loneliness.

 “Oh, you have got to be fucking kidding me right now.”

Kari Lafette gives the computer two seconds to redeem itself, then, grumbling under her breath, leans forward in her seat and smacks the side of the monitor as hard as she can. It falls onto its side with a crash, but the screen remains stubbornly frozen, a cursor blinking mockingly in the centre as though trying to remind Kari of the inevitability of human powerlessness against the will of machines.

“Come o-o-on, you pile of crap,” she moans, righting the screen and giving it a rough shake. “I do not have time for your bullshit today. My patience is at its limit, you feel me? I just need one little thing to go right today. That too much to ask?”

Apparently it is too much to ask, because that stupid fucking computer is still not deigning to respond. Kari gives a loud groan and throws her head back, rubbing her eyes and pinching the bridge of her nose. She knows she’s overreacting, but it’s not like she can help it. She’s stressed out. She’s exhausted. She has a deal scheduled in less than an hour, and without this particular computer working, she has no idea how far away from her destination she is, which ain’t exactly helping her stress levels improve. She needs sleep, and water, and a good smoke, and possibly a nice long holiday somewhere with warm weather and nice beaches and pretty girls. She’s been running deals back-to-back for seasons, travelling on this crappy spaceship from one side of the galaxy to the other without rest, and she’s reaching the end of her energy. She just needs things to run smoothly for a little while.

It looks like she’s not about to get what she needs.

She leans forwards in her seat and points a finger threateningly at the computer monitor. “Listen up, fuckface. Either you stop this little bitch fit right now, or I throw you out the fucking airlock next chance I get, you feel me? This ain’t a joke. I got other computers in storage I can use. I got no qualms about spacing you.”

And lo and behold, the computer screen unfreezes, switching from lines of incomprehensible code to the usual page monitoring the Black Sun’s progress through space. Kari slumps back in her chair, sighing in relief. Perhaps a nice healthy threat was all it needed to encourage it to start working again – she should keep that knowledge for future reference. God knows she’s going to need it.

She turns her chair around in a slow circle, sweeping her eyes around the inside of the Black Sun’s living quarters. It was luxurious once; now everything is faded and dusty and falling to pieces, the sofa in the centre more grey than brown, the small round table behind it sporting a large crack through the centre, the lonely little rug threadbare, the monitor bank Kari is currently sitting at old and dusty and largely made up of ridiculously outdated machines. And that’s not even mentioning the fact it runs through fuel far faster than a ship this tiny going at a speed this slow ever should, or that the engines are so loud they can be heard even outside the supposedly sound-proof chamber they’re kept in, or that Kari has to take this rusty bucket to the mechanic pretty much once per Cycle because the ship systems keep having a bitch fit about the state of the landing gear or the navigation software or the life-support system or fuck knows what else. One of her earliest memories is of her dad complaining that this thing belongs at the bottom of a scrapheap with the rest of the rubbish, and that was close to two decades ago. He wasn’t wrong.

Still, however much she hates it, Kari can’t imagine living anywhere else. If she wanted to, she could use her funds to buy a new, state-of-the-art spaceship to conduct her business out of – the black-market and bounty-hunting businesses pay well – but she’s been living on board the Black Sun since she was one year old, and she has to admit that she has a soft spot for it. It may be a rusty piece of shit, but she’s grown up inside it. It’s the only home she’s ever known. She’s not in any hurry to watch it rot at the bottom of a scrapheap.

Besides, it’s a reminder.

A reminder of what happened. A reminder of what she lost.

A reminder of what she needs to do.

She slumps down in her seat, and sighs. Let no-one say that the life of a criminal bounty hunter and black-market trader is easy – she’s never been more exhausted. Her head hurts, her eyes are itching, her nerves feel frayed at the edges, and she can’t even remember the last time she had a full eight hours of sleep in one night – she’s been up doing inventory until she almost passes out from sheer exhaustion. She feels like crap, and she’s still got to pull this deal off. The people she's dealing with better be on their best behaviour today. Not that that’s saying much.

Kari needs a smoke.

She takes a cigarette from the packet on the table in front of her and slouches towards the airlock, going down the short flight of steps, cycling the door open, and stepping through into the small, cramped space. When she first started smoking at the age of fifteen, her dad was adamant that she should never smoke inside the living quarters. I’m not going to stop you smoking those disgusting things – you’re old enough to know what’s good for you by now, he told her. But this ship belongs to me, and that means I can stop you from smoking them in the living quarters. I’m not having my clothes stinking of those things. You want to smoke while we’re travelling, you go out into the airlock and do it, or you don’t do it at all.

