Years later, Cid still had Avellaneda's story stuck in his head. He realized one day why, and so he set about writing his version of it:
A boy named Sancha had no idea what his parents did for a living. All he knew was that they were away a lot and that their jobs somehow involved space. Sancha himself had never been to space, but he liked to imagine life in a spaceship. He believed the biggest improvement was the kind of food he would be eating, with greater restrictions and yet more variety, from untold civilizations. He didn't know many aliens personally, and so it wasn't alien life he thought about so much as what human life looked like, but for some reason it was the food he most wondered about. He imagined being grossed out more often than not, but that it would also be fun to pretend he didn't mind, because his parents probably would.
One day he snuck aboard his father's shuttle, the one Sancha pictured either sitting in the backyard or blasting into the night sky, something mundane, and was surprised to find his father wearing a uniform, with a patch that read "Starfleet." Sancha was immediately disappointed. Everyone knew Starfleet didn't even leave the solar system, nine times out of ten, unlike the deep space freighters. But then, the more Sancha thought about it, the more it made sense. His parents were never gone that long. The freighter crews probably had as little concept of Earth as he did of their environs.
More than an hour into the flight, Sancha was tense. He'd never left orbit before, not even on the field trips to Mars in grade school he refused to take, out of fear, so his nerves were on edge, and he couldn't believe his father really didn't know he was aboard. Finally, he decided to reveal his presence, and was surprised when his mother stepped out from behind him, wearing the same blue Starfleet jumpsuit as his father, and his parents said they'd known the whole time, and that they were proud that he'd finally done it.
Sancha couldn't bring himself to talk to them about it. He decided to spend more time in silence, as the trip, wherever they were headed, continued interminably. He'd brought a book, so he wasn't completely bored, but the one thing he'd never really thought about was how there was really nothing to do in space, unless you had a job. His parents, of course, were busy the whole time.
They landed without Sancha even noticing. He'd been dozing. They seemed to have docked at some kind of station. Sancha stepped timidly behind his parents as they exited the shuttle. They were greeted by aliens Sancha thought he recognized as Vulcans, the most famous ones because they were the first aliens humans had ever met, the famous Cochrane incident that came up in school so much.
It was only later he realized his mistake, when he was much older, when he had become privy to secret knowledge, which is to say, what the Romulans looked like. He wondered at that point if he had earned his place with Section 31, or if he had been groomed for it, right from within his own family. He became positively obsessed about it, which affected his job performance, which further strained his relationship with his parents, and he thought back all those years and wondering all over again, was that what it had all been about?
And Cid wondered the same thing. He became convinced that the girl on Draylax had told him that story, in the first place, to help him along his own journey, one he was still struggling to reconcile. Well, such was life in the stars...
