FIC: Sinking Like Stones (Redux)

I would say he was a dreamer. I would say he was a good man. I would say he reached for the stars, and couldn't care less about what anyone said. I would say I loved him.

"They'll say he was a scientist," I replied.

"A very good one," the man pointed out, scribbling something onto a tattered notepad.

"Yeah."

"Okay," said the man. He sighed and shoved the pad into a pocket of his overcoat. "Sorry about your loss, kid."

"Thanks," I told him. I watched him walk away, leaving me behind. Alone with a dead man's ghost. I turned back to the tombstone, watched shadows flicker across its grainy texture. I ran my fingers over the stone. It was cold. Cold and lifeless, without passion or feeling.

That was wrong. It didn't fit. This slab of rock was the last earthly piece of my dad and it was meaningless. It was dust.

I turned away, walked back through the smog and damp of San Francisco, never to return. Wet blades of grass slashed my polished black shoes, shinning faint reflections on the toes. They were like dark little mirrors. A way into another world; a world that could never be reached.

Somewhere someone disagreed. Someone thought the impossible could be done. They would find a way. Dad would have found a way. What would I do?

Would I walk away like I was right now? Would I try to find the way?

Dad used to tell me to never give up. "Reach for the starts, Jon," he'd say "because the sky just isn't high enough."

But the sky seemed plenty high from my vantage. Too high.

It struck me then that I didn't know who I was. My whole life I'd been my father's son, living my father's dream. And now he was gone. So were did that leave me? A blank page. A blank page sitting next to an inked pen, ready to be written on but with nothing to write.

A hundred years from now, when they wrote about me, what would they say? Would I be just another footnote in my father's legacy?

I didn't believe in destiny. I didn't believe people were chosen or not chosen. I believed you made your own way.

I stopped walking and turned around, went back to the tombstone.

It was as cold and grey as when I'd left it. I didn't know what to do; I didn't know where to go. I didn't want to think any more.

All I wanted was my dad back. But that was something no one could give me. I sat down on the grass and faced the rain. It was picking up, lashing my face, beating tears out of my eyes.

It wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to end this way.

I looked back at the headstone, ran my fingers over it again. Felt the cold. The mirror in my shoes was shinning against the rain, glimmering like a sparkle at the end of time. It was subtle. It was a little thing. But that was all life was: a series of little things.

I smile cracked my face, pushing through hot tears that ran down, cooled by the rain. I watched the way the water bounced off leaves, springing back to life after falling and shattering: Silver daggers ricocheting across an impossible impasse.

"I'll see you later, Dad."

I stood and walked back the way I'd come. I wasn't going to be a footnote.

And he polished his shoes. Polished them until they shone, until he could imagine stars and planets orbiting their blank black surface.

Under his bed was the wreckage of his ship, the one his father had taught him to fly. It was smashed to pieces. Grey and yellow paint flecks were smudged across the floor, demarking the craters and gouges were the ship had been driven into the wood again and again and again until it was just a useless carcass. Something broken; something dead.

It was two days after the toy’s fatal crash when his mom barged into the room and demanded he have something for dinner. When she left she took the the remains of his ship and the plate still covered in crumbs and half-eaten food with her.

That night, with his lights off and the house quiet, he laid on his bed and stared at the ceiling. The air around him hardly moved at all and it smelled stale and fetid. He reached toward the window and found it too far to touch. He jerked in a halting, spastic way until he was almost sitting, but the air was heavy and his arms were rocks, boulders cut from jagged mountains. They dragged him downward and he sank slowly into his mattress.

Down the hall, he could hear crying.

The next morning he started polishing his shoes, scrubbing and rubbing and chafing at the leather until they gleamed like all the Academy cadets’.

In the photo, his twelve-year-old reflection had hollow eyes with red rims and his hands and cheeks were smeared with saltwater. His mom was standing too straight and her face was too blank. She had her arm around him, her knuckles white but her fingers barely brushing the fabric of his jacket.

Rain was falling around them and the field where they stood had turned to marshland and each footstep squelched like suction cups being torn off metal. He had polished his shoes until they were clear as glass. He stood still and watched the sheets of water bounce off them.

To his left a man with a deep voice and a wrinkled suite asked, “In the future, when they write about him, what do you think they’ll say?”

The woman next to him said, “They’ll say he was a revolutionary.”

Someone else said, “He’ll be remembered as a scientist.”

Everyone standing around, they were all wearing black and none of them had umbrellas. Their hair was lank and sodden and their shoes were sloshed in mud. But not his--he had polished his until they shone, rubbed at the dark leather until it gleamed like all the Academy cadets’.

The man with the rumpled suit said, “He may have changed everything.”

An old, crackly voice said, “He was so young. It’s a shame. A damn shame. Imagine what else he could have done?”

“He was a great man,” the woman said.

They were talking about his father, all these people in their dark suits, but the worlds they used didn’t fit. They were too big and too vague and too indistinct. They felt bloated in Jon’s mouth when he tried to repeat them. They felt loose and rubbery and when he tried to fit them onto his father they fell right off like they were made of nothing at all.

The words kept telling stories about something else. Someone else. They didn’t have anything to say about his dad.

Jon nodded and he said, “Yeah.”

He said, “His engine is going to really make a difference.”

The rain pouring down like a flooding culvert, no one could tell he was crying if he didn’t reach up to wipe his eyes.

Jon turned the picture over in his hands and ran his thumbs along the edges. It had been taken at the funeral by some journalist or another and in the photo it was was sunny. Behind him and his mom Henry Archer’s grave was a dark hole cut in a bright, trim lawn. There were creases in the celluloid when it had been folded, lines of tatty white paper jutting across the graveyard, cleaving it into quarters.

He found the box with the broken ship his dad had taught him to fly in the back of a closet. The pieces inside were untouched, the plastic faded. When he carried it into the hall, he left greasy handprints in the dust.

He took them both when he left and he stopped on his way back to Starfleet to pick up a tube of yellow paint.