At the center of the galaxy, you are left holding the cinderblock-heavy truth of the world you live in. The enormity of it all sits almost demurely in its place on your exosuit, that little red starseed and its cosmic significance.
Sixteen minutes. Always, sixteen.
Of course, Nada only hushes you when you try to speak about what you’ve seen. They stretch their palm outwards as you rush to inform them, sweeping away your words before they come. They are afraid — you know they’re afraid — to lose their haven to realization. Of course, despite everything, even though they have severed themselves from their people, they are still Korvax: they still fear the Atlas they reject so fiercely. You can’t bring yourself to shatter anxious Nada’s naivety.
You still find it in yourself to feel stung.
Still, though, they can see the anguish in the lines of your posture (Why won’t you listen? Why won’t you hear me? How could you leave me alone with this?), and they have never lost their kindness. Nada’s fingertips light gently on your shoulders, and when they draw you into an embrace, you return it twice as fiercely.
Polo squeezes your hand as you pass them.
“Nada fears, Traveller-Friend. Some things are best left unexplored.”
(TRAVELLER, the Atlas had said — had pleaded.)
You miss Apollo so terribly.
Sometimes you dream of a better reality: one where the world had yawned wide as you came out of the portal, and your friend was there to greet you.
Getting the details right can be tricky. You know what Apollo sounds like, sharp, sometimes guttural, mechanical and harsh at first blush. You know that standing beside them would suffuse you in subtle golden light, that it would play off the starsilk strands and fine leather of your suit. The details get sketchier and ruin the picture if you dwell too much, and so you try not to linger too much on any one point. Broad strokes.
They are bigger than you are, you remember from the tower transmissions; they are built sturdily, like industrial equipment, like a blunt force weapon. They get testy when you poke fun at it — “I don’t make fun of you for being soft, do I?” — and you know that this body is not necessarily theirs by choice. There had been grudges involved, and vengeance quests, and altogether you can understand why they choose to walk as a lone iteration entirely, free of the wistful togetherness of the Space Anomaly’s menagerie. Such tenderness doesn't suit them.
But Apollo could bludgeon you into an entirely new iteration, and Apollo chooses not to. That is how things go, in the reality where you break through to one another. The two of you cut a wonderful contrast walking worlds together. The gear you have chosen means that beside their simplicity, you are all tritium-hydraulic agility and solar-vitrified stealth, and they snipe at you over comms because they are made for steady distance and could never keep up with your gimmicks.
“Somehow Artemis was never half as much trouble as you are,” they tell you, with their strange blend of indifference and annoyance over-top a curious attachment.
“With Artemis, we really would have been unstoppable.” The thought slips out unbidden, and you pick at the enameling adorning your right pauldron as if to distract, or to mollify.
“… Yes,” Apollo says, a reply you don’t expect. Their tone is thoughtful, but not closed off, and you realize you’ve earned the rare right to their emotional input, such as it is. “We would have.”
In this reality, the pressing loneliness of all the world before you abates with your friend at your shoulder. Apollo is not necessarily talkative — in fact, without you there to prompt them, you think they might go days without a single flare of vocal activity — but their heavy tread at your heels and their ruthless haggling at trade stations compress the frightening vastness of it all into something uniquely enticing.
(The weight of the last sixteen minutes rests lighter on your shoulders, knowing that they, too, understand. They take the news of the galaxy’s infinite end steadily, a steel-stubborn levee refusing to succumb to the waves of despair that had submerged you before.)
(“Well, we all have to die sometime,” they had told you, rolling prism-studded shoulders. “And what time will be more interesting than this?”)
(They hear you, they listen, and they are not afraid.)
(In this other reality, they choose to do what no one else does: to accompany you. To understand.)
(And you know fully by now that those other iterations are just as real as you.)
(So just knowing that, you think, alone in your ship with your face to the stars — just knowing soothes the sting.)
Sometimes you dream of a better reality.
In it, all the world lies before you, and Apollo is at your back, and beneath the tint of your helmet, your eyes are wide and wonderstruck.
