Disclaimer: Bill and Laura are not mine. I just write about them to honor them.
It is the cold that kicks him out every night. Never before dusk, though. Not until the last ray of sun fades away behind the profile of the mountains, flooding the valley with long shadows that descend from the peaks, slide across the plains and climb to the top of the hill to die at his feet.
Bill turns his attention to reality again. He looks down to the ground, to the tips of his boots. Their worn leather makes a contrast with the lush green of the grass under them. He feels the cold and humid touch of earth under his palms, seeping into his bones and threatening to invade his whole body from that single point of contact. It is the same earth that wraps up her body. Tonight, like all the other nights before this one, he wonders if Laura is okay. He turns to the simple burial mound.
She is way better than him, of that he is sure.
She is not. At all. Not anymore, not anywhere, he reminds himself.
It is a mystery how new life is created, how new beings show up in the world where there was nothing before. It is as much of a mystery how life ceases to exist. Where there used to be something, someone, suddenly there is only silence and emptiness. It is just impossible that she no longer exists. Maybe she dwells some other place now… A too familiar anguish creeps to his throat as Bill realizes it: as devastating as it is to miss her this much, it is the notion of Laura's non-existence that he cannot wrap his brain around. The worst part is not that she is not with him: what is impossible to accept is that she does not exist, period. The notion of his own life without Laura, as terrible as it is, is better than the notion of a life, any life, without her in it. The fact that she no longer exists holds a deep contradiction: she was life incarnated; she was life's greatest expression, its best proof. She was energy, strength, determination. She was humor, intelligence, courage. She was warmth, selflessness, affection. Especially with him, he muses; and he is not sure if that certitude makes him feel better or even worse. He got to meet the true Laura: that Laura that she kept carefully protected inside herself, bottled up with all her old grievances, her wishes, her desires. The Laura she eventually allowed small glimpses of, only to those who were able to make her feel safe. She gave him that Laura, completely, body and soul: that was the best Laura, hence nobody has lost more than him.
If anyone ever seemed capable of cheating death over and over again until the end of time, it was her.
Tonight, as in all the previous nights and in so many moments every day, Bill wonders how much longer he will be able to carry on without her. The tightness in his chest only gets worse week after week. The idea of dying does not disturb him. He is in no hurry to leave this world, this planet that took them so much effort and sacrifices to get to. He can almost hear her recriminating him for considering the option of just letting himself die. Therefore, he will not do it. But he is not going to do more than just enough to hold on to this life that, without her, is no longer a life but just painful subsistence.
Earth was a gift for everyone else: he got his own gift during the journey. It eases his pain somewhat to realize that he was always fully aware of it: every day, every moment, every second with Laura by his side, he already knew what he had, what it meant. Long before Laura was gone, even long before she confessed her love for him putting in words what he could read in her eyes, Bill already knew without a question that she was the most valuable thing that had ever happened to him. He knew full well how lucky he was for having the chance to know her, to have her around, to share her time and her intimacy. To love her. He had not wasted a single second; even when they were still keeping their distance as a concession to their duties, he had not remained oblivious. He had been fully aware of how valuable each moment was.
Bill brushes away his tears with the back of his hand and gets off the ground with a soft grunt. His legs are stiff; he takes two wobbly steps and stays there, standing by the pile of stones. He looks at it for a few seconds, transfixed. Then he squats down. His knees creak loudly. He
places both of his hands on the stones. They are still warm from the last rays of sun. He leans over carefully, as if it were Laura's body that he is touching; as if he were afraid of adding his own weight on top of the weight she is already bearing. He shuts his eyes with force, holds back a sob.
Then he opens his eyes. He must leave now, or he never will.
