Accident

Becken met Ano entirely by mistake on the waterfront of Traxton VI in the Saxic Galaxy. More accurately, Becken met Ano entirely by accident on the waterfront of Traxton VI, because there was just no other word for explaining how she got shoved out of a bar door, tripped by a random passerby and promptly catapulted straight into his arms when he’d only been standing there wondering what all the ruckus was about and where the closest drink was.

Looking back on it, he’d wondered more than once if she’d planned it somehow. She hadn’t acted a bit surprised to find herself leaning back in his arms looking up at him when she’d been standing on her own two feet a moment ago.

The normal etiquette for this kind of situation generally included embarrassed thanks and an awkward parting and nothing more. And that was probably how it would have gone if Ano’s weight hadn’t thrown Becken off-balance and sent them both crashing off the dock into the purple water below. The water was warm and shallow, but being tackled and subsequently soaked by a complete stranger when he hadn’t even gotten his first drink yet was insane enough to make the whole thing seem a lot funnier than it would have been otherwise.

She pushed her damp hair out of her eyes and smiled at him, ignoring the knee-deep water they were standing in. “Hi,” she said easily.

For a moment he just stared at her…and then he started laughing. They stood there for a good five minutes in the water, laughing themselves silly and getting worried looks from passing strangers. Becken couldn’t remember the last time he’d had more fun.

After they both managed to collect themselves, Ano ended up apologizing by paying for drinks at the nearest bar neither of them had been thrown out of. At the time, that was the only kind of apology Becken would have accepted anyway. It wasn’t until their second round of Katlantian gin that introductions were finally made. For perhaps the only time in his history, Becken was the one who initiated them. He held out a giant black hand and looked her squarely in her brilliantly green eyes. “Becken.”

She simply smiled and returned both the handclasp and the gaze and Becken was struck that he was looking at one of the last Almarians in any of the twelve known galaxies as she responded, “Ano. You ever have an idea that just won’t leave you alone, Becken? Something to live for?”

Becken hadn’t had very many ideas that weren’t inspired by the bottom of a glass for what felt like a lifetime. “Can’t say I have,” he rumbled back, not entirely sure why he was being honest.

Ano grinned wryly into her glass and swirled the last of her drink around, which was the exact same shade of blue as her hair. “Well if you’re free, then…” her green eyes came up to lock with his dark ones again and in that moment, Becken realized that he would say yes regardless of what she asked. She tilted her head at him and put her drink down. “Want to help me with mine?”

Becken drained his glass, unaware that it would be the last one he’d touch for close to eighteen Cycles, and set it down. “Sure. I have nothing else to do.” The words were a pact between them, and from the moment he uttered them Becken understood somewhere deep inside himself that his life had changed.

They went for a walk underneath the twinkling green sky. Word by word, Ano painted a picture of a place where dreams came true and the universe was what you made it and where the two of them would become very, very rich. And because he felt completely helpless to ever tell this woman–this Almarian who looked at him instead of through him—no to anything, he told her that they would do it. Together. Somewhere out in the stars, they would create Paradise.

Ano laughed and threaded her arm through his, looking up at the stars. “We need a few more people to help, you know.”

He looked down at her because she was more interesting than the sky. “Who?”

She shrugged and started walking. “We’ll know when we find them.”

Becken looked after her for a second, unfamiliar with the feeling building in his cold chest. He was pretty sure that for the first time in his life, he might actually love something. The black man innately understood that Ano spent more time dwelling on the way things should work than the way things really happened. He knew without being told that this angel who’d just turned his world upside down needed protecting, needed watching after. He had the sudden insight that maybe–just maybe–he’d been destined for the job.

So he looked down at her and smiled; the expression was one he hadn’t used in a very long time; especially not twice in one day. “Of course we will,” he said simply. Ano walked on, and Becken followed.

It had been that way ever since.

Still

Triyankast was never completely sure whether Ano and Becken set him up the day he met them or if some insane coincidence worked it out so that he just happened to get caught pick pocketing from the one being in the twelve galaxies who had the ability to change his life forever. He liked to think it was the first one, because the second one was just too scary to really consider for long without getting a headache.

