#sstl

Stars are beautiful, but they may not take an active part in anything, they must just look on for ever. It is a punishment put on them for something they did so long ago that no star now knows what it was.

- J.M. Barrie Peter Pan

When they receive the data packet detailing their three assigned scouts, Bell spends the whole night curled up reading through every detail, narrating key details to Gigo. They’ll read it all again in the morning, and again a few weeks later, and again the night before landfall, until they’ve memorised it - the scant personal details, names and pronouns and birthdates, the more detailed medical records (you can’t monitor someone’s physical condition without knowing the baseline, without knowing that Mikail mustn’t eat tomatoes and the schedule for when Hartley has to do regular maintenance on her prosthesis), the dense reports on what’s known of their destination planets. They use up highlighters and scrawl on post it notes.

Strictly, it isn’t Bell’s job to know the first thing about the planets beyond the elevator summary, but they were a scout before they were a minder. The structure of the dossier hasn’t changed a bit, and they absorb it all. They don’t know what they missed, on their failed expedition, but they won’t let it happen again. They can’t.

Priyanka isn’t a surprise; they knew that strings were being pulled specifically to line them up to be the assigned minder for Pri’s mission, because Pri’s uncle knew that if it came down to it Summers would burn every tenuous bridge they’d managed to rebuild to get her off the planet, and damn the consequences. They’re all so, so proud of Pri for getting through training, for being clever enough and strong enough and driven enough to make it, and they’re so worried too. Bell would burn any bridges, of course they would, but not every danger has enough of a time window to drag resources into place.

Mikail on paper seems promising - when his comms unit splutters into life as he’s speeding through the stars, months into the first year of expected isolation, he seems promisingly eccentric. He’s a cheerful rambler to Pri’s quiet snark, chattering about the reading he’s doing and the experiments he ran on the side back in training. They listen, gauge his wellbeing and start the slow work of building up trust, and try to ignore the smile tugging at their lips. This burring curiosity would serve him well, they think in the early days, exploring and studying and mapping out a whole new planet, so long as it didn’t kill him. It was their job to make sure it didn’t, that he remembered to eat and sleep and build proper shelters. That he remembered he couldn’t live off of curiosity and scientific glee alone.

Hartley doesn’t respond at all.

Bell checks all of the reports they can, to see if the signal is disrupted or there’s any suggestion that there’s been a technical issue, but everything shows up as working. They can see readouts of Hartley’s vitals, pulse rate and oxygen levels, so they know she’s alive. Probably. If one thing has gone wrong with the shuttle, who knows what other bizarre glitches may have cropped up.

They tell themselves that everything is fine, that there must just be a wire loose in the radio unit or, much more likely, Hartley has just decided that she doesn’t need a scout-minder and wants to go solo, has decided that Summers is an unnecessary and patronising addition to the mission. They submit false reports on Hartley’s well being, because they have absolutely no issue with lying to their superiors when they know the consequences for revealing that one of their three scouts has gone radio silent before even making landfall.

They talk to Pri and Mikail regularly, review condition reports on all three of them, ping Hartley every day and get no response.

They tell themselves that everything is fine.

  Bell Summers is supposed to be minding three Scouts. 

Three months in Gwendolyn Hartley hasn’t answered a single one of their calls, and all they can think is maybe I already failed. When the comms finally spark to life, they almost fall off of their chair in relief even as they snap accusing protocol down the line because it’s better than saying thank god thank god thank god you’re alive thank god you’re okay to a stranger.

It’s a thought that will repeat.

  Retrieving your scout bot hadn’t been a tradition for Bell’s local program. They wonder if it’s one that other programs have, or if it’s just Hartley’s program, one of the small, unofficial differences that most of the time no-one ever knows about. It’s not like scouts regularly get the chance to compare notes outside of their cohort.

 If they kept to their class promise, Pri and Mikail had been familiar enough with their minder after three months to not inform them of where they were going - neither of them were in the habit of thinking aloud to their bots, either, which would have made it easier to hide that they weren’t strictly following protocol. Gwen was defiantly independent, uncaring of her unexpected monitoring, and Bell wanted to cheer her on and reign her in at the same time.

