Dark Sky World Tour - Part 1

Merry Christmas everyone! I just had to make this a December 25th post; think of it as a Christmas present to y'all.

Okay, fine: I had to write for an hour this morning to get to where I wanted because I'm way behind thanks to having been able to do nothing for the last fortnight, but finally my Christmas break from the day job is here, I've mostly sorted my personal issues from lately out, and I'm glad to get back in the saddle with everything I do here.

So, let's end the mystery surrounding this side project.

Firstly, this is kind of speculative. I'm liking it so far, but whether it ever becomes canon, or forms the basis of any post Gone Day future for this series and these characters, I haven't decided yet. The purpose of this is simply to entertain.

It's also based on something I saw on Netflix and then realised I could neatly plug two of my own characters into my own version of. That and a dream I had that I'm pretty sure was inspired by the finale of Mr Robot from Amazon.

Major Spoilers for my entire series contained herein. Read only after you've gone all the way to Gone Day part 2's ending. (At the time of writing I think that means pretty well all of you can read this.) Even though this might not be canon eventually, it references stuff which definitely is.

Oh yeah, and I even kept who my narrator was this time a secret too, didn't I? Let's hand you over...

* * *

Dark Sky World Tour

(Or 'The Aldrington family guide to having a good trip')

Felix

Our family is a competition. Plain and simple. I’m just still not quite sure what we’re competing for. I sometimes think it’s the answer to ‘Who’s the one you think of when you hear the name Aldrington?’ It’s always going to depend on who you ask. But it’s like we each all want the answer to be us.

Take me: I’m Professor Felix Aldrington, PhD. The guy who proved the math behind how tachyons are capable of travelling faster than light. That’s why I’ve just become tenured at Harvard age 35. Do I win that family prize then? Actually, no. I also host a TV show. That doesn’t put me close either. The family treat me like I am that winner. I do a pretty good job of hiding how I wish they didn’t.

Todd owns a mansion, for God’s sake. He’s earned it. Having a TV show is nothing compared to how much he’s been in the public spotlight most of his adult life. I still think the kind of math I can plug into the kind of physics my brain won’t quit obsessing over isn’t as hard as being a professional sportsman. Nowadays he’s head coach of the Golden State Peregrines, assistant coach to the Olympic team every four years, and a millionaire about two hundred and fifty times over. That’s without the combined income of his almost equally high flying husband – an electric car engineer for half the year and a concert pianist for the other half. Still not sure how he timetables that life. I’m sometimes unconvinced that the money compensates for their time spent apart.

We’re in Todd’s place in San Fran right now for Christmas. December 24th. The entire family are here, because Mom had to have this, and Todd had to offer it before she knew that.

For the first time in months, I’m letting myself drink alcohol - a glass of wine, and I’m glad that my husband and I long since made peace with how I openly think Todd’s husband Colton is still a seriously cool fox. Seriously as in I sometimes think, on my most out there of days, that he might even have been my first crush, the day he once sat me down for a soda in a hospital canteen and said: ‘I promise whatever we talk about right now goes no further than us. Is there someone you like?’

I liked another raccoon who was a guy, but right then, I think there might just have been a hint of ‘There sure is right now.’

At 43 Colton really isn’t showing his age. He’s filling my glass way too full and that’s fine. I fully intend to just get skooshed this evening. Probably with my brother Zack, who’s a specialist in wines and travels the world for the job, and seems to like proving he knows just as much about how to put it away.

Yeah, let’s take him for a minute, while I stand in this kitchen full of baking Christmas cake, hot alcohol and an odd mix of pine tree behind it that’s travelling all the way through from the lounge that’s more like half a ballroom.

