blasts you with my transgenderification beam

SW - SolarCurious

Main blog - @catgirlwerewolf

Other writing blog - @abducentukulele

Icon ID: Blue light in the shape of a dog on a black grid background. /ID.

It's all connected in your head. Your dad might've put you through the training to figure out what those connections mean, but you can find them well enough on your own. The world is a mystery that you can solve. A connect-the-dots puzzle where you've got no idea what the picture is. Nothing is separate. You mean to say one thing, and something only vaguely related comes out.

You realise that you're pulling your limbs closer to yourself, hunkering down, and force yourself to relax. There's nothing to be scared of. Grace isn't sick, you would have noticed. Right? And even if it is sick, it's not dying, its ship is protected from radiation, so it won't be like- it's going to wake up. You will watch over it until it wakes up.

The sun is warm on your face. Your neck hurts from looking up for so long, squinting in the bright light, but you don't want to look away. This is the last time you'll ever see the Hail Mary. The closest you can get to seeing the crew one last time; you saw Ilyukhina and Yáo just before launch, spent the days before it watching Dr. Grace sleep in every spare moment you could find, but you can't shake it, the want for just a little longer.

Your body is a vacuity, a space which nothing fills and only cold gathers, and for the first time, heat enters it, and there is nothing missing inside of you. Each empty space is filled. Every dim spot, every blurred half-memory, every faint tug at the back of your mind is wiped away in radiance. Blinded. If you'd thought you were a pale imitation before, this leaves you a blank slate. It removes all of you so that it can stretch out comfortably inside. No longer alone - you are inhabited.

The notes blur together and you can't make sense of anything but how loud they are, all the words you've learned meaningless. You could go grab your laptop, but that would mean moving from the comfortable little ball you've curled yourself into, so that's not happening. Rocky lets out a piercing trill when all you do is stare blankly at him - that, you recognise. He's worried. When you flinch at the sound, he rolls closer.

It's terrifying, knowing you can't change anything now, that you have to stick with whatever you do no matter how badly it works out. You can try out every possible option. You can take back everything you've ever done wrong. You can do it, but you can't live in that perfect life for longer than a moment. Everything has to go backwards again, and you have to live with what you said the first time around, knowing how much better you could've done.

It's not fair. It's not fair for her either, you remind yourself. That doesn't make it any easier to bear. Her misery doesn't give you back your parents. Her guilt doesn't let you sleep at night. It doesn't make you feel any better that she thinks of herself as a burden; it just makes you feel awful about the selfish little part of you that agrees.

Nothing has ever come to you easily, not even cooking; you're good at that, unlike everything else you've tried, but you're still always striving for some level of skill, of recognition, that's just out of reach. You want something that you are incapable of achieving or even naming. Despite your best efforts to find meaning, nothing has ever genuinely satisfied you. Today, you think you'll make goulash.

It's the most scared you've been since that night at the football pitch where Maddy took you to an open grave and told you you were still alive, that she'd seen your heart and it was beating. You don't need her to have been right about everything: another world, another you, waking up to find this has all been a bad dream. It's okay if there isn't a perfect life waiting for you to slip seamlessly into it, without the mess of changing this one. Really, you won't mind. You're good at not getting your hopes up. But you want her to be right about this.

It's quiet in your head. Not that blissful kind of quiet you used to get looking at the Hive or pinned under Levi, knowing that you didn't have to think at all, you didn't have to do or be anything, just let yourself be used as a vessel, but regular quiet. Calm quiet. No longer buzzing all the time. Able to sit and hear yourself think. The kind of quiet that doesn't beg for a distraction from the awful reality of being yourself.

It would bring such shame to him if word got out, you understand that; but couldn't Domek have somehow told you the girl was a transvestite before you got out the hammer and nails?

What a beautiful thing, to be made important. You were given a purpose before you had to find one for yourself. His presence had sanded away the rough edges of your life, plastered faith over your flaws and sealed them away. It's strange. You have not felt alone since before knowing him, not even when he was taken from you. But you feel alone now, in this place, even as you walk on with the certainty you'll find him.