Starchild

I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.

Chapter Five: The Unknown Moon

For as long as she could remember, Eirika had looked up at Luna with a sense of curiosity. In childhood she became familiar with the shadowed regions that made up the face of the Moon Maiden, a face that seemed gentle at times, deeply sorrowful at others. Even when she learned that the eyes of the Moon Maiden were thought to be nothing more than dark plains of barren rock, she still fancied that she sensed something- a personality- in Luna.

What Eirika saw now was not the moon she knew- not a familiar face, not the topography of dark lowlands and pale mountain ranges that she recalled from lunar maps. This was an alien landscape that spoke of aeons of violence, a vista of craters upon craters. Eirika saw craters that must surely be the size of the island of Valencia, craters that might well be as large as Renais, as large as any nation on the continent of Magvel. It was stark, horrifying, eerie, and oddly beautiful, its beauty magnified by the knowledge that she and Ephraim were the first humans ever to see this sight with their own eyes.

"Get the camera," Ephraim whispered. In this stillness on the far side of Luna, it seemed almost wrong to speak normally.

She began to take picture after picture as the newly-revealed landscape slid beneath them. Adjectives that meant "black," "white," and "gray" filled Eirika's head, for there seemed to be no color at all in the world out her window. No color, no life, no feathery clouds or glistening water. Nothing but an endless collection of scars, more forbidding than the most barren stretches of Jehanna by orders of magnitude. Did it even make sense to place a human, a pair of humans, in the middle of such a hostile place?

"It looks like they had the war to end all wars up here," Ephraim noted from behind her.

And then Eirika noticed a fragile wisp of blue and white and green just above Luna's horizon- a crescent Terra, suspended in the dark above the rim of its long-dead moon.

"It's so small."

Everything that they knew and loved was on that planet, and yet Eirika could lift up her hand and block it out, all of it- the oceans and mountains and three billion people- with only her thumb. The vulnerability of the planet, of life, struck her then, and it was enough to bring a tight feeling to her chest and throat. Eirika brought the world into focus and kept taking pictures.

-x-

"Get on out there, sister."

Eirika, encased once more in her spacesuit, prepared to embark on the spacewalk she'd been given as a last-minute change in mission objectives. Earlier spacewalks had tested the ability of a pilot to work in zero gravity- with admittedly mixed results. Eirika had only to take another round of photographs, lunar landscapes undimmed by the small, fogged windows of the spacecraft. She would bob along, connected to the craft by a tether, while Ephraim cruised alone in the Falcon II.

She didn't need her brother's encouragement to do her work- it was her duty, after all- but that certainly helped. Eirika stepped into the airless, weightless void. As she raised the color camera, she felt again a pang of dismay that she would see so much of that ugly-beautiful landscape through it and not with her eyes. A robot could have taken pictures if that were the only goal.

"I wish I knew how to paint," she muttered to herself, not caring if her words reached Ephraim or the ground crew. "I'd paint this." She'd known a painter once, an upperclassman in flight school...

Eirika forced herself back on task, faithfully logging all these previously unseen, unnamed craters for the benefit of science. When the crescent Terra appeared again at the lunar horizon, she photographed that, too. Terra looked so serene; there were no continents marked in blue to show the Free Nations, nothing marked in red to show the Loptos Empire. It was all one swirling marble, the only thing of color in the darkness.

Sweat began to bead inside of her helmet. The drops floated, like little balls of crystal...

"Pilot Oh-Twelve, time to call it a day. "

Do I have to?

That was the thought in her head. All the world heard was a prompt "Roger" as Pilot 012, her heart racing and her fingers sore, obeyed the order from ground control. When she was once more inside the spacecraft, Ephraim greeted her, and not with the thump on the back that one pilot might give another. He clasped her like a brother whose only sister had just accomplished something marvelous. And terrifying. Marvelously terrifying.

-x-

Eirika would have expected that, after orbiting Luna, the ride home and the remainder of their mission would be something of a letdown. She hadn't counted on the ship's computer failing, throwing up error after error in mid-journey. The computer was supposed to be the true brain of the ship, able to fly the spacecraft without a human pilot even placing a hand upon the controls. Yet now, its screen showed only strings of garbage numbers, blinking at them in a distress call.

"No problem. I'll take it from here." That was Ephraim the hard-nosed test pilot speaking, but Eirika again heard that note of glee in his voice at the challenge before them. And a challenge it was; if they plunged toward Terra at the wrong trajectory, it would be the end of them both. Come in too shallow, and they'd bounce off the atmosphere like a skipping stone on a lake. Come in too steep, and they'd be torn apart before they ever reached the ground. In unmanned tests, both fates had befallen more than a few Falcon capsules.

And if the parachutes also decided to fail on them...

"We'll be off-target for the landing, but we'll be alive," Ephraim assured her. The gleam in his eye now looked like pale fire. "Hold on, sister."

Already, Eirika could see flickers of light outside the window, Terra's atmosphere turned to glowing plasma by the force of their reentry. It looked almost like sunrise.

It was the wildest ride of their lives- pressed into their seats by crushing G-forces, first five and then six times Terra's normal gravity. Eirika felt as though a dragon were sitting atop her chest, and beside her Ephraim was grappling with the controls, hissing the substitute swear words that star-sailors were given to use in place of the unrestrained curses of a regular test pilot. Eirika didn't know how Ephraim managed to so much as lift his arms, but even after six days of weightlessness, her brother had the phenomenal strength needed to keep them on course- and the determination needed to keep his head together.

Outside the air was glowing white, like the aura of a saint. But the g-forces were lessening, and Eirika knew they were over the worst of it. There were only the parachutes left to account for...

Then came a crack, followed by a flutter of brilliant cloth visible at the very edge of the window. And then the radio, sputtering back to life- Eirika had nearly forgotten they'd lost contact with the ground control during the descent. She wanted to laugh, then, thinking of Ephraim saying "blast" and "crackers" instead of the words he wanted to use, when nobody but she could have heard them after all.

If the ride out to Luna had provided some jolts, those turned out to be not much at all compared with the force of their landing in the Rausten steppes. She was surprised the capsule didn't crack in two.

"Well, we're off course for sure," Ephraim was saying. "I hope there aren't wolves, but if there are, I do have a gun..."

The tears slipping down her face told Eirika that they were truly home.

To Be Continued...

Author's Note: The pistol comment is not a joke. While U.S. astronauts in the pre-shuttle days came down in the ocean, cosmonauts came down on land, and wolves were indeed an issue.