Learning to Blush (29 page)

She heard the door to her bedroom open. As her brother Mike, Tim, nor Tom could enter a room quietly, it had to have been Jack paying a visit. She didn't know what he was going to say now; after the hearing he hadn't said anything helpful, and eventually rushed her family out of the room before the boys started to suggest she start 'the revolution'. When they were alone again, she hadn't spoken to him. She was too angry. Eventually, he had left her bedroom and let her sleep.

“Honey?” Jack's voice said tenderly.

She rolled over to turn her back to the door. There was nothing to say to him. She was still too angry—mostly at all the Swarii in general. She argued that Jack could have put up more of a fight for her, even if there was nothing he could really do. He just stood by, and let those horrible men degrade her for about four hours.

To avoid conversation, she closed her eyes to pretend to be asleep.

The weight on her mattress shifted as Jack sat down and put one of his large hands over her hip. “You've got to be hungry, Eleanor,” he sighed wearily.

She didn't respond, she merely curled her feet up and balled herself more into the fetal position.

“Talk to me, Babygirl,” Jack begged, only with a warning tone. Apparently, he didn't like to be ignored.

“Your whole species are a bunch of idiots who aren't worthy of technology as advanced as an electric toothbrush. You should all still be living out of caves. You'll be sorry I was fired. You'll all be sorry that you wouldn't let me finish my project. One day another plague will come to your door and it will wipe out the rest of you, and I won't feel sorry. My species has a pair of balls. Your species is opening the door to the Frians while treating us like garbage.”

It all sort of came out in a very sultry rant. She found herself spitting the words sourly into her pillow.

“When have I ever treated you like garbage?” he asked incredulously, realizing that he was part of the group she hated.

“When have you not, Jack?” she said, rolling over and sitting up on the bed. “You're sending the boys away to a damn school, like they're dumb kids or something.”

“Tim and Tom? They
are
kids,” he argued.

“See? There's my point. They're not. They're twenty-one on Earth. On Earth, we've had people take over the world at sixteen! We mature faster than you. They're not kids, they're men… Possibly with a small drinking problem, but men nonetheless. And Mike gets no respect either! You let Thorton punch him in the face!”

“Mike told Thorton where he could go and what he could do with his dead mother once he got there,” Jack replied evenly.

“Yeah, but people say stuff like that on Earth, Jack. It's not like Mike remembered that Thorton's mother was actually dead, or else he would have never said it. He didn't actually mean anything by it,” she replied with a roll of her eyes.

“What we say means something here, Baby. You know that,” he reminded patiently.

“Mike kept me from going insane when Graham didn't show up. He didn't get any credit,” she said bitterly.

Jack rubbed his hand soothingly over her knee. “Mike's a boy. Boys get over it; they fight. I'm thankful to him for watching you, but he did completely drop the ball. Your safety is the most important thing in the universe to me, and Mike's job was to keep you safe, not bring you along on half-baked rescue attempts.

“And the reason I'm sending away the boys is because they don't know anything about our culture, and although they speak Shal'ta to the point of being irritating, their use of our language is shoddy at best. They'll go to school for a couple of years and come out better for it—I'm not sending them into the desert, you know. I'm sending them to one of the best schools in the galaxy.”

“They don't want to go, Jack. Who are you to make them? Who do you think you are?”

“I'm the damn commander of the entire fleet, Eleanor, and one of the few people that know that a Swarii-Human crossbreed even exists.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Oh, right. You're a commander. I nearly forgot, since you just watched me get completely humiliated in a half-ass trial and just sat there like your lips were stapled and your ass was glued to the chair. I swear that half the time it looked like you were catching up on your emails,” she hissed.

There was a silence that made Ellie nervous; there was a thickness to the air between her and Jack, one that she wouldn’t have been surprised ending with a threat.

“You gave them all the fodder they needed to fire you, Eleanor. You would have still had your job if you minded your Ps and Qs.” Jack stood up from the bed, saying, “I think you need a little more time in your room to recall what happened before you go around blaming people. Remember that it wasn’t me who couldn’t follow the rules for a single moment since joining the service. It wasn’t me who stole a ship, it wasn’t me who spit in the eye of the culture that took me from bondage and brought me in as one of their own!”

