Chapter Text
At roughly half past ten, Nightfall heard muffled shouting from the next corridor over. It didn’t take long to piece together who it was, and she gripped her book tighter.
Faint and muffled, she heard Gary’s voice. “Bro. Come on, be fucking serious. You are not kicking me out of–”
Avocato’s reply was less clear: “–being serious, Gary, get dressed and get–”
“There, you hear that! You proud of yourself?” Her book hit the floor with a papery thwap, and she sat up on the edge of the mattress. Tried to tell herself that this was, ultimately, a good thing. Quinn was coming back, and there was no way Gary would–
Judging by the sound that interrupted her thoughts, Avocato had thrown something. Violent, she told herself. He’s violent, see? “Stupid trigger-happy maniac…why couldn’t he just listen to me?”
Part of her wanted to ask AVA what was going on. Part of her wanted to go after Gary and ask him. If she could trust herself around him, maybe she would have. But given how that afternoon had gone, she was liable to make things even worse. Her fingertips plucked and worried the thin bedspread, and she bit her lip as she eyed the door.
“I wouldn’t advise that,” AVA chirped, and she glared at the ceiling.
“Unless telepathy came free with your last software update, you have no idea what I’m thinking.”
“Ha. I know exactly what you’re thinking. It’s late, Nightfall. We’re all too tired for another shouting match: that sound fair?”
“I wasn’t trying to–”
“Hold that thought, Gary needs me.”
AVA went silent, and Nightfall got to her feet. In her sports bra and increasingly ragged sweats, she half-shuffled into the bathroom and over to the toilet. As she scrubbed her hands afterwards, she tried to remember why she’d said anything to Avocato in the first place. “Should have known he wouldn’t listen,” she mumbled, and gripped the edges of the sink, staring into the basin so she didn’t meet her own eyes. Ever since the first time she’d opened her mind to accommodate Bolo’s reality-shattering presence, looking into her own eyes was risky. Sometimes she’d go from stone-cold sober to tripping in a matter of heartbeats, and since she was high off of cosmic enlightenment, not drugs, she’d have to talk herself down instead of riding it out. And given how she was feeling just then, a psychedelic meltdown was not advisable. “Should have known–”
Could any version of Avocato listen to her? Had any of them, ever, when she’d given them every chance she could? She wasn’t a violent woman, not inherently, not gleefully. Never once had she relished death or bloodshed, not the way Avocato clearly did. So, time and again, in universe after universe, she had approached the various Generals Avocato with olive branches and Get Out Of Jail free cards and overly generous bargains.
But the truths she told and the dooms she predicted fell on deaf ears: no matter how badly the Lord Commander (be it Jack or someone else) hurt him, he either remained with, or ultimately returned to, their service. It was as constant for him as Gary and Quinn were for each other. Does Gary know you killed your son just as often as you saved him? 50-50. In five, he’d killed The Prince alongside his parents; in five, he’d taken him as a ward, usually alongside his biological daughter, if she lived long enough to correct the misconception about her gender.
She always died young, if she made it out of her cradle at all. That was a constant too, and she’d watched two different Avocato’s lose their lives protecting her, ultimately in vain. Pawmegranate was not meant to see her twenties: the multiverse had spoken.
Water circled the drain, going round and round and round but never disappearing down the dark mouth of the pipe. Her hands spasmed on the sink’s edge and her stomach lurched. Eyes unable to look away, held to the swirling water as though caught in a tractor beam, she felt the floor of the bathroom pitching underneath her. Sweat broke out on her forehead and the back of her neck, and then she was being dragged right off her feet and down, into the pipe below the drain, swallowed in one gulp. Like Alice after her tumble into the rabbit hole, she was free-falling in the featureless dark, plummeting towards a bottom that might not exist. Flickers of light were flying past her, and her whole body ached as she glimpsed Gary–her Gary–in every single one.
The first few times this had happened, she’d panicked the entire time she’d fallen, convinced she was dying or losing her mind or falling into Final Space. Now, she knew it was utterly non-physical: just her mind preparing itself to commune with the banished Titan.
As abruptly as it began, it stopped. She stopped, rather, coming to a lurching halt mid-air. Light, pale blue and tinged with green, slowly seeped into the space, and Bolo shimmered into view. “Nightfall, what the hell happened? You said you had a plan for talking to the Ventrexian.”
Hours of prepwork, wasted. Most versions of him had been leagues more patient than this current one; she always forgot that, and it always cost her. “I did. He derailed it by accusing me of not loving Gary.” God, it had been hard as hell to not shoot him for that. Some lines shouldn’t be crossed, and some lies shouldn’t be said, no matter how much heartache you were carrying around.
Bolo’s frustrated groan shook the void around them, and she wobbled in the air, buffeted by imaginary turbulence. “We must keep trying! All that matters is defeating Invictus and sealing Final Space, and Avocato is a direct threat to that.”
A few windows into her past drifted by, catching her eye: blue ocean waves, a crush of bodies at a concert, a half-empty shopping mall. Gary’s muffled voice and tinny laughter bounced around the space before fading out again. She hated this part. She’d die if it ever stopped happening. “They fought,” she reported, a few seconds too late. It didn’t feel like a victory. Hurting Gary never did, and Avocato–
“They have fought before, Nightfall. They have an annoying habit of making up, so one fight is far, far from sufficient here!”
Avocato’s devastated voice lingered like a bad aftertaste to a cheap wine, but she managed to speak without gagging. “I know! Obviously, he’s a liability!” Old breaks, long healed but never truly gone, ached anew as she clenched her fists and glared up into Bolo’s tremendous face and expressionless mouth and empty eyes. “Before long, he’ll either betray us for the Lord Commander, or he’ll be Invictus’ puppet again! But he’s not willing to let go of Gary a second sooner than he has to!” Could she blame him? Had she ever be able to, any of the times she’d come across a Gary who wanted her back, despite knowing she wasn’t their Quinn? No. Not once. Every second with Gary–any Gary–was more precious than champagne or oxygen, and she hadn’t been raised to be wasteful.“He knows Gary’s going to leave him, I can see it in his eyes. But–” Her eyes kept drifting to the void between her slippered feet. Below her were more windows into the life Invictus had robbed her of, more smiling Garys, more scenes of them dancing or laughing and tangled together in the captain’s chair on the bridge of her first command.
Use the pain. One of her mother’s many, many lessons. Use the pain against fear, against exhaustion, against useless things like empathy for the enemy or concern for those who didn’t matter. Like a dragon covering its soft belly with gold coins and the shields of dead knights, she pressed every frame of her lover’s face over the weak points in her armor, to remind herself of the greater purpose. “But he’s too selfish to do it on his own terms. To leave before he ruins everything, to go back to Mydos and fix what he broke there.” Every time he put his paws on Gary, all she could see was a rotten apple slowly eating away at an intact one. Corruption was catching, and part of her was certain that Avocato could spread it through his very touch. The things she’d seen him do. The things she hadn’t been able to stop him from doing. The things he’d do here, too, if she didn’t fix whatever had gone wrong.
