Work Text:
The Nexus, 2839.
Lexi emerged from her office to an empty apartment. While she’d known Sula and Nomi’s plans with the older three children and that Eirian and Jaal were currently looking after Aella, she wasn’t entirely certain where Thaia had gone. Given the pervading quiet, she was likely out somewhere on the Nexus. Well, that was unfortunate. A chunk of uninterrupted time with your bondmate was something one tried to use wisely. She checked the time and—oh. At this point, it didn’t matter. Lexi had apparently not heard a single person leave, and so she’d wasted the majority of the time she could’ve had with Thaia, anyway.
She sighed. At least she could enjoy the quiet remaining to her, relatively short as it would be. A cup of tea, the novel Cora had lent her, and she could settle in for half an hour’s leisurely read.
Except when she exited the hallway, Lexi walked straight into Thaia. Startled, she yelped. “Goddess, you need to make noise. I didn’t think anyone else was here.”
Thaia steadied Lexi with her left hand and then pressed a kiss to her forehead. “I just got home ten minutes ago. I thought you were working and didn’t want to interrupt.” She held out a ceramic mug for Lexi to take. “Here, I made you tea.”
The mug was as warm as Thaia’s lips had been, and the rising steam carried with it a sweetness balanced by a light spice. A Lusian tea, if Lexi recalled correctly. She paused. Apparently, it was also a tea that defied physics. She raised an eyebrow at Thaia. “How did you not spill this?”
“Etalis-like reflexes.” Thaia grinned when Lexi further raised her brow. “And I heard you coming, so I compensated for the shift in momentum when you bumped into me.”
“You arranged our collision?”
Thaia’s impossible smile broadened. “Babe, our orbits were destined to collide.”
“Goddess, you are infuriating.” Lexi playfully shoved Thaia on the shoulder, even as she laughed, knowing full well it would only encourage further behavior like this. And, despite that, she still drew Thaia down and thoroughly kissed away the smug little smile she’d gotten at her triumph. When Lexi stepped back to reassess the time they had left, she noticed the state of the living room.
Earlier in the day, before Lexi had disappeared into her office, the living room had been arranged with a sofa against the wall closest to the door, an armchair against the longer the wall to its left, another sofa, and then an armchair directly across from the first sofa. With how many people who shared the apartment, a large amount of available seating was a necessity. However, now both sofas and the armchair on the longer wall had all been squeezed in together. Unlike the easy flow that had existed previous to Thaia’s odd rearrangement choices, the room felt cramped.
Staring, Lexi moved to stand next to Thaia, who turned to face the same direction.
Taking the sofa’s place was a bewildering object—a tree.
Its overall shape was roughly a conical pyramid. It had a short, sawed-off trunk covered with brown bark, and dark green, needle-like leaves grew from its branches. Leaning upright against the wall, the top just short of scraped the high ceiling. It didn’t match or complement a single thing in the room. While Thaia had never expressed a fondness for interior decoration, she had at least understood the concept of simplicity. Mostly, Lexi suspected, because it naturally tended toward neatness.
However, that no longer seemed to be the case. If Thaia intended to keep this tree, there would be constant problems with seating, and the surprise Sula, Nomi, and the children were arranging for Thaia right at this very moment would become difficult to manage. Goddess, right on the verge of getting an etalis kit and now they had a tree in the apartment.
Instead of asking Thaia what have you done? Lexi mitigated her reaction to a dry observation. “There is a tree in our living room.”
“Oh!” Thaia slung an arm around Lexi’s shoulders and admired the new addition. Admired. Waves of excitement rolled off her. “It’s an X-Mas tree! It’s for a human holiday Ryder and Harry told me about. You’re supposed to decorate the tree, so I picked up a crate of appropriate X-Mas decorations.” She jerked her chin toward the armchair next to them, where the crate rested. “Ryder also said something about presents and there might’ve been a story about a reverse thief dressed in all red who leaves some presents when everyone’s asleep? And he rides around at FTL speeds in a wagon powered by flying trokhera. Harry said the kids get presents and that’s why they’d like it.”
How did one even begin to address such a statement? Lexi resisted a sigh. “Did you fully listen to either Harry or Ryder?” Before Thaia answered, Lexi gave her hand a squeeze, and then retreated to the kitchen directly across from the open-concept living room. She needed her tea and she wasn’t about to risk a spill. After placing her tea on the counter behind her, she waited for an answer.
