[hr][center][color=808B96][color=ff00f5][h2][b]Yony[/b][/h2][/color] Southeastern Mir - Sculpture Copse, The Fall[/color][/center]
[hr]

The words and phrases he’d all heard before, every line a memory.  He could feel his still present intense anger at Richard Underwood, as if learning to fight helped anything.  Defending yourself had nothing to do with the kind of fighting he’d been forced to endure… that arrogant prick.  His leg twitched, pain shooting up it and causing him to stumble backwards.  They’d been walking too long and the nerve damage from the ugly scar running down his right leg was beginning to intensify beyond what the opiates and other assorted painkillers could dull.

There was a moment of sad levity remembering Robin’s tirade, after Mike’s death, about how even where they were then no one seemed to care if they lived or died.  The feeling of never knowing a ‘[i]home[/i]’ starting to becoming more palpable.  Her insistence on it just being another part of being a ‘[i]zef laaitie[/i]’ seemed so hollow now.  The literal translation of ‘[i]common boy[/i]’ did not adequately describe the kind of battle cry it had become during the tail end of the Occupation.  However, regardless of the vague and nebulous meaning ‘[i]zef[/i]’ had back home.  Regardless of his myriad of statuses thrust on him by his adoptive father.  He never felt any different, titles like ‘[i]royal family[/i]’ and ‘[i]prince[/i]’ felt too alien to him to ever take seriously.  

He stared at the drawing, scratches showing in crude detail where ‘[i]home[/i]’ was.

The wet feeling in his eyes brought back memories from the final day on an unknown world.  A maelstrom blowing due to the horrific events they’d endured, his adoptive father utterly broken from the loss of a son was standing in the wind and rain.  He remembered the man looking back, downpour hiding tears, trying his best to smile as the words came just like the had from the woman.  

‘[color=ffff00]Lay nahl loseer hreath hyao.[/color]’

			‘[color=ffff00]It can’t rain all the time.[/color]’

							‘[color=ffff00]Néanéan.[/color]’  

He was still silent, a quiet duo of patting noises arose from droplets hitting the paper as the woman’s scribblings were smeared with salty water running down the page.

‘[i]Néanéan[/i]’,  the list of people that would know that name meant was tiny, only consisting of a handful whose remains lay in the earth below.  People that were family.  The name was even more spirit crushingly meaningful now. 

It meant ‘[i]old youth[/i]’. 

Right now he couldn’t imagine a ‘[i]youth[/i]’ feeling as old as he did.

His thoughts turned to Cirro.  What would even be left there now?  He’d defaulted back to his birth planet knowing all his work making life for a second time was destroyed but looking at what he’d been given, was there even a Cirro?  His memories of the starcharts from the general area the map showed placed him far from anywhere he’d seen or traveled through.  Even if he got off this planet, there was noone to signal, his friends on this side were dead.  His family was dead.  His real home was buried under ten centuries of dirt.  For all he knew the people here didn’t even live long enough to regain the Ghosts memories.  The paper in his hands suddenly felt as meaningless now as the ones in his backpack were after his real parents had died.  What was the point of keeping any of them?

Yonath wiped his eyes to clear them and limped off away from the woman without a word, still staring at the paper.


[hr]

Xell could feel eyes burrowing into him, a glance revealed the Lutran had halted his departure parallel to the bench and was glaring sideways from his paper at him with a tear filled but sour expression.  The boy spoke hoarsely. His phrasing sounding like his mouth started in the middle of a sentence, struggling to catch up to his thoughts.

“[color=ff00f5]Why can’t you do something, fok.[/color]”

The sour expression faded into a helpless looking one he turned back to his paper and limped forward, further from the group.