Fates Between Us

Interlude #2

CTUΛ573ξ wasn’t Tul’s favourite planet. Not just in the CTUΛ Galaxy, but on the whole list. At least considering the ones he’d been on, which was an awful lot, if you were to sum up all the ones he’d visited willingly - roaming from nebula to nebula, sneaking on reeking ships, scoring a stowaway from machinists, curled between gigantic cogs - with the ones he’d been coerced on, a legitimate passenger of crafts, only these times he hadn’t been willing.

But what had he expected? With the flimflams he had been getting himself into to raise money for his never ending need to travel, to search every single inhabited bit of universe, up to its tiniest asteroid.

So there he was, on 573ξ, the last floating garbage heap they’d been dragged on upkeeping hydric stations; for all the progress of civilization, that was still something that kept needing constant maintenance. Tul couldn’t really explain himself how that was possible, and even more the fact that he had ended up being one of the dregs of humanity having to do it as forced labour.

It was true that they hopped around galaxies, but he was also stuck hauling heavy-ass metal pipes with not really many people to interact with, chained down as they were to the stupid back alleyway of the stations. Well - chains were an obsolete thing, but that was pretty much what the chip at the base of his neck was the modern equivalent of.

Tul loathed the chip every waking minute of his existence. Not for making him feel controlled, but because it was keeping him from finding the one thing that was constantly on his mind. Him. He loathed it because while he could give up on anything else, had actually given up on it all the way before getting caught, that was the one thing he could not stand to give up on. Every breath he took had his body screaming at him to find him.

They say humans have this little bug (one of many, really), of having to bat their eyelids every fifteen seconds. Well, Tul knew for a fact that it was true; he didn’t need a chronometer or anything, because at regular intervals his mind was taken over by those images that were like burned on the back of his eyelids.

It was not bad; not as much as one may think, because he’d learned to live with it with time, but his coping mechanism had been to frantically search for the object of his visions. The constant moving had been what kept the burning at bay, what had made it all bearable.

And after all, the visions were not so bad. He felt almost privileged, to be able to see so vividly things that had long disappeared from that world.

He had experienced hologram-travelling when he was still a kid, sheltered by his wealthy family, but what he experienced when he closed his eyes was a thousand times more intense. He could practically feel it on his skin, the water of the lake lapping; sometimes delicate, in those images during which they were making passionate love; sometimes, harsh and unforgiving. Not cold, never cold, but threatening. Or the leaves of the trees, wide green broad leaves, or thin needle bundles covered in snow. Snow, it was probably Tul’s favourite thing. After him, him and his too wide smile and glistening eyes, him and his soft, black locks, his chiselled muscles. And the things he did, the way he managed to guide trees and bushes and every living thing, or some other time the way he could bend heat, blue flames dancing on the tips of his fingers.

Tul hadn’t known that any of that was possible. Had never heard about it in any unit, never seen it in any reconstructed outlook.

But maybe these were things that had gotten lost in the millennia. He had learnt not to question that and a myriad other unusual things about his visions.

Until they’d forced him to stop. It was the worst torture, even worse than any of the other atrocities they’d inflicted on him, the imprinted maps on his skin talking about them on their own.

Sometimes he wished he could get it over with; end the torture, end this existence, end the scalding longing. He’d been bewildered at how it used to be possible, how humans could decide to end their journey. He had used to think that was horrible; now, as he lugged on his shoulder one more piece of syphon, he just wished he could have that.
But he couldn’t. No one could anymore.
There was no escape.

Or at least that’s what he had thought.

Until he finally found him.

It was a fraction of a second: as soon as he laid eyes on the station’s guard all the images assaulted him all at once, all he’d ever seen and much more. And all the questions suddenly got answers.

As the porthole of their craft got shut close, as their flyer voiced the command to start the cynetisinsta transportation to TWHΦ208ω, Tul saw. He saw the forests, he saw pastries, he saw wonderful moments of bliss. He saw blood, despair. He got to know how it was that fire could dance on Max’s skin without burning, or how he could make an apparently centenarian tree grow up in the span of a week. And he knew that the cyneticinsta transportation his body had just gone through was a mere joke in comparison to what he could do.

But he also knew that, in the very moment he’d found Max, he had already lost him. He knew that in leaving him behind that porthole he’d immediately put zillennials of temporo-spatial distance between them. He knew that the chip would never let him stray out of their predetermined route.

But he also knew a way to get away - a way to end it without ending it, a way he could keep on searching for him. Searching for Max.

And so, he went.