Like Home

A peaceful quiet had settled over the valley as blue and gold hues of dusk tinted the surrounding hills. Thumbs tucked into the the pockets of her leather riding pants, Jenny stood in her shop, surrounded by the broken and burned remains of her hoverbike. A year of designing in her free time, and a year of building, and now….

“May I be of service?”

Jenny looked up, the memory of fire, and screams, and her body broken in the dirt vanishing with several blinks of her long lashes. “Naw, thanks though, Max.”

The handsomely modeled human free-bot shop assistant pulled off his flashy new cap as he gave the parts on the floor a concerned, assessing look. “The parts present only amount to forty-seven percent of your former vehicle, and I determine it’s functioning capacity to reach no more than thirteen percent. How do you wish to proceed?”

Jenny’s features fell with a severe frown, her hands slowly balling into fists.

“You are unhappy?”

She’d loved this bike. More than any of the others. The chassis had been the same as the first bike her and her mother had given her. She was happy then. Everything about life then had been happy. They had a home. One made from real wood on a moon that hadn’t yet been touched by the Dominion. Her and her mother would ride for hours, and get wonderfully lost – Mother had said that getting lost wasn’t a bad thing. It was an opportunity for adventures. A way of finding a new path to somewhere better you never knew you wanted to get to.

“Miss Jenny?”

Jenny turned in the half circle. The handles were still in tact. They were the same from three years ago – four years ago? She remembered stumbling into the bar in Malgrave, the handles of her bike that sat burning on the ridge a short distance away still in her hands. Covered with soot and sweat there was something in Guy Fantastic’s smile when he traded her his pen for the handle as the sound of marauder ships could be heard in the distance. She’d signed that contract without hesitation. She’d been handed everything, a family, a purpose, a vehicle to realize her ambitions. A surge of warm emotion swelled her chest, and for a moment she’d wondered if she’d made him proud.

A flash of white caught her attention. Jenny accepted the kerchief Max silently offered to her.

She turned full circle again, her frown turning into a bittersweet smile. Had it really been eight months since that first ride in Algoroc? So many had followed, and all of them had been equally wonderful. His warm body pressed against her back, hands sliding along her thighs and around her waist as the world flew by them in rich hues of rust, and loftite, and pine. So far from all the worry. So far from everywhere.

“When we were there, I didn’t miss being back on Nexus – I didn’t even miss Cassus, really. I just… realized that being near you felt more like home than anything else.”

Jenny’s lips tugged up in a small, soft smirk. As Max stood waiting patiently in perplexed silence, she stooped to pick up the leather bike seat, the handles, and a shard of Star Silver to feed her pin-dragon that had crawled down to curl around her fingers. “Thanks, Max. I’m good. You can scrap the rest. I’ll get the grinder outta storage till we can make sumthin’ twice as bad-ass.”