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The first thing the Helio landing procedure taught Caseidae was, after making his way to the deck lined with the escape pods, to quietly stand and wait in line for the next steps: all squads will be slowly rotating positions across the entire ship, leave their job to them and do what you are told.
Caseidae was actively failing at both of those instructions, at varying levels. He drums his fingers on the side of the rollator's seat, just as impatient as everyone else is. At the beginning of landing drills, when they started dragging them out longer and longer to be accurate to what the real landing time could be, Caseidae had very quickly figured out he needed to dig his few-year-old rollator out of the storage.
He's very grateful there weren't any orders beyond stay in a single-file line for the estimated two-to-four hours until landing, but one part of him assumes his dad being in the room that the landfall procedures were revised in did help in his favor. At least no soldiers have gotten snappy at him when they see a sitting silhouette in the mass of people.
Maybe that's a benefit of space colonies and small age groups the Vertumna Group hadn't thought about: everyone knowing who you are, so after a certain point, you stop needing to explain what's different about you from scratch.
However, despite all the good things Caseidae could say about being in a tin can in the abyss—now at the gaping maw of a wormhole—it's still unbearably cramped. Especially now, with so many people divided between the two rows of escape pods, his mother has been pushed into standing half behind him, with a hand firmly grasping back metal of the rollator. She keeps leaning over and asking him if he's okay. He'll always say "yes, I'm sorry I keep bouncing my leg," and she hums and cards her fingers through his thick hair.
It feels like the family photo they'd been able to take over a dozen years ago, before their father got too swept up in what would happen when they made it, and they were just relishing in the fact they'd made it through the declared critical phase of launching at all. Erin was small enough back then, Caseidae made a joke about being able to fold him up into a sportsball and use him as such—much to the chagrin of their mother. He was scolded, and Erin lived to see another day without being twisted up.
Erin has, actually, lived a few more another days, given he's presently going-on-seventeen. Despite the half-dozen years he's spent in training by now (years of training Caseidae never had) and being double his size since then, Caseidae is pretty sure he could still fold him up into a sportsball.
However, Erin would have to actually be around for Caseidae to do that, and he's not.
Their mother, Mora, had asked Erin to send her his scheduled route for the landing protocol, and he'd done so as soon as she asked. With that, she passed it on to Caseidae as well, and he saved the image onto his holopalm for future reference, right alongside all the notes on known-slash-named organisms of Vertumna IV he'd backed up the day before.
Caseidae had a bad feeling not too long after arriving in the hallway of escape pods, but it took an hour for before he pulled up that image again and realized neither he nor Mora had received any word from him—which, fine, the lieutenants were strict about ever being out of form, as if synchronized marches would mean something on an alien battlefield.
Then, he thought about it more after he'd texted some of his colleagues and some others in his age group (which only a few responded, because once again, soldier things) and the first squadron had passed by to take role of the civilians waiting in the hallway. It was not Erin's, Caseidae knew that as soon as he took one look at them, but they were fifteen minutes off from when they should've arrived.
He hoped they were the only group trying to mask something gone wrong.
Except now that he's hearing an irregular set of footsteps, like a line of a poem read in a different rhythm, he's incredibly thankful for the mandated marching posture for making something obvious for him. His hands tense up and it feels like, despite not being cold at all, he has to manually relax each of his fingers instead of them just being parts of himself.
Not only does Caseidae know how soldier marches are, both so he could tune them out and also to the point he recognizes whenever they aren't quite right, he knows his brother's walk whenever he isn't on duty—and those two things aren't supposed to mix.
Caseidae realizes quick enough, he tilts his head out to where the next squad is headed his way, and he notices them before they notice him in specific. That's when he sees an unusually silent boy who has other soldiers' arms looped around him, like they're trying to haul him back from a body of water, but instead are just holding him far too low to the ground it forces his body to curl in on itself.
The first thing he notices is Erin's lack of the golden triangle buckle he's used to seeing on every soldier, and then noticing he's without that yellow harness at all, without any of the gear the others have.
He gets to exchange a look with Erin as the squadron approached, and Caseidae leans back in to 'stop being a disturbance in the path' with how obviously he'd peeked out to stare. In that brief moment, Erin's eyes tells him he could've been perfectly fine walking whatever that distance was.
Mora leans in to Caseidae's ear, whispering and asking him what he'd seen, and he doesn't get enough time to respond and tell her before—
"Good afternoon, Doctor, Ms. Cormorant," the soldier grappling Erin's left says. Caseidae thinks he recognizes him, with the different shades of neutrals in his hair, from brown to platinum, but the name is on the tip of his tongue. Maybe it's just the fact this boy's hair is cut similarly to how Caseidae's own was when he was sixteen. There's still softness in his face despite his expression, and given how Erin seems to be wiggling more on his side than the other, the soldier's probably Erin's age. "We have something we needed to deliver to you."
Erin finally gets released from their grasp without another word, and he toppled forward before Caseidae stands up to hold him steady. Caseidae turns back to the squad—everyone except the two dropping Erin off have started moving on, taking attendance slowly but continuing on as if they hadn't lost a fourth of their group in the crowd. This must have been premeditated—and cocks his head at them as he sits again.
Their mother holds Erin by his shoulders, keeping him up but probably digging her nails into him the same way he'd just gotten out of, but out of love instead of mild intolerance. She mumbles comfort and Erin slumps his head until he's tucked under her chin, and Caseidae faintly hears a "mama…" as he asks the two soldiers, "What is this about?"
"Officer Serinus is not in the right condition for the role assigned to him." the other explains, vaguely older than the other two she'd come with; She looks close to his—as in Caseidae's—age, but he doesn't know for certain. The fact he doesn't know feels like another scrape at a scab deep under his skin, and he decides he desperately needs to move on from it. Not right now, at least. He has planet-fall to survive first.
