CHAPTER TWO.
the martian and the pilot.IT WAS SAFE TO SAY THAT'S DEFINITELY not how Mars expected the school day to end. An insane announcement that insinuates there might be a way she could personally search for her dad was one thing, but actually getting caught for something she had been so sure would work was another. Being expelled for said thing was surely not on her to-do list, either, but, well, it happened.
She managed to keep KP's name out of it, though. She'd be damned if she was going to actually be the direct reason he lost his chance at his dreams, so she lied and said that she was going in there to change her own grades. She praised herself for covering her tracks with the search history. If only she had made it out that door, she and KP would be going back and forth for hours on what that announcement had really been about. Instead, though, she had come home with the overlooming inevitability that she would have to talk to her mom.
Standing at her own front door felt unfamiliar, a feeling she didn't think anyone else experienced. She'd looked at this door almost every day for seventeen years, yet it never felt more strange to her than now. Mars stared down at the welcome mat underneath her feet and grimaced. Closing her eyes, she exhaled and reached out to take hold of the doorknob routinely. She opened the door and stepped inside, feeling her heart sink a bit. She wasn't sure why she was expecting it to look any different than it had for the past three years, why she wasn't expecting it to be dark inside, like it had been when she left it this morning. A single light could be seen through the crack of her mother's bedroom door. Other than that, there was little notion that anyone was home, or that anyone had been home within a month at that. Dust collected in the air from the empty shelves as Mars ran her fingers across them, and both the living room and the kitchen looked abandoned as she passed them. It was practically void of life, void of the perfect little family that once inhabited it. It was empty, emotionally.
She didn't bother flipping any switches on; she'd gotten quite used to the darkness after a while. She headed down the hall to her room, which was unfortunately right across from her parents'. Her mom's. Mars kicked her shoes off at the heels and closed the door behind her, moving to stand in the middle of her room. It was brighter there, since the window was open, the curtains pulled back to let in the bluish sunlight. In all honesty, she felt like laying down right there and just pretending like she didn't exist. At least not today.
She couldn't, though, much to her displeasure, because she needed to talk to KP like they said they would during. She glanced over at the desk and laptop in the corner of her room, thinking she could just send him a quick message, but she had a different idea suddenly pop up in her head. Mars moved the opposite way, towards her bed, sitting on the edge and opening her nightstand to find a few pieces of scrap paper and useless doodles covering her walkie talkie.
Holding the junky little box in her hand, she couldn't help but grin at the dumb little drawings all over it, and KP's initials on the back because he insisted he had to put proof that it was his invention on it. He'd given it to her nearly six years ago after they played a game of spies. He wouldn't let the idea go, persisting that spies had to have a form of secret communication. At one point they even attempted to create their own language to keep "outsiders" from listening in. Her fingers subconsciously picked at the fraying duct tape that was holding the walkie together, pretty well too, considering the abuse it had endured during many of their adventures.
She lifted it to her face and held down the button, staying silent for a moment. She wasn't even really sure what to say to him. Hey, KP, I got suspended for doing that thing you tried to tell me NOT to do? Yeah, she didn't need to hear a lecture about it. She also didn't want to bring up the prophecy thing right away, she hated knowing how much she talked about her dad to him. For nearly the entirety of the first year he went missing, she would come up with ridiculous ideas on how they could go about searching for him. She refused to be a burden like that, to anyone.

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Mars Argo & the Silver Wolf [original]
Science FictionWhat remains of the human race has migrated to the planet Ceren of the Andromeda Galaxy following a nuclear war that eradicated all inhabitable places on Earth, living amongst twelve other species of aliens. Several decades into humans - adapted lat...