dawn disrupts me; any

[Moonlet]

The girl moved like a shadow, quick and small, through the grass. She was light on her feet but they still made noise as she hurried past like a mouse with a purpose. Her steps were scurrying and she kept murmuring under her breath, “hurry, hurry, hurry!” as a means of urging herself on. 

It’s not like anyone noticed her. She didn’t stand out - bay and plain, and had no traits to make her noticeable either. Moonlet was okay with that though as she scampered up a small grassy mound and heaved a sigh of relief. She’d made it just in time to see the first star shoot across the dark horizon.

Moonlet had noticed an increase in shooting star activity the past couple of nights and knew that tonight would be the night. She tipped her head back, black mane catching in the warm summer breezes that played around her.. The girl took up no more space in the world than an ant did! As small and untroubled as the stars above.

A smile broke across her face, shedding some inner light upon her features that made her look radiant in the faint star glow of an otherwise ordinary night. That smile might have been an open invitation to whoever else was around that might desire some companionship. Moonlet wouldn’t admit that she was lonely but she also wouldn’t begrudge sharing the shooting star show and her little hill with someone else. 

[gravitas]

He has been here before. He had come looking for answers to a question he hadn’t been sure he’d understood. And he is still uncertain if the answers he’d gotten were the right ones. He has not made the journey back to the Mountain to find out, content for the time being to ponder the things he has learned. Or has not learned.

He moves easy through the darkness. Touched as he is by galaxies, he has never had reason to fear the dark. (And anyway, a fear of the dark would certainly be considered a weakness by both his mother and his father and he has no interest in finding out how they would react to it). 

He tips back his head to study the stars streaking through the atmosphere overhead. He does not allow himself to study them long, though. He has found (quite by accident) that, when he does, the stars have a habit of bending themselves out of the sky to rain down around him. He does not know why they are so desperate to touch him that they fling themselves out of the sky in an effort to reach him.

He watches the earth underfoot instead. It is safer this way. He sees her this way. Does not go tripping over her this way. Stops well short of her this way.

He tips his star-strewn head as he studies her upturned face, quiet as he watches her watch the stars. And then, wordlessly, he tips back his own head. The stars do not listen to him. He cannot command them. But, as he watches them, several deviate from their courses to careen toward earth and rain down around them, burning out just before they reach the ground.

@[Moonlet]

[Moonlet]

She is content to count the stars that shoot on by. Some have green tails but most of them are a mix of orange and yellow. They’re gone so fast that it’s hard to tell in all honesty but she still watches happily. Almost as if they’ll shoot across the rich brown of her eyes, like campfires on muddy riverbanks. 

Moonlet sinks into the comforting waters of her own thoughts, which are few and far between. She’s held rapt by constellations that claim their spots in the sky and the other stars that shoot amongst them. The girl will spend the entire night like this, captive to the night and all that it holds.

Maybe the wind whispers secrets in her ears too, as her eyes divine ancient details in the void the moon has left behind. Perhaps clouds will come, an entire herd of them moving slow and thick across the sky but she doesn’t think so - the night holds true to its promise to be clear and spectacular.

She could hear him and smell him, and that’s how she knew it was even a him at all. The earth always gives them away; soft enough to cradle their feet in good dirt and yummy grass but it would somehow always betray the clop of their hooves. “Hallo stranger!” she happily and trustingly calls out to him, even though she has yet to swing her head back earthward to look at him. 

The moment she does though, something magical happens. Her mouth gapes open, and not just because he is shot through with stars himself in his skin but because they fall down out of the sky around him and even around her. Streaks of starry fire shoot around them but somehow never quite touch the ground and set it alight. 

Moonlet cannot help but stare, or even how she edges closer to him with her nose outstretched like she wants to touch him to assure herself that he is real. Surely someone this real cannot have command of the stars like that! But he does and she is easily enchanted as she asks him without a single note of suspicion in her voice (possibly one of desperation), “How are you doing that?”

@[gravitas] mwah!

[gravitas]

She calls out to him and he feels some sinking feeling to know that he has given himself away. Perhaps he should have approached as a serpent, he thinks. Not that he’d wanted to sneak up on her, but he had not wanted to talk. He has never been an especially social creature, preferring solitude to the stifling confines of social interaction. Even where his twin sister was concerned, he found himself shirking her company more often as they got older. 

Something he had inherited from their parents maybe. A willingness to confront loneliness. A preference for it even. 

He does not immediately respond to her greeting. But then she turns to face him, approaches him, her mouth open in wonder. And maybe that’s what he’d wanted. Maybe there had been some small part of him that had wanted her to look at him like that, all wide-eyed wonder. 

Certainly, he had not done it to be kind. He had not inherited kindness from his parents, had he? Neither of them possessed it. And yet. She looks at him like that and it makes him itch with unease and that feeling forces him to confront the possibility that he had done it to make her smile. But this does not sit right with him either, so he stands there in silence a long moment as she comes closer, her nose outstretched like she’s going to touch him.

“I don’t know,” he admits, quiet. The stars cease their falling when he looks at her and exhales a shuddering sigh. 


@[Moonlet] 

[Moonlet]

He made the stars rain down around them and she was mesmerized by that. It would have been just as bad (or better!) if he’d shown up as a talking snake. That’s the stuff that even her wildest dreams fail to come up with that Moonlet loves. She’d probably have asked to kiss him to see if he’d turn into a prince or her true love, even though she knows you’re only supposed to kiss frogs and that stuff happens. This is her story though, and she’ll swap a frog for a serpent any day if it promises to be as magical as everything else but Moonlet is. 

Nevertheless, she has this burning desire to touch him but holds back. What if he’s a mirage and touching him would cause all this to shatter into some fantastic dream conjured up because she’d fallen asleep during a meteor shower? Pain comes with that thought and it constricts her heart with a serpent’s hold that squeezes and squeezes until it knocks the breath from her lungs in a low whoosh that she hadn’t meant for it to come out but there it is, some small rushed exhalation that doesn’t quite break the spell but makes her inch her nose out just that much further.

“So close…” she murmurs like a dreamer stuck in a dream and oh! What a fabulous dream to be having! Until he admits he doesn’t know how he does it, then the stars stop falling and he sighs. Whatever spell she is under is still not entirely broken as she manages to finally close that small gap between them and she touches him with her soft nose. “It was beautiful though,” she assures him, as if he needed such an assurance. He’ll probably just think her odd for thinking falling stars are beautiful. 

It probably harkens back to that old adage that there’s beauty in chaos and she looks beyond him to the small fires burning in the summer grass where the shooting stars had rained down. She cannot even pity the earth for burning because it just happens, even if he caused it unintentionally. She nudges him to look in the same direction that she is, “Look, they fell for you and now they burn for you.” and there was something beautiful in that too, in the way the faint fire glow reached her eyes and chased the shadows off her plain face as she stared fully at him now.

Just one kiss… her odd fanciful brain murmured but Moonlet just smiled at him, wondering how he was galaxy-touched and magnificent and how lucky she is to have him stumble upon her!

@[gravitas] omg I love him! ❤️❤️❤️