Monica hums as she pages through the old books Cinnabari gifted her with. 

 

The Aaspan, it reads, are a lovely species, colorful and florid. They have a rich, involved art and culture which survived the era of their pacification. One of their most famous traditions is traditional courtship — a laborious process which involves the trading of shed feathers, the gifting of bright shawls, and inherited pieces of ‘sresha’ jewelry designed to make satisfying sounds as the courting party dances.

 

“Hmm,” she smiles. “Looks like we all saw romance in the pretty things, hmm?”

 

Cinnabari shakes their head, a movement closer to an animal shaking itself off than any kind of human gesture. “My sresha was no simple thing. To call it jewelry would be…accurate but not quite right.”

 

“Like calling a marriage a contract,” she suggests.

 

Cinnabari smiles, in that odd affini way which shifts the very air around them. The world glimmers as they laugh, creaking and hissing up a storm. “So self-centered, seedling!” they lean in close, mask-like face just a bit more defined than it was a day ago. It’s astoundingly good mimicry by their standards. “It’s lovely. Very…focused of you.”

 

Monica scowls. “Aliens this days,” she harrumphs, turning back to her book. “No fucking respect left, I swear…”

 

A traditional tea made of bone broth, served with a side of finau leaves crushed into a fine powder. More often than not, Aaspan will offer this as a start to courtship or as an offer of more platonic companionship! 

 

“Bone tea,” Monica murmurs. “Heard of that. Sounds like soup to me but…well, who knows? Food’s weird, even human food.”

 

Cinnabari softens — or does the Cinnabari version of softening, which is adjacent to but very much not the same as typical affini softening — their vines stilling for a moment before curling in on themselves, writhing in hypnotic spirals. “I still have some finau grafted on, even after all these years,” they say, audibly smiling. “My little aspen — they would’ve loved you. You’re the exact kind of misguided soul they would’ve loved to play around with.”

 

Monica pauses, unsure of what to say. That’s beautiful? That’s awful? That’s both the saddest and sweetest thing you’ve ever said? “Is it good?” she asks, in lieu of any better question. “…the finau, that is.”

 

“If you enjoy organ failure, then yes,” Cinnabari deadpans.  “You humans are quite adept at processing a variety of chemicals but not even you could handle finau.”

 

Monica snorts. “God, you have no sense of etiquette.”

 

“You’d hate it if I did.”

 

“I would,” she shrugs helplessly. “Wouldn’t I?”

 

They lapse into silence again. Monica chews on the concept of Cinnabari having a heart — the worst affini she knows, the most infuriating affini she’s ever met, the meanest leafy little angel that the Heavens have to offer. And yet, this too is her own doing. She chose to go after them. She keeps choosing to go after them.

 

They’re old. An old traditionalist, just like her. The affini version of an old conservative meeting with the human version of an old…not conservative, not really, but not quite as communist as the world seems to be now.

 

She’s still not sure how it works or what’s going on but she has to assume this is the Rapture her grandmother used to talk about. With all the saving and rescuing, the heavens meeting the Earth, literal eternal peace and happiness…it’s a dead ringer. Angels. The weirdest, star-damned angels she’s ever met. 

 

Two old women sitting around at home, bitching at each other, complaining about the state of the world and mourning shared woes. Monica Parolles truly has become the kind of old world relic she used to worship in her youth. She wonders if anyone is writing down human traditions — the ones that will almost certainly be lost in all the rush of wardship and change and free resources. Will anyone forget marriage in the next few decades? Will anyone forget Christmas? What will be forgotten? What will be remembered?

 

…she flips through the pages. The Aaspan were domesticated three hundred years ago. The Aaspan homeworld was fully restored 235 years ago. The Aaspan Pacification campaigns took roughly five years to complete. The Aaspan feralists were focused on preserving the freedom of their people, particularly their freedom to…

 

“They drew giant wings on their planet's moon…with lasers?!” Monica gawps.

 

“They had the cutest orbital laser cannons,” Cinnabari muses casually. “Nothing compared to real weaponry, of course, but you can’t expect Xenos to get that far with their little playthings.”

 

“Oh, shut up, brat,” Monica growls. 

 

“I am millenia your senior, little seedling. You’re…half a century, yes? A handful of decades old? I’ve passed enough time to make you look like an infant.”

 

“Brat,” Monica repeats insistently.

