He had never clothed her before, she realized. This might have been the first time he’d ever seen her as anything other than an animal toy. Maybe things were changing. She didn’t say anything, in case it shattered her assumptions. Better to live in a realm of imagination than to have to suffer through unpleasant truth. When she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine that he was a human lover, and that they were a pair about to embark upon a life of domestic bliss.
But when she opened them, he was still the same dark eyed, winged monstrosity of pure dominance who would possess her at any cost.
“Come,” he said. “You need to rest in a proper bed. Those pods you were staying in are not comfortable.”
“They were okay. I’ve crashed in worse.”
“I’m sure you’ve crashed into all sorts of things,” he replied. She didn’t bother correcting the idiom. Whatever universal force for immediate translation was at play, it clearly had its limits.
Dominax took her by the hand and led her to the bed chamber. The same place he had fucked her. The same place he had whipped her. The place she had made her escape. Looking at the bed brought back a great many intense memories, along with a tingle of desire which had long gone unsated.
“DARMA!” he called his brother’s name. “Where is the physician?”
“He’s coming,” Darma said, entering the room. He must have been hovering outside waiting to be summoned, or maybe trying to eavesdrop in case the king truly was planning on having him castrated. “I was reading about her symptoms. Many human women become quite ill when they are pregnant.”
And there it was. The thought she had been trying to avoid saying out loud, because saying it out loud would make it real, and making it real would be fucking terrifying.
“I’m not pregnant," she said, diving deeply into full blown denial. “How could I be? We’re not the same species. How are we supposed to reproduce? How many chromosomes do you guys have?”
“Uh.”
“Well, I see you’ve put a lot of thought into this,” she snarked. “What was the plan? Shoot your cum into me and see what kind of fucking monster emerged? Even if I can get pregnant, you don’t know that the baby would be viable. You don’t know…”
“Calm down,” Dominax said, invoking the two words most universally unlikely to make anybody calm.
“You calm down,” she snapped, fighting fresh waves of nausea.
“You called, your highness?”
A new Homelander stood at the entrance to the royal bed chamber. He was the doctor, she guessed. He was wearing a white coat, which might have been coincidental, but then she saw that it was emblazoned with a golden moniker in the shape of the sign of Asclepius, the same branding used by all human doctors. That was creepy.
“Where did you get the staff with the snakes design?”
Dominax sighed. “Does it matter what he is wearing, human? He is a doctor.”
“He’s wearing human doctor clothing, but he’s one of you. He has those dark eyes and those fucking wings, and…”
“How long has the patient been experiencing fits of the obvious?” The doctor smiled as he asked the question, softening its sarcasm just slightly.
“This is WEIRD!” Katie declared. “I didn’t want to mention it earlier, but you know what. This is just weird.”
“You may have mentioned it once or twice,” Darma said. She didn’t know why he was still there, hovering about. A second or two ago, Dominax had wanted to kill him, now he was ordering him about like a servant. Murder might still be on the table, but apparently, not in front of the doctor.
There were now three very large, quite handsome — okay, insanely god-likely handsome males around her, including the doctor, who, of fucking course, had the bone structure of someone stepping off an Italian fashion runway and into the Olympic village.
Dominax was still by far and away the most handsome among them. She wondered if Homeworld chose its kings in some kind of beauty pageant.
“Try to calm yourself,” the doctor said. “Deep breaths. My name is Mandrake.”
“Of COURSE it is,” she said, standing up, only to be gently, but firmly pressed back down into a seated position by Dominax. “Mandrake. Like the Earth herb. Do you guys have no original anything? Or…”
“She is certainly agitated,” Mandrake observed. “Human, your world does not have a monopoly on small mouth sounds. Mandrake is likely how my very alien name is being translated to your human ears by your human brain. If you were to hear it for itself, it would be unpronounceable to you.”
“Oh.”
“I have only recently recaptured her, no thanks to my brother who decided…” Dominax trailed off with a sharp glare at Darma, before returning to the more important topic at hand. “She has only been back for a matter of hours, having spent several weeks alone in the Golden City. It’s possible that she is pregnant.”