Chapter 6: Homecoming

Jamie awoke the next morning feeling energized, as though someone was running an electrical current through his body. How long had it been since he had felt this way? Excited, hopeful, like all of the color was bleeding back into his grey world. He didn’t bother with breakfast, taking a quick shower, and getting dressed. He considered wearing something presentable but eventually decided that Liz wouldn’t care, settling on a jacket and sweatpants. It was a brisk morning, so he decided to jog down to meet her.

He arrived at the diner to find Liz waiting for him, leaning with her back against a tree just outside. She was hard to miss, and despite the cool weather, he noticed that she was no longer wearing a concealing coat. No beanie or mittens, either. She had been so self-conscious about her alien appearance as a girl, but now, she almost seemed to be putting it on display. Then again, she was far too large for any style of clothing to stand any chance of making her inconspicuous. Instead, she sported the same bomber jacket that she had worn the night before, along with the cut-off denim shorts.

She waved to him when she caught sight of him, the sudden motion alarming a passing pedestrian, who scurried out of her way.

“Hey Liz,” Jamie said sheepishly, raising a hand in greeting. Liz was having none of that, crouching down to wrap her long arms around him once he was in reach, trapping him in a bear hug. She lifted him off the ground with the effort that one might expend picking up a child, squeezing the air out of him, pressing him into the considerable cushion of her chest. Jamie froze in surprise, feeling the bulge of her biceps through the leather of her jacket, her warm breath blowing his hair.

“Sorry, Jamie,” she chuckled as she set him back down on the sidewalk. “I sometimes forget how small humans are.”

“I-it’s fine,” he stammered, brushing himself off. He turned to glance at the diner, seeing the familiar pink neon sign flickering above the entrance. How long had it been since he had eaten here? Not since Liz had left, at least. It was oddly melancholic to be back again.

He made his way to the door, Liz pausing to size it up. Just like she had in his apartment, she turned sideways, then ducked through the narrow opening. Fortunately, the ceiling inside the restaurant was high enough that she could stand without hitting her head. They walked over to their favorite booth at the back of the room, but it didn’t look like Liz would be able to fit inside it.

“Let’s get one of the tables,” she suggested.

The diner was as deserted as Jamie remembered it, so they had their choice of seating, and the gawking onlookers were kept to a minimum. They selected a round, café style table, and Jamie took a seat. Liz scratched her chin as she eyed the chairs, wondering if they would support her bulk. They were child-sized by her standards. She shrugged, then pushed them out of the way, sitting cross-legged on the floor instead. She was tall enough that the table was still at a comfortable height to her, seeming unconcerned as she reached out to pick up one of the laminated menus in her thick fingers. Jamie watched as she traced a line of text with one of her wicked claws. It was long and black, like the talon of a giant eagle, curved into a hook.

“I wonder if they still do that burger I used to like?” she wondered, her feline eyes scanning the page. “I’d wrestle a rainbow spider for some good old salt and grease right now.”

“Rainbow ... spider?” Jamie asked.

“It’s an animal on the homeworld that ... you know what, that’s probably a story for another time.”

A waitress walked out from a swinging door that led to the kitchen, making her way over to where they were seated, her eyes fixed on a tablet computer that was clasped in her hand. This wasn’t the waitress who had so often served them when they were kids, this woman was younger, maybe a new employee.

“Good morning, what can I get you toda-” Her eyes widened as she glanced up at the pair, visibly startled at the sight of Liz, almost jumping out of her uniform. “Oh! Hello! Um, can ... your order...” She cleared her throat and steadied herself, regaining her professional demeanor. “Welcome, are you ready to order?”

“It’s okay, I don’t bite,” Liz said with a toothy smile that suggested otherwise. “I’ll have six burgers, please, with all the fixings.”

“I’ll take the eggs and bacon,” Jamie added, handing the menus to the poor girl as she entered their orders into her tablet. She turned back to the kitchen, scurrying away, her shoes clicking on the linoleum.

“I think I scared her,” Liz whispered. She turned her head to take in her surroundings, looking the diner over. “This place hasn’t changed a bit, but it all looks smaller to me, like a dollhouse modeled after the diner I remember. Hard to believe I used to be able to sit in those booths.”

