#the space au no one asked me for

[goldeneyedgirl]

whumptober 2022: day 15: unimaginable things (jasper/alice, AU)

Title: Unimaginable Things

Prompt: day 15: lies

Rating: M (body horror)

He joined the Olympia seven years ago now, still on probation from everything that happened with Maria and the Monterrey... Everything about these people, he cares about fiercely. But they also scare the shit out of him just by existing. 

Viltri is a graveyard. It’s a place of death and dying. 

He used to like the story of Viltri. An old planet, a small one, riddled with volcanic activity that was slowly dissolving it. The Federation reinforced the surface with an alloy frame, one that reminded him of the old-fashioned models - an orrery, that’s right - from Earth. But shit happens, and slowly the planet dissolved and took more than half the frame with it and then Viltri was just a curve of alloy flowing in space, a docking station with slums surrounding it, carving out some kind of living with booze, weapons, sex, and scavenging. A real shithole. 

That was the Viltri he knew as a kid. A place to get totally shitfaced and gamble a month’s wages in a few hours, and wake up in a shitty box of a room with some stranger who was just a little too gaunt and a little too worn down to be beautiful. 

But five years ago, the Federation acknowledged that it was over. The remnants of the frame were decaying, crumbling away. Entire buildings on the fringe were quickly collapsing, and the deaths were becoming noticeable. And because of the docks, because of the risk to ships passing through, Viltri had to be evacuated and abandoned, no questions asked. Third-generation criminals had been delighted they had finally found a way off without Federation paperwork, whilst the handful of native descendants had staged ceremonies of passing for the remnants of their home. 

And now it was empty. No vermin underfoot, no smell of cheap food cooked and fried and replicated. No music or shouting or rumble from the dock station. No cloud of smoke that was. some kind of miasma of fuel and smoke and shit. Nothing. 

The lights are off, the buildings are empty, and Viltri is just waiting for its slow descent into nothing. 

They shouldn’t even be there; Carlisle is back on the ship, fielding numerous messages about why they passed the safety barrier against Federation decree. Promising that they have enough fuel and rations to last them. 

“We received an SOS, and whilst the origins and timestamp were corrupted, we’re doing a sweep of the area.”

Such an easy explanation, an act of a good Samaritan. Edward’s probably already created the false message in the system for proof when some bureaucrat demands it - they’ve already demanded fuel and ration records. Rosalie’s signed off on more documents in the last hour than all month, and she’s still pissy that they came at all. 

Glass and debris crunch under his boots, and he wonders if they were wrong, if the message was old. There had been no response to the reply messages that they had sent through and that’s… well, it was the I.D. chip in their wrist (her left one) that ran the messaging system and it was powered by their bodies. The lack of reply implied…

He doesn’t think about that. Instead, he focuses on the groan of the alloy frame, a death rattle. Viltri’s got only weeks left, if Edward’s analysis is correct. 

That its final orbit was always destined to be very slow and then fast and then over.

(That hits a little too close to home. Or it will, when he looks back.)

—

His story isn’t an interesting one, like Charlotte’s. Or an adventure, like Peter’s. Born on Earth to a pair of young parents who were dazzled by the promise of space, they set off with nothing but what they could carry. 

And it was everything they hoped for. Until it wasn’t. 

He remembers how his father died far more clearly than he wants to. 

(People are always visibly disappointed that his mom lives over in Panai with his stepfather and his three half-siblings. Things aren’t exactly warm and fuzzy between them - she insists she doesn’t understand him anymore - but he talks to her sometimes. She’s happy and safe. Apparently, his story would be better if she had become a vigilante or a villain or gone and died as well.) 

He’s the least interesting of the Olympia crew; Carlisle, the heavily augmented doctor, scientist, and engineer who was one of the early pioneers in space, and was right there when Earth signed on as honorary Federation members. The owner and leader of their little clan, he’s at least a hundred years old, and his augmentations are the oldest, hydraulic-powered type that he refuses to upgrade. 

Then there’s Esme, the Atargatian female. Something about her features - the slope of her nose and the tilt of her eyes - remind him of Earth deer from his childhood picture books. In all the documentation, she’s a personal care assistant for Carlisle. That’s not really his story to tell, though. But she’s the heart of them all, the one that never flinches back from the bad, the disgusting, the grotesque. 

There’s sad, arrogant Edward who is a monument to Carlisle’s grief more than anything else.

Sharp, vain Rosalie who captains the ship, a refugee in her own right, and smarter than all of them put together. 

And then Emmett, the one-man deck crew. Emmett had never met an order he wouldn’t take - especially if it came from Rose. The man had been mooning over Rosalie ever since he’d joined the ship according to Edward, and Jasper had to admire Emmett’s commitment. 

There wasn’t really enough for a ship the size of the Olympia - there were more than a few spaces that sat empty and forgotten - but they all tend to think of it as a luxury. They all appreciate the space to be alone, to not have to fight for water and food, and peace. And sometimes Carlisle would call up the Denali or any one of his old friends who freelance if they needed an extra body or some fresh blood for a season. 

A leader, a ghost, a nurse, a captain slash engineer, an… Emmett (whose job is everything and nothing; one day he might be co-piloting with Rose, but the next he’s running the comms. He’s too good to be on a ship like the Olympia, too reasonable and proactive. A jack of all trades, and a good one.) 

And him, security. 

No analyst, not anymore. 

He and Emmett cover the tech side of things, with Edward’s input. That position has been open for more than five years. Long-term dispatch under her name in the system, like the computer won’t archive her profile in a few months and the Federation won’t send them paperwork to confirm her permanent departure from their crew. 

(And it’s his fault she left.)

—

He picks his way north and pretends the only thing crunching underfoot is glass and rubble. A few candles are still burning, jammed into nooks of walls, and spilling the red and yellowy wax down the bricks, like a burst wound. He leaves them to burn because they were lit by the descendants, the ones who watched their planet dying, only to be saved, and then lost again. The ones who finally realized that the Federation, despite their promises, didn’t really care that much about a remote planet with no long-term resources they could lay claim to. 

Maybe he’s getting bitter in his old age.

Their farewell had been poignant, piecing together the reports from the final departure - candles and prayers and ancient dirt saved in jars for decades flung out in memory of where they had begun. 

There’s an old sign, dull and broken, and when he kicks the rubble off it, he recognizes it. Not the language - no one can read Viltrian, a language with more than 900 characters across five alphabets - but the English speakers (it’s fuckin’ ridiculous they still call themselves ‘English’ speakers, but it’s been over a century and Earth is still refusing to name its official language, and there’s still a furious battle between English, Mandarin, and - inexplicably - French. The next argument will be whether Earth changes its designation to Terra or Sol or something because ‘Earth’ does not translate well to a lot of Federation languages) called it Rocco’s, due to some complex series of events long before Jasper’s time. 

Either way, he’d spent more than a few nights there - drinking and smoking and ending up in a shitty cot above the bar with a glassy-eyed companion. It had been the safest bar in Viltri for humans, the one place they wouldn’t risk being beaten or skinned or molested or just killed. The one place where the food was guaranteed not to be poisonous, the drink wouldn’t burn a literal hole in your stomach, and most of the barmaids knew enough human first aid to be useful. 

The sign is too big to drag with him, and that’s regrettable. The loss of that little safe place, that sanctuary, reminds him of things he’d rather forget. Reminds him of people he’ll never see again, and a person he’ll never be again. 

If he reaches down to snap off the end of one character, brace-laser cutting through it clean, then no one is around to see it. 

He feels like a vulture, like a carrion bird, picking over a body. 

They shouldn’t have come, there’s nothing here. 

That’s when his radio crackles to life, Rosalie’s voice sharp and serious, summoning them west - and he turns on a dime, both reluctant and anticipatory. 

—

He joined the Olympia seven years ago now, still on probation from everything that happened with Maria and the Monterrey, and tired and used up by the scavenging ships. Even the legit ones were the kind of place that wore everyone right down to nothing. The Olympia seemed like a cushy job; security for some soft-hearted millionaire running a traveling medic ship. There was nothing special about the pay or the brief, but he’d applied and gotten the job in two days. 

It had been surprising, how small the crew was. There were three empty rooms on his deck alone - one used for overflow storage. But it was… nice. Nice to have his own room and not just a bunk. A private washroom. Requisitions that were more of a formality than a process or game of roulette. 

