#the second star

You can still make a choice in the comments even when the poll has ended, I will not be taking any other choice after the first 2 chapters of the backstory are published.

“So that’s – that’s how it happened.” It was a terrible place to end the story, he knew, but Kai didn’t know any other way to do so. It was a terrible end, after all. “I don’t know how she got caught. I learned all of this from her; she wasn’t exactly around to tell me about her own demise.”

“She was your mother, wasn’t she? That’s why she wouldn’t run, when they offered her that option. She had a family. One she didn’t want to leave.”

“I’m sorry,” Kai said. He didn’t know why he said it, but – she had left everyone else, but she hadn’t left him. Not for a time, at least. Enough for it to be special, he supposed.

“Don’t be.”

There was silence for a while.

“You said she told you what happened? But you were… what, one? When she left?”

“I have a letter.” The words dragged themselves from his throat, tinged in bitterness and anger and old pain. “Written on paper, the old-fashioned way. Ten sheets of paper. That’s it.”

He took a breath, ignored the tightness in the back of his throat. He’d never been able to communicate how it felt before, but – maybe now he could. Here was the one person in the world he could share this with. The only person who might understand what it felt like to be left with only ghosts on paper, in video, the voices of the dead.

“The captain was dead. So were the others, hunted like… like so many rats. And she was given an out but she was going down anyways, she knew that. They - she only ever called them they, and I assumed she meant the peacekeepers, but I suppose… Well - they were after anyone who had ever crossed them, and she didn’t want them going after me too.”

“Or at least, that’s what I gathered from the paragraphs full of platitudes and apologies, and ‘I’m sure you’ll understand some day’s.” He snorted humorlessly. “Whether or not I appreciate her wordiness depends on what kind of day I’m having, usually.”

“She left to protect you? Not just to protect herself?”

“So she said. It might just be wishful thinking, but I like to believe her. I think she thought that they were going to find her one way or another, but maybe, if she left, they wouldn’t find me.” He shrugged, lacking the energy to turn that question over and over in his head, as he did sometimes when it ate at him in the early hours of the morning, the darkest hours of the night.

If he had ever known his mother, he might have realized that he looked very much like her in that moment; his movement full of the same unconscious grace his mother had always been full of, his expression tired and set in much the same way hers had been set the day she left everyone she knew behind her, when she faced an old friend down in the new home she’d cobbled together for herself.

“She… she was the last. She knew that, and well. She wanted to pass down the legacy to someone. She left me all the credits she had left, and told me - told me where you were, last she knew, and the code, if I ever found you.”

“Why?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it. That’s the fucking question.” Kai sighed. “I think - I think she didn’t want to be forgotten. Didn’t want any of you to be forgotten.”

“Be Not Afraid, As I am Your Sun and Guiding Star.”

Look at who you’re hurting, Micheal