“Yeah, what’s the deal with that?” Jamie asked. “Did you finally get that growth spurt your parents always promised you?”

“The idea of being as big as they were used to mortify me,” she chuckled, gazing out of the window at the street beyond as she reminisced. “Like I needed to stand out more than I already did, right?”

“I remember,” he said. “You seem ... happier in your own skin now, if that makes sense.”

“I am,” she replied, giving him an appreciative smile. “My parents weren’t wrong about everything. I discovered a new part of myself out there, I learned how to take care of myself, how to be self-sufficient.”

“Yeah, it doesn’t look like you need me to scare off bullies for you anymore,” Jamie mused as he looked her up and down pointedly. She laughed, reaching across the table to ruffle his hair again, Jamie struggling to straighten it as she beamed down at him.

“You were quite the little royal guard, weren’t you? Always looking out for me.”

“So,” he continued, settling back into his chair. “Tell me how you got so big. Is the food just that good on Borealis?”

“Borealans start off small, about the size of human toddlers,” she explained. “We’re born in litters of around five or six, so it helps to be a little fuzzball. Once we hit puberty, our hormones kick in, and we start to shoot up like bean sprouts. At least, that’s how it’s supposed to go. I was the runt of my litter, that’s why my parents brought me here while they left my brothers and sisters with family on the homeworld. I think they made the right choice. It would have been rough for me, growing up in an environment where strength means everything. Got my growth spurt in the end, though,” she added as she spread her arms wide. “Man, my bones and joints used to ache enough to keep me up at night. I grew about eight inches a year.”

“The difference is ... pretty stark,” Jamie said. She wasn’t just tall, she had packed on the muscle, probably thanks to the planet’s higher than average gravity. Just walking around on its surface must have been like resistance training. She looked as if she could chain a wrecking ball to her belly and carry it around without breaking a sweat. “I remember you being a head shorter than me, you always seemed so soft-spoken, so timid. It’s hard to believe that I’m looking at the same person.”

“It’s really me,” she replied. “I’m your Liz, and you...” She leaned over to nudge his shoulder with her giant fist. “You’re my Jamie.”

He blushed, remembering the last time she had said those words to him.

“My time on Borealis changed me in other ways,” she continued, the table creaking as she leaned her weight on it. “It was rough, at first. I had read about Borealan culture, but nothing could really prepare me for it. Someone who was raised on Earth can’t possibly understand a society so alien. My parents didn’t try to introduce me to it slowly, they just tossed me into the deep end, and expected me to adjust. I’m a Borealan, and that’s what Borealans do, so they told me. To them, Earth was the alien environment, and they were returning me to normalcy.”

“I get that maybe they couldn’t leave you behind,” Jamie said, “but weren’t they even a little sympathetic? I knew your parents well enough, they didn’t strike me as monsters.”

“They had their reasons,” she sighed, “even if I didn’t agree with most of them.”

“What was it like there?” Jamie asked. “What made it so rough?”

“Day to day life on Borealis is more like living in a military boot camp than anything resembling society on Earth. They have this really strict hierarchy, like a pyramid structure,” she said as she steepled her furry fingers to demonstrate. “Everyone lives in packs, kind of like wolves, and anyone who is ranked higher than you has total authority over you. They say jump, and you’d better jump, or you’ll answer to their claws.”

“That sounds ... harsh,” Jamie muttered. He felt his blood run cold as he remembered the meek, unassuming girl who had cried on his shoulder when her classmates had teased her about her appearance. How could that girl have survived such an environment? Maybe she hadn’t...

“They resolve all of their conflicts with violence,” she continued. “If you want to climb the social ladder, you have to fight for it. You piss off the wrong guy, and he’ll just lay into you, no questions asked. They don’t care about the circumstances. Even looking at someone the wrong way can be construed as a challenge to their authority, one that must be answered swiftly to save face. If someone is ranked lower than you, and they think they have a shot at taking you down, they won’t hesitate. Status is everything to a Borealan.”

Jamie wasn’t sure he wanted to hear any more, it sounded horrible. He couldn’t stand the thought of Liz going from a comfortable life on Earth to such a violent lifestyle. She seemed to notice his dour expression, and her excitement waned a little. She lowered her hands, stopping her wild gesturing.

