I thought her head was going to fly off the way she yanked it to face me directly. “Say what now?!” Fauve demanded. “You’re supposed to stay with us for the next fifty years. It hasn’t even been fifty weeks!” She snapped, and I was quiet for a few seconds while I thought of how to say this.

“I’m also not supposed to eat humans, not even the foul tasting ones that even the gods of your most popular surviving cults know I couldn’t swallow if I wanted to. I attacked one of your people. My government is involved, your government is involved. They may both decide the easiest way to resolve it is to deport me in your people’s case, or recall me in my people’s case.” I sat up straight and opened my hands out in front of my body like I was weighing two roughly equally weighty objects, and turned my head to face her.

My hands bobbed up and down as if weighing the two situations, “No more Bailey, no more problems. Or, no more Bailey, no more problems. Both your planet and mine may come to the same conclusion.”

“Do you… do you want to go?” Fauve asked, her lower lip quivered until she bit down on it, before she could get teary eyed, I violently shook my head in denial.

“No, of course not. I’ve spent years studying your species as my specialization. If I go back, all that is wasted, and getting another exoplanetary visa to go to some other world and study them instead? No, that’ll take years. Do you have any idea how it will look when they pull my file and see, ‘Kicked off study planet for taking a bite out of a local?’ I snorted, “I probably don’t have to tell you, pretty bad. Pre-tty, bad.” I swallowed and dropped my hands to hold on to the edge of my mattress.

Fauve was still quiet.

“Also… I’ve gotten to like humans. You’re a very exciting species, always something new, most any other species… not to some speciest or anything but… I can’t help but think I’ll find them comparatively boring.” She was looking up with me with that steady gaze like she was demanding I finish saying something.

I tried to force myself to look away, but I just couldn’t. The human stare is a dangerous, dangerous thing. Whether for intimidation or laughter, when a human’s eyes hold on to you it’s like you’re hooked and can’t escape. Strangely this power of theirs is purely born from their target. They have such expressive eyes, despite being relatively small compared to some species. They say so much with just a glance that they almost don’t need a language at all.

I could not hold out, so I didn’t.

“...And I’d miss you all too. A lot. I don’t want to go, maybe I can justify it by saying it would look worse if a dlamisa fled Earth under a cloud of suspicion. Say I should stay to clear my name and let the truth come out. But governments are governments, and even the best one is inherently lazy. They want the easiest and quickest way to resolution. Dlamisa and terran traders alike are venturing more and more to each other’s worlds. More negotiations, more treaty addendums… bad blood between us would be inconvenient toward both and this might be a mess.”

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“But you didn’t do anything!” Fauve finally ventured, I could see she was angry. Her little fists were balled up at her side and her slender jaw was clenched, though she never admitted it, I am sure I saw tears in her eyes that refused to fall.

Human ethics are quite a curious thing, most races have purely pragmatic ethics, nothing more. But only a handful of races feel a natural obligation to act in a particular way. And that inborn sense of wrongness was clearly alive and well inside of Fauve.

“I know.” I said, and meant it. “I wasn’t trying to do anything wrong, I was trying to help, and I’d do it again in the span of one of my heart’s beats. But this isn’t about fairness or human justice. If I’m politically inconvenient, removing me removes the inconvenience. Of course they could go after Wolfbeard, maybe get him to plead guilty to whatever your people consider to be his crimes. If that’s the case, if I remember, your justice system requires that he be allowed to face his accuser, but that is only at trial. If they want this swept under the rug as soon as possible, getting him to plead guilty will make this go away fast too. But even so?”

I lowered my eyes to the floor, “What’s easier? Putting me on a transport back to University? Or that?”

Fauve stood up. “That’s not fair.” She declared and crossed her arms defensively as if I’d accused her of something.

“I know.” I answered with a glum, heavy voice.

“Isn’t there anything I can do? What if we don’t want you to leave? What if we want you to stay?!” She demanded, she glanced toward my door, the faint sound of Michael crying, reached us from the floor above.

I will never not be surprised by the power of human lungs. But as to her question, I had no answer. My fingers tensed on the mattress edge, “I don’t know… you can certainly express your own wishes, but maybe it isn’t for the best for me to stay. There are some xenophobic humans out there, maybe not many, but they could still make trouble for you if I’m around.”

“But you’re good, why would-” She cut herself off. Despite being years away from full maturity in name, she was a highly intelligent child and reached the inevitable conclusion all on her own even faster than I did.

“It doesn’t matter if I’m good. It doesn’t matter if your cults all declare me a saint. To some of them, even if they let me join hands with them openly, speak for them, work for them… I will never be moved into the ‘one of them’ category. I can win over people who are open minded, I can win over those who are fair. I can’t do anything with people who are convinced I’m an abomination or a danger. And to them, you’ll look like a collaborator or a traitor to humanity. That can’t be good.” I answered her, and finally regretted at least one trait of human nature.

“This sucks.” Fauve summed up, the knuckles of her fingers turned white with tension.

“Tell me about it.” I answered, and the baby upstairs ended his crying just as William’s voice carried downstairs.

“Fauve, Bailey, food’s ready!”

“Let’s go eat.” Fauve suggested, and her stomach rumbled audibly.

“Let’s.” I agreed, and when she left the room, I followed, leaving her datapad behind and oblivious to the string of messages that were rapidly populating the screen behind us.