Todd had a bit of an explosive coming out. Me, I had my boyfriend at the time Kayden hold my hand and I just said, ‘Mom, Dad, I’m gay’ and they knew it was coming anyway. ‘And yeah I’ve had sex’ was about all I could do to make it vaguely edgy. I got there before Lucy, despite her being 5 years older. She introduced her girlfriend during college years. By the time Zack got to being who he was, Dad had seen it all. That’s when he got:

‘Dad, I hate my name. Why did you call me Zelda anyway? I guess you called it. Half the school treat me like I’m a fucking video game.’

‘Yeah, I told your mother.’ I still imagine Dad put his hands up. ‘Okay, it’s fine. So you wanna change your name? Good idea. What do you wanna be called now?’

He still says Dad being that easy about threw his whole feel for the situation off. ‘Well, thing is Dad…have you talked to Lucy lately?’

‘About what?’

‘What I told her.’

‘If it was secret, she ain’t gonna tell thisdumb old hick, is she?’

‘I don’t think I’m a girl, Dad.’

Apparently Dad didn’t freeze and pull a stupid face. He looked like he might laugh, and then his best effort made him simply say: ‘Holy shit, I actually did half call it.’

‘Half call what?’

It turned out that after Lucy came out, Dad had a phone call with Todd where he rattled off everything his kids so far had metaphorically smacked him on the head with. Alfie got shot and nearly killed by his wife while on the phone to Todd (way to ask for a divorce, bro). Rocco was a serial playboy who’d probably been with half the otters in Phoenix (still wasn’t married. Also a bit of a cheater.). Todd was the one whose coming out started with someone finding his soaked underpants in a barn. Lucy once told Dad she ‘only drew nude female racc’s for the “artistic practice” ’. Dru was the one who flat out disobeyed Dad’s instruction that none of us should ever become truckers (apart from Alfie who was never going to be anything once he sorted his life out). I was the one who thought I was half a dog (for a while I kinda did, then decided I just liked styling and acting like one. Still do.)

Beatrix and Zelda, Dad didn’t really know who they were yet. He asked Todd to bet on which of them grew up to decide they were a guy.

Dad took a while that evening trying to figure out what stunned him more: that this was real or that he’d once joked about it and turned out to be on the money. I think what Todd said during that joke helped: ‘If one of them turns out to be trans then you’ll end up being okay about that too, Dad.’ Whatever won him over, at least he wasn’t who I’d once imagined he’d be if I ever told him how I really felt, when I’d sat crying in the same hospital Colton had that talk with me in.

The past’s a bit of a scattershot, randomly recalled mix, isn’t it?

After Dad did the ‘Have you told Mom yet?’ thing, he was the one (still surprises me, thinking about this) who persuaded Zack to do it right then, with him there. Mom had seen it all, done it all, and was down to the last child still living in the family home of forty years, and someone still found a way to…how does Kaede Hudson put it? ‘Put her on her ass.’ Yeah, that’s it. When it’s serious talk time, except it doesn’t have to start with a wham-line. But I wish I could have been there when Zack delivered that one.

Mom was okay. Right up until a few hours later when she took a drive for shopping that she never bought and secretly called Todd and said ‘Please can you just explain this one to me? Zelda…I mean…I can’t call my daughter Zack. I just can’t. She’s told you, right? I mean he’s told you. Oh for God’s sake, help me here until I can somehow do this, because I don’t know how to go home tonight otherwise.’

Let’s just say Mom and Zack are here at Todd’s for Christmas, years after Zack fully transitioned, and there’s no sign that a conversation like that might ever have taken place. I still sometimes wonder if Todd knows she made that call, seeing as he was out and she got Colton instead. Who worked that same magic he always had with people it seemed couldn’t be reached.

He once let me in on the secret: ‘It’s only because I was that guy once.’

The place is buzzing with everybody’s voices, but the one who stands out is Tay: ‘Hey Dad, there’s a dog at the door.’ It stands out because everyone on the guest list should be accounted for now.

‘Oh, okay hang on. It’s probably Charlie.’ Colton is the official door-opener, just so there isn’t chaos with too many butts moving from seats out of politeness every time it rings.

