Chapter Text
“Dad, did Papa leave because of me?” Gyrus asked, tugging on his father’s robe.
Iro bent down, the purple cilia on his face twitching sympathetically. “What makes you say that?”
His humanoid face wasn’t as lined as it should have been. But Gyrus didn’t know that, yet. He only knew that his Dad was rarely home lately, and now Papa was gone for good. The days at the creche stretched into weeks, and the workers there were kind to him, but they weren’t his dads.
Gyrus squinted, and grew his own cilia as well to try and impress his father. But from the way Iro recoiled he knew he must have done it wrong. He must have glitched.
That was why. That was why Papa had left. Because Gyrus was a failure. A mistake. That was why Iro was never home anymore, either.
“Shhh, shh, calm down,” Iro said, grabbing his son into a hug as Gyrus started to cry. “Deep breaths. You can control it. Bring it back.”
“I can’t!” Gyrus wailed, and felt more of the glitches sprout from his skin, like shadows cast by a thousand bright lights that no one else could see. But they could see the glitches themselves. Space-black, formless, unnatural. They could see that he was not just different, but broken. Wrong. A freak. His mass shifted, the center stretching out to feed the glitches he couldn’t control, like tentacles but bad, because he wasn’t supposed to have them. Nobody else did.
“Gyrus. Listen to me,” Iro said, his voice shifting from comforting to stern. “You can do this. Focus. Control yourself.”
But Gyrus was still too young, to shut off the part of himself that panicked, that caused the glitches. So he stretched and flailed and glitched and screamed until he finally fell asleep, wrapped in his father’s strong limbs.
In the morning, Iro was gone again, and Gyrus knew in the bones he usually had that it was all his fault.
“Think you can handle it?” Maria asked, hand on her hip. It was still in the pincer-like form she’d been using to adjust the dials on the machine, but the rest of her looked as human as Gyrus did right now.
"Yes,” Gyrus said for the thousandth time. Deep breaths. Stay calm. Don’t give her a reason to take this away from you.
She sighed. “Look, kid. I know it doesn’t sound like a big assignment, when you’ve listened to us all talking trash and bragging for years. But time travel is hard. You’re going into a literal alien culture and trying to -- well, not change it, but preserve it. It’s really, really easy to make mistakes.”
“I’ve done a lot of reading,” Gyrus protested, aware that he was sounding a bit whiny. “I can do this.”
“Humans didn’t always write everything down. In fact, a lot of what they wrote down was outright lies.”
“I know. I read about that.”
Maria laughed at him, and ruffled his hair. He felt it trying to rise up and wrestle with her hand, and did his best to calm it down. This was not the time to lose control over his form, even in the normal way. Be human.
Maybe she didn’t notice. Or maybe she was just being kind. “All right, kid. Best of luck. Catch you on the flipside. Don’t make me come and bail your ass out of trouble.”
Gyrus climbed into the capsule.
He would not remember anything between this moment and the next, when he woke up on Earth, in the wrong space and time for the mission he remembered taking, which had already been completed six cycles ago according to his personal worldline. That information would be deleted, to make room for -- whatever he lost, in biomass or otherwise, when his time capsule exploded over the Tunguska River in Siberia, 1908, and his body frantically reconfigured itself to survive the conflagration and the fall.