you're too young & eager to love

For my wifey-pants.

I've been tinkering with this for a little bit. I was hoping it would be a piece, but I struggled. I blame the genre! Or the fact that I'm trying to write two males. Or simply because I haven't done much creative writing during the last few weeks.

Anyway, here are the fruits of my labor. Not a piece but a combination of parts.

-


It happens slowly.

Out here, there is no light to chart the days - only the fluorescent lamps and the alarms on the ships. Still, everything is charged and full of tension, expectation. The hours flutter by the way the wings of birds used to.

-

Mace’s hands have never been his own, and he would tell Capa that if he were a man of words, but he is made of fists instead. The hands of his father’s and his brother’s, lacking the soft sweetness of his mother’s entirely.

His actions are as quick as his anger, so it surprises them both when, after freshly bruising Capa’s jaw, he kisses him with intended slowness.

-

He curses and keeps his body stiff, trained for stoicism by years of being in the military. But he is loud and, that too, is a little unexpected. Loud when he hits, loud when he makes a mistake, and even louder with the errors that are not his.

-

They strike each other like meteorites.

Mace is stronger, his arms channeling strength, his knuckles rounded perfectly to impact painfully against Capa. Still, the physicist is capable too, twisting and bucking, until they have become one body – arms trying to capture and anchor, fingers gripping, breathing harsh.

Capa tries not to enjoy the heat of another body. But after they’re forced apart, separated, he’s reminded of how cold space is.

-

Out here, thoughts weigh heavily.

Mace finds himself thinking too much at night, cold but uncomplaining in his bunk, pressing his hands against his eyes.

He spends a few hours in the Earth Room the next day, but he doesn’t like it. It shows him places he has trouble remembering, reveals a world that, in actuality, is dying and empty and no longer green.

The ocean might be the only constant, still wrathful.

-

Capa watches the stars. He used to do the same thing as a child, and he doesn’t think that being closer to them makes it any less interesting. There is much in this galaxy that he still finds incomprehensible and strange and wonderful.

In contrast, Mace watches their path to the sun. He likes the order, the directness.

-

Mace does not think of their futures. He knows, has known, that their breaths will be ash and that their bodies will be the same.

Occasionally, he gets numbs with impending nothingness.

-

My writing from yesterday that I was unable to post, thanks to a naughty internet connection. Just something short, because I kept getting distracted.

-


Priam’s hair is a dark corona, and her clothing seems mussed and undone. She does not have the slender grace of a new flower. She is neither sleek nor extraordinary. She does not fit flawlessly into this world of endless space skies and eternally blooming stars.

Instead of faith or dedication, she has the viciousness that comes from being unwanted in this world. A hardening of her already thick, scaled skin.

-

Priam sees a stain against the fresh metal of the laboratory. In a moment of existentialism, she thinks she is the stain. Her nails are red like human blood, but it’s just synthetic polish. Her hair is the bruise color of damage, but it’s just hair. Her skin is pale, but not clean perfect white – just the mottled mushroom shade of a dead, pinned cabbage moth. (She hasn’t seen one of those in decades.) She isn’t enough. She knows this room was meant for someone else.

In her heart of hearts, Priam wants lasting, eternal things, places where dust cannot gather.

I will pretend that this is on time. Because I can. Then later today tomorrow, I will post something entirely new.

-


Humans, Priam is beginning to notice, have a tendency to pull from each other. They mimic and borrow speech patterns, gestures, clothing, even personality. She thinks about this in the Earth Room, running her tongue over a mouth she can’t quite get used to, placing her palms on her stomach. The smooth elasticity of her skin is still something of a surprise.

Her new Captain reminds her of Talin. He smiles in the same way, keeps a stern but uncomplicated air about him. She wonders if his autopsy would be just as similar, if she can split him from sternum to groin and see the same red-oiled insides, the pink organs.

Priam scratches the back of her neck absently. The walls in the room show stars, the great expanse of a nighttime sky.

