"Do you miss Tamaran?" Her fingers curled around the mug and she settled back into the cushions, waiting for an answer.
Her mother took her time, mulling over her answer and waiting to give it like it was something precious that she couldn't trade away just yet. Her memories of Tamaran were mostly the memories of a child and only some of them were the memories of an adult, seeing the planet through different eyes.
"I do," she said, finally letting the words spill from her mouth as Mar'i waited for more. "There's so much I wish I could see again; I don't know where to start."
Mar'i took a sip from her mug and watched her mother as she became more comfortable. Setting her own mug down on the table behind her and pulling a blanket off of the back of the couch to spread it out over both of them, their legs disappearing under its folds.
"I think I miss our winters the most right now," Kory gave a smile. "It snowed on other parts of the planet but not where I lived. Tamarus was a tropical paradise." Her eyes became far away, looking at her daughter and yet, at the same time, not looking at her at all. "There were night blooming flowers that glowed in the dark and telepathic animals we called dragetts. I suppose they weren't unlike dragons with their wings and their snouts but they talked to us."
She sighed, her eyes crinkling at the memory. "They used to taunt my father to no end; your grandfather was an excessively clumsy man and he wasn't very good on a mount – he preferred to fly at all times – and he couldn't ever catch them."
"Catch them?" Mar'i raised a brow.
Kory shrugged. "We hunted them for sport only. The dragetts were let go if we caught them, never harmed. The games we played were for fun, there wasn't a need for violence against the creatures we lived in harmony with."
Mar'i nodded.
"I always miss my parents. They taught me how to fly, they were there when I went to train on Okaara, they never wanted to give me up but when it came to it they had to. We all went through so much." Kory had turned to stare out of the window, watching the snow fall in small flurries. "They would be astounded at Earth. The United States is so different from Tamaran; the industrial cities would baffle my father." She turned back to Mar'i, her eyes no longer far away. "They still baffle me and I've been here for almost twenty years now."
"What about them confuses you, Mom?" Mar'i's brow raised in a question. She had never known anything but Earth and its concrete sidewalks, some green poking between the cracks.
Kory shrugged. "Everything. There's parks here but you can pass by it and forget it's there as soon as you're beyond it. Nothing here is one with nature the way we were on Tamaran."
Mar'i took another sip from her mug and looked into it. "Do you think they would like me?" The fears she hadn't thought of since she was a child came to the surface and she tried to tell herself that they didn't matter. Tamaran was a destroyed planet, its denizens wandering the galaxy. She would likely never meet another Tamaranean. Her childhood fears were unfounded.
And yet, she still wondered.
"I know that I love you." Her mother's voice was low, almost a whisper. She reached across the couch to tip Mar'i's chin up with a delicate finger. Their eyes met, the similar hues connecting. "And that would have been enough."