feldman

I'm still not entirely happy with this, been working on it for months now and still haven't figured it out totally, still haven't answered

fbf's beta questions to anyone's satisfaction...

...but it's "Use it or Lose it" at

farscapefriday so here goes.

Fairytale challenge. Any political aspects are completely coincidental.

Legacy
by feldman

He was small and so vulnerable it made them ache sometimes to watch him sleep in their arms--so many times in the past their arms had been bound and useless, twisted behind them, their hands had been forced, and they had acted on impulse--they had done awful things with those hands, and they had had to clench them helplessly as evil things happened that they couldn't prevent--

She met the boy as a man, arranging payloads for the huge living ship he lived on. Dark hair tousled over a broad forehead, big shoulders and a smile as wide and wonderful as it was rare. She could call forth that smile, and as the cycles passed their easy friendship deepened, sweetened, and when they fell into bed laughing one day it was obvious that they'd register the partnership, that she'd shift her office to one of the warm cavernous rooms of the Leviathan, move the ship to the local-run schedule and maybe raise a crop of younglings if the genetics worked out. She was half Sebacean herself, after all.

--but the boy slept peacefully in those same arms, and he held onto those hands when he was scared, and the two of them found inside themselves what the boy saw; protection, guidance, strength and love. The boy was their pride and joy, and they saw the universe as a new thing through his eyes.

She could choose any part of the ship save the fifth level hammond tier section. He explained that the ship had been burnt many cycles ago, and while the section was healed, it was fragile, and the ship preferred them empty. She loved the ship and the Pilot, and even though her curiosity itched, she left the place alone the same as one would avoid staring at a disfigurement.

It wasn't for cycles that she even considered looking.

The boy had the ultimate luxury of taking things for granted, and he didn't realize until too late how much his family worried when he went off on his own. He had his mother's smile and daring, had his father's sense of timing. He came back from his last excursion rich, and too late to say goodbye.

She'd been away on business for monens, setting up new supply lines into the Reformed Territories, and her sleep cycle was all turned around. So she walked while he slept, happy to be back home in the soothing dim gold of the ship. Eventually she found herself at the door to the sealed tier section.

What struck her then in the middle of the sleep cycle was that as imposing as this ship was, the burn must also have been massive. She crouched down, leaned against the solid rib lintel of the doorway, and laid her white hand against the warm skinsteel, perhaps the last metra of smooth wall before the scarring began just past the sealed door. She could hear the ship's sounds more clearly there than anywhere else, and sometimes they sounded almost like voices talking.

She came back to the door each night to listen, and by the time she realized it truly was the sound of beings talking, she was no longer afraid.

His mother's body still smiled, easily pleased like a good-natured infant, her happy feebleness proof that his mother was gone. From his father, the virus had stolen muscle, and more devastating, will. The boy had come back wanting to be seen as a man, and instead he found his parents had become children. He took care of them, and that wide brilliant smile was only seen on his mother's face.

She set the small triangular grill down by her knee, fished the comms out of her pocket, and placed it like a seed in the duct. She froze in the middle of replacing the grill, convinced she heard a woman's voice chattering in something almost like Sebacean, but all that follows is silence.

She would not have done it if she hadn't thought that there were people living in there, but if they did not want to talk to her, she at least tried.

His mother slept more often and his father slept less. The boy kept them like a souvenir, like a treasure, but he never talked about them. He thought that perhaps his father's species was just as susceptible to heat delirium as his mother's, that it was only the symptoms that differed. His father, when he stirred enough to speak, tried to explain the beauty of his crooked diagrams, but the boy had wasted his fortune on Diagnosans, and he needed to work to keep the family fed.

Monens later, her midnight trips and waking dreams forgotten, her spouse off in the shuttle pod negotiating with a cargo-loader guild, her comm crackled and breathed, and a rusty voice in the dark called her Grey Girl.

Eventually, his father had retreated into himself much like his mother had, no longer caring to struggle against the weakness in his body, letting the debility move into his mind. Most days he sat watching his wife sleep, a dusty guard to a princess who will never awaken.

The voice always spoke to her on nights when her husband was gone, telling her stories in a reedy voice and a soft tongue. Perhaps the Pilot would tell him when she was alone. She would lay in the empty bed, missing her love and imagining these strange things happening around her. So much for one ship, so much for two individuals, little wonder they learned to hold fast to each other.

He told her where the burned tiers really were, and the healing was so old that she could barely feel the difference in the mottling of the walls--she'd passed through that section many times over the cycles and never suspected. It makes her wonder what else she doesn't know.

She stopped listening to the stories and began to question the hoarse voice, began to argue with it. She thought about it all during the waking cycles, dreamt about what it described when she finally slept. She could have forced the door, but she never truly considered it. She wanted to be told. She wanted the chance to understand.

"Easy Grey Girl, easy. You know who we are, what we are, at least what's left of us. I made a promise once and I mean to keep it. But I won't be cruel to either of them, so I wait for a better time, a better way. You guys are family now, he's safe with you. We can rest, you know? The time will come, and I want to be ready. You be ready too."

It caught them by surprise, their common thread of Sebacean heritage suddenly spanning the genetic differences after all those cycles, suddenly catching and sparking. She grew fat with the child, his hand dusky and square against her plump white belly, her grey contour marks disappearing like smoke and coalescing under his water blue eyes.

"In a family way, we'd say. Kid's going to be a mutt, a real Heinz 57, Sebacean and Human and Nebari, a real three-way. Chi always reminded me of a toasted marshmallow, all hard carbon shell and so soft and sweet inside...it'd make you cry to see that vulnerability. You remind me more of Aeryn, stoic and gracious and amazing. You're good for the boy. He needs you, whether he tells you or not. When he talks about you, he smiles, and you might not know what a miracle that is, considering. We killed that smile in him, I think, even though he loves us. Did you find the stuff?"

She huffed around the burden of her belly, prying the grill off and laying it on the deck. Her spine ached, unable to flex the way it wanted to, her hybrid pregnancy a constant factor in everything she did now. She plucked the phial from her awkwardly modified bodice, Nebari sensibilities meeting pregnant necessities just as uneasily.

She looked at the phial until her knees were screaming, thinking she should throw it out an airlock, thinking she should cry for them, fight for them in a different way. Instead, she finally did as he'd asked her, over and over again.

When she reached over to lay it in the duct there was a comm and a slender ring with a stone, already set into the spot. Dusky fingers hooked through the grill on the other side, paper thin skin over heavy bones.

He called her Grey Girl, he called her daughter, and he told her not worry, not to cry.

~*~