Chapter Text
“You are a fucking disgrace.”
No.
“A liability. They should have sent me on my own!”
No.
“Rank number one? You never deserved that!”
NO.
“I’m going to do what you can’t seem to; I’m going to end this, and, if you decide not to join me, I’m going to end you too.”
Stop.
“Believe me when I say - I don’t mind what decision you come to.”
STOP IT.
I reach for Lime, but the doors to Medbay close, and I brush only metal.
***
“I met your father on a mission.” My mother wraps her arms around me, drawing me into her lap. Her fingers are in my hair. “I was infiltrating one of their Stations out on Pollux, been there for a month already.”
She pauses, the nails of her hand catching my skin. I weasel my way closer to her, biting the questions on my tongue, the need to know what ‘Infiltrating’ even meant, and how far Pollux was. If I speak, the story will be over. I don’t want the story to be over.
“He was - ah - he was very different from me. After we met, he would stop by the office I was stationed in, asking me to lunch, or to check the lava with him - to watch the stars pass overhead.
Something wet drops onto my shoulder. I try to brush it away, and my mother tightens her grip on me, stopping me from moving. “You look like him, you know. You look just like him.”
“Mama - I ca-”
“Shh, baby, it’s alright.” Her fingers are claws. My shoulder grows damper. “When I received directives for my mission, I knew I only had one option and I did not hesitate.” Her voice drops into a whisper. “I killed him first.”
“Wha-”
“No, no, shh. Baby, I need you to remember this. I need you to remember that there is always more than one option.
“I did not want him to see me become the monster, you know. I wanted him to die with the memory of my love on his lips. I wanted him to die while he still loved me. Oh, I was a fool. Please don’t be a fool, my child.”
***
The door to medbay slides open. As I am still standing, frozen with my fingertip to the surface, the motion almost makes me fall. Green reaches out a hand to catch me but I am faster, now, finding my balance one step back, so that it is Green standing there with her arm out straight.
My heart gives a pathetic thump at the sight of her. A rush of - surprise, confusion, relief - something steals my clarity, and I simply stare at her, mouth slightly agape. At least Lime can’t get her
yet.
“I came… to check on you,” she says at last. Her arm retreats slowly back to her body as she speaks, wrapping around the ever-present plant pot. The plant looks sad, its leaves drooping over the rim of its pot. “Lime… Lime isn’t here?”
I gesture around the room, shaking my head.
“Good. You shouldn’t have been left alone with them. What if they’d murdered you?!” Her enthusiasm draws her closer to me, so close I can see the blush spread across her face through the helmet. So close that I can feel the warmth of her through our suits. So close, I can hear the hitch in her breath as she realises, when she pulls away and around and off into the room.
“What about Pink?” I ask.
“Who?” She looks at me over her shoulder. A fleeting glance.
“Pink. You left Pink alone with Black.”
“Oh? Oh! Oh, no, not really.” Green clears her throat, dropping her gaze to the floor. “I guess I didn’t really think about it. Maybe I should…” She pauses. Her silence feels like a gun at my temple, making demands of me that I do not understand. It lasts an indescribable time. I cannot move, and Green does not either, like moving would break something important. Then, in a single breath, she says, “Doyouthinkitsme?”
I drop my head to my shoulder. “Excuse me?”
“The Imposter. You said that anyone could be… could be one, didn’t you?”
I still don’t follow, and Green, in the moment that I take to try, falls to the floor, placing the plant gently in the cross of her legs so she can cradle her head in her hands. I take small steps forward, coming to a stop in front of her, towering over her kneeling form. I, too, kneel.
“I could be the Imposter, couldn’t I?”
I almost laugh. Green? An Imposter? The Academy would surely have eaten her alive. But she peeks at me between her gloves, and I do not laugh. “You’re still you,” I answer.
“How would you know? You don’t know me!” She sucks in a breath. “Maybe I came here so I could kill you! I wouldn’t be able to stop myself! That would explain why I followed you, I wasn’t even thinking about following you, and yet, here I am! Doesn’t that prove it? I-”
I feel my teeth crunch together. I grab her hands and pull them away from her face, forcing her to look at me, only me. “Do it.”
“What?”
“Do it.” I pull my knife free from its sheath, place it in the palm of her hand exactly the way my mother had given me my first one, and close each of her fingers around the hilt one by one. She tries to pull away, but my hold is too strong. I bring the blade edge to my throat. “Kill me.”
“No! What? Are you crazy?”
The blade slips a little between us. It snags in my suit. “You said you were here to kill me, so stop hesitating and do it.”
Green mouths a scream. She tries to pull away again, and I let her go. She scurries to put distance between us, that knife still clenched in her fist, pointed towards me.
“See,” I say. “You cannot be the Imposter.”
I hear her whisper the words, a murmur of disbelief. When she looks at me, really looks at me, the murmurs quieten, and she drops her arm. I watch her with my head cocked to the side.
“I’m sorry,” she begins. “I just - I thought. Anyone could be the imposter, you said and, I thought, why wouldn’t it be me? It would make sense, wouldn’t it? I never fit in with my family, and then my tutor hated me just because I happened to trip up inside the greenhouse; she could not wait to nominate me for this excursion, with all these broken wires and murderers - she clearly was never expecting me to come back! But maybe that was all a ploy and…. Why do you have a knife?”
I feel a bubble of - laughter, horror, sickness - creep up my throat, and I try, desperately to keep it from spilling past my lips. It’s a gift, I think. My mother is an avid hunter. The truth of it should make it easier to say, but it becomes tangled in the mess inside my mouth, and so, what comes out is, “I am the Imposter.”
Green snorts. “Oh, that’s real funny. Think of that on the fly did you?” She turns the knife over in her hands, watching the light reflecting off of it’s surface. There are no traces of our sins etched into the blade, the dullness of its use and the splatter of blood long since cleaned away. That’s not what she’s looking for. She doesn’t know to look for it. “Is this really yours?”
“Yes.”
She nods. “And you’ve killed people with it? Because you’re the Imposter, right?”
I wet my lips. “Yes.”
She nods again, and holds the knife out to me, blade pointed towards her body. “So do it.”
“What?”
She reaches for my hand, but I move back before she can. “You won’t?” I can hear her smile, tipping her words up.
The right thing would be to take the opportunity presented to me. There isn’t anyone to suspect me, no-one to know that Green came here, when I should have been with Lime. And, still, I keep myself from accepting the knife, backing away from her so that she can’t bring reason back. Don’t be a fool.
There is always another option.
Green lets me escape, dropping her arms back to her sides. “See?” She says. “You’re not the Imposter either.”