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She stretches into the grass, fingers curling into the kentucky bluegrass, rough stalk meadow grass, white and red clover, and a half dozen other grasses and plants she doesn’t know the name of but persists anyway, pressing up through the earth and clinging on, holding on. She has the book she’d taken from a library somewhere in fuck-knows-where with the whatchamacallit key (the dichotomous key, she’ll remember later) to help her figure out what is which. Maybe Ellie shouldn’t care but she does, so she will. It is nice to know things besides.
“What’s that?” a voice calls beside her, quiet and hoarse, yet. She is beginning to think that is just how his voice is. She wonders if her other siblings will share it or if it is a feature to him alone.
“An eclipse,” she replies, watching as the sun is blotted out, bit by bit.
Dante hums in response, shifting up to hold up a hand to the clouds as if he can catch them. He is still frighteningly skinny even in human form, the palest of the lot of them. She suspects Dan would share the same if he had a human form still. If they could trust Dan outside the thermos. She suspects there may be a little more of Vlad in the boy beside her than any of them would like to think, especially Dante.
“So are we going to die?” Dante asks conversationally, too casually as the world shifts dark around them, pink tongues licking out around the darkness blocking the sun. She wonders what the pink is, twisting and bright and glorious in the sky.
“Nah,” Ellie says, content to watch as the eclipse begins to pass. “It’s just syzygy.”
“What?”
“Things lining up,” she says, soft, moon and Earth and Sun, and she remembers from some lecture she’d dropped into, invisible and floating, some professor saying that the Earth likely is rare in its eclipses, in the totality of them and their big, protective moon. “Did you know the moon is the largest in the solar system in comparison to its planet? Jupiter has bigger moons but they’re itty bitty compared to it.”
“I don’t know what a Jupiter is,” says Dante, dry.
“I’ll tell you later,” she says, the Sun crawling back out and glowing, too bright to look at. She watches Dante instead, dark liner about his red, red, red eyes that makes him look more like a raccoon than anything, dark hair streaked in white and dark clothing, thick and swathing a skinny little body. He is watching the clouds, something soft and wondering in it. He’s been stabilized for a month now and she keeps waiting, like she waits for herself, for something to go wrong. It hasn’t, not yet, and they are going to try to bring back the others next, now that they have an idea how to fix it.
She’s still not quite a year old, not yet, but Ellie is more solid in herself, more able to question and wonder and she is growing. She is growing, slow maybe, but she is more than just a snapshot in time. Dani suited her well but Ellie even more so and she watches as the clouds morph and shift, as the eclipse fades away to leave the Sun burning hot and bright and threatening to bake the late spring earth.
She stretches into the grass and shuts her eyes, trusting Dante to keep her safe and she is.
She is.