Down below, she and Gary were chasing a raccoon that he’d brought into the house, having mistaken it for their neighbor’s rotund chinchilla. Her cheek still bore the scars from its teeth sinking into her skin. To be fair, she’d cornered it: it was probably frightened.
“I don’t trust him,” Bolo said bluntly, and she nodded in agreement, forcing herself to look back up. What version of Avocato could ever be trusted? He was barely a soldier, barely a war criminal, hell, he was barely a fucking supervillain. Force of nature was more accurate: earthquakes and firestorms and tidal waves. Entire civilization ravaged, entire worlds reduced to dust and flames and ghosts. In one universe, the Earth-based rebel alliance had codenamed their version of Avocato Vesuvius, and she still thought the comparison was apt. “Especially when it comes to Gary. Nothing I know about him suggests that he’ll accept a break-up gracefully: this is exactly the sort of thing Invictus, or any of our enemies, might be waiting for.”
“I could come at this from another angle. Have Artex reach out to him.” ArtexSang was a Prince of Mydos, and a Gylm of renowned grace, intelligence, and beauty; Nightfall had encountered them in seven timelines, in four as Avocato’s paramour or spouse. But in this timeline, Mydos had never bowed to the Lord Commander, and the Gylm royal house had ceased cooperation the moment his armies grew truly hostile and imperialistic. If this Avocato truly had changed, as Gary oh so often insisted he had, then Mydos was the safest place for him. And for his son. I’ll let you lie to that poor kid forever, if you just get away from here before you go ka-boom and blow us all to hell. Regardless of what Avocato thought, ArtexSang would take him back, given the right excuses. As a culture, the Gylm might make a big to-do about their intelligence and their ability to view things pragmatically, not emotionally, but in the end, all people were people, and love easily burned bright enough to melt gold.
“We don’t have time to waste contacting them and getting them on board; Invictus has already tainted Avocato, just as it tainted the Lord Commander. Tell Gary about Little Cato yourself, if you have to, just get that undetonated landmine off the Crimson Light and as far away from Invictus as possible.”
The last time she’d felt this startled, it had been because Avery had accidentally started a pitching machine at the batting cages, and the first ball had pegged her in the face at 55mph. Broke her nose so badly she’d needed surgery, and Avery had seemed genuinely sorry: a rare state for her. “You. You want me to tell Gary–”
“That Avocato is still lying to him, yes.”
Very few Garys had ever punched her. Five total, if she was counting right. But Bolo, it seemed, was determined to make it an even half-dozen. “Bolo!” There was no real follow up to that exclamation, so she just gawked at him. He stared back, as expressionless as ever, and she dug through her ever-growing pile of unsaid things for anything usable. Anything to make him understand what he’d just asked her to do. “Little Cato–I’m not going to risk–no, I can’t! Bolo, I can’t, that is–” Her mind was reeling, and her nose was throbbing with the same phantom ache she always got when feeling overwhelmed. Half formed sentences and ill-defined anxieties started to clutter up the space between her ears, and she wished she was on solid ground, just so she could shuffle her feet. Changing her stance, even a little, got her unstuck when she was running out of things to say, or couldn’t think of how to say them. But she was hanging the void, disconnected from the body that was doubtlessly curled over her overflowing sink, empty and sack-like.
“You yourself acknowledge what a danger he is to the mission. He’s only going to grow more unstable, and Gary is only going to grow more attached. How ugly do you think it will get if that bombshell is dropped by someone else, and he loses his mate and his only living child on the same day? It’s better to do it now, force it if we have to, just so we have some control over the fallout.”
Why do I have to hurt Gary to do that? Why do I have to hurt Little Cato to do that? But Bolo, like her mother, got frustrated when she focused on things that weren’t supposed to matter. “Bolo, I know Gary, he won’t appreciate being told that by someone who isn’t Avocato! He’ll–” Heat burned in her cheeks, and only years of her mother’s discipline kept her from cringing at that expectant gaze. He’ll think I’m being jealous. He won’t listen. He’ll hate me.
“We…we got him back once before,” she said weakly, and Bolo made a skeptical noise in his colossal throat. Swallowing more of that cheap wine aftertaste, she forced more certainty into her voice. “So far, Gary has kept him away from the temptations of the Lord Commander, and Invictus usually targets the isolated.” True across every timeline: the only versions of “The Prince” that fell under Invictus’ influence were the ones without a loving family. Similarly, not every Jack of the Infinity Guard signed away his soul: only those that had no friendship with Sheryl or connection with Gary to fall back on after John’s death. “I will keep talking to Avocato, I will–I’ll–” Another sigh from Bolo, full of doubt, and she found herself scrambling. “I’ll threaten to out him, as a, as a–” The words caught in her throat, but she forced them out between her teeth. “As a liar and a kidnapper, I’ll threaten to tell Gary–” She could almost feel his fist in her gut, could almost hear him calling her delusional or evil or just telling her to get off the ship and not come back. “Unless he takes Little Cato and goes back to Mydos. If the choice is between his son and Gary, he’ll leave Gary without a second thought.” If Tribore could hear me, he’d be finding a large, raw salmon to slap me with. But she’d done worse, and so had Avocato.
When Bolo spoke, he sounded almost angry, and it took the last of her resolve to not shrink away from him. “I do not understand your hesitancy here! Doesn’t the boy deserve the truth? Doesn’t Gary?”
Long before she’d noticed how he held Gary, she’d noticed how Avocato held his son: kidnapped prince or not, he embraced Little Cato with a tenderness and devotion that looked impossible to fake or force. Multiple times since that argument on that grassy, rainy planet whose name escaped her, Gary had tried to convince her that Avocato was a changed man. Had some spiel about a cocoon and caterpillar goop and how Mother Nature herself thought people deserved a clean slate sometimes. Three dozen timelines had taught her that Gary was too optimistic for his own good; but when Avocato ruffled his son’s hair or called him boy in that gentle, affectionate voice or playfully chased him up and down the corridors like he was ten instead of fourteen, it seemed just a bit more possible.
He couldn’t have Gary: he didn’t deserve Gary. But The Prince didn’t have to suffer. Not again, not in a way that might kill the bright, warm spark inside him, the spark that kept him gentle and good-humored. Gary loved that spark, and she did too, even if it was too small for Bolo to see or care about.
