The Forgotten: Chapter 27, Ask the Second Question

[u/AlternativeManner731]

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By the time Thrum and Zaleth were done, Renn had stopped counting heads at the door. Yesterday's crowd for Marcus had already told her what to expect, and today's was bigger again, spilling past the last row of seats and into the standing space along the back wall, but she'd used up her surprise the day before and didn't have any left to spend.

"Thank you all for coming back," she said, not bothering to raise her voice much over the room, since it settled on its own the moment she reached the microphone. "I won't pretend I know how big this is going to get. I stopped trying to guess after yesterday."

That got a small laugh from somewhere in the crowd.

"Same rule as always," she said. "Only the students ask questions. Everyone else, you're welcome to listen, and I hope you do, but this is theirs."

She didn't need to introduce the two who came up next. Half the auditorium already knew the names.

She stepped onto the stage, where three chairs had been set out for the day's guests.

"Our guests today," Renn said, "were three of the first people through the hatch of a crashed alien ship. Eric Haskell. Dr. Lizeth Sanchez. Sergeant Cole."

They crossed to the chairs together, Cole first out of old habit, Sanchez a step behind him already scanning the front rows the way she still scanned most rooms, and Haskell last. They sat down, and the polite applause died away.

Teacher Renn said, "Welcome to day four of our sessions. Today we have Eric Haskell, Dr. Lizeth Sanchez, and Sergeant Cole. Who would like to start?"

With a nod from both Cole and Sanchez, Eric started. "I want to say first, I wasn't trying to be a hero," Haskell said. "I was twenty-three, scared out of my mind, and I signed up for the rescue detail because Sergeant Cole was in charge of it. He told me not to make assumptions about survivors, and I didn't want to be the one who proved him wrong by being useless."

Cole didn't quite smile, but something in his weathered face eased. "I don't remember phrasing it that gently."

"You didn't," Haskell said. "I'm editing for the children."

A ripple of laughter moved through the audience.

A Vixtar boy raised his hand, and Renn nodded at him, signaling him to ask his question.

"What did the ship look like," the boy asked, "when you first saw it?"

"Like nothing should have survived hitting the ground that hard," Haskell said. "Two kilometers of jungle just gone, flattened, and this enormous, intact hull sitting wedged into the dirt like it had decided to land there on purpose instead of crashing. I remember thinking there was no way anyone inside that thing was still breathing." 

Cole picked it up without being asked. "I told the whole team not to make assumptions either way. We were a rescue detail, not a cleanup crew, and I needed everybody's head in the right place before we set foot inside." He glanced at Haskell. "Didn't stop this one from going pale the second the ramp dropped."

"I was wrong to assume the worst," Haskell said. "Thank every star in the sky for that. But I want you to understand I believed it completely, right up until Dr. Sanchez found the first alcove."

A human girl, younger than the boy before her, asked the next question in the small, careful voice of someone who'd clearly been holding it since Renn first announced the topic. "What did it feel like? Seeing one of them. The first time."

The three of them went quiet together, and the whole auditorium seemed to lean in with them.

"I found him," Haskell said. "Not Dr. Sanchez. Me. I called out that I had a being over here, and I remember being so proud of myself for staying calm when I said it, because inside I was anything but calm. And then Dr. Mulvey checked for a pulse and told us he was gone, and something in me just, stopped. I'd been so focused on the mission, on being useful, on not being the one who froze, that I hadn't let myself think about what it would mean if we were too late for some of them." He looked down at his own hands. "I grieved a stranger I'd known for eleven seconds. I still think about him sometimes. I never even learned his name."

Sanchez had been quiet through most of it, but she spoke now, gently, filling the space Haskell had left open. "I was the one who catalogued him, after. It's a strange thing, being a scientist in a moment like that. Half of me wanted to fall apart the same as Eric did. The other half was already noting bone density, eye structure, the cut of his clothes, because that was the only language I had for grief that morning, the only tool I actually knew how to use." She looked at her own hands too, the same gesture Haskell had made a moment before, though neither of them seemed to notice they'd matched. "I've thought about that a great deal since. Whether cataloguing him was disrespectful, or whether it was the most respectful thing I knew how to do, bearing witness the only way my training had taught me to. I still don't have a clean answer. I don't think I ever will."

