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Yellow flowers sway in the garden, glowing like lamps with their petals backlit by the sun. Why? Why yellow? She squinted up at the shining flowers, radiant little cup shapes bobbing in the gentle breeze on their curving, mute green stems. Actually, if that green twinkled like a star, or swam like ink in water, or flashed across someone’s face, it would shout, but it slunk away underneath that screaming yellow. She tilted her head, chin resting in her hands, elbows planted in the cool moss, laying on her stomach in father’s well-tended garden and swinging her feet in the air while she held the flowers’ gaze. Bobbing in the soft wind like a garden flower. She stopped squinting and fixed the flowers with a wide-eyed, full-face glare. Tiny, bright things like yellow flowers should do as she says. They’re like candle flames– if she pinches them between her fingers, they should stop. Give in, like clay. Shift, at least, to some quieter shade. Blue, gray; even a cold purple or delicate mauve, while seething rude, a hue to plant a pit in the stomach, would show some attempt to soften their hard, white-hot edges. Under her commanding stare, anything as bold and as small as the cupped yellow flowers should shush. Why say no to a conversation, to even trying to listen? She listened. She listened most of the time, and now, here she was laid out down in the moss like a creeping bed letting the breathy gusts of wind slip through her leaves side by side with these yellow flowers, and the indignant, angry pinpricks never bowed, never acknowledged her questions or even her most colorful stare— they just danced like tiny, frantic comets, little shining cups of terror in the swimming greenery. How long until they broke and turned calm?
Pei held her own gaze. A silver woman wrapped in a towel and backed by white tile stared out from the bathroom mirror. The dissipating steam swam towards the vents; her face, her jaw, the soft inward curve under her cheekbones swam with a true mix of erratic, conflicting colors. It was so easy to get lost in those morphing patterns. She could watch floating clouds and layers of color stretch and shift and swirl and climb forever as they curled along their endless paths. Pei ran a hand over her head and traced the edges of the thin frills running along the sides behind her jaw, flattened against her scalp.
It wasn’t childhood that she missed, although the thought of the creche drew some blooms of warm blue nostalgia out from her, but, stars… Her eyes tracked the waves and twinkling motions of color across the sides of her face. What a relief it would be to have all the space in the world to give once again to tiny things. If she leaned forward over the cold sink, bringing herself face to face with her reflection, she could almost see the individual chromatophores pinching miniscule beads of color into view. Her breath clouded the glass. Once, she could have spent an entire day exploring just one bug, just one cluster of flowers, one question, one color– the creche gave children the time to do that, because they needed to learn the logic of the world around them. She didn’t wish to do it all over again, but now Pei found herself only holding things under such close examination in snatched moments like this– the minutes between meetings and calls with clients, a glance in the mirror after a shower… as well as the brief stretches of time she shared with Ashby, when the expectations and the apprehension which leeched into her from her double-life’s job melted away to translucent nothing. Usually, however, the two of them kept quite busy. She let out a quiet laugh through her nose and smirked, her jawline briefly flashing an amused yet low green.
Today was an exception to Ashby’s thawing effect: no matter how thoroughly she parsed her emotions, Pei had been unable to locate some hidden, crystal-clear source of her reluctance to act on her Shimmering and carry out the wonderful and noble continuance of the Aeluon species. Even though she had finally made the choice to acknowledge that reluctance and not have her egg fertilized– her face swam purple– the doubt continued to eat away at her. Since Gora, Pei was living on a nervous, vomit-yellow backdrop of doubt and crawling under a piercing, critical lens– and not the pleasant kind she enjoyed applying to curious little things like bright flowers or an out-of-place emotion, or the geometry of Ashby’s kind face. Of course now, she thought with a yellowy pang in her gut, when she was surrounded by bigger and more saturated things– mortal fear on a dangerous mission, the painful ripping of the carefully constructed border between her lives with and without Ashby, this overwhelming mess of repulsion and loneliness and despair pouring from her Shimmer– Pei only had handfuls of seconds to sort through it all, let alone sit with it for days on end like a creche child learning to skip or hold a pen.
The days she spent alone en route to Ashby’s ship had flown by– suddenly, she was here, having just stepped out of the shower, taking a moment to speak with her reflection before talking through it all with her lover. Ashby would understand– maybe he wouldn’t understand, really, but he would support her through anything. He did, she reminded herself with a burst of violet: he lied and kept secrets and bent over backwards at every odd request and special rule she imposed to keep their relationship hidden if it meant she would be more comfortable.
Hands resting on the edges of the sink, Pei drew herself up to look down her nose at the mirror. So there, she thought, not breaking her gaze, this was just one more item in a long list of decisions she could count on Ashby to support. Scarlet and indigo swept across her face. Pei held her breath and squared her shoulders. Her reflection squinted back at her, lowering its brows and flaring its frills. She cupped her face, lightly pressing her tile-cool hands on her neck under her jaw to either side of the talkbox, feeling the thin fastening chain rub against her palms, drinking in the ultimate silence in the implant’s absence. Staring hard into the mirror, Pei opened her mind to let the movement of color across her face fill her world. She exhaled slowly and focused on her cheeks. With a mindful check-in and some careful thinking, Pei could normally control the colors she displayed. Her face swam, fading to a pensive, obscure powder blue. There was satisfaction in exerting control over so many chromatophores, so many small, potent things she alone could force by her hand. Her shoulders released their tension and her expression softened. A rueful, muddy green bloomed along her jaw; how hot and red did she have to glare into her reflection to pierce through her mind, she wondered, and touch her thoughts, sculpting them with her hands into something reasonable, something that meshed with her logic like overlapping rows of scales? How hard did you have to focus to turn terror-yellow flowers blue?