“You said it just a minute ago: if we take away both Gary AND Little Cato, who knows what he’ll do? He’s a General, so, I’m going to negotiate.”
For a long moment, it seemed like Bolo was going to argue. But instead, he began fading out, and the ambient blue glow was dying away. In its absence, the fuzzy, drifting windows of her Gary, her perfect, long dead Gary, grew brighter, until they left after images in her eyes. “Very well. Stay focused, Nightfall: I’ll be in touch.”
And with no further warning, she was being dragged back the way she came, towards the mouth of the drain and back to her body. Returning to the physical was never graceful or gentle: she always came to a neck-twisting stop when she was back inside her own skin, and this time, she had the added shock of soaking wet pajamas and slippers. The sink had, indeed, overflowed, and as she reared back and slapped at the faucet, she squawked indignantly at the ceiling. “AVA! Why didn’t you shut off the sink?!”
“Didn’t notice,” the AI said pleasantly, and Quinn cursed her out until AVA started threatening to dump the kitchen grease traps all over her bedroom floor. “Do you need the medbay, Nightfall? Or was this one of your regularly scheduled light comas?”
“The second, AVA. How is…how is Gary?” She bit her lip, staring up at her bedroom lights. AVA’s vents hummed, as though considering whether or not to answer.
“Sleeping,” she said finally. “And he has expressed no desire to shed your blood, or Avocato’s. Hey, it’s his life.”
She swallowed hard, and dropped her wet pajamas into the laundry chute. Taking her last clean set from one of her sparsely occupied drawers, she asked, with even greater hesitation. “And, Avocato?”
“He’s a mess!” AVA chirped, and her nose throbbed again, as did the scar on her cheek, briefly and faintly.
Like he cared any of the times he hurt me, she thought, nearly as viciously as she wanted to. Pulling her sheets over herself, she asked AVA to kill the lights, and was relieved when she did so without argument. In the dark, it grew easier to remember that she wasn’t actually dealing with a loving, devoted single father and loyal, attentive friend: she was dealing with the same man who’d tortured her in three different timelines. The one who’d stood at an observation window, aloof and uncaring, as she fought off venomous lizards the size of rottweilers with nothing more than a nightstick, who’d deliberately stranded her in the wilderness and had his soldiers hunt her for sport, who’d starved her for two weeks and then offered her human meat–
Through the wall, she heard several more muffled, distorted sounds that might have been more things being thrown at the wall, or maybe shouting, or both, and her nose throbbed even harder.
***
After Gary took his pillow and left, Avocato couldn’t settle down, and heaved himself out of bed. “ASSHOLE!” He seized one of the smaller flower pots on their table and flung it at the closed door as hard as he could. Still shaking, he paced restlessly, glaring at the door and the broken pieces of the golden-orange pot littering the floor. Part of him was genuinely offended when Gary didn’t come storming back in to pick things up where they’d left off. Hell, he’d gotten out of bed with half a mind to follow the asshole to wherever he was slinking off to, before he settled for murdering their jade plant instead. “Bastard!” He croaked at the closed door, and stormed over to it, kicking the shards of painted ceramic aside and started to viciously punch in the combination to lock the door.
Until he was conked over the head with the image of Gary standing outside in the wee hours of the morning, trying to get in and finding the door locked for the first time in their entire relationship. “Fuck…fucking…” Finger shaking, he dropped his arm, and spun on his heel to return to their bed. It was too small for both of them, but that was fine: they both liked to knot their bodies together, liked trying to occupy the same space as much as possible. “Fucking asshole!” Since when am I the liar here? “Getting all high and mighty, such a fucking joke–You lied for a fucking living, asshole! Maybe don’t trust a bounty hunter who was there to fucking kill you! Maybe don’t pretend to take me back and then throw it my fucking face!”
Standing over their unmade bed, he couldn’t bring himself to lay back down. Paws clenching and unclenching, he stared at his lone pillow, which had some of Gary’s hair clinging to it. This was too hard. Why, why was this so hard? It didn’t use to be. Things had been easy, before everyone else showed up and started ruining shit.
In the early days of their relationship, Gary had made several very odd, very blond-human type assumptions about Avocato’s past. When he’d casually voiced them for the first time, it was with such easy confidence that correcting him was embarrassing for both of them. Unlike the Earth militaries Gary was familiar with, and unlike the Infinity Guard, the Ventrexian military did not believe in allowing peasants to become people of note through battlefield glory. Endless war would mean endless peasants worming their way into the aristocracy or, shudder, marrying into actual nobility.
No, only certain kinds of Ventrexians could become officers of any significant rank, and after a few hundred years of that, an aristocratic military caste emerged. It was from these fields that Avocato had been harvested and pulped into slurry to feed the empire. Whereas Gary had imagined a grimy, crowded boot camp, Avocato had spent most of his young life in the Officer’s Academy in Ventrexia’s capital. Gary had pictured him coming from nowhere, being no one; in reality, his grandmother had sat on the Royal Cabinet for Ventrexia’s second-to-last Queen, and his father had captained the last King’s guard when he was still the Crown Prince.
“You’re swanky?” Gary asked, voice full of something like despair. Avocato shrugged, feeling a tad bashful as Gary planted his elbows on the table between them, chin in one hand. “Like? Super swanky, uber fancy, silver spoon and golden fork and platinum butterknife RICH?”
“Was,” he said, and then said it again for good measure. “I was swanky, I was rich. But all of that was before. It doesn’t really matter now.” Gary seemed unconvinced, and he found himself staring at his paws. Dark pink highways of scar tissue lashed across his knuckles and the backs of his palms, each one marked by missing fur. The commissary was cold around them: H.U.E. was doing some kind of software maintenance on the environmental systems, since the Infinity Guard was giving them a breather. Twelve days without an attack so far. Four days since they’d hooked up for the first time, on a rickety chair in the space between the pool table and the booth they were currently occupying. “That bad, or something?” He tried to sound casual. Apathetic, even. Pretty sure he failed, but Gary softened and reached across the table to grab his paw.
“No, no way! Just took me by surprise! I’ve, uh, I’ve hooked up with rich people before and I…well, usually I can tell!” He was still smiling, but Avocato couldn’t fight off a full-body wince. Right. Gary had grown up homeless. Had sold drugs and stolen goods and the privilege of fucking him, so he could eat and sleep inside and pay his debts.
