Current mood:	stressed
Current music:	Counting Crows - "Recovering the Satellites"
Entry tags:	fandom:firefly/serenity, fanworks:fanfiction

FIC: Golgotha
Okay, snow. You've got six hours to really accumulate and cancel my evening class. I'm counting on you, babe. *crosses fingers*

Until then...fresh fic! We catch 'em, you buy 'em! Er.

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TITLE: Golgotha
AUTHOR: Beth CG Phoenix (phoenixchilde)
RATING: G
FANDOM: Firefly
SUMMARY: Twenty-five years ago, Wash's family lived on a dying planet.
SPOILERS: Extremely minor ones for "Our Mrs. Reynolds"
ARCHIVE: Ask and ye shall receive.
NOTES: Written for the Picture Is Worth 1000 Words challenge. Muchas gracias a newredshoes and neenie for betaing!
DISCLAIMER: The fans've kept it flying, but Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy, and (as much as it pains me to say we owe them anything when it comes to this fandom) 20th Century Fox were the ones who got it airborne. I write stuff like this with the utmost love and don't make a dime off of it. Please don't sue.
[x-posted/archived here]

The thing they don't tell you about terraforming is that it don't always work right.

Barely worked at all them first few decades. They dropped workers on the planets the way they're dropping settlers nowadays -- nothin' but a pressure suit and the newest tech credits'll buy you. Tech so new, in fact, half don't know how it works and the other half're just guessing. And they stumble along, makin' the grass green and the atmo blue, and if it fails in a hundred years, well, it don't matter to them, now, does it?

So they set our great-great-grandaddies down on the dirt and let 'em live, let 'em grow, let 'em work and breed and in four hundred years, give or take, they got us. And we got grass that ain't so green no more, skies that're nothin' but brown dust that eats at your mouth and eyes. Makes you blind. Makes you cough 'til you're heaving blood.

We got twigs that used to be trees before the acid rains started falling, too. There's three of 'em just ten paces from my back door, stickin' up straight and bare like grave markers: my baby boy's by them now, lying underneath to look up at the stars ain't nobody's seen for years, oxygen kit tied 'round his face to keep the haze from chewin' up his lungs.

I tell him stories about them. Don't know if he believes me, but I tell 'em anyway. He believes in the giant lizards they say were stomping around Earth-That-Was -- he likes those the best, reads about 'em all the time when his kit's run out and he ain't got nothing else to do -- so maybe tiny lights scattered in the sky ain't such a stretch.

Might be, though. Might be that he can believe in fairytales, but not in what he's surely gotta think is impossible.

I'm watching him from the back window, careful not to touch the ion field too hard and send it short-circuiting again. Word has it they're gonna have to fly in real glass soon, straight from the Core with a price to match, and replace every field in every house; they say it's gonna reach a point where fields can't hold back the poisons no more. I'm thinking I'd rather spend the credits on a way to get Hoban off this rock. I might very well do, it comes down to it.

But here and now, I'm watching. And I see the streak of light just as he does.

I got both hands pressing on the field; he's on his feet, mouth and eyes wide as anything as he stares at the broad white stripe cutting through the brown. It's lit up bright as fire as the glow bounces around the atmo. And I'm thinking whether to get my own kit and run out there -- 'cause this could be anything, could be a skimmer goin' down, could be space junk rubbing itself raw on the clouds -- but it's his expression that stops me. Right there: that face that's got a glow of its own. Same face I seen when I tell him those stories. You see a face like that and you can't help but stop.

At least, not 'til there's a boom. My hands're reaching for my kit before the table's even stopped jittering across the floor, but Hoban's already up and running, taking quick awkward little steps to keep his balance as the dead trees clack against each other. He flings himself through the door, grinnin' and panting like he just ran clear to Ferris Colony and back.

"Didja see that?" he demands. I shut the door before kneeling down to help him get all those kit cords untwisted, and damned if he isn't beaming at me the whole time. "Mom, did you see?"

"I saw it, baby," I say, looking over the kit. Dials are gummed up again. Reading's too low, too -- gonna need to be recharged before he goes out again, if we got any charges left. I sigh. "You okay?"

"Yeah, yeah, I'm fine. That was a meteor, wasn't it?" He bounces on his toes and trots after me like a little dust-streaked beagle as I walk to the kitchen. "Like in the books? Same thing that killed all the dinos on Earth-That-Was, right?"

"Could've been."

"Wow."

He scrambles up onto the counter and presses his face to the field, trying to see where the junk fell; I pull him back a few inches without thinking too much about it, and he starts up with a disappointed little whine. "You wanna fall through and crack your head?" I ask. He just sticks out his tongue and scootches toward the field again, leaning on it more careful-like this time.

Killed off the dinosaurs. Gonna kill off all of us one day. I look to him, and his face is still all lit up like the underside of the dirty atmo, eyes movin' back up to the sky.

"Could've been a star," I tell him.

One side of his mouth twists up like he's wanting to laugh, but not really wantin' to do it at me.

"You don't know," I insist. "One of 'em could've said, 'Hey, look down there, there's a boy been wanting to see us so bad -- "

"Mom!"

I laugh and drop a kiss on his hair, too quick for him to squirm away from it. "Well. I know you're gonna see 'em either way sooner or later if you want."

And Hoban gets real quiet and still for a bit, still lookin' at the sky. "Yeah," he says finally, sounding like he's already up there in the stars. "Maybe."

I just smile, rub his shoulder, and get back to cleaning up his kit. The trees are still quivering a little, but it's funny. They're almost lookin' like they're ready to sprout legs and walk around, living and breathin' like the rest of us.