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Uranus was never sure how he felt about these trips down to Earth’s surface.
They did give a break from the monotony of life in the Solar System, which was brilliant, but it also tended to mean dealing with Earthlings. Who were—and nobody could tell Earth he said this—on the average very annoying.
So he was always a little bit cautious on being excited for these Earthling surface trips… but maybe he should have been more cautious.
Or maybe the universe just had it out for him.
“This place is simply beautiful,” Saturn declared, clasping his hands together and staring out over the lake before them with open-mouthed awe. Uranus couldn’t help but agree with him, eyeing the rippling water that spread off in all directions, the edge just barely within his sight when he strained and squinted. “Earth, you’re so sweet to plan this for us!”
Earth came up the dock with a brilliant grin.
“I thought you’d all enjoy it,” he said, gesturing widely to the lake, “even if it isn’t one of the best. Probably too many Earthlings for your comfort at one of those.” He shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind it, but they are my Earthlings.” A moment later he shook his head roughly and held something out. “Oh! Before I forget, Uranus, you should probably put this on. Unless you want to share Mars’s title of Red Planet.” Uranus suspiciously grabbed it and read the label—sunscreen—before blinking at Earth.
“What?”
Earth arched an eyebrow. “You are pasty as hell, man,” he said, like that explained anything. “Just make sure to reapply it, or you’ll probably get a nasty sunburn. And let Saturn have some too! You’re not the only one who needs it.” And then he whirled around and walked away with a whistle, leaving Uranus to stare in confusion at the bottle in hand for several seconds before he finally uncapped it, squeezing some onto his palm.
It was oddly cool—which was definitely nice in this heat—but he had no honest idea what to do with it.
“Sunscreen?”
Saturn tipped his head to the side, brows pinched.
Shrugging, Uranus opened his mouth only to be interrupted by Earth’s loud footsteps on the dock. “Oh! I forgot to tell you what it’s for. Oops.” He snickered at himself. “The Sun is a deadly laser.”
Saturn made a sound. “I wouldn’t call him that…”
“Earthling thing,” Earth said, waving away their confusion as always. “But if you’re going to be out in the sun for hours, you need to put on sunscreen so you don’t get a bad sunburn. Trust me, they hurt. Sometimes they can cause third-degree burns, which…” He grimaced, shuddering. “Not fun at all. So put that on anywhere that’ll be exposed to the sunlight!” He was gone before Uranus could ask any other questions, but at least they had some idea of it now.
“Anywhere that’ll be exposed to sunlight?” Saturn repeated, pressing one finger to his mouth.
Uranus turned his hand, staring at the glob of sunscreen on it, and then he shrugged, handing the bottle over to Saturn. “If I get burnt, I’ll just blame it on Earth’s bad explanation skills,” he grumbled. “Can’t he make anything clear?” He grimaced while rubbing the sunscreen into his bare arms, the feeling oddly tacky—and even once he’d rubbed it all in he still didn’t feel right, rolling his shoulders until his back protested the constant movement and he gave up, resigning himself to the discomfort.
And then he turned to Saturn only to be practically attacked as he grabbed his chin and kept him in place, dropping dollops of sunscreen to his cheeks before using both hands to rub it in.
“Ma—e!”
“You can’t forget your face, Uranus! You don’t want a…” he paused, squeezing his face between his sunscreen-covered hands while he tried and failed to squirm away from the grip. “What did Earth say? Third degree burn? Wouldn’t that be horrid?”
Uranus mumbled a loud, muffled, “Let me go!”
Saturn paid him no attention, pressing a dot of sunscreen to the end of his nose when he finally did release him. “There! Now your pretty face will be all safe from burns.” Uranus just glared at him and rubbed the side of his hand against his nose to wipe it away. “Don’t look at me like that! You know you wouldn’t let me otherwise.”
“I can put on sunscreen, mate,” he complained. “And you could have asked!”
“Mhmm,” Saturn hummed, already squeezing more sunscreen onto his palms. “Oh! Look at that, it’s Neptune.”
And that was the only warning Uranus got before he was nearly bowled straight into the water by his cannonball of a cousin, barely stopping at the edge of the dock. “Uranus! Isn’t this so fun? Look at all that water! And Earth said we could swim in it!” Just like the rest of them, Neptune was already dressed in the bathers Earth had said they all needed to wear… though rather than tumbling free over his shoulders, Neptune had plaited his own hair in a side braid similar to Uranus's. Uranus had no idea when the bloody hell he’d had the chance to do it.
