Chapter Text
And now young faces grow sad and old
And hearts of fire grow cold;
We swore blood brothers against the wind,
Now I'm ready to grow young again,
And hear your sister's voice callin' us home
Across the open yards;
Well maybe we could cut someplace of our own,
With these drums and these guitars...
'Cause we made a promise
We swore we'd always remember:
No retreat, baby, no surrender;
Blood brothers in the stormy night with a vow to defend:
No retreat, baby, no surrender.
-Bruce Springsteen, No Surrender
I can never pretend it was easy. There's nothing easy about this. I wish I could pretend that it was all magical and wonderful, but it's never that. But y'know? The things that matter in life are never easy.
I'd drifted off in that motel room, and when I woke up, he was long gone. No notes, no nothing; he took his dagger and vanished. And after getting some sleep, I started trying to scramble back to-- to what I knew. What I understood. Clawing for a life that I couldn't live anymore, just like he'd clawed that wall for his.
He has a name now, but we'll get to that later.
But I-- I don't know. I couldn't live like that anymore, but boy, I tried. I hit the drugs and booze harder than I ever have. I tried to dope myself past the dreams, past the memories, past him, past me, past everything. We did meet up, but I couldn't even stand to look at him. But if he knew that I knew, he never showed it. As cold as ever. He must've known a doctor, because his hands were fixed up, just a few scars to show the horror. I couldn't look at his face, so I looked at his hands, and I wondered how he could even pretend that none of it happened. Even if he didn't remember the replay, he had to have seen that wall.
I didn't take his time, his space or anything, just credits, some mumbled number that didn't mean anything to me, and then I got out of there and found some buddies to get totally blown away with. It went on like that for about a half a year. I was out of control. I was trying so fucking hard to get away from it all. No more pretending, I kept telling myself. Fuck this scene.
I finally went too far. Left contact info for him, not the other way around, while I was blitzed out of my head, because I wanted to tell that fucking shadow how much I hated him, and I wanted him to kill me, and I wanted this to end.
I--
It hurt. Everything hurt. Because with his ghost, all mine came back to me. My Dad. My Mom. My sister, and I'd start sobbing in dingy bathrooms, and I got why he was clawing against a wall, because I wanted to claw my own heart out. That kind of pain makes you react with your body, because your soul is screaming. And I hated him so much. I hated him because I was okay, you know, before him.
It was before dawn in that damn alley in Belfast, and I was so fucked up that I couldn't stand, I was just laying there and I was hoping someone would take me out. And he showed up. I know it wasn't because he cared. I know he only did because I was useful. Because I was able to ferry information better than anyone else to date.
"I hate you," I kept saying over and over, and he didn't care about that either, just dragged my drugged, fucked up, sick body off the ground and to some close-by hotel, and dropped me on the bed. And then stood guard, my shadow, my silent sentry, fuck I hated him.
He must have taken some leave. Stationed in Belfast, I was later to learn, because Starfleet kept him on an extremely short leash. He was only starting to get some off-base freedom when we first met. Even then, he wasn't allowed to leave Ireland, let alone Earth. How strange it would have been to him, if he could feel, to have been born amongst the stars, only to end up tied to the ground.
But anyway, I was such a mess. He stayed. I detoxed. I lost it. I raged and screamed and bawled and he never batted an eyelash. I even swung on him once, but he just side-stepped it, and then coolly watched me as I lay on the ground sobbing into the cheap carpeting. Three days. I only remember parts of it. I remember being sick, and he was a merciless bastard, he'd just drop me in the shower like I did him and turn it on. I know it wasn't revenge. I doubt he remembered much of anything from when he'd been sick and messed up. He was just brutally efficient.
I tried to get him to knife me, but then I was too sick to even try that anymore, and I only remember flashes and lots of groaning and crying, and long hours of silence. I only remember him falling asleep once; lightly, every sound had him awake and alert again, and I was to learn that was always how he slept when he wasn't messed up. Too light for dreams.
I wished that I could do that.
I came out of it, finally. Still felt sick and hollow, but my head was clear and most of the tears had dried, and he was still there, still just watching me like I was little more than a piece of human wreckage, and--
And that's what I was. It's hard to be dishonest with yourself when someone looks at you and sees right through you. All of your strengths, all of your weaknesses. No condemnation. He just sounded my soul and found me to be worth exactly this much.