She gestures to the boy besides herself. "Lieutenant Olivaceous has excused him for the night."
Ah. Lieutenant Olivaceous. Coupled with his age, that single word tells Caseidae enough about Erin's feelings about him. Caseidae furrows his eyebrows at both of them almost instinctively. He prefers giving people the benefit of the doubt, but his baby brother is being handed off to him like a package with an unnoticed 'this side up' notice attached. "And this decision is authorized, yes?"
Neither of them concern themselves with responding verblly and nod once, almost synchronized but not quite.
"Right, okay." Caseidae looks back at Mora cradling the still-nearly limp Erin, before turning back to the two soldiers. "Thank you for bringing him."
Olivaceous opens and closes his mouth, but the other soldier jabs him lightly with her elbow. A look passes between the two that Caseidae knows is supposed to be beyond him, and decides against interpreting it.
The (lieutenant) boy keeps his eyes trained on Erin, but the other soldier cheats open to the rest of the line, and he gets a glimpse of small braids mixed into the rest of her relatively straight hair, small shocks of baby blue twirling through her bright white hair. Her skin is just as pale, and it takes Caseidae a second to tell where her eyebrows are, and the fact that they're slightly furrowed.
"It's approximately t-minus sixty minutes until the wormhole. Please stay in your designated position, and if you need any amenities, ask for someone on duty."
"You sound like the flight attendants from Earth shows." Caseidae doesn't know what he's saying, but words fall out of his mouth before he can control himself. "Can I ask what your name is? It's only fair if I know the other two's that I complete the set."
She scrunches her face up, questioning him, then questioning herself when she holds her hand out for him to shake. She only steels her expression after a few seconds of holding it out, like she needed to commit to it first. "Officer Latitude."
Caseidae takes it, giving it a firm but quick shake, and lets her go before it turns into too much of an interaction. He's gotten used to how a tight a schedule the soldiers run. "Caseidae. Be seeing you another time."
Latitude and the lieutenant boy are gone before any other words or expressions are exchanged, and Caseidae hears the biggest sigh of relief come from right besides him. "Were they that bad?"
Erin makes indescribable noises at him, wiggling a little in Mora's grasp. She frees him from the half-swaying hug she's pulled him into when Caseidae wasn't looking, but keeps him in her grasp, holding him by the shoulders as she quickly pats him down for bruises, checking his pulse at his wrist. Erin opens his mouth to speak, to respond to Caseidae, but she shushes him again as she checks the one on the side of his neck. Erin scrunches his face up in whiny annoyance, but neither of them fight it. He only replies after he's released from her grasp, and his voice is raspier than ever before. "South's fine. I hate Vace."
Called it. Caseidae huffs and says that to Erin verbally as well, but notices Mora's face darken. "Don't say that. Be kind to your peers."
"'M sorry." Erin slumps on his side against the wall, back facing Caseidae and talking to Mora first, and he turns to face slightly towards Caseidae again only after she lightens up. Under the dimmed light of the hallway and whatever metaphorical weight Erin has on his shoulders, his neon orange-yellow eyes seem more like golden brown. "I'm just tired."
"Sure." Caseidae props one arm up on its elbow, resting his head on top of his hand. Caseidae has seen tired from Erin before, and this is far from it—not even in terms of energy, but just the way he's not deflated and drained (he could tell that by the shake that's still present in Erin's good hand and the foot he keeps tapping in rhythm to marching no longer there) as much as he is passive. Speaking of Erin's good hand: "Was it about your arm?"
Erin's been out of a shoulder brace for a couple months now, Caseidae believes, and the scarring that goes down his outer side of his forearm has firmed up since he saw him in the medbay. It's still a violent red at some places, and Erin sometimes rubs up and down his bicep, like he's still not sure that's how his body feels like now.
Caseidae's also been assuming his upper-bicep was the point of contact, for whatever had got him. By the time Caseidae heard the news and had a chance to see him, Erin was two days post surgery and consciously choosing to be limp and uncommunicative with the world. The same question comes to the front of his mind as usual, but the topic is months old now, and whatever time there is to ask what happened, it's not right now.
He's come to the conclusion on his own that, whatever it was, it was something that wasn't supposed to be on the ship. Further from that, as he's not as enthusiastic about the idea of alien life invading the ship as he thinks he should be—it was something that belonged far too much to their ship, but it shouldn't have been there at all.
Erin looks at their mother even though he's responding to him, rolling his left arm at the mention of it. "I 'unno."
It's like he's purposefully missing his lines and cues, instead of being unable to keep up. Caseidae looks back up to Mora, who looks at her youngest son with a fear in her eyes that tells him she has more than double the amount of worry that he has, but less than half of the knowledge he does on how to fix it.
It's not uncommon, how often their mother is frightened, but it's not common enough for Erin to shrug it off, and he turns back to her to tell her different truths about just how fine he is.
After Erin first left for the juvenile barracks, Caseidae realized just how different their perceptions of Mora were. To Erin, she's the one he used to regularly take naps with his head in her lap even when he'd started outgrowing it, and used to sneak out of the bunk he shared with Caseidae to worm into their parents' bed, to the point the first progress report they'd received from his commander mentioned insomnia he never had before.
(To Caseidae, he sees the version of Mora who paces down the strip of ground in front of his covered bunk, whose footsteps kept him up when he was a kid and they weren't even on the Heliopause yet—In fact, he's pretty sure it happened the most during the months after they'd moved in but were acclimating to the ship before takeoff occured. Sometimes he'd need to close his eyes and watch shows in his mind as he pretended to be asleep, because she would lift the curtain to his bunk to put her hand over his forehead and say things along the lines of, "Please don't die. I need you to not die, you're so strong. Please be strong for this." )
"I think," Caseidae raises his arms above his head and stretches, almost feigning a yawn, "it's about time I should go to the bathroom, before we actually hit the wormhole. I might as well go grab my crutches while we're there." He looks to Erin, currently half distraught at why his brother is suddenly talking to him about pissing, but Caseidae pulls his expression into being something worried enough, and Erin realizes what he's actually trying to do. "But they did say civilians need someone on duty to help…"
"The rest of the platoons don't know you've been discharged, right?" He whispers.
