Archive of Our Own

“Good morning, Agent Villeneuve.”

Corentin sipped from his coffee and sat down on the empty guard’s chair that stood before one of the walls of Casey’s glass enclosure. In the first couple of months, someone had usually been there, but since Casey never did anything that needed supervision, much less immediate intervention, they had given up on anything but the cameras and very few people came here regularly now.

On a usual day, Casey spent most of his time ambling through the enclosure with its white ground and white furniture, dressed in white clothes, his seven-fingered claws holding each other behind his back, slowly walking circles until any onlooker would become dizzy; or he sat reading on the stool they had provided in exchange for a regular chair with a back, as those had proven not to fit his prehensile dragon’s tail that was as long again as his impressively tall form, which would have left him ducking even through the seven-foot-high doorways of the base if it hadn’t been for the fact that they never let him leave.

However, when Corentin came, he would stop pacing or reading and sit down instead at the edge of the empty desk by the reinforced glass wall in front of which the guard’s chair stood. It allowed Corentin a close look at him. His face was covered in shimmering silver scales and flat without the definition of a nose, as a large, ice-coloured eye, which looked as if someone had taken a human eye, enlarged it, and flipped it to be vertical, covered the middle of his face where a nose could have been. This big middle eye was flanked by four smaller dark-blue ones on each side, these horizontal, much more like those in a human face but for their number. The fact that his mouth looked entirely human except for the sharp canine teeth and that the silvery mass of inch-thick strands that hung from his head down to his waist could have passed for hair really made his many eyes quite a bit more difficult to look at than they would have been if he’d seemed entirely alien. Of course, after so many months, Corentin had gotten used to them, too. He was still staring, but only because against the silver glimmer of Casey’s scales, his clear eyes looked like precious stones set in jewellery.

“Good morning, Casey.”

He’d been calling him Casey for a few months, ever since he’d ruminated out loud on the fact that his tongue sometimes wanted to default to that name instead of his clunky designation, Case 7, a plain title given to him courtesy of the number of the security room Casey was kept in. One of Casey’s quiet acts of defiance was that he refused to tell anyone his name, for eight months going now, ever since they had taken him out of the only intact stasis pod left in a whole wall full that had been crushed by the weight of a mountain toppling on top of them. Casey had laughed at Corentin’s words and said that he could call him Casey, then. No one else in the base ever did, meaning that while Casey might always have been polite and even friendly with his other captors, too, he had only ever given Corentin the allowance to use a nickname. In fact, he never seemed to have made anyone else aware he had one, which Corentin liked that more than he admitted. Consequently, he greedily kept the information to himself, too.

“I thought you wanted to stop drinking coffee,” Casey said, glancing inside his cup. “You said it made you twitchy.”

“I’ve deliberated I’m twitchy because it’s my disposition,” Corentin said wryly, swaying his wrist so the liquid in the cup circled. “What if I told you this is tea?”

“It isn’t. I’ve had a few blends of tea. The colour is lighter. Your coffee is always the exact same shade of stark black. Officers Reynold and Müller drink coffee that’s light enough to pass for tea with milk, though.”

“You have an eye for detail better than some of the agents I’ve trained, but good God, they need to let you out of that box sometime if that’s what you spend your time deliberating,” Corentin muttered.

Casey chuckled. “Well, it is not uncomfortable in here. Much more quiet than the war that was going on when I was last conscious,” he said placidly, a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. “Our Divine Leaders would have been very pleased with me for practicing so much walking meditation.”