In any case, it happened. Right in the middle of a crowded, noisy street in Lukka, the second-largest city in the Colona Galaxy, as a matter of fact.

Tri had been leaning casually against a fruit stand as he took his time to find the perfect mark. He needed money for food and a ticket to anywhere but where he currently was, and it took a practiced eye to find just the right person to pinch it from.

The instant she stepped out of the store, he saw her; it only took him a second to choose the woman with the blue hair as his mark, if for no other reason than she’d be easy to spot in the surrounding throng.

She looked nervous and lost, craning her head around like she was trying to find someone. (Looking back on it, Tri knew that it had to be a setup just because of that. He’d never once seen Ano lost or nervous since.)

One of her hands was loosely hovering by her left pocket, which was obviously where her valuables were stored. From her state of dress (classy but not flashy) and the rings on her fingers (understated but rather expensive), Tri figured that those valuables were probably pretty significant. She looked like an easy target.

The accomplished thief pocketed a piece of fruit for later and joined the mass of sentience, putting his head down and blending in with practiced ease. At the nearest corner he stopped and waited until his mark came abreast of him. A bump, a grab, and a seemingly sincere “Sorry!” later, Tri palmed her platinum credit disc and turned, smiling widely, to spend it somewhere.

For almost an entire second, he thought he’d gotten away with it. Then a massive black hand fell on his shoulder and spun him around to reveal an equally massive black man who stared down at him with threatening dark eyes. “Very smooth,” the man rumbled with a voice that matched his stature.

Triyankast’s brain went blank for possibly the first time in his life. His mouth opened and closed a few times before he finally gave up on excuses and smiled winningly. “I thought so. Feel like rewarding me for my prowess?”

The man plucked the stolen credit disc from Tri’s hand and held it out to his side between two fingers. The blue-haired woman who owned it reached out to take it and pocket it again, sidling up to stand next to her rescuer. It was only as the two exchanged an amused look that Tri realized they knew each other.

The young thief figured he had nothing left to lose and so he smiled brightly at his former victim. “Hi there!” Then he saw her green eyes and made the connection to the blue hair and the money and realized that he’d just tried to rob one of the last Almarians in existence. This was a seriously bad day, even for him.

She cocked her head at him and those bright eyes fixed on him, like she was seeing past his smile into his brain. It struck Tri quite suddenly that she was the only being on the street that looked comfortable standing completely still. She was also one of the only people he’d ever met who looked right at him instead of past him. He found, to his surprise, that he respected that.

She had savvy. Instinctively, Tri knew something about Ano that no one else would ever suspect: she’d been out on the streets, and however she’d managed to live through it, she must have been good at it to end up this confident and to have this massive man follow at her heels.

Suddenly she moved again, her head righting itself and her eyes sparkling like they’d just had an entire conversation and she was pleased with the results. “What’s your name?” Her accent was unusual, and highly cultured.

A hundred phony identities danced across his mind and he almost used every one of them. But for some reason he would never be able to fully explain, Tri looked her square in the eye and told the truth. “Triyankast. Tri, for people who get sick of yelling the entire thing.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “I’m Ano, and this is Becken. We have a proposition for you.”

This was not at all the day he’d expected to be having. “What kind of proposition are we talking about?”

Ano smiled at him again, and it was the kind of smile that said she already knew exactly what was going to happen and she was just humoring him by filling him in. “You’re going to come with us, and I’m going to buy you lunch.”

Tri was downright curious now, but he wasn’t stupid. “Am I going to end up in prison right after that?”

“I wasn’t planning on it, no.”

Becken’s mouth opened, Ano glared at him and he snapped it shut again. She gave Tri a look that was disturbingly sincere.

For some reason he actually believed her. “I can’t argue with that. What’s the catch?”

The Almarian traded a long glance with Becken and then her green gaze shifted back to this new arrival. “I’m going to offer you a job. And you’re going to take it.”

And of course that’s exactly what happened, for reasons Tri still didn’t understand. All he knew was that because of that day, his life changed totally and completely. He never learned to like Becken–mostly because the threatening look in the man’s dark eyes never really went away. He did, however, learn to like Ano straight away. And from the first time he called the Almarian “Boss” Tri realized that he’d follow her to the end of the galaxies and back if she asked him to.

