Saw This Exact Post But About DVDs By Not-a-space-alien And Felt The Need To Check Something

saw this exact post but about DVDs by not-a-space-alien and felt the need to check something

Zelda’s always there for him when he has flashbacks.

(Sorry folks, coming back from a year-long hiatus with a sad one.)

Happy 19th (19th??) anniversary to a classic!

According to Know Your Meme, on August 18th, 2005, Erwin Beekveld brought forth this work into the world. HAPPY TEN YEAR ANNIVERSARY, THEY’RE TAKING THE HOBBITS TO ISENGARD.

So crazy how you have the worst day of your life but then the next day the sun keeps shining and the air’s just a little cooler w the onset of fall and you realize that there’s nothing you can’t come back from because the only time it will ever be too late is when we’re dead and not ever before

(via Remnants of a Legendary Typeface Have Been Rescued From the River Thames)

The Silver Stars

(Written for the @inklings-challenge! Primary prompts used were Space Travel, Grace, and Reconciliation.)

Genre: Original Work - Sci-fi, Space Fantasy, Short Story

Word Count: 7k

Warnings: Character death

AO3 link

From a worn-out Earth to a starship that isn’t what it seems, Patch Ressel learns to trust again.

—

He’s six when his village is razed to the ground.

The thin copse of trees and berry patches outside the village walls are his only company when it happens. He doesn't see much—and perhaps it's for the better, in the end. All he hears is the terrible rattle and boom of large machinery, and all he sees is a few huge dark shadows flying suddenly so close to the little tree he's climbing. There's a noise like he's going to be swallowed up in the thunder of engines, and before his six-year-old instincts can think anything beyond Go home! and Find Dad!, there's an earth-shattering whistle and something meets earth and the world lurches so hard and so loudly that he tumbles from his tree.

Sirens blare and people and animals scream. Fright threatens to choke him, and tears flood his eyes despite his best efforts. He climbs out of the swale by the knobby tree roots and stares at a sight his mind can barely register.

The worn-but-familiar sprawl of his village is gone. In its place, there's a cloud of ill-colored smoke threatening to reach toward him and engulf his play-area in the scraggly forest along with everything else.

(And everything else is gone—he unthinkingly ventures closer, to the old back gate that leads to his house, and it's gone too. There's nothing but melting, hissing rubble.)

It's dripping—the walls are dripping, and it looks so wrong and smells so horrific. Whatever liquid his village has been plastered in smells sharp—and the stench of it is fierce enough that it makes his eyes teary and his nose scrunch up as he tries to cough out the burning sensation that's crept into his chest.

He doesn't know how long he paces that side of the village walls in a wobbly line, crying and calling out as loudly as he can. People arrive, milling and running and shouting and bringing machinery and calling for help, but he doesn't recognize them and they don't seem to recognize him. Trucks with wailing sirens drown out all other sounds, and he barely hears how hard he's crying until he nearly bumps into someone who's drawn startlingly close.

His head jerks up and he tries to focus through his tears. It's an elderly woman in a plain blue blouse like the Researchers wear, covered in dust and stains like he is. Her hair is a huge mop of silver curls, and it's unusual enough that he stops crying to stare at her.

"'ere, sweetheart," murmurs the woman, even as she peers at him with worried curiosity in her pale blue eyes. Her voice is soft and yet harsh, melodic and oddly lilted. Despite her odd accent and weathered face, something in him clings desperately to the kindness he's certain he can sense in both. "Are y'alright? Where's yer parents?"

He can't answer. He doesn't know. His eyes water again as he stares at her numbly.

The old lady watches him carefully for a minute, but somehow, the worry in her eyes doesn't make him feel more afraid. It stands out in the midst of the chaos around them, and makes him feel cared for.

"It's alright, dearie," she says gently, after a minute. "I'm Bonnie. What's yer name?"

He doesn't remember answering—but obviously, he must have. He must have mumbled, too.

"Would'ye like to come with me, Patch?" Bonnie asks. The way she speaks reminds him of his sister—encouraging, but leaving it up to him. His sister calls him Patch, too.

It's not much of a decision when he has no one else, but it's a good one, he later decides. Patch accepts her offer, taking her bony, weathered hand in his little grimy one.

