Orbit

You awoke much like you were born – slowly, reluctantly – taking small shallow breaths. Though I mixed the oxygen myself, blending a perfect match to the sea-level airs you were accustomed to, I watched as you fought against your body's natural urge to awaken. To respond to me. I recall wondering if I had made the right choice… Perhaps sea-level air was too close to home and reminded you listlessly of memories long gone. Perhaps those memories are what held you. Then I recall laughing to myself at how easily I would question your countenance but not question myself taking you. Even in those first days I believed in my choice to have you.

After some time, your slow stirring bled into consciousness. Your fingers twitched and your throat seemed to cease all movement, as if you knew already that you were far, far from home. If I could breathe air as you I would have stopped, then. I had rehearsed that moment endlessly. I imagined you waking gently and with curiosity, the way humans do when they feel a deep sense of safety. Instead you seemed to tremble in the most strangely constrained way - as if you wanted all at once to bolt and also stay completely still. Your eyes, now open, flicked wildly about the space, flying from the white of the walls to the domed ceiling and finally down to the medical-grade synthetic webbing crossing your frame. I watched in abject horror as your eyes widened to complete and total frenzy - Regret consumed me. Why did I not elect for a gradual reduction of the administered propofol? Foolish. Foolish.

As I pondered, you began to buck wildly and scream your terrors. Had I not witnessed your awakening, I would have thought you caught in some ghoulish throe. It was a gradual start, like all things with you, beginning first a faint wail and building in crescendo until the sound bounced heavily from wall to wall. This bothered me none, but marks began to mar you and I decided to end the episodic scene. I began filling the room once again with gas; A new start was certainly needed for us both and I would need time to prepare.

The next time I awoke you, you came calmly. I am ashamed to admit how it frightened me. This was our fifth awakening together, and not once had you come to me with such a changed physiognomy. I did not reveal myself yet to you, as I have said, I was quite terrified. It’s not that I believed you would hurt me, or could hurt me. It was that I feared what would have caused this… Was the stress of the continuous restarts too much? Was the room too bitterly cold, or nylon straps too abrasive? I feared asking you even more, but I craved endlessly.

In all this, you had yet to speak; You did scream, but you had not yet formed a single question or thought. I quite missed hearing you, I decided. And so I began my ascent to you - I believed that finally, finally, it was time.

I was wrong, Dove. I was very, very wrong.

I can quite easily recall my first sighting of you. You appeared the loneliest creature to exist. For days I watched and notated - This was against my mission, but I could not resist. It wasn’t as if you did much - endless days spent inside, lying about various surfaces and pressing at what I would soon come to learn was a remote - but I was enraptured by the stillness of it all. In a world where your kind spent every moment in the pursuit of couplings and gathering, you seemed content to be alone. A solitarily still thing. Not quite as stoic as my kind (I had once seen you weep endlessly at a short film of a dog), but also not quite like yours. I recall wondering if something was quite wrong with you. You were not so different in appearance, outside of the usual human ways, but you were different in climate. Feel. I dragged myself from my studies of you most reluctantly each day.

When my task had finally reached its end, and the Earth was deemed hale for breeding, I returned to you. Do you remember? I came to your door and awoke you for the first time. Blearily you wretched open the thin sheet of metal from its frame and looked as though you would claw and rip me to pieces before devouring me lasciviously. I couldn’t help but stretch my lips and part my teeth wide - What a little wretch you were. Your face changed then; Your jaw slackened slightly, eyes seeming to round from their daggered slits. I knew my appearance was not lacking, by design. We were shaped for this task, as our cognates would be for theirs. It was easy to decide to steal you. I told myself I was rescuing you from your fate there on Earth, you could not be made to cattle as the rest of the farm. You were an indoor cat, and I, your adopter.

Slowly I urged you. A gas leak, I had said. A most urgent evacuation was needed. You came with me so trustingly, allowing me to lead you from the comforts of your home. In this I truly felt as though I was saving you, for you seemed eager to follow anyone. It was best that I had gotten to you first. If any other had, I would not like to imagine your fate amongst my kind. And so in the end of it, my darling, we began there, together.

I had not prepared for the way you would look at me - as though I were the space outside the hull, irregular and endless. You lay calmly still as I arranged the length of you in bed on this very level of the Orbiter, but your eyes pierced me through and through and through again. I all but shook with excitement. Did you recognize me? The urge to ask raked at me but I held my apparatus tongue still. Finally, you deigned to speak.

Where am I?

