Farscape fic: Imago
Title: Imago
Author: kernezelda
Email: kernezelda @ yahoo.com
Fandom: Farscape
Main Character: Xhalax Sun
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3000+
Spoilers: AU from Season 3’s “Relativity” onward.
Disclaimer: Farscape does not belong to me. Sad, that.
Summary: matrithon prompt - Xhalax Sun, renegade
Notes: Thank you kindly to charlie_bz for beta. This is a sequel to Butterfly Effect and Chrysalis.
Xhalax uses her ruined face to advantage in the marketplace. Even in regions far from home territories, Peacekeepers inspire a lot of respect (a lot of fear), and the scars subtly enhance the effect. Shopkeepers stumble over themselves to avoid staring, to placate her, and to get her out of their premises. Mercifully, no wanted beacons exhibit Xhalax's face or name, so she feels no qualms about claiming all the might of her race and organization to achieve her current mission. Her reception among the merchants, therefore, depends on if they applaud the recent destruction of a command carrier, symbol of Peacekeeper oppression, or if they fear Peacekeeper response to a terrorist attack.
At the moment, Xhalax means to purchase more infant formula. She hauls her daughter's offspring on her good hip, unwilling to leave Talia in their tiny, unsecured tenement dwelling. They are alone. They've been alone for days, since Aeryn and her Humans were sucked along with Moya into one of John Crichton’s frelling wormholes. And of course, Xhalax isn’t alone in her search, increasing the need for discretion: John Crichton is the Peacekeepers’ most wanted fugitive since Kaarvok the Multiplier had gone missing with his entire Peacekeeper guard.
If only one of them had perished, or even simply fled back to the barbarous world of his birth, the situation aboard Moya would have been much eased, and this disaster, among many, might have been avoided. Of course, Aeryn would choose the difficult path, as sure she could chart her own course as Xhalax once had been. Letting neither male know which had fathered her child ensured that both remained in besotted attendance.
Ten days, and Xhalax had spent the first of those frantically seeking through unofficial and less-than-sanctioned channels any information on unexplained anomalies in reachable space, anything that might lead her back to Moya. Sheer chance had placed the child in her care. In farboht fact, it was the first time she'd accepted the charge, remaining planet-side haggling for ammunition while the squabbling Crichtons flew two pods full of food to the ship where Aeryn and Pilot were negotiating the orbital fee.
As a practice, Xhalax always carries several types of currency, blades sheathed in her jacket lining, a visible pulse pistol, a smaller gun nestled in the interior of a boot, and a variety of performance-enhancing drugs in easy-to-reach locations. And those are only from the skin out. She knows secret codes and how to reach military and Directorate groups on tens of planets without revealing her own location or identity.
She has no more idea of how to care for a child than anecdotal knowledge and observation of Aeryn and the Humans’ interactions with their offspring.
The satchel hanging from Xhalax’s shoulder grows heavier with each added bottle and box labeled with smiling Sebacean infants. At the last moment, she grabs an instruction manual from the shelf near the smirking clerk’s counter. Aeryn’s child gnaws happily at the tough leather of Xhalax’s jacket. “Mnnfg,” she remarks, and drools.
Xhalax closes her eyes and attempts to control her temper, fists clenching around the satchel strap digging into her shoulder. The pressure of unwanted responsibility is crushing. After a few microts, she is able to loosen her hands, palms tingling where the material indented flesh.
For a short, desperate time, uselessly casting about on the insignificant ball of rock hosting an equally dismal commerce market, the idea of leaving the infant seemed the most logical, rational decision. It wasn't as if she had formed an attachment, or harbored sentiment for family life. Xhalax was a soldier and a deserter, and the safest course of action would be to leave and find refuge in one of the renegade squads tolerated where true Peacekeepers were either unwilling to go... or unwelcome.
Something had stopped her. Something inside, unexpected and unwanted. And known.
It is a half-breed alien, tainted Peacekeeper blood running warm in a body that looks normal. Nothing in its face or incoherent infant noises mark the child as a result of miscegenation; if her parentage were unknown, she could pass for Sebacean without question. It should have been easy to leave the hybrid and go to ground, unburdened and forcing aside any emotional ties Xhalax might have foolishly allowed to form to her unnatural and criminal daughter.
