Stardust

     “You're being way too calm about this,” Aston said.

     Lake didn't look up from his hand of cards. “Got any fives?”

     “I'm talking about opening an extradimensional portal in your bedroom.” Aston heaped stress on those last syllables.

     “Fives,” Lake said. “Got any?”

     Aston snatched his hand of cards from the coffee table and gave them a curt once-over. “Go fish.” With a huff, he slammed the cards back face-down and slumped back on the couch, arms folded over his chest. “Don't say I didn't try,” he announced to no-one in particular.

     Teiddan, who also refused to glance up from his cards, reached over to pat Aston on the shoulder. “Lake,” he said, “do you happen to have any fives?”

     Wordlessly, Lake flipped him the bird. His elbows stuck out preposterously over his knees as he leaned over in his beanbag to hand Teiddan three cards; Teiddan, having seemingly forgotten all semblance of sportsmanship, plucked the cards from his fingers with a ridiculously smug air and spread them on the table face-up, followed by a fourth from his own hand.

     “Vellum,” Teiddan said, now addressing the woman sprawled in the beanbag next to Lake's, “do you have any queens?” When she shook her head, he drew a card and only cast it a sparing glance before turning his attention back to Aston. “He can make his own decisions, you know.”

     “I know. I'm questioning his decision-making,” Aston said.

     “'He' is right here.” Lake's flat affect made the statement come across as brutally judgmental. Unfortunately, Aston could not tell if this was intentional, and rather than guess and potentially alienate the man further, he decided to exit the conversation entirely.

     “I'm out.” He leaned over to flip his hand of cards face-up on the table, then bounded to his feet, sneakers squeaking against the hardwood.

     The group didn't pay him any mind; Vellum was already questioning Teiddan about the theoretical presence of aces in his hand. Aston wandered around the low coffee table and into the heart of the living room, navigating the sunlit maze of beanbags and armchairs over to the sticker-covered wall underneath the loft, where Riot was working on his mural.

     It was coming along beautifully. Months ago, Riot had laid the foundation by painting the wall a vibrant robins-egg blue; now that blue was broken by luminescent sunbeams dancing through clusters of fluffy white clouds, shining down on a crowd of people in the foreground, portrayed waist-up. Aston was always taken aback by the way Riot was able to capture the playful dance of light and shadow—light refracted off the crowd's features in scintillating rainbow hues, yellows and blues and reds and purples, but he was able to make the supersaturated iridescence look natural.

     Riot's eyes were only centimeters away from the wall, and he was using an impossibly thin brush to slowly, slowly outline a fuzzy shape in the very back of the crowd—more texture than it was form. He didn't break away from his work as Aston approached—just raised his free hand in Aston's general direction.

     “You know, I'm not judging him that hard,” Riot said.

     Aston raised his eyes to the vaulted ceiling and kept them there as he took a long, deep breath in through his nose. Then: “Not you, too.”

     “Ever heard of 'wisdom of the crowd?'” Faceless back-of-the-crowd fill complete, Riot turned away from the wall to approach the media stand, which had been pulled out from the wall to allow him to work (blocky retro television on its middle shelf having sat unplugged for weeks, not that they used it much to begin with). He dunked his paintbrush in the mason jar of muddy brown water perched on the top shelf and swirled it around briskly. “If everyone's telling you something, there's gotta be something to it, right?”

     Aston snorted, plonking himself down to sit cross-legged on the grimy hardwood floor.

     Once his brush was rinsed, Riot turned back to give Aston a reassuring grin, all paint-splattered round cheeks and sunny disposition. “The guy's been through a lot, right? It's probably not that big of a deal to him.”

     “'A lot,'” Aston repeated. He cast a glance back to the coffee table where the trio continued to play, their conversation melting into the background with the hum of the air filter by the leftmost banister and someone's arrhythmic attempts at playing an acoustic guitar filtering from upstairs. As he watched, Vellum leaned in toward Teiddan and said something quiet that caused him to burst into laughter; the man caught sight of Aston looking over Vellum's shoulder and threw him a jovial wink.

     Aston shook himself and turned back to Riot, who'd retrieved his palette from the sagging media stand and was mixing several shades of green together on its stained surface. “Whatever he's been through,” Aston said, “it can't possibly compare to this.”

