Page 43 of Secrets of the Void
"It's sweet and salty." She licked her lips, and he couldn't keep his eyes away from the little flicker of pink that was revealed. "I like it. Maybe not for an entire meal, but it is quite delicious."
"Do that again," he asked before he could stop himself.
"Do what?"
His eyes were so clearly on her mouth, what did she think he wanted? "Stick out your tongue."
And bless the little thing, she did so without hesitation. She stuck her tongue out and all of his gills suddenly ached with need. Her tongue was short, flat, and so pink it was startling. For all his years working with her kind, he had never realized that their tongues were pink.
He stuck out his tongue as well, showing her that his tongue was long and black. Both of them stared at each other in surprise, their eyes wide as they both looked at what was very obviously a different kind of appendage than the other had.
Then he realized how stupid they likely looked. Both of them with their tongues hanging out of their mouths.
He put his back in his mouth and cleared his throat. "Right, well. Try the next then. Urchin I've heard is very good to your people."
She sucked her tongue back in as well, and very gently picked up the black urchin he'd laid next to her. He'd already gutted the beast, leaving the remains inside that she had to scoop out with her fingers. Swallowing hard, she looked at him before looking back down at the urchin. "This?" she asked.
"Yes."
"I just..."
The yellow innards didn't look appetizing to him either, but they tasted good. "Yes," he repeated.
She didn't look excited about it, but she did scoop the gelatinous substance into her mouth and swallowed it. He watched her face go through many stages of intrigue, horror, disgust, and then a very odd expression that made him lunge away from her so he didn't get caught in the crossfire when she gagged.
Ellie managed to keep the food down, but he hadn’t thought she would. Then she pressed the back of her hand to her mouth and shook her head. "No. Not that one. Never that one."
And then she let out the most ungodly sound as air expelled from her mouth and she gagged again.
Proteus leaned forward and carefully removed the urchin. Dunking it into the water, he let it fall onto the ground so she wouldn't have to look at the black spines anymore. "Noted."
Pilot skittered forward and then pointed with a single leg at the other droids he had put together rapidly. They were all terrors of droids, barely more than legs and a shovel at the front. But they would serve their function very well.
It was a good distraction as he looked them over and then grumbled, "Good job, Pilot."
"They will resume your work then if you are done staring," Pilot muttered as he headed back to the console to get power on in this facility again.
Ellie cleared her throat once more, but this time he had a feeling she was trying not to laugh. Her watering eyes sparkled as she looked at him, and he had never been so enraptured with a human before. She was so beautiful it was shocking, really. Humans weren't supposed to be beautiful. They were tools to be used, functional and interesting to look at sometimes, but certainly never so stunning.
She smiled at him, and those eyes sparkled even more. "I think we're getting called back to work."
"I am being called back to work. You should rest."
Proteus touched her leg in the water. His hand wrapped all the way around her calf, and he should have just squeezed the flesh there and left it be. But he couldn't quite force himself to remove his grip.
He couldn't even feel her skin beneath the thick hide that covered her, and yet...
"I'm not sure I've ever met a human as fascinating as you," he murmured, staring up into her eyes as though they held an answer to questions he was afraid to ask. "Why is that?"
"I'm not all that human, I suppose."
"No, you very much are human. You hold all the things that I admired about them, all wrapped up in one person. Resilience, dedication, hope, the need to use your imagination. You are the blueprint of what your kind should and could be." He lifted his wet hand and skated the backs of his claws against her cheek. A single drop of water dripped down to her chin, hanging off the pointed tip like a sparkling diamond. "If only all humans were like you, Sisu. I think I would have killed a lot less of them."
He watched her eyes widen and knew she was struggling to comprehend how she was meant to feel about that.
His words were a compliment, though. Because he did wonder if others had been like her, would he have spared them in those early days? If he had seen the value of humanity earlier, if he had seen more of it in all the people he had interacted with, perhaps the future would have been very different.
Proteus had recognized those traits too late, after all. And by then, the damage had already been done.
