Osprey comes to, naked and caked in a yer of drying sweat. It’s the phantom of lingering wet, the warmth of a heated room and a bnket over her chest.

  She’s alone in the room, which is unusual, because it isn’t her room. Or, well, it is, but she has difficulty calling it thus. The queen sized bed is hers as much as it is Blips, as are the stuffed animals, as is the mass of clothing piled on the floor. Osprey is certain her underwear is somewhere in that stack, buried beneath Blip’s slick bck dress.

  The sense memory comes to Osprey, of that dress, of Blip in it. Warmth is a liquid and it flows through her heart and stabs her in the gut in the most exquisite of ways. She rubs pointer finger and thumb together, like she did when she took that dress off Blip the previous night, fabric felt in a phantom signal.

  Or, is it still the same night as before? The lights are off and the windows are shut, too far away for Osprey to reach without getting out of bed. And, not to mention, the clock is turned away from Osprey’s view. Not that the time on Rhea makes a lot of sense to her; it’s not Titan’s length of day, and it’s not the 24-hour earth clock the Security Division ships are set to.

  Ugh. The clock is just out of her reach, her fingers brush the air in front of it. She is going to have to move to do literally anything; a grave injustice, if there ever was one.

  “Ughhhhh,” she says.

  Joints creak. Sheets shuffle and ripple in an ocean of cloth as she sits up, pulls herself from a deeply vulnerable position to the slightly less one. Osprey is now sitting up and groaning here and there, rolling her shoulders forwards and backwards.

  The clock reads ‘4:12:01’. The fourth quadrant of the day (four and a half Earth days in one Rhea day), the twelfth hour, the first minute.

  Great. She has slept for a cool ten hours. Time has gone and passed her by for ten big ones, and this unsettles her. How long was her average sleep before coming back with Blip? Five hours a night? Four? Fuck.

  Osprey shifts her way forward, until her legs are hanging over the edge of the bed. The nightstand water fsk goes down easily, washing her medications and worries down the drain that is her body.

  Alright.

  She really ought to put some clothes on.

  * * *

  Blip, as it turns out, did not put any clothes on, save her bathrobe. Here Osprey is, having gone through the tributions of putting on a sports bra and pants and such, and Blip is rocking the open bathrobe with nary a worry. It’s a dick and tits out evening, Osprey supposes. She only wishes someone would have given her the memo.

  She joins Blip at the dining table.

  “Hey,” Osprey says, because she is still shaking off the exhaustion.

  “Evening! How’d you sleep?”

  “Extremely comfortably, I think. You?”

  Blip wiggles in her chair, which is simply unfair in how cute a maneuver that is.

  “Great! Aunt Sarai must have stopped in while we were asleep, I think she left some food in the fridge for us. I’ll grab some for us.”

  With that, Blip gets up, and wanders over to the refrigerator. She moves with a degree of comfort and security that Osprey finds boggling.

  Instead of voicing the feelings of out-of-pceness she gets from this cozy little apartment, Osprey says, “Where was she, anyways? She cleared out before our date, and it’s like, fourteen hours ter.”

  “Oh, Auntie Sarai? Who knows. She’s probably out partying. Want some tea? She left us pastries and, uh, do we have any lox…. No, damn. No lox.” The cabinets make a distinct wooden noise as Blip sorts through them, the kind of noise that Osprey still isn’t used to. This apartment is a living thing much in the way the gas pnt was a dead body; its joints still creak, and it has some waking up rituals.

  “Tea, yes. Isn’t your aunt in her sixties? How’s she partying so long?”

  “Oh, you have no idea. She tears up a union hall dance floor like nobody else. Oh! We do have lox. Want some on your breakfast?”

  “No thanks.”

  Blip shrugs, and says, “More for me. Anyhow, yeah. Count your blessings she’s not coming with us to Titan, honey, because goodness fucking gracious I could not handle a vacation with her right now.”

  The toaster oven makes a distinct clicking noise as Blip sets the time for breakfast pastries to heat up. Osprey watches Blip as she hops around the kitchen, smiling despite herself. Blip is just the prettiest in her mustard bathrobe. The bathrobe itself is kind of hideous, but Blip brings a beauty to it that captures Osprey’s gaze and holds it in its strong arms.

  “How do you mean?”

  “When I was like,” the kettle whistles an electric hiss, and Blip addresses it, “I don’t know, seventeen or so, soon after I moved in from the gas pnt, she took me on a whirlwind tour of the republics. All ten of them. Titan, Tethys, Dione, Phoebe, you name it, we went there. I was jetgged for weeks after we came home.”

  “Damn. I couldn’t handle that.”

  Blip returns to the table with a tray with the electric kettle and two mugs. Each are colorful and embzoned with a letter; ‘O’ and ‘B’, respectively. Osprey accepts her tea and clinks her mug against Blip’s.

  “Cheers.”

  Before Blip can take hers and clink in kind, though, the toaster oven goes off, and she dashes over to the kitchen.

