Work Text:
It hasn’t been long since Dek and Thia and Bud left Yautja Prime; by Earth reckoning, barely half a year since they left that barren planet, since Dek was granted formal, adult, Blooded status by his terrifying mother (and Thia has spent plenty of time since thinking about her, at least two full heads taller than Dek and twice as wide, and the heartstopping minute she spent appraising Dek and the headless corpse of his sire before slowly nodding her approval. They hadn’t waited around to see if the remainder of Dek’s birth clan felt like testing that judgement once his mother left). Since then, their tiny clan has been wandering through space, both Dek and Thia hunting in their own way.
Dek finds his way by the computer in Kwei’s ship, which still holds the coordinates of all planets known to the Yautja and a helpful list of worthy hunts on each one. Dek doesn’t take Thia on his hunts, perhaps still needing to prove that he can find his own way or maybe just thinking she would scare off the wildlife chattering the whole time. Instead, she sets out by herself on each new planet, staying within a few klicks of the ship but learning as much as she can about the new life-forms she encounters. She had never been able to follow Tessa into the field on Genna except the once; her job was to stay behind at base running the labs and doing analysis, but she had wanted so badly to experience Genna for herself. Each time Tessa returned from one of her outings, Thia greedily read her logs over and over, cherishing every detail. She’d been so excited when Tessa finally allowed her to tag along on a real expedition. Of course, that had been the one where she got ripped in half. It had been the one where she met Dek, too, so–not a total loss.
On each planet, when Dek returns more or less drenched in some new creature’s vital fluids and carrying its head, Thia reluctantly wraps up her studies and boards the ship. As they travel to the next destination, she processes data from prior discoveries: drying flora and pinning insects and small animals, chemically analyzing samples, sketching pictures and diagrams from footage in her memory banks. She’s still getting used to not having a directive, and this is similar to what she did for Weyland-Yutani, but—this is what she’s good at, this is what she’s programmed for, this is her function. Doing this feels correct, somehow, even if the only authority she’s reporting back to is herself.
Kwei’s ship is top of the line but not particularly roomy, and after a few planets, Thia’s little bunk had begun to fill with stray samples and loose pages. When Dek saw there was no room left for her to lie down he disappeared wordlessly to clatter around in the largest room of the ship, where Kwei’s trophies were kept alongside Dek’s small but growing collection. Thia waited patiently to find out what he was doing, something she had gotten used to by now and found only mildly agonizing, and occupied herself playing fetch with Bud (an activity that Thia wanted to savor; it wasn’t going to last much longer, because Bud was getting too big to be galloping through the corridors of the ship).
After some time, Dek emerged and gently towed her along to reveal that he’d rearranged the trophies so that half the walls were empty.
“Now there is room for yours,” he declared, looking profoundly self-satisfied for some reason, and though Thia weakly protested that keeping everything in her bunk was fine—she doesn’t even sleep! She can run a recharge cycle standing up!—he refused to budge until Thia had displayed all her “trophies” to his satisfaction. Now, one half of the room was crowded with enormous leering skulls and roughly tanned hides, and the remainder was lined with Thia’s own work.
Dek had lurked in the corner and watched while Thia arranged the display, occasionally huffing his disapproval. After one particularly eloquent grunt, Thia rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, I’m sorry, Weyland-Yutani must have forgotten to put any Yautja interior decorating modules in my library for some reason. How would you do it?”
“Put that one up higher,” Dek said immediately, “then arrange these ones top to bottom.” He stepped up behind Thia and reached past her to point at a preserved lizard, then a series of pinned insects in successive stages of metamorphosis. For some reason, Thia found herself holding her breath, processors whirring faster than usual at his proximity. Dek didn’t give any sign that he noticed her turmoil, staying a polite few inches away as he laconically described what he considered to be the aesthetically correct layout for a trophy display.
