Chapter Text
The visor of Pidge's helmet kept fogging up in the mist, which shouldn't even have been possible. She breathed out quickly through her nose, annoyed, and scrubbed at the visor with her gloved hand for what felt like the millionth time. The last time she was here, she didn't remember it being so wet. But then, maybe it had been. She'd been more than a little preoccupied at the time. At least this time, she knew Matt was alive.
"Where are you, you idiot?" she grumbled under her breath, "You can leave a coded message on your own quiznaking grave, but you can't remember to take your transmitter with you out onto the enormous quiznaking graveyard?"
She didn't like being here, even with her brother alive somewhere. She wanted to get out. Back to her lion. Back home to the castle. Away from these reminders of death, and the persistent memory that she'd thought Matt was dead, too.
Her visor fogged up again, and as she bit back another curse, she realized that Matt had gone out without a helmet at all. Was it safe to breathe here, then? She checked the readings from her suit carefully before pulling her helmet off.
Instantly, her glasses - Matt's glasses - fogged up, but Matt was back now, so she didn't need them. She took them off, tucking them into a pocket. That was better. She could see again. She'd felt silly, replacing Matt's real lenses with a set of non-prescription fakes, but his face when he realized she was wearing them had been worth it. She just had to get back to that face. And then they could go home.
She trudged up another hill, wondering why she couldn't seem to remember how many hills she'd already climbed. Matt had to be just over this next one, right? She felt something inside pulling at her, urging her to keep moving forward and not look back. Matt must be just over the next hill. It felt like he was. He must be.
A cloud drifted over the planet's sun, dimming the light around her. It made it even harder to see through the mist, but she forced herself to keep going, focusing on her hearing to compensate for the low visibility. Matt never had been good at keeping quiet. She'd hear him before she saw him. Probably.
Pidge squinted against the mist until it got so thick she couldn't keep going without a flashlight. Her helmet had a light, if she could only wear it without the visor immediately fogging up. She turned the light on anyway and carried the helmet at her side, and that worked well enough, more or less.
The thick white fog made the identical white grave markers she was walking through seem indistinct and ghostly. She didn't pay them much mind. It wasn't like she could read them anyway. She couldn't read any of the graves here, and she hadn't been able to since she'd left the statue at the front, which surely she must have left far behind by now. Maybe too far behind. She didn't want to look back, but she wasn't sure why.
She kept walking, frowning as the mist wrapped itself around her legs and wishing she'd come in uniform instead of her shorts. She always worried that even though it was one of Matt's old uniforms, and cut for a boy instead of a girl, the sheer fact that it was a Garrison uniform made it easier to tell she was lying about her gender. People were used to girls in Garrison uniforms. Girls in baggy sweatshirts and boys' shorts, not quite so much. Especially not now that she'd managed to grow back such a good crop of leg hair, which now felt particularly weird in all the mist.
She shivered. She knew by heart which graves belonged to her dad and brother. Not that they were in them. It was just a good place to talk to them, somehow. The Garrison had said their bodies were irretrievable, before they gave them headstones in the Garrison cemetery anyway, but she knew that wasn't true. Their bodies were alive. Somewhere. In space. She just had to get to them.
Except that wasn't true. Matt was here, she reminded herself, picking up the pace and switching her flashlight from one hand to the other so she wouldn't get tired of carrying it so fast. He was here, and she had to find him. He'd left her a clue. No, not this time. This time, they'd come to the cemetery together. Right? Somehow, it was hard to remember when she couldn't see.
She kept her ears focused around her, and when a voice cried out softly - a familiar voice - she picked up the pace. A second cry came to her, faint and muffled, and she broke into a run, her heart pounding.
Graveyards were shitty places for running. Especially in the mist. But she knew Matt was ahead of her, and that was what counted. She kept pushing.
"Matt!" she called, "Matt, it's ok, I'm coming!"
She glanced at the gravestones as she passed them. They had words on them. She couldn't read them, but the letters looked familiar. Cyrillic, a couple of them. Korean. Chinese. Arabic.
The next thing she heard was less of a cry and more of a whine, like their dog, but it wasn't their dog, it was Matt, and she had to find him.
She was getting close. She must be. "Matt!"
There was no answer, but the gravestones had the right letters, now. Letters she could read. So she was in the right place. Names flashed by, half familiar, but all she could do was listen.
She tripped over an unexpected footstone, short and grey and battered, and dropped her flashlight as she caught herself on her hands. Great. Now her skirt was all muddy. As she climbed to her feet, the name on the accompanying headstone caught her eye. That was right. This was where she should turn left and go over a few rows, if she wanted to get to Nonna and Nonnino's graves. How could she have forgotten? They could hardly go to all the trouble of coming all the way to Italy and then not visit their grandparents, even though they were dead now. Maybe if they lived closer, but not now.
Her family was probably waiting for her. They were probably worried. But no - hadn't she been the one who was worried?
