Shinesman: Ruminations
by K.Huntsman
released 28th April 2000

 

Hope lifted his head off the pillow and studied the person lying next to him. Matsumoto's face was relaxed in sleep. His dark hair was in wild disarray and his face hinted at his sweet, childlike nature, though the curves of childhood were now beginning to disappear from that visage.

Hope suppressed a sigh. Earthlings aged so fast, and there was nothing Ropeless or Lafuure could do to make an exception even in Matsumoto's case.

Lafuure....

He glanced beyond Matsumoto and saw the scientist resting her head on Matsumoto's shoulder. Her face, too, was sweet in sleep. But, then, that was to be expected of Sekito's sister.

The decision to become involved in this triad had taken a lot of thought for Hope. While he was, on one hand, genuinely obliged to either kill or love Matsumoto, he certainly had had no such tie involving Sekito's sister and had frankly not wanted one. But Matsumoto had been head over heels in love with Lafuure and she with him. Hope wasn't selfish enough to want to deliberately hurt either of them, though he was selfish enough to want Matsumoto for himself once he'd found he couldn't bring himself to kill the Earthling.

But once he'd found out just how short Earthlings' lives were....

He'd had to act before he lost Matsumoto to age and human frailty. And if the price of having Matsumoto was also having Lafuure, he accepted that.

Sekito's sister had presented no objections to the only honorable solution to the situation. She, as a Voicean, understood completely the implications of royal and, hence, planetary honor. She had accepted completely the necessity of Matsumoto becoming Hope's Queen and of herself, as Matsumoto's intended, also becoming such.

No, the objections had come from Matsumoto himself. He was an Earthling and hadn't comprehended the weight of the situation. It had taken a tome (translated from Voicean to Japanese) about the few members of the royal family who had failed to fulfill their duty to get him to understand.

Hope had never seen Matsumoto so white.

In the eyes of Earth law (an inferior thing, Hope mentally snorted), Kasahara Hitomi had married Matsumoto Hiroya, with Sasaki Suguru standing as best man at the ceremony, and the bride's brother, Seki Akihito, giving her away. In the eyes of Voice, however, King Hope Saliya D'Zion had taken Hiroya Matsumoto as his first Queen and Lafuure Hirona Perseid as his second Queen. It worked well enough except for the commute, as Matsumoto couldn't give up being a salaryman and Hope couldn't give up ruling his world even if he had trusted his sister to do it properly during an extended leave of absence.

The Earth marriage had come first, of course. Hope had no illusions that his two spouses didn't love one another very deeply, and he had been perfectly willing to grant them a few months' reprieve before inserting himself into that physical relationship. Indeed, he had (honorably) waited so long that Matsumoto had come to him and asked worriedly if he'd forgotten about it.

It had felt very strange, that first night, to completely bare himself to someone else... let alone two someone elses.

Hope traced a finger lightly along the curve of Matsumoto's ear. Matsumoto hadn't found Hope strange at all, though Hope had caught a quiver of surprise from Lafuure about his deformity that first moment when he had removed the ornamental head armor. Still, she managed to accept. Matsumoto, of course, with his human sensibilities, hadn't even considered that Hope was odd. He'd seemed surprised when it had been explained to him later.

That first night... it had been sweet and intense and all that the naive ruler could have wanted. Hope hadn't felt once that he was an interruption between the two, or that he didn't belong. And though he knew that Matsumoto and Lafuure were sometimes with one another without him... he couldn't object. Not against the smile of happiness on Matsumoto's face. Anything that made Matsumoto happy was good. Earthlings had such a short time to be happy in.

He and Lafuure had made a tentative agreement with one another regarding the day when Matsumoto no longer slept between them. After all, Hope would still be King, and Lafuure would spend several centuries as his Queen....

And she, too, had seen his bare skin, so he couldn't help loving her, at least a little. But she was not Matsumoto.

 

Hiroya woke to the feeling of being watched.

