Right Back After This

Season 2, Episode 1

Riz pulls at a thread.

Deliquet was an out-of-the-way type planet. It was a tiny dwarf that could be circled in a few days' walk, orbiting the same star as some of the universe's more inhabited silverworlds, and the only things it had in spades were grey dirt and visitors. And stained glass windows. Riz had been cleaning one of those, on a day his heart hurt more than most, as if he'd known what was coming.

At dawn, he'd awoken, and although his bed left his back aching, his entire body still so pained in sobriety, at least he had no new mysterious bites on his body. There was the blessing of morning quiet, the grey light heaven compared to fiery rain. His body didn't want to move, to get dressed, but he tried to will his muscles forward on the knowledge that he knew he had food waiting for him- even stale rations.

Deliquet was billed as a planet without sin. When sin was explained to him, he had been told it was something one could do, but at the same time it seemed a type of infinite substance that filled everyone, that poisoned them, and Riz watched every visitor carry the weight of it on heavy shoulders. None looked at him, or any other member of the congregation, for very long. That was the point.

He didn't know many of the other members of the congregation, but they made eye contact like they knew him. Sometimes someone new would appear and they would all eat breakfast beside them as if they'd sat beside them every day of their lives. Riz caught on quickly; they'd done the same for him, after all.

Other times, someone would disappear. Riz was told that this wasn't a permanent place, that eventually there would be too many in the congregation, and once he could speak without a Majadhan accent he'd have somewhere else to go. He'd look at the empty seats left behind and wonder if he should be jealous of them. They'd always fill up again.

He didn't mind it. He missed plants, sometimes, but sweeping kept his thoughts empty. He walked through churches and listened to sermons in a language long dead, staring up at a glass image of a man they all hoped would save them. Riz was raised with a God, but he didn't recognise the man that seemed synonymous with that word on Deliquet. He wondered if it was the same God. If either cared for him. He sometimes gave in to the temptation to pray, but it always started with, 'if you're listening...'

What he did know for sure is that he was not saved by a man who had been dead for thousands of years. He was saved by a man he knew personally.

He didn't often get to speak to Frater Raro. He was old, moved slowly, shuffled from room to room. He looked like he carried the weight of sin more than anyone, in the hunch of his back and his tired, watery eyes, but if anyone should feel light and free of wrongdoing, Riz would think it was him. When he saw his face first, on a rubble-filled street of Majadha, he remembers confusion above all else, deriding some outsider's foolish thought to proselytise in that hell, of all places. Then, on Deliquet, he'd turn when he heard the sound of Frater Raro's cane hitting the concrete floors, still filled with gratitude years later.

Riz was up on a ladder, cleaning stained glass, dappled with its dusty orange and yellow light, when he heard that cane. He turned, and made contact with eyes as grey as Deliquet's sky. Frater Raro normally smiled at him, at anyone, but he didn't smile then.

The story that's always told about that day preserves this moment, for the most part. Of Riz and Sonja looking at one another and knowing before they know that something is there. Back then, Riz's instincts weren't so trained on body language, on the subtleties that must pass inspection. He might've noticed, if they had been, the way she was in stuck in her fear response of fawn.

At the time, he laid eyes on the man she was pushing in the wheelchair, ancient by every term, and the sharply dressed assistant walking beside them, and assumed it was normal. People come to repent for what sins they had committed, free from everything worldly. Free from both pleasure and pain- that was what this planet had offered him, a deal he'd taken, and many came to do the same- just for a while.