- Rating: Teen
- Warnings: canonical character death
- Genre: angst, whump, romance
- Pairing: aurametis
summary: Aura Blackquill has been left alone. Her brother in chains, a woman she loved gone at the hands of the princess of the space center, and her work shattered. She reflects back to the night before it all went wrong, and to Metis’ final fairy tale to her under the light of the moon.
The last time Aura had seen Metis, it’d been by the light of her beloved moon.
Bathed in the moonlight of her own personal symbol, Metis had told Aura a story about a princess of the moon found inside a stalk of bamboo.
There, brightening the lives of everyone with her stunning beauty, only to be taken away to the realm of the moon’s light with nary a feeling of those she’d come to love on Earth after a divine cloak was bestowed upon her shoulders.
It was a fairy tale, Aura had told her as much with amusement before the two of them settled in to look at the stars. The work…their machines and projects…could wait until the morning to finish, no matter how badly her fingers itched to work until the launch was ready.
Ponco and Clonco bustled about the lab, chattering away in their preprogrammed way, as Aura’s visor reflected the brilliance of the night sky.
It was easy to believe in fairy tales when Metis was there.
It was easy to see her, draped in her beautiful kimono and smiling quietly at the moon, and see the Princess Kaguya of her legend written in her fine features and gentle warmth. Everything Aura was not, Metis was…
And she loved her for it. Like the suitors in the fairy tale, she’d do anything to bathe in the light of Metis’ brilliant mind and heart.
Aura had wanted to say something to her that night. Something simple and true that they’d both felt could go unsaid and simply felt and acted upon during late nights at the robotics lab when it was just them and the forming code and chassis of their robotic ‘children’ formed of their combined talents and hands.
But she hesitated. Putting a word to it would complicate matters. It’d draw the eye of their employer, and the whispers of their coworkers. It’d complicate Metis’ relationship with her protege…her brother.
So she simply leaned into the crook of Metis’ arm, and hummed along to a song from the lab’s solitary radio as the two talked about the future of Hope and its promise of materials that would change the shape of their research together forever.
When she found herself standing in the robotics lab hours later, staring in horror and anguish at the corpse propped upon the operating table and the pooled and drying blood staining her kimono scarlet…
The princess of the moon, the woman she loved, was gone. Draped in the ID-badge mission jacket and ascended beyond the world and memory of mortals. No longer remembering the love they shared, she was gone to leave her with her grief.
It was the last fairy tale Aura ever let herself believe before the hardening of her heart and the bitter pill of reality. Her brother in chains, her partner dead, and the princess of the Cosmos Space Center the only one it could have possibly been…her world was shattered.
As she looked at the moon from the Space Center’s windows, surrounded by the cold and predictable reality of machines, she realized just how much she hated the moon.
The moon wasn’t anything half as loving and warm as she’d once believed. There were no civilizations of benevolent ancients in its pitted craters and dusty contours.
It was simply a cold, dead rock.