Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad and your little brother
Kaelo.
Family, but you don't have that anymore. Maybe
you never really did. What you've got is a proficiency with weapons and
machines, a whole bunch of tattoos that hurt like hell, and a screwed up
childhood that sometimes you can't even believe you really went through. You're
one of those kids.
But yeah. Here you are. Sitting on this stupid
little bench in this stupid little park watching all these Earth kids and their
parents having fun and shit. Laughing, playing, having picnics and enjoying
each other's company. All you really wanted was to just have your lunch--stir
fried bulbs of Kortorian onions with tomatoes--in peace while you waited for
your next job to start, but now you’re getting an eyeful of familial happiness
that brings you crashing back to a lot of bad memories. Memories that you
thought you'd gotten real good at pretending didn't exist.
Like when you finally made up your mind to run
away from your uncle's house. When you got tired of it all one night—the beatings,
the mockery, the endless pain-- and decided that you weren't going to wake up
and face the same hell you'd been going through for the last five years. You
weren't going to be hit across the face with a leather thong, or have your
step-aunt throwing hot grease onto you when you slept in too late for her
liking. You weren't going to keep picking scabs you got from harvesting the
soft silk nestled inside the thorny stalks in the pasture out back behind the
house, until your palms got good and bloody. You weren't going to keep smelling
the liquor on your uncle's breath as he held you in front of his face after he’d
slapped you so hard you saw stars, warning that you couldn’t mess up again.
Then there were your cousins...your cousins and the horrible shit they did to
you when the lights were out and the house was quiet. Maybe that had been when
you’d decided a life in reckless space was better than another minute of
torture there.
So you left. You stole all your asshole uncle's
earnings out his safe, picked his cooler of all its food, and ran through the
grass and trees and sand until you finally managed to bribe your way onto a
cargo ship that was headed straight for Galmaki Central. Things didn’t really
get better after that, maybe even worse when you thought about it, but you knew
that no matter what happened you would never, EVER, go back to that house
again. To those people who were supposed to be your family but lacked all that
ability in all sense of the word.
Then there was those years you spend with that
crater faced, bounty smuggler who was supposed to be helping you out, being
your partner as you helped collect bounties with him, but turned you into a
servant instead. The one who made you come along, help him hold down some guy who
owed him money, while he gutted a hole in his stomach. You never forgot how
that poor bastard's blood splattered in your face, how you watched it pour out
that hole, how you held your mouth shut until you were finally out of that miserable,
urine smelling apartment, out of that bastard's sight, and vomited your insides
out and cried and cried as rain poured over your back and washed the puke away.
Wanna know what was really fucked up about all
that too? When you finally came back to that bastard he laughed and pointed to
your shirt and asked, what's that? And before you could answer he knocked you
to the floor and kicked and kicked you until you felt a rib crack, and then he
just laughed as you laid there on the floor, crying, and he said, Gotta learn
to take the good with the bad. He threw the credits you earned from the job on
top of you, but took a few extra because you still had "expenses" you
needed to pay off. Good with the bad your ass.
But you left him, right? Yeah, you left. You ran
away from him like you ran away from home. Yeah, you got mixed up with some
more shit that earned you some ugly scars that you could see on your body but
actually feel inside your heart. But that’s when you got harder too, tougher.
More cold. Then again, maybe you've always been hard and cold. Maybe you've
never really been a nice guy, maybe there's never been anything innocent about
you, even with Mom, Dad, and Kaelo's deaths. Cause in truth you really can't
remember what it was like to have them close to you, to have family, so for all
you know you've always been fucked up.
So you're back to the park now. Out your head and
watching these fucking Earthling families having fun and shit. You watch as a
human father throws a football to the son, as the mother brushes the daughter's
hair and rubs her face into the curls. The fathers and sons go back to the
blanket they've laid out in the grass when the game is done and the mother
opens the basket she brought along and hands everybody sandwiches. They're
smiling even through peanut butter and jelly, even when one of the kids spills
something on their newly pressed shirt.
The mother still smiles and laughs though as she
cleans them up. They don't get beaten, they don't get humiliated, and they
don't get raped. They're still a family and not just when it suits them. You
have to wonder where the justice in the world is.
So now you can't eat anymore, no, no. You close
your container of food and feel the dressing and sauces gurgle in your stomach.
You feel that impulse to run away and throw up, to cry, to scream, but you
fight it this time. You fight it because you're not some little kid anymore,
scared, alone, and vulnerable. You know how to take care of yourself, how to
get money, how to get food, and how to make sure nobody ever, EVER, treats you
like you're less than anything ever again. You can fight back, you can endure,
and you certainly can sit in a crowded park on a summery day and watch the
family that you will never have.
