Chapter Text
as the turn of the worlds
book one: objects in space
"You know what the first rule of flying is? Love. You can know all the math in the 'Verse, but you take a boat in the air you don't love, she'll shake you off, just as sure as the turn of the worlds. Love's what keeps her in the air when she ought to fall, tells you she's hurting 'fore she keens. Makes her home."
-Malcolm Reynolds, Serenity
prelude
(on the cutter-class spaceship blue moon)
"What have you got for me?" he asked, lounging in his fuzzy chair and tinkering with the matryoshka doll that he always kept near. "You mentioned a job to Sihnon. That still open?"
"Sure," Faith replied on the other side of the cortex. He tried valiantly not to sneer -- he did not like Faith, but ever since his disastrous run-in with Patience last year, he'd been forced to turn to the old woman's worst enemy, on the other side of Whitefall. Faith wasn't as rich as Patience, didn't have as many jobs (and the ones she did have were usually less-than lucrative) but she also wasn't as likely to fill him with bullets for breathing in her sacred presence.
Plus, he had it on good authority that she was just aching to get into his pants, so there was that.
"What's the cargo?"
"Illegal shinies for the teeming underground drug rings," she answered coolly, and he swallowed a snarky response. He didn't have the luxury of refusing any jobs, legal or illegal, especially if they were one-man jobs like this one was supposed to be -- he'd tried to hire a crew once, but his obsessive tendencies (well, tendency), his cramped ship, and his perpetual lack of funds had quickly run them off, leaving him to do all the heavy lifting by himself. He only really minded during those awful stretches through the black where he had nothing but his thoughts and memories for company. "You in?"
"Of course. I'm out of options," he explained sourly, "and the Core is just about all that's left. May as well get started."
"You're still on this crazy search?" Faith asked, a mocking tone in her voice. "When will you give up?"
"When I find her," he replied through clenched teeth, "or at least her body, so I can take her home."
"She's just your sister," she said, like he didn't already know. "Why do you care so much? I haven't seen my family in, God, years."
"Well, you wouldn't understand the concept of familial love, then," he said flatly. "I promised I'd look out for her. I've gotta find her to do that."
"Who's going to care if you don't?"
He bit his tongue; the truth was, no one would care. He'd made the promise to his mother years and years ago, and while his father might hold him to it, his father had also gone off the deep end after the war and still held out for Independence. He believed in the cause, too, but he also knew when to let a lost cause go.
This, however, wasn't one of those times. His sister was out there somewhere, and maybe she needed help or maybe she didn't, but as her older brother, it was his duty -- the last thing he had left in the entire universe -- to help her in whatever way he could. But wherever she was, she wasn't giving him any clues, if she even knew he was still alive (or cared one way or the other; although a part of him refused to accept the possibility that she was out there and safe and just didn't want to be found, he had to acknowledge that it was possible).
He stared hard at the doll sitting innocently beside the feed -- he hadn't opened it in over seven years, but he knew without having to look what all the other dolls inside of it were. His father's (badly-carved) face looked at him from the largest doll, and within that doll was his mother, and then himself, and then -- the smallest doll was his little sister.
"I will," he replied shortly. "Where's the pick-up?"
Faith sighed theatrically before giving him the coordinates to his newest drop. "You know the drill. You get half from me when you pick up the cargo, half from Jun when you drop it off. I'll see you there," she said, and then cut the transmission.
Sokka fell back into his chair, exhausted.