Mars dust never washes out completely. It gets in the seams of your suit, under your nails, in your hair. A constant reminder of where you are, why you're here. My father died for this red dirt. I used to think it was because he wanted to get away from me—the monster daughter with the Mosaic Organ he gave me. That he'd rather die on another planet than look at what he'd created.

It took coming here, fighting these fucking roaches, to understand. He didn't run from me. He ran for me. To carve out a future, however fucked up, where I might exist. That realization hits harder than any Terraformar.

And you know what's funny? The thing that makes me feel closest to him now isn't the mission. It's the quiet, desperate moments after. When I'm stripped bare, my partner's hands tracing the scars on my back—some from battle, some from the surgery that gave me this 'gift.' When he pushes my face into the pillow and fucks me from behind, his body a solid, sweating weight holding me to this planet, to this life. When he comes inside me, filling my cunt with his cum, and whispers against my skin that I'm not a monster, I'm his. In that total, brutal possession, I finally feel like I belong to something. Like maybe my father's legacy isn't just a death wish, but a fucked-up kind of love letter.

Tomorrow, we push into the new sector. Tonight, I need to feel owned.