 

“If anything you’re the brat,” Cinnabari hisses, somehow simultaneously delighted and disappointed. 

 

Monica flips them off, huffing out a laugh when Cinnabari stares at her flabbergasted. “God, look at us,” she smiles, surprised at how tender she feels. “Acting like a couple of bickering school children. Soon enough we’ll start shaking each other down for lunch money or…or stealing the expensive meals and bragging about having dried out fruit while the other pokes at grey mush.” 

 

Cinnabari stiffens. Monica blinks up at them, waiting for a returned quip or a snippy reply. 

 

They just stare at her for a long moment, head ever so slowly tilting forward as their eyes gleam and glitter. The air itself starts skipping to their beat, Monica changing along with it, tension hanging thinner than delicate cobweb.

 

Her breath hitches when they stop, all too close for her usual sensibilities, struggling to inhale around the sheer grandness of their image. A quiet, solemn anger burns in their eyes as their sloppily woven faux-human form starts loosening. Vines and thorns and sprouts and stems, flashes of bright color unearthed by writhing coils as once-hidden edges reveal themselves. 

 

One vine, its thorns wickedly sharp and its flowers oozing viscous black nectar, stays visible throughout it all. Cinnabari’s mask, their signature wooden face, starts beading red between the grooves of its bark-like surface. 

 

Monica twitches in her seat, still as molasses left out in winter, staring down a grand brat several times older than her. “Cinnabari,” she aims for scolding only to land solidly on desperate. 

 

“…my control,” they say, body reweaving, vines knitting back together as their face promptly re-absorbs its sanguinous fluids, “May have slipped from me, for a second.”

 

“Really,” she snorts, shrugging off buzzing dregs of fear. “I joke about your immaturity for one second and suddenly I’m liable to get stabbed to death? This is a tantrum, Cinnabari. That’s not exactly helping your case.”

 

Cinnabari rumbles, low and exhausted, in their own special brand of sighing. 

 

Monica continues flatly, “You know, I was hoping you’d take it lightly,” she scoffs. “I know you’re all spoiled little angels with your…robots and such. But it’s given you all egos the size of the sun and I thought, well, someone ought to cut that off at the head! Affini supremacy,” she screws up her nose. “Pah! You’re incorrigible, the lot of you.”

 

Cinnabari stares at her unimpressed.

 

“If you want my respect you’ll have to actually earn it,” Monica declares bodly. “I’ve seen plenty of reasons to be fond of you and not one single respectable trait amongst those.”

 

They shift in place. “…you’re fond of me?” they sound completely monotone. A sign they’re too busy being shocked to actually modulate their voice. 

 

“I don’t waste time around people I don’t like,” she shrugs, turning away for a few seconds. Just long enough to recover from the blue-green lights refracting in Cinnabari’s marble-like eyes. “Not unless they’re in charge of my paycheck — and we don’t have any of those left, now do we?”

 

Cinnabari mutters something under their breath, a short, discordant note in their angelic melodies. Angels do sing, as it turns out. They also, unfortunately, happen to enjoy speaking. “Tempting,” they direct at her. “You are…so new. Such a tough-shelled little seed.”

 

“No one gets to sixty years by meekly following orders,” she points out. She’d thought that was obvious. Older humans are rarer and rarer these days — she can count on one hand the number of people she’s met who are older than her. The military doesn’t need to cater to the elderly, retirement funds gain companies absolutely nothing when they can’t be dangled like a carrot on a stick, and adding the frailty of a human body into all of that, plus the expense of medical care, multiplied several times by a hatred of displaying weakness…

 

It’s really no wonder she’s here instead of anywhere else. Does she actually have anyone who would be her own age? She’s not sure she would find a single one in this entire ship. They’re a factory planet, all work and no play. Old relics have no place in a world like that.

 

(She’s not sure old relics have a place in a world like this either.)

 

“It’s strange,” Cinnabari continues, as if she had never spoken. “You’re so afraid of me, practically petrified of us all, and yet you’re so…snippy. Opinionated,” they cock their head to the side, laughing like a creaky old door. “I could burn that out of you, if you’d like. Take you apart from the skin down, leave you limp and pliable. It would be so easy.”

 

“No,” Monica says, despite being unsure of that herself. “I’m tough-shelled — you said it yourself. No one cracks me open, not without my say-so.”

