Chương 62: Under the Stars

He found his parents where the tents thinned out toward the back of the camp, past the reach of the rune lights, sitting on a pair of crates with their heads tipped back to the sky. Alex almost turned around. There was something in the shape of them, his father's arm along his mother's shoulders, the two of them not talking, just looking up, that felt like a thing he shouldn't walk into. Then his mother's voice came out of the dark without her lowering her head.

"You can come sit down. I heard yor steps." So he came and sat, on the ground beside their crates because there wasn't a third, and for a while none of them said anything, and Alex looked up because they were looking up and found that he couldn't stop. The sky out here was ridiculous. He'd trained his whole life to read a sky, and this one gave him nothing to read and everything to look at.

Stars packed thick from edge to edge, more than Earth's worst light pollution had ever let him see, and among them things that weren't stars at all, a broad pale smear of a band low on the horizon, a knot of blue-white points too tight and too bright to be natural, a slow-moving mote that might have been a moon or a station or something with no name in any language he knew. He couldn't place a single constellation. There were no constellations.

Just a whole strange sky full of light with no story written across it that he'd been taught to find, and the astronomer in him, the kid who'd taped charts to a ceiling, sat there completely undone by how much he was seeing and how little of it he understood.

"Grandpa would have loved this," he said, before he'd decided to. His mother made a soft sound.

"He would have. He'd have been out here every night with that terrible little telescope, telling everyone who walked by the names of things."

"He wouldn't have known any of the names."

"That wouldn't have stopped him for a second." Ivory smiled at the sky.

"He'd have named them himself. Made them up. Told you they were official." And that was true, that was exactly true, and Alex felt the loss of his grandfather move through him quiet and clean, not the sharp thing it had been a month ago but a settled ache that lived under the ribs now, the way grief did once it decided to stay. Grandpa would have loved this sky, and Grandpa would never see it, and Alex was looking at it for both of them without meaning to. They sat with that a while.

The blacksmith's hammer had gone quiet for the night somewhere behind them, and the camp's noise had thinned to the low murmur of a settlement bedding down, and out here past the lights it was just the three of them and the impossible sky.

"I heard about today," his mother said eventually.

"I figured."

"I'm not going to ask what happened. Your father will, tomorrow, and you'll tell him the tactical version, and I don't need it." She lowered her head finally and looked at him, and in the starlight her face was doing the thing mothers' faces did, the thing that saw straight through whatever a son had arranged on the outside.

"I just want to look at you a minute."

"Mom."

"Let me look at you." So he let her. She took him in, the whole of him, and whatever she found there made her breathe out slow.

"You look tired in a way that isn't just physical." Alex didn't have anything to say to that, because it was true and he didn't know how she did it.

"I've said this before and you didn't listen, and you probably won't listen now either." She said it without heat, tired herself, an old argument worn smooth.

"You've made yourself into one thing, Alex. A weapon. The strong one who stands in front. And you're so good at it that nobody ever thinks to worry about you, because you're the thing everyone else hides behind, and how could the thing everyone hides behind ever be the one in danger." Her voice caught, just slightly, and steadied.

"But I'm your mother. And I look at you and I don't see a weapon. I see my little boy, who I know is more breakable than he lets any of you believe, and who's decided the only thing he's allowed to be is the one who takes the hit." This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.

"Someone has to take the hit." It came out before he could soften it, the old reflex.

"You saw what came home tonight. If I'm not the one standing in front of it, then it's one of them, and I'd rather it be me every single time. That's not me being noble, Mom. It's just true. I can take what they can't."

"I know you can. That's exactly what frightens me." She reached out and put her hand on the side of his face, and her hand was warm and small against him, and he let her keep it there.

"Because a boy who can take anything stops noticing when he's carrying too much. You've turned yourself all the way into the protector and left nothing over for the person. And the person is the part I'm scared of losing, because he's the part that keeps the protector from walking into something he can't walk out of." Alex was quiet.

He wanted to argue and found that he mostly didn't, that some of the fight had gone out of him on the walk home with his family strung out behind him looking like they'd been through a war, and that his mother was aiming at something that had been sitting in his own chest since the field.

"I know I'm all or nothing," he admitted, and it was easier to say to the sky than to her face, so he said it to the sky.

"It's how I've always been. When I lifted, I lifted, nothing else existed. When I studied stars, I studied stars until three in the morning and forgot to eat. I don't have a middle setting. And right now the thing I've committed all of it to is getting strong enough that nothing gets past me, and there isn't room in that for anything else. No room to slow down. No room for, I don't know. Any of the things you're talking about."

"Any of the things I'm talking about," Ivory repeated, dry.

"You mean a life."

"I mean I don't have time for a life. Not until they're safe."

"They're never going to be safe, sweetheart. Not the way you mean. There's always going to be a next thing." She said it gently, but she said it, because she was the kind of mother who told you the true thing even when the kind thing would have been easier.

"If you wait for a world where nobody needs protecting before you let yourself be a person, you'll wait forever, and you'll wait alone, and one day the protector will walk into a fight the person would have known to walk away from, because the person is the part of you that has something to come home to." His father spoke for the first time then, quiet, from the dark beside his wife.

"She's right." Chris didn't look over, kept his eyes on the sky.

"And I'm the last man in this camp with any standing to say it, because I've done exactly what you're doing. I put everything into keeping this place running and I'm level seven and I haven't held a weapon in two weeks, and your mother tells me the same thing she's telling you, and she's right about both of us." A pause.

"The difference is I'm in my fifths pushing sixty and I've had my life. You're twenty-one. Don't spend the whole of yours being a wall. Take it from someone who's tempted to." That landed harder than his mother's version had, because it came from the one person in the family who understood duty the way Alex did, who'd made the same trade and was telling him the trade had a cost.

"I'm not asking you to stop fighting," Ivory said.

"I know you won't, and honestly I know we need you to. I'm asking you to leave a little room. Spend an hour being something other than the strongest man in the camp. See the people you're protecting instead of just standing in front of them." She patted his cheek and let her hand drop.

"Start small. You haven't seen the boys in days, and they've noticed. Jake asked me yesterday if Uncle Alex was mad at them." Something twisted in Alex's chest.

"Why would they think I'm mad at them?"

"Because you're always busy, and children don't understand busy, they understand present and not-present, and you've been not-present." She said it without accusation, just fact.

"They didn't want to bother you. That's the part that'll get you. They love you so much they decided to stay out of your way." She nodded toward the middle of the camp, where a cluster of small tents sat near the fire the kids were never far from.

"They're probably still up. They're always still up. Go be their uncle for an hour. It'll do more for you than another night of hitting things in the dark, I promise you that." Alex sat a moment longer, looking at the alien sky his grandfather would have loved, his mother's words settling into him alongside the ache that Ace's healing couldn't reach.

Then he got up, and kissed his mother's head, and gripped his father's shoulder, and the two of them turned back to the stars together the way he'd found them, two people who'd built a whole life beside each other and still chose to sit and look up at nothing in particular, and Alex left them to it and went to find the twins.