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“In Cheve, we believe those who die become stars,” Scarlet’s voice is hushed. Reverent. “Sometimes it feels like I’m visiting my folks, lying out here stargazing.”
Selena squints up at the night sky above them. She can kind of see the appeal, thinking those that have been lost are watching over them.
The stars were long gone when she was growing up. Years of destruction and fire and death rendered the sky dark, leaving only clouds and storms to light the night. There were no stars in her future, nothing to navigate by, nothing to guide them by.
Nothing to show that her parents were watching over her, not the way Scarlet’s are.
Selena brings a hand up, reaching above her head as if she could pull a star from the sky. She picks the brightest one, twinkling blue and white, hiding it behind her palm as she stretches out.
Scarlet leans on one elbow, shooting Selena a lazy grin.
“You seem lost in thought,” she says, “what’s on your mind?”
A sigh, and Selena lets her hand drop again. “Nothing,” she says, “It’s stupid, anyway.”
Scarlet’s smile softens into something a little more genuine. “Hey, now,” she says, “nothing you say is stupid.”
Selena snorts. “Nothing?”
Scarlet shrugs one shoulder, tilting her head with it. “Unfamiliar, maybe. But Cheve has always been one to forge its own path. Even if we’re both of Nohr, our lives are very different.”
Both of Nohr. Selena holds back a huff at that.
“… Those that aren’t gone,” Selena says eventually, turning her face back up to the night sky, “do they still look at us from the stars?”
Scarlet hums. “I don’t think they can,” she says honestly, “I mean— they’re still living, aren’t they? Our feet are on the ground for a reason.”
“I suppose…”
“Besides,” Scarlet continues, “I think it’s enough to be able to look to the same sky.”
Selena doesn’t reply to that, leaning back on her hands and turning her face up to the starlight.
They’re a world away from Ylisse. Selena is not the same person she was, and the world isn’t the same, either.
Scarlet settles down a little further on her arm, watching Selena’s face more than the sky. “What colour star do you think I would be?”
Her thoughts drift to her parents again— the ones alive now, who never met the fate she remembers. Can stars travel through time? Is the family she lost watching?
Her mother would be blue. Selena is sure of that, watching the stars above her shift through a rainbow of colours. Blue would suit her, melancholic as it is. The same colour as the man she loved but had to stand aside from and watch from afar. Blue like the sky she rode her pegasus through, shoulders back and chin held high with pride.
Her father would be white. Pure and strong, one of the brightest ones in the sky.
Selena squints above them until she finds two like that next to each other, twinkling gently.
There’s a space in between them for a third one, Selena thinks. She’s unsure what colour, but she knows it would shine duller, hiding away so as to not distract from the beauty of the other two.
It may not be the parents she spent so long grieving, it may not be the couple she got to know as an adult, but it feels like something.
Selena tries to see the bigger picture they’re a part of, tries to find the lines connecting the stars to each other.
She can’t.
It’s the third night sky Selena has known — darkness, stars, and an entirely new world’s constellations. It had taken a while to adjust, especially when she tried to look up to navigate to only come face to face with the reality that none of the guiding stars were there anymore. Selena hid away that night, brushing tears angrily off her cheeks because she’d been here long enough that it shouldn’t have shocked her, that logically she should’ve already figured this out.
She knows what Scarlet said was a form of comfort — no matter where people are in the world, they can always look at the sky above their heads and know the other is looking to it as well, and yet…
And yet.
Selena swallows the lump in her throat, ducking her head. Scarlet sends her a questioning look.
“I dunno,” Selena says, “red?”