WARRIOR.
She meets her father at the end of the world.
He's there among the stars, his face glowing from out of the dark dripping space, as if he had always been the moon. There are security cameras everywhere. This moment will be broadcast to each corner of the galaxy, so she makes sure to look him in the eye and smile. She squares her shoulders, trying to not to look like cared little girl on a desert planet. Trying not to look like she's a million light years from home. Trying to forget she was ever the girl who cowered underneath the bed while soldiers stamped through the safe-houses and tore bedrooms apart, pilfered safety boxes, broke windows, as the planes came overhead- you could never hear them coming. They shone bright lights into all the hiding places.
Does he recognise her now? She is a thief, a master con artist, a warrior. She had wanted to go to sea, long ago, and study the behaviour of whales. Now, she stands at the end of it all with a big gun and a bigger smile. The threats worsen as time passes, but her outer shell grows harder, hands steadier.
Time can work wonders, if you want it to.
JUSTICE.
Her starship gets stolen and she doesn't realise it until it's too late. She's running where strange plants grow, through grass that scratches her legs, waving her pistol, shouting in every language she knows: how could you do this? how could you take this away from me? how could you break open my chest, take out my heart, and then crush my skull with the weight of my own birthright?
Eventually, as the hulk of metal recedes into the disappearing distance, she stops and gives up, breathless. Red light bleeds into the sky. She has nothing to hold onto anymore, and nothing that stirs her to chase after something else.
QUIET.
They huddle together as they sleep. They had taken the pots and pans off the wall, put away the plates and cleared she shelves, for the walls would be shaken with the thrum of war, and everything in the house would clatter too loudly. We might as well paint a red mark on our door, his brother had said. When he is asleep, it's the only time he is able to pretend that he isn't going from place to place with no home. He isn't running for his life. They aren't being hunted. That there is a place somewhere in the galaxy where he can go and the predators won't find him. When he wakes up, the reality solidifies around him, colder every day, but for a few seconds before he opens his eyes he is still somewhere else.
This morning, as he comes out of sleep, he is for a moment in a different sort of huddle. He can hear his mother's voice- the sweetest voice- calling for him from the other side of the lake. How long will he be able to preserve that memory of the way she laughed- like the tinkling of polished glass? How long before they invaded his sleep and found him there?
RUTHLESS.
Her mentor had shaped her into a weapon- sharp mind, sharp blade, sharp vision, sharp instincts. This combination could be what brings the empire to its knees. To its bloody end. As she spit up blood, he would tell her that she was a device, that she had one purpose. Her teeth were like little daggers. She couldn't feel things that that used to be part of everyday, but she couldn't remember those things, and didn't miss them. Her purpose had become everything.
What do I do when I reach my target? She asked him.
You do what you do best, he said. Activate.
ESCAPE.
The last place he had been before going on the road again, he had met some of the locals who had stories about the Other World. No one knew how to get there, and the gates were barred and guarded, and you'd die trying to get anywhere near the walls at the edge. His knuckles whiten around his steering wheel, the morning fog billowing in. He drives into it, wondering if he will be the same when he comes out the other side. He presses down on the accelerator. Faster, faster. If he had hope, h would throw it to the wind. He doesn't know where he's going, but he will find that gate to the Other World, and when they kill him, at least he will die knowing that he tried.
RAGE.
The very moment their trap was sprung, he knew that they were all going to die. Arrows shot from crossbows, piercing flesh. Heads separated from bodies. Fire and noise and twisted metal and brutality- that was the world in its entirety.
Sword slipping from his grip, he ran into the thick of it. Battle was the only place for anger like his.
He was determined to fight with the might of his hatred, even if it would only speed up his end.
RESILIENCE.
People used to say that humans were destroying the earth. This was an arrogant belief. They didn’t need to worry. The earth was going to destroy them before they could harm it.
They could burn down forests, reduce civilisations to dust, but the earth never stopped regrowing, repairing the damage, and try as they may, they could not bring down the mountains, and they could not drain the sea.
TRADE.
He had forbidden his children from fighting. They saw him cleaning the barrels of his guns, go down to his underground bunker where they knew he was building explosives. Strangers came to him, gave him food or books or the parts he needed to build a radio in exchange for the weapons and armour that he made. He could give them gifts on their shared birthdays because of the demand for weapons. Even if fighting was the right thing to do, he told the twins that they weren’t to fight, they weren’t to go near the weapons. If he lost them, what would he have that was worth fighting for?
He slept with a revolver under his pillow. He cried in his sleep, and dreamt in black and white.
SACRIFICE.
They had decided to disobey their father. He would come nightly from his underground room to kiss them goodnight. When he was gone, one of them would climb into the other's bed. Only when in this close proximity could they sleep, feeling safe in the knowledge that they still had one another. They slept face to face. When they woke up, they wore one another’s faces.
One morning, their father would wake to find armour and guns missing. He raged at their stupidity, at their disobedience, and waited, He could do nothing else. He had to believe in them. And he did, until his son brought back a helmet, spattered with blood. He stopped speaking, after that. I couldn’t find her body, were his only and last words. I’m sorry.
ILLUMINATION.
He meets his daughter at the end of the world. She is smiling against a backdrop of stars. The dark, dripping space. He's come to know the darkness, but seeing her in it, she is light.
He is a revolutionary, a member of the resistance, a rebellion that stretches across the galaxy.
He has been the killer, in a kill or be killed world. He is a father. He had forgotten that.
Her smile has a wicked edge, and she stands differently, looks at him differently. She doesn't look up to him anymore, but straight at him. They are equals. But her eyes still look just like they did when she was born, when she needed him. He wants to tell her that he changed to protect her. That he broke something to be certain that she would never be broken again.
In her, he can see himself. A deadly mirror, an eternally complex puzzle, part of a whole but somehow a whole, and it scares him.
The more time passes, the easier it becomes to neglect the things that were once most important to you. You can’t imagine the things that, someday, you will have forgotten. In the reframing of your promises, you detach, the ache disappears. It stops hurting to remember the way it used to be.
Time can work wonders, even when you don’t want it to.
