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To space. She was going away to space.

Hvergelmir could feel all the color go out of her face. She had no idea what the expression was on her face, but whatever it was, it couldn't have been understanding or reassuring. She didn't feel even slightly understanding or reassuring at that moment.

Why? Why was this happening again? What had Hvergelmir done wrong?!

"Don't," she said weakly, voice cracking with tears. "You won't come back. You won't ever come back."

It didn't matter what Ida had said in her dreams. It didn't matter what she was saying now. Aquarius had said all the same things and it hadn't made a difference. She was still gone. And Ida was going too. Hvergelmir had failed someone she loved again.

Hvergelmir curled eagerly into Ida's arms, hands wrapping tightly around her waist. She dug the pads of her fingers into the smooth white fabric covering Ida's shoulderblades, like she could keep the other girl from leaving by force.

"I can't lose you," she begged, her tears hot and wet on Ida's shoulder. "Swear to me you won't stay there. Please."

She could picture Ida wandering months and years among the beautiful, lonely trees of her asteroid, lost and long since gone mad. She pictured the years destroying such a beautiful, brave, fragile thing as Orah was. It felt unbearable. Not again.

"I'll do anything," she insisted, pleading, kissing a confused and desperate trail up Ida's throat. "Anything you want. Swear to me that if you go, you'll come back."

The tattoo on Hvergelmir's shoulder -- and what she chose to do with it, with the shackles it put around her -- came with many obligations. What she'd done was worth nothing, worse than nothing, if she didn't use the goodwill she'd bartered her power away for in order to try and do some good. On Wednesdays, on Fridays, on Sundays, no matter how she was feeling, she had to turn up at the park. She'd told people she'd be there. She'd created an expectation that she was reliable, findable, accessible: and she had to be those things.

And she had to listen, no matter what, to whoever came. She had to give a chance to any perspective, had to treat things as debatable that, to her, really weren't. The lives of other people. Their well-being and happiness. The nature of humanity. She had to be patient when she didn't want to be patient, had to act like nothing was really a hurry, like she had all the time in the world for people to reconsider their life choices -- and she'd chosen that, so she had to be that person. But it was okay. She'd understood that going in.

She'd forgotten, though, in the beginning of things, that she wasn't just selling an idea or an ideal -- she was selling an image. A life. It hadn't really occurred to her how hard it would be, back then -- that she had to be a person that other people might look at and believe. That if she was nervous or unsure or hesitant, they wouldn't buy into the things she was trying to sell them. After all, if she couldn't even live that kind of life, always content with her life and her choices, how could she promise it to anyone else? Who wanted to buy happy pills from Eeyore?

That was the hardest part. It had only gotten harder in what she remembered of the future. If it was hard to smile on a bad day, it was harder by far to smile on a bad day when the white rows of teeth had no tongue behind them. I have no regrets, she'd lied to Helicon -- and that was the lie she'd kept up, the one she'd lived, for five years on -- especially to the people she cared about. She was at peace. She wouldn't do anything differently. She lived a life without any doubts.

The reality was a lot more like this moment. Here. Now. Frantically clinging to Ida like a life buoy on a choppy ocean, struggling to remember everything Carmine had taught her to use as her coping mechanisms and to do as Ida asked. To breathe; just that. Breathe.

It wasn't easy. Her instincts (the fearful ones, the ones that lied sometimes) told her Ida was lying and had no intention of ever returning. They screamed rejection and abandonment at her and it was only some deformed sense of pride that kept Hvergelmir from giving in to them.

"I'm okay," she said with a little distance, stepping back and swallowing air. "I didn't mean to go overboard, I just -- I'm sure I misunderstood you." She drew up that thick veneer of false poise around herself once more, the one she relied on from the moment she sat down on her bench to the moment she stood up again. The one she fought to keep intact any time she thought someone was looking. "You should go. To your planet. I trust you."

"A month," Hvergelmir agreed, trying to inject some energy into her voice rather than repeating the words back in a hollow echo. What Ida was saying didn't sound like a real promise, not to her paranoid heart. It sounded like a bluff, an impossibly long time for anyone to be all alone up on some faraway planet. It sounded like enough time for Ida to figure out how to never come back.

But she agreed to it. Ida had already shown that she wasn't interested in the counterproposal that Hvergelmir had tried to offer.

"There's a bridge over Bethesda Creek, down in Southmyre Park. Meet me there at sunset on the thirtieth," she suggested. "I'll wait for you."