Yet So Far Away

Story by spacewastrel on SoFurry

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#4 of Respawn

Continues as part of the same noir space opera as Out of Sight (https://www.sofurry.com/view/1236909), Sticks & Stones (https://www.sofurry.com/view/1336266), and A Man To Fish (https://www.sofurry.com/view/1337719).


"I try running away, I'm just not fast enough... My own friends hate me, but I don't give a shit." (Wavves, Green Eyes)

"I can't believe you did this again."

Aside from the droning hum of her ship's engine, the two of them had been sitting in silence for quite some time before Macha's voice finally broke it.

"You can't believe I did this again?" The pterodactyl was of course sitting at her console piloting her ship back toward the System. "I can't believe you did this again!" Jackie sat in a slump back against the wall behind a force field, arms crossed, an antenna drooping, tilting her head dubiously. "That's my line." It seemed redundant, but while the roach would've gladly spent the whole trip back without saying anything, now that Macha had opened the can of worms she had, Jackie was in no mood to bite her tongue.

"You can't be serious." Even though the pterodactyl was facing away from her, the roach could still tell that she was rolling her eyes at her.

"I can't be serious?" Even though Jackie was behind her, Macha had still known her long enough that it wasn't hard for her to picture the disbelieving expression on the roach's face. "You can't be serious!" If Jackie was going to get dragged back against her will, she was going to do it kicking and screaming every step of the way. How very much like her.

"Stop that." The roach leaned forward from her slump, narrowing her eyes at her.

"No,you stop that." The pterodactyl rewarded her efforts with an exasperated sigh.

"Oh for crying out loud, Jackie!" The infinite beauty of space passed them by on each side, indifferent to their plight. "You could've died." Jackie had never been very good at taking care of herself. "Not just 'died' the way we all die all the time, either." Not if you asked Macha, in any case. "That would've been bad enough." That was putting it mildly. "Really died." They barely had words for this sort of thing. "_Died_died." They hadn't needed them in so long.

"I know." The roach slumped back against the wall.

"You know!" The pinwheel crest atop the pterodactyl's head span as she shook her head. "That's all you have to say for yourself." The nerve of that girl.

"Well_I_ think you're the one who should be apologizing to me." This time Macha's sigh was one of resignation.

"You still haven't changed." For this, Jackie stood up from her slump on her legs outright.

"That is simply not true!" A spark arced up between her antennae as she frowned only to vanish as it reached their tips, as if to punctuate her words.

"Oh,really?" Part of the pterodactyl was starting to regret having started their conversation herself. "Is that right?" But the wheels were already in motion by then. "Do you forget how well I know_you, Jackie?" It was too late to go back. "Everything I've _done for you?" Would it have killed her to give Macha credit where credit was due, for a change? "Everything we've been through?" She had tried so hard for so long. "I haven't."

"You don't understand." The roach had sounded more sad than angry that time.

"That's what you always used to say!" the pterodactyl snapped at her. "I never understood this and I never understood that." What a tiring refrain. "In all those years, did it ever occur to you maybe you were the one who never understood me?"

Jackie looked vexed. "You can't just take what I said and throw it back at me like that."

For this, Macha turned from her console to look at the roach behind her outright. "But that's what you do!"

"It's different when I do it," Jackie chuckled, tongue in cheek.

The pterodactyl turned back to her console. "You're doing this to punish me because you blame me."

"No,you're doing this to punish me because you blame me," the roach shot back.

"This is just like all the other times."

"That's where you're wrong," Jackie persisted.

"Based on what?"

"I have a plan."

Macha groaned. "Oh, really?" Didn't that just beat all. "What kind of plan did you have when you killed yourself over and over?"

"... I didn't have a plan back then," the roach admitted.

"So the Commission kept having to bring you back, over and over," the pterodactyl scolded.

"They didn't have to bring me back."

"What did you expect them to do, Jackie?"

Jackie sighed. "'The System is just like a machine or an organism, it can't function without all of its parts'," she parroted cynically.

"There was more to it than that."

"They did it so I'd owe them a debt I can't pay back to this day for something I didn't even want." The roach stuck out her tongue.

"So your solution to that is to go so far they can't bring you back," Macha frowned, "just like all the _other_times."

