Stardust

All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again.

—Battlestar Galactica (2003)     

     When Aston first moved into the Station, he saw the loft-style living room as pointlessly bougie. An unnecessarily large staircase on the far right wall swooped up to an open landing jutting out over the living room, its carved wooden railing all that separated it from the ten-foot drop to the hardwood below. High, vaulted ceilings completed the aesthetic; the overlook itself was strikingly bare in contrast to the clutter of the rest of the house, completely devoid of furnishings until you hit the hallway to the upstairs bedrooms.

     Once he experienced his first show at the Station, he quickly realized there was an actual, material purpose for the loft. The stairwell was blocked off by a padlocked chain and lengths of bright plastic tape with DO NOT ENTER printed over and over again in large red letters; the band, a painfully amateur local outfit whose drummer used a set of metal crates in lieu of an actual instrument, set up on the overlook and played an arrhythmic wall of sound while the living room below filled up with thrashing, sweating, violently excited people. No-one got into the upstairs bedrooms, which, as far as Aston was concerned, was a genius way to handle the whole matter.

     That night, someone did throw themself through the sliding glass door out to the back deck, putting a damper on the show before the second act even set up. It was particularly irritating because the Station left the back door open during shows to avoid this exact problem, but as the shards of glass littering the back deck that night proved, the whims of drunken idiots were not to be trifled with. Shows were paused for several weeks while Vellum hired a contractor to fix the glass pane; Riot said something grim and mysterious about “putting the word out” that this kind of thing “couldn't happen again,” which Aston never followed up on, but seeing as nothing like that happened again, he supposed Riot succeeded in his endeavors.

     Several weeks after Lake's arrival at the Station, it was his turn to experience his first show.

     Aston was busy putting the padlocks on all the kitchen cabinets that contained breakable items when Lake shuffled into the kitchen, looking even more wan and pale than usual. His hair was a disheveled wreck, sticking up from his skull at all angles, and he was wrapped in a blanket that dragged loosely on the floor behind him, probably picking up all sorts of dust and dirt, not that it was any of Aston's business.

     “Should I stay downstairs tonight?” Lake had quickly learned not to waste Aston's time with small talk.

     Aston clicked a padlock into place and tugged it experimentally; once he was satisfied it was locked, he stood up from his squat and leaned against the counter to peer at Lake. “Depends. Do you want to mosh to the dulcet tones of Bong Threat?”

     Lake snorted audibly. He sat down at the kitchen table, somehow maneuvering his blanket around the chair's legs to sit without tangling himself up in the process, and began to examine, one-by-one, the colorful pile of zines in front of him.

     “I'll take that as a 'no,'” Aston said, jangling the padlocks still in his pocket. With Lake occupied by zine browsing, Aston returned to securing the cabinets—only two more to go. “They're not that bad, really. Their banjoist can shred.”

     Aston leaned over the sink to loop the last padlock through the handles of the final cabinet; he had to stand on tip-toe to reach, embarrassingly enough. As he grunted, the sink jutting into the flesh beneath his bottom rib, he heard Lake shift and cough behind him.

     Finally, Lake said “Concerts aren't really my scene.”

     The lock clicked. Aston fell back onto his heels, rocking back-and-forth for a few moments before whirling around to face Lake. The guy looked slightly red in the face, and he wasn't meeting Aston's eyes, still thumbing through a stack of zines too quickly to possibly be reading them.

     Aston sauntered over to the fridge, casting a perfunctory glance at the notes on the household whiteboard affixed to its top door (“Show 2/25, 7pm!” “buy lucky charms” “you mean SHOPLIFT lucky charms” “no i mean take my goddamn snap card and buy me lucky charms” “House Meeting 2/26” “i don't care if you're transgender CLEAN THE DAMN MICROWAVE”). None of them were new since yesterday. The bottom door was decorated with a wide variety of stickers and graffiti crammed onto every free square inch of surface area. He grabbed a can of lemonade, shut the fridge, and leaned backwards against its cool, many-layered surface to regard Lake.

