Empyrean Iris Story Collection Vol. 3

Testing Positive

The ship's crew was bustling as it normally did this early in the morning. Everyone was going about their daily work preparing themselves as quickly as possible for the moment that they would be able to stop working and continue on with what they really wanted to do. The work got done quickly and well just so that they could tell the admiral about it were he to ask them at any point.

It was only Sunny and Adam themselves who broke the morning routine waiting in the docking bay silently side by side. Sunny longed to reach out to Adam take comfort in his touch, but he was wearing his uniform, and it wouldn't do to have such a display in public. She was no idiot of course, she knew that most of the crew knew, and she knew that probably meant that the UNSC brass and probably key members of the GA knew, but still, it was a good idea to keep some propriety and a measure of plausible deniability.

Though interspecies relationships were legal in the GA now, that didn't mean that everyone was as accepting as they would have liked you to think.

But still she longed for a little comfort from her battle partner as they waited for the expected landing.

The Forsaken, as they had taken to calling themselves, had chartered a ship of their own, and had agreed to come and visit them on the omen. That had been at least a day ago as they went on their separate ways, and Sunny was growing more nervous by the second. She still couldn't wrap her head around the fact that she had a sister. It was all too much to take in in such little time. She was almost skeptical of its truth.

She hadn't even thought about telling her brother as just thinking about the whole scenario was giving her a headache.

She reached up to rub her eyes with her upper hands trying to get things straight in her head. Hundreds if not thousands of Drev away in hiding to avoid persecution for how they looked. Children abandoned on the side of mountains or into the arms of stranger by Drev mothers who felt they had no other choice, and then her own mother Kazna, someone she had always looked at as a heartless, sadistic narcissist , who had shown her inability to sacrifice her children to the volcano, at least on two occasions, and maybe more, though they would likely never know.

Had her father known?

She doubted it. Lanus would never have allowed such a thing. It was likely that Kazna told him that the children had all died or been still born, if not in order to protect him, than at least to protect her own shame, which seemed common among Drev mothers if this was all true. Many of them seemed willing to lie in order to keep their children alive without the guilt of having to know that they committed infanticide.

"I'm here, what is it you wanted to talk to me about."

Sunny and Adam turned to see Kanan walking up the hallway. He was so tall that his head almost brushed the ceiling, though he didn't seem to notice or care.

The pang of jealousy she had upon seeing him was barely noticeable this time, and it had been getting smaller for a long time. She admitted there was a point at which she had resented him for a bit, with his height and fighting prowess, a trat she shared but that had not come so easy to her, but these days such thoughts were ephemeral and openly pointless as her brother's injuries gave rise to a bad leg, and the death of his mate Nehchal had left him more lonely than he might have liked to admit.

Although that was another fact Sunny was having a hard time wrapping her head around.

Dzara had said that their shortness was the product of some sort of common inheritable genetic condition that sunny had never heard of. She had always sort of assume it was just bad luck, that she was like most other Drev, just smaller.

And perhaps that was still the case.

But somehow knowing that..... knowing that there was something wrong with her on a molecular level bothered her more than she would have liked to admit. Sunny had grown up in a culture where being anything but physically perfect was frowned upon, and overcoming that herself was difficult. It was hard to accept the fact that, she wasn't just short, she was some sort of.