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torrilin reblogged your post and added:
Please do the coffee one, please. Kurt seems nice,…
I tried to do the coffee one but instead it was Kes and one of his cousins-once-removed doing morning chores and talking about chicken processing. I mean. I guess. write what you know.
Instinct and habit were funny things, Kes thought a little vaguely as he came to himself. He’d been offworld for months and months, his body completely acclimated to artificial gravity and the total lack of biorhythms of the space station, but Kes found himself standing by the back doorway, eyes unfocused, as dawn’s gray light crept up the eastern sky, with a feed bucket in his hand and Marita laughing at him.
“Xacristo, Kes,” she said, “you just got back, sleep in.”
“Gaios were singing,” he said, referring to the male chanticlos, whose obnoxious call heralded dawn and the start of the working day. That had to have been what it was that had woken him. He didn’t remember waking up. He had no idea how he’d gotten down here.
Marita stared at him for a moment, and he blinked himself a little more awake, and realized he’d probably slurred his words. “The crowing,” he said, a little feebly.
“Kes,” she said, laughing, “you’re such a dipshit. Go back to bed, honey. We have enough people to do chores without you.”
He blinked; as he woke up more, he was profoundly disoriented. “I don’t remember getting out of bed,” he mused. He looked down at himself in sudden alarm, but he was wearing clothes after all, an old set of coveralls that he’d always left hung by the door, they’d probably stayed there the whole time he was gone. Because he wore them for chores every day.
Marita leaned in and kissed his face, patting his other cheek. She was a cousin of some description, related to Norasol, and he’d known her his whole life. He’d even assisted Norasol in delivering her daughter, a handful of years back– sometimes everyone was offworld, and those still left had to get by on their own, so he’d assisted Norasol more than once in midwifing. He had a pretty strong notion that he knew more about how babies were born than Shara did, and he didn’t look forward to that process of discovery.
“You’re a good boy, Kes,” she said, “but we’ve got chores sorted out this morning. Go back and take care of your guests. Norasol was very mysterious about it all, by the way– who are those people?”
They’d gotten in pretty late the night before. Marita had been putting her daughter to bed already, Kes remembered. “Oh,” he said. “Sento and Shara. Pilots. Nice people.”
“I gathered,” she said, smirking at him. It wasn’t fair, he usually had kind of a rough transition to consciousness in the morning and it was grossly exacerbated by the travel-lag. “But why are they visiting?”
“Hopefully they’re staying,” Kes said. He rubbed his face. He was too awake now, he’d be up for the day. He bent and picked up the feed bucket again. “How many chanticlos we got now?”
“Kes, Tito’s big enough to help now, he’s probably already fed them,” Marita said.
“I know he hasn’t,” Kes answered. How did he know that? Right, he’d looked at the shoes by the door. In his sleep. Auto-pilot was disconcerting to consider in retrospect. “Boots still inside.”
Marita laughed. “Well. Teenagers. Hard to get going in the morning.” She looked over at the feed bin, which was a huge salvaged corrugated metal thing of uncertain provenance, propped on makeshift supports, with a hand-operated sliding door to dispense feed into buckets. The buckets, all odd-sized salvage, were stacked next to it in haphazard rows, but usually their arrangement made some kind of sense. Kes had a method, Marita had a method, and you could tell which animals needed what by the arrangement, unless someone else had stacked them last and paid no attention, which was often the case. “I think the chanticlos take six buckets now.”
Kes whistled. “That’s a lot.”
“Yeah, we’ve been too long without processing,” Marita said. She meant slaughtering them for meat.
“Oh,” Kes said, making a disgusted face, “you mean you were saving them for me.”
“Well,” she said brightly, starting to fill three more buckets. Kes, on autopilot, had already filled three. “Since you’re home now, you might as well.”
Nobody liked to be the one who had to do the actual killing. But ever since Kes’s hands had gotten too big to fit inside the carcasses to clean them out, he always ended up stuck doing it. There was just something about having to deal the killing stroke that was unnerving, no matter how stupid the chanticlos were.
