Teal Covey was going to be a terraforming expert. She knew this from a very young age, with the certainty that a young girl would, and all her energy went into making sure that the universe conformed to the vision. She spent hours outside, knee deep in streams and turning over rocks, fascinated by the things she found there.

Her particular interests were the small organisms, the insects and rodents, the lichens, the molds, the algae. All the tiny things that were necessary but often forgotten in the grand vision of reshaping a landscape. Every space that supported sentient life needed a robust and diverse foundation, and the interactions of that foundation were endlessly interesting to her. She had collections of flowers and pollinators that ranged from delicate to horrifying. She would talk about any of them at length, if given a chance.

Winterwing had one class with Teal freshman year, and her gaggle of friends dismissed him entirely. He had done very little that year beyond existing, and even that he had managed rather poorly. He wasn’t interested in anything, still had the wiry lankiness of a boy, and didn’t much want to be ‘at school’ but was so sick of being ‘at home’ that he was ready for an excuse to leave. He slept too much, ate too little, and had lost anything that had made him remarkable to anyone.

Teal thought his clumsy embarrassment at her attention was cute, once she realized it was authentic and not flattery. She tolerated, perhaps even enjoyed his presence for the space of that class. She would chatter with him before and after. She was enthusiastic when helping with homework–-he had no gift for biochemistry, and no interest in space. At the end of the semester they went their separate ways. There were a couple thousand other faces on that campus, and she blurred in with the rest.

It was years later, as he was closing in on graduation and editing other student’s essays for credit, that she found him again, entirely by chance, handing him twenty pages of barely coherent text. By then he had found his new persona as the workaholic. It was unclear, in hindsight, if this was better or worse than having no interests at all.

She stared at him while he skimmed it, her face the same expression as someone trying to remember a word that had vanished from memory just when needed. He didn’t notice, sitting in increasing agitation, working around tense choices and fragmented paragraphs.

“I know you,” she said. He didn’t hear.

He didn’t even look up when he asked “How... soon do you need this back?”

“Two weeks.”

“Well, thanks for not saying ‘tomorrow’ like everyone else,” he muttered.

“Do you want to grab something to eat?” she asked.

He read through a clumsy sentence, trying to parse it, before something in his worthless brain finally clicked, and he looked up. “What?”

For years everything had come to Winterwing muted or muffled, as if he were listening to someone else in the next room narrating his life for him. One day and the next seemed no different, and he often lost track of time, or simply slept through everything he could. It wasn’t as if he were devoid of joy, or anger, or anything else. They were all still there. But they were fleeting, and felt almost unreal as soon as they left.

He had been so sure of where he was going before, and then it was all gone.

Higher education was tolerable. He didn’t find a calling, or anything that he would have called a passion, but he did find that he was decent with words, so he focused on them. It made the adults around him happier, that he could do schoolwork, so that’s all he did.

It was invigorating to be around Teal.

She was happiest when she was able to continue her childhood excursions. She lived for being outside. She would spend as much time of she could on a trail, would breathe the cold air deeply as if it were the first breath of autumn. She took the requisite images and video for sharing later, but in between each, her eyes would be trained at the ground. The grasses, the flowers, even the little biting bugs. It was all fantastic. She enjoyed the half-frozen lakes of the mountains that circled the western edge of the plateau, and did not seem to notice the cold as she waded in barefoot.

She was kind enough to share all of herself in the free time that she did have. He didn’t much care for the outdoors, but she was so excited that it didn’t matter. That she enjoyed it was enough that he simply had to, by extension. She would wake him in the early morning to drag him up a mountain. She would stand on the peak with her arms out, pretending to fly in the morning breeze, and then open her eyes and grasp his hand, beaming.

He barely had the energy to keep up with her, but when he could manage it, it was worth it. He had no idea what she got out of the relationship. She couldn’t ever explain it to him, not in a way that he fully understood. She would give a shake of the head, and explain as best she could by presenting him with a warm drink and a book–-an actual paper book–-and watch him read until she fell asleep.

Winterwing recalled having crushes before. He was not entirely without a soul, however muted and sluggish his emotions had become. He knew that odd sort of prickling of the skin that just being in the presence of the right person could bring. The hyper focus on every detail, the conversations rehearsed internally and never spoken, the moments of excruciating awkwardness that overtook any actual romance.

This didn’t feel like any of that, though he wasn’t quite sure what it was instead. He did not understand himself well enough. He did wish that he had the energy to keep up with her, that he could have found the kind of delight that she did with her flowers and her bugs. It was a wistful longing, and he would imagine what his life would have looked like under different circumstances, if maybe he hadn’t lost himself. She shook her head and reminded him that they likely wouldn’t have known each other at all, and they both would have been worse off for it.

He was alive, she said, and that was enough.