The first night, after burying her, he could not bring himself to leave. He wept like a little kid, his compact torso and his arms spread over the tomb. Eventually, he fell asleep. When he opened his eyes at dawn he realized that, as impossible as it seemed, he had fallen asleep while he still cried. His muscles, exhausted from the previous day's effort and ice-cold after so many hours out in the open, simply refused to respond for a few long minutes. Even if freezing to death lying over Laura's burial mound only one day after losing her sounded really tempting, his self-preservation instincts had kicked in and he had been scared.
'I love you, Laura.' He brokenly whispers. 'See you tomorrow.'
Only the wind answers him. Sometimes, Bill feels that it is next to Laura's tomb, where she (what remains of her) rests, that her absence becomes more noticeable to him. When he is somewhere else it becomes slightly easier for him to ignore the terrifying reality of her non-existence. He can even talk to her, imagine her, fantasize with the moment her face will show up at the entrance of the raptor, those eyes so full of light looking for him, her smile widening when she sees him; he can see her walking towards him, impatient to find out what he is doing, to show him something new she just discovered. He can imagine himself wrapping his arms around her waist, holding her tight, sinking his fingers in her hair. Why not? After all, in his imagination he can do whatever he pleases: therefore, it can as well be her hair. He can hear her hum with pleasure, her face buried against his shoulder.
Her grave, however, is a sentence that admits no appeal.
Bill leans over and kisses a stone. Then he stands up. The raptor is just a few feet tens away. He sleeps in the ship for now, and he will keep doing so for as long as he has to, while he works on the cabin. So far, he has barely managed to set up a rudimentary foundation.
Inside that raptor, Laura talked to him, smiled at him, breathed for the last time.
It was inside that raptor that he slid his wedding band on her finger, sealing their mutual love for all eternity. A symbol that neither needed but that he had felt compelled to perform in that moment of overwhelming grief, when he had just lost her forever. With that gesture he had sent a warning to the universe that was taking her away from him: we belong to each other and no one else. Wherever she is, wherever I am, until the end of time.
On the back of the ship, Bill reviews his food supply. Over the past few weeks it has kept shrinking at a slow but regular pace. Bill is determined to make it last as much as he can, to postpone as much as possible the moment when he will be forced to leave and search for the others to get more food. He knows that they will worry; that they will insist on sharing with him even the scarcest goods they have; that they will try to convince him to accept a help he does not need.
He does not want company. He does not want anything from anyone. His will is just strong enough to keep him from letting himself die. He does not need them to make him explain.
Finishing the leftovers of the can he left open hours ago does not take him more than a few minutes. He stays standing as he eats and throws the can into a makeshift trash bin when he is done. Then he walks over to the rack, determined to crash on it, clothes on and all. The bottle of ambrosia, patient and reliable and half-empty, awaits him on the floor, next to the head of the rack. Exactly where he left it last night. He has not touched it in twenty-four hours and even now he simply does not feel its pull. It is strange. Now that Laura is gone for good, his need to drown in alcohol has subsided somehow. Feeling powerless when she was still alive, seeing her fading away, slipping through his fingers, feeling the inevitable end circling them, chasing them, had been more unbearable in a way than trying to resist and endure the grief now that there is nothing left to do.
He is halfway to the rack when he stops. A sudden thought assaults him and he stays standing in the middle of the narrow space. He hesitates for a few seconds, then he turns around and walks over to a corner. He hesitates again before leaning over, reaching out and lifting a bag from the floor. It is the bag that contains Laura's scarce belongings. In all this time, he has never been able, not just to review them, but to cast a single glance in the direction of that bag. He has stored it away as if it contained a threat that he could neutralize just by ignoring it. Now, tonight, he suddenly wants to face it. He needs to see her stuff once more: the clothes she wore, the objects he saw in her hands so often. Maybe even some things they shared. Determined, he lifts the bag and takes it to the rack. He takes off his boots, swings his legs up and leans back. He reaches out for the bag which he has momentarily left on the floor and lays it down on his lap.
His fingers wrap around the zipper and stay still for a moment. He does not have any doubts but he allows himself one more second to calm down, to give his breathing and his heartbeat a chance to find a gentler pace. Once the bag is open, there will be no going back. Bill takes a deep breath, exhales and pulls the zipper.
