Prose Alchemist

Title: Homestead
Author: Jordanna Morgan
Fandom: Prospect (2018)
Rating/Warnings: Mild PG.
Characters: Ezra and Cee.
Setting: Post-canon.
Summary: Life after the Green.
Disclaimer: They belong to Christopher Caldwell, Zeek Earl, and BRON Studios. I’m just playing with them.
Notes: I’ve a soft spot for this other space western in which Pedro Pascal plays a hardened killer in a helmet who forges an unlikely bond with an orphan. *g* It seems most people who actually know about this overlooked gem have their own imagining of what happens after, so here is my humble headcanon. (I swear, writing it in Ezra-speak made it about twice as long as it might otherwise have been, but it was quite the enjoyable challenge to try to capture!)
Submitted for the prompts of “Reverse” at fan_flashworks, “Home” at smallfandomflsh, and “Teenagers” at genprompt_bingo.



A flock of fat gojobi scattered before Ezra in a flurry of black feathers, angrily clicking their disapproval of his passage through their midst. He paid them no mind as he continued to stride across the gravel of the yard, his eyes fixed on the dome cabin ahead. Not significantly larger than a rock jumper, its prefabricated gray walls nonetheless encompassed something which, until fairly recently, Ezra could not recall having in his life.

A home.

He’d barely survived the wounds of his final foray into the Green, but survive he had; or at least, parts of him had. The marginally better parts, he thought, or hoped anyway. For as cliché as it sounded, being plucked from the jaws of death while you sat waiting to be snuffed out by its final bite-down had a way of changing a man.

And all through his overlong recovery, the little bird who had done the plucking stayed.

He never asked why. Maybe something in him feared that if he made her really think about it, Cee would start to realize just how ludicrous it was that she didn’t fly far from him and never turn back. After years of surrounding himself with associates who were more dangerous tools than men, who he sincerely loathed and who loathed him right back, it was a strange thing to admit he’d found someone he didn’t want to part with; someone he just might be afraid to think of a future without.

For with her, life became something he had never known before.

After a fair bit of option-studying and discussion, most of the bounty fetched by his trophy case had secured this plot of land on Brevarre: a temperate backwater planet where a large agricultural company was invested in cultivating tsuva, a grain wiped out by a blight on its native world. As was the way of business, the company took an unduly large cut just for holding the slip of paper that said they owned the lease; but still, the remainder of a productive farm’s earnings were a satisfactory sum to live on. And more importantly now, it was a peaceful place for a half-grown girl and a damaged man to settle.

The first year had not exactly been productive, as Ezra and Cee learned this new life and gained the different kind of strengths it demanded. Nevertheless, they made it through.

It was their good fortune that many of their fellow tenant farmers were more idyllic dreamers than practical hands, come from softer places with a yen to get far from lives that were too crowded or too sterile for their liking. Ezra and Cee managed to make up the shortcomings in their first harvest by parlaying skills hard-won in the Black and the Green. They did a small but prosperous trade in repairing machines and upgrading their neighbors’ often somewhat-archaic methods. Half the surrounding farms now relied on efficient new irrigation lines Ezra had mapped out and laid.

Of course, he hardly could have done all of that with only one hand.

Ezra had a prosthetic right arm now: a secondhand thing, a little bit battered and not the most finely attuned, but it was sturdy and it served him well. The last earnings of his trophy case had barely covered the cost. He resisted at first, but on this issue, Cee was much more stubborn than he had the will to be. She’d pointed out quite logically that he needed two hands to do anything of the kind of work available to them, and that very salient point was hard to argue with. It took a while getting used to after the grafting, but while his new metal hand was not quite as adept as one of flesh, it was a fair sight stronger—which he discovered came in quite handy on a homestead.

He didn’t care to think on what he would have done with a hand like that, if he’d had it back in the Green. The hand he was born with—the hand that killed Cee’s father and many others—had done havoc enough. It was sometimes tempting to imagine his late-blooming guilt balled up in the palm of that hand, simply lopped off and discarded with the festering appendage that committed the deed… but that was too easy, too tidy a resolution.

They never spoke of Damon anymore. It was almost as if Cee had left her whole life with him back there, rotting with his body in the Green.