Meeting everyone was done over dinner, a communal meal that resembled the family meals at his mother’s home more than any he’d taken aboard a ship - second and third helpings were taken without a blink, and it was mostly fresh food and not the typical stock rations most ships fed their crew. Emmett is boisterous and fun, Edward is seated and irritable, with no food or drink in front of him (it’ll be a week before Esme clues him in to Edward and the perfect tragedy of his existence, and a couple of months before his presence at dinner isn’t uncomfortable. But he’ll never be comfortable with Edward’s complete and utter access to every corner of the Olympia, to every security camera and microphone and file.) 

And then she had breezed into dinner late, and he had frozen for a moment. 

Five feet nothing, easily, and with the biggest brown eyes he’s ever seen; the tell-tale gold disc fitted over her left iris revealing some kind of augmentation, mirrored in the slim vein of alloy outlining the left side of her jaw. Barefoot and in loose pants and a tank top, her hair piled messily on top of her head, she’s just the most beautiful thing he’s seen in a long time.  

“Jasper, this is Alice - our analyst tech,” Carlisle said, smiling brightly as the girl snagged the remaining plate on the counter. “Alice, Jasper is our new security officer.”

“Hi Jasper, the new security officer,” she replies with a smile that feels brighter than anything he’s seen in a long time. “Nice to meet you.”

(Her left arm has the silvery plates of alloy peaking through the skin, especially around her elbow and wrist; it’ll be several months later when he finds the plating runs all the way down her left side, and she’s gone through and etched flowers on all the surface plating, like tattooing over a scar. There are a million different reasons for augmentation and the invisible kind is outrageously expensive. Later, when he’s going over all the onboarding paperwork, he examines the crew profiles and is secretly pleased that there are no android disclaimers on Alice’s. Some people would say he’s discriminating, but he’s not fucking anything without a soul.

That’s crude and unfair. He just … doesn’t want to get his hopes up if Alice isn’t real, if she’s just a tool to help them get their jobs done. If nothing else, he wants the Olympia and all of its unexpected promises to be real.)

—

Rosalie is already with her when he and Emmett make it to the old docking station. 

And for a moment, he doesn’t recognize her. The tiny figure in the black hood, sitting on the ground with Rosalie crouched beside her, slapping some med-patches onto her, is not one he associates with Alice. 

“What a shithole,” Emmett says cheerfully. “No idea why you’d camp out here, Alice.”

Rosalie tugs the hood off Alice’s face to add a med-patch to her temple and jugular, and he’s surprised at how much she’s changed. Her hair is cut harshly to her chin, uneven on one side. She looks smaller, beaten, in layers of worn pro-tex that doesn’t seem to fit right. And clutching a worn-out duffle. She glances at him, and then immediately away. 

“I don’t even want you to fucking look at me, you understand?” His hand was fisted so tightly in her hair that when he lets go, the strands are tangled in his watch and he doesn’t give a shit when he rips the hair from her lying head. He pretends her terror, the tears rolling down her cheeks didn’t cut into him sharply. Pretends he’s in control of his rage and fear and trauma, and that this isn’t just him wildly lashing out like a feral animal. He just storms away and leaves her there, without looking back. 

“Ready to go?” Is all he says, as Rosalie checks something on the med-screen and nods. 

“I…” Alice begins, but the look Rose shoots her stops her. “Ready.”

She’s unsteady on her feet, but she doesn’t relinquish the bag. Instead, she trails after them, limping and fragile to watch. He can see how worn her clothing is, and pro-tex is compromised when it wears. And when it’s as ill-fitted as Alice’s set is. She might as well be walking around in pajamas. 

They had to dock on the opposite side, and it’s a slow walk back. Rosalie makes them stop a few times, offering Alice pouches of rehydration fluids, and checking her vitals with a blank look on her face. 

The luminous blue mesh of the med-patches on her face draws his eyes and he tries to remember his own first-aid training. He’s not qualified to use the blue ones, but the green ones need to be placed directly over the injury and she has them everywhere, and the worry is tight in his chest, and he hates himself for caring even a little. 

Emmett finds an old Viltri flag amongst the wreckage and ties it to a broken pole and carries it like they’re on some kind of adventure mission and not just an SOS call from an old crew member on a dead planet. 

What would have happened if they hadn’t come? 

How did she get here?

How could she have gotten off Viltri before it collapsed? 

She walks in silence, her head bowed, blue mesh glowing on her skin, and he wonders what he’s going to say to her when they get back. What can he say? Nothing has really changed; they’re both just five years older. 

The shudder and groan of Viltri’s death underscores their silence as they pick their way through the wreckage. There are a handful of bodies, and it’s not hard to imagine residents choosing suicide over evacuation in the face of everything… or even for career criminals to hide and choose to die free than risk being discovered. 

He breathes a sight of relief as the Olympia comes into view. It’s become home, somehow. 

But Alice’s head ducks further, and one hand shoots up to tug her hood up, and the fresh wave of guilt settles in nicely.

Why does he still care so damn much?

—

The first few weeks on the ship are weird, he decides. And then it becomes… not quite home, he hasn’t had one of those in a very long time. But a place he’s okay being in. 

Rosalie is one of the Faceless from Velea, and he is quickly warned to never ask about her life before the Olympia; she’s whip-smart, with an engineering background and Carlisle training her as a ship-level medic. Emmett had been working on ships since he was a kid, piecing together a living to help out his family and maybe save for his own small ship one day. Esme was a runaway, and he’s surprised that someone so kind and steady could do something as spontaneous as fleeing home and joining a med support ship as a barely-qualified nurse. 

Edward was an enigma until Jasper catches him walk through a fucking wall and Esme kindly takes him aside and explains that Edward is a hologram AI designed off of Carlisle’s missing son. The whole story is horrible, and there’s something morbid about sitting down with what is essentially a memory. But despite everything, Edward is smart and occasionally witty. 

Alice is a delight, and he hasn’t enjoyed someone’s company so much in a long time. She’s always smiling, always happy to pause for a conversation. She seems to have an easy back-and-forth with everyone on the ship. She’s terribly vague about her past - the most he gets out of her is that she doesn’t have any memories of her family, and was on her own until Carlisle was willing to offer her a place on the Olympia. 

He finds himself drawn to her, seeking her out when she’s on break. He tries to justify it to himself, that it’s just been a long time since Maria; it’s been a while since he’s spent time with friends, with people who aren’t as miserable as he is. It’s a good thing that he’s making normal friends.

(If he sticks close to her side when they dock, fetches the drinks, and turns down smoking, ignores the pointed looks of the willing around the bar… well, it would be fucking rude to abandon her.)

They are a sight to behold, he knows, about more than one person whispers about them when they are docked on a new planet. Two humans together? A rare sight on the more rural planets. And they are an interesting contrast; he towers over her, with blond hair and sharp grey eyes. She’s so slender, with black hair that she changes on a whim - sometimes it’s long and pin straight, or short and curly, or braided with bright purple streaks. 

It’s… nice to be normal. Ordinary. Emmett’s quick to show him how to hide the parole anklet in the style of boots they’re issued on the Olympia (nicer than anything else he’s ever gotten on any other job), and Rosalie is quick to pay the bill if she suspects he’s short on cash. No one judges him too hard when he wants to smoke; Rosalie huffs and rolls her eyes, Emmett jokes about it but very, very rarely joins him. Alice does, but she’s tiny enough that she’s a lightweight, and Emmett ends up carrying her back to the dock dorms more than once. 

It’s especially nice when those outings somehow turn into just him and Alice. Sometimes they bum around in the crew bars, the ones where the food is greasy, the music is loud, and the booze is cheap. Sometimes they end up in nicer places, where the lighting is low and the food is good, and they have to sit too close to each other. 

It starts with a drink and a kiss, a dance, and an awkward night bunking together at the dock dorms because they checked in too late and there was only one bed. 

Alice feels like a fresh start, like something good and happy and safe. Like maybe he’s been looking for a place where he could be happy when he should have been looking for a person. He never thought he’d meet someone he’d be okay with being stuck out in the middle of space for weeks on end.

Then he met Alice and, well, he’d get lost with her any time. 

(Too goddamn good to be true.)

—

Carlisle is delighted by their return, only a flicker in his expression when he glimpses Alice. 

“Food and then med bay,” Rosalie orders, pushing past to head to the cockpit, dumping the stash bags in the alcove. “Then rest. Anything else can wait.”

“Thanks Captain,” Edward says snottily and Rose just flips her fingers rudely at him, ignoring Emmett’s chortle, the flag still in his grip. 

