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I.
Open spaces… bother him.
First rule of thieving: always watch your exits. He isn’t thieving right now—he’s running errands, haggling over a carburetor at a market stall—and yet his mind still keens at the lack of cover. He hasn’t memorized this street’s layout; the people rushing around him are strangers. Where are his escape routes? Who—what—might be watching, waiting to strike?
He blinks—and his feet have taken him somewhere dark and quiet. An alley, one he’d researched yesterday. He slumps against brick siding, tethered to the world by the carburetor’s cool metal against his palm, until he can breathe again.
II.
He washes dishes while the others eat family breakfast. Their laughter floats in from the dining room, soothing the frayed edges of his thoughts. He shouldn't join them. There’s too much cluttering his mind—the burner comms’ lead weight in his pocket, the red light bathing the ship’s common spaces as they pass Proxima Centauri, the smell of sizzling bacon. He’d kill the atmosphere. Besides, save for Juno, they don’t talk to him much anyway.
He may not be part of Buddy’s family, but he has a place there, for now, as long as he makes himself useful. So he cleans.
III.
Peter Ransom was born March twentieth to a Venusian shipping magnate. His sheltered upbringing gave him a taste for reductionist politics and caviar. He steals out of boredom.
Peter Nureyev knows the others believe these things as far as they can throw him—that it’s why they keep him at a distance. This is intentional. If they examine his mask and find ego and greed, they won't bother to look deeper.
They’re good people—and so, even as he shakes from three days without sleep, he won’t drag them into his mess. Not when they’d endanger themselves trying to help a traitor.
IV.
“Look at me, kid,” Mag says. Nureyev is thirteen; as the smoke from the blast next door clears, his mentor is coaxing him out from the crawlspace beside the gutter. “As long as you’re with me, you’re safe. You hear?”
A few silent moments pass. “That’s not true,” Nureyev says. “You can’t know that for sure.”
“Well,” Mag quirks a smile, “I suppose you’re right. No one’s ever truly safe, are they? Especially here.” The stench of burning meat lingers. “You’ll just have to trust I can keep you safer than you are alone. Can you do that for me?”
V.
His room, despite the mess, doesn’t take long to pack up. Stray papers slide into Rita’s shredder; the laundry covering his floor finds a home in the trash chute. Nureyev collapses onto the mattress, planning a new identity to slip into.
He’s not foolish enough to believe that wrapping himself in an alias makes him untouchable, or that airtight research lacks room for mistakes. But he’ll be alone soon. They’re the only defenses he’ll be able to rely on, then.
It was a nice illusion while it lasted—having a family to protect him again. Even if it wasn’t really his.
VI.
Juno is already snoring when Nureyev pushes open the door to his quarters.
He’s reminded of the last place he felt safe without pretense: a Martian hotel suite, years ago. It was a feeling brought on then by exhaustion and naivety and blood loss, one he’s usually able to dismiss his childish desires for. But now, one night away from losing everything, he’s weak enough to crave that feeling again—to pretend that one person can somehow shield him from the entire galaxy.
The goddess of protectors, he muses, sliding under the covers and settling—perhaps for the last time—in Juno’s arms.