Chapter Text
The leaves in the lake are rotting, slowly. They float on the surface for a few hours before an edge dips under, and then eventually the whole leaf goes, sinking down to the bottom. It’s always once the edge dips, broken apart by lakewater. Never before that.
Aimsey watches it from the deck and thinks of clouds of gas, tiny, distant points of contact, dim red lights that could obliterate him in seconds, were he right up next close to them like he wants to be sometimes. He thinks of nature fading into old dust, and dark corridors, corridors that become more homely and safe than those light Academy corridors had ever been. Their house becomes dusty and old almost instantly, settled-into, stacks of paper and mail piled up on end tables at the end of narrow hallways, thrifted chandeliers inches away from dark wooden bookshelves, empty at first but filling with the things they find along the way. Books, for certain, but also rocks, odd and knobbly sticks. GUQ has an obsession with the material world, one Aimsey is all too happy to oblige, struck breathless with it at times.
Aimsey’s more inclined towards the intangible, the infinite. It’s why they’re so drawn to space.
(And– well. And GUQ. Speaking of the infinite.)
Yes, GUQ has known everything; has seen models and renditions of every object humanity could manage, stored somewhere in their neural passages, though the structure has been ripped from them. It’s not the same as seeing it. It’s not the same as watching her, watching her as she steps carefully down a dappled forest path for the first time, watching the way her breath catches like Aimsey imagines it used to back when she was fully human. Raised on the moon, away from sensation, away from dirt and mud and simple things.
Things that had become mundane for Aimsey in their abundance are once again new and electric. The taut skin of an apple, resting on the table. Music. Oh, not to mention the music. There is no sound in space, and no reason for computers to hear songs, hear anything but the off-tune humming of their desperate, disillusioned captains.
Aimsey has to turn away sometimes, fighting the urge to reach out and embrace GUQ and never let go, hands digging into her back. They don’t need to fight that urge. GUQ would welcome it, like she has before, wrapped up in human touch the same way she gets wrapped up in anything. But Aimsey wants her to do it on her own, to see it fully for herself. She wants it to be all GUQ’s. They can have things together later, when their eyes are dilated properly for the light, when their feet do not feel floating on the ground anymore. When Earth is home.
From behind Aimsey, there are footsteps on the path. It’s the sound of tired leaves pressing down into soft earth, sticks wet from the lake that seeps into the soil.
“I think I like autumn,” GUQ says. There’s a hand along Aimsey’s chin, soft, and she leans into it, looking up into eyes the grey of tea and late evening, when the sun goes down.
“I’m so glad,” Aimsey whispers.