“I’ve got food waiting,” Esme beams at Alice, and Alice nods silently, accepting the gentle squeeze on the shoulder that Esme offers as she takes them all to the galley, to plate up the food and settle around the table.

For a moment, Alice is wolfing down the food in the kind of way that indicates she hasn’t eaten in a while. Esme’s a good cook, even with the shelf-stable shit they have to keep between docking. 

But just as suddenly as she starts, she stops before bolting to the flush sink, hurling before she’s even still. Esme is there with water and comfort and Carlisle shakes his head. 

“A little too much too fast,” he says as Alice wipes her mouth. 

“Sorry,” she mutters, keeping her gaze on the ground as she sits back at the table, not bothering to reach for her plate again. 

It’s an odd reunion of the crew, Alice fidgeting for a while. He doesn’t know what to say to her because he doesn’t know how he feels about her. Five years is a long time, but nothing has changed. 

Or maybe he has. Maybe five years apart, knowing he was the reason she left, has shamed him and softened him. Maybe all of those lessons he was supposed to learn from the debacle with Maria, he really learned from Alice. 

She should have told him the truth. But he should never have been that angry, that cruel and terrible to her. 

He still hasn’t worked out what to say to her when Esme escorts her to the guest suite, with Carlisle promising to look over her med report, and Alice still clutching her duffle bag. 

“I-I need to talk to you, Carlisle,” Alice says in a small voice, and something passes between the pair when she says that. 

“Of course. After dinner - you need some rest,” Carlisle says and everything feels a little off-centre, so he skips the rest of lunch and spends the day locked in the old analyst office doing ship paperwork because somehow that’s more appealing than being alone with his thoughts right now. 

—

Every year, Carlisle gives them ten days off. They dock on one of the capital Federation planets so that the Olympia can be serviced and maintain its accreditation, and they get a break. 

They usually choose late summer-early autumn - or what passes for it - for Emmett’s benefit, so he can spend time with his family. This year, he’s loaded up with gifts and dragging Rose along with him; Carlisle (and Edward) are headed to the University of Namen; Esme and Alice are going off with the crew from the Denali, and he’s headed off to see his mother. 

Panai is one of the planets most like Earth’s visions of the future, of alien cities. A futuristic white city with abundant green-space, clean air, and children playing in the street. His mother lives on the hill, with her new family, a bit of a local oddity being the only humanoid living in the Panai equivalent of suburbia.

Cass Whitlock lights up when she sees him, her smile genuine as she embraces him and brings him inside the house, but he still feels the words they exchanged right before he left with Maria sitting between them. With every argument and disagreement and look of frustrated disappointment on her face. 

His half-siblings peer around the corner of the meal-room; two giggling girls and a toddler boy - Cat, Nori, and Baby Lo. Cat’s the one that looks most like him and his mom; the blonde hair, her nose. But all three of them strongly resemble their father with the mottled blue skin, the extra digits on each hand, and the two smaller eyes under each humanoid eye. Nori has sinuous blue strands in place of hair, and both she and Lo have the flat, serpentine nose of their father, Najo. 

Jasper’s never gotten along with Najo, whose strict religious leanings made him distant and cold to outsiders. The few times Jasper had been to the house, had chosen to stay there instead of at the dock dorms, it had been uncomfortable at best. But the man keeps the space for Jasper’s father in the shrine wall out of respect for Cass, and his mom is happy with her life. That’s all he wanted for her. He’s just hurt that her happiness never seemed to have a space for him when he was younger, and now that she has made a space, it’s not a shape that he fits into anymore. 

“How are you, Jas?” Cass is already preparing snacks, and he pretends not to hear Cat hush the others. He’s got gifts for them - Najo had been seething with offence the first time he’d arrived without traditional offerings, even as Cass tried to explain that human culture didn’t involve the guest - especially family - making an ‘offering’ to allow their presence.

“I’m good. I brought stuff,” he says, and there’s a whoop of delight as Nori darts out, visibly sniffing the air. He piles the boxes on the table - wine and tea and the candy Nori ferrets out. The books make Cass smile and kiss his head, and it’s times like this he misses the outpost he was raised, the quasi-human compound that was just familiar enough to give his parents confidence. 

“You don’t have to, you know,” she says as she scoops up Lo, handing him a piece of the candy. “Najo understands.”

“Najo was genuinely disappointed I wasn’t executed or sentenced off-planet,” Jasper says and regrets it when Cat’s smile disappears. Old enough to understand, then. “I don’t want to cause trouble.”

“I appreciate that.” 

The visit goes surprisingly well, and when Najo gets home, he is polite - warm to his children and Cass, so Jasper doesn’t really care how he’s treated. 

Unexpectedly, Nori seems taken with him, staring at him as they eat, but he really doesn’t know how to talk to kids, especially these children that share his mother. 

It’s late when he goes to the shrine-wall; dozens of little alcoves with photocells of the dead. Cass only has five alcoves - Jack Whitlock, her parents, a brother who died as a kid, and a friend who died at the same time as Jack. The rest are Najo’s family and friends. 

He leaves a stone, from Yavanna, at his father’s memorial. Najo hates it, hates the symbol of an Earth faith in his home. And Jasper himself was not raised in any faith, but his father had been and it was just … one thing he could do for him. 

“You seem lighter.” He turns to see Cass. The children are asleep, and Najo is in the sanctuary, so it’s finally just them. 

“Easier work,” he shrugs. And it’s true, the salvage ships are hellish; he lost fifteen pounds his first stint, and it had only been a half-time job.

Cass shook her head. “You’re less angry,” she clarified. “I’m glad you’ve found a better place.” She moves towards the opposite wall, the one that bears the photocells of the living with incense and coins to ensure a good life. His photo hasn't been there in years - probably destroyed when he was arrested - and he hasn’t been bitter about it in a while.

“Tell me about your new crew.” Cass begins to tidy up the shrine, picking up bits of dried fruit and candy that the children have left there, and he finds himself talking, explaining, and trying to gloss over the stranger or more personal details of the people he works with. He finds himself talking about Rosalie and Alice, about their educations and how goddamn smart they are, before musing about Alice’s fascination with all things Earth and how much more celebrated someone as skilled as she was would be back there. 

“Alice, huh? Are you close? She sounds like she likes you,” Cass has a knowing look on her face as she watches him, and he looks away. Alice is a lot of things, but they aren’t anything serious. A teasing kiss in the tech room, a drink at a bar wherever they’ve docked, a soft conversation when everyone else is asleep over coffee about everything and anything… it’s becoming something, but slowly. And he’s cautious. After everything that Maria did, promised him, and everything that she ruined… he never told Cass any of that, and he doesn’t want to confirm that it was worse than she already assumed.

He lets out a huff of breath and Cass beams at him, reaching out to squeeze his hand. 

“I only ever wanted you to be happy, Jas. To let go of that anger and fear and let yourself be happy. I know it’s hard, but that’s all I’ve ever wanted for you. Sometimes it feels like I lost you and Jack at the same time, even when I had you by my side.”

He nods, but the old anger flares; the one that let her move on so easily. That she was sad for a while and she packed it away after a while. Met Najo and picked him over Jasper; build herself a brand new perfect little family.

“Do you even remember that day?” he asks, after she’s turned to leave, and when she looks around again, she just looks frustrated. 

“Of course I do, Jasper. I still have nightmares. But being angry after twelve years… it doesn’t fix a thing.”

“Maybe not for you.” Because you weren’t there. You only showed up when it was too late, when it was all over. The words he spat at her as a traumatized fifteen-year-old hover in the air. 

“I’m not having this conversation again. I’m glad you’re happy, and I’m glad you’ve made friends. Good night, Jasper.”

(Cass always thought it was like magic, the idea that a few chemicals in a petri-dish could create a fetus; he knows she was enchanted that she could go to the equivalent of a 711 and buy a baby, a child, another whole person, in a test tube. He wondered why she had never done it, grabbed the green and purple tubes of Synth, and taken it home to build the second child she and Jack could never manage. Afterward, well, she had always just been sad. Never angry.)

They don’t talk alone again before he leaves after breakfast, and he finds himself mulling over his mother’s words. Not about being happy - that ship sailed when he realised how deep he was in it with Maria. But about Alice. About that maybe being something. 

He still hugs Cass when he leaves and she wishes him well. As usual, he makes no promises when he’ll be back, and she doesn’t invite him. 

