Even when the starry sky dissolves at dawn

[brightlyshines]

WHO: Literally anyone and everyone
WHERE: The Town
WHEN: May 3rd, evening
WHAT: The town's regained both some aspects of evening and a starry night sky. Stargazing is clearly in order.
WARNINGS: All that good pure cute, probably.

The town is just a little bit different today. Color has returned to some objects, even phenomenon, and it has left others. Slowly but surely, things are changing.

In some cases, very big things are changing.

Maybe someone looks out a window, maybe they're out late in the evening. At around 6pm, the sky takes on it's normal hue, just for a moment. And later, as darkness falls....

The stars blink into existence, one by one.

Comments

[passio]

[ dextera nods, and then inclines his head her way—is she not? he could use the company, if she's going to be out here anyway. she helped him dry his tears, and it seems wrong to dismiss her now that that's done. ]

...?

[good_ideas]

I'll stay too. It's too early to sleep right now anyway.

[Also she's going to sleep till at least noon tomorrow so it all works out.]

We didn't see a lot of stars back home, so it's kinda nice.

[passio]

[ dextera sleeps whenever for however long he pleases, so he can vibe with that. tonight, the stars will be his company until his body decides that it's time to pass out, but that doesn't sound like such a bad thing.

he nods in agreement—both that it's nice, and that he hasn't seen many stars before. ]

[good_ideas]

You too, huh.

[Did that have anything to do with why he had been crying?

Hm. Well, she promised not to pry so for the moment she gives the thought a pass.

For about two seconds.]

Kinda brings you to tears, doesn't it?

[passio]

...

[ dextera lets out a breath of a laugh, the slightest bit of humor—as shiho, somehow, manages to bring out of him. even if she can be abrasive, he knows she’s a good person at heart.

he nods, and this time, when he touches under his eyes, he’s being honest. the stars... truly, this time, that’s why he was crying. ]

[good_ideas]

[So that was why. Was he just very sensitive, the kind of person who looked at stars and started crying? Or was there another reason... She could see him as either, easily. That one touch from last time hadn't given her a lot, and she doesn't know what he's lost, why he had been asleep. But he's laughing now, regardless of how little it was and that was much more important than his past.]

So that's why. Because you haven't seen so many before?

[passio]

[ honestly, it's a little of both. he's touched by the beauty of the stars, but there's a larger emotional issue at work here, knotted in his chest, that makes him want to weep at the sight of flowers, or rain, or stars. they're all things he's never seen, things he never expected to see.

he nods again, and settles down on the grass, before lying back entirely. the sky seems bigger this way—so guren said. he waves for shiho to join him. ]

[good_ideas]

Hm...

[It's a contemplative sound as she wonders how exactly it could be that someone would never have seen so many stars to the point where it could move them to tears. She could say she didn't care all she wanted, but actually putting that into practice was a lot more difficult.

There isn't even a blanket or anything, but it's not like she can ruin these clothes so she settles herself down beside him before lying back too.]

...Wow. [It makes the sky look like it stretches on forever, more stars than she's ever seen before without going camping.]

I wonder if this is still even Earth anymore.

[passio]

[ although there are many earths, dextera has discovered, he doesn't think this is one of them. he can't hear the voice of god here, and what's a god if it isn't a constant one? multiverses change the game somewhat, but there are certain consistent things between the earths—for example, the fact that they are earth, at all.

he can't speak for people who come from completely different worlds, but he's at least comfortable saying that this isn't the one he knows. ]

...

[ he shakes his head without looking at her, though the shift is audible, at least. ]

[good_ideas]

You don't recognize it either, huh.

[Shiho isn't familiar enough with stars to tell definitively either way. But there are things she finds weird about this place, what with the fact that there were so many people with so many different experiences, so many different worlds.]

[passio]

[ based on everything he's seen before, he doubts that any of them could recognize any stars in the sky that are the same as their homeworlds. this is somewhere entirely new—a new planet, a new galaxy, a new dimension entirely that still knows about worlds outside itself.

it's a scary thought, but oddly... comforting, as well. the mistakes dextera has made are not as all-encompassing as he thought. ]

...

[ what he does recognize, however, is the moon—and he points it out to her, aware of it, even though it's also something he's never seen before. ]

[good_ideas]

The moon? [That is familiar, and they only have one rather than three...]

If Aoi-chan was here, I bet we could figure this all out. [Then again, maybe Aoi's powers would be blocked as much as Shiho's currently were.

And here she'd thought that stargazing would be calming...]

[passio]

[ it should have been, shouldn't it... but dextera is unpredictable like that, and he glances over at shiho when she mentions someone named aoi. another friend of hers? like kaoru? ]

...?

