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He recalls his life on earth like polaroids strung up in his quarters, little squares pinned on white strings that crisscross back and forth to weave a web of latticed memories.
At the end of a long, exhausting day when he could still taste the tang of blood behind his teeth, Slaine imagined all of these earthly memories strung up high and blotting out his ceiling, a reminder of how the bulk of the life he’s yet to spend still tilted toward the blue planet Earth rather than dry red Vers. But they’re all a complete jumble, his memories, for he rarely remembers events in a linear way, and sometimes, now more frequently than before, when he reaches out and plucks for a memory it’s only to discover that the film has split and broken open, the chemicals inside blotting out the images which had been captured perfectly there before.
Early childhood is a mysterious fog, a lost cause, the negatives nowhere to be found, the faces of his schoolmates blurred to indistinction, the voice of his favorite landlady frayed beyond recognition. These are the lost things he knows he will never rediscover through shared stories or the nostalgia of passing through a familiar route. There’s no one to tell him how he spent the fifth summer of his life, whether or not he was a precocious child or a somber one, or what his mother might’ve looked like. He’s forgotten the shape of her face long ago. Impermanence and travel had accompanied him as far as he could cast back his memories. The Troyards were always moving from city to city in the pursuit of knowledge, Slaine butting up against language barriers and the oft impassable wall of the transfer student versus the murmuring classroom to the point where, one day, he simply insisted on doing all of his schooling at home and his father had sighed as if the saved tuition and commuting fees was a long-awaited blessing.
Slaine knows he’ll never see earth again in the same way as he did in the past, full of home and wonder. He doesn’t see it with the fondness that a typical Terran might view it. At this point, several years into his life on Vers, steeped in politics and buoyed by the Princess’s grace, he knows he’s truly a bastard of two worlds who belongs to neither. And he wonders if he should feel more perturbed about that, or feel something more than a slight pain in his chest that fades in mere moments. Perhaps he’s too tired to dredge up any bitterness tonight.
He wishes he could just fall asleep at the drop of a hat instead of lying awake grasping for things in the mist and winning sleeplessness instead, wasting away in the darkest hours of space. He’s tired enough to sleep, weariness buffeting him from every angle. Yet restlessness keeps him afloat when he’d rather sink.
But there were those other times… Other times he could turn an old memory around his fingers as if it was a coin. Singular, poignant snapshots of childhood came to him too. Nice ones. Ones that were so vivid that he could recall what a real, natural breeze felt like as it whispered over his skin, or how the sunlight slanted in through the public library window he stayed at all day long when they lived in Prague and his father was out digging through archives, or the bone white crunch of salt littering the sidewalks in the steep winters of North America. The taste of good water. The smell of rain thrown into the air. Foods different every day and everywhere.
(Did he notice all these quantitative things before
or was it Versian lust burning through his veins?)
Yet of it all Slaine best remembers his father’s hands and how they fit snugly around his own, big and sturdy as they walked the streets with crowds parting around them. Those same competent hands fumbled around a butter knife while spreading jam onto slices of bread, always smearing too much into overflowing sandwiches that bled out sweet jam with every bite, their rare picnics the only times when Slaine thinks he can recall the bass of his father’s laughter.
When burdened with work his father’s fingers scrambled through piles of papers and clattered over computer keys until night fell and Slaine would sneak down the hall on soft toes. Hold onto the office door frame and peer in to see the man lit by the fire of the sunset filtering in the window behind him and the sickly glow of the computer screen before him, nothing but clack clack clack! filling up the blackened void. Father looked like a ghost sitting there. Dark and stooped and so fleetingly seen that Slaine learned how to balance on a stool and prep his own dinner with things pulled down from the cupboard.
Then there were the mornings when a broad hand came ruffling through Slaine’s hair as Dr. Troyard was on his way out the door to a meeting or to see a colleague or to present his findings to a society.
After that those fingertips became ghosts too, haunting him with craved affections.
He cards his hand through his own hair now, the strands still damp from his earlier washing, but even when his nails scrape lightly against his scalp he can’t quite conjure up the same feeling. His own fingers are too slim. His nails are in need of cutting. He feels all too aware of his own body but continues self-soothing until his arm aches too much to keep the angle. Tired, Slaine lets his eyes slip closed with a sigh, shutting out the white polaroids in favor for the more tantalizing black hidden beneath his eyelids. The abyss of space was a comfort by now, no longer a frightening thing like it had been in the months after he crashed through in a cramped rocket, choking on liquid oxygen when it had been… it had been…
“Oh,” he breathes, realization hitting him like a hand on his chest, forcing the air from his sternum in one blow. He must have forgotten with all the recent commotion. The Princess’ aspiration to travel to earth, the constant trials of living under Count Cruhteo’s care… A brittle laugh trickles from his mouth, half-relieved that he’s finally scraped at the source of his melancholy. He tosses onto his side, blinking his eyes open in the murky lighting. There is no calendar sitting on the bedside stand, only a slim blank tablet, but Slaine can imagine the date circled in red – January 11th – and he laughs again, sound muffled against the pillow he lays his face on.
It’s his birthday.
He’s sixteen years old.