There was an echo to the void.
Sometimes, at the worst times, she could hear voices from the past. It took her years to learn not to chase, to sit back and to listen. Even thinking about those who possessed the voices brought an ache to her chest so strong, she swore if she left it alone, it would be the death of her.
She had seen the insides of ships and cells, of sky capitals and cargo bays. She had run through open fields and crossed the highest mountains in the galaxy. She had even mustered the courage to visit Ixxin'lo one last time.
But nothing compared to that euphoria of starting anew.
Rhailo was a creature of new beginnings. Ends would come and she would see them to their finish, but beginnings were so brief. All she wanted was to enjoy the bittersweet calm before the inevitable storm.
Turner Dunham was a man of few words. She barely knew him. Only really knew that he enjoyed racing across the dunes of O'shala and that his dog (recently deceased) was named Corduroy. The two met when Rhailo landed and they'd been traveling for a week since, aimless, as though the whole sandpit theme of O'shala wasn't boring enough.
It was a stroke of ill-luck that the hummer starting choking on the sand. Misfortune or not, the pair were stranded while Turner poked around beneath the vehicle.
Rhailo chose to sprawl across the hood of the parked vehicle, lounging under the heat of twin suns. They both had names but she couldn't remember them. Instead, she called them Inky and Shiny. Even such a ridiculous idea put a smile on her face, and sure enough, her face was suited for smiling. The warmth rose over her bare arms and legs, prickling her pale skin until she thought herself tender from a developing burn. Even then, she stayed where she was, enviable and envious all at once.
"Thirsty?"
Turner didn't poke out from beneath the machine, all too focused on the task at hand. Also, strangely enough, he was polite. Not once had he stared her down or leered at her or threatened her. In the grand scheme of things, he wasn't really her type.
"I have a canteen." Lazily jingling the vessel as if he might hear it, she sighed. "No. I'm just fine."
"Fine like really fine? Or fine like something is seriously fucked fine?"
She ignored his question. Instead, she asked one of her own.
"Are you a mechanic? I didn't hear you call anyone to come get us, so you must know your way around a..." She considered the vehicle in question before settling on, "truck."
"It's a Tzark 45k. Most of the work is custom. Calling someone wouldn't do us a ton of good." A pause. "Also, I'm more of a Fixer. Not just a mechanic.. I can fix most problems."
Rhailo's narrowed gaze shifted from the sky as she leaned to one side, stealing a glance over the hood of the Tzark.
"That's a really bold claim to make, yeah? What if I have some problems I need fixing?"
"Guess you'd have to let me in on what these problems might be. Figure it out as we go. If I can't fix them, you might be able to fix them yourself."
"Hmmm." The Auroun's sights flickered shut. She detached from reality. She was sending herself somewhere far from the conversation, out into the infinite, and she was going to avoid this topic because-
"Bet it's about a man." Turner chuckled low in his throat. "It's always about a man with your type."
And she was back in the present, back to the conversation, revived by the utterance of something so crazy and profound.
"What do you mean by 'your type'? I'm not a synth or anything so simple. Just because I'm not a Terran doesn't mean I'm somehow easy to read-"
"Hey, hey now- no need for that. It was a joke about pretty women, not about whatever- well, you might be."
Oh, right. He didn't know what she was. She sort of loved the fact he didn't know.
"Ah, sorry. I'm just thinking about not thinking, y'know? Maybe what you said is right. A man on my mind, problems with men, whatever. I just push it away. It's like this clutch of pearls I keep with me, but they're toxic and they're eating me alive. It's always so much easier to pretend I'm not sick."
"Sick?" He asked, finally sliding out from beneath the cover of the vehicle.
"Yeah. Sick. Sick with worry, sick with doubt. Just sick of holding on when it's not happening. Sick of asking myself to compromise for the sake of keeping up. Sick of being dropped off on random planets in the middle of a foreign galaxy." Her eyes rolled, pale and cheerless, as she added, "And I'm so sick of the melodrama. Love is just... I can't describe it. Too much too fast. Too little for too long. The rot in the core of a fruit. On the outside, it's the fairytale. On the inside, it's the forgotten ending. The lost chapter."
"Huh." Turner maneuvered with a slight squirm to get completely unlodged, then rose to his feet. Thick build, farmers tan. His hair was prematurely greying, but that always seemed like such a crazy idea to Rhailo. How many decades had she been at this?
"That it? Just huh?"
"I'm thinking," he answered. She gave a moment to collect his thoughts. Two. Three.
Eventually, as she was readying to tell him to forget she mentioned any of it, Turner said, "If you love someone enough to love them through all the rot, maybe it's okay to keep loving them. From the sound of it, it isn't that love is what's hurting you. More like you're punishing yourself for feeling the way you do." Reaching for the canteen he had in the driver's seat, he added with another chuckle, "But if you're falling in and out of love, that's something to do with your heart. Maybe you haven't found what you're looking for."
Laying in the rays of twin suns, she turned from Turner and blinked back a few loose tears. Once a cry baby, always a cry baby.
"Fuck-" she breathed just before forcing a sharp laugh. "Maybe it's me. Maybe I've been feeling so guilty for so long, I couldn't see it was okay to love him... even from afar. Even now. I would've outlived him anyway, but wow- fucking wow. I loved him so much."
"Sounds it." Turner stepped back and moved to the flatbed, unslinging the tarp covering the basin of the back. "I'm gonna put up a tent for you, alright? I'll crash in the cab."
"Turner?"
"Yeah?"
"Does that fix me?"
"...I don't think it'll be that easy, Rhailo."
And it wasn't.
BDRP Admin. Writer. Villain. Personal Blog.
I tried running from the memory and the mourning.
I tried running from the memory and the mourning.
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