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Aimsey stares at the empty patch of grass and feels, not for the first time, like he’s in a dream.
There was a body there before.
Faun knows this — the proof is still crusted beneath their fingernails, dried blood he hadn’t been able to fully rinse out. They had carried Hera’s body to that spot, bleary eyed and delirious, tucked her carefully between patches of daisies and tulips. Bodies don’t decompose that quickly. Aimsey doesn’t know much about death, but she knows that for sure.
Aimsey blinks, trying to bring faunself back to reality. Where has she gone? There isn’t anyone who could have moved them…
His breath catches in his throat as the realization dawns on them.
She’s alive. It’s a thrilling thought. It shakes them to their core, jolting faun out of whatever dreamlike haze he’d slipped into. Before he realizes what he’s doing, Aimsey breaks into a run in the opposite direction. Faun ignores the traitorous feeling of dread that begins to bubble in their stomach. This is good, faun reminds themself, and repeats it over and over until he starts to believe it.
Aimsey checks the cabin, first, though they know, deep down, that she won’t be there. The photos that frame the walls — of the two of them, happy and in love; of just Hera, candids that Aimsey had taken and convinced his wife to let him hang up — fill him with equal parts hope and fear. All was not lost. Not yet.
“You’re beautiful,” faun had said, glancing at the photographs he’d taken of his wife, not accepting Hera’s bashful avoidance.
With a playful sigh, they added, “It’s art, you know. Photography. Some people don’t consider it an art form, but I think it is. I’m quite proud of those.”
Hera’s head shot up to meet his gaze, as they knew it would. “Of course,” she breathed, eyes alight, “you should be! You’re really talented.”
Aimsey smiled, flushing a little at the praise but still smug. “So,” faun continued, drawing out each word dramatically, “it would be a disservice to my artistic talents not to hang them up, don’t you agree?”
Hera paused, huffing slightly in defeat as she realized she’d been got. “Okay, fine,” she relented, the beginnings of a smile growing on their face, “you win.”
Aimsey beamed, pecking her cheek in thankful excitement, and though Hera had been wary at first, all of her insecurities melted away as a bright smile took their place.
“I love you,” Hera said, then, soft and fond.
Though it wasn’t the first time either of them had said the words aloud, Aimsey felt as if faun could cry.
“I love you too,” he answered, pressing a kiss to their forehead.
Aimsey shakes the memory from their head and sets out the door. He’s out of breath by the time faun reaches Hera’s lab, pushing the doors open before they can second guess themself.
“Hello?” Aimsey calls out, standing in the entrance uncertainly.
He hasn’t been in here much. Partially to give Hera some space — a place to do her own thing, separate from their marriage — and, partially, faun’s a little embarrassed to admit, because they don’t want to see any of it up close.
Aimsey knows what Hera’s been studying. They ask her about it often, enthusiastically listening and nodding along as their wife rambles on and on about her research and her findings, but faun would rather not see it in person. It’s shameful, really. He’d never admit it aloud.
Death is a natural process of life. It makes sense that, in her studies of plants and animals, that Hera would become interested in the life cycle. It’s laughably hypocritical, now, for Aimsey to feel the need to muster up the courage to enter the lab when he’d been so sure he’d killed his own wife mere hours before.
Aimsey has no right to fear death anymore.
It’s this thought that surges faun forward, calling out again, “Hera?”
Aimsey falters once more when they see her. Hera looks up, seemingly absentmindedly, from whatever she’d been scribbling down in a notebook.
She looks like she had before, when he’d sobbed over her body and forced himself to carry her to somewhere nicer — a placeholder, they’d reckoned with themself. A temporary grave, for the night.
(Aimsey had almost slept right there outside beside her, but somehow managed to stumble all the way back to their cabin).
Her hair is a mess, tousled and coated in dirt and grass and flowers, and though she wears a pristine white lab coat, the floral button-up underneath is bloodstained.
Whatever Aimsey had wanted to say dies in their throat, a sob taking its place.
“Oh, hi,” Hera says, calm and measured, like this is all normal, “I was wondering when you’d come by.” They turns back to their notebook, scribbling something down.
Aimsey stuffs his fist in their mouth to stifle a cry, biting down until his breathing is even enough to speak. “I—” faun croaks, clearing their throat. “I—” he tries again before rushing toward her, needing to know for sure that she’s there.
Hera flinches from his touch, slightly, before allowing it, the only indication aside from her appearance that anything is amiss.
