She made a strange chortling sound in her chest as her lips lifted in the way anthros occasionally used to indicate happiness. But Xenon could see by her flame that she was not happy. “You are upset,” he said again.
“No,” she insisted. “I’m just…processing. It’s okay. I wanted the truth, and I got it.”
“Yes, but I can see you are very upset. I would make you happy during these coming, as you called them, months. Happy, not angry or frustrated. Please, Mother of My Drakkon, tell me how I can return your flame to bright orange.”
Her brow furrowed, lips turned down again, as new sparks of confusion lit up her head flame. “Um…what? What exactly do you mean by ‘make my flame return to bright orange?’”
Finally, an answer he could give without upsetting her. “Your flame is dark now. Blue. I seek to return it to a brighter shade, so you burn pleased with all I provide.”
Another downturn of her lips, then, “Okay, when you look at me, what exactly are you seeing?”
“Due to my injury, I confess I cannot see your outer skin as well as before. But I can make out your facial movements, and I have no problem discerning your flame.”
“My flame…” she repeated. “Tell me if I’ve got this right: you can see my heat signature using only your eyes?”
Before Xenon could express confusion, she provided a mind picture of a male glowing red with fear. He appeared to have an advanced weapon in his hands as he looked around for an unseen attacker.
“Yes, that is how I see you, as you put it. But who is this male in your image? And why is he so afeared?”
She let out a long breath, before answering, “He’s afeared of a huge alien who’s come to our planet to hunt humans like trophies.”
At her words, Xenon’s fire went cold. Yet she gave another chortle. “That was, like, my papa’s favorite movie. Now I’m fated to it! If he could see me now…”
More chortling, but her flame…
“Your ‘heat signature’ is now as distressed as when you were crying.”
“It’s okay,” she assured him again. “I’m processing. Just processing it all in my own way. Eventually, I’ll accept this, but right now…”
The female anomaly stopped speaking. So he offered, “Do you require holding?”
“No, you don’t have to hug me. I’m just…processing. Just…”
Another unfinished sentence. And instead of arguing with her further, he did something he would never have dared if she’d been drakki. He wrapped his arms around her without permission and held her close. Tucked inside his arms so tight, he wondered if she could hear the suddenly rapid beating of his three-chambered heart…or feel how his flame warmed to have her near.
“You don’t have to do this,” she said, even as she burrowed her head further into his chest.
He didn’t answer.
And she didn’t pull away.
He stood there in this strange position, listening to the distant booms of the shifting glacier ice, and the gentle trickling of his drakkon-made stream.
Perhaps they would have stood there in this way until her flame returned to good color. But his male works soon interfered.
The female stiffened inside his arms. “Is that…?”
He stepped back. Quickly.
“I apologize,” he said with a formal bow, trying to ignore the sudden swelling of his male works as they grew against the binding of his webbed skin, threatening to descend. “I am sorry to fail you in this way. Despite your having already quickened with my seed, I find I am still unable to control my male works in your presence.”
He backed away. Determined to remove himself from her.
But she held up a hand to stay his retreat.
“Really? You still want me that way? Even though I’m already pregnant? And not a—what did you call female dragons?”
“Drakki,” he supplied. His tone stiff. But perhaps not as much as another part of his body. “And again, I apologize. I do not know why my male works continue to react in this fashion. It might be our biological differences. Perhaps my body understands not that you have already been seeded.”
Mentioning this turned out to be a mistake. With one flash of memory, his second penis went from swelling to moving beneath his clothes. Seeking Female 7-133’s wet sex like a predator scenting its prey.
He could no longer hold on to his reserve. “I am abjectly sorry. I will remove myself. From this room. From this station, if that is what it takes to gain control of myself.”
“Xenon.” She said the word out loud.
He stopped short at the surprise of hearing his given name upon her lips. He’d never been called by it before.
She moved off the table and walked over to his polar bear furs, stopping at the edge closest to where he stood.
“Itsohkay.” Again, she said the words out loud. In her strange tongue. Which he could not understand.
Yet…
Xenon watched in a state of arrest as she began to remove the clothes from her large body. After the last fabricated boot came off, she held out her hand to him.
“Itsokay,” she repeated. Then inside his head, she said, “It’s okay.”
But it was not okay. He started to tell her this, but before he could protest again, she fisted the front of his shirt and pulled him down. Again, she pressed her lips to his. But this time her tongue did not try to part his lips to seek entrance.
Instead she pushed her entire body into his, jutting her hips so her lower half pressed into him.
And that was it for nobility. Or reason. The feel of her body against his overwhelmed his senses, and suddenly they were both on the floor. His body covering her back as he pushed her into a kneeling position, and pulled his fabricated pants down. His male works did not merely descend but sprang forth. Violent in their need to be inside this woman.
“Calm down,” she said, coming out of the kneel he’d just put her in, and turning to face him.
