Uninvited Ch. 04: The Way Home

The Commander at least agreed that the organic aliens were not a threat, he had consulted both myself and Vi and had concluded that the aliens were as much victims of the Elders as we were, and that they would not seek conflict. The robotic and synthetic troops were a different story, most of the resistance was coming from the larger bases and depots that had been manned by creatures such as Troopers and Archons, aliens that had been genetically engineered and cybernetically modified to serve as soldiers, they knew no other life and had nothing to fall back on. They could not be integrated, they would fight to the death, and XCOM still had some work to do on that front.

The Commander had declared that whoever wanted to leave was free to go however, we had served and we had won, those who wished it would be honorably discharged and shuttled to wherever they wanted to go.

I knew of only one place that was away from the still tumultuous population centers, a place where me and Vi could live together without scrutiny while things died down, my family's old farmhouse. I hadn't been back there since ADVENT had evicted me and relocated me to an apartment in the city, and I hoped that it was still in a livable condition. The Commander was sorry to see Vi go, and thanked us profusely for our help, then instructed the shuttle pilot to take us wherever we asked.

"I don't know what kind of future XCOM will have when this is all over," he said, holding the dropship door open as he shouted over the engines. "But if you ever need anything, anything at all, we will be there for you. The organization, and the world, owes all of our personnel a great debt."

We said our goodbyes, then he closed the door and the dropship rose off the deck, shooting out of the Avenger's hangar and into the clear sky. I craned my neck to look back on the ship out of the window, watching the massive vessel diminish as it hung in the air like a floating skyscraper. This might be the last time I would ever see it, it had been my home for months, I had gotten to know its cramped interior as well as any place I had ever called home. What would become of it when the ADVENT resistance was all cleared up? Would it serve as a mobile headquarters for whatever new government arose from this mess? Would it become a museum piece like the USS Constitution? It had saved the human race after all, as had we. It was a strange sensation to have all that responsibility on your shoulders, it still seemed unreal to me. Sure I had not played too big of a role for the most part, besides in helping to destroy the electromagnetic weapon, but that was how we would all be remembered. The title of 'Savior of Humanity' hardly suited me.

"So where are you guys headed," the pilot asked, turning her helmeted head over her shoulder to look at us. I flushed, realizing I hadn't given her the coordinates yet.

"Oh, sorry, here." I reached over and passed her a printout with the GPS coordinates of my farmhouse.

"Kansas, eh? Good idea avoiding the cities, things are gonna be rough for a while until things get sorted out. You own land out there?"

"Yeah, I have a farmhouse."

"Is it in working order? You know, now that ADVENT have been driven off there are gonna be a lot of people out there without basic necessities, they took over and automated so much of the food production and shipping. We're gonna be needing farmers more than soldiers in the coming years."

"I hadn't really thought that far ahead. Probably, yeah. All the old equipment is still lying around, we have a tractor in the barn, plows, all kinds of stuff. Though I wouldn't know the first thing about how to run a farm."

"Well you'll have time to learn."

I leaned over to give Vi a nudge, her long body was taking up almost the entire deck of the troop bay.

"How about it Vi, we could cut some overalls to fit you, you'd be the first Viper farm hand."

She shrugged, not really understanding, and I laughed at her aloofness. I turned around to look out of the window, watching the patchwork of terrain that peeked from between the fluffy clouds below us as we sped along. There was a silver lining to the dark storm cloud of near total genocide at the hands of the Elders, at least they had left us their technology. Some of their advances in medicine and genetics had been genuine and not aimed at exploiting us, and the revolutions in transport and sustainable energy alone had set humanity forward hundreds of years. Whatever world we managed to forge in their wake would be better off than it had been before the war. Maybe the pilot was right, the supply system would have broken down, I could do a lot of good if I managed to get the farm operational again.

Hell I would have been bored anyway, might be nice to get some fresh air and do some honest labor, if I had to go back to working in a factory I'd go stir crazy.