"Sasaki-kun?" he asked the pair of blue-gray-green eyes which were fixed on his face.

"It's nothing," that other murmured, shaking his head. "Go back to sleep, Matsumoto."

"You don't stay awake all night for 'nothing'," Hiroya whispered, feeling his wife's sleeping weight on one shoulder. "What's wrong?" He deliberated for a moment, then added the name he rarely used, "Hope."

The alien king flushed at that name, one Hiroya valued and used only in the most intimate of situations. "It's... nothing anything can be done about," he hedged. "Nothing you can fix... Hiroya."

Hiroya freed an arm from the sheets and raised it to twist fingers in Hope's long hair, silken strands gliding between the pads of his fingertips. "My aging so much faster," he guessed.

Hope looked away. "Yeah."

He didn't sound happy.

Hiroya gently tugged on the hair he held, and Hope followed that motion, laying a head down on his free shoulder. "I'm sorry," Hiroya whispered.

It had been a rather large surprise to find out that Voiceans lived about ten times longer than Earth people. Lafuure and Hope would still be young and fresh when Hiroya was old and then gone. And if that hurt him, he could only imagine how they felt.

But it was a Fact of Life, one which nothing would change. Protesting the unfairness did no good.

"So am I," Hope returned.

Hiroya stroked the smooth skin of the other's back. "That's a long way in the future," he comforted. "Let's not think of that now. You'll have me for my entire life, and I intend it to be a long one, for an Earthling."

Hope gave a semi-muffled snort at that, and Hiroya felt a brief wetness burning at his shoulder. But it wasn't too long until the Voicean king's breathing smoothed out and deepened as he fell asleep.

Hiroya held out a few minutes longer, but he had a big meeting the next morning with Shinichirou-san of Tokyo Electric and he needed sleep to prepare for that. His eyelids slid shut, and as he slipped under into slumber, his final murmur into the air was "I'm sorry... Kasahara-san... Sasaki-kun."

 

Lafuure waited a long time until she was sure both men were asleep before raising her head to regard them. She smiled at what she saw. Hiroya, so strong and sweet, uncountably rare, and Hope, so gentle and loving, his masks dropped in sleep. Their heads tilted together, the king held lovingly in his spouse's arm. She reached out a hand to brush wisps of bangs away from their faces.

Her fingers revealed curved ears.

On Voice misshapen ears tended to reveal a genetic weakness of inbreeding, but on Earth these were normal. She considered her own ears, feathered and warm, and the diminutive, twisted ones of her two husbands. She couldn't help the aesthetic she had been born and raised to, but such things no longer seemed so strange to her eyes after spending time on Earth. Still, she hoped that a child would inherit her ears.

If there could be a child.

Lafuure's hands stole to her flat belly as her mouth curved down in worry. Voiceans had so much longer to live that their biological cycles came far less frequently than Earthlings'. Her last time of fertility had come shortly before her marriage to Matsumoto, almost three years before. Now it was almost time for her next cycle and she was hoping against the odds that she would be able to conceive.

No one knew if the people of Voice and the people of Earth could interbreed, and if any theoretical offspring would themselves be fertile.

"Something of you to hold in my arms," she whispered. "A child through which you will live forever, Hiroya."

There would be so few chances. Less than twenty, in all probability. Each chance that slipped past was three years fewer that the child would know his or her father, three years fewer that Hiroya would get to spend with his offspring.

Lafuure desperately wanted Matsumoto's child, and time was not her friend.

And if she couldn't conceive, if Earthlings and Voiceans were too different....

Lafuure hid her tears in the pillow. Please, she prayed to her ancestors, please, let me bear Hiroya's child. He will be gone so soon and that child will be all I have left of him.

Please....

 

Author's Notes: My Shinesman interest is the fault of Sionna and Melinda. The fact that I'm actually writing stories about the series is Thea's fault. But at least she edited for me. ^^

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