TOGETHER

She splashed her hands in it, a thick tide of plasma. As hard as she tried, she could not shape it. He was it. It had been him. She stared into the pool, searching for his face, seeing only her own. The fluorescent lights glared, reflecting off the pool and into her grasping eyes, suffocating her with red glow. She could not breathe. She could not even think of breathing. How could they have done this? How had it all gone wrong? When had it all gone wrong? They hadn't even seen it coming. They hadn't even opened their eyes.

She must have stood there for hours, perhaps days. Luckily they had not come back. Strange, that. Perhaps they found it useless to clean an "uninhabited" area; perhaps they had shucked that responsibility along with all the others. Perhaps she should sleep. She wrenched herself away from the pool, frustrated by the fact that she could accomplish this, and headed for the sleeping area. It smelt of him. Everything still smelt of him. As if he had just stepped out of the room for a moment …… She picked up his pyjamas and only then realised that her hands were still drenched with his blood. Plasma. All there was, ever had been, ever would be.

Suddenly too exhausted to stand any longer, she collapsed onto the bed. She was not sure how many hours, days, months she had passed when she was woken. A clattering in the main room had her jump out of bed and straight into attack posture. She crept around the corner, to where she could see the source. Or to where she thought she would see the source. There was nothing there. She had probably dreamt it. She scorned herself for this. The trauma had set in and destroyed her clarity, despite all the training, all the conditioning. She needed the clarity now, more than ever. She would have to step out, to prove to herself that she was either right or wrong. "Unsure equals insecure" : she could still hear the mantra.

She stepped out into the main room, immediately taking in the pool on the floor (he…), the room just as it had been , as well as the android with its phaser pointed straight at her. Then the lightning overcame her and she melted into a plasma pool on the floor.

The android looked down at the two puddles. One was moving - strange, there was no prompting. It trickled towards the second puddle. The android took note of this, reported to its superiors, and turned away, oblivious to the puddles. As a result, it did not see the pools join and flood into each other. This was also the reason that it could not explain the sigh it heard.