     The noise Riot made in response to this was somewhere between a snort and a noncommittal hum.

     He was silent for a while as he began dabbing tiny blobs of paint onto the wall again; Aston, feeling very put-upon, leaned back and propped himself up on his palms to watch him work.

     The painted crowd was filled with faces both familiar and mysterious to Aston; only a few months ago, he sat in this exact spot while Cas, voice low and rough, detailed the face of their dead brother, swapping Riot's sketchbook back-and-forth, the both of them adjusting sketches until it was to Cas's satisfaction. Now Avery was near the front of the crowd, fist raised above his head, shiny black curls sticking to his damp cheeks as he grinned.

     He'd been there while others did the same—the heavyset black woman with bright red glasses had been described by Mels one sunny afternoon while Aston and Teiddan sat on the couch and ate rice crackers and red olives; Aston clearly recalled the sharp tang, almost metallic on his tongue. In the very front, a gaunt, almost emaciated woman with thinning, short red hair sat in a wheelchair, holding her hands over her head to form a heart shape. Axel and Teiddan had taken an entire evening to talk through that one, Teiddan showing Riot a handful of crumpled, faded polaroids from his wallet—photos Riot outright refused to handle, as if they were some sort of sacred artifact.

     Others were utter mysteries to him, but he could figure them out through process of elimination; the first handful of people to be painted all bore a striking resemblance to Riot, even given his unrealistic painting style—almond-shaped eyes and dark hair, round cheeks and the same dimple in each of their left cheeks. The short, chubby kid with buck teeth had shown up a week after Bowie started sleeping on the Station's couch.

     And there was that blonde woman, of course. They'd thought she was dead, after all.

     His reverie was broken by Riot's soft lilt. “Why don't you walk me through the whole thing?” He turned to point his paintbrush at Aston, a fleck of paint flying from the bristles to splatter on the floor. “Everything I've heard has been from Ray—I've only got the general outline.”

     Aston rolled this around in his head for a moment. “You remember the other week—in the woods?” Riot nodded, his nose wrinkling; he returned his attention to his work as Aston went on. “The Dusty fleet exists in another dimension—it's like a space in-between our universe and the others—you know there's other universes, right?” That was a tangent; he shook himself and refocused, not giving Riot time to respond. “That's why you can't see the fleet in the sky—it doesn't exist in this dimension. Except for the other week—it was bleeding through into our world, somehow, which—well, I don't think that's supposed to happen.”

     Riot nodded again, his brows knit together in deep concentration. Behind them, Vellum said, very loudly, “You bastard!” followed by Lake's distinctive low chuckle.

     The hardwood was slightly tacky against his palms. Someone needed to mop soon; without Cas there to enforce the chore rotation, things were going back to a very grimy status quo.

     “We think,” and here Aston felt rather pained, “that Sage and I have, somehow, been visiting that dimension while we sleep. We've been sharing dreams—we know things we couldn't possibly know, because I said them to her in a dream, or the other way around—and for a long time, we thought it was something unique to us, something about our origin or our biology, but when we saw the fleet—something clicked in my head. It felt… the same.”

     For some reason, Riot was taking this in stride; he didn't betray an iota of surprise or confusion, just kept wrinkling his nose up periodically and squinting as he entered a full squat to peer at the mural. Then again, he had only a few days ago experienced something that, to him, probably qualified as a supernatural vision. Maybe nothing was surprising after that.

     “I've been going over everything with fresh eyes since then, and Vellum—astounding woman, by the way, I do not say that enough—she nabbed a few sheets of schematics from one of those shuttleports they started building a few years ago. They confirmed what I thought—they're blueprints for a portal, something that crosses dimensional lines—but whether they go to the fleet, or somewhere else entirely, I have no idea.” Aston's head started to pound. He rubbed one temple with two fingers in slow circles, adding, “That one's not my fault. The schematics are incomplete, she only got a few pages.”

     The brush swung over the arc of Avery's arm, adding a pale pink highlight to the sheen of his skin. Riot's nose turned up even further as the corners of his mouth turned down. “So… you have plans for a portal somewhere into the fleet. You're going to build it in Lake's room, go wherever it spits you out, and hope you can find your friends and get them back through before anyone shoots you?”