They walk together for what feels like hours, skirting the edge of the village and of the acrid cloud and stench, which puts them far off any sort of path. Patch cries some of the way—but he's six, and old enough to know better, so for most of the journey, he stays quiet and tries to focus on other things. He looks at the barren sands and rocks of the desert they're picking their way through. He looks at the spindly trees that seem to bend under an invisible weight.

He tries looking up, once.

There's too much smoke to see the stars.

.

He's eight when Bonnie's husband dies.

Perhaps dies isn't the word. But to Patch, it's the same—the man lies still and stiff and won't wake up.

Stroke, he'd heard the grizzled old doctor say. Words had been thrown about, big words, the kind that Patch didn't understand and couldn't remember but left him with a horrible eerie feeling all the same.

To him, Bonnie had seemed so unalterably strong. She was a sturdy rock amidst a quickly-changing and uncertain world. That was why, perhaps, it terrifies him to see her standing at the end of her husband's ramshackle sickbed, her slight frame standing straight as ever—but with a face that's ashen, and eyes that are red-rimmed and sunken behind her huge glasses from sleepless nights.

It scares him. Disaster and death taking one family is a horrible, horrible fluke. But if it can strike and take anyone? Who could escape?

It feels wrong. Or like it should be wrong—the sickened sensation it gives him makes him want to curl up in a dark cupboard and never come out. But is this just the way things are? Trusting in anything is hard after two worlds have been shattered and altered. Will he have to learn to live with this?

He knows how to look at the night sky. Bonnie taught him that—how to sort past the debris and satellites and the grey-brown polluted haze, to tell which lights are stars and which aren’t.

He's frightened and blurry-eyed, and his mind is racing, now. He can't tell which are which.

Family, it seems, is horribly impermanent.

.

He's nine when he decides he hates Earth.

(And he doesn't want to talk about it much. His dad—his dad is somehow alive, and so different now that he's in the Enlistment. The fact that he'd come with men in strange black vests to take Patch from someone who actually cared, only to abandon him to some shady smugglers from off-planet along with several other orphans and not-quite-legally adopted children? That he would give up his own son for some bribe? It hits him hard, and deep. What was so important that his father would do that? Security? Money? The chance to betray?)

Family is unreliable, his self-preservation instincts tell him now. And it seems so true—people with good intentions can lose battles and hope. People you think have good intentions can turn and be terrible; people you trust can tear your whole world apart. Don't trust so quickly. Don't get hurt again.

By the time the old cargo ship packed with children blasts off toward whatever planet it will dock at next, Patch has mustered up enough bitterness to fuel him through the feeling of uselessness and despair that comes with being sold off and wholly devastated. After a while, he just feels numb.

He watches the distant sphere of the moon as they travel further and further away. It's cluttered with settlements and terraformed into something more brown than white, but even it seems cleaner than the earth is.

When the moon and the Earth are nearly out of sight, the thick darkness of space envelops the ship like a star-studded blanket. Patch turns away without looking any further, and retires to his shelf-sized bunk.

.

At fourteen, he has his first real job.

Not a trivial helping-hand job, or another unstable live-in apprenticeship for someone who was never around, or odd labor he'd been hired for because he would work for a meager price. This is something real, something important, something he can learn to be good at and proud of. Even if this new ship is barely less old than the first one, and even if its polish and half-decent reputation are only surface-deep—it‘s still something better, a new start to find some semblance of structure in.

He helps keep the machinery together. He helps repair faulty lines, or damaged braces, or the mess of old-fashioned wires that are strung up through levels of the ship like ancient ropes.

He's still only an agile, small-statured apprentice, not worth more than a repair monkey's wages—and what extra he receives even now is only from the generosity of an actual mechanic or two—but it gives him a bit of money and a modest place to stay and a purpose.

He’s always seen things a bit differently when he’s had a purpose. Clinging upside-down to the support beams in the low rafters of a ship's hold, hanging by his knees as he tries to work with a wrench in hand, gives him a new—albeit limited—perspective, quite literally, now. Maybe there’s still a life ahead of him. Maybe things won’t always be hopeless. He‘s safe, at least, and he has himself—the only two things he really needs. That isn’t so bad, is it?

The heavy, multi-edged bolts holding the walls together are shaped like silver stars.

.

(He's fifteen when he finds out he's involved with a smuggling operation.)