The dropship swooped low over the flat Kansas terrain, fields of wheat and corn extending from horizon to horizon, the landscape was just as flat and featureless as I remembered it. The state gave you a kind of surreal feeling, as if you weren't on Earth anymore, your brain sometimes rejected what it saw and insisted that there should at least be a mountain or a tree to break up the endless nothing. I had always liked that feeling, it made me feel lonely, but in a good way. My property came into view below us, the central house, the barn, and the unused silo casting a long shadow in the sunlight. The pilot brought us around, circling and decelerating as she shed altitude and brought the craft to a hover over the dirt road that linked the farm to the civilized world.

I felt the landing gear bounce as they hit the ground, and I slid the door open, hefting my bag over my shoulder.

"Take care," the pilot called after us as I hopped out of the dropship, Vi slithering behind me to flop heavily to the dirt. "If you need anything, you know how to contact us. Vigilo Confido."

I nodded, waving to her as the ship lifted off in a cloud of dust, then vanished over the horizon. We stood together in the middle of the road, Vi perched on her long tail and me holding my pack full of equipment as the dust cleared.

"Well, here we are," I said, gesturing towards the house. "You remember this, right? This is where we met."

She examined it, then nodded. We made our way up to the porch, and I realized I didn't have a key. I stood on the threshold sheepishly, then set my bag down and started looking around for a sizable rock. Vi watched with interest as, red faced, I smashed one of the window panes in the front door, then reached inside to unlock it. It swung open with a creak, and I stepped inside. It wasn't exactly in a state of disrepair, but it had clearly not been maintained in any way after I had been evicted, hell I would have to be insane to expect Troopers to apply a new coat of paint or check for water damage in my absence.

Some of the wallpaper was peeling, the roof had leaked in numerous places, and the whole place was covered in a layer of dust.

"Looks like the farming is going to have to wait," I muttered, and Vi cocked her massive head at me. "How do you feel about becoming the first Viper to do home renovation?"

I stowed my gear in the master bedroom, and it looked as if this room was relatively unscathed beyond the dust. The king sized bed with its old wooden supports might even be sturdy enough for Vi to sleep with me, rather than having to pile mattresses and sheets in the living room as we had done when she had first visited me so long ago. The first order of business would be to get up into the attic and patch those leaks, I might even need to do some work on the tiles. Damn it, where was I going to get roofing supplies in this day and age? There was also the matter of checking that the electrics still worked, and the plumping. They had been idle for so long that I couldn't estimate what kind of condition they might be in.

I walked around the house and took inventory of what supplies we still had, there was plenty of canned food and it was still good. There were cleaning supplies and a few tools in the garage, along with a truck that may or may not work. Home improvement I could do, but repairing an engine was another matter entirely. Remarkably nothing seemed to have been stolen, at least there was no sign of forced entry and nothing was conspicuously missing, rural Kansas must have been far too remote for even rebels to operate out here.

Fortunately the wood fire that warmed the house was perfectly intact, and the chimney wasn't clogged, so I set to work cutting some wood from the stockpile in the barn as Vi watched curiously. Burning wood for fuel must have seemed incredibly quaint to her, she had likely lived her entire life aboard ADVENT vessels or in ADVENT-controlled territory, on Earth or otherwise. In fact I had no idea how old she was, or how her people measured time. If I were to ask, would their years even translate to ours? One orbit of her home planet could take days, or decades, we would have no common point of reference. When I was done chopping wood she helped me carry it back inside, and I struggled to light the fire with a box of matches I had found in one of the kitchen drawers. Finally the kindling ignited, and before long we had a roaring fire.

Vi curled up in front of it on the moth-eaten carpet, enjoying the heat as the dancing, orange flames drew patterns on her scales. I figured she couldn't be of much help until I worked out an itinerary and decided what actually needed fixing and what we could reasonably do about it. She was cold blooded after all, she would be more active once I gave her a chance to warm herself. I left her to rest, and marched off to inspect the rest of the property.

