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I can’t say how long I lay there, only half-cogent, buoyed by post-coital bliss. The presence of Red’s cock quickly grows familiar inside of me.

When I blink awake, the light has grown orange and dusky to simulate dusk. Say what you will about Shinra Corporation: they spare no expense when it comes to their test subjects. Part of me still can’t believe Red’s enclosure isn’t outdoors.

I am content to lie there for long minutes, breathing. By now Red’s knot has deflated and his cock is small in me. Finally, Red stirs awake, grumbling, and when he slips out, it draws a gasp. Some of his cum leaks out of my pussy and my breath drags from me as my slit throbs with tenderness.

As I stand on wobbly legs, Red looks from the juices pooling in the grass to my sopping cunt. He doesn’t say anything, but I know what we are both thinking: did it happen? Am I going to have his children?

It’s not something I want to grapple with right now.

“If they were going to get you they would have done so already,” Red says, his voice low. “You’ll be left here overnight.”

I try to avoid shivering. It’s not that cold, but it seems they’ve arranged the temperature to lower in order to simulate nighttime—and I’m still completely nude.

Of course, my efforts at hiding my chill don’t fool Red. Swishing his tail from side to side, he turns and leads me away. “I have a den in a small cave near here,” he said. “It should be warmer there.”

I follow, unsure what else to do, as he takes me to a small, tubelike cavern in the side of a hill near the stream. When I go in, I gasp at the sight. Red’s den is small and cozy, with a makeshift sleeping mat made of dried grasses over a bed of smooth, perfectly-straight sticks. The entire thing is completely spick-and-span; there’s no dirt or dust anywhere. “You can sleep there,” he says, nodding at the mat. When I ask where he will sleep if I’m taking his usual bed, he barks out a soft laugh and points out that he’s roughed it in worse places than this. Then he curls up along the side of the den. “I try to keep this place as clean as I can,” he says. “If you need to do business in the evening, please step outside.” Then he curls like a cat and, his tail draped over his nose, goes back to sleep.

My walk over to the mat is ginger, every step sending aftershocks of tender pleasure strumming through me. That was the most thorough fucking I’d ever had in my life. I try not to think about how raw it was at the end, how euphoric. Me, a simple flower girl from the slums, squeezing enjoyment out of being rutted; filled; knotted?

To distract myself, I observe Red as he sleeps. His chest rises and falls rhythmically; he sleeps on his belly, his chin resting on his crossed front paws.

…I think about how he curled behind me, his paw wrapped around my shoulder, holding me tight against him like I was his lover, his mate.

Well, I guess I might be, I think ruefully, staring down at my stomach. I don’t know what to think if his seed actually took.

Eventually weariness creeps up on me and I curl against myself. Red’s makeshift bed is surprisingly comfortable and the den is warm, but I’m still just a lone, naked girl. The night is long and cold, and when I wake, I feel weary and unrested. Red is already up and gone; when I emerge from his den he eyes me with sympathy.

The morning marches along and there is no hint of the scientists, no clue that I will be freed. After a compartment near Red’s den opens, delivering a bowl of what looks like crunchy food for him and a hot meal for me, I decided enough is enough.

“Hey!” I yell, running to the nearest of the glass walls. (It’s a bigger journey than it seems. Red’s enclosure is, after all, massive.) “Hey!” I yell again, pounding on the wall.

“Specimen XIX,” a voice pipes in over the speakers, “cease making a nuisance of yourself.” The voice isn’t Hojo’s; it sounds like it belongs to some bored middle-aged woman.

“Let me out!” I yell, not knowing where to look. The monitoring cameras are well-hidden. “I did what you wanted. I let him fuck me.” I hear Red padding up behind me. “So let me out already! I’m ready to leave!”

The voice that returns is exasperated, like she was explaining something to a recalcitrant child. “The point of this entire endeavor is so that you bear specimen XIII’s offspring. One session alone is not enough to guarantee that, and besides, it is far too early to tell if his seed has taken root in you. We will fetch you for bloodwork in a few days to check if conception was successful or not. In the meantime, you will copulate with specimen XIII at least once daily to raise chances of fertilization. If not,” she warns, “we will take drastic measures.”

As her voice fades away, I am left shocked—flabbergasted—my mind roiling with the indignity. I slam my palms against the glass, yelling protestations, but the scientist’s voice does not come back. Eventually, Red quietly encourages me to follow him back so that we can eat. By the time I return, my meal is cold, and I take no pleasure in it.

“What do we do,” Red asks after the both of us are finished.

I bury my head in my hands. For a moment I think I am going to cry—but the moment passes, and when I raise my head it is with dry eyes and a grim acceptance. “The only thing we can,” I say.