[good_ideas]

Aoi-chan... [Damn it. She'd let herself get sentimental and accidentally overshared... Oh well, maybe Aoi wouldn't show up here? (And if she did, Shiho has absolute faith that Aoi could handle herself. Shiho's bark was scarier than her bite, but Aoi was scary all the way through...)]

...is a friend from back home. She's... really smart. [Kaoru was so much better at this endlessly praising friends thing. Shiho falters after that, though she has a lot more she could say: dependable, brave, forgiving, level-headed, just and amazing. And she was a teleporter with the ability to sense the space around her. But the first bunch seems too embarrassing and the last part was trump card she didn't want to reveal even to Dex. So she goes with what she knows best:]

....I... might have bullied her a lot back when we were kids.

[passio]

[ dextera thinks he gets what she means, though, when she hesitates before that compliment. he can understand the type of person shiho is—careful and guarded with her emotions, but that doesn't mean she doesn't feel them. he doesn't think kaoru would be friends with someone who was truly cruel. he hopes. ]

...

[ but shiho is a little bit of a bully. she's owning up to that now. dextera nods slowly, because it comes as absolutely no surprise that shiho would have harassed someone she now considers a friend. she might have even considered this "aoi" a friend when they were kids, but dextera doesn't know that much.

...hah. [ a breath of a laugh. ]

[good_ideas]

[He's laughing at her, even if it's just a tiny little laugh Shiho feels like she should....

....well, she wasn't that defensible as a child. She was terrible. Still.]

I was five! And... I thought she looked happier than me. [Of which she was wrong. Aoi probably felt like her family had sold her to BABEL. But at the time Shiho was still smarting from knowing that her parents loved her but that they felt it was a relief to leave her with BABEL. The adults around her also treated the two of them differently. Aoi was the cute, good child while Shiho was the one they treated like she had some kind of communicable disease that they could catch just by her touching them.]

...I strung up her panda doll. I... also gave her all my carrots because I didn't want to eat them. And... might have made her doll house into a murder scene. [It actually all sounds so childish now that she says it out loud.] I was such a bad kid.

[passio]

[ yes, all those things sound like shiho, and dextera thinks for a five-year-old, those things were quite terrible. hating someone for being happier than oneself is a complex, painful emotion for such a young child, and it was all expressed in the best way that a kid knows how. pettiness.

dextera sits up, propping himself up with his hands so that he can properly look at her face. he thinks about what he wants to say, but he can't communicate it with just his face or his eyes.

so back to the notebook it is, even in the dark of the night. ]

But you've changed.

[ she might have been a bad kid, but things are different now. ]

[good_ideas]

[Dextera sitting up prompts Shiho to sit up too for the moment. It's been eleven years and she's (supposedly) long past the point of being that little girl anymore. (Even if she still lives in the way Shiho never stops testing the people around her, trying to see how far she could push until people got fed up with her like the five year old Shiho expected them to.)

Reaching out, she lightly touches the notebook with her fingers, the movement almost poignant and poetic as if she could trace those words and physically feel that she was better, that she had changed.




But really, she's touching the notebook because it is just too damn dark out here and it's use her powers or pretend he had written something inappropriate. Not everyone can see by the light of the stars, Dex... What would he have done if she wasn't a psychometer?! She probably sees other things in the notebook too, so hopefully he hasn't been using it for weird things.]

What, because I eat my own carrots now? [She's teasing, her laughter evident just in her voice.]

[passio]

[ dextera does at first assume that she's being poetic about it, but it doesn't seem quite right. she doesn't seem like the type to linger on such emotional words, especially not when she teases him after that! he doesn't know what it could be, though, because all the mind-readers he knows can just sense his emotions. they don't need to touch or anything like that. ]

...

[ and then he lets out another breath of a laugh, scooting closer to her. ]

You came to check on me.

[good_ideas]

[The main difference here, of course, is that Shiho isn't quite a mind reader. She would be able to pass as normal much more easily if she were a mind reader.

...why is he scooting closer though?]

Of course.

...You helped me. And...I guess, we're friends. Sort of. Right?

[passio]

[ because they're friends, shiho!!!

he also wants her to be able to see the notebook, even though the next question he asks is something that he doesn't need to write to answer. they are friends, strangely enough. this conversation makes that certain.

so he nods, emphatic. ]

[good_ideas]

...Thank you.

[They're friends and this makes her happy. Though this is the first and last time she's ever going to admit to this. Probably.

Also it's dark enough that he'll never be able to tell she's smiling?]