Page 12 of Resisting the Alien Rider

“So you don’t have those on Zabria?”

“No.”

That struck me as incredibly sad. Between my five younger siblings and me, our house back on Terratribe II had teddies and toys spilling out of every corner of every room. I’d even gotten into the habit of sewing and crocheting custom ones for my siblings by hand. Last Christmas my youngest sister Robin had asked for a set of anatomically realistic Old-Earth dinosaurs.

“I could make you one,” I offered. “Maybe if you saw one you would understand.”

“What would I do with it?” he asked, cocking his head. “I don’t need a pretend animal taking up room in my bedroll.”

“You just… I don’t know. Hug it. Or talk to it.”

“I don’t know what ‘hug’ means. And I don’t talk to fabric,” he said, as if the very idea were pure lunacy. “If I wanted to do that, I’d talk to my hat.”

“Message received,” I murmured. I mostly ignored the sassiness of the second part of what he’d said because I was so startled by the first.

I don’t know what “hug” means.

So Zabrian children didn’t get hugs and they didn’t get stuffed animals. Or, at least, Garrek and Killian didn’t.

Well. Poop. Now I wanted to cry.

Was I just being an ethnocentric asshole? Maybe Zabrians truly didn’t care about softie shit like that. Maybe Zabrian children really wouldn’t want a stuffie to cuddle at night. Maybe they were completely different from human kids.

But I thought of Killian. With his big eyes and his skittishness and his gentleness towards the animals.

And I really didn’t think so.

And suddenly it was all too much. Thinking of Killian, or a young Garrek, quietly and secretly wanting to hold something soft but not really knowing how. The eldest daughter-turned-nurse in me wanted to fix things. To find solutions and help and heal.

But sometimes…

Sometimes you just couldn’t.

“I came out here to just look up at the stars, I guess. And the moons,” I said, an abrupt shift in conversation back to Garrek’s original question. “I’m really sorry that I stepped on you. But I didn’t expect you to be sleeping right here.”

I pointed down at the ground where Garrek’s abandoned bedroll was crumpled directly in front of my tent’s opening.

“Where else should I sleep?” he harrumphed. “This way if you get the asinine notion to wander away from camp during the night, hopefully tripping over my sleeping body will at least knock a little sense back into you.”

“Hey! I wasn’t planning to wander away! Despite what you may think, I don’t actually have a death wish. And I’m not stupid!”

Garrek went still. And then, softer than I’d ever heard him speak before, softer than a man with a scowl and a jaw and a body like that should have been capable of, he murmured, “I know you’re not.”

“Well… Good. Glad we’ve got that settled.”

I turned around and went back in the tent.

6

GARREK

When I packed up my bed roll at dawn, Killian was already awake, awkwardly sidling back into camp with a trough of fresh water for the shuldu. He wasn’t large or strong enough to balance it up on the back of his shoulders like I did yet, so he carried it in front of himself, leaning back to counter the weight, sloshing water with every step.

But there was still a decent amount of water remaining for the shuldu, so I decided not to complain. At least he was up and doing chores instead of any of the other myriad things he was wont to do. Like biting me.

He’d always been interested in the animals. Getting him to help out with them was never too difficult. But even outside of that, he’d seemed calmer, or at least a little more subdued, after the fire. I squinted at him as his wiry arms strained, setting down the trough. Either he was feeling enough remorse about the fire that hewas really trying to rein himself in and change his behaviour…

Or this was Magnolia’s influence.

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