conversation. When she did convey a level of emotion he could perceive, was that because she was actually having an emotion, or were her emotions so intense that even he could perceive them?

He feared it was the latter.

He had had to learn to read Ohade as Ohade’s body had failed him, and his brother had lost his voice, his scales, had grown too weak to twitch his tail and had had to have his food increasingly liquified so it would slide down his ruined throat to spare him the effort and agony of swallowing.

Something about their conversation had snuffed the brightness from Thalia, and the sparkling hum that came with Human presence. In its place was a soft cry he wasn’t meant to hear.

Without discussing it, he added water to the soup pot and (with a sigh) heated it to her preferred poaching temperature.

“No,” she said when he informed her her bath was ready.

“Yes.”

She continued to sweep the floor, focusing on getting some dust from under one of the tables.

He seized the end of the broom. She spun to look at him, sparkle returning for a few heartbeats before it disappeared again. He glared at her. He’d never known what to say when Ohade was being unreasonably difficult. He’d never understood it either. But he had also not had the plague, nor been held prisoner and experimented upon.

“Are you concerned that things will become heated?” He chose the High Dialect word to mean arousing.

Her skin prickled to indicate she understood what he’d meant. “No.”

It was impossible to tell what sort of no that was. A shy no? A waspish one? A haha, you fool, of course not sort of no? A miserable no? A matter-of-fact no? Because no was no, but he still wanted to know what kind of emotion fueled the no.

His fingers twitched with the urge to bathe her wounds and comfort her.

There was nothing about her appearance to indicate she wanted, needed, or would even tolerate such physical contact.

Restraining the urge ached. “We share the same bed. Go bathe.”

Was that a flinch? Or a little bit of embarrassed color on her cheeks? Did her shoulders slump a little as she walked towards the soup pot?

He kept his gaze averted as she undressed and he helped her into the pot. She did not sigh that happy little sigh and instead something about her seemed even more miserable as she sank up to her neck.

“You don’t have to act like you haven’t seen everything.” The edges of her voice sounded torn.

Everything? Oh, she meant her naked body. He handed her her soap. “It would be rude to presume just because I was allowed to look once means you have no right to modesty in the future.”

The little folds between her brows re-appeared, along with a bit of her focused sparkle. “Is that a 25XA thing?”

“You mean a Human male would assume that you had an encounter once, he gets to assume it will happen again?”

After a pause, she said, “Most. All the ones I’ve ever been with would.”

Ahane shook his head. Must have been because Humans tended to commingle physical intimacy with intimate emotions. How complicated. “Standard Generic Etiquette Protocol is that a single encounter doesn’t grant special privileges or access.”

“Standard Generic Etiquette Protocol?”

“There are many worlds in the Gestalt, all with their own Etiquette Profiles. The Standard Generic is like our Trade language.”

“So what’s the 25XA etiquette?”

Taidc would have a more elegant explanation. Or Keiron. “Between 25XA, there is no acknowledgement of an encounter unless we agree to acknowledge it.”

Post-encounter etiquette varied amongst species, but the standard etiquette was keep it simple, presume nothing, be respectful, while 25XA etiquette was more strict. Among many species, sexual encounters could bestow or convey a certain amount of trust, familiarity, and relationship priority. Among 25XA, this was not the case.

She asked, “So it didn’t happen unless we say it did?”

“No, it happened. I mean, it stays there.” He cupped his hands, trying to express that just because it had happened didn’t mean anything else happened too. They had agreed to an encounter. Said encounter had occurred. There had been no discussion of future encounters.

The folds between her brows deepened. “With Humans, it’s more complicated most of the time. Even if you try to keep it uncomplicated.”

“Is it complicated for you?” His emotions were entangled in this, but he couldn’t discern how. Being with her had been unlike anything he’d experienced before, and not just because of what had happened. It had felt like more despite there being less of everything.

A laugh he didn’t like was her answer. It sounded tortured. “Not the way you’re worried about, Prince Red.”

He watched her drift in the water. There were none of the subtle signs she enjoyed it. He frowned. “Why did finding out the Greys are Gestalt upset you? Is that some breech of Human Etiquette?”

She turned her back to him. Her shoulder blades rose gracefully out of the water and against her skin, a shadow forming between them. She didn’t answer right away. Then she turned her head to eye him over her shoulder. “I suppose you should know who’s breathing your air.”

“I know who is breathing my air.”

“They offered me a deal,” she said. “If I agreed to… help… them, I’d get one handler and special treatment.”

“Help them?” The way she said help did not match what the translator told him. And there was nothing special about how she’d been treated.