Ostensibly, they were keeping Casey here for reasons of his own safety and that of others. He was a live Forebearer, after all, as Casey’s people had been known colloquially for hundreds of years while humans found bits and pieces of that forgotten civilisation all over their solar system and incorporated their technology to make leaps and bounds with their own. He could attract the wrong kind of attention, might be dragged to the slave markets of the lawless planets or the Northern Empire or dissected by eager scientists. Then, there was the fact that Casey had a tremendous ability. His body emitted a pulse that he had fine-tuned control over, which allowed him to completely bypass any of the usual detection measures for electronics and live beings alike, not just for himself, but for a whole room, a building, a town full of people if he wanted. As for himself, he could even adjust the way light reflected on the scales of his body to become nothing but a shimmer in the air. If he had any criminal energy, which to be fair to him he’d displayed none of so far, he could create havoc.

Corentin knew his employers well enough to say that the blood tests they had done on Casey were not just to check his health. That latter part, this great power he had, could prove amazingly useful, and they wanted to reconstruct it from the DNA up. Before they hadn’t managed that, Casey wasn’t leaving. Casey was not stupid enough not to understand this. Despite the fact that they’d figured translators out a few days after unfreezing him, he didn’t talk to the military very much, even though he was happy to tell everything he knew to the couple of historians in the facility, while he apologised that as a child of the last breaths of his species’ decline, he really couldn’t say all that much about its glory at its peak. Corentin, who had at some point quietly given himself admin rights to the whole base, had read the transcripts of each of those interviews, learning of the rapid downfall of Casey’s civilisation in a devastating nuclear war, which had been finalised by the ravages of time destroying the few remaining Forebearers still waiting in stasis pods. Casey was the only specimen they had ever recovered.

None of this actually concerned him. The Moon Base Talia Sigma was merely Corentin’s HQ because he, like all the projects here, did not exist on official Alliance documents. However, he really was not involved in this case at all, other than having smooth-talked the responsible people into allowing him free access to Casey. At first, he’d been curious like everyone else, wanting to get a glimpse at the Forebearer. He hadn’t expected to make him his first morning appointment for the better part of the following year whenever he was at base. Who could have known that this accidental ambassador of a fallen race would be so easy to talk to?

“You have a better temper than me. If I were you, I would have locked myself in the bathroom and started to attempt to dig holes between the tiles with my claws.”

“I think there is a camera in the bathroom, too,” Casey said, as he looked over his shoulder at the milk-glass walls of it, a separate room within his glass shoebox down here.

“There is,” Corentin admitted.

No reason to lie to Casey. After all, the brass always claimed that he was not a prisoner, while staying firmly on the other side of his cage.

Maybe he’s a zoo exhibition instead.

Corentin sipped his coffee so nothing incriminating about the senior staff here would fall out of his mouth. He’d checked that these hallways wasn’t mic’d, but in places like Moon Base Talia Sigma, there was always someone listening at the doors hoping to rat you out for a step up the career ladder. Corentin’s grudge against his employer and their methods, his growing disdain for himself at abiding by them, had been festering quietly for too many years to let names slip by accident now.

“Ah, you do know. Right... don’t you have access to security footage?” Casey said lightly, with just the hint of an undertone, cocking his head at him.

Corentin almost spit his coffee. Casey was always so amiable, so measured that dirty jokes, especially ones with an edge like this, somehow still took him by surprise. Professional that he was, Corentin managed to keep all but a twitch of his eyebrow off his face, though.

He knew that Casey was probably flirting with him because he was likely aware Corentin was among the people who had the key to his cage, but he never pushed him about it and he seemed to genuinely enjoy Corentin’s presence, so Corentin did not mind. Everyone wanted something from everyone, after all, and if he was honest, it was not the worst strategy if it hadn’t been a little too effective. He liked Casey, but he would only have freed him if he’d liked him just a bit less. Casey really had nowhere to flee to in an era he didn’t know on an uninhabited moon, so while the chaos of an attempted escape would have been great fun to watch, it could only bring harm to Casey in the end.

“Casey, who do you take me for?” Corentin said laconically. “I would never collect sensitive material like that for personal gratification. I would only do it to blackmail someone.”

Casey laughed and Corentin smiled into his coffee. It was a nice sound, clear and deep, and though Casey seemed strangely content with his lot, he rarely had such effusive emotions.

