by Tinnean
They turned down the nearby spoke and stopped at the food court that occupied the middle of it. C.J. liked this spot because the proprietor had a long-standing romantic arrangement with one of the freight shuttle captains, and the fruit selection was outstanding. He’d also put in a live-action holo on the ceiling, so it looked like they were looking at the rainbow of planets stretched out beyond the station toward Hermes-Eight-Prime.
“Here, Anderson,” C.J. said smoothly, still glaring at his sister. “You and Marshall stake out a table, Cassidy Jeanette and I will go scare us up some chow.”
Cassie flinched. “Okay, Cyril John,” she muttered, still trying to act like she hadn’t done anything wrong. “That’s a great idea!”
C.J. grabbed her elbow and hauled her barely outside of earshot. “You had my room monitored?” he growled.
She shot back, “It was Mom and Dad’s idea!” before he’d even finished speaking.
“Mom and Dad? Are you shitting me?”
Cassie looked back over her shoulder, where C.J. could see Marshall’s “You got yourself into this, dear” look written plain across his face. “You know what a horndog you were, C.J.! They… they just didn’t want you to nail anything that was, you know, poisonous, or whose culture said one night meant matrimony or something. We haven’t used it in years, because, you know….”
“I’ve got better sense than that!” C.J. snarled, and Cassie grimaced again.
“Yeah. You had better sense than that back then too. I didn’t… I mean we didn’t see it until after the monitor had been all set up and everything and….”
“When?” he asked, his voice unforgiving.
Cassie had to stop and think. “Uhm… Zalandra, I think. Yeah, I think she was the last date we saw there, but it might have been Clint from that casino downside.”
C.J. frowned. “Zalandra… that was… that was right after I got here!”
Cassie nodded vigorously. “See? I told you, C.J., once I… I mean we figured out that you were, you know, using your head, we didn’t peek, I swear!”
C.J. just looked at her in disgust and shook his head. “I cannot believe you, Cass. You know that? Not everyone meets their husband at a virginal eighteen. You really have to ride herd over my love life from a molecular level?”
Cassie winced but tried to maintain her dignity. “I’ve seen the pictures of Jensen and Molly, C.J., with you in there with them. There is nothing molecular about that couple!”
“Jensen’s a good guy, and Molly’s a damned sight sweeter than you are!” he growled.
“Well, I’m not going down on you in front of my husband, now am I?” she snapped back, and then both of them stopped and grimaced.
“Ewwwwwww!” he muttered, and she agreed.
“Worst. Example. Ever. Sorry about that, C.J. You’re right, okay? You’re right, I… we… I was wrong, and we should have trusted you, but, seriously, it was seven years ago. Until I thought about where to put Anderson up, I didn’t even think about it.”
C.J. shook his head, still disgruntled. “Cass, you keep telling me that I didn’t get this job through nepotism alone. Do me a favor and… just, you know, have a little faith in me, okay?”
Cass pulled up one side of her mouth. “Yeah, well, just once you try not to think with that thing between your legs, and I’ll try that whole credit thing.” With that, Cassie flounced off to give her and Marshall’s order, and C.J. made faces behind her back, because if she could be an immature princess snot-bag, well, then so could he.
With a final snarl, he walked up beside her and started placing the order, looking over his shoulder at the young man he was ordering for.
“What would you want if you’d been living off synth-rations for the last ten years?” he asked himself, but Cassie heard him. She looked behind him, to where Anderson was looking above him at the holo of the planets in their rainbow dance. His expression would go from wide-eyed and open-mouthed to pinched and fearful and then back again, depending, C.J. imagined, on what he thought of from moment to moment as he looked at the view. What part of that made him joyful? What part of it seemed to hurt? If they were going to dig into those holograms, C.J. imagined they would get an up close and personal glimpse into Anderson Rawn’s heart. C.J. hoped that it wasn’t so broken that it fragmented them all.
“Anything,” Cass said softly, obviously thinking the same thing. “As long as I could have oatmeal between bites.”
C.J. bought a portion of every fruit he could, as well as some protein, like free-range mammal-bird, and some aquatic avian from Hermes-Eight-Beta, and some hybrid grains as well.
