Chapter 3: Pain Threshold
He held his own hand against the wound, her fingers locked over his, and neither of them flinched.
"Nothing," he said. "I feel pressure. Pain only. My own fingers might as well be a tool."
"Then we go again. Until one of your nerves remembers how to fire."
"God." He laughed, low and wrecked. "You've got blood up to your wrist and you're talking about nerve conduction."
"One of us should stay clinical." She rolled her hips, still floating, still speared on him, and felt him thicken another degree inside her. "Clearly it won't be me."
"Feel that." His hand slid around to the small of her back, pulling her down the length of him. "Can you feel that?"
"I asked you first."
They laughed together at that, a cracked, half-mad sound in the red glow, and the laughter dissolved into motion. She rode him in the weightlessness, hand over hand along the floor rail, sinking down his shaft and floating up again, her knees drifting wide, her hair a black cloud swallowing them both. Her palm never left his ribs. She kept the slow grind against the torn incision, rolling the hot tissue, and his heartbeat under her fingers never slowed.
"Elias." She leaned in until her lips touched the visor's edge. "Press harder. Both hands. Squeeze your own wound."
He did. His scarred fingers bore down on top of hers, forcing their joined hands deeper into the split flesh, and a tremor tore through his whole frame.
"Still just pain." His voice shook. "But Christ, what pain. Keep going."
"Don't come yet." She clenched around him on the downstroke, deliberate. "I want to time it. I want to feel you pulse when your nerves fire for the first time."
"You want a controlled experiment."
"I want you to lose your mind the moment it happens. I want to be around you for it."
He grabbed her hips with both hands and hauled her down, meeting her descent, driving up into the slick clench of her. The angle in zero gravity was blind and perfect, the head of his cock dragging her front wall on every stroke, her clit pressed flush to the root of him. Her senses drank everything: his blood sharp in her nose, the taste of salt and copper where her mouth had kissed the wound's weeping edge, the sound of their bodies slapping in the airless hush.
"There's blood in the air," she gasped. "I can taste it. Your blood's in the recycled air and I can taste it on my tongue."
"Filthy." He groaned it against her throat. "Say more."
"I've been licking your wound, Elias. Between strokes. While you weren't looking. It tastes like iron and salt and I couldn't stop."
His thrusts went ragged. She felt the shudder build in him, felt his pulse hammer against her palm, and her own orgasm gathered low and fast, the coil tightening with each grind.
"Together," he managed. "Feel it with me. The second I..."
She never learned what he felt. Her climax broke first, her cunt clamping down in hard waves, and his body answered, cock jerking inside her, hot spurts flooding her for the fourth time, and through the haze she watched his face behind the fogged visor for any change, any flicker.
"Did you feel it?" Her voice cracked. "The come. Your own come, inside me, hot, against your skin. Did you feel anything but pain?"
"No." Flat. Wrecked. "Nothing."
"Then again." She pulled herself along the rail, drawing him almost free, and slammed back down. "Again. Until you do."
They went again. And again. The grav plating stayed dark, the red lights pulsed their dying rhythm, and the station's hum thinned around them while their bodies refused to stop. He took her against the ceiling. She took him straddling, reverse, his hands filled with her floating breasts. He came inside her twice more, once with his mouth buried between her thighs tasting himself mixed with her, both of them smelling it, the thick animal reek filling the sealed bay.
At some point she slept, or drifted, or something like it, tangled around him in the slow spin, his cock still seated in her, her hand resting in his wound out of habit now rather than purpose.
She woke to red light and the taste of blood and realized her palm had healed nothing, and the wound had been open for days.
"Elias." She pressed her lips to his ear. "How long have we been up here?"
"I don't know." His voice was slow, thick, a man surfacing from deep water. "The clocks stopped counting when the systems failed. Or I stopped reading them."
"My hand's been in your ribs for..." She flexed her fingers in the raw tissue. "The edges should be granulating. Sealing. It's still open. It's like your body won't close it."
"Maybe my body knows something." He rolled his hips, lazy, still hard inside her, and she felt the fourth or fifth or ninth load of him shift within her. "Maybe it stays open because I need it open."
"Maybe the leak's doing more than we think. The air in here, Elias. I've been breathing it for days and I'm not weak. I'm not hungry. I should be starving by now."
She felt it then, as she said it. Her stomach. Not hunger. A tightness, a fullness below her navel that had nothing to do with him. She pressed her free hand to her belly, floated there on his cock, and frowned.
