Chapter Text
Sadavar placed his eye onto the telescope. The bright dots of the stars, like the eyes of the universe, winked at him as they disappeared behind the occasional spot of space-dust. From the Carina Observatory where he worked, he could see everything. He retracted his face from his personal telescope. His chamber had been modified since he’d come to work here. His room, on the outer parts of the station, had had a variety of amateur equipment from his youth installed. This telescope, gifted to him as a boy on Firewatch by his mother, had survived thick and thin.
The buzzing of an angry bee filled his ears as the all-too-loud noise of the phone system tried to get his attention. “Hello, Dr. Edric?” Jones, the secretary, asked. Sadavar made an affirming noise, and the secretary continued. “The Carpenter is almost here. Thought you would like to know.” Sadavar again made an affirming noise, and Jones let the line die. He collected his room, doing such things as preparing a pot of coffee with his gray-market coffee maker and fluffing the pillows that crewed the couch, then set off for the docks.
“Good morning, Edric,” one of his fellow astrophysicists, Dr. Rhea Eddstrom, greeted him as he floated to the docks.
“Good morning to you too. Isn’t it the evening shift, though?”
Rhea laughed. “It could be any time of day I want.” Sadavar nodded in agreement.
“What are you at the dock for?” Sadavar asked.
“I had a shipment of candies being smuggled in by one of the crew, but don’t tell anyone,” Rhea said.
“Why, you’ll just have to pass me one to keep me quiet,” he joked, to their amusement.
“You?”
Sadavar didn’t manage to speak over the fortissimo volume of the dock alarms. The crew airlock’s light became a deep amber.
“I didn’t quite catch that,” Rhea said, lifting a hand to their ear and cupping it. Sadavar knew it was a joke, and didn’t repeat what he said as what he was awaiting was already stepping through the airlock.
“Dad!” Sadavar’s adopted daughter, Elizabeth Ancelet, launched herself off her magnetic boots and into his arms. Sadavar moved the connected mass of him and her away from the door as more people slid through the airlock.
“Elizabeth!” he said. It had been years since they’d been able to be in person, ever since he came to the observatory. Her warmth and his felt as good as the heat from Cardeus on Endeavor.
“Dad, you’ve grown taller!” she said with mock amazement, and he laughed. He’d been in null gravity for too long, it seemed. “Why, you’ve grown a lot too,” he crowed. He motioned for her to follow him to his chamber, and she gladly obliged. It was a wonderful thing to see her face in person.
“Maybe in my mind I have. So remember how I was applying for that job,” she started, then didn’t let up. He endorsed her wild storytelling, as he had done with any of her discoveries in her youth. As the pair made their way to Sadavar’s chamber, Elizabeth went from divulging the secrets of her work experience to the most recent critter she’d found at New Idris to this one Rialtan who she shared a room with on the Carpenter.
“And that’s why I never want to play a board game again,” she finished. He unlocked the door to his chamber, and Elizabeth flew to the coffeemaker.
“Good, I hoped you’d like coffee! There’s tea in the fridge as well.”
“Yeah, I’ve drank so much coffee that tea doesn’t really register anymore,” she confessed.
“Like father, like daughter,” he said. “I only keep tea for guests.”
“OOH! Can I see your telescope?!” her gaze had already drifted from the coffee cup to his telescope display. A network of mirrors connected the exterior-mounted telescope to the wall of his room, which she had found within seconds.
“Sure!” he answered as he hit the power button. “It’s currently facing Morgana, the best spot in the sky.”
“Yeah, sure. We both know the Unicorn is the prettier constellation,” she said jokingly.
“Here we go again,” he played along. Sadavar peeked through the telescope to get his bearings, and as he was panning left to right he had to do a double take.
“Hm?” Elizabeth asked. He guessed he had made a sort of nebulous noise.
“Oh, I just found something peculiar. A mystery, perhaps. Would you care to help investigate it with me?” he fell into the script he had used when she was a child on Firewatch.
“Why, I do believe I will,” she remembered what she had always said. As she looked where he had trained the telescope on, she looked on in silence.
As she stepped back, she said, “I’m gonna need more coffee for this.”