It was late at night when Ursula got the call. Normally that wouldn't bother her, she usually still awake this early in the morning, working away at the never-ending piles of paperwork that her position entailed. Tonight however, she had decided to call it a night early. It had been far, far too long since she had a full night's sleep.

Unfortunately for Ursula, the universe had decided that there would be no rest for her. Right when her head hit the pillow and just started to settle in for a good night's sleep, the phone rang. Her private phone. The phone that very few people had the number for. The phone no one in their right mind would ever call at this time or night.

Ursula grumbled and rolled over, pulling the sheets up over her head as she did so. If she just ignored the phone, maybe it would just go away. For a minute, her strategy seemed to be working. The phone rang a few more times, then went blissfully silent. Her shoulders relaxed and she rolled onto her back again, eyes shut, determined to get a full night of sleep…

Until the phone rang again. It sounded louder, maliciously screaming to not be ignored.

"Fuck me," Ursula groaned. She tossed her blankets off, sat up and snatched the phone off the bedside table.

"What?" She knew who was calling without even needing to ask. It was Kirchoff. Who else would be calling her at this hour? She held the phone to her ear and listened.

"Yeah… Uh huh… Ah shit! No… No I'll… Listen to me alright! I'll be there as soon as I can. I'll send David down. Yes… yes I know… look, I'll be there as soon as I can." She clicked the phone off and tossed it on her bedside table. Unfortunately, the phone knocked the open water bottle resting on the table over, and spilled water all over the stack of papers on the floor that she had put there for review tomorrow morning.

"Fuuuck…" It was going to be one of those days.

"I can't catch a break with you can I?" Ursula fumed. "Just when I think I'm finally making some headway with you two, more shit happens and throws me for a loop."

"I'm sorry," Kirchoff mumbled. She, Kirchoff, and David were in her private quarters, not the 'doctor's office' Kirchoff normally had his weekly checkups in. There wasn't enough space for the three of them in the cramped janitor closet, and Ursula wasn't taking her eyes of Kirchoff for a second until she knew for certain that he wasn't in danger.

David had done his best to patch Kirchoff's arm up. He'd replaced the improvised tourniquet made from shredded strips of his shirt with stitches, sterile gauze & a regenerative salve from the first aid kit in her kitchen.

"Thankfully his wounds looked worse than they were," David muttered to her, stretching his lower back until it popped. "The claws missed his arteries, there was just a moderate amount of bleeding. Clean wounds too, no torn flesh. Easy to stitch back together."

"Lucky me…" Kirchoff muttered morosely. His gaze was welded to the floor, his voice quiet and husky. His clothes were a muddy, ragged, bloody mess. The entire left side of his pants and shirt were completely soaked in blood. Thankfully, none of it was fresh, it had all dried by now.

A little blood goes a long way. Ursula thought to herself.

David turned to Kirchoff, "Good thinking with the tourniquet by the way. It stopped the blood loss from being worse than it was. Ordinarily with a wound this severe I'd want to give you a transfusion. You should just take some blood-regen supplements and you should be fully recovered in a few days."

"Thank you for coming on such short notice David," Ursula thanked him. She attempted to slip him some money from her wallet, but Dr. Garret shook his head.

"My salary is more than enough for me," He latched the first aid kit shut and placed it back on her messy kitchen counter. "If anything happens, you know where to find me."

"I will," Ursula shook his hand, then followed as he strode out of her quarters, being very careful to close & lock the door behind him. Once the locks clicked back into place, she turned her attention back to Kirchoff.

Unfortunately she couldn't just have David apply advanced reconstructive paste for his emotional wounds. His eyes were fixed firmly on the floor between his legs, unblinking and unmoving. Even from this angle his eyes were clearly bloodshot from crying, streaks of clear skin running through the blood and dirt on his face.

God… Once again, she'd have to be the mature, reasonable adult for Kirchoff. How on Earth did I get roped into being his mother?

Ursula took a deep breath to calm herself. That was a question she could ponder later, what mattered right now was making sure Kirchoff didn't spiral out of control. Again. Before her mood could turn even more sour, she opened her mouth and asked, "Do you want to tell me what happened?"

"No. Not really." Kirchoff's voice was quiet, barely a ragged whisper.

She folded her arms & raised an eyebrow at him. "Kirchoff…"

"Sorry, that's not what I meant." He buried his head deeper in his hands. "I want to talk about it, It's just…"

Ursula waited for him to continue, but when no more words were forthcoming she pulled up the chair David had been using, seated herself directly in front of Kirchoff, and picked up the conversation for him. "Look, I'm not a therapist. I'm not great at this whole emotional support thing, but I can see how much this is weighing on you. I saw some of what happened on the security cam footage, but I wasn't there. I don't have the full picture, and I can't help you until you tell me what happened."