“I do wonder, Casey, how you’re always in such a good mood if you know these things.”

Because the more Corentin knew, the more information his job had forced him to collect, the more discontent he had become – with the Human Alliance, himself, the universe. Of course, he was not the sort of person to wallow in these feelings motionlessly. He’d already found a few outlets for his malice, such as hacking in to the base’s mainframe and from there gaining access to incoming intel of Terra main base, where he also assigned himself his own jobs now as he saw fit, things that did not weigh so heavily on his conscience. This was only an intermediate step, though. Hopefully, there would soon be a way to let all these secret machinations come to some sort of fruition.

“Everybody else in the same pod bay as me is dead,” Casey said. “By some miracle, the stones that by rights should have crushed me as well missed me. Since my life was already forfeit, I cannot complain to how it is going now, since it’s still going.”

Corentin snorted. “I had a hundred chances to die,” he muttered. “I guess I should be happy, too.”

“Well, your life is different from mine. You can leave and I have to make due here.”

“Leave the building, yes. Leave the service? They might not allow so much. Too much classified information in my head,” Corentin said.

This part, there was no reason to whisper about. Everybody who worked here was well aware they were at a level of clearance that made simply quitting their job a pipe dream. The best they could hope for was to be transferred to some bureaucratic position on a quiet colony world where their co-workers would keep an eye on them.

“Did you know that would happen before starting your job?” Casey asked curiously.

Corentin finished his coffee and got up, stepping closer to the glass so he couldn’t be overheard so easily. Casey had a way of making him talk, even when he told himself he should better shut up. If Casey hadn’t had a quiet but obvious disdain for the military around here, Corentin would have guessed they’d put him up to it. However, that was only paranoia. It was really one of the many things he liked about Casey, that talking to him did not feel like a trap in the way talking to everyone else had started to feel after too many years as an agent.

“Sure, but I was young when I signed on. I’m from an old mining world, but most of our mines were depleted when I was born. I just wanted to leave.”

He stood half a foot away from the glass now, saw his own reflection layered over Casey – shorter, slighter in build, his dark skin contrasted against the silver of his scales, short-cropped curls instead of Casey’s long appendages.

Casey gave a smile. “It’s the right of youth to ignore that retirement will eventually come for them.”

“I see that has stayed true over all those thousands of years that separate our civilisations,” Corentin said, corner of his mouth twitching. “I thought I would want to have adventures in space forever.” He raised a brow. “Well, that was twenty years ago. I’ve been in a hundred battles on cramped space ships, I’ve snuck behind enemy lines and killed people whose faces I didn’t know, I’ve chased Empire agents everywhere, between the upper floors and lower rooftops of tiered megacities to the jungles of uninhabited worlds... now, I just want to find a planet off the Alliance grid and settle down in a quiet village. Maybe at the seaside, with weather that’s not too hot and air that’s not too wet – you know, if I get to choose.”

His tone implied he was not quite so starry-eyed to believe he might.

Casey chuckled. “I do like the sea, too,” he said. “I used to live there.”

“With the others from your pod bay?”

“No, we were herded into random groups when it was clear that things were about to come to an end. I already lost all the people who were close to me long before I woke up in this age, so that’s not something I’ve just had to deal with. I do wonder, though, if things are more peaceful now...”

“Oh, there’s always war, but humans, at least, have spread over far too many planets to completely bomb us off the face of the universe.”

“That’s – good,” Casey said, with his usual optimism, and they both had to grin. Casey’s expression softened, however. “I do hope you get to go there one day, Agent Villeneuve, to that village at the sea.”

The real feeling in Casey’s voice caught him off-guard somewhat, twisted something inside him.

“There it is again. You shouldn’t listen to me blabber on about seaside villages. Better worry about yourself, Casey.”

“But you also worry about me,” Casey gave back with slight amusement. “Or else you would not remind me so often to care about myself first.”

