Family from Beyond the Stars, Ch. 17 (Patreon)

CH. 17How Far we have Come

Space.  It was like a solid black wall of night, of infinite meaning, of endless size and scope.  Stars twinkled like distant bright dots, their barely visible afterimage dimmed by the vast length of space between the viewer and their true radiance.  What worlds lurked out there, amongst those faraway galaxies and solar systems?  What new phenomenon or unworldly elements existed, kept from the scope of Humans by that vast breadth of time and distance?  What kinds of people dwelt there, looking up into that same black sky and wondering that very same question?

Kenny had always wanted to be an astronaut, ever since he was a child.  He had grown bitter and cynical of the world he inhabited from a young age, seeing it as always ready to shun and push away those who were not the societally defined version of beautiful, or acceptable, or interesting.  People were cruel and impassive, claiming to be better but rarely showing proof of it all.  But the stars.  They were like dreams, barely realized and often overlooked.  They held all potential within them.  Earth could not be, could never have been, the only planet in all that vastness to support life.  He wanted to go there, to see what had never been seen, to meet faces wholly unlike his own, to explore the cosmos in its infinity.

Maybe it would heal the damage done to him by a world that had never opened itself to him.  Maybe, out there, he would find a place to belong.  Such had been his dream, his hidden desire above all else other than to be loved and accepted.  Reality had forced him to accept less grand or illustrious truths.  Few friends, fewer lovers.  Kenny Sissom had seemingly been doomed to a mundane life of solitude and rejection and loss; his only relationship with the stars relegated to gazing at them from afar.

That had all changed the day one of those very stars had seemingly fallen from the sky.  How different would things be if he had run away?  He did not want to even imagine it.  He was home.  He had found a family, albeit an unorthodox one.  A perfect family by every definition.

Reclining back into Nova's arms, Kenny looked away from the window they both had been facing to watch as the cubs stretched and maneuvered their furry bodies experimentally in their brand-new livesuit attires. The color-shifting material conformed to their Alien bodies, showing the contours of muscles and shifting limbs.  Access panels opened on Phoebe's back as she extended her tentacles experimentally.  Joey and Chandler lashed their tails, which like their sister’s stuck out of the backs of their suits.  Each of them seemed endlessly fascinated in twisting and flexing to test the range of flexibility the suits still afforded them.

Above him, Nova chuffed.  He glanced up to see what she was working on.  It was a similar device as to the one she had attached to him before on the ice planet, using spare parts of her adaptive tech.  Her tentacles easily fiddled and adjusted things on it in endlessly intricate and complicated ways, attaching or removing parts with tiny sure movements.  What had started off as a rough cube was rapidly forming into a small, sloped-edged device.  She turned it over and over as she did, gaze inscrutable.  The light of her stripes cast glittering illumination across the polished piece of material, as well as the walls and floor around her.  Her eyes were intensely focused on her work.

More than the stars, than swirling galaxies, than any other thing in the universe, Nova was beautiful.

Her gaze shifted.  Glancing down, the Tigerine Alien mother caught him staring up at her.  Her face softened from its previous intensity.  He flushed and shyly looked away, feeling guilty for disturbing her in whatever she had been doing to occupy herself.  The time they had together, like this, felt like it was drawing to an end.  After today, everything would be different.

Soft warmth pressed against him from the side as Nova's lower pair of arms hugged him against her more.  A second later his face was being lovingly nuzzled and then enveloped in a lick.  The rasp of her warm tongue on his cheek and temple was as pleasant as ever.  He wished that this feeling never had to end.

Unbidden, memories of their time together leaped to the forefront of his mind.  He saw his coming to the ship, meeting Nova, falling in love with her.  The fear, the uncertainty, the hesitancy, and quiet longing, were things he had long ago normalized when interacting with others.  The transition from those emotions into the joy of her accepting him had been like a wave of warm seawater washing away the frost of a winter morning, setting a burning ember of hope to smoldering within his heart.  The heat only continued to bloom as he became her friend, and then hotter still when she took him to be her new Mate.  They had been through so much together.

Another lick alerted Kenny that he had been sinking into those memories.  He was aware that his cheeks were slightly damp and not from her tongue.  He looked up at Nova's concerned, understanding expression once, wiped at his eyes with a hand, and then buried his face in her thick fur.  Her purr started up immediately and her arms tightened a bit more.

'I am here,' he heard her whisper into his mind.  'Nova has you, my Kenny.  Do not be afraid to cry, for these are lovely thoughts.'

