It was an odd sensation, feeling everything and nothing. Jam wasn't sure how much of it to chalk up to nerves, and how much of it was just space itself; on the one hand, it was only her second time flying in space, and the additional trips spent as a passenger padded the number only negligibly. On the other, her raison d'etre, her every breath, thought, waking second for the last ...three months? Four? It had all hinged on this moment -- on being here right now -- and now that she was here, floating weightlessly through the lonely, desolate expanse of space trash, looking down on earth, she felt numb. And sick. And cold, and anxious, and excited and tingly and hypersensitive all at once.

She was a mess.

With a shaking breath, she flipped the silvery-reflective visor of her helmet up, and rubbed pointlessly at her arms, if only to physically hold herself together. She would like to have told herself that she was strong, and independent, and was prepared to handle anything. But didn't she see the point in lying -- it was just her and the black, and in truth, she wished she didn't have to do this alone...




"What do you mean you're not coming?!"

The lug wrench Jam had been tightening bolts with below the fuselage of her very nearly space-worthy craft slipped from her fingers, and clattered noisily to the concrete floor, as she scrambled from beneath the ship's belly to gawk incredulously at the ragged, but somehow still stately CT.

"That... that is a joke, right?"

Green fixed her with a lengthy stare from his comfortable position on a swiveling stool, while the other two CTs assisting the monkey with the aircraft stopped abruptly. Jam's dismay, as well as her wrench-dropping, had startled Phobia enough that he dropped the wrench he'd been holding as well, right onto Slaw's head, which of course also earned a lengthy stare in its own right.

"One, I don't know any jokes that don't have to do with someone getting killed. Two, no, it is not."

He was twisting a screwdriver, pinning a tiny bolt into the back of the handheld device he was occupied with.

"And before you pick that thing up and throw it at me, I'm not going with you because in order for you to succeed, I can not go with you."

Apparently finished, or at least nearly enough that he could put on a display, he turned the device around in his hand to show its HUD. "Normally, were you to go off in search of a lost one, some normal blighter, you'd never be successful. Luckily, Rock is special. This," and he waved the device a little, "will pick up the signature of the Chaos Drive inside him, and point you in his direction, wherever he happens to be. Remember how Rock and I are, in some metaphysical way, essentially one and the same? That's literally the case with this. The Chaos Drives within me harbor the same signature as that within him. And that is why me standing right next to you defeats the purpose of this machine."

He set the device down on the tool box by his seat. "Granted, the machine will pick me up until you get a sufficient distance, or whenever Rock's signature is the closer between us. Whichever happens first. But it should work in theory and practice, should you search long enough. Seek, and ye shall find."

"Are you going somewhere? Where are you going? Can I go? Can you bring me back something? I want to go. Let me go too."

"Dizzy, go away."

"Whose spaceship is this? Can I fly it? Are you fixing it? What's taking so long?"

"Anyway, that's basically the gist of it. I would go..." He looked off to the side. "And I wish I could. But I fear the choice is not ours to make."



She understood all that. She really wasn't so far beyond reason that she didn't see the horrible genius and necessity of Green's plan. But she was also, were she to be completely honest with herself, a fractured piece of safety glass that made believe it was diamond. It was hard not to wonder what would happen if everyone had been right... or if she didn't find him. Or if she did, and, and -- Well, how long had she taken, anyway? A few months? Suddenly, she wished she'd kept more careful track of the days; all she knew was that it'd taken far too long to get up there... And, sure, he was hardy, but how long could he really survive without food?... Water? How could his oxygen have not run out by now?

With a delicate shudder, she sniffed in stubbornly attempted indifference, and shook her head, fixing her wide-eyed frozen gaze straight ahead. She absently squeezed the General's tracking device in her hand, and nearly jumped when as if in response, it answered with a solitary digital chirp. Then another. She watched its display, paralyzed, as the recurring beeps gradually worked themselves into a rhythm, eventually sounding more and more like it had when she'd been standing next to its creator. With it, her heart rate tripled, as she three times dropped the thing in her lap, hastily fumbling with the knobs in attempt to adjust the sensor's tuning.

