AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Nope, this is Beaty, my sister. And whoever else she passes the tablet, too.” Garin chuckled as a girl opened a can and unleashed a geyser of carbonated sugar water onto herself. “Could have seen that one coming.”
“What are your brother’s names?” Sazahk watched one boy throw more sodas at his friends as though he hadn’t seen the explosion, and the other carefully arrange bowls of chips.
“This little chaos monster is Ethan.” Garin pointed at the soda-throwing boy. “You remind me of him sometimes.”
“I am not chaotic.” Sazahk looked away from the screen long enough to send Garin a pout.
“Mmm,” Garin hummed dubiously, then chuckled. “Really though, I meant that he’s brilliant and asks the damnedest questions. Always has.”
Sazahk’s chest warmed at that and he ducked his head. “Curiosity is an underappreciated trait.”
“Not in my family.” Garin pulled Sazahk a little closer. “Mom and Dad were both engineers. Ethan got most of the brilliance, and Lucas and I got the organization.” Garin pointed at the chip-arranging boy. “Lucas is that one, if you couldn’t guess.”
“And what did Beaty get?” Sazahk smiled when Lucas frowned at his twin with the exact same expression Garin sometimes frowned at him with. “She’s your sister, right?”
“That’s right.” Garin dropped into a sadder register. “She got all the heart and all the grit. And the short end of all the sticks. When I left, the whole household fell on her.”
Sazahk watched the merriment on the screen with disjointed melancholy. “Why didn’t you attend the party? You clearly care a great deal for them and they you if they bothered to record the whole thing for you.”
“I haven’t been to a family party since my own high school graduation.” Garin shook his head. “Never had the time. Someone’s gotta pay for it all, you know.”
Sazahk looked harder at the interior in the video. It had a spacious parlor and large floor-to-ceiling windows framing Earthen urban architecture. “You’ve implied that you grew up with modest to minimal means, but this home appears to be above standard Human living conditions.”
“It is.” Garin nodded, and his lips quirked up in a half-smile as someone carried the two-tiered cake Sazahk had seen earlier and placed it on the dining room table. “I bought it for them. I’ve only set foot in it a couple times myself, but it was never for me, anyway.”
Sazahk didn’t care about the cake anymore. He stared at Garin’s profile, the bits and pieces he’d gathered about the man fitting into a complete picture. “That’s why you joined the military, even though you don’t like violence, and why you work for Dominic now. To support your family.”
Garin glanced back at Sazahk. “That’s why most people work, isn’t it? But yeah. The army gave me a scholarship to their best academy. Paid for the whole thing. And the hazard pay for the Vanguard unit was so good, it only took me a few years to save up for this place.” He pointed at the home in the video with his chin.
A home he never got to live in with people he never got to see. Sazahk slowly rested his cheek on Garin’s shoulder as the boys shoveled cake into their mouths.
Garin ran his hand up and down Sazahk’s arm, then caught the edge of his braid and toyed with it between his fingers. “What about you? You go back for family parties?”
“My family doesn’t throw parties.” Sazahk shook his head, but not enough to dislodge Garin from his hair. “An occasional gala for a political candidate, but I wouldn’t want to go to that even if I was invited.”
Garin hummed. “Sounds like another thing you and Dom have in common. Does your family not celebrate birthdays?”
“My parents do not see my birth as something to be celebrated.”
“What?” Garin leaned back enough to get a good look at Sazahk’s face. “What do you mean?”
“I mean that my birth and existence are a source of deep shame to my parents.” Sazahk had lived with that shame his whole life and yet the horrified look in Garin’s eyes still made gray skate across the backs of his hands. “Qeshian society has long valued small families in order to maintain a population below the maximum capacity of the planets within our system. For my father and mother, prominent political figures, to have a second child when so many others abstain is a mark of decadence, selfishness, and a casual disregard for the collective.”
Garin gaped at him, his face pale below his tan and freckles, and his fingers frozen on Sazahk’s braid.
“You cannot wage war either against or allied with a people you have limited to no understanding of.” Sazahk shrugged off the dead weight of Garin’s arm. “So surely these basics of the modern Qeshian culture would have been covered in the curriculum of your higher education.”
“They were, but—” Garin came to life and reached for Sazahk’s arm as he pulled away, then caught himself and left his hand hanging awkwardly in the air between them. “There’s a difference between knowing that a culture encourages only children and hearing someone say that their parents don’t celebrate their birth.”
“And where are your parents, then?” Sazahk jerked his chin at the tablet, defensiveness flaring up in the face of Garin’s pity.
“Dad died in a lab accident when I was eleven.” Garin dropped his hand into his lap and glanced at the screen and Sazahk’s defensiveness whipped back and wrapped around Sazahk’s throat. “And Mom doesn’t do parties. She hasn’t really done much of anything since Dad passed. She was probably in her room for all this.” Garin again reached for Sazahk, as though he couldn’t help himself, but let his hand fall short, landing on the ground a few inches from Sazahk’s knee. “But she’s still happy that she had the boys, and that they exist, and that they’re growing older.”
Sazahk eyed Garin’s hand on the blanket beside him, then picked it up and turned it over to examine the callouses on his palm. “It’s not that my parents wish I were dead, or that I had never been born. We have the technology to terminate a pregnancy, and while there is some stigma attached to the act, it is far less than the stigma attached to excess progeny. For whatever reason, they chose to bring me into existence. And I think they have regretted it ever since.”
Garin’s hand twitched as Sazahk dragged the tip of his pointer finger along the tough skin at the bases of his fingers. “I’m sorry.”
Sazahk shrugged but didn’t look up. “I could have done more to endear myself to them and to validate my existence in the eyes of their peers and constituents. And for a time, I did. Very successfully. But—” but then he’d made it so, so much worse. “But that time has passed.”
