by Lauren Esker
"Lyr, I ..." How could she share her grief with him, her small and personal grief, when he'd lost so much? She hesitated, and as she did, she felt him start to pull back. He must think she wanted him to. "No, wait. It's just ... this is hard for me to talk about. I haven't really talked to anyone about it yet. Just my grief counselor—" She stopped, sensing his puzzlement. "Surely you must have something like that? Someone who was there to talk to you after your friends died? Someone who was assigned to do it, perhaps?"
She got a quick flash of Tamir before it was suppressed. "No, no one."
"They didn't do anything?"
"Why would they? I'm hardly a person to them. I'm a tool."
Meri took a breath and ran her hand across her face before taking his hand in both of hers. "I think that's reprehensible. But I guess I'm not one to talk, because even with all the resources in the world, I went through the motions of going to therapy, but I never really opened up. Not to the therapist. Not to my best friend." The pang that she felt at the thought of Cora was already more distant than it had been earlier in the evening. Earth seemed so far away it was hard to imagine now.
Lyr was still waiting, listening—not just with his body language, but with his mind as well. She couldn't even say how she knew, but she could sense that his mind was open for whatever she wanted to show him or share with him.
"Aaron," she said softly. It had been a very long time since she's spoken her dead husband's name aloud. "Aaron was his name."
Now that she'd said it, the words came easier.
"We were high school sweethearts. I guess I always knew I was going to marry him, but life happened first. I went to nursing school, and he went into the Army—the military. He was a soldier." As she spoke, she felt the pride well up in her, still as fresh as it had been all those years ago when she had first seen him in his uniform. She'd been scared, she would be lying if she said she hadn't been, but also so excited. And he'd been excited. He had wanted to travel and see the world, and neither of them had the money for it.
"We got married after I graduated. Our lives were so good then. But I was also so afraid for him. He did two deployments to a place called ... well, it doesn't matter what it was called. A far-away place on my world. We had decided when we married that we were going to wait to start a family until he got a stateside placement or got out. I didn't want to be like some of the other military wives I knew, struggling to raise small children with their husbands so far away." She swallowed hard, pushing down the bitter lump in her throat. If they had made different choices back then—would it have made it easier to bear, if she'd had a little piece of Aaron to keep with her after he was gone? Or would it have only given her more grief to raise a son or daughter who had never known their father?
"Was he killed?" Lyr's voice was so soft she heard it mainly through her mind. He must be sensing the grief that had come flooding back, crushing her heart.
"Yes," she whispered. "But not in war. Not in war. And that was the most unfair thing. He came back safe. He wasn't planning to re-up after the second time—that is, he wasn't going to stay in the Army after he finished the years he signed up for. We had it all planned. We were going to buy a house and raise a family and ..."
She had to stop as her words faltered and died. Instead she opened up her mind and pushed the thought at Lyr, the memory of the worst night of her life, when she'd gotten a call from a fellow nurse at the ER to warn her before the police could talk to her. On the way home, on a rainy night, her husband had stopped to help a stranded motorist change a tire, because that was Aaron: always doing things to help people. In the dark and the rain, he'd been struck and killed by a speeding car.
Lyr's arms were around her. She couldn't even remember how that had happened. She held back for only an instant before resting her head against his shoulder.
"I always used to love the rain before that," she whispered. Was she speaking aloud, or only inside her head? Either way, she could tell Lyr heard her; she sensed him listening quietly, sending support down the link. "I loved listening to the rain on the roof, soothing me to sleep. After that, though ... for a long time I couldn't sleep on rainy nights at all. I would sit up with a cup of coffee, trying to read or watch TV or whatever it took to keep me from thinking about—"
The tears came without warning in a sudden flood.
