POTENTIAL 1

Back in the day? She’d crack open some beers, pull up some psychedelic rhythm game on the flatscreen, and blitz her mind out on colors and sound. If you’re in the moment, you’re not thinking. You’re distracted. You can keep your head down and let the black thoughts pass you by.

Before she got her own place? Throwing herself at any book she could get her hands on. Mostly non-fiction: medical textbooks, pop science, romance novels. Another way to sink into something else and let those black thoughts go by. If your head’s somewhere else, they can’t catch up.

But that’s not tonight. Tonight she’s got no patience for the games and the beer tastes sour and she’s sprawled out on the couch facing the window, which looks out on the lights of the city.

She was a kid. (Does that matter?) They were already dead and gone. It was the last thing they could do for her. (She didn’t know.) Round and round they spin. The skin’s clammy under her fingers where she rests them on her stomach.

She sinks into the mire.

There’s something underneath, though. For once. Elegant metal. Arms she could rest in forever, because they belong to Euna.

...she screwed everything up and Euna still let her come back. She was a disaster at her, and Euna forgave her. She doesn’t deserve it, she knows, you don’t have to tell her. But she’s selfish. She’ll take it and take it and give what she can and marvel that Euna thinks it’s enough. That maybe it actually is, somehow.

The mire laps at her. The moon shines down, bright and white.

The moon. Ha! The real estate’s open again, but there’s no atmosphere. Nothing on there but an airless death, except that Euna caught her. Euna saved her. Euna hauled her back to Earth and kissed her like she was drowning, like Sara was irreplaceable, and that had been the beginning of the end.

Which end?

The end of the show. The end of tactical flirting. The end of AEGIS, all because Euna dared to kiss first. The end of this chapter and the beginning of something new.

Euna’s coming back. She’s coming back and then Sara can invite her over to the couch, just to hold her and be held. The apartment was changing, becoming something shared, something lived in, and that was good. It was [i]good,[/i] and her nightmares of waking up and having a Euna-shaped hole in the world in bed next to her, ground down to feed her light, her everything fading away until she couldn’t remember the color of her hair or the sound of her ridiculous snorting laughter or the feel of her hand on her skin...

That’s when the phone rings.