Chapter Text
“Theodore,” Claire McCallister said, pausing in the doorway of her son’s darkened room. “Are you going to get up today?”
“It’s a Saturday, Mother.” He didn’t bother tilting his head, didn’t bother seeking her out with his fuzzy vision – glasses cast away somewhere in the mess of his floor. “I was given to believe sleeping in was a thing ordinary teenage boys did.”
“It’s nearly two.”
“Then I’m doing an excellent job, aren’t I?”
“Theodore.”
He sighed, pulling himself up. She was nothing more than a blurry silhouette, and somehow that made it easier to look her way.
“I’m leaving shortly, Theodore. I need you to be able to take care of yourself.”
“You’re only gone for a few days, Mother. I doubt the sky will come crashing down in that time.”
Click, click, click – Her nails tapped against the handle of her suitcase, and he didn’t have to see her expression to know it – the creased brow, the pursed lips, the tight eyes he’d come to expect. Theodore, what’s happened? What have you done? What’s wrong with you now?
“I’ve left ten dollars on the counter,” she said, instead of retracing the well-worn argument. He was nearly impressed; they’d run over the conversation so many times it was a deep groove, easy to fall into at the slightest provocation. “Maybe you can invite one of your little friends over for a pizza?”
Which one? He wanted to ask. Heaslip, who I’ve barely spoken five words to in the past three years, but who is too insipidly kind to ever refuse? Ming, maybe? I’m sure that moron is chomping at the bit to relish my company. Oh, I know – Victoria! Brilliant, Mother, why wouldn’t I want to spend my time with the girl who can’t go ten words without bragging about herself?
“Of course,” he said instead. “That’s a marvelous idea, Mother. I’ll ring someone up right after you head out.”
She lingered in the doorway, and he gauged how well lying back down would go over, if he could go back to blindly staring at the popcorn ceiling for another few hours. He pretended to rummage around for his glasses.
“Aren’t you going to see me out, Theo?”
His hand accidentally closed around wire frames.
“Of course, Mother.”
Theodore ‘Tobey’ McCallister III only ever really felt like himself when he was alone. There was something to be said for performatism, of course; he’d floated the idea before that he was only functional when there was someone to watch him, when his dignity restricted him from leaning back in his desk chair at school and staring at the ceiling until the teacher stopped droning on about something he’d mastered before he was twelve. The perils of being called a boy genius, then actually fulfilling the title.
He’d learned calculus at five. Built his first robot before he was six. Proved a new mathematical theorem by the time he was nine. Could build nearly anything he could think of by the time he was eleven. Towering robots that could’ve crushed the city in one fell swoop. Minuscule ones that crept along the walls like so many spiders and hung, silently watching from the ceiling. Robots that cooked and robots that cleaned and robots that took him from place to place and robots that read him bedtime stories and – And, and, and.
And by the time he was thirteen, he’d learned his lesson.
It was all just… pointless. He didn’t have anything to build for. Nothing to challenge him, nothing to push against. Nothing to gain.
It had gotten to the point where Tobey didn’t really get bored, anymore. It was his stasis, his eternal quiet equilibrium, and if he wasn’t happy in it, well…
Well.
The house was quiet when Claire left. Tobey padded through its silent rooms on socked feet, flicking off lights as he went along. Outside, the air was flooded with sterilizing light, beating down relentlessly in the abrasive heat of late April. Tobey drew the blinds, pulled the drapes, until only the faintest blades sliced through the curtains.
He avoided them with practiced steps, wincing whenever an abrasive stream got too close, searing like a spotlight, like the flashlight beam of an officer, finding him in all his quiet, safe darkness.
He eventually settled down on the living room couch. He finished two books in three hours, heated up last night’s dinner, ate it over the kitchen sink in small, mechanical bites. Around him, the house creaked and settled, murmuring protests as his bare feet wandered aimless searching circles though first floor, up the stairs, past the boarded-up attic entrance, through the bedrooms, back down the stairs. He pulled the curtains a little tighter. Slumped at the kitchen counter and let his temple lay against the cool marble.
The radio played softly in the background, and Tobey half-hummed along to a love song he vaguely recognized, waxing on dreadful poetry.
I saw your eyes, and it made me smile
For a little while…
The synth chords faded into static, cut off by the blare of a news announcement.
“Mark your calendars, ladies and gentlemen, for today, the… of… we have…” The signal faded in and out of static, and Tobey rolled his eyes, automatically pulling open a drawer and reaching inside for his screwdriver –
His hand hit the wooden bottom.
Right.
Tobey fiddled with the dial, managing to parse out “...fantastic breakthrough for the scientific community…”, “...will remain in orbit for at least five years before…”, “...startling improvements on previous…” before he finally gave up and smacked it.
The audio sharpened as he shook his hand out, hissing. “And there you have it, folks! The incredible launching of a new space telescope, from right here in the heart of our very own Fair City – oh! And here’s the man behind it all. Dr. Boxleitner, Dr. Boxleitner, a word, if you will?”
A dry, raspy voice responded. “Just the one?”
“Doctor, tell us: what moved you to lead such an incredible project?”
The silence crackled on for so long that Tobey had his hand halfway out, ready to smack the radio again, when the voice returned.
“Because,” Dr. Boxleitner responded. “There’s something out there, and I intend on finding it.”
