Embrace the Fall (Part 6)

I barely registered the lift departing again. Or the gentle return of gravity. Or the tap of her crutches settling on the floor as the observation platform restarted its slow rotation.

All I could see was moonlight shimmering over loose blue hair.

“… Nelle? Why are you…?”

I wasn’t even sure I’d said the words until she replied.

“I should be asking you that,” she said, a corner of her mouth tugging up as she hobbled over to me. “Trying out exposure therapy unsupervised? Or is this like that one proverb?”

“What proverb?”

“You know the one.”

“I don’t.”

She wrinkled her nose.

“Don’t make me say it. It’s not ladylike.”

“As if that’s ever stopped you. What is it?”

“… As a dog returns to its vomit, so fools repeat their folly.”

“First, that’s gross. Second, also kind of mean. I did actually throw up here, you know.”

“I remember,” Nelle said with a grin. “That’s what made me think of it.”

I rolled my eyes.

“So, what are you doing?” she asked, leaning against the wall next to me. I heard a small exhalation of relief as she took her weight off the crushes.

“Trying out a stupid idea.”

“Such as?”

“Well, you weren’t far off with either of your guesses. I had the bright idea that maybe coming up here would help me get over my fear of heights. Like going back to the place where it all started. Or to my vomit, or my folly, if we go with your proverb.”

I expected a retort, but Nelle said nothing.

A few seconds of silence was all it took to make me jump to defend myself.

“It’s not like I actually thought it would work, okay!”

Nelle’s pfft and her ensuing laugh forced a smile onto my face as I heard myself through her ears, protesting as if I were some kind of tsundere.

“Who knows?” she said. “Maybe it will.”

“Maybe. I guess we’ll find out soon enough.”

“Not soon. Doesn’t it take like an hour for the flip? Or you could just look down now.”

“I’ll wait.”

I looked down at her, noticing the redness in her face and the sweat sliding down her neck, the depths of her breaths. Her eyes were fixed on the moon.

“Why do you look like you just finished a workout? I thought you were being a good patient.”

Nelle cocked her head, directing her gaze at me.

“It’s not easy going up the Arboretum ramp on crutches. It’s long. And I was trying not to fall too far behind.”

“You were following me? All the way from the pods?”

“It was hard when I’m so slow. I thought I’d lost you, but the operator told me you’d come up here.”

“Why?” I remembered that she hadn’t answered my first question when she’d emerged from the lift. “Even on crutches, it’s probably not great for your ankle to push yourself like that.”

“I wasn’t going to leave you to pout on your own.”

“I wasn’t pouting!”

“Sure,” she said. “You were just quiet through dinner because you were meditating.”

It wasn’t actually that far from the truth, considering how hard I’d been thinking about Elliso’s question.

“I was… just thinking about stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

Nelle had turned her face back to watch the moon, but I let myself continue to watch her face.

“I…”

I tried to decide what I wanted to say. Nelle’s presence had messed up my plans for self-reflection. Before engaging in my ill-advised “exposure therapy,” as Nelle had called it, I’d planned to come up with a solution to my inaction once and for all. It fit the theme of trying to make change happen.

But with her here, I couldn’t corral my thoughts.

I didn't know how long I was quiet in indecision.

“Do you ever wonder if everything we went through messed us up?”

“Huh?” My head jerked toward Nelle at her unexpected question, but her eyes were fixed on our lunar chaperone.

“They say that kids who get famous young have problems later in life. I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently. Because of the wind farm.”

“What do you mean?”

“Just that… I don’t know. I keep wondering if the only reason I care about it is because it would be a big deal if our model actually is better.”

“It would be a big deal, right?” I said, confused. “Wouldn’t that be a good thing?”

“Maybe.” She sighed. “Or maybe it’s just ego. Maybe it’s just that if I’m going to be famous, I want it to be for something I actually did myself.”

Now I knew what she meant. We may have been princess and ambassador, may have provided a vision of peace that inspired enough hearts to pave the way for peace, but was the effect really our own? We’d been so young, and all we’d really done was live our lives while countless eyes watched.

I guess Nelle also felt that all the adulation and noise wasn’t really something we’d merited. The disconcerting feeling of unearned praise was the background tone of both our lives.

“I guess the only way to find out how you really feel is just to do it and see what happens,” I said. 

“… yeah.”

Silence settled about us like a gentle mist alighting on our skin as we watched the moon together. Next to me, I heard a shuffling sound, and then the gentle weight of a shoulder leaning into me. Nelle’s breathing had steadied out, and I thought about how the view we were sharing changed, little by little, as the moon re-walked the path I’d seen it take once already.

Change, little by little.

“Can I tell you something too?”

“Hmm?” Nelle hummed, and I felt the vibration of it where our bodies connected.

“I told Elliso.”

“Told him what?”

“That I was afraid of heights.”

“Heh.” It wasn’t even really a laugh, just an amused exhalation. “So the secret’s out now. Why’d you decide to tell him?”

“Because of you.”

In the quiet of the observation zone, it was impossible not to hear the way her breath caught for an instant, even though she forced her breathing back to normal immediately after.

“What do you mean, because of me?”

“I mean, you getting hurt for my sake… even if it was just bad luck… I don’t want to see it happen again.”

