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Artificial starlight glitters down from the holoposter on Vace’s bedroom wall. His cabin on the Helio is cramped—he could have more space if he moved into one of the newly constructed colony living spaces, but those spaces still don’t feel like home the way the Helio does—but there’s enough room for him and Sol to lie tangled up together on his narrow bed. It’s still strange to him, sometimes, that he’s ended up here, with Sol. Nemmie is the kind of person Vace expected to end up with—Sol is… not even someone Vace ever expected to be friends with, let alone more than friends.
Then again, Vace is so much different than he ever expected to be. He’s changed so much these past few years. Because of Sol, yes, but it’s more than that. It’s everyone from the Stratospheric. It’s Vertumna itself.
It’s growing up, Vace guesses. Maybe that’s just life. You start out as one person, out among the stars, and then you become someone completely different on a ball of rock and dirt that you’re still trying to turn into a home.
Sol stirs against Vace’s chest, making a sleepy noise as they shift in Vace’s arms. He tries to move his left arm out of the way—he knows the hard metal edges can’t be a very comfortable pillow—but the movement seems to wake Sol up out of their sleepy state.
“Hey,” Sol says, propping their chin up against Vace’s sternum. “What’s up?”
Vace snorts. “What’s up is that I’ve been used as a pillow for the past hour and my shoulder is getting stiff,” Vace says, shaking his arm out for emphasis. Look, Sol knows that he’s all soft and mushy for them. He doesn’t have to say that he was just trying to make them more comfortable for them to know it.
Sol laughs, then quiets, their expression going pensive. Their eyes land thoughtfully on Vace’s left arm, and his stomach twists with something like nerves, which is not a feeling that Vace likes at all.
“You know,” Sol says softly, their eyes taking on that strange and dreamy look they sometimes have. “In all the times I’ve known you, I don’t think you’ve ever told me what happened to your arm.”
Sol says things like this, sometimes. Weird turns of phrase. All the times I’ve known you, not time. Vace has tried to ask them about it, but they always brush it off. He’s learned not to ask—it’s just another one of Sol’s quirks, something else that makes them seem… different, in a way that made Vace hate them just as much as all the other Strato weirdoes so many years ago, but that makes them so intriguing now. Endearing, even.
“Yeah, well, that’s because nothing happened,” Vace says, pushing past the sudden dryness in his throat. It’s not like he can’t talk about this. Everyone from the Helio knows about his arm. It’s just… not something he brings up, ever, really. And even though he’s mellowed out—a lot—over these past years, everyone from the Strato is either still too wary of him, or maybe just too polite, to ask him about it.
“Nothing happened?” Sol asks, tilting their head inquisitively. They reach out and lace their fingers through Vace’s metal ones. He doesn’t mind that—he’s never minded Sol touching his prosthetic, or anyone touching it, really. Sometimes the metal hand is really useful, especially in a fight. He packs a mean punch with it.
It’s just—talking about before the prosthetic that Vace doesn’t love.
“Yeah. I was just, ah, born like this,” Vace admits. He focuses his eyes on the starry holoposter. He can’t actually feel the prosthetic arm—which is another advantage in a fight—but he can imagine Sol tightening their grip on his fingers, a supportive little squeeze. Sol is good at that, being supportive. It used to disgust him. Now he doesn’t really remember how he survived without that support. “I was born small and scrawny and, uh, defective, too. Genetech can’t fix everything, I guess. Which is funny, actually, considering my augment was supposed to be ‘physical perfection.’” He makes air quotes with his right hand, his left still entwined with Sol’s. “Something went wrong along the way, I guess. I just tell people my augment is well endowed because at least it didn’t go wrong in that department.”
Sol snorts and buries their face against Vace’s chest, slapping him lightly against the shoulder.
“I don’t think it means you’re defective,” Sol says after a moment, propping their chin against his sternum again. “I think it probably just means that this is how you were supposed to be. That having just the one arm is, you know, what physical perfection is for your body. Not everyone’s body is the same. You know, like hopeyes. They only have the one foot, just ‘cause that’s how they’re supposed to be.”
Vace scowls. “Are you saying I’m a hopeye?”
Sol laughs. “No! Don’t be dense. You know what I mean, Vace. This is just… you.”