A few seconds of silence ticked by, and Avocato stared at their fingers, laying side by side. There were scars on Gary’s knuckles too, and showering together over the last few days had revealed many more, all over different parts of his soft, affectionate body. So many, in fact, that Avocato had blinked in surprise, and then stepped in closer, under the hot water crashing over Gary’s hair and shoulders and back. As gingerly as possible, like they were fresh instead of years old, he touched and traced as many as he could reach, and murmured concerned questions against Gary’s temple. With a well-practiced ease, Gary laughed it off, told Avocato a few stories that were clearly meant to be funny. My mom was wasted and threw a flower pot at me. She missed but I slipped and fell on the shards, went right through my favorite shirt! A trick tried to stab me, but only cuz I stabbed him first, and like, he didn’t cut anything important. It got infected afterwards: I still haven’t paid that hospital bill. Oh, that? A gorilla bit me, and then threw up and died immediately. Third craziest night of my life. Half of them, maybe more, had been put there by street-level members of the Infinity Guard, who hadn’t exactly been tender whenever they’d picked him up for vagrancy or petty theft or failing to produce identification when asked to.
Gary shifted his grip until he could lace their fingers together and gently squeeze his hand. “You aren’t like that,” he murmured, not specifying what he meant by ‘that’. He didn’t really need to.
Avocato swallowed hard and did his best to meet Gary’s eyes, hoping his own weren’t giving too much away. In their junior and senior years, cadets in the Officers Academy were expected to put in shifts patrolling the streets of the capital. More than once, he’d arrested someone living a life much like the one Gary had had, the one Avocato was never letting him go back to. At the time, he’d looked at people like Gary–people with nothing and nowhere to go–as another species of the city’s vermin: inevitable and impossible to truly eradicate, but not something to be tolerated, or even pitied. They drained resources, carried disease, degraded the rest of Ventrexia by mere association. In the chill of the commissary, he could almost smell the dizzying burn of dirt cheap alcohol, hear the crunch of bone and the thunder of boots over stone streets, the blur of half-lit windows passing as he sprinted after whatever unfortunate soul he was chasing that night.
Like many cadets, he’d shed blood and taken lives “for the empire” long before his first day in battle.
But a lot had changed since then. Hopefully, he had too. Maybe he had, given how fondly Gary was looking at him, and how gentle he sounded when he spoke again. “Seriously though. How fancy are we talking? Fair warning, I won’t stop asking until you tell me.” Gary asked, and his smile cracked something inside him.
“I have a title,” he confessed, and Gary full-on pretended to faint, and kept it up until Avocato laughed.
Satisfied with his audience’s reaction, he sat up and made a gimmie motion with the hand not holding Avocato’s paw. “What? What are you? I can take it.” Telling himself that this was just fun, not weird, not hard at all, he did his best to explain what rank he’d held and why that had mattered. There was, of course, no exact translation. Not in English or in any language that wasn’t his. But in short, he’d been his father’s third child, and his father had been his grandmother’s second: her title apparently translated as Duchess or Archduchess, and his own as Earl or Count. “I’m defiling royalty?!” Gary looked dumbfounded all over again, but he didn’t let go of Avocato’s paw. Just leaned in closer, eyes bright and shiny and mouth slightly agape.
Chuckling weakly, Avocato shook his head. “No, no. I’m not royalty. Hell, on Ventrexia, I couldn’t legally marry royalty. My father and my aunts could have, but not me or my siblings. Only my Aunt Clawberry’s kids, since she was the heir.” Honestly, that worked out fine for him. Marriage was a duty: a political bargaining tactic and a means of creating reliable lines of inheritance for key positions. No passion or trust or mutual choice and mutual want: worst of all, entering the legal status of married meant you were agreeing to limit your reproduction, and the bulk of your time and resources, to a single relationship. Breaking that agreement bore legally enforced, material consequences, and harsh ones. The idea of being stripped of his title and then being forced to surrender the bulk of his accounts to an any angry ex-spouse, simply for fathering a child with someone else, or of needing to appear before a Capital Court judge to argue for his right to end a relationship? Horrifying. Enraging. Given the choice, he’d have picked the Academy, any day.
Every angle of his posture skeptical, Gary slid out of the booth and squeezed his hand one more time, before ambling to the cookie machine. “Yeah but, bro! I doubt your fancy family would be chill with you and me being all…tongue-wrestle-y!” With a flourish, he dispensed three chocolate chip cookies, and leaned against the short square of counter to crunch on them. Eyes on Avocato, he swallowed and continued, which sent a few crumbs sprinkling off his chin. “Been to a lot of planets, bro. It’s the same everywhere: fancy parents don’t want their kids dating unfancy guys like MOI! It’s like how the REALLY hoity-toity perfumes wouldn’t be caught DEAD in a Sephora! Or, god forbid, a Macy’s. Cheapness is more contagious than chicken pox was when it still existed! And brother, I am patient zero AND patient infinity with regards to Cheapness Flu.” Solemnly shaking his head, he chomped into his next cookie. “Our dicks are from different worlds, financially AND literally. So, you know, que the universe desperately trying to keep us apart!”
Avocato was laughing, silent and shaky, as he followed him out of the booth and across the kitchen, just to get back in his personal space: the other side of the room was too far away. “No, I couldn’t marry you anymore than I could marry royalty. And why would I? You got nothin’, baby.” Gary folded his arms and scowled at him, last cookie carefully held in one hand. Oh, you ain’t foolin’ me. That ain’t how you look at me when you’re really mad. “To be fair, I couldn’t give you anything, either. I wasn’t gonna inherit shit. And my parents would legally have had to disown me.” He was aiming to tease, and he was fairly sure he got there; he dripped some cheese onto his next words, exaggerated his leer. “Buuuuut, I could’ve kept you around as my sugar baby.”
Would barely have had to hide it, really. Side pieces you couldn’t knock up were far less complicated, and everybody knew that soldiers came back from the front lines with a rather unrefined taste in whores. They get used to cheap goods, he’d heard his father say to his uncle once, after dinner on the High Night of the spring festival.
In the present, Gary was visibly fighting a smile as he clapped his right hand to his chest and ducked around Avocato. “Are you TRYING to insult me?!” Instead of returning to their booth, he stopped at the pool table and leaned against one side, much like he’d leaned on the counter.
“Of course not, baby.” Like he always did, he followed Gary, got right back in his bubble and accepted the bite of cookie offered to him. Dry, crumbly chocolate and crisp dough: Gary knew he couldn’t taste sweet, that his tongue was that of a genuine carnivore, but he still liked the texture, still liked sharing food with his friend. Heart soft and mushy under his ribs, he used the tips of his claws to push Gary’s sloppy bangs out of his face. “Do you prefer mistress?”
Staunchly refusing to shiver at Avocato’s gentle touch, Gary harrumphed and feigned another scowl. “I do, actually! Sugar baby implies you’ll dump me the second I get too old or you get bored with me.” How Gary could bore anyone was well beyond his comprehension, but he nuzzled his neck instead of interrupting. “Mistress implies, I don’t know, some actual passion for me! Long term investment and stuff! Like I’ll still haunt you, and your wet dreams, long after your sexy, but insanely, jealous wife drives us apart!” He finished his last cookie and swiped his mouth clean with his jacket sleeve, then asked, “so, if I was your mistress, back on Ventrexia, would I be like, locked up in an ivory tower, accessible only by hair-ladder? Orrrrrr is this a King James I kinda thing?”