“After the X-Mas tree? Babe. They’d just told me the best part of a holiday that I’ve ever heard in my life. Of course I didn’t.”
“Better than certain Janiris traditions?”
Halfway to the tree, Thaia suddenly halted to stare at Lexi. “I… fuck.”
Lexi hummed appreciatively, allowing her evaluative gaze over Thaia linger.
“It’s cruel to make me choose.” Thaia appeared genuinely stricken.
Disinclined to mercy, Lexi leaned a hip against the counter. Then she crossed her arms to accentuate certain assets, and lifted a brow.
Thaia’s eyes went directly to Lexi’s chest. She let out a long breath. “Okay, the best part of a human holiday.”
“Are you certain?” It had been such a long time since she’d made Thaia this flustered and Lexi was determined to enjoy every second of it.
“Babe.”
Lexi broke and finally laughed. “I’ll let it go for now. I’m not without mercy.”
Now next to the tree, Thaia pursed her lips in thought, causing Lexi’s actions from moments ago to backfire. Lexi wanted nothing more than to kiss those lips. Then Thaia spoke again and she nearly dashed that wish in doing so. “See, I don’t know. I’ve been your patient before. You’re kind, but you’re also the doctor type of merciless.” Thaia’s pause wasn’t long enough for Lexi to lodge her objection, and the lopsided smile that accompanied Thaia’s next statement made Lexi forget she had any objections in the first place. “To be fair, it’s only if the situation calls for it, like when a patient is being an idiot. Which I have a lot of experience with on the patient side of things.”
“Regrettably, you’re my idiot,” Lexi said.
“It’s true.” Then, with a suspect amount of enthusiasm, Thaia tilted the tree forward and suspended at an angle equidistant from the vertical wall and the horizontal floor. Leaving it in position, Thaia stepped back and evaluated her handiwork.
“Z-Mas tree?” Lexi asked.
Thaia’s gaze snapped directly to Lexi, the glint in her eyes accompanied by a rasp to her voice. “Babe, when you talk like that and we have the place to ourselves, you know I just want to—”
The apartment’s main door opened, admitting a pack of three hollering children. Behind them were Sula and Nomi, both looking please, yet tired. Nomi especially so. The children shouted their greetings to their parents over their shoulders as they sprinted into the hallway, not even granting Lexi and Thaia enough time to greet them in kind. Then Snow, their pet miniature pallad, trotted inside. He dodged first Sula and then Nomi before bursting into a run that ended with him bumping into Thaia’s hip. It was Snow’s way of asking for a few pats on the head, which Thaia tentatively obliged to get him to leave her alone. Pallads loved electrical discharges, which suited them especially well in a household full of biotics. Thaia was his favorite. Professor Herrick attributed the fact to Thaia having the strongest discharges that were also at the pallad’s favorite voltage. A beautiful match, according to Herrick.
Torture, according to Thaia, who suffered Snow’s presence only because the children loved him so.
“Go chase the kids,” Thaia told Snow.
In answer, Snow wriggled and hopped.
“You realize that the kids are the ones who like you, right? Not me.”
Maybe that had been true when they’d first gotten Snow, but Thaia did like him a little now. She’d never admit it, of course. But how he made the children happy had softened her view of him enough that she would be genuinely somewhat sad if he were no longer there. Given she would have celebrated his permanent disappearance in the early days, it was notable progress. However, Lexi and the rest of the family had collectively decided that it wasn’t fair that Thaia wasn’t privy to the same experience of having a pet that relaxed her and had recently sought to change that.
While Nomi attempted to herd the overenthusiastic Snow into the hallway, Sula joined Lexi behind the kitchen counter. It was the best spot for observing events taking place in the living room—it served as vantage point and, more importantly, cover, if anything or anyone went flying.
“I take it you were successful?” Lexi quietly asked Sula.
“Yes. The kit’s with our biologist neighbor right now until everything’s ready. It’s a good thing Eirian took the whirlwind with her this morning because there’s no fucking way she’d be able to keep it a secret. Carian’s going to have a tough enough time as it is.”
