Hawk decided to fire off an email to Emile Yung immediately after they got home. Her fellow entomologist was truly notorious for two things: being vocally non-binary, and holding a grudge until it counts as a fossil. If she sent off a note now, it would give Emile enough time to see that Hawk wasn't blowing smoke up their ass, and to collect whatever documentation they'd put together so they could drop a bomb on Dyson's latest project. Obviously, Emile wasn't going to have a full transcript of Dyson's current notes, but they might have enough to turn whatever samples they collected into a decoder ring for Dyson’s new project. Solve the whole problem overnight. Easy.

Right. Like these things ever came in easy.

Hawk and Alex lived in a rather comfortable ranch style home on two acres. Alex managed their garden, for the most part. They weren't allowed to use pesticides--too much collateral damage. It was worth losing a few tomatoes if it kept the soil healthy--so he had made it Hawk's job to manage the insects. He'd been a bit disconcerted when her response to pests was praying mantis egg cases, springtail cultures, and sugar stations for native ant species. Their garden was not flawless and if Hawk didn't net up the younger beds of veggies the caterpillars would eat them. But even Alex had to admit the butterfly garden—yellow bells, Lantana and trumpet plants lined the bed—was an excellent place to lose one’s self in a book. And he didn't mind that instead of throwing insect bait around, he was supposed to kill fire ant nests with boiling water. Instant, and less collateral damage, Hawk would remind him. Human chemistry isn’t always the better choice.

There were every-day chores at the West place, and the Wests did them quickly. Alex headed over to roll the compost barrel, because it was Tuesday and that was the schedule, and he made sure the timer on the soaker hose was working. Hawk would be inside, tidying up the kitchen. It had been Alex's turn to cook and he made lemon rosemary baked fish and baked French fries, because fuck hot oil right now. Alex really wanted to go find a vat of ice water and lay in it forever. Summer sucked in Arizona. Tomorrow it would be Hawk's turn, and it'd either be something elaborate like lobster ravioli with homemade pasta, or it'd be instant Ramen. It depended on what she wanted to get back to. He didn't care either way, but today he wanted baked fish. There was a safety and normalcy about food, that the Wests dove into with both hands.

They did not talk about going to Elizabeth Cummings' place in a few hours. Instead, Hawk talked about the latest developments with her ants, which weren't all that dramatic. At least, until she brought out the surprise. Six small, round, red-tinted abdomens in a very small cup.

The normal human response to this offering was ew, gross. Ants. But the normal human context does not allow for nuance. This was the thing Hawk valued the most. That was when Alex knew how scared she was.

"You said maybe in a few days."

She shrugged and set down her own tiny cup, and a bowl of vanilla ice cream for each of them, set down with two soft clicks. "Maybe we don't have a few days. Maybe I want to make sure that, you know..." She sighed. "things go sideways, at least I got to taste the fruits of my labor." She tried to smile. It didn't work very well.

"Hawk," he said. "You aren't going to die because we got a couple extra rads."

"Sievert." Hawk said. "Radiation is measured in sieverts."

"I don't care if it's measured in ass-widths. Your ants are your babies."

"They were probably gonna go in the next few weeks anyway. They're the oldest. The colony can handle losing twelve individuals. I'm giving them extra sugar and a tiny bit of raw fish as a treat." She paused. "And yes. Maybe I am scared."

He chucked, caught on the image of his wife offering ants teeny-tiny slivers of tuna fish. "Ever considered playing God?"

"What do you think I do in the ant room?" She grinned and picked at her fish. Then she said, "I think about that, though. Makes me wish I knew more about theology. You think God maybe thinks like an ant-keeper?"

"Like, he cares about the collective and not the individual?" Alex said, gesturing at the six dead ant honey samples. Was he actually going to eat these things? Yes. Yes he was. Because Hawk loved them, and he loved Hawk, and love sometimes means doing something unthinkable. Eating ants wasn't too bad. Wasn't there a book about a kid eating fried insects? Maybe he could fry them.

"Colonies don't care about individuals. You realize that every exploring scout and a lot of the ants that trail to gather food are old? They only risk what they can afford to lose...and that's why I have so many foundation failures. They won't forage until they have at least two generations worth of workers, and a replacement generation about to hatch. Most of the Queens starve before they get that far. So there's care for individuals. Just...not the way we value them. And I was thinking more about...you know. Move."

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Alex figured he knew what she was on about. One of those marriage short-hand things. "You said you don't have any founding colonies right now?" She had young ones, under a year, but most of hers were in some stage of foraging and growth, and the ones in decline were old and, in one case, Queenless. That one was dead. It just had a bit of dying left to do.