I got to my feet, and I was really shaky but I knew I could walk. And looked into those cold-lit eyes that were colored for warmth, a warmth stolen from them, and I still hated him, but I hurt for him, and for me, and for Dad and Mom and Rachel, and for everything. I didn't say anything, and neither did he. We just regarded each other for a moment, then I got myself together and got away, and headed back for the crappy flat I lived in.
I don't know how many times after that I'd pull out my kit and look at my drugs, or how many times I stared at a liquor store. I wanted to, with everything in me. I wanted to escape for awhile. I'd sit there for literally hours, looking at these things that would numb it all, and then I'd pull myself away. I stopped talking to the people I used to hang out with. I started saving money. It was slow, and I still wonder how I did it, but I did.
I still met him. Still took his credits. But I could look him in the eye now again. I still wonder what he saw when he looked back at me.
I started trading information for information with the rebellion at the end of that year. It was all stuff that was a matter of record, stuff the Empire either already knew or didn't care about, but to me, it was-- it was so important. I had to pick up a real job in order to survive, so I became a dock-worker.
Because the stuff I got back from the rebellion about my shadow was really only priceless to me.
The first thing I got was his name. Montgomery Edward Scott. Then I got more. Born out of an extramarital love affair between his mother and a man named McMillan, but he was adopted immediately by the man who would raise him, Robert Stuart. He kept his mother's surname, but if there was any resentment about his conception, there was no anecdotal evidence for it. Everything I found out about his family, living onboard the C/V Esperanto (my god, the history of that ship's name sang out to me), was that they stuck together like glue. It's all oral history, stories passed on through ranks of people, but if there's one thing you can count on about rebels, it's that they can keep a story intact through whole generations. I guess because that's the only way to guarantee it'll survive.
Most of what I heard was just about how brilliant an engineer he was-- is. He's still a brilliant engineer. I don't even question the toothpick anymore; I don't know what's on it, but I'm sure something is.
But even then, so little of that mattered to me, because sometimes I'd get something about him.
Or, who he used to be.
He was onboard another cargo carrier, the Ci Bach, on loan to do upgrades and repairs for a few weeks, when the Esperanto was blown out of the sky by an Empire ship. They'd gotten away from one with the warp drive that he'd installed, but a second got them, and that family loved him so much-- so much that they died rather than surrender. The Empire was looking for him. They died so that not a one of them could be tortured into giving him up.
He was fifteen. I can't imagine how much hurt he had to live with, just from that alone. I don't know if he ever found out that his family chose to die for him, but he survived anyway. He had to grow up real fast, and I doubt that engineering anything after that was the fun it had to have been for him to enjoy it so much before, but he did it.
The Ci Bach's crew called him Scotty, and in my head, I call his ghost that sometimes. Because when I look at him, I see the shadow he is now. But I never wanna forget that there was something bright there once.
And when I tell him my name for the first time, I don't tell him A-Jay, what my buddies used to call me-- I tell him my name is Andy. The name my family used to call me. He doesn't call me that, and he can't possibly know what it means. But I give him that anyway.
My name is Andy.
It's the anecdotal, human stuff that I learn about him that hurts me even when it makes me smile. It's hard. Don't ever let me tell you it's easy, because I get some little piece of his story from other rebels, and there are times when I can feel the love and hope shining across the years and distances, and I have to go back to my flat and stare at my now dusty drug kit. I have to sit there and I think about forgetting it, or trying to, and I think about my own ghosts. Mom went to pieces after Dad died. I ran away, but she went to pieces, and in the end, I lost all of them -- my Mom hanged herself in the house I grew up in. Rach, I found out, was shuffled into the system and ended up dead at sixteen from a drug overdose. Must run in the family.
But he fought back. Managed to carve out some little place in the universe, not just for himself, but for a family.
I spent so many hours looking at my kit thinking about that stuff.
The name he'd cried on the wall was Jenna. Jenna Richmond. She was another engineer and another Empire orphan, and had been onboard the Ci Bach, and they'd struck up a love affair, even though she was four years older than him. And from the life and death of the Ci Bach, the echoes of them singing dirty spacer songs back and forth in the engine room ring through the lightyears.
