by Xenutia
Disclaimer: I've said it before and I'll say it again cause it's expected...I really don't own even the smidgiest little bit of them. I'd like to, but that doesn't count, does it? They belong to Tribune, not me. I'm not making anything from this, just learning to write different genres.
Rating: Probably R for violent content, even if it is suggested rather than shown. I'm not very good with US ratings systems, if I've rated it wrong let me know. As far as content, well, if you've read any other stories on Harper's past you'll know what to expect. Some violence, suspense, nothing too graphic.
Summary: The longest night of Harper's life happened when he was fourteen, still trapped on Earth with travel to the stars just a dream. Forget The Long Night, this one was even longer...
***
Such a simple prayer, that. Just one wish, four little words, words he dared not say aloud because to say them would mean accepting the reality of the situation. But he could think them, hold them inside like a mantra, and hope that someone, somewhere, would hear them.
Let there be light.
Had it always been this dark at night? Black so dense it hurt to try and see beyond it, velvet and solid and living...that sounded paranoid of him, to believe the dark could be watching him with eyes he couldn't see but sense anyway...it sounded paranoid, but it felt too much like the truth to let it go. There were eyes in the trees and the rock, eyes in the fires that rose along the distant horizon like a flaring red wall...the stars were eyes in the night sky, looking down on him, laughing. Or were they beckoning?
Hell, he'd take the chance. Whatever those stars held, it couldn't be worse than this. All the bad in the universe had already found this little backwater of a planet dying in space like a fevered Magog-infested human, and used it as their stomping ground. What hadn't been taken by the Nietzscheans had been devastated by the Magog. What had survived both had not survived the natural catastrophes of the decaying planet itself. Nothing grew here anymore, except by sheer force of will or careful nurturing from hard, unenriched ground. Any water that did not come direct from the sky was more likely to kill than quench, and even what fell as rain was polluted by centuries of abuse from the people whom had stripped the planet clean of metals and minerals.
Huddled to the ground beneath an outcropping of rock on the northern borders of the camp, Harper coughed, trying to force the tickle back down his dry, raw throat before it could betray him to the swarthy shadows moving about in the dark. Years of breathing polluted air had caused him to develop asthma, and he struggled to process the smoky air that dragged reluctantly into his burning lungs. His mouth and throat felt stripped of their skin by the dense black cloud of smoke rising from the pyre the camp had become, a column twisting up towards the cloudless purple sky, the air shimmering from the heat.
Purple. He'd always liked purple. Everything here was brown and barren, grey and dusty, and when spring came and these failing woods bloomed with scattered remnants of flowers he would creep away from his home, and spend hours alone, just wandering in among the trees that had not yet been taken for wood. One year he had picked a bunch of them and taken them home for his mother, and he could remember the shine in her eyes to this day as she accepted them, tears of sheer exhausted wonder that in surroundings such as these, her son could care enough to recognise them for what they were - good amongst the bad.
His mother. He hadn't seen her since the attack began, hours earlier, when the skyline was still a dusky rose deepening into night and no fire lit the horizon. He had been out here, in the dwindling spatter of trees, too old and too hardened to care about flowers anymore. He had been too far away to hear the onslaught before it was too late to be of any help. His first alert had been screams, the stampeding of far too many feet to count...and then the fire, and the smoke, and the god awful sweet sickly stench of burning meat...
So he had run, run to this place, this outcropping of rock against an impenetrable slope he knew of. He doubted even this could protect him, but if it was a chance, however slim, he would take it. He knew the odds, had done all his life, and he didn't much care for them. The odds of him surviving tonight were slim. The odds of him making thirty if he stayed on this planet were remote to the point of a joke. His odds of eventually finding his way off this planet...
Much as he tried, valiantly or foolishly, to convince himself otherwise, the odds were probably zero. The only way anyone got off this planet was in the bowels of a Nietzschean slave ship...or in the tower of smoke he could still see blazing away in the distant. Either way, you didn't choose to go to the stars...you were carried there.
Harper clawed his thin rags of clothing tighter around his shoulders, cold despite the fierce heat emanating from the inferno that used to be his home, perhaps struck not with a chill but simply with shock. He had never wanted anything more in his life than the thing he wanted now; he wanted the dawn to come. Magog were nocturnal, by choice; although they could survive in sunlight, it wasn't to their liking. They would leave, when the sun chased them away. They would leave and whatever was left of this paltry and downtrodden community could try to carry on.
He squeezed his eyes shut tight against the memories of tonight already branded into his mind like a tattoo, the nightmares quietly waiting to be made, and swallowed down the bitter taste in his mouth. It hurt to swallow, but he did it anyway, trying to force back more than the taste; trying to force back everything. The distant play he had seen, silhouettes against the fire, as a Magog tore his father apart like a ragdoll.
And ate what was left.
He shuddered, horrified. By what he had seen, yes, and what he may still see...but even more horrified by his own inability to cry. He never cried. By tomorrow, or the next day, just like all the times before, those memories would be pushed down, boxed in in their own little room where he never went, allowed to roam only in his dreams when he couldn't keep them down with tasteless banter and sometimes heartless jokes. Many of the camp thought he was callous, cold, even inhuman, making fun of such serious things, or in spite of them...but he wasn't callous. It wasn't that he didn't care.
It was that he didn't know how to.
The hours passed, or at least what felt like hours. It could have been minutes stretched out indefinitely by his own shocked mind, trying to make sense of what he saw. At one point he thought he saw movement within the flames, and almost convinced himself he wasn't seeing what he thought he was. People, still moving in the blaze, still walking as they burned, corpses too distant to identify piling up on the burnt ground. But, slowly, the Magog grew fewer and further between. They had gorged themselves on this defenceless village and were retreating to move their masses where the eating was richer, like cattle grazing new ground when the old was bare.
As the last of them moved away, the rain began to fall.
The purple overhead darkened to black, clouds boiling in their own acid lightning, a growl of thunder echoing the dying sounds of a massacre. The rain thickened until it fell in a punishing, drilling hail, dampening the fires where they burned. Smoke blanketed the air like a shroud.
Shivering, Harper crawled out from beneath the rock shelf that had saved his life, knowing that now the guilt would begin. The knowledge that he ran, away from the camp and the people that needed him. But here was a truth for the do-gooders, and one which was unequivocable; he was alive. Had he tried to help, had he done anything other than what he did, he would be dead, too.
The rain was like tiny bullets muzzling into his flesh, soaking into his skin and damping his reckless hair into his eyes. He blinked, trying to see through the downpour. At his feet, the dry topsoil churned into a river of mud. Scarlet ribbons wound through the quickening streams. And there, amongst the blood and dirt and the wet, charcoal smell of burnt meat, was one tiny shimmer of colour. White. Unstained, pure white, like snow.
It was a daisy.
Harper stamped it beneath his foot with the trails of rain hiding the tears on his cheeks, turned, and very slowly, walked away. Along the ashen horizon, a sliver of silver brightened to gold.
At last, dawn had come.
***
Author's Note: I was going to make the flower at the end a purple one to tie in with earlier, but that seemed too much like he was acting towards Trance rather than the notion of something pretty being allowed to survive there...so I made it a daisy. The idea of Harper stamping on Trance seems totally wrong to me!
Author's Post Script: It just occurred to me that by making the purple sky darken in this fic, I'm sort of implying that Trance will turn out dark one day...I didn't intend it, but looking back that's how it reads. Let me know what you think, yeah?