 They guess most places have a tradition or two, some secret pact amongst scouts who are pointing themselves out to the stars and seeing where they land. Something to tether you, when you set foot on a new planet and know you’re on your own, something that ties you back to the people you left behind. Bell takes a moment to be grateful that their pact hadn’t been quite so risky; instead of venturing out into the unknown before even setting up a shelter, they had sworn to wake up early, ignoring all the schedules and warnings and automated messages prompting them to get their full six hours - find somewhere high and climb up to watch the first sunrise on planet.

 They’d scraped the skin off their palms clambering to their highest point, winced as they cradled the thermos they’d carried up with them and the warmth stung the broken skin. The ground had been damp, seeping through the seat of their trousers, a bite to the air that made their nose run, but they’d done it. They’d pointed Gigo in the right direction to record the sight, this first dawn over a new horizon, the first day of their new life.

 Despite everything that happened, the nightmare things had turned into, the bitter taste on the back of their throat whenever they think back to the way it had gone, it’s a memory that brings a smile to their face even as they scold. It’s a memory that they might not have thought to be precisely worth it, if they’d known at the start what they’d learned by the end, but it’s a memory they cling to all the same.

 They can’t help but be a little glad that there’s some kind of tradition for Gwen, too, even as they worry aloud about structures and protocols and whether Hartley is going to have the shelters up in time.

 The shelters have air filtration built in, have temperature regulation, and are designed to withstand the harshest of conditions. If everything turns to dust, they think the shelters will keep their scouts alive for long enough to find a solution.

  They direct all three of their scouts to build an emergency beacon, the one deviation from the protocols that Bell told themselves at the start that they’d not only permit but encourage - no, insist upon.

 The union had fought so hard for assigned minders, for check ins on alternate days and a reliable source of human contact, citing studies of mental well-being and the importance of support networks, but it all went one way. Bell would call their three charges every other day, talk to them or listen in as they went about their business for the mandated four hours, and review any data packets the scouts copied them into when they were sent out to home office - to monitor for adhesion to proper protocol, for signs of strain, and for their own scientific curiosity. The scouts would answer the call, update them, then be stuck waiting a day and a half for the next call. If there was an emergency, they would have no way to reach out, to ask for help.

 If something happened, Bell wouldn’t know until they tried to call and no-one answered.

 The beacons meant that the scouts could at least ping them, a request for contact that would tell Bell to drop everything and grab their headset. With a few quick instructions, the beacon could be altered - honestly, any of the scouts probably knew enough engineering to figure it out themselves - so that it wasn’t locked to just the one frequency.

 If there was an emergency, if their scouts were let down by all official channels, Bell wanted them to be able to reach out to anyone else who might listen, to have the choice to burn their own bridges for the sake of living. They thought, sometimes, that if it had just been them they wouldn’t have called on the smugglers, but they wouldn’t ask the same of these three scouts; looking through the dossiers, curled into a narrow bunk on a half decrepit station, Bell had already known that they’d beg them to do whatever it took to survive.

 It’s not even that they’re that much younger than Bell - only a few years their junior - but they seem it. They seem so painfully young, practically children for all that they’re in their twenties. Still caught in the excitement of it, lost children pointing themselves at the stars and planning to map it all by hand.

 Bell had been that young, once, before everything - before they spent years alone on a planet, before they were told your lives aren’t worth saving and turned around to save them anyway, before all of the ongoing consequences of that choice drove the knife that much deeper.

  What are you going to do if something goes wrong? snipes scout Hartley, her first day on planet as she’s standing on shaky legs, leaning on Boots because she managed to get bitten by something venomous on her little jaunt into the undergrowth. Listen?

  Bell splutters something back, because they know how useful this can be - someone to talk to, someone to do research when you’re stuck, knowing that someone picked up the phone and heard you out. Knowing that someone out there will notice, if you disappear for good.

 They don’t sleep well, staring at the ceiling over their bunk, thinking. They know it can help - they know they can help, that Hartley would probably be a lot more inclined to listen if she knew that her minder had walked this road themselves - but they can’t hide from the harsh truth.

