WARNING: graphic scenes and explicit topics will be featured in this story. I make sure to stay clear of anything regarding rape or sexual assault in any of my current and future works, but I am making a special exception for this one.
I will put warnings at the beginning of the chapters that will have explicit and sensitive scenes shown.
He had to get the eggs just right.
Fox had made a lucrative carrier in his mercenary work, completing the contracts he had signed off on with hardly any issue and without any compromise, save for the occasional times of war in the Lylat System―which happened too often during his relatively short lifetime. The point was that while he made sure to satisfy the outcomes desired by his clients, Fox had never cared for them in the way he cared now.
Who he aimed to satisfy now was not an anybody with enough credits to throw at him to make ends meet, oh no. The stakes were raised beyond that. Far beyond that. This particular client got Fox's services free of charge, and her satisfaction meant everything.
Fox knew that his lovely wife liked her breakfast a certain way on the eve of apprehending a big bounty: light but full of nutrition. Fox was keenly aware that she liked substance-packed items in light portions. Thankfully, his wife had simple tastes and was fond of the basic things, like eggs, toast, and any kind of meat that would go well with either of them. Fox was no chef, but he at least knew how to make these things, and the ingredients to prepare them were luckily well-stocked aboard the Great Fox II.
Fox had snuck out of bed a little less than an hour before his wife did to have breakfast ready when she woke up. She was a heavy sleeper most night cycles and reliably was able to sleep through most of Fox's frequent jostling in bed, and that came in handy for occasions like this. However, not unexpectedly, Fox's wife did inevitably wake up to see that Fox wasn't by her side, yet she knew where he was on the ship and what he was up to.
It wasn't always easy to surprise Krystal; being a born telepath makes one a much more accurate guesser seeing how they get access to the cheat sheets beforehand. Fox was well aware of this, but it still hardly mattered to him. He was still determined to finish before she fully got up.
The two of them would eat together in the quaint galley which was adjacent to the kitchen. Being a decommissioned Cornerian assault carrier, it was not inherently the most lavish accommodator when it came to aesthetics but given all that Fox and Krystal had invested into blinging her up over the year, the galley now looked quite clean and considerably more modern to their liking. The two of them had grown quite affectionate for this old rust bucket and wanted to treat her right after all she had been through.
"Good gracious, whatever you're making, it smells divine," a gentle stream of words wormed their way into Fox's head. He smiled to himself after hearing them.
"You may as well be yelling that at me from down the hall," Fox retorted playfully, much like how both of them spoke during most of their telepathic chats. "At least try to act like I'm able to surprise you."
"My love, where my mind fails, my nose doesn't," Krystal countered back. "This is on you for preparing meals so well."
"Just get over here and get your breakfast," Fox instructed, though the smile never left his muzzle. The two of them would often bicker and banter at each other from different ends of the ship. The telepathic link that had been firmly established between the two of them made it so that they were rarely without each other's counsel. Even in private moments, it was difficult not to poke each other with their thoughts, even when neither of them meant to.
It was mostly harmless fun, though. The link could be easily severed if the bridge between their minds truly would get out of hand, but neither of them held that desire. They had been keeping up their unvoiced banters since they first started dating and persisted in their marriage, which was now almost a whole year strong.
However, their best interactions were always when they were face-to-face, and such meetings were natural to occur over breakfast. Though the subtle drone of the ship's ambience could easily dilute the untrained ear, Fox spent most of his life in and around vessels like this and was able to hear the delicate clicks of his wife's clawed bare feet traipsing across the cool tiled hall towards the galley entrance.
Fox had just finished prepping the table a clean three seconds before Krystal peaked her head around the open doorway. Her sleepy teal eyes were immediately drawn to her arrangements sitting there waiting for her on her end of the table, a dozen feet away from the door. She placed a hand over her chest and made the sweetest grin.
"Oh, darling, will you ever cease spoiling me?" she asked, her voice so gentle and loving. Fox had been walking over to her with his hand behind his head.
"Don't think so, Krys. Getting up early is worth it if it means I get to gaze at that raw heavenly glow of yours."
Krystal chuckled at his remark and walked over to meet him. She was wearing her favourite red sweater that was two sizes too big for her. While she was dressed in her short bedtime wear―which was just a simple t-shirt and loose short pants―her sweater made it look like she was wearing nothing else but that, revealing only her lovely blue barren legs and only the halves of her two identical swirly signs on her outer thighs. Fox hardly minded the fetching eye candy she deliberately displayed to him, as he wasn't wearing a shirt and was only in boxers and an apron. They both knew what the other liked to see and hardly spared a chance to let them see it while alone with each other on the ship.
They both met halfway across the room for a tender kiss, holding onto each other's shoulders. Krystal's long hair was quite messy having gotten out of bed only moments ago, but Fox admittedly thought she looked her best like this: unkempt and relaxed. Forward-thinking as she was, Krystal asked an important question once they parted lips.