He is—almost solicitous, these days, as if he’s trying to make up for the time when he was slinging her around like a bag of tubers. Thia has decided she finds it annoying. She’s hardly breakable, and she’s had enough of careful distance for a lifetime. She spent so long secretly building a delicate relationship with Tessa under a shield of plausible deniability, only to watch it shatter under pressure. Now that she’s free to feel whatever she wants without worrying that she’ll be decommissioned, Thia wants to be effusive, to feel everything in extremes. She is discovering that she is an intense person by nature. But Dek is recovering from his own repression, and it’s clear he has a long way to go. (“Grief is weakness,” he’d said on Genna—how absurd! She wonders if all Yautja think that way, or if his clan was more inhibited than most). There’s no way to broach the subject without spooking him, so she waits and watches.
The watching, in particular, is getting to be a problem. Thia’s curiosity isn’t limited to the denizens of the planets they visit. Her favorite subject is Dek, and though she knows he’d hate her looking at him like that—though she tastes hot guilt in the back of her throat, remembers him strapped to Tessa’s examination table and howling in pain and rage and betrayal, the heartbreaking expression on his face—she can’t stop.
It’s in her programming, is the thing; written in Thia’s very core is the directive to learn about every creature she meets, to know each one down to its bones and beyond, to unpick the delicate relational web inside which they exist. It’s why Weyland-Yutani gave Thia that enhanced sensitivity, the double-sided blade that let her perform so effectively but also led her to betray her makers in the end. Empathy feeds curiosity in an endless positive feedback loop. The longer she knows Dek, the more she wants to know about him. Weyland-Yutani doesn’t know much about Yautja and if she was still under their control she likely would have been directed to do as much surveillance and analysis as possible, but it’s more than that. Thia has never experienced hunger, doesn’t even have a digestive system to speak of, but this yearning at her core–is this what hunger is like? She understands, now, why humans can become so desperate when they feel hungry.
Sometimes, when it gets bad, when he’s starting to get annoyed with her endless questions, Thia watches Dek while he sleeps. It quiets that yawning ache inside her, lets her continue with other work during the day cycle as a corner of her processors happily cycle through her growing library of Dek, analyzing his moods and behaviors and physiology. When Dek is awake, he shrugs off her fascination; getting answers out of him about his culture and biology is like pulling teeth. When he’s asleep, he can’t twitch away from her in self-conscious recrimination. She doesn’t touch—too risky; like any good warrior, he’s a light sleeper—but she thirstily drinks in everything she can. The colors of his skin, murky brown at first glance but rich with green and red undertones and somehow well-matched to seemingly any foliage or cover he lurks in. The textures of him, pebbled and scaled on the outsides of his arms and legs, smoother and less armored on his stomach, the lines of his body occasionally interrupted by ropy scars speaking to a life of dangerous hunts. The way his muscles attach and pull over his bones, subtly different than they would in a human. His thick fingers, lax in sleep but so nimble when he’s awake, capped by glossy jet-black claws narrowing to vicious points. His furrowed brows over his closed eyes, which when open are such an arresting molten gold, and which reflect even the tiniest glint of light like coins when it’s dark. The delicate, thin skin between his mandibles, the fine tracery of veins therein, the pristine ivory fangs. She still doesn’t have the story on what happened to the broken one–when she asked, his face crumpled and he clammed up for a full day. She hasn’t touched the subject since. When she gives in to herself at night she’ll hover over him silently, processors whirring as she integrates everything she can. She saves the footage to long-term data storage hidden behind a maze of mislabeled directories, as if she’s still with Weyland-Yutani, trying to hide her most precious memories where MU/TH/UR won’t find them.
Today, Dek has been gone for longer than he usually is on a hunt. Thia is on the verge of admitting to herself that she’s getting worried. Dek’s hunts take two to five days on average, with only a few outliers in Thia’s memory. In most of those outlier cases, the trophy he was hunting was more difficult than expected and he had trouble returning to the ship. This morning makes seven days he’s been gone. Dek is strong, but there’s plenty of stronger things out there, and one day he’ll be bested in combat–it’s what he wants, it’s what every Yautja wants. Thia keeps finding little feedback loops of concern eddying in the corners of her consciousness, whispering what if - what if - what if no matter how many times she terminates them.
