Page 53 of Meet Me in the Stars

“I’ll print them off,” Izora said. “You can sit up now if you want to.”

The doctor turned away to fiddle on his computer across the room. Elio stayed on his back and ran a soft hand over the flat, lean plain of his stomach. Not all dragons looked pregnant. Some never looked pregnant even while they laid their eggs because the eggs would continue to grow outside of their bodies.

“Are you excited?” Elio asked, not looking up at me.

“Over the moon, mate,” I said, leaning down to kiss his forehead.

“We gotta get them settled so we can build our nest. Do you want to request a pack or gather wild?”

“Huh?” I asked, realizing the claiming vows left out some vital information on the caring of dragon eggs here on Starscale 1.

“The flight will provide a package of materials for building a nest upon request. Most dragons add in some of their own things. They don’t make you take it, though. You can gather up the things on your own, if you like. The packs are nice, though. I had a summer job as a teenager of putting them together and delivering them out. I always imagined how excited I’d be when I got my first one delivered.”

“Then it sounds like you’ve decided,” I squeezed his hand.

“Well, you do get some say in it,” he laughed, glancing up at me.

“I think we can work with a pack and then see if it needs more padding.”

The way Elio grinned told me I’d chosen correctly. Nests were always personal to each dragon. Different flights, even on Earthside, had their own customs. As long as the nest did its job, I didn’t care much about how it looked. Nests were messy things by nature. The sturdiness of a nest was a billion times more important than how aesthetic it was.

“I love you,” Elio said, catching me off guard.

“I love you too,” I said, feeling that old flutter deep within my stomach. Being close to him stoked the fire burning in my belly. Maybe this was what happiness felt like. Maybe this was the feeling I forgot while I was conked out.

Chapter Twenty-Six

Elio

In the days following my ultrasound, everyone was obsessed with my egg photo. Some of the guides said that there were mention of such machines in the older parts of history, but they figured it was something lore added in. The ship was inundated with requests from pregnant carriers. They all wanted Izora to take photos of their eggs too. None of them got an appointment right away, because we were busy moving house. Well, moving ship.

Marsin was Marsin and that meant he didn’t mind us landing the ship on the estate, but he traced out roughly in chalk where he thought we should put it. I gave him that much, because he grew some food in the garden every summer. It’d be a shame to gain a whole family only to lose that home grown food.

Castor wasn’t only an expert engineer, but he was also an expert navigator and landed the Medwin 2 perfectly without the dusty chalk lines that my brother drew on the grass. With the ship in a more permanent home, we set about preparing it to function as a house instead of a ship. Castor locked up all the magical and flight control rooms. Only he and his giant cousin, Casimir, had keys to those rooms. He opened up windows that I hadn’t spotted and lowered the shields from the top deck of the ship. He’d probably get in some good sunbathing up there.

After the Medwin 2 and crew were settled in Fred carried his meager belongings into my house. His eyes lit up as we stepped inside the air-conditioning.

“You guys build high like we do,” Fred commented.

“We have to. We’re dragons and we need to make the best use of our space so we’re not all crowded in together. You can put your stuff anywhere. There’s plenty of space. I’m the only one who lived here up until now and mostly I was over at Marsin’s. Marsin might come over here a lot now or who knows, maybe we’ll be over there a lot. It’s easier to cook for two or three dragons than one anyway.”

Fred sat his stuff down on my black cowhide sofa and pulled me in for a kiss. That was the first of many kisses to unfold under our roof. Over the course of our first few days of living together we claimed and marked every room as our own. We barely left the house. It was as if we slipped right back into our matingmoon. We romped in every room, exhausting ourselves to the point of drinking straight from the faucet as not to get dehydrated. Once our home smelled like us and only us, it was time to start thinking about our future. Once upon a time that would’ve meant brainstorming out ideas of how to connect the Starscale worlds to the Other World gateways. Now, it meant requesting a nest pack and examining the house’s towers.

“Even my house back home only had one nesting tower,” Fred said, and I flinched.

“Sorry, mate. It’s hard not to think of it that way, but once we get the gateways, I’ll be able to take you to visit.”

I bit my lip. I’d sorta like that. Sorta couldn’t think about leaving home while an egg was growing inside me. I needed to stick close to the safe spaces. Sure, all three worlds were more or less safe, but my dragon insisted upon his way.

“Well, after the baby hatches, of course,” Fred clarified, and my inner beast relaxed a little bit. “It’ll probably take a while to get a way over there that isn’t a year long nap on a spaceship.”

“How could you sleep during that? I would’ve gone mad staying awake so that I didn’t miss anything,” I grinned. “They’d have to peel my eyeballs off the portholes.”

“Eh,” Fred shrugged. “If I told you the only reason I came is because Teddy wanted to go to outer space would you be mad at me?”

“No,” I grinned. “I don’t care what made you show up, but that does make me feel all warm and fuzzy because one day it’ll be our egg brat running around wanting huge favors like going to outer space.”

“I hope not. Not that one anyway. Outer space is boring,” Fred laughed.

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