And some good ol’ Terran oatmeal.
ANDERSON DIDN’T eat nearly enough. He smiled at the taste—the peaches were a definite hit—and he dutifully tasted everything, but he was obviously used to skipping meals to save the synthesizer.
“We’ll have to get you fattened up,” C.J. said with an encouraging smile. “Trust me, there’s enough.” C.J. packed the leftovers to put in the cooler in his quarters and tried to tempt him with some sweets—ice cream, chocolate, a cookie—but Anderson politely declined, looking more and more overwhelmed with every offer.
In fact, by the time lunch was over, he was looking damned close to losing all composure.
“Hey, Anderson, we still have to check out the ship, but how about I take you to my quarters. They’re small, they’re homey, there’s a vid screen with some vids I bet you haven’t seen.”
“Comedies?” That lower lip trembled in a way that was positively wistful, and C.J. smiled gently.
“Yeah. Comedies, lots of ’em. My favorite vid.”
Anderson’s smile was sweet, that open to the universe smile that C.J. was starting to associate with the peculiar feeling in his chest. “Good,” he said softly. “Because we haven’t seen anything new in a while.”
C.J. shared another look with Cassie, and then he stepped into the breach. He took the lead and guided Anderson down the color-coded beige corridors of the employee quarters ring while Cassie and Marshall followed.
“Which ones are your favorites?” C.J. asked, making the emphasis casual.
Anderson smiled guilelessly. “Bobby and I tend to like the dumb ones. You know, the ones that make you want to crawl out of your skin because the main character does something so totally stupid, and then in the big climax at the end it becomes this big public embarrassment? But Kate likes the ones with the wordplay, the subtle ones, where you have to watch them a couple of times before you get it all. Henry likes action movies, the kind with the one-liners at the really tense parts, and Risa likes the sweet romantic stuff.”
It was the longest, most confident speech he’d made so far, and C.J. went with it.
“What about Alpha? Which movies does he like?”
That guileless smile and the youthful enthusiasm leached out of him like calcium from a bone. “Alpha doesn’t like vids,” he said quietly. “He thinks they’re a waste of time and power. Is your apartment here in the middle? Yeah,” he answered for himself. “You said that. You work for the station, so this is where you live. It’s nice!” He smiled as they came out of the spoke to the middle hub. “I like that the living quarters have carpet. We didn’t have any carpet at the colony. Things were pretty spare.”
C.J. looked down at the short-cropped, easy-care tan and blue carpet beneath his feet and realized he’d never really thought of it before. “Yeah,” he said, surprised. “We’ve got it pretty good. Here we are.” He looked up at Cass, who nodded. “Cass and Marshall are going to go take a look at your ship and get the download of the remaining info started, and I’ll get you situated here. Is that okay?”
Anderson bit his lip and nodded. “I, uh… I’d really like it if I could spend the night aboard my own ship. Can I do that?”
It hurt to say no.
“If we want to get your records downloaded, I think we’re going to have to have the place to ourselves for a while, okay, Anderson?”
Cassie said it, and C
.J. was grateful. The truth was, all they really needed access to was the bridge. The hard, cold fact of it was that not one of them wanted to let Anderson back into his little bacterial breeding ground of whatever it was on that tiny ship that was hurting him.
Anderson’s look went from “uneasy” to “acutely uncomfortable” at Cassie’s words. “You have to understand,” he said pleadingly. “They’ve never had a night without me. They… they’re going to be afraid. The ship will go into sleep mode, and they’ll go to sleep, and we programmed the video to play for the recorder, and they’ll know that. They know that time passes when they’re unconscious, and I won’t be there, and they won’t know that they’ll wake up.”
His forehead furrowed and his jaw tightened, and he tried again. “It’s really important that they know they’re going to wake up,” he said earnestly, and Cassie was the one who spoke.
“Anderson, Kate knows me. If I tell her that we’re not going to cancel their programs, will that be enough? Look at you, honey. If anyone needs a night’s sleep in safety, it’s you. Let us take care of your friends tonight, okay? I promise,” she said somberly, “we won’t let anything bad happen to them.”
