Welcome Home, Sasha (G/t)

Four.

Tshepo ravaged the latter half of his meal, slurping up every last bit on the plate as if his life depended on it. Scraping up every drop and crumb, he constantly bit back Sasha's previous fantasy of each one replaced with a person or an inconsequential pile of them. But his bites of bread and beans were bigger, like the stomach they filled but not the cloud of discomfort emanating from across the table.

"You okay, Sash?" Tshepo tested through stuffed teeth, looking up from his quickly clearing dish to the form of a broken boy.

Sasha was overcome by an onslaught of horrible truths with a smorgasbord of graphs, reports, and photos across the table. The diminishing of his domicile was more than physical and farther out than the epicenter where he and Tshepo currently were. Some could've debated that their current locale got the worst of it, but with all these innocents dwindling on a dime and neighboring yards with fences becoming food deserts below pebbled mountains, immediate vaporization may have been preferred over surviving the apocalypse. Instant evaporation felt like a better future for Sasha than trying to rationalize this... and his place in it.

In a clamp that would poke a hole if he weren't careful, Sasha held a transcript of a recording and coordinates of a ship on a journey to further enforce the prehistoric doctrine of manifest destiny across the cosmos to find new areas for humanity to stake a claim and thrive. The ship and its crew had been decked out for a prime terraforming mission on a suitable spot in an unmarked star's habitable zone. Its process would've been simple for an empty space, and like a phoenix, it could only rise from the dead. But like the monster it also was, it would produce the dead from the living if it had to, marking the need for a universal law.

"Do. Not. Terraform. Terra."

The worst crime had been committed as the highest rule was broken: a brilliant counter to the cheery snapshots of its offenders amidst their infractions attached to their new case files in progress. A curious crew – a convoy craving to conquer – reached their destination to build a world anew, only to leave a mark on history by erasing what was born by the ancestors. The resultant calamity from its countering was acute pain with a still bleeding wound. But as its causers were recognized as being of the cavalcade that deserted him in Hangar C that day in that same ship and all, reminiscent of everyone on Novis that shamed his and Tshepo's existence, Sasha would've bet on the hurt going chronic.

Red eyes for red skies.

"Could... Could I have prevented this at all?" Sasha softly sobbed, wiping away budding tears spilled under crimson scleras with his shirt hem. "Did I... let this happen?"

"Of all questions, you're going with those?" Tshepo tossed back while tossing more food in his mouth. "You don't really believe that, do you? Sasha, not to lessen your worth, but I'm pretty sure they only 'invited' you on that trip as a joke because they left way before when they said they would. You were never meant to go; you were never involved. You didn't and couldn't do anything."

The assurance was relieving, but it fixed nothing as Sasha set the papers down with a large exhale. "C-Can I do something now? " he hoped with a frown. "Surely, there's been some research done that looks into reversing the effects if it's common knowledge how bad they could get, right?"

"Would you believe that trials up to this point were actually ethical and never allowed for testing on animals?" Tshepo chuckled tensely. "Really, though, previous tropospheric tests were in contained environments: compact vacuums, controlled variables, and the like. This wasn't that." Cleaning a hand with a napkin, Tshepo reached across the tablespace and flipped to a section of files that Sasha hadn't touched. Here, rather than being more qualitative details like what Sasha kept cycling through, these were quantitative studies of the 'how' of it all. "The only thing we really know for now," he continued, pointing to a data table, "is that the overall lack of suppression is what allowed it to spread, yet that same absence of inhibition also made its effects differ for each person."