Scene: Pre-2183, Omega. The many faces of Aria.
Aria's lips are usually pursed with frown lines subtly marking the sides of her mouth like bookends. The double loop of her facial tattoo gains an extra dimension when she scrunches her forehead, whether from stress, irritation, consternation, or all three. And her jaw, always tensed, always a small muscle imperceptibly twitching on one cheek. The face of Omega's queen, hard-lined and perpetually ready to face the galaxy. The face of a woman who never stops thinking about her next thirty moves. A face Nyreen sees when she closes her eyes, behind the eyelids, with skin like a cool-toned nebula and the temperament to match.
And it would be worlds easier, wouldn't it, to forget a face like that if that had been all she saw during her time on the station, but her memory proves cruelly accurate, and another more traitorous image occasionally surfaces as a reminder of what she's walked away from.
Moments like when she catches Aria in a rare facial limbo, her brow line smooth and her jaw relaxed, rendering her temporarily unrecognizable, but more importantly (most importantly), the effect it has on her, the look she wears when no one's around, when the lights are dimmed, when the clothes are off, when the older woman sits up in bed to touch Nyreen awake—"it's almost morning," she says in a voice that matches the way those hands rub circles around her waist—and Nyreen shifts to allow better access, half-asleep murmurs bubbling from deep in her chest.
"I better go then," she sighs.
A set of violet fingers curves tightly over her angular hip. "There's no rush."
Nyreen smiles to herself—"No?"—and turns to face Aria who's mirroring her expression. She swears she's still dreaming.
"Come closer," Aria says simply, and Nyreen does, always.