A / N : Sorry I went AWOL, guys. I work and study full-time, so I don't get as much time to write as I'd like. Trying to fix that.

Amy baby: I love Amy. She's not the main focus of this story by any means, but I've tried to keep her present all the same, and to show her as more than just a promiscuous ditz. I'm glad you think I got her right! You know, I think you're the first person to notice that Fry and Lars both wound up with broken ribs, are both angry at Nibbler, and are both fighting authority structures. Go you!

Graie: Fangirl as much as you want – there's no way I'll mind! That stuff keeps me going. Oh, that chapter with the video tapes was one of my favorite things to write, even though it kind of broke my heart. The bit where he gives the baby his seven-leaf clover might have made me tear up a bit. I'm not ashamed.

Fry kicked back in the passenger seat, yawning as he watched the stars whizz past.

"I spy something beginning with . . . s."

Silence.

"It's not space."

No response.

"It's not stars this time either. I know it was stars the last two times, but this time I swear it's not stars."

He looked sidelong at Glottus. The captain was doing his best to ignore him, but had started to rub his temple with one hand – a sure sign he was getting annoyed.

Fry grinned.

"It's 'ship'! Okay, now you go."

His companion ground his teeth and tugged hard on the gearstick, making the hovervan jump.

"I wouldn't play this game with my four year old daughter," he snapped. "Find something else to do."

"There is nothing else to do," Fry whined. "I'm bored. I can't just sit here while you do all the driving, dude."

Glottus clipped him around the ear.

"Don't call me 'dude'," he instructed. "I may not be your commanding officer but I'll be damned if I let some civilian call me 'dude'."

Fry scowled. He slouched further into his seat, nursing his ear.

"Still bored," he groused.

"Get some sleep."

"I don't want to. Last time I went to sleep I had this dream where I was back in the cryogenics lab and I got hungry, but when I opened the pizza box a Brainspawn jumped out, and then it grew these tentacles and started strangling me like aggghhhhh -" Fry waved his arms wildly - "and you know what the worst part was? I never even got any pizza."

This got a long silence. Glottus scratched his cheek.

"Maybe it's a sign your memory is coming back," he said at last, as he steered them left of an asteroid belt. "Dreams are supposed to be wired to your subconscious, right? Your brain uses them to make sense of everything that happened in your day. I heard that somewhere. If you're dreaming about these Brainspawn, could be your memories are starting to surface again."

Fry frowned.

"I don't know," he mused. "I don't think a Brainspawn could fit in a pizza box."

"I didn't mean it that literally, kid. I meant -"

"It would have to be a really big pizza. Or a really tiny Brainspawn. And in the dream it was pretty big . . ."

Fry waved his arms again, approximating the size of his dream attacker.

"Right."

"And I've never seen a tiny Brainspawn, I mean, they're like, people-sized. If you squashed a person into a big pink jell-o and it floated around in this big bluey-purple haze thing. Aura. Whatever. I think they zap you, like bzzzzzt -"

Glottus groaned. He was kneading his forehead with the knuckles of one hand. His expression was the one Fry's parents used to wear during long road trips with their son.

"I'm gonna take a wild guess here," he said abruptly. "You have ADHD."

Fry blinked.

"How'd you know?"

"Lucky guess. Want me to get you a 'scrip when we next stop? Ritalin? Medical marijuana? Whatever normally shuts you up. It's on me."

"Nah."

"You sure?"

Fry waved a dismissive hand, reaching back into the van for another can of Slurm.

"My parents never let me take prescription drugs. My dad used to say big pharma was in league with the Russians and they were doping up America for the great Commie takeover."

"What?"

"And my mom used to say there was nothing wrong with me cutting down on sugar wouldn't cure."

"We're selling the rest of that soda next time we stop," Glottus decided.

Fry opened his mouth to object and got distracted by a quasar shimmering on the horizon. It was a hazy pale purple; the color reminded him of Leela's hair reflected in the ship's windscreen, when he was staring at her and didn't want her to see.

He fell silent, gazing out at it.