Erin nods, then clears his throat and speaks louder than he has all night, to make sure others can hear; "I'm going to need to supervise you, to make sure everyone is accounted for when we reach the wormhole."
Caseidae grins, standing up and taking a moment to get adjusted to balancing his weight on solely his two feet (with Erin yelping when he needs to become a support for a second, but Caseidae evaluates and happily declares his body isn't out to get him at this hour), and they're both humbly excused from their spot in the line.
The first thing Caseidae says once they're out of earshot from everyone else, down the metal corridors they'd wandered through their whole life that would soon become entirely optional to see, is him admitting that the "needing to piss" part was completely a lie but wanting to go get his crutches was not, and Erin's immediate response is no longer to mumble incoherently but cuss him out with half-fondness in his voice.
The second thing Caseidae says is, "Alright, out with it. What's wrong?"
Erin groans like he's a small animal needing to get his nails trimmed and rubs his eyes. "So fucking much."
"Elaborate."
Erin takes his hands off of his face just to wave them around sporadically, and Caseidae notes to himself that he was right about what Erin needed to loosen his inhibitions.
"Before we started doing rounds, we went through some drills again, yeah? And everyone was looking at me when Vace called me up on my own, and he wasn't doing that to give me a chance—he just wanted everyone to know I've fucking fallen."
Caseidae pauses and blinks when another swear falls from Erin's mouth, almost needing an extra second to process it, but he couldn't judge. Erin's already been through it today from the sounds of things, and the last thing that would be helpful would be a reprimand for the frequency of foul language. Caseidae trails his hand along the walls. "Were you still doing drills before they…?"
"No. They let me stay in line because even some of the other kids—like, even the ones that usually egg him on, 'n stuff—thought making me fire shots would just make everyone late for when we start patrolling. Some of them still thought about it! Vace definitely did, but we didn't want our asses whooped by, just, anyone who noticed we were late. So they agreed they could test me once we landed. It's—"
"Erin." Caseidae walks in front of him, and Erin looks him in the eyes instead of just the far-off distance. "Breathe."
"I am! My fucking—Void—Why do people keep saying that this is just how I talk—" Erin still takes very exaggerated deep breaths, like he's trying to show it to Caseidae, but unfortunately for him, it actually helps.
At least for a short while, because on the third hold it, breathe out, that Caseidae guides him through, he slumps on himself like his ribcage has been sewn closed, and he only catches himself by gripping Caseidae deathly tight.
Erin looks back up at him in his slumped posture, then his eyes widen, and he turns on his heel to keep walking normally. He looks like he's physically chewing on a thought. "We were monitoring the third quadrant first, and three times I banged my shoulder when we turned the corner. That's when they pulled me aside again."
There's silence when they round the corner, almost mirroring the story Erin himself was telling, and they passed by another soldier herding a civilian to their assigned escape point. Caseidae recognizes them from the hydroponic labs, though they've never talked, but he still waves to them as their paths converged. They wave back. When Caseidae looks back to his own company, he realizes Erin's been glowering at the soldier that entire time.
As Caseidae opens the door to their unit in the barrack (technically, though Erin hasn't formally lived here since he first left, and Caseidae pretends not to notice how Erin's body language has changed for the third time that hour), he looks at Erin and asks, "Does it hurt still?"
Erin doesn't respond. He gestures at the fold-out couch in the middle of their unit (Caseidae does not complain about sitting) and does a full 360 looking around the room. As Caseidae's watching Erin navigate the space again, it only makes the difference between seeing him now and the one that he's consolidated in his memory for so long even more apparent.
He should probably actually tell Erin where he kept his crutches, but he's watching him scurry around like rodentia on Earth, and not only does Erin seem far too deep into whatever he's feeling at the moment to think about asking for help, Caseidae's not impartial to making him worry a little on something less significant.
It still doesn't take long before Erin pushes back the curtain to their pod-looking bunk beds, and finally locate the forearm crutches from the wall they've been left against. He makes a fake throwing motion, which Caseidae takes with mild amusement and mostly fear, before passing them to him normally. Caseidae gets up again, this time with actual support. He's lucky today seems like one of his better days, but it feels better for him regardless.
Good. Since that matter's over now, he takes the short way out of their home, and passes right in front of the old family photo on the wall—the only one they were able to nanoprint. Caseidae's eyes snap to it when he's still near it, tearing his gaze away in time for him to actually get out the door, but looks back at it from the doorway. Even at the slightly awkward angle, he can make out the four of them all in black and blue clothes, their dad's hand on the chair he was sitting in, and a toddler-sized Erin held at their mother's hip.
He couldn't imagine that Erin remembers much from that period of his life, being too busy wailing at full volume, but Caseidae does—somewhat, as it was also when he'd started getting buried in the archives, being assigned to comb through every single document thus far about Vertumna's fauna to "catch up" with all of the fully-adult scientists who would soon be his peers. Caseidae remembers Erin when he was learning how to speak and simply did Not get along with words, so his body language became bigger than life itself and he started nodding his head incredibly vigorously in response to anything. He remembers when they were on better terms and Erin had first learned Caseidae was going back into schooling, and he randomly got into Caseidae's bunk with him to explain to him how school works, with his knowledge at the ripe age of five and having been in school himself for about three months.
Either way, it's not like Caseidae's fully reminiscing about who Erin was before, but if either version of him—the one trapped in the photo, or the one standing by it right now, with a new starry and sharp face tattoo following his lower eyelid and down his cheekbone (was it Erin or Impresa who decided that? Caseidae guesses probably Erin while influenced by Impresa)—were to approach him, neither version would feel out of place.
