(10 Years Earlier)
Cleo had been at this for hours and she wasn't stopping anytime soon.
The lab was exactly the kind of mess that only made sense to the person who made it, papers everywhere, tools scattered across every surface, pieces of the machine laid out in an order that looked like chaos but wasn't. She had built this before. It had been taken from her before she could finish it and starting over had been frustrating in ways she didn't like to think about, but she was close now. She could feel it.
She moved through the room whistling to herself, flying between the shelves and the workbench picking up pieces and setting them down again, completely in her element. The warm light from the overhead lamps caught the metalwork on the machine as she passed it, throwing small reflections across the ceiling. This was the part she loved. The building. The figuring out. The moment when all the separate pieces finally started talking to each other.
Then she heard the footsteps.
The marble floors gave it away immediately and she smirked before she even turned around. She knew exactly whose footsteps those were. She set down what she was holding, chuckled quietly to herself, and slipped behind the door just before it opened and Gabriel walked in.
He was tall and well dressed, posture straight like always, one hand holding a bouquet of flowers as he stepped through the doorway and looked around the empty room. He scanned the space for a moment, shook his head with a quiet laugh, and let himself fully inside since the door had already been open. He walked carefully through the mess Cleo had made, stepping around the scattered paperwork and the open books and everything else that had found its way onto the floor.
"What a mess this girl has made." He clicked his teeth.
He spotted the machine.
He stopped walking and just stood there looking at it, his free hand reaching out slowly toward it without touching it, like he was approaching something that deserved a certain kind of respect. His eyes moved across every part of it and a smile came across his face naturally, the kind that comes before you even realize it's happening. The light from the lamps hit the machine differently from where he was standing, and he tilted his head slightly taking it in from a new angle.
"Marvelous." He said it quietly, mostly to himself.
He didn't know what it did. He didn't need to. If Cleo built it, it was something worth looking at. He stood there a moment longer before finally pulling himself away and setting the flowers down on top of the desk, right on top of the pages covered in her handwriting that nobody alive could read except her.
"Cleo." He called out, looking around. "Cleo, are you in here? It's me, Gabriel."
Nothing.
He let out a slow breath and smiled to himself. "I brought you flowers. Came to check on you since you've completely disappeared on everyone." He said it to the room while moving around, picking things up and setting them back down carefully. "A whole month, Cleo."
Behind the door she pressed her hand over her mouth to keep the laugh from coming out.
He heard it and his head turned immediately in the direction it came from and he started moving toward it, slow and deliberate, that confident smile already spreading across his face.
"Cleo?" He moved like he was trying to sneak up on her. "I wonder where she could possibly be." He said it in a way that made it very clear he wasn't actually wondering.
He reached the door and threw it open.
"Ah ha!" Both hands out, ready.
She wasn't there and the smile dropped into a flat, playful frown. He stood there staring at the empty space behind the door feeling completely outplayed.
"Looking for me?"
Her voice came from directly behind him.
"Oh god!" He spun around and stumbled back a step, his hand going to his chest. "Cleo. You need to stop doing that to me."
"You say that every time." She was already laughing.
"Because every time I mean it."
They looked at each other and both of them laughed, the kind that came easy, the kind that didn't need a reason to keep going.
"I'm sorry." She smiled, her voice going soft and a little too innocent. "I just wanted to play with you a little. Did I overdo it?"
Gabriel looked at her and forgot what he was going to say next.
The room felt different when she laughed like that. Quieter somehow, even with all the noise of the lab around them. He took a step toward her without thinking about it, his tall frame settling into the space between them, the lamp light catching the side of her face and making the moment feel slower than it was.
"So." She reached behind her back and pulled out the bouquet he had left on the desk. "You brought me flowers."
"Yeah." He cleared his throat. "From the garden of Eden, actually."
Her face changed when she heard that. She brought them close and breathed in slowly, her eyes closing for just a second, her whole expression going still and easy as she exhaled. The faint scent of Eden filled the space between them, something warm and ancient that didn't belong in a lab full of metal and paperwork but somehow felt completely natural in her hands.
So beautiful. He watched her and thought it without meaning to.
"Speaking of the garden of Eden." He straightened up slightly and stepped a little closer. "I was thinking you and I could go there tonight. Have dinner together, just the two of us."
She looked at him.
A few seconds passed between them and he could see her thinking about it, her eyes moving briefly toward the machine before coming back to him. Already making a list of reasons why she should stay.
He didn't give her the chance.
"I'm not taking no for an answer by the way." His voice came out easy and certain. "You've locked yourself in this lab for a month Cleo. I want you to myself tonight, that's it."
"Is that so." She tilted her head, the corner of her mouth pulling upward.
"It is."
She looked at him for a moment longer then looked down at the flowers and smiled to herself like she had already made up her mind before he even walked through the door.
"I guess it is then." She looked back up at him. "I'll see you later."
"I'll come and get you." He pointed at her on his way back toward the door. "Wear something nice."
She nodded once and he walked out into the hallway carrying himself like a man who had just gotten exactly what he came for, the smirk already on his face before he even rounded the corner.
