Dashel shook his head. “Not at all. I understand perfectly. I'm somewhat ashamed to admit it, but I felt the same way after losing Qumarah.”
I tilted my head, looking up at him. “Your mate? The one who died? I remember you mentioned her during the fight with the Pax.”
He let out a mirthless laugh. “Yes, the perfect time to reminisce about one's deceased wife, eh? In retrospect, I'm surprised my sentimentality didn't get us all killed.”
I put my hand over his. “What happened to her?”
“She contracted a terrible illness. Giliu Syndrome. We both did, actually. I recovered from it, but she didn't. And for the longest time, no matter how much I tried to cling to the good memories, the best times we'd shared, the way her beauty and kindness had lit a lantern inside my heart...”
“Instead, all you could think of were those last awful moments,” I finished for him, nodding. “It felt like all the happiness that was yours by right had been stolen, replaced with the ugliness and horror and grief of their deaths. Until in the end, you find yourself hating them for ever having been in your life at all—”
“—and hating yourself for hating them,” he said softly. “So you do understand. Ever since then, I...well, I didn't handle things in a particularly healthy manner. I became terrified of germs, of getting sick again. Not because I feared dying from it, but because I feared that the experience would force me to re-live her death all over again.” He paused, then added, “Or perhaps because I simply worried that the next time, I wouldn't be able to muster the strength to fight it off, preferring instead to simply succumb to it and join her. Either way, this manifested in extremely paranoid and unbalanced behavior. I started cleaning myself obsessively, far too many times each day—each hour, even. When I received this command, I was concerned that my crew would find out and worry that their captain was suffering from some form of insanity.”
“But I've been here for quite some time now,” I pointed out, “and I haven't seen you act that way.”
He frowned, as though this hadn't previously occurred to him. “You're right. I haven't. Not since you've been here. Whatever prison of the mind I'd locked myself in, it seems you've released me.”
“Which is a bit ironic,” I said with a smile, “given how our relationship began.”
Dashel laughed, but I could tell he was still preoccupied. “So would you? Bring him back, if you could?”
“That seems like a fairly useless question, unless you Drakon have some kind of cloning technology I don't know about. Which, now that I think of it, isn't wholly beyond the realm of possibility.”
“We don't, no. Several scientists on our world have attempted to develop such things in secret over the past century or so, but once they were discovered, they were promptly executed. To bring back someone the universe has taken from us is considered a grave abomination in our culture – or at least, that's what our leaders tell us. Sometimes, I suspect it's simply because they don't want such technology to fall into the wrong hands. Which makes sense. After all, you wouldn't want to have to fight the same Pax armada we just defeated over and over again, would you?”
“I didn't even want to fight them the first time.” I thought about it, then shook my head. “No, that's not really true. I guess I did want a bit of payback.”
“I realize it may seem like a useless question,” he went on, returning to the subject I'd desperately been trying to distract him from. “But I'd really like to know.”
“Would I bring Daniel back?” I sighed. “If you're asking whether I love you and I'm happy to be with you, Dashel, the answer is yes. But if you're asking whether part of me still misses him, the answer to that is 'yes' too.”
“I can understand that,” he answered hesitantly, “but it seems like there's more to it than that, too.”
“Like I said, the worst part of losing him was the loneliness that followed. And no offense, but I'm not sure if you can fully understand this part, since you were born and raised on a planet where galactic travel and interstellar wars were just a normal part of life. As a human, that stuff is so far beyond anything I was mentally or emotionally prepared to handle. We only saw those things in movies and on television. They were entertainment for us because they were so far beyond belief, you know? Colorful fantasies invented by creative minds, and always confined to the limited space of the screens and our own imaginations. But once I was faced with the real thing, space just seemed so...impossibly big, and so violent and unforgiving. And when he died, I had to face it all on my own. I couldn't even lean on the support of my fellow slaves.” I let out a harsh laugh. “I guess I was a little too busy ordering them around and abusing them, so I could find some way to get ahead.”
“You don't have to face it on your own now,” Dashel said. “You have me.”
“And I know that, and I appreciate it. I always will. But it's not the same, you know? I'm worried I'll lose my grip on where I came from, the place that made me who I am. I can't just drop all that and suddenly consider myself a Hielsrane. And even if I could, no one else would ever let me get away with that. Out here among the stars, I'll always be a human surrounded by aliens. That's why I'm so scared that I'll never see Earth again, Dashel, if you really want to know. That's why it's so important for me to feel my home planet