She couldn't even remember the last time she'd cried on someone's shoulder. She tensed up in his arms, but Lyr pulled her against him, rubbing a soothing hand up and down her back, and Meri gave in to a tide of grief she'd been fighting for years. She had cried a lot in the immediate wake of Aaron's death—but in private, trying her best to hold it together at work. Eventually she'd pushed it down completely, convincing herself somehow that, against all odds, she had to get on with her life.
Except she hadn't, had she? Cora had been right, those times they'd argued on the phone as Cora tried to talk her into moving out of Columbus, getting out and seeing a little of the world, living a little. She'd been spinning her wheels, going through the motions, losing herself in her daily routines because she didn't want to think about a future without Aaron in it.
But the future kept coming, whether you wanted it to or not. All she had managed to do was get ten years older without ever really getting anywhere else at all.
As awful as the last couple of days had been, she hadn't felt this alive, this present in the world, since that night when she'd gotten that awful phone call. For a long time she'd felt as if some part of her had died with Aaron, but she now realized it was more like she'd ... stopped. She'd gotten stuck that night, and she had been living in that endless, terrible moment for the last ten years.
But now, sobbing on Lyr's shoulder, even as grief cut through her like a knife, she realized that she was feeling it. She wasn't dead inside anymore. She was aware of everything: the warmth of his arms around her, the crackling of the fire and the smell of smoke, the unaccustomed aches and pains where she'd been wrenched around and thrown to the deck on the ship.
And that made her cry even harder. She didn't want to go on without Aaron. They were supposed to be forever.
But it dawned on her slowly, as she sobbed and Lyr petted her back and sent wordless reassurance through the link, that she had gone on. It was ten years later now. She'd survived a grief that she had thought would destroy her, and now that she was letting it in again, she found that it wasn't as devastating as she remembered. In fact ...
She was sad, but she didn't feel broken. Those days right after Aaron's death when she'd laid in bed for days and never wanted to get up again were over. It hurt, but it hurt like the pain of a twisted ankle or a torn muscle that was starting to heal. Even broken hearts could recover. There would always be a scar, but as a nurse, she knew that sometimes things healed stronger than they were before. A broken bone deposited new bone around the break, and muscles had to be hurt a little bit in order to get stronger.
"Thanks," she mumbled. She pulled away and sniffled, wiping uselessly at her face and trying not to think about how messy and swollen it must be. "I'm sorry—" But she stopped herself. She wasn't going to apologize for grieving. Not to him. "I mean, thank you. Thanks for being there for—"
She broke off, because she had looked up to his face, and was startled to see something glistening there.
Tears.
Lyr looked equally puzzled when she gazed at his face in open surprise. "Are you all right?" he asked.
"Yes ... I mean, no, but I will be. It's just ..." She touched his face lightly, felt the dampness on her fingertips. "I didn't know your people could cry."
"I'm not ..." He broke off and raised a hand to his cheek. Wonder dawned on his face. "Oh."
"Are you all right?" She wasn't sure how to read his stunned expression. He was staring at his damp fingertips as if he'd never seen them before.
"I didn't know I could do that anymore," he murmured. He raised his wet eyes to her face. "I thought I had lost my ability to weep, as I've
lost my ability to love."
Her heart broke anew, and not for herself this time. She took his hands in hers. "Lyr," she said quietly, "if there is one thing I've learned about you by now, it's that you definitely haven't lost the ability to love."
She leaned forward and kissed him again, and this time there was only the faintest, most fleeting thought of Aaron—mainly, that she didn't think Aaron would want her to be alone; he would have been the first to encourage her to move on and find someone new—and then she lost herself in the heat of Lyr's mouth, the touch of his hands.
They kissed and kissed in the firelight. Her body thrummed with desire, and she felt something answering across the link, an intensity of emotion that quivered like a plucked guitar string. And yet ...
"Lyr," she said at last, breathless from kissing him. "I don't want you to think—I mean, I'm really enjoying this, a lot, but I think ... maybe I'm not quite ready for anything else. Not tonight. Is that all right?"
