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“I want to break up.”
You've heard this millions of times in your dreams, you heard it just tonight even. The last fog clouds of sleep drift clear of your head and you weakly open your eyes to Tangent laying wide awake at your side, watching you. “I want to break up,” she repeats quietly. This is real, this is today, this is right now.
“I don't have the attention span to adequately focus on both my work and a romantic entanglement,” she continues. She's said over and over, she'll say countless times more. You close your eyes again and release a long, slow exhale before looking back to her.
“Okay.” Tang has been with you your whole life. Undergoing genome treatment together as children, to make yourselves into yourselves . Giving her a flower you found the first time you snuck out of the colony, the first time you told her that she's beautiful. Asking her about the databand you still wear, the one she still refuses to admit was from her. Spending an impulsive teenage night on the roof of Engineering. The plague. Her reconciliation with Dys. She was always there, with the slight smile you've learned is the closest she'll ever come to saying “I love you.” The smile she's aiming at you now, even as you agree to separate.
She's been there in the flickering glimpses of a million other lives, always with that smile. Always this moment. Always, she leaves.
“But this doesn't change how I feel about you. And you're still my best friend?” you continue.
Her lips part for a word that doesn't come, just that small smile again.
Your relationship is taking a new form, but the feelings that drive it are the same as always. The same as a million other lives. Tang's love needs distance, and six years as a couple has slowly whittled away the distance afforded to either of you. It's love without romance, love barely connected to her sexuality. Being a couple was fun, it was affirming to your bond, but it was only ever an afterthought to love.
You grin back at her and lean in to press a kiss to her forehead before peeling yourself from her bed. “I can shift to some other projects if you want some space in Engineering for a few days?” you offer as you hunt for your underwear, “Mom and Cal were talking about something going on in Xenobotany, I think.”
“Your concern is appreciated, but unnecessary.” Tang rises and a moment later you hear the bathroom sink running behind you. 'Appreciated', stoic as usual, but she probably only needs a day. You'll find some way to kill a day off with Rex or Nem. When you were eleven you explained the visions of your million lives together with Tang as like being 'married'. It wasn't flowers and ceremonies and long years side-by-side, it was this moment, or millions like it- the comfortable, forever mundanity of love, the understanding without saying, the trust, the confidence in your bond and one another.
How else would a preteen raised in the shadow of old Earth norms process a bond like that? Process the enormity of a million, million iterations of it, compared to the only dozen-or-so lives you've seen with Nem? The singular flashes of other partners?
Tangent does her intermittent-but-meant-to-be-daily morning routine while you finish collecting your clothes and dress. You catch her eye in the bathroom mirror, “Bring dinner by for you tonight?”
“Thank you,” she replies around her toothbrush, then spits.
“'Kay. Later, Tang. Love you.”
“Goodbye, Sol,” she says as she looks back up in the mirror. That small smile returns as you step out the door, that silent “I love you, too.” You'll never be together quite like this again, but there's still love, there's always love. And you'll get to fall for her all over again, millions upon millions of times.