Despite her attempts to regulate her breathing, I could feel the stiffness in her body.

“I did it because I wanted to.”

“I know. I’m not blaming myself. You can call it selfishness, if you want. That’s all it is.”

Selfishness. 

The quality of caring about one’s self or one’s own interests. 

After all this time trying to avoid falling in love with her, trying to avoid selfishness, this is where I’d ended up. At selfishness, but without the lo–

“I don’t like you calling looking out for me selfish.”

Nelle’s voice broke into my thoughts, and I realized that her hand was tight on my arm, trying to pull me to face her. Moonlight crossed her face, her bangs sending shadows as dark as space in jagged marks over her features.

But her green eyes, each one illuminated in a band of pale light, shone.

“Don’t we both look out for each other? Isn’t that what we’ve always done?”

I’d always wondered what it had meant when the classic books we read in class described someone as being “transfixed.”

Now I knew.

I couldn’t look away from the sight of Nelle’s face, the fierceness in her expression. Even as she gingerly balanced on her injured leg, crutches leaning against the wall behind her, she truly did look like a space princess.

The same princess who’d been looking out for me for the last nine years of my life.

The girl I’d been looking out for just as long.

The person who was my childhood friend, my fellow savior of humanity, my classmate, my favorite person.

Nelle XI Yumin Rondar, the height I was most afraid I would never reach.

Nelle.

And, suddenly, it all clicked into place.

“Haven’t you done enough for everyone else?”

“Not when she’s obviously in love with you and you refuse to do anything about it?”

“Unlike Pera, I don’t imagine horrible things happening to the person I li–”

“Where’d you get the idea that you need to fall in love with her anyways?”

“I guess the only way to find out how you really feel is just to do it and see what happens.”

I was the frog in the pot that wouldn’t jump out as the heat gradually rose. All this time, I hadn’t even noticed what should have been obvious.

I’d loved her the whole time, hadn’t I?

All that was left was to do it and see what happened. It was the only way to confirm it.

Right?

“Nelle, can I…?”

I leaned in to her space, an impulse I barely recognized pushing me forward. In that glass bubble in space, I worried that my thundering heart would shatter everything around us, that the heat coursing through my limbs would melt it all away.

As I crossed the slow inches, I watched something in her eyes shift.

“…!”

Just as our foreheads touched, her hand appeared between our mouths.

“No, Annin,” she whispered, fingers dusting back and forth on my lips. I swore I could see sparkles dancing like shooting stars in her eyes. “You have to say it directly. Otherwise, I can’t say it’s official.”

“Nelle…” I breathed, throat so tight I could barely say her name. I felt I was on the verge of a headache, my heart was beating so hard, my bent back so tight, my lungs barely able to intake air. “I… can’t…”

“Why not?” she whispered back, tone far more amused than I knew I deserved. “I’ll say it back, you know.”

My thoughts flailed uselessly, the explanation coming out in a mess I had no control over.

“Because all this time…” With every word I uttered, I felt her skin on my lips. “All this time, I thought I had to fall in love with you. I thought something in me had to change. So I’m– I’m trying to follow my own advice to find out how I really feel: to do it and see what happens.”

“It’s not a bad idea, but…” Her cheeks lifted in a smile that was almost smug, and her hand came up to pat my cheek, just once. “A princess has to have standards. I can wait.”

She began to withdraw her hand, and the moment her fingers lost contact it was as if light years yawned between us.

I can’t say it yet, but I can’t just let her go.

I reached out, grasping her retreating wrist with as much gentleness as I could manage.

“Annin,” she said. A note of warning feathered through my name, although she still smiled with an expression of amusement.

“I’ll say it as soon as I can,” I babbled, hardly knowing what I was saying. “But until then, take this as a promise that I won’t make you wait much longer.”

Then, I pulled her hand to my mouth and kissed the palm of her hand.

“Ann–” I felt the tremor that raced through her arm, pressing my lips to her skin for just a little longer before releasing her. At last my lungs let in a full breath, my head clearing of the pounding, the world inside the observation zone re-stabilizing in my vision.

I could see Nelle’s arm drop limply to her side, eyes wide and her face redder than I’d ever seen it.

“What… was that?” she gasped.

To be honest, I was asking myself the same thing.

I stepped forward as she wobbled, then started to collapse. I was quick enough to get my shoulder under her arm, but not so fast that I could keep her standing. Instead, all I could do was slow her fall, kneeling beside her.

“Sorry,” she said. “I just…”

“Probably the strain of having to come all this way on crutches, right?”

“The strain–?” she started, and our eyes collided. For a moment, we just looked at each other. Then the laughs spilled out, quiet at first and then fully in our chests.

“Yeah,” Nelle said between laughs. “It was definitely that, and not you suddenly deciding to act like some kind of 1800s playboy.”

“Did they even have playboys back then?” I asked as I helped her back to her feet.

“Probably.”

I reached for her crutches, but a hand on my arm stopped me.

“Let’s say it was the crutches,” Nelle said. “In that case, I’m going to need help getting back to the residence pods.”

“What did you have in mind?”

She smiled, and for me, it was brighter even than the white light of the moon.

“I think, due to my stubborn personality, I’m going to need you to carry me piggyback.”