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.At first, Kate had worried about the noise keeping them up, and that was when Alpha had discovered the thing that caused the second fight.“We’re all programmed to sleep through the night?”Anderson had been surprised.“Yeah, I’d almost forgotten about that.” Things between them had mended in the past month, as they’d spent their energies fixing one problem and their creativity fixing another.Alpha was always happier when he had something to do, something purposeful.When he was happier, he was the young man from Anderson’s dreams again, and things were peaceful in their small community.(Even their home had been made smaller by the elimination of the school.Their entire house, which had been a good-sized dorm complex, now consisted of three bedrooms and a common room, and Alpha had been subtly campaigning to put the other two couples into one room.Anderson had coldly vetoed that one.He didn’t want his privacy violated any more than he imagined anyone else did, but that didn’t stop Alpha from keeping up the argument.)“Forgotten it? Why did you do it?”Anderson flushed then.This was a secret thing.This was a thing he’d told no one, not even Bobby.Especially not Alpha.“I was afraid the random behavior algorithms would disrupt my own sleep patterns,” he said calmly.He was called upon to prevaricate so very rarely that he wasn’t sure if he could do it right.Alpha seemed to be mollified, though, so he let the matter drop.Anderson walked out of their room then, and into Bobby’s, and simply put his finger over his lips for a moment while he leaned against Bobby’s wall and trembled.That had been a near thing.A terrible thing.Bobby looked at him hard for a moment, but Anderson shook his head.Neither of them mentioned the moment again, and Alpha never asked, especially when the math revealed that a significant amount of energy was saved by keeping everybody asleep unless they were needed at the bridge.Neither Anderson nor Bobby mentioned the fact that Anderson was now afraid of his lover to the point that he’d rather run away than risk Alpha’s anger.Neither of them mentioned the fact that they were both sure the disagreement would have come to blows.They were an isolated few people on a small ship, alone in the vastness of space.Some things simply had to be endured.For the next four and a half years, that’s exactly what they did.Endure they did.Even as Kate sent out the all-important hail to the space station, the six of them were still engaged in the painstaking task of calling up data on their tablets and then showing it to the holo-recorders plainly before deleting it.Every deletion felt like a betrayal.Every betrayal made Anderson hate himself a little bit more and made Alpha a little bit angrier.The first month after they started the deletion found two more bruises marking Anderson’s face.They hadn’t even had to ration the organic matter that the synthesizer used yet.The day Anderson had started throwing paper-based colony manifests into the synthesizer in order to make food, Alpha had split his lip in an argument about whether keeping the name of every last man, woman, and child on the colony was a sacred trust.Anderson’s lip and nose had been pouring blood, and still, he’d insisted that it was.Alpha knocked his head against the wall and then stalked out, but Anderson remained convinced that one was a win.When they reached the point of deleting their least favorite videos (but the ones Anderson was sure his mother would have liked) Alpha was greeting Anderson at the door by throwing him on the bed, yanking his pants down, and taking him forcefully, sometimes painfully, and never by asking for his consent.About the time they reached the archives for the colonists themselves, Alpha’s hands made their first circle around Anderson’s throat during sex.That had been nearly a year before they found the space station at the Hermes-Eight system.And now, after a day of celebration and a joyful use of the much-hoarded energy reserves, Anderson was afraid to walk into his sleep quarters with the man who had been built to love him.But the fear had never stopped him before.He walked into their small house—they’d put it close to the biosphere in the holo-design, so it had been like they’d grown up and taken jobs, instead of like they’d been forced into a smaller bubble of reality—and then into his and Alpha’s room.The room itself was… it was pretty.He kept a picture of his family there on his old school tablet, in spite of Alpha’s protests, and looked at them every day and said their names.His mother, Caitlin, with the fine blonde hair and brown eyes and a smile that seemed to stretch her narrow face.His father, James, who had Anderson’s fair hair, brown eyes, and a slyer, more grave smile, but a fond look as he gazed at his children.The tablet held more than just the picture, but the picture itself was special.It had been taken the day Anderson had turned twelve.He was smiling in real, honest-to-God sunshine, and Melody was trying to shove cake down his face
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