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comets
#1
Late November 2013
Somewhere in Nevada


She was dreaming about walking through a door when her father shook her awake. She hadn't meant to fall asleep but she'd been in the empty backyard of the abandoned house drinking vanilla vodka and reading up until about two hours ago. No notion of where he was or what he was doing. It was harder to keep track of him in these empty houses than it was in the places that belonged to the dwindling list of people he trusted. If he found a place with a basement it was all over. She wouldn't see him for days sometimes.

This happened. She does not remember when it happened. Everything that happened before January is all muddled up by what he did anyway. She thinks this happened in this timeline but how the hell would she know.

"Adelaide," Khaled said.
"What?" his daughter asked as the gray of night replaced the dream.
"Get up."
"Why?"
"I want you to see this. It might not happen again, we don't know if its nucleus will survive post-perihelion--"
"Post-peri... shit. Is this that comet?"

She didn't understand his fascination with this fucking comet but she didn't understand his fascination with a lot of things. Didn't take much to fascinate him. Her father had the attention span of a schoolboy some days and it annoyed the hell out of her when she was trying to concentrate. Certainly annoyed the hell out of her when he woke her from a dead sleep and turned on the lamp on the bedside table to hustle her outside.

Two months from now she would forget these nights ever happened. That he would ever awaken her for a reason other than one of his machines telling him a squad of operatives was about to come within twenty miles of them and they needed to move now and she needed to help him he still couldn't see straight.

"Alright, Jesus, I'm coming."

She had fallen asleep atop the duvet and she didn't remember dragging a blanket over her lower half but there it was as she tried to kick her legs over the side of the bed. She smeared her hand across her face and grabbed the blanket to make a cape around her shoulders. Her father stood in the half-banished darkness taller than she could ever hope to be hair a mess hadn't shaved in however-many days dark against the mustard-yellow and cowpie-brown hue of the room and she groused as she followed him outside. As he hauled open the door and put his arm around her shoulders and the blanket over her shoulders to guide her.

"How old is it?" she asked.
"The comet? I don't know, there's some who think it's the Great Comet of 1680, the first one ever spotted with a telescope, but I reckon it's a coincidence, yeah? A new sungrazing comet come onto our radars doesn't make it the first, you understand."
"Where's the Great Comet been the last three hundred years, then?"
"As of last year it was about two hundred fifty AU from the Sun. Two hundred fifty three, I believe. Last year was 2012, wasn't it?"
"Yeah, Dad. Last year was 2012."

They kept walking out past the patio and the bramble and out into the desert. She looked back to gauge the smallness of the light through the window and her father hadn't taken his arm off her shoulders. She let him keep it there.

"No one had seen it since March of 1681, prior," he went on. "The year of its discovery. It had such a long tail, you could see it during the daytime, even. A German astronomer named Gottfried Kirch has credit for discovering it but the funny thing is there was a Spanish Jesuit priest, Eusebio Kino, who was observing the night sky in Cádiz during a departure delay, he was supposed to be en route to Mexico but the seas were too rough, and he observed it around the same time Kirch did. It wasn't until he arrived in the City of Mexico that he published his Exposición astronómica del cometa, which is one of the earliest treatises written by a European in North America."

They came to a halt some distance from the house and she peered up first at her father's profile and then at the sky.

"That's fascinating," she said as she tried not to yawn.
"Isn't it?" he asked as he dropped to a crouch beside her. Had to let go of her shoulders to take a knee in the sand but he kept one hand between her scapulae like he needed to know by touch where she was. Like he didn't trust the world around them even if he had his ridiculous circa-1989 cellphone-sized device on his belt. "But this isn't the Great Comet. I'm sure of it."
"So why do we care?"
"This is one of the few times in your life you'll be able to watch the outgassing of an icy body without the magnification, darling, to see solar radiation and wind acting on solid matter without outright destroying it, this happens less than once per year. I want you to remember this when they detect water vapor on Ceres."
"What are you talking about?"
"The line between a comet and an asteroid isn't so solid as it was once. Lines serve their purpose when one is traveling but they divide more than they connect when it comes to classification, I really think we ought to do away with--never mind, look!"

She had her arms crossed tight across her chest to hold the blanket shut around her but she did look the western sky blank and black and dead but for the loudest of the stars and nothing came to her eyes for so long she was about to ask her father what he was asking her to look at when she saw the first burst of bright. It shocked into her lungs a breath that came back out as steam.

"Holy shit," she said.

Scientists would detect water vapor on the dwarf planet Ceres on the 22nd of January, 2014. As far as she was concerned the other events of that day being what they were Ceres and water vapor and asteroids and everything else in the universe could go to Hell.

Late November 2014
Somewhere in Colorado


She sat in the kitchen late one night tapping away at her burner phone's keyboard. Reading messages as they came through on Ginger and chewing her thumbnail and not trusting the silence. Not trusting much of anything. Trust was a difficult concept to work into a paradigm. Her handbag sat on the counter at her elbow and screen glowed blue into her eyes and she didn't realize she'd started crying until the saltwater hit her throat.

Big as this house was she never felt alone in it. Maybe in an alternate universe she doesn't think she has to leave it. She will turn twenty years old on the 20th of November. Time doesn't mean anything to her anymore.

She sat in the kitchen for a long time and when the time had passed Alicia gathered her bag and walked out of the house.
Look. I have school. And RP. And all my other time is taken up by sheer, unreasoning panic. I don't have time for Reddit.
-- ixphaelaeon
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