Work Text:
There isn’t much that you can give Oros in the cramped prison of your cell. You can offer to replicate meals, but the ration card allows you both the same five dishes, so there is hardly a surprise to be had. You can try and beat him to the housekeeping, the daily rituals that make your close quarters of cell and lab bearable to live in together, except that Oros always wakes before you, and the tasks are done before you even leave your mattress.
You could try and bribe one of the guards to bring you something, anything, that you can give to Oros for his birthday, but you dare not attract their attention to your relationship, your closeness, your friendship. You dare not let them know how much Oros has come to mean to you. The best gift you can give him in that regard is leaving the Chain in ignorance.
But you have never had a friend before. You’ve never loved someone like you love Oros, and it means more to you than you can articulate even to yourself that you show him how special he is.
So you think, and you think, and then you replicate some charcoal, or a close enough equivalent anyway. It’s stored as a supplemental scientific supply in the replicator, inaccessible to dilithium engineers like you, except you’ve hacked better replicators than this one, and the low-level supplies are easy to get into. If only the Chain was so easy to break when it comes to food, but of course they guard that far more jealously. Can’t have the prisoners getting a taste of anything except the five types of mush.
When you were a child on Risa, your earliest schooling was in art. Risians thought it was important, that children needed to be creative, to express themselves, to learn who they were before anything else was put into their minds. For all that you haven’t thought of them in years, you did not mind the art lessons. In fact, you even enjoyed them, when you were small and knew nothing of the world beyond. As soon as you learned to read and write, and then learned your numbers, you lost interest in self-expression. There were more important things to be done.
But perhaps here and now, in a world so full of grey and pain, you can reach back to the little boy who found something of himself in the paintbrush pressed into his tiny hand.
When Oros goes to sleep on the eve of his birthday, you leave him on your mattresses, and you go to the fresher. It is the only place in this cell that is not monitored by a camera, and where the guards never visit. It is perfect.
You pick up the charcoal in fingers that feel clumsy suddenly, despite the day of work you have just completed handling delicate tools, welding hair-like wires one by one. You close your eyes and take a breath.
Kayalise. You have imagined it a thousand times, a picture painted by Oros’ words, so vivid that you see the place in your fantasies. You cannot give Oros much for his birthday. But you can give him this, if only for a day, if only for an hour. You can make Kayalise tangible for him, a thing to be looked at and enjoyed. Something more than a dream.
You open your eyes and press the charcoal to the wall.