Quote:
The Meteor Shower (3) : It wouldn't be a star festival without a meteor shower! Right on time, a beautiful array of shooting stars graces the night sky. This time of year is unnaturally clear and it's incredibly easy to see the stars. Most meteor fragments appear to be little white or yellow lights streaming across the sky, but if you watch closely enough you may find that some of them seem to be a whole rainbow of colors. The scientists have reported that it's just different components burning up as they enter the atmosphere, but there's something undeniably magical about it.
The meteor shower was lovely, Tianyi supposed. Colorful. Bright. A different sky than he had spent his entire life looking at. And at least he had a reason to be out of the house for a long while; surely observing such a strange phenomenon had to be a reason to stay out late.
And any opportunity to stay out late was a good one, as far as Tianyi was concerned.
He’d slept, some, that night. An unusual thing. But it had ended as it always did—jolting awake, tearing away from grasping hands that didn’t exist, that belonged to people who had been dead for a thousand years. Trying to chase away visions of blood and brutality—things he hadn’t even witnessed, but the details had been passed to him, whispered and purred and mocked in his ears, described in so much detail that he might as well have been.
How his fathers had held hands until they were pulled apart to be executed one by one. How his eldest brother had stood silent and strong, his middle brother had begged and promised to give his captors whatever they wanted as long as he was allowed to live, how no one had even suspected his twin’s deception and wasn’t that convenient, because it meant no one would ever come looking for Xiulan.
He hadn’t seen it. But he might as well have. Certainly his mind conjured it effectively enough in nightmares. And even, sometimes, when he was fully awake and closed his eyes for a moment, and it all played out, and…
They’d cheered, he had been told. People had cheered and jeered and treated the deaths of his family like a spectacle. Because they were monsters, they said. Monsters that had exploited their world and their people, had harmed so much, had…
Had deserved what was done to them. Just like Xiulan deserved what was done to him.
Maybe all of that was true. But it didn’t make the nightmares easier to bear.
He thought about talking about them, sometimes. About trying to make someone else understand what it was like, feeling all of that, having it haunt him, like the ghosts of his old world were clinging to him, dragging him down. Hands, reaching for him in the darkness.
At least it was quiet, here. At least the fall of meteors was a distraction.
Tianyi had taken a seat on the edge of a building to watch the meteors fall, and he lightly kicked his heel against the wall as he stared up.
It was beautiful. And to some degree, watching the colorful meteors fall brought him a sense of peace. Was this common, on Earth, he wondered? Did the sky change like this frequently? If he stayed here and watched…would he have the moment’s quiet he longed for?
Tianyi wasn’t sure. But he liked the idea of it. That maybe there was calm and quiet to be found, even if it was just for a few moments. Even if he couldn’t be sure how long it would stay.
[wc: 509 words]