“Hey, it’s not all that,” she said in an attempt to reassure him. “I’m here, and I’m healthy, right? The story has a happy ending, I promise.”

“If you say so...”

“It took me a while to get it, but there’s ... a strange logic to it all,” she said with a flourish of her claws. “Your pack is like your family, you share everything, you look out for each other. You’re never alone, someone always has your back. Your Alpha – they’re the highest-ranked member of the pack – is tasked with taking care of everyone under their authority. If they’re irresponsible, or they mistreat their packmates, they don’t last long. Doesn’t matter how tough you are if you have half a dozen people always gunning for your position.”

“How do they even survive?” Jamie asked, eyeing her long claws. “Borealans are built like grizzly bears, wouldn’t they be spending most of their lives in the hospital?”

“The thing about Borealans is, we’re tough, right? I read all about it in xenobiology classes back in college, but it was amazing to see it in action, to ‘feel’ it. Our muscle fibers are far denser than those of humans,” she continued, flexing her bicep through her jacket as if to demonstrate. “We have a much more reactive immune system, too, with a healing factor that’s through the roof. You can give a guy a gash half an inch deep, and he’ll be back a couple of days later with only a scar to show for it. Humans would need stitches, weeks of recovery, but Borealans just walk it off.”

“What about infections?” Jamie asked.

“They happen,” she replied, “but we tend to get over them just as quickly. Believe it or not, it’s rare that anyone ever gets seriously hurt during dominance bouts, the victor is usually decided well before the fight escalates to become life-threatening.”

She put her grisly story on hold as the waitress returned with their meals, Jamie scooting his chair back a little, giving her room to place his plate of bacon and eggs on the table in front of him. She was balancing a whole tray of burgers in her other hand, it looked like an order meant for a whole booth full of diners, but she set it down before the giant Borealan. Liz licked her chops with her rough tongue, picking up one of the sandwiches in her hand. It was a sizable burger, but it looked tiny in relation to her. She chomped it in half in a single bite, and even then, Jamie still got the impression that she was pacing herself. She had always been a prodigious eater in her youth, but the amount of calories she must have to consume to maintain such a large body was mind-blowing.

“Where was I?” Liz continued, swallowing a mouthful. “Oh, right. So, my family arrives on Borealis, and I’m just beside myself. I don’t know which way is up. Everyone is expecting me to know all the ins and outs of their culture, and I didn’t have you around to stick up for me. My parents weren’t much help, and my littermates ... that’s a whole story in itself. I just wanted to stay inside and hide, but they weren’t having any of that. Nobody was mean to me exactly, not by their own standards, but the first month or so was ... really hard on me.”

Jamie forked some bacon into his mouth, listening to her tale. He didn’t feel so hungry now, his stomach was knotting as he listened to the tragic story. Liz seemed nonplussed, finishing off the remaining half of her first burger, pausing to lick some of the grease from her furry fingers with her prehensile tongue.

“Damn, these are as good as I remember them,” she muttered. “So, my parents got frustrated with me and started locking me out of the house during the day. They told me to go learn what I needed to learn, toughen up.”

“Liz, that’s terrible,” Jamie said, grimacing at the thought. “How could they do that to you?”

“You have to understand how they saw me at the time,” she explained. “I was soft, weak, in every sense. Growing up in low gravity had made me far more frail than someone of my age should have been, and being raised in human society had instilled me with ideals that just don’t exist on Borealis in the same way that they do here. In their eyes, compassion would only abet weakness, and I could only find my place in society by becoming strong.”

“That’s like ... asking a librarian to become a cage fighter,” Jamie marveled, shaking his head in disbelief.

“Hang on, this is where it gets good!” she insisted. “I’d been there for a couple of months at this point, and I’m walking down the main market street of Elysia, which is the biggest city on the planet. It’s pretty much the unofficial capital, a backwater by Earth standards, but huge for Borealis. It’s clogged with Borealans – all bigger than me, mind you – so I turned off the street and into an alleyway just to get away from the crowds. There are these guys there, maybe four or five Borealans with red hair. I didn’t know it at the time, but it was a pack. These guys are blocking my way, just hanging out in this alley and chatting. Maybe they worked at a nearby stall or something, I don’t know, but I tried to get past them. I tapped the biggest, baddest looking dude on the arm, just to get his attention. They probably hadn’t seen me because I was so small.”