Maybe that was easy to do when he’d never given her a life in the first place.

Her father’s name and memory were not all that went unspoken. Here on Brevarre, Ezra never bothered to disabuse the locals of the notion that Cee was his own daughter… and much to his amazement, neither did she.

It was a simple expedient for her own benefit, after all. If folk believed she was of his blood, that only reinforced the impression that she was his to protect. That if anyone ever tried to do her any hurt, they would have one very angry, very dangerous man to contend with.

That much was nothing less than the truth.

Not that Ezra was unduly worried on that score. They were overall a polite and easygoing people, these Brevarri tenant farmers. Around here, he’d been given no cause for the thought that he might need to raise a thrower against anything more than an occasional wandering woodland beast.

He still wasn’t quite used to feeling like his life was not in danger at every moment.

The sun was sinking lower in the sky. As he approached the cabin, he saw that its front door was open, and heard soft music issuing from within.

Cee had all the music she could want here. Brevarre might have lacked in various other luxuries, but its orbital alignment was such that the interstellar signal reception was excellent. She spent her days wrapped in the far-flung songs crackling through the comm panel’s speaker as she went about her chores.

There was an easy reassurance about the scene that made Ezra feel more relaxed. Strolling up to the doorway, he rolled the tension out of his shoulders—the tightness around his prosthetic port still made itself felt on even the best days—and breathed in the scent of savory cooking food. Having something and someone to come home to still felt like a fresh wonder every time.

Had he chosen to, Ezra could have had better than the toxic struggle of the Green years ago. Funds stashed carefully out of reach of treacherous allies could have set him up in another trade, another life. Trouble was that it had never been enough for the life he thought he wanted: a soft life and easy, with everything of the finest. That desire kept him coming back for each one more time, each quest for a score big enough to overrule avarice. Along the way, taking gambles that lost more than they won, making deals with ever more cunning and brutal devils, his ambitions—and too much more than that, down in the core of him—had been twisted into something he’d never intended. By the time he came to any real consciousness of that, of where he’d come to from where he’d been… well, his hands were bloodied and the Green was in him deep, like the rot of its dust in a wound.

Only half-death and a girl’s merciful hand had been able to drag him out. To lead him to the kind of better he’d never thought was good enough, but now seemed a paradise beyond the hell of a poisoned moon.

Ezra had work now that was hard, but steady. He had sun and rain for partners far more gentle than all the violent, scheming men he’d never dared close his eyes to. There was no chance of wealth in this bargain with the soil, but there was the opportunity to meet his needs by way of a very different green, nurturing life rather than killing it—and likely being killed himself one day. Mere safety was a blessed kind of restful he’d long forgotten, and now it felt more than worth his present labors in itself.

The glare of a late-afternoon sun was still in Ezra’s eyes as he reached the cabin’s threshold, casting the common room in a hazy brown darkness. As his vision adjusted, he made out the fine gold of Cee sitting at the table, humming along to her latest favorite song while she mended what looked to be one of his shirts.

Cee had ample work of her own. She helped with the crops at planting and harvest when the work was heaviest. She minded the household chores, the cooking and cleaning and whatever repairs she could carry out herself. She kept the vegetable garden that increasingly provided for their sustenance. She tended the livestock—the feathered but flightless gojobi flock, the pair of big plodding oloo, the half-dozen smaller hoofed kashenn—that gave them eggs and milk and meat.

That last responsibility confirmed Ezra’s suspicion that caring for animals suited the girl a damn sight better than butchering them.

When he stepped inside and his shadow fell across the table, she turned to smile at him. They greeted each other then, with a quiet, laconic affection that he didn’t think would feel any different if she really had been born to him.

Hey.

Evenin’, Birdie.

For a few minutes they talked about their day: the work they had gotten done, things they noticed were needed around the cabin and the property, the random happenings of inbetween moments. From there the slow winding-down of evening commenced, a routine now familiar and comfortable. Ezra went to wash away the sweat of his labors, scrubbing dirt from around his port with care as he listened absently to the shower-muffled music from the common room. Meanwhile, Cee finished preparing supper in the tiny kitchen, and had their meal laid out steaming on the table by the time he returned.

