Chapter Text
Ayda came downstairs on an early morning it had been very hard to climb out of bed, wrapped in her favorite robe against the chill of the weather, to find Gurathin curled up in the window seat of the living room, arms around his legs, head on his knees, staring out into the rain-soaked orchard as the leaves trembled from each drop.
“I’m not used to weather,” he said quietly as she came up beside him.
There was so much about him she still didn’t know, so much she thought she never might be told, but this seemed like an easy enough question to hope for an answer.
“You didn’t live on a planet?”
He shook his head, gaze still aimed out the window. “Born on one station, sent wherever the company wanted me to go, but almost never planets.”
“I like this weather,” Ayda said, leaning on the sill of the window and resting her head against the ruddy wood. “It feels cozy, to me. Rainy mornings make it hard to wake up, but it’s such a lovely note to start the day on.” Rainclouds on Preservation could catch the light of the sun in a way that made them glow, and this morning’s sky was warm shades of rose and amber through the falling rain tinted golden.
Gurathin didn’t say anything for a long moment, but he tilted his head back to look higher into the sky. “Hard to wake up sounds like a nice problem to have,” he said.
He’d been fully detoxed on Preservation Station before being released to the planet, but his recovery was nowhere near complete: he still had trouble falling asleep, staying asleep, relaxing enough to rest for any length of time. Ayda had offered him a spare room on the Mensah farmstead after getting consensus from the rest of her family to shelter the lonely and skittish refugee she’d promised to help build a new life. He moved quietly through the halls, made himself small in the corners of rooms, was polite in a stiff and breakable way when Ayda’s spouses or siblings or in-laws spoke to him, and never stopped scanning for a threat at every unexpected sound.
There was a grey cat that Farai had adopted, around the time that their first child was born, who had spent the first year of its life living under the porch of their closest neighbor. Farai had answered the call when their neighbor saw it limping, spent days coaxing the hurt and fearful little thing close enough to catch and get it medical attention. That cat was currently curled up between the glass of the window and Gurathin’s hip, tail over its nose, old enough that it spent most of its time asleep these days. It had taken years for it to accept petting from anyone besides Farai, but in its old age it was appreciative of the gentle hands of its family. Even Gurathin’s touch, hesitant as it was, was allowed in a moment of stillness and quiet like this one.
Ayda hoped that Gurathin would find in Preservation some peace, some calm, some measure of love that could smooth out the jagged edges that seemed to be the entirety of him now. People were harder to care for than cats, but he was her rescue, the spy who’d put himself in her hands rather than target her, and she was determined to see him thrive, no matter how long it took for that to happen.
She rested her hand on his shoulder, a warm and grounding touch. “Have you had breakfast?”
He shook his head and leaned just slightly into her touch. “I’m not hungry,” he said. “I might just stay here and watch the rain.”
“All right,” Ayda said, and patted him once before going into the kitchen.
She came back out, ten minutes later, with a steaming mug in each hand and a dried fruit bar held between two fingers. “Sit up,” she said, and waited for him to do so before she handed him a mug and dropped the fruit bar atop his lap, tucking herself neatly into the window seat beside him with one foot on the floor to keep her up. “Rain like this is a seasonal thing on this part of the planet,” she said, wrapping her hands around her mug of tea and inhaling the steam. “It comes down much more heavily in summer, the sound of it on the roof is completely different. It’s enlivening, then, not soothing like now.” She was a terraforming specialist; weather patterns were a special interest of hers, and one she could talk about for as long as she had a willing audience.
Gurathin glanced sideways at her, just once, and kept his gaze on the golden rain while he sipped the milky, sugary coffee she’d handed him, letting her voice lull him the way the sound of the rain lulled her.