(He's just trying to be proactive about his job. A loose panel usually needs reattached, and he can do that; that's well within his skill level—but when the space behind that panel is full of unmarked brown parcels, it makes hesitating and trying to pretend you never noticed it difficult.)

(Plausible deniability feels vital when your job puts you in the very suspicious position of working with the ship's paneling often. He tries to act like everything's fine.)

(...But this is his life now; the best opportunity he's had for an ounce of security in years. Somehow, his brain convinces him that maybe everything still can be fine. That maybe it still is fine.)

(The Captain's stare feels colder than usual. Only once Patch comes to terms with what he might be turning a blind eye to does that coldness become less sharp.)

.

At fifteen, the universe thinks it would be fun to let him get attached to someone again.

(He knows better, he knows better, but he also knows how it feels to be a lonely child bereft of any security or family. He can’t just—stand by and ignore it when he can keep that from happening again.)

The emotionless ship captain has a little daughter. She was seven when her mother died, Patch is told. Three months had passed on the planet she'd lived on, a bleak place called Sahra, in the six weeks of space travel it took for her father's ship to come pick her up after the woman had passed. Captain Ray Hawke had never given up his shipping routes before, and even with a child to retrieve, he waited the run of the usual shipment course until they reached her planet. In Patch's eyes, it was only a sorry excuse for a family member who would deliberate on such a thing for so long. Was the man so cold-hearted he wouldn’t attempt to make it back for his wife’s funeral?

(Cryostasis, he’d realized belatedly, once they’d made it there and the Captain had attended the funeral. Still. It didn’t make it feel right.)

Despite his feelings on the matter—or perhaps because of them—he finds himself at least attempting to be kind to the hollow-eyed child who clings to him whenever her father is busy. He can’t compare to his own sister, he doesn’t know how to, but the least he can do is try to remember the reasons he'd thought following Kaylia around was the best part of life when he was small.

Talissa Hawke seems to decide he is the closest thing she has, now, to a playmate or a sibling. Perhaps it’s because he‘s the youngest crewmate on the ship—perhaps it‘s because he seems to be one of the few who makes an effort to be hospitable to her.

"Wanna play hide and seek?" she asks, once she's warmed up to him quickly and he's thawed to the thought of caring for someone very slowly. It's not the first time she's asked while he's trying to work, and he doubts it will be the last.

(If this—caring about someone, trying to help them, no secrets! like she'd made him promise—ends badly? For her sake, he decides—so be it.)

"Sure." He stares at her unblinkingly and smirks. "One... two... three—"

"You have to close your eyes!" Tally squeals, her grin bright in the bluish lights of the ship and her dark eyes glittering as she stomps a foot indignantly at him. "Start over!"

Patch can't help a grin, just like he can't help the sadness that tries to creep into it. He shrugs and slumps his head in exaggerated defeat, sighing dramatically before he turns to face away from her and out the window.

He follows her advice and starts over, here in the belly of an old transport ship—and for the fleeting moment before he closes his eyes, he sees something not quite so lonely reflecting back at him in the convex glass. The vastness of starry space is still outside—but in here, there's a moment where he's wanted, where he feels like he might have a fragment of a home.

.

It doesn't last long.

They're loading cargo at Galacia, an isolated planet ridged with huge snow-covered mountains and scarred with jagged grey valleys. Most places here are desolate, but the biggest valley is almost beautiful—fresh snow gleams atop the docks and old fortresses and huge stone storehouses, and not so far in the distance, thick glass panels arch over a large old city and glint in the sun. It's a city of giants, and several folk who tower immensely over outsiders come to load their goods, their fur-clad figures lifting huge loads with slow and steady ease. By all accounts he's heard, their planet's castles and greenhouse-valleys are a sight to see. If Patch didn't have as much self-control, he might've taken a few minutes to go explore.

Tally, it seems, has no such concerns. Hide-and-seek is almost always confined to the ship, at the behest of her father—but here, with the cargo door open, it isn't hard to see the set of small shoe-tracks in the snow if you're looking for them.

The Captain would kill him for losing his daughter. Or worse, fire him.

The blue worker jacket he grabs from the loading area isn't built for the biting cold. Patch huddles into it for warmth, wincing as he steps into the snow and it immediately goes several inches past his shoes, soaking his pant legs. It's unpleasant, but the crunching of snow is a novel sensation. It didn't snow where he was from.