"Umm…" Kirchoff hesitated. "I still don't know if I want to talk about it..."

"For fucks sake Kirchoff! Keeping it bottled up isn't going to help fix your problems," She snapped, her frustration peeking through her calm, reasonable façade. She leaned in and continued in a half whisper, "And as much as I'm invested in your little high school romance drama, I don't have the time to wait for you to get your shit together. We are on thin fucking ice. We can't afford any delays, and I can't offer you help until you tell me exactly what happened."

She leaned back in her chair, folding her arms. "So spill it."

Kirchoff's breath was shaky, but after a few deep breaths he finally spoke. "Valen and I wanted to do something nice together. Well, it was more like I wanted to do something nice for him, and a change of scenery seemed nice too… so we decided to go camp somewhere for the night. While he was hunting, I was setting up a campfire and I was going to surprise him by cooking his meal for him. But then out of nowhere he… Valen confessed that…"

Kirchoff's voice hitched and tears welled in his eyes, "And… I panicked and…." Kirchoff twisted his head away from her, but Ursula could still hear his sniffles. His tears dripped off his chin and into his lap, staining the blood soaked fabric.

Confessed? What the hell did Valen confess to… Oh… "Oh!" Ursula gasped in understanding. "So, Valen finally confessed his feelings for you huh?"

Kirchoff's head jerked back to look at her. Good lord, he was having a full blown ugly cry, complete with running nose and hot red eyes. This is really eating him up inside…

"How did you know?" He croaked, sounding like he had to fight his vocal chords to get the words out.

"Kirchoff," If Ursula rolled her eyes any harder they would be at risk of rolling out of her head. "Valen might be smart, but he's not exactly subtle. He follows you everywhere you go like he's a lovesick puppy. He dotes on you constantly. How could you not tell?"

"But that's…" Kirchoff shook his head, refusing to acknowledge what was blatantly obvious to her. "He just needs to be around me or he gets sick."

"He needs to be around someone, or he'll suffer from Eusocial Withdrawal." She explained. "That doesn't necessarily mean that he needs to be around you specifically."

"But…"

"Kirchoff, just think about it for a minute." She rubbed her temple with one hand and pointed at him with the other. "You've been cohabitating with a Xenomorph for weeks. You live together in an underground forest vacation paradise; on my dime might I add. For fucks sake you literally snuggle every night with one the deadliest apex predators that humanity has ever known. Do you really think that you would even be alive right now if Valen didn't love you?"

They both went silent for a moment, before their eyes met… and they both burst out laughing. They were both so tired, so worn down by the last few weeks, that the absurdity of their situation was suddenly the funniest thing to ever happen. It took a full minute before Kirchoff could gather himself enough to reply.

"I never thought about it like that." Kirchoff said as he wiped his eyes. "It's just so… surreal, y'know? Like it doesn't even feel real to me sometimes, but it actually is."

"To be completely fair to you, I don't think you've had time to reflect on how absurd this whole situation is. We've been too busy trying to keep our heads above water here, I don't think couple's counseling for you and your Xenomorph boyfriend has been high on our list of priorities."

"Well I think we might need it now." Kirchoff's smile faded and his gaze fell to the floor again. "Valen ran off, and I'm afraid he won't want to see me anymore."

Ursula leaned forwards and squeezed his hand. It was surprisingly soft under the caked on blood and grime. "Kirchoff, you know that's not true."

"Please… just call me Steven." Kirchoff… no Steven, said. His gaze never left the floor, but she saw the tension in his shoulders relax, just a little bit.

"Okay Steven, let's think about this logically. Valen must be feeling just as horrible as you are right now, if not more. He just hurt the only person he's ever loved. Valen may be intelligent and sharp witted, but he's never dealt with emotions like these before. He's still really emotionally immature in a lot of ways. I'm not really surprised he reacted as badly as he did when you didn't reciprocate."

"Yeah I know… I'm just…" Steven's voice caught in his throat. "I'm afraid that my reaction… my trauma… ruined everything for him… and I'm so terrified that I ruined everything and I can't fix it. That I messed everything up for us. All of us."

