Title: Marvel
Character(s): Megan Morse/Miss Martian
Summary: There was something about the intrinsic value that books held that drew Megan to the library. The ability to know, the act of acquiring knowledge, was sacred.
Words: 970
Disclaimer: I do not own Young Justice.
Marvel
She loved the library. There was something about the intrinsic value that books held that drew Megan to the library. The ability to know, the act of acquiring knowledge, was sacred, was important and essential for one to survive, especially on a foreign planet. There was the written word on her home planet, and there were books and libraries there too, and after days spent ensconced in the library of an unfamiliar place Megan realized that she loved the library because it was familiar. It was the only familiar thing in a sphere of unfamiliar and when Megan was immersed in the unfamiliar she got nervous. But the library kept her calm because it was a familiar atmosphere; an atmosphere of repressed awe because gathered around her and the tables and piled up on the shelves and climbing the walls like plants were books. Books that held information that could one day save her life; books that held facts that could amuse her on a rainy day; books that could teach her, that could make her learn.
And if there was one thing Megan was good at, one thing she loved to do, it was to learn. Because no one knew everything and her idea of perfection was to know as much as the mind could know, an impossible. So Megan made it her duty to learn something new every day. And books helped her.
They were old friends. Helping her, guiding her. The language was different, the subjects were different, the basic sentence structure was different, but the books were the same. They had the same look, the same smell even. They invoked the same images of a warm laps and laughs as she first learned how to read. The memories tied to books were both good and bad and they were all Megan's memories. She would never forget them because the books would not let her forget and for that she was forever grateful.
She loved all sorts of books, and the library that she was allowed full reign to did nothing but feed her devotion. The books were mostly new and it saddened her and made her happy at the same time. No one else claimed this space as their own, leaving the books to just sit there, unused, unread, not fulfilling their true purpose. But the books she loved most were astronomy books.
On Mars, Megan had loved the stars and the sky. It was so vast, so big and utterly indefinable, that she felt small but she knew that there was something out there. She drew pictures in the sky as an infant; she still took pride in her childhood drawings with black skies and white dots and a small, little green girl flying through the middle grinning like a fool. And later she discovered the names of the constellations and she memorized them with a desire and a love that no one had ever seen before. Megan could name every single constellation that had ever been above her home ever since she had been born.
She liked to draw the lines between the stars, liked to connect the dots. She didn't know why, it was just something she amused herself with, and when she did trace the constellations that had worn a path in her memory it calmed her, a familiar routine.
So, when Megan woke up one night to find that the only familiar place was closed because of the paint fumes of the new decorating scheme, she unconsciously went to the next best thing to keep her calm. It was when the wind was blowing at her hair that Megan realized that she was on the roof, head thrown back, looking for anything familiar. Her heart was in her stomach before she saw it: a long dragon, too long, snaking across the sky.
It was too long and skinny but it looked so much like hers.
Running back inside, trying to keep as quite as a mouse because she had read that mice were very quiet, she quickly retrieved a book that she had thrown onto her book-ridden bedroom floor days before. With slightly shaking hands, Megan opened up the book and traced the positions of the stars.
It was hers. It was the first constellation she had ever correctly identified. Homo sapiens called it Draco but it was her dragon. And there, they called it Orion but she knew it as The King; the three stars that made up Orion's belt was the King's belt as well.
Dazed with wonder, Megan sat on the roof and began to learn out of a book she had taken from the library about stars and constellations and things that were familiar even though she was so far from home it made her want to cry sometimes. By the end of the night, she had learned the stars that made up five different constellations, the stories behind the constellations, and where she would always be able to find them. She found the North Star, Polaris the pole star, to be very comforting because there had been pole stars on Mars as well.
There was something familiar on Earth and with awe Megan understood she just had to look to the sky, just like she would have done at home. She just had to continue her routines, continue her hobby, but instead of just tracing the stars she would learn their names and the pictures they formed and the stories they concealed and guarded. This could be her home.
The simple fact that a thousand billion miles away someone on Mars could be looking at the same pattern in the sky that she could made the discovery even more of a marvel.
Megan saw home in the stars, whichever planet they were seen from.