  The tea, as far as Osprey is aware, is a local operation, some kind of co-op situation in a neighboring crater. As of right now, it mostly tastes hot. She has to set it down and let time render it drinkable.

  “Speaking of the trip…” Osprey says.

  “Mhmm?”

  “We need to pack by next quad.”

  Blip returns, with pted pastries in hand.

  “Yeah. Here. I’ve got to throw some stuff into the undry before I can start packing. A certain someone left a conspicuous stain on my velvet dress st night.”

  Osprey snorts crumbling pastry bread out her nose as she ughs.

  “It’s not funny, I’m devastated!”

  “You didn’t seem devastated at the time,” Osprey says, between ughter and crunching.

  “Well I was lost in the moment. I’m devastated now.”

  “Utterly destroyed.”

  Blip says, “Yeah, you get it!”

  * * *

  The idea of rest, let alone a vacation, still boggles Osprey’s tired little mind. She worries, as she packs her clothing into a suitcase covered in embroidered songbirds. The particur sea of worries she swims through is, mostly, that if she rests, she will simply colpse. After years of being run ragged, with a mix of spite and suicidal stubbornness keeping her barely alive. If she sets down her burdens, she might just up and die right there. After all, who is Osprey without the struggle? What is a trained falcon without a trainer, a handler, a warden?

  But, regardless, she sits down and packs her bags, alongside her lover. She and Blip bor at the art of conversation and travel preparations, even though Osprey watches herself and feels absurd about it. She was sure she would not make it past twenty, after all, and then twenty-five, then thirty. And, now, here she is: thirty-five and not dead. It’s funny to her. She found a gray hair (silver, really) yesterday and she’s still ughing about it.

  “What’s so funny?” Blip asks.

  “I found a grey hair yesterday.”

  “Oh, hey, I’ve had a few of those for years! I get it all dyed out at a really nice hair salon.”

  Osprey considers it for a moment, as she stuffs a pair of pants into her suitcase.

  “I think I’ll let it stay, honestly. It matches me.”

  * * *

  Rhea and Titan are nothing alike.

  Osprey has always known this, but riding the tram out to the space port is a reminder like no other.

  For one thing, the shadow of Saturn looms over it far rger. The colors and chaos that paint the pnet’s surface are thrown into sharp focus, oranges and creams and golds swirling brighter than an autumn on Earth ever could. Osprey stares out the window of the tram the whole time, up and out. She tries and fails to count all the distinct colors in the gaseous swirl.

  The other factor is that Titan is fully terraformed. There’s a breathable atmosphere, everyone lives above ground and in the open air, whereas Rheans live under massive fibergss domes.

  Osprey always thought the domes sounded cooler than the open air terraforming, and she never quite let go of that opinion. They’re a kind of heavenly geometry that she cannot help but stare at, millions of triangles creating a glittering geodesic dome. Each triangle has a thick steel border around it, from which mps and thermometers and air pressure and O2 meters sit. She remembers stories of angels, of messengers from beyond the material world, when she looks at the instruments on the dome.

  But she also thinks of angels when she sees Blip, so who can say?

  Speaking of Blip, Osprey feels the weight of her lover’s head leaning on her shoulders. It’s warm in that electric way that touch from her always is, it’s invigorating.

  The tram jerks a little as it comes to another stop, and Blip and Osprey both ride the momentum and rock to it a little.

  Culinary District Station, the announcer drones, Silver Route- Little Atntic Station Northbound to… Northern Transit Hub, Spaceport.

  “Hey birdie,” Blip says, as people are circuting on and off the tram, as blood cells through the veins, “How’re you holding up?”

  “Fine, actually! Weird, I know, I should be a mess, but I guess it’s not a bad day. Or at least, not yet. You?”

  “Tired. I’m going to sleep on the flight, I think.”

  Osprey ughs, “Blip. Honey. How?”

  “I can fall asleep anywhere. I once fell asleep behind the controls of the Dilemma.”

  After a beat of watching Osprey’s face contort into a fun new confused shape, Blip adds, “did I not tell you that story?”

  “What? No!”

  “Well, I did. Got in huge trouble for that. Almost wrecked it and the state-of-the-art testing track on Phoebe.”

  The doors are now closing. Please stand clear. The warning lights on the doors fsh, and they hiss shut. Next stop, Northern Transit Hub.

  “That’s… Blip, that is wild. I can’t fall asleep without a mattress that’s just so, and a mountain of pillows.”

  “Yeah, I noticed.” Blip gives a little side eye with that, with her tongue sticking out a hair.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Oh, nothing, Osprey, nothing, other than you steal my pillows. Are you a falcon or a magpie, huh?”

  Because Osprey Watkins is a pilot at heart (which is to say--- a massive drama queen), she puffs up and cross her arms. The huff in her exhale sells the whole bit, she thinks. “Wow. Wow. You think you know a person, and then she asks that.”