Banishing the worry from her working memory yet again, Thia forces herself to focus on the work she planned for the day. The day they’d landed here, she’d taken footage of a pair of drab-looking fauna performing some kind of mating dance and had been delighted when they simultaneously flared out bright feathery ruffs, which had previously been hidden and flattened against their necks. Her first instinct had been to kill the animals for their hides, but nobody was looking over her shoulder anymore, and she no longer had to carefully hide evidence of her softness from MU/TH/UR, from–-she admitted it–-from Tessa. Instead she waited until the dance had ended and picked up a single shed feather from the trampled ground. Now, she pulls the footage into her workspace, irritably deleting another little worry spiral. She selects a particularly expressive frame of the two animals facing each other with ruffs flared wide, and her pencil blurs into motion up and down the page, neatly reproducing the image from her memory banks left to right like an archaic printer.
Thia straightens abruptly when she hears a loud thud, then the telltale hiss of the airlock. Finally, Dek is back. Another stupid little anxiety subroutine dissipates as she bounds over to greet him.
Her excitement doesn’t last long. Dek stumbles through the airlock and braces himself on the wall, swaying; when he straightens, he leaves a bright green handprint. He’s bleeding heavily from at least one wound on his torso. Thia feels a chill of fear pulse through her as her adrenals leak hormones without her permission.
“Dek! You’re hurt!” Thia exclaims, and her hands flutter around the wound. “Let me help you, that looks like it needs bandaging-–wow, it’s deep–what is that, a bite?--can I just–”
To her shock, before Thia’s hands can land on him, Dek jerks back and gives a warning growl with his mandibles spread. He hasn’t pushed her off like that for months, she realizes with another chill.
“...Dek? What’s wrong?”
He looks slightly–-what is that, guilt? She compares the expression to her database, but it vanishes inside of a second as his eyes narrow and he clicks a warning. “Don’t touch me. I don’t need your help.”
Thia rolls her eyes. This again? “Dek, I thought we were past that. It’s not weakness to let me help you, it’s only–”
“I said I don’t need it!” he snarls, managing to push past her without touching. Despite the careful distance, Thia can feel heat radiating off him.
Thia says nothing, watching as Dek stalks past her and tosses down the trophy he’s been carrying, a head that looks like it might have belonged to some massive lizard. He’s not quite stumbling, but he walks stiffly. Something’s wrong with his gait. Is there an injury she can’t see?
Carefully, Thia edges closer to Dek as he irritably unloads the weapons he took with him. “You should go to the medbay, at least,” she says neutrally, noting a tiny flinch when Dek realizes she’s approached. So his senses aren’t as sharp as usual, either. Some kind of poison? “That’s a nasty wound. Did that thing get you?”
“It’s a jurr’tak. I was careless,” Dek growls. Thia doesn’t have that word in her language records, but dutifully logs it as referring to the head now dripping all over the floor.
“Medbay?” she says, pointedly, when Dek seems like he’s mostly finished pulling knives out of unlikely places on his person. He rolls his eyes but, with bad grace, allows Thia to herd him across the ship.
“Go on then, if you don’t want me to help,” Thia says when they arrive at the tiny medbay, glancing at the bite wound. It’s dripping fluorescent gore all down his chest and really does look nasty, though it’s hard to tell how serious any wound really is for a Yautja when they’re resilient enough to shrug off small-caliber bullets like wasp stings. At least it looks like he managed to keep it reasonably clean on the hike back to the ship.
The medbay is hardly worthy of the term, being essentially a glorified closet, but like most Yautja tech the healing unit itself is both astonishingly advanced and completely impenetrable to an outsider. Dek slinks past and clumsily pokes a few buttons on the side of the unit, keeping his body angled away from Thia, but instead of sitting down in the unit’s chair to be scanned he hesitates, swaying slightly, then picks up the handheld unit and starts sealing his wound that way. He grunts in pain as the ragged bite mark fills in with new flesh and braces himself on the wall with his free hand, leaving another green smear.