But the child has a name. Talia. The syllables roll smoothly in Xhalax's mouth, curling her tongue over the sounds that mean this infant, whose blue newborn eyes are her fathers', but whose delicate lips are Aeryn’s… Talyn's. In Xhalax's arms, the soft-fleshed body is fragile and helpless, less hardy, surely, than a child of pure Peacekeeper lines would be. The tiny hands, looking Sebacean to the bone, are perfect, already able to grip and cling with surprising strength.
It's not that Xhalax couldn't live with a decision to preserve herself and abandon the unasked-for responsibility thrust upon her.
It's that she chooses otherwise.
*
Thirty days, and Xhalax has carried the child from system to system, following rumors, seeking something she might never again find. The infant cries. It spits up food whenever it is tricked into eating what it doesn't smear onto its body or Xhalax's. It soils itself. It wails, disconsolate, limbs flailing, tiny hands reaching and grabbing. It tries to eat things that are not food, and shows no ability or even desire to control itself or begin to respond to Xhalax's weary commands.
Xhalax leans over the flimsy bars of the child-cage, and Talia stares up, fascinated. “Maadaaadaamaa?”
It stings. Less than three monens have passed since Aeryn birthed her offspring with the frantic assistance of two overly excited men, the calmer assurances of a disgusting, filthy creature called Grnchlk and a drunken Diagnosan. Only Cholak knows how Aeryn survived the process, although it was a near thing, the child twisted inside and unwilling to emerge on schedule.
A mobile of colored plastics rotates above Talia’s pen, and the small fingers reaching for Xhalax change course as she fails to respond. Either of the Crichtons would have swooped up the child and lifted her high, made ridiculous faces at her and nuzzled her nose or belly or palms or toes until Talia shrieked with ear-splitting laughter. Only then would they move on to maintenance duties. Aeryn would have checked the child’s status first, and then would have held her close, perhaps feeding her, perhaps simply talking as if she’d be understood.
Had Aeryn been like this? Had Xhalax?
She had held her daughter for five hundred microts: not the minimum allowed nor the maximum. Some new mothers resisted, had to be restrained when the medtechs took away the newborn. Xhalax had given the child life and a name; she locked love inside, starved herself of all but the briefest of caresses. To her comrades, Xhalax had expressed only her relief in a duty well-performed. Later, only once, did she visit the ship's nursery; such deviances were noted, and the twisted misery of Xhalax's existence was the proof and the price.
Aeryn had been a stoic, quiet child. Xhalax supposes that Aeryn's offspring has inherited its behavior from its paternal species; Peacekeepers truly are superior even during infancy. Xhalax remembers nothing of her own nursery years before the crèche, before discipline, training, learning to be what she was destined to be: soldier and pilot, a warrior in the service of honor and justice.
A failure. A deserter. A renegade.
And now, a parent.
It's not what she wanted from her life. It's nothing she's trained for.
Xhalax made a choice, once, to defy all she knew and take what she wanted. In so doing, she laid the seeds of her own destruction, lost her lover, her child, her future.
She murdered her love. She almost murdered their child. She could have left the result of that child’s forbidden union behind.
She didn’t.
Xhalax buys formula; she learns to change the drooled-upon, pissed-upon, shat-upon wrappings; she keeps the child by her at all times, waking and sleeping, listening to its murmurs and the shallow beat of its heart.
She doggedly searches the news nets and listens to rumors.
*
Arnessk, floats a whisper on the fifth world, a monen later.
The Prowler seat suffers a cradle harnessed to its back. Xhalax can reach over to touch the child, or when not in flight, clamber around to tend to more complicated needs. The cockpit smells of bits of scattered food adhering to the bulkhead and canopy, and unfortunately, to Xhalax's clothes and hair. At least, until they reach the next station or planet enroute. Cleaning away the filth will be a priority.
Meanwhile, Talia babbles and waves the brightly-colored, damnably loud rattle. Xhalax wishes she had never bought the thing, but the shopkeeper had recommended it, that and the sucking ring. At least the ring keeps the child quiet.