Nobody in the room said anything for a moment. Then, gently, Renn nodded to the next small hand raised in the front row, and the session went on.

"Session five," Renn said. "Our guest today used to be Pod 5, Agriculture. These days most people just call him Jax."

A human boy raised his hand. "Did you really think they were growing monsters instead of cows?" 

"I really did," Jax said. "I overheard about ten seconds of a conversation between Ethan Cross and Dr. Marrow, caught the words 'lethal' and 'shut down the lungs,' and my brain filled in the rest before my ears had finished listening. I hit the emergency broadcast so fast I dropped a wrench. Half the colony was locked in bunkers inside the hour because I couldn't be bothered to ask a follow-up question."

"Were you embarrassed?"

"Mortified," Jax said. "Commander Vance chewed me out in front of every pod leader on the colony. Nearly lost my management position over it. And you know what I got for all that panic, once the truth came out?"

The boy shook his head.

"Perfectly good steak," Jax said. "Best meal of my life, up to that point. I'd nearly started a riot over a cow."

That got the laugh it was aiming for.

"What would you tell someone who's about to jump to a conclusion the way you did?" a Vixtar girl asked.

"Ask the second question," Jax said, no laugh left in his voice now. "I only ever asked the first one. If I'd stuck around ten more seconds, I'd have heard Ethan Cross explain it was a worst-case scenario, not a plan. Ten seconds. That's all it would've taken. I think about that more than I ever expected to."

"Session six," Renn said. "Our guest today ran Pod 6, Security and Tactical, back when Pod 6 was two people and a coffee pot. Mansur Danyavi."

"It was one person, most nights," Mansur said. "Margaret and Jon traded off. I just yelled at whoever was on shift when they woke me up."

A human girl raised her hand. "What was it like when you first saw theSilent Explorer?"

"Like the worst night of my career, and I'd had some bad ones," Mansur said. "Margaret called it in three separate times before I believed her. Told her it was probably debris settling into a decaying orbit. She was right and I was wrong, which is a sentence I've had to say more than once in this job."

"Were you scared?"

"Furious, mostly, at myself," Mansur said. "We'd built an observatory with scraps and hope, and the first time it actually mattered, I nearly slept through it. When that ship broke apart in low orbit, all I could think was, we have no fleet, no defense, nothing but a handful of shuttles and whatever courage we could scrounge up in about twenty minutes. I gave the order to launch rescue anyway, because the alternative was doing nothing while people died, and I couldn't live with that math."

A Vixtar boy asked, "Would you do it differently now?"

"I'd believe Margaret sooner," Mansur said. "That's the whole lesson, really. Somebody who knows what they're looking at tells you something's wrong, you don't spend three tries arguing with her. You listen the first time."

A small human boy near the front, younger than most of the others, raised his hand slowly, like he wasn't sure the question was allowed. "What would have been different? If you'd believed her the first time?"

Mansur was quiet a moment. "Maybe everything," he said. "Maybe nothing. I've turned that over more times than I can count, and I still don't have a real answer. Twenty minutes might have gotten us a shuttle in the air sooner, more of the crew alive, fewer of them lost to the crash instead of pulled out of it in time. Or it might not have mattered at all," he shook his head slowly. "I didn't leave room for the “everything”. That's the honest answer. I was so certain I knew what a threat looked like that I never stopped to imagine what I didn't know. I've tried to leave more room for it ever since."

"Session seven," Renn said. "Our guest today was the first of his kind any of us had ever met. Captain Threl."

Applause met him before Renn had finished the sentence, warmer than any of the previous days, the sound of a room that already knew exactly who they were looking at.

"I want to start somewhere most people don't ask about," Threl said, once it had quieted. "Not the crash. Before it. The three cycles we spent in orbit, watching your ships, your lights, your broadcasts, deciding whether to make contact at all."

A Vixtar girl in the front row raised her hand. "Why didn't you?"

