isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone

She has forgotten that she is missing something.

In the weeks following that encounter with her father she had felt something was amiss, but nothing that she could place. Sometimes there would be a phantom ache, and it was such a strange thing to feel in the midst of the hollowness she usually felt that it forced her to pause, to try to follow it. But she always came up empty—no answer, no memory, nothing to explain why it felt as though something was missing.

She did not connect the new phenomenon to her father; she did not understand love enough—or know her father well enough—to see why he would see that as a weakness that needed to be removed.

But as all things eventually did, the ache, too, faded away.

She watched as the world around her changed, and she did not remember that she had someone to miss.

The only thing she found peculiar is that now when she stared at the stars—the same way she had ever since she was born into this mortal body—it felt as if she were seeing them for the first time in years, though she cannot recall why she would have ever stopped staring at them.

There has never been anything earthbound worth her attention—not that she can remember.

She watches them now from a willow-lined bank, standing in some land that she did not know the name of. The lands had never been of much interest to her, though she has tried. There had been Pangea, the land her father had created, and she remembers Loess and its steep cliffs, but she did not care enough to return to the one or to miss the other.

The sound of a disturbance in the water catches her attention, and she peels her gaze from the sky above to look down to where someone is stumbling their way onto the shore. Even from where she stands she can see the way he trembles with exhaustion, can smell the way he is thoroughly saturated by the sea, as if he had been there for far too long.

She notices, too, the way a faint glow emanates from beneath his skin, his chest alight where his heart beats, and for a moment something like curiosity flickers in her starless-night eyes. She almost says nothing, but years upon years of teaching herself how to act like the rest of them had finally nurtured some kind of social reflex, though her tone is still hollow when she asks, “are you hurt?”

It would be a beautiful thing, to say that her heart immediately recognized his even though her mind did not, but instead all Islas does is stare in that otherworldly, unnerving way of hers, surrounded by her own starlit-glow.

isn't it lovely all alone, heart made of glass, my mind of stone

He looks at her as if he knows her, but that dormant flame in her chest does not reignite.

She has learned that some of them are transfixed by the idea of her having once been a star, though she supposes she cannot fault them for this; the stars were beautiful, more so than they could ever begin to comprehend. For years this reverence had only further stoked her desire to return to the sky, because telling them she used to be untouchable and incredible while trapped in this body felt like a lie.

She assumes, then, that this is why he stares at her the way that he does. That he recognizes her starlit glow, the celestial kind of energy that she cannot control radiating from her.

But she still is not prepared for the way his emotions flood into her.

The adoration is warm and comforting, yet it feels alien and strange flooding into something so previously hollow—like sunshine melting ice. She nearly recoils from it, having forgotten all of their previous encounters, but once it has a chance to settle she finds herself exhaling a sigh of something like relief.

“You don’t sound okay,” she tells him honestly, and she stares again at the way his chest pulses and glows. The distance between them closes, and for a moment it appears as though she is going to touch the glowing skin, before she seems to remember herself and she stops short. “Your chest. Does it always glow like that?”