Flauraan, Abigail is 17, Sophie is 19
Pottering about in the kitchen with my mum, I try not to smile at the sounds of laughter from the roof above us. I am remaining stoic and dutiful, passing my mum measurements of twine as she divides up her herbs, then moving over to cast an eye over the sterilised jars lined up pristinely by the window, which is ajar and letting in a slight breeze. When she turns around I am distracted, gazing past her and focusing on the sounds of mechanisms carried by the wind. She smiles knowingly at me and before I can even be embarrassed to be caught she crosses to the cooler and pulls out a pitcher.
“Why don't we fix up some refreshments for our hard workers?” She teases gently and I accept the inevitable shedding of my own aloofness. I don't even know why I feel the need to hide what this means to me. It's all a bit overwhelming, really.
We carry out a tray of one of my mum’s slightly fruity concoctions and I squint against the sun as I take in the construction site that Sophie and my dad have been toiling in. My parents have good reason to worry when Sophie and technology mix in our home, and honestly I don't know how she convinced them to let her mess around with the preexisting wiring there. Alright, I know how she convinced them. They love her almost as much as I do, and even though I have played it cool, they clearly all know that this is affecting me.
We are standing there for a while, watching them work, my dad supervising as Sophie crouches in the now exposed communications unit and tinkers with a focus I've rarely seen her show anything except machines.
Mum clears her throat and speaks over the wind, “Are you ready for a break?”
Dad turns around and smiles warmly at us, Sophie tries to do the same but gets snagged on something and starts yelping and apologising. Dad quickly reaches down to help her get unsnagged and now I am the one laughing, clear and happy, and I don't try to stop the sound from carrying into the sky.
Once Sophie is untangled with only a few minor scrapes and cuts in her clothes to show for it, she stands for a moment and looks right at me as my laughter dies down. For that moment it feels like we are the only two people in the entire universe, and I try to transmit all the feeling I've been trying to suppress straight into her. Then the spell is broken, they climb off of the roof and we sit and chat together as a family as they take a well earned break before returning to their work.
Once it is all done, and Sophie is covered in grime from some unclear source, she presses into my hand the communicator she made for me the first week we'd met. It is surprisingly pristine.
“Obviously we still need to test it.” she is speaking casually, as if she's handed me a trinket, as if this is any other gadget in her bag, as if she doesn’t know that I know that she is giving me a direct line to her, a lifeline, as a way of trying to apologise for all the time I spent tortured by her absence. Making up for her joining the Alliance and continuing to be so far from me by using Alliance transmission technology to ensure we can talk even if she is systems away, a promise that she will always be here for me, always come back for me, always be in contact with me from now on.
I couldn't hold it against the suffering Sophie, the aggrieved Sophie who'd just watched a friend die and blamed herself for it. Even when days turned into weeks and months and I didn't know if she was dead or alive. And I certainly can't hold it against this Sophie, who is doing everything in her power to make it up to me, to earn back my trust. I can’t pretend it doesn’t make me incredibly anxious, that there hasn’t been lasting damage from the way she abandoned me. I really do hope that this new era of both of our lives with assuage my anxiety.
Time will tell. But now when I am sick with worry about her, I at least have something to do other than wait and see.
She is surveying her work but all I am doing is looking at her, and thinking how lucky I am.