Chapter Text
Prologue
"You can't go two days without telling folks where you come from. Why, if the past ain't important?"
"It's...complicated."
- TAH #157
With the constant relocation their parents’ work foists upon them, USSA brats have to get good at socializing.
New school, new planet, new species – for a lot of kids, the constant movement makes the whole process easier. If they strike out this group, they can try with a new batch eight months later.
So despite the common conception, most USSA brats make friends.
Sparks is not one of them.
He's already a curiosity for being one of the few children of starship captains actually born and based on Earth, not in the air. This makes pretty much everything about his bones and blood and heart wrong for living in space. But Caiaphas got on his high horse about his sons being proper, "Earth-born Americans", and so Sparks is subject to a litany of injections and foul tasting medicines until he's ten, just to make sure he lives. Kids make up all kinds of stories about how his eyeballs are going to pop out, or that he'll go looney and start biting if he's off-planet for too long.
He’s small for his age, and skinny. No good at sports – Stacy blames the asthma he definitely does not have, Caiaphas blames a bad attitude –and no matter how far away they are from a sun, the orange freckles sprayed across his face like an explosion don’t get any fainter. (Carson called him a Jackson Pollock painting, and once Sparks looked up what that meant, he tried to punch him.) Whenever he even thinks about talking to a girl, his throat closes up or worse, won’t, and he starts babbling like a lunatic.
He imitates the way his father talks, in brusque, gravelly asides, hoping it will make the other kids respect him, but it just makes them think he’s weird, mimicking him with crossed eyes every time he walks by – Sparks has Earth Madness!
Carson tries to help. He teaches him to shoot a laser pistol, aiming for the cans he programmed to hover at the end of the USS Indomitable’s hall. He makes Sparks do it again and again until he hits every single one with his eyes closed and draws almost as fast as Carson himself can.
They camp out under the stars and he tells him to be tough, that if people don’t like Sparks that’s their loss. Keep his head down, keep practicing his shooting, and pretty soon people will take notice, and not in the mocking way. That they’re Nevadas and Nevadas are not quitters. They’re from Earth. And that's an advantage, not a shame.
Nobody ever teases Carson, or thinks he's fragile. Tall, broad, and square-jawed like their father, inheriting their mom’s dark, wavy hair. He’s always getting in good with whoever they meet on a new planet. Within days, he’s usually found a girlfriend. Mostly human, but the ones who aren’t, he hides from their father. (Sparks privately thinks his big brother could bring home, like, a boy Martian, and Dad wouldn’t bat an eye as long as he was still the rising star at the academy.) He aces every test, every sim, graduates with the highest honors and an offer to captain his own ship as soon as he gets married.
And then he dies.
Sparks is sixteen, and enjoying a rare month back on Earth. His parents have finally, finally deemed him old enough to stay on-planet by himself. He’s out in the sand dunes, riding his horse in circles so he can practice shooting cans while on the move, when his arm vibrates, an incoming communication from the Indomitable.
If you’re not already outside, get there. We are beaming you up. Urgent.
There was an altercation. That’s was his mother keeps saying, her voice getting tighter and tighter. The ship Carson served as a lieutenant on stepped in to stop a land dispute on Pluto and got tied up in the battle. And Carson, the golden boy who drew faster than anyone, couldn’t beat a Plutonian to the trigger.
Caiaphas spits out every dirty slur for an alien he can think of, Stacy weeps in his arms, and the Indomitable takes off across the solar system to reign hell down on every last Plutonian who took their son from them. There is so much fire, so many barked commands and flashes of light. In the chaos, nobody remembers to send Sparks below deck, but after awhile he can’t look out at the battle anymore. So he stares down at his boots, still caked in sand and dirt. They were hand-me-downs.
There’s a funeral and then a tribunal where his parents are found not guilty of war crimes in their grief-soaked slaughter. His father slams into the family’s living quarters on the ship and presses a USSA acceptance letter into his lap. Sparks understands; Now the burden falls to him.
