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The moon shines hauntingly bright overhead as Samuel walks along the avenue. It’s always been a gorgeous sight --- if dulled, occasionally, by the sparkling lights of the buildings nearby --- and yet never has it shone so brightly as it does now. The light skates along the pavement, glints off the rainwater collected in the crevices, glows against the walls and windows of nearby buildings with a resilience to defy any ambient competition. It’s beautiful.
It’s taunting.
Margaret’s face doesn’t leave him as he walks, and he can’t resist the racing of his mind enough to push it away. She’d looked so pained during their conversation, while talking about her past. He’d never been in exactly her situation, and yet he understands loneliness --- understands feeling out of place, as if you don’t belong --- can see the same isolation reflected in her eyes that he knows occupies Rose’s, occupies his own. (And yet that just makes it worse because he’d had Rose through it all, and she’d had him. Who did Margaret have, outside of a moon a world away and an empty chair from which to view it?)
She makes the Hoax terrifyingly real. Before, the audience for their stories had been faceless, nameless. A blob of numbers and readership statistics and financial gain. They’d never really been people --- or, at least, Samuel had never let himself think about the fact that they were, lest he talk himself out of taking the leap required to print their lies in the first place --- and so lying had been harmless. Beneficial, even, since surely the people of New York would want a break from the mindless drudgery of city living that had so worn down him and Rose over the years, let the facts be damned! Who wouldn’t want a bit more excitement in their lives? What harm could come from a minor fib?
A lot, as it turns out. Samuel won’t be forgetting the guilt he’d felt while listening to Margaret’s story any time soon. She’d smiled when talking about the Discoveries, had held out her trust for them to hold when they’d already betrayed it, had said she believed them when she barely even knew them, and it was that --- the ease of her commitment, bolstered as it was by the desperation of getting answers to her too-deep, too-unanswered questions --- that made it so hard to hear her words.
I believe you, Samuel.
They echoed in his ears, as unable to be ignored as everything about her, and he almost wants to cover his ears for how real it seems. He doesn’t, though no one is around to notice the oddness if he had, because he knows it’s not. It’s merely the ghost of his own remorse, dogging his heels and taunting him with what he’s done.
He’s never used his words to hurt before. Not intentionally, and never to someone so innocent as a person he’d never met. For Rose, they were excitement: distant glories and far-off adventures to liven up a world that never cared for them but always seemed to hold so much more. For him… Well, he’d be lying if he claimed there hadn’t been a bit of that for him, too, but nonetheless: it was more an escape instead. An exercise, to clear the cobwebs from his brain, or to vent the chaos of his thoughts. To let the people in his head --- imagined and all the better for it because they’d never leave for long --- have a moment in the sun.
The day they’d first come up with the idea of telling each other stories about the moon, everything changed. The tales hadn’t been the Discoveries back then --- had been even more fantastical than they were now, and absent the earthly lens The Sun used to report about them --- but they’d been the perfect nexus between Samuel’s words and Rose’s fascination. The stories were theirs. And, since they were stored in their heads instead of on paper, they could never be taken away.
A thing of wonders indeed.
Not a thing of cruelty, like Samuel’s worried they’ve become. Margaret might not know what they’ve done, and yet it is cruel, isn’t it? Letting her believe that she’s learned more about her one so-elusive constant --- about herself --- and to know all the time that it’s never been real at all? To dangle a string --- delicate as a moonbeam because what is more fragile than trust? --- and lead her along by it, a leash of their own making: forged with lies and tempered by her faith? It’s a cruelty of which Samuel had never thought himself capable.
He keeps walking, eyes fixed ahead to try and ignore every haunting way in which Margaret has unknowingly followed him, but it doesn’t much work. He’s not even sure what he’s doing out on the streets now --- pacing aimlessly back and forth --- but the memories and thoughts and guilt are there nonetheless, racing along at a clip he’ll never be able to ignore. He can’t even write through it --- can’t pull out his notebook and ignore the world around him by weaving an extraterrestrial one of his own --- because the Discoveries are precisely the cause of the guilt roiling in his stomach.
By the time he sees Rose again, he’s come to the only conclusion that feels right.
– – –
When Samuel finds her, Margaret is sitting by her window as she so often does. Her features --- breathtaking since the first --- are draped in moonlight and it feels right, like she’d always been meant to have her face turned towards the heavens, crowned by the radiance of some far-off beauty to match her own. Seeing it, Samuel understands better what she told him about her connection to the moon; how could he deny such a romantic idea when the proof sits before his very eyes?
She turns away from the window when he walks in, but her smile, soft and easy, doesn’t dim. (That feels as wrong as the Hoax --- or, perhaps, the same, since the two are connected --- and Samuel knows that he’s about to do the right thing. It just… happens to be terrifying in equal measure.) “Mister Stratford!”, she calls, and she’s on her feet moments thereafter. “How does the night find you?”
“Well; thank you.” Thank everything for scripted niceties; Samuel doesn’t have the energy to invest in coming up with these, too: not now. “I… I have to talk with you about something.”
“Oh?” She straightens, smoothing her skirts, and he’s not sure if she’s preparing herself or holding herself back. Neither option helps. “Of course. What is it?”
“It’s…” No way out but through, Samuel. “It’s to do with the Discoveries.”
A flash of something too bright for what he has to tell her skims across her face. “Yes? What of them?” She takes a measured step forward, with all the impression of a motion just barely restrained. “Is there news of the next installation?”
“I-–” Well, how to answer that? “In a sense. Rose and I… talked. We think there’s something you need to know.”
She nods. “Okay.” Then, when he doesn’t immediately speak: “I must confess that your manner does not seem to indicate good news.” She pauses, seems to steel herself. “Is something wrong?”