Although Vace doesn’t love the comparison to a hopeye—look, he’s learning to be better but that doesn’t mean he loves all the weird alien life on this planet, not the way Sol and Cal and those hippy types do—but he can’t deny that Sol’s easy acceptance is easing the tightness in his chest.
“Yeah, well,” Vace says. “It would be a lot cooler if I had lost my arm in some kind of battle. I thought about making up a story when I first got here, but everyone from the Helio has known me since I was a little kid, so it’s not like I could get away with it.” He groans. “Can’t believe I’m agreeing with Marz about something, but sometimes she’s right about this place being too small.”
Sol smiles, gently. “Well, I’m glad you didn’t have some kind of horrible accident. My mom did. She lost her leg before she left Earth, and it never really stopped hurting her. Like, she had a cool robot leg and everything, but that kind of injury… It still hurts, I guess. Even after the limb is gone.”
Vace never got to meet Sol’s mother—she died before the Helio arrived—but from everything he’s heard about her, he thinks he actually would have liked her. “That sucks,” Vace says, genuinely sorry for this woman he never met. Sol’s quiet honesty about their mother makes him feel a little calmer about opening up, too. Sol’s ability to make him feel okay with being vulnerable is almost supernatural, sometimes. “I did have to have surgery when I was a kid for the prosthetic. For the connection port. That hurt like a bitch for a little bit. But, uh, it’s kind of similar to a holopalm surgery, so it healed up pretty easy. Feels pretty much the same as my holopalm, now.” He opens up his right hand, briefly flicking on his holopalm to demonstrate.
“How old were you?” Sol asks curiously. “When you got the arm?”
“Ten,” Vace says. “The ship medics wouldn’t do it before then, even though I begged them. They wanted to wait even longer, until I’d grown some more, but Lum, uh… He wasn’t even that old or that important at the time, but he was in charge of training the younger kids, and he convinced the medics that I’d be useless in training until I got a prosthetic, so they agreed to do it early.”
“Oh,” Sol says, looking sad. “Man. Lum sucks.”
Vace scowls and looks away again, unsure how to feel about that reaction. He’d always considered Lum sticking up for him, talking the medics into doing the surgery early, to be a win. He’d wanted the prosthetic. And he’s been glad to have it ever since—he never would have become the soldier he is today without it.
Except, well—he never got the chance to try. His dad, Lum, the other kids—everyone made it pretty clear that with just one arm, he was useless, a drain on the Helio’s resources who couldn’t even train for the one thing he was born to do.
(So of course, when he was just a little older and had two arms and wanted to prove how useful he was—of course he broke Rex’s arm. He wanted to make Rex as useless as he’d been for years and years and—)
“Hey, sorry, I didn’t mean to bring up bad memories,” Sol says, sitting up on their knees to look down at Vace, their face creased with worry. Vace doesn’t think that Sol can read minds, but sometimes they’re almost too perceptive. The way they sometimes know things that they shouldn’t have any reason to know—
Vace shakes off the thought. He accepted Sol’s weirdness years ago. He’s not going to stress about it now.
“No, it’s okay,” Vace says. He sits up and stretches, cracking his back and his neck after lying down for so long. “It’s actually kind of weird that you didn’t know. I feel like you know everything else about me.”
Sol grins. “I like that I don’t know everything about you,” they say. “It’s nice to know that there’s always new things to learn, no matter how much time passes.”
Vace rolls his eyes and reaches over to pinch Sol’s nose. “Stop talking like you’re old,” he says with a laugh.
Sol ducks out of the way, laughing, too. They hop off the bed and hold out their hand, nodding at the clock on Vace’s wall. “Okay, come on, I bet Tammy made some kind of amazing cake with that new flour Cal’s been milling. If we leave now we can get there before everyone else eats it all.”
Vace takes their hand—with his right hand this time, his real hand, so he can feel the solid warmth of their hand in his—and lets them haul him up off the bed. They’re strong for their size. It’s one of the first things Vace loved about them, before he learned to love everything else about them, too.
He lets them lead him out of the Helio and into the warm hazy air of a Late Pollen evening. He thinks there’s probably still an infinite number of things for him to learn about Sol—they seem to contain lifetimes inside their lanky, compact frame—and he finds himself feeling strangely excited to learn it all.