All I Wanted

@tazsapphicweek Day 7 - Prompt: "Past/Future". They had the beach, they had the uncertainty of what was next, they had each other… They had a whole new world that stretched out before and beneath them.

(I promised myself I would finish this fic for sapphic week 2024 if it was the last thing I did, and well. Here we are<3)

Word count: 3,519 (Chapter 3)

Ship: Oksamber - Amber Gris/Oksana (Ballaster Kodira)

Warnings: The bittersweetness of being (nearly) alone in the world (but it gets better)

Chapter 3: I Could Follow You To The Beginning Just To Relive The Start

It never quite stopped being a weird feeling, being just the two of them. The blink sharks offered some reprieve, of course, especially after they figured out a means of communication that worked for both parties, but it was not the same (especially since the sharks insisted on being all solemn and worship-y about it). There was always that stinging feeling of finality, of irreparability. They were a constant reminder of who Amber had been, and who she was now; and she could never stop feeling like those were two completely different, irreconcilable people.

She had started trying to build a small shack using the wood from the trees in the jungle, but picking up carpentry from scratch by herself was unsurprisingly a steep learning curve. That and hunting kept her busy, though, and that was the only thing that mattered. It was all Amber could do to will herself not to go completely insane.

Oksana seemed to have her own ways of keeping her head on her shoulders. She went on long walks across the shore, just looking at the sea, at the sky, at the ground beneath her feet. It was strangely soothing, watching her leave footprints on the sand that were washed away by the lapping waves now and again. Her skin gleamed softly in the sunlight, against the soft purple of the water, and she was all Amber would ever need to look at. If the sharks reminded her she could never be the same, Oksana brought her hope that the new her could be what this world needed. What she needed.

Amber didn’t press her about it for a while, assuming it was just one of those things people did. She reminded her of their time on the shoreside, before Founders’ Wake, when she used to walk for hours to gather resources for the community. Amber thought maybe she was looking for some plants they might be able to eat other than weird, tiny, three-pointed bananas —she did come back with something resembling kiwis one day. They were pretty good, if surprisingly nutty—. But one afternoon, Oksana finally showed her what it was she had been doing.

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