“Gary, who is King James I?” He toyed with Gary’s belt buckle and pressed in as close as he could. Hell, he was practically humping Gary’s thigh, and he’d gone from nuzzling his soft skin to nibbling it: barely a caress in response, like Gary hadn’t even noticed.
“Basically, I’m asking, would you like, bring me to all your snobby parties and balls and golf tournaments? Flaunt me in front of your peers and your very jealous, very sexy wife?” He sounded almost hopeful, and Avocato rolled his eyes.
“Okay, in this fantasy you’re clearly having, why is me having a sexy wife so important?”
“Would you prefer to have a very jealous, very sexy husband?”
With a hard snort of laugh, he lifted his head to meet Gary’s eyes and found him smirking, hands planted on the pool table behind him. “For the record? It’s crazy unlikely I’d be married at all–” Artex flashed in his mind, and he shooed away their sad, betrayed face. “But as for everything else?” That version of him hadn’t been much for subtlety, and he paid little mind to how his behavior effected his family. Young and stupid, richer than anyone should be, always dressed in either the silver and black suits favored by his family, each worth roughly what a peasant soldier earned in a year, or in the crisp, bright blue of his Academy uniform, always surrounded by a pounce of other noble non-heirs, all equally impulsive and entitled. He wished he could say he no longer recognized that cruel, arrogant brat, but no matter how far he ran or how long he lived, he could step back into that version of himself as easily as Gary had slipped back into his bomber jacket the day his sentence was up.
But this was a fun talk: they were flirting, damn it, not trading sins. So he shook off the creepy-crawlies under his fur and cupped Gary’s cheek with one paw. “I’d have flaunted you.” He pitched his voice low and sincere, kept his touch as gentle as it had been in the shower, and Gary practically purred. There was a soft, welcoming light in Gary’s eyes; crumbs dusted his smile. “Especially if I was in the Capital. At the Academy, or staying in the palace with my father. Maybe not at the palace, but out on the town? Club-crawling, the arena, the race track? Oh, yeah. I’d have had you with me all the time.” Through the fur on his paw, he felt the warmth of Gary’s blush, and he bumped their foreheads together, nipped the tip of his nose. “No ivory tower,” he added, running the thumb along Gary’s cheekbone. “I’d would have had to get you an apartment–”
Gary interrupted with another exaggerated gasp. “Apartment? You are an EARL, Avocato! Penthouse, bare minimum, or I swear to every single Power Ranger, you won’t get laid for a year!”
Before he’d boarded this dinky little tin can of a vessel and found himself tied up, with playing cards in his mouth, he hadn’t laughed since Little Cato was taken from him. Hadn’t been able to imagine doing so until his boy was back in his arms. But Gary was, well, Gary, and Avocato’s sour demeanor always crumbled before the might of his babbling.When he got his snickering back under control, he nuzzled their faces together and toyed with Gary’s belt some more. “Penthouse, you got it, baby. Or I’d have just bought you a hotel suite. Leased it out a year at a time. One guy in my dorm? He bought a star yacht and a dock at the space port, kept his side piece on the ship.”
Thoughtfully, Gary stroked his chin, and continued to ignore Avocato’s increasingly obvious fuck-me signals. “Depending on the nice-ness of this yacht, I would CONSIDER that. Do these mistress yachts come with servants?”
“Uh, if I hired some, yeah. But, if we were back at my family estate, they’d just, you know. Already be there.” That clearly caught Gary’s attention, so Avocato returned his smile and curled his tail around Gary’s calf. “I couldn’t keep you in the manor itself, but there were other buildings on our land. Smaller houses, for guests or if one of us grew up but didn’t wanna move all the way out.” Why would they have wanted to, any of them? Everything they’d needed, and most of the people they’d loved, had been there. Why rear children with your paramours when your own siblings were close at hand? Especially when said siblings took up so much room in your heart and your head and your home and you didn’t want it any other way. To scrub their dead, ruined faces from his mind’s eye, he sought Gary’s hands and laced their fingers back together. “You’d have been close to me, twenty minutes away at most. You’d have had servants, and a car to take you into the city if you wanted, and you’d have had friends, too.” His siblings had had friends like Gary living in their various homes on the land, though many of those relationships had been shorter lived, or less intense. Still, Gary would never have spent his days alone. Just to put a cherry on the charmed, wistful sundae in Gary’s eyes, he added, “annnd a stable of camels and riding oryxes.”
Direct hit, center mass: Gary lit up and finally threw his arms around Avocato’s shoulders. “Camels?! Really?! Camels are rad!”
Avocato huffed a laugh and rubbed their noses together. He decided he’d have put Gary in the Pistachio House, the three-story guest house surrounded by a small pistachio orchard. It was only ten minutes from the manor, but the trees, and the huddled family of hills between it and the main house, gave it more privacy than most of the other outbuildings. Plus, it was pretty, and–
His heart clenched, hard and sudden and cold, caught in the stony grip of other memories of that pretty little house on his family’s palatial grounds. An ornate crib, his son sleeping inside. Behind it was a large, round window, through which he could see the rusty red-orange of the late evening sky, and the shadows of the wide-spread, nut-laden branches of the house’s pistachio orchard. His son, asleep in inside, tiny and soft and perfect. Still nameless, but he had it narrowed down to two options: Pawstachio, or Pawmegranate. Two names, and two weeks to go before the ceremony at the manor, where, on the first anniversary of the boy’s birth, he’d enter his name into the lineage book of House Catdonnay, officially claiming him as a son instead of rejecting him as a bastard.
As expected, the boy’s mother had been no help in making a final selection, too focused her upcoming exams at the Academy and her sister’s upcoming ascension to their family seat to bother with naming her child. And the boy was pretty useless too, seeing as he couldn’t talk yet and therefore didn’t give a shit what his name was. So Avocato had been left to wrestle with it on his own and was nearing the end of his endurance.
Two weeks to go, and he’d gone to bed with a vague idea of either foisting the responsibility onto his grandmother (hadn’t sucked up to her in a while, and both names had been borne by her now-dead sisters) or flipping a damn coin.
In the morning, he’d woken up to the nanny screaming.
RKE. Random Kit Expiration. That was what the doctor called it. Random, Kit, Expiration. Healthy infants went to sleep, and never woke back up. They simply stopped breathing. Nobody could tell him why. Apparently no one knew: it just happened in four-limbed, one-headed species. Their babies just died in their sleep sometimes, and you couldn’t predict it or stop it or undo it once it was done.
