The knot subsides, and the separation makes us both hiss. He rolls us so I'm on his chest, pulls the thermal blanket around us, and the heat of him is different now. Not just temperature. The bond makes his warmth feelspecific, the particular heat of the person I'm permanently synced to.
"Krilly's vital signs are within normal parameters," Bebo announces from somewhere in the discarded jumpsuit. "Horgox's vital signs indicate significant neurochemical restructuring consistent with Varkaani pair-bonding. I have been recording environmental data throughout this encounter. The biometric dataset isextensive."
"Bebo. If you sell that dataset, I will disassemble you component by component."
"The thought never crossed my processors." A pause. "The OOPS extraction shuttle has confirmed receipt of the beacon signal. Estimated arrival: five hours, twelve minutes."
Five hours. Five hours before ships arrive and the universe intrudes.
His arms tighten around me. His contentment reaches me through the bond, deep and unfamiliar andhis. He feels my certainty, the specific Krilly-brand conviction that hasn't wavered since I pulled him into a cave and decided he was worth keeping.
"Five hours," he says, nuzzling the claiming mark. "Enough time to rest."
"Or not rest." I shift against him, and the bond carries his response: the sharp spike of want, the heat rebuilding. "I seem to recall notes I wanted to share."
"Your notes." His chest vibrates with a quiet laugh. "My bonded mate has engineering notes for our intimate life."
"I always have notes. It's a professional hazard." My fingers trace the circuit tracery on his ribs, the blue lines now framed by the opalescent shimmer of the claiming color, new code written over old damage. "For instance, I have extensive notes on the cave wall dream I never got to finish telling you about."
"The one I physically stopped you from describing."
"That one. Turns out the real thing requires field testing."
"Field testing." His hands settle on my hips with purpose. "I'm a thorough field researcher."
"Prove it."
He lifts me like I weigh nothing, and the bond sings with mutual intent, and above us alien stars wheel across a purple sky while the beacon broadcasts and Snowball rumbles a distant patrol call and Pudding answers from the canyon depths.
I prove it.
We prove it together.
Thoroughly.
11
What the Bond Costs
Horgox
Krilly'sheartbeatwakesme.
Day nine on this planet, and the heartbeat that pulls me from sleep is not the one against my ribs where she's pressed into my side, face tucked beneath my jaw, one leg slung over mine with the possessive confidence of someone who has decided this is how sleeping works now. That heartbeat I could ignore. Could fold it into the familiar catalogue of her body against mine that I've been building since she crashed into my jungle.
The heartbeatinsidemy chest is the one that pulls me from sleep.
Layered beneath my own, slightly faster, running at a rhythm that isn't mine but resonates with mine the way a harmonic complements a fundamental frequency. Her pulse. Carried through the bond that snapped into place when her hands closed around my horns and the claiming color turned the darkness opalescent.
I can feel her dreaming. Not the content; the texture. Contentment washing through the connection in warm, diffuse waves. Safety. The particular brand of deep satisfaction that her waking mind would deflect with humour and her sleeping mind offers freely.
My thumb finds the bite mark on her throat without conscious thought. The skin is raised, warm, already healing into the permanent scar that marks her as claimed. Where I touch her, the bond feeds a ghost of sensation back to me, a feedback loop that's going to take some time to calibrate.
The opalescent shimmer runs through my markings in slow pulses. Visible in the pre-dawn dimness, a color that didn't exist in any spectrum until last night. I hold my forearm up, studying it. The claiming color threads through the jade patterns like a new mineral vein in familiar stone. Permanent. The visual evidence that a hundred and twenty years of existence finally produced something I chose rather than something that was done to me.
Krilly stirs. A soft sound, her hand flexing against my chest, fingers curling into the scars where the harness used to sit. Her contentment shifts: the dream thinning, awareness surfacing, the first spark of waking consciousness that carries her specific flavour ofoh-god-what-did-I-do-last-nightfollowed immediately byoh-right-everything-and-it-was-incredible.
"Hey." Her voice, rough with sleep.