"Something's different."
"What?"
"Lower belly. Full. Firm." She pressed again. "It wasn't like this when the leak started."
He went still inside her. Then his hands moved from her hips to her stomach, framing it, and his breathing changed.
"Soraya. How long since your cycle?"
"I don't know. I stopped tracking. There were no days." She heard her own voice go thin. "You can't. The leak, the stress, eleven hours of nothing and then..."
"Then months." His grey eyes found hers through the visor. "However long it's been. It's been months, Soraya."
She looked down at her hand on her own belly, red-lit, blood-slicked, and pressed. Firm. Rounded. Alive.
"We never stopped," she whispered.
"No."
"Not once. Not for sleep, not for food, not..." Her fingers spread over the swell. "And something took root in there while we weren't watching."
His cock pulsed inside her, hard again, his body answering before his mind could speak. She felt the shudder run through him into her.
"Elias."
"I know." His voice was ragged, half horror, half something she didn't have a word for. "I know what I'm doing, Soraya. I can't make myself stop."
She lifted her hand from her belly and pressed it back into his wound, deep, feeling his heartbeat slam against her palm.
"Then we don't stop," she said. "Not yet."
They didn't stop.
The days bled together in the red glow, and the days became weeks, and the weeks became something with no name. They lost the clocks. They lost the shift rotation, the comms checks, the distinction between sleep and waking. What they kept was the motion. Her hand in his wound or his hand in his wound, the signal never allowed to go dark, his cock buried in her through the slow spin of the darkened bay. The leak fed them. Soraya understood it before Elias would accept it, tasting the air one night and finding it sweet, thick with something her body drank like a meal. The chemical had not only stolen their senses. It had become their air, their food, their pulse.
Her belly grew. She watched it happen the way you watch a planet turn, helpless and fascinated, the swell rising out of her flat stomach month by month while she rode him or he drove into her against the ceiling. Her breasts filled and ached and he filled his hands with them, his mouth drawing on her nipples, and the sensation went through her like voltage. His senses never came back. Pain never stopped carrying. So they kept hurting each other, gently now, her nails in his ribs, his teeth on her shoulder, and the sex never broke rhythm for more than an hour at a stretch.
Ten months. She counted them by the size of the child inside her, by the first flutter she felt while Elias was seated to the hilt in her, by the day she felt a heel press outward under her palm. Ten months of floating, of their fluids drifting in pearls through the crimson dark, of the wound on his ribs staying open and weeping and alive. Ten months of the air tasting of iron and salt and them.
The comms panel had been dark the whole time. Then, one shift that might have been morning, it crackled.
"Aether-7, this is Rescue Vessel Tereshkova. We have hard dock. Attempting entry to med bay."
Soraya surfaced from a slow orbit on his cock, her swollen belly heavy between them, her hair a wild grey-streaked cloud. Elias blinked behind the cracked visor. Neither of them stopped moving. She couldn't have said why. The rhythm had become breathing itself.
"There's a dock," she murmured, and sank down on him again.
The med bay door shrieked when the cutter opened it.
Three figures in white hazmat suits stood in the breach, lamps blazing, and their lamps found the thing inside. A man and a woman floating in the red dark, fused at the pelvis, turning in a slow lazy revolution. The man's eyes were pure red, burst vessels threading his sclera from lid to lid, and his hand was buried wrist-deep in the open wound along his own ribs. The woman was hugely pregnant, her belly tight and rounded, nine or ten months gone by any human measure, and she was riding him. Still riding him. Their skins were glazed with sweat and dried blood, their bodies scarred and marked and glistening, and the air that rolled out through the breach was thick, sweet, coppery, visibly hazy in the lamplight.
The woman turned her head toward the light and smiled. "Hello," she said, husky and calm, and did not stop moving her hips. "You took ten months."
The man's red eyes tracked the lamps without blinking. "Seal the door," he said, in a voice like gravel dragged over steel. "Or don't. But she doesn't stop. We don't stop."
One of the rescuers made a sound that might have been a prayer.
The team backed away slowly.
They went backward through the breach one step at a time, lamps swinging, the senior medic's glove pressed flat against the younger one's chest plate to pull her along. The two figures inside kept their slow rotation, welded together, the woman's hand stroking the man's torn ribs with something terrifyingly like tenderness, his red eyes following them to the door without anger. Just watching. The way something watches from deep water.
"Get the door," the team leader rasped. "Seal it. Nobody goes back in."
