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"I don't hate you. I could never hate you. That's the problem."
Marcus and Abby fought.
Everyone knew it. Like the laws of gravity, or the speed of light, it was just another universal constant to the people of the Ark: given two seconds together, Marcus Kane and Abby Griffin would inevitably end up in an argument.
Everyone knew it, but no one understood it.
“They just really hate each other,” some people would say.
“You know who fights like that? Scorned lovers,” other would say.
Thelonious Jaha knew that neither of those things were true. The constant fighting would have made sense if they were. No, Marcus and Abby had never been lovers, and despite outward appearances they didn’t hate each other, either. The problem was that they were drawn to one another - the laws of attraction pulled them invariably closer together. The logical conclusion would have been a collision, but circumstances made that impossible.
Jaha privately cursed those circumstances sometimes. With no outlet for the forces that worked on them (and the concerned parties’ unwillingness to acknowledge what those forces were in the first place) there was no way to relieve the tension - except to fight.
And boy, did they fight.
“I won’t let you do that.”
“Let me?” Abby repeated in a dangerously low tone.
Marcus and Abby were too busy staring each other down to notice when Jaha left.
“You don’t control me, Kane.”
He snorted in derision. “No one controls you, Abby. Maybe if they did we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”
She barely had time to register the comment - to realize that it was a petty jab at her dead husband as much as it was at her - before Marcus’s face crumpled in shame and he turned away.
Instead of getting angrier, Abby just felt suddenly, achingly tired.
“How did we get like this?” she wondered into the stinging silence.
Marcus’s shoulders shifted with a heaving breath, but he made no reply. Abby studied his back the same way he studied the earthly orb outside the window.
They couldn’t keep doing this.
“I know you that you hate me -”
Marcus laughed: the sound was bitter and full of shadows. “I don’t hate you.”
Abby’s mouth fell open. “Really? ‘Cause you could have fooled me.”
Marcus started to reply and then snapped his mouth shut with an audible click. He shook his head once and breezed past her on his way out the door.
He stopped before turning the corner. With his head half-turned toward her he said, “I don’t hate you. I could never hate you. That’s the problem.”
It took Abby a full five minutes to catch her breath again.