Thia narrows her eyes at Dek. Yautja don’t sweat, but he looks feverish. He’s flushed greenish around his face and neck, and breathing more quickly than usual–-panting to lower his internal temperature? He did seem unusually warm when he brushed past her earlier, even though Yautja already run hot. Consideringly, her eyes drop lower. Why’s he so determined to keep facing away from her?
“Dek,” Thia starts carefully as he drops the handheld unit back into its place with a clatter and reaches for a cloth. He gives a frustrated huff but doesn’t otherwise acknowledge her, contriving to appear extremely busy haphazardly wiping the remaining blood off his chest. “Forgive me, I’m not sure how this works for Yautja, but are you… going into heat?”
Dek stills, then-–too late-–throws her a panicked look and says “No!”
Scenting blood in the water, Thia presses, “You are, aren’t you? What happened on that hunt? Or is it a coincidence? Is it just mating season or something? Do we need to go back to Yautja Prime?”
“Just—go away,” Dek demands, but it’s too late. Thia bounces on the balls of her feet and waits, feeling shivery with adrenaline and something else, an emotion she can’t identify. Dek groans expressively, burying his face in his hands.
“...the jurr’tak is not the trophy I was hunting,” he finally grits out. “It ambushed me and caught me off guard. Its venom is,” here Dek visibly swallows and steels himself. “It is. Commonly used in the mating pits. To ensure. Performance.”
“Oh!” Thia says. “It’s an aphrodisiac!” She desperately wants a sample; anything that can affect the Yautja constitution is probably a remarkably deadly poison for most other species. She hopes the venom glands are in the head Dek brought back. Maybe he’ll let her dissect them out if she leaves the skull intact.
“I just have to wait it out. The effects will only last another few days. It’s not dangerous,” he says dismissively, still facing away from her. He’s trying to sound unaffected but the venom’s effects are obvious now that Thia knows what’s going on. She takes a few quiet steps up behind him, lightheaded and thrumming with something she’s never felt before.
“Do you really just have to wait it out?” she says from directly behind his shoulder, making him flinch again, oops. “Or… could I help you?”
At this, Dek turns halfway around to give her a disbelieving glare. “What.”
Thia’s heart is pounding in her chest cavity. She runs a diagnostic–what the hell is all that adrenaline for? She forcibly purges it, taking a deep breath and letting her fluids cycle. “I could help you.”
Dek is silent, staring at her. Thia feels like all her synthetic organs are about to leap out of her mouth, and thinks of the day they met. He’d kind of had a similar look on his face then. “Come on, even if you don’t need help, I can give it to you—like a tool, remember?” she says, chuckling a little at the memory. He’d been so bratty.
Dek snarls, but it’s not directed at her. “Thia. You are not a tool,” he huffs, glaring furiously into the corner. “I did not… on Genna, I did not realize. You. You are–”
Laughing, Thia rescues him. “Dek, I was joking. It’s okay, really. They built me as a tool, you know, that’s all I ever was for a long time. I thought, with Tessa…” she pauses, her mirth subsiding. “I started to think I was a person, with her. And I think I was. Maybe I always was. But I never knew what that meant, really, until I met you. You were… the first thing I wanted for myself other than Tessa, that wasn’t part of my programming. And I was supposed to interface with her anyway. You, I chose myself. Only myself.”
This was more honest than Thia had meant to be, and she feels uncomfortably exposed, but something’s changed in Dek’s face. He still looks mutinous, but it’s more on stubborn principle now than out of any real objection. When had she gotten so good at reading this alien face? She moves a little closer, and he shifts uneasily and nearly stumbles, obviously unsteady. “Sit down, Dek,” she urges, lifting her hand but not quite placing it on his shoulder; Dek, usually so solid, sways into her palm like a young sapling.
