Mira doesn't hate me anymore. At least, that's what I think as I scrub blood and other impurities from my hair and body. The salt in the spring burns my wounds, which have already started scabbing over, but I don't mind. It distracts me from the real ache within my body.

All I want to do is grab Mira by her shoulders, and tell her everything. I have to bite down on my own tongue, to resist the urge. I want to trust that she'll believe me, but I know if I start acting crazy now, the tentative trust I've built with her will shatter.

As much as I abhor her distrust and hatred of me, a part of me is relieved. Relieved that her temper hadn't been quashed by our decade long separation. I'll graciously take Mira's hatred over her indifference.

Mira remains in a stone-like stillness as I finish bathing and dress. A slight breeze circulates throughout the cave, cooling the water against my skin.

Mira doesn't look up as I get out of the water and dress, her spine completely rigid, and breathing tense. The silence eats at me, and I open my mouth to say something. Nothing comes out, and I close it again.

This was not how I imagined our reunion. After 13 fucking years, this wasn't how it was supposed to happen. I had been in a state of disarray when I finally found Bronson. Didn't think twice before I delisted his company and bought-out his investors. I would have never thought he'd send Mira after me, not after all the trouble he went through to hide her.

Not that he did a good job of that either. Bronson is a dumb fuck through and through. Out of all scientists, researchers, and professors on Cassda-14, I remembered Bronson's face the most vividly. His disconcertingly smooth skin, from one too many carbon-laser facials, blinding white teeth, and upturned nose.

I remember him because he wore his lab coat wrong, forgetting to lace all the fastenings, or forgetting gear before entering the testing facility rooms. Academia's a hard field to get into, considering the sheer volume of prerequisite information required to master before starting independent research. Yet a motherless waste of oxygen like Bronson had managed to make it.

Countless restless nights, sitting alone in the white room, had been wasted on pondering how. This had been after the other children, and before I'd met Mira. Where I'd have weeks on end of isolation, with nothing to do but count the specks of dust flying through the air, or listen to the regurgitation of the oxygen recycler.

Bronson called himself an entrepreneur and an inventor, but I'd met floor-roomba's smarter than him. He had been bright enough to get accepted into university, grown rather adept in DNA sequencing, and eventually picked up some low-level languages like assembly. But that's where his achievements ended.

I was three when he first entered the lab, and listening to his dull-witted chatter had been the equivalence of nails on a chalk-board. His contributions to Cassda-14's research could be better described as set-backs. He'd once tried to convince the board of Cassda to add a beer bottle opener to one of my fingers. Bronson wasn't a scholar, but a vegetable who had somehow found his way into STEM. Too preoccupied with the prestige that came with research, fucking around with girls in shitty cantine clubs, than actually doing his job, yet not ill-educated enough to be fired. If he really cared about Mira, he wouldn't have let her off-planet. If he really cared, he wouldn't have sent her to do his dirty work day-in and day-out, asking her to fight for his entertainment and curiosity.

But Mira doesn't believe that, and it's not something I can even fault her for. She has no memories of anything before Bronson. No friends, no family, not even those shitty shows they used to show her at Cassda for 'socialization.'

Just thinking about it makes my knuckles go white, and I close my eyes, releasing a slow breath in a bid for patience. My hands are restless, and there's nothing I want more than to have my hands around a screwdriver, to breathe in the musky air of my respirator, and feel the cancer-causing radiation glide off my skin.

Instead, my hands are closed around the broken half of a solar panel, two antennas, a couple chips, graphic cards, and other junk I managed to scavenge from our broken half of the ship. There's not much to work with, as all the important high-tech parts of the pod had been on the front of the ship, the side with Mira's three friends.

But I've worked with worse, and I get to work immediately, sorting everything I had brought into neat piles, then using CAD to map out a few basic prototypes with our given supplies. Nothing I draft outputs a band above 110 MHz, which is expected, but disappointing.

I'm fixing a logic gate on the transistor of a small chip, when I hear the faint sound of clicking break through the heavy silence. I lift my head up, and my eyes fall onto Mira's form tucked away in a far corner. The chattering gets louder, and I put the chip back onto the ground.

The hot water I brought back from the site has long since gone cold, and it's far too dark and windy to go out for wood and light a fire. Hesitantly, I get up and crouch beside her curled up form. But before I can say anything, Mira's eyes pop open, and she sits up.

"I'm not cold. I'll be fine," she says, and it's almost endearing how hard she tries to keep her voice from being affected by her teeth chattering.

"I'll get firewood the moment dawn breaks," I promise her. "I'll also skin the creature we came across for its coat, granted its corpse is still there tomorrow. In the meantime, do you want to do some push-ups to warm up? Maybe a few jumping jacks?" When she doesn't respond, I realize her eyes have drooped close again, and I tap her shoulder to wake her. "I'll even do them with you. I have to hit chest and triceps today anyways."

"Too tired," she mutters, struggling to her feet. It takes me a second to register where she's going, and when I do, my hand closes around her arm immediately, dragging her back.

"No, you're not sleeping in the water," I hiss. Mira doesn't seem to be listening though, and she pries my hand off her arm, muttering something that sounds like but it's warm.

I reach around her, then pull her into the air into a bridal carry, eliciting a cry of protest from her. Carefully, I lie down in the corner where she had been sleeping before, and wrap my arms around her body. Whatever drowsiness clouded her eyes before, is now gone, and she fights my grip, coherent enough to decide she doesn't want to share my warmth.

If it were anything else, I'd give into her demands. I wasn't about to watch Mira freeze to death in the middle of the night, or fall asleep with her head underwater and drown. I grab one of her hands, and place it against my bare chest. She goes still, realizing how much hotter my body ran compared to hers.

She doesn't fight me when I slide the blanket and jacket off her body, positioning her so the back of her chest is pressed up against my chest, and my hands wrapped around her waist. She's stiff for only a minute or two, before she finally relaxes against me. I don't relax though. I keep utterly still, not daring to move a single muscle.

Again, the sense that everything is all wrong, returns. But it has nothing to do with Mira, and everything to do with me. An hour passes, and my muscles begin to cramp, but it's nothing compared to the turmoil boiling over within my head.

Holding Mira in my arms is a gift that goes beyond a blessing, while also being the most torturous thing I've ever put myself through. I don't remember ever wanting something more in my life. It takes every ounce of self control I have not to tighten my grip around her, and pull her closer to me, for reasons unrelated to keeping her warm. I close my eyes in an attempt to avoid the overload of data streaming into my head, data that I absolutely don't need.

But my emotions and lack of discipline are my burden to carry, not Mira's. I waited thirteen years just to see her again. I wasn't going to lose her again, to my own selfish desires. This time, I would get it right. 

*Authors note*

I was only going to spend a paragraph on Elias' inner monologue about Mira's dad but it ended up being 350 words long. What can I say, he really hates the guy. 

Anyways, this book is reaching 30K which is kinda wild because I started it as a joke and didn't bother outlining at all, which I am definitely feeling the consequences of now.

Regardless, thanks for reading! :D Sorry the update took so long, I 100% jinxed myself when I said I'd be writing a ton. Hopefully this week I'll be writing a lot more, since my sleep schedule is (mostly) fixed. Have a great weekend! <3