Somewhere On Mars
By: Shima And Tempis
Disclaimer: Yeah, I'm not Diane Duane. Sorry to disappoint, but these characters belong to her, not me.
A/N: This takes place during Wizards at War. The beginning is prior to Dairine going to Wellakh, and the second part is after she has gone to Wellakh. Thus, it's AU, since this never actually happened.
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Dairine had Spot on her lap as she looked through the Wizards' Directory for their galaxy. Again. She was glad Spot had stopped reading the data happily aloud. It had started grating on her already well-worn nerves.
She was on Mars.
She should have been a number of other places. She should have gone back to Earth to see if her father was okay. She should have been on the Moon, helping to clean up. She should have been on Wellakh, being the bearer of horrible news. But she wasn't ready to face anything just yet.
So she was on Mars.
"Message!" Spot chirped, and opened the message from Nita without being asked.
Where are you? We need to talk. Meet me on Mars. –Nita
Dairine closed the message and set Spot on the sandy Martian ground.
"Take me to Wellakh," she told Spot, who happily started making a spell diagram.
Might as well take the last item off my list of "should-have's."
--
Red dust kicked up from the ground and onto Nita's shoes as she looked around Mars. She never understood what Dairine and Kit liked about the planet. It was smaller than Earth, certainly, but it had none of the intimacy and, in all honesty, the memories that the Moon had.
No matter how barren it felt to her, however, Nita knew this was the only place she could convince Dairine to come to just talk. Nita knew her sister was most comfortable on the Mobiles' planet, but she also understood that the planet was not hers to visit when she felt like. Regardless of their sibling rivalries, Nita knew when to respect her sister's boundaries.
The familiar pop! of displaced air told Nita her sister had arrived. Looking around at the mostly barren landscape, Nita found a large red rock to sit on as she tried not to watch Dairine bound lightly toward her. When she was finally next to Nita, Dairine's air bubble bumped with Nita's own and they merged as Dairine sat down beside her. Nita heard Dairine breathing hard and ragged, and knew without looking that Dairine had been crying—and just as she realized that, her head turned sharply to look at her sister.
Dairine was dressed in her usual t-shirt and jeans, but from the look of their rumpled exterior Dairine had been to a few other planets before ending up on Mars. Her eyes were red and puffy as well, and her knuckles had gone white from how tightly she had been gripping her hands together.
"What?" Dairine asked, a mere echo of her normally haughty retort. To Nita, her sister had never looked so small.
"You know what. How are you?" Nita asked in the Speech, so the simple question suddenly held more weight.
"I personally feel like crap. You?" Dairine answered as sarcastically pleasant as possible. She unclenched her hands in order to put them behind her and lean back on the Martian rock. Nita remained silent. "Neets, is this what it's always gonna be like?" Dairine asked suddenly a moment later.
Dairine was still speaking in English, so Nita switched as well. "What do you mean?"
"Our lives as wizards. Are they always going to be like this? Losing people we care about?"
Nita now understood why Dairine had continued speaking in English. For one, death was always an uncomfortable topic to bring up in the Speech. Also, Dairine was not about to admit any deep feelings for someone because she was speaking a language which did not allow her to lie. Nita took the question as seriously as possible, only to have memories flood her. Memories of Fred, Ed, their mother…
"We'll always have Timeheart," was Nita's answer.
It did not satisfy Dairine. "That's years and years away! I want to know now if all we get to do as wizards is watch people suffer and die." Dairine was standing now, and Nita noticed the way she used the word "people" to mean more than just human beings. Their air bubbles bumped together again as Nita stood up.
"I don't know, Dairi. But is that really all we've done as wizards? Watch?" Nita saw the anger slip from Dairine's narrowed eyes, and Nita knew Dairine remembered. She remembered that they had also saved the world, the universe, and everything in it. "But I don't think it gets any easier."
"Of course not. We're practically superheroes. Why would the powers give us a break?"