When the moon becomes old and tired, Quetzalcoatl, the great world serpent, consumes the moon and replaces it with a fresh source of light for the people of earth. The brief period of darkness that follows his consumption of the moon is a time of great danger in the myths of the Aztec. A careless human soul observing such an event can be displaced by a demon, or even another human being.
The alarm went rang angrily on the nightstand until Gregory's hand put a stop to the noise. Reaching groggily for his watch, he blinked at the sleepy darkness around him. 3:31 am. He looked at his alarm again, uncertain if he should chuck the damn thing into the garbage or try and reset it. He was leaning towards the former when he remembered Sean.
Sean had to observe the lunar eclipse for his astronomy class. Sean was notorious for having trouble getting up in the morning, and as parents the responsibility of making sure he saw the astronomic phenomenon had fallen to Olivia and himself. Sean's lack of enthusiasm for the morning hours was unfortunately an inherited condition, as Olivia slept on at his left elbow.
Gregory kissed her cheek, begging the often arduous process of coazing her awake as delicately as he possibly could. She stirred slightly but rolled away from him in her sleep. He snapped his watch onto his wrist and reached for his alarm to adjust it to a proper hour.
"Olivia." He began patiently without expecting an answer. Gregory stood up, flicking on the bedroom light as he pulled on his robe from the closet. "I'm going downstairs. The light stays on-"
She pulled the covers over her head and he chuckled in mild amusement.
"I will have coffee ready when I get back, and you will get up and watch this eclipse with Sean and I-" Gregory walked to her pillow, peeling to covers back to kiss her forehead even as she wrinkled it in disgust at the light. "Because you're the one who encouraged him to take this class."
She batted at him sleepily, but he dodged her easily and headed downstairs. As he predicted, she spent the five minutes it took him to grind coffee, heat the water and drag their complaining son out of bed, clinging to the last tendrils of sleep. Pulling the covers from her as he pressed the coffee cup into her hand, Gregory made sure she was avoiding the temptation of her pillow before he fetched her robe from her side of the closet. She declined to speak. She rarely bothered to for several minutes after being roused from sleep.
Sean was the same way. He stood on the edge of the balcony with his notebook and stopwatch in hand without saying a word to either of his parents. The August night had a premature hint of fall in the air, and the breeze off the ocean was cool. Olivia gratefully found refuge in the warm arms of her husband as they waited for the moon to lose its' roundness.
Gregory felt his impatience melt as her head slipped comfortably into the hollow of neck and shoulder. There was a certain peace to the early morning and watching Sean work on his assignment gave him a sense of family he hadn't felt in some time. Sean rarely talked about what he was doing, and the mere mention of the this task some days ago over dinner had been enough to make it a family outing. Caitlin wouldn't be roused at this hour for anything short of the apocalypse, but it was pleasant in a way dear to his heart that Olivia was in his arms and Sean was smiling at him. Albeit a groggy smile of too little sleep, but a smile nonetheless.
The moon began to disappear slowly, as if a child had taken a tiny bite out of the left side and decided she liked it enough to enlarge the bite. The circle obscuring the golden surface of the moon grew quickly after that. It expanded across the face of the moon, tingeing it red as went before eating it away to black.
Olivia smiled at it, deciding it really was quite beautiful. She'd never bothered to watch one before, preferring the comfort of her bed to scientific curiousity. Even now she found the pleasure it in purely aesthetic. The explaination Sean was giving to Gregory was rather dull compared to the sweet wonder of watching the constant moon vanish away to nothing. She couldn't help enjoying it.
The moon was nearly gone now, only a burnt silver remained in the sky. She felt her breath quicken with childlike excitement and Olivia chastised herself for being so easily swayed. Then Gregory sneezed. The sudden motion and the way she nearly fell out of his embrace drew her attention away.
The moment of complete darkness, when the moon was entirely eaten by the shadow of the earth was lost on both of them. Olivia looked up into Gregory's eyes and felt herself drift towards the warm brown of his eyes.
