Work Text:
Eva tries, more than once, to explain.
Because here’s the thing: space is vast. Time is vast. And it is quite literally impossible for the human mind to conceive of that vastness.
Yes, there are comparisons: if the history of the world was a year then humanity would be around for a single second, if the sun was a basketball then Earth could dance on the head of a pin, so on and on. But the truth is that no human mind can comprehend distances that large.
And that’s before you bring in relativity. Traveling between planets, a generation can pass in the blink of an eye. It can take eternity to traverse a grain of sand.
Eva tries to tell this to reporters, time and again, when they demand to know why she’s not worried.
It’s been a year, they say. It’s been three years. It’s been five. It’s been a decade. Shouldn’t he be back by now?
No, Eva says. Not necessarily.
Visser One traveled from Earth to Leera, to Anati, to Sleegab 5, to Madra and Enceladus, and so Eva did as well. Eva may not fully understand the sheer enormity of the distance separating Earth from Kelbrid space, but she has more of an inkling than anyone who has never left the planet.
Traveling through z-space is like being an ant on an oak leaf, Eva tells Peter. Peter, unlike CNN, actually has a prayer of understanding.
Sometimes, just sometimes, if you walk to the outermost edge of the leaf, you can leap clear into the air just long enough to land on a leaf of the next tree over. All that distance disappearing in an instant. Sometimes the slightest capricious breath of wind will stir the tree you’re on, or the next one over, and leave the inches between those two leaves insurmountable. If you’re an ant, you could spend half your entire life running down the twigs and branches and trunk of your own tree and only make it to the right leaf of the next tree over after near-infinite searching.
That’s what it’s like to hop from Earth to Mars by way of z-space.
Marco and the others? They’re an entire forest away by now.
Maybe a lucky breath of wind will carry them home. Maybe that breath of wind will even occur sometime in the remaining decades of Eva’s life…
But she knows not to count on it.
“So you think your son is still alive, then?” today’s young reporter says. He holds out his microphone for Eva to use.
“I think that I’m never going to know,” she answers. “I do like to believe that someday I will see him again, but I probably never will.”
The reporter’s forehead distorts with wrinkles, cracking his makeup. “And you’re satisfied with that?”
She’s probably ruining his simple story, Eva thinks. He wants a yes-or-no answer. The public wants a yes-or-no answer.
“I understand that that’s just how it is sometimes,” Eva says.
“But don’t you want to know for sure?”
My father loved me very much, Eva considers telling this young man, and he loved my mother even more. My father loved us both so very much that he kissed me on the forehead when I was eight years old, put my hand in my mother’s, and gave his last hundred dollars to see us safe across the Rio Grande into the U.S. It made sense. The border-patrolling weekend warriors would be less likely to murder a woman and child arriving alone.
This was before cell phones or email. Before any of us could afford airfare or bus tickets. He never spoke to either one of us ever again, and he knew that that would be the case when he hugged me goodbye and told me to be good.
“Wanting a thing badly is not enough to make it so,” she says instead.
"Then you do want to find out what happened to your son."
"Of course." Eva looks the camera in the eye. "Of course."
"But then..."
The reporter waits for her to fill the gap. She waits for him to finish waiting for her. She is terribly patient; she always wins.
“This ceremony must seem premature to you,” the reporter prompts.
Eva almost smiles then, thinking of Cassie’s snappy retort to the same question. (“Statues are for dead people," she'd said, a five-word public statement. She won't be making an appearance today. Good for her.)
“My son did a lot of good,” Eva tells this young man, tells NBC, tells the world. “More than most people ever accomplish in a lifetime. It is right that he should be recognized for it. Jake Berenson and the others as well.”
“Yes, but…” The reporter pauses, searching for a question that will produce a sound bite from her. “But you really think you’ll never see him again?”
Now Eva does smile, a little sadly. “I think that if we try to do our best in this life, we will be reunited with those we love on the other side of death.”
“Thank you,” the boy says. Just slightly condescending. Thinking her delusional.
Eva nods, once again certain that she has communicated little and accomplished nothing. No matter. She knows that she does not live in a world with happy endings and achieved dreams.
She knew every time she hugged Marco goodbye and told him to be good — in the taxxon caverns during Visser One’s trial, outside the hork-bajir valley before the final battle, on the airfield next to the Rachel while Jake and Tobias looked politely away — that she might be doing so for the last time. She accepted that possibility because she had no choice.
Peter steps up to take her arm as they walk into the banquet hall. His arm is warm against hers through the thin fabric of his coat. He's no better than she is at making them see. At translating so much complexity, so many hopes and longings, into words that the listeners at home will actually understand.
The dedication of this statue is meant to honor the ten-year anniversary of the day all four male Animorphs were declared missing, presumed dead. It’ll be a long ceremony, tasteful and discrete on its surface but aimed straight at the press in spirit. Eva’s black sheath dress and comfortable flats reflect both realities.
The usher seats them next to where Jean and Steve Berenson are half-curled in silent grief.
Interview those two, Eva thinks. They spill over with grief. Those two probably gave reporters the voyeuristic pain the country wants.
Immediately she feels disgust with her own lack of compassion. No one ever warned them what the world is like, after all. They did not live their lives simply knowing that they would one day say goodbye to their loved ones forever, if not one way then another. Their lives were not like Eva's; nothing prepared them.
Jean stares into space, expression hard, face that of a woman twice her actual age. Steve presses into her side, shoulders shaking. They’ve buried both their sons now.
No. Buried is too kind a word. Their children are gone, swallowed into the void of space, leaving behind no bodies to dress, no shiva to sit, no ritual of returning to the earth.
Knowing Jake as she does, Eva suspects he didn’t even bother to say goodbye. It might have been a kindness in its own way to avoid prolonging his parents’ agony. She’ll never ask to know for sure. Never tell Jean or Steve or even her own Peter that she, of all of them, had the chance to hold her child one last time and tell him how proud she is of the man he’s become.
The lack of closure is not a kindness for them.
Not the way it is for Eva. Eva who secretly, foolishly, chooses to remember the wide-eyed little boy who tugged her hand nearly hard enough to pull her over when bringing her outside to show her the rock he found, the brilliantly competent young man who laughed at his own jokes and burned down the world to save her from the yeerks.
Eva who chooses to hope that somewhere out there in the vast void, he is even now living and laughing and trying to come home.