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This is a dream, Shadow thinks, but he cannot bring himself to move.
He is sitting on the floor of a long forgotten yet familiar bedroom. He can see the sparse few posters on the wall, and the wardrobe that's somehow always messy in spite of how few clothes there were, and the spread of books lying around the rug on the cold, tiled floors. He can hear the laughter, her laughter, soft but full of little snorts, as she chuckles at some naive question he’d asked.
He is dreaming, he thinks, because he can’t be there like this anymore. Because Maria cannot be here like this anymore.
It’s strange; Shadow rarely needs to sleep to begin with, and even more rarely does he dream if he does. It’s stranger still to be aware of it, somehow seeing Maria as if he’s really there, as if she's really there, yet looking in at the entire scene as if he’s a distant outsider—as if he’s the ghost of the situation.
Everything is clear but blurry, distant but close, and he doesn’t know what Maria says in response but he knows that he frowns at it, and frowns more when she giggles, and then Shadow isn't smiling but he stops frowning because she’s started pointing excitedly at something in her book again, and he can never frown when she does that. He cannot hear, but he listens so intently as she sighs dreamily of a world she would’ve loved. Of a world that is more horrible than they could’ve imagined, more beautiful than they ever hoped. Of a world she never got to know.
Shadow is awake, he realizes, when he’s staring up at the popcorn ceiling of Rouge’s apartment’s guest room, and not the metallic walls of the ARK.
It takes him a while to move, limbs unwilling to listen, traces of that dream-like feeling still present even as his mind begins to whirl as fast as he can skate. He doesn’t know how to feel about not feeling; about no longer feeling the crushing grief of Maria, agonizing and painful and blood red, and instead feeling the dull ache of her smile, her laughter, her happiness at what little she had regardless of the wistfulness of what she cannot. Did not. Could not.
Would he rather still be dreaming? Of memories long gone, days long past, moments that he knows can never happen again ... The knit in his brow is ever constant, but somehow not present right now in this not-awake-not-asleep state.
He wishes he had more time with her. That she had more time. But all the time in the world would’ve never been enough for Shadow; ironic, then, that that’s all he has left (and that’s a thought for another time, about how maybe there would've been little difference whether he was frozen those fifty years or not).
She was always bound to have limited time, and he is bound to have far too much. One day, Shadow would’ve had to see her go—perhaps more peacefully, perhaps after she’d finally seen the earth, perhaps still far too soon for someone like her; in the end, he would still be here eventually. It only comes as a small comfort to him that he can even remember her this way—remember her at all. Maybe it’s that limited time that makes it all the more precious.
At least he knew her. At least they’d been together. At least he got to hear her eager ramblings, and he got to know how she’d loved him, and he got to know her. At least he loves her, and nothing could change that sparse, little time they did have.
At least he is alive, to live for the both of them.
Shadow stares up at the popcorn ceiling, spotty with age and yellowing in certain corners, and sighs. He gets up.