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Being apart was uncomfortable, and being together was insufficient, and so they decided that the best thing to do would be to go on a date, and to try to find a way of being two people instead of one.
This is how the decision was made: they stood on the deck of a pirate ship and looked at each other.
Feferi said: 3;)
Nepeta said: ;))
--
They flew to some bubble or other – Jade’s, maybe, or John’s, or both, an endless expanse of frogs under glass, and the night sky hung with fireflies. Nepeta found a pair of bellowbeast horns in her memory, horns that she had taken after a long, moonlit chase and sawn free, sharpened and shaped and lashed to moccasins made from the thing’s hide, which in turn she had tanned in her cave with smoke and cholerbear urine, and stitched with its own sinews. And Feferi, from the same memory, as much hers now as Nepeta’s, took a pair for herself.
And Feferi remembered a night in Gl'bgolyb’s many, many arms, and a vision of her future – a dream of an empress, whirling on the ice of a frozen river, drenched with jewels and lit by a thousand candles, the unquestioned center of a ballet of courtiers and counts, dukes and flunkies. She remembered their adoration and their fear – the knowledge that she was beautiful and terrible, and that the lives of all around her hung on her whim – and how every detail of her adornment spoke of this power, from the priceless diadem at her brow to her reindeer mittens lined with mergoat’s wool. Mergoats are not easily sheared, and each glove cost more than a lowblood might make in its lifetime. The dream had troubled her, at the time, but mittens were mittens. She took a pair, and so did Nepeta.
Feferi said: 38D
Nepeta said: :DD
--
The light was cool morning as they set out onto the ice together.
Feferi skated in lazy arcs, circling the vague outlines of frozen frogs and peering at each as she went. Nepeta sped forward and back, raising showers of crystal dust which each turn. The endless black of the sky surrounded and sheltered them, and but for the scrape of their skates there was no sound at all.
It was remarkable, all things considered, how careful they were not to touch each other.
They darted and feinted and dived, together and apart Nepeta pounced at nothing, rolled, came up laughing silently, steaming. Feferi floated through the mist cloud of Nepeta’s breath and felt the strangeness of the smell of it to the bottoms of her feet.
What she wanted to say was: I remember your breath, coming from my lungs. I remember the rhythm of your blood, pumping from my heart. I remember your smell, which is my smell. I remember the way your legs stretched as you grew. I remember the ache in your muscles. I want to feel all that again.
She said nothing.
The afternoon stretched in the timelessness of the afterlife, and they marked it by exploring the world they’d found together, skirting around the jetsam of other people’s dreams. When they saw things that they knew – the flap of a carnival tent in the distance, or the ramparts of a sunken castle – they let their feelings rise to their faces, and sometimes they would glance at each other for confirmation or recognition, but mostly they didn’t bother. They rode the same cloud of memory, looked down from above at the same shared life. How could there be any doubt that they felt the same feelings?
They passed a distant suggestion of deep forest, and Feferi remembered killing an animal with her hands, for the joy of it as much as for the dross of bone and muscle she could harvest from what was once a living body; she felt how strangely this memory sat within her, that she, a princess, should know the sharp smell of the hunt, and the feeling of rooting through something’s fresh death. It was jarring and lonely, this slow sinking back into myself after ourself, but there was another taste to it, something thrilling. What a thing, to be able to hunt through herself like this – to be able to discover herself again, to feel strange to herself. As what was truly hers began to emerge from what had once been theirs, she could learn to know herself again as a traveler learns a new continent.
How cool was that?
And so when a stray burst of aurora from a long-gone planet rinsed the black sky teal and violet, olive and red, and Feferi felt a blooming in her heart – an excitement that recalled everything that had once mattered – she swung around, carefully and precisely, and let her mitten brush Nepeta’s, because it was the best and most natural thing in the world to do.
Nepeta went stiff and coughed.
Feferi said: 38?
Nepeta said: ://
--
The wind kicked up, skirling dusty snow across the surface of the frozen river.
Feferi felt the blood hammering in her head, and wanted very badly to kick herself. Of course it hurt – the last time they’d been even a little bit out of sync, they had literally exploded. Why had she thought this was going to be easy? And if she said anything, anything at all, it would just make it worse, of course. Why couldn’t she have just left it alone? Kept pretending they were still one and the same?
It was the first moment of disharmony they’d had since they’d been alive, and she knew that there would have to be more, that the long picking apart of their selves was the only way forward. In the end, it would be worth it, it had to be, but if it was like this every time – like having the wind knocked out of you, like losing a best friend –
She made herself look up, just to see how bad it was, in time to see Nepeta turning away - and wobbling a little, and windmilling, and pitching forward, and pitching back, and bending and buckling and spinning until she sat down with a thump.
