‘Verse: Blackguards and Plaster Saints
Length/Rating: 273 words, PG, Gen
Pairings/Warnings: None
Summary: There are only two people left in Elm Creek who remember when it was simply The Ship, without qualifiers or descriptions required.

There are only two people left in Elm Creek who remember when it was simply The Ship, without qualifiers or descriptions required. Thirty years into the Hundred Years war and now it was ‘our ships’ and ‘their ships’ and ‘seeder ships’ and ‘warships’. The first ship was only a single note in a much larger song… at least to everyone but Sara and Jackson.

Jackson had taken to staying inside, with the broadcasts turned off, the music turned up, and all of the blinds screwed shut against the sky. He played old television shows, and radio broadcasts, cocooned in echoes seventy years gone. Mementos of a world that hadn’t learned to fear the stars.

Sara visited him sometimes, just to soak in that long-forgotten childhood, but she never stayed long.

She’d been four when the Ship had arrived, just old enough to process the fact that something had gone terribly wrong, but not enough to understand why. She grew up in a world preparing for war, with silhouettes of the shipyards carving out gaps in the stars, and the decimation of the Lost Generation ahead of her.

At forty-nine the first of the ‘their’ ships had arrived, five years into the hundred year window of war. They were sparse in the beginning, the battles that rained fiery debris that might have been Us and might have been Them. Thirty years in, the night had turned into a constant reminder of the children and grandchildren fighting and dying above them.

At seventy-one, she was too old to fight, but too young to give up, so Sara sat on her porch and cheered them on.