Griffin: [Laughs] Uh, the last two- the last two people to present their work to the audience and to the mountain, is Barry and Lup. Um, and you haven’t like seen them much this cycle? They’ve been spending like a lot of, uh, time together. Specifically working on this work that they are going to present to everybody. And it’s not uncommon for them to like, go off like this. Like they are… at this point like, very close collaborators on a lot of the things that they do.
Most of the time in like studying different parts of the worlds that you’re in. But this time they got together to… to work on this very very specific craft. And as they approach the stage and sit down, Taako, you can’t remember the last time you saw Lup nervous, but she is. Barry’s always nervous and he’s in rare form here, but Lup also seems kind of anxious, about this performance. And she walks up, and she picks up a violin, and Barry sits down at a big grand piano, and they play a duet. And in watching them play this composition, you realize, really for the first time, just how profoundly Barry and Lup’s relationship has changed.
Time is different for the seven of you, than it has been for anyone else who ever lived. During your one-hundred year journey, you don’t age thanks to whatever forces keep putting you back together at the beginning of each year. Your minds stay sharp. You learn skills and languages and new proficiencies. You become remarkably capable adventurers during your voyage on the Starblaster. But it’s not just your minds that develop, across this ageless century, something less quantifiable develops too.
[Salut D’Amour by Edward Elgar starts playing]
Our capacity for love increases with each person we cross paths with throughout our lives, and with each moment we spend with those people. But, too often we neglect that part of ourselves in favor of others. And by the time we realize just how important it is, we find ourselves with fewer folks around to practice with. But the seven of you have something that nobody else ever had: time. All the time in the world. Time enough to grow indescribably close. Time enough to learn how to care for each other, how to allow yourselves to be cared for. And in the case of Barry and Lup, time enough to fall deeply and truly in love.
Barry felt it first. During a particularly challenging year, Lup caught him crying. And she softly and sincerely consoled him, and just for a moment, the professional wall between them came down. And something shone through. Lup wasn’t far behind; her moment of realization was a bit more innocuous. During that cycle with the robots, Barry helped repair the small frame of a vessel housing a particularly rambunctious spirit, and it kept shocking him, and laughing. And Lup laughed too, and she knew.
This new love, it wasn’t their focus during the journey. Barry worked tirelessly to understand each world you traveled to, to understand the Hunger and figure out a way to defeat it. Lup grew furiously in arcane power, studying the mystical secrets of the planes, hoping to master whatever spell would break your team out of their desperate retreat. But there were moments between those studies, meals shared in secret, just the two of them under the guise of their work, sightseeing trips for two across these doomed worlds. And that love grew, and it grew, until it reached the point that all great loves grow toward: the point of… inevitability.
Looking back, this performance is where that love that Barry and Lup cultivated quietly and cautiously over the last half century truly bloomed. There was romance in every measure, and longing in every note. And after the performance, they take each other’s hands high in the air, and they swoop down for this over-the-top bow, just laughing at the drama of it all. And the audience cheers. And Barry and Lup laugh, and they don’t let each other’s hands go. And then they stop laughing, and they don’t let each other’s hands go. And they keep not letting go. And Lup says,
Lup: Barry, do you wanna go talk somewhere for a while?
Barry: [Wholeheartedly] Yeah.
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![The Less I know The Better [played in a reverberation room]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/_1499643166_cover.jpg)