Corentin snorted. Casey was not wrong.

“As I said, you would have made a good agent.”

-

Corentin made sure to visit Casey whenever he could, even though there would have been remote work for him to do on any free minute of the day. Still, Casey could well need the diversion. Only reading would eventually get boring, after all, and Casey also liked to talk about his books with – well, only with Corentin, it seemed, since the rest of the people on the base described Casey as pleasant but curt, something else Corentin shouldn’t have enjoyed quite so much, but did. In exchange, Corentin told of him too many classified stories from missions and brought pictures of planets he’d been to for Casey to marvel at.

“Some of your buildings look a bit like ours used to,” he said on a quiet evening, looking at the wide arches of the Great Bridge of Luna on Corentin’s tablet.

“As I told you, we got a jumpstart finding your people’s technology on our planet Venus,” Corentin said, tilting the screen more towards him. “I’m not an artist or architect, but I’m pretty sure I learned in school it inspired the aesthetic of early space-faring civilisation as well.”

Casey looked at the picture for a bit longer, then smiled. “I like that our legacy, in the end, was to help another species take flight. When I was born, war was already ever-present. We tore ourselves apart. I always felt that there used to be more to us.”

His voice was soft and conciliatory and despite his size, his fangs, his claws, Corentin could so very well imagine him greeting confused humans stumbling out of their crude spaceship on Luna in the old times of the twentieth century.

“Your people are lucky that it is you who is the last one. It reflects well on them,” he said. “I can’t imagine they were all so easy to like.”

Casey chuckled. “Maybe I’ll not be the last, in the end, if... well.” Casey smiled. “I shouldn’t talk too loudly. Your colleagues have been satisfied with a few syringes of blood so far, but who knows what experiments they will want to start?”

“Do you know of more of your kind who may have survived?” Corentin asked quietly.

He almost didn’t expect Casey to answer, but he did after a moment’s hesitation.

“The distinction between men and women was different in my time. Maybe it does not really match at all, but those are the words what your translations device defaults to.” He made his voice even quieter. “Our females could more easily birth offspring made with the help of males of our own species. Our males could more easily birth offspring of our kind created with members of any other species. Females could also mate with other species, and males with the same, but it took longer to produce results. I am male, though. I don’t see why it wouldn’t work with species of this age...”

“You’re right, you shouldn’t tell anyone else,” Corentin said, and stored that information too deep within him, shoved it down so he didn’t have time to look at the idea of Casey considering whether he should try to repopulate his species, and the unspoken idea that he would need a willing partner for that. Corentin very much didn’t need his mind to run away with being his only confidant on the matter, either.

“Don’t worry, I am not so careless,” Casey said, stroking Corentin’s ego with the idea that telling him was not careless. “Anyway, I would have to leave here first.”

Getting out was always a topic, but still Casey had never asked Corentin to spring his trap and didn’t this time, either. Maybe he really did just like talking to him so much that he did not want to risk their conversations on the vague hope that Corentin would compromise his career for him. Maybe Corentin had a crush and was an idiot for thinking this.

Of course, when it came to the topic of an escape, Casey was at the wills of destiny down here, but Corentin was not. He had been planning an exit strategy for a while, in fact, only waiting for an opportunity, and it came a scant couple of weeks later. The next assignment that took him from the base, with Casey’s gentle reminder to be careful in his ear, was one he had assigned himself in the system. It called for him to take down a slave trader, not the type of person Corentin felt even a slight bit bad about sacrificing for his own devices, and his exceptionally fast speeder ship.

Getting on board was the tricky part, but Corentin managed to fly close enough to hack into the ship, disable its thrusters and initiate docking protocols. He had only ever been an average shot, both in space battles and with a gun in hand, but he could crawl into just about any system and so few expected anyone to do it on the fly, especially in space.

