Earth, 4 months before the Wedding

Family involvement in the wedding. Family involvement. I fixate on the idea of it over and over until I can't bear it anymore. Jayken's wedding vision boards swim before my eyes, and I try desperately to remember any details of my parents wedding, squeeze my brain until I have to face the fact that I don't know I don't know, and eventually I give in and do what I probably should have done from the beginning; I call Rachel and Kris.

They're younger than me, they shouldn't know more than me. It's embarrassing to admit to them the way my brain seems to operate like a sieve. I mean, I guess technically they don't remember that much also, but they've kept up with it. They've made an effort. Rachel has journals. Kris has photos saved on a digifile. They both have stray memories of our parents that I can't even place. I remember dad the best, I think, but they both have such a clear view of our ammi that it makes me want to cry to hear them fondly recall her. Ammi where did you go? Why don't you live in my mind? How could I let this happen?

"Their wedding?" Kris says when I ask if either of them remember anything about it, and scrunches up his face which is funny to see through our patchy connection. All three of us are in far flung corners of the galaxy. He's with his crew on a delivery, a long haul voyage. It must be so interesting... "I definitely have seen photos or videos, I'd have to look through them again though. I feel like I remember ammi wearing a red dress of some sort? And a fancy hat thing. Or maybe it was a crown?"

"Oh, isn't there something like that in the storage cube?" Rachel chimes in suddenly. Her connection is the worst of all of ours, and she's just on Earth. I guess the tech in our hometown isn't THAT cutting edge.

"The what?" I say intelligently.

They're not in the same room and it doesn't make sense at all, but I swear they exchange a swift look. "We got access to the place where they put our parent's stuff when ammi died." Kris explains and I make a surprised oh face. It had never occurred to me once to think what happened to all our stuff. I mean, it's not like they let us take much with us. I figured it was all just gone. But I guess not.

"Oh." I say.

The call is silent for a minute.

"Do you want to look through the storage place?" Kris said. "I won't be home for a few weeks but maybe Rachel can go with you."

"Yeah, okay." Rachel says and just like that I find myself with my little sister back on Earth, awkwardly visiting a chaotic but organised warehouse.

"So have you gone through all of this stuff before?" I ask, as we pick our way through the cramped cube littered with pieces of our childhood. There's stuff I recognise but so much I don't, and the thought of how much of my memory of my parents and the unit we used to live in is just straight up GONE bites and nips at my brain.

Rachel looks at me, like she's maybe worried about how I'm about to react to her answer. "Yeah. Only a quick look though. Kris and I got access when we turned twenty, and they were going to incinerate it all if we didn't claim it. We had a look through but neither of us had any space to store it so we opted to move it to this place. The guy at the original facility seemed upset that he didn't get to destroy it all actually; I think he got his hopes up because you didn't claim anything when you got access."

I try to think of my life at twenty. Working for the Alliance. A year before the Weraynian war. So much going on that it all blurs together into a mushy lump. If Earth had tried to contact me about my parent's stuff it would've been buried in a million other communications. I guess I'm lucky I'm not an only child or every memento of our parents would have been lost forever. That concept makes me feel so awful that I stop for a minute, grabbing onto the nearest random item and turn it over in my hands obsessively, trying to tell myself that there's nothing I can do to change the past. That I am here now because I am trying to honour my parents, involve my siblings, make up for the rest of my life so far from them all.

I regain my composure after slightly longer than I'd hoped. I try to pretend everything is normal. "So we think the headdress ammi wore to the wedding is in here?" Kris did end up managing to find the pictures from their wedding. They both dressed so fancy.

"I guess so." I look at Rachel, who is looking around and looking kind of crushed. I try to think of appropriate comforting words to say as a concerned older sibling who isn't wrapped up in her own problems. I am at a loss, as I often am. I'd like to think I've gotten better after being a parent, but it's different, coparenting with Mickey, looking out for a teenager who is eager to connect with me. Rachel is so far away. I don't even know this girl. I dropped the ball for too long. I haven't been what I am supposed to be to her.

These thoughts fester within me as we search through items, a thick, gross silence hanging between us. I trail my hands along dusty containers while Rachel opens one and breaks the silence with a surprised squeak. She turns to me in a whirl, showing me what she's found.

“Look Sophie! Here’s the bot you made with ammi!!!” She is so excited to show it to me, connect with me in this remembering, and as I stare over the hodgepodge of a device, long inert, I hope that this will stir some memory in me. Instead there’s nothing, no familiarity in this lump of wires and robotic limbs. Did it ever work? Surely it did, if I built it with ammi.

