I had no idea of how much time I spent in that bathroom. It felt like hours but I didn’t have the strength, nor the will, to even look at my watch. Lying on the cold floor I tried in vain to put my mind in blank; the eyes of that man, my father, kept coming to me like in a dream and I was almost sure I could hear his voice calling me. I started to think about my mother, which only brought more tears to my eyes. Why didn’t you tell me, mom? How could you keep that away from me. I tried to stand up but my legs weren’t obeying my brain. I felt like I had been punched. I was weak, I was sick. Come on Alex, you have to recover from this. I finally stood up and after splashing some water on my face - Don’t look at the mirror. God, his eyes are like mine. - I managed to return to my bed and I just lied down there looking at the ceiling. Is it cold in here? My head was spinning and my heart was still beating too fast. I heard a knock on the door but I didn’t answer. I assumed it was Brian, or maybe Howie. Much to my surprise Kevin entered the room.

“AJ, we need to talk” he whispered.

Now you wanna talk. “Go the hell away Kevin.” I tried to remain calm and didn’t even bother to look up when I spoke to him. “Just go away,” I added with a softer voice. “I want to be alone.”

“Alex” he pleaded.

“Please Kevin.” I felt like I was going to cry again at any time. “Just leave me alone.”

He ignored my words, closed the door behind him and came closer.

“What do you want from me?” I asked giving him a withering look.

“I…” he bit his lips. “I don’t know Alex. Your forgiveness?”

“How could you do this to me, Kevin? How could you?” I wasn’t yelling, quite the opposite, and for a moment I thought he had not heard me since he just stood there in silence.

“Aren’t you going to say anything?” My voice was trembling.

He took a seat at the foot of my bed but didn’t face me. I didn’t move my feet though, I wasn’t going to make him feel comfortable. I gave him a sidelong glance. His eyes were fixed on the wall in front of him. He rested his arms on his knees and folded his hands, and just before speaking he looked at the floor for a minute, as if he was trying to find the courage to do it.

“There are so many things I have been keeping away from you, Alex,” he sighed. “Sometimes I’m not even sure what I am doing. Sometimes I think all this is just a bad dream and sometimes I think I can’t do anything right, but there is one thing I’m sure about...” He finally looked at me. “I won’t ever do anything to hurt you.”

“Maybe it is a dream.” The tears were running down my face and I was looking at the ceiling again. “Is this a dream Kevin? Am I going to wake up soon?”

“No, baby, you won’t.” At any other time that answer would have made me laugh.

“Kevin, when are you gonna stop using that word?” I said wiping my tears with the sleeve of my shirt.

“Never?” he said raising his eyebrows.

I smiled. “You know that even Nick is too old for that.”

“Sorry,” he added “I can’t avoid it. Old habits are hard to break. You...”

“What?”

“Nothing. Is just that I...” he stuttered, “I just remembered that your mother was always using that word. She used to call me baby.”

I breathed deeply and, noticing that I was about to cry again, took one of my pillows and buried my face in it. I felt his hand on my leg, he was trying to comfort me but he probably didn’t know what to say.

“Why Kevin?” I asked placing the pillow aside but without looking at him, one of my arms covering my eyes. “All this time since I know we are different it never crossed my mind that my father was anything else than human. I was fine thinking that he was just a stupid human that abandoned us. Why didn’t you tell me? Yes, I already know you have kept lots of things away from me Kevin but this... How could you?”

“AJ, look at me.”

I wiped my eyes again and sat up. For the first time since he entered the room we were face to face.

“I couldn’t Alex. I was about to do it years ago, the day I told you about our powers, but I couldn’t. I wanted to tell you the other day, when I showed you the crystal, but I didn’t have the courage.” He stood up and turned around but it was too late, I had already seen the tears in his eyes. He wiped them before facing me again. “How do you say something like this? What could I have said to you? That your father was a bad guy? An assassin?”

