Touch
In the evening, he stands by the doorway of the house he built of a ship a hundred and fifty years ago. It is strong, the metal walls still warm, though the sun is hovering, the flicker of a flame, by the horizon. Zefram is carrying fruits from the trees and roots from the earth, and the Companion slips her hand into his, the softness of another skin. He is looking out, at the stars, and remembering. It has been very long since he flew among them, just another speck in the void. Here, with soil under his feet, he feels a rootedness he never thought he would feel; had, for a long time, never wished to.
"What are you thinking of?" she asks.
"I'm thinking of the stars," Zefram answers. "And those travelers we met…" Captain James T. Kirk, Doctor Leonard McCoy, and the Vulcan, Spock. "I wonder where they are now, what they are doing." They have kept their promise, it seems. No ship has come to demand an old man return to a home that slipped by him a long time ago.
She turns to him, face pulled down into an expression of concern. "Do you wish you had gone with them?" she asks.
"No," he says. And he thinks he means it. It isn't regret that he feels, but something more elusive, quieter.
"Do you regret what you chose?" he asks her, looking into her eyes, brown, human eyes. They are hers now, though they have not always been. Some days he might have forgotten entirely, how naturally she seems to inhabit this skin; other days it seems a strangeness he still hasn't reconciled.
"How can I?" she says. "It has given you to me, fully. Here, we can join. Here, we can touch."
He reaches out—feeling the softness of her chestnut hair, watching the tiny flecks of her eyelashes, and feels an empty wrench, an inconsolable guiltiness. "I've never apologized," he says, quietly, and turns away, letting her hand slip free. She tilts her head, watches him with removed puzzlement—something ancient and alien.
"Apologized?" she asks. "For what, Zefram?"
He shifts his weight; moves his basket from one hand to another. He reaches in, rolls a fig in his hand, the cool living flesh; the vibrant pink of a root; the dusky blue curling vine, studded with red.
He can't look at her. The words seem to stick in his throat, and yet they tumble out, the thought that he has been carrying inside him since then. "When I found out that you loved me… when I realized what it was that you have been giving to me—that I had been giving to you… all these years… I reacted badly. Yes, I was shocked. Startled. By that was no excuse. A lifetime I spent flying through the galaxy, meeting other races different from my own, and yet I couldn't reconcile… love. Somehow, that—that was too much."
She reaches out for him again, takes his basket and puts it down, wraps him in strong arms, deceptively thin, and he buries his face in her shoulder, feeling small, and weak, and so, so unworthy of what he has. Then she speaks, and he can feel the vibration of her vocal cords, and that extra reverberation, that echo of the air about her, unique to her alone. "I understand," she says, gently.
"I don't think you do," he says.
"When I realized I loved you, I was frightened. I did not know loneliness before I met you; I only existed. Then I found you, dying; I healed you; I knew you. And I felt want." Her breath exhales, soft, against his cheek; he moves, stares into her eyes, brown and fathomless.
"Yes," he says. "Yes, I was frightened. God, how could I not be?" he laughs.
"Shall we go inside?" she asks, with the tilt of a smile, and he follows her into the shelter, watches her put each growing thing into its place.
"It's more than that, though," he says. "I feel like I coerced you, somehow, into—changing for me. Into thinking it wasn't enough, to be as you were. I don't want you to think that."
She straightens, and turns back to him. There is something knowing in her expression. "And if I had not changed?" she asks. "Would it have been enough for you, for us to be as we were? Without touch, without form?"
"I…" words fail him. His face colors, his mouth goes dry. He can't think of an answer. "I don't know. No. It wouldn't have been enough." The words are heavy. "But that's not fair to you, and I forced you—"
"Zefram," she says. "You did not force me. I chose. The part of me that loved you went to the woman and felt her pain, and I asked her a question. The part of me that was Nancy Hedford was dying, and with my life at an end, I saw the span of my finite years, and realized they were empty. I had helped peoples come together in peace, in friendship, but I had never myself loved another. In my pain, I heard a question, and I answered it. And we joined, together."
It's something he shies away from thinking of—the fact that she is two people, the Companion he has known for years, and Nancy Hedford, a woman much like he had once been. But she stares at him frankly, and he cannot turn away now or deny the truth. Under her gaze he feels judged, though he knows she offers none.
"You did it for me," he says. It's a statement, but it is questioning, uncertain. He knows she did.
"I did it because I could not live, not having tried."
"I know."
She reaches out for him, taking the edges of his face between his hands, as though he is a marvel, some incredible impossibility. She leans toward him, breathes the air, lets her lips hover over his own before pulling him forward, toward her. And he follows—unable to do anything else. In that one bed, she leans over him, an incandescence of wonder, with all the friction of flesh and of sweat. And he can't let go, still afraid that if he did she will disappear, a desert mirage in the eyes of a dying man.
In the darkness, still, he can feel her heartbeat, her breasts pressed against him, her fingers entwined in his, under the soft sheets, with the sound of their breathing. He stares up toward the ceiling, restful, floating, anchored by bodies from the vastness of space.
"Do you miss it?" he asks, at last. She shifts, plays her fingers lazily across his skin.
"Miss what?"
"How you were. Boundless. The ability… to feel my mind in your own, as though we were one." His voice slows, rough and caught by sorrow. "Untouched by time."
She is quiet. In the sound of their breathing, he cannot reach her thoughts, not anymore, that last divide.
She speaks.
"Do you miss the stars?"
.
.
.