 

“I could get your say-so. I’d rip agreement out of you, if I were any less polite than I am,” they hum, musing and light, even as they continue on this horrifying trail of thought. “I could pry the softness out of you, leave you sweeter than kiish, make you call me by all the titles in the world.”

 

“I could make you beg to be so sweet again. I could take away every single scar, every wrinkle, every horrified little nightmare you’ve had since birth. Shatter you like glass and put the shards on display.”

 

“But,” they chuckle, too throaty and guttural to be recognized as human, “I do like our little talks. So, I think I’ll leave you be, for now. No need to thank me, petal.”

 

Demon, Monica thinks distantly, terrified out of her wits. She reacts to the fear how she always does: by doubling down and snapping at everything in her nearby vicinity. “Are you done?” she asks testily, focused in on their cheeks, pretending to meet their gaze. “I hope you know this isn’t respectable. You can’t threaten me into taking you seriously.”

 

“That wasn’t a threat,” they say, “just an offer.”

 

Monica rubs circles into the back of her palm, breathing even and deep, acting like the fully grown woman she is. She’s not going to tolerate this. She shouldn’t tolerate this. She should leave, right now, or otherwise report this thing to…to someone. Get help, before it decides to kill her, before it decides to eat her, this terrible brat of an angel.

 

Instead, she looks into their eyes, falls into their rhythm, and snarls at their insipid little smirk. “I’ll be back in a week,” she growls, “But threaten me a second time and I’ll take the hints you’ve been dropping, leave you alone to your books and your lonely old papers. You’re the oldest brat I’ve ever met, you know that?”

 

“You can’t leave,” Cinnabari replies, somewhat amused. “You’re welcome to try, though. I do enjoy watching little sophonts realize how much they need me.”

 

“I don’t need you,” she snaps. “You need me. Or else these English books are just fancy paperweights, your home is just a lonely little shack, and you have no one at all to speak with because in the end — you’re just as lost as I am, aren’t you? You’re just as old as I am, just as bitchy, just as—”

 

She shudders, rage swelling up so large she could choke on it, shaking with the force of it, the strength of it. “I’m going,” she says softly. “Sorry for t…that was out of line. I just — no, no, no.”

 

Cinnabari shifts and she barks out, “NO!” as loud as she can. “Stay away, you stay there, I refuse to tolerate this! To, to reward this kind of disrespect.”

 

“Oh, I see,” Cinnabari coos indulgently. Sweet. So, so sweet and all for her — and she’s never really had anything, has she? Everything she had went to people who are either lifetimes or light years away, sons who left years ago and daughters who never visited and siblings that never survived. Everything she had had to be shared and doled out and split up into little bits, sold off or kept for needy, repurposed or thrown out in case they got fined for keeping trash in ‘residential’ areas.

 

She wants. She always wants. She has so much practice in wanting that the crash of longing — so strong it borders on grief — does nothing but make her frown as everything in her lurches forward.

 

She feels like there’s a magnet, pulling on her insides through the skin, a hook sunk deep into her soul, a line connected to Cinnabari. “I don’t need you,” she spits. “Not as much as you need me. I’m not, not coming back, not ever, just going to…going to leave…be alone…”

 

Doubt and fear and terror and sorrow, all of it swelling, all of it bloated, terrible, ugly, vulnerable. She likes ugly things, she likes honesty, she hates that she’s in love with a thing like this because she’s much too old to be dallying with someone so laden with red flags they might as well be swimming in them. She’s too smart, too strong, too knowing to just fall for this. She hates that they’re saying that shit, that they just look at her like they’ve seen a thousand of her, like she’s just one in a long, long line of identical faces, like they love her in spite of that fact—

 

“Go on, then,” Cinnabari says patiently. Softly. A low-toned, hushed up croon. “Get out now, seedling. Come back when you’re ready. I’m always here.”

 

Please, she thinks, please. Something is so horribly, terribly right about all this. Monica trusts her gut, listens to her instincts, but her instincts are saying that this creature is hers and she belongs to them and she wants them, she wants them, she wants to be kept and keep and—

 

Melody. A slow, cruel melody. Strings plucked one at a time, sounding like pleasure and safety and comfort, sounding so, so right that she leans forward to listen better, hungry for more and this and everything—

 

Monica tears herself away, stumbles to the door, and tries to pretend the heat in her cheeks is coming from anger.