Anderson’s shoulders started to relax, and C.J. thought he’d add to the comfort moment. “Cassie keeps her promises, Anderson. She’s never let me down.”
Anderson nodded slowly, and Cassie and Marshall turned to leave.
“Uh,” Anderson spoke up, “could you guys tell Bobby not to provoke Alpha, okay? They need to just leave him alone. I don’t know what he’ll be like tonight.” He blushed then and looked at them unhappily. “He… he tends to get angry at change.”
Cassie nodded like she took warning about holograms all the time, and Marshall gave a little two fingered salute, and they took off. C.J. noted that their hands were tightly intertwined—Marshall’s pale, slightly gold-tinted, attenuated fingers engulfing Cassie’s dark, tense little ones in all of the comfort they could give.
C.J. smiled reassuringly at the shorter Anderson and hit the I.D. panel with his palm. The vacuum swish of the door opening ushered them in.
“Warm,” Anderson said as he walked in, and C.J. blushed a little as he walked to the tiny kitchenette and the small cooler to put the reusable take-out containers inside. He liked warm colors—gold, red, orange, burnt umber, tans, and browns—but he also liked the cool ones as well. The living room was decked out warm. The walls, the couch the pillows, and the carpet were all earth and sun. His bedroom was blue and green, lavender and violet, and silver.
He opened the connecting door to show Anderson, and Anderson turned that gorgeous, open-to-the-universe smile on him. “Cool,” he said with a little perk and almost a giggle.
God, C.J. liked him.
“Yup, just like me,” C.J. bragged expansively, and Anderson grinned.
His expression faded after a moment, and he said, “I made my room yellow and gold and green. I… I really missed the sun and the earth.”
C.J. swallowed. “We get four weeks down planetside for every twelve weeks up here. I spend all my time outside. I have a yard and a garden, and I live near the ocean. God, I love it down there.”
Anderson looked at him in wonder. “Then why do you work up here?”
C.J. shrugged. “I love it here too.”
What C.J. was starting to think of as Anderson’s true smile burst over his face, making his thin, pale features look sun-kissed and whole. “So you’re like the rooms. Coolness of space and water, warmth of earth and sun. That’s nice. I like that.”
C.J. didn’t know what to say, and he was lucky, because Chips spoke up into the silence. “Chips is a dirty bird!”
Anderson jumped about a foot and looked into the corner of the living room at what he’d probably assumed was just a decoration.
“What in the fuck is that?” The exclamation was followed by his hand slapped in front of his mouth like a child, and C.J. fought the urge to laugh at him. The last time Anderson had been around anyone but his own peers—as C.J. was thinking of them now—Anderson had been a child. God, what a mindfuck. C.J. figured that part of his mission here was going to be to teach Anderson to swear in public without feeling the need of a public smackdown.
“That is a bird that is native to Hermes-Eight-Gamma. The original colonists had zero imagination, so they just called him a gamma bird, but I call him Chips.” C.J. walked up to the cage and pulled out a cracker he’d pocketed just for this reason. “Right, Chips? Did you miss me?”
“C.J. stop fucking around!” Chips squawked, and C.J.’s eyes narrowed.
“Can we say, ‘Cassie shut your trap’, Chips? Can we? Let’s practice that now, so you can say it when I catch up on my leave. ‘Cassie shut your trap’, okay?” He fed the squat little gamma bird pieces of cracker through the cage bars, careful of the bird’s thick, curved beak. Chips had been molting two weeks ago, but that all seemed to be done with, and his long, curling feathers in all shades of purple were growing back in nicely.
“C.J. stop fucking around!” Chips squawked again, and C.J. sighed.
“Man, I don’t know what I’m going to do to get her back for that, but it’s going to be something dire. Bitch. I hope she gets hives!”
“Stop it!” Anderson snapped, and C.J. turned to him in surprise.
“Hey, man, I didn’t mean it. Cassie and I go back and forth—older sisters, you know!”
“Stop being mean,” Anderson insisted. “Don’t say mean things. Don’t say them, not to your family. Don’t ever say them, because they’re there, in your head, forever. Don’t say them!” His shoulders hunched as his face crumpled, and his chin was tight in that way that C.J. realized indicated a true level of emotional upset.
