Work Text:
Elliott still dreams of Earth sometimes.
Most of it was during his first days off the planet. Like waking up after a long move, and forgetting for a moment that they weren’t still at the last campsite they’d called home.
He dreams he’s on Earth and it doesn’t feel like coming back to anything. It’s definitely not like coming home. In his dreams, every so often, he’s still on Earth and it really just feels as if nothing has changed. Though that stops making sense as soon as he wakes up and thinks about it, because in his dreams Mo is usually there, not to mention the Hive, or Mrs. Argolis, or his smartwatch from that one cool shop in Centrium City…the list goes on and on. The longer he stays on the Centrium, the more new memories start to meld with the old.
Maybe this is what it means to finally settle down somewhere: dreaming of school halls and neighborhoods that he knows by heart for once, letting them take the place of the blurry, never-set memories that used to be “home”. That the neighbors come from different worlds, or that those school halls teach alien anatomy and starship physics, makes less of a difference by the day. It’s still home. Lately, Elliott finds himself knowing some parts of Centrium life better than any campsite, town, or school district he’d ever been a part of. And his preference has become infinite.
When he dreams of Earth, he’s not upset to wake up and realize it’s no longer reality. He’s not even startled. Sometimes, he knows it before waking up in the first place. There’s some things that stepping into the transport sphere meant unexpectedly saying goodbye to, things that once upon a time would be hard to imagine gone: McDonald’s restaurants by every highway exit, reruns of Jeopardy and Family Feud, the planet’s constellations in the nighttime sky. But it was nothing he couldn’t live without. And besides, the Centrium, in all its huge and multicultural glory, could provide some surprisingly close alternatives. He even, dare say it, liked hot dogs from space better.
It’s just a little strange. Anything before this new home seems so other. Somehow, the pre-Centrium days seem to be a lifetime ago. Back then, he was a human among humans, and yet many days so isolated in it. Now, in a way, the opposite.
But in those dreams, he watches as two separate acts of his life, light-years apart, start to overlap.
It’s become a bit of a reminder for him. Something to stay mindful. In there, for once, it’s not then versus now, not “back on Earth” or “here on the Centrium”, it’s just everything. His life. It tells him, in his sleep, that even through all those years of moving, and one fateful day of crossing space itself, he’s still the same person. It tells him, when he wakes, that the young face in the mirror is still that of an earthling. Even up there in the stars, even when he’s not looking back at it, he always carries Earth with him.
Frankie dreams of Earth rather often. Like, weirdly often.
Most nights, she has the same sorts of dreams that she did before leaving the planet. Dreams of everyday life, in campgrounds, at university halls, along the highway. Usually her dreams back then weren’t all that strange, actually. And now, in comparison, they seemed terribly mundane. Her waking life has become far more surreal than any dream.
On Earth, she’d spent her waking hours so split between her research and her son that both got equal prominence in her sleep. Sometimes—too often—she’d dream of having some sort of discovery regarding the meteorite. Something that could finally push her investigations somewhere, that made her want to shout for joy into the great craters she studied, that made her want to never open her eyes.
All just for her to then groggily wake up.
And at that point she would realize it was never real, and also made no sense. So she’d brew some coffee, wash it away, and start another day of trying to make the dream true.
But the weird thing is, even after some time up here on the Centrium, she still dreams about it. As soon as she falls asleep, the clock turns back, and the present unravels perfectly. She’s on Earth again, investigating impact craters and iridium traces as if nothing had ever changed. As if she’s still looking for the slightest sign of an answer about the rock.
And maybe she is. Sure, they’d had the biggest, most life-changing breakthrough possible, but after one step forward it all literally turned to stone again. She’s back to waiting and wondering, not unlike all that time on Earth, while the Head’s searcher droids comb the biosphere far away. It leaves her, and her shallow dreams, restless.
She can never think about it too much. That’s true of most things these days. If she does, her entire life starts feeling ridiculously fake, a bargain-bin movie her son snagged at a gas station. The house is just special effects; the food is all cheap props.
In some ways it’s easy to adjust, at least to the parts that sort of resemble a life on Earth. She can tell the kids to get ready for school, look for a job, take a trip to the mall. But if for a single moment she considers too deeply the odds of all of this, of even just one detail—how about the fact that “the kids” includes a talking dinosaur?—then everything starts to break down. Sometimes it’s all she can do to refuse any questions but the most immediate.
