Otherworlds: A Fan-fiction of a Romance Between a Human and a Space Jockey

Prologue: The Space In Time In Which Something is Never Fulfilled

I sit. I sit, lest my legs will crumble. And I will fall. And to hit the ground is the last thing I need to be literal. 

Sasha comes to me, kneels down in front of my shaking seated body. I'm in a chair, though it feels like it'd be of no help if my physical strength gave out and I were to collapse.

Sasha: she is my best of friends, the best of friends. She knows I won't drink it, yet she places a steaming cup of store-bought tea on the table in front of me and sighs solemnly, her head hanging low. As she looks up at me, she pushes hair out of her eyes. I look at her closely; tears sit on the edges of her bottom lids like rebellious teenagers not knowing they could fall off. Not wanting to fall off.

"What are you going to do?" she asks, her voice nearly begging. Begging for an answer that won't bring pain and confusion. We have enough of it already.

Alas, the concept is unattainable. "I think we must leave," I reply, not believing myself.

"And go where?" she challenges, complicates. "It's everywhere. This is going everywhere. And if you're talking about not on this planet, which I sincerely hope you're not, we don't have easy access to a fucking spaceship! Even if we did leave, find some bubble that's safe from all the pandemonium only to become suffocating, it wouldn't be any use. It'd be a waste. He's never going to hurt you."

I nod, my mind resetting; something I've trained it to do over my lifespan. Now it does it automatically.

"Just everyone else whom I love," I project, and she gives me a hopelessly hopeful stare, then nods a forlornly harrowed nod, as if surrendering to something I know not yet.

Maybe our new reality. "Right," she squeaks.

"But I could get hurt. Those others with him don't exactly like me. Even if he's told them not to touch me, I'm sure they would first chance they get," I propose. She's shaking her head. "And that's another thing: I don't think he really wants to do this. Sure, maybe it's the mission he was given and he'll complete it by rule, but I think he's fragile. Maybe he's standing on the edge of two realms. Maybe we could yank him over to the right realm. Maybe we could save him."

She face-palms. "Save him!" she gawks.

"Save ourselves," I say quietly. Now I'm the one who's begging. Imploring her to validate what I want to be validated, though have no idea of whether or not it's even valid. "Save our race. Save the human race."

"Yeah. Mm-hmm," she responds in deadpan disbelief. "And how are we going to do that? While he's creating a massacre upon a city, terraforming or whatnot, just grab a megaphone and say, 'Hey, love, remember me? I shared my bed with you for a while? Yeah, I need you to come down for a minute so I can talk to you. Do you think you can stop shooting bombs at the Empire State Building for just a second?'"

"Sasha!" I exclaim, hurt.

She sighs and looks solemnly at my feet. "I'm sorry... I didn't mean to be so harsh about it. I'm just not seeing the reality in what you want to do. I know you really want to do it, Lu, but I just... I don't see it working."

I burn holes into the floor with my eyes. Wishing I could un-hear the knock of common sense waiting at my door. She immediately sees, and tries to comfort me.

"Hey. Hey, hey," she says in a calmingly soft voice, reaching up to hug me. "Hey. I'm sorry. I really didn't mean--" I push away her attempts, both to comfort me and to hug me, though I know her intentions are nothing but benevolent.

I've seen too much passive malevolence this past week to know the difference.

"Never mind, you're right; we have to cope," I say flatly, giving up. Giving in. But with some contempt. "And how are we going to do that?"

She gives me a steady, wide-eyed and sorrowful stare that I have yet to figure out how to respond to. I realise: she's hurt, too. Then she winces, starting to cry, and I feel remorse.

"What do you want me to say?" I make my voice soft, like hers was. I don't know if I succeed.

"I don't know. I don't even know anymore," comes a voice she manages to push through sobs. "Hold me please."

I nod again, this time lucidly and empathetically; open my arms. She crawls into them like a puppy to its mother.

My chin on her shoulder, I glance around the room in random places: first at the cabinet, open; at the chaise longue in the corner, stained with the grease and sweat of a long life in the living room; at the window on the far side of the room. Unbroken. Oh, how I envy.

Don't fret, I think to myself. Just remember-- if everything goes to shit, you can live in spited bliss knowing that your life was something of the utmost extraordinary.

Don't fret. Don't fret. Don't fret, don't fret, don't fret.

Isn't it ironic? We tell ourselves commands with the purpose of making them go into effect, but instead they rebel, yet we keep commanding them until we're so ridden with exhaustion and hyperventilation that we can't command anymore. And I guess that's the goal. Think something until your body is suffering. Think something until you can't think about anything anymore.

On an instrument, frets are the things you gently place your finger above on the string to get a pretty harmonic. In a human, the word "fret" sounds pretty. Fret, fret, fret. Wish you could say it all the time. But when someone plucks that string in your soul, its resonation is one that shakes and erupts and rebounds through your body and creates the most devastating inner destruction for the moment it possesses. 

I wish we were instruments. Then again, I wonder if the instrument's experiences are the same way? Maybe I shouldn't be so wistful. Maybe I'm being selfish. But right now is a moment in which I do not want to be myself. Is that selfish? How?

So we sat. We held each other. We sat and held each other for the rest of the hour in fear of this being the last time.