Apoch, in passing, laughs. It is a rumbling, rockslide noise. “You aren’t tired of those damned things yet?”

Unblinking, she turns her face, her cheekbones slanting and sharp even in the dim light. “I do not know what else to look at it. Earth is not my home, you know.”

“Try our oceans.” He suggests, and the walls shift, replace the stars with crashing waves. Thick and storm-like, bluer than her planet’s, rocking with turbulence.

-

The cook trusts her the least.

When she does not eat his food, he takes it offensively. She lets oddly colored pills rest on her tongue instead. As they dissolve, they calm a quiver in her veins, an aching in her spine.

“What?” He spits, wiping sweat from his brow even though the cooking area is the same moderate temperature as the rest of the ship. “Ain’t my food good enough for your kind?”

“My kind?” She mocks, raising an eyebrow. She was taught to do that, was told it implied sarcasm.

Suli sneers, his mouth wide. “I bet you eat all types of flesh. Well don’t get any ideas, you hear?” He points a fork at her.

When Priam looks at him, her eyes are clear, opaque. They do not flash with anger but turn colorless from it. He expected an elaborate green, a radioactive yellow, not such an absence of pigment. It’s worse.

He blinks. It’s enough time for her to reach the door.

-


Xie’s back is as straight as iron. Her gaze is calm, but her impatience is all caught up in her eyebrows. “Captain, are you sure about this? We aren’t completely familiar with this zone.”

“I am.” Apoch uses the type of tone that can settle any dispute, and Xie keeps her mouth in a soft line.

Zare, his fingers knotted with age, stands with Suli. They watch the orange gas that is the air surround the ship as The Demeter lands. The planet is not enemy territory, but it’s foreign enough to suggest a certain amount of discomfort with the crew. “Why does she get special treatment?” Suli grumbles, slurping on coffee thick enough to be sludge.

The ship lurches a little, and Priam waits by the loading dock. She does not pace, but her stature is of discomfort. Her eyes have been that odd milk-color for six days, and she has chewed her nails down to her skin. Her cuticles aren’t red from being gnawed at but blue, like the faint glow of her veins. Bindi stands a few feet behind her, like a shadow, and Priam recognizes her as the apprentice. A shiver of energy too, like an electric current.

“You can’t go out there.” She sounds as though she doubts her own statement but like she’s happy about it. Intrigued.

“I don’t breathe the way you breathe.” Flicking her hair back impatiently, Priam turns just enough to catch the blonde’s gaze. “But this atmosphere might hurt your lungs. Don’t linger too much.”

Seven months aboard the ship, and she does not feel the effects of isolation and limited space the way the other crewmembers do. She does not snap cruel comments into their faces nor does she retaliate with violence. Hers is a different plight, and Apoch thinks it has something to, unfortunately, do with the less than warm welcome. With the rumors and the hissing sounds of gossip. The uncertain gazes and sneering grins. Priam would say differently. Her body aches, is all. She feels confined in soft skin, her throat hurting, the rustle of her body threatening to break the seams of her guise.

She wants to stretch. And not in the mess hall where the sheer size and structure of her form might unsettle the less liberal.

When the doors open and dock lowers, she is too fast. She doesn’t like to do that – move the way she was born to, with the speed and grace of her species – but she’s uncaring in her haste. When she shifts, her body rippling and expanding, it’s immediately when her feet hit the ruddy soil. Bindi thinks she can see the whip-like motion of a tail disappearing into the thick gas air, but she isn’t sure. Her eyes are already watering.

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.

Work and a Halloween party interrupted my possibility of writing yesterday. Yadda yadda.

Here's some sci-fi to hopefully make up for the nothingness that was yesterday.

-

I no longer speak for effect.
I speak the truth without the niceties.
I am hundreds of years old but do not know how many hundreds.
The person I was does not know me.
- Marvin Bell

“Your kind,” the cook asks while stretching his stiff arms, “they live for a while, don’t they?”