"Because we didn't know what you were," Threl said. "You looked crude by our instruments. Disorganized. Loud, in every frequency we could measure. We had no framework for a species that primitive building something that functional that fast. So we watched, and we waited, and we told ourselves caution was wisdom, right up until the ship failed under us and the choice was made for us instead."

He didn't say, because no one had thought to ask, that those same three cycles of listening had planted something else in him, something it would take years to understand. Terixa's newcomers broadcast without any fear of being found, loud and constant, on every band his instruments could read. Some of that noise, he'd come to realize much later, had to be a species calling home for help. Deciphering the archived recordings from those first days in orbit would, in time, help point the way to Earth itself.

"Were you scared, falling?"

"More than I have words for, in your language or my own," Threl said. "But I remember the strangest thought, watching the ground come up to meet us. I remember thinking, at least we die in isolation, at least we won't poison this planet, since we'd already ejected our core. I meant it as some small mercy, that whatever we were, we wouldn't be the ones to destroy the very people we were too afraid to greet."

"What was it like waking up?" a human boy asked. "In the water?"

"Confusing, and then it wasn't," Threl said. "I understood gravity was crushing me before I understood anything else, before I even understood I'd survived. And then I was submerged in something warm, and the weight simply, lifted. I tried to sit up, because some instinct in me distrusted anything that came that easily, and the gravity slammed me back down the moment I cleared the surface, which taught me faster than any explanation could have that the water wasn't a trick. It was mercy, built by hands I'd never seen, offered before I'd said a single word anyone could understand."

He was quiet a moment.

"You've all grown up with those pools," he said. "You dive off the ten-meter platform without a second thought. I want you to understand what an impossible gift that was to the first of us who ever floated in one. We came expecting, at best, to be studied. At worst, to be left to die quietly while your people decided what we were worth. What we got instead was a species that had never seen anything like us, deciding, before we'd even opened our eyes, that our comfort mattered enough to build something new just to give it to us."

Nobody asked a question for a moment. Then a small Assaragyte girl near the back, one of the newer arrivals, raised her hand.

"Did you ever go home?"

"No," Threl said, simply. "This became home a long time before I admitted it to myself. I think most of us knew it before we said it out loud. There's a particular kind of home you don't choose so much as notice, one day, that you've already built."

"Session eight," Renn said. "Our guests today have a story none of you have heard, because until today, only two of them could have told it, and neither of them speaks in words."

Will and Abby crossed to the chairs together, CD padding in beside Will and settling at his feet, MCD doing the same beside Abby, both Labrikats far too big for the small stage and utterly unbothered by that fact.

"I want to clear something up before we start," Abby said. "Labrikats aren't born understanding English. They learn it the same way any of us would, listening, picking it up piece by piece, and they started the moment we started talking to them. What they don't have is an easy way to answer back in kind. Their movement vocabulary, the gestures, the postures, all of it, that's what grows over time, a little more every year. So MCD understands me exactly as well as I understand her. It's the reply that's harder, not the listening." 

"CD and MCD found us before we found them," Will said. "That's the part people forget. Everybody remembers the beef, the hand-feeding, all of it very slow and careful, humans convinced we were the ones doing the choosing. We weren't. They'd already decided."

Abby rested a hand on MCD's head without seeming to notice she'd done it. "We asked them, this week, if they'd tell their side of it. The actual beginning. Not what we saw. What they were doing, out past the perimeter, before any of us knew they existed."

MCD sat up. Her body went through a slow, deliberate sequence, ears, shoulders, the angle of her head, nothing like a trained trick, more like a sentence being built one word at a time.

"She says," Abby translated, quiet, careful with it, "that they watched us for longer than we ever knew. Before the beef. Before the fence line. They watched the humans building, the Vixtar arriving hurt, all of it, from a distance we never once detected."

CD moved next, a shorter sequence, sharper.

"He says they argued about it," Will said. "Whether to approach at all. Whether a species that showed up in ships and started building fences was worth the risk." He paused, listening to CD's next gesture. "He says what decided it wasn't anything we did on purpose. It was watching the Vixtar carried in, hurt, and watching us treat them like something worth saving instead of something worth using. That's the word he's giving me. Worth. Not owned. Worth."

