Home
Luna wasn't Jacob Keyes's home. For all intents and purposes, neither was Earth. And if Miranda Keyes had thought that feeling the same way would have made clearing out her father's Mare Insularum apartment would have made the experience easier, she was wrong.
"Insularum..." in Latin, it literally meant "sea of islands." Maybe that was what home was for both of them-islands scattered in a stream of stars, briefly visited when not onboard a starship. Legally however, the apartment belonged to Jacob Keyes. And as his next of kin, it behoves his daughter to either take up the claim herself, or to vacate it. And since Miranda's home has been even more scattered than her father, not to mention that the concept could be rendered moot in the next few days, she's settled on the second option.
It's the photos that get to her the most.
It's eerie, really, how holo-stills are interspaced with print photography that should have been rendered null centuries ago. It's strange how she never noticed them before...true, not all of her childhood was spent on Earth's only natural satellite, but even so...maybe if she'd torn herself away from the latest news reports of battles in the Outer Colonies and studied the past in addition to the present...well, maybe she wouldn't feel so uneasy about the future.
The first photos are easy to go through-she can look at them on her own time, not the time that Admiral Hood kindly gave her to visit Luna when she should have been at the Cairo. Hawaii, some scenes from Luna OCS that seem to be focussed on anything but candidacy for the Navy. Miranda allows herself to smile at the antics...it's a side of her father that she's never seen before. And, she reflects sadly as the smile fades, she never will. The graduation holo-still is an exception to the rule, but Jacob is standing so stiffly, it might as well be print.
The next photo doesn't involve her father at all.
Miranda doesn't know why she picks it up, why she's looking at a picture of her mother standing outside the University of Calippus. She glances at the date-11/17/24. She fights back the bile in her throat. She knows what that date signifies in her life, what it led to...All things considered, she has to wonder why Catherine Elizabeth Halsey is even in this apartment in some form. She'd never expected her father to be that attached to her...
Or maybe it's because she hasn't let herself think about her mother. Not since Reach anyway. Maybe it's because of a different sense of loss...she misses her father because she knew him, while with her mother, she misses her because she didn't. Tearing herself away from Halsey's gaze, Miranda shoves it into the rapidly filling box of photography. She can deal with regret laced with bitterness later. It'll be number 113 on her "list of things to do after war" list.
Moving on, Miranda doesn't know how other photos came to be on the shelf. She knew what happened in the few marked '25, how the chance of even taking photos and living to tell the tale dropped sharply. Still, they're there. One's dated as '35, when her father returned home from his exploits in the Rubble. The others are...wait a minute. The Hilbert, the ceremony at Quezon when she'd recieved the Silver Star...these are all of her. Yet this was her father's apartment and he hardly visited the place so...what were they doing here? Because Luna was a safe place to store them? To hand them over when he got the chance? Or did he envisage restarting a normal life here?
Fighting back tears as she clears the shelf, Miranda Keyes knows that she'll never know.