 If it comes to it, if one of these three scouts finds themselves trapped in an apocalypse, sends up a beacon to say it’s all falling apart and I have no way out - all they can do is listen, and hope it’s enough.

  Priyanka falls ill, and they don’t notice.

 Pri has been important to them for years, but they’ve never been close, exactly. They know each other mostly from stories shared by Pri’s uncle, and there’s a level of familiarty that you don’t get from those kinds of tales, from a few months’ worth of regular check ins. Hartley notices, sees something amiss between the lines of the letters Pri sends her, and she does the only thing she can, flags it to their shared scout-minder - she does the only thing she can and speaks up, hoping that someone will listen.

 Bell wonders, later, once Gwen has been proven terribly right, if maybe this is the first time that Hartley has thought of their presence as anything other than an annoyance. Pri, once she got over the change in expectations, had been glad to have a semi-familiar presence on the line, someone who she could trade family gossip with when she felt like it and had worked out an agreement with for the time when she didn’t want to bother with conversation, and Mikail had been cheerful enough from the start to have someone to talk to about all his ideas and findings, but Hartley had always seemed - resentful, maybe, like having Bell shatter her solitude was unwelcome, for all that she seemed to agree with the union on the practicalities of providing a life line of contact.

 Pri fell ill, and Bell didn’t notice.

 They remind themselves, over and over, that it hadn’t been obvious. Gwen, Mikail and Pri had studied together for years, lived in each other’s pockets as they made the same harsh choice to leave everything they knew behind with no guarantee they’d ever be able to get any of it back. It makes sense that Gwen had seen something Bell didn’t, they know it makes sense, but they can’t keep from going back over every report, replaying every conversation, trying to pick up the hints of a change that they hadn’t seen.

 What else would they miss?

  They lose Mikail to a storm, nothing but static when they try again and again to call. Bell hunches over their monitor in their tiny cubicle, punching buttons with fingers that want to shake, hoping that if they try just once more it will go through. They’d known the risks, all of them, of course they had, but -

 This was what they’d feared most, when they took the job. If a planet collapsed, if it came to it, they had strings they could pull with the smugglers, had learned already where they drew the line. The worst news they’d expected to have to deliver would have been bad news, the settlement office doesn’t care about you at all and won’t cough up any of their copious spare change to save you, but good news I’ve got some friends on their way, so sit tight and keep the line open. But they’d known the statistics for scout missions; they’d known that they’d be stuck on one end of a line through accidents, through unforeseen dangers.

 Bell had wondered, on sleepless nights, what they would do if they called one of their scouts and got nothing in return. They’d thought they would have gotten used to it, what with Hartley turning off all comms for literal months before they finally made contact, but this was different. At least with the shuttles they’d had the readouts, vital signs and tracking, to guess that things were probably okay.

 Mikail was just gone, and they thought about what Gwen had told them, what Mikail had never mentioned directly for all his endless chatter - of all the scouts, of all the planets, they’d sent the one who hated water and despised swimming to a place he couldn’t escape the sea.

 They had never met their scouts, but they had seen them in photos. There hadn’t been pictures included in their briefing information because it wasn’t necessary, but Bell had wanted a mental image of the people they were speaking to, so they’d looked up the relevant records in the system. Pri they’d seen in pictures before, shared by a proud uncle, but Gwen and Mikail had just been names with attached heights and weights until they called up the photos attached to their official IDs.

 It meant they could imagine - Mikail, on his island, frowning at the waves and smiling at his scans. Mikail, caught in the water, washed away in a storm surge - they see it, over and over, whenever they try to sleep.

 The beacon pinging them is so unexpected that they think for a moment they may be dreaming. They’d thought it too late, that everything must have been washed away along with their scout, but here he is reaching out to them. The emergency, against protocol backdoor channel that they’d insisted on was doing its job, and they were so glad. They drop everything, as promised, as planned, and when Mikail’s voice come through their headset they bury their face in their hands, even while they fight to keep their voice even.

 What else had they missed? Pri, poisoned by something in the air that crept into her system and twisted her brain in circles. Mikail had been quietly studying an alien species without mentioning it, had learned enough to make a call that they wish he didn’t feel he had to make.