“Ghaalaalaa!” Unlike now.
"Quiet!" Xhalax commands. Her head aches. They've been in flight for over a solar day, with many more to go before the next chance to sleep in a real bed, instead of slouching in her seat or awkwardly curling in the storage space behind while the Prowler floats guideless.
Talia squeals in her ear.
Before she realizes it, Xhalax's arm flashes out. She feels the smack in the back of her hand, her wrist: minor physical sensation, far less impact than the hot burst of fury that cascades in her mind. This... This... This creature is the cause of her suffering, the stupidity of her actions, the search for a daughter she doesn't know, tied to a half-breed infant that by all decency should have never been born!
She feels her blood pressure rising, the skin breaking in her palm where her nails bite down, the too easy lure of stopping all the frustration by wrapping her hands round the infant’s fragile neck and squeezing it to blessedly welcome silence.
“Sssaaaaalll!!!”
Xhalax presses her hands to her head, teeth grinding down and the wounds in her palm scraping as she scrubs clawed fingers through her hair. The pain suits her, distracts her from the vicious anger trying to break free.
"I can't do this." Sobbing breaths intersperse with the child’s seemingly endless lung capacity.
But she is the only one who can. Talia’s screams ring through the cabin. Xhalax forces herself to calmness. She bears the cries and the angry buzzing in her skull. She slows the Prowler, comes to a gradual halt in the nothingness that surrounds them, darkness unlit by stars, cold particles brushing the hull where they float in a gaseous cloud. The child's shrieks stab into Xhalax's ears. She breathes deep, ignores the stink. She turns and releases the child from the cradle.
A runaway Peacekeeper takes a child into her lap. Awkwardly, with rough voice and hard hands and uncertain intent, she tries to comfort it from pain she inflicted. Xhalax strokes Talia's back, her hair, speaks to her as softly as she knows how. The child snuffling in her arms is too young for discipline, too young to understand anything but that she is happy or hurt, that she wants or doesn't want.
It's no one's fault. It's the way things are. All Xhalax can do, for what honor and life remain to her, is the best she can.
Talia is all she has left of Aeryn, and there is so little there, so little time they had. Xhalax comforts her grandchild until the infant sleeps, thumb secured into her mouth, hiccupping sobs reduced to even breaths. Only then does Xhalax realize: she was crying, too, liquid on her cheeks testifying against disbelief.
The Prowler drifts in space for a time, its occupants curled together.
*
After a monen’s journey, Arnessk proves to be nothing more than another disappointing rock of a planet. Deserted, barren of intelligent life, though once that was not the case. Xhalax approaches with caution, her scans finally gaining intelligible signals: Leviathan calls and a ground-based comm system.
And a voice that cracks through her like ice.
“Jool, we’re coming down.” Flat-toned, as thin and lifeless now as it had been thick with grief over the remains of a Leviathan hybrid.
Xhalax lands her Prowler near an Interon academic ship, the lack of dust on its hull marking it a recent arrival. According to the closest world’s port and traffic chatter, archaeologists visit Arnessk every cycle during its habitable season, which has only recently begun. The vessel itself scans empty, and there are no life signs in close vicinity.
Keeping a watchful eye on the surrounding scrub forest, Xhalax watches the swooping descent of a golden transport pod. It lands on the rocky plain well beyond the Interon ship, near an alien vessel recognizable only through familiarity. Once-white rounded wings are folded upward, and stains blur the Human markings. Xhalax blinks. There are two of them, and their engines are still hot.
She re-settles herself in the cockpit, the Prowler’s engines primed for takeoff. She doesn’t expect… Well, she doesn’t know what to expect, but given past history, she’d lay odds on disaster.
They’ll have scanned her, if any sense remains beyond emotional cataclysm. The canopies lift. A Crichton emerges from the one on the right, pistol steady in hand, long coat swinging around his legs. He’s haggard, red-rimmed at eyes and thin-lipped. His left-side double follows, short-jacketed and bearing a pulse rifle. This one looks as worn as the first.