"Tally?" he calls, once he's certain he's out of the crew's earshot. There’s no answer—only more footprints.

Icicles glisten on the massive shopfronts that stand out of the snow, lining the streets that he trudges along. The distant sun is creeping downward, and the sunlight on the thick drifts of snow glitters beneath the empty sky.

.

At sixteen, he discovers he's not all that great at making friends.

Not that making friends is really ever the intention, at least with the ship's occasional passengers who he'll likely never see again. But at the same time, he can’t lie and say he never spent some nights wishing, entertaining incredibly dumb thoughts of maybe finding people his age to talk to who both spoke his language and aren’t completely terrible.

Alis Vorst is... not terrible, and she does speak his language. The young giantess had accidentally found Tally, and had managed to obtain two seats for herself on the Silver Hawk in lieu of a cancelled shuttle flight to the metropolitan capitol of not-too-distant Pyro. She was a bit older than Patch, and a good head and shoulders taller, though she seemed to shrink meekly when talking to anyone. (At almost seven feet tall, however—dressed in lynx and sable furs that denoted her part of the Galacian royal house—it was impossible for her to be swallowed up by the floor or blend in with her surroundings, no matter how much she might look like she wanted to.) It makes her far less unnerving to approach, although it somewhat pushes the problem in the opposite direction, toward awkwardness.

(She seems... nice, almost, though he's hesitant to get his hopes up about even that. What gives? Is it just ordinary humans who are so prone to being awful? Alis is a giant, and seems terrified to so much as break a swiveling armrest in the ship's cabin. There's a genuine unsureness in her eyes that looks hard to fake.)

Tally glues herself to her self-proclaimed new friend for the rest of the day, and by extension, Patch tries to stick around in an awkward attempt to rescue the shy newcomer from a barrage of seven-year-old questions.

Alis, despite what he would've assumed, has been off-planet planet before—and after being made unfortunately aware that she‘s not the most socially inexperienced person in the room, she proves to be a decent storyteller. She describes a world of ice and giants that is so ordinary to her, but leaves Tally starry-eyed. She describes Pyro and its volcanos and metal mines, and Ia with its miles-deep jungle canyons.

"Did you ever go to Earth?" Tally asks, eyes wide as she perches on the edge of her too-big seat.

Alis's demeanor and voice are still reserved and soft-spoken—though her grey eyes are bright with a gleam that Patch recognizes, of someone who seems genuinely touched to be listened to. She shifts a bit in her too-small seat.

"Only once. It's far from here. Father took me there when I was small." Patch flinches on her behalf and his own—what father would take their child somewhere so war-torn and sick?—but Alis's eyes actually shine. "It's beautiful. There are trees even older than Galacia's civilization, and huge monuments built long ago that no one can understand the origins of. The whole universe has history there."

Tally grins, her eyes mirroring Alis's in brightness. "I knew it sounded cool. Patch says he'll never go there."

Patch feels himself turn as red as his hair at the remark. He shoots Tally an exasperated look that is hopefully subdued enough that she won't comment on it too.

"What about Grebara?" he interjects, to change the subject. His voice cracks despite himself. Alis, who either doesn't notice or is too polite to draw attention to his plight, shakes her head.

"Not yet. I don't know if they have a government that's... ready, to accept dignitary visits. I've read it's a bit like Ia, but more... boggy? If that's the word. My uncle has been there, though."

The conversation swings back into tales of other planets—Tally boasting of places her parents had once been, Alis describing sights that seemed huge and grand even to a race of giants, and Patch wishing he knew any stories worth telling—and the ship's interior lights slowly dim, simulating the setting of the Earthen sun.

Stars and distant galaxies creep past outside the ship's windows, but for once, they don't seem so impossibly far away.

.

Candor, the ivory planet, is their next stop for fuel.

As soon as they land and are in position—the doors open, the fuel lines securely hooked up—the ship is raided.

It happens faster than feels possible—interplanetary officers storm the decks, and every crew member and passenger are escorted out onto the docks at blasterpoint. Captain Hawke, somehow, is nowhere to be found. A hollow-eyed Tally clings to Patch's leg, unusually silent throughout the ordeal. There's a solemn aura coming from her that Patch doesn’t understand.