I wonder how much time we spent together, building things. Those memories must be so buried, covered forever by the memories of ammi so sick, of medical visits and nothing working and difficult conversations sitting by her bedside about treatments that we couldn’t afford. There existing a time before all that, a carefree time where I had fun learning things from a mother that had time and energy to spend on something so simple and fun, feels impossible.

"Oh, wow." I say and I take the device in my hands, turn it over as if absorbing the nostalgia but truly I'm trying to see if I can figure out what it is. The workmanship is a little shoddy, as if the wiring was done by a child. I guess it probably was. I can sort of see my own hand in this, I can see the way I usually stick things together, but there's parts that are unfamiliar to me, that are fixed in a way I would never do. Looking closely, I can piece it together, looking at the interface, the limbs that should fold out, it reminds me of companion bots, toys which could be activated to follow you around, do basic tasks with basic voice prompting, like simple fetch quests. Looking at the speaker inputs, this one probably played music as well. It's cute. I still don't remember it, but it's the sort of thing I would've thought was really cool as a kid. Its power cells aren't even that degraded either. Hmm.

Rachel laughs softly. "Look at you, totally absorbed in that thing. I wish I could understand tech the way you can."

I shake out of my trance and place the bot back in the box. "Oh, you know." I say lamely. What can I say? That I got lucky to have gotten just enough training from our parents before we lost them? That I only survived out in space on my own because I figured out how to pull stuff apart and make things of them? That it's the only skill I have? Nothing I can think to say sounds helpful, so we just continue awkardly with our search.

Blurry memories stir as we find more things, staying just out of reach at the edge of my mind. It is endlessly frustrating.

Finally, finally, at the bottom of one container, we find a box with lots of padding surrounding it. Feeling hopeful, we carefully remove it and get it open. And here it is! The headdress ammi was wearing in the photos, a gold and red crownlike thing with dangling pearly bits and flower type things poking out of the top. It is actually incredibly beautiful. I stare and stare at it.

"Here, try it on." Rachel says, and even though I feel suddenly very unworthy of wearing this beautiful thing that belonged to our ammi I let her place it on my head. It's not as heavy as I expected, though the dangly bits tickle the side of my face.

Rachel smiles wobbily at me, and then turns her digifile into mirror mode and holds it up so I can see how I look in the headdress. I look entirely unlike myself, but also unlike ammi too. I don't look that much like her to begin with. She was very thin and serious, with neatly tied hair. There's a few photos where she's laughing where I can see it, but otherwise she looks more like Rachel and Kris. I look more like a blob of both of my parents. Even though my head is rounder than ammi's the headdress fits okay.

"What do you think?" I ask Rachel. "Should I wear this for my wedding?"

Rachel bites her lip. "It looks nice on you. You should wear it if you want to wear it."

Hmm. Not really the sort of answer I wanted. "But do you think-" I say, but my voice is oddly high so I clear my throat and try again. "Do you think she would be okay with me wearing it?"

Her face drops and I immediately feel like an asshole. Maybe this was all a bad idea. There's a few horrible moments where I think Rachel is going to cry and I don't know what to do. Then, "Sophie," she says in a strangled voice, "What do you- of course she would."

"I'm sorry." I say stupidly as she buries her face in her hands, and I put my arm around her, awkward as anything.

"No, it's not your fault." she shakes her head, voice muffled. "It just- I thought this would be easier. But it's not."

"Yeah." I say, and I try to think of how to fix things. "Look, Rachel, if it's too painful for me to be wearing ammi's stuff for my wedding, I don't need to. I just- I don't know. I thought it would help me remember her. Remember both of them. I haven't been very good at that so far."

Rachel emerges from her hands, shrugs off my arm (why did I think that would help anyway) and wipes furiously at her eyes. "No, it'll be so good for you to wear it. It'll be like she's there."

Like she's there. Oh god. Family involvement in the wedding. This is fine I feel fine. But this is the point right. This is why we're here at all.

I nod and say, "Yeah, it will." Even though I'm not convinced at all. If anything it will make her absence more real. Will draw attention to the fact that she's not there. I think of all the other people who won't be there. My mouth feels dry. If I'm going to commit to this, if this wedding is supposed to be about us and our lives and the people who matter to us, we need to find a way to honour them all, even if it will be painful. I need to talk to Abigail desperately...

But this is a good start. This I can do. I can wear the headdress. It really will help the wedding feel special, it's so much fancier than anything else I have ever worn in my life.

"Thank you for helping me find it." I say to Rachel, who smiles at me and leans her head against my shoulder. I hesitantly put my arm around her again because this feels like the right thing to do and this time she doesn't shove it away.

"No worries. Can we go get ice tea now?" she asks. I think for a second. Huh. Why not.

"Sure!" I say, and as we head off together it almost feels natural, like maybe I know how to be a good sister after all.