He took two bullets in the thigh before he managed to shoot the slaver dead after he had bordered. He slapped med-gel on the wounds, dug out the identity chip in his own arm with a knife, and stuck the chip down the dead man’s throat before he dragged him into the pilot’s seat of the Alliance vessel he had come in.

It took a little manoeuvring, but he blew up what used to be his own ship, plus the dead slaver on it, with the speeder’s torpedoes, even though an old-fashioned bomb would have done the trick quicker and cleaner. However, this would make the debris look more like the remains of a tense space battle.

As he sat quietly bleeding over the pilot’s seat, ripping another pack of med-gel open with his teeth, Corentin knew he could have punched the accelerator and flown out of this sector before anyone had even a chance to consider his trick. When they inevitably detected the ship at the border, he could escape into some densely populated planet’s atmosphere out of Alliance territory, strand the vessel, and lose himself in a city in wild space never to be seen again. It would be easy for him.

He put in the coordinates for Moon Base Talia Sigma.

-

He landed his vessel right out of the base’s detection range. The cloaking device on it was powerful, but not enough to escape notice at too short a distance – that was how Alliance intel had kept track of the thing in the first place. While it was fast enough to outrun most ships and he was pretty sure he’d managed to mask his entrance into orbit, take-off would also produce a heat signature that would make him obvious to the scanners at the base. If things went well here, though, he might not have to worry about that.

The admin password he’d given himself years ago came in handy as he approached on foot. Corentin walked on quiet feet through a backdoor that slid open willingly, hacking into cameras with his tablet as he went, hiccupping their feed to an hour ago. Someone in the control room would eventually notice that things that had happened already were playing again – some guard roster not lining up, someone seeing themselves walk under a camera –, but with any luck, it would buy him a few minutes.

He took the staircase down to basement level seven. Casey sat with his back to him on the small stool in his cell in an unusual position, his tail curled tightly around himself. He reacted only slowly to the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside. All his eyes grew wide in shock as he saw him, though, and he jumped to his feet.

“Agent-”

Corentin put a hand tightly over his own mouth, a universal enough gesture that it immediately quieted Casey. He hurried to edge of the enclosure instead.

“They said you were dead,” he whispered, and his claws would have left scratch marks on the glass if it weren’t so heavily reinforced.

“Let’s hope they’ll believe that for a bit longer, don’t we?” Corentin smiled. “If you don’t mind going on the run, I’m taking you with me. It’s not going to be easy, though. I unlock this door and you’re no longer a peaceful prisoner to them.”

Casey stared at him, both of his hands pressed against the glass. “But how? Is there a key? I don’t even know how this is locked...”

Corentin looked at him for a moment, fully silent. The confusion on Casey’s face was real. It hit him that Casey had never known that Corentin had the code, that he’d only spent months talking to Corentin because he’d decided Corentin was the only person in the base that he wanted to speak to on a daily basis. Corentin’s stomach flipped.

No time to moon over him. Later.

“I had the code for a while. No sense in using it without a getaway plan, though,” he said, and as he typed on his tablet, a part of the glass seemed to separate and slid away.

“Countdown’s running,” Corentin said. A cage opening always threw up an alarm in main control, even if it was an authorised access.

Thankfully, Casey did not argue with him, but simply chased after him up the stairs. They had almost reached the ground floor when two officers barrelled down towards them.

Corentin only just got his hand on his gun when Casey suddenly launched himself forward, arms outstretched. Corentin had only ever seen him move slowly within his cage, measured, calm. Now, he crashed into one officer and knocked him down, grabbed the other with his tail around her waist and threw her down the stairs, where she laid at the bottom looking as stunned as Corentin felt.

“I’m no soldier, but I told you, it was wartime when I was last alive,” Casey said breathlessly, a little sheepish, staggering back to his feet as they pushed through the door on the ground floor.

“Good!”

