Chapter 7

Something cool and damp was being pressed to her forehead.

Mel opened her eyes to find herself flat on her back and looking into a wide pair of anxious baby blues. The young woman's face came into focus above her, the anxiety dissolving into a soft smile.

"Welcome back."

"Wha ... What just happened?"

"You fainted. Luckily, I managed to catch you before you hit the floor and cracked your skull. Just relax. You've..."

"Fainted!?" Mel yelped in indignation, beginning to hitch herself up onto her elbows. "I've never fainted before in my..."

"Then it's a first, isn't it?" A hand, gentle yet surprisingly firm on her shoulder, restrained her from sitting up, insisted with steady pressure that she lay back down. "Just give yourself a couple of minutes. Your color's starting to look better already."

"How long was I..."

"Well less than a minute. Maybe all of thirty or forty seconds. Just try to relax." She smiled again, patted her shoulder and nodded encouragingly. "Stay still and I'll be right back. I'm going to get something for you to drink."

Brushing birdseed and stray down feathers off of her jeans, she got to her feet and hurried out of the room.

Mel lay still for a count of three, then promptly sat up, immediately wishing she hadn't. Woozy, she had to brace herself with both arms while the vertigo took its time subsiding and the floor gradually stopped rolling.

"You don't follow orders or listen to advice very well, do you?" the young woman wryly noted when she returned a few moments later. Depositing a paper bag on the table, she came over to Mel and crouched down beside her, handing her a small paper cup. "Here. Drink this."

Mel uncertainly eyed the clear liquid.

"What is it?"

"Sugared water. Best I can do on short notice. The carbs will give you a quick energy boost."

Mel cautiously tried a sip. Finding it as advertised, she drained the cup in one long gulp.

"When did you last eat?"

"I just had..." Mel began, then stopped. She'd been about to say that she just had breakfast, but that wasn't true. She hadn't swallowed enough food to satisfy a hamster. When did she last eat, anyway? Yesterday? The day before? Two days before? Three? Unable to remember, she just shook her head.

"There is such a thing as taking a diet too far, you know," the young woman strongly admonished. "A body needs a regular supply of energy!"

"I'm not on a diet!" Mel snapped, becoming irritated at the younger woman's pseudo-maturity. What could she possibly know? She was just a kid!

If the young woman took any umbrage at her tone, she didn't indicate it. She fixed her in her laser-blue sites and gazed at her steadily for a long searching moment, then the furrow between her brows cleared.

"Is there someone you'd like me to call?" she quietly asked.

The scalding hot tears that had been threatening to flow all morning sprang unbidden to her eyes, as if they'd only been eagerly waiting for another cue. Mel hung her head and turned her face away, trying to hide them from the younger woman's sight, struggling to hold them back.

There was no one.

And there would never be anyone ever again.

Ever.

A soul-deep desolation, an oppressive, overpowering sense of utter isolation enveloped her, an emotional bleakness as blasted and complete as a final holocaust. She was all alone in the world, cut adrift and more completely alone and afraid than she'd ever been before in her life, a yawning chasm of difference forever segregating her from the rest of Humanity, severing her from life itself.

"Stop fighting it," the young woman murmured. "You can't. Just let it take you."

Soothing fingers smoothed her hair back as she began to tremble, then to quake, her tears running hotter and faster, defying her every pathetic attempt at control.

"You don't understand..." Mel whimpered, helpless and utterly mortified, unable to stop herself.

"Maybe not the why... But I very well know grief. And fear." A comforting arm slipped around her shoulders, offering her safe refuge. "Let it go."

"You couldn't ... There's n-n-no ... w-w-way ... y-y-you..."

Broken, keening sobs tore from her throat, her words losing all coherencies as the young woman turned her and drew her into the sheltering embrace of her arms.

"Shhh. I know. Believe me. I know..."

**** *** **** *** ****

A turkey breast and Swiss on whole wheat with lettuce, tomato and Dijon mustard.

A Granny Smith apple.

A ripe banana.

A homemade pecan brownie drizzled with fudge icing.

A cup of Dannon blueberry yogurt.

"Your choice. Any or all." The young woman gestured to the food she'd just taken out of the paper bag and set out on the bird room's table in front of her. "Help yourself."

"I can't ... I won't take your lunch..." Mel uncomfortably demurred, her ears still hotly burning with the embarrassment of so badly losing it.

"Don't be silly. There's a cafe next door. I won't starve. Now! Eat something!"

"Are you always this bossy?" Mel grumbled, unable to argue with her logic.

"Yeah!"

She sat down on another stool opposite the one from Mel and returned to her interrupted hand feeding of the baby cockatiels as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened.

Mel picked at a hangnail and warily regarded her benefactor from under her lashes.

"You ... You're not going to even ask what that was all about?"

"No, I'm not. If you want to tell me, you will. If not..." She shrugged. "It's okay."

Relieved at not being expected to explain herself, Mel mutely nodded her thanks.

She felt drained, scoured agonizingly raw through and through and all but hollowed out, but somehow a little better, a little stronger, not quite as fragile as before.

Until the next round hit her.

Although she had no doubt at all that there would be many next rounds to come, at least the gibbering voices had finally fallen blissfully silent. Whether or not they'd remain that way was another matter, but for now her head was wholly her own.

It was weird, she reflected. The two of them didn't know a thing about each other, not even their respective names (and it certainly seemed much too awkward for her to ask now!), but she'd spent nearly fifteen minutes sobbing into the other woman's shoulder in what amounted to an oddly mother-and-child experience.