A shadow falls over them from behind, and Patch jerks his head to look at who'd gotten so close. It's Alis, huddled into her huge fur coat and casting him a slightly embarrassed, apologetic look as she seems to stand close to the two people she knows, staring at the scene in worry. He tries and probably fails to give her a thin smile of acknowledgement before looking back toward the men in uniforms again.

Officers call out information and questions one after another, and Patch struggles to calm his pounding heart. Someone calls for the arrest of Ray Hawke, who somehow seems to have vanished—and the tentatively-crafted glass walls Patch has just started to build up, to claim this new life as his own, shatter. Tally buries her face into his side hard enough that it's uncomfortable, and pain strikes him even more deeply as a horrible thought arises. How much does she know? Why isn't she surprised?

His whole body shakes despite his efforts to calm down. He's sure the dread he feels is rolling off of him in waves so large that everyone will notice.

Only one person seems to.

"You knew," Tally whimpers against him, before drawing away from him a bit even though it's clear she still wants comfort. Her voice grows injured and bitter. "...'nd you said no secrets."

He doesn't realize what he's doing when the officers come to take their names and suspend their IDs for the course of the investigation. When a woman requests to take Tally—who Patch reflexively blurts is his sister, a claim that Tally somehow, mercifully doesn't reject—into Care for the day, he agrees.

The white sands and the clear blue skies of the planet seem to mock him with their vibrance as a tear-stained Tally is led away without trouble. He's nervous, and not thinking clearly. What he's doing doesn't hit him until much, much later.

Night comes early on small planets. The crew of the ship is confined to a cramped, nearby hostel. The bright lights of the city wash out the stars.

.

Alis is free to go, of course. Even at nearly seven feet tall, she has the lost, doe-eyed girl look down well—in addition to luggage full of government passes and clothes for a meeting she might barely make, if she finds a different flight.

Patch isn't questioned until late the next day, and it's a blur. He thinks he pulls off the frightened, clueless teenager look alright. His travel ID is suspended for a week, however, along with the rest of the crew's as the ship is investigated.

Tally is nowhere to be found.

The lady from Care Services doesn't see a reason to inform him about it until hours after the fact, and it's one of the few times that Patch absolutely sees red. It's only because he's still able to roam the city semi-freely that he doesn't cause his first scene. He has to keep what freedom he has if he's going to search for her.

He searches everywhere he can. It's a bustling city, but a small one, though he doesn't know where to start or stop or even how to ask for help in the local tongue. He looks everywhere he thinks she would go and she's not there. He's frustrated and horrified with the world right now. Does the universe so enjoy pulling every rug out from under him?

He finds Alis at an interplanetary messaging station, by another docking port at the opposite side of the city. An entire rant of frustration and pleas for help is on the tip of his tongue—but when he approaches her, he sees that she's shaking.

Her eyes are glazed when she looks at him and registers his presence.

"I contacted my uncle," she says quietly, and Patch stares. It's strange how someone so tall can look so small. "I'm not supposed to go to Pyro anymore."

His instincts want to scream That's not important! Tally's gone and I may never find her again, but something about her pale face stops him. "What happened?"

"My father was..." She goes quiet, and there are tears that glitter like ice in her eyes. Her throat catches, and she doesn't finish that thought. "My uncle says there might be someone waiting for me there."

Waiting for me means something very ominous in that sentence, and Patch's mind whirls.

"Tally's gone," is all he can say, probably winning the Least Helpful Acquaintance Award in a record-breaking two words.

His heart does the most bizarre lurch from hopelessness to hope when Alis blinks in confusion.

"...Really?" she asks, and though her voice is still small, she glances down the street. "She was just here."

.

Alis is a blessing from the heavens and easily wins the Most Helpful Acquaintance Award, as far as he's concerned. Not only has she seen which way Tally went, but she speaks enough of the local language to ask others if they've seen her.

Tally must have been upset with him. According to a street child, a girl of her description had snuck aboard a transport ship bound for Earth.

"Would she do that?" Alis asks him, looking mystified to think of a young child attempting such a thing. A hundred memories of very similar scenarios and lost games of hide-and-seek come to mind.

"Yes," Patch sighs flatly.

It doesn't seem to occur to her that he'd do anything but try to follow Tally. Even now, after whatever happened with her father, she looks more resolute than he feels.

"I'll come," Alis decides quietly. "I can stay at the Embassy there. Are you free to travel yet?"