He sucked in a breath when she reached back, taking his second penis in hand, stroking its rigid length. Somehow calming, but not nearly sating it, with her touch.
“I did this to you?” She posed the question with a soft voice inside his head.
He answered with the rough nod of the Far Travelers, unable to push words into her when her hand was around him like this.
Then she leaned forward. And took his other penis into her mouth.
His breath didn’t just catch; his respiratory system stopped working altogether. Xenon’s body lit up with a flame so hot; he was certain it could easily burn him alive. Melting his insides as surely as an enemy drakkon’s roar of fire.
He supposed he might die. Supposed and did not care.
But when he felt the now familiar pressure building up inside his seed sacs, he somehow managed to push the words into her. “I am calmer now,” he said gravely. “I would prefer to seed your sex.”
She seemed to be deciding how to answer. But after a few more indolent sucks and strokes, she removed him from her mouth.
“Okay, fuck me then,” she said, holding his gaze as she laid herself back on the fur, her luscious milking mounds in the air. “Fuck me. Make me forget who I was. Who you are.”
His brain understood little of what she said, but his male organs easily found their way between her legs, his hands lifting her by the hips to better receive him. As if having agreed to take turns, his second penis entered her birthing canal, while his first snaked up behind her. Tight. Dry. He might hurt her.
In response, his penis oozed a viscous substance from its tip. A lubricant of some sort, Xenon realized when the tip swirled the thick substance around her other opening. And with an instinct he had no idea he possessed, he grabbed her around her full thighs and circled her legs around his waist. Opening her backside up to him and consequentially, allowing him to sink in ever deeper.
By the Mothers! It felt amazing to be inside her like this again. Able to gaze upon her as he…what had she called it? “Fuck”…as
he fucked her. It was like a homecoming, and a discovery at the same time. Though that made little sense.
Poetry, he remembered her saying earlier.
Being inside of her felt like poetry.
Poetry he didn’t get to enjoy for long. Before he could give her his claiming bite, she began to babble aloud in her language again. “Ohgod! Ohgod!”
Her wet, vertical slit squeezed down so hard on his second penis, it began the seeding process before Xenon could think to command it otherwise. But the rush of pleasure up his spine obliterated any regrets he might have had.
In that blinding moment, he better understood the upright primates. Why they spent so much of their time attempting to breed. What he could not understand was his own race. Why they made no attempts to mate outside of breeding. Why they never sought this pleasure out.
She was the mother of his hatchling. He, her acolyte, mating her as he was bid. But in that moment, he felt selfish. Like he would fuck her and fuck her until they both ceased to exist. Until they both turned into ether…antimatter.
At least that was how he felt until another sound broke through the haze.
She was leaking water from her eyes again. Or as she had called it, “crying.”
“Did I…hurt you?” he pushed into her mind as he quickly pulled out of her. The mere thought nearly extinguished his hot flame with heavy guilt. He would never perform the mating act with her again. He would sleep elsewhere if he had to—
“No, the opposite. You made me feel something other than overwhelming sadness for what I have lost. Thank you.”
But still, she continued to cry.
“I will lie with you upon the furs, and hold you while you cry yourself to sleep.”
“No, you do not have to.”
Not wishing another argument, he did as he was learning to do with her: followed through on his decision without listening to her spoken request. As good as his mate was at breeding, she was rather odd when it came to expressing her true flame. Masking her desires behind strange noises and denials of the obvious.
Observing her flame, instead of her words, he gathered her in his arms and tucked her head into his chest as she continued to cry.
Strange. Only a few rotations ago, his flame had been a cold blue. He’d been alone by choice, but far lonelier than he cared to admit, even to himself.
Yet now his flame burned bright and warm as he held the drakki-sized wolf hybrid. The mother of his young. His flame was turbulent with worry and change. He was, after all, a drakkon in violation of nearly every protocol created specifically for this trip. Yet sleep stole over him quickly in this position. And as his eyes closed for a much-needed rest, he found himself wishing he could keep his new treasure for longer than three moons.
17
Processing. That’s what she’d called it. This processing went on for several days and nights. After the first night, Xenon decided to match her sleep cycle so he might be a better acolyte to her. However, he soon found this meant he rarely got a full night’s sleep with his mate.
From the very first night cycle they spent together upon the furs, he would awake to the sound of her mumbling, calling out a name. Ola. The delusion she’d left behind in her time still came to her in her dreams. Those mumblings, however, weren’t as bad as when she spoke with someone she called “pahpah” in her civil tongue. These conversations most often made tears leak from her eyes, as her flame burned dark red and blue. Shame. But why?
He did not understand. And she seemed to have little desire to talk about her night fires, which she referred to with a word their mate bond translated as a “night demon”.
“Nightmares are another form of processing,” she explained the first time he pulled her out of one of her close-eyed arguments with pahpah. “I’m trying to reconcile a lot of things,” she assured him.
