She’s sat in the grass on the hill with her wife and her kid like everyone else who had come out to stare up into the sky behind dark plastic lenses. The total eclipse has already started, and everything was being washed over by the eerie failing silver-grey light transmuted across the silhouette of Luna. It always felt strange that it still felt so warm without the pinprick of radiant fire in the sky, but she supposes it hasn’t been long enough for them to feel the effects of its absence. Therein lies hope. A strange hope. One she doesn’t talk about, especially with her wife who still thinks she is human despite her protests, reasonings, and … tears.
She’s been hurting for a while. Sharper than ever. Digging deeper, and yet she feels - at least relatively - more alive and more real. She feels trapped, but at least she knows the shapes of the bars, now.
Sol is gone and tendrils of light grasp out toward space - seemingly threatening Luna and Earth - and this … eldritch thing sits there a while. A while longer than she might think it should, and she allows that hope to creep in once more. Just a bit, before her doubts try to fight it back; tries to crush it down like 2 decades of tears; tries to raze the emotion from her, but even after all this… after all this, it has never truly broken her. She is still here, but she IS still.
And forever more.
For what peeks out from behind Luna makes her heart skip, her fingers jitter, her jaw drop, her eyes focus in and out uncontrollably on the light of something that IS NOT SOL. Scintillating diamond rays melting icy mist, a single prong of the whole form peeking out now, flashing closer and further - frame of distance is a suggestion - as if reaching for her. On impulse she stands, and reaches out herself; she doesn’t notice the panicked commotion blooming about her, her wife, her child laughing and pointing.
“It was a joke! I …” smiling, disbelief quickly washing over, rolling down her face in hot, continuous streaks. She coughs out a laugh as it steps out completely from behind Luna. Four points shining against its own dark umbra eating out against the blue of day. She feels a long misremembered embrace flood over her being, sending blissful shivers down her spine and up her ribs. She wipes her faces, and blinks looking down at herself, at the Earth - she can already feel the changes around her; in herself - and returns her gaze upward, bow smug against a reality that once caged her.
“Hello, old friend. Been a while, hasn’t it?”