A small hand tucked inside the cuff of an oversized shirt sleeve rubbed at the round window, attempting fruitlessly to wipe away the smudges built up from years of a little nose and forehead pressing against it.  Giving up, as he always did, the boy leaned again against the window, crossing his arms beneath his chest to support himself on the end of the bed.  His feet wriggled in the air, and his bony shoulder blades tented his baggy pajamas; he looked for all the world like some strange cloth-bound bird perched on a cliff, ready to dive down at any moment, into the sea of nothing that swirled outside the little round window.


“Alek, c'est l'heure d'aller au lit.”


“Je le sais, maman. ”


The door slid shut almost silently, and the boy blinked once-twice, refocusing his wide, blue eyes on the negative space, the black between the stars that surrounded and embraced him constantly in their neglect.  Somewhere beyond here, the silence of his room whispered with the voice of bells in his fragile ears.  Somewhere in the between, we are waiting, his toy cars assured him, the tiny LEDs trapped behind the headlamps quivering as he was with childish anticipation.  Somewhere, you will find me, promised the fading paper poster of the Eiffel Tower, the photograph dated sometime before his grandparents’ birth.


Squeezing his eyes shut, as if he hoped to hold the silent words in his mind by shutting them in, the little boy rolled over, pulling his blanket up over his nose.  The gentle creaks and rocks of the station sang him to sleep.


---


A thin stream of bubbles wormed its way to the water’s surface, bursting with an invisible spray of chlorinated droplets.  If anyone had been watching, they might have noticed that the bubbles slowly became larger until the water appeared to be boiling with a localized fervor.  However, the pool was entirely abandoned except for the man whose dirty blonde head at last broke through the surface, mouth gaping wide, gasping for air.  

Using one hand to wipe his hair away from where it had plastered itself to his forehead and eyelids, the man then resumed treading water slowly and quietly, his nose barely above the surface of the pool, his blue eyes blinking at the droplets steadfastly refusing to jump ship from his long, dark eyelashes.    

He slowly rotated, as usually does a swimmer treading water with both arms but only one leg, until the glass wall of the overarching athletic complex was within his sight.  The mounted lights lining the sidewalk outside the building buzzed off as they recognized the spring dawn.  With a contemplative crease across his forehead, the man stopped treading and instead slipped back beneath the surface, feeling the last tug of surface tension as his hair followed him down.  Maybe it was time for a haircut.  Maybe it was time for a drink.  Maybe it was time for him to leave before he got caught.  

Or maybe he had all the time in the universe, suspending him perfectly here in this moment, in the firm but gentle arms of the Olympic-sized basin.  For as long as he could hold his breath, he could remember what it was like to defy gravity. He could remember what life was without pain.  

However, he could only hold his breath for so long.  All the time in the universe would take some practice.  This time when he broke the surface, he didn’t bother to open his eyes or wipe his hair back.  Beelining for the ladder, he planted one foot on a step, then, grasping the curved railings, pulled himself out of the pool with a great rush of runoff water splashing across the deck.  There had been a time when he had taken care to not even leave a damp footprint behind, but his level of caring had exponentially dropped off over the past several years.  If security didn’t know about his late-night sojourns by now, he might endeavour to have them fired for gross incompetence.  

That would take effort, however, and effort was not exactly something he had in spades these days.  He made sure to leave the door cracked on his way out, though.  


---


“Where’s your roommate?”

“Class… got a late class…’til eleven…”

“Then?”

“Goes to the bar--oh just stop WORRYING stop worrying….be all right-“

“Never said it wouldn’t be…never said it wouldn’t.”


---


“Oh dear God, is he alive?  Is he actually alive?”


---


The chilly, moist breath of the early morning’s rain still hovered over the quad, shallow but impertinent puddles refusing to give up their ghosts even this close noon.  The sun might have been shining, but the ground was freezing, and evaporation was losing the war versus the leftover rainwater.

That was not to say that there were not small victories, one being the grey and black sneaker that firmly landed in the middle of a particularly obstinate puddle, spraying its constituent droplets far across the sidewalk as the runner pounded on, oblivious to the havoc his feet were wreaking aside from the refreshing feeling of the escaped water dripping down his calves.  

Every breath of the harsh winter air scalded his lungs in that brilliant, masochistically pleasant way, much like drinking water while chewing mint gum.  He really rather preferred fruit gum, so running would have to be an adequate substitute.  Mostly it was, the burn of exertion underscoring his intense and twisted thoughts in a way that left him not only pleasantly buzzed at the end of a run but also at peace with whatever anxious shade had been cast over his psyche this time.

That is, unless he was interrupted.

“Hey there, Rocks for Jocks.”  Sing-songy voice, paired with a flash of impossibly white hair.  Without moving his gaze from where it was fixed an infinite distance away, the runner deduced, accurately, that one Johanna Staal had joined him.

“Buzz off, Clouds for Brains,” he grunted, noting with a slight raise of an eyebrow that she was keeping pace with him.

