Chapter Text
Erebus was… not doing anything productive.
There was a lot to do now that the solar system had joined them, but instead he’d been staring at an asteroid with an intensity that likely made him look absolutely insane to anyone else. He should do something productive, like speak to Jupiter or WISE or…
Stars above, he didn’t want to do anything.
So study and catalog every feature of this random asteroid floating within the kingdom it was.
Siliceous, oddly pitted, roughly the size of a small moon… Proteus, maybe?—actually, no thinking about that!—it had been floating through near him, the unlucky recipient of his redirected attention.
He knew its composition by now. (Very well.)
He knew its trajectory, or the one it would have if just released. He knew—because he’d spent a hell of a lot of time observing things (it wasn’t stalking, okay? It was… okay, it was a little bit) that there was nothing new to learn from it. But here he was, running the same one in circles in his hands, rubbing at the pits with his thumb and crumbling it a bit accidentally, because studying asteroids was easier than thinking about what was happening inside his own core.
It wasn’t even the only asteroid in his proximity, because Guillermo was floating beside him.
The little rock... asteroid... thing had been his only companion for a while—the only thing he’d kept from the Solar System, Jupiter’s gift that was really a gesture of somewhat reconciliation that Erebus still didn't quite know how to deal with. How was he supposed to just—?
Eugh.
At least Guillermo had a face—not a real face, to be clear, moreso a collection of craters and shadows that, from the right angle, suggested eyes and a mouth, all painted blue… probably by Neptune—so he could consider it a little less weird, but still.
Erebus had talked to him.
And would keep talking to him, which was not something he’d ever admit to anyone.
"You know who I keep expecting to pop up out of nowhere?" Erebus asked Guillermo, face screwing up as he gave the asteroid a little flick.
Guillermo, as always, said nothing.
(Mostly because Erebus didn’t make him say anything. The only times he talked was when Erebus talked for him, which… stars, didn’t really make him sound any better.)
"Neptune!” he said, giving his head a harsh shake. “He's always drifting around and appearing where he's not wanted, saying things that don't make sense. Ruining everything…” He paused, frowning. “Even if I guess I should be glad for it now. And when I actually—" Erebus groaned under his breath. "—when I could use the distraction, he's nowhere."
He didn't know why he was thinking about Neptune.
The ice giant had been surprisingly decent during the journey to the rogue planet kingdom—genuinely curious about his eyes, about what it meant to be a rogue planet, about whether he'd get cards for joining (which apparently meant the trivia cards, which was.. confusing?). But there was something under his... very scattered surface. Erebus had watched the Solar System for billions of years. He knew Neptune's rhythms, the 165-year orbit, the crushing isolation, the way Neptune had disappeared into and emerged and disappeared into it and emerged and… well, he know he had to deal with an orbit that kept him in a cycle that hurt in ways that never fully healed. He knew about Triton, the captured dwarf planet, knew about the destroyed moons, the lie Neptune had carried for eons to protect him. He knew, in other words, that Neptune was burdened by a hell of a lot.
It was one thing he’d considered exploiting at one point.
His frown deepened at that reminder. Stars above, was there anything he hadn’t—?!
"Boo!"
Erebus made sure he didn’t flinch. (Not outwardly, at least. Even if he’d never reveal otherwise). But his teeth clicked against each other when his jaw clenched tight in reaction to the bright yell in his ear, a reaction that was wholly instinctive and very unwelcome.
He turned instead of thinking of it a second longer.
Neptune materialized from the darkness around him much easier than he should have been able to, what with the… bright blue coat and hair and all. He was a literal eyesore. The rogue planets could probably use his coat as a source of light. It was completely obnoxious and—
Okay, Erebus, he told himself, enough about the coat.
Neptune was still in the midst of a little spin—one full rotation, arms out, the same manner one of the more childlike moons might twirl to show off a trick or something of the sort—as he glided to a stop in front of him. "That's me!" Neptune said, stopping mid-spin. "I’m the Neptune you’re expecting to pop out of nowhere, so I did it! I was in the neighborhood. Well, not the neighborhood. The neighborhood is very far away. Earth has the neighborhood. I was just in the neighborhood of thinking about the neighborhood, and then I was here. You know how it is."
"I don't."
That made zero sense to him.