C.J. dropped the last of the cracker in the bird’s cage and held up his hands. “Okay, I swear. I won’t say mean things about my….” He paused to edit all epithets like meddling, pompous, irritating, bitchy, and moody. “Beloved older sister. I promise. No being mean. I swear.”
Anderson nodded his head like he could live with that, and then his entire body was overtaken by a single, jaw-cracking yawn.
C.J. said, “Wait here!” Then he disappeared into his room and came back with some yellow sleep shorts and a green T-shirt, all in soft cotton and not the scratchy synth of the coveralls. “Here, go ahead and change, and I’ll show you how to call up the vids. Once I get you settled, I’ve got to go help Cass, but you can watch any vid you want and then fall asleep whenever.”
Anderson nodded and then gestured shyly to the room. “Can I go in there to change?”
C.J. blinked. It was… it was such a maiden girl thing to do—certainly not the reaction of a young man who’d been living in space for ten years. Those sorts of inhibitions tended to die quickly when you were thrust into a small space with a lot of people. But then, C.J. had to concede in the same thought, holo-figures could disappear into their own rooms at will, couldn’t they?
“Knock yourself out,” he said lightly. “I’m going to set up the vids.”
While Anderson was in the other room, C.J. gave Cassie a quick call to verify that the damned monitor feeds were in both rooms and then turned on the vid screen that took up much of the wall between the living room and the bedroom.
Anderson came in and lit up appreciatively. “It’s so big.” He blinked his eyes. “I guess I could have made mine that big. God, I’m so stupid. I spent ten years watching vids from my school tablet propped up on a table. Jesus, no wonder Alpha—” He stopped talking abruptly.
“It’s probably just as well,” C.J. said smoothly, pretending the mysterious Alpha had never been mentioned. “You were running pretty low on fuel when you got here. And man, no one’s said anything about it, because we didn’t want to make you self-conscious, but we’re all pretty damned impressed, you know? You got here, and you’re not stark raving bugshit. Anderson, that is one hell of an accomplishment, you’ve got to know that!”
Anderson gave him an inscrutable look
. “It’s nice that you think so,” he said faintly. He seemed to fall into the couch then, boneless, like a cat exhausted by the weight of its fur and the world at large. “I think the gravity is higher here on the station,” he said in explanation, and C.J. nodded.
“Yeah, we try to keep it as close to Hermes-Eight-Prime as we possibly can. I think your little shuttle probably had a much lower setting. We’ll have to check it, and then we can get you a workout regimen to help acclimate you. You’re going to be conking out for a while, there’s no two ways about it.”
Anderson looked at him unhappily. “Are you sure I can’t go back to my shuttle?” He crossed his arms in front of him, and the T-shirt wrapped around his body, pulling low at the neck. The bruises that had so affected Cassie were there, faded now with the ultrasonic mending Cassie had given him, but still very distinct fingerprints wrapping around the soft flesh of Anderson’s throat.
“Yeah,” C.J. said, pretending like his own jaw wasn’t tight and he wasn’t feeling the urge to just cuddle the guy like a teddy bear and not a tough, surviving adult. “I think you managed to stay alive and sane for ten years. We need to make sure there’s nothing left in there that can hurt you.”
Anderson nodded, and C.J. moved forward and pressed the remote control for the vid screen into his hand. “There’s games under this file, and comedy vids here. My favorite,” he said as he flipped through a couple of titles, “is this one, Privateer’s Dream. You’ll like it.”
“Is there kissing?” Anderson asked, his voice sleepy even as C.J. neared the door.
“Only a little, at the end. A girl and a boy.”
“Good,” Anderson murmured. “I like it when it ends happy.”
“It doesn’t have to be a girl and a boy to end happy,” C.J. objected, and Anderson turned a half-lidded, dreamy smile toward him.
“I know,” he said. “I like two boys or two girls at the end too. As long as it ends with a kiss.”
C.J. grinned at him, but Anderson had already pushed play, and C.J. watched as he rested his arm on the arm of the couch and then rested his cheek on his arm. He’d be out in a couple of minutes, C.J. hoped as he hit the vacuum close of the door, and nothing could hurt him again.