Spike must have been on the balcony. Gregory heard her whisper as he felt himself sink into the soft blue eyes smiling up at him.
That mutt must have been up here. Olivia heard him say with the annoyance he reserved only for Tiffany or Cole.
Sean's gasp of wonder drew their attention back to the eclipse. But they had missed it. The moon was starting to reappear bit by bit on the right hand edge. They shared a sigh of loss as they realized what they had missed, but they both smiled cheerfully at Sean as he turned to them with tired glee.
"That was great."
His parents yawned sleepily in unison, making him laugh as they opened the door and ushered him in just ahead of them. He watched them disappear back into their bedroom together with a ray of hope. They'd been doing so well lately. They were close again. Sweet to each other again. It was almost as if they loved each other, like parents were supposed too. Like other children's parents did. He offered a silent prayer that they'd continue to find a way to understand each other. To see through each other's eyes somehow and find the middle ground.
Gregory's alarm went off stubbornly at 5:45, his preferred hour to start the morning. Olivia turned away from the sound, as she always did, and started to go back to sleep for the second time that morning. A hand hit her in the chest and she started awake for two reasons that jolted her sleepy mind.
First, the hand came from the wrong side. If Gregory was trying to wake her his hand would have come from the right. He slept on her right side. He had for twenty years. A hand from the left implied someone was on her side of the bed and that didn't make any sense either.
Secondly, the hand had impacted not on the soft flesh of her breasts as she expected, given the angle, but onto the hardness of ribs beneath her muscles. She was still mulling over the oddness of that fact alone when she heard her own voice.
"Where is that dammed alarm clock?"
It was her voice that carried through the jarring sound of the alarm but she wasn't speaking. She was sure she hadn't spoke.
Her arm shot out instinctually to shut it off. Olivia looked down at her arm. She was wearing Gregory's blue pajamas. That didn't make any sense at all. They'd been too tired to fool around when they returned to bed. She was wearing her ivory nightgown, the one Gregory found so elegant, but now she wasn't.
The light came on with a curse from her left. "What the hell?" Again, it was her voice, but she wasn't speaking. Olivia was beginning to wonder if this was the strangest dream she'd ever had, when she turned towards the curse and saw herself staring back at her.
She squeaked in surprised, twice shocked as her voice came out deep and masculine. Pulling her knees up to her chest in shock, Olivia watched her own hand reach out for her face in confused amazement.
"My God." Gregory felt the rough stubble on his own chin with the dainty feminine had that for some reason completely beyond him, responded to his commands. "Who are you?" His voice was too high. Too soft and melodic to be his.
The face that looked like him raised an eyebrow in surprise. "Who are you?" There was fear in the voice that was supposed to be his. A sense of foreboding that made him feel guilty for not being better equipped to answer that question.
He got out of bed, throughly confused as he swung his legs over Olivia's side of the bed. The bedroom was slightly larger then he remembered. His feet felt smaller and his nightgown- Gregory stopped short when he realized he was wearing an ivory silk nightgown. Looking down over his legs and stomach he laughed as he realized for the first time in his life, he was looking down his own cleavage.
"This is a dream." Olivia's voice, but the words were his. He nearly ran to her closet, opening the door to expose the mirror. He looked into Olivia's face. Her eyes were laughing at his confusion as he reached up and touched her nose, she did in the mirror. As his hands ran over his face, his neck, his shoulders, the Olivia in the mirror followed each one of his motions.
"Is it your dream?" Gregory's voice asked him gently from behind him.
He turned around, watching himself sit daintily on the edge of the bed.
"If it's your dream, why does it seem so real to me?" His voice asked him again as his doppelganger stood up and ran a hand through his hair.
Olivia felt her hair, and stopped in astonishment. Her hair was cut close to her head, shorter than she'd ever had her own. She started to say something, to ask the version of herself in front of her why she couldn't just wake up, when she looked past her double into the mirror behind her.
Into Gregory's eyes. It was Gregory's hand on his hip in the mirror. His other hand that pulled at his hair tentatively. His jaw that dropped open in surprise. "You're me." She whispered finally.