His last words were barely a squeak. Tears ran freely down his cheeks, snot dripped from his nose, and he broke down sobbing. "I ruined everything…"

Deep in the forest, wedged into the forked trunk of a sturdy, leafy… What had Kirchoff called this kind of tree? Oak? Maple? Whatever it was called, Valen had wedged his hulking frame into the forked trunk and had been there since Kirchoff had fled.

You're so stupid, you know that right? He told himself for the umpteenth time. It was almost a mantra, a way to avoid lashing out and ripping down the forest one tree at a time. Why did you think he would ever love you?

Valen thought he understood Kirchoff. Valen thought he understood him on such a deep, intimate level that there was no doubt that Kirchoff would love him back. That upon hearing how much Valen loved him he would confess his feelings and then…

And then what…? Valen asked himself. He hoped, almost prayed, to hear an answer from somewhere in his own mind. That some part of himself would give him the answer he so desperately wanted. To indulge in the fantasy of what could have been… But you don't have an answer. You didn't think what would happen next, you just assumed that he would act how you wanted him to.

Valen hissed, a guttural, low hiss. A sound of irritation directed at himself. He knew he was right, but to admit that to himself would be to accept the possibility that he had made a mistake. A serious mistake that might have cost him everything he cared about, and that there would be no one to blame but himself. If I had just waited… If I had just listened to his emotions… If I had just hadn't hurt him…

The sudden sharp, hot pain of claws tearing into his soft skin. Hot blood spilling from the wounds... The rapid pounding of his heart... The overwhelming, primal terror at the hulking beast towering over him, clenching him in an unbreakable grip…

Those final flashes of Kirchoff's thoughts… How he had been horrified by him… those raw, primal, instinctual emotions had been what snapped Valen back to reality. It was what made him run away into the woods. That feeling of absolute horror directed at him had hurt more than any physical wound could. Not that Valen could say that he didn't deserve it. He probably hates me now. I acted like everyone else who has hurt him in the past… No, I was worse. He trusted me… and I still hurt him in the end... just like everyone else.

Valen shook his head. His thoughts had been treading the same path over and over all night. If he kept going he was probably going to wear a trench into his subconsciousness. But what else could he do? Kirchoff had fled, and he hadn't returned. Valen hadn't felt so much as a flutter of his thoughts, his feelings, anything. He probably ran right to Dr. Nigel, and now they were discussing what they were going to do... with him.

Maybe now was the time to make an escape attempt. To flee before the inevitable retribution that was no doubt coming… but he couldn't make himself do it. If this is the punishment for ruining the best thing to ever happen to me… then so be it.

Steven had almost cried himself out before Ursula spoke again. He didn't know how long he had been sobbing, clinging to her hand like it was the only thing tethering him to reality. But when she spoke again, she asked, "Steven… Do you love Valen?"

"I… what?" His eyes snapped up to meet hers. He wasn't sure what he was expecting to see there. Frustration, irritation, impatience, he expected all of those. She was clearly fed up with him by this point. She had plenty of reasons to be irritated at him. But what he saw was… Concern?

"It's a simple yes or no question Steven. Do you love Valen?"

"Well… I mean… What I think… What I mean is…" He stammered. His gaze fell back to the floor, his cheeks flushing red.

"Steven, I already know the answer, but I want to hear you say it."

"Why?"

"Because you need to say it. For you own sake."

Steven sucked in a deep breath and let it out. And another. And another. After about 5 minutes Ursula started to suspect that he was taking breaths as a way to avoid talking about his feelings. Which he was.

Ursula gave an exasperated sigh and threw up her hands. "Kirchoff... er, Steven, I'm not going to judge you. I've seen so much weird shit over my career that a man falling in love with a Xenomorph doesn't even break into the top 10 weirdest things I've seen."

"Really?" Steven looked at her out of the corner of his eye, skeptical of her claim.

"You have no idea. At least you two can talk to each other. Some of the other shit I've..." She trailed off. "Look, it doesn't matter. If you two wanna be all lovey dovey and hold hands and have candlelight dinners and get married, fine. But you need to tell Valen if you do love him, and you especially need to tell him if you don't feel the same way about him. If he won't cooperate, or won't go near you, then we're royally fucked."

"So…" His shoulder slumped, "You're just giving me relationship advice so we can get back to work."

"Of course!" She rolled her eyes, but not as hard as usual. "We need to keep working, you know that. Your lives and my career are at stake."

"Thanks for the reminder Doc…"

"But… you two are still under my care. I'm responsible for you. I have to make sure you two are happy and healthy, so you can do what we need you to do. Both of you are useless unless you're able to keep working with me here, and we can't do that if you two don't resolve this... whatever you want to call it."