Vi cocked her head as she watched me paint, I dipped the roller into a bucket of the green liquid, spreading it on the kitchen wall to cover up the mess the wallpaper had left when I had taken it down. It was far too damaged by the damp and mold to save, and so I had decided to just paint over the whole room. I had gone with a nice viridian, at least that's what was written on the side of the can that I had found in the barn. Sure there were more pressing matters, repairing the roof was especially important, but there was just some amusingly mundane about painting a kitchen after everything we had been through. Vi was bemused, she had no idea what the point of this activity was, and so I gestured for her to approach and thrust a paintbrush into her scaly hand.

"Dip it in the paint, then spread it, like this." I gripped her wrist and showed her how to spread the paint around. She looked confused, then gurgled in a way that I knew was a dismissive and sarcastic 'why?'.

"Because we want the kitchen to look nice." She stroked the dripping brush over the wall experimentally, then huffed, amused. "See, I knew you'd be a natural."

We painted for a while, and her clumsy strokes became less so as we coated the walls in a green sheen. She didn't seem to understand the point of it, but she did as instructed, as she must have been conditioned to do throughout her life. It bothered me a little that she would follow orders with no regard for their purpose, or even that she would consider my requests and suggestions as orders. She was ever the enigma, as much as I understood her body language and expressions, it was hard to tell exactly what she was thinking.

I watched her rise up on her long tail to reach the last empty patch of wall near the roof, then she scanned the kitchen to ensure that the task was done, and set the paintbrush down in the can. She learned quickly, and seemed to apply the same logic to chores as she did to combat, where ruthless efficiency was the name of the game. I recalled how the concept of 'COMFORT' had been such an alien notion to her, perhaps in time I could teach her to relax and take things easy too.

I stepped back to admire our handiwork, I had dusted earlier and now the kitchen was clean and fresh, we could prepare food here now.

"Soon you're gonna understand the difference between a house where you happen to live, and a place you call home," I chimed, and Vi cocked her head at me. "Come on, we have a lot to do."

She trailed behind me obediently as I led her outside to the barn, and I located the large stack of roofing tiles I had found earlier. As it turned out, my grandfather who had originally owned the property was quite self-sufficient, I guess he would have had to be back in the day. He had a large stock of spares and replacements for all manner of household tasks. We carried out a few stacks of tiles and a ladder, and Vi watched as I climbed up onto the roof. I checked for broken tiles, or tiles that had been blown loose in the strong winds that often ravaged to the region, and replaced them where I could. Vi eventually grew curious and scaled the wall, perching on the roof beside me. I shooed her away, as her impressive weight was cracking the tiles under her belly. I instructed her to pass the replacement tiles up to me, and after a few hours I believed I had found every damaged tile and replaced it. That should take care of most of the leaks, the water damage was already done but I wasn't too concerned about that. It wasn't as if the house was going to fall down any time soon.

Next up was dusting, and Vi grasped the concept pretty quickly, between the two of us it only took a couple of hours to clean all of the floors and surfaces. There were some pretty impressive cobwebs in some places, but a duster took care of those, their tenants scurrying into the safety of the old walls.

The plumbing all seemed to work, which was a relief, the well the property used as a water source would not be running dry for decades. The electrics however were another matter. Fortunately some rooms still had power, including the bedroom and the bathroom, but rodents must have eaten through the insulation exposing the copper wires to damp in some places. I would have to hire an electrician as I didn't have the skills to repair it myself, God knows how I would go about doing that.

For the moment at least, we had rudimentary heat, power, water and shelter. I had plenty of food for the time being, but I doubted Vi could subsist on spam and canned beef. There was ample wild game in the surrounding land, and I doubted hunting and fishing licenses would be a problem in the post-ADVENT chaos. Could she hunt? Soldiery might translate to being a good enough shot to bring down a buck, but it didn't mean she could track worth a damn. Just look at her though, she must be able to track prey, she was built like some primordial dinosaur. I decided it would be better to just ask her.

"Do you know to hunt, Vi?"