     “You make it sound simple,” Aston said dryly.

     “I mean, when you guys said you wanted to break them out, I figured you were talking about burning down a federal prison or something. This is a piece of cake.”

     He snorted. Riot shot him another winning, sunny grin, still squatting like a frog.

     “Is Lake going through the portal?”

     “What? No. That's my job.” The sunlight pouring in through the large, multi-paned windows was aggravating Aston's impending headache. He squinted to compensate. “I know my own biology, I think I can handle physically crossing over into whatever this dimension is—I don't know about you lot. And even I need to figure out a failsafe of some kind, there's—” He paused, making a low, aggravated noise in the back of his throat. Not for the first time, he found himself frustrated with the limitations of English, especially compared to alien tongues he was familiar with.

     But English was all he had, so he would have to make do. “Alright, so—when I go to sleep, there's a 'me' that's sleeping in bed, and there's a 'me' that's… wandering.” That was a terrible way to phrase it; Aston barreled on anyway, fretfully wringing his hands. “Something's separated my body and my… consciousness, you could say, and now when my body sleeps, it lets my consciousness go wandering all over this other dimension. But it's only alive because it's tied to my body—my meat, you know, all that icky blood-pumping and oxygen-processing and electrical impulses that keep the show running. If I go all the way into this dimension, meat and all, and something happens to my body in there—I don't know what will happen to me.”

     Riot was silent, his eyeball nearly pressed up against the infinitesimal lines of black fuzz he was painting on Avery's forearm. Then he sat back on his heels again, mouth set in a critical line. “You said there's a failsafe?”

     “Maybe?” He practically had to force the word out, surreptitiously rocking back-and-forth as his brain worked overtime and his hands continued to fidget almost of their own accord. “I'm trying to figure out if I can make an… anchor? Something that's me, genetically, but not-me. Something that's… alive, but not-alive. Something my consciousness could tie itself to if my body is—well, if something happens to me in there.”

     Another slow, thoughtful nod from Riot. “So what's the big deal with Lake?”

     His fixation on the man was starting to grate on Aston. Regardless of how the conversation started, he was in full-on explanation mode at that point, and the redirection rankled. “He—we don't know if anything can get through to our side of the portal. Law enforcement could track us, somehow—something could slip into his room, and no-one else would know until it was too late—the portal could emit something toxic I haven't accounted for—look, what isn't a big deal about this?”

     Riot rose to his feet with his hands on his hips, still eyeing the mural. After some silent contemplation, he gave a dramatic huff and turned to rinse his brushes in the jar of muddy water. The soft tink-tink of their handles against the glass joined the sounds from the still-going card game and the half-baked attempts at music from upstairs; after a bit, Aston's shoulders began to relax, and he replaced his palms on the gummy floor, his breathing begrudgingly returning to normal as Riot cleaned up.

     Once Riot had dried his brushes and replaced all of his art supplies on the media stand, he came over to sit beside Aston and said “You know, I asked Lake the other week if there was anyone he'd like me to put on the mural. He said no.”

     “Okay,” Aston said, nonplussed.

     “Aston,” Riot said gently. He met the younger guy's dark eyes—and suddenly his small, round face looked awfully worn and old, and Aston realized he actually had no idea how old Riot was, only that he was very small and normally very chipper. His headache surged. “The only people he cares about are up there, in that—that dimension. He doesn't have anyone else.”

     In the background, Vellum's bright cackle rose up again, bracketed by a friendly murmur from Teiddan. Aston's chest felt light and empty; he didn't look back over at the group. Instead, he turned his attention back to the mural, squinting at the sea of faces through his rapidly-increasing pounding headache.

     They didn't look happy, exactly. Riot had painted them with a kind of frustrated melancholy to their expressions—even the ones who were grinning, clasping hands and hugging and slinging their arms around one another as if overcome by the passions of friendship, had an underlying anger in their eyes. They looked like they loved each other, and they looked like that wasn't enough. Not enough to have kept themselves alive, not enough to fix anything now.