They angle to cover her. Under the half-crazed Human glares, Xhalax doesn’t draw her own weapons, doesn’t move a dench. She doesn’t have a death-wish any longer, and they look at her like she’s the enemy.
(Wasn’t she? Yes.)
Is she? No. (Not any longer.)
Talia wriggles in her seatback cradle, beginning to wake from her nap. She’s hidden from view by Xhalax and the rim of the cockpit, not coincidentally out of the direct line of fire, should this meeting go badly. A tiny hand clutches Xhalax’s queue. It’s been a long time since she bore another’s touch, and it had been strange during the past weekens to accustom herself to the child’s irrepressible questing fingers. Talia’s fair hair is fine and soft, as yet uncut and growing fast. Before landing, Xhalax tied it into its own neat braid.
“Maa?”
The pod door swings open and Aeryn descends the steep steps like a drugged queen. Her glazed stare never wavers from Xhalax, not even glancing at the men framing her approach. Confidence, or complete oblivion. The darkness there is like looking into a mirror of the past. Xhalax sucks in a breath against the remembrance, feels herself stiffening where she stands. Her fingers curl, itching to hold weapons.
Aeryn’s right hand rests loosely on the holster hanging from a belt drawn tight over ill-fitting clothing. She’s lost weight. Dark hollows underscore dull eyes. Her long hair is pulled back, drooping into a lifeless tail. Aeryn looks as old as her mother feels.
“It’s taken you long enough,” Xhalax snaps. The guns shift minutely, but Aeryn keeps trudging forward. Xhalax knows the path her daughter walks. It leads to nothing but defeat and despair. Once she had wanted her child to suffer as she had, to pay the same cost and more. Instead, the sight of history repeating itself is unbearable. Xhalax lets her breath out sharply. She pushes the memory away. “Three monens. That’s how long I’ve searched for you. Me… And this one.”
She has no nerves to lose. It’s a clean vault, clearing the cockpit and leaving the child in partial view with one smooth motion, landing in a crouch and rising to her feet, head high and shoulders straight. If Xhalax dies now, it will be a stupid, pointless death.
But Aeryn and her child will be re-united.
*
The guns fall limp, and Aeryn wakes up on the instant, disbelieving eyes brightening to awareness. She passes Xhalax in a flash of unwashed hair and skin, too-thin hands reaching and grabbing onto the frame, pulling herself high with wiry strength and staring as if she’ll never stop. She grunts and kicks a leg up and over the cockpit rim, falls in and keeps moving, unstraps her child with shaking hands.
The Humans slam up beside Xhalax, mouths open and spewing incomprehensible verbiage, astonishment and thanks and suspicion. They help Aeryn down, far more hindrance than help. The three of them pass the child from hand to hand, their stances easy with one another for the first time since Xhalax has known them.
She steps backward, looks away from the naked joy and relief, the love that renders them beautiful to the eye, like the survivors of battle, fellow soldiers finding one another and rejoicing. Aeryn breaks free of the Crichtons, and they stand shoulder to shoulder behind her, craning their necks to see the child held tight against her chest. She finds Xhalax, takes a step, a step, another.
“Mother.” Her arm reaches out, her fingers spread wide. “Thank you.”
Xhalax looks at her daughter. She glances at the Human men, at her grandchild nestled under Aeryn’s chin. Talia’s pursed lips indicate puzzled happiness, pleasure at being held, knowing no stranger - the Human in her supplying that flaw, surely - and so young that she barely remembers her mother, if at all. But there is time. Time lost to make up for, but time to do it in, if they remain careful, and out of harm’s way.
“Aeryn…” It’s rising up again, the feeling that had prevented her from leaving the child, that had kept her searching for her daughter and the Leviathan, and Cholak help her, even the Humans.
Once she hadn’t understood it. Once, she’d naïvely desired it. Later, she had regretted and loathed it. Now, it curls inside her chest, settling lightly as if to take up residence. It pushes words into her throat, into the air for them all to hear.
"Aeryn... Love." The word scrapes through Xhalax's mind, but it's exactly the one she wants. It's not enough. She latches onto something she's heard the Humans say, bizarre and yet somehow appropriate for the irrational decisions Xhalax has made, what her life is becoming. "That's what family is for."
