This ficlet is dedicated to Trisha Lynn Sebastian, to show that there's no hard feelings. This should be perfectly comprehensible without background information, which doesn't mean that she's under any obligation to like it ;).
This is set some time after 'Mind the Baby' but before 'The Ugly Truth.' The fact that I am Australian and have not seen Season Three may or may not be blindingly obvious. Written for the 'another world' challenge. I'm not quite sure it's what cofax was after, although there's more than one definition of 'alien.'
Alien
By Andraste
Crais didn't truly realise what it meant to be exiled until he had to get supplies. To listen to the ripple of silence that spread wherever he went, and the whispering that followed. The eyes of the aliens were hostile, and the uniform he had worn as armor since childhood began to feel like chains. What had Peace Keepers done to inspire such hatred? It was a new question, but he knew too many of the answers. All the more reason to leave his past behind. Even if he had feared solitude, Talyn was always with him.
Yet it was not easy to walk strange streets alone. The creatures - no, people, it was only carefully instilled Peace Keeper prejudice that made them something less - treated him with suspicion. He was beginning to question such judgements, but struggled to suppress disgust when one of them brushed his hand while taking his money.
Crais was angry - with the aliens, and with the society that had stolen him, raised him, and twisted something inside him while doing so. With himself, for being caught between the self-loathing of irreversible contamination and the self-loathing that such knee-jerk intolerance now inspired. He completed his transactions quickly, longing to return to his haven.
It wasn't until the transport pod landed safely on Talyn and he heard the young starship greet him from the other end of their neural link that he remembered he wasn't alone at all, and that there were alien touches he could never despise.
The End
