In principio: Smiling Stars

Posted on Tue Jun 23rd, 2026 @ 3:29pm by Master Chief Petty Officer Julian Trent

1,717 words; about a 9 minute read

Mission: Prologue
Location: York, England, Earth
Timeline: 2350

York, England, Earth, 2350

The office had a blue chair, a yellow chair and a rug patterned with small, cheerful stars, which Julian thought was stupid because stars were not cheerful. Stars were burning things at impossible distances, and painting them with smiling faces did not make them friendly. He sat in the blue chair because the counsellor had offered him the yellow one first, and because he had already decided he was not going to make this easy for her. His knuckles hurt where someone had cleaned them before bringing him in, not roughly enough to complain about and not gently enough to be comforting, which somehow made it worse. The skin across two of them had split, and there was a bruise rising along the side of his hand where he had caught bone instead of soft flesh. His lip was swollen too, though that had come later, when the other boy had managed to get one good hit in before one of the adults hauled Julian off him. They had tried to use the dermal regenerator on him but stubbornly he had pushed them away, wriggled so much that they couldn’t use it without restraining him. So he had been let go, with his achy knuckles and his throbbing lip.

The counsellor sat opposite with a PADD in her lap and the kind of expression adults used when they wanted you to know they were not angry, merely disappointed in a way that was apparently meant to be useful. Julian hated that look more than shouting. Shouting was something he could blur out, or guard against. Disappointment made something twist inside of him, because there was nothing to do except to sit and wait for her words.

When she finally said his name, calm enough to make his teeth ache, and asked if he could tell her what happened, he looked down at the stars on the rug instead. One of them had a little wink painted onto it. He wondered who had decided children would find that reassuring. “He said something,” he said, keeping his voice flat even as his fingers curled carefully against his bare knees. Summer season meant shorts. Or skirts. Whichever you preferred. They looked scabbed and knobbly to him and he eased his grip a little, not looking at her.

“I know he said something,” the counsellor replied, and Julian hated that she did not sound annoyed. “I am asking what he said.” She shifted slightly in her chair, not much, just enough for the fabric to whisper under her, and Julian watched the movement without lifting his head. He was good at that, sneaking little looks.

He kept silent as long as he could, until it felt like it was pushing down on him, his throat, his neck. Then he grimaced, biting his lip before he looked at her, bright blue eyes narrowed. “Doesn’t matter,” he said, defiantly.

“It mattered enough for you to hit him,” she said, eyes on the boy in front of her with the uneven haircut, the uneven teeth, the blood behind his left ear.

“I didn’t hit him,” Julian said before he lifted his head. He saw her hesitate. He honed in, a smile making his lip hurt more. “Hitting happens once. I bloody pummelled that wanker.” The silence stretched and he saw her fingers move on the PADD. He let it, hearing his own breathing. And then, reluctantly, it came. “He was askin’ for it.”

“That’s not an answer…or a reason,” she said, raising an eyebrow. She put the PADD to the side, leaning a little closer. “And I am quite certain he didn’t ask for any of this.”

“He did,” he said, insisting, because from his point of view he did. “He was askin’ for it, needling and needling, like…like a wasps’ nest…buzzing and buzzing around you until all you can do is swat ‘em away…” His teeth found the swollen lip, pressing down, pain blossoming. It eased the breathing, prevented that hitch.

He could still hear the other boy’s voice in his head, high with the pleasure of finding a weak place. Not even especially clever. That was the insult of it. It had not been witty, or original, or worth remembering. It had just been…there. Rat, no one wants you anyway.

The words had gone through him before he had decided what to do with them. One moment he had been standing in the recreation room with a half-built model shuttle in his hand, pretending he was not listening, pretending it did not matter that the other boy had been needling at him for half the afternoon, and the next the shuttle was on the floor and Julian was across the room with both hands full of someone else’s shirt. He remembered the boy’s face changing, because they always did. Surprise, at the speed, then fear as the words suddenly had consequences.