The younger rescuer, her voice shaking inside the suit, whispered, "Did you see her? Ten months pregnant. Did you see what they were..."
"I saw."
The outer hatch booted shut and the magnetic seal engaged and the three of them stood in the access tube breathing hard through filters, and behind the bulkhead, faint through the steel, they could still hear it. Rhythm. Slow and steady, like a heartbeat that had outlived the people it belonged to.
The medical officer pulled off her helmet with a white face. "Their vitals came through the med telemetry when we docked. Both of them. Strong. Better than strong." She scrolled the readout. "He's numb from the leak, we know that from the logs. She should be starving. Ten months, no rations drawn. The air in there is saturated with the compound. It's metabolizable. They've been breathing their food."
"That's not the part I can't stop thinking about."
"I know."
Inside the bay, Soraya arched her back in the red dark, Elias's hands framing her swollen belly, his cock pulsing inside her, her palm pressed deep in the wound that had kept him alive.
"Did you hear them?" she breathed. "They went away."
"They'll come back with more lights." He rolled his hips, unhurried, and she felt the old shudder build in him. "It doesn't matter. Nothing out there matters. In here there's you, and this, and the signal."
She laughed, low and wrecked and happy, and pressed his hand harder into his ribs until his pulse hammered against her fingers.
"Then keep the signal," she said. "Come inside me again. All of it. We have time."
He came, and she clenched around him and drank it, and the baby kicked beneath their joined hands, and the red light pulsed on, and they did not stop.
The Tereshkova left before the shift was out. Through the breach the team bolted two steel gears to the inside of the hatch frame, weighted so they'd drift to hand, a manual override and a pressure lock key. "If they come to their senses," the medic said, loud enough to carry through the steel, "they can open it themselves." Then the tubes were empty, and Aether-7 hummed alone again with its red light and its two occupants.
Elias caught one of the gears out of the air with a numb hand, turned it under the light, and let it go. It spun slowly past the visor and drifted to the far wall, joining the orbit of speculum trays and pearls of dried fluid.
"Souvenirs," he said. "They think we're sick."
"We are sick." Soraya hooked a knee over the rail and drew herself back down onto him, her swollen belly swinging heavy between their bodies, dragging at her spine. "Just not the way they mean."
The months went on. They did not stop, not for a minute longer than her body demanded, because the rhythm had stopped being appetite and become survival itself, the pulse that kept blood moving and air metabolizing and the signal alive. He took her strapped against the ceiling with his fist knotted in her floating hair. She rode him through slow tumbling orbits with her nails raked down his chest, and when her hand tired of his wound his own fingers took her place, digging into the raw incision until his eyes rolled back. The bay was thick with them now, the air sweet and coppery and visibly hazy, their whole world reduced to a red-lit meter of space and the cock buried in her.
Her belly kept swelling. It passed any measure Soraya knew, tight and gleaming and hard as a drumhead, the skin shiny and striated, and still the child did not come. She felt it turn inside her while he fucked her, felt the heel of it press out under his flattened palm.
"It should have been born," she gasped one cycle, pinned against the ceiling housing, his hips driving up into her. "Ten months, Elias, then eleven. It's being held. The leak is holding it in."
"Then the leak knows what it's doing better than we do." His teeth closed on her nipple, drew, and her climax ripped through her without warning, her cunt clamping around him, his seed flooding in hot for a number she'd lost count of. The baby kicked hard against his hand and he groaned like a man being blessed.
Then, one shift that might have been any shift, it broke.
She was on him, mounted, his hands full of her belly, riding the long slow grind that had become their liturgy. The orgasm built from her spine down, huge, inevitable, and she pushed her palm deep into his wound at the moment it broke, and her senses, all of them, smelled and tasted and heard everything at once, every input flooding her skull like a cracked dam failing, and in the white heart of it something clicked back into place.
She stopped. Everything stopped. Her hips went still, his cock buried to the root inside her, her hand slack in his torn flesh, and she looked down at herself with eyes that were suddenly, horribly her own.
"What," she whispered. "What is this. Elias. Elias, look at me. Look at what I am."
Her belly was monstrous, taut and gleaming, veined dark under the red light, overdue by months and swollen further still. Her thighs were crusted with the leavings of a year. Her nails were caked black-brown with his blood, his wound open under her hand like a mouth she'd been feeding on. She could smell the bay, and the bay smelled of a slaughterhouse and a sickroom, and they were the only thing in it.