“I bet you have questions,” Hera supplies, and though Aimsey wants to say so much more, he nods. “I do, too,” Hera says, and then slips from fauns grasp to fetch her handheld recorder.
“Okay,” she says, once she’s pressed record, “can you tell me what happened last night?”
Aimsey’s speechless, unsure of how to respond.
Hera blinks. “From the beginning, please,” they prompt, almost impatiently.
Aimsey hasn’t ever seen her like this before.
He’s seen the start of it, sure — when their wife would get that look in their eye, like she’d had an important revelation, and Aimsey would assure her over and over again that it was okay to run off to her lab before the thought left her — but they’ve never been the focus of Hera’s intensity like this.
Faun swallows hard, and decides that they owe her this, however strange the circumstances.
“Well,” he starts, voice still a bit weak. They clear their throat and start again. “You told me you wanted to talk.”
Hera nods encouragingly.
Aimsey continues. “So I met you at our favorite spot, the flower field.” His voice wavers a bit at the end, but the intense look in Hera’s gaze causes them to keep going.
“You arrived, and you sounded nervous, and- and I know that you don’t like it when people stare at you, sometimes, so I kept my back turned and I let you talk,” faun explains, taking a steadying breath. “And then you—” Aimsey stops, again, though faun knows he shouldn’t. Emotion overcomes them.
“Continue,” Hera urges, now noticeably impatient, and Aimsey obliges.
“And then you told me you were an alien.”
Hera nods expectantly.
Aimsey sucks in a shaky breath. “And… and I had- I had always suspected, y’know,” faun starts, and they’re rambling, he knows, but he keeps going. “But I- I thought that, well, it’s stupid, really” — a hollow laugh — “but I thought that, if neither of us said it out loud, I could pretend it wasn’t true. That it didn’t change anything. But- but then you…”
“But then I said it out loud,” Hera finishes for them, and her tone is so clinical and detached that Aimsey nearly recoils.
“And- and you see,” faun resumes, trying to explain it, “I’d heard that aliens were bad. I’d been told that they would pretend to be your friend, your lover, and- and then, when they’d gained your trust, they would strike.”
Aimsey can hear, as they speak the words aloud, how stupid they sound. It all sounds so stupid in retrospect.
“Strike,” Hera repeats, a question in her flat tone.
“Like—” Aimsey stutters, desperate to make any kind of sense, “like- they would become violent, and you’d find out that it was all a lie, all the love you thought they felt for you. It was all a ruse so they could try and take over the world.”
His wife stops, then, looking up from the recorder and her notes to meet fauns eyes.
“And you really believed all of that?” she asks, and their tone has an edge to it that makes Aimsey believe she’s gone off script.
“Yeah,” he admits, unable to meet her eyes.
The admission hangs in the air between them for a moment, and then Hera says, “And then?”
She sounds almost small as she says it, but when Aimsey looks up to meet their eyes they’re steely and guarded.
Aimsey swallows. “And then I followed my instincts, what I’d been told to do,” he says, dancing around the truth as long as faun can. Though faun knows they should, he refuses to look at her as he continues, “I walked up to you, and I grabbed my sword, and I—” as hard as he tries, Aimsey can’t get the words out.
A sob wracks its way through them, shoulders hunched and shaking and hands outstretched, trying to find purchase on any limb of Hera’s they can reach.
“I’m sorry,” is all he can say as faun cries, sliding to the floor and grasping desperately at her legs, a mirror image of themself only a day before, in the field, clutching Hera’s dying body like his apologies would be enough to bring her back.
“How did you feel after you did it?” Hera asks after a few minutes have passed.
The question nearly shocks Aimsey out of their fit.
“What?” they rasp, and Hera repeats her question but slower, as if faun hadn’t heard the first time.
“I regretted it,” Aimsey whispers, still clinging to her wife’s leg, trying to grasp her hand, to make her look at him. “I regretted it immediately. I was in shock. I didn’t even” — they hiccup — “realize I’d actually done it at first. I sat beside you, crying and praying and apologizing—”
Hera scoffs out a breath. “Yes, yes. That I know. And then I was in limbo, and I found a way to come back.” She moves toward the recorder, dislodging Aimsey from her leg. “End of log,” they say, turning the recorder off.
“Thank you,” she says, and it sounds like a formality. “I’m going to go clean up now. I have all I need.”
Aimsey sits on the floor of the lab in stunned silence as Hera leaves.
When faun returns home an hour later, he avoids glancing at the photos adorning the walls.