Crichton says there is no love like the first love.

(First sight: walking toward me across the cargo bay. Trim figure in red leathers. White skin glowing like moonlight around a little boy smile. Smooth black hair crying out to be ruffled.)

Deep and wide as the ocean, he says. Never mind I don't know how deep or wide an ocean is, that's Crichton.

(Right at first sight.)

A new experience; indescribable. Lovers and parents and poets try to tell what it's like, but in the end every human has to discover it anew for themselves.

Crichton...I close my eyes.

It starts in the eyes, he says.

(Black eyes drinking me in at the cargo vessel's controls. Eyes with a question behind them.)

In the eyes: a shock of recognition. Then a magnetic pull.

(A solid duty rotation piloting cargo. Sitting right next to him. Barely half a metreh. An ocean away. Calling to my blood and bones. Velorek.)

And finally, at last, a touch.

(A soft hand stroking my neck after helping me out of my flight suit's helmet. Tugging lightly at the loosening hank of hair. The pit of my stomach falling away as if in zero-g.)

What they can't tell you, Crichton says, try though they will, is what it's like to melt into another person. No boundaries; no telling where one ends and the other begins. How can you explain the contradictions? To drown in being one and yet not one; somehow to survive and come back to being just one, and yet not one.

(That caress again at the end of the second rotation. That time with a kiss, moving along the base of my neck, fit to melt my spine. Spun him up against the wall and set upon him like a bitch in heat. Tearing at clothes; frantic groping of lips and hands. Frenzied until I found his eyes, and into his eyes I fell. And fell, and fell, at the feel of his hands skimming over me; the taste of his pale skin; moving with the sweet, slow rhythm of his pulse. And when the fall finally reached impact, he was there to catch me at the end. The steady heat in his eyes rising to slow my fall. Intimate.)

You never love like that again, Crichton says. You're so lost in the wonder of it all you open yourself completely; give away all your trust. You can't see that the first love never is the last love, even when it's all with the same person, as it was with his parents. Childhood sweethearts, he called them, which sounds vaguely obscene.

(He got back the face he lost to childhood when he slept. There was one piece of that perfectly groomed hair that wanted to go haywire when he slept and wouldn't be smoothed no matter what I did. All the muscles of his face and jaw would go slack in sleep, and he'd smile, as though he still knew how to dream.)

It's never that new again, he says, and you can never not know again. You learn, next time, to guard against the pain of love's endings. You learn in all the times after to keep back a part of your heart for yourself, and steel yourself to being just one again even when the meltdown begins. You never truly are one and not-one again.

(Velorek trusted me completely; told me everything - every treacherous thought, every mutinous plan. I could have stood being discovered, his eyes told me when they came for him, far easier than I can knowing you sold me away.)

The first love is the love you never get over, Crichton says. It's the measure you take of all other loves, and they always fall short, because they can never be the first.

(I still ache, even after all these cycles, for just one more touch. Damn you, Crais.)

I look Crichton in the eyes, straight on, and tell him it must be another peculiarity of humans. And walk away from the terrace, back straight, so he won't see the tears.

****fin****