Lexi nodded. “Aella’s only six. Expecting her to keep the surprise a secret would be unfairly setting her up for failure.”
“At least the other three stopped grousing about their little sister getting all that time with Jaal and their aunt to herself, once they saw.”
Nomi and Thaia finally got as far as shooing Snow into the kitchen, where he settled for standing between Sula and Lexi, earning absentminded pats from each. Pallad herded, Thaia returned to evaluating the tree and only then was it finally brought up by the newcomers.
“Why is there a tree on a z-axis in the living room?” Nomi asked, settling into a corner of the couch farthest from the tree.
The children thundered back into the room, along with the apartment door opening again to admit Eirian, Jaal, and Aella.
Aella bolted into the living room and immediately skidded to a halt. “Why do we have a tree? Is it a Remnant tree? Is that why it’s in midair?”
“Those are biotics holding it up, not remtech,” Carian said.
“It’s a tree indigenous to Earth,” Anahera said. “A conifer, but I’m not sure what specific species.”
Thaia carefully floated the tree to rest horizontally on the floor as Carian trotted over to stand next to her. “It was specifically grown for a human holiday Ryder and Harry told—”
Anahera scowled, flinging an accusatory finger at the tree and then Thaia. “That’s irresponsible! Do you know how irresponsible that is? They’re an invasive species!”
“Not in this case.” Thaia muttered something about the name not matching the axis, and then suspended the tree diagonally in the air again. Afterward, she said to Anahera, “They deactivated the something or other that lets it make more trees.”
Lexi sighed. Regrettably, this was her bondmate. Someone who could explain the minutiae of planetary mechanics with clarity and ease in a way simple enough for anyone to grasp, yet practiced a willful ignorance of the biological sciences. Her major reason being biology’s where gross things can appear out of nowhere.
The universe’s first attempt at righting Thaia’s wrongful view of biological science had been Thaia falling in love with a doctor—and said doctor falling in love with her in return. Then, when that hadn’t appeared to work, the universe had given Thaia a daughter who’d taken to each and every biological science she stumbled across. Thaia’s views had yet to shift much, but the twins were only twelve. There was plenty of time and Anahera didn’t disappoint in taking advantage of the opportunity. Much to the annoyance of her sisters, she launched into an explanation of tree reproduction so detailed that she didn’t take a breath until she was forced to.
“Goddess, you sound so much like Safira sometimes,” Eirian said, giving Anahera, gulping in air, a fond rub on her head. “I can’t decide whether that’s a good thing or not, though.”
“I wouldn’t let her near a rain gauge, just to be safe,” Sula said.
“Hey!” Thaia then looked from the tree to Anahera, who was now inspecting the tree’s leaves. “Actually, probably a good idea.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Anahera didn’t look up from spreading a tuft of needle-shaped leaves across her palm. Observing her, Lexi predicted she and Thaia would need to request more advanced and less generalized biology courses for her in the near future.
“Are you saying your mother hasn’t told you how she met your father?” Sula asked.
“Wasn’t it on a space station in the Milky Way?” Zahra asked, placing some stray green needles on Carian’s crest, with Carian none the wiser.
“There’s so much more to the story than that,” Eirian said. “Like the bar fights. Plural.”
“And how much of a dumbass she was,” Sula added, ignoring Lexi’s warning look.
Zahra looked at Lexi in shock. “You?”
There was a certain satisfaction Lexi took in Zahra’s reaction, along with the reactions of each of her daughters, all sharing varied looks of utter disbelief.
Carian was quickest to cast a pointed look at Thaia. “I think she meant Daddy.”
“Well,” Anahera said, “that fits.”
Thaia rolled her eyes. “Of course none of you believe Lexi could ever be a dumbass. Even fucking once.”
“It is somewhat farfetched,” Nomi said, accepting a drink from Sula.
“I wish to hear more about the rain gauge,” Jaal asked in his familiar rumble, scratching Snow right under his mandibles. He and Eirian had taken the spot at the counter next to Lexi right after Sula abandoned it.
“I want to know more about the bar fights,” Zahra said.
“You would,” Anahera said.
