A Big Shiny Blue Marble

***Talon's a lonely guy, but he's used to that.

He's just not used to everything else.

This happens near the old Colorado Springs airport. Well, it's old in this story since its been hundreds of years since the place had been used for much.

Just a word, there is an element of, ... I dunno, horror, maybe in one scene. I'm not big on writing horror scenes, particularly, so I just write what I need for the tale and move on. The one in this isn't long and it's not bad. Just try to remember that there are different species here.

Oh, and while there's a bit of conversation on the topic, there is no guy/guy in this. I've learned that readers with allergies don't like to find themselves suddenly in a different category.

As for the names, 'Sonja' = 'Sonia' and the same goes for the 'j' in 'Katje'.

This will work into the rest of the tale, but for now, just try to believe in young love, ok?

0_o

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Book of the Forsaken Part 12

Talon awoke in darkness, needing to pee. Well, at least he wasn't dying to piss; he'd just woken up needing to, that was all.

The first thing that he noticed was that he was hard, and he supposed that it was just a by-product of a full-ish bladder, but then, he thought, one never knew under these circumstances. Like any guy, he supposed, he was subject to many nocturnal erections, most of them showing up and going by unnoticed while he slept. It seemed that every single time that he woke up – when he did – in the middle of the night, he had a boner. A full bladder just made things worse, and an erection would prevent the relief of that until it was pretty much gone.

Yeah well, his lack of a cooperative outlet for his urges probably had a part to play as well.

And like probably any guy who awoke this way all alone, he unconsciously reached for that hardness and began to toy with it. Within say, oh, five seconds, the shaft in his hand responded and grew as hard as warm stone, awake now and aware that there was pleasure to be had, as lonely as it was.

But then, dicks don't have brains, he thought as he pushed the covers off and worked himself. They don't care about anything other than one thing.

Talon sighed.

It must be nice to be so single-minded. With all of your energies focused on just gratification, there wasn't much more to think about anyway, was there?

But as he wanked along, his mind began to wake up a little more – which was not what he really wanted, since it would force him to think about his current state of affairs.

Which was that there weren't any, hadn't been for a long time, and as far as he could tell, if he added only a little pessimism to his outlook, there wouldn't be any forever.

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What he wasn't aware of was that he wasn't alone in the room. There was another here who watched from the corner just under the ceiling. She'd seen him while searching for someone else, and while that search had been fruitless, she was now wondering a little as she watched in the pitch darkness, having just the sort of night vision which allowed her to see almost perfectly in here.

She stared as he masturbated, licking her lips unconsciously every so often. She was something which could rip him to pieces in a heartbeat, but she wasn't hungry in that way at the moment and the truth be told, she wouldn't dream of harming anyone for the most part, and most especially one as beautiful to her as this one.

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The longer that he masturbated, the more he awoke and the darker his thoughts became. Talon tried to push it all away and concentrate on only the one thing so that he could pee – since with it this hard, that sure wasn't going to happen and worse, he knew that it would take a good long while anyway for it to soften enough to even seek out the comfort of a good long pee. He was screwed no matter what he did and he knew that, his dick had already been too erect for the urinary function by the time that he'd awoken.

Talon thought about his situation and felt like just leaving his erection alone to subside by itself. He was that unhappy.

Right now and for the last couple of years, he'd felt like the biggest fool.

He was only twenty-two and he considered himself a full-blown failure at life. Left at the gates one day by someone who didn't want him, he'd been raised into an old cult and he was all that was left now. The other two youngest had been living alone with him for only a few days after the last priest had perished, telling them just to run and save themselves the day four years before when a small flock of demons had landed on the runway and stood looking at them for a minute. They ran and made it to the old bomb shelter, locking the door to sit weeping with their backs to the wall while outside, their priest walked calmly toward his death.

The creatures had spent two days at the blast door, trying to get to them before giving it up and moving on. The boys had waited another day, listening at the door for any sound before they opened up and walked out. All that they found of the older man had been his torn and blood-caked clothing, a few cracked bones, and a little hair.

It had happened on the worst day possible, the high day when the idol was to be pulled out into the sunshine and started. The three had tried to go on with the ceremony, but things seemed to have been fated to carry bad luck after that. Thomas was to do the honors of the start and he did get it done, lighting both turbines for the few minutes that it was allowed since there was hardly any fuel anymore.

Talon had genuflected and prayed in the propwash as he was supposed to, but Jerry did the unthinkable then. The boy had been talking of the pointlessness of it all but no one had taken him seriously in the days leading up to the high day ceremonies and Talon guessed that the strain of the loss of the old man was the clincher. The talk had gotten worse while they were locked inside the shelter. Talon wasn't the bullying kind but he finally stopped the incessant muttering by threatening to kick the snot out of Jerry again if he didn't think that he could shut his mouth. Things were bad enough without having to listen to his whining.

The incident in question had been a surprise to everyone – most especially to Talon himself. It had been Jerry who had needled and picked on Talon for years, being a lot larger and heavier. With his back to the wall, something had happened inside of Talon – and that was the only way that he had of describing it.