     “I'm going with the triad to look for bones tonight,” Aston offered. “I could bring you along.”

     They usually invited Aston. Pluto, despite his overall preference for rowdier scenes, also preferred to stay sober, so he stayed out of the house on show nights, and while neither Klutz nor Riot had any problems with drinking, they tended to go with their boyfriend in a show of support. Seeing how uncomfortable Aston was at his first, mildly disastrous Station show, Pluto had quietly offered to take him bone-hunting during the next one, and he'd just never stopped tagging along since then. Knowing human romantic structures, this should have been awkward for Aston, but it never was—he found whatever was going on with the triad infinitely more tolerable than any other romantic coupling he'd encountered during his time in America thus far.

     It was taking Lake a while to answer. Aston cracked open his can of lemonade and took a long, harsh sip while he waited for a response, grimacing slightly at the sour flavor. He wasn't sure why he kept drinking the stuff—masochism, perhaps.

     Lake put the zines down and shrugged. “Sure.” His casual tone was entirely at odds with how long he'd thought about the offer; before Aston could prod him about this, he followed up with “How's the math going?”

     Aston choked on his lemonade. Sticky, sour liquid bubbled over his chin and ran down his shirt as he sputtered; suddenly feeling hot and itchy, he bustled around the kitchen grabbing napkins and sopping up his mess in a hasty attempt to recollect.

     “It's going!” he said brightly, dabbing at his shirt with a paper towel. It was one of his favorites, too—a neon-pink short-sleeved Hawaiian button-down with bright yellow flowers. Luckily, the long-sleeved button-down he was wearing underneath it was mostly spared.

     Lake squinted at him. Aston suspected he was being perceived, and he resented it.

     Over the last few weeks, Aston had made approximately zero progress on the matter of locating the medical facility in physical space, or of accessing the Dusty fleet from their plane of reality whatsoever. He assured Lake it was a matter of “really complicated math”—which was probably true, to be fair. The problem was, Aston had no idea where to start, and so he ended up not thinking about it at all.

     “It'll go faster when Teiddan's project ends,” he added, somewhat lamely. This was also true. Teiddan being swamped with his current work responsibilities, and therefore unavailable for Aston's purposes, had put a major damper on his motivation.

     Lake nodded slowly, still squinting. “Let me know if I can help.”

     “Thanks, love the enthusiasm,” Aston said hastily, holding his lemonade aloft like a torch as he scampered across the kitchen, “it was nice catching up, see you later!”

     With that, he was out the door and rushing across the house, holding onto the vain hope that Riot would give him some other imminent chore to do before Lake tried to ensnare him in conversation again.

###

     The trip out to Pluto's preferred park was an hour long and involved two busses. The same trip would have been approximately fifteen minutes by car. Aston's opinion on this would have gotten him branded as a terrorist by the United States government, if he expressed it publicly, and if he wasn't already considered a terrorist by that very same entity.

     The sun had already set when they traipsed down past the large pond, which shimmered faintly in the blue-dark twilight, through the paved trails, and into the thick of the woods. All three had come along this time—Pluto in his patched jacket and neon-orange disposable vinyl gloves, a small bag slung over one shoulder, fire-engine-red dyed hair sticking up at all angles and practically glowing against the dusky surroundings; Riot, in all of his five-foot-two-inches glory, his moonlike face curled up into a permanent grin beneath his mask and dark bob swinging around his chin; Klutz, ratty hair spilling down his back, wearing at least four layers of clothes in a hodgepodge aesthetic Aston personally approved of, bringing up the rear and stream-of-consciousness babbling the entire time.

     Lake towered over the group, his (frankly unnatural) height even more jarring contrasted with their relatively short average. He'd been ominously silent the entire trip.

