Chapter Text
You have to keep moving. That's the only truth you have to cling to these days. Just keep your head down and your feet pointing out of town. Your eyelids are heavy with exhaustion and your nerves are frayed, but you have to keep moving. Can't stay anywhere too long. They're hunting you. Always.
In the small towns you pass through you trade non-essentials from the ship when you can spare it, but often negotiations take too long or you worry your goods are too exotic, too noticeable. You scavenge where you can and steal where you have to. The mission is bigger than any temporary hurt you inflict, and you only take the necessities. Besides, they'll all be gone in a year regardless. You have long given up on capturing the Light of Creation, a lost cause without the support of your team on this hostile world where you've been stranded. And yet… every time you are forced to draw your wand or take a life, you are pained.
But you don't let it break you. You can't or it's all over. Your friends, this world, the universe, every universe - all of it would be consumed, forever. Every sacrifice you had made would have been for nothing. So you only let yourself feel the pain inside. And you steel yourself. And you keep moving.
You never travel more than a day’s walk or ride from the ship, carefully hidden while you work on repairs. You have to be around to care for Fisher. He survived the crash, luckily, and he is your only source of companionship. Sometimes you imagine Magnus’ face brightened with joy and relief at seeing Fisher safe and sound when this is all over. Sometimes it’s only this thought which keeps you sane.
You’ve managed to repair the ship by now, a slow and arduous task you’ve barely managed to scrape together from a few manuals on board and trial-and-error methodology. Every few days you move the Starblaster, silently, in the dead of night, holding your breath, praying to any god or goddess who might be listening that your patch spells don’t wear thin. Just a little longer you think. Just a little longer.
Replacement parts are hard to come by and you can’t get too many from the same town. Usually the people on this dry and withered world with anything worth having protect it fiercely, else they don’t hold on to it for long. Marauding bands of thieves and thugs roam about the gray landscape, pillaging and murdering those they consider weaker. Sometimes you are unlucky and they find you first and you are forced to fight. Other times you set out to find their camps, trading for the rarer elements needed to keep the Starblaster operational.
The men and women of these marauder camps are cruel. The upper-class citizens who live in the bubbled oases look the other way on these barbarians as long as they don’t disrupt their resource supply chains, and even hire them from time to time to track down escaped criminals or round up labor for their factories. Justice is harsh and swift here, as unforgiving as the landscape.
You are forced to disguise yourself, rarely exposing your face. You are a wanted criminal, a name and a face plastered on the bounty boards in almost every town. Your friends are likely dead. You’ve heard others talk about how they treat criminals in the cities, especially the capital. It isn’t kind. It weighs on your soul, knowing you’re the only one left. That everything rests on your shoulders.
You continue to write, chronicling every moment of struggle, every passing and mundane detail in the hopes that this will all mean something, one day. It is dispassionate and factual accounting, a succinct summary of daily events and facts gleaned about the world. The writing keeps you focused on the future. Soon, you tell yourself, this will simply be a chapter in the vast novel of your extended and fantastical lives, a strange detour. An obstacle you overcame. You try to believe that this too will pass, but sometimes you can’t help but think you are writing a eulogy.
Sometimes you sleep in their rooms, just to feel close to them. Wrapped up in Lup’s blankets, safe among Barry’s experiments, nestled in Merle’s flora, it’s easier to feel their spirits cheering you on. Over meager dinners of scavenged sustenance you try to remember the vibrancy of Taako’s meals, Davenport’s excitement over a new discovery, the timber of Magnus’ laugh. In the beginning you often cried, but these days you’re too tired. There isn’t room for tears. You’re too empty. You clean up your dishes and keep moving.