Odd because she had become the child. And this young woman, this teenaged stranger, had so naturally and easily stepped into the role of surrogate mother. With a bedside manner like that, Mel thought, this kid was going to make for a wonderful physician.

The young woman looked up from her task as Mel's stomach loudly rumbled and gurgled, adding yet another unwelcome layer to her embarrassment.

"You know, sometimes when a bird or animal is sick or gravely wounded, it refuses to eat. Then it has to be force-fed so it can have the strength to heal. I've never had to force-feed a Human before but..."

"Yes, mommy," Mel growled, feeling perversely petulant as she snatched up the brownie and took a small bite. "Happy now?"

"Ecstatic."

She smiled at her and Mel found herself managing a slight, if rather lopsided, smile in return.

Mel also found that she was actually tasting the brownie, the first food to even have a taste in weeks. She swallowed and took another bite. And then another. And then one after another, little realizing that she was wolfing it down.

"I really... I want to thank you for, um..." she awkwardly began as she finished the brownie and licked the icing from her fingers, uncertain of what she wanted to say, much less how to say it.

The young woman didn't even look over. "Mmm... You could do with some protein and fiber as well. Probably potassium, too. Eat the sandwich and the banana. The yogurt couldn't hurt, either."

Mel eyed the food. The thick sandwich looked to be far more than her too-long-underfed stomach could possibly handle, and she still felt guilty over eating the woman's lunch. After a moment's hesitation she compromised by accepting the banana.

"How did a girl your age ever get to know so much? When I was your age, I was a royally screwed up mess. Hell, I'm still a royally screwed up mess."

"Are you sure about that?" Another satisfied cockatiel was returned to its nursery and yet another took its place on the table. "Or have you only been royally messed with?"

"Both," Mel answered, making no attempt at censoring the anger and bitterness in her voice. In one way or another, she was finding that she'd been messed with' her entire life, messed with' long before she was even born.

"You're a survivor. And a very stubborn and tenacious one at that. That much I can tell. So whatever it is, you'll find a way to pull yourself through."

"Or not."

The young woman sharply looked up.

"Is that really an option?"

Mel found that her eyes were unnerving, almost too intelligent and missing very little, far too old and aware for such a young face. Uncomfortable under such keen scrutiny, she looked away and didn't respond.

What was she supposed to say?

The world and her view of it had irrevocably been altered and nothing was what she'd always thought it was. And no one was who she'd always thought they were, either.

Not even herself.

Especially not herself.

And although she could well understand why this young woman would be regarding her with concern and even with a certain degree of alert wariness, she hated being the focus of anyone's solicitude. It would be difficult enough if she had to endure the honest compassion of her close friends. With strangers, it was far too easy for such sympathies to do an about face and turn into contempt and abject scorn. She bristled at the idea of being perceived of as weak or out of control or drowning in the seas of self-pity and wouldn't tolerate being patronized.

For Melanie C. Porter, self-respect had been hard-won with considerable effort through a wretched childhood that, save for the constant love and support of her grandmother, had provided fertile ground for seeds of self-doubt and for excessive feelings of guilt and inadequacy to flourish in a weedy jungle. She refused to surrender what she had struggled so hard to attain – even if that, too, proved to be only an illusion. It was all she had left.

In uneasy silence she polished off the banana, tossed the peel in the trash, then stood.

"Thank you for seeing me through that ... episode," she blurted out as she hurriedly shouldered her purse. "And thank you for sharing your lunch. But I ... I really have to get going."

"Sure. Whatever you say."

With a crisp nod Mel hurried from the room, unable to leave fast enough, well aware that the young woman was watching her every move.

But she only got as far as the college textbooks stacked on the store's front counter.

It was the top book on the stack, Genome: The Blueprint of a Species, which stopped her.

What was it had Cole told her?

"There's always a basis of truth to every myth and every legend."

Had he merely been recounting a story to her, a myth or a legend, as one possible explanation?

If what that young woman said was true, then what was the likelihood of two very different species not only being able to produce progeny, but fertile progeny to establish continuing bloodlines?

Certainly Earthly mythologies were rife with all manner of Human/animal hybrids, but that didn't make them anything more than fantasy. Was it possible for a Human and a goat to actually breed a faun? Could a Human and a horse produce a centaur? How about sphinxes and minotaurs and mermaids and all those beings, gods and demigods with the heads or bodies of animals?

Could Miss Piggy ever have a family with Kermit?

And if there was no likelihood of such things, if they weren't possible, then how exactly had the Human/Cirronian bloodlines been set up?

Were there other methods beyond hybridization?

She shivered through a sudden attack of intense revulsion, knowing that there surely were, knowing where that train of thought was headed.

"... mad scientist's test tube..."

Did she really want to know for certain?

One of life's oft-repeated lessons is that knowledge and understanding in and of themselves seldom bring peace of mind. For several weeks now her life had been a nerve-flaying purgatory of pain and confusion, an incomprehensible waking nightmare that didn't seem quite real, that couldn't possibly be real. But if she began to find the answers to her questions she might end up discovering that there is such a thing as hell on this side of death and her current state of ignorance would seem as a serene and comfortable refuge by comparison.

Is it better to be torn to ribbons by knowing the truth?

Or torn to ribbons by not knowing it?

"Embrace it ... It's yours..."

But what had he asked her to embrace?