She rolled her eyes. "Queen Honey finally moved," Hawk said. She had two m. depilis colonies , and both colonies had been provided with a very nice formicarium as soon as they were large enough to occupy it and not use it as a garbage dump. They still used it as a garbage dump for the following two months, as the test tube they had grown in continued to first grow mold, and then dry out completely. Alternative housing had been provided the instant Hawk spotted those tell-tale black spots on the cotton, but it hadn't mattered. Two months later, the tube was emptied of water and still filled with ants, and Hawk's comfort with this situation diminished as time went on. All logic and Hawk's degrees insisted that the ants would move from the dry, unpleasant tube to the far more suitable and moist formicarium, because the tube itself was now a risk to the brood. They still wouldn’t move.

On occasion she thought about various Bible stories she'd absorbed from her fellow Americans via osmosis. (April Rayne hadn't gone on her Southern Baptist Convention kick until after Hawk was old enough to ignore the Chick tracts. The fact that they still made those was pretty impressive, as was the measure of offensive content. Fortunately April's choice to experiment with bisexuality ended the SBC adventures). She'd think about a God of some sort, sitting up there on a cloud--were clouds like the fine mesh screens on her tank lids? Do Gods have some version of fluon barrier to keep humans from escaping reality?--watching humans do things He knows is dumb, begging humans to do the right thing for themselves, please make the good choices, please stop hurting each other, please stop shitting where you eat. And maybe there was something a god could do to force humans to do what he wanted, but an ant keeper was SOL. She was hesitant to even dump the recalcitrant little things in a tank and let them figure life out. She'd lost queens before, doing that. People talk about sinners in the hands of an angry god. Hawk was suspicious that it was more like they were in the hands of a terrified one. He wants to keep humans, it's just...he's so big and they're so damn small...

"And, I mean...if you want a healthy colony, all you can do is just...give them everything they might want and let them take the lead. An ant keeper who tries to force ants to do what he wants usually winds up with dead ants." She said, and ate a bite of fish.

"So you're saying that God lets us do whatever because forcing it makes it worse?" he said.

"Or maybe I'm saying comparing gods, humans, and ants might be silly." She shrugged, and picked up one of her ants. He watched her eat it and waited for the grimace. Instead, she grinned. "Oh, wow."

He loved her smile. It caught him sometimes, like a flash of light. Her joy, displayed for the world to see, undimmed by any negative response. He did not fall in love with her beauty, though that had provided that initial spark of attraction. It wasn't her mind, either, though it was a joy to watch it work. It was her. Body, mind, these were just shadows cast by some numinous sun, and she was that star. Her enthusiasm for what she loved, the way she threw herself into her loves, heedless, heartstrong. The way she looked surprised when she actually got what she wanted.

So that was why he ate her ant. He put it in his mouth and bit. It came hot and spicy at first, and he remembered the words formic acid without really knowing why. But then the sweet hit and it was unexpectedly good. Hard to describe, though. Sweet, with a sting.

"It's good?" He said.

"Oh, yeah. That's amazing." She said.

"You need to say, it's good. That's what gods do, after creation." He said. "It's good."

"I'm a shit deity," she said.

"I'd be a worse one." He said. And then he rolled in for a kiss.

They made love as the sun set. On one hand it was easy, familiar. As routine as bathing and brushing your teeth. And yet it was always new. Finding the rhythm like you're pacing yourself to their heartbeat. Hands on shoulders, on waists, and now below. Do tricks with the fingers, tie pleasure in knots until she grips the bedsheet, both fists, moaning. Whispers, do you like that? And down, further down, and breathing becomes a drum-beat. Sweat glistens into a robe of diamonds, drips like alms upon a landscape of thirsty sheets. There was one muttered ow that was soothed away with a pause and a few caresses. Good sex is not perfection. It's partnership, and realizing that the act neither begins nor ends with an orgasm. It's the curve of their arm, the scent of their hair, and the slow spiral back down to earth, and if you neglect any part of this you might as well date your own hand. Sometimes good, sometimes bad. Tonight, it was normal.

***

Hawk lay in his arms when she was done and thought, this is my favorite part. When it's all done and the sex, like a storm, is spent and over and all that is left is breathing. In his arms, shattered, reborn, shattered again, there's peace and safety and rest. Weightless, one had to turn to other things to define this precious value. And even there, it was hard. Would she trade safety for a moonbeam? Her peace for the wealth of a nation? You had to reach for cosmic heights to put a value on love. Not sex. This curve of his arm, the brush of his chin against her hair.

Why does someone fight to save the world? For Hawk, it was because of this. Oh, everyone wants excitement. Joy. Peak experiences. To find the very height of what feeling can accomplish. But that is not sustainable. Joy is a fire. It burns, and it boils, and it sends you reeling in a desirable way, but no one wants to reel forever. Nature does not provide infinite fuel; fires are meant to go out.

But peace. Contentment. Knowing that no matter what happened, no matter how big or small the disaster, desired or hated in its way, there would be a place to pause...sometimes that's all that gets you through.

This was her place and her person. And she'd fight the whole world to get to keep it.