—

Edward shimmers as he strides irritably across the galley, and Jasper idly wonders what it’s like to be eternally seventeen. To have all the thoughts and feelings and memories of an ordinary kid, to think you are that kid but in reality, you aren’t. Just a database of code. 

(There’s a panel in the hall outside of Carlisle’s room and everyone hates it. Of a redheaded girl at a piano, smiling as she plays; then she looks over her shoulder and laughs. Miss Edythe Cullen, frozen forever at her piano; an eternal shrine that is a little too lifelike, a little too convincing.)

Rose strides into the kitchen and for a second, she’s faceless before her usual, perfected facade drops into place. He winces because Rose hates it when she lets her facades drop, when others see her in those moments. 

“She still in there with him?” She asks grumpily. 

“Yes,” Edward scowls. “Carlisle turned off the projection in there. Wanted privacy.”

“Esme’s retired for the night,” he adds in casually, and they all exchange looks. Esme is privy to so much of the crew’s … mess that it feels notable that she’s not included in whatever Carlisle and Alice are discussing in his quarters. 

He wants to not care, honestly. Not to desperately want to know how the fuck she ended up on Viltri after the evacuation. Why she had waited five goddamn years to call them. 

“Well, I’m not waiting up,” Rosalie said, turning on her heel and leaving. “Whatever she wants or has or knows is just going to be more drama.”

Edward huffs and continues pacing and Jasper slumps at the table and wonders again what its like to be eternally seventeen, and not being able to sleep or eat or fuck or do anything but wait. 

Everything about these people, he cares about fiercely. But they also scare the shit out of him just by existing. 

—

When he walks into the galley the next morning, he expects a crisis. He expects Rosalie to be percolating with irritation, Emmett to be shoveling in breakfast so that he can get on with whatever plans they need to put into action, Carlisle arguing with Edward and trying to talk Rosalie out of her snit, and Alice and Esme to be trying not to trigger an argument. 

He’s not expecting silence, of Rose and Emmett drinking coffee alone. 

“Where is everyone?” He asks. Esme prides herself on cooking for them regularly, but this morning is pre-packaged rations that Emmett is attempting to reanimate with gels and the precious bottle of honey they snagged during the last supply run. 

“Edward and Alice haven’t come to breakfast,” Rosalie said, her stern look masking her worry. “Esme is tending to Carlisle.”

That’s bad. ‘Tending’ means she’s there in a professional sense, as Carlisle’s nurse. ‘Tending’ means that something is wrong. He can’t even begin to understand Carlisle’s health or medical status, but the few incidents he’s seen are clear reasons that Esme is employed on the ship, her relationship with Carlisle notwithstanding. 

“Rose thinks she’s handing out a nice relaxing sedative,” Emmett says, taking an experimental bite out of his breakfast and looking satisfied with the results. “Eddie hasn’t told us anything.”

“Probably just a long night,” he says, snapping off a chunk of the breakfast bar and popping it in his mouth. He regrets it immediately; it’s the same brand and flavor the Monterrey used to stock and it takes him back to a place he’d rather not be, mentally. “Or his hydraulics fucked up again. You know how he gets.”

“Maybe.” Rose pushes her untouched breakfast toward Emmett and stands up. “If you see Alice, tell her I want to see her in the med bay. You two are on dinner duty - no reheats or rations. I’ll take lunch.”

That’s when the sense of dread really settles into his bones. Rosalie offering to cook. 

It’s nothing. What could it be? They’re all here, the ship is fine, they have supplies. 

Anything that has happened, they can fix.

He tries to convince himself of that as he throws away his breakfast bar, but the bad taste continues to linger.

—

Of all the secrets he kept - the ones that kept Peter and Charlotte out of prison, the ones that let him still see his mom, the ones that mean the difference between life and death - the dumbest is the one that has always weighed the heaviest on him, has gnawed at him over the last five years. 

They got married on Xevis, drunk and high and happy. It was a fucking cliche, and when they had sobered up, she had laughed until tears rolled down her cheeks and he was just embarrassed that he didn’t do it properly. 

(Grandma Whitlock was still alive down there in Texas, and he’d always promised himself that he’d take himself back to see her one last time. With a bride in tow… well, that would have made her so happy.)

The paperwork sat in the inbox for nine weeks before everything went to hell, and then she left the ship, and he didn’t bother doing anything with it. Just an ugly, sour memory split between fear and resentment of everything that she hid from him, and regret for how he had driven her out of her home. 

(The marriage was legal and binding on Xevis, but never filed with the Federation. Meaningless unless they wanted to work or live on Xevis, and that would never fucking happen. He’d be more likely to set up shop on Viltri.) 

But it was still a vow. A moment where consequences and rationality had been damned, and he - they - had just done what they wanted. And then, when everything had gone wrong, he’d become the person everyone feared he always would end up being. 

Sometimes he wondered what would have happened if he’d never found out. If she’d just been another pretty augmented human girl to him, and his wife. He’d never wanted kids, and she’d never be able to have them, so that wouldn’t have revealed her. 

(He’d been shitfaced when Emmett dragged him back to the ship that last night, and loudly slurred if he ever saw the fuckin’ Synth again, he’d shoot her between the eyes. Esme and Rosalie had been horrified, and Emmett had blamed the drink. She’d already left by then, but it would take him another two days to notice her absence, those words echoing in his head.)

—

The compound he was raised on was one of two that Earth had contributed funding to, for expats. He remembered a scarlet sky with two suns, and lush grass that was more blue than green. He remembered their bungalow of straw and mottled wood. 

He remembers most of the residents at the compound being humans; the adults had grand plans of raising earth animals and selling them to alien worlds and making millions.

(He was only young. He didn’t know everything. He didn’t know anything. He knew three languages, and that watermelon, corn, and blueberries became poisonous when grown in alien soil, and that the half-alien girl in the house down by the northeast corner was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen. He didn’t know the price on human bodies, on human tissue. He was a white boy from Texas; he could never have dreamed up how dangerous and unfair and cruel life could be.)

He was nearly twelve, by Earth-time, when it all went to hell. 

They were supposed to be safe. 

That’s why when the compound bought the Synths as support workers, they included security. It was probably more expensive than necessary but it was important 

Back then, Synths were not really special, not to him. Humans made in Petri dishes and grown in labs weren’t all that interesting when he might see something blue and gelatinous or with five legs or sixteen eyes at the docking station. They were just neighbours to all the kids in the community. 

And the Synths ones in the compound weren’t fancy; they looked like regular people. They were treated like regular people, mostly. The only real difference was the tattooed serial number on the inside of their middle finger, a shade darker than their skin. Something you had to look for, designed to be subtle.

No one knew they were unhappy; they were good at hiding it. Or rather, they were upset as the Federation began the Synth restrictions - tougher than androids because Synths could blend in so much easier. But no one noticed their rage. 

(The trigger was when Earth refused them passports, refused their entry, and made them stateless. He remembers his father promising his mother that it would be okay, they would look after their own.)

He remembers it being a hot day, helping his father with the precious few chickens they were attempting to acclimatize in a corner of the barn.

He remembers being confused when the barn doors closed.

He remembers his teacher, her gaze hard and cold against him, holding him back as the others cut Jack’s throat. 

As they laid Jasper’s father down next to the other men, the older teenagers (nine of them died that day), and stripped them down.

When they began to cut and slice and peel, as they bagged and boxed each piece, they didn’t need to hold him back anymore. He just stared, blood sticky on his face and hands. Too young to be worth a dime. 

Sixteen hours in that building, before they packed up their bounty and bid him farewell, and left him there with nine splayed out bodies, cut down to the bone and hollowed out for profit. 

(The one with the dark hair blew him a kiss and promised they’d come back for him when he was older. He still has that nightmare where he’s just another body on the floor, eyes and tongue and organs scooped out.)

Cass had howled when she saw Jack, screamed when she saw Jasper, and grabbed him in her arms so tightly when he reached for her that there were bruises on his arms. He shook but he didn’t cry, didn’t make a sound. 

Not even when the community lined up the other Synths, the ones that were just as confused and afraid as the humans were, and executed them on the spot.

Monsters were real and they wore human skin. 

—

Carlisle comes to dinner with red, tired eyes. 

Edward appears not at all. Neither does Alice. 

The meal is eaten in silence, Carlisle looking exhausted and worn and utterly hopeless and nothing is said until the plates are cleared and Rosalie is pouring cups of coffee. 

