A/N: Written in a rush last night because I have too many feelings that I can't deal with.
Stars. There were supposed to be stars. You always...always thought there would be when the time came. Stars. A tapestry of them. It seemed so fitting that there might be, that stars would be the last that these eyes would see.
That stars could be the first sight again, After.
You could almost imagine them, winking back at you. Soft and glowing in the darkness. But imagined stars are not real stars and you need real stars, you need them.
The curling, rolling fireball obscures where the stars should be, and you cannot hear your own breaths through the roaring hiss of it in your ears.
The pain burns in your chest, and you gasp, but you can't move you can't and you need to keep looking up or you'll miss any stars that could appear.
Pain and stars. Stars and pain. And one is here and the other isn't and if you could swap them you would, oh how you would. Trade the pain in for the stars but you've been doing that for centuries, millennia!, and this is where it's gotten you, lying in an imagined forest in a spaceship looking up at an imagined sky and wishing for stars. But if you could just pick up and go, just once more, just once, and walk among those stars again...
(If you could find her, find them, and see them and know, just know that they are all right—You reach out with your mind, your grasp weak, and brush up against only darkness, not another bright mind where there should be. Only darkness.)
Is that dampness on your cheek? A tear?
Where there's tears there's hope. You said that once, what feels like, like so long ago. And you left out the bit that where there's tears there's often hopelessness, and frustration and nothing.
There is nothing now. No stars, no hope, only endless, endless burning blackening your skin.
The ash sears your lungs, sticks in your throat, and you cough, gasping for air. Darkness is creeping around the edges of your vision now. You have been here before, with the darkness lurking, ready to spring. Have been here so many times before and it would be so nice to just...rest, to not have to change.
Just rest.
Rest.
Dimly, through the most falling before you, you catch one glimpse of a twinkle. One glimpse, and the darkness falls.
Behind your eyes is a sky of stars.