Two teenagers are sitting together on a big dusty grey rock: a boy and a girl, admiring the view. Mostly.
The rock is on the Moon. It’s on the peak-ridge of one of the Lunar Carpathians, which is a young and jagged mountain range rearing up over the pale rolling highlands that run down toward the Apollo 12 and 14 landing sites. The rock is the topmost fragment of a boulder the size of a suburban house, cracked off the body of the mountain’s uppermost peak a millennium ago in the wake of an impact by a fragment of an “earthgrazer”-class asteroid. Bits and pieces of the old peak lie strewn all down the mountainside, mingled with older, smaller rubble and assorted displaced regolith. But the girl and the boy are long familiar with this old vista, and pay it no mind at the moment.
They’re mostly looking at the Earth right now, not least because this is one of the best times of the month to view it from up here. Since the Moon as seen from Earth is presently a crescent barely three days old, the Earth is just a shade shy of its full—a hot blue-blazing cabochon jewel in the night, burning green and dun and desert-pale, glowing white with weather. The light of it, this close to perihelion, blots out the view of the nearby stars and shines ten times brighter than a full Moon would anywhere on Earth. That blue-green light, so intense in hue as to seem warm, is washing across the lunar surface and drowning everything in an almost-undersea luminescence. “The old Moon in the new Moon’s arms”, they call it at home: Earthshine. Wizards, of course, have other names for it. But these two aren’t considering those at the moment.
“Things are changing…” the girl says.
The boy nods. “Well, we’ve known for a while it was coming.” He raises his eyebrows in annoyance at the Shuffle, shakes it…
They’re sitting within easy reach of each other. Either one could touch the other one without otherwise moving. Right now, neither does. The boy (short-haired, Hispanic, in the middle of a growth spurt that’s taken him from short and a bit stocky to surprisingly tall and fairly lean in a short time) is dressed in a big loose dark hoodie and jeans and is poking at an iPod Shuffle, squinting down at the little display and frowning at the controls, which aren’t responding properly. The girl (of average height and weight for someone in her mid-teens, with longish brunette hair, also in jeans and two layers of V-neck, dark-and-light) is fiddling idly with a wand of rowan wood, which is glowing faintly but not the way it usually does. Both of their outlines shimmer slightly around the edges with personal forcefields, like heatshimmer in air; except that heat is in short supply here (as the temperature’s hovering around -120C at the moment), and there’s no air at all.
“This thing hates microgravity,” Kit mutters. “The playback’s screwed.” He pulls the headphones out of his ears and rolls them up, then lifts the Shuffle to eye level. “What’s your problem, buddy?”
Nita grins a little as Kit starts communing with his hardware, and tucks up her legs under her, moving to sit crosslegged. Moondust kicks up around her, shedding and sliding gently down across the face of the boulder like the thinnest (and dryest) imaginable waterfall. She then goes back to twiddling her wand over and over between her fingers, as if it was an oversized pen. Most of her attention is on the Earth, which stands about halfway up the sky; but her gaze keeps sliding sideways to Kit.
“So how do we handle this?” she says.
The look he gives her, briefly distracted from the Shuffle, is that of someone who wasn’t expecting that particular question at all. “I didn’t know we needed, well, a plan as such,” Kit says. “Thought kind of feeling your way along was normal.”
She glances over at him more straightforwardly now. “I didn’t so much mean us,” she says. “It’s just… you know. The parents. They have all these expectations. And none of them the same ones. Sooner or later we’re going to run up against something they’re not expecting us to do.”
“They didn’t exactly expect us to start running all over the universe and repeatedly saving the world,” Kit says, “and they’ve done okay with that so far. Maybe we should give them the benefit of the doubt?”
“Not that I’d be arguing that,” Nita says, “but these are parents. They’re likely to think that this is more dangerous.” Her glance goes to the empty air between them.
Kit glances at that empty space: then at her: then a bit hurriedly away, off down the mountainside. And then something widens his eyes a little.
Nita follows his glance. Off westward there’s something moving; a shape silhouetted against the faint blue-green radiance of the landscape—a tallish form. Kit squints at it.
“Is that who I think it is?”
“Nope.”
“Not Ronan.”
“Shorter. And not his shoulders.”