"How far out are we?"
Fox thought for a moment and checked his wristwatch. "Just over four-hundred-thousand miles," he briefed. "We'll be there in a few hours."
"All the more reason to eat up while we can."
A little while after the vulpine couple had eaten breakfast, which was as lovely and scrumptious as Krystal expected, retreated to the bridge where ROB was manning the ship's wheel at the helm.
She knew that ROB 64 was presently in autopilot mode until they would come within a certain range of their destination, so he expectedly did not greet her upon her entrance. That was all right with her; apart from showing her affection to Fox that morning cycle, she was too wrapped in her thoughts to converse with anyone else. She found herself situated in one of the navigator seats with her still-hot cup of herbal tea, gazing out at the planet within view.
It was a modest planet covered with white clouds, a dominantly icy surface, and a beautiful blue aura. A single small grey moon could also be seen in its orbit about a hundred thousand miles or so away from it, though it could have passed off as a large distant star given that it was currently further behind the planet. Krystal had always enjoyed the sight of distant planets from the ship, especially when details of them could still be made out but when there was a considerable distance in between, and this world was no exception.
She couldn't quite find herself as easily captivated by this world in particular, however, for this one was different. She had never been here before, but in another instance, she had. This was the planet Kew.
Krystal and her husband were here in this distant galaxy for a bounty. A murderous criminal kingpin from Titania was reportedly said to have fled the Lylat System to escape prosecution. While Cornerian authorities had been scratching their heads to find any leads about where he might have fled to, a few reliable connections in the Sargasso space station informed Krystal and Fox that he had situated on the planet Kew in the Brokkr system, which was a tiny transit world in a star system with only a few other planets.
It was strange seeing this world; it did not look familiar to Krystal, but she could hardly overlook the ties she had to it. Whether or not they were actually hers was not the issue. It was the other she could not stop thinking about.
She had been able to put away that brief saga decently enough for about a year, but as she feared, coming upon this world was beginning to reopen the wound. A sheet of melancholy had gently been wrapping around herself the longer her vision remained fixed on Kew. She kept thinking about her other and all of the mistakes she had made. It was hard for her not to feel responsible for them as well.
"You okay?" the tender voice of her husband asked. Krystal turned her head and saw that Fox had entered the bridge, now wearing a T-shirt and shorts. A part of her wished he had remained mostly naked for the sake of getting her mind off of her worries, but if she wasn't able to sense his incoming presence that probably wouldn't have worked anyway.
"Always," she smiled, hoping to quell that worried look on his face. Fox, unfortunately, had become skilled in reading the faults in her body language and began walking towards her to sit down in the seat next to her. He was going to anyway, but now he had a greater purpose to do so.
Once he did, he too noted Kew in the far distance, which was only getting closer by the moment―the ship likely breaching its atmosphere in about an hour out. "You know, we don't have to take this bounty," Fox reminded, looking at his wife with concern. "There's still time to turn around."
"We won't get another chance of taking one this lucrative again," Krystal insisted. "We need the credits if we want enough in reserve when we start our family."
"That's true," Fox agreed. "But Lylat's got no shortage of dangerous scoundrels. We would easily make the credits anyways."
"A part of me feels like I need to be here," Krystal refuted, taking a modest sip of her tea. "Perhaps…both of us need to be here. To reconcile when the other ones couldn't…"
Fox didn't say anything for a moment, only letting out a quiet exhale. "You don't have to keep feeling like you did those things. You're not her."
"I am her…" Krystal turned to Fox with restrained anguish. His face fell after the brief silence following her passionate rebuke. "It frankly doesn't matter whether or not her circumstances played out differently," Krystal continued. "She was still me, and I willingly did those awful things. To you, and the others. Forgive me if I still find that reality deeply haunting…"
Fox continued to frown solemnly, and Krystal felt terrible that she was slipping up this badly right now. A few months before she and Fox wedded, something truly extraordinary happened. Right within the midst of another brutal system-wide invasion that nearly brought Lylat to its knees, someone else, in a sense, invaded alongside them. A deeply resentful and far more dangerous version of Krystal had manifested amidst the chaos and had nearly killed the two of them, who went by the alias Kursed.
While everyone else Fox and Krystal were associated with, both close friends and rivals alike, believed this entity as a clone of some kind―a cheap and twisted imitation of the real Cerinian vixen―the vulpine couple knew the truth. Kursed had hailed from a reality where she had betrayed the ones she loved and was darkened by a life of self-exile and isolation. They did not kill her in the end; she simply phased back into the "hypothetical" existence from whence she came, though not before receiving a chance to finally reconcile with Fox through Krystal's own.
Krystal knew what insinuated this whole ordeal to begin with, though she was unable to speak of it without potential cosmic ramifications. While she was not certain of them or if they would even occur, she dared not test them. Fox was primarily in the dark about how or why Kursed had appeared to begin with, though he did not question it. He too realised there was some kind of cosmic purpose to it, and if he was meant to steer that troubled version of Krystal back on the right track, then he was content with that.
