Adromeda Starcrest [District Three]

Adromeda Starcrest -- eighteen -- female -- District Three

You've never been able to protect Orion. You learned that when you were eleven, the same week you—all four of you—learned that the world can implode in a matter of days and parents are as flesh-and-bone fragile as anyone else. By then you and Orion were already long since inseparable, but those months you spent even more time than usual plastered together; neither of you ever said you were afraid to forget your mother, but you traded the same stories over and over, sometimes tripping over yourselves to finish each other's sentences. Death wasn't a bully you could threaten or a puzzle he could solve, but you could cry together and cradle memories between you until it became easier to coax laughter forward again.

That lesson—that there will always be things beyond your power to shield him from, but that you can always find ways to help him handle them himself; that perhaps, sometimes, that's the way things need to be anyway—has stuck with you through all the intervening years. Bluffing confidence furiously, you taught Orion what you knew about standing up to bullies, and did what you could to reassure him that he deserved to use it. At fifteen you couldn't earn enough to keep your little brothers from having to work, but after the first time Orion got hurt at the factory, you poured what remained of your free time into helping find parts for his inventions in the hopes that more practice with machines would help him keep himself safe. You bought him new journals when money was tight and he seemed hesitant to spend any on something frivolous, because even when it doesn't make life easier, happiness isn't frivolous.

If you had ever realized that you needed to add shooting to the list, you would have helped him build the practice gun. He would have filled pages with vectors and calculations, so you would have reminded him that thinking about something and learning to do it aren't always the same thing, and you would have taken turns helping each other aim at targets until math and motion alike became instinct.

You would have.

---

"She doesn't even do anything."

Someday, you'll stare into the mirror of your memory and find your mother's smile warm and fondly amused. Today, full of a six-year-old's righteous indignation, you huff at the way she covers her mouth briefly to compose herself. "We didn't want any of you to be exactly like the myths, Meda. Corvus was a liar, and Orion was mean and unlucky, and the Nemean lion terrorized people."

"At least they do something." None of them have to be the chained woman, punished for someone else's bragging and saved by someone else's sword. If you have to die, you might as well make your own messes along the way.

"Do you know—" She pauses, stroking your hair absentmindedly, then stands. "Let's go outside."

You follow, but you drag your heels and grumble the whole way. Your parents have shown you the Andromeda Galaxy on moonless, low-smog nights before, and books have shown you the shape of the surrounding constellation you would see if the factory lights shut down for a night. One of those stars is a binary system with the brightest mercury-manganese star in the sky; supposedly, that should impress you.

"Andromeda has twice as many stars—"

"—as the Milky Way, I know, Mom," you say. Reading numbers in the billions doesn't make much of an impression against the evidence of your own eyes, and twice as many as all the stars you've ever seen still doesn't feel like much.

"Did you know we're going to run into it someday?"

That's news. You look over sharply. "When?"

"Not for billions of years," she says with a laugh. "But all that—" she circles her wrist to encompass the whole of an immensity made insignificant by distance— "is moving toward us, and someday we'll make a new galaxy together. And so much of what could happen is still a mystery. It could rip apart the Solar System, or fling it into the distance. Maybe we're looking at microbes right now, and by the time they get here their descendants will be aliens looking back at our ruins and wondering what happened to us."

"So?"

"So," your mother says teasingly, "think about all that potential." She runs a hand through your hair again, then tugs you close as a chill gust sweeps around you both. "Adromeda comes from Andromeda, but it's your name now. You get to decide what it means."

Years from now, unable to sleep, you'll clutch Orion's hand as you hold up the mirror again to tell him this story—a version of it, condensed and filtered through time, but a version as true and as real as the fresh one. Between wistful smiles and telling him how much he sometimes sounds like her when he talks about science, you'll finally feel like you're starting to understand what she meant. In the moment, you're still too stubbornly cranky about the injustice done to Andromeda to listen—but the early autumn night is cool and your mother's voice is as warm as her hand on your shoulder, so you lean into her side, stare upwards, and wonder idly what the sky would look with all those stars on display.

---

After the first Reaping, before you called it the first Reaping and back when you thought you had faced the whole of the yawning void of helplessness, you and your father held all three boys close and told them you loved them. If anyone asks—if you have a moment to compose your face and your words and your heart—you can't hate Larceny Theft, not with the memory of how you'd never loved a stranger as fiercely as in that moment. Not after the way he screamed, sounding as destroyed as you felt, as Peacekeepers dragged him offstage two years later. You can't.

But in that moment before you find your composure—

No one tells stories about Orion with you; you've never been as close to Corvus and Leo as you were to him or they are to each other. Besides, you go back to work as soon as you can, unable to afford more time off and equally unable to stand hours on end of cloying, flower-drenched air beating down on you. You walk back into the factory with Orion's blood still bright behind your eyelids every time you blink, drawn up as tall as your small frame allows and staring straight ahead, straight ahead as people turn to stare at you. You work surrounded by machines that Orion understood better than you ever will, and you go home to a house full of well-meaning gifts and empty of his voice.

Then you do it again. And again, and again, relentlessly, until you realize you'll never focus hard enough to drive away the the echo of the question he died asking, or the dream of standing next to him while he kneels in Oblivion's blood, still somehow helpless to reach him—and then you do it again, because what else are you going to do?

You can't hate Larceny, who did what you never could and protected Orion. But you hate that he gets to be sixteen, and your best friend never will.



:hell_heart:

Arrows has dibs, of course <3

facts only here about the general oof nature of constellation myths, and about the Andromeda Galaxy, including that you can see it on a moonless night even around some light pollution. and hopefully including aliens? [blows a kiss to the stars, just in case]