“Yeah.” Kit squints downslope. “Oh, wait…”
The shape is closer now, and they both have a better view as it starts making its way up the long broad west-angling ridge of the mountain. It’s a woman of middle height, with shortish auburn hair and rimless glasses. She’s wearing boot-cut black jeans and a black Tyrwhitt’s ladies’ cardigan and a blue chef’s apron with white stripes, and in this rather unusual garb she’s working her way up the mountainside with relative ease, not showing a lot of air under her bounces—well, all right, vacuum—or stirring up a lot of dust… the moves of someone who’s up here on a regular basis. She has no forcefield, apparently not requiring one; probably something to do with being (creatively speaking) more centrally positioned.
She bounces gradually upslope, dislodging surprisingly little of the light pumice-scree as she goes, and finally comes up level with the boulder and pauses a couple of meters away, holding still until the dust she’s kicked up has a few seconds to start settling. “Cousins,” she says. “Room for one more?”
They budge over a bit and make room for her, while somehow not getting any closer together.
The woman steps carefully over to keep the dust at a minimum, boosts herself up to sit, and pushes herself back across the top of the boulder with a faint gritty scrape. Once settled she pulls a white iPad out of the pocket of the apron. Then she sits for some moments and says nothing, just taking in the view. “Gorgeous,” she says finally. “Never get tired of that.”
“Yeah,” Kit says.”Us either.”
Presently the woman lets out a breath and (maybe a bit reluctantly) shifts her gaze away from the view of the Earth and over to the two sitting to her left. “So,” she said. “I wanted to catch you before anything got started. Are you sure you’re up for this?”
They nod at her. “Like Ronan says,” Kit says; “for shits ‘n’ giggles, why not?”
The woman produces half a smile at his language, nods a bit. “Fine.”
“One thing, though,” Nita says. “Is this going to be canonical?”
“Some of it might be, eventually. I think we’ll have to rule on that on a case-by-case basis.”
“’We?’” Kit says. Nita glances away, not succeeding in hiding a smile.
The woman gives them both a look. “What? You don’t think I’d pass a ruling without consulting you guys, do you? Please.” She glances down, idly brushes moondust off her blacks. “This has always been a cooperative venture. Why would that stop now?…” And then she sighs, dusting off her hands, and dusting, and dusting. “God, this stuff gets everywhere.”
“Yeah,” Nita says. “It’s the static. Stay away from your DVDs until you change.”
“Right.” The woman gives up the hand-dusting as hopeless and scrubs the last of the moondust off on her apron.
“You’ve got some concerns, though?” Nita’s tone makes it plain that the question’s a courtesy, no more: whoever has the concerns about the next month’s business, it’s not her.
The woman sighs. “Look,” she says, waking up the iPad and glancing at a list on its screen, “number 5’s hardly an issue. That was always going to happen, whatever else does.” She’s not looking at them right then, so she doesn’t see the wry glance that Kit and Nita swiftly exchange. “I confess it’s going to be interesting to see how you handle numbers 14 and 17. For number 12, it’s possible I may just avert my eyes. And as for 30…”
“Trust us,” Nita says.
The woman nods. “Of course.” she says. “So go on, have yourselves a party. You planning to involve anyone else?”
“It could happen.”
The woman chuckles, clicks the Pad off. “Let me know if you need any help with staging. Busy week next week, but you know where to find me.”
“All the time,” Kit says, without more irony than necessary.
She smiles at them, slides off the boulder. “Good enough. We’ll see how the month goes. Dai, you two.”
“Dai…”
The woman starts making her way down the mountain again, not without a few stops along the way to admire the view. They watch her go with mild amusement. After a while, Nita says under her breath, “Does it freak you out slightly when she shows up in the middle of stuff like this?”
Kit shrugs, says nothing: then reaches out for Nita’s hand.
She takes his. The grip of it is slightly gritty, and a little damp. Both of them have been suffering a bit from sweaty palms at such moments since the time the words “boyfriend” and “girlfriend” were first heard in open conversation.
“So how do we handle this?” Kit says under his breath.
Nita shakes her head. “You got it right before, I think. Otherwise… we do what we’re doing. We figure it out as we go along. And we let her know how it turned out. Same as always.”
There’s a long silence. Both of them turn their eyes back up again to the blue radiance from above. “What about you?” Kit says. “Any issues?”
Nita thinks, then snickers. “Only that this time last week I didn’t even know what a kigurumi was. And now that I do know, I really don’t want Dairine seeing me in one.”
Kit rolls his eyes. “May take some doing. We’d better make a plan…”
But there seems no rush about that. They go back to watching the Earth slowly, slowly rising, hand in hand…
To the YW 30 Day OTP masterpost
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