This grown version doesn't seem out of place in their home, either. That's Caseidae's last thought before he's ready to round the corner and head back, assuming they'll just keep on walking and talking, but it takes barely two seconds for him to realize Erin isn't following.
He peaks back around the corner and finds Erin idle and motionless in the room, right where he'd left him. When Caseidae enters again, making sure to firmly shut the door behind himself, Erin's hands move over his face and he walks himself back to the couch without looking. He flops down against the backside, folding his worse arm over his chest while his opposing hand is still over one of his eyes, and Caseidae takes a seat again besides him.
"Not ready?" Caseidae asks, and Erin lowers his hand just enough to give him a squinty-yet-painful glare.
Erin blinks once with far too much intensity. "I don't—They don't need me out there anymore, anyways. They'll survive without me."
"They're going to think you're trying to blow this place up."
"Ha. Well, screw them."
A beat of silence passes before Erin flops his hand back down and rests his head back. Caseidae can follow his gaze to their bunk bed-slash-pods, but before he could comment on it—
"I lied."
Caseidae blinks. "What?"
"It—it wasn't just that I was off, or I bumped my shoulder into a wall too many times. I'd be dead if I actually banged up my shoulder on anything again. That wasn't why they told me to leave. I'm such a—a fucken'—" Erin sniffles loudly, burying the lower half of his face into the crook of his elbow just in case, but Caseidae decides against any immediate comments calling him grimy.
He sits up straight and turns more towards Erin. "Hey, no, don't call yourself that."
"I blew up at my friends, after the thing with Vace. I don't know if you remember them but, Plani and Adro—they were just trying to—they wanted me to be okay that's why they told me I should just, take a break, since they knew I've been—and then I told them to shut the fuck up and that—"
Erin lets out another incredibly hoarse cry. "It was in front of everyone. And Vace thought I was gonna start fighting them, said that it was out of nowhere, and of course that guy doesn't know I actually have friends so he 'n some other guys started grappling me, like I'm not just Some Guy and they forgot my shoulder's still fucked, so—"
Caseidae, listening to Erin's rambles that slowly grow more and more incoherent, faintly realizes the incredibly dim lighting of the escape pod walkways must've obscured how obviously red the scleras of Erin's eyes are.
"They're gonna hate me forever," Erin ends his ramble with, his voice even more hoarse than how it usually is, but without enough energy to panic. It just sounds like he's declared it as fact. "Them and the other soldiers. They're not going to trust me when we get on the stupid planet."
Huh.
Caseidae hadn't realized that someone could look at the wormhole, at the idea of living planetside, and see something even close to dislike at the idea. He's used to something like duty being associated with it, as that's the most common feeling from some of his peers—this is something that was inevitable, that they've been given the priviledge of being there for, something they must see through.
He's also used to his own, pure, unbridled joy. The night there was an update to every screen and communicator with a constantly-ticking countdown timer—he couldn't sleep. Not out of fear, but the same way he's heard people describe being so excited for something that they feel it shaking inside of themselves. Besides staring out the windows of the singular hallway on his daily commute that has them, there was no way to compare how much it felt like Caseidae was looking out into freedom for the first time in his life.
Except now, face to face with a similar kind of freedom, Erin looks like he's about to start heaving if someone mentions the name Vertumna IV.
(Some part about it feels like it should be the other way around, like what everyone assumes of them when they realize Doctor Caseidae and Officer Serinus are related. Later, Caseidae will be surprised at himself, more than anything else.)
Is he saying—he's scared? It's an incredibly dumb questions for him to think, and Caseidae's not one for those—never to the point he actually says them out loud. But Erin's face contorts again and he realizes he actually had.
"Stop." Erin sounds like he wants to yell or cry or manifest his plascutter out of his locker to stab something. "I don't know. I don't think I'm scared," Erin says, despite being what Caseidae imagines is the textbook image of frightened. It's something to do with the garrison, he assumes. About cowardice and camaderie and soldierhood and how you can't have all three.
"Mm." Caseidae turns in his seat, bringing his legs up onto the couch and sitting criss-cross. In turn, Erin curls up on his side, facing him in almost fetal position. Caseidae's pointer finger taps uncontrollably on his knee, and he equates it to clicking buttons on his projection keyboard in the lab, cycling through f0lders upon folders of facts and memories and photos for what he's looking to say. "The planet's a planet, and it comes with the million unfamiliar things that any unfamiliar planet needs to survive, we can't change that. We also can't change how we're actively barrelling at it, and have been for eighteen-odd years. I can't make the ship go backwards, neither can you."
"If I asked Dad nicely, he probably could."
"We're not talking about him right now, and you know he would not let that slide.." Caseidae huffs and continues, "but, we're here, and we're going to have to face the music regardless. You are going to make it to the planet, and you will do everything you need to, just there instead."
Caseidae points a finger at Erin accusatorily. "That includes telling your friends you're sorry you were being stupid, and I'm going to have a very important chat with your lieutenant about why my three-second-old brother is being treated like a sportsball to throw around."
He expects some sort of rebuttal, with the fact that this has also been a recurring bit of Caseidae making Erin younger every single time his age is brought up, but Erin looks at him with glossy eyes and nods. It's to some distance behind him more than at him, but Caseidae can tell that's the best he could do. If it isn't, well, the moment's already starting to pass, and Caseidae's just about out of care and comfort and advice he can give out, before he starts needing to dig into the catalog of wishy-washy statements he doesn't fully mean but feels like he has to in order to 'round out' the conversation.
He doesn't want to do that, so this is enough. It's enough to the point Erin crawls over and folds in on in himself and over, wrapping his arms around him in a deathly-tight hug.
"Ah."