It kept happening. Every time he thought he'd managed to forget about her for a while, something would occur to remind him of Leela, back on Earth. Fry couldn't decide if it helped or hurt to think of her. Mostly it was just weird. The Professor had probably hired a new delivery boy by now. Which meant someone else was probably annoying Leela on deliveries - or maybe not annoying her at all – and someone else was learning her favorite fast food and finding out she was a mutant and watching her let her guard down for the first time. And feeling nothing at all. They wouldn't love her like he did, which felt vaguely unnatural to Fry. Over the years he had come to associate going to work with seeing Leela. It was why he had kept going in, even after she'd gotten married. It was why his job at Planet Express had lasted so long; why the good days had always seemed to outnumber the bad, somehow, whenever he considered quitting. Until recently, anyway.

Another thought struck him. Bender might not be working there anymore either. It wasn't like the robot cared all that much about earning an honest wage, and in recent years his relationship with Leela had become prickly - probably because he'd had to listen to one too many drunken lamentations about her from Fry. (Fry himself was usually too drunk to remember, but more than once he'd woken up after an all-nighter to find the robot glaring daggers at him and sporting a rusty jawline.)

What would be worse, he wondered: if his old life carried on the same without him, or if it fell apart in his absence and left him nothing to come back to? Not that he wanted to go back. Then again, maybe he did. Lately Fry couldn't decide how he felt about that either.

It was only when Glottus started shooting him funny looks that Fry realized he'd been staring at the quasar for twenty minutes in wistful silence.

He sighed. Then his forehead crinkled in thought, as something he'd overlooked before finally trickled through.

"Woah, woah, wait a minute . . . you have a daughter?"

"What?"

"You have a daughter," Fry repeated. "You said you wouldn't play this game with your daughter, so you have a daughter."

Glottus scowled.

"It's a figure of speech."

"Oh. So . . . you don't have a daughter?"

There was a silence, which stretched out uncomfortably. The captain stared ahead, unblinking. Fry got the impression he was seeing something other than the stars.

"I do," he said at last. "I have kids."

Fry felt his stomach dip.

"Um," he said nervously. "They're not . . . um . . . y'know . . ."

"They're not dead."

"Phew!"

"I just haven't seen them since all this started." Glottus dropped down a gear, like he needed time to think. "I don't know if I'll ever see them again."

"Why not?" Fry asked, confused.

Glottus shot him a look like he was crazy.

"I was framed for murder by the most powerful force in the galaxy," he said slowly.

"Okay, but -"

"I deserted from the DOOP."

"So?"

"The penalty for desertion is death, kid."

"Not if you can prove you're innocent," Fry argued. "Not if you can prove it was really the Brainspawn that killed all those people. Then you'd be a hero, and the DOOP would be -"

"The DOOP would be the assholes who couldn't identify a Category One threat, and framed one of their own when he started to investigate," Glottus said flatly. "If you see them owning up to that, you're more naive than I thought."

Fry swallowed.

"But – but -" he sputtered.

"It suits the DOOP better if I'm a dead deserter," the Captain told him. "Of course, that's assuming the brains don't get me first. All in all, my chances of ever seeing home again are pretty slim."

"What about mine?" Fry blurted out. The thought of never seeing Leela again felt like a knife to the gut; like the space bee's stinger sinking in all over again.

Glottus simply shrugged.

"I'll get you home if I can, but I won't swear to it. That's the best I can do. You want to take your chances on your own, you can."

Fry nodded, watching stars and space debris flick past. Somewhere out there the Brainspawn were massing. He was the only one who could fight them, but that was no use unless he knew where to find them. Glottus was right. Some enemies you could charge blindly at, but for some you needed a battle plan – and the only way he could formulate one of those was by gathering all the available information and figuring out what it meant.

His eyes wandered to the golden data nugget around the Captain's neck. On it were the details of every unexplained death the DOOP had encountered in the past two years. Information. That was what he needed. The memories someone had stolen from him were what he really wanted, but for now he'd take what he could get.

"I'll stick with you," he said.