When I learned that and spent hours staring at my kit, I could still hear him crying for her.
And then there were the children. Never learned their names. Just that they existed, two more orphans. And that Scotty had been a good father for his age and inexperience; uneasy, uncertain, but the story goes that he loved those kids so much, even just a kid himself, that he would have rather been grounded and abandoned than let go of them.
And I hear him in my head going, "I'll be all right," with so much fear and trying to be brave, and all the warmth there for his Jenna and those children, and it was probably when he hid them, then turned around to stand ready to face the Empire.
I think that's when I found out that you can sometimes hate someone and love them at the same time. While I stared at my kit, thought about my family, South Bristol, the pain I faced at the same fucking time I was facing his-- I hated him. And when I thought of that kid, seventeen, ready to die for his family even though he was scared?
I love him. I love him because even though it all went bad, and it didn't end the way good stories should, he was ready to give his life to try and make sure that it did. I think I sometimes wish that they had just killed him. But they got his Jenna a week later, and instead they broke his heart and will and he died on a wall. Destined to breathe on, but not really live on.
I'll make it clear here that I don't pity him any, only mourn for him. Only wish that there had been some mercy then, in all of that. And that the kid I love woulda lived past seventeen, even if that means I wouldn't have the shadow of a man left behind.
But I think sometimes that I also love the shadow he is now, if not for different reasons and in different ways than I love the kid who once was there.
He's just shy of twenty-seven now. I'm sort of surprised at that; that means I met him when he was twenty-three, and the whole awful night in the motel was only a month after his twenty-fifth birthday. I started piecing together this story awhile ago. Now he's almost twenty-seven, though he doesn't really look any different than he did at twenty-three or twenty-five, but I guess I'm surprised because I'm not quite two years older than he is.
I take his time again. He gives me nothing. But I take his time again, and instead of making him guard me in dives, or tolerate being handled, I take him out to dinner.
Funny, huh?
I take him out. I know he's pretty dangerous in crowded places, so it's almost always quiet all night cafés and diners, all over fucking Ireland. I don't get in his space, at least not on purpose. Sometimes when we're walking, we're almost matching shoulders, but then I remember and give him his three feet. He paid too high a price for it, for me to just flippantly take it. And I keep him a night, sleeping at least three feet apart in somewhat better hotel or motel rooms, and let him go after breakfast the next day.
If he's surprised by the turn around, of course, it never shows. But god, I'm just-- I love being around him. Not like I'm trying to toy with a weapon, but because I'm trying to see if there are any burning embers left behind in the ashes the Empire made of him. I know he can never be that brave kid I love again. I know that, and I'm okay with it. But I hope that maybe with enough time, maybe he can live as something else, something just as bright.
Just like I am, now.
So, I take him out. And that's where we are now, in a café, sitting in a booth. And I chatter at him like some kind of wide-eyed kid myself. I've got a business idea. I want to start up a consulting firm to help commercial fishermen get financing for boats and gear. I got the idea from him, or rather, from his family. Esperanto. Means to hope. I remember the story my father told me; the Gloucester fishing schooner of the same name, a beat up but beautiful vessel, that won over the famed Canadian Delawana in a race, provoking the Canadians to build the even more famed Bluenose. The beaten underdog won. It sings out to me.
I chatter, he just listens and doesn't comment. You know, I used to think his coldness was creepy, but now it's just something I'm used to, and I keep talking because maybe some of my words will filter past that down to those embers that might be left behind.
"Can you imagine?" I say, and I'm grinning and gesturing, and taking sips of my coffee and looking across at him. "I can totally do this. I've got a business plan, wanna see?"
No answer. He just looks at me, but for a second I think that he almost looks exasperated by my constant yammering on, and I shove the papers across the table. He watches me for another moment, then looks down at the papers. And then, damned if he doesn't ask me for a pen, and the next thing I know, he's revamping my entire business plan.
And I watch him work, and I just wanna laugh. A good laugh. The best kind of laugh. I watch my shadow across the table, focused on ripping my hard work to pieces and making it better, and I don’t know how to put into words what kind of joy that is, what kind of hope, or even why.
But I know that it matters.
If I love the kid he used to be, then I think I'm in love with who he is right now, just for making me feel those things.
It's not easy. I don't pretend it is. But then, the things that matter in life never are.