Being complicit is a crime. There are cameras on the ship. The computers had always been closely guarded by the Captain, but they weren't unhackable. Once the officers got their hands on the recordings, they'd surely find something incriminating him.

"...Not yet," Patch says, and it feels like he's lying to her face. It makes something in him flinch, but he's had perhaps too much practice quieting his conscience. "But I don't think I can wait."

"...Do you think she's with her father?" Alis suggests quietly. "It looked as though he... left."

The thought is a decent one, and it gives him some hope. It would make sense, if she'd followed her father—she'd have the person who was supposed to be taking care of her, that way.

Patch manages the tiniest of smiles. "I hope so.”

The shadows grow long again as evening sets in, and together, they start the long trek back through the maze of ivory buildings that fill the city. The sky is turning purple, and pink clouds streak the horizon.

Across town, the Silver Hawk explodes.

.

The rest of that day is a blur.

Captain Hawke couldn't have left if he was still here, blowing up his ship, apparently, to do away with the evidence. (Patch's mind is still whirling at that. Is the Captain really the type of person to do that? The ship was old, but replacing it would cost a small fortune. It doesn't make sense. Was there something on the ship that was really so imperative to keep from the authorities?) The Captain had been silent and stoic and hard to read sometimes, but he was always strict about his daughter's safety. He never would have told her to sneak aboard a foreign shuttle, especially by herself.

There's no choice, really, but to follow Tally's alleged trail.

As if he hasn't had to wrap his mind around enough unexpected occurrences lately, Patch has to figure out what to think of the extremely bizarre transport pilots they hitch a ride with for a suspiciously low price. Vera, the Grebaran she-troll, is odd enough. Her skin is grey-green and her pale hair doesn't look like it gets washed more than annually. Conversational boundaries are of no concern to her, and for some reason, she mutters and chats with them as if they'd known each other for years instead of minutes. Felix, the large black cat aboard the probably-not-quite-legal little ship, is even weirder. The cat waits until their fare is paid and the doors are locked before snapping on a white, metallic translation collar and hopping into the pilot's seat, his paws clasping the controls and tapping buttons with a practiced ease.

Patch probably would've been more startled—impressed, even—if Felix hadn't immediately begun proving that it might be for the best that the average cat couldn't talk. It isn't two minutes before he's chatting up Alis in a suspiciously amiable way and making remarks about her very short significant other.

Patch is neither very short nor that, but Alis is already trying to convince the cat pilot of both those things, so there's not much for him to do but try not to dwell on the way liftoff always gives him deep-seated headaches. (Or on how they've somehow gotten an animal to pilot them somewhere in a ship that certainly doesn't look up to recent code. Is this it? Are they all going to die in space? Between the chatty robotic voice coming from their pilot's collar and the nauseating feel of acceleration beyond anything humans were probably meant to endure, the thought doesn't seem so implausible.)

Stars blur in whitish streaks past the windows, and Patch tries not to watch them and feel sick.

.

They don't die in space.

(In fairness to logic, however odd their pilots are, it makes sense that they would take precautions to avoid such a fate. In fairness to his dislike of this whole situation, though, he would've preferred quite a few things over the sight that now grows closer outside the window.)

The brown-and-blue orb stares back at him through the thick window-glass, almost picturesque against the vast blackness of the expanse behind it.

"We're not gettin' off with ya," Vera warns, her voice raspy and trollish, though her demeanor doesn't seem intentionally harsh. She's taken a shift at the controls, and the fact that their flight has become less smooth with a humanoid creature in the cockpit is unsettling to Patch. "Earth ain't too keen on folk like us."

"You two gotta plan?" Felix asks, his translator somehow conveying a big-city accent that almost melds with Vera's country-ruffian one. He perches on the minuscule excuse for an on-shuttle countertop, dispensing himself a mug of something that looks like coffee but smells like fish. "Any clue where your friend went? You'll look forever if ya don't know where to start."

"You're best off checkin' the ports first," interjects Vera, before either of the people being spoken to can formulate a reply. "Though without'n ID, good luck, kid. Heard humans need a chip for everything down there."

"Well, I'm going," Alis announces softly, in a voice that's low and serious, and for the first time since he’s met her, her head-and-shoulders-taller frame seems to tower over everyone else.

