I watched, obsessed, as faint lightning patterns traveled from her spine to cross her collarbones, lighting up the dark.My marks.The mating bond taking hold.
The storm marked her as part of me.Made her mine.
I pressed my mouth against those first faint traces.They pulsed under my lips.
Fuck.That fast, I was hard again.Aching.The storm riding me to thrust deep.Make us one body.
She made a sound — low and wondering and wrecked.Her hands came up to cradle my face.She tilted my jaw until my gaze locked with hers and looked at me in the blazing silver light of my own nodes.Her dark eyes were stripped raw, held nothing but desire and wonder and truth.
"What was that?That last?—"
"That was the bond."Strange how grateful I felt, and how difficult it was to speak of.I was too raw.Too exposed.She could destroy me now, this alien female who worked so hard to leave me.Utterly and completely destroy me.If she left, I would never feel whole again, not if I lived two cycles or two hundred."When the Skybond completes, it creates a mating circuit that both partners experience simultaneously."
Her eyes moved over my face.Not cataloguing now — something slower than that.Something that didn't have a scientific name.
"Is it—" she started."Is it always like that?—"
"No."Never.Not in any account the elders had given, not in any description any warrior of Sol'Virex had offered of the Storm Surge with a bonded mate.Nothing had prepared me for this.Nothing could have.
Her hands were still on my face.
Mine were at her waist, her back, pressed flat against her skin as though I couldn’t bear to let her go.Her warmth.The aliveness of her pressed against me in the dark of this cave.Her heartbeat slowed toward something that matched mine with a precision that had not existed this morning and would never leave us now.
The Skybond settled into its final stage.Deeper than it had been an hour ago.Irreversibly deeper.The kind of depth you did not come back from.The kind the elders described.The kind that changed the fundamental shape of a life.
She was quiet for long minutes.Her thumbs moved against my jaw.Slow.Thoughtful.As though she saw something in the structure of my face that she wasn't yet ready to process.I wasn’t going to move.Not when she was touching me like this.Like I was hers.
"Why am I getting these marks?"She lifted one hand from my face and touched her own collarbone, where the faint lightning traces still pulsed with residual light.Her fingertips found them and her eyes went wide and wondering."Are these?—"
"Just the beginning," I said.
"I'm going to have marks like yours?"
"Yes, although your skin is still smooth, where mine is not."They marked her skin where I had kissed her, lingered where my hands had touched, the pattern nearly identical to mine, to the storm's claim on me.She was mine now.One glance at our bodies and everyone in the village would know exactly what she was to me.What I was to her.
She looked at the evidence of our bond.At the faint branching light under her skin, followed the lines of her collarbone in patterns that already, unmistakably, mirrored the patterns that ran across my own chest.Different — unique to us, to the resonance of our combined signatures — but undeniably the same geometry.The same fractal language.
The planet wrote itself into her.Wrote me into her flesh, and her into mine.
Her hand trembled slightly against her collarbone."They're beautiful."Her voice was little more than a whisper.
The word hit me somewhere until my chest ached with it.I reached out and covered her hand with mine where it rested against the marks.
The discharge that followed was gentle.A soft arc.A whisper of current, nothing like the storm that had just moved through us — more like the planet's hum, low and constant and entirely without urgency.Like breathing.Like the valley in the still hour before dawn.
She looked at our hands.
Then she looked at me.
And for one unguarded, unscientific, entirely human moment, she let me see everything.
All of it.The wanting and the fear.The wonder and the thing she had refused to name since the moment our eyes met with her crashed ship behind her and the storm clock already running.Hope.Worry.I knew she was afraid of what would happen if more of her kind came to Soltharra.I had felt her concern in the bitter taste of the air.
I saw it all.I worried about nothing.The Storm chose our path.It was simply my place to walk that path next to her.
I kept my hand over hers and held her.I didn't ask her to name her emotions.I didn’t need words it was too soon for her to give me.Our bond was too new.Her faith in us fragile.But I saw the truth.Had felt it in her touch.
Surrender.She would not fight what was between us.She was mine.Perhaps, if I could not convince her to stay with me, I would board her ship and travel with her.Explore the stars.Send reports back to my people.She was my home now.Wherever she wanted to go, I would go.