“While we are rebuilding our armies and constantly at war? No. But perhaps one day, when peace once more returns to our realm, and when we have regained our strength, I would like to see a little creature with my scales and your eyes.”
“One day sounds good,” I smile. Even if we never have a baby, it’s nice to know he thinks of me as the sort of partner he’d want to have a baby with. Nobody has ever wanted me to have a baby with them before. One time I had a pregnancy scare and the guy practically dragged me halfway to the clinic before I got my period anyway. It was only six hours late. I’m not used to men wanting me long term or maybe even for a lifetime.
“Tell me you love me.”
He looks at me, and there’s a moment where I’m afraid he’s going to refuse and plunge me back into that state of feeling like a desperate loser.
“Lucky, I adore you. You’re everything to me. And while you may have put yourself in obscene danger to be with me, and there’s no doubt in my mind I am going to spend the rest of our lives together punishing you for an almost endless series of infractions, never forget I love you.”
My smile is as big as any smile I’ve ever smiled before. “I love you too.”
Ten
Lucky
We are returning in what I’m going to call triumph. Technically, Terrible is returning in triumph. I’m just along for the ride. But what a sweet ride it is. The EnD ship is much nicer in some respects than the king’s own ship.
It has food replicators which I can use to make my own meals, which are far more to my liking than what Terrible used to pull from the ether. He was always focused on nutrition and appropriate calorie content. I am concerned with what tastes good. Ice cream. Spaghetti. Not at the same time, but one after the other. And then wine. So much wine.
I’ve had a buzz on since day one on this ship, and it’s coming up to day three, I think. You might wonder how we managed to fly to the ship in a day or so, and then it take three days to get back. I guess it’s because this ship is slower. Or something.
I am lounging on the bridge in the captain’s chair. Terrible has been touring the ship and generally terrifying people into submission. I have been imbibing and enjoying being generally triumphant. There’s still something about me that makes me more or less invisible to most aliens. The bridge crew pays very little attention. They won’t even look at me.
I walk up to the navigator, several drinks deep (me, not him) and peer into his face.
“Does it hurt if you bite yourself with your own fangs?”
He doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even look at me. It’s like being a ghost. I start to wonder if perhaps I have died, and I’m just imagining that I am alive, but really I was never alive at all. Maybe I never left Earth. Maybe I tripped over the curb as Emmet threw my panties at me, and they covered my eyes and I fell into traffic and everything I’ve experienced over the last few whatever periods of time is just the misfirings of my dying brain desperately trying to manufacture some happy ending to a short and miserable life…
A scaled hand lands on my shoulder and turns me about, just as I am starting to hyperventilate. I stare into the face of the alien I love.
“What are you doing?” He asks the question so dryly that I know this has to be real. No dying hallucination would be this unimpressed with me in general.
“Am I invisible?” I answer his question with a different, but equally pressing question.
“You are not invisible,” Terrible assures me, lifting me up and onto his lap. He sits down in the captain’s chair and assumes command without so much as a word. Everybody on the bridge has quietly snapped to semi-attention, and are performing their tasks with all the terrified stiffness of aliens with sticks up their butts. That’s just the effect Terrible has on the world around him. “Why would you think you’re invisible?”
“They don’t look at me. They don’t talk to me. They act like I’m not here, which made me wonder if I wasn’t here, or if they weren’t here…”
“They know better than to interfere with something that belongs to me,” he says. “They fear me, and so they fear you. You are not invisible. You are precious.”
“Oh. Shit. That’s… kind of cool.” They’re too scared to look at me, or to talk to me. I guess that’s kind of cool. I guess there’s some power in that. I guess I’m important and special. I guess.