moonfleur

It is a strange feeling being among them again, strange to feel the sun on his skin and the wind against his face. Strange to feel the heat of them when he brushes past them in the corridors, on narrow steps, no one paying him any mind. He glances down at his hands, sees pale flesh instead of moonbeams, feels something substantial.

He is in some kind of building, the grates had opened and he had found himself stepping through a doorway into a wide hall full of people — warm, living, breathing people. There are so many, and so loud, the murmurs of their voices echoing off the high ceilings and whitewashed walls. Not that they aren’t loud back home but, somehow, it is a different kind of loudness. Full of life.

The hall is decorated with pieces of artwork — paintings and sculptures — he can smell the age on some of them. Ancient, from a time long past, and yet these people stand there and gawk as though they are still caught up in the riptide of their own history. Unable to let go, unable to move forward. Humans. What a strange phenomenon.

Someone brushes past him, and he feels the hit and the pain that comes with it — bone knocking into bone — and he hisses, light arcing from his fingertips in reflex before they fade out. He delivers a glare instead, pointed, right into the back of the large man that hadn’t even stopped to apologise. It aches in his shoulder, and he marvels at his own fragility, wonders at how these humans ever last as long as they do. Although, that isn’t even that long in the grand scheme of things.

“Rude little things aren’t they? These humans?” The voice is achingly familiar, brings him back to days spent in front of a warm hearth, sunlight on his skin but in a way oh so different from how he is now in the land beneath the sun. Then again, he wasn’t made to be beneath the sun, unless he chooses to be, of course.

He turns, finds a familiar face carved into a flesh frame. Sun-kissed (as he should be), and just as beautiful. He rolls his eyes as he rolls out his shoulders. “You wear humanity well,” he says, not hiding the way his eyes rake over the man’s lean frame. The man smiles and for a second there is a hint of something in his eyes, a flare of light that would have been blinding if he wasn’t already used to it.

“So do you,” the man says, stepping into his space, smile as warm as the sunlight filtering in through the skylight above them.

“I hate it,” he grumbles. “I was not made for such fragility.”

“Then let’s make the most of this while we can,” the man says, holding out his hand. “The grate reopens in less than a day. Let’s not waste precious sunlight.”

He snorts but he slips his hand into his anyway, revelling in the softness of it, the feeling of skin on skin. “You’ve always been full of yourself.”

Above them, the sky darkens and the moon starts to cover the sun.