Page 35 of Fathom

"I don't want to ever see you again," the reptile said as he turned away from her. "This is over."

He turned and ran from the table, the camera focusing in on the torment on his face.

Then it flicked back to the female alien who sat there, staring after him.

"That's how I know you love me," she whispered.

The show ended, optimistic music playing.

I’d seen so many scenes like that so far. Abby had definitely put together a playlist of shows with a specific theme: the predator and the prey.

The predator was always fierce; fangs, claws, and impossible strength. The prey was always soft, bright-eyed, delicate. Each of them was always a member of a set species. There were never predator species in the prey roles. Their relationships were charged, emotional, borderline sexual at times, but never went all the way. Always the prey who pursued, always the predator who resisted, at least, if he or she was a good guy. The bad predators did the pursuing. When the relationship was real and reciprocated, it ended in heartbreak and separation. The happy endings showed the predator stepping back, watching from a distance while the prey found love with someone of her own kind. Sometimes, the predator found comfort in a same-species bond, but often they watched from a distance, longing after what they could never have.

In the bad predator stories, they ended with death.

The prey was killed, often graphically, by the very predator she loved. He would lose control, a madness coming over him, so similar to the madness I had seen in Eun. The predators in those types of stories would sometimes be evil from the start,tricking the prey into a secluded spot by courting them. Sometimes they seemed to believe in their own good intentions until the very last moment, where they lost control. Those ones focused on the psychological aspect of the predator fooling themselves. Those episodes lingered on the gore, the death, like pain was the inevitable price of wanting too much. The dead prey in those were obviously the result of puppetry and movie magic, just fake enough to make me sure I wasn't watching a snuff film, but it was still disturbing, like the people making it were turned on by the slaughter. The worst part about it was that the shows made it clear that the predators who were lying to the prey, who didn't love them, and go mad, and instead planned ahead, those ones were clever about where and when they killed their prey and would get away with it.

After seeing enough of them, I understood something clearly.

Eun was treating me with the utmost respect, by the standards of his world... as if I were a prey species. Before he had locked himself up, he had treated me with consideration that was standard to what I saw of the 'good predators' on the show. He avoided touching me, at least with his hands. He couldn't seem to keep his tail off me. He was thoughtful of my space. The way he had treated me before this, all of it wasright. His behavior was culturally appropriate. Except for the sole fact that he lived with me. They never lived together in the shows, unless it was a bad predator show.

The tragic story of the 'bad ones' was the ones who tried to live with their partners, and that was when everything went wrong. Those ones, the predators didn't want to kill their partners, and it always ended with them being taken away by the police because they were in such a state of madness that they had to be chained up until the madness passed.

Eun, right now, was like one of the bad ones, the ones who were snarling beasts who had to be locked up after they killed and ate the ones they promised to love.

He was locked up in that room for me. To keep me safe.

The thing was, I wasn't a prey species, not by the definitions of this planet.

No humans were, even if we swore off animal products altogether, it didn't change the physical needs of our bodies. We could go without, but only if we had ample supplements available in a technologically modern society. I could understand why he would think of me as prey. I had the look of one who was sure, with my blunt nails, softer features, and mostly flat teeth.

But ultimately, if I were dumped on a primitive planet with nothing but a rabbit, there would be no question about where I stood on the food chain.

I looked down at the petals in my lap, surrounding the key to the deadbolt. They were pale blue, trembling slightly in the breeze from the ventilation system. The thing was, Eun hadn't hurt me. When he put his teeth against my neck, it didn't hurt. He hadn't bitten me. Even when covered in blood and clearly out of his mind, he was gentle with me. Something deep inside of him recognized me for who I was and who I could be to him.

He was there for me when I needed him the most.

I couldn't stop thinking about him moving against me. The details of it would come to me late at night, swirling in my mind with the remembrance of the hard lines of his body, the soft texture of touching him, how he seemed lost in me. The first time I had squeezed him in my hand, I felt so in control and out of it. It had aroused me like no other moment I could think of in my life. The second time, when he had pinned me to the floor and humped me, the memory lived rent-free in my thoughts,playing over and over again. He hadn't hurt me. He had saved me. He wanted me.

And yet he still locked himself up like he thought he was a danger to me.

I knew he wasn't, but I also knew there was only one way to be sure about that.

I picked up the key, rising to my feet and letting the blue flower petals scatter to the ground around my feet. One thing I knew for certain was that this was going to be one of the best or worst decisions of my life. It was okay. Even if I was wrong, he was still chained. I just had to stay out of his reach.

"Eun," I whispered, leaning my forehead against the door. "I'm going to come in there."

He let out a groan, as if he were trying to speak, but the words wouldn't come.

I unlocked the door and pushed it open.

Eun stood in the center of the room, slack in the chain that attached to the thick metal collar around his neck, staring at me with his feral eyes, his hair reaching out towards me, looking longer than before, framing his face. He stood perfectly still, as if the slightest movement would cause me to flee. He wasn't wearing much, just a pair of tight-fitting black boxers that were darker than his slate grey skin, the rest of his beautiful body on display. His muscles tensed as I looked at him, accenting the gorgeous lines of his muscular frame, his skin pulled tight against them to show them off in extreme detail, as if every additional bit of fat in his body had been devoured for some other purpose.

The sight of him was so disjointed from the reality of his work. This wasn't the body of a server in a restaurant. This was the body of a man who lived and breathed movement and strength. The rest of his clothing was trashed, torn apart intotattered rags as if a wild animal had been let loose in the room. The rags were piled up near his mattress, which he had dragged off its frame and onto the floor, with all the sheets, blankets, and pillows piled up near it, but not on it. On the far end of the room, where the chain was bolted to the wall by a metal plate, the wall was cracked around it.

I stepped into the room, and his eyes never left me, tracking my movement.

"Eun?" I asked. I found the words in his language, framing them as I had practiced. "Talk to me."