The two of us fritter away the day, Red showing me various places around the enclosure. It’s quite spacious—there is a tiny rocky quarry, a path winding around a grove of fruit trees, even a dense pine forest.

It is here that he takes me from behind once more, the thick evergreen scent wafting in my nostrils as I keen out with every thrust. Red’s paws are draped over my shoulders as before, holding me tight against him as he ruts me. This time I’m the first of us to cum, and as my pussy flutters around him, he growls and hilts into me and I whine with delight as his knot swells, tying us together. After, when we are unstuck, I stare at the ceiling, hoping that the Hojo, that the scientists, that any of my captors can see my anger. “Did you like that, you bastards?” I cry out. “Huh? Was that good enough for you?”

When it’s time to retire to the den that evening, Red trots over to the same spot against the wall he slept the previous evening. But as he curls down, I bite my lip. “Wait,” I say, and he looks up at me. “You should sleep here.”

Red shakes his head. “I won’t swap places with you,” he says. “I’m better suited for sleeping in cold spaces than humans.”

“I…” My voice stammers. Why am I being so fearful? Red, he… he’s been in me twice, now. There’s no reason to hesitate. “That’s not what I’m asking. I think we should share it. Together.” Red blinks and tilts his head at me, and I continue, the words almost spilling over themselves as I speak: “Not like that. It’s cold, and, um, I… I could really use—”

He nods in understanding and stalks over to the mat. We lie together, him on the outside, curled around me. His paws gently wrap around my front, pressing against my chest and my tummy, and hold me against him. I can feel body heat radiating out of him: it’s like lying on a hearth as the fire is burning low. Every breath of his pushes his fur against my body.

We’ve been like this before, both times after sex. But this is the first time the two of us have simply laid together in each other’s mutual comfort and presence without having intercourse first.

He feels so soft. He feels so warm. So safe.

And despite myself I begin to cry.

It starts small, at first, the crying: just sniffle. It quickly snowballs until I am wracking with sobs, burying my face in my palms.

I feel Red tense up behind me. “Are you oka—”

“Don’t let go,” I sniffle as he is about to withdraw his paws from me. He keeps them there, holding me tight, at my urging. “I—I—”

Fuck. I’m a mess. A weepy, desperate mess.

“I’m just really lucky that you’re you,” I manage to force out. Red doesn’t respond and I can sense his confusion. I push on, hiccupping occasionally despite myself. Crying isn’t as clean as you might believe.

“What I mean is,” I begin, “that Hojo could have given me to some monster or horny animal who would have pinned and f-forced himself on me and then cast me aside without a thought. But instead, it was you. You’re thoughtful…”

“Thoughtful? The end result was the same,” Red said, and I can hear the bitter self-loathing in his voice. “You were made to have sex with something you didn’t want to. To bear his offspring.”

“It’s different,” I say, because it is. I can’t articulate how—but it is. “Besides, we… we don’t know if we’re even compatible. This whole thing might be a wash. I’m not pregnant yet.” He tenses behind me in response, and an uncertain silence fills the den. “I mean I’m… I’m not,” I insist, suddenly unsure.

Tensing again, Red sighs. “…you are, Aerith,” he says. “Maybe they won’t be able to tell for a bit, but I can already smell the change in your hormones and chemistry. It’s been obvious to me for a few hours now. I don’t know whether our offspring will be like you, like me, or even a hybrid, but… we’ll have offspring of some sort. It’s inevitable. You’re pregnant.”

I blink. Blink again. Look down at my own body. Even in the dark, I can make out the shape of my stomach. It looks trim, flat—certainly not the tummy you’d expect of a mother-to-be.

…Mother.

I’m going to be a mother.

“Oh,” I say. My hand is resting on the spot just below my navel. I can’t say when I put it there. “I… oh.”

“Aerith, I…” Red says. He stops himself from apologizing, keeping the promise he made yesterday, but I can still hear the self-hate in his voice. It jolts me out of my reverie.

“Hey,” I say, rolling over to look at him. “I…” My voice trails as I fumble for words. “Is there a good way to say ‘if I’m gonna be knocked up with some nonhuman test subject’s kids, I’m glad they’re yours’?” I finish lamely. He laughs, despite himself, and I wrap my arms around his neck. “I wouldn’t have chosen this, but since it’s out of our hands, we may as well make the best of it.”

“…I suppose,” he replies. I lean in, resting my face against his fur. It’s soft—inviting.

“Thanks, Red.” Then, suddenly, something hits me. “Red. That’s what Hojo calls you, isn’t it?”

He rumbles an assent. “Specimen Red XIII is my official designation. The scientists mostly just use my number, but Hojo likes the nickname.”

My eyes are drawn to the numeral crudely tattooed on him. That must have hurt. They haven’t done anything like that to me—yet. But the thought of carrying that number on me like a brand, of only being called by what they want to call me, rather than my own name…

It sickens me.