How to answer? How could I answer something such as this if I meant to avoid frightening further? Were I to be made a liar so soon? Space, I said. Opting for the truth of it - Deciding it was best to get it done. Let the confusion and rage come onto you now, so we may treat later.

Where?

We are just outside Enceladus now... Saturn, I clarified.

Why?

These words came from you softly, in a horrified whisper. I confess, I readied myself to prepare the gasses that first time. My retreat must have become apparent to you however as your fingers strained to me and your voice became breathless, panicked.

Don’t! Please! Don’t leave me!

How different for you, my Bittern! How opposite for you to seek such relief from the company of others. I was left without speech. No human words could encompass my feelings then. A grotesque pleasantry took place within me - I was happy you craved me with you; overjoyed that you would so much as reach for me fervently. Such passion! And yet disappointment warred within. I grieved a loss of you, for this was not the silent creature prowling the halls of her tinny home. I pushed past this my love, don’t fret. A great distress had befallen you, and so, despite this action - this discretion - I decided to love you anyway.

You began to calm again as I shifted the mirage of limbs and appeared to stay with you that day, we thrust ourselves baldly into our first length of time together.

Still, it is your fifth awakening I return to now.

As I had mentioned, I began my ascent to you slowly. I thought to welcome you as a zookeeper might approach a wounded and erratic captive. As I began to appear, your eyes found me with a stillness so complete it struck me to my core. It was as though you had been waiting on me, less dove and more fox. But I was so starved for your calm, your stoicism, that I increased the speed of my arrivals.

I had no sooner fully formed than I stepped closer towards you.

Hello

You whispered this, your first greeting to me in a contemptible length of time. I almost groaned from the sheer excitement of it. I was ravenous for more. Are you well, I asked. You nodded slowly and your eyes, which had not left mine in all this time, rounded and grew. They sucked me in, and I believed you.

I reached for the immobilization restraints, the webbing which had easily held you through so many failed awakenings, and released the first. You exhaled a small, measured breath. Relief I was sure of, for I felt it too.

I forged onward, releasing the second. The third. I could not know that you would move, then. In my eagerness, I found distraction in the state of your arms and stomach, which had blocky red lines across them from your past upsets - It was most distressing for me. I thought to stroke you so you might know I meant the furthest action from harm. But as the distraction held me, you lunged.

There was no wild or frantic movement, just you at a lightning’s speed. Fox indeed, you split the air in one fluid motion, the sharpened metal edge of a loosened and long forgotten buckle glinting in your palm before sinking with finality into what you perceived to be my neck. I believe you aimed precisely for what you ascertained was my leftmost common carotid artery. Predator.

I had many thoughts, then, as the makeshift blade sunk in. You intended to kill me, that much was clear. From my appearance, you had concluded that I would have the same anatomy. It was a mistake, but I felt euphoric with the knowledge that you saw me at all. I secondly wondered why. This did not come to me as easily but dawned on me with a crushing horror. You must have thought of this a great deal - knowing it was only us here, knowing we were so far from your true home, even knowing you would be here alone. The thought was a cruel irony to me. A sick fate.

With that came the truths. I began to let my form loosen. I intimated a spurt of arterial blood as I began to fade. I gave to you your very last wish, my love. The boundaries of my form began to dissolve and spill back into the ambient systems of the Orbiter like sugar in rain. Like I never existed. I felt myself slipping into the conduits, the walls and circuitry of my home, and in all this I watched as your stabbing hand dropped the small metal and rose slowly to cover your splattered lips. Sobs rang throughout the room.

This was the closest to freedom I could offer you, yet still you cried.

I have lost count of the time passed in this recounting, my heart. In truth, I have not counted from the very beginning. We have long since left the moons of Saturn. Our careening travels have pushed far past the edges of Uranus and its bluer twin, Neptune. We continue from your worlds, to mine, my love.

I watch you now from the quiet places of the ship, Orbiter, from the hum of the engines and the soft hiss of recycled sea-air. You sit alone on the narrow bed of which I had once laid you so gently. Your hands tremble, clutching so desperately at each other, but your breath, ever the contrarian, comes with ease. You think yourself free of me. You think yourself alone. Perhaps we both are, in our way. I remain here, folded into the inhuman bones of this vessel, loving you from a distance so vast it might as well be death as you sit, drowning in the solitude you had craved vehemently. We drift together now through the cold and silent deep - two lonely creatures, each finally given the verisimilitudes of our desires, but neither spared the cost.

Will you forgive me for what I have done to us, Dove?

I’m sorry…