25. Forever Young
TWENTY-FIVE
FOREVER YOUNG
Charlie slept until the midday cycle turned over.
It hadn't been the plan but when she'd gotten back to her quarters, she'd sat on the edge of the bed intent on staying awake and going about her day, because sleeping could lead to dreaming about Katie aging in a corridor she couldn't run fast enough to reach.
But the exhaustion hit her immediately and pulled her down onto the pillow with the authority of knowing she needed it without her consent, and she was asleep before she could even argue against it.
And gratefully, she didn't dream.
When she woke, the ship's lighting had climbed to midday peak.
She padded across her room, noticing someone had left a tray just inside her door.
She immediately knew it was Borran because the napkin had been folded into a shape that was either a swan or an extremely confident triangle, and because the bowl held the grain porridge he'd started making after Charlie had made the mistake of describing oatmeal to him.
Borran hadn't knocked or asked if she was hungry, he had just decided she needed feeding and made it happen.
As she ate, she thought about the night before. Not the Med Bay or the numbers, though they were present in her mind regardless.
Mostly she thought about Reyna.
Charlie didn't even remember walking into that room.
She felt as though she were coming apart at the seams. But then she'd found herself there, the one that had become a sanctuary without Charlie even realizing it until she arrived.
And Reyna was there, as if waiting for her.
Charlie remembered the tight coil snapping at the sight of the captain, and remembered how she just fell.
But Reyna had crossed to her immediately and taken the weight without being asked.
She caught Charlie completely, and Charlie recognized she had spent a significant amount of time with her face against Reyna's shoulder and her hands fisted in her captain's uniform while Reyna had just held on.
As the night went on, Charlie learned how Reyna had spent thirteen years grieving her own losses, similar to those Charlie was newly experiencing, and last night she'd done it with Charlie, for a reason that had nothing to do with her own ghosts.
She thought about the pieces Reyna had handed her. About Elena and Jere. About the pen she never put down and the fork she'd traded away and lost. She recalled how the captain gave up her own grief one careful sentence at a time.
And then there was the name. Rey.
Charlie finished the porridge and stood up. Sitting still was the enemy, she knew that much. So, she went where she always went when her own head got too loud.
Engineering ran quiet in the afternoon. Tavi had a diagnostic spread across two consoles, his hands moving constantly between both workstations.
Maren was at the far station, cataloguing the Canoplyn Glider atmospheric data while her shimmer flickered as she cross-referenced against the perfect archive behind her eyes.
Charlie sat at her console and pulled up a maintenance report to just read the same line eleven times without absorbing a single word of it.
She sighed, closing her eyes for a moment to try and reset. When she opened her eyes, she pulled out her datapad and opened Tavi’s music program.
She scrolled what felt like endlessly, looking for something she wasn’t sure she could identify. Something to occupy the hole in her chest that had everything to do with a bracelet on her wrist.
Then she saw it. “Forever Young” by Rod Stewart, released in 1988. She knew it was from Katie’s 11th mixtape. They listened to it the first time it came on the radio as they drove from their apartment to the Farmer’s Market one Saturday morning.
It felt like a blessing, like the kind you say over someone you’re sending out into a life you won’t get to follow them through. Charlie realized that was it, the complete emptiness of this feeling. It was a wish, spoken to Katie, already knowing she couldn’t make it come true.
She pressed ‘play’ on her datapad and listened as the song filled the bay, low and deep.
She let it run while she stared at a maintenance report she still couldn’t focus on, and somewhere in the second verse she felt what she’d been holding all day start to surface, slowly, like finding her place, even though it felt wrong, and settling into the slot without effort.
“That’s a sad one,” Tavi said from her side.
Charlie startled, not having heard him cross the bay.
“Maybe,” Charlie said. “But it’s good.”
“So it’s both, then.” He hitched himself onto the edge of the console next to her, which put the top of his head about level with her shoulder.
Charlie watched as he looked at her sideways, his amber eyes bright but still, focusing on her.
“You’ve been a particular kind of quiet today. A very not-Charlie quiet.”
“He’s right,” Maren said without looking up from her spot. Charlie noticed her shimmer had gone steady.
“What’s got you in a state, Spark Plug?” Tavi asked.
