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Uranus had a secret.
Not a bad secret, to be clear. It was just… something he’d rather keep to himself.
The paintbrush sagged in his hand as he sighed, too distracted by the bounty of strings leading from his index finger and over his shoulder. He knew the exact number without even counting them, had watched the number slowly grow over the years.
28 strings of pastel cyan stacked in a ring on his index finger, leading directly over his shoulder—and when he turned his head, Uranus found exactly what he expected, all 28 of his moons sitting behind him. They were all gathered in a loose grouping a short distance away—within the orbits of some of his closest-orbiting moons—and every string ran straight to its respective moon.
He went ahead and counted them, eyes jumping to each.
Cordelia, Ophelia, Bianca, Cressida, Desdemona…
Until he landed on Ferdinand, his farthest orbiting moon. A tiny relief dripped into his core once he’d counted them all out—that same sense as always that wanted his moons close to him. (At least he could always find them with their strings. Hopefully.) His gaze turned back to the strings a moment later, twisting his hand side to side and watching the strings move with it.
He’d been seeing them ever since his collision.
Whatever had slammed into him all those billions of years ago had not only knocked him clean onto his side and given him bouts of pain that never quite went away, but it’d somehow also granted him the ability to see the strings. At least that was what he assumed, since he couldn’t remember seeing them before his collision… though his memory of that period of time was bad enough that he could have always had the ability and just forgotten it.
Anyway.
He’d nearly told Neptune about it once, after he’d caught Uranus staring at the brilliant blue of the strings leading straight to his moons—the dimmest of which was Triton’s, and even that was bright—but he’d psyched himself out of it.
What would telling anyone else get him?
(What would he even say?
G’day, mate, did you know there’s some strings tied to your finger, and also I’m apparently the only one who can see it?
Yeah, right.
Neptune would believe him. He knew Neptune well enough to recognize that, but… stars, it just felt like revealing something else was different about him, and he dealt with enough of that. Ugh.)
It’d taken him a while to even realize what they were, and where they went, and what the glow meant. His moons had his color in pastel cyan, but they each had their own set of strings stretching between them that he could see if he paid attention, in a wide array of shades that usually matched their hair—their surface—color.
He’d figured it out the best in the end thanks to Jupiter and Saturn.
They both had a cord that ran between them from one pinky finger to the other, pink at Jupiter’s end and gold at Saturn’s, the two colors melting into each other in a gradient that shone brilliantly a step behind the Sun’s light. They had moon strings of their own, too, stacks and stacks of them in pink and gold, though none of them had ever shone half as bright as most of the ones on his own finger. Theirs were all dim, some the dimmest he’d ever seen, barely visible.
(It was the one thing he had over the two of them, and he couldn’t even tell anybody.)
The two strings that ran from his own middle finger to each of them, one pink and one gold, were thin as hairs and glowed much dimmer than his moons’ strings.
He’d gotten over how he felt about that. Mostly.
(Okay, maybe not at all. But he could keep that to himself.)
Uranus looked back at his canvas hanging in front of him in the grip of his gravity, gaze sweeping over the half-finished Saturn painted onto it. He’d gotten the rings started, but he’d stalled on them since, unable to keep going for a reason he really didn’t want to name.
Ugh.
He dabbed a little yellow along the outer edge of one and sighed. “Come on, mate, just stop—”
“Hey!” Miranda landed on his shoulder with a bounce, small enough that he barely felt it, and peered past his ear at the canvas. “Saturn again?”
“It’s n-not again, mate. The last one was Jupiter,” Uranus said, flushing.
“And the one before that was Saturn.”
“...Yeah, okay, the one before that was Saturn.” He rolled the brush between his fingers, staring at the yellow on the end rather than his painting. “He’s just got a lot going on, is all. It’s good practice.”
“Hey, no shame in it.” She leaned out over his arm to watch the brush, chin propped in both hands. “You’re getting better at his rings!”
“You reckon?” It came out a lot faster than he’d meant it to.
“Yeah. They used to look sorta like a hat.” She twisted around while he was still working out whether that counted as a compliment. “Ariel, come see! He did the rings right this time!”
Titania stayed exactly where she was, arms folded.
(That was probably fair.)
Miranda’s string was shining, though. It had flared up the moment she’d settled on his shoulder, brighter than he’d seen it in a good while, and it kept brightening every time the brush touched the canvas—a warm little glow against his knuckle that he could almost feel. He turned his hand over to look at it properly. 28 strings, and now that he was paying attention he could see they were just as uneven as everybody else’s. A lot of the smaller ones were fainter than he remembered them being.
His core gave an uncomfortable little squeeze.
He’d been meaning to fix that. He had.
It was just that there were so many of them, and they were always off doing their own things, and he never knew what to say that wouldn’t come out wrong, and lately there’d been so much else taking up room in his head.
“O-Oberon,” he tried, twisting around. “You want to come see too, mate? There’s plenty of room.” Oberon jumped at the sound of his own name. He looked up at Titania first, then at Uranus, then drifted a cautious little way closer and stopped.