     “—just fucking sad,” Klutz was saying. Once they stepped off the beaten path, he'd walked up from the rear to link elbows with Riot, who proceeded to lead him around obstacles while he babbled. “Like, you're gonna get a dog and not even look up how to take care of it? And he won't listen, keeps being like no, it's a guard dog, like fuck off, buddy, you're just teaching him to bite anyone, you think you'll be an exception to that?”

     “Klutz, do not steal the dog,” Pluto said, without looking up. During the dog monologue—dogologue, Aston allowed himself to think, but then decided that was much too stupid to share with the group—Pluto had dropped to squat on his heels in front of a tree; two of its roots formed a large, shallow pit in the dirt between them, and he was using a stick to carefully overturn layers of detritus and leaf litter.

     “I never said I was gonna steal the dog,” Klutz said passionately. Having dropped Riot's arm when they came to a stop, he picked up a stick off the ground beside him and started waving it aggressively at a nearby tree, thwacking it against the bark as he spoke. “But I should! He doesn't deserve a dog!”

     “Vellum is allergic.” Riot's warm-honey tone drifted from the ground a few yards away, where he perched with his forearms on his knees.

     “Well, someone needs to steal the dog,” Klutz said, still beating the poor, defenseless tree.

     Pluto let a few scraps of plant matter flutter to the ground with a sigh before rising to his feet. “But not you,” he told Klutz, coming around to give him a gentle, affectionate headbutt on the shoulder. “You already have a dog.”

     “Yeah, and you're a good boy,” Klutz said. As Pluto came into hitting range, he nigh-instantaneously dropped the stick to give Pluto a quick scratch behind his ears.

     Somewhere in the gloomy background, Lake shifted and made a couple of noises that could have been coughs, or maybe he was clearing his throat.

     Pluto disentangled himself from his boyfriend and set off in a seemingly random direction; Aston followed promptly, the rest of the group slowly filing behind. Dry brown underbrush crunched under Aston's tennis shoes as they hiked through the sparse forest for a few mostly-quiet minutes.

     Klutz continued his never-ending monologue, interspersed with cheerful comments from Riot, but Aston was starting to find the conversation hopelessly grating and tuned it out. Pluto seemed to be on the same page; he had his head on a low swivel, eyes glued to the ground, but he still managed to direct his attention toward Aston. “How's the project going?”

     Cool sweat broke out on the back of Aston's already-chilly neck.. He glanced over his shoulder at the group; they were very close behind, Lake only four or five feet away from him. “Teiddan's been busy,” he said carefully.

     “Yeah, his job's shit.” Pluto stopped walking abruptly, then beelined toward a large, flat rock a few feet away. He dropped to kneel at its base. “Hey. Flashlight?”

     That was Aston's cue, thankfully. He whipped the flashlight out of his inner coat pocket and shone it on the scene with a bit more zest than was necessary; the beam illuminated a mid-sized, furry mass at the base of the rock. It was sprawled out on the ground, a jumble of black-and-white fur and strange angles that took Aston several beats to parse—and then he realized it was a domestic cat, mottled fur dark and damp around its throat.

     A flash of pink winked at its neck, and after another second, Aston realized it was a collar. A little pink scrap bedazzled with plastic gemstones, no tags to be seen.

     “It's fresh.” There was satisfaction in Pluto's voice. He poked and prodded at the limp body with his gloved hands, examining its limbs carefully, pulling one lip up to expose its gum, carding through its fur for who-knew what. “No signs of disease, either.”

     “Stop letting your cats outside, for fuck's sake,” Klutz grumbled.

     To Aston's surprise, Lake came up to kneel beside Pluto on the ground. There was a mumbled exchange, too quiet for Aston to hear, and then Pluto handed Lake the bag and Lake, cool as a cucumber, withdrew and donned a second pair of disposable gloves.

     “Are you gutting her tonight?” This time, Lake's voice was loud enough to carry. His gloved hand went out to slowly stroke the dead cat's head—but there wasn't any distress in his voice, he spoke as casually as if they were talking about the grocery list.

