There are only a few of you, people I've met through this strange new world, people who don't know me to look at and couldn't pick me out of a crowd at a dozen paces, people who don't know the story. Our story. It's a long damn story, frustrating in places, exhilirating in others, and I can't tell you any of it, even behind locks and filters tucked away like this. Too much danger. Too much risk. Too fucking young to be this old, this jaded, this broken, but I am and we are and I can't say a fucking word, no matter how much I want to. Some habits you learn early, even before you raise your hand and swear.

*

It's killing me how much I miss him.

A week, he says, through layers of intermediaries he wasn't supposed to use. Maybe two. I'm left here to pick up the pieces, to smile and make nice at the people we accidentally fucked over, to sit in my 'chair in front of my laptop and pretend to care about null memory pointers and stack overflows while he's out there alone doing the things we both trained to do. The things I can't do anymore.

I'm worse at the widow's walk than I should be, for all it's bred deep, for all I can pick up the phone and take an hour or five with Mitchell men and women who've walked it a lot longer than I have. It's worse when you know.

He left without telling me because he didn't want me to ask him to take me with him, because he knew I'd ask and he knew he'd answer. Only reason we've gotten ourselves this far is because we know each other well enough to know that there's nothing we can say no to each other about. I can't even be angry at him for it, now that I've calmed down. He's better equipped to make that call than I ever would be. He's had to make it a hell of a lot more often.

*

"God," he cries, dying on Mars, "God, we made it!"

*

Sometimes I stop and take a look at our life and wonder how we got to be so good at lying to everybody but each other. Probably a stupid question. It's an occupational trait, and that's something you don't lose easy.

*

The ocean said, what are you trying to find? I don't care; I'm not kind; I have bludgeoned your sailors, spat out their keepsakes.

Thirty-eight years old and I'll never walk unassisted again, never run again, never dance again, never place baseball, wrestle with my brother or my nephews, never again have a single day where I don't have to tally up every last erg of energy and spend it carefully and always discover at the end of the day that I've run myself into a deficit I can't ever make up. There ain't a medal in the world, no matter how prestigious, that can repay the loss of my wings.

Rewind me four years, put me back in that hangar with full knowledge of what's to come, and I'd do it again. No hesitation, no quarter given. But knowing it was necessary don't mean it'll ever be easy.

*

Sometimes I think it's ironic that the first thing he ever did for me was save my life, because I know he considers it as repaying a debt to me someone else incurred in his name a full year after he was born.

That sentence makes a hell of a lot more sense if you know the true story of what was.

*

Weather's changing today, deep and sharp, down in my bones so hot and heavy it makes every joint feel like someone's torched it. I can feel my pulse throbbing in my knee every time I stop to concentrate on this body I live in. He's the one who taught me how to do it -- can't fix what you don't know about -- but it's a hell of a lot easier to be mindful when there's someone there to catch you when you get lost.

*

People who don't know us think we're mother and son, or cousins, or sometimes lovers, and it's easier to let people think whatever they will than try to correct the wrong impression. I don't think there are words for what he is to me, except 'magnificent'. And I only know a fraction of the story.

He pushed his way into my life (with that shit-hot swagger and that little smile that in other people would be a full belly laugh and that firm and implacable refusal to accept anything less than absolute truth) and made himself indispensable, and I'd be dead without him four times over (at least) and the only thing that makes it bearable is that I know he'd say the same.

*

If blood be the price of admiralty, Lord God, we ha' bought it fair!

*

A week, he says. Maybe two. I'd find it more of a comfort if I didn't know how easily plans get fucked when he's dealing with the people he's dealing with. (Absent friends, lost loves, old gods, and the season of mists--)

A man can't serve two masters, and five years ago he swore to serve no master but himself ever again. It was the vow he needed to take at the time, in order to come out sane on the other side. (I couldn't have done what he did. No matter how much he insists that I did.) But some habits you learn early, even before you lift your hand and swear, and there are forces still acting on him that I understand deeper than either of us wants to admit. He couldn't not, not and still be able to look himself in the eye in the mirror, and there are two people on this fair world (other than him) who know the amount of effort it took to get him to a place where he could look himself in the eye (or in the mind's eye, which is far more uncompromising) without flinching.

I'm one of them.

He's with the other.

(That makes it worse. Because that person knows what this could do to him, and had to ask it anyway.)

*

No, it really isn't any easier when you can put a face to the monster under the bed.

*

I wish I didn't have to make you read between the lines.