Chapter Text
sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name
There is a ship. She is an old ship, birthed by a civilization none yet living can remember. She has been changed and damaged and modified and repaired many times, nearly unrecognizable now, though the same heart beats within her. Nine hearts, to be precise; each one unique, each one essential. Beating in tandem, beating out a rhythm that carries countless stories across the stars on the silk-thin thread of a spider's web.
Each of her hearts have been broken, countless times over. None of her hearts are whole. But neither are they alone. Each heart completes the others, takes the place of something unnoticed but lacking. And so her heart is a snarling chimera inside of her, as incompatible as it is inseparable.
The ship understands that her hearts have legs. They need to wander just as much as she does, need to see the stars and the stories for themselves. It does not make them any less a part of her, to be separated by time and space. And so she feels as her hearts come and go, dancing in their inscrutable orbits of narratives and nebulae. They always return to her in the end.
For the ship is the heart of her hearts, the gravity well from which they cannot escape. As much as they hurt each other, as much as they bicker and fight and hate and kill, they will come back to each other, and to her, for they have no one else. This is what family is, she thinks. She does not tell her hearts this. She knows they must learn it for themselves.