"It is fine." He caressed her hair lightly. "I don't think I am, as you say ... ready for anything else tonight either. And you are very tired."
"You can tell that, huh?"
"It's been an extremely long day for both of us."
"No kidding." Now that he'd mentioned it, weariness came crashing down on her. She could hardly keep her eyes open.
Lyr gave a sudden, short laugh, and lunged to rescue the lizard-on-a-stick from the fire. "Also, I am afraid that dinner might be slightly burnt."
It was charred black on the outside, but still pinkish on the inside. They both picked at the pale meat, which tasted a lot like chicken to Meri. (It's true, she thought; everything tastes like chicken.) Half-burned lizard washed down with plain water wasn't exactly a gourmet meal, but it was better than the ration pouches ... slightly.
While Lyr heaped ashes on the coals of the fire, Meri checked on Tamir again and hooked the last saline pack to his IV. If he didn't wake up soon, she was going to need to figure out something else to prevent dangerous dehydration. Distilled water, perhaps? She wished she knew more about field medicine. Everything she knew relied on having an entire hospital full of equipment, drugs, and specialized surgeons to back her up.
But he'd hung in there so far. She found no sign of infection or fever. "Keep it up," she murmured, patting his shoulder.
Lyr was spreading blankets on the floor, making up beds for them. Meri took off her shoes and decided to keep everything else on; it was getting chilly in the cargo bay now that she was no longer getting her face toasted by the fire. And there was another reason, as well.
"Lyr," she said, sitting on a blanket with her arms around her knees. "Could I ask you to do me a favor?"
He looked up. "Of course."
"Will you hold me while I sleep?"
"Yes," he said quietly. "Yes, I would be very happy to do that."
He closed the airlock door most of the way, leaving only a thin sliver open to the night, not big enough for anything dangerous to get in but wide enough to give them some fresh air. Then they arranged themselves in a nest of blankets.
Meri had slept alone for ten years, and it felt strange, re-learning how to fit herself together with someone in her bed. There was some fidgeting and rearranging as they both worked out where all their limbs should go. But eventually they were curled together, with her head pillowed on his arm.
"You tell me if this gets uncomfortable, okay? I don't want you to end up with your arm falling asleep or something."
"I am not uncomfortable," he said quietly, and moved slightly, tucking one of his feet under hers.
"Try telling me that in a few hours," she murmured.
"Go to sleep, Meri."
She expected to have trouble falling asleep; she always had difficulty sleeping in a strange place, and this time she was sleeping on a bare floor on an alien planet. But sleep washed over her like a tide. Wrapped in his arms, she sank into darkness before she even had time for the day's memories to haunt her.
13
___
L YR WOKE WITH MERI'S HEAD pillowed on his arm.
He had awakened frequently throughout the night, alerting every time something small rustled in the brush. Each time, he found Meri sleeping deeply against him, as if she hadn't a fear in the world with him nearby. Her sleeping contentment was a warm, lazy hum in the back of his mind, soothing him back down into sleep every time he woke.
It was light now, a shaft of thin morning sun slanting through the crack in the door. Lyr lay for a time and looked down at Meri's sleeping face, struck anew by her beauty in the soft dawn light. Her skin was perfection, a warm soft brown, endlessly touchable, infinitely beautiful.
He succumbed to temptation enough to brush the backs of his fingers across the corner of her mouth. She stirred slightly and then sank back into sleep.
Lyr sat up and carefully untangled his limbs from hers. He left her tucked under a blanket, and stepped out in the clean air of morning. The sky was a vivid blue overhead, with only a few trailing wisps of clouds. He walked a quick circuit around the perimeter of the campsite, checking for tracks and scenting the wind, but there was no sign that anything larger than the tiny forest-dwelling lizards had approached them last night. No predators or obvious dangers, no reason why he couldn't leave his companions alone for a few minutes while he took a quick look around from the air.
