The Birth of the Sun - Niki and the Dove // Let There Be - Children of Eden Soundtrack // Cosmic Love - Florence + The Machine // Sedna - Heather Dale // Daughter of the Moon - Adriana Figueroa // Wiccan Lullaby - Gyspy // When the Day Met the Night - Panic! At the Disco // Turn to Sand - Musique Le Pop // Kamikaze - MO // No Mythologies to Follow - MO // Black Trombone - Hannah Schneider fea. Shanghai // Black Out Days - Phantogram // Sundog - Niki and the Dove
Notes: For @hunter-maurice‘s AU where Maurice is the Sun Heir and Robert is the Son of the Moon. Poem snippet comes from Anthony Madrid’s ‘At Night There Are Millions Of Suns’.
Summary: He was full of love for the one he was supposed to hate the most.
Sunkissed
.
At Night, there are millions of suns; in the daytime, only one.
Like with so many things, we adore the light that happens to be nearest.
.
Maurice's father told him he was a great man. And Maurice believed it.
Maurice's father was the Sun King. What wasn't great about that? He was the power of fire and life and light, and that was unmistakably something extraordinary. Something godly. Something to be worshipped.
Before, Maurice tended not to bother with what happened when his father slept. During that time, his mother would come out from the darkness with her sisters and begin their eternal dance. They told the story of eons and nothingness and forever as they twirled in the sky, a thousand icy fires that would live forevermore.
The heir of the sun didn't know if he should feel sorry for the moon. Every night, she loyally stood at the center of the dancing stars, her head down as she walked slowly across the sky. She never spoke, and she never opened her eyelids to reveal the one eye she had left but would never see with again. She had to be terribly sad. But she had already cried the oceans of the world. What expression could be worth more than that?
But she deserved her fate, didn't she, right? His father told him she had once been terribly cruel and almost killed the world.
"We adore the light that happens to be nearest."
Only later, in a garden that seemed to be in the heart of the world's night, when he decided to explore the nocturnal world, did Maurice hear something new.
He heard it from a boy who didn't look much different from most pale people. He wore a sweater with brown trousers and black shoes, and he played the piano beautifully. He was almost a perfect human being.
Yet, he wasn't a human at all. If one looked closely, they could just perceive it: the overall silvery nature of him. In the darkness of night, his pale face was like a candle that burned blue and low and cold. His eyes were almost too dark to believe, and in them there was a shine like the shape of a scimitar moon. His black hair was so soft it was nigh like morning light—but no, it couldn't be light. Light burned and darkness did not.
He was the Son of the Moon.
"That's why the people adored my mother," he said to Maurice while he sat cross-legged by his piano, his voice nearly like the wash of the sea on stones. "She is so close to the earth she is almost human."
He turned his head, and Maurice saw it was like the movement of the moon across the sky.
"I am almost human."
But he was not. He, Robert, was the Son of the Moon, and he was far too old and far too aware of it to be anything quite enough human.
"Maybe that's why I like it here."
He ran his hands over the grass. He then tipped himself back and fell into it, a painfully wonderful motion like the breaking image of the sun on water. Maurice, unashamed, lied beside him. The ground was cold against his heat.
Robert said nothing and made no motion of recognition. He simply stared at the dark sky and distant lights in the ever infinite heavens, his breathing shallow and quiet.
"… I wish my mother could see it."
Robert sighed deeply. Maurice waited as he hesitated, Robert's eyes aglow with an emotion that was too wise to be human.
"I play for her so she knows," he began. "I tell her in music the beauty of the mountains as they wither away, and the glaciers as they crash their great weight into the sea, and the blood of the earth as it erupts forth to create a new world. She is going to be here until the end of days. She should know of something other than the sky she walks."
The wind blew in the encompassing silence. Maurice rolled his head over to view Robert, the son of the queen of darkness, and spoke:
"You say you are almost human, but you are not really, are you?"
The Sun Heir touched a nerve and unknowingly set it ablaze. Robert swiftly moved his head and gave Maurice a gaze that burned: not like fire, but the certain scorching of salt in a wound. Maurice all at once knew his error.
"I'm sorry--"
"You don't know anything about that, so don't speak of it," Robert replied tauntly. "You are surely not human yourself."
"I know. I'm sorry."
Robert turned away back to the sky, Maurice still perceiving his stormy anger in the dew-wet air. Robert, eventually, sneered his remaining bitterness, lashing out in a personal manner.
"Like how I will never understand why people admire the sun. There are millions of suns at night."
Maurice did not become upset at the direct insult to his father. He couldn't really be, for he was too hurt over Robert and too knowing of everything his father had taken from him.
Maurice simply said:
"My father gave you everything you love on this changing, burning earth; how could you say that?"
Robert seized up in some sort of fear, like he was preparing to be hit by a wave. His infinitely gorgeous dark eyes met Maurice's, and Maurice saw the reflection of his own—the color of hearth fires—like little gaslights shining in the black of a sea chasm.
"Without him," Maurice started slowly, "there would be no people. There would be no rain, or rivers, or trees. There would be no winter nights or summer days; there would be no warmth of the day. There would be no life."
Maurice took Robert's hand and put it against his own fluttering chest. When Maurice moved his arm, it was like bronze flashing in midday light.
"There would be no me."
Robert appeared upset, and Maurice was sure he looked equally so.
"We adore the light that happens to be the nearest."
Robert was physically humbled. He shivered with feeling, and his breathing quivered like water.
"I'm sorry--"
Maurice pulled Robert over into a kiss. The boy born from the moon relaxed as his lips were met and his head cupped, the boy born from the sun soft and full of love for the one he was supposed to hate the most. He pulled back after a moment and admired the pale little boy with small sun-burst spots from where he had first touched him.
"You," Maurice chuckled and grinned, "have just been sunkissed."