"You didn't have to come after me either, you know," Jackie said softly, "any of those times."

"I came after you because I cared about you." The pterodactyl wished she could've knocked some sense into her sometimes. "Why do you think I offered to help you work it off by partnering up with you in the first place?"

The roach looked down. "I was just slowing you down." Macha was surprised that Jackie didn't deny that she'd really cared, as the roach had done many times before that. "I could never keep up with you." The pterodactyl's ship sped through space faster than it had any right to even as they spoke. "I should've known I couldn't outrun you this time either." Working as a Runner in space, she'd put a lot of work into making sure that her ship would be as fast as it could possibly be. Her living hinged on it.

"You promised you'd stop. I believed you. What kind of plan do you have now, Jackie?"

Jackie's antennae crackled. "I have a self-renewing power source now, Macha," she pointed at them as she spoke, "just like you."

The pinwheel on the pterodactyl's head had worked as a small wind power device, and her wings had double as solar panels. Once she'd had Crone put them in, working as a Runner on-world, she'd always recharge her power even as she'd flown over planets like a hang glider. Being able to gain resources while she'd spent time working had ended up playing a significant role in what had made it possible for her to work her own way out of debt before that.

"I'm not going out there to die, not this time," the roach shook her head. "Not anymore."

"What do you think you're doing?" This should be good, Macha thought.

"Since I don't have to worry about running out of power, I can make it all the way to another world somewhere, beyond the System."

"There_aren't_ any worlds beyond the System," the pterodactyl gestured emphatically. "Everyone knows that."

"Well," Jackie quipped resignedly, "we'll never know now, will we?"

"You're lucky I caught up with you," the pterodactyl harrumphed. "You'd have never made it."

"Of_course_ you caught up with me. You always had to be faster than everybody else."

Macha's countenance darkened. "I wasn't _always_faster than everyone else, you know."

The roach tilted her head. "Oh?"

"Did you ever hear about someone called Bertha?"

Jackie shook her head. "I don't think so, no."

"Bertha and I were partners for a long time, long before you and I met. I was her partner longer than I've ever been with anyone else." Where could the pterodactyl have been going with this? "We ran into an anomaly one day, unlike anything we'd ever seen. I tried to get there before her but she got to it before I did. When Bertha got near it, it ended up destroying her ship."

The roach winced. "Good ships are hard to come by."

"That wasn't the problem, though," Macha clucked her tongue. "Well, it was part of it, but we could always get another ship."

Jackie furrowed her brow. "So what happened?"

"The anomaly scrambled her brain waves in a weird way. It turned out no one ever saw anything like it in the System before or since. When the Commission brought her body back to life, Bertha... wasn't herself anymore."

"What do you mean?"

"She'd lost her mind. She didn't remember me. She didn't remember anything. She couldn't even act like a person. It was like she turned into a force of nature. She went on some sort of destructive rampage and just... never stopped. Every now and then, she dies, and the Commission brings her back, but like... There's no way she can ever pay anything back to anyone anymore. She'll always be a Renegade. She can't even understand what work is."

The roach shuddered. "What a story..."

"So now, I can look at her, but it's like she can't see_me. I can talk to her, but she can't understand me. She talks, but what she says doesn't mean anything. She saw something in there, heard something, something must have happened in there to make her this way, but I have no idea what it could be. I can never find out. I've never seen the anomaly since. I don't think her original personality can ever be recovered now. It's _gone."

"That's awful..." Jackie had never heard of anything like it happening, to anyone.

"I went up to her to try to save her, time and time again. Over and over, in her blind rage, she killed me, without even thinking of me as a living thing that could die. Eventually I accrued such a debt thinking I could do it if I tried one more time that I was forced to give up for good. I'd still be working it off if it wasn't for my pinwheel and wings. I'll never be able to talk to her again. I've experienced a kind of loss we don't have words for here, Jackie."

"I'm sorry, Macha," was all the roach managed to say.

"When I tell you I can't deal with having to lose you forever, I'm not talking extemporaneously. I'm saying that because I know exactly how that feels. I can't turn to anyone who can relate to what I'm going through. I'm the only person I know who can even say that. So you see, Jackie," she finished bitterly, "I'm not always the fastest, but when I'm not, bad things happen. And maybe you're the one who doesn't understand me."