Liz swiped her claws suddenly, imitating an attack, startling Jamie as he tried to eat his fried eggs.

“Boom!” she exclaimed. “I feel this searing pain in my belly, and I look down to see a red patch spreading across the front of my dress. Turns out unsolicited physical contact is a big no-no on Borealis, I might as well have just insulted his mother. This guy, who was easily two or three times my weight, just scarred me without a second thought. So I start to cry because, hell, I was still a little girl, but that just pisses them off more. Borealans loathe weakness. So this guy starts gearing up to have another go at me while his pack backs off, and I have this moment of clarity, a realization. This guy doesn’t care. He doesn’t care that I’m smaller than him, that I’m a girl, that I’m upset. This is Borealis, and nobody will ever care. I could have backed off and groveled, and he would have let me go. That’s how an encounter like that is expected to play out, but I didn’t know that at the time.”

Jamie forked another piece of bacon into his mouth, both captivated and mortified by the story.

“Then I get angry,” she continued, exposing her sharp teeth in a grin. “This new feeling wells up inside me like a fever, like there’s magma in my veins, and I start seeing red. Suddenly, I understand what my parents had been trying to teach me. I could stay a scared little girl, or I could break bone. Before I know what’s happening, I have this guy’s wrist in my hands, and I’m flipping him over my shoulder. I scream like a Valkyrie, and drop him on the stone paving slabs like a ton of bricks, right on his stupid face.”

She laughed at the memory, picking up another burger as Jamie listened intently.

“His pack don’t know what to do. This just became a dominance fight, and they can’t intervene, so they just kind of back up to get some distance. You remember I used to take Aikido classes, right?” she asked as she waved her sandwich at him, a few droplets of sauce falling to the table. “At the time, I just wanted to feel more confident. I thought that if I learned how to defend myself from bullies, you might not have to feel like you had to look after me all the time.”

“Yeah, I remember,” Jamie replied. She had never talked much about those classes, Jamie had always assumed that it was just good exercise.

“As it turns out, Borealis has no martial arts,” she explained. She paused to lick her fingers again, Jamie watching the barbs on her tongue rake the sauce from her fur. “At least, nothing like what we have on Earth. There are a few fighting styles that they teach to soldiers, but it all revolves around their claws, they don’t have any experience with throws or holds. The Alpha gets up, and if he wasn’t angry before, he is now. He turns to face me and charges me at a run. The thing about Aikido is that it’s all about subduing heavier, stronger opponents, ideally without actually hurting them. So if this guy thinks he can win with brute force, he’s making a huge mistake.”

“That’s hard to picture,” Jamie said as he tried to imagine someone of Liz’s size when she had left Earth throwing someone the size of her father around. “What did you do next?”

“My training kicked in, it was like a reflex. I converted all of his weight and momentum into a throw and just launched the guy. He came down hard,” she said as she pounded her fist on the table for emphasis, making Jamie’s breakfast jump on his plate. “Before he could get up again, I pounced on his back and got his arm in a lock. I was tiny compared to him, but he couldn’t break out of it. The more he struggled to try to free himself, the more the hold hurt him. I said to him in Elysian, ‘submit, or I break it’, and he must have understood well enough because he lay still. I waited a couple of minutes, I was scared he would try to attack me if I let him up, but a defeated Borealan won’t have a second go. At least, not immediately. When I released him from the hold, he just kind of stumbled off. He seemed more scared of his pack than of me. I probably tanked his status.”

She chuckled to herself, finding the situation far more amusing than Jamie did. He watched her pluck another burger from her plate, popping it into her mouth like a slider, chewing happily.

“I ran back home, thinking I’d been gutted, but the cuts were healed by the next day. Shredded my dress though, I liked that damned dress...”

