Awe

"You ever think about how... like..." You drift off a bit, thinking hard on your wording.

"How, like...? Come on, spit it out," she urges, poking at the fire with her stick, watching the remnants of marshmallow char.

"When the Union was around. Didn't this always seem... boring? Like, I don't know. It's nice out here, and there's so much strange stuff to look at. The night sky looks a lot different on every world, but I never noticed it before recently." You shrug, gazing into the mess of broad, fan-like leaves that forms the 'treeline'. Bushline? Hard to really determine what they are.

"I guess you're right." She casts the stick into the flame, folding her arms on her knees and tapping her foot as she seems to mull on what you've said. "All the... protocol, the constant spread of civilization, the knowledge of... what was gonna' follow us once we arrived on a new world. It got pretty dull after a while, I guess."

"Yeah, right? It's like... I dunno'. Being here feels a lot more real now?" Again, you catch yourself staring into the trees. The forest is eerily motionless in a way you find fascinating. The heavy, waxy leaves scarcely so much as twitch in the breeze. "We're not here to colonize, to look for resources, all that shit. We're just... here."

"I mean, we're here for a reason. But it's not any of those reasons, so you're right. Especially now that command's a lot less shitty. Don't think we'd be roasting marshmallows if we were under our last captain, huh?" She laughs quietly, smiling in a way you haven't seen for quite some time. It's infectious, so you smile too, of course.

"Yeah, ha. It just always kinda' felt the same. Like every planet was just gonna' be another number, another in a list of potential colonies. We weren't frontiersmen or starfarers or whatever, we may as well have just been real-estate agents scouting new investments or whatever. But now... now that there's so much more of it, I guess, it's hard not to be awed by how beautiful and strange everything is."

"Guess it's because we're a lot more alone now. We're not the big boys in the galaxy anymore with more resources and security than anyone could imagine. Suddenly we have to worry about nature again, and something about having to worry about it makes it more... awesome, I guess."

"Huh. Yeah. I think that's it."

The two of you look into the fire for a bit, in silence now. But it's not long before your gaze is turned skyward, to the glitter of the galaxy, scattered only by the faintest hint of the morning haze to come.