“Oh, like you—”
“Why is there a tree?!” Aella shouted, emphatically motioning toward the plant in question, followed by running up to it. She jumped, arm extended to grab the trunk, but the lift grabbed her first. Several needles came off and floated in the air around it and Aella after she bumped into it. Not that being suspended upside down in the air deterred her. “I asked my question first and no one’s answered!”
Thaia gently plucked Aella out of the lift and tucked the indignant, squirming child under her arm. “Like I was saying, it’s here for a human holiday Ryder and Harry told me about. It has an X-Mas tree and that you kids would like it because we’re supposed to decorate a tree and there are presents involved. Somehow. There’s a reverse thief who wears a red suit of armor to do with it.”
Frowning, Carian approached the tree, but stayed out of the lift’s reach, unlike her sister. The biotics cast a blue glow on her cheeks and deepened the blue of her eyes. “But this is on the z-axis not the x-axis.”
Thaia’s proud grin lit the room. “That’s my—”
Aella gasped. “Daddy, you got it wrong!”
“I don’t know whether I should be offended or not, but you can definitely go play in the air for it.” Thaia put Aella back in the lift with the tree, with enough spin that Aella slowly rotated as she floated, still indignant.
“I doubt she’s wrong. It’s math, not biology.” Anahera brightened. “Oh, maybe it’s an experiment.”
“Is it?” Carian asked.
“Sort of.” Thaia brushed the needles from Carian’s crest. “Mostly, I’m trying to figure out the best axis for this thing. Ryder called it an X-Mas tree, except every image she showed me has it on the y-axis. When I put it on the x-axis, it looked wrong.” She considered the tree again. “If we get three, we can just put one on each axis. XYZ-Mas relay telescope tree!”
“No!” Anahera, Zahra, and even Aella chorused.
“It’s my new favorite tree orientation,” Carian said. “Where can we get two more trees?”
“New favorite child,” Thaia said.
“Hey!” said the others.
Then Anahera said, “If we get it to work, I’m sending Aella through it.”
“Hey!” Any effectiveness of Aella’s defense was negated by the fact that she was now sideways in the air. “That’s mean.”
“Mean? Look at what you’re doing to the tree! Look at all those leaves you’ve torn off!”
“It isn’t my fault! I grabbed the trunk and it was sticky and now everything sticks to my hands!” Aella slapped her right hand against her stomach and pulled to illustrate her plight. “See? Now it’s stuck to my shirt.”
“That’s a shame,” Anahera said with a straight face. She wasn’t even the least bit sincere.
“That was dry enough to make a desert look like a fucking rainforest,” Eirian said. “That was all Lexi.”
It was. There was no denying it. Instead, Lexi allowed herself to feel some pride.
“Just wait until I get out of here,” Aella said to Anahera, shaking her free fist as she bonked into the tree again.
“Wait,” Zahra said, worry creeping in. “Maybe we aren’t getting it because it’s something to do with religion? Is this a religious human holiday? What if we did something to insult them?”
“Um, it sounded pretty secular to me from the way they described it, but the specifics were lost to me after math got involved.” Thaia looked over at Lexi. “Babe, which is it?”
Lexi had studied many human holidays and this was one that came up in many different traditions. “It depends on the humans and what beliefs they hold.” Ryder, she knew, along with Harry, celebrated the entirely secular version of the holiday.
Thaia frowned. “That’s a useless non-answer I could’ve come up with myself.”
“That doesn’t make it untrue. Think about how seriously the huntresses and priestesses take the Night of Kurinth’s Light and compare that to how maidens—”
“Party hard,” Thaia said.
“Celebrate,” Lexi continued, sharply enunciating the word, “in their own way that looks remarkably like a Janiris celebration.”
“Okay, fine. That makes sense. But that still doesn’t help. Either we just need to pick what we like best or we ask Ryder.”
“Let’s ask Ryder!” Zahra said, her sisters loudly agreeing with her. Even Aella, now drifting away from the tree again and frowning at her hand.
Thaia grudgingly agreed—mostly, Lexi suspected, because she wanted the three-tree version and Ryder would likely override her. Then Jaal volunteered to make the call on his omni so that Ryder could see the extent of the problem.
As soon as Ryder’s face, backdropped by Hydroponics, appeared over Jaal’s omni, the kids all clamored to talk to Ryder at the same time, clustering in front of the counter with Aella floating behind them. Aside from her irritation at her sister, Aella was perfectly content to remain where she was. Whenever she wasn’t, she asked to be moved, and she’d yet to do so, even after vaguely threatening Anahera.