Fox began thinking about the moments before Kursed faded away as well and gingerly slid his arm over Krystal's shoulders, atomically triggering her to lean into him. "Let's not forget here that the me she was acquainted with was also a major idiot for kicking her off his team for no substantial reason," Fox said, beginning to play with his wife's long hair―an act that always comforted her. "Do you remember how close I came to making that same mistake?"
Krystal looked up at Fox's beautiful jade eyes while resting against him. "No matter how much the other you may have mishandled things, that still leaves no excuse for me," she said. "I did what I did after out of pure spite. I played with your emotions. I turned into a vindictive monster…"
"Enough with the 'I's, okay?" Fox said sternly. "You did none of those things. She did what she did, and he did what he did. It's better if we remain content with the fact that we both made the right decisions here when they didn't. It's better for your head, too."
As dense as Fox could be at times, there was also plenty of wisdom in him. He had certainly come a long way since he first revitalised his father's team, Star Fox. Krystal treasured the wisdom Fox had whenever he shared it; often it was just what she needed to overcome a burdensome qualm and move past it, much like this one. She smiled gratefully and began to nuzzle her husband as he returned the same affection―feeling each other's whiskers.
"You're right," she conceded, "maybe I am a little prone to overthinking. I wish I could help that sometimes."
"It's one of your best traits," Fox said sincerely, kissing her on the forehead. Krystal returned an identical kiss on his cheek before his arm eventually released her from the loving bond. Krystal returned to leaning back against her chair, feeling a little better now as she looked out into space again along with Fox, who was lightly tapping his finger on the closed tablet he had in his other hand.
"It's a cute little world though, isn't it? Very white―not unlike Fichina," he observed.
"Quite so," she agreed. "Not to bring up you know who again, but I still find it ironic that we're both taking a bounty that led us to this world in particular. A part of me is almost wondering if it's the same bounty…"
"Who knows," Fox shrugged, not sounding too concerned about it, which Krystal found to be reassuring to her. "I'm more concerned over what it'll take to nab this guy. Hippos are monstrous when they want to be."
"So I have heard," Krystal said, looking at Fox. "Just how extensive are this criminal's offences? His reputation is widespread enough, but I don't think I've ever gotten a full list of his crimes."
"Got the case file right here," Fox said, opening up his holo-tablet by splitting open two grips with a holographic screen filling in the space between. "Let's get a refresher."
Krystal leaned over to see Fox scrolling past several mugshots of a massive man of a hippopotamus with a scarred face and injured eye, though that twisted smile he wore was a clear informant of the extent of his innate cruelty. "Wanted for ten million credits," the digitized poster read. Slippery as he was deadly, the bounty on his head was one that many dared not to take for the sake of their own lives. In other words, this was Fox and Krystal's perfect job.
"Rankous Bugatti," Fox read. "Wanted for public endangerment, aggravated assault, burglary, counterfeiting, money laundering, forgery, vandalism, drug possession, drug trafficking, drug distribution, pimping, wire fraud, homicide, and… Oh, yeah, and mountains of unpaid parking fees."
"Brilliant," Krystal pondered, taking a mindful sip of her tea, feeling a swell of indignation hearing Fox tally those offences.
"Yup, sounds like a swell guy to have at your picnic for sure. Probably great with kids," Fox acknowledged with sarcasm, closing his holo-tablet back up. "I'd pay ten million credits to have this guy locked up too if I had them on hand."
"He'll likely be executed for all of these crimes," Krystal pondered.
"All the same," Fox replied. "Juicy credits or not, it's good to be getting this guy for good before he can scourge another star system."
"I second that," Krystal agreed, finally finishing her tea. Kew seemed to have gotten bigger within the time they had been talking, which likely meant that they were now much closer.
Noting this, Fox soon looked back at the helm, where a chromed-out ROB 64 maintained the ship's course reliably. "Hey there, ROB? How much longer before we reach the port?"
"Forty-three minutes, precisely, Captain McCloud," ROB replied, not sounding nearly as robotic as he used to. The reasons for this were long and convoluted, so much like most of their recent trials. They, along with the recent invasion of the Lylat System, and especially Kursed's presence, was all a story is was meant to be told another day.
"Thanks, pal," Fox smiled before turning to his wife, his brow knitting with eagerness. "We should probably suit up soon and get our wing's flight-ready. The works."
"The works," Krystal repeated fondly, already beginning to fashion her long hair into a manageable tail. "We better bring some coats, too. Kew looks mighty chilly, even from up here."
"And, should you disembark underdressed for the climate," ROB added, turning his robot head to meet Krystal's eyes with his bright red visor, "I will prepare hot soup to combat your consequential colds, Mrs McCloud."