you're too young & eager to love

This didn't come out how I wanted at all. I blame my attention being spread thin. I wanted to work on Priam's back story some, and how she's probably been transferred to a variety of ships since she's so old, but ... yeah. It just wasn't really working for me.

Still, it counts!

-



Afterwards, Priam feels relief. It’s familiar, cynical, comforting.

-

This man, Talin, knows who she is. What she is. He is more accepting than the others and a weary exhaustion she’s been fighting for decades, a pressure in her chest built from witnessing too many untrusting stares and cautious preliminaries, lifts a little. He has rough hands from working with boilers and a mouth that is hard but friendly. A shadow of beard across his jaw making him almost beastly.

“You are aware that this means nothing?” Priam says, and he grins a crooked self-deprecating smile.

“I know.” His hands are big on the small of her back and his mouth is wet and close.

It is a strange act, she thinks. Strange because he finds her desirable, this shell that she wears, and because she is unsure. She understands the anatomy of many species but not this fake one, not when it applies to this solitary act. But the monastic, anguished grieving routine makes no sense to her, and she guesses that Talin does not care. That it is less about conquering and more about exploring. Her skin ripples, like sheets wrinkling, or scales turning over because what could have been tactile clothing is now the star-white skin of her body. Exposed, synthetically fresh.

It’s easy to slip into an intimacy that’s comforting despite its lack of meaning. It’s harder to excise their less shallow ghosts, to get over what they’ve left behind from crumpling worlds, what they’ve lost with the expansion of time.

Talin doesn’t look at her with adoration, and she wouldn’t know what to do if he did. But he is good, she presumes, in the way human women would need him to be. Practiced, solicitous. When she thinks to look in his eyes, she sees that he’s not thinking about her exactly as much as she isn’t about him.

-


When they find him dead in the mess hall, his blood already drying on his mouth, she performs an autopsy. A perfect, clean inspection, but she cannot locate a reason.

An unsatisfactory response, she finds.