She rose to a knee so that he could see her midriff over the table, then pulled down the zipper on her leather jacket, revealing the grey tank top that she was wearing beneath it. His eyes wandered up to her chest, and how could they not? Her breasts had filled out just as much as the rest of her, so large now that they were at least as big as his head, the outline of an oversized sports bra clearly visible beneath the insubstantial fabric. He remembered the perfect handfuls from their last night together, but these looked more likely to engulf his hands completely if he tried to cup them.

His attention was directed to her belly as she reached down to lift her top, revealing a set of developed abdominal muscles, the sight making his heart skip a beat. He had known that she was stronger now, but seeing her sculpted abs casting shadows on her tanned skin put that into a whole new perspective. If Borealis was a chisel, then she was the marble, its harsh environment shaping her into something that more resembled a Greek statue than the lithe girl that he had once known.

What she wanted to show him was the trio of faded, pink scars that trailed across her belly, contrasting with her caramel complexion. They were long-healed, but it gave him an idea of the damage that the aliens could inflict upon one another during their violent bouts.

She zipped up her jacket and sat back down, continuing her story.

“From that day forward, I wasn’t scared anymore. I didn’t go looking for fights, but I never backed down, never lost. They even gave me a nickname when I started to earn a reputation,” she chuckled. “You wouldn’t be able to pronounce it in the local dialect, but it means ‘never learns’, because I didn’t have the patchwork of scars that most Borealans end up with by my age.”

She shifted her weight, perhaps growing uncomfortable sitting on the hard floor, and popped another sandwich into her mouth. She seemed to be waiting for praise, as if Jamie should be impressed by her story, but it had only made him anxious.

“Jamie...” Liz crooned, her tone softening. “I’ve known you long enough to guess what you’re thinking. It might seem like a lot has changed, but it’s still me, I’m still the same girl you grew up with.”

“Sorry,” he sighed, setting down his cutlery. “It’s just a little ... overwhelming. You’re overwhelming,” he added, gesturing to her massive frame. She took it as a compliment, grinning back at him.

“Yeah, I got pretty big, huh? It’s weird for me, too. I remember always having to look up at you, you were so much taller than me when we were kids. I used to like how that made me feel,” she added with a smile, gazing into the distance as her nostalgia overwhelmed her for a moment. “Looks like the tables have turned.”

“So, tell me what Borealis was like,” Jamie said, changing the subject before he got too flustered. “The place, I mean. I think I’ve heard more than enough about the people.”

“Hot,” she replied without a moment of hesitation. “Really, really hot. Couple that with the gravity, which is thirty-percent higher than on Earth, and stepping off the shuttle is like walking into a sauna with a fifty-pound rucksack on your back. I took one step off the ramp and almost buckled.”

“It has its benefits, though,” he said as he gestured to her muscular frame.

“You can’t help but toughen up under that kind of gravity,” she explained. “You might not believe it, but I’ve never lifted a dumbbell in my life.”

“You said that Elysia was a city?” he continued.

“By Borealan standards,” she chuckled. “When you say ‘city’, you think of glass skyscrapers, streets packed with cars and people. Nobody in Elysia has a car, there’s no traffic, no mag-levs. Few of the buildings are more than a couple of storeys tall due to the high gravity, and they use stone rather than steel. Hell, it’s not even customary to have windows on their houses. Helps keep the heat out. It was a real culture shock,” she continued as she licked some more grease from her fingers. “In many ways, Borealis is a medieval society. They had only just discovered gunpowder by the time humans showed up, most of the planet is pre-industrial. They’re modernizing, but slowly. Most dwellings have no electricity, no intranet, but the capital does have running water on account of it being on the shore of a giant lake.”

“Is that why you were never able to contact me?” Jamie asked, seeing his opportunity to press her on the subject. “I tried to get in touch with you, but I didn’t have a clue where in Elysia you might be.”

“Believe me, I wanted nothing more than to get a message back to Earth,” Liz sighed. “There was no phone service in Elysia, and besides, my parents had confiscated mine. The only line of communication off-planet is an FTL satellite operated by the UNN, and it’s not exactly easy to get a message into the queue.”

“Tell me about it,” Jamie muttered.