Days turned into weeks, and Fry's life took on a routine. During the day, he and Glottus took it in shifts to drive the newly-disguised hovervan. At night they set up camp somewhere out of the way and went through the reams of data on the DOOP info-key again, painstakingly analyzing two years worth of death and disappearances.

Two weeks in, Glottus figured out how to hack into the DOOP radio frequency, and gave Fry the job of listening to it and writing down anything that sounded like Brainspawn-related activity. In the evening the former delivery boy would hand over his poorly-written notes and the two of them would try to pinpoint the current whereabouts of the brains.

The problem was the hovervan. It was cramped, and creaky, and Fry was sure Glottus had damaged the heating coils when he ran him down in Mars Vegas. But the worst part was that it was slow. As time wore on, Fry found he missed the old Planet Express ship more and more. Journeys that would have taken hours in his old ship now took days or even weeks, and by the time they reached their destination the DOOP had often cordoned it off and they were forced to retreat. Fry was starting to dream of warp drives and dark matter-powered engines.

"Ooh – ow! Trisol!" he said one night.

The piping hot filling of a Fishy Joe's apple pie had just burst into his mouth and burned his tongue, but he ignored it. Instead he stabbed a sugar-dusted finger at the word in his notes.

"What about it?" Glottus asked.

"They said on the broadcast the planet's gone dead. All the people just disappeared one day. Total radio silence. Suspicious, right?"

Glottus stretched his legs out by the fire, groaning.

"Ah, my back . . ." he muttered. "I'm too old for this shit. Alright, alright. Trisol," he mused. "That's not far from here."

Fry risked another bite of apple pie.

"That's what I thought," he said through his food. "We could check it out."

"What makes you think the DOOP won't be all over it?"

Fry grinned.

"Because they're not in the DOOP," he said. "DOOP stands for Democratic Order Of Planets, right?"

"So I'm told."

"Well -" - Fry's grin widened - "Trisol's not a democracy."

The captain looked skeptical.

"You're sure?"

"Absolutely."

"It's not that I'm casting doubt on your intelligence here, kid," Glottus pointed out. "But Trisol is a long way from Earth, and I can't help but notice you're spelling it 'Trysol'."

Fry waved this off.

"So I can't spell it. I can't spell lots of stuff. But I know Trisol. I've been there."

Glottus looked up, startled.

"You have?"

"Sure." Fry gestured at their map of the Brainspawn's movements. "I've been to all these places."

Silence.

"I'm a delivery boy," he explained, when an explanation seemed required.

Glottus was staring him, his mouth hanging slightly open.

"Let me get this straight," the older man said at last. "We've been going over this map for weeks trying to figure out what the Brainspawn want. Looking for some connection. Some reason they target some planets and skip over others."

"Yeah . . .?"

"And you're telling me the connection is you."

"What?" It was Fry's turn to stare. "What are you talking about?"

"Do you know how big the universe is?" Glottus demanded. "Do you know what the odds are of you visiting every place on this list?"

"No?"

"They're pretty damn small!" The captain jabbed the map, his finger hopping from one marker to another as he followed the Brainspawn's trajectory. "Balls, kid. You're the only one in the universe not affected by these things, and it doesn't even occur to you they might be looking for you?"

"No!"

"Why the hell not?"

"I don't know!" Fry struggled for an answer. "I'm not . . . y'know. Important."

Glottus was rubbing his temples again.

"Christ," he muttered.

"You really think they're looking for me?" Fry repeated.

He felt dazed.

"It makes sense." Glottus indicated the map again. "Our first reported disturbance was here, right?" He pointed. "That's where the craft came through, two years ago."

"The anomaly thing. The rip in space."

"Right. That's the first sighting," Glottus continued. "The first deaths. From there they've been moving outward, stopping -" - he tapped the relevant markers - "- anywhere there's a record of you." He stared at the map for a long minute, then smacked it in annoyance. "This still doesn't tell us what they want. You're a threat to their plans, but we still don't know what the hell those plans are."

