Work Text:
He’d always loved the ocean. Never saw it much, growing up hundreds of miles from it and all, but he loved it.
Now, as he watched the waves lap at the yellow surface, swelling only to break and collapse back into the ocean once more, he found a bit of that appreciation again.
He swirled the bottle in his hand and took a sip.
The sun was beginning to slink away behind the Earth’s surface, and he hadn’t the energy to cling onto it as it waded away. The blue of the sky twisted into pinks, purples. The sun was always beautiful like that. Even when leaving, it always tried to make the world around it better.
He wished he could do that.
If he were to try and ignore the sound of water, dripping and spilling and splashing around him, he would hear birds. Not birdsong, but the squawking, incessant screeches of seagulls. He’d never much minded them. Always thought they were cute. Reminded him where he was.
The sun felt differently. The sun always squirmed away from the sound, never near one another. As the sun rose, the seagulls would cease, and vice versa.
He had a feeling the sun would now do the same with him. In the end, he’d filled an all-too-similar role. Screeching and screaming and crying and shaking and waiting, hoping, that maybe it would come back.
He felt certain it would.
Why wasn’t it back already?
The marbled sky had begun to leave, now, electing to fill the sky with an inky black. As he looked at the ocean he could see the little droplets of stars, moonlight, beginning to paint its surface.
Instead, he returned his attention to the bottle, watching its waves crash and break apart as he shook it. It was a bad habit, the sun had told him. Never ended well. More than once he’d spilt it. This was the first time he’d broken it. The glass shattered as it hit the concrete block he was sat on. Suddenly it was that same, all-too-perfect inky black, as he stared down at the shards.
He wasn’t all too sure why the sun had left. He’d learned it in textbooks, in documentaries, sure. Science was always one of his strong suits. But this was different. What had happened here was chemical, a loss of…
a loss of feeling, he supposed.
It happened over a few hours, but, really, he would argue it happened over years. Decades. The sun was weird like that.
No, he corrected himself, the sun was patient like that.
But the sun should be back, at least. Why wasn’t it back?
Eventually orbits shift. The sun had just moved out of his.
Or maybe it never was in his, he corrected once more. The sun doesn’t orbit.
He took one of the crystals beside him into his hand, twisting it through his fingers, staring. He held it up, where the sun would usually be in the sky, and instead stared right through it at the moon.
He stood up, still clutching the thing, and wandered forwards. Gaze never wavering from where he knew the sun should be, in front of him, with him, why wasn’t it with him?
Even as the waves began to wrap around his ankles, then his calves, then his waist, he didn’t waver in his mission.
Why wasn’t it with him?
He dropped to his knees, letting the glass in his hand sink beneath the surface with him.
He could find the sun here, at least.
Why wasn’t he with him?