 They lose Mikail to the sea, after all.

 That he was choosing to dive and keep swimming helped, but they lose him all the same.

  Gwen’s planet lights itself on fire, and all they can do is listen.

 They wonder, somewhere in the midst of the panic they’re fighting not to allow to bleed through into their voice, if this is some kind of punishment. If this is another penalty, some kind of justice, you let your settlers down and now you have to be stuck watching, always watching and never able to do anything useful.

 They’d been stuck listening as Pri struggled to diagnose the changes to her own brain, to the silence on the end of the line when Mikail was swept away, to the quiet certainty of his decisions after that. They’re stuck listening once more as Gwen runs back into the oncoming fire to get their maintenance kit, because if she leaves it behind there’s little enough point surviving anyway.

 They don’t know who they think it’s a punishment from, and they don’t voice the thought because they know it isn’t, really. They do. Bell knows, as well as anyone, that knowing someone is listening even if there’s nothing to be done can mean everything.

 But it seems like so little, one hand clutching the edge of their wobbly desk in their narrow cubicle to ground themselves, pressing their headset closer to their ear like that will somehow help, like being a millimetre closer to the ear-piece can make a difference to Gwen as she tries to outrun a wildfire. It seems like so little, to be able to only promise to pass on any messages that Gwen wants, to swear they won’t stop until they’re delivered, if they’re the last words Gwen ever gets to say.

 It seems like so little, and that’s before they learn the truth, learn that Peter will never read any of the letters.

 Peter has been dead the whole time, and later Bell will think they should have guessed - neither Mikail or Pri had mentioned him much at all, even when Mikail had been listing off who he wished he could talk to about his decision, the limited handful of people who he wanted to be told the truth if it was safe to. Gwen had never shared a single snippet of a letter from Peter, for all she repeated gossip about her sister and stories from her other friends on their own missions, and Bell thinks they should have guessed from that alone rather than assuming it was just too private.

 They hadn’t - they hadn’t thought they knew everything about Hartley, of course they hadn’t, but Gwen narrated her day to Boots and, by extension, Bell whenever they called. They’d thought that Gwen was the one they weren’t missing anything from - no unrecognized illness, no secret alien encounters.

 Just a grief they hadn’t known she was carrying, a loss she was still learning to live with.

 They think maybe they know, now, why Gwen had been so reluctant to have a voice in her ear, that first day, setting out to rescue a scout bot she’d sworn to retrieve. Why it had mattered so much that this was her first achievement, once her boots touched the ground of that alien planet for the first time.

 Gwen’s planet is burning and neither of them know what she’ll have left in the world when it dies down, so Bell does the only thing they can and tries to fill the uncertain silence with a story to hold on to.

  When Amelia lays out gleeful threats, promises of justice, it’s Gwen that Bell calls.

 Their head has been spinning since they hacked into the archives - they’d bought into the conspiracy theory, somehow, half convinced themselves there was a big reason for what had happened, something that would answer all the questions they’d lived with for years. Something that could ease the burden of guilt on their shoulders and caught at the back of their throat.

 Well, they had their answer: a skipped scan. A check they forgot, let slide because they were busy, a protocol they set aside to juggle other things - yet another warning sign they’d missed.

 Gwen insists otherwise, points out the ways they can’t be blamed, the way they wouldn’t blame any of their scouts if positions were changed. Points out that maybe it wasn’t a conspiracy, but there’s still something dodgy going on. There’s still something here - in the way these records are hidden, restricted, when they should be public record.

 If there was nothing here more damning than the record of what Bell missed and the price their settlers paid - it would be a cautionary tale, something held up in class for the overconfident new scouts: here’s why you should stick to protocol, kids, even when it seems pointless. This is why you can’t get complacent, get comfortable, can’t trust that after five years you know everything about your planet and you can relax.

 But it’s hidden, and they refuse to let that stand. They’ve wondered, so often over the years, if being made to do nothing but listen helplessly is the punishment for whatever mistakes they made. They know that’s what their employers think, those in the know about their history, shaking their heads and murmuring about how at least this once-promising scout can put their training to use. Those that can do, do, and those that can’t, teach. Or, as the case may be, listen.