“Uh… right. And– And that has been our ten o’ clock news briefing! A lovely night to all our listeners, and be sure to stay tuned for the midnight rock show on our very own Fair City radio, channel 42.7. This is Lorretta Sanchez-Johnson, signing off.”
Ten o’clock. A justifiable time to escape back to bed.
On his bedside table, Tobey’s watch ticked steadily past three. The midnight show had come and gone, leaving Tobey alone in the after-echos of rock turned up loud enough that he could feel it in his skull, loud enough that if they’d had any neighbors, they would have hammered on the door with scowls on their face and rollers in their hair.
There were a few advantages for how far they’d moved out of town after everything, though Tobey didn’t quite find himself grateful for them.
He just laid in the gentle, comforting darkness, enveloping him so completely that there was nearly no difference between his eyes being closed and open. It was a quiet, moonless night, and Tobey burrowed deeper into his piles of blankets and pillows, into the familiar groove his form had worn down. He could see the barest glints of stars through the open window, and he pressed his fingers into the air, as if he could reach out and collect their ethereal light into the palm of his hand, let it run across his skin – liquid and illustrious.
His desperate grasp met nothing but another handful of darkness.
Tucking his hand against his chest, Tobey turned on his side, staring until a shadow of dark gray emerged from the darkness – the tiniest sliver of starlight streaming in. Violet had told him, once upon a time, that the vastness of space was a horror to her, that it made her feel so small, insignificant, in the face of starlight that had traveled millions of lightyears just to crash into the Earth. Tobey didn’t remember what he had said so long ago, but he disagreed now.
He was nothing more than a blip. A momentary blockage of the light, a tiny speck in an infinite, swirling cosmos. Nothing he did mattered, and that, at least, was a dull comfort. Everything he’d done, everything he’d failed to do… invisible. Hidden between one star system and the next.
If only he was the size of the universe. If only he was big enough for the emptiness, the loss inside him to be nothing more than one in a hundred billion parts – insignificant. But he was trapped on Earth, with terribly human proportions that couldn’t help but prod at the gap inside his chest, like a tongue instinctively seeking out an absent tooth.
Tobey had been looking for something for so long that he could no longer remember what he was missing.
A bright streak of silver arched across his wall, slicing through the pervasive dark. Idly, he wondered if Plato’s Allegory of the Cave applied to falling stars, if their ghosts could grant wishes.
Maybe he’d get everything he asked for. Maybe he’d get a sinister imitation, hiding behind that bright light. Maybe he wouldn’t get anything at all.
Either way, worth a shot.
“Please,” Tobey said, softly, quietly into the velvety darkness. “Please, just… give me something new and fantastical and wonderful. Let me have something worth… anything, anymore.”
The light flared, as if in response, growing brighter.
And brighter.
And concerningly brighter.
“What the–” Tobey fumbled for his glasses, shoving them on and scrambling for the window just in time to see something silver streaking out of the inky sky, so bright and quick that the afterimage seared on his eyelids was nothing but a blur, like the tail of a falling star. It was coming faster, faster – right towards him.
Tobey squinted, and the light was blinding, searing, washing away every shadow that had ever been–
And the ground shook.
Tobey found himself littered among the debris of his bedroom floor, eyes stinging, hands shaking, pulse roaring in his ears. Before he could even process what he’d seen, Tobey was on his feet and stumbling through the house, yanking on a robe as he went. His mind ran the impossible image over, turning it around and squinting at it from all angles, but he couldn’t make heads or tails of it.
He’d finally lost it. It couldn’t have been real. Nothing like that existed outside of sci-fi movies.
Right?
Fumbling at the back entrance until he pawed it open, Tobey threw open the door and stepped into another world.
Massive piles of freshly tilled dirt pushed into the sky in haggard lines, picked into sharp relief by a strange silver glow, shining from behind the natural wall. It cast an otherworldly sheen on the backyard Tobey had seen every day for three years, turning the undersides of leaves gray and tree trunks into massive legs of metal.
Tobey clambered up the earthen mound, promptly toppling over and tumbling into the trough. He landed on his hands and knees, the wet mud slowly seeping into his pajamas, but he couldn’t bring himself to move.
A small silver spaceship laid, smoking, at the end of the gully. It was shaped something like a rounded triangle with fins, although that could just have been the crash damage. Even as he looked, one of the rocket boosters on the side fell off with a groan of metal, landing with a dull thud on the ground. It was so strangely incongruous, shining with a luminous silver light of its own making, slowly sinking into the dirt.
With a hiss, the blue-tinged windshield (space shield?) opened slowly, thick white smoke immediately leaking out into the air.
Coughing came from inside, and Tobey scrambled forward before he could think better of it.
“Hello?” He called, leaning into the small hatch, waving away smoke. “Are you quite alright?”
The haze started to dissipate, carried off by the breeze, and–
Crimson.
Eyes the brightest, most vivid crimson stared out at him, rimmed with dark, thick lashes and shining out of a face with moon-round cheeks and constellations of freckles. They blinked up at him, once, twice, and slit pupils dilated in the night, swallowing that crimson up in brilliant darkness.
A mole hung like a gem just below one strangely gorgeous eye.
Lips of deep ruby parted into an unsure smile, revealing sharp teeth and dimples.
For the first time in forever, Tobey felt very, very awake.
Slowly, the girl in the spaceship lifted a gloved hand and waved her fingers, a bit awkwardly. “Hi! I um… I think I took a wrong turn somewhere near your moon.”