Respit

"-the cuff seals feel a little bit loose, are you sure they'll settle in after a while?"
No reply. 
"Gunny?"
No reply.
The armoury was empty. Silent. Lyzander-G276 paused for a moment, cocked his head. Nothing. Not even the hum of power conduits, or the ship's engines growling deep beneath them.
"Hello?" 
Still nothing. Still nobody. The crew were absent from their posts, the gunnery sergeant from the station where he was supposed to be handing over Lyzander's armour from refurbishment. The entirety of the ship was as quiet, empty, without so much as a star for him to see in the inky black beyond.
It should've felt uneasy, but it didn't. He frowned, glanced down, before turning around-
-----
There was sound now. A harsh scrape, a soft hiss. A door closing, and heavy bootsteps stomping away outside.
The bulkheads were duller, all of a sudden; aged and scuffed, floor plates worn by the movement of pallets and vehicles. His memories dug up the familiarity of this place, a composite of a hundred different fragments cemented into one concrete place. A relic from when he knew for certain what to do, when those beside him were a bedrock of trust. 
This was a cargo bay. The UNSC Fortissimo Whisper. This was Earth, years ago - those footsteps must be Hari.
How-?
No. He didn't care how. It didn't matter. He just had to catch up with her, to apologise, to let out the words that had weighed on him for the eternity since they had last spoken.
He stepped forward - or he tried, but his suit was lead. It didn't matter. Legs moved through treacle, arms took an age to budge, but it didn't matter. He just had to catch up. His brow furrowed, his heart pounded, the effort built up and refracted off of something inside that insisted it wasn't meant to be, focused itself into a blinding pain just behind his eyes. He just, he just had to-
-----
Lyzander's eyes opened. Ground lay beneath him; rocky, bare ground under his back. No armour, no suit, just ill-fitting fatigues and a bundle of ferns jammed beneath him, a hastily-assembled roof of branches sitting above.
Onyx. Camp Curahee. He was barely a boy, now. He knew it instantly, and he didn't know how he knew.
But it didn't matter. 
The figure beside him stirred, slowly. Teammate, friend, confidante. She had seemed so strong at the time, hadn't she? So determined, so prepared, so ready to take on anything without a word of protest. But now she looked small, scared, fragile. He remembered being scared, too.
A disturbance outside caught her ear - and his, as well. They were voices, voices that he couldn't make out the words of, that he could almost put faces to but were just out of reach. In a moment she was sat up, rising, climbing forward. Pushing the flaps covering their shelter's entrance aside, stepping into the daylight outside. He barely had a second-
"Avila, wait!"
-and she was gone.
His breath caught in his throat. He sat up, looked around, tried to get to his feet - the improvised lean-to should have been too small by half for his augmented body, but it wasn't. His body didn't move like it should; he was smaller, he was clumsier, his mind tired and his eyes foggy. 
It didn't matter, he just had to catch up. He swing his legs over, half-stumbling half-crawling to the entrance, almost falling out and into the light after her-
-----
"Lyzander?"
The voice was soft. Weathered, but soft. A simple comfort; it was fresh air, a cool bunk to retire to, like the one he could feel beneath him. 
He opened his eyes, again.
"Mamma?"
Her face was kind, her eyes gentle. 
"Who else would it be?"
A smile took root and spread across her face; and as it did, unbidden tears did the same at the corners of his eyes. He blinked them away, leaning forward and feeling her arms pull him close as he did.
"Come, now, it's alright. I have you."
He held himself there for as long as he dared, for as long as he could let himself bear the warmth and care, before leaning back and getting to his feet.
"My boy, you've grown." Her laugh was bashful, as if wary of clichéd sentimentality, yet it barely disguised her glowing pride. 
"I... I, I have." The words tripped over one another as they trickled from his lips. 
The world around started to fade, the cracked walls, the tired furniture of his childhood giving way to a blank canvas. It was just her. It always had been.
"You've grown so, so much, and you've done so much."
The simple words stopped him in his tracks, and something broke. 
"Mamma no, I - no, no, no." The trickle turned into a flood, his chest tightening in on itself. "Mamma, I wasn't - I couldn't - I never got to say - I should have-"
"Shhh, hush now." She smiled again; this time, the tears were welling up in her eyes, but she made no attempt to stop them. "It's okay, it doesn't matter now. I have you, I'm here."
"-not when, not with what I've done-"
She reached up - reached so far, she was so much smaller all of a sudden - to his face, softly. She looked up at him and one hand gently cupped his cheek. 
"Lyzander, my boy, my boy." Tears flowed freely now, leaving shining trails down her face as they passed. "How many have you saved, how many lives still go on because of you? How many children has my son brought back to their mothers alive? How many more sunrises have they seen because of him?"
One of her hands stayed at his face, the other belatedly moving to wipe tears from her own. "It doesn't matter, no, none of it does." Her arm withdrew for a moment, before both reached forward for him, and before he could think his own were pulled around her. 
Holding her close. One more time.
"How could I not be so proud of what you have become?"
Category:The Weekly