 They listened, and they know that mattered.

 They listened when Hartley raised concerns, pushed for scans and tests to uncover what was ailing Pri, what could be done to save her. They listened to Mikail when he begged to be declared dead, gone, pleaded for them to be the one to break his family’s hearts because he couldn’t stand to be the reason his planet and its people were destroyed. They listened to Gwen while her home burned, talked to her through the panicked flight and the post-adrenaline slump.

 Sometimes all you can do is speak, and hope someone is listening.

  Twenty years for the murder of someone still alive. There’s an irony there, but they’re not sure they appreciate the joke. Less for good behaviour, so they try to curb their tongue, suppress the urge to fix things and instead try to maintain a stoic silence when they want to stand up to anyone who thinks to shove them around.

 After the first time they throw a punch in prison, because someone crosses a line and it’s all too much, because they can’t let it slide and still be them - it occurs to them, bandaging up bruised knuckles and wondering if they tell Gwen about this or try (and probably fail) to hide it, that it doesn’t matter.

 They aren’t here because the people in charge really think they committed murder – no unbiased court could look at assembled an emergency beacon out of spare parts and scout who hated swimming drowned after his entire camp was destroyed in a massive storm and conclude that it was remotely related, let alone intentional: they’re here because when they were told the price of freedom was lying to – lying about - their settlers, denying their dead justice, they said not a chance in hell.

 This isn’t a flawed attempt at justice, this is a punishment.

 They won’t be allowed out early, even if they’re the perfect prisoner. They have to live with this, and if that means getting a few bruises and scraped knuckles - well. They’ve never been afraid of a fight, and they weren’t the best at following the rules even before they realised just how little anyone in power cared.

 Gwen writes to them, and they can’t help checking in - are the crops growing, is her leg holding up, has she done her monthly environment scans (yes, yes, and of course, Bell) - all of the questions they had written out years ago to cover in regular check ins.

 They wonder who has taken over as scout-minder, who’s talking Pri through her newfound challenges as best they can without stepping too much on her fiercely independent toes and trying to figure out the change in cadence that signifies Hartley has switched to talking to Boots rather than whoever is on the line. They wonder if anyone is trying periodically to ping Mikail, hoping against hope that this time he’ll answer, that by some miracle he survived (they wonder if he’s figured out how to get his own messages to Gwen, once he realised that conference calls had always been an option except for bureaucratic limitations)

 They’re checking in, lists of questions and signs to watch out for briefed to them in advance, but they’d ask anyway, even if they’d never been told to ask.

 This stopped being about making sure that the scouts who’d had so much money and time invested into them remained at optimum performance sometime around the first time the call connected and they were taken on a completely out of protocol wander through Gwen’s new home in search of a defunct scout bot and a new horizon.

  They’ve come a long way, since the first long weeks of trying and failing to reach the third of their assigned scouts over the comms, since the first time Gwen picked up the call to discover that instead of an automated message she had a live - and somewhat irate - scout-minder waiting on the other end of the line.

 Bell knows that there’s no point trying to call until the ship is in sight of the planet, that they won’t have the signal or the range to reach Gwen until it’s a matter of hours before they meet face to face. They try anyway, thinking with retrospective fondness of the first three months, calling a number that never picked up no matter how often they tried.

 They wonder what’s going on, on planet.

 This is the first time they’ve been out of contact from Gwen since the first relieved moment when a call went through, when Scout Hartley made landfall and resigned herself to turning the computer and all its notifications back on. Bell thought at the time that being stuck just listening was bad, but they never thought they’d have months with no contact at all, no way of knowing. Everything had seemed fine, and the settlement ship was en route, but they knew how quickly things could deteriorate.

 Then again, Hartley had managed to coordinate a prison break remotely and apparently undetected despite using official comms channels to do it under the settlement offices’ collective noses. She was probably fine and managing to do a lot of impressive and yet wildly off protocol things that would delight and exasperate Bell in equal quantity.

 Honestly, Bell would like to say they’re surprised that this is the kind of woman they fall in love with, but they’re not; they’re years past lying to themselves like that.

