Tail, Dark and Handsome: Celestial Mates

Chapter 1-3

The island spread out below them, foliage and scrub on the mountain, the boxy structures of the village, and the thin band of pale gray sand beaches. Beyond that, the ocean surrounded them, an endless stretch of wavering gray. Sunlight gleamed off the water, the light diffusing into a bright glow that made him blink.

Winter turned away. Salty wind ruffled his hair and threatened to whisk the hat away. He clamped a hand to hold it in place. His legs ached wonderfully from exertion. From their perch, there was only birdsong, sun and the wind.

His total color blindness—achromatopsia—left him in a world of varying shades of gray and sensitivity to light. Outdoor activities required planning and certain equipment—shaded contact lenses, tinted glasses, and a hat for very sunny days—or he ran the risk of being completely blinded by sunlight and suffering a debilitating headache. Overcast days were easier, but he refused to let a little sunshine spoil the show.

Winter naturally craved the solitude of life aboard his ship, but it was too easy to be trapped in that sterile environment, where he could control the lighting. He had spent years in his workshop, sitting front of screens and hunched over prototypes. At some point, being in his ship felt like hiding, like letting his achromatopsia dictate his life. Now, he hungered for dirt, sun and sweat. The soreness in his muscles reminded him that he was alive.

A recluse by choice, not because of a hereditary medical condition.

Unfortunately, Zero did not agree about the virtues of the outdoors and complained mightily. He was more than happy to spend his adolescence with his nose in a book and parked motionless in front of a screen.

Zero flung himself down on the rock beside Winter, groaning dramatically. “I’m gonna die…”

“You will recover,” Winter said, handing the kit a bottle of water and a pair of specially created sunglasses. “Put these on. Do not damage your eyesight.”

Zero complied, his dark hair plastered to his forehead with sweat and managing to also stand straight up from the wind.

With an amused huff, Winter plucked a leaf from his kit’s hair.

A comfortable silence fell between father and son. His body ached in a pleasant way. Some morning his joints moved stiffly as he lumbered out of bed but he was still able to hike and appreciate the natural world.

The bot whirred and beeped below them. “That really is the dumbest thing Uncle Chase’s ever built. Like give up, stop bashing the rock,” Zero said.

Winter could order the bot to cease, but he was meant to test it in the field, which meant he had to allow the bot to batter itself to pieces. Hopefully the sensors and programming kicked in to tell it to stop, unless locked in a loop. Even a worst case scenario where the bot destroyed itself provided usable data.

He sighed at the remarkably unintelligent bot. He had hoped to keep production costs down. The small size and versatility of the bot would make it instrumental to colonists and those individuals on isolated, far flung homesteads. The military, of course, would be interested in anything that had explosives strapped to it. He considered that a neutral use of his research, as the bot had as much potential to save lives as it did harm.

Chase, no doubt, would insist on marketing it as a personal servant, ideal for glamorous camping, to the idly wealthy, the exact sort who travelled three weeks in a private space yacht for rare mushrooms that only sprouted once a decade and had to be harvested by moonlight or they turned toxic. That sort.

He and his cousin agreed on very little, especially when it came to running the company. The fact that Chase had always been the favorite did not help.

“Dad, pay attention.” Zero nudged his shoulder.

The moon drifted across the sky as if pulled to the sun. Strange how it hung almost unmoving in the sky all day but now the eclipse approached alarmingly fast.

“Look!” Zero pointed to the ground. Leaves from nearby trees scattered shadows of the eclipse on the ground.

The sky dimmed into darkness as the moon eclipsed the sun, and the light took on an ethereal quality.

“It’s red. So cool,” Zero said, despite knowing the color held little meaning. “The sky is normally blue. Red is dark and a bit like blood.”

“Blood red,” Winter said, recognizing the phrase.

A ring of dancing fire, blinding in its intensity, encircled the moon. Winter held out a hand, letting the refracted shadow dance across his skin. He traveled light years to witness this moment. His heart hammered in his chest, partly from a mix of exertion and awe.

Mostly awe, he decided.

Zero squirmed beside him.

“The wonders of the universe bore you?” Winter asked.

“No,” Zero said too quickly, which meant he was hiding something.

“And it has nothing to do with the notecards in your pocket?”

Zero’s ears flattened as he shifted to pull out the battered notecards. “Can I?”

“Please.” Winter turned his gaze back to the vista stretching before them, waiting patiently for his kit to gather his thoughts. This was hardly a conventional location for a presentation, but he couldn’t think of a better spot.

