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“I’ve never really paid attention to this before…”
Wendy was talking half to herself as she and Webber were laying on the soft ground, looking up at the night sky.
Webber smiled. “It’s nice, isn’t it?”
Through the corner of Webber’s eyes, he saw Wendy give a small nod, not quite smiling but looking peaceful. “I suppose it is. Do you look at the stars a lot?”
Webber shrugged. “We used to… but we kinda forgot about it when we got you and the others for company.”
Wendy tilted her head. “I didn’t think there could be anything in this world that I had not seen before… well, nothing this simple, at least.”
Webber shrugged. “Guess even after all this time, sometimes things can just escape our focus!”
Wendy didn’t respond. She looked thoughtful.
After a little bit, she eventually spoke up.
“We’ll live forever here, won’t we?”
It wasn’t really a question so much as it was a statement. Aging either didn’t happen in the Constant, or if it did it just happened really slowly, to the point where Webber and Wendy were still pretty little even after being in this world for years. But that was a fact that, subconsciously or not, they had always known. It wasn’t some big realization. For Wendy to point it out this way… it probably meant she wanted to hear what Webber had to say about it.
“Maybe…” he muttered. “But we don’t think that’s a bad thing! If we lived together forever, we would be pretty happy, don’t you agree?”
Wendy looked like she appreciated Webber’s words, but she also looked as though she had expected them. And she had a rebuttal ready.
“You’re sweet,” she replied, making Webber feel a bit warm inside, “but there could be a point where it stops being so good.”
“But…” Webber faltered. “We would be with each other, right? Why wouldn’t that be a good thing?”
It was at this point where Webber fully looked away from the sky and at his girlfriend. She was sitting up and looking down, her arms wrapped around her legs, with an expression that looked tired and a little scared. Was this something that had been on her mind a lot?
“Eternal life sounds like a curse,” she growled. “You live to see everything you can do, and then when you’re done, you’re forced to keep living forever beyond that. An endless, meaningless existence… the fact that we might have to go through that may just be the worst part of our already miserable lives here.”
Webber understood, but he couldn’t help but disagree. “We’ll be together, though! And we won’t just get bored of each other! We…”
Wendy’s arms were still crossed. Webber moved his hand closer, inviting her to hold it and open up a bit more.
“We don’t think we’ll ever stop loving you,” he whispered. “And… we think you probably feel the same.”
Wendy looked at his hand for a few seconds, eventually reaching out and grabbing it. She was still trembling.
“But what if we don’t have a choice?” She whispered. “What if it just… happens? And we can’t stop it?”
Webber frowned. In a way, she was right. He didn’t know what he would do if he stopped feeling good about everything. But right now, he knew that it was not a real possibility. His heart still pounded every time he saw Wendy, he still felt the same ease he had always felt, and he didn’t think that could ever really change.
Before Webber could reply, Wendy continued. “I used to think there would never be a moment where I wasn’t miserable. For a long time, it was all I knew. But with time, my mind has let me forget about all the things that trouble me. Alone, it sounds like a nice feeling, but it should also mean that it’s possible to go the other way. My heart says that my love will never leave me, but… I don’t know if I can trust it.”
Webber squeezed her hand. “We don’t have to let it happen, though! It’s our minds, we can tell ourselves what to feel.”
“And how do you know that?”
Webber hesitated, taking a deep breath. “Because we… kinda did that before? Back when we first became…” Webber gestured to himself. “…this, I really hated this body. Like, so much! I wanted to get out of it and be a human again so badly, and it was all I thought about for a while.”
Wendy’s eyes widened, and she looked like she wanted to say something, but she waited for Webber to keep going.
“But…” Webber continued, “that couldn’t happen. We couldn’t change what was going on, all I could do was change how we felt! And we did! And now we’re more comfortable with it. And since then, we’ve let ourselves be happy, and we’re better now!”
“What’s your point with this?” Wendy asked. “You’re just talking about changing how you feel, not preventing that change.”