Erin's not been affectionate to him, since—well, since he was ten, and by proxy, since he'd been officially enlisted. All of his affections have been in play-insulting, both to Caseidae and what he's seen of Erin interacting with his troops, with the only exception he'd known being their mother.
Except Erin's sobbing (more in sound than actual tears, garbled curses and words buried into the noise) and adjusting himself so his chin actually fits on Caseidae's shoulder, fingers digging into him like the change from space to land means a change of his entire family too. Caseidae feels the tremor wracking through him even harder when he finally reciprocates the hug. His brother is a snottily digusting crier. He doesn't mind.
When Caseidae's ribcage begins to hurt, in the same way it feels like someone is forcibly closing it up and joining them together, he was going to joke to Erin about easing up on the tightness. Then the entire room felt tighter. Closer—no, denser—like the walls were pushing all of the air into them too.
Caseidae feels his breathing slow, and he recognizes it with a 'not again' first, before he stops feeling himself breathing at all. Everything slows down.
Then an explosion revertebrates through the walls. It feels impossibly close to them, though it's far out of their sight—it feels like it's under his skin, though he knows it isn't.
Erin unlatches from him as they fall sideways off of the couch, and Caseidae's upper half slams against the coffee table before he could catch himself. His breath is shuddery, and he sits himself up and needs to grab Erin by the shoulders to get him up too.
The engines are all based on the opposite end, by the hangar of the ship, but for some reason it feels like they're being cooked alive inside of their unit, the gaseous hisses of pipes and wires in the skin of the ship are rattling deep inside of Caseidae's skull.
There's commotion outside. Running, yelling. He can't decipher the words, a mixture of military jargon he'd never learn and words that are indiscernable on their own—fear, shock. Caseidae faintly remembers the sleek and military disclaimer, "quietly stand and wait in line for the next steps: all squads will be slowly rotating positions across the entire ship, leave their job to them and do what you are told."
"Comms are down." Erin rapidly flicks through the radio system he accesses through his holopalm, coming up entirely blank, and Caseidae watches as he even checks his personall holochats for any texts, notices, anything. He grabs at his crutches again and it's punctuated by groaning and warping metal somewhere else.
The lights all turn red after that. Erin's stuck in place, flicking through a million different communication lines he's got access to (his eyes look unfocused, glossed over and far away in a way that's absolutely not right, and there's something stuck to his face that he didn't properly get to see), and Caseidae's grabbing him between the ties of his vest and no other words besides the voice in his head that tells him to go.
Something's happening.
The clamouring becomes a million times louder once the door opens—thank the stars the door can still open—and it's almost just as terrifying to see nobody, nothing besides sterile metal walls for miles, but hear everything.
There's nothing to say between them, just the present click of crutches along with human feet to two different rhythms, and metallic popping and crunching they don't know how to outrun. He barely processes the thought through the thumping and clicking echoing in his head, but a part of Caseidae's brain is itching to run, run, run, get out (why did he ever have his hopes up for this?) and it's clawing at him to do so.
But, even more so than how easy it is for him to make things worse for himself, out of the corner of his eye, Caseidae keeps watching Erin stumble every time they round a corner, with one of his legs bent inward like a gangly doe with limbs too long.
The ship feels impossibly large, like they're the only ones in this entire sector. Except the noises prove otherwise. There's alarms running, the further they head in. Caseidae believes it's further—he tries his best as a mental map of their floor, while trying not to trip over his own feet. Their unit is by the bridge and Command's office, and if they—
One of the gates to a 4-way intersection slams shut when they were less than a meter away, without any notice at all, and the way they went skidding backwards on the soles of their shoes makes a noise that would be audible and annoying in any other moment. He adjusts his grip onto Erin's forearm-or-other (he wants to check on him, actually look at Erin and pat him down for injuries, but his head doesn't want to turn on it's own even if he wanted it to) before taking for the other nearest walkway.
"WHERE THE HELL'S BACULUM?" They both hear, but neither of them can help. The commotion ahead is less of the alarms and the Heliopause AI repeating emergency guidelines, but a clamour of people talking over each other. Stepping over each other.
Follow the voices, he has to actively tell himself, though it seems contrary to everything he's internalized. Caseidae watches Erin's legs almost give out, once, twice, but Erin gets a hold of things eventually, neither of them say anything about it.
The next thing Caseidae remembers, besides more noise and more blank hallways, is Erin banging on a metal door with both of his fists, screaming at the top of his lungs until his voice became shrill.
Serinus doesn't know if he could stop screaming, more than anything else.
He's figured out he doesn't know a lot of things. One of them that he doesn't know if people knowing who he is or not is better or worse for him. That's what's being proven right now, because he knows there goddamn are people behind his door and they know it's him, and they better—
The door slides open with the grunts of two people on the other side. It looks like another one of the civillian evacuation points, and his eyes automatically start searching the room before he remembers he's on the opposite sector of emergency points to the one Mama was stationed at. His voice does a weird hitch, one he's not sure he's in control of, as his volume tapers out by the force of his heaving breath.
His eyes meet a small hunched over figure, sitting with their legs drawn up to their chest. They lock eyes with him, he thinks; he can't really tell with the grey hair covering their eyes (eye? Erin's still not sure how the ocular prosthesis is coming along), with how their head's tilted downwards. Erin holds his breath (kind of) and hopes Professor Mercurial isn't here also.
"Serinus," another soldier, far older than he is, says. Erin's never seen him before until now, so there must be some sort of power he holds. Maybe he knows that Erin's supposed to be off duty, and with that, anywhere but here. The man, alongside another completely unidentifiable helmeted soldier, must have been the ones to pry the door open themselves.
Erin's head throbs even worse when he clears his throat. When they fell he hit the coffee table temple-first and walking has felt like the ground is tilted more than it actually is, it feels like the sounds around him are from a radio improperly tuned.
Erin needs to respond. "Sir," he can barely hear himself, "what's happening?"
