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Spiraling (The Gap Years 2x11)

October 15th

The Elven Palace

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Ryn thinks about his choices and what he's become. For the ends to justify the means, you've got to be very convinced of the ends.

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Sometimes he fears he’s growing backwards. The youngest Stormson in living memory is now cursed to be a father of three with homesick dreams. And for a Voyager who changed his name in search of glory to dream of home… Well, if a shark stops swimming, it drowns.

Ryn circumnavigated the globe before his voice stopped cracking on every other word. Every Voyager does, but few young crews had a captain as sure as he became. Now he makes grand schemes for other people to carry out and gives rallies to commoners. Engagement is best when he calls himself Stormson. Spark representation and all that. It’s not a last name though, and it’s not a synonym for Voyager no matter what some believe. Life and death, Voyagers don’t even have last names. Before he spent eight years sailing the world, he was just known as his father’s son. Then, every time they dropped anchor elsewhere, he was Ryn of Red Oak Harbor. Ryn left that name behind too before long. He was forever a Stormson, and no homeland or lineage could ever define him as well as the high honor he’d attained. Ryndrion Stormson Mercuralis though is a sell-out. A killer who married up and is only trying to use them.

He tries to let their words roll off him. He knows how they really feel. When Ryn was young, he was told about a future so long-awaited that he came to think of it like a religious end-of-days. Voyagers were descended from astronauts, and someday they would return to space. That someday had stretched on for thousands of years. Now they dig up old blueprints because of him. Progress! Humanity has weathered worse than their plague. Surely his family knows this. Surely they remember the peoples who used to live in the human world parallel to their harbor.

The sunrise is blindingly bright off of the water. Ryn shields his eyes with his arm. The palace city is too sunny and the ocean is cold enough that it’d sooner give him hypothermia than raise a hurricane. Ishtar says the weather is perfect, but he disagrees, and so does Amedi. Ryn would rather face a week-long blizzard (fourth year at the Conservatory) or blistering sandstorms (year six), than this clear blue expanse. Stormsons are Stormsons because the hurricane doesn’t care about your family or where you’re from. You face it as you are. Good weather just hides the danger.

“You’re spiraling, Ryn”. He doesn’t bother to look up. Arjuna’s voice is as clear as his footsteps aren’t.

“I’m writing a press release on the recycling project”.

When he doesn’t dignify that with a reply, Ryn lifts his head from the table. Ishtar’s husband is what wild humans expect an elf to be. Graceful and deadly, with downturned ears the length of his hands and inky black hair that curls to his waist. Arjuna has also killed more people, elven people, than anyone Ryn has ever known. He throws open the windows. The sea breeze threatens to scatter the papers not weighed down by Ryn or his numerous paperweights.

“Was it bad news or bad dreams?” Arjuna is familiar with both. He’s a master illusionist, but those spells take their toll. Sometimes the hallucinations are benign, but he’s been a killer all his life. Of course, being an assassin hasn’t kept the names of the people he loves off the casualty reports either.

“Bad news. It’s really nothing. Everyone else heard it a month ago”.

“If you just heard it, it’s news”.

He glares into Arjuna’s silver eyes. There’s a reason the kids always ask Ryn for permission when they're bending rules. He sighs.

“It’s the consequences of my actions. Voyagers think it’s valor-stealing for elves to take part in human science, but if tame humans want to go back “home” and help, then we forge ID and try our best to make it possible. My father called to say we killed six attacking the physics labs”.

“I see. Collateral damage always feels worse, but we’re past the point of conquest that gets casualty lists”.

Tiredness slows his thoughts. “The lab was working with Cai Sondaica. They weren’t collateral”.

“They weren’t specific targets either”.

“There were no specific targets! We were trying to get back at Cai, and we couldn’t reach him. That’s not collateral damage that’s-”.

“Something even more callous. No casualty list means nowhere to put the guilt. You need to figure this out, Ryn, before the plague starts”.

“I know that!” Gullin plans for upwards of one hundred million dead within the first six months, most of them adults in their prime. Ishtar will reveal herself once alien tyranny would be preferable to human failure. “We’re already telling expatriates to return home, but we can’t give out vaccines, because what if someone hands it off to human authorities, so all those people are dead anyway”.

“Reminds me of a certain mountain campaign…but that was where I met you”.

“Is that supposed to make me feel better? That the ends justify the means?”

“Well, I'm glad we met. We could’ve done without the malaria though”.

They met half a lifetime ago, during the biggest conflict since the last coup. A noble kicking around the human world had been shot by British soldiers, but no one could believe it, so rivals were blamed and war began. He and Ishtar had to grow their legend into something more than Conservatory wins from a few decades before, so they backed Arjuna’s genus and its beliefs.

