The following is a work of fanfiction. The character(s) and worlds depicted within it are not in any way mine: Gundam Wing belonged to Bandai/Sunrise last time I checked. I also, sadly, do not own John Donne. Although I've often wished I did.
A nocturnal upon St Lucy's day; being the shortest day.
'Tis the year's midnight, and it is the day's,
Lucy's, who scares seven hours herself unmasks,
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world's whole sap is sunk:
The general balm t'hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed's foot, life is shrunk,
Dead, and interred: yet all these seem to laugh
Compared with me, who am their epitaph.
John Donne, "A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day, being the shortest day"
Hilde told me, once, about Santa Lucia's: about the white paper flowers they made - real flowers were of course far too expensive for orphaned convent girls - and the way they glued them to strips of cardboard for headdresses. About the little parade of eight-year-old girls in white, or the closest to white they could get with old faded sheets torn and sewed into dresses, hushed in excitment as midnight, a time they were never allowed to see, came yawning closer. Hilde's dress was ragged and badly-seamed - she was never any good at sewing - and she tried very hard not to trip on the back of the one in front of her, because every hem on that was neat and perfect.
It was fun, she said, a beautiful ritual. Nothing more than a dream, the way she tells it: a mirage of barefoot children singing hymns in a language none of them understand, holding battered torches aloft. Later, one of the nuns explained about Santa Lucia, how she had refused to marry a pagan and outwitted the prefect of Syracuse: when he, angry, tried to get her sent to what the sister called "a house of ill repute" (a whorehouse, went the common whisper, and stray giggles rose from the throats of the less wise) she stood her ground, and God helped her stay firm, and eventually the pagans killed her. And so Santa Lucia helps us to do what is right, even when others are trying to make us do wrong, and Santa Lucia is celebrated on the darkest day of the Earth year, because she gives us hope even in times of darkness.
But out in the colonies, no one day is darker or longer than the other. They gave us mechanisms for climate, to keep us from freezing and to help the plants cheaply convert our breathed-out carbon dioxide into oxygen, but to give us seasons would have meant far too much expenditure. Every day is the same: the temperature fluctuates only when the homeostatic mechanisms go off-line, and everyone sweats and shoves up water prices, or freezes and spends their food money on fuel. The lights of our colony begin to fade at nine every evening, and are out by ten: they snap back on at seven every morning. Sometimes the motherboard for your area will blow in a shower of sparks, and only then will the ersatz night last, filled with the thin wails of hungry babies and pawnshop alarms.
God, too, doesn't fix your feet to the concrete to keep you from the whorehouse, or at least from the shabby hotel and its hourly rates. We can't all have Lucy's scruples, we can't all stand there and wait perfectly calmly for the knife to come jabbing at our throat. Maybe Lucy wasn't calm: maybe she tried to step forward and give in to the fat-fingered prefect's demands, because anything was better than the death she could see in front of her, but God interfered and forced her into martyrdom. That kind of thing could happen on Earth, where days and nights depend on the sun and not a timer, where God reaches in one divine hand and holds mortals in place to die for the sake of his morals.
We don't have that God in the colonies. When the prefect points at you, you go, and when you stand there feeling the air dim in every direction you can't blame God for not stopping and killing you before this happened. You just have to live.
Tonight is Santa Lucia's - the festival of light. Somewhere on this globe the faint hologram of children in my head is being played out for real: real flowers from a greenhouse instead of paper ones, real dresses made in a factory rather than sewn by each child, real candles dripping wax rather than old torches which have to be switched off after a few minutes to save the batteries, real children rather than the faded grey colony copies. Lucy's light means something to them: they have seen the sun collapse early and stagger out of bed late, they have felt the sharp blackness of a night which is more than just the absence of the major streetlamps. If the sun never returned to them, they would be unable to merely blame it on a fuse or a technical malfunction. The unknown is everywhere on this Earth of theirs.
When their winter comes, the ground beneath their feet feels like the dead pavements of any colony, and they fear that their God will leave them and make them like /us/, like the rubbish they couldn't throw far enough away, that their gravity pulled back in and kept. Lucy, and her morals and her scruples and her messy death - Lucy's blood would have bubbled out, warm and red and accusing, not seeped away into blackness like it does on the colonies - is their proof that they are luckier than us. They live in colour, in emotions, growing and living around one another, whereas we shuffle past in monochrome, pragmatic and sterile.
Now, for the first time, I am at the mercy of their God and their close living Earth, and am praying for Lucy's hope.
intellectual property of harpy_elian, november 2001