Author: kernezelda
Email: kernezelda @ yahoo.com
Fandom: Farscape
Main Character: Xhalax Sun
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3000+
Spoilers: AU from Season 3’s “Relativity” onward.
Disclaimer: Farscape does not belong to me. Sad, that.
Summary: matrithon prompt - Xhalax Sun, renegade
Notes: Thank you kindly to charlie_bz for beta. This is a sequel to Butterfly Effect and Chrysalis.
Xhalax uses her ruined face to advantage in the marketplace. Even in regions far from home territories, Peacekeepers inspire a lot of respect (a lot of fear), and the scars subtly enhance the effect. Shopkeepers stumble over themselves to avoid staring, to placate her, and to get her out of their premises. Mercifully, no wanted beacons exhibit Xhalax's face or name, so she feels no qualms about claiming all the might of her race and organization to achieve her current mission. Her reception among the merchants, therefore, depends on if they applaud the recent destruction of a command carrier, symbol of Peacekeeper oppression, or if they fear Peacekeeper response to a terrorist attack.
At the moment, Xhalax means to purchase more infant formula. She hauls her daughter's offspring on her good hip, unwilling to leave Talia in their tiny, unsecured tenement dwelling. They are alone. They've been alone for days, since Aeryn and her Humans were sucked along with Moya into one of John Crichton’s frelling wormholes. And of course, Xhalax isn’t alone in her search, increasing the need for discretion: John Crichton is the Peacekeepers’ most wanted fugitive since Kaarvok the Multiplier had gone missing with his entire Peacekeeper guard.
If only one of them had perished, or even simply fled back to the barbarous world of his birth, the situation aboard Moya would have been much eased, and this disaster, among many, might have been avoided. Of course, Aeryn would choose the difficult path, as sure she could chart her own course as Xhalax once had been. Letting neither male know which had fathered her child ensured that both remained in besotted attendance.
Ten days, and Xhalax had spent the first of those frantically seeking through unofficial and less-than-sanctioned channels any information on unexplained anomalies in reachable space, anything that might lead her back to Moya. Sheer chance had placed the child in her care. In farboht fact, it was the first time she'd accepted the charge, remaining planet-side haggling for ammunition while the squabbling Crichtons flew two pods full of food to the ship where Aeryn and Pilot were negotiating the orbital fee.
As a practice, Xhalax always carries several types of currency, blades sheathed in her jacket lining, a visible pulse pistol, a smaller gun nestled in the interior of a boot, and a variety of performance-enhancing drugs in easy-to-reach locations. And those are only from the skin out. She knows secret codes and how to reach military and Directorate groups on tens of planets without revealing her own location or identity.
She has no more idea of how to care for a child than anecdotal knowledge and observation of Aeryn and the Humans’ interactions with their offspring.
The satchel hanging from Xhalax’s shoulder grows heavier with each added bottle and box labeled with smiling Sebacean infants. At the last moment, she grabs an instruction manual from the shelf near the smirking clerk’s counter. Aeryn’s child gnaws happily at the tough leather of Xhalax’s jacket. “Mnnfg,” she remarks, and drools.
Xhalax closes her eyes and attempts to control her temper, fists clenching around the satchel strap digging into her shoulder. The pressure of unwanted responsibility is crushing. After a few microts, she is able to loosen her hands, palms tingling where the material indented flesh.
For a short, desperate time, uselessly casting about on the insignificant ball of rock hosting an equally dismal commerce market, the idea of leaving the infant seemed the most logical, rational decision. It wasn't as if she had formed an attachment, or harbored sentiment for family life. Xhalax was a soldier and a deserter, and the safest course of action would be to leave and find refuge in one of the renegade squads tolerated where true Peacekeepers were either unwilling to go... or unwelcome.
Something had stopped her. Something inside, unexpected and unwanted. And known.
It is a half-breed alien, tainted Peacekeeper blood running warm in a body that looks normal. Nothing in its face or incoherent infant noises mark the child as a result of miscegenation; if her parentage were unknown, she could pass for Sebacean without question. It should have been easy to leave the hybrid and go to ground, unburdened and forcing aside any emotional ties Xhalax might have foolishly allowed to form to her unnatural and criminal daughter.