Meeting Jenny a Cycle later certainly didn’t hurt, of course.

But still, from that moment in Lukka onward, whenever he was with Ano, Triyankast would always get the unnerving feeling that he was standing still while the rest of the galaxy rushed past him.

Lost

Becken found her sitting in the empty office on one of the corner couches. She didn’t move as he drew closer. Her eyes were open, staring into space, blank with the vision that comes from looking inside your own head. As far as he was concerned, Ano had already seen more of the inside of her mind than was really healthy.

Becken slowly sat beside her, the couch dipping slightly with his weight. He stayed silent, feeling the relief of settling into old rhythms. He’d missed her–more than he’d ever admit, probably even to himself.

For a long time they sat there silent, Ano staring off into the stars and Becken watching her from the corner of his eye. It was a routine that rang familiar from times long ago.

To a man that had never had one before, this felt like home.

Finally, he spoke, quiet enough to be to himself, even though it was to her. “Where were you?”

Her eyes were still vacant, and her voice was distant when she answered, “Remember where we met?”

“‘Course.” The apparent non-sequiter didn’t worry him. She was building up to something, and he let her.

“You weren’t there,” she said.

Becken’s brow furrowed as he half-turned to face her fully on the couch. “I wasn’t there when we met?”

“Not this time.”

He stared at her. “Now you’ve lost me.” That wasn’t an easy task, especially for her. His remark seemed to bring her out of herself a little, and she looked at him for the first time, if only fleetingly.

“I lost everyone,” she sighed. “I woke up in my old place–remember, that terrible room I had in the mining colony when we first met? And I had that awful old haircut. It was like the last 20 Cycles had never happened.”

Becken took a moment to process that. It wasn’t a pretty thought; most days, he tried to forget anything that didn’t have to do with the last 20 Cycles. He had a feeling Ano was the same way.

She continued, her voice getting stronger as she went. “So I went looking for you all. That street we found Tri in, that cafe where I bumped into Elim. Paradise wasn’t here, so I didn’t even know where to look to find Jenny.” At long last her troubled gaze came to meet his, and this time it held as her voice softened. “And then I went to Traxton, to the dock, and I told myself that if you weren’t there, I was giving up.”

She shook her head like she couldn’t believe what she was saying. “I stood right there where we ran into each other, and I just waited for something to happen.”

He knew what was coming now. His head was swimming a little from the implications of what she was saying. “Nothing did.”

“Nothing did,” she agreed. At long last her eyes cleared, and Becken saw her, maybe for the first time. And also for the first time, he saw himself reflected back, and he suddenly understood deep in his chest that this, here with her, really was home. She looked away, slightly sheepish, but her words still resonated in Becken’s chest. “That was all it took. I just…I gave up. It’s a scary thing, to get lost in your own head. If you hadn’t come for me, I don’t know what–” she couldn’t finish the sentence. Becken was glad; he didn’t want to hear what she would have said.

The large man leaned back, absorbing all of this. She’d said more than either of them had ever dared to over the course of their time together. He found himself glad that she had. “Glad it wasn’t me,” he rumbled.

She glanced over at him, understanding on her face. Despite the fact that they never talked about their pasts, Ano knew him better than anyone else. They both knew he would have ended up drinking himself into a virtual oblivion. Even seventeen Cycles of sober wouldn’t have protected him from life crumbling down around him.

Not for the first time, Becken decided that Ano was the stronger of the two of them, no matter how much muscle he had.

Ano’s brain was on a different track. Her eyes traced his face again with evident fondness. “Thank you.”

He tilted his head to look at her. “For what?”

She shrugged a little. “Nothing. Coming after me. Everything.”

For the second time in their history, Becken held out his hand to Ano, this Almarian that looked at him instead of through him. She took it, but this time he didn’t shake it. He just held it.

They sat there in the dark, hands joined, and Becken felt a sense of peace that was so alien is almost startled him.

“Welcome home,” he murmered.

Ano didn’t answer. Her eyes were closed, her breathing even.

Becken held her hand and watched her sleep.