They’d buried him in the family crypt, in the same chamber that held every child who didn’t reach their naming day. In the lineage book, they’d recorded him as ‘Unnamed Infant Kit’ Catdonnay, with a thin line connecting him back to Avocato. His mother’s family likely didn’t record his existence at all.
He didn’t know if the crypt was still standing. After the fires went to ash and his family home was nothing but a valley of tainted earth and angry ghosts, he hadn’t gone back to check.
In the present, Gary was talking about camels, so Avocato laid his head on his shoulder to snuggle close and listen. Somewhat absently, Gary started scritching that spot on his lower back that made him purr. “–but regardless of how rad their hooves are, my point, Avocato, is that your promise of camels has won me over. I would have HAPPILY been your mistress.”
Avocato hummed contentedly, and Gary squeezed him tight. Affection dripped off of him, landing everywhere their skin touched, and for a moment, it was easy to believe he’d found something real. That he could tell Gary the truth, the entire truth, and not be thrown head-first out of the airlock. That he could share his grief over his massacred family, could say their names and tell all the stories about them that he was carrying inside like a bag of rocks. Could talk about how they died, about how his first born son died, about how so many versions of him died between then and that moment, lounging against the pool table at the edge of civilized space.
But he couldn’t. Lumped together, it was all too big to leave his throat. Just got stuck there, no matter how much he wanted to fall at this bizarre, hyperactive primate’s feet and confess his every sin and heartbreak, beg for absolution.
Through the layers of their clothing, he could feel Gary’s hypnotic heartbeat, and he pressed one paw over it. Gary had gotten his screen out and was tapping it with his thumb, lips moving as he typed something out. “Whatcha doin’, baby?” Aiming for casual, he traced his claws over Gary’s shoulders and pecs, and tried not to purr when he felt Gary start to get hard against his thigh. Free hand on the small of Avocato’s back, Gary ticked his eyes between his face and the screen. “Gar, seriously, what are you looking at?” Do me, you idiot. How much more obvious did he need to get?
Instead of an answer, Gary smiled and leaned in to lock their lips together as best he could. Kisses were a new thing for him. Ventrexians weren’t inclined to it, nor were the Gylm. Reigna’s people, the Scyvench, kissed as much as humans did, but she had grown up in Ventrexia’s Capital, had almost exclusively had her fun with home-worlders. She hadn’t ever asked him to do it, and he certainly hadn’t offered. But Gary liked it. A lot. So he found himself liking it too, and felt almost eager as he kissed back. Enthusiasm was always rewarded, and Gary gripped him tighter, called him something sweet and rolled their hips together. When he broke the kiss to speak, his voice had heated up by several degrees. “You went to the military academy, you said?” He nodded, and Gary’s smile had a new edge to it, something he couldn’t exactly place. “So, while you were there, did you wear this little…uniform?”
Avocato blinked at him, and then looked at the screen as Gary faced it towards him. Ah. He’d had been searching for information on the Academy, and had pulled up several public records of it. Including pictures of the various uniforms that cadets wore throughout their education. In the last three years, they all wore the same pale blue, and those in their final year were marked by several insignias and the addition of epilettes. Heat crept through his body, and he found himself reluctant to meet Gary’s eyes again. Didn’t stop him from feeling his leer, or noticing the way his hand started to wander. “Yeah,” he said, after a moment.
“And, how old were you? When you were wearing, say, this one?” He tapped the final year cadet uniform with his thumb, and Avocato couldn’t fight off a nervous laugh.
“Eighteen, nineteen. Why?” He knew damn well why.
Air hissed through Gary’s teeth as he sucked in a breath, and yanked Avocato’s hips closer. His cock was definitely hard behind his fly now, and Avocato once offered his thigh. “Pictures, you have pictures, right? You have to have pictures of yourself in these, cuz like, I gotta be honest. You are always smoking, but you are double-smokin’ in your evil army general clothes, and like. There’s no way you weren’t a new, crazier type of hot in THESE.”
Nervous laughter bubbled out of his throat and he briefly put the back of his paw over his eyes, only to have Gary drop his screen to pull it away. When their eyes met, Gary’s smile was teasing, and he felt his arm start to go limp.
“Stop hiding from me.” Both of Gary’s arms settled around Avocato’s waist, and he rested their foreheads together. “Show me, please, Avo, please–” The nickname made his ears twitch, and he melted into Gary’s embrace. Apparently, Gary took the nosing at his earlobe to be a no way, you stupid monkey, and he whined like a child. “Do I have to bribe you? I have NO money, but I do have fancy shampoo that I have been selfishly hiding from you. Show me the sexy pictures of you, being all sexy, and I’ll share it.” More melting, and it felt natural to tuck himself under Gary’s chin and start purring, so he did. Gary hugged him tighter, and it was his turn to laugh awkwardly. “Dude. Not that I want you to move, but, you’re way too big to be a lap-kitty.”
“I’m not a cat, Gary.” Absently, he scratched his claws against Gary’s stomach, briefly enthralled by the sensations of the tips catching in the folds of the aging cotton. He did, in fact, have pictures.
“You call me a primate!”
“You are a primate, idiot, but I am not a cat. I’m not even in the Feline family. I am a Carnivora. You can call me that.”
“Oooh, look at you, Mr-I-Went-To-Prince-School!”
“Not a prince. I went to War Criminal School.”
“Man, does correcting me turn you on?! Because, if not, your timing is terrible.”
Nuzzling his head harder against Gary’s jaw, he slid his paw under his shirt. “Maybe it does.” He pulled his claws back in, and Gary started biting his ears. Pleasure, briefly and tingly, made his fur floof up and his body roll, and he was gasping a little when he asked, “does that uniform turn you on?”
“Just told you it does. Whose the idiot now?” There was something low and gruff in his voice, and it was still there when he repeated, “show me.”
Growling playfully, despite how fast his heart was going and how dry his mouth was getting, he patted around in his pockets until he found his own screen, then dug through his files as quickly as he could. His heart was nearly racing as he pulled up the photos Gary was asking for. Trying to seem more exasperated than anything, he offered it. “Here. Perv.”
Smirking in a way he hadn’t seen before, Gary took his screen from him and scanned it. “Oh. Oh fuck.” His eyes went wide, and Avocato went back to nuzzling any part of him he could reach. “Bro. Bro, oh my god–” Glad for the excuse to hide his face, he gently bit Gary’s shoulder through his shirt, and dropped his paw to tug at his belt again.