Immediately, the beeping stifled, and in its abrupt silence, Jam choked a panicked gasp back, as she readjusted with increasing desperation; she was rewarded with a single, unaccompanied beep. With her lips sandwiched between her teeth, she made the smallest, most minute of adjustments to her thrust vector, and listened raptly to the nothing that followed, as her ship plowed soundlessly through the rubble. She nodded, watching the tracker's display, and carefully guided her ship back the way it had come. Another beep.

She waited without breathing.

The device beeped again, and she sighed in relief as though the world had only just then started to spin again.

The mess of orbital scrap—the literal boneyard of the Typhaon—seemed to stretch on forever. In a way, it did. Components of it had, over the months, spread to form a contiguous ring around the entire planet. To find anything in it must have seemed utterly hopeless until that very moment, when suddenly, monotone beeps meant life, reunion, everything.

The trail led out of the main bulk of the debris, downward, closer toward the planet. The field pulled thin there; bits and pieces, decaying in their orbit, were dragged ever lower, ever closer to Earth's exosphere. One huge chunk stood out from the rest, though, and the closer Jam drew to it, the steadier the signal became.

If her heart continued to beat after that, she didn't feel it. It, and everything else seemed to stop as she homed desperately in on that signal. There was no mistaking it; not because of Green's tracker, or because it made sense, or for any other reason besides that she just felt he was close. The fighter's delicate approach was painfully slow, and as if in attempt to assuage her impatience, she shifted restlessly in the cockpit, vainly trying to see inside... to catch a glimpse...

While she didn't see any conspicuous white monkeys, she did see a gut-wrenchingly familiar ship stuck to the top of a shuttle... For the time she'd spent in it, it was barely worth mentioning, but how many times had she seen it in hindsight, as she backed away from it and Rock, leaving them behind; the last time she'd seen either... It was seared into her memory forever, such that, ravaged and worn though it was, she'd never mistake it for another, nor its presence for a coincidence. She gasped audibly, sharply, and pitched forward at the waist, forgetting entirely about the ship she controlled, as she tried to physically run to it.

Nothing was fast enough to suit her, and her haste made her clumsy. The fighter stuttered and cartwheeled awkwardly over itself as it was subjected to every manner of overzealous thrust, countered with overzealous compensation. The prematurely deployed magnetic landing struts stuck out like rigid legs, batting at stray pieces of debris, tumbling endlessly, until slamming harshly and succinctly into a ruined piece of hull. There was more frantic struggling and cussing as she wrestled with her safety restraints, and tried valiantly to not get tangled up in her bag of supplies. Were it not for the lack of gravity, she'd have fallen out of the cockpit onto her face. Instead, she fought and clawed her way through 0-G, toward the shuttle. She could have screamed in sheer frustration, but she was crying for another reason entirely.

Inside her abandoned cockpit, Green's tracker chirped rapidly and incessantly...

The outer airlock door was a test of patience; only after carefully following the directions—sequentially turning this handle, pulling that lever, etc.—did it finally open. Once it was closed behind her, the second was mercifully easier to get through, but what greeted her on the other side was foreboding.

It wasn't just that it was dark and silent. It was that her suit's computer had something to say. On the heads-up display of her helmet, the little LED that lit up when pressurization was at a safe level turned on. However, a flashing orange light also appeared.

CO2: ~200,000ppm
Toxicity Fatal!

The first look around the small chamber she entered revealed little. Her helmet's light revealed floating litter, discarded dehydrated oxygen bottles, food wrappers and protein drink containers. The next chamber was full of silver emergency blankets, hovering still around an unmoving, adrift form.

It was him.

"Laz!"