He doesn't know why the universe has given him a friend who seems to want to stick with him, but he's grateful. (How long? a silvery voice in the back of his head whispers. How long before this ends too?)

As they land, it's all Patch can do to keep the contents of his stomach down.

The smell of fish-coffee doesn't help.

.

Earth is like a bad dream. There are some things that feel familiar, some he knows he's seen before, and other things that seem so new and out of place.

Everything's brown and green and dried up and forced to grow and the air reeks slightly of chemicals.

(His dad, a [traitor] member of the Enlistment, is probably still alive somewhere. Bonnie's husband, a drain on society's resources, probably isn't.)

He tries to ignore those thoughts.

.

(It's such a blur. Earth is a fading and drying planet, crumbling with age and neglect, all bright colors and false greenery like a bandage on something so old it doesn't seem worth keeping.)

(Alis's own relatives want her out of the picture as they seize her father's power. The Captain is still nowhere to be found. Tally is now in the less-than-great care of the authorities he'd been lucky to avoid as a child. And Patch? His head is still spinning. Protecting a friend, he might be able to do—finagling or breaking Tally out of government custody, he could might be able to do. But managing both at the same time, with no clear picture of what happens after? It feels hopeless and daunting, though even all of that isn't the most crushing weight on his chest.)

(His dad is still alive, and is claiming things he doesn't want to hear. Who cares if he sent Patch off to get him out of a corrupt Administration's clutches? Who cares if his father has an empty sleeve where his arm should've been; a sleeve he can't fill while the people who destroyed his arm still control all decent prosthetics? Who cares, who cares, who cares?)

(He cares. And it hurts.)

.

"You've got to let it go, Patches."

Out of all the voices on Earth he'd never expected to hear again, Bonnie's had long since been forcibly assigned a spot near the top of the list. Patch can't stop staring at her, trying to search for the face he recognizes. Bonnie couldn't be that ancient, could she? How could those wrinkles and spots and sunken-in eyes have developed in the few years he'd been gone? Her hair had always been silver and incredibly curly. Now, it's snow-white and thin.

If anything is the same, it's that her eyes are kind—and that she’s never hesitated to offer advice.

"Not because anyone deserves it," she murmurs, blue eyes fixed fast on him until he has to look away. Her voice trembles in a way that makes her sound so very old. "I know none of us ever do. Because it'll taint every relationship you try to have, if you're still cartin' old hates around. It'll kill ye in the end."

(He doesn't ask how she knows.)

When he's with Bonnie, a part of him still feels six years old. He supposes it's because he misses his time with her. It doesn't make him very eloquent—but she's never seemed to mind.

"But people suck," Patch mutters, half under his breath, eyes fixed unseeingly on the dirt-stained floor.

"Sometimes they do," Bonnie agrees quietly. "Ol' actions can't be changed. But remember, Patches—people can be."

Her words makes him want to look in a mirror long and hard, and it's a feeling that makes his skin crawl.

"Be careful, thinkin' ye know someone from what they do under stress." Her faint, sad smile is more in her voice than on her wrinkled face. She doesn't look judgemental—just sorry for him, and it stings. "Or someone might just judge you the same way."

(He's never done anything remotely like what his father did. Right?)

.

He's spent so much of his life trying to ignore the thought of his father.

Even now, he leaps at every chance to distract himself from it. He helps find Alis a safe place to stay, while the Embassy remains unapproachable to those who came to Earth on less-than-legal transport without the required IDs. Alis has her documentation—she could go, but she's surprisingly adamant about not leaving him quite yet to retreat for her own safety. Bonnie acts like the unassuming little guest room in the safehouse is hers to offer, but Patch knows it's his father's. Alis should be safe there, at least. He can only hope whoever's after her won't think to seek out Earth's sort-of-rebel sort-of-underground.

Bonnie has raised orphans before. Some legally, and some not quite the way Earth's powers that be wanted her to, but she has experience with these things. When she says she can find a way to get Tally back, he believes her.

His father's words, however, are harder to listen to.

"...I'm sorry, Patrick."

It's Patch now, he wants to say, because his brain is blocking out the first part of his father’s sentence completely. Like Kaylia used to call me. But his throat is closed too tightly, and this is all so disconcerting that he thinks he might cry if he tries to mention his sister. (He can't quite remember what she looked like, after so long, and it hurts. He thinks he recalls that she had her father's pale green eyes and thin face, and that her red-orange hair shone gold in the sun.)

