#i know angry people from landlocked locations are going to find me and say 'the lakes!! how can you not count the lakes!!'

[pentanguine]

Does anyone else ever get the sudden yen to move to Wisconsin?

[bombshellsandbluebells]

The 100 Fic: On My Way Amongst the Stars

Summary: Otan used to say they were from everywhere. But Emori knows that's wrong. They don't belong everywhere; they belong nowhere.

Or: Emori struggles to find a place in the world, meets a boy who says he's from the Sky, and eventually visits it herself. Emori character study.

Relationships: Memori, Emori & Otan

Read on ao3

I finished one of those wips

“God will mercifully guide me on my way amongst the stars.” -The Old Astronomer (To His Pupil) by Sarah Williams

Otan used to say they were from everywhere.

He said it when the desert nights were long and cold and they were without shelter, lying curled together to stay warm. He whispered it as they left towns after trading, suspicious eyes pressing heavy on their backs until they were out of sight.

The reason they couldn’t root themselves in any one place, he’d insisted, was because they belonged to too many. They had bits of the boat people in them because they knew the smell of the sea and the bitter taste of salt water. But they also knew the sharp burn of the desert sun and the icy bite of mountain air.

Emori never knew if Otan truly believed his lie or if he said it only for her sake, but she had never been able to believe it. She remembered too well the hot flashes of shame and fear when her hand was exposed, or the bitter envy that grew like an thick, knotted weed in her stomach when she watched young children playing freely without care in the villages they passed through.

They don’t belong everywhere, Emori knows. They belong nowhere.

But Otan was right about one thing – they have been everywhere. In her earliest memories, she is small and young, draped on Otan’s back, her hands wrapped securely around his neck, as they move from forest to forest and village to village – in each place catching only the slightest glimpse into lives they could never have.

Most people, she knows, never leave the clans they’re born in – never even travel beyond their borders. There are people of the southern forests who have never seen snow or desert sand, and people from the desert who have never seen the ocean shore.

But it’s easy to travel when you’re unrooted.

She’s seen the lake people, located to the west on the lake shore, who build their houses on poles to escape the mud. Their boats are larger than her and Otan’s and run on louder, angrier motors. They traded old machinery there once for a fishing net and later had taught themselves to use it. Otan had ended up more tangled than the fish he was trying to catch, and Emori had laughed at him, loud and joyous.

“I will be forced to eat you for dinner,” she’d teased, then screamed with laugher when he pushed her overboard.

Soon they added fish to their usual diet, learned how to clean them and repurpose the scales and bones into jewelry they could sell in landlocked clans. Emori made herself a few pieces as well, sometimes hanging them from her ear or asking Otan to braid them into her hair, other times weaving them into her clothing. She doesn’t hold onto many personal belongings beyond necessities – the more you have to carry, the slower you move, and the slower you move, the faster death catches up with you – but sometimes it’s nice to own something just for the sake of owning it – just because it’s pleasant to look at and it makes her happy.

One winter, they traveled through Azgeda territory and saw snow for the very first time. Struck mute with wonder, Emori had cupped it in her hand and shivered at the sting of it. When Otan wasn’t looking, she’d snuck up behind him and shoved it against his exposed forehead, ducking away as quickly as a hare before he could retaliate.

Emori knows Sangedakru, too – the people that make the desert their home, as few of them as there are. There is a trading post and a small camp on the northern edge of the Dead Zone that deals in food and water instead of tech. Supplies that help them survive their harsh environment have great value there, and occasionally they give her pieces of tech they’d found in the desert in exchange for the meat and edible plants she brings from the forest. The people there have grown familiar with her and Otan; they pass word of interested buyers when they have it. Still, Emori had always kept her hand well covered and Otan, his face.

Familiarity doesn’t necessarily breed trust or safety.

There is another Sangedakru settlement towards the south. Emori has only been there once and vows never to return. She steers clear of it when she needs to cross the Dead Zone. It has been months, but sometimes she still wakes up with Baylis’s face in her mind. Otan had always been able to recognize when her nightmares were about him; he would silently wrap her in his arms, and, though on most days she would huff at his mothering and insist she was no longer a child, on those nights she would bury her head in Otan’s chest and let herself feel safe and loved.

