Unreciprocated Regrets

What follows is, by a fair margin, the best argument I've written. Ever. In this chapter: Cypris and Jacob argue. And that's basically it. 

Jacob was staring at the station schematics. Cypris was pacing. Jacob was making suggestions with a chalk pencil. Cypris was pacing. Jacob was jotting down lists of necessary improvements. Cypris was pacing. Jacob was putting careful notes on the margin of the FTL Stuffpusher blueprints. Cypris was still pacing. 

While Jacob Tracker maintained an air of callous detachment, Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker was drifting into fragments. She was scattered and confused, and profoundly angry, primarily with herself, primarily because she had to work with Jacob and partially because the station was broken and there was a good likelihood that everybody would die and a good likelihood that they’d never see home again, even if they did survive. Jacob looked up from the schematics and watched his ex-wife clomp up and down the length of the bridge. Reyes was on a lower level of the bridge, muttering to himself. He was counting steps to his equations, counting equations, tapping nervously on his workstation whenever he came upon odds and distances. 

“Maricela—?” Jacob began. 

Reyes picked the clippad off his workstation and left in a hurry. 

“Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker, you’ve been very selfish and I’m not entirely convinced that I can forgive you.  We were good together, and you ruined it, just because you were scared to change, and scared that we might need work to stay together. Dammit Maricela! You weren’t supposed to leave it behind! In sickness and in health you said, and I said it too. We got an actual priest! A real goddamn priest, because your parents wouldn’t settle for anything less! I paid three weeks salary for a priest, did you know that? Just so that we could have proper vows and a proper wedding, and you threw that away. We were going to have a house in the woods, where the pollution’s not so bad, and we were going to have our own goddamn car so we could drive to market every morning to buy fresh vegetables. But you decided that we weren’t right for each other, and we’d rushed things; but so what? So what if we had? Cypris, I’m tired of asking myself what you wanted, so I’d like to hear it from the source: What would have made you stay? Because I swear to god, if it’ll get you back, I’ll do it!”

“We are in space!” Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford shouted. “We’re light years away from home, and you’re worrying about our marriage? Move on, Jacob.” 

“Move on? Don’t be hypocritical, you’re obviously hung up about the divorce.” 

“Maybe. But I don’t have any false impressions about our marriage. I don’t imagine it to be anything but a failure. And when we were married, I wasn’t so busy dreaming about the future that I lost sight of the present entirely. You wandered off into your own fiction, and left the real world far behind, and me with it. And don’t say I should have been more imaginative; I had to find another retail job because you were wrangling with writers’ block or else you were blogging.” 

“But you didn’t find another retail job.” 

“They blackballed me because of a stunt you pulled.” 

Jacob grins in recollection. Cypris almost punches him. “I was crazy about you. And how was I supposed to know they were diabetic?”

“They were from a diabetic summer camp, Jacob, they had shirts that said so!” 

“Why did you marry me if you didn’t love me? You didn’t have to say yes, and I know you didn’t say yes to spare my feelings, you’ve made it very clear how much you care about those.” 

“I did love you, but we didn’t have anything in common. It was never going to work.”

“It was working well enough to be worth the effort until you hired a therapist to find out what was wrong with us. What did you expect it to find, exactly? Everything that was right and perfect in our lives? It was a therapist!”

“And you were a writer.” 

“I still am a writer.” 

“You’re still needy and shabby and grouchy and superior, you mean?” 

“Hey, at least I have a skill, miss retail, you can’t do anything useful. Why are you even on this station? You’re totally un-special! Are you here simply because you have slightly more authority than any one of the rabble you pretend is a crew?” Jacob shouted, bitterly angry until Cypris kicked him in the leg and sent him to the floor, heels over head. 

“I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here. I don’t know what I can possibly do to help get us home, or even keep us from burning in a star, so maybe I’m not the most qualified person for the job, and maybe I am here by accident. But I know that my crew sure as hell isn’t here by accident. They’re here because they earned it and because they’re a damn sight more skilled and brilliant than either of us. There are two expendable people on this ship, and we’re them. And you’d better accept that if you know what’s good for you.” 

And with that, Cypris turned on her heel, and stormed out huffingly, looking much more confident than she felt, and feeling much more confident than she was brave. Cypris wasn’t brave, she was very frightened of a great many things. Burning to death was near the top of her list, and Jacob was somewhere around the middle, and sharks were just higher than Jacob, and responsibility was second only to burning to death, though it was occasionally superseded by clownsharks (a rare species), but that was only when she was uncommonly sure of her self, or exceptionally closer to either clowns or sharks than she was on a regular basis. 

Jacob stared at the floor. Evie tromped past despondently, carrying an armful of daffodils to the new composting room. She stopped halfway across the bridge and didn’t turn to face Jacob. 

“Are relationships hard, or are you just really bad at them?” She asked.

“Shut up.” Jacob said. 

“Just wondering!” Evie said, and tromped off the bridge, cheered to know that she wasn’t alone in her anguish and tribulation. 

She wasn’t cheered enough to keep from crying when she dumped an bundle of bright, crisp flowers into a composting heap in the upper storeroom, though.