“I dinnae like the look of that storm.”
Luca looked up from racing leaves along the babbling creek, noticing for the first time the way the sky darkened on the horizon. He climbed to his feet and trotted back towards the clearing where Ryan had the portable terminal set up, readouts spewing from the compact screens and sensors flashing. Their little impromptu trip out to the wilds of Terra Nova was part recon, part recreational – and one hundred percent solo.
Luca’s favourite kind, if he was honest. Just him and Ryan in the ass end of nowhere on a planet that had barely been settled. He could spend the entire time out here naked as the day he was born if he wanted to, there weren’t any other humans around for miles and miles.
He didn’t though, because as lovely and as forgiving as Terra Nova was, it his thin spacer skin and sweet blood meant he was very, very interesting to the local wildlife. Also… bugs.
Luca had lost a lot of his spacer misgivings since the time he had spent on Earth and various planets with the Alliance during his service. His life on the Citadel had been boxed in and singular until the pilgrims for wayward children (aka duct rats) had found him and drawn him into their fold. They offered him an education, fostered his innate talents for tech and music and Luca had been content enough never to have to leave the sprawling space metropolis. He might have stayed on the Citadel for his entire life – except that nothing came for free and the education and comfortable place to lay his head had come with a price tag and that price tag was to be handed over to the Alliance and shipped off toe Earth for training the moment he turned eighteen.
What followed was five years bounced around from planet to planet, warship to warship, station to station. The war came and he saw combat.
And then, at the tender age of twenty three, he had found the one thing he hadn’t even known he was looking for.
He trotted to Ryan’s side, taking in the worried frown on his lined face, the smatter of silver that matched his distinctive streak in his hair now weaving through the reddish tint of his beard. His broad shoulders were hunched and the top part of his flight suit had been stripped down and tied around his waist, leaving him in a simple Alliance issue shirt that did little to hide the intricate Celtic tattoos that covered so much of his freckled skin.
“What do you mean?” Luca asked, peering over Ryan’s shoulder. He was glad Ryan had set the terminal up under the wide wingspan of the nimble flier they’d taken out to the wilds. Part copter, part jet, the little craft was little more than a cockpit, a tiny cargo bay and a bed that folded down from the wall barely large enough for two people – and a host of monitoring and recording equipment. It had been designed with recon in mind and not much else, a unit used for scouting and mapping the locations of the planet in closer detail than what the ships in orbit could do.
And when Mara had quietly confessed they had been granted more land following the latest Alliance victories in light of Isaac’s stellar service but lacked a pilot for the craft – Ryan had jumped at the opportunity to take Luca away.
Neither of them had planned on the storm though.
Ryan pointed a gloved finger at one of the screens where shifting, colourful shapes slithered across the screen. “It’s a big one. I’m no’ gonnae take you up in that, love.”
Luca frowned and glanced uneasily towards the darkening sky. “Are we going to be okay?”
Ryan exhaled roughly. He was uneasy, Luca knew him well enough by now to know all his tells but Ryan also wasn’t trying too hard to hide it. They didn’t have secrets. They were too intertwined body and soul for that. “I’m worried. We’re below that mountain ridge and this valley looks to me like it might easily flood – see this? That links with the river. One swift deluge and we could end up washed away.”
“So we just pack up and move to higher ground,” Luca shrugged. Even a spacer kid knew that much.
“It’s not that easy, love. The flier, she’s no’ ready for flight right now.”
“Shit.” Luca’s heart fell. Part of the reason they were in this valley was due to an emergency landing. The flier was old and while she had been maintained as best as Mara and her limited crew of helpers on the farm could, she was an old bird with plenty of old problems. Luca and Ryan had combed over her maintenance logs and picked her over four times before they dared take her out for a flight but neither Ryan nor Luca could have anticipated the random bird strike that took out one of her starboard engines.
It wasn’t anything they couldn’t handle. Between Luca and Ryan, there wasn’t much they couldn’t fix, but the issue now was time.
The sky looked even darker than before. A slither of ice skittered down the back of Luca’s spine.
It was an old habit – deferring to the senior officer in a time of crisis. And Ryan, at fifteen years Luca’s senior, well outranked him.
Ryan turned his face towards the sky, the furrow between his brows deepening as he thought.