Going to the academy is like being a kid again, only a thousand times worse. He’s still too thin, freckly and ginger, and his classmates stare at him when they hear his last name. Nevadas are murderers, Nevadas are trouble. Nevadas all get Earth madness. This time, he has no one to protect him, to make him practice hitting back.
So he learns to make himself practice.
He gets gruffer, and the voice doesn't sound so silly now that he's older, stronger, throws out all but one of his inhalers. He cuts his hair close on the sides and learns to take a gun apart and put it back together in thirty flat. He reads everything he can get his hands on, mountains of paperwork logged from old missions, near-escapes, no-escapes. He runs through the simulations again and again, even after all the administration buildings are closed and a janitor has to kick him out.
He meets Mercy Laredo when they're both twenty, and she’s his first everything, all in one night. He comes on too strong, grinds against her too hard, does everything too much with an energy that borders frenzied. He wants to reach up and pull the sky down on top of them as they fuck, bury them in the stars.
They’re lying on their backs after, still naked and breathing hard, when Mercy tells him he’s a bad kisser. He snaps back that he’s only been doing it for about an hour – and has himself a panic in the vein of Please Don’t Tell Anyone. She just smirks, pins down his wrists, and his hips snap up to meet her’s for another round. He likes practicing this, too.
Life becomes something like good, a binary of playing hero in the simulators and having sex with Mercy back in the real world. He gets better grades than anyone in his year. His reports are impeccable. He learns how to properly go down on a woman. People still think he’s weird, but now it’s because he’s intense and grouchy and fills out his jackets. Nobody mentions his family. Nobody is surprised when he's chosen to act as captain in their class's no-win scenario final; it's a clear dry run, almost a formality, before the USSA gives him a ship of his own.
And then everything goes to shit.
He’s standing behind the command center, alarms blaring, lights flashing. Mercy is shouting at him, so are his other classmates, the comms are jammed, the bad guys closing in. He says it’s fine. Mercy tells him their chances of survival are .0001%. He still says it’s fine. His fake crew starts walking out the real door, and his feet are glued to the floor. He doesn’t see the simulated window in front of him, but the gray, battered surface of Pluto, feels the room shaking around him, because he can’t give up, he can’t just let him die–
Someone from the observation deck – he finds out fifteen years later it was his mother - slams the ABORT SIM button, and the entire room goes dark. He closes his eyes and finds them wet.
When his parents come into his dorm a few hours later, his father gives him an uncharacteristically gentle pat on the head. They talk about no-win scenarios. They argue about his future, retaking the exam. Caiaphas asks him if he wants to end up working on some podunk planet for the Coalition.
Nobody actually wants to say the words, “froze up” and “flashback” and “Carson”, so they fight about his grades instead.
The minute they leave, Sparks throws his clothes into his bag, sends Mercy a goodbye, and slips out into the night. He goes back to the desert, and falls asleep in his old boots. They’re a little too tight, now. But the dirt sticks to them.
He couldn’t be the perfect, pragmatic soldier. He was never going back to being the weakling who needed someone else to save him. There had to be somewhere in the middle where he fit. Where he could grow his hair out, but still outdraw anyone he met. Be the hero, in the black-and-white, save-everybody-with-no-exceptions kind of way. To be the kind of man Carson was. But better. One that stays suspicious and stays alive.
He stays out in the sun and lets it warm his bones, gives himself an entire day and night to be missing, and to miss his brother. After that, he freezes up that part of his heart, lets it calcify and spend it’s days ignored. His boots fill up with sand. He lets them get as dirty as they can, and then never wears them again.
Nevadas aren't quitters, they're adapters. They're survivors. They're... from Earth.
The boots break several health code violations when he brings them on the ship to Mars seven years later.
Red, a friend like him just when he’d given up hope, asks why he always brings up where he’s from, not where he is. Sparks finds his hand drifting to touch them where they live in the bottom drawer of his desk.
“It’s… complicated.”