Chapter 9 #2
"Khrelan called you honest. He just used a different word." She looked at him. "You admitted your feelings in front of twelve councillors and your father. That took guts."
"It took desperation. Denying it would have been worse."
"It would have been easier."
"Easier and worse aren't mutually exclusive."
They were quiet for a moment. The underground lake reflected the ceiling's lights in slow-moving patterns that looked like galaxies turning.
The sound of water was distant and constant.
It filled the silence the way the waterfalls filled the Colony's corridors.
Background music for a world that lived underground.
"Athena told me I should talk to you about something that doesn't have a section number," Marina said.
"What does that mean?"
"It means I've been hiding behind the alliance proposal because the alliance proposal is something I know how to do, and this;" she gestured between them. " is something I don't."
Toren turned to face her. The bioluminescent light painted his rose-gold scales in shades of blue and violet, and his eyes were very bright, and very serious.
"What do you want to know?" he asked.
"Everything. But start with something small. What's your favorite color?"
He looked at her with an expression that was half amusement and half something deeper. "I didn't have one until three weeks ago."
"And now?"
"Green," he said. "The exact shade of your eyes when you're arguing with a council full of people who don't believe you. It's the most stubborn color I've ever seen."
Marina felt her face get warm. She was almost thirty years old, she'd survived a crash landing on an alien planet and presented data to a king, and she was blushing because an alien prince said he liked the color of her eyes.
"That's a terrible answer," she told him.
"It's an honest one."
"You keep saying that."
"Because honesty is the only thing I'm good at. Ask Khrelan; he'll confirm I'm terrible at everything else."
She laughed. He laughed. The sound bounced off the cavern walls and scattered across the underground lake, and for a moment the dying suns and the food crisis and the thirty-day assessment felt very far away.
"Tell me about the whale movie," she said. "Not the plot; I know the plot. Tell me what it meant to you. Why a twelve-year-old Weredragon prince watched a human movie about a whale and decided that humans were worth knowing."
He was quiet for a moment, gathering the memory the way you'd gather something precious that you hadn't taken out in a long time.
"I was lonely," he said. "Not in the way that people who have friends are lonely; the passing kind, the kind that goes away when someone walks into the room.
I was lonely in the structural sense. The Colony is twenty thousand people living underground, and every one of them knew who I was, and none of them knew me.
I was the prince. The D'Karr's son, the heir.
Those aren't identities, Marina, they're job descriptions. "
"I understand that. The lead scientist of the Vulcana expedition isn't an identity either."
"No. It isn't." He looked at her, and the recognition in his eyes was the thing she'd been circling for three weeks.
It was the understanding that they were the same kind of lonely.
Different planets, different species, same ache.
"The movie showed me something I'd never seen on Dobromia.
A relationship that wasn't based on obligation or hierarchy or survival.
The man loved the whale because the whale was beautiful, and different, and alive.
That was enough. He didn't need the whale to be useful.
He didn't need it to serve a political purpose. He just; loved it because it existed."
"And you wanted that."
"I wanted to believe it was possible. That you could care about something completely different from yourself, not because it served you, but because it was there.
Because existing was enough of a reason.
" He paused. "And then you crashed on Ceylara, and you were completely different from me, and you were there, and you were enough. "
Marina didn't trust her voice. The cavern was quiet. The lake reflected their shapes in the dark water. They were two silhouettes, close but not touching.
"I haven't been enough for anyone in a long time," she said finally. "I've been useful, competent and necessary. Those aren't the same thing."
"No. They're not."
"You see the difference."
"I see you, Marina. The whole thing. Not the scientist, not the diplomat, not the woman who organizes rescue operations while covered in dust. You.
The person who can't sleep because she cares too much, who steals mineral samples without realizing it, who argues with alien researchers at three in the morning because the data matters.
I see all of it, and it's enough. It was always going to be enough. "
She wanted to kiss him. She could feel the wanting like a physical weight, pressing against the careful professional distance she'd maintained since the day they met.
But the distance was there for a reason, and the reason was forty-seven people on a broken ship who needed her to be thinking clearly.
She did, however, lean into him. just slightly. Just enough that her shoulder pressed against his arm, and his scales were warm through her jacket, and the contact said everything a kiss would have said without crossing the line she wasn't ready to cross.
Toren didn't move away. He pressed back, just as slightly. Just as carefully.
They sat like that for a long time, in the dark, by the underground lake, not kissing, not talking, just being close to someone in a universe that seemed determined to keep everyone apart.
It was enough. For now, it was enough.