She cocked her head at me like a gigantic dog, and I gestured for her to hand me her tablet computer. She watched over my shoulder as I accessed the database and tried to show her what I meant. I brought up images of deer and elk from the encyclopedia, and then tried to demonstrate what hunting entailed. As well as translating ADVENT text into an English synthesized voice, the tablet could also do the opposite, though I found that it rarely conveyed the meaning I wanted it to. Perhaps the alien language was a lot more complex, or structurally very different from human languages. I attempted to translate some simple words without attempting to form complex sentences, words like 'hunt' and 'eat', or 'track'.

She seemed to get the gist of it, but I was no more a big game hunter than she was, I couldn't even point her in the right direction. Perhaps a neighbor could help us? The term 'neighbor' could apply to anyone within a hundred miles of here, as distant as the farmhouses were from eachother, but that would have to wait until I verified the state of the truck in the garage. Having to call in a favor from XCOM to jump start a broken down pickup would be more embarrassing than I cared to admit.

Oh well, it was getting late, we could deal with all of that tomorrow.

I sat on the ratty couch by the roaring fireplace, I had cut enough wood for a few days and it was doing a good job of warming the living room. There was no electricity to this part of the house, and so as the sun dipped below the horizon, only the flickering flames from the hearth illuminated the room. The windows were beginning to frost up, it was winter and the temperature was getting pretty low at night. The cold seemed to bother Vi, perhaps because she was a reptile, and thus could not regulate her own body temperature through biological means. When she was cold she had to find a heat source, when she was hot she had to find shade, though she did sweat so her alien physiology probably wasn't so clear cut. Doctor Tygan would probably know more, he had dissected enough of them, but he wasn't around to ask.

It had been a long day and I was tired, it was so quiet out here, a far cry from the bustle and constant noise of the Avenger. Whether it was the sound of the engines, the personnel going about their duties or just the mechanical creaking and whirring of the ship's machinery, it was very difficult to relax in such an environment. Now I felt like my body was making up for lost time, there would be no attacks here, no alarms waking me up in the middle of a sleep cycle. As my eyes began to close and I leaned my head back, I felt movement. I opened one eye lazily and spied Vi slithering across the carpet to join me on the couch, nudging me with her head like a dog starved of attention. Before I could protest she coiled around me, wrapping me in her long, muscular tail and replacing the cushions beneath me with soft fat.

She lifted me and placed me in her lap, crossing her arms over my chest and resting her heavy head on my shoulder, watching the flames lick at the grill as they cast their long, dancing shadows in the gloom. Maybe she could sweat, but she certainly seemed cold right now, this was an old, drafty house and it was poorly insulated. I could probably find her some blankets, but as I made to leave she increased her grip on me as if to say 'no, stay' and pressed her breasts against my back. Her chubby tail encircled me in a prison made of taut muscle that flowed like liquid, her scales creaking as she tightened her grip on me. I realized my arms were pinned against my body by her chubby coils, and I struggled playfully, knowing it excited her.

She pressed her lips against my exposed neck, mouthing softly, and I felt the pinch of her fangs on my skin. I sighed and leaned back into her, well, this way certainly one way to warm her up. She slid her long fingers under my shirt and dragged her claws across my chest, leaving red trails and making me squirm against her sinewy coils. She huffed her amusement, and crawled her hands slowly down towards my belt. She unhooked the catch with her now practiced hands, tugging down my fly and releasing my growing bulge, she wrapped her fingers around it through the fabric of my briefs and squeezed gently. I bucked into her hand and she smirked, her fleshy hood flaring outwards enthusiastically to frame her face, and she slipped her fingers beneath the waistband of my underwear. Her smooth, scaly skin was a little cool compared to the warmth of my burgeoning erection, and she seemed enticed by its heat. She stroked softly up and down the shaft, holding it in her palm and letting my coursing blood thaw her. She ran her other hand over my belly, teasing me as I jerked and bucked, her hard nails tickling me.

Her long, thick tongue parted her puffy lips to graze my throat, and I shivered. There was just something about having her nuzzle and bite my neck and shoulders that shut me down and made me embarrassingly compliant, ever since the first time we had made heated love and she had plunged her partially retracted fangs into my shoulder in order to assert herself over me. Never with the intention to injure, merely as a way to communicate that while she was capable of hurting me, she would not.