He'd almost killed the big goof before three priests had pulled him off with difficulty two years earlier. It had happened in front of everyone and Talon had supposed that it was one of the underlying causes that he'd snapped – the way that no one ever stood up for him. Jerry couldn't so much as look at any other boy sideways, but Talon had always been fair game until that day.

It brought the desired result in that Jerry shut up then, and it also earned him the hard stares from Thomas. Oddly enough, there was something inside Talon which told him that if the demons were successful somehow in getting in, he'd live through it and the thought just twisted his brain, so he discarded it quickly and tried to think of something else.

He still remembered noticing it when Jerry got to his feet and walked forward. Thomas was at the controls and he tried to shut everything off, but that wasn't something which could be done instantly and the prop blades could continue to windmill for many minutes even so. He watched in horror as Jerry walked straight into them and was killed instantly.

After that, Thomas just sat in the cockpit and cried. When he got a little past it, he just climbed down and walked away. Talon still couldn't fathom it. He'd walked along with Thomas, trying to talk to him, but Thomas wouldn't reply and just walked toward the town some miles distant. Talon had never seen him since.

Talon had buried Jerry alone and he'd spent the rest of the day trying to wash the blood and gore from the holy artifact before he pulled it back inside of the temple with the tractor and closed the doors after seeing that the prop blades were undamaged.

He hadn't known what to do then, and he still admitted that he didn't – but over time, he thought about things and realized that the whole thing, the entire religion had been based on foolishness. He could see that now from the vantage point of a man, but at the time, he'd still almost been a kid, brought up from infancy in the temple which worshipped an old flying machine as though it was the extension of a deity's will.

Knowing now that the temple had been nothing more than a building used to house flying machines from a greater age of man's distant past, Talon had used his brain and searched a lot more carefully, once he'd divested himself of the 'holy' garbage. From his present viewpoint, the artifact was no more holy than last week's dirty laundry, though it was a whole lot more valuable to him even so.

He still needed to eat and it was a hard business until he found a weapons lock-up three years ago. After finding and figuring out how to work an oxy-acetylene torch which still functioned, he'd cut the locking chain, pulled a rifle out of a rack full of them and with some ammunition, he'd taught himself to hunt so that he could eat a little more regularly.

He'd moved into this guard shack, since it was easier to keep warm, having a woodstove in it left over from God knows when and more importantly, it could be locked-down tightly at night and no one could see in through the bullet-proof polycarbonate windows after he'd closed the venetian blinds. He lived alone there, not wanting very much to try to live in the town. He supposed that what they'd been taught about the place was likely as steeped in horseshit as anything else that he'd been taught, but what the fuck, you know?

It was then that Talon discovered that living alone carried its own curses – like being alone, for one. Now that he'd been removed from the community of living with others, he'd also discovered his own curse and blessing in that he found, after a great deal of introspection, that he wasn't like a lot of the men that he'd lived with. Growing up as he had, his little discoveries about himself – the ones which related to his own sexuality, decided that they didn't necessarily like being as suppressed as they had been until then.

He found that, even though he lived out here all by himself, he didn't really fit in with anyone.

The year after the demise of the cult, a young woman had shown up one day and tried to live there. They'd just sort of fallen in together. Talon had finally known the love of a woman for a time. But that came with several costs to him as well.

For one thing, she wasn't inexperienced and he was. For another, he'd been far too trusting and open with his heart and had just assumed that he could say – or ask for things that he wanted just as she'd done. The trouble with that was that she'd then been able to point out just how 'weird' Talon was whenever she needed ammunition during their not-infrequent squabbles.

He didn't know any better at the time, but it was about the last thing that he needed to hear. Well for one thing, he wasn't a big guy, being only about 5'-8" tall. For another thing, Talon only weighed about one-fifty and though he was a little bit muscular and trim, for the most part, he was just thin-looking. Lonnie made a point of telling him that she liked bigger men – and not only in the size of their bodies, either.

Talon had never given it much thought before then, but using a steel rule from the maintenance section much later, he'd found that all that he'd been given to um, work with had been about five and a half inches at full erection. According to Lonnie, that left him critically short by about another inch and a half at least in her book and she was quite vocal rather often that she liked them a lot thicker as well.

The remark – the first time that he'd heard it – had caused him to look at what he had to think about it, not understanding the way that things can be said hurtfully even by someone that one might care for a lot and he concluded that while Lonnie might have wanted him to be fatter there, he'd have looked a little ludicrous with a dick any fatter than what he had. He wasn't a woman, so he didn't know what one of them would need or want, but on him, ... he couldn't imagine it much thicker somehow.

The time that she'd done some things to him in bed after sharing a bottle of wine that she'd been carrying on her travels, they'd both gotten snockered and the things that she'd done after their long bath together had blown his mind and ever since then, it had been what he'd wanted.

It just wasn't what she wanted to do, necessarily; a lot of the time, anyway.

That had all been well and good until the day that Lonnie had gotten really angry with him. He couldn't remember anymore what it was now that he'd done, or hadn't done, but he remembered all too well the way that she'd just torn into him and belittled him for the things that he'd liked – after she'd shown him that she liked to do them for him, apparently.