Priam does not blink her eyes. She glances up from the holograph of yet another discovery - a new breed of cannibalistic post-humans. She’s studying again, integrating the anatomy of a fanged and elongated jaw into her memory. Humanity seems a decreasing concept with evolution, she thinks, then realizes that spending so much time around these people has made her feel included. Less foreign. The body she hides behind her more acceptable skin shivers. “Up to their forty-eighth Twenty.”

The cook calculates, whistles between his teeth. It’s a shrill noise and hurts her ears. “960. So, you’re … relatively young?”

She smiles, thin lips arching difficultly. She still has trouble with a pliable mouth. “You could say that.”

The silence that settles is awkward, but she doesn’t notice, adding notes into the ship’s computer database. Her fingers are tired. Her body feels worn from being contained for so long. When she stretches, too many joints crack. A splintering noise that has the cook lift an eyebrow and she recognizes that male grin on his face. Can smell sweat and pheromones and the lechery of a limited mind.

“You know, I’ve always been interested in – “

“The entering of a tentacle down one’s throat? Then a mucus block forming? Because that’s the beginning of my mating rituals.”

The cook grimaces, fumbles a response, and then conveniently finds a reason to shuffle away. Creeping with the dark shadows of the ship. From a corner of the room, bundled in layers to protect herself from the deep cold, the engineer laughs. She’s a sprightly thing, tiny-boned, impossibly friendly in the impending isolation of space. “Do you really have tentacles?”

Priam tries smiling again. “No. Now ask me if I have mating rituals.”

“You have a sense of humor, though.”

“When I remember to.” Shifting back to the holograph, she doesn’t notice the engineer frowning. She can feel the pity though, the thickening of the air. It brushes down her spine, easily ignored.

I didn't get to go nearly as in-depth or cover as much as I would have liked with this piece since I'm at work. But it's a start! I also have no idea what I'm doing in this genre. I'm fumbling around in the dark without a flashlight. Or a handy-dandy wand that has a glowing tip like in Harry Potter.

Anyway, here is my introduction(?) to a sci-fi alien doctor character. Yup.

-

The captain is a rough, aged man, and he eyes her wearily. Distrust shapes his eyebrows, and he runs the back of his hand across his dry mouth. He’s met his fair share of species, and it isn’t the blood difference, he thinks, but the silver-blue of her eyes. The way she never blinks.

Although the hiss of the doors opening signals his entrance, his voice booms out welcomingly anyway. “Priam.”

The human-shaped female’s back straightens. She drops a scalpel onto a tray and turns her head.

“Interesting name.”

“Chosen by the cataloguing system, sir.” Her voice is not monotonous but a subtle combination of tones. As though her tongue and teeth work precisely for each pronunciation. When she was taken aboard the ship, the captain was told that she spoke fourteen major languages and thirty-four dialects. He heard her once conversing in a series of shuddering clicks and gurgles – the type of noises that, he thought, needed mandibles.

He makes a noncommittal sound, sucking on the end of a fat cigar. “Just stopping by to see if there’s any news.”

She flexes her fingers and for a moment they look too long. Her nails, briefly, seem too sharp. More like talons. “The subject is a variety found in the third region of mercurial star hexes.” She isn’t wearing any gloves but her skin is pristine. There’s a blue tint to her, just barely, noticeable more in the length of veins running up and down her arms. She taps the surgery table for emphasis where a hulking foreign frame is half dissected.

The captain snorts. “That’s not possible. All those colonies were extinguished.”

Priam’s human guise is lithe, blade-slender, but he swears she grows before him. A thunderous, oppressive shape, the shiver-stretch of her flesh that encompasses her anger. But he blinks, and the guise is there, has not changed, while the alien clicks her tongue impatiently. “If you doubt my professional judgment, Captain - “

“No, no.” He chuckles even though nothing is funny, running his hand over his mouth again before taking another pull on the cigar. “I’ll report the finding to the home front.” Turning to leave, he swears he hears it again, that stretch of joints reshaping, of limbs being molded and released, once the doors close behind him.