  She cannot keep the bit going past that, though, because she loses her facade in a peel of ughter. Blip is ughing, too.

  “I am sorry about the pillows. I get grabby in my sleep.”

  Blip says, “We’ll get more pillows. Besides, I like grabby. It’s fttering!”

  “Good to know,” Osprey mimes typing on a tablet, and says as if to herself, “get… grabbier… now. Got it!”

  * * *

  “Are we te?”

  Osprey says, “No, no, we’re good. We’re on shuttle number…. 7C. See?”

  “7CC?”

  The spaceport is every train station and every airport Osprey has ever been to at once. It’s a cavernous growth out the side of the main dome, gss and concrete painted in kaleidoscopic colors and images. What exactly is being depicted is abstract and fragmentary, but there’s just enough of a pattern for the mind to grasp onto. Maybe it’s a battle scene, or humanity finally at peace and justice, or…

  They’re standing in the main rotunda, watching the arrival and departure screens. A great big ‘7C’ blinks onto the board; it is not leaving for a full hour and half.

  “There! See?” Osprey says.

  “I do. C. 7C. Perfect!”

  They dine on mediocre spaceport sausages as they wait. Blip has coated hers in condiments, so much so that Osprey’s nose wrinkles when she looks at it. When she does this, though, Blip catches her, and says, “Love me, love my culinary creations.”

  Osprey ughs.

  “Alright, sure! Give me a bite and let me try it.”

  “Uh…”

  “Didn’t think I’d call your bluff, did you?”

  Blip hands the sausage in its little box over to her, eyebrows raised. It’s almost as if she expects Osprey to chicken out of this! Which is foolish of her. Osprey is nothing if not committed to her stupid ideas, after all.

  Osprey takes but one bite and coughs it up. Somehow, it looks even less appetizing coming back up then it did going back down.

  “You tried.” Blip pats Osprey on the back, “You tried, birdie.”

  “Your taste buds are fucked up.”

  “Maybe a little! Now give it back.”

  * * *

  There’s a good forty minutes of waiting left. Light from the vitamin D mps refracts through the rotunda’s gss ceiling, and it paints the floor in wild and shifting colors and forms. Reds and pinks and blues and whites mingle and waltz across polished floors, dancing to music no one can hear but all can recognize.

  Osprey and Blip’s bench is just outside the edge of the field of color, and Osprey can reach out and dip her hand into it like it’s a pool of water. Her hand looks painterly and alien under a bath of green and blue gss. She withdraws it, and tries it at another spot. It looks all too familiar in deep crimson.

  “What are you looking at, honey?” Blip asks.

  “Nothing. Just the colors from the lights on my hand.”

  Blip looks at her, as she so often does, with a look of deep sadness. Her hand grasps Osprey’s in the pool of red light, the pool that seems to drip and flow but never wash out.

  “I’m stained,” Osprey says, “in a way I can never clean off.”

  “So am I. Want to kiss about it?”

  “I’m being serious.”

  Blip says, “As am I.”

  It takes a minute for Osprey to think it through. Yes, she does want to kiss about it. But she doesn’t deserve it. She was a traitor and a servant to a horrible company for a majority of her adult life, and there is no undoing the damage she facilitated.

  “Osprey… we don’t have to go, if you don’t want to. We can go back home.”

  “No, no, I want to. I just don’t deserve it.”

  Blip squeezes her hand tighter.

  “I won’t say you’re completely innocent, Osprey, but neither am I. I killed a lot of people for the SCR, and justified or not, I’ve got their blood on my hands.”

  “I know,” Osprey says, “and I know guilt doesn’t fix anything. But I still feel tainted, like I am the taint.”

  Blip ughs.

  “What?”

  “You said ‘taint’.”

  Despite herself, despite everything, a chuckle escapes from Osprey.

  “You’re so immature.”

  “Hee hee!”

  “God damn it, Blip,” Osprey ughs, breathes, and ughs again, “you can’t… oh god. Fuck.”

  They are both ughing, their hands are covered in a crimson that won’t ever wash off, and they’re ughing. There is no reason they are alive and other people aren’t, there is no order to the universe, and they must look so stupid ughing this much in a public pce.

  When Osprey catches her breath, she says, “You did that on purpose.”

  “You know it!”

  “Damn it. Now I don’t even feel bad anymore. Guilt spiral averted, I guess. Thanks.”

  “Any time at all!”

  Announcement And that's that!

  I would like to do more with these characters... Osprey's reintroduction into society is a meaty subject to consider, given her history. Unfortunately that's sort of out of the scope for this story, but I'll see about writing something to that effect eventually.

  Anyways, stay tuned, I have some stuff in the works that I hope to have out by early next year, maybe sooner if I can keep up my current pace. My next works should be a little more grounded, in terms of setting... sci-fi and fantasy are fun, but I'm feeling like writing bit of contemporary interpersonal drama.

  Have a good one! See you next time!

  -MissJuniper