“Rosalie, please run co-ordinates for Noctuae, Small Island,” Carlisle finally says, deflated. “They should be in the system.”

“Of course,” Rosalie says cautiously; she’s been quiet all day - like the rest of them, she’s been waiting for whatever bomb is about to be dropped.

“Emmett, send a message through to Masen House that we will be docking for three in nine,” Carlisle adds, staring down at the translucent slices of fruit remaining on his plate with the sort of hopelessness Jasper is familiar with. 

“Masen House?” Rosalie asks, and Jasper surreptitiously runs a search for the name in with his Lens, the name ringing some faint bell. Edward Masen Cullen. “What’s going on, Carlisle?”

There is a terrible, hollow pause as they watch Carlisle try to gather himself. 

“Alice brought me Edward,” Carlisle says simply, staring into his mug. “She found him being used as a tissue farm and…” His head bows and Esme’s gone pale in horror, and Emmett looks vaguely ill. 

Tissue farming had popped up before the Synths and continued on after them; it wasn’t something they could be blamed for. It just… wasn’t taboo in some quarters of space. DNA splicing, transplants, blood, and organ donation… it was all legal. The problem was in that there was always a demand for more variety, more choices, especially exotic ones. Like humans. And where there was demand, there was always going to be someone willing to provide. 

He imagines what Alice found when she saw Edward. If it was a nice place, probably a man kept alive on life-support, harvested at the whim of wealthy clients. Probably brain-dead from the chemical coma. 

If it wasn’t a nice place… he didn’t want to imagine that. Edward’s just a kid.

Or he was. He always has been. Always will be, now. 

Carlisle sets the metal box down, a rough label slapped on the front, along with a blood-stained microchip. 

“She had no way of traveling with him,” Carlisle began, and he can already see the sobs building. “And he couldn’t have anyway, he was gone.” The sobs break through and Jasper wonders what that level of love felt like when turned to grief. If he’d sob if any of his half-ling siblings were found too far gone to help. 

“We’ll take him to Small Island,” Esme rushes to comfort Carlisle, her own face streaked with tears. “With Edythe and Elizabeth.”

“Yes. The end of a chapter,” Carlisle manages with a shuddering breath. “A father without his children…” He shakes his head. 

“You’ve still got a child,” Rosalie says softly, and looks down the hallway and for a second, Jasper expects to see Edward’s mopey visage, trying to compute the idea that he’s a hologram and AI of a dead person and how exactly he needs to mourn himself. 

Instead, he sees a flash of black hair and worn pro-tex, and he just feels pity for them both.

—

It starts - or ends, really, with Alice flipping Emmett off.

They’re in the galley, doing the quarterly reports on supplies. It’s boring as hell, documenting every mug and every spoon, with the knowledge that once the galley is done, they have to check over every other common or unoccupied room in the ship. 

(“It’s fucking stupid, but at one time any human goods fetched a good price on the black market,” Emmett informed him solemnly during his first year. “When I was a kid, a potato peeler was worth more than a new optical drive. So now we log every fuckin’ dish towel for the Federation to make sure Carlisle doesn’t make his dough hocking tube socks and chopsticks on the down-low.”) 

It’s a good night; Rose mixed drinks for them and they’ve bypassed Edward to pick the music themselves, and Emmett’s making salacious jokes at their expense because their last date-night at the Peremai dock involved too much liquor and not a whole lot of discretion, and Alice flips Emmett off and that’s when he sees the tattoo. 

The shiny glint of the genetic-tattoo a shade darker than her skin, running up the inside of her middle finger, and the bottom drops out of his stomach. The world tilts, and he hears static, and then he feels sick before he feels anything else. 

Maria reassured him, all those years ago, that the Federation had outlawed Synths after the attacks on the Earth compounds, and the small population of them were tagged and monitored - virtually the only forms of employment for a Synth were wet work and sex work. You had to go looking to find a Synth.

That was what she was good at - they were good at. 

And Alice is standing there, laughing with a drink in her hand, and he doesn’t know how to speak. 

(What happens next is that he grabs her by the arm and drags her out of the room, and Rosalie demands to know where they’re going and Emmett wolf-whistles, but really he takes her back to his quarters and he demands to know the truth. There is screaming and crying and words that he doesn’t remember saying. He remembers punching the wall over and over again, and when Esme is bandaging up his hands the next morning, he can’t convince himself that’s the only thing he hit. It’s all a messy blur in his mind, of terror and rage and betrayal and the kind of fear that never ever leaves him, that remembers the shape of him. He doesn’t remember a word she says in her defense, and for a long time, he doesn’t care.) 

Carlisle finds him three days later and invites him into his lab. He’s hungover and an open wound, ready to be fired and dumped at the next docking station. He wants to fucking yell every obscenity at the man for not disclosing Alice’s status anywhere at any time.

But he’s not fired. He’s given a cup of coffee, and Carlisle is serious but kind. Every human knows of the Earth Nine, knows their names. They’re in the history books, even in space. 

“Alice has been put on an alternative schedule for the foreseeable future,” is the first thing out of Carlisle’s mouth and he is petty enough to be pleased that she - it - will be on shift alone, maybe with Edward for company whilst the rest of them sleep. The rest of what Carlisle says is the usual - counseling, time off. Nothing he hasn’t heard before, and he doesn’t want to admit that he can’t afford extra leave because of all the fines and shit that were a part of his sentence. 

It’s late at night when he’s trying not to listen out for her moving about the ship and get some fucking sleep, that he allows himself to mourn what he thought he had. To let the great well of sadness swallow up the rage. And he blames himself for thinking that he could ever expect anything to be good, to be safe, to be happy. 

(Maybe, after she’s gone, he starts gathering two stones from the places he visits - one for his father’s shrine at his mother’s house and a spare, one that he lines along his port window and never acknowledges.)

—

It’s quiet after they find out about Edward. Carlisle spends a lot of time in the mostly-unused sanctuary of the ship, lighting cells and whispering prayers from one of the Earth religions over the box of ashes. 

Esme takes to cooking, and everyone pretends they don’t see her sniffle over cookie batter - another child lost to them. If the world was a perfect place, everyone on the ship would have their children, their siblings, and their parents. But it isn’t, and he’s the one that goes with Esme with her little bundle of things - a cookie, some strands of hair from an old hairbrush, writing he cannot read on a piece of paper - to throw into the airlock and release into the sky as Esme kneels and whispers the prayers of her childhood. 

Rosalie just looks sad in the few absent moments he catches her; she prefers to remain busy, moving between the cockpit and the med bay, to make sure everything is textbook-perfect. 

Emmett’s in the tech room and Jasper runs into him having a conversation with his siblings on the video-comm, and Emmett looks a little sheepish, but he understands - you want to hold a little tighter to what you have when there is a loss. 

Edward and Alice are both absent from public spaces, and he feels slightly pathetic when he leaves a hydration pouch and some snacks outside the guest room door - along with a spare pillow and a set of clean pyjamas - instead of knocking on the door and talking to her face to face. 

He wishes she’d chosen to stay in her old room, but he understands why she doesn’t. She emptied it before she left; he remembers Carlisle telling him she’d left the ship, and going straight to her room like she’d be waiting there for him. And it had been empty, smelling of antiseptic, the bunks folded up and the walls blank. The guest quarters are always made up and ready. He doesn’t even know where her stuff is - he assumes in storage but he doesn’t know. 

He finds himself wandering the ship under the guise of keeping an eye on things but really, he’s thinking about Edward, about tissue farms, about his father and eight others splayed on the barn floor, hollowed out for profit. It makes him feel old and tired and lost. It makes him hope that Edward’s death was soft and peaceful, that he just drifted off and eventually his brain gave out from the drugs. 

He hopes it wasn’t ugly and dirty and scary. No one deserved the death his father had, what he witnessed. He wouldn’t wish that on anyone. 

It’s quiet, but the weight of everyone’s grief is the loudest thing he’s heard for a long, long time. 

—

Alice’s quarters were always the smallest on the ship, and she’d joke that it was because she was too. Narrow and programmed to have purple walls with flowers that bloomed around doorframes, it held a pair of single bunks, a locker, and a small desk. She used the washroom across the hall and he was bewildered that an analyst with seniority was given worse quarters than he was. 

But there was the window. The one opposite her bed that took up the entire wall and offered an uninterrupted view of the sky. It was beautiful, and the entire reason she kept the room. 