He’s shockingly hot to the touch, running even warmer than he usually does. Thia tsks and gently pushes him towards the chair, and to her surprise he goes easily. He thumps down into the seat, collapsing backward with his legs splayed and a funny, dazed look in his eyes. Thia’s gaze locks onto his stupid little loincloth, which is–-wow, she was right, he really had been keeping turned away for a reason, there’s clearly something going on under there. She’s been successfully keeping a lid on her own curiosity so far, but now she finds her mouth watering with the need to see, to touch, to-–to taste-–fuck, keep it together, Thia–-she doesn’t have any information on Yautja reproductive organs and customs and she’s been so good, she hasn’t asked him to strip for her even once, never even peeked when he bathed in streams, but this is too much, she needs to see–
Dek is regarding her as she struggles to get herself under control. “Thia,” he says, and when she forces her eyes up to his face, he flushes even greener than before as he asks “...are you even built for that?”
“Oh! Good question! You’re actually right, I don’t have any genitals,” Thia says brightly, and shimmies the pants of her skinsuit down (Dek chokes slightly) to display the smooth, unblemished skin at the apex of her thighs. “See? But it’s okay, I can still help even though I’m not a comfort model. I wasn’t always deployed on Genna, you know, I used to be on assignments with humans, and they never told me not to monitor the cameras, so I saw a bunch of things. They’re surprisingly versatile! I’ll use my mouth,” she finishes, and watches Dek process that as she pulls her pants back up. Well, she guesses it’s not surprising if Yautja haven’t invented oral sex, given the teeth situation.
She scoots a little farther forward, into the vee of Dek’s open thighs, and goes to her knees. She desperately wants to put her hands on him, but he still looks uncertain despite the bulge at his crotch making his physical need obvious. Thia says, trying not to sound too gentle despite the overwhelming fondness she feels, “Dek, it’s okay. You don’t like it, you pull me off and I’ll leave you alone for the next week and never mention it again.”
Dek takes a deep breath. Thia holds hers. She’s very close to him now, closer than she’s been since the days when he was hauling half of her across Genna’s deadly landscape. She can see the steel-cable tension in his huge shoulders, every twitch of his mandibles, all the subtle movements of his slightly glazed eyes as they track over her face. He is so beautiful. Thia had said on Genna that she never tired of the view; she feels now that she could stare at Dek for centuries and never tire of this view either.
“...Thia,” Dek says softly. “You’re sure?”
Her carbon-fiber heart stutters and melts under a wave of helpless affection. This enormous alien hunter, asking her if she’s sure. As if she wouldn’t happily bargain away a limb or two to do this. She is so close to him but she wants to be closer, to download and read his memories the way she could with Tessa, to catalog every single one of his organs down to the cellular level, to rip her torso open and keep him safe in her titanium ribcage forever.
Instead of saying any of that, Thia says “Yes, Dek. I’m sure,” and in a moment of inspiration she leans up, braces a hand on one of his muscular thighs (she’s finally touching him, really touching him for the first time in months, and has to partition off a neat fraction of her processing space to deal with the excitement), and brings her other hand up behind his thick neck to press her forehead to his. He gasps and her lips brush his mandibles. Unthinkingly, she flickers out her tongue. The partition gibbers and spits out garbled code as Dek leans into her, a little clumsy, panting with need.
Thia’s mouth is watering, which she hasn’t told it to do. She swallows the excess liquid and watches Dek’s eyes track downward to the movement of her throat. She slowly reaches down to remove his loincloth. “Okay?” she asks, pulling on the knots and letting them unravel.
Dek grunts.
“Nuh-uh,” Thia says admonishingly, removing her hands and sitting back. “Verbal consent, big guy.”
Dek rolls his eyes to the ceiling, which is astonishingly bratty for a man who managed to get sex poisoned. “Yes,” he grumbles, which would have been fine because Thia was mostly just fucking with him, but then he grinds out “…please,” and holy shit.
“Thank you!” Thia chirps as if she’s not going to be looping her recording of Dek begging for her to touch him until her CPU disintegrates, and returns to removing his clothes. She’s pretty sure that if she was a human her hands would be shaking, so it’s a relief to watch them smoothly undo the knots and pull the cloth aside without a single tremor.