He grimaced into the thick fur that covered her body, trying to bite back the waves of emotion that kept battering at his self-control and restraint.  They were not just joy or nostalgia now.  He never wanted this hug to end.  The moment it did might very well be the last.  They were not going to run anymore.  But he was still so scared.  His resolve was not shaken but it was a tenuous, trembling thing; his courage right then warred against a lifetime of running and avoiding conflict.  But he knew he couldn’t run anymore.  He had steeled his heart, fully prepared, he hoped, for anything that might happen.  It was a lie he had to believe in with all his heart.

A soft growl disturbed his downward spiral of doubt.  He suddenly felt the weight of the world drop away slightly.  Nova had scooped him up more into her double pair of arms, chuffing and lay her head directly atop of his, easily curling his little body into her much larger one.  He smelled her summer scent rich in his nostrils now, face all but wedged into her collarbone.  Hot breath brushed his thick, curly hair.

"Kenny..." she breathed out.  Her voice, her real voice, was scratchy and rough through her vocal emitters, but she had grown much clearer in speaking out loud.  Nothing could be more beautiful in his mind than that sound.  She switched back to her mental voice, having more to say.  'You amaze me, my little Mate.'

He blinked his eyes open and lifted his head.  His augmented eyes gazed almost directly into Nova's face as she continued to hold him up against her.  "I...amaze you?" he asked.

She blinked.  'Humans.  You feel emotions, as powerfully as we do.  But you are not controlled by them.  Even so, they are nevertheless just as strong.  That makes you the strongest, the bravest, the most fascinating being in all creation to me.'

Heat burned in his eyes and he sniffed.  "I'm...really not all that," he objected.

Her arms tightened around him more.  Nova's face did not grow stern or harder, nor did her voice, but he could feel the intensity behind her glowing eyes as they bored into his.  'You are afraid, but you stand resolute against that fear, even as it threatens to freeze you stiff.  You are not strong, fast, nor possess powerful weapons, or even have gone to war before.  This is no place for you, on the eve of battle against the most terrifying creature I've ever known.'

Kenny looked away, having told himself all of this before.  It was the truth, but hearing it spoken aloud by another didn’t make it hurt any less.

'But still, you stay,' she continued firmly, again drawing his gaze back to hers.  'Your own world, it had no place for you either.  So you made one yourself.  You would not settle to just lay down and die, even as meek and sickly as you were when I found you and the cubs.  You made yourself belong, stood fast between me and them, ready to give your life after only knowing them for such a short time.  You made yourself a home."  She laid a paw against her chest.  'With me.'  She nodded past him at the cubs.  "With us," she spoke aloud again.

Tears dotted his eyes and hers as well.  He sniffed again and she blinked several times, long and slow.  "You're...all I've ever wanted," he breathed.  "A family..."

'And we will always be a family,' she growled.  'He cannot take it away.  I will not let him.  Never again.'

Kenny leaned his head wordlessly forward.  So did Nova.  Their brows met and he felt the tingling rush of their minds melding wordlessly.  He felt everything she did, heard her thoughts as his own.  They were as music to him now.

'I love you.'  He wasn't sure which of them had said it.  Perhaps it didn't matter.  Never before had he been so close to someone else.

They leaned back from one another at last.  At his nod, Nova let Kenny slide back down along her body and eyed the device in her tentacles' grasp.  She grunted and made one last adjustment.  As Kenny's feet once again touched the floor, she held it out and down to him.

'Use it only as a last resort,' she instructed him as he took it from her.

The device was roughly a foot long and rectangular with sloping, slightly curved edges that conformed to his palm easily.  Brightly lit displays flashed in his inner HUD right behind his cornea as his suit adapted and assimilated the new piece of tech into it.  He nodded and stowed it against his thigh where it seamlessly adhered to the texture of his outfit.

Something brushed him from behind and he turned.  Phoebe, Joey, and Chandler faced him.  Their eyes were soft and warm upon him.  He couldn't help but notice how much they had all grown in what felt like such a short amount of time, their shoulders now easily reaching the center of his chest even with them remaining hunched over on their six limbs.  How long had it even been since they left Earth?  Months?

Phoebe went first.  She held out a device she had previously shown to him before.  'I fixed it,' she hummed.  Her mental voice was stronger than it had been, or perhaps Kenny could just understand her and her brothers better now.  'It shouldn't jam anymore.'  Her usually stoic expression was disturbed by her hidden emotions and he saw her jaw tremble slightly.

Kenny took the piece of tech and wordlessly attached it to his wrist.  Again, he felt the HUD flare to life as the gadget made itself a part of his suit as a whole, now forming an octangular shape on his wrist and forearm.  Afterward, he reached down and hugged her hard around the neck.  It was getting harder to get his arms around her fully now.  Her purring started up at once and she wormed her thick head against him, returning the embrace before she disengaged and stepped back.

