disclaimer: I lay claim on neither the character of Bean, nor the world that he lives in; this is simply a careless little addition on my part.
notes: Fic is tiny (four hundred words or so), and in a very different style from the one Card uses. No (snarky) dialogue for one. No plot for another. Written slightly under a year ago for the Livejournal Community 31 Days (October 13th: what you pay for) -- semi-spoilers for Shadow of the Giant. Takes place post-that, too.
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time
In the end, the voyage is shorter than it should have been.
It feels longer.
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On the spaceship, he has nothing but time.
He dreams when he sleeps, and sometimes when he does not, watching the changing textures of stars tangled in the surrounding dark. His throat catches when they draw near blue planets, that split-second before his mind says - here, the continents are wrong here, the seas too dark there, the clouds thick, the wrong color.
Recognition of the home is instinctive to animals, he remembers, from old textbooks and half-scanned treatises on reactions and desire - instinct clear and precise, unmarred by decision, hesitation of something conscious.
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He wakes cradled against the glass, gasping. He grips his shirt; his fist knuckles at his heart, the beat tumbling out of pattern, too quick, too sharp. I am dying, he thinks, and the thought does not displease him as it should before he remembers, too: chest pain doesn't strike just so before a death.
The sudden slur, the salt that dries his tongue. Not symptoms of death, then, but something else.
Irrational patterns sift through the sky; counting lines of lights he thinks he sees traceries of Petra's face in the dark. Human illusion -- but he is not human. It's the major reason why he's up here now, in a spaceship hurtling away from the world where he was born.
We do not possess the Earth, only lease it for the short terms of our lives -- the old saying spoken, and scoffed at. He finds himself forgetting, now, the name - the face of the girl who laughed at it with him. (Sharper than she might have, should have at the time, and it was his fault, partially a goad for what it meant.)
A star winks where an eye might be; he feels his bones shudder as he grips the ledge. He cannot remember if it has ever done that before - human at last, when he does not need to be.
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Philosophy and anatomy form boundaries around humanity - definitions, graphs, designs. Reasoning, abstraction, carriage and the lengthening of bones shape borders that he can cross and categories that he cannot fall into. It's all the same in the end, sensibility reminds him: he's found his way onto this spaceship, and what has been started can never be undone.
Nor could he want it to.
Ah, he says, breath to glass, splaying his fingers across the space as if he might span the blackness with his hands - if only he had been as ignorant as a philosopher, as painstakingly theoretical.
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Even in space he isn't alone.
But he is.
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He dreams: that by the time the ship returns to descend the last decadent civilisation will have crumbled to dust, humans only bones and ash in deserts stripped of color.
Sometimes he dreams that he doesn't go back at all.
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end
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feedback is appreciated, though hardly hoped for.