Wonder//Deena x Sam

Chapter 2 epilogue: melancholy.

"If you love a flower that lives on a star, it is sweet to look at the sky at night. All the stars are a-bloom with flowers..."

Chapter 2
There's a planet out there with a girl and a book of flowers.

"But you said that was a really long time ago."

Deena glances down at the Glietian boy and reaches out a hand to ruffle his hair. It is thick and dark and feels like tendrils of a long ago night, when stars still used to paint the skies.

"It is" Deena replies, and though it has been too many Earth years, she still can't quite shake her accent. Her words are rounder, softer, slurred in a way that Glietian isn't.

"Then how is she still a girl? Shouldn't be a--a..." the Glietian boy frowns, features startlingly similar to a human's. Deena wonders if either of his parents were human but that's still rare, and genetic testing is at a standstill.

"Grown-up?" Deena supplies with a little laugh, leaning back in her chair, her head hitting the trunk of one of her beloved cherry trees. She points up at the greenhouse ceiling, a thin sheet of shifting plasma keeping the oxygen in, the nitrogen out, projecting the universe across this particular expanse of sky.

"Yeah, one of those things."

"Because I don't know if she's chosen to grow up yet," Deena says, "I sure haven't. I'm still a girl."

The boy frowns, "What do you mean?"

Deena presses a few buttons on her chair and it spins into life, wheeling over to the edge of the huge greenhouse, where an entire wall is covered in books behind carefully monitored cases as to prevent decay. She reaches in and tugs one out, a particular book, a thin book, with the picture of a little boy and a flower on the cover.

"You've read that book to us," the Glietian boy trills, clapping and grinning.

"It's my favorite, well no--my favorite book is with that girl on Earth."

"What's her name?"

Deena pauses, Sam's name on her tongue like a prayer, a pearl, a perpetual promise of maybe, "I forget--like I said, it was a really long time ago. But I like to think of her as the keeper of memories."

"Keeper of memories," the Glietian boy echoes, voice thrumming soft and round, trying to imitate Deena's accent. Deena flips open The Little Prince and points at a passage about seeing and hearts and flowers and she reads it out loud, translating as she goes. The boy stays quiet till the end and quirks his head.

"So are all these flowers for her? So she won't have to wonder if a sheep has eaten her flower? There are too many flowers for any sheep to eat here!" and as if to illustrate, the boy waves his hands towards the massive expanse of the greenhouse, acres and acres of land, acres and acres of cherry blossoms.

Deena laughs, "Smart--yes. These are for her. So she can look up at the sky and see the stars a-bloom with flowers."

"Must be lonely, all by herself..." the Glietian boy says, wrinkling his nose as a petal falls on it. He goes briefly cross-eyed, staring at the tiny pink thing before he shakes his head and it flutters to the ground. Deena heaves a sigh and nods and tries not to think (as she has done so many nights, so many days, so many weeks and months and years) about how small Sam must have looked curled up on that couch, wonder if Sam sang herself to sleep that night, with her eyes squeezed shut, pretending that it's Deena's voice and if Deena had to name one regret in her whole entire life (sans the obvious one of letting Sam--if she had only held on--if she had--if--) she would say that it was not singing more when she had the chance. Not singing for Sam when she had asked, not singing her awake and singing her asleep and singing her through the paces and prints of every single day they had together as girl. Still as girls now.

"She has my favorite book to keep her company, and if she can see it, this whole garden in the sky," Deena says, and smiles to herself. Because she has to hold onto something to keep herself sane, funny that it's the very thing driving her to what the people of old would have called insanity--believing, deluding herself into--no, believing that maybe, there's a chance that Sam is still alive, and looking up and wondering if Deena is there too.

"Well if these are her flowers, then where are yours?" the Glietian boy asks.

Deena presses her fingers over the book in her hands, tracing the tattered outline and tries to imagine sunrise. There are two suns here, and too many moons to count, so no sunrise or sunset, as the rotation of suns and moons and so many stars it's nearly impossible to chart them. She tries to imagine a sunrise as beautiful as those on Earth and can't, and then he wonders if the sunrises themselves were beautiful, or if they were made so by the way Sam's face would light up when they happened; she tries to remember a sunrise without Sam by her side and can't. There are none to be remembered.

"She's my flower," Deena says, "just the one."

"Oh," the boy says, and then recedes into silence. And then, "Then how do you know that she's still there? That the 'sheep hasn't eaten the flower', that's what the book says, right?"

Deena nods and places the book back in its case, lock clicking into place with a small hiss.

She looks back up at the makeshift sky, projected across the greenhouse ceiling and tries to imagine the universe beyond, the direction that Earth might be in, and he sighs, deep and heavy, lacing her fingers over her lap.

The ground below is covered in fallen flowers.

"That's why I'm still a girl... because I wonder if my flower is still there. And like the book says, that's a kind of pain, a kind of importance that no grown up will ever understand."