The girls caught sight of Suvi when Ryder swung around to sit, and they all declared that Suvi needed to talk on the comm, too.
“Why is Aella floating in midair?” Suvi asked the moment she joined the comm.
“I’m being oppressed!” Aella said.
Lexi had to smother a laugh at Aella’s sincerity.
After rolling her eyes, Thaia retrieved Aella from the lift even as Aella continued making her case to her skeptical audience. Then she set Aella on her feet, carefully separated Aella’s hand from the now ruined shirt, and then sent her into the kitchen to thoroughly wash her hands. Lexi lent Aella some help, the sap proving difficult enough to remove that it turned into something akin to scrubbing in for surgery. She still listened to the ongoing conversation in the background as she checked over Aella’s fingers.
“Right,” Thaia said, “so we called because—”
“Because Daddy was wrong!” Aella shouted over her shoulder.
“I was not!” Thaia replied to her, and then returned to Ryder and Suvi. “We’re confused about the tree and the axes. You called it an X-Mas tree, but everything you showed me has it on a y-axis. So, I figure, maybe you can pick x, y, or z-axis for your own tree. Then Carian and I decided that getting three and having all the axes worked best, but everyone else disagrees because they don’t appreciate mass relays.”
“Mass relay trees aren’t a thing,” Eirian said. “And should never be. Especially not in our living room.”
“She’s right,” Zahra said. “It would be so ugly.”
Thaia’s hand covered her heart. “I can’t believe my own child called a mass relay ugly. My own child!”
Zahra rolled her eyes and the Mum that accompanied it had Lexi suddenly dreading Zahra’s adolescence in twenty years. Then Zahra said, “A triple mass relay telescope tree, specifically, would be the ugly thing. Not real relays. Those aesthetics are forever.”
“Good. Now I won’t have to disinherit you.”
“Thaia!” Lexi said as she escorted Aella to the hallway and sent her to put on a fresh shirt.
“What? I said I won’t have to!”
“Okay, so the mass relay triple—whatever that weird idea was—isn’t how it works,” Ryder said over the comm. “I know it’s called X-Mas, but, yeah. You stand the tree up on the y-axis and then decorate it.”
“Oh,” Thaia said, she and Carian wearing matching morose expressions as Thaia slowly rotated the tree to vertical and rested it against the wall.
Aella came tearing down the hall, still tugging on her shirt. Lexi caught her by the shoulder and helped her get her arms though her sleeves. Then she turned her loose in the living room to terrorize friends and family. “The tree’s vertical! I bet I can climb it!”
Sula hooked Aella by the waist as she blasted past, stopping her. “We already know you’re a pyjak. You don’t have to prove it.”
“And,” Lexi said, “you just put on a clean shirt.”
“Can we at least decorate it now?” Aella asked, finally not fighting against Sula’s hold.
“I think you need more decorations, first,” Ryder said. “String lights, specifically.”
“No, we have plenty,” Thaia said, brow furrowed in confusion.
“I don’t know about that,” said Suvi. “Snow looks like he’s eating his favorite spaghetti back there.”
“What?!” Thaia and everyone else whirled around to find Snow in the corner of the living room. He’d parked himself next to the crate Thaia had pointed out earlier, and had a string of lights hanging out of his mouth. The other end of the string was still in the crate. When everyone’s eyes fell on him, Snow stopped chewing and placidly looked back at them. Then, when no one said a word, he went back to munching on the lights, the wires slowly disappearing into his mouth.
“Oh, it does look like he’s eating spaghetti!” Ryder said.
“Snow! Spit that out!” Zahra said. “We need the lights for the tree!”
Snow stared at her, swallowed, and then opened his mandibles. The remaining ten centimeters of string lights fell onto the floor.
Zahra trotted over and gave him a kiss on the head. “Thank you.”
Aella ran up to the counter, jumping up and down to see the comm. “Ryder, is the reverse thief like three commandos in the same armor?”
“Is it red?” Carian asked. “Daddy said it was red.”
“A reverse thief? Thaia, what exactly have you been telling them?” Ryder asked.
