The details: I don't own or profit from Andromeda in any way. This is figment/fragment of my imagination as far as the plot goes and it's copyrighted. I'm just borrowing the aesthetics. And since I've never dedicated a fanfic to anyone before: this one is for you, D.J., wherever you are, because you wear it well.
WABI-SABI
Harper had been sound asleep, dreaming of surfing, beach babes and all the Sparky Cola he could consume. Sweet.
"Harper, can I ask you something?" Rommie's avatar said standing over him as he fell out of bed in a state of near cardiac arrest.
"Jeez, Rom-Doll, I love ya and all that and normally this would be happening in my dream of dreams, but what the hell do you want to know at…0330…?" he said squinting at the clock, in a half-stunned stupor. "And knock next time, will ya?"
"Sorry. What's Wabi-Sabi?"
"You wake me up from the first restful coma I've had in a month to talk about ancient Earth Japanese aesthetics? Is Charlemagne Bolivar firing sushi at us or something?"
"No, no…just Rev thought if I asked you I'd understand something is all. He was very mysterious and wouldn't tell me anything more."
"OK, so what was it you two were talking about that I'm supposed to enlighten you further about?"
"Aging, impermanence, love, and the meaning of life."
"Oh, is that all. You'll sleep a lot better if you stick to the light and fluffy stuff before bedtime, Rommie. Trust me on that one. But since we're up and all that…."
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Rommie had been becoming more and more emotional lately and had been trying to understand her newfound feelings. Especially her feelings for Dylan.
She'd known him for years now and watched him change, grow, and age. Logically, she thought, this last one should distress her. His youthful physical perfection was gradually fading. The laugh lines were deepening, the scars from battles growing more numerous, the cut sharpness of his muscles smoothing slightly, the veins/sinews of his strong hands becoming more apparent, his hair was slightly receding. After all, this was the touch of mortality at work. He would grow old and die one day and leave her alone. The man she'd come to love with all her heart now that she'd had one.
And yet, oddly, these physical changes seemed to make him that much more attractive and handsome to her. He'd become familiar in a well-worn sort of way. It was very sexy and it made no sense whatsoever to her.
She was used to him. Used to every detail of his body as he got out of the shower. He didn't know she still watched. It was her guilty pleasure.
She was used to the scent of him after a hard workout with Tyr when he was all sweaty and in his grungiest clothes.
She was used to the way he left things in casual disarray in his cabin.
Everything he was was human and natural. Everything she was was not. Opposites attract. So said the database. Logical, but it didn't seem to explain it all. There was more to it than that. Her gut told her so.
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She'd heard Becka talking about her first love once with Trance. He'd been an older man of sorts. Not human, but so humanoid the differences were on a molecular level. She'd known him all of his life. All 10 years of it.
"I was there when he was born, she'd said. I delivered him when his mom was wounded in a Nietzchean raid on their ship. Uncle Sid, Dad, and I picked up the distress call in the Maru and we arrived too late. They'd left her to die not knowing she was pregnant. They'd taken the ones fit for work and killed the others including his father who'd died defending them. She'd begged me to take him to their home world. I didn't have the heart to tell her that the Nietzcheans had gotten there first and there was no world left to go home to.
"They're not like us. They age very quickly in the first year, becoming a full adult in the time it takes us to learn to walk and talk. They age at about a decade a year then and die by 10. His mother told me to expect this. She didn't tell me I'd fall in love with him.
"I was 10 the day he was born and 11 the day I fell in love. He was beautiful. He had a cheeky sense of humor, warm dark brown eyes, was short—only 1.6m—and had a really sexy body. He was my first love. Uncle Sid knew it and so did my dad. They knew he'd fallen in love with me too. Life was short and brutal for everyone we knew so it didn't matter as far as the "age difference". He was a good man, too. Kind and gentle.
So we grew up together and I watched him age literally before my eyes. He was always beautiful to me even when the lines on his face deepened, the muscles were no longer so toned, and his hair was streaked with gray. He was always my love. He taught me that there is beauty in imperfection, impermanence, and even incompleteness. He taught me that love knows no bounds including time and that we would always have what time we had. He died in my arms when I was 20."
