Ivory Hill had spent the majority of her adult life running. Throughout her twenties and the first part of her thirties it was from bombs and bullets. Now, at thirty six years old Ivory was running from something that she could never truly escape fr...
Ivory jerked upright, beads of sweat standing out on her forehead.
Grace stirred, half raising her head from the pillow. "What's up?" She asked, her voice gravelly with sleep.
"Nothing, go back to sleep." Ivory slid out from under the covers and left the room, trailing barefoot down the corridor and into the bathroom. She rinsed her flushed face with cold water then crept back to the bedroom.
Grace was sat up properly now. "Are you alright?" She asked, struggling to make out the other woman's face through the gloom.
"I'm fine." Ivory got back into bed.
"Did you have a bad dream?"
"Mmm." The dark haired woman murmured, pulling the duvet tightly around herself.
"Come here." Grace slipped an uncertain arm around Ivory's waist and pulled her closer. "Do you... want to talk about it?"
"It should've been me that died, not Olivia. I as good as murdered her," Ivory said matter of factly.
Grace couldn't imagine a life without Ivory forcing her to listen to some hideous country song and take silly pictures or stay still so that she could draw her or the noise of her rambunctious cards games with Jake and Trudy or the sound of her singing with Norm in her usual tone deaf manner. Grace felt sick with herself. Someone else was dead and all she could feel was relief that it wasn't the woman that she was beginning to care about more than she'd like to admit. She swallowed hard then pressed a kiss on Ivory's forehead. Grace knew that they were running out of time.
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Ivory was sat in the lab as usual, fidgeting in her seat. She reached out and took one of Grace's notebooks from the tabletop, ripping a sheet out of it. She tore a strip from the paper and began to fold, her brow creasing as she focused.
"Ivy what the fuck are you doing with my log book?" Grace demanded, snatching it off the desk.
"Making you a lucky star." Ivory dropped an origami star on top of Grace's notebook.
"What?" The redhead tipped the star into her hand and tossed her notepad onto the other desk.
"My step mum taught me how to fold them when I was little; they're Japanese. They're supposed to bring luck to your..." the woman trailed off, there was no way that she could say partner, especially because Grace was nothing of the sort. "Whoever you give them to. You're meant to fill a jar with them. I made so many when I was a kid that there was a shelf of old peanut butter jars full of them in my parents room."
"Thank you." Grace dropped the paper into the pocket of her lab coat. She was quiet for a moment, tucking a red curl behind her ear. "What do your parents look like?"
"Wait a second." Ivory pulled her phone out from her combat trousers and scrolled through her photos for a few seconds. She passed her mobile to Grace.
Grace looked at the screen which showed a sun drenched photo of Ivory and her parents at her university graduation. Ivory was sticking her tongue out at the camera, squinting in the bright sunlight, sandwiched between a tall man who had a shock of messy black hair and a scattering of freckles on his lined face and a woman with sleek black hair and dark eyes outlined with a thick layer of eyeliner.
"That's my dad Atsuki and my step mum Kiko." The dark haired woman gestured to the screen of her mobile.
"You look like your father."
"It's the freckles." Ivory picked Tigger up. "And the height." She added, almost as an afterthought.
"Do you miss them?" Grace didn't really have anyone back on Earth to miss, she'd never had children with any of her partners and her two marriages had long since fallen apart, one torn to bits by her ex husband's infidelity and the other one destroyed by her intense dedication to her work.
"Yeah. When they found out I was going to move to Pandora they did whatever they could to make me stay. They couldn't understand why I'd want to leave them after so long. I didn't want to leave them really, but I didn't want to stay on Earth either. I have too much of a past there." The dark haired woman broke off, burying her face into her cats fur. "Turns out it's followed me here too."