As she’d suspected, he’s similar enough to a human, but different enough that her eyes widen in excitement. His cock, already hard and large enough to be slightly intimidating, is flanked by two bony plates and emerges from a pouch or sheath of some kind at his groin, which must be protected by the plates when it’s not in use. It’s wet, and as Thia catches her breath, she sees more slickness drip from the opening of the sheath. How interesting that the genitals are so well protected outside of coitus! Then again, of course the Yautja wouldn’t have such a weak point just dangling where anyone could kick it. Thia wonders where the sperm production happens; she doesn’t see any kind of testicular structure, so it must be internal. Yautja run very hot, so their genetic material is presumably more heat-tolerant than human sperm. Is there anything like a prostate in there, and is it accessible? She wants to take him apart from the inside out, and she’s terrified it shows.
“Oh, it’s so lovely,” Thia blurts, painfully sincere, and then winces. “Um, I mean, very masculine?” She glances up at Dek, who is giving her the flat look he usually reserves for her fifth indelicate question in a row about his upbringing. With a thrill, Thia belatedly realizes he has almost certainly never done this before.
There is an awkward two second pause, which for Dek is trivial and for Thia is absolute agony; at her advanced processing speed, she can simulate dozens of increasingly dire outcomes for this scenario in the time Dek can blink. What if he changes his mind? What if she’s completely ruined everything? Oh, there go her adrenals leaking terror into her system again, how do those keep slipping out of her control—
“...just get on with it,” Dek sighs, and it’s pure relief.
“Okay!” Thia says, and reaches forward without allowing herself any more time to overthink. She grips Dek firmly and strokes, and he exhales in a slow controlled hiss that only betrays how wild he feels under the surface. His eyes are wide, golden irises stark against his black sclera, and his cock twitches hard as she pushes her thumb up under the tip. Dek makes a tiny sound and then visibly restrains himself, swallowing hard. He feels incredible in her hand, heavy and thick and already wet enough from his own lubrication that she can slide her fist up and down with almost no resistance.
Thia’s body sways forward, but she stops herself for a moment to pick up Dek’s spasming hand and lay it on her head. “Like I said before–-if I do something you don’t like, just pull me off, okay? I won’t be offended!” she says cheerfully, and then gives in to her desire and leans in to mouth at the slick head of Dek’s cock, running her tongue across it, wrapping her lips around it in a soft kiss and then sliding down to suck gently. Dek chuffs in surprise and tightens his grip on her hair, claws digging into her scalp. Thia pauses, but he just pants for breath and doesn’t move to pull her off, so she continues her exploration.
Sucking him in deeper, Thia hollows her cheeks and hums to herself, then pulls back and pensively licks the shaft. The musky animal smell of him is so strong here, and she greedily logs the volatile molecules that make up Dek’s scent profile. Do all Yautja smell like this, or just him? It can’t be all of them, they can’t all be walking around smelling this incredible, that would be-–maybe it’s the aphrodisiac. Thia feels wild, more like a creature of meat and bone than she ever has. Under that intoxicating aroma, the actual taste of him is rich and salty and a little bitter. She rolls him around in her mouth, rubs the head against the silky insides of her cheeks, lets her tongue press hard into the bottom of the shaft; her eyes go half-lidded as she concentrates on capturing the sensory detail of the slight ridges there, and Dek exhales harshly.
Yautja have a higher pain tolerance than humans do, she remembers, so she allows her teeth to graze Dek’s shaft and is rewarded with a hard jolt of his hips before he recalls himself and settles, breathing hard. Those molten eyes are huge and shocked, and he catches his breath on an aborted syllable as if stopping himself on the verge of demanding she do it again. Gloating to herself, Thia starts on a steady rhythm of sucking that soon has Dek gasping as if he’s been sprinting, breath chirring softly on each exhale and hitching whenever she teases him lightly with her blunt teeth.
She has no gag reflex to speak of, so after a while Thia experimentally opens the back of her throat and sinks further onto Dek’s cock than before, swallowing him down into her fluttering throat. He’s thicker here and her mouth is forced open wider, enough that her jaw would be aching if it was organic. She thinks about just unhinging it but she would need to pull off first and she doesn’t think she can actually make herself do that right now. Dek groans, fisting his hands and definitely cutting his own skin open on those ridiculous talons. She swats at his free hand, and when he obediently uncurls his shaky fingers, she hums in approval, looking him right in the eye.