The war had been the least of their issues at the time. Ishtar had proposed, in the noble way, just like she’d done after they graduated. Ryn refused both times, citing how they couldn’t afford to commit such a noble taboo. That wasn’t the full truth. So they’d been working together more than talking, and kept the fighting against their opponents instead of between each other. Arjuna entered both their lives as an assassin, one working for them, thankfully. He’d been younger than Amedi is now, but already had a vambrace covered in kills. The elven world can’t sustain many assassins. They’re usually spares. He joined their army, then the command council, then married Ishtar by the end of the war. She didn’t love him the same way she loved Ryn, but that was for the better. She’d learned how to love by then.

“Okay. Fine. Power is miserable but it leads to good outcomes. Now you’re going to tell me to go to bed and talk some more when I wake up”.

“And drink water,” he adds, stalking over to the table. “See, more evidence that you’re not doing well. You’re drinking black coffee”.

“I always drink black coffee!” Ryn replies. These talks always follow the same arc. “You’d appreciate it if you weren’t coming up with arcane rituals for tea”.

“My family would take offense to that”.

“And mine the same”.

He lets Arjuna walk him down several twisting flights of stairs from his observatory-office to the body of the palace. Sometime in the past century Ryn lost the ability to function perfectly after a night awake, and he feels even more of a noble because of it. It wasn’t even a proper all-nighter. He woke up around two, like usual, and just didn’t bother to go back to bed. He got three or four hours of sleep!

He sits at the table between a bleary Ishtar and two of his fully awake children. Suen and Fen are having an animated discussion about aerodynamics, by which he means Fen is trying to convince his sister to drop paper airplanes off the roof with him. His older son is off with Arjuna’s family this week. The rest of them have nothing particular to do today beyond rule the world.

“Want to hear something fun?” Ishtar begins. “Tell them what the Voyager coalition said. The kids will love it”.

He struggles to remember. What do the Voyager leaders want with him? He’s given them the sky back but he’ll hardly be welcome after this. The memo wasn’t about him though, or at least not what he’s become.

“The Voyagers sent out a call. They’re training astronauts again”.

The kids look at him with wide eyes. Suen is the heir apparent, but Fen will lead in another way. He’s been told he will be part of the first generation to return to space. Fedran is a strong Voyager name; an ancient title for the planet Mars, and a patron god of mechanics and rocket fire.

“Already? Is there going to be a real Space Camp?” He asks. Suen elbows him and whispers in his ear.

Their mother tries to keep a straight face. “I think that's any Voyager town. Ryn, tell them about the qualifications”.

He drinks a whole glass of water in the time it takes to steel himself. He may be on the High Council, but the room where they meet is at about ground level. Ryn gave up the sky when he accepted Ishtar’s sponsorship.

“Stormsons under the age of 256 are eligible to apply for astronaut training. It’s a bit more complicated than that… but it’s finally time”.

When Ryn was young, his town was nearly manic with excitement. Emer Sondaica would never sail with Voyagers again, but she was the new Apex, and her twin was a mad astronomer. In the other world, humans had begun to invent new math and new mechanics. Hope hung over the swamp like mist. Of course he became a Stormson! His father was, and he simply had to be part of the new era. It was always said that Stormsons kept the watch that astronauts once held.

Fen takes a moment to realize. “Wait. You’re younger than that! Are you going to be an astronaut?”

Ryn looks at his son. “No. I am part of your mother’s High Council… but I could’ve been in another life”.

Arjuna puts a hand on his. “In another life, the coup never would have happened, and there would be no astronauts”.

Ishtar might not have even survived the Conservatory. He'd have always been fine, but the young woman he first met was like a tidal wave. No purpose, no true goals, only a direction to move in and the promise of destruction. He showed her the fireflies and the way the stormfronts rolled in from the plains. She resolved to die for him before three months had passed. Perhaps then the six Voyagers they killed would live instead.

Ishtar scoffs. “That’s why we have seneschals. Anyway, Ryn is my first officer. If he wants to go to space, he’s going to space. Not a soul in the world would refuse the man who made it all possible”.

He’d be a tourist, not an astronaut. You don’t call a man who rides a ferry a sailor.

“Of course. Once things settle, I’ll be off! Suen will have to fly up and get me back”.

The kids laugh. The rest of them pretend.

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every time i write Ryn he gets a little less stable, and his relationships get a little worse.

Ryn and Arjuna are cultural representatives of a coffee vs tea debate that's raged for thousands of years. These days they use it as a cooldown topic for when they have leftover bad feelings but know they need to stop arguing.

@lokiwaffles @reggie246 @wishndreamer

#the gap years #WE’RE SO BACK

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