Thaia lifted Aella up to sit on the counter, ignoring Lexi’s frown. “The flying trokhera wagon person.”
“I’m sorry, the what?” Ryder was so bewildered that Lexi leaned around the counter to see for herself.
“Oh, I know this one,” Suvi said. “Trokhera are the closest Thessian megafauna to Earth’s reindeer.”
Ryder looked between Suvi next to her and Thaia on the other end of the comm. “Do they fly? Like, with biotics?”
“Trokheras charge! With biotics!” Zahra said. “Etalis are the ones that fly. With wings and sometimes biotics.”
Aella jumped to her feet, fists in the air. “Ancient huntresses rode them, swooping down on their enemies!” To illustrate, she swooped herself off the counter in an upward arc, Thaia catching her before she swooped downward into the floor. Aella kept talking throughout. “But they couldn’t use etalis to hunt the trokhera, so the huntresses had to leap over the charging trokhera to get them all twisted up, and did you know that they always had the youngest huntress be the one who made the trokhera charge at them?”
“I didn’t even know about trokhera at all until two minutes ago,” Ryder said. “I kinda want to hear more about the etalis. Those sound awesome.”
“I can tell you more,” Eirian said with a grin. “Illustrations included. It’s the only art history lesson of mine that Thaia’s ever wanted to hear all the way through and more than once.”
“Ryder, you don’t want to miss it,” Thaia said. “Still fuzzy about the trokhera, though. And the thief. How does the thief get in? That should be prearranged in a house with commandos in it or it could go very, very poorly.”
Ryder blinked. “Okay, you know what? Suvi and I are coming over there.”
“Can you please bring more lights?” Anahera asked. Sometime during the comm, she’d seated herself next to Snow, and was currently passing him another string from the crate. “Snow’s hungry.”
“We’ll bring a whole new crate,” Suvi said over Carian and Zahra’s outraged shouts at their sister. “See you soon!”
Jaal deactivated the comm. “There. Now we have our answers.” He paused, tilting his head. “Some of our answers.”
By the time Ryder and Suvi arrived, each bearing a crate packed full of decorations, from ornaments to string lights to garland and tinsel, the tree was half-decorated. Sula had disappeared partway through the process, but Nomi remained and helped the children with decorating decisions as best she could. Jaal eagerly joined in, while Eirian sat on the sofa and researched more about the human holiday. Thaia played referee, especially when Zahra’s inherent bossiness combined with being overly picky about where to hang the various decorations began to grate on her sisters’ nerves.
“No, we can’t wrap the garland on the branches like that,” Zahra said. “It has to have some negative space.”
“I’m going to negative space you in a minute,” Aella said, shaking the loops of golden garland at her. They were piled so high in her arms that her face was barely visible.
Thaia stared at Zahra and then turned to Eirian. “Negative space? Which kid was it who hung out with you today?”
“Zahra was last week,” Jaal said. “We visited the angaran art exhibit.”
“Right.” She looked over at Zahra. “We have a ton of garland. What else are we going to do with it? Oh, maybe we can feed it to Snow.”
“Snow can’t eat garland,” Anahera said, scratching the top of Snow’s head.
“Not with that attitude he can’t.”
“Or,” Ryder said, sliding in between Thaia and Snow with her arms outstretched, “you could wrap it around chairs? It’s a good thing Scott isn’t here or he’d be wrapping it around me.”
Trading grins with Zahra and Carian, Anahera leapt to her feet. Then they rushed toward the crates, retrieved more garland, and descended on Aella. Seconds later, Aella’s entire body was wrapped with garland, leaving her unable to do more than stand there and giggle.
Which was when Sula returned from next door, arms full of an etalis kit with short lavender fur, a sprinkling of silver spots trailing from the top of its head to the tips of each of its three tails. Curious and bright amber eyes lit on the pack of children in the living room and the previously calm kitten squirmed to free itself, its tails flicking back and forth in its eagerness to play. Sula dodged two tail flicks, but the third whipped her on the cheek, and so she unceremoniously dumped the kitten on the floor. It scrambled to its feet and raced into the living room, where it immediately playfully pounced on Aella’s bare toes.
