Apparition lay back on her bed, alone, and tried not to think. It didn't work. After five minutes of her thoughts' spin-cycle, she gave up, sat up and took in the omnipresent hum of Legion World and the uniform grey walls. Three things stopped her from sleeping:
One, her child. Cub was now apparently six years old, despite having been born only two months prior. He'd been two years old before his experience with Universo jumped him forward to five, and in the past fortnight he'd aged another year. At that rate, he'd be older than her in just over half a year, and dead of old age by the time he hit a real-time three. And none of the doctors, nor Brainy or Lyle could find a reason for it.
(For a moment, she wondered what possessed her to call him "Cub," then she remembered. Minutes before she gave birth she'd heard of the Lost Legionnaires' return - indeed, that had triggered her labour - and she didn't want to name him without consulting Jo, and in the meantime Brin had taken to calling him "cub" as his general name for a child. Then, with Cub's aging and Problem Number Two, choosing a name first slipped down her list and became impossible after Universo...)
Two, her marriage. She'd now moved out of Jo's suite entirely as their mutual trust had seemingly evaporated. After she'd read his letter to Imra, and he'd read something that wasn't there into her relationship with Brin, and now, and now...
Three, herself. Or, more specifically, her third self. She'd tried to block it out for the two years since she'd merged with Phase, but every now and then something inside herself reminded her that she wasn't quite "whole." Her mother hadn't known her father was Carggite, and he'd taken her other selves at birth to sell to the Luck Lords to placate them over a gambling debt. A pure Carggite would have died, but being half-Bgztlian had saved her. But when she'd merged with Phase, it had nearly ripped her mind apart, which was why she'd avoided looking for her third self since. Even now, when the Kwai could find her in minutes, she'd been putting off looking for her third self.
She sat there for five minutes more, knowing what she was about to do and trying to talk herself out of it. Eventually, though, she gave in and went to arrange for childcare for Cub. She couldn't help him, and she didn't know if she wanted to save her marriage right at that moment, but she could find her third self, and not be two-thirds of a person any more. She had to do it.
She emerged from the Threshold on a silent moon under a force-field dome. Shivering, she asked her Kwai guide to return in two hours if she didn't call sooner, and looked down. There, under her feet, was an unmistakable grave.
The small-holomarker accompanying it didn't give a name, or indeed any details, but she knew she stood on her own grave.
Bundling her cloak around her, she collapsed on the dusty ground, tears running down both cheeks. She'd sneaked out here in the hope of... and she'd... and...
She sat like that for almost an hour, undisturbed, the only living person in the city of the dead. Eventually, the tears stopped and she started thinking again. Realising that perhaps there was one way to answer her questions, she became immaterial and slipped into the ground. Staying phased when she saw the corpse nearly proved impossible, scraps of hair clinging to decomposed skin barely holding to her bare skull, but she found what she was looking for and got out as soon as possible.
Back on the surface, she opened her hand and looked at the touchstone. Not smooth and rimmed in gold like her own, but a simple, rough, red jewel. After her own experiences with death and life, she knew that their connection with the dead was more than mere myth. Holding the pose a second, she clasped it to the touchstone on her cloak. Fragments of memory from her final self ran through her head like a badly damaged holo. She saw the Luck Lord that had retained her Phase self selling this third self to a slave trader, who had sold her in turn with a group of a thousand other Bgztlians to a mining company, who'd thought that Bgztlians might prove easier to use in their operations, on the basis that they wouldn't need elevators or mineshafts.
Every single one of them had died, on the moon she now stood on. Her third self was one of the "luckier" ones, having made it to the surface to receive a proper burial. Most still lay dead in the caverns below.
As Apparition retched violently, the touchstone conveyed one final image to her before it dropped to the ground. One that shocked her almost as much as what had happened beneath her feet, but in a very different way...
The next day, after a sleepless night, Apparition lay on her bed once more. It was one of her rest days, and she'd spent the previous night and that morning lying there, trying to comprehend the last image her other self's touchstone had given her and trying not to think of the other images. The rough touchstone lay at her bedside, nothing more to convey to her. Now she knew of her third self's fate, but that was different from merging with her, the way she'd merged with Phase. After unmoving hours, she stood and picked up the other touchstone, thinking of the final image as she walked in to look at Cub's empty bed, Cub himself spending time with a couple of the younger Cadets.
Her own face, on a Jinx-Dog, pushing a Dominator out of the window as she lay beneath in an unflattering blue maternity dress with her face screwed up in labour.
She'd never realised just how unflattering that thing looked. Of course, Brin wouldn't have said so.
She could joke, of course, but the knowledge that she was her own son was freaking her out. Even if it explained why even Brainy and Lyle were stumped over Cub's mysterious aging. Neither subscribed to mystical thought, especially Brainy, who came close to pretending magic didn't exist when it wasn't being paraded in front of his face.
She'd worn her touchstone during pregnancy. She'd phased (against doctor's advice), during pregnancy. The third fragment of... her soul?... had come through and entered her baby, and having two souls was burning Cub out, killing him, she just knew. There was only one thing to do.
"Hi," Cub said as he entered.
"Hi," Apparition's tear-streaked face looked her son straight in the eye. "Do you know what this is?"
"A touchstone, like yours?" Cub said upon seeing the red jewel she held in her hand.
"Yes, take it... just for a moment. And just remember I love you, always." When it was in his hand, she took her own touchstone and touched it to the jewel in his hand. Then her world went black.
She awoke in Legion World's medi-bay, grey like the rest, however much later she couldn't say. Her head... seemed oddly quiet, yet somehow more complete. She turned her head to her right and saw Doctor Gym'll rushing towards her, then turned her head to the left.
There, in a crib, lay a two-month old child with the barest covering of black hair covering his head, Jo standing over him with a puzzled expression on his face. Brin was there too, but facing her rather than the crib. She shut her eyes. She didn't have any more memories, the way she'd had after merging with Phase, but then Phase had been alive, not reborn in the body of her son. And her baby would live to whatever age he would live to. That was the important thing.
"Cub? Cub..." Jo cooed.
"Byrin. His name's Byrin."
"My Son, Myself"
An Untold Tale of the Postboot
By SoMReboot.