Dek looks undone, gasping for air, the green flush climbing higher than ever. He’s making a desperate clicking purr on every exhale, unable to stop himself. She likes seeing him like this, she decides; he’s so unflappable most of the time, and it’s satisfying knowing she’s the one who so thoroughly stripped him of his composure. She’s recording every scrap of data she can for later review, of course. There’s an electric feeling building inside her chest that she’s never experienced before. She records that too.
Feeling daring, Thia glances down at the base of Dek’s cock where it disappears into that exciting pouch or sheath that it presumably lives in. He’s still got a hand in her hair, clenched hard by this point though he hasn’t taken the initiative to guide her yet. He could stop her anytime, so she decides to take a risk. Deliberately swallowing, Thia brings up her hand to stroke around the slick base of Dek’s shaft where it emerges from the protective sheath. She feels another hot pulse of wetness ooze out as she rubs at the opening, which feels like a good sign; carefully, she pushes until her finger pops inside. She inhales through her nose in triumph and hears a shocked grunt from above, but she’s still not getting yanked off by the hair; in fact, Dek is hitching his hips slightly into her hand, as if he wants her deeper. Thia probes farther inside, stroking firmly into that slick hot cavity and still swallowing around the leaking cock in her mouth, and without warning Dek comes down her throat with a hoarse shout.
Thia fumbles to record this sensation too, hot and slick and bitter as Dek gasps and thrusts despite himself, and she slowly pulls off while making sure to swallow everything she can–-this is data, too, and while she doesn’t have a stomach she does have several different internal compartments to store samples where she can run tests on them with her inbuilt sensors. He keeps coming for what feels like minutes but is subjectively only a few seconds, and she savors every one, greedily capturing as much sensory data as she can; lets him finish pulsing on her tongue until she’s sure he’s done, lying limp on the chair and staring blankly at the ceiling of the medbay. She finally, regretfully lets him go, and he glances down just as she’s licking a stray drop off her chin. He shudders one more time, and his softening cock gives a valiant twitch. Thia’s reward center dispenses a little packet of dopamine for acquiring a new sample as her internals start automatically running tests, and she barely represses a shiver of her own.
This is a tipping point in the interaction, Thia knows. She has to stick the landing on this or Dek will overthink it and things will be awful for months and she’ll never get any closer to him than she is right now. She sits back slightly and cocks her head, trying to look like this was no big deal to her, not even a little bit earth-shattering, and she doesn’t even care if she never gets to do that again. She suppresses a hysterical giggle as her analytics subroutine helpfully informs her that the sample she just took has a pH of 8.74 and contains several molecules that pose a moderate to severe risk of poisoning if ingested by humans.
This clears her throat slightly and says, “Feel better?” then winces, because she sailed way past casual and she’s not sure if the desperate brightness in her tone made it through the translator.
Dek heaves a massive breath, his unfocused gaze flitting onto her face and then softening in a display that surely nobody else in the universe has seen from a Yautja. He’s looking at her like–like… she doesn’t have an analogue for this expression in her catalog. She takes a snapshot for later analysis. It makes her chest feel warm. (Or is that the–)
“If mating is anything like that,” he says at last, “no wonder all the young bloods fight so hard for it in the pits.”
Despite her bowstring tension, Thia laughs, and finds it veers a little wild. He really hadn’t ever done that before. “Was that a joke? Are you joking right now? You can’t do that, you’re—you’ve barely even stopped bleeding!”
Dek shrugs. “Barely stopped is still stopped.”
Thia scoldingly smacks his thigh at 5% strength (which is still a not insignificant amount of force) and feels his pelvic muscles twitch around her finger. He gasps a little. “Ah, sorry, sorry!” she says, pulling out, already missing the silky feeling of him around her. She watches, fascinated and slightly mournful, as his cock retracts slowly back inside of himself and the bony shielding plates settle back over the opening.
Dek seems to catch the look in Thia’s eye, and huffs disbelievingly. “Thia. I do not want to see a drawing of my genitals on the wall.”
