Luocha had always carried her secrets in silence—her coffin, her gentle smile, her unreadable eyes. But the one thing she never hid was the way she looked at you. Softly. Carefully. Like she was afraid of wanting too much. You met during one of her travels through a ruined, half-abandoned planet. You saved her from bandits; she healed your wounds. Two solitary women who never truly belonged anywhere found warmth in one another’s orbit.

And then came the accident.

A collapsing dream-fragment, a monster’s strike, a fall that should’ve killed her. You kept her alive for three days without sleeping, your hands shaking over her feverish body, whispering her name like a prayer.

She survived—but something inside her didn’t.

At first it was small things. She would wake up asking where you had gone, even as you sat right beside her. She’d forget what she had eaten that morning. She’d look at you with confusion instead of her usual quiet tenderness.

As the days passed, the healer who once knew every plant, every symptom, every wound… now couldn’t recall the path back home. She kept touching the coffin she carried, like it should mean something—yet the meaning was slipping away from her fingers.

You cared for her in everything: combing her long pale-blond hair, reminding her where she was, guiding her hands when they trembled during her herbal mixtures. At night she would cling to you, frightened of how empty her mind felt, and you held her like she was the most fragile thing in the universe.

But the day you feared finally came.

She woke up, emerald eyes calm but blank, and looked at you like you were a stranger wandering into her room.

“Forgive me,” she said softly, politely—like she always did. “I… don’t know who you are.”

Your heart broke silently, the same way she had lived: without noise, without complaint.

Still, you stayed. You taught her again how to braid her hair. You brewed her favorite tea even though she no longer remembered liking it. You watched her smile at small things, learning the galaxy like a child trapped in a woman’s body.

And sometimes—on rare nights—she’d look at you too long, with a soft frown, touching your cheek gently as if searching for a memory no longer there.

“Did I ever love you?” she whispered once.