Yes, Samuel can’t help but think. Yes, it is, and it’s all because of us–- but he can’t say that. He has to pick his words more carefully, and yet all of his pre-prepared speeches have flown from his head now that he’s here and needs them the most. “I… have a confession to make. From both of us.”
“A confession?” Is he making up how hollow her voice sounds? He knows that tone --- hears it in his own voice whenever the ground has dropped away from him, or when he feels like it’s about to --- and he winces just to hear it in hers. “Mister Stratford, you’re worrying me. Please, make haste with your…” Her words linger, searching. “News.”
The moment draws out. He can’t possibly say how much time has passed from her saying that to now, how many seconds or minutes have ticked away. She sits there and waits, with a willingness that he knows comes from years spent needing unfailing patience, her agitation visible only in the slightest trembling of her fingers as they rest, clasped, in front of her. He tries to remember the sight --- to remember Margaret as she is, kind and generous and so, so trusting; happy, almost, or at least peaceful, but not upset yet --- because he’s sure that won’t last. Not for the first time, he wishes he could capture a moment for the future, with more than merely the incomplete picture that words can create.
And, when he’s done all he can do, he takes a breath.
“We lied.”
She blinks, slowly. “I’m sorry?” Her head tilts, face still so open. “You lied… about what?”
“The Discoveries. I’m sorry, Margaret, I know how much they mean to you, and-–” He pauses. Breathes, lest his words trip over themselves and fail him now that he needs them more than anything. “Please believe me: it was never meant to go this far. They were just… they were stories. Fictions, that we thought the world should see because they were good and interesting and exciting and…” He drops his eyes. Stares at the floor, at his shoes --- dirt-specked thanks to his walking through city streets, out of place as he always feels --- not meant to stand on such high-class floors. “We never counted on you.”
“What…” Her voice is definitely hollow now, like everything that once sustained her has been pulled out, and she sags against the chair behind her as if his words had cut the strings that held her upright. It puts her in his line of vision again, and he can see her eyes searching his face. He wonders what she’s thinking --- if she’s trying to gauge whether he’s playing a trick on her, or if she’s just wondering the same thing about him --- but he can’t bring himself to try and figure it out, not when she also looks so devastated. “What do you mean, you lied?”
“There’s no telescope. I don’t know Sir John Herschel, and neither does Rose. The Discoveries are just… they’re stories we made up, staring at the moon and asking questions, just like-–” Just like you, he almost says, but he can’t bring himself to say that when their situations are so different, when he and Rose have (inadvertently or not) taken advantage of that fact. “We wanted to make people’s lives better and now that we know we’ve done far worse for you…” He hangs his head again, because what else is there for him to do? “We can’t keep quiet. It would be unconscionable.”
“Everything you wrote. The flowers, the water, the… the people.” Her voice shatters, cracking beneath the strain of what he’s just revealed, and he winces to hear it. “It’s all a lie?”
“Yes.” A moment, then, “I’m sorr–-”
“Get out, Samuel.”
The words are quiet and he can’t quite make them out from where he stands but he hopes he misheard. He has to have the time to say his piece --- to apologise, to explain, to tell her everything about what happened and why --- because his words are all he’s got and to not be able to share them means that he doesn’t know how to fix this. “What?”
“Get. Out. Samuel,” she says again, and there’s no mishearing it this time. Gone is the eloquence he so associates with her, and the honorific by which she usually calls him; Mister Stratford is the name of the man she respected, and now she’s seeing him as he is: Samuel, and all of his flaws. There’s fury in her voice instead, thick and crackling. She stands again, towering over him not by form but by sheer unhappiness, and a betrayed pain has writ itself across her every feature. “I said: leave. Now.”
“Please, Margaret, let me just apolo-–”
“I don’t want to hear it, Samuel. Get out.” She’s still standing by the moonlight, the glow from just beyond the window draped along her back, her hair, her skirts, until it almost looks like she’s gathering it close to her: a shield, perhaps, or a weapon. “I’ve asked you kindly. Now see yourself out.”
“But-–”
“OUT! ”
He only half-processes her hands lifting towards him, like she’s trying to push him away. The way her eyes glow bright, bright blue with a power he can’t explain. The way the moonlight she’s standing in seems to churn and heave and seethe, more with every passing moment. He’s more focused on her --- on the pain carving channels into her expression, the tears glinting in her eyes and streaming silent, silver paths down her cheeks, the noble way she holds herself despite coming unquestionably close to breaking down --- than he is on the impossibility of starlight itself coming alive to avenge her shattered trust.
But come alive it does, glowing from her skin and slamming through the room with force Samuel would never have expected from its normal silvery grace. (How much strength must lie beneath any cultivated delicacy, lest that very quality be wrenched from it, piece by piece. How difficult gentleness must be, in a world that seeks to destroy it entirely.) He doesn’t even have time to blink before it slams into him, too, pushing him back, back, back: blowing him through the door with a force that leaves him stumbling into the street. He can’t wrap his head around the logistics of it because he can’t bring himself to think about anything save the betrayal on Margaret’s face, the power she wielded against him. (It hurts, not that she used her, frankly, astonishing power against him, but that she felt compelled to do so in the first place --- that she’d had to defend herself against him when he’d never meant to hurt her --- because it shows him precisely how much he had.)
He doesn’t try to go back inside. Everything feels wrong --- questions layered upon questions flooding his mind --- and yet he knows that telling the truth was the only right course of action so he also feels oddly settled. There will be time to figure things out later. Time to explain if she wants to hear it and apologise if she doesn’t. Time to ask questions, if they ever manage to make up for the hurt they’ve caused.
Instead, he stands on the street and basks in the moonlight, face turned towards the sky.