fate

So, I have surrounded myself by men who refuse to die.

There have been losers, too, those who work for profit and violence. Space is filled by men either too smart or too stupid to follow the rules.

And now Caban. He is somewhere inbetween Lys and Jamie…cheerful, distant, serious, reckless. Undeniably lucky. It pains me to think of him dying like Lys, shaking and bloody. Easier to imagine him against a backdrop of smoke and fire, knives clutched firmly in his hands. He would never resign himself to civilian life or old age.
Kon is almost old already, and I see him living out his days a grizzled old man, growling tiredly in the back room of a bar somewhere.
Em will, if she has any sense, grow older if not any bigger. She'll find scrapings in space long after the rest of our bones are growing moss. That is, of course, unless she scorches herself to death like most Chemmies. I see her crawling about stations and ships, no less happy than she is now.
And Ice, she is a tricky one. I can see her old, her hair stark and white, her attitude not lessened, her game not given up. She seems, of course, the type to die fierce in battle, but I cannot imagine her engaged in the physical act of death. She will simply cease to exist. Be and then not be…it would be just like Ice.
But then again, I can rarely imagine myself as an old woman. Only sometimes I see myself with grey hair and a dark red sweater, being handed a cup by a woman older than I am now, a woman with long dark hair (whose daughter?). My old-woman self speaks to a young girl, teaching her. It is a vision that presents itself occasionally, but I can’t trust its truth.
I might easily have a commonplace death here in space, to suit my unacknowledged life. But I only hope that the last thing I see will be worth it, that I will live long enough to make my life..and Lys’ life…mean something.