     “Probably,” Pluto said. “I don't get one like this very often—I should treat her right.”

     “I'll help.” It wasn't a question. It was a statement of fact. Aston bristled at the sheer presumptuousness—but Pluto just nodded, the corners of his dark eyes crinkling up like he was smiling under his mask.

     Together, Pluto and Lake packed the corpse away into an industrial-sized zipper storage bag, while Aston averted his eyes. All he needed to do was hold the flashlight, after all. He did attempt to question Lake on his apparent interest—but all the man said was a gruff “I've been hunting a lot,” and then the conversation was derailed by Klutz entering an extended anecdote about fishing trips with his father, peppered with interjections from Riot about some cabin in the woods.

     Once the cat was successfully confined to the bag, Pluto stripped his gloves off, and then Aston was assaulted by a sudden, blinding surge of light.

      He dropped the flashlight. Klutz's distinctive screech pierced the air; Aston's hands shot to his eyes and he stumbled, breath frozen in his lungs, as the light hit him like a physical force.

     It was instant and it was everywhere. The insides of Aston's eyelids shone dark red. Somewhere close by, Pluto said “What the fuck,” his voice ragged and breathy.

     When Aston opened his eyes, it was broad daylight.

     The sun beat down on the group without repentance; it illuminated their shocked expressions, Klutz sprawled out on the ground as if he'd fallen in his confusion, Riot knelt beside him, staring at the sky, his face tilted up and contorted into wide-eyed awe. It refracted off the cherry hues of Pluto's hair, revealing the smudges of dirt on his ruddy tan face and streaks of mud on his pants.

     A hand fell on Aston's shoulder. He jerked away, whipped around to face his assaulter—but it was just Lake, looking grim and pale, leather jacket draped loosely around his body like a shroud.

     Wordlessly, the man gestured to Riot, who'd begun mouthing silently, lips wrapping around the mute shapes of unvoiced words as he rocked back-and-forth on his heels, his mask pulled down around his neck, and then Lake pointed at the sky himself.

     Aston looked up.

     The sky was blue. Brilliantly, brightly blue—a true sky blue, a true clear day, not a cloud in sight, and not a speck of stardust, either.

     That would have been strange no matter what. But just above the horizon, an odd, industrial shape broke up those endless fields of blue—a massive shape, clearly unnatural, clearly something made by sentient hands to float in the sky, but larger than any spaceship Aston had ever seen. It was a confused, topsy-turvy mess of skyscraper-esque boxes, a tangled web of architecture that all blurred together from a distance til it was nearly incoherent; he made out promenades jutting from the sides of buildings seemingly at random, massive stairways that led to nothing but patches of empty air, metal tunnels through the air between buildings that had to be miles apart…

     “That's medical,” Lake said.

     “What?” Aston broke away from the nonsensical structure to stare at Lake, whose face looked even more haggard and sunken than normal. “No. What?”

     “That's what I saw out the gym window,” he said.

     Aston returned his gaze to the inconceivable, rambling city in the sky—but something else was happening, something with the light. It shimmered and waved, pulsing with an otherworldly quality—a sickening throb of something completely indefinable, something immaterial, a slight change in hue, a shift in texture, that left Aston feeling sick.

     Off to the side, Klutz was frantically whispering to Riot, who had pressed one hand over his eyes and was murmuring in turn, something Aston couldn't understand, could barely even hear—“al m'zuzot beitekha”—and then Pluto dropped to his knees in front of the pair and grabbed Riot's shoulders. His fingers dug into the smaller man's biceps, wrapping nearly the whole way around; he sounded quite firm as he repeated “You're not dying. You're not gonna die,” but Aston wasn't so sure about that.

     The light rippled like a fluid. Aston's stomach churned. His armpits were soaked, his back slick with chill under his coat. Lake was saying something low and urgent; he didn't care. He stared at the ground, at the shadows twisting and sinking into the dead brown underbrush.