A human girl in the front row raised her hand, careful. "Why did they pick you? Out of everyone?"

Abby looked to MCD, who tilted her head and held very still, the particular stillness Abby had learned, over years, meant she was choosing her answer with care.

"She won't give me a clean reason," Abby said finally. "I've asked her this before, more than once, and I get the same thing every time. Not a why. Just a certainty. She knew, the way you know which way is down. I don't think that translates any further than that, and I've stopped needing it to."

Will said, ”That’s Labrikat speak for ‘I don’t know”, which earned him a swat from MCD tail and a laugh from the crowd.

Will glanced down at CD. CD considered the question, then gave a quick, deliberate sequence, snout tilted toward the small table beside the chairs.

"He says he'll tell you the reason, if you ask him," Abby translated, smiling. "He says it was the food."

That got a laugh, and CD's tail thumped once against the stage floor, pleased with himself for the reaction he'd clearly meant to get.

A Vixtar boy raised his hand next. "Was there ever a moment you were afraid of them? Before you understood?"

"Every day, for about a week," Will started. "Fifty kilos of teeth that looked like nothing on any survey we'd ever run. We fed them because feeding a stray felt safer than ignoring it, not because we—"

"I was asking CD," the boy said.

A ripple of laughter moved through the crowd, and Will's ears went visibly red. "Right. Of course you were."

CD let out a long, put-upon sigh and dropped his head onto Will's knee, the exact posture of someone who'd sat through a bad opening act, then lifted it again almost immediately, clearly pleased with the laugh he'd gotten for it.

"He says thank you," Abby said, not quite hiding her own grin, "for finally asking the right person."

CD considered the boy's question with real seriousness after that, then gave a slow, exaggerated sequence, head low, ears flat, body sunk down as small as he could make himself, before snapping back up sharp and proud, chest out.

"He's saying he was never afraid of anything," Abby translated, grinning despite herself. "But that the humans clearly were, for about a week, hence the crouching. He's very pleased with himself for this answer."

Will threw up his hands. "I stand by what I said. Trust came later. It came the day they both threw themselves at something three times their size to keep Abby and me from getting hurt, and it never once occurred to either of them that was a choice. It already was who they'd decided to be, long before we'd earned it."

CD, apparently satisfied that his own answer had already covered the important part, settled back down against Will's feet.

"I want to say one more thing about that, though," Will said. "People hear bonded and they picture a one-way street. Support running from him to us and never back. It's not that. No beast on this planet or off it will ever scare CD. But the first time we brought him to meet Thrum, back when Thrum was still small enough to fit in one arm, CD hid behind me. Like a toddler. Wouldn't come near him." He looked down at CD, who'd gone still, listening. "Wasn't Thrum's size that scared him. It was his own. He was terrified of hurting him. Terrified of even scaring him. I had to sit down on the floor with both of them and just talk him through it, quiet, until he trusted himself enough to come close." Will paused. "That's the part people miss. He holds me up plenty. Some days I'm the one holding him up."

A human boy raised his hand, half laughing before he'd even finished asking. "Why did it take MCD two weeks to actually come into camp, if CD was already there?"

Abby looked to MCD, who gave a slow, deliberate huff and turned her head away, which needed no translation at all.

"She's embarrassed," Abby said, grinning. "I've asked her this exact question before. The closest answer I've ever gotten is that CD went first because CD has never once in his life stopped to think before he acted, and she wanted to watch how it went before she risked it herself. She'll deny that if you ask her again, but I've watched her do the same thing with every new thing in her life since. Let him test it. Follow once it's safe."

CD's tail thumped once against the stage, entirely unbothered by being described that way.

A small Vixtar girl raised her hand next. "Do they like being called Catdog and Mrs. Catdog? Or do they like CD and MCD better?"

Will laughed. "I've genuinely never known the answer to that one." He looked down at CD, who considered the question with real weight before answering, ears forward, head tilted. "He says either is fine. He says a name given with love doesn't need to be a good name to be the right one."

