Paul spent every spare moment he could with his mushrooms. He struggled through boredom and anger and pain with each and every one. He thought to go raise them on their new home, to foster them into beautiful life even though they were no longer needed by Starfleet. They needed him, after all. But he stayed on the ship. Everyone on board needed him more.
The ship went around. People came and went, talked and fled. He found some reflection of normalcy, but it felt empty. Always empty. He only acknowledged that void in the bathroom mirror and in bed, when the lack of Hugh’s warmth was the most noticeable and the mushrooms were too far away to reach.
Then, Tilly gave him a mushroom. A prototaxites stellaviatori, to be exact. It wasn’t doing well. It looked muted and withered and so broken. She fumbled around a explanation, but he didn’t need it. He thanked her in a monotone way and took the spore to his quarters. There, he nursed it, he watched over it, he cared for it. Slowly, very slowly, it flourished.
Then Hugh came back to him.
It wasn’t an image of Hugh, or a dream of him, but Hugh himself, body and all. Paul managed to keep his composure, but Hugh’s hands were there, warm and present, passing across his arm, even as the Chief Medical Examiner did her work. It wasn’t until they returned to their quarters that Paul allowed himself to crack, allowed the tears, allowed the sobs, allowed everything to spill out rapidly. He spoke of the absence, of the loss, of the vacancy in his life and in his work, of all his children, gone, of needing to fill the void that come so close to breaking him. Hugh listened and kissed and ran his arms across his own.
Once he calmed, Hugh spoke. He gave comfort and assurance and peace. Always peace. Paul embraced that, embraced him, in a comforting silence he was so thankful for since he’d said goodbye.
“I thought you said you terraformed Delta 2 with all the spores from the cultivation bay,” he said.
Paul caught Hugh’s gazed and peered at the table, at the mushroom Tilly had given him weeks ago.
“Oh,” Paul said, “Ensign Tilly gave it to me. It wasn’t doing well, so I nursed it back to health.”
“Did it help?” Hugh asked.
“It’s doing well now,” Paul said.
“No, I meant, did it help you?”
Paul looked at him, looked at the concerned look on Hugh’s face, and realized what explanation Tilly had been trying to fumble around all those weeks ago. Paul opened his mouth to speak. No words came. Hugh waited a moment, then pulled him into another hug. A kiss touched his cheek. A moment later, a tear traced over where Hugh’s lips had been.