“When did you do that, mate?” he asked, baffled.
Neptune blinked, eyes drifting past him to the lake, practically gleaming blue. “Do what?”
“Your hair. On your head.” He looked up and up—enough that his eyes nearly rolled back in his head—until Uranus sighed with helpless fondness and shook his head. “Nevermind, mate. Are you swimming?” The outfit made it pretty obvious, but with Neptune assumptions were never really the right course. “I don’t know if I will.” He looked out over the lake behind them, studying the scenery before his eyes fell to the deep blue of the water itself.
Saturn chimed in, “Oh, Uranus, I think you should! Don’t you, Jupi?”
Uranus turned—confused on when Jupiter had arrived—only to find him coming up the dock with the rocky planets behind him, chatting to each other in voices just low enough to be indecipherable to him. “I think we should all try swimming in the lake at least once,” Jupiter said, stopping right beside Saturn. “Trying is never bad.” He paused. “Rarely bad. It depends on what you’re trying to do.” The way his eyes slid to the rocky planets, Uranus had an idea of why he’d said that.
“I’m not sure,” he admitted, tugging at the end of his braid.
He wasn’t even sure what had him so uneasy, but something did.
“I’ll stay by you,” Neptune chirped, abruptly right against his side. “Don’t worry, cousin!” Uranus finally let go of his braid and nodded reluctantly—he knew if anything, Neptune wouldn’t let him get hurt if he could help it. And this uneasiness was probably just his own stupid nerves, nothing else.
He would be fine.
“You guys can swim whenever,” Earth called out, pointing straight at the lake. “Just remember, it’s deeper the further out you go! Watch the drop-off. If you lose ground under your feet, just float. You know, like you’re in orbit!” He stepped to the edge of the dock. “Oh, and it’s cold. Don’t worry, you’ll get used to it.” With a mocking salute, he grinned at them and said, “Last one in the water’s a loser!” Uranus stared in disbelief as he fell backwards off the dock and straight into the water, engulfed beneath the surface for a second or two before emerging and wiping his hair out of his eyes. “Come on!”
Neptune tugged at his arm. “You heard him, Ura. Last one in the water’s a loser!”
He pulled again, dragging him that much closer to the edge of the dock.
Uranus’s eyes widened. “Don’t you dare—!” But his words cut off when Neptune pulled them both off the dock and into the water below with a cheerful yell. The sensation of air and then water under his feet and all around him was an abrupt transition that had him spluttering as he burst above the surface, slicking wet strands of hair back from his face. “Bloody hell, Neptune, you wanker!”
Several more splashes told him that more of the others had jumped down from the dock.
Neptune emerged from the water just enough to ask a cheerful, “What’s that?”
“Exactly what you are,” Uranus grumbled, staring down at the water around him as he abruptly realized he was staying afloat, that he was actually… swimming? He was in the water and swimming? “Bloody hell, I’m swimming!”
“Technically you’re just floating,” Neptune chirped, swimming literal circles around him. “Try to go to that rock!” He lifted one dripping hand and pointed at a rock just a little further from them, poking out of the water in an oddly-square shape. “I think I’ll call that one Proteus-rock. It looks like Proteus.” Uranus blinked at him, and then at the rock, and then he blinked again the moment he realized Neptune was actually right, and then he gave up on understanding anything. “Swim to Proteus-rock!”
Swimming was harder than he expected.
Much harder than floating.
“Go Ura! Woo!” Despite what he may have thought, Neptune easily swimming alongside him and shouting encouragement did not make him feel better. Frankly, Uranus had no idea why he thought it worked that way. His own splashing and wild limb-flailing didn’t resemble swimming in the slightest in comparison, but at least he could say he was getting somewhere. Even if it was taking longer than he ever would have liked. “You’re almost there!”
If he didn’t think it would make Neptune very sad, Uranus would smash Proteus-rock the second he got there, from how mocking it seemed just sitting there.
His limbs felt heavy and tired already just from that short period of swimming, and he grabbed onto the rock like a lifeline the moment he was close enough, gasping for air and ignoring the subtle embarrassment of looking like an absolute fool for being unable to swim easily.