“Is it ours?” Thaia asked over Aella’s laughter and the excited squeals from the other three children. Without waiting for the answer, Thaia crouched down to the kit’s level and ran her fingers through its fur. Thaia’s nose narrowly avoided getting whipped by its tails, but it was a show of excitement from the kitten, whose attention turned from Aella’s toes to trying to clamber up Thaia’s arm. Given it already reached as high as Aella’s waist when standing on all four legs, it mostly just propped its overly large paws on Thaia’s shoulder and peered around. Thaia hadn’t stopped grinning.
“Yes, she’s ours,” Sula said. “Yours, technically. See? I finally got you that etalis kit you’ve been asking to get for centuries.”
“We,” Eirian said. “You, Lexi, me, Jaal, Nomi, the girls. It was a team effort.”
Ryder plopped herself on the floor next to Aella. “Holy shit, this is awesome. I want one. Do you think we could keep one on the Tempest?”
“It depends on whether or not you’d like your pyjak to constantly have to evade a predator,” Lexi said.
“No, that really wouldn’t be good for him. You probably just saved Carrot’s life.”
Carian gave Ryder a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, you can visit ours!” Then she sat down on Ryder’s opposite side and shook some garland. The kit pushed herself off Thaia’s shoulder and somersaulted gracefully through the air, only to tumble into a crash landing in front of Carian. Laughing, Carian reached out and rubbed the kitten’s tummy.
“What will we name it?” Zahra asked, abandoning her tree decoration for sitting on the floor with her sisters and mother.
“Sky!” Aella said.
Anahera nodded. “Yeah, Sky!”
“I like it,” Carian said.
“Sky because it can fly! I think it fits,” Zahra said.
They all looked over at Thaia, whose smile had finally slightly faded in order to fix her children with a look of disbelief. “Seriously?”
Each child answered in the affirmative.
Thaia remained unconvinced. “You named the pallad Snow because he’s snowy white, and you want to name the etalis Sky because she’ll eventually be able to fly?”
“Hey,” Sula said, entering the kitchen and heading straight for the tea, “it checks out. Your ancestors named the bay ‘sea cliffs’ because its most noticeable feature was the big ass cliffs over the sea.”
Jaal crossed his arms, slowly drawing his watchful gaze from the children and etalis on the floor and over to Sula. “Really? That sounds very… unimaginative.”
Eirian heaved a sigh. “Yes. Kunoura is an ancient Armalian word meaning sea cliffs. My ancestors were exactly that unimaginative. There are times where I’m convinced that my father was the only Kallistrate in all of history who appreciated figurative language.”
“Look, there’s nothing wrong with sea cliffs. It’s a perfectly valid name for the bay,” Thaia said.
“And that’s why your family pets are named Snow and Sky,” Sula said.
“Sky,” Zahra asked the kitten, “do you think Aella would make a nice decoration for the tree?”
“What happened to ensuring there’s enough negative space?” Eirian asked.
“It’s more fun to torture my little sister?”
“Yes, that’s true. I’ll allow it.”
“Hey!” Aella said, managing to jump just enough to knock herself over, but still couldn’t wrangle herself free of the garland. “You know what? I don’t want to be the youngest anymore. Mum and Daddy need to have another kid.”
Lexi choked on her tea. Thaia let out a strangled noise. Then Zahra, Anahera, and Carian said as one, “You have no idea what you’re asking for.”
“Yes, I do!” Aella rolled to the side. A helpful Sky darted over, grabbed an end of garland in her mouth, and started unwinding it from around Aella. “I’m asking for someone else to end up like this instead of me.”
“Or,” Anahera said, “you could try, I don’t know, slowing down to sublight speeds.”
“There’ a better chance of your mother completing a PhD in biology than there is your littlest sister moving any slower than faster than light speeds,” Sula said through a laugh.
When no one else spoke, Aella looked between Thaia and Lexi. “So?”
“Answer’s no,” Thaia said quickly, rising from the floor and joining Lexi and Sula in the kitchen.
“No forever?”
Goddess, she sounded so heartbreakingly sad at the prospect. Lexi could hardly be expected to give her a hard no. “Possibly,” Lexi said.
Next to Lexi, Thaia leaned against the counter in front of them. “Maybe.”
“That wasn’t a forever no,” Sula said.