And Julian had bloody loved that, seeing the fear in the eyes of the boy who had been taunting him all day, who pushed Kai down the stairs and called her clumsy, who nicked Laurie’s teddy bear and dismembered it, nailing its parts to the back wall.

How does it feel, you bastard, to face the consequences of your actions? The smug thought lasted a second before it drowned in red. He didn’t remember much. Just the feeling of his fists against the other boy, the hotness of blood…their blood.

Someone had shouted his name. Shouted for an adult, but it had sounded like it was under water. But eventually something, someone, grabbed the back of his neck and pulled him off. Julian was breathing hard with it, looking down at the other boy…feeling sick and victorious and ashamed all at once, which was too many things to hold in one body, so he had picked the easiest one and worn it like armour. He had grinned through blood on his lip and said something sharp enough to make one of the adults go very still, and that was how he had ended up here, in the stupid blue chair, with his knuckles cleaned and his name likely being added to another file by someone who would go home at the end of their shift.

The counsellor said his name again, and Julian blinked the office back into place by pieces. Blue chair. Yellow chair. Smiling stars. His hands curled into fists on his knees. “He was wrong,” he said, quieter than he meant to, and when the counsellor softened at that, not pity exactly but close enough to make him hate it, he looked down at his split knuckles and forced his fingers open one by one. The skin pulled. It hurt, which helped. Pain was simple. Pain did not ask follow-up questions. When she asked what the other boy had been wrong about, Julian swallowed around the pressure in his throat and shook his head once. “He was just wrong.”

“Julian,” she said, and there was something in the way she said it that made him want to kick the blue chair over just to change the shape of the room.

He stilled and looked at her, taking a slow breath, the childish stubbornness there. “I said he was wrong.” He saw her hesitate and then write something down. He swallowed back the bile.

“You hurt him quite badly, Julian. There are consequences,” she said, her voice soft, firm but gentle, the tone trained. “You’ll be seeing a lot more of me. And you’ll be…restricted. We have to remove you from the dormitory, put you in one of the…” she paused and he knew what she meant.

The rooms where the troubled ones went, who couldn’t be trusted, with the bioreaders on the doors, too cramped to do anything, no one to interact with. He kept himself still. “Solo. I know,” he said, and his voice felt rougher than it had any right to be.

“And your privileges will be restricted. This is going on your file…” she said the last quietly. The file.

The file that people could look at if they wanted to adopt you. But he was too old to be considered anyway, he was sure of it. No longer cute, a little too wiry and lean. A little too big in the gob too. Proper bastard when he wanted to be. No one’s angel.

“Julian…You cannot solve every hurt by making someone else hurt more,” she said, and Julian finally looked at her properly. She had kind eyes, which made it worse. He wished she had been angry. He wished she had been stupid. He wished she had given him something easy to dislike. Instead she sat there with her professional softness and her careful voice and her PADD full of tidy explanations for a boy who had just proved, very clearly, that he was more trouble than he was worth.

“I know,” he said, because he did know. He was not stupid. That was the whole problem, really. He knew the other boy had cried. He knew the adults were worried. He knew this would be another mark against him.

The counsellor seemed to hear something in the answer, because her expression shifted by the smallest degree. “Do you?” she asked, and the choice was clear.

It hurt his split lip and came out crooked, but that was fine. Better, maybe. Sold the smile better, the charm, the hint of manipulation he had picked up because kids were survivors…vicious little things keeping themselves safe. He had no illusions, even at that age. What he fed her wasn’t a promise. It was barely a lie. It was…optimism. “Of course,” he said, leaning back in the blue chair as if none of this had reached him. “Next time I’ll use my words.”

She did not smile back, which was a shame because it was a perfectly good answer, and Julian looked down at the stupid stars on the rug while deciding, with cold certainty, that next time he would simply make sure no one saw which words had hurt him.

---

 

RSS Feed