A stew made of gojobi meat, with root vegetables some kindly locals had taught them to forage in the woods adjacent to their fields. Thick brown tsuva bread, and greens from Cee’s own garden. There was not one thing here that was packaged, processed, concentrated, dehydrated or rehydrated; every morsel had been gathered fresh by their own hands.

Ezra had a full and satisfied belly, here on Brevarre.

For the life of him, he could not recall what he’d once thought would be inadequate about such a simple but intense pleasure.

He ate slowly, savoring the meal as if its vivid tastes and varied textures were new to him all over again. Cee cleaned her plate more quickly, fueled in part by a youthful appetite—and more so by eagerness to show off her progress at recreating the song he’d heard when he first walked in.

Cee had a Valkreean songbird: a small bird-shaped instrument in the manner of an ocarina, made of fired and glazed local clay, a rich deep blue with white flowers dotting its back. It was a gift from Ezra, for when it caught his eye in the market stall of the artisan who sculpted it, how could he resist commemorating both Cee’s love of music and his own pet name for her? Now it was one of her most cherished possessions, and she was thrilled by the thought of being able to join in the music-making at the next harvest festival in the village.

In the meantime, if its sounds as she learned it were to falter now and then into a flat, wincing whistle rather than a proper note, Ezra didn’t mind.

Later on, after the exquisite supper and Cee’s charmingly enthusiastic performance, the two of them could enjoy a few hours of evening downtime. This was unrivaled as Ezra’s favorite part of the day.

Ezra had a big deep chair to relax in. It was practically more nest than seat, a bowl-shaped wicker frame padded with a single round cushion. Secondhand like most everything else, it had been claimed from a neighbor’s junk pile by Cee and carefully repaired: its broken ribs replaced, its cushion thickly restuffed with gojobi feathers. Ezra didn’t know what exactly had possessed her to take up the project—did he really look so tired as to need such support at the end of the day?—but he wholeheartedly appreciated both the effort and the result, for it was indeed the most comfortable thing he had ever settled in.

And so, sprawled languidly in his chair with a mug of spicy wild-herb tea, he closed his eyes and listened while Cee read to him.

Cee had books now.

There were schoolbooks for after she finished her work. With these Ezra insisted on sparing no expense, obtaining not only textbooks on science and engineering and agriculture that would cultivate skills relevant to her field, but volumes about literature and art that would at least touch on the studies of her fictional friends in their conservatory. From the teary-eyed joy in Cee’s eyes as she received them, to the thoughtful frowns of diligence on her face as she worked through them, Ezra had found not a moment’s cause to regret the investment.

Then too, for the peaceful settle-down hours before bedtime, Cee had a small but growing collection of fiction novels. Some she bought with hoarded savings from her personal allowance—for any little bit left over after their expenses was subject to the even split they had agreed upon from the start. Others were castoffs from neighbors, either gifted or traded for small repairs and various useful bits of flotsam she found and restored. …And of course, there was her beloved Streamer Girl. The glossy new copy was another gift from Ezra; indeed, the first he’d given her, after he recovered from his Green-wounds well enough to go shopping without her following anxiously at his shoulder.

He read it before presenting it to her, of course. While hardly the paragon of literary craft it seemed to adolescent eyes, it was an invaluable keyhole into the heart of a lonely Floater girl who dreamed of lives beyond her reach. They’d spent many a pleasant hour discussing the book’s characters and themes in minute detail.

Without the need to transcribe memories of a lost book any longer, Cee had even begun writing some original works. Her first authorial goal was to win the publisher’s prize in some digital magazine that was popular with teenagers. At first she was deeply reluctant and shy in reading her stories to Ezra, but upon being met with his very genuine and encouraging interest, it hadn’t taken her long to open up eagerly about the worlds in her head. Surprisingly, they were not tales of such cultured young academics as she’d idolized, but the tense adventures of very different characters out in the Black.

He had to chide himself for feeling a faint twinge of pride when he listened to her. Not a bit of Cee’s talent and creativity owed anything to him… nor to Damon, for that matter. Her father’s only contribution to her character had been the neglect of a fertile ground that allowed wildflowers to flourish; for her imagination was the kind that only bloomed in isolation, making friends in the quiet corners of all the what-ifs her life was not.