“There’s some traffic from spacecraft, mostly Navy vessels bringing in troops and supplies, but civilian trade is pretty light. You’d be lucky to see more than a couple of freighters a year, and there are no spaceports, no tethers, no orbital stations. The only way to get word to you would be to come here myself, and ... that’s what I did!” she said with a shrug. “It took chartering a private shuttle to get me off the surface, then I booked passage on a jump freighter to reach a colony where I could catch a more traditional flight. Had to raise the cash first, mind you. As it turns out, being an Alpha has lots of privileges. Borealans are oddly unconcerned with private property and personal wealth, the pack shares everything. If I wanted something, I generally got it.”

She patted her bomber jacket, directing his attention to her ample chest.

“Cool, right?” she asked as Jamie appraised her outfit.

“Yeah,” he conceded, “it’s pretty damned cool...”

“Thought I’d need some human clothes if I was coming back to Earth, so I had it custom made,” she added as she tugged at the furry collar. “Say what you want about the Borealans being backward, but their artisans are without compare. Let’s call it size XXXL,” she laughed, downing her last burger. “Anyway, enough about me. What have you been up to all this time? When I turned up at your apartment yesterday, you said something about hiring a detective and bribing a UNN official? That’s a story I want to hear.”

“Oh, right,” Jamie replied. “Yeah, that was a few months after you left. I ran into a similar predicament as you did. I couldn’t get a message through the satellite buffer, and I had no clue where you had gone. The first thing I did was find a private eye in Old Town, hoping that I could hire him to find your new address.”

“Old Town?” Liz asked, leaning her head in her hand as she listened intently. “That place was super creepy, I never liked going down that way.”

“That plan fell apart pretty quickly when he explained the logistics of locating someone off-planet. Fortunately, he knew a contact in the UNN who had access to one of the quantum satellites, and who had a way to bump civilian messages up the queue. It was like communicating with a spy, it was crazy. The guy would take calls in audio-only mode, and he used a synthesizer to change his voice so that nobody could recognize him. Well, I say ‘he’, but it could just as easily have been a woman. I’d have no way of knowing.”

“Exciting!”

“I would have called it scary,” Jamie chuckled. “I felt like this guy was going to black bag me if he thought I might blow his cover. Anyway, his method was to encrypt the data using Navy protocols, then he’d slip the encrypted package into the buffer, passing it off as some important UNN communique. As long as the file size was pretty small, it wouldn’t attract any scrutiny. Problem was, he was asking a pretty steep price for his services.”

“Here it comes,” Liz said with a shake of her head. “I didn’t think he’d put himself at risk of a court-martial out of the goodness of his heart. How much did he want?”

“Five thousand credits,” Jamie replied, Liz’s feline eyes widening in surprise.

“Five?” she repeated, her furry ears twitching as though she might have misheard him. “I hope you told him to cram it.”

“It was cheaper than using a private company, by a considerable margin,” Jamie explained as he shrugged his shoulders. “I didn’t have much of a choice. So, I sold my console and my VR kit.”

“Oh no!” Liz exclaimed, her brow furrowing. “You used to love playing that thing! What was the one you always tried to get me to play with you, the one with the guy on the station fighting Bugs? The virtual reality always used to scare the hell out of me.”

“I remember that,” he said, chuckling at the memory of her flinching away from digital Drones as she waved the controllers around. “Don’t worry, I replaced it eventually, got the latest model. But yeah, I was still pretty far off the mark, so I ended up getting a part-time job to raise the money.”

“All this just to get a message to me?” she asked, her expression warming.

“I wanted to reconnect with you more than anything,” he blurted, composing himself as a wave of embarrassment made his cheeks warm. This was Liz, and yet, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was talking to a stranger. They had kissed in his apartment, surely it was okay to get personal? “After that note you left on my door ... well, that gave me even more motivation. I felt like I had to set the record straight. For one brief moment, I had everything I ever wanted, and just when I felt as if I couldn’t be any happier ... you were gone. I didn’t even get a chance to say goodbye.”

“I couldn’t face you,” Liz said, her excitable demeanor darkening as she sifted through the old memories. “That’s why I left the note. It would have killed me to say goodbye, so I ran from you, I always regretted that. But if I had stayed, your last memory of me would have been miserable, and I wanted that night to live on forever. It was the closest thing to a perfect moment I’ve ever had,” she added, laughing more bitterly now.