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[thefallingstar.insanejournal.com]

Who: Atlas & Asteria
What: Star-gazing stoic-faced Titans hanging out
When: Friday night
Where: Woods outside the city

Atlas had taken to frequenting the clearing outside the city whenever he needed to clear his head. Which, given how often New York gave him headaches, was most nights. Things were too crowded, too loud, too bright. Sometimes Asteria was there, sometimes she wasn't. They never really planned to meet up, it was just sometimes that they did. It was quiet and peaceful, even when she was there. Sometimes they talked, sometimes they didn't.

Tonight, he knew he had to get out, because he hadn't been out for nearly a week, and being cooped up was getting to him. He left a note for Pleione, packed up his telescope, and headed out to the clearing. He wasn't at all surprised to see that Asteria had beaten him there. He didn't say anything, just set up the telescope and folded himself onto the ground. If she wanted to talk, she would. If not, that was fine too.

Asteria had been lying on the grass for the last three hours, watching the slow movements of the sky above. She was a daughter of Titans, of heavenly Coeus and earthly Phoebe, but she still remembered a time that had never been: when she herself had been a star in the heavens before she fell to earth to be an island. Conflicting stories, but to Asteria they were both true and she ached with homesickness for the blue-black canopy of sky above.

She might have looked like a dead woman to anyone who came by, a young woman in jeans and a white t-shirt, unmoving and with the shallowest of breaths. But the person who came near to her wasn't any mortal and she recognised Atlas without even looking over at him.

"Cygnus is brighter than usual tonight," she said instead of any sort of greeting. "Cygnus lights up the sky."

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[spinningheavens.insanejournal.com]

Atlas adjusted his telescope, locating the Swan easily. "So it is," he agreed. He moved south, locating Cassiopeia. "And the Queen shines out as well, she will not be ignored."

"Sometimes I wish I was still guarding the Pillars," he said, not looking up from the lens. "When all I did was study the sky. Just me and Pleione. Things were simpler. I miss that."

[thefallingstar.insanejournal.com]

"I, too, have been considering the past," Asteria admitted from where she lay. One hand she lifted to draw slow lines through the air between distant stars. "I was born once among that canopy, although I remember too being born of Phoebe. But the stars, always I long to return to them. Although-" she dropped her hand back onto the grass again "-I don't know where in the sky I sat."

Asteria - who had been heavenly then bound in flesh then built of stone - turned her head to look at Atlas for the first time. "I do not know if anything was truly simpler in those days."

[spinningheavens.insanejournal.com]

"Belief makes us what we are, and not always for the better," Atlas rumbled. "They tell my story where I tried to trick Hercules into taking the world. I would never do that. But I remember doing it. It's strange."

He looked down at her. "In comparison to now, it seems so. But you may be right. Neither of us ever had it easy, so how can we really know?" He shrugged.

[thefallingstar.insanejournal.com]

"We all remember so much that never happened." She didn't know if they had ever even existed. People spoke of 'history' in a way that never involved them but Asteria knew that she had lived, that they all had. It made her head hurt to think too long on that.

"I remember all was simple when we were young," she said. "When you and I were children together, before there was talk of war and children of Cronus."

[spinningheavens.insanejournal.com]

Atlas nodded. "It twists the memories that we have left," he agreed. "And so often I wish it was not so. Life is complex enough without our very memories not belonging to us."

That brought a very faint smile to his lips. "When we used to play together, like real children. When my mother thought we'd be a good match, before everything changed and the world was ripped apart."

[thefallingstar.insanejournal.com]

Asteria agreed with him but didn't feel the need to say as much. It was hard sometimes to be a product of so many different stories. Asteria's whole existence was a contradiction of facts. They even tried to take Hecate from her, to make her belong to Nyx or to Demeter. They tried to erase Perses and make Zeus out to be her father - an even worse insult as Asteria saw it.

"And a good match we would have been," Asteria agreed. "Perhaps we would have led a quiet life dedicated to the midnight sky. But none can tell. A fate unwritten is a fate that cannot be read."