"We know thinking hurts them," Fry pointed out. "Maybe they want to stop everyone in the universe thinking somehow. Or maybe they just want what the bad guys always want. An evil empire and all that stuff."

"Maybe." Glottus shot him a look. "You still don't remember anything about the second time you fought them?"

Fry shook his head.

"No. All I remember is that it was something to do with Leela, and that doesn't make sense at all."

"Who's Leela?"

"She's . . . uh . . . it's a long story."

"Give me the short version then. Friend, lover, wife, boss . . . what?"

"Um," Fry said weakly. "All of them? I told you, it's a long story." He sighed. "She was my last captain. I fell in love with her."

Glottus raised an eyebrow.

"You do that a lot?"

"No! Just with her. She's . . . you wouldn't understand. I couldn't even make her understand, for the longest time. I'd do anything for her. I love her."

Glottus frowned.

"You think she was in danger? You think you did something to the Brainspawn to keep her safe?"

"I don't know, I don't remember. It's possible, I guess." Fry raised the remains of his apple pie to his lips, preparing to take a bite. An instant later he dashed it to the ground and jumped to his feet, horrified. "We have to warn her!"

"Say what?"

"Leela," Fry stressed. "We have to tell her about the brains! She can't fight them off, and if they want me, they're gonna end up on Earth! I live there! That's the first place they'll go!"

"Easy, soldier." Glottus stood up and forced him down again. "We've got time."

"No we don't! I told you, Earth is the first place they'll go! I live there! The brains -"

"Should be there already," the captain interrupted.

Fry stopped.

"Wait . . . why aren't they? I don't get it."

"I'm not surprised." Glottus sighed. "Tell me kid, how fast do you think these things move?"

"I don't know."

"They have ships?"

"No," Fry said slowly. He tried to remember the time the Brainspawn had come to Earth. "They fly, I think. Like birds. But, uh, they don't have wings."

For the first time, Glottus grinned.

"So what you're telling me is that they move about as fast as this heap of junk." He indicated the beat-up hovervan. "Which makes sense, if they came through here -" - he pointed at the anomaly on the map again – "- and it took 'em two years to get as far as Trisol. They're headed for Earth alright, but they can't move fast enough. They don't have a high-speed spacecraft."

"They could steal one," Fry suggested.

"Maybe not. Maybe there are too many of them to fit in a ship. It would explain how they're decimating whole planets overnight."

"Or maybe they can't fly ships. You know. Because they don't have arms."

"Uh . . . right. Point is, they're moving slow. And stopping anywhere you're documented."

Fry scrunched up his forehead, frowning.

"Isn't that just a big fat waste of time? Why don't they go straight to Earth, and not keep stopping? Seems like it'd make more sense."

Glottus shook his head.

"You're a delivery boy."

"So?"

"So, how many of your deliveries are Earth-based?"

"Oh." Fry's eyes went round. "Oh. Hardly any, I guess."

"Yeah. And how many contract clients do you have?"

"What?"

"People you deliver to on a regular basis," Glottus explained.

"Um. A few? If we don't screw it up."

Glottus nodded.

"Then it makes sense to check out places you've already been."

"But that means Leela's still in danger!" Fry leapt up again, hopping mad. "If the brains think I'm with her, then she's in danger! We have to warn her! If she's still at Planet Express she could go out on a delivery and walk right into a trap! And Bender too, and Amy, and – even Zoidberg!"

Glottus put a restraining hand on his shoulder. Or maybe it wasn't meant to be restraining at all – maybe it was meant to say sorry without the words.

"We can't go to Earth," he said. "We don't have time, and I can't let you walk into a trap either."

I don't care! Fry wanted to shout. They're my friends, I can't let anything happen to them!

"We have to warn them," he said stubbornly.

The captain mulled this over. He didn't seem to like the idea - but he was actually thinking about it, Fry realized. He was taking him seriously.

"One call," he said at last. "After Trisol."

Fry sank slowly to the ground again.

"Okay," he muttered. "After Trisol."

He stared down at the remains of his apple pie, suddenly aware of how hungry he was, and how tired.