The night he spends in her room, he keeps finding new things to look at - the moons and stars and suns she’s painted onto the underside of the top bunk; garlands from every planet she’s visited, each of them with a different meaning, strung across the ceiling. How she requisitioned as many blankets as she could and cut them all up to make a hideously ugly quilt of industrials greys and greens and blues, and then spent a fortune on inks and brushes to painstakingly paint each square in bright colours. How she’s piled half the bed with pillows like she’s trying to create some kind of nest. 

“It’s a mess,” she says shyly, as she begins gathering up her clothing to cram them into her locker. She has more clothes than any of them, picked up at markets all over space. It reminds him of some kind of home seeing her swan down to breakfast in a floral bathrobe and duck-print pajamas; to drag him off the ship when they dock clad in a white sundress and ballet slippers. 

“It’s perfect,” he says, and she beams at him, crawling onto the bed with him. 

“You know what?” She asked him shyly, her hair falling into her face. 

“What?” She’s so tiny in his arms, he worries he’s going to hurt her as he gathers her up. 

“I love you, Jasper. The most I’ve ever loved anyone in my entire life. I just wanted you to know that.” Her eyes are wide and she smiles at him before she kisses him, and that’s the moment that imprints itself on his brain; surrounded by stars with the scent of floral shampoo, and them wrapped up in each other. 

(Something in him breaks, months later, when he finds that room empty and grey, and smelling of antiseptic cleaner. It’s the kind of despair that cuts deep, and he knows that he deserves it, every ounce of pain. But it takes years for the rage to dull and let the shame and regret through.)

—

It’s Edward that finds her. 

Three days later - three days of Edward hiding away from everyone, three days of Carlisle shutting himself in his quarters to mourn. Three days of Alice emerging for meals she picked at in silence before returning to the guest quarters, never going near her old room.

He hears the alarm go off for med bay, and Rosalie and Carlisle dash through the ship to the guest quarters; he and Emmett follow and for a moment he wonders if she’s killed herself.

She’s on the floor in her sleep clothes, so pale she looks translucent, with Rosalie already slapping med-patches onto her and Carlisle checking her vitals. 

“I told her to go to the med bay,” Edward says waspishly, the first words he’s spoken since he found out, and it is comforting that he’s at least been confiding in Alice. 

“How long has she been sick?” Carlisle asks. 

“She wasn’t in great shape when she boarded, Carlisle,” Rosalie’s answer is short, and Carlisle looks away and he realizes that even though she arrived covered in med patches, Carlisle had been too distracted to look over the health report Rose had compiled. 

“Two nights ago,” Edward says quietly. “She said she found treatment before she left for Viltri, but she implied it wasn’t good.”

Carlisle nods, his whole demeanor changing. “Get her to the med bay,” he says, flicking the screens on the med-screen authoritatively. “I’ll stabilize her and pull up her records.”

Emmett is the one to carry her, with Rose and Carlisle hot on his heels. He stays back with Edward - he knows basic first aid, nothing useful at this moment and he’s seen enough dead bodies not to enjoy this part much. 

Edward’s looking at him, and he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to say. 

“How sick is she?” Is what he goes with, and he’s surprised how lost he sounds in that moment. 

“She’s been sick a long time,” is what Edward says. “Do you know how hard it is to find doctors that know human physiology and will see a Synth? Let alone treat one?”

Edward leaves without another word, and not for the first time, he wonders where she’s been and how she ended up here. 

—

Alice leaves them. 

There's not much else to say about that, really.

It's weeks after he found out the truth and she's been working second-shift the whole time. He barely sees her, and he's glad of it.

He goes with Emmett and Rose when they dock, and he walks past her on the ship, holding a cup of coffee and looking tired.

Edward tells them not to bother taking the projection cells, he's staying on the ship with Carlisle.

He walks out and goes and gets blackout drunk, and when his hangover passes, and they are two days out in the middle of nowhere, it finally registers that she's not on the schedule anywhere, that it's been Emmett in the tech office.

"Alice decided to take extended leave" is Carlisle's diplomatic answer when he asks. And that's it.

She's gone.

Alice left (and she never planned to come back.)

—

He’s not allowed to see her until the next day. 

Edward tells him everything, refusing to speak about anything but Alice when he appears - that she did regain consciousness but only long enough for Carlisle and Rose to question her. 

He selfishly wants to know if she asked for him, and the look Edward gives him implies that he knows what Jasper is thinking and that he really is a fuckwit to think that the girl he so fantastically terrorized out of her home wants anything to do with him anymore. 

“She was out of it,” Edward finally says. “Answered direct questions but didn’t realise she was here. Kept trying to give out our call-signal. Rose was pretty generous with the pain meds I think.”

Rosalie is never generous with pain medications; insisting on a stockpile in case they really needed them. Emmett needed laser-stitches up his back a few years ago, and even then Rosalie had been stingy. It makes his stomach twist, that Alice needed them bad enough that Rose was willing to give them. 

He waits for a while before decamping to the galley, where Esme is waiting with lunch and a sympathetic touch to his shoulder as he paces, uninterested in food. 

“She would hate seeing you so upset. Carlisle and Rosalie are beyond capable of handling this,” Esme says so gently, her words punctuated with a soft click-pop typical of her species. It’s comforting.

He shakes his head and keeps pacing, gets himself coffee just to give himself something to do. Esme sets the table and Edward slouches against the wall, scowling at the pair of them. 

“Do you think…” Jasper begins and Edward huffs. 

“Tell him Esme,” Edward says and Esme frowns before looking over at Jasper. 

“Alice corresponded with me a few times over the years. Very superficial messages,” Esme says, and he whirls around at the idea that there are clues and information that has led them to this moment. “There was nothing to tell, so I didn’t think it was worth mentioning.”

“What did she say?” He wants to yell. That any message was better than nothing. As if it is Esme’s fault she’s so sick she doesn’t know where she is. 

“She said she hoped we were all well and safe. She mentioned that she hoped you were happy once or twice. Edward seems to think that withholding this information from you was tantamount to betrayal, but they were nothing, Jasper. I write longer supply reports.” Esme looks so sad.

“You went to her room the other night and spoke with her,” Edward retorts, and he and Esme have always had an odd, sibling-like relationship where they both know best and both want the best for Carlisle. Normally, it is funnier. Now, it’s just irritating. 

Before Esme can respond, Rosalie emerges from the med bay, looking tired. She plucks the coffee out of Jasper’s hands without a word and takes a long draw from it. 

“Carlisle said you can see her if you want to,” is all she says to him, as she takes a seat at the table and pulls a plate towards herself, ignoring Esme and Edward’s bickering. “He’s put her under though - advanced systemic shock.”

Life-support. It sounds worse than it is; he knows this. Humans are put on life-support for bad fevers, infections, setting badly broken limbs - anything where the body needs to be stabilized and supported. It just makes him nervous. 

The med bay is quiet when he slips in the door, his eyes finding her immediately. She lies on the gurney like a dead body, wrapped in medical modesty garments and nothing else, staring blindly at the ceiling and seeing absolutely nothing. He sees the white tubing threaded through her nose and mouth, into both wrists, and he knows that it's the life-support system that will keep her sustained until the treatment is over. But the tubes are almost as thin as wire, enough to render them invisible in the bigger picture, and mostly she just looks like a corpse on a slab. He can see her skin now, blue and black mottling all over her right side, pink and scarlet lines of infection just under the skin. 

(Did he read everything he could on Synths after she left them? Yes, he did. He knows about systemic shock, and he knows about every single hellish detail about the long-term effects of lab-generated tissue. Somewhere, Maria is laughing at him and calling him a hypocrite and a traitor.) 

Carlisle looks at him with pity. “I haven’t prepared her yet. Taped her eyes and such,” the man says and that makes Jasper want to gag a little. 

“How long will she be under?” is what he manages. 

“It’s been a long time since I treated advanced systemic shock, let alone of this severity,” Carlisle admits. “She’ll be under for a while, at this rate. Alice knows the risks and accepted them.”

Ninety days. That’s the limit of life-support for Synths. They die quickly after that; and it takes at least twenty-one to grow new tissue if the infection on her side is too far gone. He knows that. 

That’s why she’s got so much plating down her side, he realizes suddenly. A previous infection. He never asked and she never told him. But it makes sense. If a tissue-graft hadn’t taken or had needed some kind of binding and reinforcement, plating would have been the most effective option.