She heard him slam the door behind him on his way out.

She sat for a long time, grinding her teeth as she stared at the door to the bedroom—not her own, but Jack's. Jack made her stay with him so she could be 'watched'. Somehow that made her angry; like she couldn't live on her own!

After stewing for a while, she began to miss Graham. Sure, he wouldn't have made her feel better. He was a Swarii, too, and there was probably nothing he could have done to save her from being fired even if he was able to go to the hearing. Instead, Graham was still at the hospital where they were trying to save the sight in one of his eyes. She missed his voice, though. She missed his warmth and the way he just held her when she needed to be held…

She picked up the communicator and put it to her ear. Fie answered the call on the other line. “Put Graham on,” Eleanor ordered immediately.

“Probably not the best idea,” Fie said in an uneasy voice. “He's pretty loopy. I just gave him another dose of—”

“Put him on the line anyway, Fie?” she begged miserably.

Fie sighed. He probably knew about what happened at the hearing. Knowing the speed of word-of-mouth on the ship, he probably knew everything that had happened nearly as quickly as she did. “Sure, hold on.”

She heard mumbling on the other end of the phone until she heard Graham’s voice. “Hello?”

Even if she hated the Swarii, she still loved Graham! Even the sound of his voice sounded so good… “Graham? It’s Ellie.”

“Ellie…?” came his confused drawl.

She heard Fie explain, “
Your wife, Eleanor, Captain.
”

“I’m married?” Graham asked Fie. “What? Who’s this?” he asked again on the communicator, confused.

Ellie wanted to laugh and cry at the same time. “I love you, Captain,” Ellie whispered into the phone with a hoarse voice.

“Jinga? What’s wrong, sweetheart?”

Ellie grimaced, realizing that she was being confused with Graham’s youngest sister—the one that had been the first to die in the plague. It made Ellie sick when she remembered Graham’s loss—how could they let the Frians take out everything they’d ever known and still not appreciate the work that Ellie wanted to do for them? “I love you, Graham,” she said again, swallowing loudly.

He gave a gentle, friendly laugh. “I love you too, Babygirl. Is mom with you?”

Yes, Graham’s mother had also died a couple of weeks after Jinga. “I gotta go.”

“Er-uh, okay, Honey. Give the communicator back to mommy, alright? You be a good girl.”

Ellie hung up the phone, feeling even worse than she did before she called. Whatever they had Graham on must have been extremely strong stuff. But then again, they were trying to stimulate regrowth in his ocular nerves, which wasn’t something Earthlings had learned to do yet, but the Swarii doctors had told her that the process was quite painful if they didn’t zap the patient with enough pain medication to drop an elephant. The medication had the ability to make Graham forget the last fifteen years; even
her
.

So, she had no one to drag comfort from. She cried herself to sleep, feeling alone, feeling rejected, feeling like the world was crashing down on her. She didn’t know what to do with herself now. What could she do without
work
? And for months she wouldn’t even have Graham!

There was nothing to be done. No hope. She was in a world that hated her and didn't respect what she could do. She had talents she couldn't use, and she was in the middle of a war, forced to watch the people she loved come out on the losing end. What she needed now was a miracle.

* * *

Eleanor wasn't certain when she went to sleep. She knew she was dreaming, and where she was in the dream: she had been on planet-side, on Swaraan, where Graham's family compound was situated like a beautiful castle with the views over a waterfall and a jungle. In her dream, she was watching as her half-Swarii children padded in the stream to climb up to the swinging rope to allow them to dive to the water pooling under the falls. It was warm there, and she was so happy… Until the blearing noise started coming from nowhere, piercing her ears, making her cry out!

She woke up as she was falling off of the bed, and the blearing noise was still there; even louder, and everywhere. She pressed her hands to her ears tightly, trying to block out the noise. The ship under her shook and rattled.

Somewhere through the sirens she could hear Jack's voice cry, “Eleanor!” and she felt his mighty hand grip her arm and heave her to her feet. He pulled her into the doorway and pressed her to his chest as he hovered over her, covering her head with his body. He put his other hand over his own as if expecting the whole ship to collapse around him.