Feferi was so busy calling herself ten kinds of idiot that she barely noticed rushing to Nepeta’s side and holding out her hand. When she realized what she was doing, she almost snatched it back, and then stopped herself, because that would alsobe stupid, and so ended up leaving it limply hanging in space as Nepeta looked up at her wanly, which was still stupid, but less so than the other available options. She hoped.
Her train of thought was interrupted by the clearing of a very, very dry throat.
Nepeta said: “The small and furrankly bewildered meowbeast has appurrently lost her knack for skating and is just going to slide around on her glubbing bass until her mussels give out. Cod, this is conmewsing.”
Feferi said: 380
--
NEPETA: I was affuraid.
FEFERI: What did you have to be afraid of? You know who I am just as well as I do! If not better!
NEPETA: Well, you should know who I am, then, and you should know what I know. This can’t work! It’s utterly impurractical. We know each other too well to be really flushed – there’s nothing to discover there, no fishstery. Neither of us needs conciliating, and I don’t think I’m ready for another moirail anyway, and I couldn’t hate you! I couldn’t. So there’s no way around it. And since you know that and I know that –
FEFERI: You thought we were going out here to say goodbye?
NEPETA: I thought... I somehow thought that’s what you meant by 38).
FEFERI: Why would I wink about that?
NEPETA: I couldn’t see the wink through your goggles!
FEFERI: That doesn’t make a sardine’s worth of sense.
NEPETA: I didn’t see what else it could be! There just isn’t a way it works out. But I was terrified to ask you, because if I did, it might turn out you were thinking something different than what I was thinking, and I couldn’t stand that. I really liked being the same purrson as you, and I wasn’t ready to be abalone again. So I clammed up.
FEFERI: Oh, no. But that’s not what I was thinking at all.
NEPETA: See, that’s what scares me. I lost you already and I’m going to keep losing you so we might as well make it offishal –
FEFERI: The handsome fish princess puts on a brave face in light of this unfortunate revelation but must object to the meowbeast’s use of fish puns during a serious emotional moment!
NEPETA: The meowrpholigically indistinct furry scaly fishbeast who can’t even stand up by herself right now regretfully informs you that it’s going to take her a while to remember what the difference between a cat and a fish is.
FEFERI: Fish swim.
NEPETA: Urgh, no. Don’t talk about swimming, either – I have a lot more memories of being underwater than I’m comfurtable with right now. See, this is why I hate that we’re not together anymore! All those memories felt really right and comforting before, but now it’s just… me thinking about all these things I would hate doing, if it had really been me.
FEFERI: Sorry.
NEPETA: And also, please don’t talk about your mom. I don’t want to think about your mom.
FEFERI: Look, I understand, but – don’t you want to know why I thought we were coming out here? Isn’t that a little bit of a fishstery, which is a glubbing terrible word, actually, now that I say it out loud?
NEPETA: Glub.
FEFERI: Glub. You make the cutest glubs.
NEPETA: :((
FEFERI: Look! You don’t know what it’s like to look at you. Right? I know what it’s like being you, but I don’t know you. I don’t yet know what it’s like to be with you, I don’t know what it would be like to have you let me in to find out about you. Even now, just right now, I can see things about you that I don’t remember you knowing. And you can see me, and tell me what you see in me. We can help find each other. We can be explorers! Isn’t that exciting?
NEPETA: Was that see myself or sea myself?
FEFERI: See? You don’t know, do you?
NEPETA: That’s all shell and good, but that excitement – it’s not going to last. And when it’s gone, what happens? There’s nothing under our feet – just a pawful awkward void. There’s nothing to build this ship on!
FEFERI: I can build that ship, and I can sail it. I am shore of it. I purromise you. And anyway – I just really want to know what it’s like to touch you from the outside.
Nepeta said: :00
Feferi said: 3 ;)
--
Feferi took her hand back, slid off her mitten, and offered it again. Wind shook the bubble and the cold nipped at her fingers.
“You’re going to get bored,” Nepeta said.
“I’m just a midblood. I know how these things work,” Nepeta said.
“You’ll leave and I’ll be alone and it’ll be even worse than it is now,” Nepeta said.
Feferi swept her leg back and made a full, imperial bow, balancing on a single skate, her furs billowing. Her hair, caught in the wind, spread out around her like a vast, dark halo. Her smile was bright, and sharp, and as wide as the sky.
“May I take your hand?”
Nepeta looked up at a girl who could have been queen of her entire race and squinted.
“You’re lucky you’re so hot.”
--
The spark when their hands touched was enough to set the bubble’s dormant forge ablaze, and the river duly melted, freeing the trapped ghosts of a thousand dreaming frogs. Luckily, they both could swim.