But the child has a name. Talia. The syllables roll smoothly in Xhalax's mouth, curling her tongue over the sounds that mean this infant, whose blue newborn eyes are her fathers', but whose delicate lips are Aeryn’s… Talyn's. In Xhalax's arms, the soft-fleshed body is fragile and helpless, less hardy, surely, than a child of pure Peacekeeper lines would be. The tiny hands, looking Sebacean to the bone, are perfect, already able to grip and cling with surprising strength.
It's not that Xhalax couldn't live with a decision to preserve herself and abandon the unasked-for responsibility thrust upon her.
It's that she chooses otherwise.
*
Thirty days, and Xhalax has carried the child from system to system, following rumors, seeking something she might never again find. The infant cries. It spits up food whenever it is tricked into eating what it doesn't smear onto its body or Xhalax's. It soils itself. It wails, disconsolate, limbs flailing, tiny hands reaching and grabbing. It tries to eat things that are not food, and shows no ability or even desire to control itself or begin to respond to Xhalax's weary commands.
Xhalax leans over the flimsy bars of the child-cage, and Talia stares up, fascinated. “Maadaaadaamaa?”
It stings. Less than three monens have passed since Aeryn birthed her offspring with the frantic assistance of two overly excited men, the calmer assurances of a disgusting, filthy creature called Grnchlk and a drunken Diagnosan. Only Cholak knows how Aeryn survived the process, although it was a near thing, the child twisted inside and unwilling to emerge on schedule.
A mobile of colored plastics rotates above Talia’s pen, and the small fingers reaching for Xhalax change course as she fails to respond. Either of the Crichtons would have swooped up the child and lifted her high, made ridiculous faces at her and nuzzled her nose or belly or palms or toes until Talia shrieked with ear-splitting laughter. Only then would they move on to maintenance duties. Aeryn would have checked the child’s status first, and then would have held her close, perhaps feeding her, perhaps simply talking as if she’d be understood.
Had Aeryn been like this? Had Xhalax?
She had held her daughter for five hundred microts: not the minimum allowed nor the maximum. Some new mothers resisted, had to be restrained when the medtechs took away the newborn. Xhalax had given the child life and a name; she locked love inside, starved herself of all but the briefest of caresses. To her comrades, Xhalax had expressed only her relief in a duty well-performed. Later, only once, did she visit the ship's nursery; such deviances were noted, and the twisted misery of Xhalax's existence was the proof and the price.
Aeryn had been a stoic, quiet child. Xhalax supposes that Aeryn's offspring has inherited its behavior from its paternal species; Peacekeepers truly are superior even during infancy. Xhalax remembers nothing of her own nursery years before the crèche, before discipline, training, learning to be what she was destined to be: soldier and pilot, a warrior in the service of honor and justice.
A failure. A deserter. A renegade.
And now, a parent.
It's not what she wanted from her life. It's nothing she's trained for.
Xhalax made a choice, once, to defy all she knew and take what she wanted. In so doing, she laid the seeds of her own destruction, lost her lover, her child, her future.
She murdered her love. She almost murdered their child. She could have left the result of that child’s forbidden union behind.
She didn’t.
Xhalax buys formula; she learns to change the drooled-upon, pissed-upon, shat-upon wrappings; she keeps the child by her at all times, waking and sleeping, listening to its murmurs and the shallow beat of its heart.
She doggedly searches the news nets and listens to rumors.
*
Arnessk, floats a whisper on the fifth world, a monen later.
The Prowler seat suffers a cradle harnessed to its back. Xhalax can reach over to touch the child, or when not in flight, clamber around to tend to more complicated needs. The cockpit smells of bits of scattered food adhering to the bulkhead and canopy, and unfortunately, to Xhalax's clothes and hair. At least, until they reach the next station or planet enroute. Cleaning away the filth will be a priority.
Meanwhile, Talia babbles and waves the brightly-colored, damnably loud rattle. Xhalax wishes she had never bought the thing, but the shopkeeper had recommended it, that and the sucking ring. At least the ring keeps the child quiet.
