Outside Meerkat for the moment, Monday early afternoon.

[izzyalienqueen]

After spending a lazy morning sharing coffee with Jack and then visiting Janet, Elizabeth, and Tempe over at Pangolin, Isabel changed into her running clothes and went outside to stretch.

[locked to someone who knows who he is. Okay to say they ran together. Conversation itself is NFB]

Comments

[like-a-sponge.livejournal.com]

Greg stared at her.

"So you're supposed to go back and save them?"

[izzyalienqueen.livejournal.com]

Isabel nodded slowly. "Yeah, kind of scary isn't it? The three of us responsible for saving an entire planet. We don't know when we're going to go, or how. We sort of lost our way home," she sighed. "But someday we're gong to have to." Isabel closed her eyes and tried to keep her face blank so Greg couldn't see how much the idea bothered her.

[like-a-sponge.livejournal.com]

"And you know it for sure?" Greg sighed, staring at his hands.

[izzyalienqueen.livejournal.com]

"That's the message we finally got last year," she said flatly. "But that message was over fifty years old. So much could have changed since then. We just don't know." She stretched out her hand towards a pine cone and it floated over to her. Plucking it out of the air, she turned it over in her hands, studying it as if it would provide answers. "So many things went wrong when the crash happened. We spent years without answers, wondering who we were, where we were from. We've finally gotten some, but of course they only leave us with more questions."

[like-a-sponge.livejournal.com]

"And you're actually betrothed," he repeated incredulously.

[izzyalienqueen.livejournal.com]

"Maybe in that lifetime. But not in this one. I've spent way too long thinking of Michael as a brother to even try imagining him as something else." The pine cone? Was fascinating. "Besides, he's so in love with Maria..."

"Remember I said we lost our way home?" she asked abruptly. "That's because back in March, when I went home for Alex's funeral we almost wound up leaving then. Ask Peter about the email I sent him," she said with a sad, quiet laugh. "I'm surprised he didn't kill me when I got back here. But the things is, there we were standing in the Granolith, minutes to go before it left, and Michael, who's wanted to go home forever and gave us such a hard time about the ties we have here. Michael chose to stay. For Maria. Because he loves her that much. So as far as we're concerned, there is no betrothal."

[like-a-sponge.livejournal.com]

Greg was quiet through all of this, thinking. He finally said, "Good to know. Um. Not, um, that I had any real reason to know. But, you know, in general." He gave her a shy, genuine smile for the first time that afternoon.