[modern au - fic: expansion]

[population_ctrl]

Title: Expansion
Characters: Jean Louis
Summary: For the prompt: I've been living for tomorrows all my life. NaNo preparations.






Expansion


I’ve been living for tomorrows
all my life


~

It’s a hard thing to explain. Wanderlust. And it’s not what he has, not really. He’s seen everything he wants to see of the world; from arctic to desert, from tropic humidity to Scandinavian anonymity. Jean Louis knows every international airport worth knowing like the back of his hand and a long plane ride is not an interruption anymore. Rather, it’s a state of transit. When he’s working from the sky, he’s merely gone one step beyond all the bad metaphors. And the route from A to B neither bothers him nor entices him notably. Necessity in movement, a moment of purely physical, bodily standstill.

If it’s work-related, he can’t entirely place it. This need to leave and to come back. It’s a strange sort of circularity, to fly out and return in the span of days. He knows, objectively, that it’s an altogether reasonable pattern to uphold when you work the way he does – when your contacts are globalized to a degree that’s inarguable. Impossible to ignore or work around. But it’s odd all the same, isn’t it? That he keeps wanting to repeat it, to leave Luxembourg behind for something he doesn’t care about nearly as much. Because that’s the truth of it, naturally. He’s going back because he’s attached – irrevocably so - to everything he’s pushing in the background with each flight.

When the LSP takes over in 2014, he senses clearly the drop in intensity. How his party goes from aggressive dominance to calmly waiting in the wings, following in the trails of Potos’ limping, political half-aspirations. To begin with, the change is a gradual decrease in excitement and stress, the party members finding a way to breathe soundly and safely for the first time in months. The decision made, the future laid out for them once more. Even then, the quiet never truly reaches him. It leaves the halls of parliament feeling heavy with its inherent emptiness, the pace slowed down to a crawl – but while his colleagues leave their bodies and minds saturated, he finds himself stopped. Incapable of settling down and equally incapable of taking his aspirations further than the next proposal from a new government, the state that isn’t his any longer.

With the first, lingering traces of unrest forcing his attention out of its context – leaving him absentminded as a consequence, even on the weekends and the days off which are getting more and more frequent – he sets his sights on something else. On something different. Surely, this new rhythm of politics is slow enough to grant him all the space he’ll need to plan another route through the wide-open airspace. Nothing’s going anywhere. He’s going to let it, oh yes, at its own, sluggish pace; but certainly, he’s incapable of true passivity. Of waiting when the world’s turning around them like it always has. He’s got Mireille, he’s got his secrets and his weapons and his plans. He’s got a return-ticket booked for later.

He’s got the moon. Surely, he’s more than prepared to reach for the stars and surely, the sky wouldn’t be tantalizing if he couldn’t.

~