This is my fairytale ending. I never thought I’d get one of those. I didn’t think they actually existed in real life. But they do, and now I think about it, maybe they're not even rare. Maybe they just seem rare when you haven’t found yours yet. Maybe they’re even somehow cosmically inevitable.
Brawn and I feel right together. We have both fought for this. But our meeting was random and then circumstance threw us together. We have fought, both with one another and with those who sought to keep us apart. And now we’re together. Forever.
“There it is! There it is!”
I call out with excitement as his world comes into view, a red and blue orb twisting in the light of a violent golden sun. I find my eyes fogging with tears as I look down at it, not knowing what awaits me down there.
“Yes,” Brawn says. “There it is. This is my world. Half of it is eternally bathed in flame, the other half, eternally locked in ice. There’s quite a nice band in the middle, and that is where we live.”
We are traveling over that band, his ship casting a great shadow over the lands below. I can see dense jungles and forests giving way to farmland and then cities, then back to wilds.
“How wide is that? How much…”
He thinks for a second, somehow managing to interrupt my words with his thoughts. “In your human units, we’re talking three thousand miles wide, twenty-five thousand miles around. Seventy-five million square miles of civilization. Our species numbers around one billion souls.”
“Just one billion?”
“We are not as prolific as your species,” he says. “We only procreate when conditions are ideal. At all other times, copulation results in mere pleasure.”
“Oh, mere pleasure?” I smile at him and give him a little wink.
“Great pleasure, transcendent pleasure,” he growls, his voice all husky and sexy. It does things to me. It makes me weak. Hell, I think it might even be making me wet. Everything he does makes me want him. My hunger for Brawn is still insatiable, though I can no longer taste his seed. But right now we are on the bridge, and I am still fascinated by this new world, which grows even more interesting the closer we get.
I can see the flames on the one side of the planet, and the ice on the other. Down the middle, in a strip of land three thousand miles wide, there are villages and farms and the occasional city.
“Earth is covered in habitable land. Surely most worlds have more than this. Why do you stay here?”
He looks around for a moment, his golden gaze taking it all in. He smiles, his fangs longer and sharper in that expression of pride and glee.
“Home can only be found where home is. This is where my people were born. This is the soil from which their bones were formed. This is the air their new lungs first breathed. Being here matters.”
“That’s quite beautiful. I don’t feel that way about the planet I came from.”
But I’m lying. I miss Earth. I miss seeing green trees, and blue sky, yellow sand and grey concrete. Never thought I’d miss concrete. I guess it’s too late now. I’ll never go back to that planet, and even if I did, I am sure that I would be arrested on sight. This is my world, one that suits me, this narrow line of beauty and fertility between two polar opposites.
“Are you ready?”
I take his hand and smile into his eyes. “Yes. So yes.”
Whatever happens after we land doesn’t matter because I already have absolutely everything I could ever want and ever need. Brawn once promised me he would save me. I thought that he was saying he would change me, but that’s never what he meant. He didn’t change who I was, he showed me what I could have.
He has not been a perfect mate. He has been an abductor. He has been an addiction. He made me worry, and wonder, and work for him. But I was not easy either. When we first met, I could give him nothing but rebellion. I was so angry, and not just at him. I was angry at everything. I had been angry for years. I’m not angry anymore. I’ve been through so much. I’ve been alien abducted twice. I’ve been cared for by two separate species, both of which wanted the best for me.
I have finally seen the love in the universe that people used to blather on about incessantly while I stared at them and waited for them to stop talking. I feel it all around me, and more importantly, I feel it for Brawn.
He came for me. Twice. Maybe the first time was an accident, but everything that happened afterward was no accident. He could have chosen any mate. He could have anybody in the universe. And he chose me.