-	“What sort of person was your father?” A question I did not expect emanates from her mouth.
-	“…Silent, quiet.”
-	“Like you?”
-	“Many people have implied or explicitly said that, yes.”
-	“…Do you feel uncomfortable talking about him?”
-	“A bit, I suppose.”
-	“…Sorry.” Her embrace gets tighter and I can hear her clothes rustle around me.
-	“…No, no, it’s okay.” I get my hand through my coat, into one of my pockets, pulling out a wallet. Not much is in there, I don’t need money, but I do need my keycards and identification cards.
-	“What are you doing?” Her curiosity seems to trump her earlier bashfulness from asking something she felt she shouldn’t have.
-	“Here, look.” I take out a photograph from the wallet, buried between the many keycards in it, along with the countless horrible photographs of me imprinted onto the identification ones. I hand it over to Juno.
-	“Is this… your father?”
-	“That’s him, yeah.” I nudge over a little so I can see the photo myself and point some features to her. “See that? He’s in full dress uniform. All two shades of blue and gold.”
-	“…And that’s you in his arms?”
-	“You got that right. All 3 kilograms of little old me. And if you’ve noticed, he’s even smiling.”
-	“Makes me a bit jealous you had a father like this…”
-	“You shouldn’t be, real double-edged sword.” I take the picture and stare at it for a while longer, like I tend to do sometimes. “Best to not have a father than have one that ignores you.”
-	“…I see why you were reluctant.”
-	“Well, nothing I can do about it now, he’s gone and kicked the bucket. Reminiscing about the past won’t solve much.”
-	“…You might find solace in telling someone about it though.” Her words tick me off just a little bit, it’s obvious, I agree with it, but I don’t like that I have to admit I’m somewhat wrong.
-	“Are you sure?”
-	“I am sure. Do you not trust me?”
-	“Alright…” Uncomfortable silence fills the room as I notice more and more that I should start speaking once and for all. “It’s complicated, so complicated. I can’t quite put it into words, it just pops up in my head when I go to bed and don’t immediately fall asleep. I start thinking of all the things I would tell him if I could only see him one more time, I don’t even want repairs or resolution I just want to tell him everything I really thought, everything I was too scared to ever say.”
-	“Do you feel he wronged you?”
-	“No… Yeah— God, it’s just so complicated…” I lean back and let my head tap Juno. I can see her eyes looking down on me. I’m too embarrassed to look at her in the eyes right now, let’s just not. “I don’t want to say he wronged me, I understand why it all happened, but it still hurt a lot to be the one aggravated by his justifiable actions.”
-	“…” Juno doesn’t speak, but she keeps me in her arms, I suppose she’s attempting to tell me she’s listening.
-	“You know how I told you he was smiling in that picture? He smiled a couple times in my childhood, whenever he spent time with me. I remember when he gave me his gun— unloaded of course— and told me to hold it and extend my arms. I was interested in firearms even back then, so getting to do that felt exceptionally satisfying. He’d gone and taught me what a pistol was, how you hold it, what constitutes one, its parts and everything else, and then when I was satisfied, ‘Don’t touch it, don’t point it at people.’ …And that’s my last good memory of him.” I don’t feel a knot in my throat, I don’t feel like crying, I know I’m upset, but it’s just not enough to be sad anymore. “That was my father, the real one, the one that would teach me things… In this sad little ringed rocket of ours, there’s very few good role models. Few men as intelligent as he was, and sadly he paid the price for that… The entire station needed him to work, and so, I ended up as an auxiliary meaning for his life. He’d stopped smiling by then, he’d stop spending time with me, he’d stop teaching me things.” I still don’t feel sad enough to cry, but I almost wish I could, I feel like I’ve been drained of my rightful emotions. “He never took me to a firing range, never taught me how to fire a gun, instead all I got was all his work relegated to me, and I’m afraid, so very afraid I’ll make the same mistakes as him, that I’ll become a mindless drone for this government, that I’ll ignore what is true and good— I just— I just… dream of being human and… feeling the things he did in this photo.” I swing my head to her, but I don’t look at her, I just want my voice to get to her directly. “In a way… You’ve… You’ve given me a taste of what being human might actually be.”
Juno grips me, she’s gripped me oh so many times before, and yet all of them feel so distinct. It’s such a regular occurrence that I can get away with saying that this hug of hers is no different from the rest, just as memorable as every last one. I look over to her, gentle smile plastered wide on her face, a smile I want to see every day, a smile I don’t ever want to see fading, like someone else’s. These moments with her have granted me the knowledge of how invaluable it is to belong, to someone, to anyone. I want to belong to her, and if I may be allowed to be selfish just today— I want her to belong to me.

          

It’s not quite easy to explain how I feel at this very moment— or at any moment, really. I’ve grown accustomed to the warmth, the feeling of safety, the whole forgetting my words whenever I stare at her. She tells me to speak and— and it’s not like I’m not trying! It’s just, you know, I try to think of something but I’m just mesmerized by her the whole time, I want to think of a topic but I’m just so focused on admiring her. She knows, she notices, she lets me take my time before she inevitably teases me with that sly, devious smile of hers. “Are you gonna speak or are you too busy fancying me up?”, followed by a spiteful, compulsory dry groan and a left, face in shame as I desperately attempt to prevent my face from contorting into a grin. I can’t stand to look at her whenever she says things like that. Mostly because she’s right, but also because I’m too ashamed to admit I like it when she’s confident. I send her off on errands and then get mad at myself for not going with her, I get impatient, I start wanting to chew her head off for taking too long, sometimes I decide ‘I’ve made up my mind! This will be the day! Today for sure I’ll punish her for being late!’ …And then I see her and it just all goes away. She notices I’m looking away, even just vaguely pouting, and before I know it I’m there, in her arms, expiring the last of my breath through the parted lips I wish she’d take… And it’s only by the next day that I remember why I was mad.
“I want to run away with you…” Are words I shouldn’t have blurted out so easily, but when I’m with her I just can’t help myself, I want to tell her everything I think about, I want her to know how I feel, I want to explain to her in a thousand different ways how much— how important she is to me. I have this horrible urge to be witty at any possible chance, but I think of too many ways to flirt with her and it just ends up amalgamating into me blurting out things that barely make sense… But she seems to like how pathetic I am, so I’m not too worried on that front.
-	“Do you really mean that?” her tone is a little bit more somber than I’m used to.
-	“…I do.” … “We’ll need surnames, right? …People— real people, they have names, surnames, jobs they willingly go to, right?”
-	“I suppose so.” … “Well, we can just share surnames, and then we’ll be like sisters.” She lets out one of her creepy laughs, the type of laugh she pukes through when she’s trying to tease me or successfully riles me up. I just nuzzle her chest until I find myself more comfortable in her arms.
-	“Sisters don’t do the things we do.” With how drowsy I am from talking so much, how tired my vocal cords are— and how comfortable, how safe I feel, I just can’t help but say this in a raspy, soft voice.
-	“I’ll have an entire novel series written where they do and have the whole astral system read it, then it’ll be normal.” This woman is something else.
-	“You’re too much.” I’m sure she can tell I’m grinning.
A station wide alarm goes out, the kind you hear only in the worst case scenarios.