Title: Katin, February 1
Fandom: Griffin & Sabine
Rating: G
Length: 600 words
Content notes: Counting this towards the Female Characters badge.
Author notes: A first hand at a very old love.
Summary: Sabine's thoughts when she finds the photo of Griffin.



It wasn't for lack of trying that Sabine seemed unable to have a lasting relationship. She'd kissed boys, of course; had taken lovers, but she tired of them quickly. For the last five years, there had been no one. Her mother had stopped asking; her father had never started.

Her work meant more to her than any romantic partner, and the unpaid jobs more than the paid ones. Her parents thought her a little odd, perhaps. Neither of them knew about the strange shapes Sabine saw when she closed her eyes, or sometimes in the middle of the day. Shapes that she had figured out at sixteen were not dreams, but another human being's creative endeavours.

Now she was staring at the photo of Griffin Moss in Grafica magazine. A typical Englishman, her mother would have said, and a typical artist, from what she could see herself. Bearded, with ink-stained fingers and hair that had been cut just a little too long before the photoshoot.

She realised then what it was; the thing that had kept her from connecting with any man on Sicmon. There was a part of her, a part that she'd kept secret even from herself until that moment, that had felt she was somehow cheating on Griffin when she was with someone else. At the same time, it would have been difficult to explain it in those terms - for one thing, she hadn't even known whether "her" artist was a man or a woman, and besides, it was more like his art was part of her in a very fundamental way. By the time she'd developed an interest in men, she'd already felt that her unknown artist was closer to her than anyone else.

So many years he had shared his soul with her through his art. He'd never asked for anything in return because he was unaware she even existed. And now here he was, staring at her from a photo in a magazine.

She hesitated before putting pen to paper. For a moment, she had a mad fear that somehow, the act of initiating real, tangible contact with him would destroy that link that existed outside the possibilities of the known universe; would somehow reduce their relationship.

She closed her eyes, riding out this wave of intense emotion; a powerful sense both of something lost and something gained. It finally crested and washed over her, and then she opened her eyes again to try to think clearly.

There were only two ways she could see. If she wrote to him, she would either lose this link and with it the feeling that she ought to be with someone, that puzzling sense of fundamental incompleteness that had dogged her all her life; or she would keep hold of it and have a chance to make it into something that had currency outside her own head.

It was an easy call, after all. What she hadn't realised until now was that, after so many years of yearning to know, to finally have the solution was not a solution at all, not an end to a mystery. It was a beginning; a strand for her to pull on in the hope that doing so wouldn't unravel her universe.

There was no easy way of starting a conversation like this; no simple formula for repaying him for the glimpses of his soul that he'd shared throughout the years. She settled for a playful image in the end; a brightly coloured island bird who came from a rough design for one of the stamps she'd designed earlier in the year; and two sentences on the back of the postcard.

A fortnight later, she saw a pencil sketch of a parrot just before falling asleep, and she knew then that she'd made the right decision.