     Lake's fingers gripped his chin and turned his face back up to the sky, to the sun blazing its remorseless glory over their heads—but it was dim, a shadow of even its normal, stardust-choked smolder, it flickered like a candle and its hazy orange glow was soft enough for Aston to stare directly into its center.

     The Sun twisted in on itself.

     Aston felt, very acutely, that he was going to throw up.

     The star warped like it was being pinched in the middle—its edges curled, then stretched loose and long, pulled like putty—it rippled like a fluid, melted into the sky—then it contracted, snapped down to a tiny, misshapen ball with the velocity of a rubber band being shot from someone's fingers, and it was sickeningly, horrifyingly familiar.

     From across the universe, Ora tugged at Aston's chest.

     He gagged. His muscles convulsed, icy sweat coating every inch of his skin. The hole inside of him yawned—he circled its brim, threatening to fall over the horizon, lost forever to the endless dark—and he needed to run. He needed to leave.

     But Sage wasn't there, and the sun, the Sun, the Sun was—was—

     —was unfurling like a skein of yarn, spooling out into a spiral of fire that defied Aston's understanding of natural laws—

     And there was another sudden, blinding flash of light, this one brighter and hotter than anything you had ever experienced; it was so hot and bright as to preclude the survival of any living thing in its radius, and you screamed. You screamed because you knew, you knew, it was embedded in your history, in your DNA itself—your ancestors screamed through you, a raw, agonized “Not again. Not again. Not here, not now, not again.”

     The burning only lasted for a split second. As quickly as it came, so came total and utter darkness, and with it a bone-deep chill. It froze you instantly—calcified all your soft tissues in ice, crept inside of you and packed itself into every crevice.

     It hurt.

     As soon as it started, it stopped.

     Aston was on the ground, his face buried in prickly dead grass. The forest was dark—not the horrifying empty blackness of a dead planet, but the gentle moonlit darkness of sparse Chicago woods at night. He sagged limply into the dirt, head spinning.

     The void in the back of Aston's head was quiet; the rest of his head was not. For lack of anything more useful to do, he sat up. Riot was curled into the fetal position, shoulders jerking erratically as choked sobs burst out of him in spurts; his partners were crouched in the dirt, murmuring softly and stroking any parts of him they could reach. Lake squatted beside Aston, a hulking, quiet blur in the darkness.

     “Sorry,” Lake said. His voice shook slightly. “I shouldn't have made you look at it.”

     Aston ignored this. His chest felt oddly light; his thoughts raced faster than he could keep up with. He dragged himself to his knees, ignoring the stiff complaints of his kneecaps, and hobbled the few inches toward Lake needed to grasp the man's shoulders with manic intensity.

     Lake flinched.

     “I get it,” Aston said. “Fuck, I don't want to, but I get it—”

     “What,” Lake said.

     “I know what they're going to do.” Aston's mouth was moving faster than his mind could keep up, but he knew—he knew—he was confident for once in his entire stupid, useless, ridiculous life, confident that he wasn't bluffing, he wasn't running a con. He understood. “I have to talk to Teiddan—we have to make a plan—”

     “Aston.” His name sounded strange coming out of Lake's mouth. Lake's face looked even stranger under the barely-there light of the moon; the caverns of his cheeks and eye sockets looked practically skeletal, his expression haunted. “You're not making sense, man.”

     That was because he wasn't sure how to make sense, not at the moment. It was too much, there was too much in his brain—Ora and his people, the Dusties—the lizards—fragments of cultist nonsense drifting around his head, snatches of conversations with Sage, the otherworldly vision of the fleet bleeding into their own sky, their dreams—he needed to sit down, to lay it out in a concept map, to talk through it til it made sense. He needed to go home.

     Lake was waiting for an explanation, and he didn't have time to make sense of it all, so he went with the next-best option.

     “World's ending,” Aston said shortly.