Work Text:
“You keep the word from worlds above,
And folded hopes from ones you love,
We all keep ones we're thinking of
Don't let the Watchers see. ”
“Why are you humming that?” Mish asked. “We’re not in the mines anymore.”
I started. I’d barely realized I’d been humming it at all, I was mostly focusing on tending our group garden.
“An old habit, I guess.”
It was an old work song. I’d learned it as a kid and taught it to Mish and the rest some time after I got shipped off to the backrocks.
“Little weird to still be humming shit like that. I mean it was good when we were back there but…”
I smiled, standing and wiping my brow. “I know what you mean, It just… It reminds me of family. The one I had before I met you all, you know?”
I remembered mama teaching Teva and I, and all of us singing it in the tunnels when we were just girls as we worked. Then Teva and I teaching Ria, even while we planned to make sure she never had to work a day in her life.
Plans that failed catastrophically.
It was memories, and it was more. It was hope. The kind of hope we could scrape from deep in the mines.
Mish nodded knowingly and walked off, leaving me to my work. I kept humming.
“You sing to know you're not alone
Don't let the Watchers see
While working your hands to the bone
Don't let the Watchers see
You borrow time between the blasts
Can pause and talk once they are past
You're hard at work, if they should ask,
Don't let the Watchers see. “