The fact that Casey had some experience fighting could only be to their advantage. Corentin grabbed his arm and pulled him around a corner, punching in another series of numbers on his tablet. The lockdown alarm was blaring, but these idiots hadn’t scrambled all the access codes before putting it into effect. He’d always had to tell them to take their security more seriously. Should have listened to me.

He ran out into the thick forest surrounding the compound when he felt a flicker run over him, like a trickle of static electricity.

“Did you mask us from scanners?” he asked, pulling Casey behind a line of trees.

Casey nodded his head as they hurried side-by-side through the underbrush.

“You should take off your clothes and camouflage as well. If they catch me, you can slip away. The spaceship is straight ahead, maybe you can figure it out on your own and-”

“No,” Casey just said.

His tone was not harsh, not even stern, and he smiled as he looked over at Corentin, but it was clear he would accept not arguments. Corentin huffed and took point, feeling warm despite the cold air rushing into his face, the pain racing up his leg.

The ship came into view behind the sharp curve of a small mountain ridge. Corentin ushered Casey up the ramp before he let it close behind himself, falling down on the blood-stained captain’s seat.

“You can mask this whole ship, right?”

“Yes, that shouldn’t be a problem,” Casey said, looking around him.

“Do it.”

Corentin lifted the ship only as high as he had to, still grazing the treetops, all lights but for the fire of the thrusters dimmed. In the distance, he could see ships lifting out of the base, but Corentin raced south, out of visual range, and then rose into the sky. None of the ships he saw on his scanner reacted to their movement.

They went higher and higher, out of the atmosphere and into the dark of space. Corentin breathed a sigh of relief as the stars surrounded them, quickly setting autopilot to the closest border passing into wild space beyond. With Casey by his side hiding the ship, there was no reason to tarry or look for the least defended piece of the border. They just had to stay out of visual range, which was easy enough in the depths of space. The sooner they got out of the Alliance’s space, the better. Looking down at his scanners, he still saw the fading dots of the ships that were searching for them waving in the atmosphere below.

“Amazing,” he muttered. “You know, this vessel has top-of-the-line cloaking technology, but that is a toy next to you.”

Casey looked over at him with a frown.

“This ship has cloaking devices? Then why did you need me? It was dangerous to free me.”

“They’re not as strong as you, but... I could have crashed this thing and skipped planet the old-fashioned way on a transport, true,” Corentin admitted, and looking into Casey’s many eyes, he felt suddenly self-conscious. With Casey still staring at him, no doubt understanding now that Corentin was only here because of personal affection, he shook his head. “Look, you’re helping out here, so you don’t owe me. I’ll take you to the Outer Rim in wild space. I’m going there, anyway. There are so many aliens over there, you trip over one you haven’t seen before every other step. Nobody will look at you twice.”

“Are you going to the Outer Rim, too?”

“Well, I’m certainly not going back to the base, no. I’ve been meaning to leave for a while, and...” He shrugged his shoulders. “It didn’t feel right to leave you behind.”

Even if that meant letting Casey go now. Corentin hadn’t dragged him on board so he could become his own prisoner instead.

Of course, maybe that was a thought born from his hubris. Turning in his chair, he realised that for how much he’d thought this plan through, he had put himself on a ship with a seven foot two inches high alien with sharp claws and a tail strong enough to crush bones like branches, as well as a really good reason to have a grudge against humans. He didn’t fear Casey, but logically he should have. Talk about a fool in love.

“Thank you,” Casey said, heartfelt, as he sat down on a small ledge sticking out of the wall by the side of the console.

“Don’t thank me yet. I can’t promise you they’ll never hunt you down.”

“That’s possible. I don’t know much about this era. It would be much easier to stay hidden if I had the knowledge of an agent...”

He glanced carefully at him, his expression caught between nervous and playful. Corentin felt his heartbeat pick up just as it had settled fully from their flight.

“It certainly would be. In the depth of wild space, I could make sure neither of us is found,” he agreed, and felt a little lighter, allowing a slim smile. “Then you’d be stuck with me, though.”