“Do you have a real name?” I ask. He eyes me. I can see the hesitation on his face. His real name is something he must keep private. Something they can’t take from him.

But I’m not them. I’m like him. A captive. An innocent soul.

And besides. I’m going to have his kids a few months from now.

I can see all this playing out in his eyes, and then he grows resolute. “…Nanaki,” he says.

I turn the name over on my tongue. “Nanaki,” I say. It’s not like any name I’ve heard before. It’s exotic. Poetic. Beautiful, even. “Thank you. Can I call you by that name?”

He nods. Red—no, Nanaki nods. “Yes. To my people, it has a special meaning. ‘Hope’.”

I huddle closer to him. To my crimson-furred, protective beast. Nanaki. “We could use some of that, lately.”

Perhaps we should be sleeping, but the surrender of his name pries open Nanaki’s mouth, and he spends the evening regaling me.

“My home is far from here, on the western continent,” he tells me. “It’s a sacred place to us. Our language is mostly unpronounceable to humans, but its name translates to ‘Valley of the Fallen Star.’ In your tongue, they call it Cosmo Canyon.”

I can hear the memory laying heavy in his voice as he tells me his past. “My tribe has often protected that land. We live alongside the humans there. It’s a place you could never even imagine… all red stone and dusky canyons and rich sands. It’s a noble desert the color of a painted sunset.”

A desert? I’ve never thought of them as special, really, but as Nanaki describes it, it sounds lovely. But wait…

“The enclosure looks nothing like the place you describe,” I say. Nanaki huffs.

“Indeed. They built it based on what they thought an ‘animal’ would like without even asking me of what I was used to. I miss the austere stone… the noble red canyons… this endless green does nothing for me.” He nuzzles closer and licks at my shoulder. His tongue is warm, and it drags like a cat’s tongue. I sigh at the feeling and hold him tight.

“I spent about a year shuttled between cages after they caught me,” Nanaki says. “After they brought me up here, I wept. Not because it was beautiful—in fact, I hated of how little it reminded me of home. But because I realized that they wouldn’t go to such effort building such a place if they ever intended to let me go. I realized I was going to be their captive for the rest of my life.” And here his voice grows flat. “And my species lives for a long, long time.”

He continues telling me his story. How his people performed rituals in the sacred places of the canyon to appease the planet. Of their enemies, the Gi, and how his father and mother gave their lives defending him from them, leaving him the last of his kind. Of how his parents’ human friend had raised him, instilling a love for the planet. Of his uncertainty regarding his ability to live up to his parents’ legacy, and how he’d run from that duty. Of how Shinra had captured him.

As he speaks, I wonder who he is speaking for. Himself? For me? Or maybe he is talking to the tiny life that had just taken root inside of me, informing his offspring of their legacy. Deep in the night, after Nanaki has finally exhausted himself from talking and has drifted off to sleep, I lie there drowsily as his paws hold me protectively. Just a few days ago I was a flower girl from the slums, living as unimportant a life as could be. And now, here I am—mated with a creature from across the world. Carrying the legacy of a long-lost land within me.

---

The next morning I slam my hands on the glass and tell them that I’m pregnant. They ignore me and order that Nanaki and I continue mating until they’re ready for bloodwork.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that they don’t believe us. They clearly see us as little more than specimens, and Nanaki—despite his words and his eyes and his proud bearing—is treated more as an exotic dog than the multifaceted spirit he is. So despite the fact that it’s completely pointless, he and I continue breeding for them.

We experiment, stepping away from the doggystyle of our last few couplings. It’s awkward at first, finding positions and styles that fit our rather divergent anatomy—but then, the two of us have nothing but time. We do it once when I’m on my side, raising my leg; once with him sitting and me riding him.

The one I like best is missionary, me on bottom and him on top. As his cock sinks into me, the burrs along it delectably nipping at my inner walls, I hold him tight and sigh, threading my hands through his fur. Every long, luxurious fuck of Nanaki’s sends pleasure strumming through me, solid and regular, like the tide creeping up on the shore.

It is in the aftermath of that session, where I am half-sleepy from coital bliss, still heavy with his seed and still spread with his knot, that I realize that if he truly is the last of his kind, what were his prospects for love? For mating? To spread his people’s legacy?

I think to the tiny life still budding in my womb, a scant day or two old, and I think that it might well be a blessing for him to have found the last living Cetra, the one being on the planet who could help his people survive.

Leaning my head in, my arms wrapped tight around his back, I whisper this in his ear and I’m rewarded with an emotional shudder from him. “But it feels wrong,” he says. “Because they made us.”