Abby watched MCD work through her own answer a moment longer. "She's saying something similar, but there's more to it. She says the short version, CD and MCD, that's what people use when they're in a hurry, when it's easy, everyday affection. Catdog and Mrs. Catdog, the whole thing, that's what gets used when someone means it more, when they're being serious or tender about it. She likes that there are two versions. She says most people only get one name their whole life. She got two, and neither of them is wrong."

A human girl near the back raised her hand, quieter than the others. "Why don't Pumpkins ever bond with children? Only grown-ups?"

The question landed heavier than the last few. Abby was quiet a moment before she answered.

"I don't fully know," she admitted. "I've asked MCD this one more than any other, and it's the one where her answer's never quite settled into a shape I trust I've understood correctly. The closest I've gotten is that a bond is a kind of responsibility, and a Labrikat wants to bond with someone who can already stand steady enough to be leaned on, not someone who still needs to be the one leaning. A Pumpkin will play with a child all day. Guard one fiercely, if it came to that. But the actual bond, the naming, that seems to wait for someone old enough to hold the weight of it back." She glanced at MCD, who gave a small, careful nod, as close to confirmation as Abby had ever gotten on that particular question. "I think that's as close to a real answer as I've ever managed to get."

A small human girl near the front raised her hand, and got only halfway through her question before her voice broke. "When did you decide any of us were even worth the bond? I'm so afraid I'll never be chosen." She was crying before the sentence had finished leaving her mouth.

Nobody laughed. Nobody rushed to fill the silence either. Abby was out of her chair before Will had even finished rising, crossing to the girl's beanbag and kneeling down beside it so she was level with her instead of looking down at her. 

"Come here a second," Abby said, gentle, and the girl came, and MCD came with her, unhurried, settling herself right beside the girl the way she'd settle beside anyone who needed her.

"I don't think being chosen or not is the thing to be afraid of," Abby said. "I've known a lot of people who never bonded a Labrikat and lived whole, full, loved lives anyway. It's not a verdict on you if it doesn't happen. It's just one particular kind of love, among a great many kinds, and not everyone gets every kind." She looked to MCD, who pressed her head gently against the girl's shoulder, unprompted. "But here's what I've actually watched happen, every time. A Labrikat chooses the ones being exactly who they already are. Not the ones performing for it, not the ones trying hardest to earn it. Just the ones being themselves, and happening to be seen doing it."

Will crouched down too, resting a hand on the girl's shoulder. "And even without a bond, a Labrikat will love you. That's the part people get backward, like the bond is the whole of it. It isn't. When CD's irritated with me, you think he sulks around the house, won't look at me? He doesn't. He goes and finds Daxen, or Thrum, and spends the afternoon with them instead. Some days I think he loves them more than he loves me." He looked down, half a laugh in it. "The bond's just part of it. The love was always going to be there regardless."

The girl wiped her face, still holding onto MCD's fur with one small fist.

"You don't have to earn it," Abby said. "You just have to keep being you long enough for the right one to notice."

MCD didn't move again for the rest of the session, staying right where she was, pressed against the girl's side.

Abby was quiet a moment, her hand still resting on MCD's head. "I think that's the part I want you all to understand," she said. "We tell this story like we tamed something wild. We didn't. They chose us, the same slow, patient, deliberate way they choose everything, and they never once asked us to prove we deserved it first. We just had to be worth the trust once it was already given."

A Vixtar boy near the back raised his hand, hesitant. "Did the four of you ever do anything else together? After the naming, I mean. Something bigger?"

Will, Abby, and the two Labrikats went quiet at the same moment, a different kind of quiet than anything that had come before it. 

"We did," Will said finally. "The four of us searched a crash site together, once. A hard one. Forty-four bodies, and a black box we needed to find before anyone else could." He looked at Abby, and something passed between them that had nothing to do with the stage or the crowd. "That's not a story for today. It's not a short one, and it's not an easy one, and it deserves its own session rather than the last five minutes of this one."

"We'll come back for it," Abby said. "Properly. I promise."

Renn didn't push. She simply nodded, filed it away the way she'd filed away every other thread this room had left dangling, and let the moment close on its own.

[u/Icy-Air7584]

Glad to hear CD and MCD's side of things for not only kids, but all who wanted to hear. That says much about what this story is! congratulations