 The planet comes into view, and they reach for their headset again. In a matter of hours, it won’t matter - neither of them will be stuck just listening, offering up ideas and research and stories to carry each other through, calling for help and hoping someone pays attention.

 But for now, the comms unit splutters, Gwen’s voice filling the storage bay they’re illicitly camped out in, and Bell presses the headset closer to her ear like that will help them hear more clearly, will make it easier to know for sure that Gwen is really okay, unsuspected and untouched by the fallout.

It’s…admittedly not the worst thing they’ve ever said to someone they have a crush on, but that isn’t exactly the metric Bell wanted to measure this by. They’re standing just feet away from each other, drinking each other in. The silence starts to shade awkward before Gwen swallows, shrugs, gives a shaky smile. Bell remembers a letter, one of the first, remembers reading the clouds are all blurry and the twisting mix of regret and guilty relief, because they didn’t want Gwen to be upset but they couldn’t help but cling onto the fact that she was, that someone was upset on their behalf.

“Well, I never got to see your school graduating photos, so I had no expectations of your jawline, Bell, but hey! It’s a pretty good one too, so congratulations!”

Gods, they’ve missed that laugh.

Someone interrupts them then, of course, because the settler ship has just landed and scout Hartley is very much in demand by everyone, not just Bell. There’s a whole crew of people looking to start a new life, and all of them need their scout to tell them what to do, where to go, what to watch out for. They wave a forlorn goodbye, find a place to sit and idly look around, trying to match this new settlement (very new, scout Summers could probably gauge to the day when these buildings were set up by the wear and tear, even after all this time) to every overheard exploit they’d listened in on over the years.

Gwen had moved the settlement into the trees, combined the natural firebreak with dug trenches to add a layer of defence. There’s a clear track that Bell would bet leads straight to water by the quickest route, an escape path to the coast. They think that perhaps the two of them should put their heads together, figure out emergency bundles for evacuation protocols. Food and water, a spare repair kit for any prosthetics…by the time they find Gwen again, hours of running around helping the settlers - the other settlers - move in, Gigo has a whole list stored. Ideas and checks and suggestions that Bell got halfway through recording before realising that maybe Gwen already thought of all of this and they no longer needed to jot everything down to cram into their four hour window of contact.

They live on the same planet, now. There’s no limit on contact, except that the first several months after settlement are absolute chaos for the scout, and from what Bell recalled hadn’t seemed likely to slow down even before the apocalypse threw everything out the metaphorical window.

Maybe with two of them with scout training it’ll be less…just less. Gwen might be able to get if not the mandated six hours of sleep at least enough to average out more at four or five. They weren’t going to comment on it, but it was easy to tell she hadn’t been getting her full rest anyway - probably hadn’t for months, dark circles under her eyes like permanent bruises.

They’re standing awkward feet away from each other again, and Bell knows there’s going to have to be a conversation about that soon, because it hadn’t really occurred to them before that they know a lot of things about Gwen, years and years of stories and rambling conversations, but there’s things you don’t learn without being in person. Personal space, definitions and comfort thereof, the body language and facial expressions to interpret to know what’s welcomed and what isn’t.

“Hey, so, uh…I know there’s a protocol that I’m supposed to follow when my settlers arrive, and all, but there’s something else I want to do instead.” Bell huffs a laugh, steals a shy glance to see Gwen’s answering smirk.

“Another sworn class tradition to fulfil?”

“Nope! We never talked that far ahead except as jokes. We knew the stats, y’know? But - you told me, the first day, that I should watch the sunrise, that that was something I shouldn’t miss, my first morning. And I don’t…we don’t have that, but I’ve had a long time to find my own wonderfully inspiring views of nature here and I wanted - Bell, you haven’t been on a planet for years and you were with me through everything, but you’ve never seen any of it in real life and I want to show you all of it, and I know where to start.”

