Up for Adoption! Final Part

[WP] When aliens invade Earth, humans are seen as very fascinating creatures, but also confusing. The aliens decide to 'adopt' humans that are sad, scared, or alone as pets. You're trying to avoid your toxic family, who are determined to keep you around and beg an alien to 'adopt' you.

*****

Y'ggdrasog swore under his breath, before remembering himself and having the fabricator print out a few tissues for his guest. As he passed them to her, he broke the silence.

"If this is too painful for you, I don't blame you. Stop whenever you feel like it, my curiosity isn't worth causing you pain."

Kate wiped away the tears once more, shaking her head as she did.

"No. No, I'm- It's a relief, I think, to talk about this."

She was silent for a few moments before chuckling and continuing.

"...Even if my surrogate therapist has a damn-near unpronounceable name and looks like a 7-foot-tall cross between a praying mantis and a bipedal, glowing chameleon."

Y'ggdrasog was silent for a moment before leaning forward, clutching the table and making strange noises as his bioluminescence floundered about for a bit before landing on sunflower yellow and staying there for several seconds.

Kate was worried for a moment before realizing he was laughing. It was an odd sound, like sandpaper on stone mixed with something akin to a windchime in hurricane winds. Upon realizing this, she gave a genuine smile for the first time in days and giggled with him.

He wiped away a green teardrop from his eye and spoke.

"Ahaha, I needed that after all this horrific talk. ...But like I said, if this is too much for you-"

Her smile faded, as quickly as it came.

"Don't. I- I'm fine, ok? Don't worry about me."

He knew Kate was lying. She knew that he knew. But she pressed on regardless.

"...What hurt the most was that no one stood up for me. The cousins were silent whenever my father raised his voice. When I looked at mom, she... she just turned her head. Couldn't meet my gaze. They just let him do it. Let me be his chew toy, his verbal punching bag because they didn't want to risk gaining his ire as I had.

It came to a head on day 7, when I was going over our inventory of supplies for the 5th time in an hour. It was the only thing I could do to entertain myself besides counting the ceiling tiles. It was silent in the bunker save for my rearranging the cans and bottles in the storage closet, just barely audible clinks and scrapes, the sound of glass rattling against glass and metal sliding against the wood.

I heard a roar from behind me.

"SHUT UP!"

I jumped and started to turn, but then his hands gripped my throat.

"SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP!"

He was choking me from behind. My- m-my own father, trying to kill me, over a few tiny sounds.

For a few, agonizingly long seconds I was too shocked to do anything but clutch at the hands on my throat, wheezing for air, but then survival instincts took hold. I lurched forward, managing to slip out of his grip, took a desperate lungful and grabbed a glass bottle we had emptied a few days back before turning and smashing it against his face, breaking it into pieces.

He cried out in pain and clutched his face, but as I swung again he grabbed my arm with both hands and wrenched. I heard more than felt the horrific crack my bone made as it twisted into an unnatural angle before he grabbed the bottle from me and gouged it into my now-crooked limb.

I still had some adrenaline left flowing through me, dulling the pain, and knew I had to get out of there before it faded and the pain crippled me. With my good arm, I punched him in the face as hard as I could and ran past him as he clutched at the broken cartilage that was once his nose.

As I ran past my cousins, and my mom, it felt like time slowed. I looked at them, and their expressions... not one had so much as stood up to help me, to investigate what the noise and fuss were about, to even look at me. They just... j-just didn't care, as long as it wasn't them in his crosshairs."

Kate wiped away the tears from her face once more, before glancing out the viewport at the burning planet below.

"I escaped the bunker, heedless of radiation or other possible dangers- they certainly couldn't be worse than the hell I just escaped- and ran as far as I could before the pain overwhelmed me. I just sat in a ditch about 5 miles down the road from the farm, brain fogged- partly by the pain, but mostly by the grief. The grief of a daughter who lost her father. The man I once knew, I once loved, that took me to ballgames for my birthdays, who watched my god-awful poetry recitals in high school, who hugged me as I got my bachelor's diploma..."

The tears stopped, and her expression was one of dull, exhausted sorrow.

"...That man is dead. He was dead the minute he set foot in that precious fucking bunker of his."

She set down her (now mangled from clenching so hard) spoon and stared into the distance for a while before continuing.

"I passed out at some point. Then I woke up in a dark room with an alien standing over me, and... well. You know the rest."

Y'ggdrasog leaned back against the wall for support, his legs feeling like jelly. This was... so much worse than anything he had imagined. And his heart broke at what he had to say next.

"I... ...I hate myself for this, but- look. Standard protocol for injured civilians in a first contact scenario is to patch them up, then leave them with a relative, if possible-"

She stared at him for a moment with the eyes of one who has known far too much suffering for her youth and responded in the hollow, dead voice of one who cared not what happened to her anymore.

"If that's true, you may as well have let the infection kill me."

A flurry of colors glowed across his face, as he started and faltered sentence after sentence.

"I... I Can't- Look, it- I mean... I- I have no choice but to I'd be risking-"

Suddenly, his eyes went wide and he glowed a pure white.

"Wait... That just might- WAIT! Hold on, I need to check- just give me a second-"

Kate flinched from the sudden movement as he dived for a holo-tablet sitting nearby.

"What are you doing?!"

Y'ggdrasog ignored her, concentrating on scrolling through what looked to be some sort of massive form, chock full of bulleted lists and footnotes.

"...I swear to god if you're- I dunno, doing your taxes or something right now while I'm about to get sent back down to what will almost certainly be my death, I WILL-"

"YES!" Y'ggdrasog said, shoving the tablet into her good hand. "LOOK HERE!"

She frowned at the unfamiliar symbols. "I... I can't read this, it's just a bunch of squiggles and weird shapes."

"What? ...Oh spirits above, I'm sorry, I forgot, you're not- no implant for-"

Kate pinched the bridge of her nose, tossing the tablet back to him as he continued to stammer.

"You'd better start explaining real fast or I'll- I'll... ...When I think of something sufficiently bad, I'll DO IT!" she finished lamely.

He was silent for a moment, glowing bright blue with his head cocked to the side before composing himself.

"Uh- right. Um... Section 15a, subsection 45 of the 5th article-"

"Skip the legalese and get to the point."

"...When participating in an uplifting, a member of the uplifting team in question is allowed to choose between a credit-bonus or a choice piece of paraphernalia from the race in question, up to and including pets."

".....I'm not following."

"It doesn't have a hard definition for what constitutes a pet! It just says "a living being of your choice that you have formed an emotional attachment to, and that you are equipped to handle, house, and provide care to."

".......If you're suggesting what I think you're suggesting-" she began.

Y'ggdrasog's mandibles clacked together decisively.

"You won't have to go back."

She stared at him for a moment, face blank, as he continued to babble about how no, he didn't see her as his lesser, this was just to keep her safe, she'd be free to leave at any time and would have equal rights to any other individual in the collective and so on, his voice fading into the background as the most important part repeated over and over in her head.

You won't have to go back.

Her eyes filled with tears and she interrupted his rambling by flinging her good arm around him to pull him into a tight hug, starting to sob again. Muffled by his carapace-covered chest came two words that held the weight of the world in them.

“…Thank you..."

As the shock of the moment wore off, he smiled, closing his eyes and gently returning the hug, glowing a dull pink as he did so.

*****

THE END