She still had no idea what was going on, but eventually the rattling under and around them slowly stopped and then soon after the sirens quieted, leaving them in deafening silence, except for the pounding of their own eardrums and the sound of Jack's chest heaving with panicked breaths.

Jack got down on one knee. “Are you hurt? Are you okay?” he asked in a desperate manner, so quickly that she didn't know if she should shake her head or not.

“I'm okay, I'm okay,” she assured, nodding. “What was that?”

“I have no idea,” Jack said, “but I'm sure as hell going to find out!” He got up and marched over to the communicator and put it onto his ear and adjusted it to his own face. Soon, he was yelling into the receiver as Ellie watched, still dumbfounded, from the doorframe.

Eventually she got the courage to open the door and, on wobbly legs, walked to the twins' room. They were walking out of the room and met them in the hallway, wide-eyed and worried.

“What was that?” Tom asked, panting. “Did we hit a meteor or something?”

Jack suddenly appeared behind Ellie and put his hand on her shoulder and squeezed. “No, it wasn't a meteor. We had a run-in with a Frian vessel. They took off, but not before they took out a whole communicators tower!” He turned Ellie around so that she was facing him and grasped her face with both of his hands. “Are you okay if I go to work? I can stay if you need me, Babygirl. You only have to say the word. I'll understand if you're frightened… Or you can come with me, even! How about that?”

She shook her head. “No, I'm okay,” she assured. “You go. I want to make sure Graham, Mike and Penny are all okay.”

The admiral's face fell into a frown, exposing that he didn't really like her plan, but he didn't say anything against it. He stroked her cheeks with his thumbs and then dropped his hand into his pocket and pulled out a communicator. “Okay,” he allowed. “I want you to stay safe, you hear? Keep your communicator on you at all times, get me?” He put the communicator's ear-bud into her hands and closed her fingers around it.

She nodded. The admiral didn't waste any time heading out of the apartment and towards the mothership's mission control.

She and the twins left the apartment as well, and headed towards Penny and Thorton's apartment. “Tell me that doesn't happen often,” Tom begged. He still looked beyond freaked.

“It's
never
happened!” she replied earnestly.

Tim, who looked a little stoned, put his hands in his pockets, trolling along behind them. “It wouldn't have been so bad,” Tim mentioned. “You know… Dying out in space. I mean, that's sort of cool in a way! You know, a lot of people pay some buko bucks just trying to get their ashes out into orbit when they die…”

Ellie stopped and turned around just to roll her eyes at Tim before she spun back around and continued marching, trying to make calls at the same time. She'd been trying to get in touch with Fie since she'd left the apartment. He finally picked up the other end. “Graham's fine,” Fie said shortly. “I have injuries to take care of here, Kitten. I'll call you after.” After that, he hung up the phone.

She frowned and pulled the earbud from her ear and looked down at it, incredulous and annoyed. “If that was all the response I was gonna get from him, he could have at least taken my call earlier!” she huffed.

“Aliens, huh?” Tim agreed with a rueful snort. “They got a lot to learn about decency.” He leaned over Ellie's head and knocked casually on Penny's door.

The door opened very soon after the knock and Penny flew out of the opening, flinging her arms around Tim. “Are you guys okay?” she demanded. “Really scary, huh?”

“It sure beats the piss out of a cup of coffee!” Tom assured, rubbing at the back of his neck. “So that shit can just happen?” he asked Ellie. “You know—people can just
attack us
?”

Ellie raised an eyebrow. “We’re sort of fighting a war, Tom. That's part of my annoyance regarding the whole getting-fired thing,” Ellie reminded flatly. “How do they expect to win if they're not willing to bend some rules, huh? Riddle me that!”

Tim reached over and ruffled Ellie's hair, releasing himself from Penny's embrace. “Penny, come with us to go see how Mike's doing,” he invited, nodding in the direction of Mike's puny digs far on the other side of the ship.

“Mike's with Thorton; I already talked to him. They had to go work on something. Repairs, checks, I dunno—you know, mechanical crap,” she replied, waving her hand in the air. She looked tired, though, and her eyes looked puffy, as if she'd spent a lot of time crying or eating raw onions.