She misses Otan like a misplaced part of her, like a limb that has been cut off and can still be felt but no longer used. She misses him with a painful desperation – if only I hadn’t let him go with Jaha, if only I hadn’t left in the boat – if only, if only, if only. She hopes he’s safe. She hopes he’s alive. She hopes John will agree to help her find him.

John is a mystery.

He’s different from any people she’s ever met. Emori can’t tell what clan he’s from, though she studies him closely when he isn’t looking, searching for details she recognizes. He wears no identifying marks on his skin or in his hair. His pale skin is covered in scars, but not the ceremonial scarring of Azgeda. His clothing is strange; he carries no trinkets.

One day, as they sort through their recent score, she decides to ask. “What clan are you from?”

He looks up from his pile. She’d taught him what can get a good price and what isn’t worth carrying, but he seems to instinctively have a good eye for what can still be reused. Sometimes when she sorts something as waste, he pulls it out of the pile and suggests another purpose for it, and she can’t help but wonder if he also grew up as a scavenger.

“I’m not from a clan,” John answers. Emori understands that – the sense that you can’t classify yourself as any one people, that you can no longer claim the clan you were born into. She knows he was banished from his own people, same as her. Still, she’s curious, so she waits, watching him expectantly, and raises her eyebrows in silent question. “I’m from the Ark,” he clarifies. “You guys call us, uh, sky crew, I think.”

Emori has never heard of the Ark. Skaikru sounds familiar, though. Perhaps she’s heard it in passing at a trading post. “I’ve never heard of the Ark. Is it far from the Dead Zone?”

John laughs. “You could say that.” His voice is light with amusement. Emori feels like she’s missed a joke. “The Ark’s on the ground now,” he continues, “but it used to be in space. Uh, in the sky.”

Emori stares at him without comprehension. “What do you mean in the sky?”

“Uh…” John looks unsure of how to phrase his reply. His mouth twists. He scratches the back of his neck awkwardly. “Guess you guys don’t really understand space, huh?”

The insinuation is insulting. She’s sure she would understand it if he would just explain. She continues to stare at him, expectant, slightly more peeved now.

“In the stars,” he says finally.

The metal cup she had been examining falls from her grasp. It clatters to the boat floor, spinning and rolling away. She stares at him. “You’re from the stars?” She doesn’t know if her voice sounds incredulous or just skeptical – she doesn’t know which way she’s feeling, either.

The stars are familiar to her. She has spent many nights staring up at them, from the gently rocking floor of her boat or the cold desert sand or the uneven forest floor. When she was younger, she would trace them with her hand, finding shapes and pictures hidden amongst them, and Otan would add to them, crafting stories to entertain her out of the glittering lights above them.

He taught her how to navigate with them, too – how to find her place and her destination, how to use them to guide her path. The stars are a comfort, because they’re a constant in a world that never lets her settle.

But she’d never thought of the stars as a place you could live.

“I don’t believe you,” she says finally, because ever since that first meeting, she’s never lied to him.

John bristles. “I’m telling the truth.” Emori knows she’s hit a nerve; his voice is sharp and tight, his shoulders hunched. He throws the shredded fabric he’s holding in the trash pile. “I’m not the one who goes around lying.”

It’s Emori’s turn to tense. She’d thought they’d gotten over that, honestly. He’s never brought it up again. “I apologized,” she snaps. “And I haven’t lied to you since.”

John doesn’t reply. Nor does he look at her. She watches him places a decent looking wire in the trash pile without hardly looking at it. When she leans closer to him to move it to the keep pile, he tenses.

Sometimes he reminds her of cornered prey. She can’t fault him for it; the world is hard and cruel and she’s often been made to feel like cornered prey herself, though she’s gotten skilled at hiding it behind a smile. The only time she lets herself appear vulnerable anymore is when she’s pulling a con.

“I didn’t say I thought you were lying,” she explains softly. With Otan gone, the thought of John growing angry with her and leaving is terrifying. “But I don’t understand how it can be real.”

“It’s not my fault grounders don’t understand science.” He still sounds defensive.