Yet eventually, as Ezra listened to her stories, a startling recognition had struck him. Familiar turns of convoluted phrase, actions that echoed experiences of his own: engaged in by her characters not for his wrong reasons, but always for beautifully right ones.

At some point during his recovery, he’d stopped telling her long-winded yarns about his past exploits, because he no longer wanted to remind her—and perhaps even more so himself—of what he’d been. …He started again after he discovered what she made of those tales. If she had the kindness to pick through those ugly fragments for something of value, to weave them into a more meaningful if rather disingenuous epitaph for his late unlamented former self, he was not inclined to deny her.

It was kind of nice, thinking those rose-colored bits of him would stay with his little bird.

Ezra had permanent lung damage from the dust infection. He could feel it oftentimes, a quiet little hitch in his chest when he breathed too deep or too fast. It had likely shaved a handful of years off his life, and might fate him someday to a kind of death more messy than the swift violence of the Green: drowning slow in his own fluids in his declining years, when mitigating medicine and an obstinate constitution were no longer able to preserve his health. A fitting enough sentence, he reckoned, for the man he had been… even if he surprisingly did not seem to be quite that man anymore.

He hadn’t told Cee about this. Far as he was concerned, she wasn’t going to know for as long as he could help it.

…Barring, of course, the very distinct possibility that whip-smart girl had already figured it out, and was only keeping silent on the subject for his sake.

She was too observant. She wouldn’t have failed to note the filter mask Ezra wore in the field, protecting his lungs in times of exertion from even the fairly innocuous soil particulates and pollen of this mild planet. She had watched her father spiral down in a haze of other pills for too long not to pay attention to the prescription bottle Ezra kept tucked away.

Maybe it really was just as well.

Still and all, it was not a thing to dwell on now. If he had a chance at a decent number of good years to come, then he owed them to the girl who was the reason why. In spending them on making her life as fine as he could, perhaps he would one day deserve the grace she’d already given him: the patience, the loyalty, the care.

And it didn’t hurt that he just plain liked what he was getting in the bargain for himself.

When Ezra was thoroughly lulled and drowsy with the soft rhythms of Cee’s voice, that was the time of night when she closed her book. She plucked up his near-empty tea mug and carried it off to the kitchen to wash it, wordlessly prompting him to roust his body up from the chair and make ready for bed.

As the cabin featured only one small bedroom, they had compromised by partitioning the space with blanket curtains. In the beginning they’d discussed expanding their quarters when they could afford it, buying the ready-made kits to build a new room or two onto the dome. However, they never took any serious steps to go through with the idea, and it had gradually ceased to be brought up again.

Night was a little too close to the Black, Ezra supposed, for either one of them to want to lose the unspoken comfort of another warm breathing body close by.

A few minutes after he laid down in the dark, he heard Cee shuffling about on the other side of the room. Presently there was a click, and a low light was cast against the curtain.

Cee had a little makeshift desk beside her bunk, and a salvaged lamp with a solar battery she rigged herself. After some admonishment early on that she needed plenty of rest too, Ezra had settled for a mutual agreement that she could sit up and write for the hour or so that the lamp’s charge lasted. He wasn’t sure he’d ever had the kind of energy she did, but he was glad her way of burning it off was so much more healthy than the ill-advised nocturnal amusements of his youth.

Besides, he really didn’t mind the soft amber glow, or the faint scratching of pen on paper.

Most folk would regard the loss of a ship, a crew, a chance at wealth, an arm, and very nearly one’s life as a disastrous reversal of fortune. It was certainly so to the parts of Ezra that had been flayed off like rot on his final quest in the Green; but for the healed if not unscarred man that remained, he preferred to see it as a reversal of his very concept of what fortune was.

He’d gone in yet again seeking treasure enough to make the expedition his last, and finally found it: not in the luster of aurelac, but in the golden heart of a girl.

Ezra had good nights of sleep now, drifting off to the sound of that heart flowing onto a page.

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© 2022 Jordanna Morgan