Bell thinks about muttering about protocol, for the form of it, for the joke that can be dragged out of it, familiar banter, but they decide not to. It’s no longer their job to care about protocol, and anyway the only reason they cared about the protocol was to keep their scouts safe. Gwen is standing right in front of them, leaning gently against Boots with a casually familiar stance - if they pointed it out, Bell knows she wouldn’t even have thought about it. This is just what Gwen does, when she’s standing about with nothing to do with her hands; rests an elbow companionably atop Boots, one foot hooked around a standing leg and balanced on the toe of her boot.

Gwen is standing right there, safe and alive and happy, so protocol can sort itself, thanks.

(Bell realises they have their own hands in their pockets, their own casual stance, and wonders if Gwen is noticing that too, drinking in all of the unconcious habits that it would never occur to either of them to verbalise. All the little tics and quirks that don’t translate over a FTL comms.)

It’s not a long walk, and it’s more silent than Bell would have guessed, but it’s comfortable. Novel, really, to not have to narrate things aloud because they can just look and see what Gwen is doing, can point at a bird with a dorsal fin and pause to watch it flutter around rather than try to describe it.

They can’t stop stealing glances sideways, catching Gwen more often than not doing the same, both of them collapsing into giggles about it each time. It’s just so surreal, to be walking side by side, after all this time. It feels like a dream, like one of the stories Gwen tells Boots at night - once upon a time, there were two explorers, setting out through the trees…

The light dances on the waves, well below their cliff edge destination. At some point Gwen must have rolled a fallen log over to act as a bench, because it’s too well placed to be natural and there’s a fire-pit dug and lined with careful stones. Close enough to be cosy, but far away from the treeline itself to be safe. The light is dancing on the waves and the grass is drifting in the breeze, a periwinkle blue that Bell is used to seeing in photos if they thought of it at all. Something that had seemed so wonderful and new, when scout Hartley made her first observations, but had drifted into commonplace. A detail that wasn’t worth mentioning any more.

“One day, I’m going to make a boat and go explore that.” Gwen waves grandly at the horizon; she’s leaning her head on Bell’s shoulder, and Bell has decided that they will happily never move again. The two of them can just stay there, forever, Gwen’s head on their shoulder and the soft whisper of waves below. “Once my settlers are…settled, and can be left without supervision for more than a few hours at a time.”

“Already missing the solitude? Mourning all that lovely peace and quiet?”

“What solitude? I had a very efficient scout minder in my ear, I’ll have you know! I didn’t have time to get used to the peace and quiet before beep, time for another check in. Hartley, have you followed the itinary, Hartley, did you maintain a reasonable sleep schedule, Hartley, have you eaten a balanced meal at your officially directed time selected for nutritional optimisation…”

“I’m honestly surprised that you went for reminding me of my remote presence first rather than protesting that Boots was with you the whole time. And I would also like to ask, in the spirit of enquiry, have you done any of those things without my input?” Gwen shakes with barely suppressed laughter and doesn’t bother answering; Bell tries not to join in, because Gwen’s head is still on their shoulder and they’re still determined not to dislodge it until they really have to. “And…hey, I also told you to go watch the sunrise, and you found this instead. I - when did you find this? You never mentioned a little ocean watching viewpoint.”

“I - uh, set it up a few months ago. I didn’t know if it had worked, or if it had all gone wrong, or - and I spent so long pacing around here and wondering what you’d think of the view…”

“Aw, and you say I’m a romantic.”

“With a capital R, yes, you so are. I’m your favourite person, you said so, it was very romantic.”

“That was possibly the least romantic declaration of love that has ever been given. I congratulated you on your jawline, Gwen, I write poetry in my spare time and that was the best I could come up with. I should have just stopped talking - writing, I don’t even have the excuse of not being able to edit it out, the first bit was fine but I kept rambling.”

“It was romantic and I loved it and I have saved all of your letters in three separate back ups to make sure I don’t lose any of them.”

Bell laughs, curls an arm around Gwen’s shoulders as easy as breathing, and lets themselves relax for what feels like the first time in months. A flock of birds takes off from the trees, darting past them over the cliff edge, setting out over the waves. The sun glints off their feathers, the raised fin, a riot of colour catching the light as they watch, leaning against each other, shoulder to shoulder. Gwen is beaming out at it all, and Bell can feel their cheeks creasing to match.