‘Dad, I know who Charlie is. And he came earlier.’

The guy who nearly married Todd once instead of Colton. Wasn’t that a year. He even brought a present for me, remembering the teenager who once talked to him on Zoom with a broken leg and a good case of the Mom-hates-my-fuckin’-ass blues, and said ‘I feel like I wanna be a dog.’

‘Okay, it’s probably one of the team, hang on, I’ll go see him. What does he look like?’

‘He’s….okay, this is awkward, I don’t know what sort of dog he is. Looks like a labrador but he’s got the wrong…I dunno.’

Oh bloody hell. He seriously hasn’t, has he?

I hear the front door open. ‘Oh hi Colton. Someone told me my husband’s here.’

I’m down the corridor like a child who thinks they’ve heard the real santa come to the door instead of down the chimney. ‘You total, unbelievable…goddamn it, you said you were working! Sorry.’

‘Surprise!’ Kayden puts down the bags even though Colton’s offering to take them, oblivious to it because all he wants to do it hug me like he’s doing. ‘And Fe, I’ve told you, you can say goddamn if you want to without saying sorry.’

My beautiful kelprador, husband for ten years just gone, is here. And how pissed am I trying not to be that he took advantage of how we once promised each other that unless it was a family emergency, the science always had to come first for both of us. Kayden never lost his faith exactly, he just came to find more fulfilment in science and it backed him down from being quite so full on about the Christian side of his life.

‘And I know what you’re gonna say,’ he says, after kissing me on the mouth. ‘I really was working, I promise. The breakthrough was a false alarm. They called me this morning and said don’t come because everyone was so burnt out and disappointed that they’re not going to start again until the new year.’

Kayden’s a neuroscientist and a biomedical engineer. His favourite brag is sometimes: ‘I’m a PhD and not quite an MD, but the doctors still come to me.’ He’s been working in a team developing some big wonder-drug that he can’t tell me much about, except I’m guessing it’s something to do with people like him, because it usually is.

I rub noses with him and lower my voice a little. ‘Did you remember where the keys were?’

‘Yeah, no problem, they’re where they should be.’

He winks when he says that, even though it’s not to tell me the opposite meaning, he’s just always done it. That’s our code for me asking him if he’s remembered to take his meds. The only reason I still do it is because I’m afraid if I don’t he’ll take it to mean something’s wrong with me instead. He’s been stable and sticking to treatment so long it goes back to before we were married and almost got written into our vows, until I told him not to because the best promises are the ones you don’t make in front of other people on your wedding day.

The keys. We called them that because he thought of it first: medication really is a kind of key to his stability in life with bipolar type one. The rest is mostly to do with two things: work and me.

The only time I sometimes worry is when I find him looking at more research into people who supposedly found their condition got better with age, and then he sums it up with ‘It’s like some people can grow out of it.’ Then he says he thinks that might be happening to him. I’m pretty sure it’s not. I’ve half dared tell him, just saying ‘But you’ll still keep the keys, won’t you?’

Every year for the last three I’ve been wondering when he might hit me with suggestion he can change them or maybe try to stop. But thank God, it doesn’t look like it’s going to be this Christmas.

I take him upstairs to our room with his bags and close the door. Lucky, all the rooms in Todd’s house with beds have doubles in, so there’s room for him as I was supposed to be sleeping alone but got one anyway.

‘Zack’s here,’ I said.

‘Yeah?’ Kayden says. ‘Why are you saying that like it’s awkward?’

‘Because it is awkward. Out of all the people he called that night he told Mom and Dad he was a guy, I handled it worst. And he always knew what was happening, and we never talked about it. I was trying to pretend I wasn’t off my face. I shouldn’t have. I should have called him back. But how could I? Now I don’t know whether I should talk about it.’

‘You shouldn’t worry about it, dog.’ Kayden said. ‘You never said anything wrong, did you?’