“Nineteen? You’re nineteen here?” Glancing up from undoing Gary’s buckle and fly, he saw that Gary had stopped on one picture and had turned the screen to show Avocato. Looked like it was one of his commendation ceremonies: he was solemnly accepting something being pinned to the breast of his coat, posture at attention, and yeah, he was probably nineteen. He started to answer, but he only got out yes, that’s my– before Gary was kissing him. Hard and demanding, not how he’d kissed before, and Avocato let himself shiver and press closer, cling tighter. “You look older,” Gary said, voice husky and gritty like smoke. “Not way older, but, like,” he let out a low bark of laughter against Avocato’s ear, earning another shiver. “Basically, if I saw this you? Like, if me yesterday saw–” He waved Avocato’s screen to indicate the photo, and then he swiped to a different one: he was mid-shrug while shedding the unform’s coat, showing the tight black undershirt and straight-legged pants. Must have been taken by one of his friends. Or his younger sister, maybe; Vodkat was always too comfortable opening her siblings’ screens under the pretense of snapping candids for them to stumble upon later. “Come on, how are you HOTTER in every new picture?! What Ventexian sorcery is this?! But, bro, I would so, so talk myself into being creepy enough to make a pass at you.”
Pants successfully open, Avocato slowly sank to his knees to start pulling them down. “Baby, you’d have gotten lucky; I loved fucking off-worlders.” Gary snickered and set Avocato’s screen aside to shrug off his jacket. With his shirt halfway off, several of those scars were visible, and Avocato bit the ones he could reach. In between nips, he added, “loved letting them fuck me, too.”
Suddenly, Gary’s hand was gripping the fur on the back of his head, and he gasped in surprise and just a little pain. “Yeah?” Gary almost rasped the word as he pulled Avocato’s head back to force their eyes to meet. Another gasp fell out of his mouth: Gary’s pupils were blown and his face was flushed; that smirk was back, too, and threatening to become a full-on leer. “What a coincidence. I, uh–” He took a breath, and then held the screen next to Avocato’s face, so he could look at the side-by-side comparison. Feeling like he was for sale and Gary was debating if he was worth the pricetag, he wriggled in place and swallowed a whine. He hadn’t had a chance to strip himself yet, and his cock strained against his fly. Gary finally set the screen aside and said, with a genuinely adorable cockiness, “I just happen to like hooking up with spoiled pretty boys.”
“So you could rob them?” Avocato asked, aiming for sardonic and barely hitting cheeky.
Eyes fond and voice sweet, he twisted the locks of Avocato’s fur around his fingers tighter and tighter until the stinging pleasure made him purr and tip his head back, exposing more of his throat. “Ha, okay, yeah. That was like, ten percent of the reason! Also, one guy? His house was so big, I phrogged there for like, four months, before his gardener caught me. But, mostly, you’re fun.”
“Fun?” He rasped, and reached for his own belt. Gary tutted at him, and Avocato dropped his paws back to either side of his knees. Cool metal knuckles slid down the side of his face, making him purr again.
“Yeah, you’re all so easy.” The toes on his hind paws curled inside his boots, and Gary smirked like he somehow knew. Satisfied that Avocato was going to keep his paws to himself, he kept his voice pitched to a murmur. “Just want a little attention, that’s all.” Each cheek had small scent glands under the fur, and Gary put some pressure on the lower left one. Not much, just enough to make Avocato gasp and try to open his own fly again. With a snort of laughter, Gary gently batted his paws back down. “Which I’m happy to give you, by the way. Attention. If you want it.”
Don’t pant. Don’t fucking pant, you aren’t an animal in heat. “What the hell do you mean by attention?” It came out far less playful than he’d intended, almost combative, and he reprimanded whichever of his brain’s tiny workers was in charge of his tone. To his dismay, Gary stopped petting his cheek and relaxed the grip on his fur.
Now mostly cradling the back of Avocato’s head, he visibly made an effort to seem unphased. “Uh. Anything you want it to mean, I guess.” He hesitated, and his voice had lost that husky quality that had been going straight to his cock. “But you look so freaking cute in those pictures, and you look even cuter right now, down on your knees, all shy.”
Cute. Pride crumbling like wet toast, he tried to plead with his eyes more than he could with his voice. “N-not shy–” Like a reward, Gary’s hand was back on his face, and Avocato shivered in pleasure, forced himself to let out the tiny moan coaxed up from his throat. Fuck my mouth, come on, I’m talking back, make me choke on it–
Gary’s breath audibly hitched. “Need some attention?” He asked, thumb pressing slow, gentle strokes against a gland on Avocato’s chin, grip relaxed enough to let him nod hazily, hands obediently still. “Bro, thought you weren’t shy. You want me to fuck you? Don’t nod, Avo, say it.”
Just a touch of that husky voice from earlier, and Avocato felt it crackling through his bones and his veins and his cock, making it a little bit easier to do as he was told. “Fuck me, please. You, you can do whatever you want, just–” Talk mean. Pull my fur. Make me come more times than I think I can. “Please, let me take my clothes off–” Harder than before, Gary smacked his paws away. “Gary, please, just fuck me. I–” Need it need it need it. He did want attention, Gary’s attention, and all of it. Wanted it in a way that would leave him sore and spent afterwards, but knowing he’d been put to use. “I’ll do as I’m told, please.”
Like he needed a second to compose himself, Gary’s head fell back, and he closed his eyes. Bare chest fluttering, he took several breaths, and now both hands were exploring the back of Avocato’s head. “Wanna do as you’re told, huh? You like that, being–” He paused, took another breath, and mostly managed to pin his I’m Gonna Rearrange Your Guts grin back into place. Determination lighting up his eyes as much as the lust was, he asked, in that low, hot voice, “you like being a pretty little bitch sometimes?”
“Yes!”
“Yeah, you liked getting fucked in your sexy little uniform?” as he tried and failed to nod. “Say it,” Gary ordered, practically drooling, and Avocato laughed so he wouldn’t whimper.
“I–” He stopped, bit his lip, and laughed again, more embarrassed than he’d been in years. “G-Gary–” He reached for his own belt, but Gary shook his head, looking far too amused. “Gary!” Despite his protests, he dropped his paws, and . Mouth dry with mild terror, he tried to press against Gary’s leg, and heard himself starting to whine. “Please, please–”
Gary’s voice came out a bit shaky, but he was playing along, and his eyes were full of heat and want and something sweeter, seeping in at the edges. “Please, what? Say it! Come on, say it one time and I’ll give it to you.”
Anxiety tried to knit his mouth shut. Not in years and years had he asked anyone to do something like this, pin him down and treat him like a stress ball and make him feel wanted and sexy and useful all at once. Usually, he just had to be cute for a bit, and they’d get the hint. But Gary was Gary. He needed things spelled out. Hell, sometimes he wanted things spelled out.