“Ugh,” he said. But the deep-freeze conservators had to be nearly empty now, they’d need to get a batch done soon surely. And they sold the excess for processing into protein rations, it was an important source of income for them. “Give me a couple days at least, hey?”
“We got time,” Marita said. “Think our guests will want to help?”
Kes froze midway through loading two of the buckets onto the back of the hauler they used to get around for chores. It had a cranky repulsor that meant it always lurched sort of diagonally, but they’d never gotten around to fixing it very well; it was so rusty that the frame was going to fall apart at some point so there was little point in repairing it. “They’re spacers,” he said, thinking with horror of the Beys interacting with livestock in any way. He would lay actual credits that Shara had never seen a live chanticlo in her life. “They’re not– I don’t think–” He faltered. “Maybe we can put them in charge of lunch.” But he didn’t imagine either of them even knew how to cook.
“Everyone helps out,” Marita said, mock-severely. “You’re not trying to impress this girl, are you?”
Kes loaded the rest of the filled buckets onto the hauler instead of answering that. He hadn’t failed to notice how very carefully polite Shara was being, how neither of the Beys had commented on anything about the living situation. He’d expected it’d be weird here, for them, but he hadn’t wanted to think about it too hard. There was nothing to be done. He was saved by Tito stumbling out the back door, trying and failing to get his foot shoved into a boot. Tito’s shirt was on backwards and his hair was sticking straight up. “I got it, Mari, I got it, don’t be mad,” he said muzzily.
“Kes just crossed half the galaxy and has slept for like three hours and he’s way ahead of your lazy ass,” Marita said tartly.
“It’s okay, Tito,” Kes said, ruffling the boy’s hair. Tito was taller now, and gangly, his pudgy-baby torso stretched out into teenagery gawkishness. Tito loved Kes and had always followed him like a puppy. He gazed up adoringly at Kes now, and Kes pulled him into a hug; he’d seen him the night before, but there’d been a lot going on. “I got you, baby boy.”
“I can do it,” Tito said earnestly, and he wasn’t such a teenager he couldn’t wrap his arms around Kes and hug him properly, snuggling in against his shoulder sweetly.
“You can help me do it,” Kes said. “I know you’re not lazy. It happens, when you’re growing, that your body’s clock gets all screwy whether you go offworld or not.” He put his tongue out at Marita. “It doesn’t help when the old ladies are mean to you about it.” Marita had been merciless to Kes when he’d been Tito’s age. He let Tito go with one last hair-ruffle, and Tito grinned up at him, and stars, he wasn’t a kid anymore at all, his face was starting to look like a grown man’s.
“Old ladies,” Marita said. She was only five years older than Kes was. “Old ladies! You’d better watch yourself, talking like that.”
“If you prank me,” Kes said, “you know I’ll get you back.” He leaned over and banged on the water tank strapped into the hauler, trying to gauge how full it was; he’d put the hose into it on autopilot too, and it had been filling for the whole time they’d been standing there. It sounded full, so he hopped up and flipped the hose switch off, pulling it out before swinging back down.
Marita took the hose with a roll of her eyes, stepping into the garage to put the hose away near the spigot. “You think you’ll get me back,” she said. “But what’s really going to happen is that you’re going to need a favor from me and you’re going to be so so so sorry you were mean to me and one of these days, I won’t do whatever it is you need, and then where will you be?”
“Reminding you that I literally pulled your child out of you,” Kes said, “don’t give me this owing-you-favors bullshit!” He had; his hands had been smaller than Norasol’s then, and the baby had needed turning. Marita squeaked with indignant laughter.
“You can hardly expect me to repay that favor,” she said.
Kes stared at her for a moment. “Not directly, no,” he said, and it suddenly wasn’t funny, because he’d thought he was completely at peace with the fact that he was going to have a baby, but now he didn’t really know how to feel about it.
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