Page 155 of Stars
Sergey wasn’t a doctor, but he wasn’t sure about the medical soundness of that logic. He said nothing.
“When they brought him in, they stripped him of his space suit and clothes. They burned everything he wore.” Kilaqqi reached into his pocket and pulled out a piece of rolled leather. He unwrapped it in his palm and held it out to Sergey. “Except for this.”
In the center of the leather, on a long chain, lay a ring, a single piece of black titanium framing a cobalt diamond. Sasha’s dented dog tags were tucked alongside.
“This is yours,” Kilaqqi said. “I can feel you through it.”
“I gave it to him.” His voice bounced off the inside of his hood, echoed in his ears. “I told him to bring it back and I’d propose for real.” He picked the ring out of Kilaqqi’s hand, taking it off the chain and holding it between his fingers. “I didn’t want him to go out there without knowing he had something to come home to.”
“He knew, even without this.”
“I could never compete with his dream of space. If he’d been given the Mars mission, I would have had to learn to love him from afar. Look up at the sky and track the red planet every night just to catch a glimpse of him.”
Kilaqqi shook his head. “His dream wasyou.” He laid his hand over Sergey’s, cupping the ring in both of their palms. “He did not fight his way through the lands of the dead to see the stars. He did that to love you.”
Sergey closed his eyes, waiting as the memories poured through him. All the moments he’d shared with Sasha, from the first to the last—from the night he’d found Sasha in his hospital bed and held him as he came apart to the memory of walking away from him at the Houston airport, waving and waving and blowing kisses, dreaming of coming back and never leaving, of watching with pride as his husband blasted off on his fifth, seventh, ninth mission. A hundred nights together, sweat-slick skin and presses of lips, arms and legs tangling, fingers entwined, toes curling. They’d poured lifetimes into three short years: a million memories, a million smiles and kisses andI love yous.
Sergey fisted the ring. He’d agonized over picking it out, spent days searching for the perfect design. He’d asked Oleg for the right diamond and had paid for the rarest of them all, the perfect shade of blue from the deepest shaft of Oleg’s mines. He’d set it in the darkest titanium he could find, as dark as space, trying to symbolize everything for Sasha. The blue of his love’s eyes, the perfection of his soul. How he’d love Sasha from the beginning to the end, forever, no matter what, through orbits and moons and Mars and all the stars in the universe.
No matter what. Even through death.
He pulled Sasha’s hand to him. He’d promised Sasha he would ask for his hand if he brought the ring back. Sasha had, and now it was time to keep his promise.
“Sashunya,” he whispered, sliding the ring onto his right ring finger. A smear of blood followed the metal’s path. “I want to marry you. I want to make you mine and let the whole world know. I want to be yours and scream it to the sky. I want to hold you for the rest of my days, take every breath by your side. I want a lifetime with you—” He crumpled forward, lying over Sasha’s limp body as his tears came again, cries breaking in waves against the shards of his shattered heart.
Kilaqqi pulled him back, after he’d screamed Sasha’s name and cursed the universe, shouted obscenities to the ceiling and the sky and the stars above. Kilaqqi sat on the edge of Sasha’s bed, holding Sergey’s hand in both of his own again. “You must not lose hope,” he said gently. “Sasha is home. He is with us. We have him in our love. He will come back to us.”
“I don’t think that’s how this virus works.”
Kilaqqi laughed. “No. It succumbs to the antibodies flooding his and Mark’s immune systems. My immunity will boost their own, like a mother's boosts her child’s after it is born and is new to the world. It will spur their systems to create duplicates of the antibodies we have given them. As the virus dies, it will hemorrhage all the poisoned blood it colonized until it has bled out and departed from their lives.”
That sounded better. Sergey stared at Kilaqqi. A shaman teaching him about antibodies and transferred immunity. Was he awake or asleep? What was real and what was a dream?
“He is here with us,” Kilaqqi said again. “And I will bleed my entire life out for myhutechi. I will give him every drop of blood I have, every cell in my body, every portion of my spirit, for him to open his eyes and look upon us again. I will give everything of me. So what I said was true.” He smiled. “My love—our love—will heal him and bring him back to us.”
“I don’t have antibodies to give him. I don't have anything to give him.” Sergey squeezed Kilaqqi’s hand, helplessness like a knife to his heart. “I have nothing!”
“You are thereasonhe lives.”
Sergey stared into Kilaqqi’s eyes, falling into the depths. Forests as wide as time spread there, bracketed by mountains holding a million mysteries within their slopes and a taiga brimming with generations of life, from the reindeer to the falcon and everything in between.
“He will return to us,” Kilaqqi said. “He has fought the demons that rose to the stars. He has stopped the dead from rising. He went to the heavens and saved the great tree uniting all the lands. He is journeying back from the land of the dead.”
Sergey’s eyes wandered over the medical detritus in the isolation room, the multitude of machines keeping Sasha alive. The IV pole, the fluids, the antibody infusion equipment. The transfusions of a never-ending river of blood. The breathing machine, the EKG, the EEG strapped to Sasha’s skull and measuring his brain. He’d never felt less spiritual, faced with the sterility of Sasha’s treatment and the horror of his sickness.
“I don't know the world you live in,” he croaked. “I don’t know how you can have that kind of faith. None of this”—he waved his hand around the room, at Sasha’s and Mark’s broken bodies—“works that way.”
“Love works that way.”
He had nothing else to give, nothing else to try. He’d spent a week watching Sasha’s chest rise and fall, counting the beats of his heart and watching his blood pressure shift in a sine wave. He’d stared at every doctor, tried to divine the secrets of their treatment from the shifts in their elbows and eyebrows, tried to discern whether this hour was better than the last. He’d sat in silence with only his thoughts and his pleadings, his desperation and his broken heart for company.
He closed his eyes and gave everything to the shaman who called Sasha his son. All his tattered hope and his fragile, delicate belief. “It will work because it must.”
It would work because he loved Sasha and because their lives were intertwined in a way he couldn’t define, couldn’t describe, butknew. He knew he and Sasha were meant to be, and he knew this wasn’t the end.
They didn’t have an end, not truly. No matter what happened, he would love Sasha for eternity, in every way, in every form.
“Sashunya,” he whispered, “come home.”