The fingers gripping his fur relaxed, and wandered to one his ears; he looked away, and Gary made a low, affectionate noise in response. “What do you want?” He repeated, voice a low, coaxing murmur. In slow, careful circles, he toyed with the sensitive spot at the base of Avocato’s ear, and made more approving noises when Avocato sighed in pleasure and wiggled in place. It felt good to kneel, to be toyed with so gently, to have to beg a little and prove he’d be good.
Shivering and unable to stop, he looked at the floor and mumbled. “F-fuck me–” On the floor on either side of him, his paws twitched. Every part of him ached to be tied up, just so he wouldn’t have to consciously resist the urge to touch and grab and scratch. “I want it, please, fuck me.” He couldn’t bring himself to say more than that, couldn’t tell Gary how rough he wanted it or how long it had been. Besides, he could tell from Gary’s touches that he was going to be gentle tonight, no matter how much he begged otherwise.
Above him, Gary’s eyes had fallen closed, and he’d set Avocato’s screen aside to reach inside his open fly and fondle his own cock. “Sweet Grandor’s Glove, I’d have given you my life-fucking-savings to hear that. I’d have given you my kidney to hear that. Fuck, do you have any idea…” He trailed off, and tilted Avocato’s chin back up. Tearing his eyes away from the sight of Gary touching himself was hard, but he tried to obey, tried to meet his friend’s eager, tender eyes. “Say you like getting fucked in your cute little uniform.”
Electricity, hot and sudden, crackled down his spine and made his tail twitch and thump; Gary groaned at the sight and played with his ear some more. “I can’t,” he tried to protest, and Gary tutted at him. “Gary–please, I already begged–”
“Not really,” Gary drawled, barely sounding self-conscious, and Avocato whined when Gary wouldn’t release his jaw to let him look away. “That wasn’t begging, bro. Gotta do better than that. Gotta tell me how much you liked getting dicked down by older guys in your slutty little uniform.” He cocked one eyebrow, and his mouth softened: a question, testing the waters, and Avocato nodded as eagerly as he could with Gary holding his chin up.
“Told you, you just gotta say it once. Well,” he dropped his voice into that smoky whisper again, and Avocato was fighting the urge to bear his throat. “Until I get you a new one. Then, wow, yeah, you’re gonna be saying it a bunch. Like, the whole time I’m doing you, you’re gonna be telling me how much it turns you on. That sound good? Cause we’re just brainstorming here. If you’ve got a better pitch, I’m all ears.”
Several important wires short-circuited between Avocato’s ears, and he was practically humping Gary’s calf without really meaning to. “Want that,” he said, somewhat mindlessly, and Gary’s face lit up with the dopiest smile he’d ever seen. “Gary, want that, I want–” Every caress to his ears or the side of his face had him swallowing whines. Where, exactly, Gary planned on getting a cadet uniform from was a complete mystery to him, but that could wait. “Please, d-do that to me–please I–I like–” An encouraging nod. Another gentle scratch under his chin. With a hard shudder of pleasure, he moaned the rest. “I liked letting…letting older men fuck me in, in my cute little uniform–”
“Fuck–fuck, get up here–” Hands shaking, Gary pulled him to his feet and into another sloppy kiss. Too distracted to really kiss back, Avocato scrabbled at the catches and buttons of his clothes, and gasped when Gary’s hands tangled with his to help him strip. “Anything you want, okay? If you want something, tell me, you can freaking have it.” Much like their first kiss, their first fuck, Gary shoved him backwards across the commisary, until Avocato found himself on his back on one of the booth’s benches. “Your hotness is bordering an ecologically catastrophic, you know that? Every single time I think we’ve hit peak Avocato-hotness, you do something totally uncalled for.”
“Not doing it on purpose,” he said, trying to sound innocent, and Gary called him a tease with so much affection that his eyes prickled, and he had to hide his face in his arm. He’d never been a tease before. Felt nice. Almost as nice as Gary’s metal hand gently guiding one of his knees back towards his chest, while his other started to fondle his achingly hard cock. “Comes naturally, honest to Glory.”
“Oh?” Gary leaned over him, grinning, and he wanted to cross his wrists over his head, wanted to feel them lashed together tight enough to put him back in his place. Expression pure mischief, Gary bonked their foreheads together, and then began gently kissing his way down Avocato’s chest and stomach, towards his needy, leaking cock. “Wanna see something that comes naturally to me?”
In the present, onboard the Crimson Light, he was seeing red, and his heart felt like a hole had been blown in it, sending it sinking like disabled sub. “Don’t need this shit!” Claws out and hands shaking, he grabbed the Shark’s Tongue plant off the table and flung that at the door too, followed by the thing Gary called a daisy, and Scyvenchienne Prayer Lantern too, for good measure. “Bastard! Bastard bastard bastard–” He pressed his paws over his eyes, gasping like he’d sprinted up half a dozen flights of stairs. Through his half-spread fingers, he could see the lantern’s purple glass mixed in with the orange ceramic and the pearly white porcelain. The daisy might be salvageable, but the jade plant’s injuries were clearly fatal. “Good. You love that fucking plant, so fuck it and you and–and–”
Fuck. He’d killed the jade plant. And Gary loved the jade plant, and the pretty purple lantern, which they’d just gotten on a tiny, independent space station two weeks before. He’d been all impressed when Avocato had known how to light it.
“AVA? AVA, can I fix this?”
Her vents hummed, and the lights clicked back on. “Do you mean the hand-made, culturally significant artifact lying in brittle pieces all over my floor? No, I don’t believe you can. Unless you’ve received the 13 years of training required to master traditional Scyvenchienne glass-blowing?”
Sure, let’s pretend I was talking about the lantern. “Nope. Dropped out,” he said dryly, and sighed. Like the lantern, all the fire had gone out of him: he felt empty and on the verge of crumbling into sharp-edged dust. “Crap. Can you…is there a way too…”
“Organics need sleep in order to problem-solve effectively, right? Perhaps you should go to bed. After all, the lantern will still be broken tomorrow.”
“Gee. Rub it in, why don’t you?” Temples aching, and hind-paws bleeding from a few places where the jade plant’s broken pot had cut them, he shuffled back to their bed and crawled under the covers. Carefully, he used his claws to pluck several stray blond hairs from his pillowcase. He wondered how much of his fur was stuck to Gary’s.
Tell me when I betrayed you? “Here’s the problem,” he mumbled, to his dead sisters and his dead brother and his dead parents and his dead son. “I am a liar. So maybe he gets to call me whatever he wants, right?” They didn’t answer him. How could they, why would they? After what he’d done, what he’d become?
How much do you think Gary can forgive?
He really should sleep. The lantern wasn’t the only thing that would still be broken in the morning.