When he'd awoken the next day, Lonnie was gone and he'd never seen her again. He supposed that part of it wasn't terrible. He'd never been able to get a handle on her moods anyway. But faced with the wants that she'd placed in him just by showing him that some men liked it, ...

He wasn't at all familiar with the term, but if it had ever been mentioned to him, he'd have wholeheartedly agreed that self-loathing was a good name for it.

He groaned, seeing that this little round of self-depreciation wasn't going to get his little problem taken care of. That caused him to think about a few other things. There had been a couple of times – way back when he'd been a kid, that he'd heard about a couple of members being cast out of the cult for their proclivities, meaning specifically that they liked to have sex with each other.

It had kind of cranked his head a little to hear of it, but being one of the younger 'pilots' at the time, and given that to rise to that station had been a hell of a hard uphill struggle, he hadn't really inquired, though he'd really been dying to find out more. To this day, he didn't understand it. They were a bunch of men living in a commune. What the hell did the masters think would happen?

All that he knew was that for the most part, the thought of another man making out with him left him cold.

But he also knew that it wasn't a completely solid thing to him. He'd never seen one, but he knew enough about himself now to know that with just the right man – and he didn't know himself what that entailed – he might like it. Other than that, he was a guy who liked girls, though his one chance hadn't gone particularly well, on balance.

One day, while scrounging around for lack of anything better to do, he'd found a full-length mirror and after looking at his reflection there for a little while, he'd just taken his clothing off and tried very hard to look at himself objectively.

Just what the fuck was he, anyway?

The answers never came to him in anything that would leave him with the satisfaction of knowing for certain, but he did arrive at a couple of conclusions. Though he looked the same as everyone else, pretty much, he was different somehow in a way that he couldn't fathom. He liked girls, but for the right one-he'd love to have a guy, at least sometimes.

Well, he thought that he would. With no experience in that regard, who the hell knew?

He'd concluded that because the image had come to him not infrequently while he masturbated; a perfect man wanting him - skinny and small Talon. In those little fantasies, that man never laughed at him or made fun in any way. To that man, Talon was what he wanted and that non-existent man knew his good fortune and would never do anything to screw it up.

Those little imaginary scenes didn't come to him all that often, but they were among his very favorites.

He thought about it and decided that a man very similar to the way that he looked might be a good place to begin, but he knew that it likely wasn't going to happen anyway.

He did like his own body though. He decided that. He also liked the way that he looked – well, almost. Talon had jet black hair and bright blue eyes set in a face which didn't carry a lot of baby fat and was a little angular. He looked at his long hair and decided to do something about it, so he carefully cut most of it off, leaving it well over the collar at the back and he thought that it gave him a very, very slightly effeminate look, which surprised the heck out of him to see it, though he liked it a lot.

And he didn't really give a shit about what anyone else might think. He lived here alone, after all, so there was no one else to please other than himself.

The next thing that he noticed was that he needed to shave, so he did that, thinking to go back and look at the mirror again afterward. But while he was trying to even up the very short sideburns, he'd gone a little overboard and gone far too high on one side. He'd cursed at first, but then just reached for the hand clippers again and sawed off everything on that side up to about an inch or two from the centerline at the top of his skull. He stared at himself then and grinned, liking it. So, ... he'd lathered up again and shaved that side clean.

Looking at the big mirror again, he not only liked it, but it had gotten him horny as well for some reason, so he'd been about to do the same thing that he was doing now.

But then he decided to just get rid of his pubic hair too and after that, he just threw himself down on the bed in the room and went to town.

Since that time, he'd come to a realization. He still didn't know just what he was, but he really didn't give a fuck anymore either. He let his hair grow back very long for the most part, but every once in a while, he shaved it again the way that he had that day. Very recently, he'd left an overgrown Mohawk stripe and shaved both sides of his head, liking it best of all. He'd also found a few earrings, bracelets and bangles that Lonnie had forgotten about and he liked to wear them as well, since she'd pierced his ears for him the second week after they'd met.

He thought of himself as a man, but it was a slightly loose connotation to him in his mind. He didn't think of himself as a female – or the sort of man who liked to be on the bottom, either - not very much, other than in those fantasies where the man came to him. He also knew that wearing female clothing didn't do anything for him. He'd read a little about that and it was just, ... no.

He just knew that he didn't fit somehow and he almost stopped caring since it seemed to make his lonely life a little bit easier to bear once he did. He'd never meet anyone who might have an interest in him so what did it matter?

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She kept watching the thing in his hand and without really thinking about it, she'd gone from licking her lips now and then to reaching down between her legs to play and tug at her labia a little, trying to imagine what that thing might feel like inside her. She wasn't needy at all; she just liked what she saw so much. But she remembered in time to stop before she got herself really wet and then he'd wonder about the soft scent in the air. It would take little time at all. She knew herself. So as difficult as it was to do – especially since she'd just about really begun, she stopped abruptly.

Then the thought came to her that she also knew that once she was wet and had started, she'd likely make a little noise because of her slickness. The thought made her cringe – this beauty suddenly hearing the noises and then seeing her somehow.