"Turbulence. More than expected, at least," the man tells him. He crosses his arms and Erin feels the need to do the same, looking up at him. He speaks loudly to combat with the alarms, but it only makes Erin hear him ever less, especially on top of feeling like he's actively being waterboarded. "Differences in pressure inside the wormhole causing the air to bend around us in a different way, or that's what the scientists are saying."
"Communications are down, Sir." Erin thinks he's mumbling. He doesn't know if the words he's thinking sound anything like what he's saying.
Nobody speaks for a few seconds and they look at Erin like he's grown a new head. Maybe this was another moment he's supposed to not do anything except listen—why would they do that to Erin? Now? When the ship's in the middle of exploding?
"That's why we need an actual administrator at work right now…" The helmeted soldier says, and their tone of voice makes it sound like they're metaphorically pinching their nosebridge. Baculum, he supposes, must be the one most responsible for them. Caseidae knows more about him than Erin does. "Everyone's scattered like scared animals 'cause of the tremor, fuck if even half of the civillians are where they're supposed to be right now."
Erin turns to see where Caseidae's gone, only to see him barely a few meters away, back turned towards Erin and obscuring him of whoever he's talking to. Caseidae's being patted down and checked for injuries with a focus never seen anywhere else. He's being asked if he would rather sit down, and Caseidae's making a half-snippy-half-exhausted remark about having too much pride to sit on the floor. Her voice is warm, yet stern, yet enunciated perfectly enough for Erin to know it's—
Auntie Impresa's hair is tied up with a few of her twists having fallen out or not made it into the ribbon, a geometric-patterened shawl wrapped around her for comfort. Erin's the only one in his family that's currently in uniform—Why isn't she in uniform? She was—
Caseidae points behind himself, at Erin, with him thumb and a haphazard glance in his direction before it's suddenly Not a haphazard glance. Caseidae's staring at Erin openingly with wide eyes and the look on his face is one of some kind of abject horror—its not one Erin has ever seen on him before, but it doesn't seem out of place.
Auntie Impresa trudges up to him to do the same examination, before watching him jolt into standing upright and stock-still, and steps back. Instead, she does a little hand motion for Erin to hold his arms out in front of himself and turn his head.
When he does, she winces.
"Stars above, what happened to you?" She asks it like he's supposed to have an answer.
"I feel like shit," Erin's voice wobbles far too much, and he watches her scrunch her face up at the way he says it. Or how he looks saying it.
"No wonder. Did those guys tell you you're bleeding?"
Erin makes a pitiful squeaky noise and looks down at his hands, and she points up at his face. He brings a hand up to his cheekbone, then to his temple, and he feels wetness and split skin. It must've only started bleeding while they were running, and he faintly recalls Caseidae was running on the other side of him.
Then the ship rocks again and it doesn't feel like it's possible for a hunk of metal so large to be thrown around like this. He's barely able to catch himself, the ache is light compared to the first one, and it's not the worst thing in the world.
The worse part is the second explosion, and Caseidae grabs him so they both hit the floor in time for the ship to rumble and tilt and warp again, Erin crouched down with his head pressed against the metal wall. He knows the ship has explosives, and he knows it has engines, and knows there's at least five million other parts about this trip that could cause something to happen somewhere (he has known), but this one lasts for far too long.
Erin hears something like bullets that probably aren't bullets pop pop pop-ing in the distance and it blends in with the ringing in his ears, and they both only subside after far too long. He keeps itching to lean off of the metal wall, in fear it'll suddenly start warping and take him with it, but he can't move even if he wanted to.
All Erin can see from this angle is Caseidae leaning against the wall, the dull-violet parts of his hair pitch-black under the light and falling wildly across his shoulders, eyes blown and his breathing heavy, like he's finally coming to his senses—finally understanding what Erin meant. Erin wants to shake him.
(Erin remembers a scenario from years ago, when he was eight and Caseidae was double his age, both of them lying in their respective bunks. He never pulled back the curtain of his specific pod to see what was going on below him, but at some point he forgoed his pillow to press an ear straight to his mattress, and he could hear Caseidae—having probably sat up in his own bed and his head far closer to the ceiling between them—mumbling and heaving and sobbing and desperately trying to inhale all of his snotty tears back into himself.
Erin could hear he was talking about something related to dying. And he couldn't sleep after that, because it was obviously disasterously creepy, so he had to wait until it died down before crawling out and weaseling into his parents' bed again foot-end first.)
(After he moved to the juvenile barracks, it used to be the only thing he could think of whenever he heard Caseidae's name, or they saw each other but didn't know what to say without it being violently awkward. Now that he's here, he wishes that eight-year-old him could've put his fear aside to check on Caseidae instead.)
But he looks at the reflections in Caseidae's eyes, and realize he's staring right out of a rounded window, where two other people are lying down below it. In Caseidae's eyes, Erin can see the fire and smoke coating the ship, but in brief moments where the billows of smoke pass just above or below the window, they can both see a swirling planet of different shades of pinks.
It's either seconds or an hour until the rumbling suddenly subsides, and in it's place, it feels like the ship is freefalling. It stops for a second, and Auntie Impresa helps Caseidae, then him, to their feet. Erin runs across the hall to help others as well, before it starts falling again, before it stops and stabilizes, and again—
Another group of people come pommelling in besides them, from the same entrance Erin had clawed at however long ago.
It's another two soldiers—ones he recognizes but does not know. One of them looks like South but is not South, did she ever say if she had a sibling? Actually, why would she tell him—an engineer, and a man with brown and blue hair in telltale Command-blue clothes and more authority in his stance than anyone else in the room; Erin's only assuming he's Baculum by context clues. He looks anxious. It sounds like it would be time for them to do a "stay in place, please be calm," announcement, but it never comes.
Instead, they ask, "Does anyone know how to remotely steer the ship? Does—does anyone here know if that's possible?"