"Oh God." Her voice cracked. "We're monsters. Elias, look at us, we're not people anymore. We've been down here rutting like animals for a year and I can't remember my own mother's face, I can't remember Earth, I can't remember anything but your cock." She pulled at her wrist, trying to draw her hand free of the wound. "Stop. Please. Stop moving."
He didn't stop. His hands closed on her hips, scarred and numb and strong, and he pulled her down onto him with a slow, deliberate thrust that drove the head of his cock up against her cervix, deep, deeper than reason, grinding into the mouth of the womb the leak had sealed shut.
"Stop," she gasped, and her body betrayed her at once, clenching around him, slicking him, her hips twitching against her own will. "Elias, I mean it, I came back, I can think again, we have to stop."
"Feel that." His voice was gravel, unhurried, red eyes tracking her face without a flicker of shame. "That's your cervix. That's where I am. Twelve months I've been fucking you and I still can't feel my own hands, and you want me to stop at the one thing I can feel."
"You're not listening to me. Your eyes. Look at your eyes, they're burst, you're bleeding inside your own skull, we're breathing blood, Elias." She pushed at his chest with her free hand, and his pulse hammered under her palm, strong as a young man's, obscenely healthy. "What have we become? Tell me you can see it. Tell me you're not gone."
"I see it." He rolled his hips, dragging himself slow through the grip of her, and she shuddered and hated the shudder. "I see a woman full of my child, sitting on my cock, telling me she wants to stop. And I see her cunt saying something different."
"You bastard." Her voice came out thick, half a moan. "Talk to me like that one more time."
"You felt it just now." He pulled her down the last inch, pressing her swollen belly flush to his ribs, her nipple dragging the raw edge of his wound. "The moment you came back, your whole body clamped down on me. You came back to your senses and your first act was to milk me. You're not a monster, Soraya. You're mine, and you're perfect."
"Filthy." Her protest was dissolving, her hips resuming their grind without her permission, the sensation of him deep against her sealed cervix flooding up through the clarity instead of drowning it. "I can see everything now and I still want it, that's the filthiest part. Oh God, I'm a monster too."
"Then be one." He thrust up, hard, and she cried out. "Ride me. Look at yourself with your new eyes while you do it. Watch your belly bounce on my cock."
She looked. She rode him with her senses fully awake for the first time in a year, every detail terrible and precise, the blood under her nails, the wound weeping under her palm, his burst-red eyes burning up at her, and she felt herself climbing toward the edge again, fast, helpless.
"If I stop," she breathed, grinding down, "we die. That's it, isn't it. The air, the food, the baby, all of it. The signal."
"That's it."
"So I get to choose." She pressed his hand flat against her belly, over the child, and slammed herself down his full length. "Choose, Elias. Both of us. Right now."
His thumb ground into her clit, slow and vicious, and her orgasm started building before she'd finished asking.
"You already chose," he said. "The second you came back, and didn't let go."
Her orgasm broke over her in a great slow wave, and at its crest something gave way deep inside her.
The sound was small. A muffled pop beneath his cock, inside her body, felt more than heard. Then the flood.
Fluid burst out of her in zero gravity, and it had nowhere to fall. It sheeted out around the place their bodies joined in a widening lens of pale amniotic water, catching the red light, breaking into hundreds of beads and globs that spun away from them in slow orbits. The bay filled with it. Droplets clung to the ceiling, drifted past the visor, beaded on her floating hair. The smell hit her newly returned senses like a slap: warm, saline, sweet and mineral, the smell of the inside of her, everywhere at once.
"Elias." Her hips locked. Her hand slid free of his wound, slick and shaking. "Elias, stop. Stop moving. That's my water."
He stopped. Buried to the root, red eyes wide behind the cracked visor, his chest heaving. Fluid drifted between them in trembling spheres.
"That's your..." He reached out and touched one of the floating beads with a numb fingertip, pressed it, watched it deform and split into smaller beads around his finger. "It's everywhere. It's in the air."
"Twelve months." Her voice came out thin. "Twelve months of this air full of the compound, full of us, and now my water's in it too. Elias, the baby's been breathing this air before it was ever born. What did that chemical do to my child?"
She felt him pulse inside her, hard, and knew his body before he spoke.
"Your body is answering mine," he said, ragged. "Your cunt just clenched around me and you're asking about the baby."
"Don't." She gripped his wrist, hanging onto the floor rail with the other hand as the fluid kept seeping, warm and endless, slicking the space between their bodies. "Don't move. I need to think. Contractions. I need to feel if I'm having contractions."
