Legion of Super-Heroes - The Memory of Stars

[fajrdrako_fic]

Title: The Memory of Stars
Author: fajrdrako
Fandom: Legion of Super-Heroes (DC Comics)
Characters: Ayla/Vi
Genre: Femslash
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Not mine, no claims. Property of DC Comics all the way.
Note: Spoilers for vol. 4. This is one of a series of Legion of Super-Heroes stories I wrote for the apazines Interlac, APA-247 and APA-LSH. These stories were all based on DC Comics' Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 4, by Tom and Mary Bierbaum, Keith Giffen and Al Gordon. Contextual notes follow the story.


The Memory of Stars

Violet remembered that once on Braal she had looked up to see the stars of the night sky, with one broad, glittering constellation overhead. She had not known what it was called. She was not familiar with the constellations of Braal. But she had thought with utter, irrational certainty, that one of those stars was the star of the Winathian system. Her eyes had filled.

She opened them now, quickly. One eye - her left eye - was still capable of a tear, and she blinked it away. The other, dammit, was slow to focus properly. Not that there was anything to look at anyway: a few old holovids, a dismal view through the window of a dismal shipyard full of dilapidated war vessels. One of them had been hers, and she had been proud of it. What a fool she had been. Too young to know any better.... how many weeks ago had it been?

She had lost track. She didn't care. One day was pretty much like another.

She had been locked up before. That was worse, in the hands of the Durlans. This was a picnic in comparison. The food was slop, but there was plenty of it. The guards were friendly, and not unkind. She got visitors, sometimes, when her father made the trip from the City to come to see her. She got mail once every few days. Her eye filled with tears again at the thought.

Oh, God, she was turning into a sentimental idiot. Another kind of fool, with the mail delivery the only thing worth living for. At least the Durlans hadn't forced her to take mandatory counselling for her "socio-anomalous behaviour". The therapist was a worse idiot than Vi had ever been, chirping about her role in Imsk's future. Future? Hah. She had no future. She had told them what to do with their medal. Disgraced, despondent

and degenerate... well, they didn't need to know about that last bit. There were no Titanians around.

Her com-buzzer bleeped. "Field Commander Digby, you have a guest. It is your father. Will you receive him?"

She closed her eyes. Sometimes when she pretended to be asleep, they left her alone.

"Field Commander Digby? Please respond."

Her father's voice: a little self-conscious. "Sal, are you there?" The concern in his tone made her feel a twinge of guilt. None of this was his fault.

"Hi," she said. "Sure, I'm here. Come on in."

It would take him about five minutes to come from Central Receiving to her quarters... to her cell. Any room with a door locked on the outside was a cell. She sat up, straightened her shoulders, and waited. Might the guard come with her father, and bring mail with him? Ayla might have written again.

How long would she continue to write, with her letters unanswered? Already it had been weeks.... eventually, she would have to interpret the silence and realize that Vi was not going to write back to her again. Then there would be no more letters.

"Honey?" said her father, as the force-shield on her door dissolved to let him walk through. His face, full of pity, made her realize how miserable she must look. She wiped the tear and stood up, giving him a brief hug. "Good to see you," she said, as lightly as she could manage.

"Is there anything you need, Sal? I could bring it. They let me bring things."

"No. I don't need anything."

"Sure you do. A new eye."

"No way, Pop. I've already got one."

He smiled more in grief than amusement. She knew what he was seeing: his daughter, always his greatest pride, with one brown eye that didn't work properly, a scarred face, cropped hair, and no joy left in her. His daughter, who had inexplicably turned on her planet and her people, defying them at every turn. She was a little old for adolescent rebellion.

He said, "Why, Sal? Why do this?"

"You know. Venado Bay. We killed a lot of people. And we shouldn't have."

"It's war. People die in war. You know that."

"People do worse than die. They scar each other, even if they used to be loving friends. They tear each other apart. They kill souls, they lose their honour - don't you understand?"

"No. I don't know what you mean."

He didn't know what she was talking about. Of course not! "I doesn't matter," she said.

"It does. You'll ruin your career."

"What, in the military? I wouldn't return to that. Ever."

"I just want you to be happy again. You look so unhappy."

"Guilt," she said, which was true. "Try a little mass murder yourself. It does wonders for one's ego." The evasion was only half a lie. Mass murder was one reason for guilt. Not a bad reason, when you thought about it. The other was not to be spoken of, not to any Imskian and least of all to her father:

This obsession, this pervasive desire, this heavenly madness that was torturing her.

"But, Sal.... all you need to do is be quiet. They'd let you go. You haven't done anything, really - they just don't want you to embarrass your leaders. Don't you see how bad that would be for Imsk?"