She leaned in again, arms on her knees, glaring at him with an intensity that made the hair on his neck stand on end. "So you need to get your shit together, and either tell Valen you love him, or that you don't. It's not going to be easy, it's not going to be pleasant, but that's what you do for the people you care about. You be honest with them."

He felt something touching his hand, and when he glanced down he saw that she was holding his grimy, bloodstained hand in her small, clean one. When he looked up again, her expression had softened again. The empathy and concern for him revealed from under her irritation and stress and frustration. "So, Steven. I'll ask you one more time. Do you love Valen?"

"I… I'm not sure… I mean, I do but…"

"Great! That's all I need to hear." She let go of his hand and leaned back in her chair. It was as if her entire body decompressed and relaxed, as if released from under a great weight. "I don't need to hear the specifics, Valen does. You should think about what you're going to say to him, because you're heading back to the forest ASAP."

"Do I need to go back right away?"

"Yes," Ursula stood up and started rummaging around in one of the cupboards in the kitchen. She pulled out a tin of instant coffee, a mug that was comically huge, and started to scoop spoons of the powder into the cup. "I've informed your security detail to come escort you back, they should be here in the next ten minutes. I can't have you running wild up here you know."

"Wait when did you…?" Steven asked, confused. He hadn't seen her make a call, or even send a message to anyone. To answer, she just gestured to a remote sitting on the counter next to her.

"Wow, you're not giving me much time to think at all huh?" this time Steven was the one to roll his eyes.

"You don't need it, you just needed a kick in the ass to get you back on track." She didn't even bother to boil any water, instead running hot water directly from the tap into her mug. Mug might not be the right word to describe it. It was more like a bowl with a handle.

"Geez," Steven chuckled and shook his head in amusement. "Sometimes I wonder who has worse manners, you or Valen."

"Valen? Manners?" Ursula raised her eyebrows. "Are you sure you didn't lose too much blood?"

"Hey, at least he actually listens to me now," He fumed. Ursula's eyebrows didn't budge a millimeter.

"Sometimes…" Still, the eyebrows remained sky high.

"Occasionally…" That made her crack a smile. It was rare to see her genuinely smile lately, it was nice to see that she wasn't completely jaded by recent events.

"It's not my fault if you let your boyfriend walk all over you," Ursula grinned even wider at the deep red flush of his cheeks, "He's still an ass, but he's still being more cooperative than he's ever been in the past."

"He hasn't tried to eat you yet." Steven noted. "That's a good sign."

She shuddered. "Honestly, I was half-expecting he'd take a swipe at me the first time we met face-to-face."

"Don't worry Doc, I would have stopped him."

"You couldn't stop a rampaging puppy Steven, let alone a Xenomorph."

" , fair point." Steven raised his hands in surrender. "But look on the bright side. At least you'll have something to give to the Board. A Xenomorph developing a close bond to a human, close enough to fall in love with him. That's gotta be something that you can spin to make them happy."

She mimed gagging and flopped back into her chair, almost sloshing coffee onto her lap. "As if. The Board dismisses half of what I give them out of hand, and I'm pretty sure they just toss the rest in the garbage after they review it unless it has some kind of military application. Unless they can fire it out of a barrel they don't seem to give a shit."

"Why?" Steven asked, puzzled.

"Huh?"

"I mean, have they always been like this?" He continued. "I can only speak for myself, but as a Doctor of Xenobiology, if I was on the Board for a cutting edge research company, I would be losing my shit and seeing big flashing dollar signs if I got my hands on a telepathic Xenomorph. There's no way a company motivated purely by profit would pass up an opportunity to monetize telepathy."

Steven stood up and started pacing, absorbed in his line of reasoning now. "But they're not. They're totally disinterested in the possibility. In fact, they're trying to shut it down. Even with the running expenses of keeping the forest enclosure online for a few more weeks or months, I can guarantee they could recoup their costs if they could figure out some way to replicate Valen's ability. I mean, even if someone on the Board held a grudge against you, I don't get why they would be screwing themselves out of so much potential profit just because it doesn't have a direct military application. Doesn't that seem odd to you?"

"I…" Ursula looked confused, then thoughtful, then took a massive gulp from her coffee bowl. "Fuck! Why didn't I think of that?"

"To be fair," Steven continued as if nothing had happened, trying to salve her ego. "You've been busy trying to keep our collective feet out of the fire."