“More intense procedures. Different, I guess. But always with the same handler. And I know that might not sound like much, but it is. Because the others they have a script, and you’re screaming and screaming and fighting and there’s nothing there. They stay on script. At least the specific handler engages with you. It probably doesn’t make any sense. Maybe it’s a lie I told myself because I like pillows.” Her one visible eye was wide, bright, in the extreme corner of the socket. Her fingers dug into her upper arms. “So I took the deal. A single handler. Special food. All the pillows I wanted. To be kept like a pet,” she bit the word out, “in return for my interactive participation in whatever experiments my handler intended to run.”

She hugged herself, her fingers digging in to the skin, and they would have drawn blood if she’d still had her fingernails. “I was a collaborator. And He’d tell me you can go back to the others, and I did. Once. I didn’t last. When He came to take me back, I went. I fucking went. I crawled away behind him.”

Ahane frowned. “Why did you go back?”

“Because the other Humans hated me. They knew the deal I’d made. A deal they hadn’t been offered.” She slowly turned in the water to face him fully. Her eyes were rimmed with red, but no tears fell. “That’s why I was down there. That’s why I have this translator. That’s how I knew the code to the bay. I could steal things from his thoughts. I’d trick him into telling me things or revealing things he didn’t want to reveal and shouldn’t have revealed. I don’t know why I bothered. Maybe to get back at him. He told me the Gestalt would do even worse things to me, and I believed him. Telepathy means it’s almost impossible to lie. And it was true. Except it was the truth as the Greys perceive it. Not what I, a Human, would consider ‘worse things.’ And he knew that and let me toddle off. He lied to me without even lying.”

Emotions pushed through her words and something desperate in her expression told him the words she had for this weren’t adequate.

She dropped her hands back under the water. “They tamper with your mind. The brain starts to fight back from the trauma and eventually disintegrates. They’re always trying to refine their techniques. I thought I knew what kind of piece of shit I was. Kept me sane knowing the score. And finding out I didn’t really understand anything or know anything…”

Her voice cracked and broke and disappeared into the steam while her eyes rimmed red and so, so, so bright.

Her throat pulsed. The distended veins flowed under her skin with the motion. “You can hate me for what I did. I know what I did. Or, at least, I think I do.”

Ahane stepped onto the low stool. He reached into the cooling water and scooped her out. She resisted feebly, he held her close, tucking her against his neck and chest.

She surrendered into his arms and all the fight fled from her.

His voice clawed out of his throat. “You were a prisoner. An experiment.”

“I just said that,” she said softly.

“I don’t know what He did to you, but I know nothing He gave you can ever balance what He did to you. You may not believe that or know that, but I do.”

He staredat the ceiling and tried not to think about her soft breathing and body curled up against his. She was still awake. So was he: he needed less sleep than her, and they were on different cycles, but there was nothing else to do until the diner opened, so he was content to wait and stare at the shadows and simmer in his own violent, seething emotions.

The rhythm of her breathing and the sensation of her skin told him she was still awake. The tension also told him she couldn’t fall asleep. He risked twitching his arm slightly to increase the contact with her skin. She didn’t flinch. Not at his touch, anyway.

Ohade had been full of pain like that. Pain that none of his brothers could ever really understand because they weren’t being eaten alive by the plague. Ohade fought to hide his suffering, but the plague hadn’t taken just his body. No, the plague started with the body. Then it had taken Ohade’s music, his voice, his future, his pride, his freedom, and finally, his dignity.

His brother’s sobs and rage and suffering had been buried behind a dam of shame and self-hatred. He had blamed himself for contracting the plague, even though none of them could know where he’d gotten it from. Trying to comfort him had only evoked rage, but leaving him alone had only increased his misery. His suffering had been total, multi-faceted, and had become him.

Ohade had apologized—the last thing he had ever said to Ahane before the plague had taken his voice—for not having the will to spare the family his suffering.

Nothing that had come before or after could possibly, ever, come close to that hellish moment.

Ahane prayed it was defiance that kept his brother fighting. Not penance or guilt. But he’d never know, because Ohade could no longer do more than croak single words.

And scream.

He didn’t have Ohade’s singing voice. His singing voice was something only a cat would like. So storytelling would have to do. Taidc had found a book of old 25XA myths, legends, and fables, and he’d read all of them to Ohade at least five times.

Ahane started to tell her an old children’s story from his planet. It had been the first one he could remember being told by his father. He told it in High Dialect, since Thalia seemed to be soothed by the cadence and sounds of that dialect, and she could ignore his voice as droning if she preferred.

Her presence stilled and softened. She shifted a hair and her spine brushed oh-so-slightly against his arm, maintaining a tentative contact.

He paused mid-story. Dared to flick his wrist and brush his talon along the small of her upper back.

Her spine ended in a little point. The bone-tip pushed gently against her thin skin. Interesting. Had Humans had a tail at some point?

But more importantly: she was asleep.