“Not a chance.  I gotta find out why you’re running around half naked in the middle of the coldest winter San Francisco’s seen in a century first.  Whole campus is wondering, and I’m dying to spill the beans.”  Another flash of that hair.  He finally dignified her with a quick glance.  She winked, and he considered the possibility that being interrupted wasn’t as terrible as maybe he’d thought it was.

“First things first, I must know how it is that you are running at all in your uniform,” he said, the ‘all’ sounding more like ‘ull’ in his strange, implacable accent.  “In those boots?  And that above-the-knees skirt?  Shameful.”

“I want to get just as many people as you staring at me this morning.  Is that such a terrible thing?”  He cut her another quick look, and this time she smiled broadly, revealing the missing premolar in her upper jaw.  For the hundredth time, he wondered but did not ask.  Rolling his eyes at her, he turned back to the sidewalk.

“Terrible, no.  Disgusting, yes.”

She smacked him in the arm, and he tried to run her off the path in return.

“Really though,” she said as she shoved her way back onto the pavement. “It’s about as cold as Admiral Barnett out here.  Are you stupid or just plain dumb?”  

He suppressed a smile and instead gave her short and fast comments in between breaths.  “I like it cold.  Space is cold.  Space is home.  Therefore, home is cold, and I am comfortable when I am also. Elementary.”

“A man of simple words.  I like that.  Much better than ‘electroplastic cumuloelliptical formations’.  Race you to the creek.” She had already pulled ahead with a burst of speed before he processed what she’d said.  Sneaky girl.  

The creek was just barely within sight, a thin ribbon of dirt and plants and trickles of sandy water carving carefully through the center of the Assembly Hall’s lawn.  There was no reason for it to exist, but by that logic, there was no reason for it not to exist, especially since it had clearly been there since before the Academy was built, being of no use except to allow mosquitoes to breed in standing water alongside it.  However, this morning, the creek served a purpose – the finish line for two very competitive people currently in competition, and so at that moment, it was the most important little tributary in existence.  

Gloating slightly inside as he saw her boots sinking in the damp soil, the runner entered a sprint about thirty yards away.  He knew exactly how much weight he could put on each foot and with what distribution to avoid slipping or sinking into in the mud.  Whether it was intuition or a byproduct of his education, he couldn’t say, but it made him a damn fine runner in any conditions.  Even those that involved unbelievably fine and soft hair whipping around in front of him.  Seriously, he could swear she had some sort of alien blood in her.  That was one question he did ask and one question she never would answer with more than a beatific smile.

He’d wipe that smile off of her face in a second.  

They were tied.

He was an inch ahead.

Two inches.

A whole footlength.

The creek.

He jumped.

And then the unbelievable.  Johanna threw herself over the creek, and from his position frozen in time, straddling the creek in midair, he watched her execute a beautiful shoulder roll, ending crouched, one knee on the ground, skirt concealing exactly what it needed to, only a light smudge of mud across the shoulder of her uniform.  And then he landed.  Not quite as gracefully.

In fact, he might have called it a “faceplant”, if it wasn’t so damaging to his self-esteem.

"Haaaaaaaahahaha, you totally just faceplanted in the middle of Assembly Lawn.  I will never let you live this down."

…or if Johanna wasn’t going to do it anyway.  Damn alien-blooded girls.  


---


Relatively few lived aboard the station.  It functioned smoothly on automated systems and the occasional pair of hands, each day restarting the routine to run through, well-oiled, well groomed, all over again.  The boy woke up in the same way every day, to the same noises and processes at the same times.  He left his family’s quarters each morning only to run into the same people in the same places, running the same errands and experiments, wearing the same clothes.  After all, this was an official outpost, with official jobs and official orders, and official things had routines.

The boy decided one day that he was very much an unofficial citizen of the station and was thus not held to any schedule or routine but his own.  In fact, he was a stowaway, investigating the vessel on which he had hidden!  

In preparation for his expedition, he donned the most outrageous clothes he owned, which were really not that outrageous at all.  An orange T-shirt with a picture of a pine tree on it; green, torn up pants that were a little too small; and a blue plaid bathrobe of his father’s on top of it all that was a little too big.  The ties dragged on the floor behind him as he squared his shoulders and stepped into the hallway, barefoot.

The first thing he noticed about being unofficial was that it was very cold.  He began to wish he had at least worn socks, but quickly reminded himself that being unofficial came with a price, and that was not always having everything you wanted or needed.  After all, he thought, patting the bathrobe’s pocket lovingly, not every stowaway has a big Chompie bar in his inventory in case of accidental hunger.  

The second thing he noticed was that there was no substantial difference in turning right instead of left in the big, round hallway.  He just ran into Dr. Hartgrove a couple of seconds earlier.  The man did not even blink sideways at the departure from the usual, and as he stalked by, his lab coat brushed the boy’s nose.  After an explosive sneeze and sleevewipe, it was clear that just changing his route and clothes were not enough to make him unofficial.  

Something big was necessary, and the boy had an idea.