“Well, we like to think of it this way,” Webber articulated. “We have a lot of reasons to maybe not like this whole thing so much, but we’re able to stay optimistic by just thinking about the good things! Just like we changed because we felt like we needed to, a lot of other things have stayed the same because we told ourselves it was okay. I guess what we’re saying is… we, and that means us and you, we can choose not to let things happen to our minds, or to let them!”
Wendy just stared with an unreadable expression.
“Besides!” Webber chirped. “It’s not like you don’t think about Abigail anymore, is it? You’ve just gone from being broody all the time to only being broody most of the time!”
“Such high praise,” Wendy dryly replied, her eyes betraying a fond amusement.
“And even though, to us, you’re the cutest, funnest, most perfectest girl in the world,” Webber kept going, electing to ignore the blush that came over Wendy’s face, “you aren’t the ONLY thing we think about. There’s a lot of stuff here! If it was just us, we’d kinda get it, but isn’t there so much more? It’s not like the only thing we can do here is talk to each other!”
Even though Webber thought he was doing a pretty good job at talking about why he wasn’t worried, Wendy didn’t seem to be cheering up at all. Was there still something wrong?
“But with so much time, we will inevitably run out of things to do, and what will we have then?” Wendy lamented. “What will we have a thousand years after that?”
Webber paused and put a hand to his chin, trying to pretend to himself as though this was just a deep and complex thought experiment and not one of his best friend’s biggest fears. “We could just… do it again?”
“But with the memories of having done it once before, would they not be more hollow the times after that?”
Oh no, Wendy was starting to talk in sentences Webber could hardly understand, that meant she was really spiraling now!
“W-well, we won’t remember all of it, will we?” He countered. “We don’t have everything we’ve ever done just neatly kept in our heads! So it’d basically just be like the first time all over again!”
When she next spoke, Wendy sounded… somehow, even more hurt. “So we’re just doomed to repeat the same things over and over, never even aware that we’ve done them before… for all of eternity.”
Webber didn’t know how to respond. She wasn’t wrong, when she put it that way… it did sound like a nightmare. It sounded like a world where they would be reduced to playthings for the people who controlled it. Even though Webber still thought he had the right idea, even though he knew the only thing that truly mattered was how they felt, he couldn’t possibly say something that would prove her wrong, because she wasn’t really wrong.
“I’m sorry,” Wendy said in a low voice after a few seconds, “for bringing that up. I know it won’t happen any time soon, and I should just… enjoy what I have while I can. I didn’t mean to make you feel sad too.”
It took a little bit for Webber to respond, and when he did, the words that came from his mouth felt like they were coming out before he could stop them, but, like, in a good way? It felt like he knew on instinct what he needed to say, and didn’t need to rationalize it in his brain at all.
“We’ve watched the stars before, did you know?” He asked, though he didn’t wait for an answer. “It was a long time ago, we aren’t surprised that you forgot. We were still figuring out how we felt about you at the time, but we remember that day pretty well. You ended up falling asleep pretty fast and resting on our side, but we were up for a bit longer, ‘cause we thought you’d be mad if you woke up cuddling us, hehe…”
Wendy was looking at him with a raised eyebrow. “Where are you going with this?”
“You said before… that this was your first time watching the stars.”
“I suppose I did.”
“Did us reminding you of that make this time any worse?”
Wendy blinked, and Webber took the time to clarify, “And, we don’t mean this whole talk, we mean… the stuff before it! Stargazing! Is it worse now that you know you’ve done it before?”
Wendy stared at him for a few seconds, before slowly saying, “I did have a good time, I suppose…”
“And…” Webber slowly began, deciding to be a bit more bold than usual by putting his arm around Wendy and pulling her to his side, “This is… still nice to us. It’s nice to you too, right?”
In lieu of an answer, Webber felt a head tilt onto his shoulder.
Webber rested his head on hers, and after a moment, realized she was breathing rather slowly. He turned his head to find that she had fallen asleep on his shoulder, once again.
He smiled, knowing he definitely won this debate, and got a happy Wendy as a result.