It was annoying as hell, having to go into this crappy cupboard-sized space every time she wanted a cig, and Kari complained at him for weeks, but he never changed his mind. He held firm that as long as the ship belonged to him, Kari would not smoke in the living quarters, and no amount of teenage brattiness could ever change that.

He’s been dead for nearly three years now. The ship has been in Kari’s name since then.

She still goes out to the airlock every time she wants to smoke. 

She slumps against the cold, hard wall of the airlock and lights up the cig with the tiny fingernail-sized lighter she carries in her pocket, shutting her eyes as she takes a long draw of the sweet Virran grass and breathes out a cloud of thick white smoke. It lingers in the still artificial air like fog. 

Already feeling far calmer thanks to the Virran grass, she turns to her reflection in the airlock window. She can see her tall, lanky, black-clad self superimposed over the thousands and thousands of stars and galaxies sprinkled through the cold empty void. She looks like a ghost in the darkness – like she’s as insubstantial as the smoke hanging in the air in front of her; like she’s not really a solid person at all. If she looks closely, she can just about see her eyes, cold and harsh and grey as a choppy sea. Grey as the storm clouds over the Merkin Ocean in winter, her dad used to say. Maybe if you look close enough, you’ll see lightning. For years, little Kari would peer anxiously into her eyes each time she looked in the mirror, hoping to catch a glimpse of a flash of lightning in the midst of her stormy irises. She never did.

These days, the storm doesn’t rage in anything as superficial as her eyes. It rages deep within her, in her mind, in her heart, in her soul, where it cannot be easily seen simply by looking in a mirror.

She takes another calming drag on her cig and lets her eyes unfocus, looking past her own ghostly reflection to the galaxy she is currently hurtling through, the faraway stars and planets and systems deceptively still as the Black Sun cuts through deep space on its journey to Trielle. Kari has grown up seeing a view like this every time she looks out of her bedroom window, but she still feels a tangle of conflicting emotions every time she takes a moment to look outside like this. It is both beautiful and horrible, breath-taking and terrifying, emboldening and humbling: millions and millions of stars, planets, nebulae and galaxies, of all shapes and sizes and colours, spinning and revolving around her little spaceship in a massive celestial dance – a dance that she has been involved in her entire life, but that she still has no part in.

A million stars.

A million planets.

A million worlds.

She takes another draw of Virran grass.

It would break her, if she lingered on it too long. She knows it; she knows it as clearly as she knows her own name. It would destroy her mind. It would drive her to insanity.

It could kill her.

The loneliness of it.

The loneliness of being one single, tiny, insignificant person aboard one tiny, single, insignificant spaceship, hurtling through a universe that doesn’t want her and that she’s never belonged in, a universe that she’s been travelling through for eighteen years and that yet will never be hers.

It’s almost exhilarating, knowing that her own mental ruin is so close at hand. It’s thrilling how close she can come to the edge of utter insanity before pulling herself back, how easy it would be to let herself free-fall into a realm that even a traveller like herself has never dared to venture into before, how simple it would be to fall into darkness and never find her way up to the light again.

All she needs to do is think about it a little harder.

All she needs to do is think about the loneliness.

A million planets.

A million worlds.

A million homes.

And not one of them her own.

The smoke from the cig makes her cough, and she shakes herself out of the reverie, looking away from the window and focusing on the thick, sweet smoke that hangs in the airlock like a dense raincloud. She sighs, takes one last pull of Virran grass, crushes the cig underfoot, and starts to cycle open the airlock door.

Enough with the sentimental bullshit.

She still has a lot of work to do. 

                                                                                                   

this is from a novel i started writing last summer; it never really worked out and i ditched it after the first few chapters, but i still have a definite soft spot for the characters and the concept, and i hope to be able to recycle them into another WIP in the future. kari is possibly one of the characters i've ever had the most fun writing -- she's tough and arrogant and rebellious and swears like a sailor, but she's also got a very soft, introspective, vulnerable side to her that she keeps well hidden, and i had a great time exploring that through writing. this isn't really edited as i never got to that stage when writing this WIP, so apologies for any possible typos or grammatical mistakes.

i hope you're all doing well during this whole coronavirus thing, and that you're staying home and safe, sending socially-distanced hugs <3

 > > Andrea