No one responds, and Erin watches Auntie Impresa share a look with some of the other adults. The helmeted soldier from earlier steps forward, "What's happened?"
"….Someone was checking vital resources, and since communications were down nobody had any idea, but finally—" The engineer takes a breath before continuing. Everything else reaches Erin's ears in waves.
Everything feels spacey, but the kind he's more acquainted with. The kind he only knows how to fix by shoving his face under a plugged sink in the mens' restroom, ice cold water running down his skull and water filling up the basin until it's in his nose and eyes, and he stays down until it burns.
Shoving his face down into the water,
"—One of our supplementary circulation routes got knocked off in the blast, for the west wing. We're evacuating everyone on the escape lines there to this side."
then coming back up for air.
"—Oxygen line to the bridge is damaged—"
Down into the water,
"—Ship is contorting, we can't get eyes on the damage but —"
then up for air.
"We're still aimed us towards the original colony, and we've been trying to get people to pry the door open, but—"
Erin heaves like he'd actually been drowning. Nobody notices, he thinks.
"We have to cut our losses and get everyone back in formation for landing." It's the first sentence Erin hears supposedly-Baculum say, and it feels like his voice is run through a speaker, even if it's just the way he talks. Not loud, exactly, but with presence.
Presence doesn't mean he doesn't sound desperate and grasping for straws, though.
"All we can focus on is landing properly. We can handle the rest from here."
Cut our losses. It rings in his brain with a hollow echo, and the end of it is puncutated with another sudden slam to the ship. Erin is rattled against the wall again, his stupid augment all for nothing; the only good it does is give him a split second to watch everyone grab onto whoever and whatever they can before they hit the ground, before he also goes toppling after them.
He should do something, but that's easier thought than done. He should—what's he even permitted to do right now? Sit around and twiddle his thumbs? Vace discharged him—Wait, no why's he listening to Vace, now of all times? Everyone here just sees a boy in uniform sitting around and doing jack shit at the moment! He should— what does he do? Help someone? He might get punched right now, everyone's—
It's at this point where some other part of his brain says the word family, and suddenly his ribcage is contorting inwards until bone stabs into himself, and he can feel it tear deeper with every breath, and suddenly afterwards it's flaying outward and his lungs are each being pulled in opposite directions.
He feels his head, or body (definitely only one or the other) cheat over to where everyone else was, but everything around him feels more like shapes juttering around in a two-dimensional world, like the loading screen of his holopalm every time it restarts when the night cycle settings suddenly snap into the workday one; Erin still jolts at the sudden reload when he stays up too late scrolling through nothing. Instead of the good morning message lighting up in front of himself, the text that fades into the front of Erin's mind is only one word:
Dad?
Their father isn't in the bridge, is he? Fuck, Erin doesn't know. He's not part of navigation, or deck crew. He does command things in the special office space near their unit. Which is in the bridge.
Oh.
Erin snaps out of it to a hallway with no more soldiers in it except him. Beyond him, he hears the clack of crutches.
He turns his head in time to see Caseidae halfway ready to run.
Impresa—Impression, if you have to be insufferable—had been ready for the ship's arrival at the wormhole. She'd mentally prepared, because just less than a decade ago, she and Equivocation had sat down in one of the side common areas in the middle of the ship's night cycle, after he'd finally gotten his youngest to sleep for once.
In a moment of weakness, he'd told her there was no way this trip—even if they are able to make it a round trip back to Earth, like planned—would be anything less than half of everyone's life. Forty years, give or take, he'd said.
Impresa had spent her life so far trying to make sure those forty years would be hell of a good few. She was nineteen when she boarded, with nothing except "miscellaneous labor" under her enlisted occupation and "family member to necessary crew" for why she'd been able to get a spot on the ship; Now, she's only a year off from double her age since then, with three different jobs on her record on top of "miscellaneous labor," and a connection to over half of the people on this ship that would make her want to take a bullet for them.
With all that said, and every single thing she'd expected from planetfall (catastrophic explosions were considered, sometimes scarily similar to this), the one thing she did not expect was to see her baby nephew throwing himself across a hallway, grabbing his brother by the shoulders and shaking him like he weighed nothing, screaming, "WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING!?"
Caseidae drops one of his crutches and grabs at Erin's shoulder, pushing him away but not off of him. "He— Erin, I have to go see him, come on—"
"You— what are you thinking?!—" With Caseidae holding him an arm's width away, Erin makes up for it by leaning in with only his neck and head and screaming into his face.
It looks like a dog fight, like she'd seen when looking up forms of entertainment that Earth had, outside of the Vertumna colony. Scrappy and with too much emphasis on the teeth and the claws.
But those are her dogs, and neither of them are good at fighting. There's something about the sight that she would've never imagined before; maybe it's because all the altercations between them have never been in front of her eyes—they wouldn't dare— but Impresa can tell Erin's attempt to hold Caseidae down is as amateurish as Caseidae's attempts to break free.
It reminds her of herself, at nineteen, and the newest and most unexpected person to have made it onto the roster of who would board the Heliopause. Her brother (oh, Equivocation. That's what this is about, isn't it? That's why these two are at each other's throats? She'll figure out what she's supposed to think later) wasn't even the first-pick for who would be Chief of Judiciary, so Impresa herself must have been another hundred names further down that list.
And she knows, at the beginning of things, she'd fought like the roster of applicable passengers was a leaderboard, like she could rewrite. Like she could prove to be better, and more deserving than they were for their spot on the ship.
This is not the time for her to be nostalgic. She looks to Crepuscular, seperated from the crowd of people who are all pointedly staying out of her nephews' trajectory, and motions them away. She wonders where Professor Mercurial is, if his son is here. They join a smaller huddle of people by the exit furthest from the scuffle, but keep their head stuck out to watch it.