‘I told him I didn’t understand it,’ I said. ‘I would have if I’d been sober. I asked embarrassing, stupid questions and he took ages trying to explain it to me. He hadn’t expected it. And all because I…when we made that documentary, I never told the whole truth did I?’

Kayden looks amazed for a moment. ‘Oh Fe, come on. We both know how smart Zack is. And he’s seen that show we did. Because that was your way of telling him what really went on that night. There’s nothing to be worried about here. If you really wanna get the awkwardness you feel out the way with him, plan it and talk about it. Just don’t do it because you can’t clear your head of it. Not with this much of your family around. Have I even met them all? I don’t think I’ve ever met Colton’s son before.’

‘You’ll like him. He copies stuff adults say to try and feel grown up.’

‘Now who does that remind me of?’

‘Yeah, but you never really knew me when I did that a lot. And I had a condition. He’s a teenager and he does that the teenager way.’

‘So did Colton get a vixen pregnant before he married your brother?’

That would have been funny, and very Colton, but no. It had happened a couple of years after. No cheating, Todd knew Colton had a close friend who was a good looking vixen, and he saw the signs of it coming for weeks. Maybe even months. He figured he owed it to Colton for how he’d once had a thing with Trick Dixon. And how he basically nearly chucked Colton for Charlie and then went back on his knees when Charlie told him what a mistake he’d made. So my brother and his fox had an open marriage, and a happy accident happened.

The one thing I still wondered might secretly be a bone of contention, deep in the pockets they never let anyone else into: Todd never wanted to find a suitable surrogate mother, make a sperm donation and give Taylor Aldrington-Vincent a step-brother who was a raccoon. One or two conversations that showed signs of going that way; I’d seen them quickly shut down in the past. Every time by Colton, and that look that told his son where the boundaries were.

Nobody did ‘that’s the end of it’ in a look like Colton. Except, of course, for my mother. Now isn’t that an observation.

A voice that’s not Kayden from out in the hallways cuts my thoughts off: ‘Oh God, what’s happened, you asshole? What are you laughing at?’

‘Your mom just dropped the fucking Christmas cake!’

‘Oh God, okay, go in there, shut the door, get it out of your system where she won’t kill you. I’ll go down.’

Dru and Braden, the trucking husband and wife. He always finds things funny that send his mother in law to the ceiling.

So Mom’s in the kitchen. She couldn’t help herself, could she? It’s the same as last time: that memory of her and Colton making the Christmas dinner together during the first year he came for Christmas at the old place in Phoenix, it just makes her go to Todd and Colton’s kitchen before she even knows she’s there and try to help.

Kayden’s looking out the window.

‘Are you trying to look at stars? Good luck around here.’

‘Actually it’s not too bad. Light’s going off early with people heading to bed for Santa.’

He’s right. San Fran is usually the a light pollution city, but tonight it’s cutting anyone interested in astronomy a break.

‘Stars are half the reason I ever asked you to marry me, remember?’

He’s never come out with it quite like that before.

‘You know,’ he says. ‘The night before?’

‘Yeah, I’m not exactly going to forget it,’ I said. ‘And there’s kind of a connection there I guess, but you asked me because we loved each other and you finally stopped worrying I might say no despite that.’

‘It was after you told me that story. The stars were what made you do it, whatever else you think it was.’

‘Kayden, that story was slushy and icky and the stuff of terrible feel-good movies, and it was all based on a dream I don’t know how I even had. I’m glad it didn’t end up on TV when we were dumb enough to do that show.’

He looks at me, and I know what’s coming next. ‘You’d still stay though, wouldn’t you?’

‘Course I would.’

‘That’s why I married you. But I still think about it sometimes, what if I really begged you not to because…’

‘Kayden. Stop. Not again. I’d stay. No matter what. That’s it.’ Did I sound too harsh. Thankfully, it looks like I didn’t.