“Thank you for agreeing to meet with me. I know your schedule is busy.” Zero shuffled the notecards before tapping them against his thigh. “I believe my presentation,” he made an awkwardly stiff sweep with one hand, “will convince you that my proposal is advantageous to both our interests. There’s supposed to be a whiteboard. Imagine the whiteboard.”

“Consider it done.” Winter’s tail swished with amusement as he watched his son stumble awkwardly through his presentation. He found Zero’s copy of The Art of Persuasion and Arguments, so he had an inkling this was coming. Zero had an analytical mind and researched everything thoroughly, especially before venturing into unexplored territory.

Zero cleared his throat. “I could bore you with the statistics for adverse outcomes for child prodigies who receive exclusively private tutoring—”

“Were you able to find any statistics?” Winter leaned forward, the uneven rock digging into his ass. The shadows of the eclipse scattered over Zero's face and the notecards.

“Anecdotal and nothing recent.” Zero shuffled the notecards, which meant no. He most likely wanted to open with soft data that would put Winter in a defensive position. Tricky, tricky kit. Zero continued, “As you know, my education has been extensive and intense.”

“You’ve had the best private tutors that currency can supply.” Winter would know. He sat atop a considerable fortune and poured a staggering sum of it into his kit’s education. In their private spaceship, they traveled from city to city, planet to planet, to attend lectures and workshops given by a variety of leading experts in whatever subject currently interested Zero. Mathematics, music, philosophy, literature, history, archeology, they all interested him to some extent, though Zero seemed to lean toward mathematics and music.

Currently, Zero’s attention was caught by political rebellion expressed in music. They would soon travel to Earth to allow Zero the chance to watch human operas performed in original human languages. Apparently Earth operas were quite seditious. What other kit could say they had the same opportunities?

“I have worked hard and my test results have exceeded the general requirements to graduate from primary education according to Interstellar Union guidelines.” Zero moved the card to the bottom of the stack. “But I believe this is one area of my education that is lacking. Remove cloth. Oh.” He looked up from the card, blinking, then, “Pretend this is the whiteboard.”

He passed the card to Winter. Neat blocky letters spelled out “Be a Normal Person” at the top. Underneath were six points.

1. Hire a tutor for social skills.

2. Live in one place for at least a year.

3. Attend a regular school.

4. Do a sport.

5. Make friends.

“You are a normal person,” Winter said.

Zero scrunched up his nose, and his ear flicked. “I’m not.”

Winter’s fingers itched as his claws threatened to unsheathe. The last seven years had been a tangled mess. He lost so much time to grief, blame, anger, and physical pain that he left his kit to find his own way through the darkness. How badly had he failed Zero that he believed himself to be abnormal?

“Who said you were abnormal? Was it Chase? I will—” Winter bit off his words. He wanted to threaten violence but did not want to utter words that could be misconstrued, even in the privacy of his own home.

“No one. I just am.” Zero hesitated, his ears pressed back. “I can tell.”

“No one? What about that last tutor? He was a rude fucker.”

Winter paid a small fortune to supply Zero with the best tutors in the galaxy. Always precocious, Winter let Zero’s curiosity guide his education. As he flitted from interest to interest, he gathered books and tutors. They travelled vast distances between stars to attend lectures and visit museums. Winter hired experts to give guided tours and private one-on-one sessions. Any other kit might be spoiled, but Zero soaked it all up. No one single kit had such a lavish education, a fact which pleased Winter. That Zero’s interest kept returning him to music pleased Winter less, but the kit seemed to be equally drawn to mathematics as music.

If Winter could burn every piano in the star system, he would.

Zero rolled his eyes. “Because I found an error in the textbook, which he wrote.” His tail swished in amusement. “My five-point plan,” he said, tapping the card to redirect Winter’s attention.

“Just five?”

Zero leaned forward to regard the card, upside down. “It may fluctuate once the plan is in motion,” he said, then shuffled his cards again. “Point one. Socialization opportunities with my own cohort have been limited. This creates a gap between my cohort and myself. There is much I do not know about kits my own age.”

Winter softened. A hard life of disappointments created a protective barrier around him. He had little room for anyone in his heart except for his kit.

If Zero wanted to socialize with kits his own age, Winter would not argue. Fourteen was too young to not have friends and too old to awkwardly figure out how to make friends. It was a tender age, and Winter needed to protect his kit from the many hurts others inflicted.

Brilliant, as brilliant as his mother had been, Zero missed social cues. He relied on crutches, like tips on small talk from self-help books, and Winter knew the fault belonged to him. Isolated on their ship, Zero’s only companions were the people hired for his education. His kit had no one his own age, just adults paid to see to the needs of his intellect. Zero would either flourish once he reached adulthood or flounder, and the outcome would depend on the skills he developed now.