It is not the time to be nostalgic, but she may die here as much as the next person, and she's content with being considered one of them when they tally all of the names.
She turns back to the ongoing scuffle now that no one will be stepped on, and she knows exactly what's wrong with the two of them.
Erin continues, and in a voice much more shrill than the rest of what he's saying, "you're gonna die!"
Erin lets one of his hands go for a brief moment, and Caseidae uses that small moment to try and stretch himself out of his grasp. "That doesn't—I don't—" Erin swings his arm around until he gets grip on the collar of Caseidae's shirt. He misses the first time around and instead hits his knuckles against Caseidae's throat.
By this point, she knows for a fact that this isn't something they'll resolve on their own.
"—Dad IS dying! I have to go—"
Caseidae tries jabbing Erin with his elbow.
"NO YOU DON'T!"
Erin takes a hand to the side of Caseidae's head and tugs, like it's a material stronger than just his brother's hair, and Caseidae's head falls forward as Erin tries throwing holding him away from the nearest exit.
Impresa marches up closer behind the two completely unnoticed, and is almost stepped on when Caseidae turns around and shoves Erin towards a wall (Erin does not land against it; they're causing this ruckus smack-dab in the middle of the hallway, but Impresa can tell what the intent was.)
More than anything, she needs to make sure these two don't hurt anyone else without realizing, and—Erin is the perpetrator here, but Impresa knows for a fact that it'll more likely cause him to start kicking and screaming, and he never reacts well to—
"You're not doing this, you're gonna die, I thought you'll actually get it—You're supposed to get it—" Erin shakes Caseidae again. "YOU'RE supposed to—"
Nevermind. That settles it.
The last thing between their scuffle is Caseidae, throat-hurting and hair-pulling and all, yelling louder than she's heard from him all his life: "Let me make my own bad decis—"
She hooks both of her arms around her younger nephew's abdomen and hauls him off of his brother.
Everything falls apart after she does so, starting with the kid thrashing against her. Erin claws at her arms and pries one arm off of himself with sheer force.
Caseidae's voice tapers off, the look on his face makes it seem like the words that came out of his mouth were not unfamiliar to him.
With her vision obscured behind Erin’s head, the most she sees when she glances up between kicks and wailing noises that sound progressively like sobs, is Caseidae half crumpled without someone simultaneously throwing him around and keeping him upright.
Impresa adjusts her grip to make sure she isn’t digging her arm into his bad shoulder’s underside and lets go once Erin can’t immediately jump his brother again.
She looks up to Caseidae, with both of his crutches again, staring at his family, then the exit behind himself.
Let me make bad decisions. She wonders why that train of thought sounds familiar to her.
In the time it takes for her to decide, yes, now that they’re not immediately fighting she has to say something, at least get their attention—Caseidae runs.
Erin’s voice doesn’t sound right when he screams his name, shaking but only able to keel over at most. Impresa runs after him.
He’s going to the bridge. Impresa barely goes over there. What specific path would he take? His housing unit is also by there, isn’t it? Stars, he probably knows this path by heart.
Impresa’s leaving someone behind. She may die from this, too. Circulation’s been cut off from a chunk of the ship and it’s any second before they land head first into destruction. This is a suicide mission, both for her and her nephew.
She still can’t let him die.
—
There are thin pill-shaped windows on either side of the air locked entrance to get into the council’s specific office, the office being locked up and grouped off with the bridge. Regardless of emergency protocols, you need a special permission key on your holopalm to get in.
(Caseidae knows this because his father brought him here before to show him what he did for work, when Caseidae hadn’t been enrolled as a xenobiologist—or for that matter, involved with the scientists at all—-yet. Maybe he wanted Caseidae to be his sucessor.)
Caseidae feels like he’s about to start coughing up blood from how fast he ran. He can’t help but throw himself against the door too, leaning on his side, full body weight against it. He’s not even in the middle of the door, but off to one side and his left shoulder is more against the doorframe than anything.
He remembers the engineer who came by and said people could tell the bridge wasn’t in good condition by looking out windows—-which makes sense; the Heliopause is big enough that, pressing your cheek against the glass at the right angle, you could see further parts of the ship.
He’s next to two right now, the only two which have a clear view directly into the glass dome of the bridge.
Caseidae heaves. Instead, he balls his hands into fists, and knocks against the metal door as hard and fast as he can, “Dad?"
”Can you hear me?”
”Dad?”
It’s me.
You can hear me, right?
You recognize my voice, right?
Are you—
Dad?
Caseidae’s hands are numb. He can’t keep his head upright. He doesn’t actively recall having slumped down but he’s kneeling now.
When he looks down at his lap, he can see his crutches laid on either side of him, and accompanying him is one floor-to-ceiling pill-shaped window. He keeps his head low enough that he can only see the planet below instead of the ship in front of him.
It’s beautiful.
It might be his doom.
[LAT-SQD 4]: Any luck with the missing person hunt?
[DEMI-SQD 4]: yes! impresa n erin went to the medtent by themselves and got accounted for there, so we can cross them off the list
[DEMI-SQD 4]: literally none of that freaking family were at their assigned locations besides one (erin what did you do this time…) i hate my job
[LAT-SQD 4]: No you don’t
[DEMI-SQD 4]: *i hate running around scrambling for a lost person who has run off in a mysterious direction that im being forced to find and chase
[DEMI-SQD 4]: oh, medtent just msged me, impresa says missing guy is around the bridge… yikes then.
[DEMI-SQD 4]: ..? south are you there? hello? don’t leave me on read after that now i feel bad
[LAT-SQD 4]: How did we not find him sooner.
[LAT-SQD 4]: Caseidae’s alive. Right by the bridge but not quite. Like the vent into the council meeting room.
[DEMI-SQD 4]: huh wha
[LAT-SQD 4]: Get a medtech
[LAT-SQD 4]: Now
[LAT-SQD 4]: Please