"You thought I was ugly, when we first - when we first met."

His voice was lined with a smile, a faint cough not managing to steal the bemusement away.

"Too much hair in all the wrong places, and I smiled too much, and you said that my eyes didn't have enough light to them. You said I was the worst choice they could've made. I remember that."

Lyssa couldn't help but laugh, the echo of his hands in the way she brushed an imaginary strand of hair from her face. He'd been ugly. He still was, by the standards of everyone she lived with. They'd all clustered around, wanting to know, wanting to toss in their opinions at warped tones of his voice. Is that even a man, they'd yawned with amusement. That's it? That's the best they can do? A mistake. A joke.

And she'd agreed. Her work had taken her hither and yon, and she'd thought she'd seen the ugliest things life had to offer, and yet... this was something new. Beautiful, if you were a poet. Which she wasn't, but when Mannos had pulled her aside, and flicked at a spike in some signal from nowhere, she'd felt it. That feeling of something new. Something worth the exams, the trials, the endless, messy dithering about protocol and politics and all that...

"Bullshit."

Lyssa did her best to grin back at him, his eyes twinkling in the glow of the screen. It'd gotten so much better, since the early years, the things he'd shared with her, the things he'd sent. The first time they'd talked, a faceless voice, the shape of words on his tongue muted and twisted. And when they'd seen each other, his eyes dark and quiet.

And when she'd stayed late, standing at her desk, curious what the word he'd used was. He had seemed ashamed of it; someone with a different sort of decoration had told him off. An animal, and... that. Hardly diplomatic. Hardly appropriate, for the significance of the occasion. Bullshit had sounded strange on her tongue, a vacationer out of place, and the sound in fuck still didn't make sense. Not real sense, the sort that clicked inside your head and set the thudding inside you to a sort of music. The sort of sense that he made, after the early years.

They'd still laughed, and prodded her. This was normal now, they said; the connection was better, and it was strange to dwell. Let it go, flit onto something else, be normal yourself and let something new catch your eyes.

They'd asked her, as one of the first. To go there, and he'd done the thing with water, again, glistening on his cheeks, like he'd done when she'd explained to him a word of her own. It was a long trip; the laws were hard as iron on that, the weight of a constant hanging over it all. But it was a chance. A chance to go, and see what he'd talked about. Bulls, and shit, and green, even if it still was just a figment.

"You're what, halfway out?"

The amusement was there in his eyes, cloudy and not nearly as dull as she'd thought, when she'd thought he was ugly.

"I remember when I was a kid. Back in Nebraska, when my family went to visit our grandmothers. A long, long trip, even along the lanes. I'd always sit in the back and ask them, 'are we there yet? Are we there yet?' And they'd always tell me I'd know when we got there, Lyssa."

He laughed.

"You'll know when you get here, I promise. The sea wall I used to run on, and the sun doing its best, and maybe they'll find you a good, old-fashioned cow to gawk at, legs and all. Ugly as hell, I promise. Like me."

Something flickered inside Lyssa as he spoke, the cough at the end of his words almost covering up the sounds in his room.

Her family had flitted on, onto other families, other lives, a few decades here and there, popping back up just to laugh at how she was stuck, still... not studying, not anymore. Stuck on the journey, now, letting the short-term jobs and temporary lives flit best in the blink of decades. Mannos hadn't been able to take it, but he was just there for curiosity. She was there, stuck in the constant hum of engines, for... more.

He grinned brighter. "You remember when you showed me where you grew up? I wish I could see the colors like you could. I thought all of it was so strange. Ugly. Warped and misshapen, and... well. Not you, though."

His hand pressed to the screen, shaking.

"I thought you were the prettiest girl in the world, when I saw you. Too struck dumb to think about that not even making sense, all things considered."

Her hand was on the ghost of his, his fingers pressed together, trying to overlap hers, the muted beeps growing slower around the edges of his voice.

"Halfway there."

She'd given her report, an urgent abstract, a few scant decades after it had happened. They were as much alike as different, all things considered. Similar drives and dreams, and the recipes he'd sent hadn't even tasted bad, even if he were too polite to say the opposite was a mess. They fought and played and stared out into the night sky, up at their moon, in the same way people had stared up at the Twins. Even if they were... temporary. Fast, and full, and grinning, like how he'd walked away from the lab, for the first time, and showered her new sunlight, and made her wish she could run to him and wrap her arms around him and feel his heart.

"Halfway there, Liu'ly-a- Ah, hell. Lyssa. It's the closest I can come. Halfway there, love."

He was quiet, now, a smile still on his face, in a silent room.

They were short and swift, faster than the awful slowness of the journey, but by all the stars, they could wait. Wait, and hope, and hold one thing in their heart above all else. One thing, burning above all, that would light their eyes and make them smile, and keep on long after their time had stolen up on them.

One thing.

And Lyssa was, she felt, small and alone in front of the sweep of it all, glad to have been his.