The first night in the habitation pod had included what felt like a solid two hours of touching the hard coffee table, the fuzzy couch fabric, the never-cold-enough water from the sink. She’d barely graze them with the pads of her fingers, allowing only the slightest sensory input, like any pressure would pull the whole place back into whatever unseeable shimmer had printed it into being. Just to make sure that she was really there, and that it wasn’t all some eccentric coma.
But nope. By now she’s certain. She knows for sure whenever she’s awake; it’s only in her sleep that the veil between believable old and unbelievable new starts to blur things back together. Then every time she wakes up, everything comes crashing back into its precarious new shape, reminding her with a bang that this is real life, her life. It’s a little less of a shock every time, and it will certainly be gone later…but for now, the shock has stayed.
The amount of time she’s been on the Centrium is a tiny fragment compared to all the rest of her life. Earth, thirty-six years; the Centrium…a few weeks. And although change is something she’s quite familiar with, a given and a necessity, she wasn’t quite molded by it like her son was. Especially not change she isn’t in charge of. Change she can’t somehow prepare for.
It’s going to take some time.
Mo insists he had a dream about Earth.
It’s a little perplexing at first. Mostly since Mo, as far as he can remember, has never been there. And especially considering that all his knowledge of Earth is entirely secondhand. Everything he knows about it is either assumed, imagined, or seen in dusty DVDs copied from human memories. It’s not even something he thinks about much, not without someone else bringing it up first.
Maybe sometimes, though. Maybe occasionally he’d wonder about it, about how it was his home planet and he still knew so little, in thoughts stomping restlessly about just before he fell asleep. But most of the time, that was all. Hardly enough to put together any questions. And he’d always forget by the time he woke up.
But this time he’d actually had a dream about it! He’d dreamt that he was on Earth and it felt just like how the real thing probably is. And he’s so excited to tell Elliott, because it was Elliott who had taught him all about it, after all. So at lunch, over trays of neon-colored cakes and some sort of spicy-smelling slime, he brings it up between bites and eagerly waits for the response.
Elliott looks at him and hesitates, as if waiting for something else to happen. He finishes a whole new bite of lunch before answering. “So what was it like?”
“Well, it…” Mo starts strong, but almost immediately trails off. How to put it? “So, you, me, and Frankie were all there on Earth. I think we were going to get dinner, at one of those big places with the plants everywhere. And it was in a city like here, except on Earth there were way more dinosaurs and humans, and guess what—some of them really did have lasers, like in the movie we watched! Remember?”
A pause.
Mo, as he’s begun to figure out recently, is not always the best with expressions. So Elliott’s face now is particularly hard to read. Mo begins to think his subconscious had gotten some details wrong. Elliott seems…confused, maybe?
After a moment, though, Elliott looks back down at his food, and continues poking at it with his utensils. “Uh, yeah, I mean,” he says, nodding, “that…sounds like Earth! More or less.” He shrugs. “Maybe not as many…lasers?”
“I’ve never dreamt about Earth before.” Mo says. He drums his paws on the table cheerily. “It was amazing! Like I was really there.”
Lost in his imagination, he sighs. Though it’s never been offered, Mo sometimes wonders what it would be like to visit for himself. Even if Earth isn’t quite as cool as the movies made it look, that would be okay. It’d just be nice to know what it’s like.
“Well hey, we could teach you more about it sometime, if you want,” Elliott suggests. “Me and Mom have got a ton of things from Earth we can show you.”
“That’d be cool!” Mo chirps. “What kind of stuff?”
“Oh, you know, like…comic books, old pictures…uh, I bet there’s still some ice cream left in the kitchen, if you want to try that…”
A wide grin crosses Mo’s beak. “Of course!” Earth snacks, how cool is that?
He wants to see it all. Everything they’ve got. He’s from Earth too, and he should know it, understand it. He wants to know. He wants to understand his new family.
And so the afternoon plans begin. Ice cream, comics, and old photographs after school, with plenty of snacks and even more questions. Anything—even if the place is still light-years away—to bring Mo a bit closer to Earth.