“Ghaalaalaa!” Unlike now.
"Quiet!" Xhalax commands. Her head aches. They've been in flight for over a solar day, with many more to go before the next chance to sleep in a real bed, instead of slouching in her seat or awkwardly curling in the storage space behind while the Prowler floats guideless.
Talia squeals in her ear.
Before she realizes it, Xhalax's arm flashes out. She feels the smack in the back of her hand, her wrist: minor physical sensation, far less impact than the hot burst of fury that cascades in her mind. This... This... This creature is the cause of her suffering, the stupidity of her actions, the search for a daughter she doesn't know, tied to a half-breed infant that by all decency should have never been born!
She feels her blood pressure rising, the skin breaking in her palm where her nails bite down, the too easy lure of stopping all the frustration by wrapping her hands round the infant’s fragile neck and squeezing it to blessedly welcome silence.
“Sssaaaaalll!!!”
Xhalax presses her hands to her head, teeth grinding down and the wounds in her palm scraping as she scrubs clawed fingers through her hair. The pain suits her, distracts her from the vicious anger trying to break free.
"I can't do this." Sobbing breaths intersperse with the child’s seemingly endless lung capacity.
But she is the only one who can. Talia’s screams ring through the cabin. Xhalax forces herself to calmness. She bears the cries and the angry buzzing in her skull. She slows the Prowler, comes to a gradual halt in the nothingness that surrounds them, darkness unlit by stars, cold particles brushing the hull where they float in a gaseous cloud. The child's shrieks stab into Xhalax's ears. She breathes deep, ignores the stink. She turns and releases the child from the cradle.
A runaway Peacekeeper takes a child into her lap. Awkwardly, with rough voice and hard hands and uncertain intent, she tries to comfort it from pain she inflicted. Xhalax strokes Talia's back, her hair, speaks to her as softly as she knows how. The child snuffling in her arms is too young for discipline, too young to understand anything but that she is happy or hurt, that she wants or doesn't want.
It's no one's fault. It's the way things are. All Xhalax can do, for what honor and life remain to her, is the best she can.
Talia is all she has left of Aeryn, and there is so little there, so little time they had. Xhalax comforts her grandchild until the infant sleeps, thumb secured into her mouth, hiccupping sobs reduced to even breaths. Only then does Xhalax realize: she was crying, too, liquid on her cheeks testifying against disbelief.
The Prowler drifts in space for a time, its occupants curled together.
*
After a monen’s journey, Arnessk proves to be nothing more than another disappointing rock of a planet. Deserted, barren of intelligent life, though once that was not the case. Xhalax approaches with caution, her scans finally gaining intelligible signals: Leviathan calls and a ground-based comm system.
And a voice that cracks through her like ice.
“Jool, we’re coming down.” Flat-toned, as thin and lifeless now as it had been thick with grief over the remains of a Leviathan hybrid.
Xhalax lands her Prowler near an Interon academic ship, the lack of dust on its hull marking it a recent arrival. According to the closest world’s port and traffic chatter, archaeologists visit Arnessk every cycle during its habitable season, which has only recently begun. The vessel itself scans empty, and there are no life signs in close vicinity.
Keeping a watchful eye on the surrounding scrub forest, Xhalax watches the swooping descent of a golden transport pod. It lands on the rocky plain well beyond the Interon ship, near an alien vessel recognizable only through familiarity. Once-white rounded wings are folded upward, and stains blur the Human markings. Xhalax blinks. There are two of them, and their engines are still hot.
She re-settles herself in the cockpit, the Prowler’s engines primed for takeoff. She doesn’t expect… Well, she doesn’t know what to expect, but given past history, she’d lay odds on disaster.
They’ll have scanned her, if any sense remains beyond emotional cataclysm. The canopies lift. A Crichton emerges from the one on the right, pistol steady in hand, long coat swinging around his legs. He’s haggard, red-rimmed at eyes and thin-lipped. His left-side double follows, short-jacketed and bearing a pulse rifle. This one looks as worn as the first.
They angle to cover her. Under the half-crazed Human glares, Xhalax doesn’t draw her own weapons, doesn’t move a dench. She doesn’t have a death-wish any longer, and they look at her like she’s the enemy.
