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She’s been here before. Aimsey is standing in front of her treehouse, preparing to do the hardest and yet most familiar thing bloom has ever done — leaving is habitual, at this point, it’s muscle memory, but it still hurts every time: a muscle used too often, weary and strained and tired.
She lies, because it’s easier, and says that she’ll only be gone for a little while. Aimsey tries to ignore the pained twitching of her heart as bloom watches Guqqie’s face fall. So easily, they had asked where the two of them were going, as if it wasn’t even a question that they’d do it together.
Aimsey catches herself. No. She won’t make this mistake this time. Bloom has spent years regretting the fact that she gave into the instinct of pulling away because she was too scared of what it would mean to let herself get close.
“Actually,” bloom says, “I’d really like it if you came with me.”
Guqqie blinks, a small and hesitant smile spreading across their face. “Really? Are you sure?” she asks, voice small and sweet.
Aimsey smiles, bright and wide and warm. “Yeah,” bloom says, and it feels so right, why had she ever thought she should go alone?
“Okay,” Guqqie replies, happily. “I’ll go pack some things, then.”
As she goes to turn away, Aimsey’s face falls. It didn’t happen this way. She’d spent every day after, wandering alone with nothing to show for it but her own anger and regret and loneliness, wishing she’d done this differently. She’d spent years regretting this, years after Guqqie had—
“Wait,” she calls out, grabbing Guqqie’s hand, and Guqqie turns to face her, smiling sadly. “This… isn’t how it happened.”
“No,” Guqqie replies, “we made our choices. We could have made better ones.”
“God,” Aimsey breathes out, “we really could have, couldn’t we? It could have been better. I wish I’d never left. I wish I had stayed.”
Guqqie nods sadly in agreement. “I wish we had done a lot of things differently,” she agrees. “We could have– we could have been each other’s home, you know.”
Aimsey’s vision is blurred by tears, which she quickly wipes away, dropping Guqqie’s hand briefly to do so. She wants to see Guqqie. She wants to see her, again, even if it’s the last time.
“I know,” Aimsey manages to say through her tears, “I’m so sorry, Guqqie.”
Guqqie’s eyes are glassy, too, and she reaches out again to hold Aimsey’s hand, rubbing zir thumbs along her knuckles comfortingly. It could have been this easy. “I know,” she echoes, voice breaking slightly. “I’m sorry, too.”
Aimsey sniffles. “I miss you. Every day.”
Guqqie smiles, though it ends before it has the chance to meet her eyes. “You were a wonderful experience, Aimsey. Even with- even with everything that happened.”
“You were…” Aimsey tries to find the words, tries to find the right way to say this. “…everything,” is what she lands on, and it’s true, isn’t it? It always was true, and it always will be true.
Guqqie grabs Aimsey’s other hand, too, and gives them both a light squeeze. And there’s so much left to say, so much left unsaid, but bloom thinks that Guqqie somehow knows it all already. Maybe they’d heard all of her desperate pleas to the night sky, all of her apologies and elegies.
“Goodbye, Aimsey,” moon says, and Aimsey isn’t ready to let go — she never was, really, even though she’d tried to convince herself otherwise — but Guqqie and the world around them are starting to fade, and so it must be done.
“Goodbye, superstar,” Aimsey chokes out.
She wakes, a few minutes later, with dried tears on her cheeks and the ghost of hands held in hers. The morning light is streaming through the window, peeking stubbornly around the curtains.
And Aimsey feels lighter.