Ficlet!
Everyone remembers the first, and some weathered through time or trouble, remember the last. But John remembers all of them. He remembers because he keeps a list tucked into the back pages of War and Peace. It is in itself, unremarkable. A small sheet of unlined paper with a soft tear at one edge where it was ripped from the bottom of a half-finished mission report back when paper was still a commodity. It is dog-eared and folded but the writing is neat and clean, numbered and small on both sides.
There is no title or suggestion of what these strange and seemingly coded words denote and would mean little to anyone, though no one but John has seen it, save for a small glimpse by Rodney who merely caught a yellowed corner unphased and uninterested.
John remembers all of them; the good and the bad, the many and the frenzied and the few and so very far between. He remembers because he has to, with an empty stretch of space and thousands of light years between them, and constellations above his head growing more and more familiar every day.
He’s never called anything home until the lost city that became his, but the glow and the hum beneath his fingertips that tell him he belongs, is shadow and ice compared to Cam’s skin beneath his.
