Page 37 of Alliance
Fásach was definitely awake.
I took a deep breath and reached out to his linguitor.
[Link established.] “May I come in?” I asked when the connection beeped in my aural sensors.
“Roz?” Fásach murmured, his voice deeper and quieter than normal.
“Oh! Yes.” I squeezed my eyes shut. “I thought you’d know it was me.”
“You don’t have an iden-number. Pretty sure you bypass the whole comm system,” he hedged.
The door slid open, dim light from the hallway spilling into the room. Fásach sat in a nest of pillows and blankets on the ground between two dark bullet-shaped pods. Safia and Misila snored softly from within, the younger pressing the tail of a roly-poly advenan doll against her nose. Fásach ran his claws through his tresses and hugged his knees with a loose grip, motioning for me to come inside.
“Sorry for intruding,” I whispered, sitting cross-legged just outside of his nest.
“You don’t need to whisper,” Fásach said quietly. “Our place had thin walls and Huajile never sleeps. And you aren’t intruding.” His brow drew together. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you abou—”
[Priority] “Me too,” I interrupted, leaning forward on my palms. With conviction, I held his blue eyes. In the dark room, his horizontal pupils had blown open, so they were nearly round. “You don’t need to transition if you don’t want to, Fásach.”
One of his brows hiked up high on his forehead. His ears fell back with a mixture of hesitation and confusion.
“You don’t need to change who you are,” I insisted, holding up my hand to keep him quiet. “I can do a lot of heavy lifting if I can charge more often, and my digestive system is universal, which means I can test out foods before you eat them now that I’ve got yiwreni profiles in my database. I also installed some hand-to-hand combat and trap-setting protocols this afternoon. If you want, I have enough space to add weapon-handling and stabilization softwa—”
“Stop.” Fásach covered my hands with his, the thick pads of his palms calloused from years of dry heat and work. He squeezed my knuckles. “A yiwren isbothpredator and prey by nature. Everything in between. Moving further down either end of the spectrum doesn’t change who I am or my sense of self-worth. It’s not tied to gender or sexual orientation, likes or dislikes, authority or rank… I’m just,” he breathed a laugh. “I’m justme,Roz.”
The way he echoed my own feelings about myself resonated. I closed my mouth and swallowed the rest of my words. “Just you.”
He nodded. “Honestly, I’m more comfortable in my pred state anyway. I went prey for Safia and Misila when their mother died, and it was a huge learning curve.”
“Oh?”
He scratched his ear bashfully. “Pred state makes it harder to tell if food is rotten. I was worried, since cooking was new too.”
I tilted my head, my mass of silk shifting sideways. “So that’s not what’s making your vitals so unstable?”
There it went again. Fásach’s heart rate spiked, and I pointed at his chest as if singling out the culprit of a crime. He licked his teeth with a grimace.
Instead of answering, he twisted away on his seat and reached his arm back for an open bag on the ground. When he returned, he held out a square of thick plas, all but one inch printed into a dozen evenly spaced long teeth.
“We need to detangle your tresses,” he said, motioning for me to spin around. “Otherwise they’ll get matted, and you’ll have to shear them off.”
With worry, I dug my fingers into the mass of silk that felt thicker at the base of my neck. “Is that thekoom?”
He smirked. “Comb. Technically it’s a pick. We’ll use this to get some of the tangles out, but you shouldn’t use it too much. Otherwise it’ll hurt your tresses.”
“I can learn and then do it myself, so I don’t bother you.”
Fásach blinked at me, then glanced at the pick, his ears flattening. “Do you mind if I do it for you? I’ll teach you, but…” He cleared his throat. “Yiwren like to groom each other. I haven’t gotten to do that in a long time.”
My face prickled, blood rushing beneath my skin. I smacked my cheeks lightly, honored that Fásach would ask such a personal thing of me. “Okay. If it makes you happy. But if it’s a burden, I will do it myself.”
I turned around and Fásach scooted closer, his blankets butting up against my back. He separated out sections of my silk, tying the majority of it out of the way with strips of an old shirt he ripped apart with his claws, murmuring instructions and reasons.
[Recording]
This kind of fabric is better for wet tresses than normal towels.
Scrunch, don’t rub.