Cleo stood in the middle of her lab holding the flowers, looked at them for a second, then set them carefully on the desk and got back to work.
Later That Night
She stepped out in a black dress that moved with her like it was made from the night itself, silk falling cleanly down her body with a slit running up one side. Her hair was done and everything about her was precise without looking like she had tried too hard, which was exactly the kind of thing that was impossible to fake.
She stood in front of her building with the doorman beside her, both of them waiting in the cool evening air. The city around them was fully alive. Cars cut through the sky above in long smooth lines, their lights trailing briefly before disappearing between the towers. Music drifted from somewhere below street level. The air smelled like the city always did at night, charged and moving, like the whole place was running on something invisible.
Gabriel pulled up exactly when he said he would.
He stepped out and stopped when he saw her, just for a half second, the kind of pause a person can't really control. He recovered quickly but she caught it and said nothing, which was somehow worse for him.
"You look incredible." He said it plainly.
"You said wear something nice." She glanced down at herself then back at him. "I wore something nice."
He laughed and offered his arm and she took it and they moved together through the city toward Eden.
The garden of Eden sat above the rest of the city like it had always been there and the city had simply grown up around it. It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be. The moment you crossed through its entrance the sound of everything outside dropped away and what replaced it was the low movement of wind through trees that were older than anything nearby had any right to be. The air was different here, softer and heavier at the same time, carrying the scent of flowers and earth and something underneath both that had no name.
Lights hung between the branches in long gentle arcs, casting the whole place in a warm gold that made everything look like it was sitting just inside a memory. The tables were spaced far enough apart that each one felt private. A string quartet played somewhere deeper in the garden, close enough to hear and far enough not to intrude.
The host brought them to their table without a word, set down the menus, and disappeared.
Gabriel watched Cleo look around the garden the way she always did, like she was cataloguing it, noticing things most people walked straight past. She ran her fingers lightly across the edge of the table, feeling the grain of the wood.
"You've been in that lab so long you forgot what real air feels like." He poured the wine.
"Real air." She picked up her glass. "The air in my lab is perfectly fine."
"It smells like machinery and whatever you burned last week."
"That was an experiment."
"Was it successful?"
She paused. "That's not the point."
He smiled and leaned back in his chair, watching her in that easy way he had, like he had nowhere else to be and no interest in pretending otherwise.
The evening moved the way good evenings did, without feeling like it was moving at all. The food came and they ate and the conversation wandered through comfortable territory, stories from before, things that had happened recently, observations about the city and the people around them. She was sharper when she was relaxed like this, quicker, and he always forgot that until it happened again.
It was somewhere between the second glass of wine and the dessert that Gabriel set his glass down and looked at her in a way that was different from the rest of the evening.
"I want to ask you something." He said it carefully.
She looked at him over the rim of her glass. "Okay."
"And I want you to actually think about it before you answer."
"Gabriel."
"I'm serious."
She set her glass down. "Then ask."
He leaned forward slightly, his forearms resting on the table, his voice dropping just enough that it stayed between them.
"What are we doing, Cleo? You and me. What is this."
The garden kept going around them, the string quartet still playing, the lights still hanging warm in the branches above. She looked at him for a moment without saying anything, not because she didn't have an answer but because she knew the answer wasn't what he was hoping for.
"We're having dinner." She said it gently.
"You know what I mean."
"I do." She looked down at her glass. "Gabriel, I care about you. You know that."
"I know that."
"But what you're looking for." She stopped and started again. "You want something I'm not built for right now. Maybe not ever. I have work that I can't put down for anyone, including you. That's not something that changes."
He was quiet for a moment. Not upset exactly, more like a man who had known the answer before he asked and had asked anyway because he needed to hear it said out loud.
"I just think." He stopped. "You work like you're running out of time. Like there's something at the end of all of it that you're trying to reach before something catches up to you. And I don't know what that is."
She looked at him and something moved behind her eyes that she didn't let reach her face.
"We have responsibilities." She said it simply. "Both of us. Our people, our civilization, everything we came here to oversee. That doesn't stop because dinner is nice and the garden is beautiful."
He studied her face. "Is that really all it is."
She picked up her glass again and looked out across the garden, at the ancient trees and the hanging lights and the city glowing beyond the edges of it all.
"We are not like them, Gabriel." Her voice was quiet and certain. "We never were. The sooner you stop wanting what they have the easier this becomes."
He followed her gaze out across the garden and sat with that for a long moment.
He already knew she was right, which was the most frustrating thing about her, and had always been.
He picked up his glass.
"Fine." He said finally. "But I'm still coming to check on you."
"I know you are."
"And I'm bringing flowers."
"I know that too."
He smiled and she smiled back and the evening continued the way it had before, warm and easy and with the particular kind of sadness that lives underneath things that could have been something and both people know it and neither one says so out loud.
Above them the lights moved gently in the garden breeze, and the city kept flying past in the sky beyond the trees, and the two of them sat in the middle of it, ancient and unhurried, exactly as they had always been.