For a moment, she thinks she's awake. But she wouldn't be waking up standing in a city square, with a strange weight on her head and an even stranger weight on her back. She's wearing clothes she's never seen, wine red, maroon, her exact favorite hue. The hands emerging from these sleeves are a strange color, but undoubtedly hers.
People are staring, vague, shifting gray and pink blobs that draw into focus if she looks straight at them. Everything is pleasantly dim. Is it dusk?
"Excuse me?" she asks no one in particular. Her voice is strangely hollow.
No one in particular answers her.
Her impatience powers what she now knows are her wings. She rises above the crowd, which stops shifting to look up at her. Primary colors: azure, crimson, gold, recognized simultaneously, spark an urgency in her hazy mind. The person wearing them is of no consequence, but the colors are.
"Sollux," she mutters. The O is drawn out, eerily, beautifully resonant. It sounds to her like a familiar foreign verb conjugated in a new tense. It is the name of the one who matters most.
Spurred by newfound purpose and a developing familiarity with her new appendages, she flies a little higher. The wind at this altitude stirs past her, gently pushing her hair, now black as midnight, in front of her eyes. When she reaches up to tuck it back behind her ears, her fingers bump into something hard. Taking care to maintain her tenuous balance in the air, she explores this, following its curve with her hand. It feels like something somewhere between bone and fingernail, and it has a mate on the other side of her head. The strange weight on her skull is a pair of ram's horns. Now that she knows what they are, it's suddenly hard for her to imagine not having them.
She scans the crowd. They're still looking up at her. She realizes belatedly that she's wearing a skirt, calf-length but a skirt nonetheless. Well, there are more important things to think about now. Again, she scans the crowd. She's not entirely certain what the boy she's looking for looks like, but she'll know him when she sees him.
"Excuse me," she asks the man whose clothing reminded her of him, her voice still hauntingly beautiful, "have you seen a boy with gray skin and horns like mine, but much smaller and two pairs?"
The man's eyes are slightly glassy, but he is breathing regularly and rocking back and forth on his heels and she can tell he's thinking.
"He wears glasses," she adds, "one lense red, the other blue…and he speaks with a lisp."
Something seems to click in the man's mind. "I think he went that way." He points towards the setting sun, his voice like something heard through water.
"Thank you," she says, voice growing warmer but Os still ghostlike.
There is a growing sense of a distant clock ticking away towards something. She feels that she has enough time but sees no reason to squander it, so she freezes it because apparently she can. Everything but her becomes perfectly still. People walking are trapped in mid-step, windblown papers stuck right where they'd been in the air when she'd flipped the intangible switch. The unseen clock stops moving and becomes silent. A calm overtakes her, quieting her nerves.
She begins flying forward again, and as she passes a tree planted on a street corner, she pokes a falling leaf with one yellow-clawed fingertip. It unfreezes, resuming its spiraling descent, but she doesn't stop to watch it fall. She has to find him.
These wings are gossamer, butterfly-like, but they're more than enough to support her weight. She wonders briefly if her bone structure is different, aside from the obvious. The space between her legs feels different, she realizes, but figuring out this body's reproductive system is not important right now.
Onward she flies, over the heads of people and animals frozen in time, past shop windows lit by the afternoon sun as it sets, or would be setting if the planet wasn't currently motionless in its orbit. Concrete gives way to cobblestone, and parked cars become few and far between. She catches a brief glimpse into the sewers through a manhole without a cover as she passes over it and the caution tape that ropes it off. For a split second, it makes her nervous, but then it's behind her.
The ground beneath her feet changes again. Grass. It looks soft, but before she can think any more about that she realizes she has to stop. She stills her wings and tumbles gracelessly about ten feet to land at the base of an oak tree she just narrowly avoided crashing into. As one maroon-clad leg brushes one of the tree's roots, the oak breaks free of its time-frozen state and its leaves are again stirred by the wind. She looks up and spots a beehive nestled amongst the branches, and it further reminds her of him.
Getting to her feet, she feels the grass between her fingers when she pushes herself up, and yes, it's very, very soft. But there is no point in lingering. So she moves on, heading towards a few more trees nearby. She can just see the other side of this little park, if it can be called a park, from here. And just past that edge, she sees-
She breaks into a run, dashing past more trees and over the soft, soft grass, and when a bench stands in her way, she flies right over it without hesitating. Instead of landing on the other side, she rises higher, until she's above the last few trees and can see the top of his head, with those two pairs of short, sharp, slightly curved horns she'd mentioned.
She soars over a maple tree to stop in midair a few feet in front of and above the bench he sits on, temporally paused. Behind those dichromatic glasses, those are definitely his eyes, even though from here she can see that one is solid red, the other solid blue. She reaches out to touch his face, wings beating the air furiously to keep her balance. When her hand brushes his cheek, he joins her in this unfrozen state.
"AA?" A smile overtakes his alien but familiar features, revealing teeth she would recognize anywhere.
She smiles, too. Whatever her name may be in this world, that is his nickname for her still.
She alights on the bench and it, too, rejoins the flow of time, almost imperceptibly. Her wings shrink to nothing as she sits down next to him. He reaches over to grab her hand, and she wakes up for real.
…
The park, the bench, the trees, and the boy were gone, replaced by sterile smells and papery blankets. Her horns had vanished, too, and it almost felt weird without them. But mostly she noticed the tubes and wires.
She tried to sit up, flailing, squeaking. Someone came running through the curtain, a muscular guy about her age. From the other side of the curtain, someone seemed to call after him.
He pulled off his battered sunglasses and stared at her for a few seconds. Then he coughed, wiped his face with a handkerchief, muttered an apology, and said"You're awake!"
Her voice came out in a croak, hoarse from disuse. "Where is my boyfriend?"