Saturn's Rings ~ f. millstone

Alex's Legacy

"Welcome aboard, Captain Hawthorne."

Willow dropped her bag by her feet in awe. She may have just stepped inside, but she was already overwhelmed with joy. Her eyes took in over every inch on the entry, not wanting to blink and look away from what was now hers. Years of hard work had paid off, and there she was: on her very own ship.

It was just like she remembered it. The last time she was there was years and years ago. For her birthday one year, Alex, her father, returned from Halcyon to visit. He asked if she wanted to see the inside of the ship, then called Reliable, and it was hard for her to say no. That's where she blew out her candles and wished to have a ship just like her dad one day.

Willow even used the red icing on the cake to put a sloppy "un" in front of the "reliable" on the plaque. Alex thought it was funny, yet fitting, so he kept it after all this time. The icing unfortunately had to be replaced with paint, but it still made her happy to know it was still there.

She found herself wandering about the ship, seeing if the rest was like how she pictured it. The cargo bay was nothing special. Just a place to hold junk and unload incoming shipments with a workbench pushed up against one of the walls.

She climbed up the ladder to the catwalk, then up another one to the galley. It was a rather spacious room. Well, it was spacious in comparison to the rest of the ship. The kitchen appeared to be exactly as Alex left it, including a layer of dust on just about everything in there. She ran a finger across the dining table and scrunched her nose at the gray coat of gray now on her hand. She wiped it off on her pants and continued looking around.

The hallway leading to the galley had five small bedrooms and the maintenance closet. All the bunks' doors were shut, which made the open maintenance closet seem out of place. The red glow pouring into the hallway only made Willow's curiosity grow.

Cautiously approaching, Willow found no threat. Just a smiling robot on it's charging station. She looked the robot over and discovered his name was SAM, short for Sanitation and Maintenance. Her fingers grazed over some scratches over his soap dispenser. She concluded that someone had tampered with him by replacing the soap with some type of acid. She assumed it was her dad, needing another hand in combat and not knowing where else to turn. The machine was also very dusty, meaning it had been out of commission for quite some time.

"Don't worry, buddy," she whispered, "I'll get you up and running again soon."

Willow continued her tour by descending the stairs and stopping in front of the Captain's Quarters. There was a sign above the door indicating it as so, and it made her laugh. Why would her father have needed a sign telling him where his bedroom was on his own ship?

When she stepped inside, it was exactly what she would have expected. Off to the right, the unmade bunk sat with wrinkled covers bundled at the foot of the bed. An empty bottle of Spectrum vodka laid on the floor next to the bunk, knocked on its side. She rolled her eyes at her father's untidy ways and looked over at the long desk against the window. Sitting to the side of the terminal, there sat a big box that said her name in all capitals. When she got closer, she noticed a small piece of paper with familiar chicken scratch handwriting next to the box.

"Congratulations on graduating, Captain Willow! I'm so proud of you. Can't wait for all of our space adventures together. You're going to love it. Love Dad"

The note nearly brought her to tears, but what was inside really opened the waterworks. It was the uniform they talked about. She drew a rough sketch when she was in high school, mostly as a joke, but it seemed he took it seriously. A tag in the neckline said Jolicoeur in fancy cursive. He totally blew all her expectations out of the water.