Charles waited impatiently for the injured baby kraken to be brought to him. “You’ve got to be kidding me?” He muttered when he saw the disfigured baby kraken for the first time.

It was missing an eye, along with several of its tentacles. They had been keeping it in an aquarium only barely bigger than its body that didn’t even allow it any room to move.

“And we call these things monsters,” Jeremy whispered beside him. “Sometimes I’m not sure which of us is the bigger one.”

Charles grunted in agreement. The baby kraken squealed and thrashed, cracking the thin glass as he reached in and took hold of it.

“Knowing they can feel and think certainly changes our perception of them. As long as they don’t attack us, I see no reason we can’t co-exist. Of course, I say that as someone who has the power to back up my words most of the time.” He placed a hand over the jagged hole where its eye used to be and began the process of reconstructing the missing orb.

His intermediate-level healing spell made the process easier than it otherwise would have been, but he still needed to concentrate. Unlike with so many of his other recent patients, this time Charles remembered to deaden the injured and inflamed nerves. There was no reason to cause the poor creature more pain than it had already suffered through.

The frantic monster slowly calmed as it realized that he was trying to help instead of hurting it more. Slowly, the frantic bubbling screams gave way to gentle burbling coos. Its remaining tendrils wound their way possessively around Charles as he finished remaking the missing eye and then connected it to the optic nerves. He healed the rest of the ravaged nerves and then moved onto the missing limbs before taking the baby outside to its mother.

“Lock the gate behind me. There is no telling how the mother will react to what was done to her son. I may have healed him, but…” He shrugged. If it had been his kid, he would still destroy the place and then salt the ground so nothing would grow there.

As it was, he was a little more worried about how Kira might react to what had happened. He wasn’t sure how close to home this would strike for her.

The mother kraken was visibly impatient by the time he stepped out the gate with her baby son wrapped around him. Freshly healed though he may have been, a mother’s intuition knew no racial boundaries.

“What happened to him?” She screeched, reaching a pitch that would have shattered glass had any been nearby.

“The ones who brought him to the town used him for a couple of experiments,” Charles said, throwing the fleeing group under the proverbial bus. “I’ve healed his physical injuries, but I can do nothing for his mind.”

The kraken woman scoffed. “His mind will be fine. We are not as mentally fragile as you humans tend to be. These humans that experimented on him… I presume they are the ones who fled just now?”

He nodded, stopping before with his hands outstretched so she could untangle her son.

“Good, it will be a short but interesting hunt, then.”

“I figured that would be the case. Just please leave the people of the town alone. They had no idea what those involved had done.” Charles requested, a slight grin ghosting across his face as the small child kept reattaching each tentacle that his mother pulled off. It was such a typical child move that he almost couldn’t help himself.

“Xer’Tryl you will stop that at once!” She demanded, losing her patience. “Let me look at you.”

Charles was no expert on cephalopods, but he swore she was acting just like any human parent at that moment. The baby kraken stilled and finally let himself be pulled away from Charles. The next moment, it latched onto its mother with full strength and buried its head into her shoulder.

The tendrils at the bottom of her head roamed over her child, inspecting him with care. “Thank you for returning him to me. As you requested, I shall leave this town alone. However, the ones who hurt him will suffer my ire.”

He had expected no less, though the ease with which she had capitulated was somewhat strange. “Uh, thanks. I didn’t expect you to agree quite so easily.”

“I saw the truth of your words in my son’s mind.” She replied simply, her tentacles waving as she spoke. Apparently, the inspection had been more than it appeared to them.

“Oh,” What more was there to say to something like that?

“Thank you for healing his wounds. Their losses would have been catastrophic for him.” She hugged her boy tight and turned away.

Her body began to grow as she retook her original form. Not to the same size as before, but she was still larger than most yachts they had seen on TV. Charles guessed that her healing depended on making her smaller. Which meant that if they had truly needed to fight her to the death, it would have been a very long fight.

He was glad that some species were willing to talk to them. It made him feel a little bad about that nest of goblins he had exterminated in Aurora, Colorado before. They had simply wanted to live in peace as well.

The problem was the place they had chosen was also occupied by humans and was a military base with the equipment they needed. They had been unwilling to move, so he had gotten rid of them. Thinking about it now, the action had started to take on a slightly off-taste to him.

What other choice had there been?

That might have been the turning point for him. The mission was where he started to get disillusioned with everything and realize that not everything was quite so black and white. The first strands of doubt had begun to creep in with that one encounter.

Now, he was struggling to find the desire to go on most of the time. It was selfish of him, and he knew that, but that’s where he was at. So much unasked-for responsibility had been thrust on him and his team, that it was too heavy of a burden for him to bear.

The team watched her hurry off after the fleeing group of scientists with dispassionate gazes.

“I think I’m ready to go back up to the station,” Kate whispered, holding Beth and Inara close.

Silvi continued to watch the kraken mother’s retreating form for another minute with a complicated expression. “We just sent her to kill those people. Didn’t we?”

“Yeah, Silvi, we did.” Sierra strapped her bow to her back, not quite willing to trust her inventory again. “Just think about how you’d feel if someone had dared to experiment on Myriam.” She was speaking to the silver-haired girl, but her eyes were on Kira.

Kira’s enormous, spiked hammer flowed into a liquid state and reformed as a bracelet on her wrist. Her arm dangled limply at her side as her eyes filled with an inner peace that hadn’t been there before. The chocolate brown orbs with flecks of gold were locked on Charles instead of the kraken like the others.

For her, his action of saving and healing the little kid, even if he had been something other than human, had meant more than she could have ever guessed. It was in that moment that something she hadn’t even known she was missing and wanted appeared, and was filled all at once.

Charles had rescued and healed someone like her, who had been captured and tortured. Somehow, the thought of saving others in similar positions had never fully crossed her mind. The dim hope had been there, and she may have even mentioned the desire once or twice in the past.

Despite that, it had never seemed like something that could really happen.

Now it had.

Kira ignored the notification that sprang into view as she continued to stare at her fiancé. A sense of peace about their life and what they had together filled her in that moment. Right then, she wanted nothing more than to be married to him. It was impulsive, but so had been their engagement.

Nothing would even change once they were married. They were already living together, and they more or less already had two daughters as well. The only thing that would be different was how official it was, and that maybe she was finally ready for the next stage of their relationship.

That thought brought a chuckle to her lips. Finally? As though they had been dating and waiting for such a long time. It had only been a few months, an intense and emotionally rife time, true. But short, as most people considered it.

It was long enough for them. She had been the holdup, and now she felt ready to continue on. Excited even.

“Yeah, let’s go back up to the station,” Kira said, agreeing with her sister. “I think the people down here can handle everything else that needs to be done.”