“THAT HE WAS ALIVE FOR GOD’S SAKE!”

“I NEVER TOLD YOU HE WAS DEAD!”

“BUT YOU LEFT ME ASSUME IT.”

He kept quiet again.

“No, AJ,” he finally answered. “That was your mother. She was one who made you believe he was dead.”

I rested my head on the headboard and closed my eyes.

“I’m so sorry. I...”

“Don’t...” I raised my hand to stop him but I couldn’t keep talking. He understood though and remained in silence for a moment. I saw him look down and play with the ring he wore in the chain on his neck. I had seen him do that thousands of times. I knew that ring was his safe place, like my medallion to me. It had appeared on his neck the day we left the space station but he never wanted to tell us where it came from. I probably was the only one who knew the story.

“I knew he was alive the day you showed us the pyramid?” I finally admitted, not only to him but to myself.

“You saw him?”

“Yes. I didn’t become aware of the true then, but I’ve been thinking about that day and I remembered I saw him in those images the pyramid showed me, and I just realized that he wasn’t only in my vision of the past. I saw him in my future.”

“The images the crystal shows are not clear.”

“I noticed.” I took a deep breath before asking what I wanted to know. “Are all the lies ending today, Kevin?”

“Yes.” I could tell by his voice that he was trying too hard not to cry. “All the lies are ending right now, Alex.”

“I hit Howie” I sighed after suddenly became aware that Howie was probably suffering as much as Kevin.

“I know. I just saw him. He could have healed himself but he didn’t do it. Maybe he thinks he deserves it.”

“Aw God!” I hit the headboard a couple of times with my head, I felt like kicking myself.

“And if you really think that, then maybe you should hit me too.”

“Before you came here that was all I wanted to do,” I uttered, my eyes fixed on him.

“I probably deserve it.”

I decided to change the subject. Part of my wanted to punch him on the face while the other part of me wanted to hug him and cry. “Did Howie tell Brian and Nick?”

“No. They are out there thinking you lost your mind. Or at least Brian is. Nick is probably thinking about his fate. Right now he had other things to worry about.”

“Haven’t you spoken with him yet?”

“No, I wanted to see you first.”

I looked at my watch and what I found took me by surprise. Three hours? I’ve been crying for three hours?

“It took you three hours to came back to the ship?” I asked him. “Were you with him all this time?”

“No. I talked to him but didn’t stay there more than ten minutes. I went to the rebel base after that.”

“So you talked to him?”

“Yes.”

“About?”

“You.”

I closed my eyes and tried to picture that conversation. When I opened them again Kevin was looking at me.

“You can start now, Kevin. You said all the lies were ending today. You can start now.”

He took a seat again and sighed heavily.

“Your mother had just turned fifteen when he met him AJ.” Oh God, that’s younger than Nick. I already knew that she was sixteen when I was born but I have never really thought about it. “She was this beautiful and bright girl. Always playing jokes on people, always laughing. You remember her, right?” He made a pause. “But no matter how intelligent she was, Rachel was an innocent girl who saw no harm in anything, in anyone, not even in Drew.”

“Are there any good Tracons?”

“No that I know.”

I looked down.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered and I had to look up again.

“Don’t. Just keep going please.”

“As I told you before. Tracons weren’t our enemies but they never had a problem hurting humans. Drew wasn’t the exception. Remember that all the things I’m telling you about that time are what Rachel told me,” he stated. “I don’t remember too much, I was only six years old when Rachel got pregnant, but she told me everything a couple of weeks before we left Earth.

I nodded.

“She got pregnant and told Drew,” he continued.

“And he didn’t take the responsibility.”

“You are wrong there. He did take responsibility, or at least he did it in a way.”

“What? “

“He wanted to be with your mother. He wanted to raise you.”

I couldn’t believe his words.

“What are you saying? That my mother was the one who left him.”

