Lost Change

Chapter 62

*~Minna~*

Why did I ever come to this planet...

Meeting Arlia had been nice. She was a good friend. I would definitely have to keep in contact with her.

And it had been nice to be around my niece. Lyzel was adorable, and I had taken hundreds of pictures and videos of her for Mom and Dad just like I had promised. I was proud of my older brother. He was doing a good job raising her. I still wasn't sure how I felt about his choice in women, and it was pretty obvious Loreena didn't care much for me... but... they were raising a good kid. It had been nice to be around them for a time.

But other than that... this planet was just a giant ball of misery and false hopes. Nothing worked out the way it should here. Even the plant Terron had given me as a housewarming present had been impossible to keep alive. I would have been better off if I had just stayed home. Waited a few more years for an apprenticeship program to open up there. Put up with my parents a little bit longer. Maybe pretended to be interested in a suitor or two, just to keep them happy.

I should have been more patient. Everyone always said that about me. Too rash. Too easily excited. Too jumpy. Which was actually a useful trait in a pilot - when you were traveling at velocities fast enough to cover the vast distances in space in any sort of time frame short enough to be useful, you didn't always have the time to think things through all the way. You had to react, and react in the right way, or else things would get ugly.

So my flight instructors had always rated me favorably. They had just worked on helping me jump to the right reaction, not on teaching me to slow down. In a pilot, those traits were a good thing.

But they were bad traits in every other part of my life.

Those traits had pushed me to talk my parents into letting me leave home early to get into an advanced program. The traits had pushed me to spend weeks arguing about it with my parents, only getting them to relent on the condition I went to the world my older brother had moved to - a recently settled colony world that barely had enough shipping to even justify a shuttle training program in the first place.

My rash nature had pushed me to annoy all of my instructors and all my fellow students except one - though to be fair that only added up to five people on this backwater world - they had pushed me to get kicked out of two apartments before finding the one crummy apartment on the planet that would tolerate me, and they had pushed me to spend practically all of my free time with my brother and his daughter. Because what would be the point of making friends on a world I would be leaving forever in only a few years.

They had pushed me to use lethal force to defend my niece... against something that wasn't even a threat in the first place. Against a lonely animal in the forest that, in the end, had only wanted to play.

And they had pushed me to take responsibility for the other lonely animal that had possessed no other friend in the world but the poor animal I had killed. Even though everybody said it was a mistake. Even though everybody told me to let somebody else take care of him. Even though the animal himself had left extremely clear, extremely painful messages all over my hand and arm that quite definitively told me that he should be somebody else's problem.

I had ignored all of those warnings and made a rash, stupid decision.

I had grown attached to the little thing. I had told myself not to, again and again and again; I had told myself it would never actually work out. I had told myself it was always going to end like this, with me leaving the planet, and with him there, back in his home and utterly rejecting me. I had told myself over and over that it would be a disaster if we did somehow both grow attached to each other.