A/N: And here we… mostly cease flashbacks. Kinda. This story is very hippity-hoppity concerning flashbacks. Now? The chapter of 'In Which it Becomes Painfully Obvious Just What Happened.' ENJOY.

Thank you so much for all of your kind words, guys :3 I really, truly eat allovvum up. (And I'm so glad Atticus is a go!) I'm so enjoying writing this!

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Blue Sky Future

4

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Wilbur's daddy was odd.

Of course, he was nothing like other daddies because he was a Robinson. Because of that, Wilbur counted himself one-up on other kids: because nobody had lived the best day ever until they'd spent a day with him, Wilbur Robinson. He had more toys than anyone could dream of; his bushes were dinosaur-shaped. His toaster got impatient with him, and his mommy actually told him to stop teasing the refrigerator once. He had boots that made him jump really high, too, but his favorite things were toys that his daddy had invented for him. Just for him, because that meant that he taught Wilbur how to use them, and his daddy was just about the coolest ever to hang out with.

Wilbur's daddy was a scientist. He was gone a lot, but Wilbur loved him dearly; so did mommy, and it wasn't just because he always brought weird stuff back for them. Plus, the house was never empty. Wilbur was never lonely, because there was always Cousin Lazlo and Cousin Tallulah and Lefty to play with and other times he was at school. Wilbur didn't like school very much: he had just started school, kind of, but he already knew he liked his high-roofed house with its squiggly carpeting and noisy, full rooms best.

He liked home better than school because of who was there. Wilbur didn't have many friends at school. Nobody really talked to him. That's why his daddy was his best friend and he always tried to help him out in the lab—which was always a cool place to be because everything gurgled and the roof was glass. Wilbur loved playing with his dad in the lab, but there was something funny about the lab, or his dad, or both.

It went like this: every morning (or at least every morning that Wilbur was there too) Daddy went into his lab and said 'Good morning.'

Wilbur didn't know who he was saying good morning to, but he didn't sound happy when he said it. His daddy was a pretty happy person and Wilbur didn't understand: maybe it was because none of his inventions said good morning back? Every morning it was the same, and he kept guessing at who his daddy was talking to. He didn't know, until one day when Wilbur was hiding a little bit where he shouldn't have been (just a little, because he was only half inside the air-duct), he saw Daddy look around, sigh, and go over to a long box with a curtain over it and say:

"Good morning."

Just like always, only this time he touched the curtain and then went to work.

Wilbur waited until his daddy was out of the room (he was really tall and skinny so he was easy to watch leave) and clambered out of the air-duct, scraping moist grey dust off of his overalls, and approached the blanketed box. It hummed just like everything else in daddy's lab. Maybe it glowed a little, if he cocked his head.

"Good morning," he said, distinctly as he could with three teeth missing.

Nothing happened. He hadn't hoped to feel sad like Dad, but when nothing happened… it was disappointing to say the least. As a Robinson, he was used to having interesting things bang and explode and throw everyone into a multi-colored uproar. This was boring. The silence was sad in a flat way, and made his lower lip creep out.

"Good morning!" He said again, because it seemed the only thing to say to a covered box.

Then he realized that he didn't even know what he was saying good morning to, and why it didn't have proper manners, and got a little upset. Only a Robinson could have a bruised ego from a piece of equipment not returning their salutations. All the same, Wilbur grit his little checker-board teeth and grabbed a fistful of the scratchy green cloth and pulled as hard as he could, feeling his little red sneakers squeal on the linoleum as he yelled a final time:

"Good—"

He never finished, because two things happened: the blanket gave and his sneakers went whizzing out from under him and he fell back on his bottom with three armfuls of blanket over his legs, and his dad came back.

"Wilbur?" His daddy called from somewhere in the lab, nice brown shoes clicking slowly closer. He sounded troubled, which meant that Wilbur might be in trouble for messing with his good morning machine. Wilbur hurriedly shoved the wad of blanket back from his knees so he could escape back into the air-duct, but looked up in the process. Wilbur's eyes stuck to the secret glossy box, and no amount of blankets in the world could cure the chill that settled in his tiny bones: it radiated off the machine in white tendrils and made it hard to be brave. He squinted past the bright glare cast by the laboratory's halogen lighting and when he saw past the glass he stayed on his hands and knees and stared.

There was a man in Daddy's good morning machine.