The scent invades his nostrils. It is a familiar scent that bathes him in memories, sensations. A distinct fragrance that blocks his throat and floods his eyes in a split second. It is Laura's scent: the one he always perceived around her; maybe her shampoo, or an echo of her perfume, the one she so sparsely used in an attempt to make it last as long she could. More than anything, it is the scent of her skin. Her own personal scent. This experience is the closest he has felt to the woman he loves since she passed away.
Bill sobs. His shoulders shake in gentle spasms as he slides a trembling hand inside the bag. His fingertips explore the content. Almost everything he touches is cloth, garments. Her blouses, shirts, and suits. Her underwear. Bill laces his fingers around a garment and pulls it out through the slit: it is a black bra, the only one she had that was slightly more special. According to her own words, the only decent bra she owned. He had guessed its dark shadow under her shirts in different moments and places, even long before she allowed him to see it directly on her skin, to touch it, to take it off her. Bill's fingers play with the garment for a few seconds before placing it back inside the bag. With his eyes closed, the images that the object conjures up make his pain physical, tangible. Bill puts up no resistance, lets the weight of those memories invade him. He is not afraid to feel it. That which he feared the most has already happened.
He has already lost her.
He slides his hand inside the bag again. This time, his knuckles brush against a hard object. Its touch feels like worn leather. Searider Falcon, he immediately guesses, only to realize a second later that it is not possible: it is him who has the book. It rests very close, also inside the raptor, with its unrevealed ending, its unfinished story, so much like theirs. Among his belongings, not among hers. He has no intention to open it for now, but it is his most treasured possession.
Curious, Bill pulls the object out of the bag and holds it up before his eyes. It is a book, indeed. However, there is no title engraved on its dark-brown cover. Not without a vague apprehension, Bill picks a block of pages at random and skims through them, bending them slightly and letting them fall as they escape his thumb.
He freezes: the book is handwritten. It contains pages and more pages of a handwriting Bill could recognize among all the handwritings of the universe. It is a diary; her diary. The realization startles him. His hand closes the book with a sharp move and a thud. He is not sure he should read this.
He does not know if he wants to.
Bill tilts his head backwards and closes his eyes. He should never have opened the bag. He should have left it where it was instead of giving in to his curiosity, to his need to see her stuff, to feel those objects in his hands again; a vague, ridiculous echo of what having her felt like. If he had not opened it, he would not be facing this dilemma now. Right there, inside that book, there are her words, her reflections, her feelings. Maybe even the answers to some of the questions he never dared to ask, sometimes because he did not want to hurt her, other times because he feared her reply.
This book represents his only chance to listen to her once more, to know her a little better, to get closer to her now that she is so far away. Bill knows that, reading her, he is going to hear her voice. It is going to be her soft voice telling him everything, reading to him each and every word written in that diary.
Bill opens his eyes and stares at the cover.
He should not do it. The fact that she is dead gives him no right to violate her privacy. He will not do it. He will put this diary back in the bag and forget it exists.
Don't be silly, Bill. Open it.
Bill does not move. He recognizes the inflection of the voice that delivers such a sweet order. He knows it is a mirage, a figment of his imagination. He does not even think he is losing his mind. This has happened before. It is his own mind talking to him with her words, in the tone he knows she would use. It is his ears reproducing the sound he misses most; his own mind desperately trying to make up for his loss with fond memories and warm sensations.
Come on. There is nothing in there that you can't know. As a matter of fact there are things I want you to know. I want you to read it.
Bill sighs. If things had gone the other way around, if he had left before her, he would have liked to imagine her reading him, sharing his intimacy. For him it would not have felt as a violation of his secrets but as a new way to share with her, to give her something more even after leaving.
With his heart threatening to burst in his chest, Bill slides a finger among the pages and opens the diary.