Vee017: Thanks for sticking with me. ;) Hope you enjoy this part.
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You used to captivate me
By your resonating light
Now I'm bound by the life you left behind
Your face it haunts
My once pleasant dreams
Your voice it chased away
All the sanity in me
Old Earth Song Lyrics
Evanescence
circa 2000AD
You know, whenever I think about my father, I picture him at the end. I try not to, but…I still do. It was hard. I have to just remember that those were just a few years in a long life. When I was a kid, when he was young, he was the best, Trance. He was smart, and funny, and tough. And brave. He could make me laugh until my sides hurt. No matter how dark things got, and no matter how long the odds, he always…always came up with a plan. The right plan. I wish you could've met him, Trance.
Capt. Rebeka B. Valentine
circa CY 10087
I loved him so much.
And I have so many good memories of him.
Almost all of them are before Rafe left, and most before my mother left, but they're still good memories.
Daddy taught me how to fly the Maru before I could walk. He called me his Booster Rocket and swore I'd be the best slipstream pilot in three galaxies and predicted that I'd be the youngest pilot on record to be FTA-licensed.
When I finally got my license, a year after he died, I couldn't stop thinking about how proud he'd be.
For my eighth birthday, he and I left Mom and Rafe on the Maru. He took me to Infinity Atoll, and he taught me how to surf. For a whole week, it was "Whatever Rocket wants, Rocket gets."
One of the few times in my life I've actually enjoyed being planetside. And it was due far more to Daddy than to Infinity.
Once, when I was nine, we had a cargo shipment to Teagan Drift. And while Daddy and everybody were all busy with unloading the cargo and dealing with messengers and pavement, Rafe and I decided to go exploring. We made it to the market area of the drift and then got separated and I got hopelessly lost.
I was scared. The drift seemed so huge to me. I couldn't find Rafe and I couldn't find the Maru and I was afraid to talk to anyone and somehow I ended up in the seediest, nastiest area of the drift, surrounded by thugs and gangsters, druggies and lushes, thieves and murderers.
And that's where Daddy found me.
I was crying and trying not to draw attention to myself, desperately searching for a way out of there. He found me and hugged me and told me how worried he'd been, how everybody had been looking for me like crazy. He kissed me and brought me back to the Maru.
He was my hero.
And, of course, there was my tenth birthday, and the candied eggs.
I remember how happy Rafe and I were to see him, because he'd been gone for a couple weeks and the two of us had been running the Maru with the help of Evanson, Daddy's then-engineer. I remember him laughing and saying how happy he was to see us and apologizing for being gone. I remember him telling us he had a surprise for us in honor of me turning 'the big one-oh'.
I remember the amused look on his face while we hunted down the eggs and taunted each other with who had more.
But Sid says my memories are wrong. That he was the one who planted the eggs and watched us find them. That Daddy was sleeping off a Flash binge.
So who's right? Sid or me?
And if my memories of my tenth birthday are wrong, what about my other memories? Maybe Daddy wasn't the one to teach me to surf, and maybe Rafe was the one who found me on Teagan, and maybe…
Maybe Sid's lying. Sid's always lying. He has to have lied about this too.
I won't believe that my father wasn't the man I remember, the man I love. Sid's a liar, it's what he does.
But maybe my subconscious has rewritten my memories so that I can believe that my father was the man I want him to be.
Why can't I trust my own memories?
I hate this.