Emori scrunches her nose up at the unfamiliar word. “Grounders?”

“That’s what we call your people. Because you live on the ground.”

“I don’t have a people,” Emori corrects sharply. John looks up abruptly at her tone and locks eyes with her.

“Right,” he says, and something softens in his eyes. “Yeah, I know. Skaikru aren’t my people, either. We’re just from the same place.”

“The sky,” she says, still trying to wrap her mind around the idea. She looks up into the sky and images a city built in the clouds. It sounds impossible.

“You believe me now?”

Emori stares at the sky for a moment longer. She doesn’t understand it still, but, if nothing else, John believes it. He isn’t lying to her on purpose. She shrugs. “Well, you’re a terrible liar, so it must be true.”

“What? That’s not true.”

Emori grins at him. “It is. You’ll have to play a corpse in our next con because it was so bad. I thought I would have to come out of the trees early to save you.”

“You’ve just had more practice,” John snaps, but his tone is not truly angry. This is a friendly argument, like she would have with Otan, and it fills her with happiness. She’s glad that John is here with her; she’s glad he still seems to like her.

They continue to bicker playfully as they sort the rest of the stolen goods, and Emori can’t keep the smile from her face. She likes him, she realizes. She’s never had anyone to like before. It’s a wonderfully addictive feeling.

--

“So how do you live in the sky?” she asks one day as she’s repairing the boat engine.

“I don’t know,” John replies. He’s no help at all with machinery, so he’s lying in the shade of the boat cover, fanning himself with a spare piece of fabric. It’s hot with the sun beating down on them, but he’s still too scared of the water to jump in and cool himself off. “Same as down here, I guess.”

She stares at him, shrewd and unbelieving; seeing it, he falters.

“Well, not exactly the same. You can’t live outside in space because there’s no oxygen, so you have to live in a ship.”

“Oxygen?” she asks curiously, catching on the unfamiliar word.

“It’s an element in the air that you need to breathe.”

She takes that in, processes it. “And there’s lots of oxygen here?”

“Yeah, there’s tons on Earth. Lot more than the Ark had.”

When she asks him to explain further what oxygen is, he fumbles over his words, unsure how better to describe it. Eventually, she tires of both bombarding him with questions and messing with the stubborn engine and decides to teach him to swim instead.

--

“Everything floats in space,” John tells her one night when they’re cleaning fish for dinner.

“Why?” she asks.

“There’s no gravity.”

And then she has a new word and a new concept that John finds difficult to explain. She mentally adds it to the list.

--

“How do you travel to your home in the sky?”

“With a rocket ship.”

“Like a boat?”

“No, not really. It has a massive engine, and it just sort of shoots you up there.”

Emori tries to picture it, but the only image she can produce is their little boat fitted with a bigger engine, floating up towards the clouds, and she knows that isn’t what John means. It’s frustrating to be unable to fully understand him. She’s not stupid, but the concepts he talks about are so unfamiliar it’s nearly impossible to wrap her head around them. And John, much as he tries, seems unsure how to explain them so she can.

Still, when she asks questions, he answers them honestly and as best he can, and she appreciates it.

She understands better when the chip is in her head and ALIE is feeding information into her brain. Everything comes easier to her then, even the explanations that John had struggled to give her.

Still, she won’t fully understand space for nearly another year, not until she sits beside John in a rocket ship – not at all like her boat with a bigger engine attached – and leaves the only places she’s ever known behind for the stars. Suddenly, she can understand all of it. The lack of gravity is what lets Raven float into the air like she’s weightless. The lack of oxygen is what nearly kills them all. The concepts that John had tried his best to explain become real in a way they never had before.

Space is deadly, she learns. Perhaps more deadly than the deserts or the oceans or the fierce cold of Azgeda territory. It is cold and dark and empty and vast.

And yet, it feels safer than any place she has ever been before. None of the people there threaten to cast her out because of her hand; most of them don’t even treat her differently because of it. The Ring is small and confined, but she learns to be free in a way she has never been before. She stretches herself out and grows, one day, she realizes she's stopped covering her hand at all.

Otan used to say they were from everywhere, but the first real home that Emori ever knows is in the sky.