Her headband had slipped when she fell, and she took a moment to pull it out of her hair and put it back in right, so her hair would stay out of her face. She had to catch up to the others.
She turned left, hurrying along the way through the haze. Why was it so hazy today? She could barely see anything. And everything was too bright, with the sun lighting up the fog. Shouldn't it be dissipating it, by now?
She heard a shout in front of her and broke into another sprint, heart leaping into her throat. After a moment, she could see Matt, and then he fell down in front of the graves with another shout, and she felt ice run through her veins. Four. Why were there -
Matt shouted again and the whole world was suddenly shaking under her and then Pidge opened her eyes to find darkness.
"What?" she gasped. "Matt?"
"Oh, fuck," Matt sighed. She was on her side, facing away from him, and she wasn't sure how that had happened, but somewhere in the process of rolling over, she realized she'd been asleep. It had been a dream. That was good. Maybe.
Matt was sitting up, hunched over his knees, and Pidge wondered if his heart was racing as hard as hers. She sat up, too.
Matt took a deep, shuddering breath. "Sorry, Katie. I didn't mean to wake you up. I didn't think about that when we told Coran we could just share for tonight."
For a moment, she hoped he wouldn't notice that she was shivering, too, but then she thought about it a little bit more and decided she didn't care. She wrapped him up in her arms as well as she could at this angle, and he leaned sideways into her.
"Nightmares?" she asked.
"Yeah."
"Me too," she admitted.
Matt sighed, turning his head to kiss her forehead. She usually would have squawked and shoved him away, but it was just a relief having him here, after her dream. And after all the months that had come before it. Maybe it would always be a relief having him here, and maybe he shouldn't get his own room once Coran had time to set one up for him. Not that he'd been the dead one in her dream, but there had been that graveyard where she'd thought he was dead.
"Do you think Mom and Dad are ok?" she asked, the words falling out of her mouth before she'd thought them through.
"I don't know," Matt said. "I used to think that at least you and Mom were safe but now you're here, so maybe you weren't, always. But I'm sure she still is. And Dad's - Dad. He's tough."
She'd already admitted to him that she didn't have any solid leads on Dad, and he'd admitted the same. It was frustrating, but there was nothing to be done about it.
"Sorry," she said, "That's not really - what did you dream about?"
Matt closed his eyes. "Battle. So it's not really something to talk about either."
"Oh," she said.
"Yeah," he said, "I was kind of hoping for one of those silly kid nightmares, too. Remember that one I used to get where I was wearing my bathing suit at school and they wouldn't let me go swimming because they said there wasn't a pool?"
"There wasn't a pool."
"That's not the point!"
She wasn't sure the story made her feel any better, but the fact that Matt was trying did, and that counted for something.
"I'm not mad you woke me up," she said, "I'm pretty sure when I got to the graves you were looking at in my dream, it would have just been upsetting."
"Shit, really?"
"Yeah. That whole coded gravestone message was a real asshole move, actually. I definitely thought you were dead."
"Yeah, well, if I'd known - no, I still would have done it. Dad - wait, maybe that's it! Or maybe it's something anyway. We can put something on my grave so it alerts us if Dad finds it. If he's not still in prison."
If he's not dead. But neither of them said that. Pidge just let go of Matt for long enough to grab her tablet and let the thought stay unspoken. "I'll make a note, so we remember in the morning. It's gonna be pretty busy tomorrow. We should probably try to go back to sleep anyway."
Matt groaned. "Yeah, probably."
Instead of lying down, Pidge leaned into his side again and let him slide an arm around her back. "I know it's dumb sharing a room like we're still little kids or something," she said, "But I'm still not used to you being back, so it's nice to have proof it wasn't just a dream."
"But that grave thing was."
"This time, yeah. That's... nice to have verified, too."
Matt looked around her dim bedroom. "How do you even get out of here? I kind of have to pee, but there's no floor. That's how I know Mom is definitely not also in space. She'd have made you clean it by now."
Pidge snorted. "Oh, ha ha. There's a whole two square feet of clear space right in front of the bed, and then it's just a little bit to hop over."
Matt rolled his eyes and moved his arm, then clambered awkwardly over her and stood up into the clear spot before picking his way carefully to the door. Pidge scooted over toward the wall, so he wouldn't have to climb over her when he came back, and curled up on her side, watching for him. It was good to have Matt home.
When she closed her eyes, she could half see the black pillar with his name on it, again, but she hoped that once he was breathing beside her, that would go away. When he came back, she pretended to be asleep, right up until he took her hand and the angle he picked felt weird and she had to rearrange them.
"Oh," he whispered, "Sorry, Pidge. I just thought I might sleep better if I really knew you were here."
"S'ok," she whispered back. "I think I might, too."
It was weird staring at her brother in the dark like this, but his hand felt familiar in hers, and her heart had stopped racing from the nightmare and it must be something like 3 am, and by the time she was halfway back asleep, it wasn't weird at all.
She fell asleep with a half smile on her face and didn't dream of anything.