Still
Eve woke first. She had woken first for four thousand years, give or take the centuries she'd stopped counting, and the habit had outlived every reason she once had for it — no infant now, no patrol, no war. Just the old animal preference for meeting the day before it met her.
The room assembled in the grey light. She had made the room; she made most rooms, it was easier than keeping them. The walls she'd grown last century out of a carbon lattice, and the window she thinned each morning to the exact clarity of old glass, because Mark liked the small imperfection of it, the faint swim at the edges that real glass used to have. Outside, the city did whatever the city did now. She'd stopped learning its languages three revisions ago. The things moving down there would not have recognised the word people she still used for them in her head.
On the shelf by the window was a mug.
It was a bad mug. It had been a bad mug when it was made, in a factory that had been slag longer than most stars stay interesting — thick white ceramic, a hairline crack running up from the base like a river on a map, and around the side, in a typeface that had been cheerful once, the words WORLD'S OKAYEST and then nothing, because the rest had worn away under ten thousand mornings of a thumb.
Eve could have read the missing word off the wear pattern. She could have told you the isotope ages of the glaze. She could, if she wanted, take the mug apart atom by careless atom and set each one back exactly, so that no instrument in the reformed Empire could tell it from new — could tell it from itself. She had offered to, once, a long time ago, when the crack first appeared and Mark went very quiet holding it.
He'd said no.
He said it the way he'd once said four words to his father, in a life so far back it had happened to a different arrangement of the same atoms. No. Not because he doubted she could. Because she could. Because the whole point of the thing — the only point, the thing it was for — was that these were the actual grains of clay his mother's actual hand had actually closed around, on actual mornings, in a kitchen that no longer existed on a version of the planet that no longer existed. A copy, however perfect, would be a lie in the shape of the truth. It would be Viltrum's entire philosophy fired in a kiln. Make a better one. Make it last. What will you have left of the old thing in five hundred years?
This. He'd have this. The bad mug. The crack he would not let her heal.
She made coffee. There was no coffee — there hadn't been coffee, the plant, for a very long time — but she remembered the molecule and built it, and poured it into two cups that were not the mug. The mug they never used. The mug just sat, being itself, being worn, being the one object in the dwelling she was forbidden to improve.
Mark came in already talking, the way he had at nineteen and at nineteen hundred — some thread about the southern arcology, a dispute he'd been asked to witness. He was always being asked to witness now; the reformed Empire had made him into a kind of standing conscience, the man who had once said no and could be trusted to keep saying it. He took his cup. He did not look at the mug. Not looking at the mug was its own kind of looking; she'd learned that in the first century.
"You're tired," she said. Not a question.
He drank. "I did the arithmetic last night. Couldn't sleep, so I did the arithmetic." He said arithmetic the way another man might say drank. "Everyone I was born knowing. All of them. I got to the end of the list and there was more list."
"I know."
"He said it would feel like this."
She knew which he. There was only ever the one he who lived at the bottom of that sentence, four thousand years down and still, some mornings, the loudest voice in the room. You're going to outlive everyone you've ever known. It had been offered as a reason to stop loving them in advance. Nolan had been right about the fact and catastrophically wrong about what to do with it, and the distance between those two things was the whole of the life Mark had built instead.
"He was right," Mark said. "That's the part I never tell anyone. He was right. It does break you. Every single one, it breaks something, and it doesn't grow back the same." He turned the cup in his hands. "He just thought the answer was to stop before it started. Get out ahead of it. Be strong."
"And you think the answer is—"
"I don't have an answer." He almost laughed. "That's the secret. Four thousand years and I never found one. I just get up. And you're here. And the mug's still on the shelf."
That was the argument. It had always been the argument, the only one that ever beat the long view, and it did not get stronger with the millennia or wiser or more general. It stayed exactly four words wide. I'd still have you. He had said it to a father already gone in every way that counted — said it, without knowing, straight through that man to her, to the one attachment that would turn out to be able to walk the whole distance beside him. Not because she was owed it. Because she'd chosen the same thing he had, every morning, on her own side of the bed: the losable life, the woundable body, the world you can only have by agreeing in advance to lose it.
She was, by any measure the old Empire would have recognised, the most powerful thing on the planet. She could unmake the city with a decision. There was almost nothing left in the material universe that could tell her no.
The mug told her no. Every morning the mug told her no, and she loved it more than anything she had ever made.
"Drink your coffee," she said. "It's getting cold."
It wasn't. She kept it exactly warm, the way she kept the window exactly flawed. But he smiled at the old line, the mortal line, the thing you said in a kitchen when you had a finite number of mornings and needed to pretend the number was smaller — and he drank, and outside the unrecognisable city went on not needing them, and on the shelf the bad mug held its crack open to the light like something being, very slowly and very much on purpose, still.
Head-canon of [[invincible-the-inheritance-offered-in-love]] — deep-time (Mark & Eve, ~4,000 years on) · beauty (mono no aware). The origin vignette: the un-remade mug, love as the refusal to make a perfect copy.