A/N: Vee017: Thanks for reviewing! And just for you, here's the second installment.


These wounds won't seem to heal
This pain is just too real
There's just too much that time cannot erase

Old Earth Song Lyrics
Evanescence
circa 2000AD


Here I am, I'm streaking like a freakin' comet. You can't stop me. You can't stop a Valentine with a head full of steam, believe me, I know. I tried. Blood of my blood, Trance. What if it's in my blood? What if I can't stop?

Capt. Rebeka B. Valentine
circa CY 10087


There are so many memories that I'd like to erase from my mind.

Every fight Rafe and Dad had. Every screaming match my parents got into, before and after my mother left. Every Flash high. Every time he came back to the Maru after being missing for days, drunk and sick and broke, barely able to recognize his own children. Every gift he took back, every promise he broke, every lie he told.

Finding him dead.

Oh, now, there's the perfect example.

I was sixteen. Rafe was long gone by them, and it was just me and Daddy on the Maru. He'd been getting sicker and sicker for months until finally he couldn't even get out of bed most days.

Then one day I brought him breakfast and realized he wasn't breathing.

That…that's an image I would like to destroy, and yet it's burned into my brain forever.

I tried to find a pulse, tried to resuscitate him, tried and tried and failed and at last I had to admit that he was gone.

He didn't weigh much more than me at that point. The drugs and the sickness had taken their toll. But it still wasn't easy for me to take him from his quarters, drag him across the ship, load him into a lifepod…and then eject him.

Leaving me utterly alone on the ship that had been my home since birth, the ship that was mine by right now.

There's a memory I'd like to erase.

I cried, then.

I don't like being alone.

It wasn't much of a funeral. Not the kind of funeral Ignatius Andrew Valentine deserved.

One scared, crying teenage girl trying to work up the courage to press Yes on the flashing console display.

Eject Cargo Pod: Yes / No

Eject Cargo Pod: Yes / No

Eject Cargo Pod: Yes / No

But at last, I managed to hit Yes, and then my father was gone.

And I was alone.

Nobody was there to mourn his passing except for me. Nobody cried for the death of one more Flash-fried junkie…

Except for me.

After a couple days I managed to get things together, file the paperwork on Dad's death, transfer the Maru to my possession, restart the business…but frankly I'd really like to forget all of it.

But most especially the image of my father's corpse.

I wish to God, I wish to Rev's Divine, I wish to whatever deity may or may not exist—I wish that I could forget.

But I can't.

And time doesn't heal all wounds.