And this is all assuming the infection hasn’t gone to her brain or heart, he swallows hard and drifts to the seat at her side. If it has, there’s nothing anyone can do for her. She’ll just die.

Maybe that’s why she chose Viltri to send an SOS. Planned to be quietly dead when they arrived, with Edward’s ashes in her bag. 

Or maybe she never planned on coming home, and planned to pass on her message, and stay behind to die with the planet they met on. 

(Carlisle lets him stay as he tapes her eyes close, draws blood, and links up with the chip in her wrist. At some point, he finds himself holding her hand and pressing his lips against her knuckles as Carlisle drills into the bone of her thigh for tissue. 

If he finds himself praying, saying the words a half-remembered grandmother once taught him, well, maybe that’s okay.)

I’m here and I’m so, so sorry. 

I’m sorry for hurting you, I’m sorry for forcing you to leave, I’m sorry for forgetting how much I love you.

And I do, I love you, and I’ll wait for you as long as it takes. 

—

She’ll be okay. 

He doesn’t believe in much, but he has to believe that. 

—

Notes

For those who don't dwell in the same media spaces as I do, 'wet work' is killing for hire.

I have detailed backstories for every single character. I just need you all the know the idea captured me and became a thing. Thanks for the inspo, Archer 1999.

Jasper’s father was raised by a Jewish mother, and whilst Cass and Jack Whitlock were more science over religion, they did teach Jasper as much about his origins as they could. Leaving a stone from his travels at his father’s memorial was the way that Jasper could honour his father that had multiple meanings. But I really wanted to mention that yes, Jack Whitlock was raised by a Jewish mother. 

Rosalie’s backstory here is somehow grimmer than her canon backstory, but I hope to explore that in an expansion of this fic. Basically in this fic, Rosalie’s parents were far more active in her downfall, that Rosalie is a 100% self-made alien. 

Edward as an AI hologram allows him to keep so many of his canon personality traits, as well as some of the hurdles his relationship with Bella faces. Edythe’s demise weighs heavily on both him and Carlisle. There is a story there, and if I get the opportunity to tell the full, multi-chapter version of this fic I don’t want to spoil it ahead of time. But Edward and Edythe were not Carlisle's bio-children.

The Lens is something that didn't get explored enough but is essentially a permanent contact lens that allows users to access their computing network - that's what the gold overlay over Alice's eye was. Alice chose one that was very visible over her eye, mostly people chose them to blend in with their eye colour.

Cass Whitlock's story is a lot more complex than gets touched on here - I have a whole backstory for her. I'm still undecided whether she's kind of an asshole to her eldest son, or if she was just totally unprepared to deal with his level of trauma.

[tryagainstarlight]

Enter: The house maiden

Act 1, Scene 1

Lost to the noise... Unfortunate.

[PREV] || [NEXT]

[wszczebrzyszynie]

why did scar burn down the ranch in the space mining au? did he think jimmy had something to do with grian's disappearance?

In short: it was for revenge. He knew well Jimmy had nothing to do with anything that happened to Cub or Grian, but Tango did, and at that point in time Tango fully moved in with Jim. Scar just treated him like collateral damage. Cubs corruption (which was a consequence of both his and Tangos actions) happened at that time, and Grian disappeared (caught by Martyn) leaving Scar alone. And Scar doesnt really... handle being alone well

A very... long version is under the cut. And i do mean it, its long, but explains exactly why Scar burned down the ranch, with all the events leading up to it and with some Cub characterisation in it

Best way to start all of this is to say a bit about Cub in this au. Even though he and Scar arent related, theyre very... brotherly-like, as theyre both second generation vexes raised together. Except while Scar went into the very bootlicking job of official bounty hunting, Cub was always against everything govnerment related. Never an outright criminal, but always hanging out in these circles. He supported Scar to an extent while making sure Scar knows what he thinks about all of this. And also that, ultimately, he knows he can count on him if something goes wrong. Even if Cubs going to be annoying about it

Cub is smart. Cub has insane amounts of knowledge about an insane amounts of topics. So much so that he was able to (with help of Mumbo, i suppose) design a complete new type of mobility aid specifically made for Scars new crime job. He is also, to a fault, interested in space mining. Hes a bit younger than Tango, but was already an adult when sculk was discovered to be a dead, alien lifeform. And the thing about sculk is that its the most important discovery in modern human history that everyone wanted to know more about, Cub included. Its what truly started his... adventure, with space mining. Its what got him close to Tango in the first place

Cubs sculk corruption happened almost acidentially. Ive mentioned before that Jims ranch is on a planet in the middle of nowhere, which also happens to be a living sculk planet; sculk planets and moons arent common, but they exist (one of them being callisto) and are pretty well known, plus its possible to find sculk in smaller amounts on planets and asteroids that wouldnt be considered "sculk planets" (as in, sculk isnt the main thing to be found there). Living sculk planets on the other hand are so rare that theyre more of a theory than a real thing, at least at first*. While sculk found in most places is long dead, Jimmy, with correct tools, could have access to its living form. And this is how Tango gets a sculk sample as a gift for Cub; so small it fit in his pocket. So that Cub could continue his research on his own, without having to spend ungodly amounts of money. And Cub does so, and experiments with it, and reanimates it, leading to his infection. And, unlike what Tango experienced at callisto before it got blown up and Tango became a wanted terrorist, it actually felt good for him. Being a vex comes with so many health complications that having a parasite (especially one Cubs been fascinated about for so long) that completly dulls it is something he was okay with. Neither Scar or Tango agreed with him here, Tango knowing everything sculk does first hand, and both of them made the decision to save Cubs life, whether he likes it or not (Cub didnt exactly... believe that sculk could kill him). Sculk is sensitive to sound and light, thriving in dark, wet and quiet environments, and its extreme sensitivity to sound is what Tango learned while helping Zed. The exact logistics of it and timeline of events are not set yet (rip) but what matters is that Tango and Scar succeed, saving Cub, who goes unconcious for a while

Now that the backstory is over, the reason Scar burned the ranch down is because not only Tango got Cub infected in the first place, but also because he... broke Cub, in Scars eyes. Cub cannot forgive Tango for saving him because he doesnt believe he needed to he saved. He thinks that Tango acted out of self righteousness, setting back his research (needless to say Cub didnt exactly think straight while corrupted and after the coma, kind of like with his original sculk corruption durning the crossover). He holds similar feelings towards Scar; more complicated, sure, because he loves Scar, but he also believes that Scar hurt him and tore out something he needed to really feel alive. Scar cannot forgive him specifically because the corruption changed Cub and his relationship with him, and the fact that Grian, a vital part of Scars already small close support system, wasnt around, it made Scar act rasher and with more hate than he would normally. He didnt go there to burn it, exactly, as probably simple murder was on his mind, but he activated one of Tangos paranoia-filled security measures (...traps), one thing led to another, an explosion happened, and scar decided to burn it all to the ground. Like a normal person

For more info as to why Tango was living with Jimmy at that time, im sure i mentioned it somewhere here? Ill just add that to protect both of them and their home Tango trapped it. And like most of his traps, they backfired.

Put some old art here to better demonstrate what im talking about

* the funny thing about Jimmy here is that he tends to find sculk... a lot. The reason he had to move from one place to another time and time again is that all the mining sites he used to work on got either closed down or fired people en masse because of sculk; while mining sculk is extremely profitable, its also hard and requires a lot of special machinery, including mechs, which wouldnt be used for things like coal. And when he got divorced and stopped being a miner, he moves to a planet, breaks his helmet in an accident believing he would die, only to realise that the planet had breathable air all along because of sculk under the surface. This is the closest space mining gets to the canary curse because i dont really like the curse as it is now, but its so heavily mining related i had to tie it somehow in a way that would satisfy me. Very offtopic but i think i should mention it

[is-this-even-relatable]

A Rising Phantom

———

Summary: danny died, and no one knows. He is a full ghost, and only thanks to his dual obsessions can he “live” a normal life and pretend that nothing happened.

I aim to make this a multichaptered fic! Hopefully, the first fic I post on AO3!

HEADCANONS/TROPES/TAGS:

no one knows! AU

full ghost! danny

eventual everlasting trio

dual obsessions inspired by this post, which are protection (Phantom) and space (Fenton)

my own headcanon: danny's death is inevitable, a single point in time that cannot be avoided or changed.

———

Danny died on a Saturday.

He was too young to have been left alone; any other house would’ve be fine, but everyone in that town knew, even then, that the Fentons' house was to be avoided by a wide berth.