“We’re gonnae have to bunker down. Hope for the best.”
Luca tried to quirk a rueful grin but the flutter of nerves in his belly made it seem watered down. “Not the romantic getaway I was hoping for, LT.”
Thunder rolled across the sky, loud even in the sealed cockpit of the flier. Luca sat uneasily in the co-pilot seat, watching as the clouds swirled and darkened overhead, dreading the turn of the planet into the night zone. There would be no light out here, not even a moon, and the storm was terrifying enough as it was in the waning afternoon mist without the pitch black of night.
In spite of himself, Luca jumped when another screaming crack boomed outside, followed by a piercing shard of lightning arcing down from the sky – or it might have just been the unexpected hand landing on his shoulder.
“Come away from the viewport, boy,” Ryan told him, his voice low and gravelly. “If that shield cracks, I dinnae want you in the line of fire.”
“This thing is supposed to be built for vacuum, right?” Luca said, gesturing at the dull console. Only the emergency lighting was on, and a portable lamp Ryan had dug up from under one of the cargo bay’s floor panels. They had pulled out the emergency kit but the MRE’s were twelve years out of date and the blankets were scratchy and musty. “It should be strong enough to withstand a storm.”
“I don’t trust it.” Ryan sighed behind him.
Luca couldn’t tear his eyes away from the storm. The wind had picked up now, buffering huge winds against the trees, almost bending them sideways. The sky opened up, dumping rivers into the dirt around the ship, almost obscuring the view outside. Luca thought of the little creek he’d been fascinated by just hours earlier, idly racing the little leaves over the rocks and through the water while he waited for Ryan to finish his work. That creek was probably a river now and he wondered if he strained his eyes hard enough, he might see it rising through the storm.
The hand on his shoulder squeezed gently then Ryan hooked a finger under his chin, forcing him to look away and up at him. “Dinnae fash. We’ll be alright as long as we stay here.”
“What are we supposed to do? Just… sit around? What if goes for days?”
“We have food, we have water. We have each other. Isn’t this what yer always wanted, boy? Us alone together, no one else to bother us?”
Luca took in Ryan’s slow smirk as he ran his calloused thumb over Luca’s jaw. He wanted to melt into it. Ryan’s touch was warm and strong and went a long way to calming his anxiety over the storm.
He forced a smile. “I dunno, LT. I might need a distraction.”
Ryan laughed, dark and low. He pulled Luca up and led him into the smaller space in the belly of the flier where the bed had been lowered and a pile of blankets adorned it. Ryan had hung the lamp in the corner and it’s soft light threw their shadows against the wall. In here, Luca could barely hear the storm. He couldn’t hear the thunder at any rate.
He could hear the hitch of his own breathing though.
Ryan drew him into a kiss, lining their bodies up and cupping the back of his head so that he could press hungrily into Luca’s mouth. Luca welcomed his kiss, welcomed the insistent push of Ryan’s tongue between his lips. Ryan’s other hand found his hip, jerking Luca closer so that he could feel the budge there and then that hand was on his ass and Ryan was grinding his hips against his.
Luca moaned into the kiss and Ryan lifted his head to stare down at him. “Take ye clothes off, boy.”
A shiver rolled down Luca’s spine. His dick was instantly hard, any thought of the storm forgotten. “You too,” he panted, pulling at his flight suit and kicking off his boots. He ripped his undershirt off over his head and shucked off his underwear, all in record time then launched himself at Ryan, eager to help him divest him of his clothes too.
Ryan chuckled as Luca’s greedy hands plucked at his clothing. “Easy. We have plenty of time.”
“Fuck that,” Luca grunted, shoving his hands down into Ryan’s half pulled down flight suit. “I need your cock. I need it in me right now. Then I need to do it again and again, until this damn storm is gone.”
Ryan caught his face and held it, forcing Luca into stillness. Something inside of Luca thrilled at his forceful touch.
His blue eyes looked almost black in the shadows of the flier. “Do you think you deserve that?"
Luca hissed and moaned because Ryan was torturing him but Luca wanted – no, needed to play. He closed his eyes and turned his face just enough to kiss the inside of one of Ryan’s palms.
He made his eyes wide and round. “Do I, daddy?”
