Mindless Lunacy
"Hello, I'm Mindless Lunacy. I've come to talk to you, Fallen Meteor."
"Hello, that's not my name, but I guess I'm the one you seek. Call me Falling."
"Falling, Can I come in?"
"Sure, come on in, don't make trouble, and I won't make any for you."
"Like I could make trouble for a big boy like you." She said, blushing reflexively. He's just out of the shower, damn, my timing is so bad. She thought to herself, for indeed, he was in a simple robe, clearly after his morning ablutions.
"You've been here before?"
"What? No, why do you ask?"
"You knew about the cat's hiding place, under that couch, I saw you avoid it with your feet."
"I've not been... to this new place, but the layout's almost identical to your old one. When you were Meteor alights the horizon, you had a similar appartment." She blushed again.
He coloured too, seems either he was remembering, or he was embarassed not to have changed the layout of the place. "Am I that predictable?"
"Well, to Mindless Lunacy, maybe, not to Dancing Devil in the Pale Moonlight. We had no secrets then... I'm sorry, this is awkward, but hopefully, it'll only be awkward once."
"I'm listening..."
"I'm sure you've heard rumours of my getting involved, with Bramble, and with Jester..."
"Yes?"
"Me and Jester are through, I tried to kill him, although, sadly, it didn't take."
"You admit to trying to kill him?"
"He's a creature of darkness, as defined by your own patron, I'd have been doing Yu-Shan a service, maybe gotten a medal."
"There's that, he's not exactly a common interloper."
"No, and we were together some years." Almost four, less than I was involved with you, back in the day, but not that that much. She didn't add.
"And what's that got to do with me?"
"Jester? I wouldn't put it past him to target you in retaliation. He's always been quicksilver, and he's about as sane as five kanuki hopped up on catnip in a bag. You may need to take precautions."
"And?"
"And, I'm with Bramble, I'm not with you, look. You've been out of this for a while now, it's given me a long time to think..."
"..."
"About why it didn't work between Devil Dancer in the Pale Moonlight and Meteor Alights the Horizon."
"I didn't..." He started, then stopped himself, unsure how to proceed.
"No? Well it'd have been the first time. You may have had your memories trimmed a bit, but I didn't. We fell for each other at least four seperate times, as Shot from the Heavens, as Hammer of the Sky, as Comet Strikes the Earth, as Meteor Alights the Horizon. It didn't work out any of those times, and I'm not saying it's you... But the fact that you kept getting killed, and changed, while I stay the same, it..."
"Feels odd?"
"Yeah, you're about to start finishing my sentences aren't you? Well don't! I don't need you, and I..." She was crying.
"Now, now. I wasn't, or at least, I'm not doing it on purpose. And I think you're right, it's best if we avoid each other. For a bunch of reasons, including Jester, he's less likely to come blaming me for no reason if we're never seen to together. For the fact that it never worked, too. Everyone kept mentioning you, telling me I should see you again, now that I'm back, but even I could tell it's a bad idea. I'm not any of those four guys you named, I'm my own person, I can't own their mistakes and repeating them isn't a great idea either, not when I'm trying to learn who I am as a person."
"See, that's so reasonable. Grr."
"Now now kitten."
"Stop it! I hated it when you called me that."
"No, you didn't. You can't fool me, they didn't erase my memories this time. Not all of them. I remember calling you kitten... Err, no, sorry, I shouldn't have said anything." He was blushing again. Her hair was tangled over her eyes, just like in his memories, her big, luminous cat's eyes, green, slitted, like a cat. Oh, that had been her tell, long ago, she had cat's eyes in all her forms. Walk away Falling... Walk away. He told himself. Walk away from those huge, luminous green eyes. Most lunars didn't inherit tells. Wait, she hadn't, I'm the one who reincarnated. She's still the one that had those green eyes when she turned into a Simhata, when she swam like a barracuda in the far west, hunting for pearls, with a cat's luminous green eyes under the seawater.
I'm the one that changed, damn, she's the one that still looks that damned good, how many centuries has it been? She might know, but she never told me. Said Luna herself had forbidden from letting others know her true age, nor how many centuries she spent in the wyld in that... experiment. She'd changed her name, the changes from the wyld had been too intensive, people hadn't recognized her, anyways. But she was, in truth, Devil Dancing in the Pale Moonlight, the woman his soul had fallen in love with, five times now. And seventeen times she'd told him she was in love with someone else.
It didn't matter. It didn't stop either of them, then. If he was smart, he'd ask her to walk away. If she was smart, she'd slap him, punch him, do anything to make him leave. Oh wait, she was in his place, she should just walk away.
But she couldn't. Bramble was going to make a scene again.
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