--Childhood--
--J--
Jalissa Shepard sat on the narrow cot in the makeshift orphanage. The partitioned room could have held many children, but housed only four, three boys and Jalissa, all orphans. The youngest of the very few survivors of the raid on Mindoir. They did not talk to one another and of the four Jalissa proved least responsive, animating only when Lieutenant Robbins came by to check on her.
Robbins was not unusual in this. All four rescued children had someone who came to see if they were still alive, to tell them the world wasn't ended, just…disrupted. Nice as this was to hear, no amount of saying it could convince the children of its truth.
Right now, Robbins was nowhere Jalissa could see or talk to her, so Jalissa sat mired in misery, a chill unlike any other seeping into her very core. She cried herself out repeatedly, but kept finding more tears, especially at night. When they did sleep, she and the others screamed and cried out in the clutches of vicious nightmares tearing at juvenile minds. Sleep became an enemy, fought until it beat down the will to fight. Only then did they give in, giving up all the usual respect for day and night.
The door at the end of the dorm opened, revealing one of the Alliance doctors. Casualties on Mindoir were heavy, survivors few, so none of the medical staff begrudged the time and effort of trying to patch the kids back together—though no one could do much until the psychological personnel arrived. Until then medigel applied with compassion was the best help available. The doctors were not cruel people, nor even unkind. They were simply helpless to fix wounds no one could see.
"Lunchtime."
The mechanical quality of the movements of the four juveniles, as they filed past the nameless white coat, gave the impression they were more like ghosts than anything else, drifting unmoored in the world, fleeting and transient, interminably waiting.
Jalissa did not think of herself as a ghost, or even a zombie. Her agile mind clicked, stuttered and popped behind her blank expression as she tried to evaluate her situation, tried to plan a future. The one she once wanted no longer existed. She could not go back to the farm, nor could she bury her dead—the Alliance wanted the bodies. She refused to raise an issue over this. She did not know what to do with the empty shells of the people she loved, particularly when at least one was less a shell and more…a burnt blob.
Her eyes burned, her throat tightened, but no tears came. Had she finally exhausted the reservoirs of saline behind her eyes? The lack of them left her empty, strangely methodical, and analytical. She could not go back home. She could not stay on Mindoir. She had no other family, which meant an orphanage, or foster care, until she turned eighteen.
Two years. Two years to decide what she wanted to do.
Jalissa sat down at the table with her tray, among the other personnel on lunch. In a quirk Jalissa found decidedly curious, she and the others liked sitting near other humans. They did not want the other humans to talk to them. It must be, her inner analysis continued, a proximity thing.
She supposed there was college…but where? There was nothing, as far as she cared, left here. Mindoir was a small colony to begin with. There were no institutes of higher learning, yet. In any case, what would she study?
Her spoon slipped from her suddenly nerveless fingers, splattering soup on the table. As her chin sank towards her breastbone, her eyes wide and unblinking, she almost imagined she could see her reflection in the green, murky mass.
She did not know if it was merely the way the dining facility worked, or if it was an attempt to lessen the shock of the survivors, but so far all the food was both familiar and easy to eat. None of it required a great deal of thought. She would almost call it 'comfort food', if the dishes did not smack of cafeterias, hospitals, and insane asylums, though of much better quality.
Tomato soup and cheese sandwiches—the sight of which made Toole showed a spark of life. Macaroni and cheese—caused Gabe, the youngest, to tear up. Jalissa had expected him to bolt from the dining room that day, but he had not. He simply sat there, spooning macaroni into his mouth, tears sliding down his childhood-soft cheeks.
It was cruel. So cruel.
"Jalissa?" A hand touched her shoulder.
Jalissa flinched, picked up her spoon again, and began mechanically eating with greater speed than usual. Shoveling down sustenance so no one would fuss, however gently, about eating properly.
The empty future still lay like blank canvas before her.
Anger suddenly licked up her insides, blazing from dead ashes to an inferno which made her hands shake. This was their fault. All their fault. They had not stolen her dreams: they destroyed them, leaving shattered pieces and shrapnel to drift like space junk in her soul, tearing into whatever the sharp edges came in contact with.
An ugly look passing over her face like a cloud over the moon, somehow making the hollows in her face and the shadows under her eyes more prominent. She could enlist. She had not wanted to, before they came. But now…Robbins, even Maguire, told her how so many frigates, members of the navy and the marines, spent time in the Traverse, picking off raiding parties, mercenary bands, general scum in the universe.
Wouldn't that be something? Put her in a place where she could bury the pain, could do something about the creatures that so carelessly crushed her life.
Why did they do it? Not for ideology. Not even a vague concept like freedom.
Slavery. Money.
They're bastards. They're all bastards.
Jalissa ate steadily, the tattered remnants of her childhood burning as she watched.
--J--