Becka hadn't engaged the privacy mode and so Rommie hadn't had a choice but to hear everything and to see the tears in Becka's eyes as she recalled her one true love.
How awful it must be to have to feel such emotions she'd thought. How wrong she'd been she now knew. She wouldn't trade her feelings for Dylan for anything. Even if it meant the agony of losing him one day. It was worth it all.
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So, OK, the love part made some sense to her now. After all, Dylan had many of the same qualities that Becka had said had attracted her to her first love. But why were these signs of Dylan's aging so damned attractive to her? Why don't I want to reverse it, she thought? If it means I'm going to lose him just like Becka lost her first love, why doesn't it seem ugly and frightening to me? And even my avatar can't age in appearance in the same way. Shouldn't this difference be upsetting? It's one more way we are not alike.
She thought about it for awhile and found no answers. She knew that Dylan often sought out Rev Bem when he had philosophical questions or simply wanted someone to listen while he sought his own.
So she went to Rev and told him her thoughts. And he'd smiled and sent her to Harper. He was human and he was in love all the time. He'd be able to explain it to her in a way she could understand he assured her.
He hadn't said to ask him right at that moment, but it was gnawing at her circuits and she needed closure. Impatience and impulsivity were more of those strange new emotions she was learning to deal with she thought as she headed for Harper's quarters.
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"Wabi-Sabi is an ancient Japanese concept", Harper said. " It's a style or a way of perceiving a style. Basically it says that everything in the universe is impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete and that's OK. It's better than OK, it's in harmony with the universe as a whole. There's beauty in the wear and tear.
"Take my surfboard here. When I first got it, it was so damn perfect, I was afraid to touch it. It stressed me out. I'd have to polish off the fingerprints, set it perfectly upright, have perfect form, never wipe out…yada, yada, yada. Way too much stress there.
"After awhile, though, it took on a beauty of its own. It developed a well-worn patina—wiping out and crashing into coral and sand kinda does that to a finish ya know? And here, see, this nick is from when I was won my first competition, got drunk, and fell over it at the feet of a really hot beach babe on the boardwalk. I'm sure it was a great night if I could remember it. It's all in that nick, though, LOL.
"And you, Rom-Doll, you've got your own patina, inside and out. All those modifications and that tattoo you wanted. Those things make you unique and we share all that. It's a bond see. Perfection never lasts and there's no bond there. Nothing shared. No memories.
"So, when you grow old with someone, you've got that patina together, that wear and tear, that bond and that's why they're more beautiful to you. That's what love does. Ain't it a beautiful thing? That's why you feel like you do."
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"Wow, thanks Harper," Rommie said when he finished. "Since when did you go all philosophical. I've never seen that side of you?"
"Being philosophical makes me a chick-magnet and there are a couple of more sides of me you haven't seen yet, Rom-Doll," he said with a naughty grin.
Rommie threw his pillow at him in mock disgust. He threw it back at her. She threw him on the bed. He wrestled her. "See, see, I told you—foreplay!" He shrieked with laughter as she tickled him without mercy.
"Foreplay! In your wet dreams!"
"Rommie—no fair!" he yelled as she turned on the sprinklers as a cold shower, her hologram laughing as her avatar neatly stepped aside leaving Harper soaked and tangled in the sheets.
"My silk sheets!"
"The water spots will give them that Wabi-Sabi chic look."
"Nice, nice. What happened to waving them about as we walked through the village in the morning to celebrate the consummation of our love?"
"I'll wave you out the airlock with them if it makes you feel like a man."
"The thanks I get for imparting my ancient cultural wisdom to you."
"It was the only way you were ever going to go for a roll in the sheets with me Seamus, and you know it," she said with a playful kiss goodnight.
"I know, I know: I'll always have the memories."
"Yep—and the patina. 'Night, Seamus."
"'Night, Rommie."
THE END