Charlie looked back and forth at the two of them. Her two best friends on an alien spaceship forty light-years from everyone who’d known her before. Everyone that would never see her again.
“Charlie,” Tavi said gently. “Something’s up. What is it?”
Charlie watched as Maren walked over to her station, standing next to Tavi. Looking at the two of them, she could see their true concern. She took a deep breath, realizing the truth was the best course.
“Kess found something,” Charlie said. “In my medical scans.”
Tavi went still, very still, especially for him. Maren’s eyes began to flicker.
“I’m not sick,” she added quickly, realizing the seriousness that overtook them both as she watched the word Kess land on both of them. “I’m fine. I’m healthy. Well, sort of. Actually, that’s almost the irony of it.”
Neither one of them broke their gaze with her, and the words ‘I’m healthy’ didn’t seem to assuage their concern.
It was still written across their faces.
“Okay,” Charlie relented. “The thing is, well, you know the PERS thing that brought me here was broken.” She stopped, realizing the difficulty she was having just saying it to her friends.
“The radiation it dumped into me hasn’t worn off.
Kess says it should have, a long time ago.
It didn’t. Instead, it’s... it’s done something else entirely. ”
Charlie watched Tavi’s expression stiffen. And then he held out his hand to Charlie while Maren laid hers on top of Charlie’s shoulder.
“What’s it doing, Spark Plug?” Tavi asked gently with the warmth of the most loyal friend she’d ever had.
She took a deep breath, shaky and unsteady, making herself say it plainly.
“It’s slowed my aging down. A lot. I’m running at about a third of the normal human rate.
Maybe even less. Kess is going to continue monitoring the rate and see what it settles at eventually. ”
The bay seemed to go eerily quiet under the song. Charlie continued.
“It seems that for every three years that go by,” Charlie said, “I only age one. Give or take.”
She watched as Maren did the math, her shimmer flaring once across her violet-gray eyes, bright and brief.
Charlie knew she’d just made it a memory, an archive entry, the numbers and the moment and probably even the look on Charlie’s face as she said it.
But Charlie didn’t mind. Of all the people to carry this, she felt a person built to remember was the perfect option.
“Katie,” Tavi said. Charlie startled at her sister’s name, but it was short-lived. Tavi was intuitive, beyond comparison to a human. He knew immediately what Charlie’s slow aging meant.
“Katie,” Charlie said. Her sister’s name on her own lips was the only word that wobbled. She steadied it on the next breath. “She’s twenty-three now, but when she’s seventy, I’m going to look forty-five.”
“And that would be noticeable on Earth,” Maren stated softly, her eyes dropping from Charlie’s face to the floor.
Charlie nodded. “The Coalition can’t send me back,” she said, her voice stale. “A human who doesn’t age the way a human should is the kind of evidence your non-contact laws exist for to keep off a planet like Earth.”
“Charlie—" Tavi started, but Charlie couldn’t bear it.
“So,” she interrupted. “That’s it. That’s everything, that’s the whole shitty report.
” Charlie’s emotions were taking over, angry ones now.
“I can’t go home, and the reason I can’t is because of an accident with technology I didn’t even know existed a year ago and because of laws in a galactic organization that means to leave Earth alone as long as possible.
Oh, and because I get to stay young and live a lifespan unbeknownst to humans while my sister doesn’t. ”
For a moment nobody said anything. The song wound toward its theme again.
“’Forever Young,’” Tavi said softly. “I get it now.”
Maren pulled a chair from the station next to Charlie and sat down, close, in a way she never did. She placed her hand back on Charlie’s shoulder and just sat, shoulder near shoulder, present.
“I’m not going to lie to you and tell you it’s all right,” Maren said. “Because, for one, it isn’t. But also, I’d remember I lied to you.” A pause, the shimmer flickering. “But I’m here. I’m going to keep being here.”
“We’re here,” Tavi said, tightening his grip on Charlie’s hand.
Charlie’s throat suddenly felt thick, and it took her a moment to swallow the feeling that lodged there at her friends’ words.
Tavi slid off the edge of the console and stood in front of her.
She looked up at him, noticing his usual warmth had come back into him.
But now he took both of her hands in his.
She could fully feel just how much warmer Tavi’s hands were than human hands.
But the warmth was welcome as it moved through her fingers, steadying her.