Page 22 of The Alien Minotaur's Bride

The main room where we'd spent the heat was just the beginning. There was the storage space I'd already seen, a preparation area for food with counters at my chin level and heating elements I couldn't have reached without climbing, a hygiene chamber with a basin large enough for me to bathe in entirely and a waste disposal system that required me to basically climb up onto it like mounting a horse.

Everything was built for Khorreth. Every single thing. The dwelling hadn't been adapted for a smaller occupant because it had never needed to be – Keth lived alone, and before the serum, there had been no omega to consider.

I was an afterthought in a space designed for someone else entirely.

"The heating system is here." Keth was following me through the dwelling, pointing out features I could barely see, let alone operate. "The water recycler here. The communications panel–"

"I can't reach any of this."

"No."

"Keth." I stopped in the middle of what appeared to be his personal workspace – a room full of tools and half-finished projects, all of them scaled for hands twice the size of mine. "I can't live here. Not like this. I can't do anything for myself."

He was quiet for a moment.

"You lived alone for many rotations," he said finally. "On your station. Everything there was built for you."

"Yes."

"You provided for yourself. Tended to yourself. You were–" He searched for the word. "Self-sufficient."

"Yes."

"That was important to you."

It wasn't a question, but I answered anyway. "It was everything to me. It was–" I stopped. Swallowed. "It was all I had."

He looked at me, his huge dark eyes unreadable. Then he turned and walked out of the room.

I stood there, alone in the oversized workspace, feeling very small and very stupid and not sure what I'd said wrong.

Then I heard a crack.

I followed the sound back to the main room and found Keth kneeling beside one of the heavy wooden chairs, a tool in his hand. As I watched, he fitted it against one of the chair legs and twisted, and the leg snapped cleanly at what would have been knee-height for him.

"What are you doing?"

He didn't answer. Just moved to the next leg and repeated the motion. Snap. Then the next. Snap. Then the last.

The chair, which had been tall enough that my feet wouldn't have touched the floor, was now low enough that I could sit in it comfortably. My feet would reach the ground. My back would rest against the support.

He stood, surveyed his work, then crossed to the heavy table in the centre of the room. His tool made a different sound this time, not snapping but carving, gouging a series of notches into the table's edge. When he was done, there was a rough set of steps cut into the wood, leading from floor level to tabletop.

"Keth–"

He moved to the sleeping pallet next. Grabbed an armful of the furs piled there and carried them to the corner of the room – the warmest corner, I noticed, nearest the heating system. He arranged them there with surprising care, building up the sides, hollowing out the centre. A nest. Sized for someone my height to curl up in.

Then he went back for more. Heavy woven blankets this time, soft and dense. He layered them into the nest, adjusting the shape, until there was a space that was warm and enclosed and exactly my scale.

When he finished, he stepped back and looked at me.

"I cannot make everything in this dwelling fit you," he said. "Not quickly. But I can start. I can watch what you need and change what I can change." A pause. "You are not an afterthought, Mara. You are the reason the dwelling exists. The reason I exist now. Your comfort is–" He searched for the word. "It is the only thing that matters."

"You had three rotations," I said. The thought had been building. "You knew you were bringing me here. You built a cell on your ship that fit me. You made the serum. You planned all of it. And it never occurred to you to put one chair in your home I could actually sit in?"

He was slow to answer. "I thought about it. I had drawings made – furniture to your scale, the whole dwelling fitted before you ever arrived." A pause. "Then I stopped. A cell is something you build for someone, to keep them alive on a journey. A home is something you build with them. I did not want you to step into a life already shaped to someone else's guess at you, every choice made before you had a say. I wanted to see what you reached for, and change the world to match it."

"So the chair was a romantic gesture."