"Truth is never bad for a planet. Don't you see how bad our leaders' lies are?"

"Sal, it isn't your job to save our souls."

"I'm only trying to save mine!"

She could see the mixture of pride and regret in his eyes. He shook his head. She added, "What's left of it."

"Is it so important to keep the scar?"

"Yes."

There was a long silence. "Well," he said at last. "I'd better go. My shift begins at eight."

"Yeah. Okay. Good to see you, Pop," she lied. He patted her unscarred cheek, and turned to the door. Then stopped.

"I almost forgot. I have something for you." He fished in three pockets before he found it: the violet envelope with the distinctive, long-lettered black handwriting she knew so well. "From one of your Legion friends, the Ranzz girl. She figured her letters weren't getting through to you, so she asked me to forward it to you if I could, wherever you were. She seems to think you're still on Braal."

Vi took the letter, clasping her fingers around it. "Thanks," she said.

He left. She watched his hat disappear down the corridor. She sat on her narrow bed and looked at the letter. Her heart was pounding. She thought, This is wrong. I'm never going to see her again. I should throw the letter away without reading it. I'm just torturing myself if I read it.

She knew she could no more throw it away unread than she could... cooperate

with the Generals of Imsk.

The letter started,

Dear Vi,

Wherever are you now? There have been terrible rumours
about Braal, and whatever happened there. I hear Rokk has been
hurt. Poor Lydda! I wish I could help. Did you get to see him
while you were there?

It looks as if Mekt might be coming back to live with us.
It feels strange, to see him and know how he has changed. At the
same time, he hasn't changed. He still has the brains and the
guts he always did, but now he sees the world without anger. We
visited him on Sunday, and it was so cute to see Graym on his
lap, telling him about Proty the Pachyderm....

When she finished reading the letter, Vi stared into space for a long time.

She had decided after Venado Bay to never see Ayla again, or write to her. Since she couldn't... since it was impossible... since some of the Winathian social customs were unthinkable to an Imskian.... She kept losing her train of thought.

Imskians were not, well, like that. Not like Winathians, for whom just about anything was okay. They even went around naked.

Maybe she wasn't an Imskian any more. Maybe that was the problem. She loved her planet and its people, yes, but they looked to her now like naive children, grasping at military glory and narrow ideals.

She touched her scar. She was ending her military career on Imsk because their ideals were wrong. Were they not maybe wrong about other things, too?

If she - be honest now - if she loved Ayla, was that so bad?

Not from the Winathian point of view. Not from Ayla's point of view. What did she believe, herself?

Could a person shake their old perceptions off, like a wet dog?

She thought of the last time she had seen Ayla, really seen her, and touched her too, and found herself blushing with the first happy thought she had had in - well, since Venado Bay. She touched her scar. If she could face Venado Bay and its consequences in her life, and she could, could she not face the possibility of another kind of life? For Ayla's sake? For her own?

Her father would be ashamed. He would never speak to her again. But he had said, "I just want you to be happy." He had meant it. Only she could know the requirements of that happiness.

They brought her meal, but she didn't eat.

Somewhere out there, beyond her prison walls, beyond the gravity-field of the Imskian command base, beyond the interstellar travel-lanes, was a star circled by the planet Winath, with green fields and no war and the person she loved. That was where she belonged. She had lost the Legion, but she had not lost what the Legion had taught her.

She had not lost the only thing worth having: Ayla's love. Ayla was still writing, refusing to believe the rejection in her silence, offering friendship if Vi would accept nothing else, offering sanity in a crazy world.

Vi picked up her Omnicom and wrote,

Dear Ayla,

You'll never guess: I'm in the stockade. I've been back from
Braal for weeks. It was awful - worse than anything I have ever
seen before. And now I see a lot of things much more clearly. I
still have a lot of thinking to do, but I understand a few
priorities. You are one of them.

After she had written her letter, she lay back on the cot and realized that the pain in her face was less, and the pain in her heart was gone.

------------

Notes: In the continuity of Volume 4, Lightning Lass (Ayla Ranzz) and Vi (Salu Digby) were lovers. Salu Digby was originally known as Shrinking Violet because her power was to shrink to infinitesimal size, but she did not use that name in the continuity of Vol. 4.

During the five-year gap between Vol. 3 and Vol. 4, Vi's planet (Imsk) defeated the planet Braal in warfare - it being the home of Cosmic Boy (Rokk Krinn). This happened with much devastation, particularly at Venado Bay. During that war, numerous atrocities happened, and this was my extrapolation on Vi's role, based on what we knew.

Previously, Vi had been a prisoner of the shape-shifting Durlans, who were of the same race as Chameleon Boy (Reep Daggle)