Minai Desert, Hakar, Senes, Stardate 2281.199
Losha opened his eyes to the bright rays of the sun reflecting off the desert sand. The bus had jerked forward suddenly, jolting him from his seat. After over an hour of riding on the desolate desert road, he'd grown tired of looking at sand and had closed his eyes. It would be several more hours before they reached Inz Raan - several more hours of riding on the bumpy road in the old, rickety bus with nothing to look at but the endless desert. The climate controls on the bus seemed to be struggling to produce cool air - most of the Seenans around him were sweating and fanning themselves. For Losha, however, the temperature was comfortable.
He wondered if this is what the deserts on Vulcan were like. As a child, he had often wished he could go there after reading of places like the Fire Plains, The Forge, and Mt. Seleya. He had wanted to know more about these places, places where his ancestors had lived and so he had subjected his parents to an unending series of questions about their home planet. His mother had been hesitant to speak of Vulcan at all, telling him that "the past was the past and we should look to the future." His father had indulged him at first but eventually began trying to direct Losha's curiosity elsewhere. He did not sense that his father felt the same regret and longing his mother did when the topic came up though.
Losha had tried to stop thinking and wondering about Vulcan for years, but it hadn't been easy when he was constantly reminded by the people around him that he wasn't one of them. He wasn't Seenan, he was Vulcan. He remembered the feeling of constant stares on him and was glad the sur had dulled his senses. He knew the stares were still there but it was a relief to be mostly oblivious to them. He'd still catch someone in a stare from time to time or hear them whispering but wasn't bothered by it.
He wasn't bothered by much of anything anymore. He remembered how full of anger he'd once been - angry at his father, angry at the war, and angry that he did not belong anywhere. He couldn't even fathom becoming that angry again. Being angry took up energy he no longer had. That angry person no longer existed. Now he felt very little of anything. He couldn't say that he was completely devoid of feeling but he knew he did not react to things in the way a "normal" person would. A normal Seenan anyway.
He often felt as though he were surrounded by a barrier that prevented the things happening around him from getting through to him. If something pushed against the barrier hard enough or long enough, it would eventually get through, but his barrier held out a lot longer than most people's. People who didn't know him didn't think it odd - they expected Vulcans to be emotionless. He had often wondered if this was what it was like to be Vulcan - to be alive without actually experiencing any kind of feeling. But this feeling of nothingness was so strong that it had stripped away all his energy and ambition and he could not believe that an entire planet of people existed in this manner. Recently, however, a few things had managed to penetrate the nothingness, and he wasn't sure what to do about it. He no longer felt capable of handling emotions. At times like these he thought about sur again but knew that was not a possibility. He didn't want to end up like Joa. His father wouldn't allow it anyway. He'd already told him he'd lock him up if he suspected he was even considering it.
A child's laughter behind him drew him out of his thoughts again. He'd imagined the long trip to Inz Raan would have been a quiet one but there were a number of children on the bus who were talking loudly, laughing, and shrieking. How odd, he thought, that children should be on this bus at all, let alone be laughing along the way. Perhaps they didn't fully understand where they were going. Perhaps they did. Perhaps they made regular trips to Inz Raan to visit family members. One day Naalem would be one of these children on the bus.
Naalem. When he returned from Inz Raan he was going to have to pick him up. He didn't know what he was going to do then. He was not a responsible person and now he was going to have to be responsible for a child. He had never imagined he'd be in this position when he'd agreed to be Naalem's lel. How naive he had been. He had seen so many people die yet he hadn't believed that Joa or Yeshayn would ever die or be incapable of taking care of Naalem. If the thought had ever occurred to him, then he'd imagined that Malar, as the boy's kle, would be there to help him.
Malar was not the mothering type but somehow he'd imagined that because she was a woman, she would be more capable of taking care of a child than he was. Why had he thought that? She found children annoying. When Joa had tried to get her to hold Naalem shortly after he was born, she had snorted. He had then practically shoved Naalem into her arms and she'd begrudgingly taken him but it had been clear that she found the experience extremely uncomfortable. Malar was gone now, anyway, and he had no way to get in touch with her. She had said she'd be back and while he knew she wouldn't have said anything she hadn't meant, he also knew her feelings might change. She'd been wanting to leave Hakar for some time. Wherever she was now, he imagined she found it a much better place than here. There was no reason for her to return except to visit her old friends, both of whom she had said, were ruining their own lives.
When she had come to visit Losha before she left Hakar, Malar had chastised him for not having gone to visit Joa since he'd been in Inz Raan. At that moment something penetrated the barrier - guilt. Joa had been in Inz Raan for four months and he'd yet to visit him. Malar had been twice. He knew he was a terrible friend for not visiting him but even the enormous feeling of guilt Malar had stirred up in him had not been enough to push him to come here until now, when it was absolutely necessary. And now he felt not only guilt but regret - regret that his first trip here would be as the bearer of bad news.
Part of it had been a desire to avoid a long trip to an unpleasant place. Leaving Undaa and its familiar surroundings made him uncomfortable. It had been over ten years since he'd gone any further than the Sea of Lataan. Though he'd once felt completely at ease being constantly on the move, it now made him anxious. It was another feeling that had penetrated the barrier that he didn't know what to do with. He'd just been avoiding it by avoiding leaving Undaa.
The feeling of anxiousness was only half of the reason he'd avoided coming here for so long. The other half was that he didn't know what to say to Joa anymore. He didn't even know what to think about Joa anymore. The last time he'd seen him seemed like a lifetime ago. In some ways it was - it had been before the war ended, before his father had returned, and before Joa had killed someone. He didn't know how to reconcile the fact that since the last time he had seen him, his best friend, one of the kindest and most loyal people he'd ever known, had killed someone and was now spending the next thirty years in prison.