"Shit." This was a major oversight, something she could have caught earlier. There was only one person she knew who was utterly obsessed with militarization of her work to this degree. And despite the assurances that he had been detained and was merely awaiting the next transport out of the system, what proof did she have of that? She hadn't seen Julius at all since their last confrontation. She had taken the Board at their word that they would deal with him… And that was a mistake. A big fucking mistake. Fuck, this could actually ruin everything for them if she didn't get on top of this right now.

Ursula shook her head. She could think about it when she had time, but that was for later. Right now, she had to finish playing couple's therapy and get Steven and Valen back to work. Regardless of who the Board was taking advice from, or what role Julius might be playing behind the scenes, they still expected results. She couldn't give them any reason to doubt her more than they already did. It was too risky to tip them off that she knew was amiss.

"We'll talk about this later once you and Valen have made up," She stated, forcing herself to focus on the immediate task at hand.

"Yeah…" Steven muttered. "I'm still not sure what I'm going to say to him..."

"I think we both know what you really want to say to him Steven."

Silence. Steven stared at the floor between his legs.

"Ok, let me ask you this then." She pointed at him with her free hand. "What would you do in the worst case scenario, if you lost Valen forever?"

"I…" Steven's eyes went wide, clearly shocked by the possibility. Despite everything that had happened, he must not have considered actually losing Valen. "I can't… I can't lose him. I just can't. I've already lost so much... Not him too."

"Well you will if you don't go find him, and tell him how you feel." Ursula glanced at the clock on her microwave. Only two minutes until the security detail was scheduled to arrive. "I need both of you working together with me on this more than ever."

"Wait, I have to find him?" Steven asked, clutching his left arm to his chest. "Can't you just track him down for me? Don't you have cameras set up all over the place in there?"

"There's a lot of monitoring equipment in that enclosure, but not enough to track down a Xenomorph in hiding. Most of it is for monitoring atmospheric and soil data. I had to install security cameras on short notice, there's still a ton of camera blind spots in there."

"Couldn't you just get your IT people to install enough to get full coverage?" Steven asked. "I'm not sure I can hunt Valen down if he doesn't want to be found."

"I've got a lot of sway as Research Director, but even I have my limits. Besides, that enclosure isn't exactly easy to modify. I'm not sure if you remember from your orientation, but the natural environment on Bernard is Terran compatible, but it's so hostile to foreign life that we had to build an underground bunker to prevent the wildlife from getting into the forest enclosure and destroying it. That's the only reason that I managed to get you two transferred here in the first place. It's probably the second most reinforced containment system we have planetside outside of the containment cells."

"They're not that secure," Steven remarked, a trace of pride in his voice. "I got into one of the cells."

"Those cells were made to stop very dangerous aliens from getting out, not to stop dumbass, lovestruck scientists from getting in." The look she gave him out of the corner of her eye was enough to make him blush again.

"Okay Doc, point taken." Before either of them could say anything else, a knock sounded at the door. It was Steven's escorts.

"Call me if you have an emergency," She told him as she strode over to the door, gesturing for him to follow. "Otherwise, don't call me until I call you. I have some… things I need to take care of."

Steven raised his eyebrows, but didn't have enough time to ask her about it. She practically shoved him out the door and into the waiting arms of his security detail. "Get him back downstairs in one piece will you." Ursula told the guards before slamming the door shut. Once she was certain that they had left, she slumped against the door and slid down to the floor.

Fuck... "FUCK!" Ursula slammed her fist into the door behind her. Julius... Goddamnit you just can't stay out of my life, can you?

It really was turning out to be one of those days.

Oh boy, it's been a little while since the last update huh?

To cut a very long story short, life has been bonkers for the past year. I've been diagnosed with ADHD (a big surprise I'm sure), lost my job, and have to move back in with my parents to get out of an abusive relationship.

On the bright side, I've been doing LOTS of therapy and I'm the healthiest mentally I've been in a long, long time. I finally feel enough like myself again to be able to engage in my hobbies again, especially writing.

I won't make any promises about a consistent release schedule, or that there isn't the possibility of a long hiatus in the future. However, I've been stealth editing Unusual Testing for the past few weeks, and this latest NEW chapter is finally done. The story is all planned out, and all that's left is to finally finish this almost decade long journey.

I know that UT isn't my most popular work, and I doubt it every will be. But this story has changed so much from what I initially wrote all the way back in February of 2014, and I have a very personal connection with it. UT has become so much more than I ever could have imagined, and it is so intertwined with my life that I cannot just leave it abandoned, unfinished.

Kirchoff and Valen deserve a proper conclusion to their story, and so do all you wonderful readers. - AX