His parents had rushed out in a frustrated fit, leaving him and Jazz by themselves for the weekend, just like so many before. They were always an afterthought to their parents, long before he was 14.

Danny didn’t intend to go down to the lab that night. But Jazz was out with her friend Kyle, and he was bored. And something down there called to him, though he didn’t know it.

He didn’t know that forces beyond his comprehension were leading to this point, this singularity.

If Danny had known the fate in store for him, he would have begged his parents for them to stay that night, or take him with them. But he didn't know, he couldn't have known... because that's how it was always going to be.

He didn’t know that a man with a clock in his chest, who changed between ages in the blink of an eye, was watching as he walked down those lonely steps.

He didn’t know, as he pulled on a white hazmat suit hand-sewn just for him, far too flimsy for what it was meant to protect him against, that a sentient dimension was pushing against the veil, straining for him.

He didn’t know, as he stepped through the gaping metal maw, that it had already called his name, and death had claimed it.

And afterwards, while he curled up on the cold basement floor, clutching his chest for a pulse, he still did not know that even if he had known... he would have had no choice but to do the same.

Danny died when he turned the portal on, alone in his parents’ lab.

Standing inside, fifty million Watts of electricity coursed from his palm to his heart, searing its path into his skin. It had no exit route. It cooked him from the inside, lighting all of his nerves on fire, and doused him in an infinite realm’s worth of dimensional energy. After what seemed like hours of screaming, panicking, burning- he somehow managed to crawl out of the portal.

He died then, lying flat in front of the machine that ended him, as the intense pain faded into a dull throb that replaced the beating that used to be in his chest.

And as he sat up, feeling both sore and feather-light, he looked down upon his body, and realized that he had died that day, and he was not coming back.

Danny panicked. And he did the only thing he could do. He decided to run away, afraid of what he was, confused and scared and feeling very not himself.

But the main anxiety that drove him to hide his accident was a rather juvenile one.

…He was afraid that his parents would be upset that he had gone into the lab without their permission.

He had messed with their stuff, and turned something on… something he definitely shouldn’t have.

He had just opened a portal to a realm full of the very things that kept him from sleeping at night, of “unfeeling monsters” that his parents had drilled into him about for years.

A portal to ghosts… that were now free to come through.

That thought made something inside him solidify, and a low hum began to emanate from him as he worried about his family. About the ghosts and the portal and how they were going to manage without him…

He couldn’t just leave like this. Not when he was responsible. He couldn’t let a whole realm of monsters hurt his family. At that thought, dread filled him, and that same something inside his chest ached.

But it occurred to him that he still had to leave. Not just at the thought of his parents stumbling in on his body.

No, it was about him. For he was one of them now, wasn’t he? A ghost. And he was a monster now, too. Despite not feeling like one. Despite knowing that there was clearly something wrong with what he had been told and what he knew was intimately true of himself in this new form.

But something inside him whispered at him that he couldn’t take the chance, if he did turn into a monster. He couldn’t let himself hurt his family.

So with fears on his back and a tingle fading from his fingertips, Danny pulled himself up onto unsteady feet. He took his body outside, to the woods where no one would know. And he buried it, alone, surrounded by trees and the sky.

He sat there, at his fresh grave, and cried.

Holding his arms around himself tight, he mourned the loss of warmth, of blood pumping and his heartbeat, so loud in its absence.

Surrounded by nothing but silence, he mourned that he’d never made close friends, nor really had the chance.

Looking up at the stars, he mourned that he could never fulfill his dream of being an astronaut.

He mourned for himself because no one else could.

And as his last cry petered off into the night, the sun broke the horizon.

A different something tugged at his chest, and he let it pull without resistance, worn ragged as he was.

And he was grateful he did. For a soothing light washed over him and transformed him into something similar, but not quite as he was Before.

But he felt warmth, and he felt a pseudo-beat in his chest, sluggish as it was. And suddenly he realized that although he was dead, he was alive in a different way.

He was still there.

He didn’t have to give up on life.

He was not going to be a monster.

Danny walked back home. He washed the dirt away from under his fingernails. He swept the lab until it looked like no one had been there. Minus the massive swirling vortex.

And when Jazz got home from her sleepover, Danny hugged her with a smile.

He was going to be fine.

They would all be fine, he would make sure of it.

[hawkinasock]

The file crashes everytime I try to edit it, so this will likely remain unfinished until I have a better device. Thought I'd post the wip to commemorate Yanqing being amazing in 2.5 <3

(Redraw of that one chimera Falin scene iykyk)

[kingflups]

Luis couldn’t feel his body anymore. The presence existing inside him coiled, and Luis recognized it enough to know it was pleased. There we go, the presence purred. It wasn’t one voice, but the chorus of many as acting as a one. It spoke quietly, and honeyed, and with a warm calling of crickets song. It was sour. Home, home, home. Thank you, little lamb. We’ve missed you.

Day three of Serenedy Pride Week! I completely lost control and went into a full Dungeons and Dragons AU! Which is still fantasy but god damn. God damn!! I got lost in the sauce of this one. Luis goes through it.

[lyfrassiredda]

introducing the unwilling captain of the Dynamos, former Inspector Second Class Lyfrassir Edda! 

The AU where lyfrassir tries to hunt the prison mechs down with their shiny new eldritch powers (and a gun) for ditching them while their system was vored by a crusty imperialist’s eldritch sugar mommy.

Unfortunately, they’re not the only survivor of a Near Mechs Encounter interested in finding the crew of the starship Aurora— not by a long shot.

[kitsunespawz]

Omg i hope you never stop putting blockmen in dresses, we rlly need more of those

If I ever stop, assume I'm dead

Anyways here's a sketch of Etho wearing a Kimono that I did back in may and never posted

[jichanxo]

how it started:

how it's going:

[i3utterflyeffect]

okay so victim wants to keep friend but kill noogai, which are the same person. the cognitive dissonance is terrible. maybe conclude that artificially removing all memories of noogai from amnesia!Alan would count as "death" and still get to keep fren?

GOD THAT'D BE FUCKED UP. fortunately i figure that'd take a while for victim to figure out considering they never really invested their time into technology that can alter people's mind even though they do have the mind reader; erasing memories is a lot harder than altering someone physically or spitting out a feed of their memories

[lazaruswitch]

was thinking about jane gardner au specifically jane and isabel and was all <333 bc bc bc !!! jaysabel!!!

but here's the thing. jane is a redhead isabel is blonde. jane is a green lantern and isabel sometimes gets caught up in shenanigans so she gets to have a cool outfit and a smth heavy to hit ppl and aliens with. gothamites will look at them and go oh i didn't know other places had their own harlivy that's cool ig a win for the lesbians and all

[laplacesdevil]

I can now spread my propaganda of Jeremy as phone dude. AND objectum

[mamawasatesttube]

outsourcing my decisionmaking again. as sotm winds to a close, what smaller lil oneshot type thing should i focus on next?

[just-bendy]

just-bendy is back in business!

(( now that i've set up CSP on my new laptop, I'll finally be able to answer asks!

i'll reopen the ask box later with a MINI EVENT! please be kind to the two characters that'll be the focus of the mini event

thanks to the people who have been waiting patiently! 😊💜 ))

[liesmyth]

omg Redditor???

YES! you won't catch me dead discussing any sort of media or politics on reddit but I love it for stuff like. cooking subs. fitness. various hobbyposting etc. I also get sports news on there and sometimes the comment sections on those are hilarious but sometimes it's the worst thing on earth. but it has trained me to look away! from bad internet opinions in a way that tumblr could never hope to achieve. I modded a couple decently big subs over the years and I used to get the most unhinged DMs there

I genuinely like reddit because I think it's like sitting at a table in a cafè and overhearing randos' conversations in terms of getting the pulse of what people outside your circles think about various stuff. BUT. I AM irrationally peeved whenever all the r/soccer dudes still think I must be a man. even though my account has a blatantly obvious female usernames and she/her in the user description.

[apocalypticdemon]

I would say I have no explanation for this, but uh. I really do. Behold: the first ideas for a Terror IndyCar AU that has possessed me for the last 36 straight hours. It would not leave me alone until I put some of it to paper.

Behold: Crozier as an established, relatively liked, if cynical, driver, upstart rookie James Fitzjames, and Hickey, who is, as always, totally normal and not causing problems.

The art is rushed, but I needed to purge the demons as fast as I could