     Or maybe Aston was reading too much into it.

     He gestured at July, who was in the very front row of the crowd, fist in the air right next to Avery's. “You should put someone else there. We know she's alive.”

     Riot was quiet for a moment, not looking at Aston. “I could, but… We're still fighting for her, right? Her and everyone else.” His fingers brushed Aston's shoulder, making him jump; Riot pulled his hand back, face drawn with concern. “Do you want me to add Sage?”

     Aston choked back a disbelieving laugh. “Absolutely not.”

     Sounds of a disturbance started up behind them. Aston craned his neck around to look at the card players again; the deck was abandoned in a loose pile on the coffee table, and Lake had withdrawn his straw from his cup, taken a stack of napkins from the table, and was, with surprising speed and grace, tearing off little pieces to ball up and shoot at Vellum using the straw, while Vellum attempted to hide behind a throw pillow she held in front of her face, still cackling in what sounded like sheer delight.

     Teiddan caught him watching again and raised his eyebrows. “Either of you want in on the next round?” He had to raise his voice to be heard over Vellum's laughter.

     “Sure.” Riot got up and brushed the dirt off his knees with a casual air. “I'm done for now. Aston?”

     Aston looked around the room, taking in the cluttered, graffiti-and-sticker-filled mess of it all, the paint drips on the floor and on Riot's clothes, the sagging shelves full of tattered books and DVDs. He looked at Riot's hopeful, earnest grin, and Teiddan's fingers beckoning him invitingly, and Lake's unreadable expression—he'd paused in his attack on Vellum and was frozen, straw in the air, looking at Aston with something approaching softness, maybe even friendliness, but the constant stony set of his lips made it difficult to tell. He looked at Vellum, who'd politely placed the pillow in her lap and was very obviously waiting for his response, eyes crinkled up along her heavy laugh lines.

     His head still hurt.

     “Yeah,” he said. “Let me take some ibuprofen first.”

###

     Several days later, Aston was sprawled on the scratchy floral-patterned rug in Lake's room, Vivaldi playing softly from a sticker-covered CD player while Teiddan knelt a foot or so away from him, using pliers to carefully manipulate something inside the large metal box affixed to the wall.

     A couple of weeks ago, they'd installed a metal frame around the empty doorframe of Lake's closet—first hauling out all of the previous residents' clothes to shove into trash bags and pile by the basement landing for storage, of course—and ever since they'd been gradually building and installing the internal components of the portal. The majority of them went into the metal box Teiddan was working on, which was installed right by the doorway. Wires dripped from the corners of the frame down to the metal box and small rivet-like protrusions dotted its inner rim, some of them sprouting spiderweb-fine black fiber strands like bristly fur, barely visible to the naked eye.

     Something clicked audibly. Teiddan sat back on his heels and let the pliers fall to the clear plastic mat he was squatting on, exhaling slowly through his teeth.

     “Taking a break,” he announced.

     “Welcome to the club,” Aston said. He grabbed the half-empty bottle of lemonade at his side and took a swig. (It had not stopped being sour in the fifteen minutes since he'd last taken a sip.)

     The two men sat in peaceable silence for a minute or two, Aston nodding his head gently to the concerto playing in the background (it was something from Four Seasons, winter most likely, but he couldn't place the exact piece). He would have been content to sit and listen to classical music with Teiddan indefinitely, but apparently that was not in the cards that afternoon.

     “I was talking to Riot about the project yesterday,” Teiddan said, deceptively casual.

     Aston cast him a sidelong glance. He looked totally at ease; thin face relaxed, lips curled up gently, eyes soft and not focused on anything in particular. They snapped to meet Aston's as soon as he looked over; Teiddan's lips curled up even further, his eyebrows quirking slightly.

     “He didn't seem to know anything about the part with the sun,” Teiddan continued.

     Up until this point, Aston had been equally at ease; the instant he heard “the sun,” his palms started itching horribly. He surreptitiously rubbed one palm against the crinkled label of his lemonade bottle. “Yeah. Why would he?”

     Teiddan's eyebrows quirked up even further. “Aston.”

     He pulled at the collar of his shirt, gaze drifting over to the lifeless portal.