“I-Is that allowed?”
“Course it’s allowed,” he said, a little baffled.
The string between them lit up like the Sun coming out from behind Jupiter. Uranus stared at it for a moment, his brush forgotten.
All he’d done was say his name.
(Stars, how long had it been since he’d said any of their names, if that was all it took?)
Oberon made it the rest of the way over in nervous little bursts and perched on the very edge of his shoulder, as far from the wet paint as he could get. “His rings are brighter than that,” he offered, after a while. “They’re nearly all ice. It’s yours that are the dark ones.”
“I know that, mate, that’s what the bloody yellow’s for! See, right there, that’s...” Uranus trailed off, squinting at the canvas and the rings on it. “Okay, maybe they need some white.”
“Why do you always paint him?” He abruptly realized Ariel had invited herself over as well, floating upside down in front of the canvas with her chin propped in her hands. “And Jupiter. It’s always those two. Do they paint you back?”
“Yeah, nah. They don’t paint, mate.”
“Ooh, but what if they did?”
“They don’t,” he said, sharper than he meant to. “Sorry, mate. I just—let’s move on.” Stars, he really didn’t feel like about talking about them today, yeah? He looked down at his hand without meaning to, to the hair-thin pink and gold on his middle finger, and then one finger further along, where Neptune’s was knotted fat around his ring finger and trailed off into the dark wherever he was. It was a bright, cheerful blue from one end to the other, and outside of the stack on his index finger, it was the brightest string he had.
Neptune could forget what they’d been talking about halfway through a sentence, could forget Uranus’s own name on a bad day, and that string had never so much as flickered.
So he had that, at least.
Sighing, he reached up and gave his braid a tug.
“Uranus?” Ariel had turned herself the right way up to peer at him. “Why do you keep looking at your hand? Is there something there?”
“N-No! No, it’s just paint, mate. I got some paint on it.”
That one was even true, at least, so he held up the yellow-smeared side of his hand for her to see and hoped that would be the end of it. Ariel hummed, satisfied, and went back to talking with Miranda about something. Titania’s eyes stayed on him for a few seconds longer than he liked.
A slight new pull settled onto the top of his hood.
Uranus tipped his head back as far as he could without dislodging anybody and found Umbriel looking down at him, silent as ever, and he blinked, confused. She never came this close without a reason, after all. Her gaze slid from his face down the length of his arm, past the brush, past the crowded stack of cyan on his index finger, and stopped at his pinky.
His core twisted in his chest.
She couldn’t see it. She couldn’t—
Nobody could, and he’d never told a soul. He didn’t even really want to acknowledge it in his own mind.
But Umbriel had always had a knack for feeling things about people, things that she had no business knowing, and her eyes had gone to exactly the right finger, and now they were following a line out away from his hand, past the canvas, past the place where Neptune would be, and on into the black beyond the Kuiper Belt. Uranus stuffed his hand into his jacket pocket.
“She’s trying to understand something,” Ariel said, cheerfully. “She doesn’t stare for no reason.”
“It’s just paint,” he repeated, a bit weaker.
Umbriel blinked at him once, and then mercifully turned to watch Miranda and Ariel.
He sagged with relief and went back to his canvas, or at least stared at it. In his pocket, where none of them could watch him do it, his thumb found the string on his pinky.
It was the only one on that finger (the same finger Jupiter and Saturn kept theirs on, of which he tried not to think about too hard), and the only one of his that didn’t lead anywhere obvious. It was blue as well, but a deep, dark blue, far darker than Neptune’s was; against the black of space he should have lost sight of it billions of years ago, especially since he’d never even bloody seen whoever it led to. It shone anyway, and he had no idea why.
(He’d followed it once.
He’d gotten farther out of the Solar System than he’d ever gotten before, had felt his teeth chattering from the cold, had only given up when the string kept going and going and going no matter how far he was. And when he’d come back, nobody had noticed he’d left. That’d felt great.)
Some days it shone brighter than others, and he’d gotten it into his head that those were the days whoever was on the other end happened to be looking back this way.
It was very bright today.
“Hey!” Miranda tugged at his sleeve, nearly bouncing herself off his shoulder. “I had an idea, Uranus! Do us next! All of us, on one painting!”
“All of you?” He huffed out a laugh. “I’d need a heaps bigger canvas, mate.”
“So you’re gonna make a bigger one, right?”
“...I could give it a go.”
“Super!” Miranda cheered loud enough to make Oberon flinch, and Ariel started calling over the rest of the moons while he was still agreeing to it.
“Nobody crowd the canvas,” Titania called after them. “And we all stay where I can see us, okay?”
28 strings twisted at his finger as they all came crowding in around him, and for a moment nearly every one of them was shining. Uranus let Saturn’s portrait drift off to one side and called up a new canvas—a wider one, this time. He kept his other hand in his pocket, where his thumb was still hooked over the string on his pinky.
It pulsed warm against his skin, just once, like something had tugged back.
(Who are you?)