She was. It started as a tightening low in her back, rolling forward, and her womb squeezed down around him, around the child, and she gasped at the double sensation of it, labor and fullness in the same heartbeat.
"That's one." She arched. "God, that's one and you're inside me for it."
"I can feel it." His voice had gone strange, awed and animal at once. "Your whole body's squeezing me. The muscle, the wall of your womb, all of it bearing down on my cock. Soraya, I can feel it. Not pain. I can feel it."
She looked at him. His scarred hands, which had felt nothing but pain for a year, were spread over her straining belly, and his face behind the visor was coming apart.
"You can feel the contraction." She laughed, and the laugh broke into a moan as the next wave built fast, barely a minute behind. "Twelve months of nothing and my labor is what wakes you up."
"The baby's coming and I can feel it." His thumb pressed down through her mound, feeling the hard roll of the uterus under her skin, tracking the wave as it crested. "There. That ridge of muscle. It's moving. Christ, Soraya, I can feel my hands."
"Then keep them there." The contraction peaked and she rode it, crying out, her cunt clamping around him in a grip that made him bellow, his head thrown back. Fluid spun past them both. "Keep them there and tell me everything. Every wave. Talk me through my own labor, Commander, you're the only one aboard with a medical degree in feeling things now."
"Wave two, coming." He watched her belly with his burst-red eyes, hands flat, reading her skin. "It's rolling from the back. It's lifting your whole belly, I can see it move. It's cresting. Your womb is hard as a plank."
The wave crushed through her. She bore down without meaning to, and he groaned at the clench of her, his cock jerking inside her, and for a moment the two rhythms tangled, labor and lust, indistinguishable.
"I shouldn't want you during this." Her forehead dropped against his, visor to visor. "I know I shouldn't. Say something filthy so I can hate myself properly."
"You're beautiful." His hips shifted, micro-thrusts, barely motion. "A year of rutting made you this. This belly is mine, this water is mine, this baby is mine, and you're going to push it into the world with my cock buried in you because neither of us knows how to be apart anymore."
"You're a monster."
"You married the monster when you put your hand in my ribs."
She screamed then, not from fear, from the third contraction, the longest, and he talked her through it, his voice steady as a readout, the wave, the crest, the easing, his hands never leaving her, feeling her the way no man had ever felt a woman in labor, from the inside.
"Rest between them," he murmured. "Breathe the air. It's feeding you. It'll feed you through this."
She floated in the easing, sweat condensing off her skin in glittering clouds, her hair a corona, his cock still hard inside her, the fluid thinning now to a slow weep. Below her navel the child shifted, huge, turning.
"It's descending." Her voice shook. "I can feel the head. Elias, it's so low. It's right against your cock, right against my cervix, and I can feel both at once and I can't tell which sensation is which."
"Then don't tell." He rolled into her, gentle, and the pressure of him against the crowning head dragged a sound out of her that was half sob, half orgasm. "Tell me what it feels like. That's all I've ever asked of you. Tell me."
"It feels like being split open from the inside in two directions." She bore down, and the amniotic haze drifted through the red light around them like snow. "It feels like the end of the world, and it feels like you."
The fourth contraction hit like a wall and she grabbed the rail with both hands and pushed, screaming his name, and inside the crimson haze something moved. His hand flew to where the pressure changed, between her legs, beside the place he filled her, and his numb fingers touched the top of a skull.
"I feel hair." His voice cracked clean in two. "Soraya. I feel hair. Wet hair. It's coming and I can feel it with my fingers."
"Then catch it." She turned her head, sweat and tears beading off her jaw, and looked at him. "You wanted to feel something that wasn't pain. Catch our baby."
The next wave bore down and she pushed with everything the year had built in her, and the child began to arrive into the red-lit dark, into the drifting water and the sweet thick air, into his waiting, finally living hands.
The shoulders came, and then the rest, and the child slid free of her in a rush of fluid and heat, catching in his cupped hands like something heavy thrown from deep water.
The cord floated between them, pale and translucent. Elias caught it, gathered the baby against his chest, and looked.
It was not a monster. That was the first thing he understood, and the relief of it nearly broke him. It was a baby. A small red-faced, screw-mouthed human infant, perfect in every proportion, ten fingers, ten toes, ears folded soft against its skull. But the skin. The skin was pale blue, the color of glacial ice, of the morning sky seen through a visor, and it was faintly luminous in the red dark, glowing with its own cold light.
