CHAPTER 1-3
Phoenix

Washing dishes in an environmentally conscious manner while camping was something Phoenix had never before given even the remotest thought to, but was, he soon learned, a surprisingly complicated process, involving heating a large pot of biodegradable soap and water from a nearby creek over the campfire until it was toasty warm, removing every last scrap of food from the dishes before submerging them in the pot, the scrubbing of them that he had already expected, and then the scattering over a wide area, far from the campsite, of the dishwater's remnants.

Because he was following all of Áthas' directions very carefully, it wasn't until the midst of this latter task that he was finally able to stop paying such close attention to what he was doing and instead pay closer attention to the person he was doing them with.

He had been busy wracking his brain for a good conversation starter, as they had been mostly handling the evening's dishes in silence, save Áthas' directions or his occasional questions, but she got there first.

"So, from the Empire, huh?" she inquired.

They were some thirty feet into the woods to dispose of the dishwater; it was amazing just how much darker it was in here than out on the beach, all because of some tree cover. Thankfully, the half moons were almost directly overhead, and provided enough light to see by.

"I don't recall mentioning being from the Empire," he replied carefully. One never knew which direction such a topic could go in the Republic. Most Republican citizens, entirely justifiably, he thought, looked upon Imperials as dangerous xenophobes, at best.

"No, but your accent, and your brother's name, and - wasn't there something else? - ah yes, the Imperial Zoid you arrived in, have rather tipped your hand for anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention." Phoenix had thought that the evidence of his upbringing in his speech would have mostly faded by now, between living in the Republic for several years, and working diligently to adopt its peculiar accent, which still sounded a bit foreign to him even after all this time. So much for that notion. "So, what brings you here?"

"We're refugees," Phoenix said, and left it at that. This answer was usually sufficient to both render someone less suspicious of him as well as discourage further questioning that would approach uncomfortable topics like desertion, and it worked again now, for Áthas took a different tack.

"If you could go back home, and be able to live there safely, would you?"

This was a question no one had ever asked him before. He stopped walking, the pot of dirty dishwater bumping gently against his leg and then stilling. Áthas splashed the cup of dishwater she'd been holding in a wide arc into the dense foliage on the side of the path, then turned towards him when he didn't immediately reply.

Phoenix had never stopped thinking of Schönberg, had never stopped dreaming of it in all the years he'd been gone, and if his brother's occasional unconscious mumbles in the wee hours were anything to go by, Heinrich hadn't, either. Phoenix's heart ached terribly for his family's house, the tiny details of it that were all etched into his memory forever: the arrangement of the furniture in each room, which of the staircase's steps creaked and must be avoided when sneaking out at night, the view from every window on both floors, the sound the wind made around the eaves during a storm.

His dear friend Willow had told him, once, about how it had felt to say goodbye to the vast spaceship that had brought her here to this planet from the other side of the galaxy. The ship had crash landed on Zi's surface, all systems failing at once from the violence of its sudden arrival. She had spent her entire life up until that moment aboard it, known intimately its every inch, and yet, when it came time to bid it farewell for good, she had understood that though it still stood before her in the desert twilight, it was functionally already gone. Something had been lost in the crash that would never be coming back.

And so, Phoenix knew that even if he were to return to his house, even if somehow every last detail were still exactly as he had left it nine years ago, it wouldn't matter: the house that had harbored him for the first eighteen years of his life was gone.

The Empire was directly responsible for those seven painful years of separation from Heinrich. And his parents, and almost everyone else he'd ever known, had died in the cataclysm, anyway. What was there to return to, even if he could somehow magically go back completely shielded from the consequences of his desertion of the military?

"No, I don't think I would," he said at length. "I'll miss it there for the rest of my life, but many things are better here, in the Republic. And sometimes, no matter what you do or how hard you try, you just can't go back to what was."

"I know what you mean," Áthas said with a faraway look into the darkness surrounding them. Phoenix immediately sensed that there was a story there, but he did not wish to pry, and so remained silent. "Anyway," she continued, brightening, "I'm glad to have you both with us. I really look forward to getting to know everyone over the next week."

"Me too."

Áthas peeked into the pot he was carrying, and evidently decided there was little enough left to dispense with all at once, for she took it from him and tossed its contents into the undergrowth, where it landed with a loud splash. "There, that wasn't so bad, was it?" she asked him with a cheeky grin over her shoulder as she turned for the beach. "Being my helper?"

No.

No, it was not.