She literally flew straight at the mound of crinkling foil and monkey, launched from a hard kick off something she didn't even notice. Though they collided with a painful thud, Jam wasted no time rending the emergency blankets from the body in shreds as her ribs quaked and her hands trembled. She unearthed him, still, and unresponsive, and whimpered a mute, "Baby, please..." In a sudden jerk, the simian girl clambered around to his backside, and seized hold of his life support pack, shoving her visor away to squint blearily at its display. Surprisingly, it still had power, but was otherwise of little comfort; the 02 meter showed a blinking red light, and the ominous value,

0.00

In that environment, it was difficult to tell if she turned him over, or climbed up and around his body, but before she could consider her readiness for the sight to greet her, she fumbled back to the monkey's front side, and practically tore his helmet off.

She choked on the rush of tears that spilled forth, streaming down her cheeks.

He was very pale. Almost like he'd been several months without sunlight; thinner, with longer hair, but otherwise still Rock. He could have almost been sleeping... She pulled her satchel from behind her, and promptly broke the zipper in her haste to yank it open, but after a half-second of harried rummaging and a few more uncoordinatedly fussing with fiddly tubes and straps and knobs and valves, she'd secured the mask of an oxygen resuscitator over the primate's face, and initiated the flow of gas...

Despite her panic and pounding heart, her blotchy eyes hung heavy and half-closed, as she watched him. They drifted there weightlessly in silence. Pulling the simian into her arms, she combed the fingers of one hand through his overgrown white hair, while the other stroked his cheek with a slow, meticulous repetition.

Her lips parted, and in a quiet, quivering croak though a throat too constricted to breathe let alone talk, she began to sing.

"I miss you...
I miss being overwhelmed by you...
And I need rescue;
I think I'm fading away.
But I keep thinking that you'll wake me up with a whisper in my ear.
I keep hoping that you'll sneak in my room...

"So I wait, and I wait,
And I run old scenes through my tired head
Of the days that we laid by the school and said... 'forever'..."

Her head drooped, her forehead resting on his behind the obstruction of her helmet.

"Was that... the best... we'll ever be?"

There was a strange, low thrum, like something somewhere was spinning on the farthest periphery of the range of audible sound. The bolt-shaped gem on the necklace looped around Rock's neck seemed to shine a little brighter as it drifted, disturbed by all the movement, and intertwined its gold chain with the dogtags Jam wore. The dry air was static-charged; even through her suit, her hair felt like it wanted to stand straight.

She lifted her head as though it weighed a hundred pounds, only to find her range of motion constricted by the tangle of chains around their necks. Though Jam frowned confusedly at the familiar, glowing stone, she abruptly ceased to care about pondering it when the subtle movement she'd chalked up to mere floating became two very deliberate hands on her back. Was he holding her in return? Then there came a flash and jolt; a crackling bolt of electricity wrapped up, around, and through the both of them. Her glassy eyes went wide, only to immediately squint shut as the shuttle's interior ephemerally lit up like the sun.

Rock's eyes snapped open, too, vivid and pupilless pink and blue ovals.

♫

A pulse returned. Awareness came in a rush. He stared at her through her helmet's face, bewildered, overwhelmed—happy, but with the emotion only catching up several seconds in. When it did, he squeezed his eyes shut tight and laughed through his mask, gripping her with every ounce of his strength. It wasn't much anymore, but it was everything.

She threw herself into the embrace, desperately grasping, groping, and pulling, reciprocating it with more force than Rock could likely appreciate at the moment, all the while shaking with the heaves of a soundless sob. Between hyperventilating gasps and dry, arduous gulps, her voice was barely a squeak.

"Thank you for holding on for me."

Rock looped his arm over her shoulder to pull the mask off his own face. He swallowed dryly. An uncooperative voice, raspier yet with dehydration and disuse, failed to sound enough to convey what he wanted, but managed to choke out the most important part:

"Let's you'n me go home."



The enormous blue horizon beyond their scrapyard reunion place somehow seemed more welcoming, even as the Chimera fighter roared and rumbled down into the atmosphere, trailing a long, glowing streak of green plasma from its orange-glowing underside. It was a world in shambles, a speck of wartorn dust in the greater, starry universe, but it was their speck, and they'd get to go home to it together.