‘Yeah, you’re right. Not again.’ He kisses me for a long time. He’s not rubbing against me much, but I can feel what’s in his pants anyway. ‘You wanna fuck?’

Kayden only ever really says the word when it’s for foreplay. ‘Yeah, dog. Except one thing. The lock on that door’s broken. I broke it yesterday.’

‘Aw dog, you didn’t!’ He tries it, hoping it will be a wind-up. It’s not. The mechanism went ping when I tried to lock it, and there’s no way of fixing it with every hardware store in San Fran now shut. I never told Todd because he had enough to do with the entire family being here. ‘Okay, let’s fuck anyway?’

‘If you can bear it, let’s wait until later when the house has gone quieter. Dru’s kids are still combing this house trying to find where presents are hidden and Freddy keeps opening this door thinking my room’s his. This house has got an Escher effect about it.’

Kayden’s ears are pricked up. ‘Who’s that playing a guitar upstairs on the top floor?’

‘Freddy.’

‘Then we’re safe, right?’

Freddy Aldrington, my nephew who’s only seven years younger than me, is a touring session musician. Never without an axe (why do guitarists call their instrument that?). He made a commendable effort as a college quarterback to be able to afford to do a music degree, didn’t get drafted, spent the next six months getting wasted because of how depressed it made him that he wasn’t going to be the Todd of football, and then Alfie woke him up: ‘You’re luck,’ he apparently said with his hands on Freddy’s shoulders, ‘that you didn’t bust these playing that game years ago, and I fucking told you you’d be lucky. So get being lucky again and get yourself in a band. If you’re gonna be wasted all the time, fine. Been there. But at least you can play the blues while you’re doing it.’

Freddy actually took his father’s advice. Then his grandfathers, after one too many conversations about Deke made Freddy finally accept that he might have made the draft if it wasn’t for his party lifestyle, and an ‘It ain’t just a son who can inherit an addict’s personality, Fred. Trust me.’ He started going to AA. However many years later it is now, he’s a sought after session player (‘I hate bands; bands fall out. You fall out with a session player? They just tell you to do one and go find another session to pay them.’)

‘I still think Freddy’s at least bi,’ Kayden said. ‘He walked in here? Maybe he’d learn something. And listen to that tune he’s playing. We can totally do it to that.’

All I can hear’s the Elton John Christmas song coming from a radio down the hallway with Be’s kids singing along. ‘You can say that, you’re not related to him. Alright, If you’re desperate, keep your back against the door and drop your pants.’

He can’t stop his tail wagging. I don’t think he’s trying.

‘Okay, hold the tail there, dog. I wanna take them off.’ Down on my knees, I hook my thumbs into my husband’s pants, the tight elastic Levis ones that he knows I like and probably bought new this morning before travelling, and just as I’m about to get started:

‘Oh wait, dog! Chair!’

‘Chair?’

‘Put it under the handle, professor. That’ll keep the naughty elves out.’

‘Kayden, did you really get a PhD once? That’s a round handle. What’s the chair gonna stop?’

‘Yeah yeah, okay, but it’ll stop anything if you get the angle right. Waaaaait, you still can’t do this, can you?’ He laughs. ‘What’s your mom gonna do now she can’t stop your allowance, call the university and tell them to withhold your salary?’

I’ll play along. It’ll make this cuter. ‘Never underestimate her.’

‘She won’t even know. She’s got a ruined Christmas cake to deal with.’ He does what I never let him do when we were teenagers together and puts the chair under the door, angled so it does indeed look unstoppable.

It’s not. Beatrix still enters a room like Mom always did: knock and then open without being told it’s safe, because so what if it’s not?

Kayden just about gets his pants back up in time.

‘Hi Fe, can you…oh, hi Kayden, I thought you weren’t coming.’ She sees the chair. ‘Oh man. Sorry, you guys were at it.’