Joey came up next.  He just gave his Daddy a deep nod and a big cheesy smile that looked only slightly forced.  'Why you look so serious?' he chided Kenny in his rolling baritone.  'It's just a game.  For keeps.'  Then he winked one big, bright eye.  Kenny gave him a mock scowl and bustled the big male cub into a similar hug as he had given Phoebe.  Joey returned it, quivering slightly against Kenny and letting his Daddy know how much he needed this.

Last, but not least, Chandler walked straight up and thudded his head against Kenny's chest.  He scratched behind his third child's ears, making him croon softly.  Their eyes met again as Chandler leaned back.  'Whatever happens,' he growled, the lighter cadence to his voice, usually lilted for humor, was, for once, fully serious.  'We are a family.'

"We always will be," Kenny vowed.  He scratched Chandler once more under the chin.  He expected the cub to wriggle and writhe in delight.  He didn't.  Before Kenny's eyes, Chandler slowly, carefully rose up to his hind paws, pulling his head back and up out of Kenny's reach.  He stared up at Chandler in amazement.  Behind him, Phoebe and Joey did the same.

They were all so tall...7 feet at least.  Finally standing as bipeds, he saw their forms were at last beginning to show distinct differences.  Chandler was long-limbed, gangly, and spindly but built like steel wire, his tufted ears and mohawk making him the tallest of the three.  Joey was a block of fur, solid and massive, broadest across the shoulder of his siblings but also the shortest by half a head.  Phoebe's feminine curves were starting to show; she would probably look just like her mother when she reached adulthood, and she also had inherited Nova's heavy muscular build as well.

Kenny looked up at his children and beamed.  Tears glistened in his eyes.  "You've...all grown so much," he whispered just loud enough for them to hear.  "I remember when all three of you could nearly fit in my lap."

They blinked in unison down at him.  Behind him, Kenny heard Nova stir.  He made room for her to stand up to her full height, turning and looking back at her.  Nova reached up and touched the display at her throat, cycling her paw pad against it in a clockwise fashion.  The two-piece, bikini-like livesuit pieces she wore began to expand until they covered her whole body from neck to paws, just like the cubs' did.  She nodded down at him once, then turned.

Kenny and the cubs watched as Nova strode to the armory and opened it up.  On went her armored suit, fully repaired and outfitted.  He recognized the streams of code flash on the display monitors, as well as the various, collapsed armaments that she strapped to herself alongside the massive plates of armor.  Before their very eyes, Nova transformed back into the armored warrior they had all first met.

Leaving her helmet off for now, the Mother alien turned back to look down at her family once she was fully suited up.  Warmth shone in her bright eyes.  Wordlessly, she kneeled down as they all walked forward.  Multitudes of arms wrapped around one another, hers circling them all as they shared that one last big hug.

When they broke apart all their eyes were set, their jawlines grim, and their shoulders stiff.  Up they marched from the hangar bay.  For the first time in his life, Kenny wished he could zoom out and take a slow-motion camera shot of them all just then, as a family.  He walked in the front, cubs stalking upright behind him and Nova at the rear, towering over them all.  Their eyes glowed like cold-fire, determination hardened into a solid bar of steel.

At the end of the short hall, Kenny paused and let the cubs climb up the hall to the cockpit before him, waiting to feel Nova's teeth catch the back of his livesuit's collar before she lifted him up and climbed after their cubs.  Once at the top, Nova placed Kenny gently back down and then led the way into the cockpit, where she strapped herself into the main seat.  The rest of them did the same but with safety harnesses attached to the wall.  All of their eyes flashed white as scanners, sensors, and displays flared to life all around them.  As a family, they looked out across the blackness of space outside their vessel.

Before them lay the intimidating maw of the black hole, yawning wide and devouring all before it like the maw of Charybdis in the Odyssey.  It swirled ominously like that same all-devouring mouth of a cosmic whirlpool from the Greek epic.  They were far enough away that the gravitational pull of the well did not affect them.  Even so, a thrill of fear passed through Kenny's stomach to look into the blank dark of nothingness.  Nova gave one of the steering handles a twist, turned the ship in a slow 180 degrees until they faced away from the black hole.

This was it.

He and Nova shared one final nod.  She reached up, paw trembling only slightly, and turned off the stealth drive.  Their ship's glittering hull flashed into being, drifting there silent and still in the vastness of the void around them.  Lights hummed into being all along the engines and sides as all systems roared to life, quadrupling the energy output that sensors would be able to pick up upon if they had the right logistics to do so.  It was an open invitation.

Come and get us.

No more running.  They stood their ground.  The hunt, the chase, was over.  All they could do now was wait.

It did not take long.