“Good job, Uranus!”
He looked up at Saturn’s shout only to find him attached onto Jupiter like some smashed-together asteroid, hands buried in his hair and legs wrapped around his neck. The moment he looked up Saturn beamed at him and started clapping, but that just told Uranus both he and Jupiter had been watching that entire thing, and so he only felt more embarrassed. It wasn’t fun.
Neptune started clapping along with Saturn a moment later, but he did it half-underwater, which made it sound that much weirder. Uranus sighed and sagged against the rock.
“Now—!”
He interrupted Neptune. “Can I have a moment, mate, please? Before I try to swim anywhere else? Bloody hell, you’re going to give me a core attack.” He already swore he could feel his pulse in the back of his head, and Earth had already given them the whole “Earthling bodies are fragile, so you have to be more careful down on my surface than you can be in the Solar System” talk.
“Okay,” Neptune said, dragging the word out. “But you shouldn’t give up!”
Uranus wanted to give up and go right back on shore, maybe dip his feet into the water at most. He could sketch the scenery, take advantage of the one strength he did have. But Neptune’s pleading eyes were hard to resist, and so he sighed and nodded. “Yeah, mate, I promise. Just give me a bit.”
“Yay! I’ll be right back!” Neptune swam off in a burst of speed, ducking straight under the dock.
Open-mouthed, Uranus stared after him. “What happened to staying by me?” he muttered. He knew Neptune meant it with every molecule of his body, but he seemed to have a very different definition of stay by you than Uranus did.
For all he knew, stay by you for Neptune meant the whole bloody lake was free for all.
Sighing at that thought, Uranus turned and eyed the next-closest rock he could see, taking a moment to glance over the rocky planets where they were incessantly splashing each other—or rather, Earth was splashing Mars, who was splashing him back, and Venus and Mercury were both mercilessly splashing each other—and Jupiter and Saturn still in the same position they’d been in before.
Everyone but Neptune was in sight, and nobody was paying any attention to him at all.
All he had was Neptune, who had just… swam away from him.
“Bloody great.” Uranus muttered under his breath for several moments before finally letting go of the Proteus-rock, kicking his feet until he felt well enough about staying completely afloat. The nearest rock was close enough that he thought he could get to it before Neptune came back, and then…
At least then he’d have some sort of achievement to share, yeah?
With one last glance around to make sure Neptune wasn’t going to appear out of nowhere, Uranus kicked away from the rock and on towards the next one, ignoring the returning heaviness in his limbs and the cold seeping into his skin. He was used to the cold, after all.
This was nothing in comparison to the temperatures of his orbit.
(Not for the Earthling bodies, the sensible part of his brain replied.
Uranus ignored it.)
It took long enough to get to the next rock that his legs felt like asteroids grafted onto him rather than his own limbs by the time he managed to slump against it, arms wrapped around it. He could feel the rough surface of the rock grating against his bare skin, but the sheer nicety of having something solid to rest against made that feeling easy to ignore.
“Uranus! Uranus!”
He was half out of it before he registered Neptune’s gleeful shouts, turning his head enough to rest his eyes on where he floated next to the Proteus-rock. “You swam it! Without me watching you!” He clapped above the water that time, shining so brightly with happiness that it made his own exhaustion recede a little, enough to push off the rock and wave to him. “Wow!”
“Thanks, mate!” he called out, ignoring that it took a try or two before he could. “Did anyone else—?”
But the moment he glanced around Uranus knew the question was futile, seeing as the others were still focused in amongst themselves, and Neptune was the only one looking at him. “What?!”
“Nevermind!” he shouted back. “I’ll see you at the next rock!”
Ignoring his own lead-heavy limbs and the confusion flashing over Neptune’s face, he turned and pushed off from the rock he’d still been slightly clinging onto. A slight zing of satisfaction rang through him when he noticed his swimming strokes were that much easier… though that didn’t last for long before he was only halfway to the next rock and his entire body gave an abrupt no, apparently dissatisfied with him not resting for longer. He tried to turn—his head, his body, anything—and only felt his legs lock up completely, his arms non-responsive to his inner attempts to keep going for the rock, for any sort of solid something to grab onto and cling.
There was nothing.
And no one.
