#original sff

Can you hear me callin’ out your name

You know that I’m fallin’ and I don’t know what to say

I’ll speak a little louder, I’ll even shout

You know that I’m proud and I can’t get the words out

Oh I

I wanna be with you everywhere

- RIP Christine McVie. Could never have got this one done without you.

She didn’t need anyone to like her, hadn’t since the day she realized the traders praised an empty shell. Realized a door, a vase, and a safe were all the tools she had to break the padlock on the world. She knew what her fellow lockbreakers needed–safe haven, reliable air, central heating, an income valued at fourteen thousand six hundred and ninety exchange points each, by her calculations–and she was the one who was going to get it.

That was who she was. Not the dream or the dreaming girl anymore.

That afternoon the storm broke at last, overflowing the desert in a matter of minutes. By the time the sun kissed the sentinel towers at the crater’s edge, the clouds had parted and double rainbows were spreading over the land. High above the white city, on the grassy crests of Aya Loropa, Cepheid stood like a stone but for the cool downdrafts moving her hair.

Lux took one step toward her, but she felt like she was interrupting something.

“I guess I don’t owe them anything now.” Speaking the calm, oh-well sentence, she fell beside the edge on her knees. “I’m free.”

She laid her head in Lux’s arms and shook with grief.

I’ve said before that one can imagine the need to get trapped dirt out of an entire body covered in basically fingernails but there’s also the fact that they’re hard and smooth and ambient temperature on the outside but have normal like...living thing temperature homeostasis processes on the inside--and more often those are actually cooling them down because their lights obviously generate heat, especially so if they’re excited or stressed or sick or doing physical activity. So an astraea who’s worked a whole imperial standard day (which is close to 30 earth hours), especially somewhere like Altamai where it’s already super humid, is probably a lil soggy and looking forward to clean clothes. Bodily dirtiness is much more associated with like, mildew, although there’s certainly still concern about germs (having evolved in the vacuum of space and being built like living HEPA filters anyway astraeas don’t have super great immune systems compared to humans because they usually just don’t need them, but when they need them they REALLY need them)