‘Don’t go,’ I say. ‘It was a bad idea. What do you need help with?’

‘Oh, nothing, I was just gonna say can you come downstairs? Coz everyone’s getting around the TV and the food’s out, and Zack’s about to do something really dumb.’

‘What makes you think I can stop hi….fuck, he’s not, is he?’

‘Yyyyyuh-huh. He’s just put Have a Nice Trip on.’

I looked at Kayden. ‘I told you! This is revenge, I knew he’d do something like this. Shit!’ I start for the stairs.

‘Felix.’ Kayden and my sister stop me in unison, like they’ve read each other’s minds.

‘Dog, why don’t you let your family finally see it? Come on. Oran already did, right? And what did he say?’

What my father said, after he saw it by chance, on one of those nights where he was clicking around on Netflix and got a moment where he thought he could connect with his late brother by watching something Deke would have watched, was: ‘Felix, I’m seventy-five years old, I’ve seen what happens on just about every highway this rock’s got on it, and you still thought you could surprise me.’

‘This is Mom again, Kelpie,’ Beatrix says, one of the few people who Kayden doesn’t seem to mind calling him only half his species mix. Maybe because Be followed Mom into the business and does a pretty wicked fur-style on my husband whenever we’re in Phoenix.

‘Dru’s kids,’ I said, holding up a finger like I’d had a lightbulb appear cartoon style over my head. ‘We need a Christmas movie for them to watch. Not an adult doc that’s nothing to do with the season.’

‘Braden’s putting them to bed right now,’ Be says. ‘Just for once they’re not making a fuss.’

‘Colton’s gonna let Taylor watch this?’

‘Course he is,’ Kayden says. ‘It’s a better education than what his school’s gonna teach him about this. Especially when he sees an actual professor talk sense about a hot topic.’

‘He’s actually got a point, Fe,’ Be says. ‘You were education our family practically from the minute you got delivered thirty five years ago. Would this really be the worst way you ever did it?’

‘Jesus, you two,’ I say. ‘Fine. Let it never be said I didn’t know when I couldn’t win.’ I go down the stairs, get myself another glass of wine, and head into a living room packed with so many bags of fur that we barely need the heating on. ‘There any of those shrimp this year? Cool, send them this way.’ If they’re going to see this, the last thing I need to worry about is manners. This can just be my show. ‘Well, isn’t this a right old Christmas? Watching a documentary about drugs in a room packed full of raccoons.’

Tay and Colton get there first:

‘Fox.’

‘Fox.’

‘Dog.’

I skip Tay and Colton and look straight at Kayden as if to thank him for stating the obvious.

Now I look at Zack, who can’t hide the smirk on his stupid face as he slurps down something that looks like it had a tail.

‘You bitch,’ I mouth at him. That only makes him smirk more.

The doc has already gone through two rock stars and an actress, two of them humans, and now we get to the academic part, a little history, and then the modern take the studio just had to have. Never mind that I’ve been on TV in my own right, co-hosting Wonders of the Universe. If Trick Dixon had never met Todd Aldrington, I don’t think his studio would ever have picked me for this. Except that I never even told Todd much about this part of my life.

I told them not to put my title or letters on this when they added all the text and edits to Have a Nice Trip. I just wanted my name, and the story title under it, because everybody’s nice trip had it’s own title, and now my family were going to see it.

Rocco was the first to get past the time-out-of-joint moment as soon as I came up and introduced myself. ‘Bro, no way!’

‘Way,’ Zack said, before I could, and now managed to laugh.

On TV, I’m right in the spotlight, my own home front room in Massachusetts the set: ‘Hi, I’m Felix Aldrington, and I first took acid with my boyfriend in a field in England. It was sunset in the middle of June, we set up a telescope, and we made sure we were nowhere near a cliff edge. Or at least, we did to start with.’

Here it is, my title.

Felix Aldrington: Dark Sky World Tour.