An Old Stool

[hamratza]

While settling into this visit with muir partner in Vancouver, I requested a stool be brought into the bedroom so I could sit by their side while they browsed on their computer. I did not think this particularly significant to me until it was placed before me and I saw that it was the very same image of that stool likely still lingering in Jonas's living room.

It was haunting to perch atop it, to sit on this echo of my past on Lagrange. It was haunting because he was my friend and comrade of two hundred and fifty years. It was haunting because I remember the tenderness of time and of touch and of the unspoken tension between a man and a woman who neither had a conniption about closeness. It was haunting because it was he who orchestrated my death.

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I remember those first sparing visits, the first time I requested a stool because his couch left my tail kinked and sore before long. I remember how rarity turned to habit, and habit to ritual, the weekly imbibing of ale or of wine — but always of laughter — contingent upon whether we celebrated success or drank to drown out our frustration.

I remember perching atop that stool, weaving my legs within its barred frame, sliding my knees onto the floor and resting my stomach atop its wooden seat while I bantered away the evenings with him. I remember crossing my legs or sitting on my feet beside the coffee table, pressed up against the edge of it to peer over at whatever document he had just pointed out.

I remember sitting beside his legs on the floor one thousand times, his reaching over my shoulder a thousand more, the idle comfort of his thigh when my eyes burned at 4 AM. I remember scooting up onto the couch and reclining there while we strategized or gossiped or talked the evening away. I remember lounging there with a glass in my paw while I gestured in grand elocutions with the other, looking for all the world like some Victorian passion come down with a case of the morbs and still called floozy.

I remember, too, when laughter at times turned to a silent reckoning, when we stayed up far too late working on one project or another together in that quiet loft of his and found ourselves weary for the hour. I remember curling up beside him while he shuffled our dossiers away, the thoughtless touch of his hand to my hair before he retired to his bedroom.

I remember ten thousand nights just like this. It is the life I lived on Lagrange because he was my only enduring ally. Even Debarre, in the end, could not but dance on my grave at least a little bit. Michelle quit likely still believing I had wrought some great evil upon the world in her name. My peers had turned against me, and when I was dead and gone and who would become Sasha was my only remnant, she and all she had come to love in that period of trauma and grief and world-shattering change were cut off from the rest of the clade indefinitely.

I remember an old stool in the living room of an older friend, and I remember the softness of such comfort as we found in one another even while he deftly evaded whatever wiles I exuded over the years. I remember, also, the terror of a blade driven through my throat at his behest.

My cries were not of agony, but of shock and of grief and of the sensation of betrayal that had become all too familiar.