Silent Night
24 Dec 2024Rawnu
I sit here on the Gallifrey, the familiar hum of her systems wrapping around me like a blanket against the silence of the void. It's 24 December by Earth’s calendar—and though I’m not religious, something about this moment feels special. Not in the way of gods or rituals, but in the way the stars hold space for reflection, for the weight of things both lost and found.In my lap rests my father’s sitar, its wood polished smooth from years of his hands and now my own. Marika had kept it safe all these years, and when she handed it to me back in the commune, she said, “Il t'attendait.” It’s been waiting for you. And now, here I am, unsure if I’m the person it was waiting for, but unwilling to let it remain silent.
My fingers find the strings almost instinctively, and the notes of Silent Night, Holy Night spill into the cabin. I didn’t choose the song—it chose me. The melody is tentative at first, a whisper, but it grows, weaving itself into the hum of the ship and the silence beyond. As I play, my thoughts drift, and the past reaches out to meet me.
I think of my father, Raw’nuruodo, the man whose name I now carry as mine–and his first name as my callsign. Nobody really knew how this naming convention of his worked, it's not a Leesti custom even though he was brought up there. He never spoke much about his early life, and what little I know came from whispers and pieced-together stories. He was an orphan, picked up by traders from Leesti after a pirate raid. His survival had been a twist of fate, but he never called it that. “Luck is a lie,” he once told me. “You make your own way, or you don’t.”
I don’t know much more about those early years, only that they shaped him into a man who distrusted authority but believed fiercely in justice. Maybe that’s why he clashed so much with any kind of authority. Maybe it’s why he taught me that freedom among community is the only thing worth fighting for—and the hardest thing to keep.
But there were parts of him I never understood, pieces of his past he kept locked away. He’d never speak about his early life, before the pirate raid and before Leesti. It was as if those years had been buried with the family he never knew. And now, with him gone all those years ago, these answers are buried too. I wonder sometimes if he carried the weight of that silence the same way I carry mine.
The music flows, shifting as it always does when I play, blending the earthly songs my father taught me with something... other. The haunting tones I heard from the fallen Titans have worked their way into the melody, as if the sitar remembers what I cannot forget. The hums of those vast, alien machines still echo in my mind, mournful and layered, and I wonder if my father would’ve understood them better than I ever could. He had his own ghosts, after all. Maybe they would’ve recognized each other.
The song fills the cabin, carrying with it memories of Earth, the alpine commune, the resilience of my people who refused to leave even as Cocijo loomed over the planet. It carries the weight of the war, the questions Seo Jin-ae’s warnings left behind, and the unsettling knowledge that we don’t yet understand what we’ve done—or what comes next.
When the last note fades, I let the silence settle in its place. The past and future feel tangled, a knot I’ve been trying to unravel for years. My father’s absence is part of that knot, and tonight, I feel it more keenly than ever. He’s gone, and so much of him went with him—his stories, his pain, his truths. But his sitar remains, and as I hold it, I feel connected to something larger than myself. To him, and to the galaxy.
If you celebrate as part of faith or tradition or just because this is a time of love and community, merry Christmas to you all!