“Tavia,” I say.
“It’s biology, Papa. You told me we don’t apologise for biology.”
I had said that. In a completely different context. About bioluminescence during thunderstorms. My daughter has weaponised it.
Dove catches my eye across the room. The corner of her mouth twitches. Her heart rate spikes—brief, hot, involuntary—and I feel it through the bond like a fingertip drawn down my sternum.
Four hours. I have four hours to sit in this chair and be professional while the woman I claimed wears my scent and my shirt and my bite mark and runs a community I built but she brought to life.
The ridges stir. I shift in my seat.
It is going to be a very long meeting.
Evening arrives with the rhythms we’ve built—routines that feel less like structure and more like gravity. Something we orbit rather than enforce.
Tavia helps Dove cook. I handle protein preparation because my temperature regulation allows me to test cooking surfaces by touch, which Dove calls “unfairly attractive” and Tavia calls “useful but please stop staring at Dove-Mom while you do it, Papa, you’ll burn something.”
The kitchen fills with steam and laughter and the scent of food that shouldn’t work with station rations but does because Dove treats cooking the way she treats everything—as a problem to be solved with creativity and force of will.
“Dove-Mom,” Tavia says, testing the name. She’s been using it since she decided to stay—tentatively at first, then with growing confidence, then with the casual ownership of a child who has decided the universe should conform to her nomenclature. “Can you teach me to make the sauce?”
“The secret is patience and too much garlic.”
“There’s no such thing as too much garlic,” Tavia says with the absolute conviction of an eight-year-old who discovered garlic bread last week and has not yet recovered.
“She’s right,” I say. “Lividian palates process allicin differently. We experience garlic as—”
“Papa. Please don’t science the garlic.”
“I am providing relevant biochemical context.”
“You’re making dinner weird.”
Dove laughs. The sound settles into my nervous system like a calibration tone—baseline, reference, home frequency. I watch her guide Tavia’s hands on the stirring spoon, their heads bent together, Dove’s dark curls against Tavia’s teal-streaked black, and the claiming mark catches the kitchen light.
My mate. My daughter. The family that assembled itself around a stranded courier and an electromagnetic storm and a sarcastic AI who denies having feelings about any of it.
Dove glances over her shoulder. Catches me watching.
“Optimization face,” she mouths.
I don’t deny it.
After dinner. After stories—Tavia’s scoring system has expanded to include categories for “Papa’s heart-eyes frequency” and “Dove-Mom’s accent accuracy,” both of which Pickles tracks with unnecessary precision. After small markings dim to sleep-glow and a bedroom door seals on a child who is safe and loved and furious about being eight years too young for space.
In our quarters, Dove strips off my shirt and stands in the low amber light of the sleeping cycle, and the claiming mark on her shoulder pulses gold in time with her heartbeat, which is also my heartbeat, which will be my heartbeat for the rest of my life.
“Come here,” she says.
I go.
The comm chirps at 2200.
Dove is sprawled across my chest, boneless and warm, her fingers drawing idle patterns on my stomach that make my markings glow and chase her touch. The sheets are ruined. We’ve stopped pretending we can keep sheets intact.
I reach for the panel.
“Specialist Storm. Captain Foxton.” Mother Morrison’s voice carries the particular dryness of a woman who has been managing interstellar romantic disasters for three decades and is no longer surprised by any of them. “I assume this is a good time.”