"It's breathing." Soraya's voice cracked. "Elias, it's breathing. No mask, no hiss, look at the chest."
The small chest rose and fell, smooth and easy, drinking the thick coppery air the way its mother had learned to drink it. No struggle. No cough. The leak's air, the air that had fed them for a year, was this child's birthright and first language.
"What is it?" She pulled herself along the rail to him, shaking, and pressed her forehead to the small blue brow. "What did we make?"
"Us." His voice was wrecked. "Made of us, fed on the compound, born into it. Look at it, Soraya. Look at it breathe."
The baby opened its eyes. They were his grey, softened to silver-blue, and they tracked the drifting beads of amniotic fluid with calm, unhurried attention, a creature perfectly at home in the red-lit weightless dark. Its small hand closed around Soraya's bloody finger and held.
"It's not cold." She laughed, and the laugh broke into a sob. "Feel it. Feel your child, Elias. You can feel your hands now."
He could. The warmth of the small body sat in his palms like a coal, solid and real, the first honest touch of his life in a year. His burst-red eyes blurred and the blur ran down his face, and Soraya caught a bead of it off his jaw and drank it without thinking.
"She's hungry," the baby's mother said, because the child turned its face against Elias's chest and rooted, mouth searching. Soraya guided it to her breast, and the small mouth latched, and the drawing sensation went through her like a current, her whole body clenching.
Elias felt that clench. He was still hard inside her, still seated to the root, and the contraction of her post-birth womb around him dragged a groan out of his chest.
"Sorry." He didn't sound sorry. "I can't. The feeling, all of it at once, the baby in my hands, your milk, you squeezing me. It's too much."
"Then don't be sorry." Soraya looked up at him over the feeding child, and her new eyes were steady. "The air, Elias. The baby breathes it. It feeds her. It's feeding her right now through me. We don't have to be afraid of it anymore. We don't have to be afraid of anything."
The baby fed, blue and glowing, its small fist kneading her breast, and the draw of its mouth sent waves down through her body that gathered where he filled her. She felt herself slicken around him again, felt her hips tilt, her body answering the year's rhythm the way a heart answers a defibrillator.
"They're watching us," she breathed. "The rescue ship. The sensors. What do we care?"
"Nothing."
He moved. Slow at first, careful of the child at her breast, a long drag of his cock out of her flooded, stretched, birthing-raw heat and back in, and the sensation after everything was enormous, a landscape her returned senses mapped in unbearable detail. She bit her lip and rode it, one hand cupping the feeding infant, the other finding his wound by habit and pressing home.
"There's the signal," he grunted, hips finding their stroke. "Christ. A minute old. Our daughter's a minute old and you're already squeezing my cock like you're trying to pull my soul through it."
"Filthy monster."
"You pushed her into my hands while I was buried in you. You married the monster twice."
She laughed and clenched and he swore. The baby fed on, indifferent, blue light washing over both of them, and the sex resumed the way the tide resumes, inevitable, the two of them drifting slowly through the amniotic haze with their daughter glowing between them. He turned them with one hand on the rail, careful, his cock working her in long deep strokes, and her orgasm built strange and huge, layered on the aftershocks of birth, her womb still clamping in soft waves.
"Inside me," she gasped. "Fill me up again. I want her born into a full house."
He came with a roar that shook droplets loose from the ceiling, pulsing hot and deep, and her climax followed it, milking him, the three of them welded together in the red dark, one breathing thing.
The baby finished feeding, unlatched, and looked up at them both with her silver-blue eyes, and yawned.
"She's not hungry anymore," Elias said, staring. "She just... the air. She breathes and she's fed. Soraya, look at her. She's complete. She doesn't need anything this station doesn't already give her."
"Then we did it right." Soraya floated against him, spent and glowing with sweat and afterbirth and his come, her daughter sleeping on her chest, blue as moonlight. "The wrong way, for a year, and it came out right anyway."
"It came out perfect." He touched the small blue hand with a fingertip, and felt it, truly felt it, warm and gripping. "She's the proof. Whatever the leak is, it wanted this."
The baby slept. The station hummed. And after a while, quietly, without shame, without any of the old horror, Soraya reached down between her own thighs, gathered the mess of him on her fingers, and pressed them into the wound on his ribs, and his red eyes rolled back, and he hardened inside her again.
"We have time," she said, and drew herself down his length. "We have all the time the air can give us."
They did not stop.