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“What of you, Matt-hew?” Gal-besh asked, passing the bottle to him with one clawed insectoid hand-like appendage. “Have humans hives?”
Matt accepted the bottle and started to shake his head, then shrugged. “We’ve got families.” he said, and took a swig. The drink tasted vaguely alcoholic, like one of those ‘‘girly’’ drinks Shiro and his dad like, but at a guess he’d say it was no stronger than cheap wine. Apparently aliens like his friends had a low tolerance. “I guess you could call them like, really little hives.”
“Small?” Nam-ya frowned as he passed the bottle to her.
“Like, my immediate family is only four people, counting me.” Matt gestured vaguely with his hands. “Mom, Dad, me, and Katie. But if you get into extended family, there’s my parents’ parents, and their siblings, and their siblings’ spouses and kids, and their siblings’ spouses siblings...” he trailed off and shrugged again. “But we only see most of ‘em once or twice a year. Or, well, Mom and Katie do. Probably.”
Without Dad’s job at the Garrison, there was nothing really keeping Mom from taking a better-paying position somewhere else. They’d probably been declared dead when their ship blew up, and it had been, what, at least a year now? Probably more, but keeping track of time in space was hard.
“Is your queen the one called Katie?” Jan-doo asked, leaning forwards and clicking curiously.
Matt snorted at the question, picturing the time he and Katie had gone as, respectively, Alice and the Queen of Hearts for halloween. Her hair had still been short, back then, and he briefly wondered how long it had grown in his absence before shaking his head and bringing himself back to the present. “Nah, Katie’s my little sister. Mom and Dad raised us, and took care of us until we got old enough to take care of ourselves. Or, well, took care of me until I grew up. Mom’s still taking home of Katie, back on Earth.”
“How strange.”Nam-ya said, passing the bottle to Jan-doo.
“Sounds lonely.” Gal-besh added. “No hatch-mates?”
Matt shook his head. “Humans don’t lay eggs. The closest thing we have to hatchmates is when two kids are born at once, and then they’re called twins.”
“Are the young cut from the mother’s body, as with the Jicama?” Jan-doo asked eagerly, holding out the bottle for Gal-besh to take.
“Uh, not usually?” Matt grimaced at the memory of his sex ed teacher’s particularly graphic explanation of childbirth and the many ways it could go wrong. “Katie was, but that’s because she was pointing the wrong way and Mom couldn’t push her out the way she did me.”
“How strange.” Nam-ya said again. Matt accepted the bottle as it was passed to him, and took a deep drink.
“Yeah.” Matt nodded. “Humans are pretty damn weird.”
“Are all as strange as you?” Jan-doo asked.
“Nah.” Matt shook his head. “I’m one of a kind. We all are.”
He tilted his head back, and looked up at the alien stars. His family was somewhere out there, Mom and Katie back home on Earth and Dad on some distant Imperial moon. He would get back to them, some day, once he no longer had to worry about an Imperial battlecruiser showing up in the sky to add their beautiful little blue planet to the Empire. And if the recently spreading rumours of Voltron were true, that day might come sooner than he’d dared to hope.