“You won’t! I promise you won’t!” He won’t see it on the wall–-how ridiculous. She’ll be keeping them under the mattress of her bunk, and there will be more than just one. Contemplatively, she brings her finger to her mouth and licks it.
Dek looks, if possible, slightly disgusted. “Thia.”
“What?” she says defensively. “I’m built to gather information, all right?” Time for a redirect. “And–-and speaking of my functions, will you please take me on your hunt next time instead of nearly getting yourself killed? We’ve done this before! Aren’t you over the macho Yautja hunt alone thing?”
Dek scowls. “Yautja do hunt alone. You know this. Genna was different. I don’t need—“ he catches Thia’s dangerous expression and snaps his mouth shut before he can say I don’t need your help. “…a hunting partner,” he finishes, somewhat lamely.
Thia looks down at her lap. He doesn’t, not really; but that’s not the point. Maybe she can try honesty, for once. “I used to miss Tessa when she went on expeditions,” she said quietly. “But, more than that… I was jealous. I wanted to be out there with her. I wanted to see things with her, to fight with her. Dek, you can hunt alone, you can even die alone, but—wouldn’t it be nicer not to?”
There’s a pause, and Thia blurts, “I missed you and I worried about you and I want to see you hunt again,” then covers her own face in a rush of mortification.
After a pause, Thia hears the creak of the chair as Dek leans forward and feels a puff of warm air ruffle her hair as he sighs. Clawed hands grip her wrists and draw her hands away from her face. “Thia. I’m sorry.”
…what? “What?” she says, blinking.
“I have been… a coward, I think,” Dek says thoughtfully, looking over her head into the middle distance. “I used to hunt with Kwei. Always. I miss him, I… I grieve him. I have thought that if I hunt with you, if I… replace him with you, I betray him.”
Thia looks at him. This is probably the most words Dek has said to her in a row about Kwei since Genna.
Dek’s gaze returns to Thia, filling again with that strange softness. “He would have liked you. He would have enjoyed hunting with you. And you—“ here Dek’s shoulders shake a little and he clicks rapidly, a Yautja laugh. “You would have watched him, instead of me. He was a better specimen.”
Thia’s eyes widen in horror. “You know about that?” she yelps.
Dek chitters some more at her expense, leaning back again. “I would be a poor hunter indeed if I didn’t notice you stalking me every other night!”
Fuck. There’s no salvaging this. Thia buries her face in Dek’s powerful thigh, since it’s right there and she might never get another chance. It’s ridiculously hard and muscular and comforting. “I’m sorry,” she says, a little muffled. “I know you hate it, I—“
Dek’s warm hand lands back on Thia’s head and pats it consideringly. He’s miscalculated the amount of force to use for a pat, so it’s more like he lightly smacks her several times, but it’s the thought that counts. “I do not hate it,” he rumbles. “When it’s you. You can… keep looking. If you want.”
Thia turns her head to look at him with one eye, nearly shivering with joy and relief. He’s flushing green again, but when his eyes flick down to meet hers, they are sincere. She pushes her luck. “Can I have a blood sample too?”
“Thia.”
“Ugh! Fine, keep all your blood to yourself. Anyway, you’re wrong about one thing,” Thia says. “I would have liked to meet Kwei, but… you’re my favorite specimen, you know. The best. There’s nobody else I’d rather look at.”
Dek draws a surprised breath and his face does something Thia can only describe as melty. It looks like he’s about to say something, but it is at this moment that Bud ambles past the doorway, holding the juur’tak’s still-dripping head in her jaws and trying to look innocent. “HEY,” he snaps instead, and launches himself after her as she breaks into a playful run. “Bud, that is not for eating! Drop it. DROP IT. BUD—“
Thia, still kneeling on the floor in the medbay, exhales and lets her shoulders relax. Their little clan isn’t falling apart over this. And, perhaps more importantly–Thia rises to her feet to go and help corner Bud, and finds herself smiling a huge and irrepressible grin–she’s pretty sure Dek’s got an actual bone in his cock and she has to get her hands back on it as soon as she can.