Current Date: June 9, 4024
Character: Champagne Bourgeois
Race: Boozeling – Champagne
Age: 2 772, physically about 17
Current residence: Aboard the CS Black Coral
It hasn’t even been a year and I don’t remember why I was having the bad dreams I was when we first encountered them. When they first came into our lives. I was struggling with insomnia and whenever I would fall off to an exhausted sleep, I would be reliving the hours before my pod crashed into the home and the few hours after I first woke up following that.
That time was an unpleasant blip in my life, but I consider myself lucky. I know I’m lucky. Casimir spent probably half of his life awake in that pod, his mind trying to reach out to Pieter’s own and just, it’s terrifying to imagine and it’s something none of us really talk about. I remember mentioning it to Bryce once or twice when we were talking about my own background but that’s been it.
It took a few weeks after they started settling in—after they learned the ugly truth about their vessel—for my insomnia to settle. It’s the only way I can sort of keep track of the when of things. Otherwise, being out in space as we are, stopping at stations but otherwise just being comfortably out there, it’s hard to keep track of days and I don’t like asking Star to constantly keep me updated on the date. I know most of us still work on something that resembles Earth-time because the vast majority of us spent more than half of our lives out there. Myself only half-included but I’m okay with that.
I know that spending time around Bryce helped. I don’t know why, but it helped. It’s like it gave me some sort of purpose, especially when that purpose was clear in my mind that I had to distract him from his own thoughts. This mountain of a man with the shoulders and back of a god—as far as my mind is concerned, shush—is very much so a one-track mind sorts and stopping his brain from always being on and focused on all of the what-ifs felt as though I had an extra purpose in life.
In a way, once my own sleep schedule had reset itself to the near-norm, I think I made it my mission to be an annoyance to him. He might not have seen it that way, and I know that, in the long run, I wasn’t trying very hard to annoy him, but it still sort of stamped itself that way in my mind. I distract his thoughts as necessary, a.k.a. I annoy him, he doesn’t get fixated on the possibility of every future out there, the rest is history.
It mostly worked, too. I mean, I can’t read his mind, but he does seem at least a little less tense in the shoulders now than he was when they first came in but, I know, this could also just be from the fact that most of them now have settled in. It’s like we have an extended family on board, now, but one that all of us are just really comfortable with. I can even say that I’m sure I’ve seen Casimir smile more. It’s subtle, that smile, but it’s been there, that subtle little smile and a bit of light in his eyes.
For him, Adrien and Zen, I know they’ve struggled with integrating into our family. Casimir and Adrien have been with us for years but there still seemed to be a sort of connection lacking—not from lack of trying on all of our ends—but with this extended family, there’s something that changed and I’ll take it. The connection might not have come from us but that hardly matters, so long as both of them feel as though they belong with us—all of us.
Zen is still a bit of a mystery since he avoids the group spaces to a point still. I can’t blame him, not when you consider the reason why he was sent off. He’s gotten a little closer to most of us, but he still keeps his distance. He seems to have allowed Thrace and Tillian in a little closer too, not much but still enough. What amuses me a little about that situation, though, is that there are days when I feel that my situation with Bryce isn’t all that different from Zen’s situation with Tillian.
Maybe we’re more alike than not but that’s not for me to do much of anything with. It’s just something I’ve noticed, and I think it’s sort of interesting. In a way, all of us have sort of found someone to open up to, even if it’s possibly just a little, but that opening up to is probably the best thing that has probably ever happened to the lot of us. After all the others had left, there had been something missing, and I think we’ve found that missing something. I also I hope that this puzzle that makes up the mental and emotional state of the ship remains tightly pieced together until the end of everything.
Works of JD Beckett 