“Neptune,” he tried to call out, dismayed when his voice failed him and stretched thin and reedy. His breath was bursting in and out, every single one of them aching in his chest. “Neptune!” And suddenly a single wave slapped against his chin, and he lost concentration, and—
An electric twinge shot through his leg, and—
What the—?!
Uranus’s breath left in a cut-off gasp of pure pain as his entire leg tightened up in white-hot agony, and before he knew it he slipped completely under the water, mouth full of it and eyes aching even when he squeezed them shut. He surfaced for half-a-second, but any sense of relief swept away the moment he slipped under the surface again. Clawing at the water with his aching, lead-heavy arms did nothing, just made him feel more exhausted and overwhelmed, and as the surface closed over him completely and his vision washed over with blue, his sense of hearing dulling with it, Uranus could only hope to all the stars in the universe that Neptune would get there fast enough.
(Because he knew he’d been watching. Neptune had said he’d stay with him.
He had to be.
…Right?)
The sunlight around him was slowly dimming, a fact he could tell even through his closed eyelids. It was just… darker. His entire body shuddered—save for his leg, still stiff-straight and sending lightning-zaps of agony through his system—and Uranus reached up, reached until his arm ached, reached, reached, reached—
And then he forced his eyes open and realized he couldn’t even tell which way was up and which was down, and his thoughts exploded in a wash of broken, half-formed thoughts.
Which way—? Where’s—? What happ—? Neptune! Jupiter! Saturn! Anyone—
Uranus whimpered soundlessly, choking on water and his own thoughts.
When the fire in his leg abruptly died, he felt relief for a single glorious second… and then he realized his limbs still felt unbearably heavy, and he was still sinking, and he was so tired, and he couldn’t breathe, and his vision started turning dark at the edges, like everything was narrowing to a circle in front of him. Everything was distant and muffled like a dream.
A dream.
Maybe that was all this was.
A bad dream. He was fine, just fine.
Uranus was perfectly fine. Nothing to wo r r y a b o u t.
And then suddenly he was reminded of the hurt, and he turned his head to the side and coughed, coughed, coughed, coughed, coughed—
Come on Ura, come on!
Until suddenly his chest convulsed and suddenly he was coughing up water, a disgusting sensation and taste that had him internally cringing even as it kept going, an endless process once it’d started. “That’s —that’s it, Ura! Cough. Cough!” Neptune’s voice was suddenly much clearer, the hand on his back patting and patting. It took a second for his brain to connect that and Neptune, long enough that he tried and failed to squirm away even as he kept coughing up water. “Saturn!”
“I’m here!”
His throat ached, chin trembling as he coughed several more times without surfacing more water. “Uranus! Uranus, are you okay?” Uranus coughed several more times to answer that question, whimpering in pain as his throat ached with every single new cough. “Oh, dear.” A warm hand smoothed hair back from his forehead, and helplessly he melted into the touch, whining in pain the moment his brain took stock of his entire body and realized just how overwrought he felt. His entire leg—the one that’d felt like electric fire was working through it—still ached like one big knot lived under his skin, and he tried fruitlessly to move it, squirming against the ground even as Neptune and—and Saturn, that was definitely Saturn, tried to stop him from moving.
“Breathe slowly,” Saturn told him tearfully, pressing one hand to his shoulder, then his forehead. “Earth will be here in a second, okay? I can’t heal you here. I don’t have my powers. I’m sorry, darling.” He gently swept aside more drenched hair. Uranus’s eyes hazily blinked open only to find both Neptune and Saturn hovering over him, wearing identical expressions of distress that looked out of place for both.
Uranus groaned.
“—at ppend?”
Neptune and Saturn exchanged a glance. “Don’t worry about that now, Ura,” Neptune said, trying for a smile that looked so fake it was unreal on him. “You’re okay!”
He blinked, eyes suddenly watering.
"I -ought I was going to die," he choked out, watching Neptune's smile immediately crumple out of existence, his eyes filling with identical tears.
"Ura—!"
“Sorry, sorry!” another voice interrupted. “Move over, he’ll need healing now.”
Saturn moved to the side, and Uranus struggled for a second to recognize who was crouched over him before he remembered it was Earth, and he remembered exactly what that meant, and utter relief poured through him in time with Earth’s welcomed healing touch, cold and familiar ice flooding through every vein in his body until his limbs all felt limp, his thoughts drifting away one by one.
Get him—
—happened? How could—?!
I didn’t—!