Casey mirrored his smile at the idea, but the expression faded.

“You’d be safer without me,” Casey replied.

This was true, of course. A human had a much easier time blending in, considering how many of them they were.

“I think we’ve established that when it comes to you, I’m willing to make a few compromises. Anyway, I’m good enough at my job to hide another person alongside me,” Corentin said confidently. “The Alliance’s power is nonexistent in wild space and the people of the Outer Rim and around like it that way. They won’t help them.”

Casey stood and walked over to him. When Corentin did not break eye contract or turn away, he leaned down and pressed their mouths together, artlessly, but with a sweet languidness to it.

“My kind did not do this, but I read about it. Did I do it right?” he asked, as he parted from him.

“Perfectly,” Corentin said, tugging him down for another kiss.

He pulled Casey into his lap, felt his tail wrap around his good leg as Corentin pushed his tongue into his mouth, and Casey’s palms curled tightly around his shoulders, his clawed fingers carefully bent away. As he leaned back and Corentin looked into his many eyes, he thought there could have been a dozen more and he wouldn’t have minded, since they were all so beautiful. He leaned in again and pressed his mouth to Casey’s throat, testing if he could feel his kisses through the thin, almost translucent scales there. Judging by the breathy sound that escaped him, Casey could. His body squirmed in Corentin’s lap and he felt his cock rise in response, press against Casey’s middle.

Casey’s arms wrapped around his neck.

“We should maybe not do it in this position, me in your lap... I could end up carrying your child,” Casey said, but he was still leaning in, pressing himself against Corentin’s bulge.

“Why not?” Corentin grinned, light-headed with the joy and shock of it all now that he realised fully all that had happened. He was a free man and Casey was in his arms. It was crazy to do this, but he hadn’t done a sane thing in a couple of days now – or maybe he hadn’t done a sane thing in twenty years and this was the first time that he was seeing clearly, having clawed his way out of the web of deception, corruption and lies. “To start our new life, let’s make you not the last anymore. After all, we do want to stay together, anyway, don’t we?”

Casey smiled, delighted, and dragged his claws gently over the back of Corentin’s neck.

“Then, still not here,” he said. “I saw that your leg is hurt. You should lie down.”

He rose and pulled Corentin with him. The speeder was small up top, a bit heavier down in the base where cargo could be stored. The captain’s bed was a cot crammed right behind the cabin, small for two, but they’d make it work. From there, Corentin could still make sure that they were not getting off track, and he’d linked his personal computer to the ship’s interface a day ago, so if anything approached, they’d be alerted.

“I put enough med-gel on my leg to last me through a bit,” he said, as he sat on the thin mattress. “You don’t have to do all the work.”

“I have no issue with that at all, Agent Villeneuve.”

Casey kissed him again and nudged him gently to lay down before he pulled off the white shirt and trousers he had been dressed in, plain, nondescript clothes worthy of a closed psychiatric institution. His silvery body shimmered in the dim glow of the cabin, beautifully catching every bit of light and turning it into a silver river on his body. Letting his gaze fall, Corentin noticed that his hard cock was missing balls, and he figured those were probably internal. A biological question for later, finally one he would be able to ask without glass separating them and with no one listening in. For now, he only wanted to touch.

“I’m not an agent anymore and my first name is Corentin,” he corrected, as he pulled Casey to sit over his thighs, his large figure looming over him, shivering as Corentin touched the head of his cock and found it silky smooth and just as sensitive as the human equivalent.

“I do like that name,” Casey decided, his hands finding the fastenings that held Corentin’s bulletproof vest and pulling them apart. “Mine is Inar-Tel Am.”

The words were spoken almost casually as the vest’s buckles clicked under his fingers. Corentin stared up at him.

“Inar-Tel Am,” he repeated, imprinting it on his brain.

“Yes. Although I think I prefer Casey from you.”