(Wasn’t she? Yes.)
Is she? No. (Not any longer.)
Talia wriggles in her seatback cradle, beginning to wake from her nap. She’s hidden from view by Xhalax and the rim of the cockpit, not coincidentally out of the direct line of fire, should this meeting go badly. A tiny hand clutches Xhalax’s queue. It’s been a long time since she bore another’s touch, and it had been strange during the past weekens to accustom herself to the child’s irrepressible questing fingers. Talia’s fair hair is fine and soft, as yet uncut and growing fast. Before landing, Xhalax tied it into its own neat braid.
“Maa?”
The pod door swings open and Aeryn descends the steep steps like a drugged queen. Her glazed stare never wavers from Xhalax, not even glancing at the men framing her approach. Confidence, or complete oblivion. The darkness there is like looking into a mirror of the past. Xhalax sucks in a breath against the remembrance, feels herself stiffening where she stands. Her fingers curl, itching to hold weapons.
Aeryn’s right hand rests loosely on the holster hanging from a belt drawn tight over ill-fitting clothing. She’s lost weight. Dark hollows underscore dull eyes. Her long hair is pulled back, drooping into a lifeless tail. Aeryn looks as old as her mother feels.
“It’s taken you long enough,” Xhalax snaps. The guns shift minutely, but Aeryn keeps trudging forward. Xhalax knows the path her daughter walks. It leads to nothing but defeat and despair. Once she had wanted her child to suffer as she had, to pay the same cost and more. Instead, the sight of history repeating itself is unbearable. Xhalax lets her breath out sharply. She pushes the memory away. “Three monens. That’s how long I’ve searched for you. Me… And this one.”
She has no nerves to lose. It’s a clean vault, clearing the cockpit and leaving the child in partial view with one smooth motion, landing in a crouch and rising to her feet, head high and shoulders straight. If Xhalax dies now, it will be a stupid, pointless death.
But Aeryn and her child will be re-united.
*
The guns fall limp, and Aeryn wakes up on the instant, disbelieving eyes brightening to awareness. She passes Xhalax in a flash of unwashed hair and skin, too-thin hands reaching and grabbing onto the frame, pulling herself high with wiry strength and staring as if she’ll never stop. She grunts and kicks a leg up and over the cockpit rim, falls in and keeps moving, unstraps her child with shaking hands.
The Humans slam up beside Xhalax, mouths open and spewing incomprehensible verbiage, astonishment and thanks and suspicion. They help Aeryn down, far more hindrance than help. The three of them pass the child from hand to hand, their stances easy with one another for the first time since Xhalax has known them.
She steps backward, looks away from the naked joy and relief, the love that renders them beautiful to the eye, like the survivors of battle, fellow soldiers finding one another and rejoicing. Aeryn breaks free of the Crichtons, and they stand shoulder to shoulder behind her, craning their necks to see the child held tight against her chest. She finds Xhalax, takes a step, a step, another.
“Mother.” Her arm reaches out, her fingers spread wide. “Thank you.”
Xhalax looks at her daughter. She glances at the Human men, at her grandchild nestled under Aeryn’s chin. Talia’s pursed lips indicate puzzled happiness, pleasure at being held, knowing no stranger - the Human in her supplying that flaw, surely - and so young that she barely remembers her mother, if at all. But there is time. Time lost to make up for, but time to do it in, if they remain careful, and out of harm’s way.
“Aeryn…” It’s rising up again, the feeling that had prevented her from leaving the child, that had kept her searching for her daughter and the Leviathan, and Cholak help her, even the Humans.
Once she hadn’t understood it. Once, she’d naïvely desired it. Later, she had regretted and loathed it. Now, it curls inside her chest, settling lightly as if to take up residence. It pushes words into her throat, into the air for them all to hear.
"Aeryn... Love." The word scrapes through Xhalax's mind, but it's exactly the one she wants. It's not enough. She latches onto something she's heard the Humans say, bizarre and yet somehow appropriate for the irrational decisions Xhalax has made, what her life is becoming. "That's what family is for."