Thanks for the reviews! (I will try to think of something for the prompts, but for now this came out)
Just to be clear, this is Eight when he was around nine years old. And I made Reynolds more understanding and have a humanistic (or Loricistic) point of view because no other Loric so far mentioned does.
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In the Dark Night
"Why can't we go home?" he asks into the dark night.
"This is home," his guardian, not his father but a father figure nonetheless, responds, too tired to anticipate the next question.
"No, our real home," the boy emphasizes. He holds the toy his guardian bought him, patting the soft fur with his small hands.
"You remember that?" his guardian asks in shock. Reynolds turns over to face his Garde, surprise masked by the absence of a moon.
"Of course I do," the boy says stubbornly.
"What do you remember?" Reynolds asks, the workings of memories were a foreign language to him.
"How it was warm at first, and the pretty pink flowers that were around where I was," the uncertainty is breathtakingly clear in his voice. "Then it was cold all of a sudden, like it fell asleep."
Reynolds waits for his young Garde to say something more.
Eight, or as Reynolds calls him, Joseph, is silent for a long time.
"What else happened? What is Lorien?" he asks.
Reynolds is silent for a while before choosing to say everything he could, "Lorien. Lorien is where we are from. We are not humans like the people you see and talk to every day. We lived on a beautiful planet, with the pink flowers you described. It was magically warm all the time. The only wars were millennium before-"
"What's a millennium?"
"It's a thousand years," Reynolds explains impatiently. "And the planet was in peace. We had contact with Earth, and with another race, more savage than ours and with a long history of tribal problems. While our planet thrived, theirs fell into disrepair under all of their technological advancements. They were desperate and we were the victims that fell to their hands. We fell, too fast and too easily, our numbers slaughtered by the hundreds," his voice grows faint and choked, Reynolds blinks several time, biting back tears and the images of those long dead. He knew the day of telling his young Garde would come.
"We left along with eight other children and their guardians, and the driver to the ship. Everyone else who stayed, died by a genocide. We are the last of the Loric, you are Lorien's Legacy."
Eight balls his hands under his blanket, the words fill his heart with burning, he isn't sure about what, "I will kill them."
"It is your destiny," Reynolds says quietly, tears freely running down his face in the dark night. He is glad that Eight cannot see him. Some day he will tell Eight more, when he is ready understand.
"What is a g-genocide?" Eight has difficulty pronouncing this word.
"The deliberate destruction of a certain group of people," Reynolds answers quietly.
"Has it happened on Earth?" Eight asks, mind immediately side-tracked.
"Yes, many times."
"When will we come home?" Eight asks after a long time.
"For now this is home. But you will come back to Lorien and bring it back to it's glory," the longing in Reynold's heart swells but he reminds himself that it is Eight who will rebuild Lorien without him. And he will join the Loric with the Gods of the heavens.
"When will the rest of the Loric come back?" Eight asks.
Reynolds is confused, "When you find them here on Earth."
"No the other Loric, the ones who went away when the Mogadorians in-in-va-ded," Eight says, he has trouble pronouncing the word.
Reynolds does not answer. Children cannot understand death. Neither can adults, no one understands death until they have faced the eyes of the demons themselves.
After a long time, Reynolds had thought Eight had fallen asleep until he turns over to face him with his bright stare. His tears had long since dried and replaced with a sense of satisfaction of Eight knowing his Legacy.
"Are there people here, on Earth," Eight says the word with difficulty, "who are asking right now when they will be able to come home? People who are not at home, but want to come home?"
"Yes," Reynolds says after thinking for a long time in the night. "People are the same everywhere, ideas stay the same for the thousands of years. Loric, humans."
On that, Cepan and Garde, father and son, fall asleep together in the dark night.
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I made the Loric polytheistic and the tribe (and others) mentioned in the oneshot before are monotheistic.