(It's excusable, because he was young. It's inexcusable, because that was his sister.)

What can he say? The shields he's put up inside himself for years want to hurl accusations at his father—you didn't even care, you were all I had left, you sold me like an animal, you should've died with Mom and everyone else!—even while something small deep in his chest wants desperately to make things okay again, but doesn't know how to begin to do it. Everything feels too extreme, or too inadequate. Attacking his father won't help—but in that moment, staying silent, not speaking out feels like the worst act of being a doormat in the world.

Curris's eyes drop to the mug of watered-down tea in his hand. The lines of his face look so much more pronounced than Patch remembered.

The silence that fills the room resounds more loudly than any noise, so his father continues.

"...It was wrong of me to do what I did," Curris says, voice a bit rough and uneven. "I wanted you somewhere safe. Where you wouldn't have to go through all this. Away from here."

The mug in the man’s hand doesn't look like it's shaking. There's a ripple that faintly catches the light off the tea that suggests otherwise.

"I... should have done something different, though,” continues Curris, his brow tensing and his gaze drifting down, to some point miles away. “Planned better. Been better."

The walls are too thin; there are people too close to shout all of his hurts and insecurities here. Patch keeps his jaw clenched shut.

"...I shouldn't've ever let you think I was abandoning you. I'm so sorry."

The silence that follows—all of it from himself—is almost unbearable. His father seems to think so too, because he breaks it after a long minute.

"You're all grown up now, almost. And well-traveled, huh?" Curris chuckles, and the sound is soft and raspy and painfully familiar. The way an old shadow leaps in his heart at the noise, reminded suddenly of happier days, is downright agonizing. "I should've been there to see it."

Patch finally finds his voice. The only think he can think of that's not paltry or snappish is the same mantra he's had running through his head for years and years.

"...I never liked Earth anyway," he mutters quietly, staring distantly at the floor.

Curris watches him for a long while. When Patch manages to pull his gaze back up for a moment to look, his father’s grey-green eyes are tired, gentle, yet unreadable.

"I understand if you'd rather not stay," the man says carefully, almost weakly.

It's his father's way of asking for forgiveness; of asking how he's been, of letting him know that he's not going to try to sweep in now and assume the position of parental authority he'd given up knowingly years ago when it'd mattered.

Patch knows that. Still, he stays silent.

.

(First, he has to be forgiven—Tally isn't practiced at holding onto bitterness, but he can see it beginning in her like it began in him, and something deep in his chest is horrified at the idea. It weighs on him like a load of steel—that he'd sent her away, when he was all she'd had left to hang on to. He'd done just what he'd hated his father for and hadn't even noticed. Did he deserve to not be resented after that?)

(He doesn't know. Tally is younger and far less hardened by the world and clearly a better person than he is, though—she forgives him, and despite everything, he has his almost-little sister back.)

.

(Time passes and the world goes on. Alis is finally able to take back her seat in Galacia's House of Lords, Tally's remaining biological family is found and things are sorted out, for the most part—and somewhere amidst it all, Patch finds that he might be truly okay with his life again.)

.

He's seventeen when he forgives his father.

(It's a slow process, and he knows it shouldn't be. He's been forgiven the same wrongs, he was as soon as he'd asked for it, and it's hypocritical beyond all right for him to turn and withhold that from someone else. He doesn't want to be a hypocrite. He's not sure why his emotions make it so easy to be one.)

His father is getting older, though he doesn’t always look it. When Patch tells him—tells him and apologizes, because there are few burdens in the world worse than asking forgiveness for accidental hurts and having it be withheld from you—the greyness of Curris’s skin and hair seems more apparent as his face goes slack.

(It’s uncomfortable being hugged so tightly that it resembles being at another air pressure on another planet, but at the same time, it’s relieving.)

(If he finally lets something around his heart crack open—if it’s a stone in the desert that splits and lets a river come forth—no one but his father and his tear-soaked shoulder have to know.)

.

The silver stars turn slowly overhead, arcing their paths through a vast world above. For once, their light seems less lonely. It‘s as though a great weight has been lifted from his chest.

The thought of forgiveness had been dark and cripplingly heavy.

Forgiveness itself, Patch thinks, feels very light.