Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

You can still live.

Joe’s words still rang in my mind as I left his planet’s atmosphere in my ship, the Aeneas. The hydra fuel cell I created from the metal I harvested had managed to push me from the magnetosphere surrounding the planet, but I doubted I would ever be able to get home at this velocity. I tapped on the control panel, which I had linked to a cord attached to my spine. It confirmed my course—I was going to Cana’hla. My home. The only problem was it would take three years to get back at this speed.

Oh, come on! I thought, frustrated as I tried to remember anything about accelerating the Aeneas’s energy regulators. I could try to make a new hydra cell, but I needed a magnetic ignition, which could only be generated by destabilizing and re-stabilizing the conformium joints that my ship consisted of entirely. And doing that would be to lose pressure inside this compartment. And, unlike other species from Cana’hla, I could not survive in the open void of space.

My memory...those creatures…the humans, when I was locked away...I could not remember everything, even about my own ship. Damn them! They killed five of my people—three from the surveillance team several years back, and the two explorers who came with me to find out what happened—and they took my memory. I was tortured for over twenty years in their puny laboratories, experimented on. Mutilated. When I got home, no matter what it took, I would get my people to return and kill them all. I would make the humans pay! I would—

I know bad things happen, Joe’s voice again. Just like Thomas’s voice, when he used to tell me he could come find me, save me from his own species. I lost my connection with Thomas a day or two before I met Joe. But you can still live.

Memories flashed through my mind. It started when the doors to the Aeneas closed behind me. The inside of the ship was round, crystalline walls with white panels I had long forgotten about. Then farther back, climbing up a tower where I prepared my ascent. No, farther. I dug tunnels inside a human structure, full of the primitive human technology I needed for my magnetic ignition. And full of the humans that helped me stay alive.

All of those minds shared with my own. In order for me to eat, I needed to touch them. It was an...unsettling experience to consume creatures I could hear mentally crying for help. But I did what I had to do to survive. They did nothing when I was taken by their warriors. I wanted to get off that planet, and I could not do that if I starved to death before getting the proper materials that would react to electromagnetism.

But Joe was different. He showed care, maybe even relation, to my pain and fear. I understood partially what he said aloud (being trapped in their laboratory helped me comprehend some of their language), but I needed to know if he was actually an ally. So I connected with him. He was so calm, like Thomas. I saw everything within him, saw his mother’s funeral, felt his depression after that. Felt his love for Alice, a female human I had connected to just moments before I was about to devour her. I was him. Something came back to me for the first time in years. I looked inside Joe. He was pure, one of the purest humans I had ever encountered.

I know bad things happen. But you can still live. You can still live.

I decided to calm down enough to remember the dark matter engine, which would use the energy field surrounding the Aeneas as a temporary accelerator, decreasing my four-year journey home by ninety-nine percent. So, judging by the calculations appearing on the instrumental panel to my right, it would take slightly over two weeks to get back to Cana’hla.

Upon my return, I would tell my leaders of my experience, and would call for a counterattack against humanity. I would spare few, but would destroy all of those that experimented on me for over twenty years. They deserved the pain I felt.

I know bad things happen, I now understand what that meant. Taking the fight back to humanity would be considered a “bad thing.” They would be broken, crushed, burned.

But you can still live. But they would learn from their mistakes and rise from the ashes, knowing shall never torment one of my kind again. Not all of them had to die. Especially not Joe.

Chapter Text

I was in a stasis pod those two weeks. On the fifteenth day, I had awakened, the recycled air drying my nostril. Soon, I wouldn’t be on this ship, with its claustrophobic walls and sole compartment. I was glad to be arriving home, but it would have been nice if my people had any thought in passenger comfortability.

Outside the observation window, I could see the verdant glow of Cana’hla in the distance. It was just a barely noticeable dot, and then it began to increase in size. I could begin to make out details: the green mountains; the cobalt blue of the Latarja Sea; the palaces that led down to our underground sanctuaries I had longed to recreate on Earth but could never match the prodigious beauty of the originals. My home world, drawing closer and closer every moment as the hydra cell looped me underneath the moon, propelling me into the atmosphere.

I had to hide my sole excitement, or else drive myself insane with zeal. It had been a long time since I had felt such joyous emotions. I allowed myself to forget about the torture that I endured from the humans, about the years I spent mourning the grisly deaths of my friends. All of this has led me back to Cana’hla. I persevered. I made it!

I was home!

The globe was now as massive as the energy surging through me. I tapped onto the interface and made sure I would be able to hit the magnetic field at the right angle, to keep the Aeneas from destabilizing when I landed. I wish I could say that I made a graceful landing when I hit the magnetosphere, that I managed to pass through without any risky maneuvers or power surges.

I didn’t.

Yes, the Aeneas was an advanced ship. And yes, this type of spacecraft was the premier vessel for the Chiefs. But it was over twenty years old now. We progressed fast as a species. Who knows what we might have come up with in twenty-one years? This ship would have been an antique. A long-forgotten satellite that had fallen back to the atmosphere. Or worse: an unidentified craft.

The now burning Aeneas shook violently as I punched through the atmosphere, the windows now blotted by the flames of reentry. My bones were vibrating from the speed, my skin smoldering from the heat. This spacecraft had not made an interstellar trip in the past two decades. There was a forty-two percent chance that the hydra cell would overheat and rupture. Besides, we never even entered the Earth’s atmosphere intentionally—the Aeneas was shot out of the sky. By the humans.

“Damn them,” I found myself muttering again when power to the ship shut down for a moment. It restarted almost immediately, but I was still worried. I was not ready to make another emergency water landing. Well, unless you considered being shot down by a nuclear weapon and unconsciously crashing into the ocean a “water landing." At the very last moment, I managed to put the ship in a rotary maneuver, slowing my descent. Once the spinning stopped, I pushed the hydra cell into a fission blast, cooling the ship off; if I had pushed the hydra cell to full power in reentry, it would have overheated and blown the Aeneas to pieces. But pushing it subsequent to my arrival into the airspace of Cana’hla, with the rushing air now depleting the heat, I could allow the hydra cell to stop the overheating altogether. I wouldn’t want to fly the Aeneas into space again, but I would survive.

I steered the Aeneas in the same tower I launched from all those years ago. It took me just a fraction of the time to approach it, coming in at about three and a half hours. It was on the other side of the continent. Landing on that tower brought back a myriad of memories. Suddenly, I had a longing to see what changes had been made to the world while I was away. I wanted to see my family.

The Aeneas jolted to a stop on the tower. As my fingers traveled to shut the ship off, I hesitated. This colossal piece of machinery I used to make my way home, I was about to leave it behind. Hopefully for good. But part of me was uncertain, as peculiar as it sounds. A relatively large chunk of my life was spent on Earth. Hell, I was afraid of what would happen if I left all of that behind, if I stopped looking over my shoulder every day.

Then, after all these years, I deplaned the Aeneas, climbed down the tower, and stepped onto the soft ground of my world.