“That’s not on us,” I whisper back. “Let’s find whatever silver lining we have.” And then a thought pounces upon me, one I had never realized but which, now that I’m thinking it, is nothing but the truth: “I don’t regret this,” I tell him. “Having your young. I’m… I’m okay with it, because it’s you.”

He licks at my shoulder again, making me hiss with delight as his rough tongue drags down my skin. “Not even a week bred,” he observes wryly. “Let’s see what your song is when you’re so swollen you can’t move.”

The day after that, Hojo brings me in for bloodwork. I get to leave the enclosure for the first time—but he still keeps me nude, parading me in front of interested onlookers in Shinra’s research lab. I stand there in nothing but my own skin, pretending that I can make sense of the charts and readouts, as he fills a tiny vial with crimson and runs it through a machine.

When the reading is finished, he looks at me. “Well,” he says, his voice as uninflected as ever, “it took—and then some. You’re pregnant and in perfect health. The ideal young mother.” Despite his voice, he looks proud.

Proud? Why? I think bitterly. I’m the one doing all the work. “I told you that a few days ago,” I say, my voice not quite a growl as I force it through my teeth. I cross my arms in front of my chest, hiding my nipples from view, though Hojo is one of the few men here who seems uninterested in my body as anything other than a scientific specimen.

“And what reason had I to believe you?” Hojo says. “The girl who begs not to be bred and her paramour, the animal with a conscience. You’d conjure up any story just for a reprieve.”

Hojo dismisses me and sends me back to the enclosure. I’ll be staying there, I’m told, with my mate for the duration of my pregnancy.

My mate. I guess that’s what Nanaki is. A mate.

Since I’m confirmed pregnant, Nanaki and I don’t have to breed anymore, and he honors my request for us to stop. I just… He’s a kindred soul, and beautiful in his own way (the way his sunset-colored fur whipples as he races like the wind across the grass takes my breath away) but I just can’t accept regularly sleeping with a… a beast.

It feels wrong thinking of him that way. Shameful. But I can’t break it.

But Nanaki and I still keep close company. We’re all we have, of course, and at night, the two of us still curl together in his den, basking in one another’s warmth.

It is on one of these warm nights that he asks me what, exactly, a Cetra is.

It’s a question for which I have struggled to find a meaningful answer my whole life.

“I’m not sure,” I tell him. We are curled together in our favorite position, him on the outside and me on the inside. His paws are wrapped around me in the way I have learned to associate with comfort and safety. “I’m the last one, and my mother… she died when I was just a girl. I never really understood it.” I paused for a second, feeling almost wistful at her remembrance.

“My birth mother… I think she was a captive for a long time in a place like this. My earliest memories are of a lab. Eventually she managed to escape, taking me with her, but the injuries she sustained killed her not long after.”

“She’s like my parents,” Nanaki says, his voice low. “They all gave their lives so that we could continue living.”

He’s right, of course. There’s almost a poetry in our backgrounds. They rhyme.

“I was found by a woman in the slums named Elmyra Gainsborough,” I continue. “She’s the one I call mom now. She raised me. The only real thing I know of the Cetra is that we look indistinguishable from humans, we once had a great civilization spanning the planet, and that we can hear the Lifestream.”

Nanaki’s paws shift over me. “Lifestream…” he said. “My parents spoke of that, though I was too small to understand.”

“It’s all the life energy of the planet,” I say. “Plants, fish, bugs, people, you and me—our souls come from the Lifestream and return to it once we die. Shinra mines it as ‘mako’ energy. That’s where their power comes from. They’re leeching the life of the planet itself.”

“Monstrous,” Nanaki growls.

“You don’t know the half of it. Before I came here, I tried to live life as a normal human girl. I had a boyfriend named Zack.” I feel Nanaki tense behind me—he doubtless remembers the name I used to comfort myself during our first lay together. “He was a soldier,” I say, “one of the best.” Zack strides into my memories—his raven-dark hair, his easy smile, his sapphire eyes. “But one day he went on a mission and just… never came back.”

“I’m sorry,” Nanaki says.

“Don’t be. I’ve moved on.” I sigh. “After Zack, I tried living normally again, but then I fell in almost by accident with AVALANCHE—a group of freedom fighters trying to bring down Shinra. To wipe them out, Shinra collapsed part of the city onto itself.”

“Was that the sound I heard?” Nanaki mused. “Like an earthquake, but grinding and cacophonous. It was only a day or two before we met.”

“Yes,” I say. “They killed—I don’t know how many that day. Tens of thousands. Hundreds, perhaps. All to wipe out a group of six people.” The memory was nightmarish. I had felt the Lifestream crying out in despair as such a flood of people had rushed into it, all before their time. “Amidst the carnage and the chaos, Shinra caught me, and—here I am.”

“I’m sorry,” Nanaki said.

I reach back to stroke his fur. “But at least I met you,” I say.