Still on the couch, Nomi nodded sagely. “You are both on the young side of matronhood.”
“Right?” Sula sipped her tea and then addressed Thaia and Lexi. “I wouldn’t rule out a second batch in a couple centuries if I were you. Matronhood’s last hurrah. It happens a lot if you have kids young.”
“That’s too late!” Aella said. “I’ll be two hundred and they wouldn’t be doing this anymore and there wouldn’t be a point!”
Thaia laughed, but it was kind. “Trust me, the perils of being the youngest don’t disappear just because you’re all older.”
Aella rolled over again, orienting herself toward Eirian. “Aunt Eirian, is that true?” Sky, thwarted in her attempt to free Aella, gave up and trotted over to investigate Nomi, then Suvi and Ryder.
“Oh, completely true,” Eirian said. “Karyote’s right.”
Thaia rolled her eyes. “That’s exactly the shit I was talking about.”
“To be fair to your parents,” Sula said to Aella, humor mixed in, her laughter as kind as Thaia’s had been, “sometimes it takes centuries to get over the disaster nature of your youngest to find the fortitude to even contemplate another kid.” Then she looked directly at Thaia.
“I’d be offended if I didn’t know exactly how right you are.” Thaia’s gaze slid straight to Aella. Aella, focused on rolling to Nomi, didn’t notice.
Lexi had noticed, but it wasn’t like she could scold Thaia for saying out loud what they’d both been thinking. Aella was thirty handfuls to her sisters’ three and even the barest of thoughts of another child threatened her with thorough exhaustion. It wasn’t her capacity for love that ran the risk of running out, however. It was her ability to simply keep up. She sighed and leaned against Thaia, the reason why their youngest was a little blue blur of chaos.
Sky, having finished her round of meeting everyone there, including Eirian and Jaal, began a loop around the room. It was then that she finally noticed Snow in the corner, still placidly eating string lights. When he saw the etalis kit looking at him, he stopped eating and stared. Sky made a slow, somewhat wary approach, and then halted just out of the reach of Snow’s forelegs. From there, she returned his stare.
After a moment, Snow bent down and nudged a section of string toward Sky.
Perplexed, Sky poked at it with a paw. It did nothing and she looked to Snow in puzzlement.
As if to illustrate what one did with string lights, Snow resumed eating a section. Sky looked at the string, looked at Snow, looked at the string, and came to a decision. She made a running leap up onto Snow’s back and settled down, tails waving contentedly.
Snow continued to snack on the string lights.
Zahra gasped. “We need to finish decorating before he eats them all!” Then the three oldest children descended on the tree, decorations at the ready. Aella rolled to a stop at Suvi’s feet. It only took one pitiful look from Aella for Suvi to begin untangling Aella from the garland.
“They like each other,” Thaia said in horror, quiet enough that only Lexi heard.
“That’s a good thing,” Lexi said, taking a step back, so she was behind Thaia. Then she wrapped her arms around Thaia’s waist and propped her chin on Thaia’s shoulder, wanting the physical closeness as she watched the bedlam unfold in the living room. As soon as Carian took tinsel out of the crate Ryder had provided, Sky jumped off Snow’s back and dove into the crate, sending bits and pieces of tinsel everywhere. A silvery ribbon was draped across her muzzle when her head emerged from the crate.
“Babe, I was talking about the kitten and the pallad, not the kitten and the kids.”
“I know.”
Aella, finally free, raced over to Sky. “I wanna ride the etalis!”
“She can’t even fly yet,” Thaia said. “Her wings need to grow a lot more.”
“What about when she’s big enough?”
Thaia made a thoughtful noise. “I mean, I suppose we could—”
“No,” said Lexi.
“But—”
“Absolutely not.”
Aella’s look was disappointed, but she recovered quickly, sprinting from Sky to the pallad still calmly watching events from the corner. She threw her arms around him and pressed her cheek to the mandible closest to her. “Snow will give me a ride!”
Thaia’s shoulders tightened reflexively, as they did each and every time the children got close to Snow’s face. Lexi pressed a kiss to one of those shoulders and Thaia relaxed. Slightly. Then Lexi whispered against Thaia’s crest, “Happy XYZ-Mas.”
Chuckling, Thaia turned her head just far enough for a brief kiss. “Love you, too.”