Then before he could ask further questions, she’d reach inside his scaling and pull down his male works. As if this act was the only thing that could erase the night demons from her mind. His male works happily responded to her request. They, like he, seemed to lament that he wouldn’t have his treasure for long.
But even the wondrous feelings she gave him afterward wasn’t enough to make up for what her unrest did to him. He was her sworn protector, yet he could not protect her from the night demons. Or the quiet pall that often fell over her during their days spent together in the lab.
“What would happen if we walked directly south from here?” she asked one morning.
“We would come to sea ice in less than a wing hour. And then several wing hours of sea before we reached a land of ice where nothing but flightless birds the size of Far Travelers live.”
Silence. Then, “Antarctica. We call that place Antarctica. Which I guess means we’re on the wrong side of the Bering Strait.”
Again, he had little idea what had caused her flame to darken so, but the pall lasted until they rested upon the furs again that night.
He found himself burning with a strange, paradoxical rage. One that made him feel helpless and frustrated, even as he began to treasure her for reasons that went beyond the new life she carried.
But then one morning, like a wish granted, she woke him with a gentle shaking during the early morning hours.
“Yes, Female 7-133. How may I honor you?” he asked, a strip of bright surprise burning in both his voice and head flames.
“I have to go,” she explained, her cheek flames brightening with embarrassment. “I know you don’t like for me to do it alone, and I’m not sure where to find the collection cup, or how to make the clothes I need to go out in the snow…”
Yes, it was time for the morning urine sample for the daily test he ran for the baby. Since much of his equipment emitted trace amounts of radiation, which Drakkon scientists discovered could lead to mutations in gestating young, he’d been forced to go to rather unorthodox measures to monitor the female’s pregnancy. He not only conducted exams with his tongue, but he also collected urine and blood samples to ensure the baby inside her was thriving.
To his surprise, the gestation process had gone well so far. The first moon was said to be the hardest milestone among drakkon. And she was already two full moons in.
A fact she did not seem as happy about this morning as she dressed. In freshly replicated clothes, since the previous ones he’d made her less than a quarter moon ago no longer fit.
“Are you sure the baby’s okay?” she asked. “This baby seems really huge already. Like, impossibly so.”
He kept his eyes on the wall he programmed to check Female 7-133’s vital signs every morning. He still had not happened upon a way to tell her about the near certain-death drakkon births entailed.
The scientist in him could see no reason to tell her. At best, she’d spend another week crying, her flame paling to gray.
Yet the strange emotion she so often brought forth in him told him he should say something to her. As soon as possible, so she could “process” it.
He snorted steam. “I believe the time has come to discuss an important Drakkon custom.”
His eyes were trained ahead so he could not see her face, but he sensed her pause in her dressing as she answered, “Okay,” inside his head.
“If the fetus you carry survives laying, it would be of unknown potential. A hybrid born to a genetically modified species; a wonder of modern science. Also, you will have granted me the boon of a hatchling. For this, I have no words to express my gratitude. In fact, on my planet, a drakkon who has been honored with a child will spend the rest of his life honoring the female who did bestow this gift upon him. Because of the young you carry within your womb, I will revere you for the rest of my breathing days without mating with another. That is the Drakkon way, and we even have a formal set of customs to go along with this tradition. We call this Reverence.”
“Okay,” she said, in a tone that seemed to imply she found it necessary to process the information he’d just conveyed. “So you’re happy to be ha
ving this baby? Even if it’s not full dragon?”
He started at the notion that he might be anything less than happy to have a hatchling on the way. One that was becoming more viable by the day, according to this morning’s wall readings.
And he turned to face her, rushing to say, “I am a drakkon exiled. I would have never dared to hope for, much less believed, a mate and child would be possible for me. This is truly nothing less than a wish fulfilled.”
“That’s…great to hear. Um…so tell me, why do I feel a ‘but’ coming on?”
“Because, Fated One, I am afraid the tradition of Reverence is rooted in a period of mourning. You see, we revere our mothers forever because most drakki do not survive childbirth. When one is mated, when one volunteers to take her mate’s seed so his line might continue forth into future generations, it is with the understanding she will most likely not survive the laying. Our reverence practice is a direct result of this knowledge. The mothers of our race are our most exalted heroines, and this is why males only mate once.”
“Let me get this straight. What you’re saying…” she smoothed a hand over her round belly… “is that you don’t think I’ll survive birthing…whatever is inside of me.”
He answered with a short nod…and watched her visibly swallow, her neck flame waxing a deep red with fear as it rolled down her throat. And behold, even the voice inside his head quavered as she asked, “You keep saying ‘lay.’ Does that mean I’m going to, like, lay an actual egg?”
NAGO, His Mississippi Queen: 50 Loving States, Mississippi (The Brothers Nightwolf Trilogy, Book 1) Page 28