Disclaimer: Rick Riordan would never be as cliche as this. He is, after all, a man.
Also, I know shooting stars are actually burning meteors and such, but artistic license, right?
Fluff Warning.
"Thals. Look at this."
"What?" She sprang up, instantly alert, looking around. "Monsters?"
"No… It's me, Luke. Shut up for a second or you'll wake Annabeth."
"Then why is it okay to wake me up? It's the middle of the night," she muttered, completely missing the careful hush in his tone that did not break the heavy silence.
"No, wait. I want to show you something," he breathed into her ear. His lips grazed her earlobe.
She shivered.
"Okay."
He took her narrow hand in his, rough and dry clasping smooth and delicate. They scrambled out of their tent and into the small clearing in the woods the trio had been camping out in.
It was a full moon, so heavy it hung low in the sky and tinted everything burnished silver. It threw its light on Thalia's glossy obsidian hair, waist-long by now, making rivulets of pure silver stream down its length and Luke want to touch it so, so badly.
He swallowed and murmured, "Shooting stars."
She turned to face him, eyes wide in a manner that did not suit her at all, in an environment that did suit her, the moon's white shadows lending her skin a pearlish quality and changing the color of her eyes.
"Where?" She breathed. The word bloomed from her lips before lingering slightly, finally dropping into the silence and smoothing itself away.
He grinned in reply. "Where else? Up, you idiot."
She turned away quickly to hide her slight smile, though she was pretty sure he had seen it.
Luke saw the slightest of smiles and heard the barely audible gasp from Thalia when she finally tilted her face towards the heavens to behold the stars yet he didn't scorn her amazement. The celestial fires were otherworldly, fantastic to behold, breathtaking, wondrous.
Gradually, she began to relax as everything but the stars melted away from her: the rock under her left shoulder blade, her bitter thoughts, her everyday worries. They all seemed so mundane now, so irrelevant. She lay down, a new peace invading her body, her hair spilling over her shoulders and through the grass like a tumbling black river as she gazed up, riveted by the stars – the ones that took the risk, and, suddenly, leapt from their place in the organized clutter of the others and flew.
Flew for but a moment before vanishing.
And never faded, never gradually extinguished: to the end, burning, never forgotten; remarkable. The ones that stood out from the rest: an expanse of cold, glittering stars, but instead burning, leaping for more, so passionately, always ending in nothing but tragedy and leaving a hollow, breathy trail of emptiness that served as a memorial to the brilliant streak that had once burned.
The wonderstruck smile crept onto her face, a tender, awed, genuine one, one that Luke, in all his two and a half years with her, had never seen before. He decided he liked it, found it more entrancing even than the shooting stars and would do anything to see it again.
Maybe, she thought for the first time, just maybe, magic and splendor and perfection and happy endings are not all that much to ask for.
And so the two soaked up each other's company, taking comfort in the silence that coated them – not like an uncomfortable barrier, but a blanket the two shared, blocking out the world, containing the magic of the moment: easy, understanding, uniting. There had not been a lot of time like this, not since Annabeth had joined and though they did not hold it against the seven year old, these were the times that Thalia and Luke yearned for: time alone, yet together; time full, but silent.
The stars stopped their suicide firework display and still the two continued to lie there, easing themselves out of their whispered star spangled thoughts and into a more lucid state of mind.
Eventually, she turned her head and smiled at him, not the same amazed smile from before, but a slightly wistful one, as if she were already reminiscing about the time she had sat with the full moon and together they had viewed the flying stars in the muted night. He sighed in response and together they got up, careful not to break the thick hush of the darkness.
The two treaded lightly through the grass, made metallic from the moon. Their shoulders bumped together from time to time, but it barely mattered because they were so close anyway and although all her thoughts had revolved around the shooting stars just moments ago, a familiar (though she refused to admit it), pleasantly light feeling overcame her when he leaned in closer to her and breathed his thanks for coming with him and then she was whispering back that it was fine and he was the best and before she knew it his mouth, which should have been by her ear, talking, was on hers, cutting off the words but it was okay because together they were burning, flying, intense, beautiful, soaring like the stars –
There are times when it seems stupid to hope. This time though, he knew he was hoping but he did not stop.
Author's note: It's supposed to be from Luke's perspective in the last sentence. (You know how I was changing perspectives throughout the whole thing)
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