Xavier

The good days had stopped coming entirely by the second week of the new month, and Darrell had learned, watching the pattern settle into something he could no longer pretend was temporary, that the medical staff's careful, clinical language — escalation, progression, decline — had finally run out of room to soften what all of them already understood.

Xavier was dying. Not abstractly, not as a future possibility they were all still bracing against. Now. Soon. The technicians had stopped offering interventions somewhere in the last ten days, not out of neglect but out of the specific, exhausted honesty of people who had tried everything within their understanding and had nothing left to try that wouldn't simply cause more suffering for no meaningful gain.

"I want to go outside," Xavier said, on a morning that had started clearer than most, his voice steadier than it had been in days, though Darrell had learned not to trust the steadiness anymore, understood it now as its own kind of warning rather than reassurance. "Not the courtyard. Somewhere with a real view. I'm tired of ceilings."

Ar arranged it within the hour — a quiet clearing at the edge of the settlement, close enough to reach without taxing Xavier's remaining strength, open enough that the sky stretched wide and unbroken overhead, the strange, unfamiliar constellations still wheeling their slow, patient course even now, even here.

They carried him more than walked him, in the end, Darrell and William taking turns supporting his weight, and settled him onto a soft rise of the blue-green ground with Rachel close on one side, William on the other, and Darrell himself sitting near his feet, watching his oldest friend's careful face and his crewmate's failing body with the same held-breath attention he'd once given a dying star through a spacecraft's narrow window.

"Tell me something good," Xavier said, eyes closed, face turned up toward a sun that wasn't his own. "Not comfort. I don't want comfort right now. Just — something good. Anything."

Rachel was the first to answer, her voice carefully steady. "Ava told me yesterday the catalyst model's holding up under a third round of stress testing. It's not solved yet. But it's the first time in eleven years anyone's gotten this close to something that might actually work. That's good, Xavier. That's real."

"That's good," Xavier agreed, faintly. "I'm glad I got to be here for that. Even just the beginning of it."

"Ar found an old poem in the archive last week," William offered, when Xavier's silence stretched a moment. "Wrote it down for me because he thought I'd like it. I don't remember it word for word, but the gist was something about how a garden doesn't stop being worth tending just because the gardener won't live to see every season of it. He said people used to carve lines like that onto the walls of places like this facility, back when this whole civilization still built places meant to outlast the people who built them."

"That's a good one," Xavier said, eyes still closed, something almost peaceful settling into his face. "I like that. Tell Ar I liked that."

"I will."

"William's got a teaching offer," Darrell said, when the silence stretched a moment too long, and he felt William's sharp glance land on him, surprised he'd mentioned it. "Ar told him a few weeks back. Formal position, training the next generation of engineers across three settlements. He hasn't said yes yet, but I think he's going to."

Xavier's eyes opened, finding William's face with visible effort. "You should say yes," he said, quiet but certain. "You'd be good at it. You were always good at explaining things without making people feel small for not already knowing them. I remember on Hope , ninety-something days, you taught me how the whole life support system worked, start to finish, just because I asked once and you didn't want me walking around not understanding my own ship. Nobody asked you to do that. You just did."

William's jaw worked, and he didn't trust himself to answer right away, and Xavier, patient even now, didn't push him to.

"What about you," Xavier said, eventually, turning his gaze to Darrell. "Anything good on your end, Captain?"

Darrell managed something that wasn't quite a smile. "I've been thinking about the tape. The one I've been carrying since launch. I think I finally understand what I want to do with it."

"Yeah?"

"I want William to have it," Darrell said, and felt the words land somewhere heavy and true in his own chest even as he said them, a decision he understood, in that moment, he'd actually been circling for weeks without letting himself name it plainly. "Not now. Not today. But eventually — when the time actually comes, when I have to say goodbye to him for real. I think he should have something of home to keep. Something that isn't just memory. Something he can actually hold."

William made a sound that wasn't quite composed, and looked away, out toward the strange horizon, and didn't say anything for a long moment.

"That's a good thing," Xavier said, softly. "That's a real good thing, Darrell."

They sat together a while longer, the four of them, not needing to fill every silence with words, watching the light shift slowly across a sky none of them had ever fully learned to read, and Darrell understood, sitting there, that this was probably the last ordinary afternoon the four of them would ever share together, and that Xavier, characteristically, had chosen to spend it exactly like this — quiet, honest, surrounded by the people who'd carried him this far, asking for nothing except a little bit of good news to hold onto.

The end came two nights later, gently, in the medical facility's soft, patient light, with all three of them present, none of them having left his side once the technicians' careful faces told them, without needing to say it plainly, that the time for waiting was running out.

Xavier drifted in and out through the final hours, lucid in fragments, confused in others, and Darrell held his hand through all of it, steady, present, the same way he'd held it once before, briefly, in the dark of Hope 's observation module, ninety-three days into a mission neither of them had known was about to become this.

"Priya," Xavier murmured, at one point, eyes closed, and Darrell understood he wasn't fully present anymore, was somewhere else entirely, some private place none of them could follow him to. "I named her, didn't I. Tell her I named her."

"You did," Rachel said, gently, though Darrell understood she meant it as comfort rather than correction, understood that whatever Xavier was experiencing in that moment existed somewhere outside the careful facts they'd all learned together in the archive. "Maya knew. She always knew you loved her, even from so far away."