     “Who did you tell?”

     “You,” Aston said defensively. There was a pause, during which Teiddan's silence rang palpably judgmental. Then he said, “And Lake, of course.”

     “That's it?”

     Aston took another face-pinching sip of lemonade.

     “Aston,” Teiddan said again, his voice soft and just the tiniest bit sanctimonious and exactly the tone Sage would have used in that moment, and Aston dropped his bottle to the floor and began scratching his palm in earnest, eyes practically boring a hole in the door frame.

     “They don't need to know,” he snapped, and before Teiddan could interject something else holier-than-thou, he barreled on: “because I don't know. All I've got is what I've told you, I can't exactly go to them and say, oh, by the way, your planet might be destroyed at any second when your star collapses into a black hole—something it shouldn't be physically capable of doing—what's my evidence? Why, intuition and supernatural visions of my ancestral trauma, of course!”

     Teiddan made a low, thoughtful noise. When Aston finally scraped up the wherewithal to look back over, he found him staring into the distance, idly playing with his anti-static wristband. “You all saw the same thing that night.”

     “And I'm the only one who came away convinced it was some kind of prophecy.” Aston sighed heavily, still scratching at his palm. It was starting to sting. “I need more… evidence. Or information. Or something.”

     “When I spoke to Lake, he—” Teiddan was, thankfully, cut off by the pounding of footsteps on the basement stairs, followed by a series of loud, sharp knocks on Lake's bedroom door.

     “Come in!” Aston, his palm now raw, sat on both his hands.

     The door swung open to reveal Klutz, who was wearing an Aston-approved outfit of a dress over cargo pants and five different necklaces, looking characteristically wild-eyed and spastic, one foot tap-tap-tapping as he stood in the doorway. Without preamble, and all in a rush, he said, “Hey guys, Bowie said he's moving on next week so Ray's making lasagna for his goodbye dinner, so you should be upstairs around seven if you want in on that, and Vellum said if she has to clean up after him tonight she'll start taking hostages, so I'm gonna do the dishes but if someone could dry them that'd be pog. Also, hi Aston, I've got a present for you.”

     Klutz yanked a little bag out of one of his many pockets and dangled it in front of Aston's face; he nearly went cross-eyed in his attempt to see the little black velvet pouch.

     “It's from Riot,” Klutz said, “but also me and Pluto, kinda, we helped but it was his idea. He said you needed, like, a totem or something?”

     With only a little trepidation, Aston plucked the bag from Klutz's hand and delicately fished out the item inside.

     It was a paw.

     It was one of the paws—it had to be. Its fur was black-and-white, its little leathery pads pale pink and perfectly preserved; it dangled from a small leather cord, just the right size to loop around his neck.

     “It's from the cat you found that one night, yeah?” Klutz was saying. “Riot said he doesn't know how any of this shit works, but he thought it's worth a shot, he's being spiritual again or whatever. It's clean, obviously, we preserved it, just don't get it wet or—”

     “Thank you,” Aston said. He rubbed one finger over the largest pad in the middle of the paw. It felt warm under his thumb, calloused and tough.

     “No prob,” Klutz said. “I'm just the messenger. Didn't even do the stitching this time.” He pulled the end of his fishtail braid (oddly neat and clean, Vellum must have gotten to his hair recently) over one shoulder and yanked it awkwardly.

     “Bowie's leaving?” Teiddan said.

     “Oh, that.” Aston, in a move much more decisive and confident than he actually felt, hooked the necklace over his head and let it fall against his chest. The paw thudded to rest just over his heart. “He's finally bored of Chicago?”

     “Yeah, said he's gonna hop a train next week, try to work his way up to Seattle.”

     Aston flashed Teiddan a winning smirk. “What do you think, can we wrap this up in time for dinner?”

     There was a pause, during which Teiddan's eyebrows worked overtime to communicate This conversation isn't over. Aston just kept smirking.

     “Of course,” Teiddan said finally. “We were almost done for the day, anyway.”

     His heart beat against the paw, skittery and light, but the longer he remained aware of it, the more it slowed. Aston wrapped his fist around the paw and held it as they cleaned up their tools, squeezing tight until his heart was back to normal.