OOS: Dreaming
Darkness, heavy and black. Like the night sky before Elfangor's ship lit it up. Like the compound housing the Pemalite Crystal before they set off the alarm. Like the ant hive, like the ocean at one hundred thousand feet, like so many nights, so many missions she remembers.
She's dreaming. Knowing that doesn't make a difference.
The grey eyes that break through the darkness are just as easily recognized.
"Rachel."
No.
That's better. That's him.
The look on his face when she was a bear on the Blade Ship. He'd demorphed for her, he knew she would have wanted that, that she always wanted him to be human.
She'd demorphed for him, too. Because he would want to remember her as human, not as the bear, bloody and broken and dying.
The look in his eyes... He always forgot to use proper expressions, he really couldn't do them automatically, but she could see the horror there in his blank face. There was nothing she could say, nothing she could do to make it better. Jake had issued an order and she'd obeyed. There was no question of choice, of making her own judgement. An order was an order.
She looked him straight in the eye, even as the polar bear reared up on two legs to strike, she kept her eyes on his oh-so-human face with the knowledge that she would die in seconds.
She said what he already knew, what he would have liked to hear anyway.
"I love you."
He will mourn you the rest of his days.
Hasn't he mourned enough? His family... his mother finally back with him, he shouldn't have time to mourn, he had Loren. The Ellimist had been exaggerating, he had to have been.
Grey eyes in the darkness, deep and sad.
Gone North, Mort had said. Why? The hawk hated the cold and he would know, wouldn't he? He would know to wait for her in their town, he would know that she would find him, that she would do anything to find him.
He will mourn you.
Not if she finds him, can't mourn a living body. And what would it matter, what she looked like now? A teenage girl and a hawk wasn't any more or less strange than a woman in her twenties and a hawk. And he wouldn't need to trap himself in morph, he only had to travel with her, just morph a few times, just so she could hold his hand, maybe kiss him a few times, she wouldn't push him like she used to, she wouldn't.
How could she ask him to give up his wings? When the whole universe seemed to know that her purpose was to fight, shouldn't she recognize that his purpose was to fly? To be free?
She understood that now, she would understand for him, she would find him and make it better, apologize for not telling him about the mission, make sure he didn't blame Jake.
Grey eyes in the darkness, waiting for her.
She's on her way.
Wait. Please wait.