Corentin sat so Casey could get rid of the vest and strip his shirt.

“It doesn’t remind you too much of your captivity?”

“It reminds me of the man who came every day to speak with me,” Casey said.

Inar-Tel Am was a fitting name for the beautiful, strange creature sitting over Corentin right now and caressing his chest, but quietly, he approved that he would also still be his Casey.

It seemed, new as this custom was to him, he was growing quite fond of it, as he let Corentin pull him down into another kiss. Fascinated by his plush mouth against his own, Corentin pressed his thumb down on his lower lip as they parted and Casey sucked his finger into his mouth as he reached under himself and opened Corentin’s trousers. Taking Corentin’s hard cock in hand, he did not stop swirling his pointed tongue around Corentin’s finger, all eyes on him. Shuddering, Corentin added another, pushed them gently in and out of his mouth.

When Casey lowered himself over him, his opening was slick against the head of his cock and Corentin figured it made sense that someone built to carry children had some functions that made receiving them easier. He gentled his free hand along Corentin’s hip, grasped the round shapes of his ass. Once they were outside of the bounds of Alliance space, he would lay down for a day with Casey and do nothing but explore his exceptional body.

He let out a quiet huff of breath as Casey sank down, but Casey was not so quiet. He moaned loudly and as Corentin slipped his fingers out of his mouth, he kissed them down to the knuckles.

“Your hands are nicer than mine,” he said breathily. “They’re so soft and blunt.”

Corentin snorted. His hands were quite calloused, actually, but in comparison to Corentin’s clawed fingers, they must seem that way.

“I don’t know,” he said, raising his hips to meet Casey’s heavy, steady rhythm, glancing down at his hand. “I do like an edge of danger, if you hadn’t noticed. I think I will enjoy your claws on my skin.”

Casey laughed as he curled over him, his tail caressing Corentin’s leg, but flipping to the side, then, softly thudding against the wall, as if the pleasure made him lose control over its movements. Reflexively, Corentin reached out, touched the muscular length of it, which Casey dragged against his palm when he noticed Corentin’s interest.

Corentin squeezed and stroked it and in the same moment dropped his other still-damp hand down to Casey’s cock, stroking it hard. Casey made another uninhibited sound in the depth of his throat and went faster, roughly fucking himself on Corentin’s cock. Corentin felt his mind drift on a wave of pleasure, for once losing hold of all plans, structure, only in the present.

As he came, Casey’s tail was still twitching under his fingers. Corentin saw that his seed was thin and clear and found that it tasted faintly sweet when Corentin licked away the speck that had landed on his face under Casey’s startled gaze.

He grabbed his hips with both hands and Casey continued moving on him, taking him eagerly still, his breaths soft gasps. Watching the movement of his thick muscles under the scales, the way his body writhed, Corentin spent himself inside him, thinking that he could do this again, at his leisure, whenever they wanted, that they had allegiance only to each other now, and it was almost as intoxicating as the orgasm.

They laid together for a moment, until Casey said: “I’m too heavy for you.” However, as he tried to slide off, Corentin tightened his arms around him, shaking his head. Smiling, Casey carefully stretched out on him, seeming not too dissatisfied that he could keep the position.

“I wonder,” Casey said, after a moment, “about wild space. Are there quiet seaside villages with mild weather?”

“There must be one with so many planets to choose from. Such a place would be good to raise children, too.”

Chuckling, Casey folded his arms on Corentin’s chest. “You took to that idea quickly. Once might not be enough to make it happen.”

He’d taken to it quickly because it meant Casey, the man he loved, had chosen him for this special purpose, and perhaps because it was the first time that someone looked at him and thought he was a good choice to make life instead of taking it.

“That’s fine. We have time. I didn’t run without money and you are keeping us nicely hidden. No war, either. We can see the sights, get you used to the new era.”

“I think I will like it here,” Casey said quietly.