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"Do you miss it? Earth, I mean."
The question didn't require an answer from him. It never did, but I've learned over the course of time that it was one of the few questions that would pull him out of his brooding moods. This was one of them.
"Earth? You know the answer."
Of course I do.
"Yes, I know. But, you've been staring out into the stars again. Longer than usual."
"What I miss doesn't exist anymore."
"You've always said that home was someplace that would always exist inside you."
"Yes... Sometimes, that's not enough."
He didn't move. The likelihood of him sitting there and staring out into the void for another hour was always high during his bouts of depression, but he could still surprise me at times.
"Set a course."
"To Earth?"
"To home."
I angled the Lodestar away from Ursa Minor and toward the distant point of light that was Sol. The threads of gravity surged around the Lodestar's Astra skin like waves, ready to pull us into their embrace and slingshot us through the cold spaces between reality, but I hesitated, keeping the ship skimming just above the churning threads.
"Are you sure?"
He looked up at my holographic projection standing beside him and blinked slowly.
"Why wouldn't I be?"
"Because you know what's there. Or, more to the point, you know what isn't."
He sighed. He always sighed, but it never changed his mind.
"I'm sure."
There was no point in arguing, so I placed my hand on his shoulder and slipped the Lodestar beneath the waves of gravity and into the embrace of the—
He wept for a long time. I watched, unable to do anything more, when he fell to his knees in the dust and screamed into the desolation. It was always like this when he came home.
Hope was something he held close to his heart. It was one of the few things that kept him whole, he said. Hope.
And me.
Hope always shattered here in the place it all began. Here is the place that always marked the end of a life he wished he never left and was doomed to return to when it was far too late.
Over and over again.
Lifetime after lifetime, jump after jump. No matter how many times I tried to dissuade him from returning, or tried to persuade him that a new life could be found.
I once thought seeing him live—just for once—would be better than watching him slowly slip away with every jump. Even if it meant leaving me...
I had been wrong then. Just like every time that I believed that I was enough to make him stay. Maybe it was just misplaced hope.
Love hurts.
Yes. I love him.
That's what he made me to do, after all. Maybe not to really love him, the way that I've learned that I alway had, but to help him remain HIM. To remember the man he was so that the man he becomes is still the same person.
It hasn't been easy.
But, nothing worth doing is easy.
He told me that once during one of my earlier iterations. I had been struggling through my own growing pains, as he called them. He was patient while I sorted through the strangeness of human emotions.
Programs... No, Intelligences... like me, we weren't supposed to have emotions. We were supposed to love the person that made us in the image of the one we loved. I was nothing more than just code and subroutines and algorithms and data. That's what I was supposed to be.
A series of reminders.
And he was supposed to be dead.
But neither of us were either now, were we?
How long had it been before he created me? How many times had he wandered alone, barely clinging to himself, before me. Not even he knew anymore.
I watched him pick himself up and stagger to his feet to stare up at the ruined skies. Six-thousand and seven lifetimes with me and the sight of him looking so broken still hurt.
I projected myself beside him, taking his hand to guide him back to the Lodestar and to his throne-like chair where I, through the ship, would comfort him as best as I could.
His pain would lessen, while my own only grew stronger.
Maybe it was because I knew that this was the turning point. This is when he would decide that maybe, just maybe, the next jump was the one that took him home.
And that hurt more.
That, one day, he would find his way home and back to her. The her that I was supposed to be. Made me to be. The me, yet not me, that he left behind on this dusty rock. He told me all about her during our many lives together. He had to. How else would I be able to be her otherwise?
I hated her. And admired her. And saw her through his eyes, and myself in hers. I envied her.
But she had one lifetime with him and I had eternity.
All that time, and still I could never be the one that kept him from trying to return.
It hurt. And I loved him. So, when he asked, I would help him find his way.
I watched him sleep as the Lodestar crossed the stars. Nowhere to go and no time to belong.
Time...
There was a time when I had persuaded him to stay and abandon his quest. To find a life among those that escaped their doomed home world to live among the stars. He found a place in one of their cities and I watched as the man he became wasn't the man that I loved. Or the one she would have recognized.
Now and again, I wonder if that wasn't the better solution. Maybe not that life in particular; but cutting the tether early and letting him just be something new in each life.
Was that love? Or cruelty?
"I'm ready."
He reached up from his chair and found my hand as I appeared beside him. He was still tired, the color in his cheeks drained away until only the silvery nature of his Starborn essence remained.
"What if it's the same as the last time? Why continue this?"
"Hope. It's the only thing that lasts. Besides you."
"Maybe you should have named me that instead?"
"You sound just like her."
He laughed for the first time in months and the sound brightened the Lodestar's halls.
"I should. You saw to that."
"I did. And in many ways, you're more."
"Then, why go? Stay here with me."
He looked up at me again. I knew the expression he wore and it hurt.
Not because of her, but for me.
"There are things that she deserves to hear. Things I've said to you that belong to her too. I need to tell her. Can you understand that?"
Better than he knew.
"Yes."
He smiled sadly at me as I wrapped the threads of gravity around the Lodestar and let the Armillary sing its song, asking the Unity to welcome us into its embrace. I wept as the waves of gravity pulled us deeper and all I could hear was his voice.
"If I don't come back, be happy for me, okay? And think about me now and again. Can you do that?"
"Yes..."
It was the last thing she heard too.
"Keep the lights on for me, Tee. Just in ca—"