“Yes. But hear me before you jump to conclusions,” he added quickly “He did want you and your mother with him but it wasn’t for the right reasons. Rachel, of course, didn’t know this at first and decided to run away with him.”

“Run away?”

“My father didn’t want to let her go with him.”

“Oh.”

“Luckily she realized what kind of guy he was before running away. He heard him talking on the phone one day, about you. He...” He kept quiet and looked at the ceiling.

“What?”

He didn’t answer.

“What is it, Kevin? Tell me.”

He took a deep breath before speaking again.

“The Tracons thought that the child of a Tracon and an Alomega would be very powerful, the power of the two races combined in just one person.”

I’m half Tracon, half Tracon. God. I have been repeating those words for more than three hours and I still can’t believe them. “You mean that what happened with my mother and my father was a first. During all those centuries it never happened before?”

“It happened once.” He stood up again and started to pace the room. “Man, I don’t think I can do this, AJ.”

“Kevin, you told me all the lies would be ending today.” What’s he hiding from me?

“The only time it happened before was before our ancestors went to Earth. And it was the cause why they left their planet,” he said looking at me from the other side of the room.

“I don’t get it.”

“Life in the Alomega and Tracon planets was completely different. The two planets had old fashioned societies with lots of strange beliefs. I think I already told you that the planet of the Alomegas was known as Blazul, the translation in English would be Blue. The Tracons lived in Gründe, which means Green. The blue and the green planets. Blue was full of water...”

“I know, like Earth.”

“More. Earth was 75% water. Blue was 95% water.”

“Yeah, our ancestors were good swimmers,” I snorted with a laugh that probably sounded too false since he didn’t even smile.

“You can say so. Remember that the original Alomegas could live under water too.”

“I already know that, Kevin.” I rolled my eyes. “Remember the first time you told us this. We joked about Nick and his passion for water. Brian said that he probably was half fish like our ancestors.”

“It wouldn’t surprise me if he ends up developing the power to breath under water. But that’s not the point. I’m telling you all this again because I’m trying to explain you something. Gründe was 95% earth.”

“And why wasn’t its name Brown?”

“What?” He looked confused.

“Earth, brown, you know.”

“I have no idea AJ. Who knows if the earth was green there. Like you haven’t seen already how everything can change from one planet to another. Do you want me to continue or not?”

“Jeez. It was just a question.”

“Sorry, is just that this is not easy for me.”

“I know that Kevin,” I growled. “You already said that, just keep going, okay.”

He shot me a glare. I was sure he was trying hard to remain calm.

“Like I was saying,” he finally added, “those were two completely different planets. Two races completely different too, with two old-fashioned societies that didn’t consider appropriate to mix the races. The two planets were close, they needed each other, they depended on each other to live. Alomegas couldn’t live without Trancon’s earth, the same way that Tracons couldn’t live without Alomega’s water. But they just came together for practical reasons. Besides that need, the two races really didn’t frequent each other.”

“I still don’t understand. You are not telling me anything I didn’t know before. What have this to do with my mother?”

“I never told you what happened to Blue and Green.”

“They lost their sun.”

“How?”

He didn’t tell us. “You never said how it happened. You told us that you didn’t know too much about the history of our race.”

“I lied.” Nothing new there.

“Really? But you never lied.” I couldn’t avoid the sarcasm, he didn’t pay attention to my comment, nor to the sardonic tone of my voice, and just kept talking.

“It was destroyed in a war, AJ. A war started by the first child of the two races.”

“WHAT?”

“Azdé. That was his name. He was the son of an Alomega man and a Tracon woman. Being the Alomegas the most conservatives the boy was raised by his mother and the Tracons. He was powerful but when he grew up he tried to dominate the two planets. Some Tracons followed him. The rest of the Tracons and the Alomegas fought him and he was finally vanquished, together with his followers, but not before he destroyed their sun and their planets too.”

“Oh, my God.,” I said standing up after reality suddenly hit me. I am like him.

----
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