So about those space orcs…

variablejabberwocky:

temporaldecay:

I’ve seen a lot of posts about humans pack-bonding with frankly everything, no matter how big, scary, threatening, lethal or oozy.

But you know what I haven’t seen?

Humans entrusting their young to their pack-bonded friends. Because that’s a thing we do. We entrust our children to our friends. We entrust our children to our dogs. We befriend the biggest, meanest, scariest shit, and then we dump our defenseless, hasn’t-even-got-a-fully-fused-skull-yet offspring on them. Half for shits-and-giggles, half because it’s cute, mostly because children are exhausting and we need a nanny.

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[OP’s text from under cut because its adorable]

Captain Zardher is by no means what the humans call a noob – they’re still not 100% of the exact definition of the term, mostly because every human they’ve asked has given a different one, but the common thread through all is inexperience and youth, of which Captain Zardher likes to think has none. They have crossed three galaxies and fought anything and everything, for the glory of the Federation.

…admittedly, the most recent addition to the Federation is unlike anything they’d ever seen before, but they have seen it now. They have humans in their crew. They have traveled with them and seen them be exactly the kind of bizarre, horrifying, strangely friendly monstrosities that only a death world like Earth could produce.

Humans are strange, otherworldly creatures, but Captain Zardher prides themselves in their own adaptability and they know them.

…still, they pause when they hear the tell-tale high pitched calling of a human young in the depths of the containment zone. They know the humans call it giggling, and find it endearing, somehow. Captain Zardher finds it personally terrifying, comparable to the sound of a predator cowering prey into rushing out of hiding in a poor attempt of fleeing, but when they shared this insight with one of the humans under their command, they’d laughed and said the sound was “cute.”

The Captain had wisely chosen not to argue.

They walk slowly through the labyrinth of stasis pods containing all sorts of strange flora and fauna collected as part of the science division’s mission to curate near extinct species. Most of the humans aboard the ship are part of the science division, in fact. The Captain has learned not to trust on labels though, because they are humans first and everything else second. Their enthusiasm for research is only comparable to their capacity for being unpredictable, and every now and then, even the meekest-looking one of them will do something that will remind the crew as a whole that these are indeed creatures that colonized a planet seemingly hellbent on destroying them, and then flourished on it, to boot.

The Captain is not inexperienced or new or young. The Captain has served thousands of tours of duty, from science missions to more unfortunately violent ones. The Captain is wise and patient and commanding.

…the Captain also makes a loud distress display when they round a corner and find Human Scientist Sarah’s young lying on a pile of blankets, giggling, and trying to catch the waving scythe like tail of a large, black quadruped creature, the name of which escapes the Captain at the moment. Quite possibly because their hearts are beating too fast to keep each other’s rhythm and they might be going into cardiac arrest. The Captain might not remember the name, but they remember the titanic effort required to capture the specimen and the four separate task forces it demolished before the humans stepped in to take care of it.

Not the warriors, mind, the scientists.

Which is why the Captain knows not to trust labels.

Then the creature notices the Captain and stands up to its imposing size, nearly ten feet worth of heavy armored exoskeleton covering nearly twelve hundred pounds of solid muscle. It shifts into an aggressive stance, body towering over the human young and bares its double rows of teeth, acid already sizzling in its maws. The Captain takes a defensive stance on reflex, one pair of eyes focused on the wicked-looking tail swinging high above, and the other on the small human that is now making quiet, distressed noises.

“Mia!” Human Scientist Sarah snaps as she walks from another corridor. “Bad dog! Don’t hiss at Captain Zardher!”

The Captain stares, as the creature lets out a high, screeching sound but ceases all threat displays at once, lowering its body until it’s curled around the human young. Who then proceeds to reach out and pet the shiny black plates of the creature’s body and resumes its giggling.

“I’m sorry,” Human Scientist Sarah says, expression shifting into what humans term apologetic. “Mia is really attached to Lily, Captain. But she didn’t mean to upset you,” she adds, giving the creature a stern-coded look. Then she smiles. “She won’t do it again, right, big softy?” The creature makes another screechy noise, raising its head towards the human and lazily flaring the spiked barbs around its collar. “Good girl.”

“That is not a dog,” is all the Captain manages to say, because they covered basic human symbiotic species learning module when they got their first human crew members, and they are pretty sure dogs are much smaller, covered in fur and definitely not capable of producing acidic spit.

“Well, no,” Human Scientist Sarah says, now coding her face with embarrassment, “but she acts like one. And she reminds Mark of this big, silly mastiff he used to have back home.”

The Captain stares a bit more before bobbing his head into what humans call nods, because they’ve learned that nodding is perhaps the safest way to deal with a human being… well, human.

“Is… is it customary?” They can’t help but ask, after their hearts are no longer beating discordantly in their gut. “To establish pack dominance so early?”

Human Scientist Sarah is bewildered for a moment, before she laughs.

“I guess?” She gives the now crooning creature a fond look. “She’s just good at looking after Lily for those blessed five minutes, you know?” The Captain most assuredly does not know. They nod anyway. “Honestly we were all a bit surprised but Mark says a patient nanny dog is nothing to scoff at. And Mia was so bored inside that cage, poor thing.”

Later, much later, after the Captain has returned to their quarters without even delivering the notice they had meant to give Human Scientist Sarah in the first place, they slowly and methodically rub every inch of skin with intoxication gel and feel, as humans say, so very blessed that humanity chose to join the Federation, rather than stand against it.

So very #blessed.