"Good," Xavier breathed. "That's good."

Near the end, he came back to himself more fully, his eyes opening, finding each of their faces in turn with an effort that visibly cost him everything he had left.

"I'm not scared," he said, and his voice, though thin, carried a clarity that made Darrell's own composure crack for the first time since they'd arrived. "I thought I would be. I've been scared of this for weeks. But right now, I'm not. I think — " He paused, gathering the strength for the rest of it. "I think it's because I know. Whatever happens after this, I know. Maya. Seventy-four years. A whole life, and some of it, some small part of it, was mine, even though I never got to see any of it. I don't need anything else. I got the thing I was most afraid I'd never have."

Darrell felt something break loose in his own chest, a grief he'd been holding at careful arm's length for weeks finally arriving all at once, and he gripped Xavier's hand tighter, unable to speak, unwilling to let the silence be anything other than complete attention.

"Xavier," William said, his voice breaking entirely.

"Don't," Xavier said, gently, though his eyes had found William's with something soft and certain. "Don't be sad for me the way you're being sad for me right now. Be sad later, if you need to. Right now I need you to hear this instead — you found something here worth staying for. Don't let losing me talk you out of it. Don't let grief make you smaller than you're allowed to be."

William nodded, unable to speak, and Xavier's gaze moved to Rachel.

"Finish the model," he said. "Whatever it takes. I want to know, wherever I end up, that the sun got saved because of something you helped build."

"I will," Rachel promised, her voice wrecked. "I promise you, Xavier."

His eyes found Darrell last, and something in his face softened further, the last of whatever effort he'd been spending to stay present finally beginning to ease.

"Go home," he said, quiet, certain. "Find out how the sentence ends. You deserve that much, Darrell. You've earned it, carrying all of us this far."

"I will," Darrell said, and felt his own voice break completely, finally, after weeks of holding himself together for the sake of everyone else. "I promise."

"Good." Xavier's eyes drifted closed, his hand going looser in Darrell's grip, though not yet gone, not yet fully. "Tell Maya — if you ever find a way — tell her the wanting to look, that's mine too. I want her to know I never stopped either. Same as her grandmother, I bet. Same as all of us, probably, in the end."

He didn't say anything else after that. His breathing slowed, gradually, gently, over the better part of an hour, three people holding onto him and each other in a silence that had nothing left in it to fill with words, and sometime in the deepest, quietest part of the night, four million years and one impossible distance from the town where he'd been born, Xavier Freshwillow simply stopped.

Darrell didn't know, afterward, exactly when the moment had actually happened — there was no dramatic last breath, no cinematic final word, just a gradual, gentle absence settling into a room that had, moments before, still held all of him. He sat there a long while after, still holding a hand that had gone quiet and still, unwilling to be the first to let go.

Rachel was crying without trying to hide it, her head bowed against the edge of the bed, and William stood very still by the window, staring out at a sky that continued, indifferent and beautiful, exactly as it had every night since they'd arrived, holding no acknowledgment at all of what had just been lost beneath it.

"He wasn't scared," Rachel said, finally, her voice thick. "At the end. He said he wasn't scared."

"I believe him," Darrell said, and found, somewhere underneath his own grief, that he did — that whatever peace Xavier had found in his final hours had been real, earned, the specific hard-won peace of a man who had gone looking for an answer and had, against every reasonable odds a person could calculate, actually found one.

They stayed with him a long while after, none of them ready to leave, none of them entirely sure what came next — the practical machinery of grief, the questions of how this world handled its dead, all of it waiting somewhere beyond the door, patient, unavoidable, but not yet, not this hour, not while the three of them still needed simply to sit with what they'd lost.

Ar found them there sometime before dawn, quiet, respectful, offering nothing except his presence and the specific, wordless understanding of someone who had spent a career sitting with fragments of grief and had never, until tonight, watched one happen in real time.

"I'm sorry," he said, finally, softly. "I don't have better words than that. I wish I did."

"Those are the right words," Darrell said, and found, standing there in the grey hour before morning, that his own resolve — already hardening for weeks under the weight of everything the archive had shown him, everything Waterlake had cost him — had settled now into something final, something unshakeable.

He was going back. Whatever it took, whatever the Silex Sxar demanded of him, he was going to stand in the place where Mara's sentence had cut off, and finish grieving her properly, the way Xavier had finally, at the very end, finished grieving the not-knowing that had haunted him from the moment a message had cut off mid-word, four million years and one lifetime ago.

He looked at Rachel, red-eyed and resolved beside him, and understood that her own choice had hardened too, somewhere in the long hours of this night — not toward leaving, he suspected, but toward finishing what she and Ava had started, whatever it eventually cost her to stay behind and see it through.

And he looked at William, still standing at the window, silent, grieving, and understood that whatever this loss had done to any of them, it had only deepened the shape of the choice he'd already made — a man who understood, now more than ever, exactly how precious and how fragile the thing he'd found here actually was, and exactly how much he intended to hold onto it, for as long as he possibly could.

Xavier was gone. But he'd left them, in his final hours, with something none of them intended to waste — a clarity, hard-won and irreversible, about exactly what each of them owed to whatever time they had left.

Darrell held onto that, walking out into the pale, unfamiliar dawn, and let it carry him one more day forward, toward whatever came next.