Author's Note: I don't own any aspect of Andromeda. I wish, but the universe is a cold cruel place.
I often thought about Sarah and how she coped with the march of years without Dylan. I think she found happiness after a fashion, but it just was never the same. I wonder….
I WONDER. . . .
It was about 3 o'clock in the morning and Sarah woke with a start. She listened carefully to the silent house but all she heard was her husband's soft breathing, asleep beside her. She got up carefully so as not to wake him and walked over to the overstuffed easy chair by their bedroom window. She parted the drapes and stared out into the moonlit gardens. She saw a few Tarazed fire moths flitting from flower to flower but nothing else moved. She leaned back in the chair and thought that it was going to be "one of those nights."
"Had it really been thirty years since he had been gone?" she thought. It didn't seem possible. "Where is he right now?" she wondered. "He is near the accretion disk of the black whole, where else," she smiled at herself without humor. Her husband stirred and turned on his side and continued his undisturbed slumber.
"I wonder in whose arms he will find forgetfulness," she thought but didn't like the turn her thoughts were taking. "In whose arms did you find forgetfulness Sarah?" she asked herself. Her honest nature forced her to reply truthfully, "Ishmael Khalid's, Dylan's close friend. But that wasn't really forgetfulness was it?" It was more like expediency. "But I love Ishmael, I really do," she argued with herself. "But her honest self answered, "Yes you love him after a fashion, the kind of love his Nietzchean nature was willing to accept. You have given him six children all of whom were adored by both father and mother." She did adore her four sons and two daughters who were now all married and gone. "But I wonder how much more I would have loved Dylan's children?"
"It is completely ridiculous for me to moon after a man I cannot have, and after thirty years to boot," she scolded herself. She pulled herself together and went back to bed and lay down next to Ishmael. She closed her eyes only to open them again after a few seconds, "I wonder," she whispered to the night ….