Subject: [OTL]: [Pryde and Wisdom] Half Moon (G) Date: Tue, 11 Feb 2003 13:07:26 +0000 From: infinitepryde@lycos.com DISCLAIMER: Pete Wisdom and Kitty Pryde belong to Marvel Comics Group and are used without permission. No profit is being made. NOTES: Happy birthday to Vesper Antagonist; happy Valentine's, the rest of you. ARCHIVING: If anyone wants this bit of fluff, go ahead; I do request to be notified (infinitepryde@lycos.com). My net access is likely to go down without warning for an indeterminate period, so please don't be surprised (or insulted) if there's no response. Half Moon infinitepryde She was still sitting in their window when he finally made his way up the corridor. Her head was tipped back to let her study the only thing visible in the night sky: the pale white curve of the half moon. The corridor's glaring lights shot night vision all to hell, leaving the stars invisible. He slowed and stopped a few feet away. She didn't turn to greet him, just lifted one hand and waved fingertips. Those eyes of hers were half-focused, dreamy. He leaned his head to admire them for a few moments. "Sorry I'm late. MacTaggart won't be happy till she's got enough bloody samples to make another one of me." "That's Jamie," she answered. "Besides, it's only sheep the Scots are obsessed with cloning, right?" He snorted quietly, but even that repressed laugh triggered a brief spasm of coughing. When he straightened again, she was leaned far over, her hand on his arm. He came closer to lean against the windowseat, then, as if reluctantly, settle in the unoccupied half. She was still watching the moon. "Penny for your thoughts," he said finally. Her hand stayed on his arm, though her fingers spread a little, relaxing. "Just thinking about geometry." He squinted at her. "What?" "Sometime tonight," she continued dreamily, "the whole planet's part of a more or less perfect right triangle. The moon's a little bit under four hundred thousand kilometers away, the sun around a hundred and fifty million - means the angle's *tiny*, the difference between the right-triangle arrangement and the isoceles is miniscule. It disappears so fast when you start approximating at all. Maybe a five-hundred-kilometer difference. The moon covers more than that in ten minutes. We think that kind of distance is such a pain, most of the time, but it's nothing compared to things we see every day. It's like - there are reminders all around us not to take things too seriously, that there's a scale on which we barely even register... and at the same time, there are things on that scale that care about us, that're interested, like the Phoenix. Like the sun. So we know we *do* matter after all. We've got our places. We fit. If we want to." There was silence; he watched her, but didn't say a word. After a good ten or fifteen seconds, she started to color slightly. "What?" "Trying to see where you hid the calculator," he said. She laughed faintly and reached up with her free hand to tap the side of her head. Her chestnut hair rippled, catching the corridor light. "Up here. Sorry." "Don't be." He covered her other hand where it rested on his arm. "How do you get philosophy out of geometry?" She shrugged. "It's there. What did you expect? It's part of why I like math and physics. Sometimes it's hard to think about the bigger picture. Things like that - relating simple ideas to really big, really physical things - or just plain things like that," and she gestured up toward the moon, "or sunsets, or anything ... anything where the most basic natural laws turn out to be responsible for making things that're beautiful enough people used to take them for acts of God ... well, they make me think *about* God, I guess. They reassure me that there really is one, when sometimes it gets so hard to believe. Don't you have anything like that?" He made a noncommittal sound. A few seconds later, he expanded it without clarifying. "Maybe." When she glanced at him, he was still watching her; but she looked away again too quickly to read anything in his eyes, and though the color was back in her cheeks, she didn't ask.