Daddy might have called his name again: once or twice. But by the time he trotted up the steps and found his little son kneeling in front of the poisonously blue pod, it didn't matter. His daddy stopped and clapped a hand over his mouth. Wilbur looked over, face white.

"Daddy?"

Daddy's mouth came unplugged with a giant scared sound and he clambered up and dropped to his bony knees beside Wilbur and scooped him up into his arms.

"Oh, hell—oh hell, Wil," he moaned, messily cupping a large hand to his son's cheek and turning his face—his pretty face with his mother's big brown eyes--away. "That's—"

But he stopped and just shook his head.

"Who—" Wilbur squeaked, squirming against his father's broad shoulders.

"It's—he's one of daddy's friends, baby," his daddy explained, sounding scared.

"Is he dead?" Wilbur whispered, straining to peek through his thick fingers at the cold sky-blue box to see the man: the good morning machine. Had it eaten him?

Daddy stopped and thought and shook a little before he answered, soft as he could:

"He's just sleeping."

Daddy stayed and ruffled Wilbur's perfect hair for a while. After a moment more of his dad's too-warm, airless hug, Wilbur prized himself away and looked up into his dad's face, a new feeling making his insides itch. He wasn't quite sure that Dad was telling the truth. His little face constricted.

"You can't sleep standing up," Wilbur told him solemnly. His daddy dropped his head and ran a hand through his messy dark hair.

"He's different," he said after a while, struggling with something. His bright blue eyes flickered this way and that. "He's like… you know Sleeping Beauty, right, Wil?"

His little boy nodded. It was a girly story, but he knew the basics.

"He's sleeping, because a sort of… curse was put on him. In there. He's been sleeping for a long time, and we don't know when he's going to wake up, you see," Dad explained, putting a hand on Wil's shoulder and looking tiredly into his eyes. His daddy looked old, a little. "He got stuck in there, and he's just sleeping, but we hope we can wake him up soon and he can come to dinner. You see? Would you like that?"

Wilbur thought that, as full as their house was, the new person would need a room to stay in, and he didn't know if they had any left but he didn't know if he wanted to share his room with a blue guy. Wilbur's daddy finally laughed and said they could think about that when the time came, and maybe the blue washed off, and Wilbur felt much better about everything.

It wasn't scary at all, this good morning machine. Wilbur's daddy was just saying hello to his sleeping friend, who he hoped would come and stay for dinner one day.

Wilbur liked dinner best when Carl made meatballs.

Twelve years later, Daddy's friend woke up.

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It was like being ripped out of a hole in the ground.

But this hole was a skeleton: he was a fleshy organic flap, sealing the hole, dry veins grown into the black wet hard sides of it like vines. He had no form. He simply filled the hole as he made it, a quietly throbbing growth with white bones sealed into the hole around him, poking through his skin. Woven into the hole. They were part and parcel, he and the hole.

And both of them were nothing.

Then someone reached inside and punctured him and the cold secret air hissed out and all of a sudden he was being ripped off and off and off, like canvas from the frame or a fleshy, root-riddled plant from hundred-year soil. Out, up, rip--pain as his bones separated, some left behind in the hole, waggling like broken tree limbs. Crack. Crack. Crack. His veins had snapped off, wriggling along his white arms—but white, everything was white because it felt that way.

He opened his eyes and he was on his feet for a split second. Feet.

He saw gold. He saw sky-blue. He saw something tall and warm-looking and darkly moist—rich was the word--and he knew it was a person. He knew that this person was very important: that notion came rushing out along with all the frigid air, some lasting thought that had been trapped with him. In the hole. In those last moments before white.

Now… let free, let loose. Exposed.

His arm jerked up in front of his face, reaching.

"W-wilbur—" he thought, or said, or cried. It came out and was swallowed in a vomit of sound, nonsensical.

But he felt like dust: his organs were pulverized, bruised sacs, and he could feel his face shriveling in the non-white air—he was going to die again--

The lab heaved in front of him as his hole gaped behind him, several white blurs throwing themselves left or right as voices raised, high and low and nauseating. His arm dropped, broken. Waggling at his side. He took a breath.

"How c-could you d—"

Then he died.

He collapsed forward and splashed into another hole, and as the green sloshed up over his white ears and his eyes flickered shut, he left the world, only conscious of the horrible, mortal chaos raging around him and the tall, richly colored boy in the center of it all.