He climbed the hill that he and Meri had walked up last night. At the top of the hill, he shifted and sprang off the edge, spreading his wings as he fell and then flew.
It had been a long, long time since he'd flown with wind rather than vacuum beneath his wings. Flying in atmosphere was always a feast for the senses, in a way that flying in space wasn't. The air was pleasantly cool, carrying the sharp salt tang of the sea. It rushed over his wings as he circled higher, basking in the sensation of cool breezes and the sun on his back.
It was his first opportunity to get a good overview of the area around their campsite. The little valley in which they'd landed was one of many such valleys where the ramparts of the mountains rolled down to the sea. The entire coastline was rumpled like an unmade bed. It made him despair of being able to find the fallen passenger module. Even if it had survived their crash landing, it could be anywhere.
He flew lower, sweeping along the white sand of the beach. A small cluster of medium-sized lizardlike creatures with long legs bolted at his approach, bounding across the sand in long leaps. His claws twitched with the urge to pick off one of them for breakfast, but instead he soared higher and watched them take shelter in a brush-choked ravine where one of the many streams flowed from the mountains down to the ocean.
He could hunt later. Right now, he didn't want to get distracted, give in to his instincts, and leave Meri alone and unprotected. Anything could attack while he was gone. Once they had the campsite better secured, he could start making longer excursions and begin a systematic search for the module.
For now he contented himself with a single quick survey flight. Rising on thermals, higher and higher, he scanned the landscape and particularly the mountains. He was confident could fly over them without difficulty, but it would take him out of range of Meri's ability to contact him. He wasn't prepared to leave her and Tamir alone on a world filled with unknown hazards, not quite yet.
After one last long circle over the sea, he touched down on the hilltop, shifting as he landed, with a moment's regret for the loss of his wings. He'd almost forgotten what it was like to be able to shift and fly whenever he wanted. Already he yearned for the sky again.
But not yet.
He could still feel the warm, dreaming presence of Meri's sleeping mind. She wasn't awake yet. He'd work while she slept, he thought, to make the campsite safer and nicer for her.
He tried not to think of it as making a beautiful nest for his mate. But some part of him was thinking it anyway.
***
Meri woke to the sound of strange birds singing. She had been dreaming a flying dream. She'd had them befo
re, but never so vivid. It was like she was really there, hanging between sky and earth with her own wings keeping her aloft.
For a little while she lay wrapped up in blankets, drifting between sleep and waking, listening to the unfamiliar whistling songs and the rustling of wind in the trees. It was light outside, the clear gold light of early morning, with an unseen sun shafting into the cargo bay to paint the opposite wall in shades of amber and rose-peach and other paint-chip colors.
She wasn't afraid, nor did she feel lonely. Lyr was no longer under the blankets with her, but she could feel him nearby. He was sending out a little trickle of reassurance to her along the link, letting her know that he wasn't far.
I'm on an alien planet, she thought, and tried to work her mind around that thought. It was too huge, too hard to believe.
I'm on an alien planet with dinosaurs.
That worked a little better; at least it made her laugh to herself.
*You're awake!* Lyr said in her mind.
*Good morning,* she said back, as she sat up and stretched. Her arms and shoulders were stiff from sleeping on the floor, and she felt rumpled and sticky, now regretting the choice to sleep in her clothes. Her eyes were puffy and dry; she'd forgotten how unpleasant it was in the morning when you'd had a good cry before bed. And she really wished that she'd stuck a toothbrush in her purse along with all the other things.
*If you need hygiene items, there are a few in the ship's head. I can show you.*
*A little later, maybe. What are you doing?*
Rather than answering in words, Lyr showed her. He was knee-deep in water, wrestling a large rock into a half-built dam.
*You found a spring! Is it close?*
A 3D mental map showed her his approximate location, a little deeper in the thicket, not too far from the ship. The images rotated and changed to show her what he was up to, piling rocks to pen up the rushing water. He'd already made a fairly respectable pool.
*What's that for?*