Thank you so much to everybody who took the time to comment, I say it every time but I really do mean it - thank you for your encouragements and your well wishes, and I hope this shorter chapter isn't too disappointing. I have the next one lined up, so once it's through editing there'll be something much bigger to sink your teeth into very soon.
The view screen cuts off, and she pushes the terminal back into the surface of the table. She closes her eyes in the exhaustion of it all, though the world doesn't turn dark, and nothing much changes at all.
Just in front of her, only in colours black and white, she is sure she sees her husband. She knows it's quite impossible, and really a rather human thing to experience, but she is sure nonetheless.
Her mouth opens slowly, but he is the first to speak.
"I've missed you so much,"
Iain utters, not a second older than the day he left her.
His body floats in a gentle circle until he no longer has his back to her, and she can at least see his grim smile.
"Why do you look so sad?"
She finds herself asking, no way to weasel her way inside the head of a man who is not even there.
He does not come any closer to her.
"Because so much has happened and nothing is the same."
Those blue-cut eyes of his close up for a split second - she is convinced she's lost him again.
"Our daughter is not the same,"
He tells her sadly, and when he opens his eyes again, they have become starkly purple, indigo; her breath is stolen for all they remind her of.
"She could never have been seven forever, no matter how far you went,"
Lwaxana manages to echo just the same sadness, fingers reeling and reaching at her sides, wanting to touch him but knowing the illusion will be destroyed.
"But she was more open than a mourning flower, more loving and more lovely -"
Death has made a poet of a military man.
"How could you have turned her into an ocean 'Ana, people drown in oceans."
"You left me Iain,"
She defends, drowning too in the ocean that they both have created.
"I did the best I could with what remained."
A tear falls, more vast than a glacier, more moving than the moon moves the tides.
Damn them both for becoming poets, for forgetting how to simply talk.
She absolutely despises him.
"But you didn't have to punish her for my mistake,"
He goes on, filled up with pity just like a dove.
The sun lights up the tips of his hair where they are straying from his head, and he has the halo of a terribly dark angel.
A smile sours into a grimace upon her face as he speaks:
"You can either fight her or support her, but you can never control her."
"I don't want her to go away."
A tear leaves her own eye now too, and the sun gets trapped atop the apple of her cheek. He glances down at it, a man too in love to be alive.
"I don't want her to be gone like you."
Iain has no answer for her, smiling like some serene fool, like this is his swan song, like he's just a swan and not a man.
She wants to stamp her feet and scream; what good have swans ever been anyway?
"Please tell me she's okay - before you leave me?"
He closes his eyes again, opens them a few times over, each in deeper, more harrowing shades of purple, not even himself at all.
Death has changed him so intimately that his answer might not mean a single thing.
"I can't."
The truth rings between the mountains off in the distance, and she's sure she hears her little girl calling back, so many years ago.
"I'm with her always, no matter where she is or what is become of her."
In a rush of wind, he is less than an inch from her face, and the ghost of his forehead rests softly against her own, the two of them completely equal for the first time.
The smell of sandalwood and ocean spray mingles between them, and she tries her very hardest not to turn into a blazing fire.
"I will make sure she is okay, eventually."
All the air is blown out of her lungs, and she couldn't be a fire even if she wanted to, couldn't even click up a spark.
She opens her eyes, and nothing was real but the wetness of her cheek and the sun that lights her up, the lingering warmth of skin on skin, and the feeling of dread that will not lift from where it sleeps well, a beast curled up in her belly.