There was only one answer. “I agree,” Winter said.

“You do? Of course. Very good,” he said, quickly recovering from his initial surprise. He shuffled to the next card. “We need to hire a specialist for social skills.”

“Is there even such a thing?” Winter scratched behind an ear. He could think of maybe a motivational speaker on winning friends, but that didn’t seem correct.

“I was thinking of another nanny.”

“A nanny? You’re too old.” Fourteen was too young to be unsupervised but definitely too old for a nanny.

“Not to supervise, but to coach me. Help me be normal around people.”

“Are you saying I don’t know how to be normal around people? No, don’t answer.” A recluse for the last few years, Winter did not know how to be normal around anyone. Not that he ever excelled at sociability. He lost his polish and with it the social niceties like being polite and refraining from growling when someone shoved a camera in his face.

“We’ll revisit. Point two, I want to stay in one place for at least a year, to maximize social investment.”

“Our ship is not good enough?” Their private yacht had all the luxuries a person needed to cruise the stars in comfort.

“Dad, you don’t understand,” Zero whined, suddenly sounding very much a teenager. “I want to live on Corra.”

“No.” Absolutely not. He would never return to that horrid place.

“That’s it? No reason, just do as I say?”

“You know the reason,” he growled.

Zero’s ears went back but he lifted his chin in pure stubborn determination. “I want to visit Mama’s grave.”

“She is not—” Winter closed his eyes, wanting to say that Rebel’s body might be interred on Corra, but her heart and spirit were not there. Zero carried them with him. Instead, Winter recalled the dark skies as the storm swallowed their vehicle and tossed it about like a toy. For a moment, they had been weightless, then the vehicle slammed into the ground. He awoke to fractures in his hips and legs and Rebel had vanished.

It took six months to recover her body. In that time, Winter’s broken bones healed and he learned to walk with an artificial hip. His reputation had been shredded from trial by the media.

The official investigation deemed Rebel’s death an accident, but the damage from what had been said about him, about their family, speculated on the front page of every news media site, could not be undone.

Winter fled the planet the moment he could, and he never wanted to return.

“I know. I just want—” Zero reached for his tail, spilling the cards onto the ground.

“Would you consider an academy? You could stay there for the entire school year?”

Zero’s ears went back, disliking the idea. “Then you’d be alone.”

“I’ll be fine.” He had kept his mind occupied for the last few years by traveling the stars in his private ship. He had shown his kit many wonders but there were more places to visit. He could explore on his own. It was not running away, and he always had his work.

“I just want to be regular.” Zero slumped down, leaning back on his hands, and his tail dangled at his side like a limp noodle.

Winter’s heart ached for his kit. He would do anything for Zero, but what the kit wanted… He was too young to remember the media storm after the accident or, if Winter were being honest, the constant rumors before the accident. Staying in one place for too long brought attention, even now. There were always those who wanted to stick a camera in his face and discuss Rebel, hoping to get a reaction. Constant travel protected Zero from that.

But it left his kit feeling rootless and without friends. It pained Winter to see make friends a goal. Seclusion may have been right to him, but it harmed Zero.

And it had to be Corra, because his kit needed to see a hunk of polished granite engraved with his mother’s name.

“One year,” he said.

Zero immediately perked, his tail vibrating with excitement. He threw himself at his father in an increasingly rare display of affection. “Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! This is going to be the best year!” He rubbed his cheek to Winter’s, a soft kitten purr in his throat. “But—”

“The house may be in disrepair,” he cautioned. Harboring too many painful memories, he left the property—and all his research—to a caretaker. Other than the occasional update and request for repairs, he knew nothing about the condition of the house. “It will not be as comfortable as the ship.”

“I don’t care! I’m so excited. When? Can we go now? Let’s go now.”

The journey to Corra would take a solid month from their current location. “When my project is concluded.”

“And I’ll find a nanny,” Zero nodded, as if he settled the matter.

Ah, that blasted nanny.

“No nanny.” Zero opened his mouth to protest, but Winter held up a hand. “No. If you want to be a peer with your cohorts, you must have the same accommodation. You are too old for a nanny.” Avoiding media attention and simply being the child of his parents would make Zero’s plan difficult enough. Having a nanny follow him around would further ostracize him from his peers and potential friends.

“Fine,” Zero said, dragging out the word to clearly indicate that it was, in fact, anything but fine. “This will be great. You’ll see!”