"No, I guess you wouldn't. The neighborhood chooses very carefully." Neptune’s mock seriousness as he said that made Erebus roll his eyes. "But ooh! Look at this place.” He blinked, staring around at the vista surrounding them. “It’s very... rocky.” There were barely any asteroids. “Very void-adjacent.” Not… wrong? “Very crowded. Tell the rogue planets I like what they’ve done with the nothing."
No thanks.
He was impossible to read.
Which very much annoyed Erebus, who’d learned to do nothing but read people. It was the first thing he’d noticed about Neptune, back when he'd resolved himself to watching from beyond the Kuiper Belt. The other planets had glaring tells: Jupiter's guilt, Saturn's anxiety (and weird protective streak over Jupiter, who could definitely handle himself), Earth's insecurity, Venus's bluster. But Neptune's surface was as fluid as his attention span. He’d really learned the art of deflecting.
(Even if it was obvious, given you were actually looking.)
The playfulness was genuine, as far as Erebus could tell, and Neptune rarely dropped it. But it was still a shield. It was a defense built from spending so long alone that letting anyone truly see him felt dangerous. Erebus understood the need for a barrier—his own obsession with revenge against Jupiter and Saturn served a similar purpose—but Neptune’s was different. His playfulness actually gave him the upper hand.
Really, what had his obsession with revenge gotten him? Eugh.
"Was there something you wanted?" he asked, keeping his eyes lidded in annoyance. He might have just been wishing for Neptune as a distraction of sorts, but he was already regretting the thought. Why did the universe only listen to him when it was something he didn’t actually want?
"Well…." Neptune drifted past him with a rising and falling hum, hands clasped and twisting behind his back as he examined the asteroids he’d lined up in a row. "Uranus seems different lately, don’t ya think? Lighter! Not as much like a planet carrying several billion years of existential dread. More like a planet who'd had a good cry and maybe a nap. He's been talking to his moons again.” His voice gained a genuine happiness, the tone just a bit different from his feigned cheerfulness. “I’m happy for him. So happy.”
Erebus said nothing.
He'd noticed Uranus from a distance. A pale cyan figure drifting near the other planets, his posture less rigid than it had been when they'd first arrived. But he hadn't approached him. He wasn't even sure if he had the right. They might have exchanged a few friendly words, but...
Neptune glanced back at him, one eyebrow slightly higher than the other. Almost. It was a little off-center. "Didn’t you notice? After all,” he said, gaining a musical tone, “you've been watching him."
He would have been annoyed if not for the fact that the musical tone was less happy and moreso… well, a little creepy. The kind Erebus hoped he’d never shown off to his moons.
It also wasn't a question.
Erebus felt his shoulders tighten. "I watch everyone,” he said warily, lip curling. “Old habit."
"Is it?" Neptune plucked a small asteroid from the wall and began tossing it from hand to hand—left, right, left, right—with the casual dexterity Erebus wished he had. He added a second asteroid to the mix even as he cheerfully and creepily continued on with, "Because I've been watching you watch him. Very specific watching. Not how you watch Saturn, which is all guilt and avoidance. Did you know he avoids you the same? You two are so inter-esting.” Erebus’s scowl didn’t lessen. “And not the way you watch Jupiter, which is—" He caught the asteroid and held it, tapping one end to his chin. "Mmm, I don’t know! But it’s different."
Erebus folded his arms over his chest. "I don't know what you're talking about."
"Of course you don't. You're very mysterious, Planet W.” Neptune beamed at him. Erebus just rolled his eyes. "The one who spent billions of years alone in the darkness!" He tossed the asteroids back into the line, gravity strengthening briefly as he pushed them into place. "But I really like to think I can be perceptive. It's one of my many talents. Right up there with juggling and also remembering all my moons' names. And Uranus’s!” His eyes narrowed, an expression off enough that Erebus wanted to look away. “And what I am perceptively percepting is that you want to talk to him, and you're too scared to do it."
"I'm not scared of Uranus. And is that a word?”
Neptune annoying ignored his attempt to veer the conversation. "No, silly, you're scared of what happens after! Uranus isn’t very scary. But don’t tell him I said that.” His eyes darted around as Erebus stared right behind him and tried to will another planet into existence just to interrupt this conversation. “When you apologize! When he doesn't forgive you. When you have to sit with the fact that you hurt someone who was already hurting, and there's nothing you can do to undo it." Neptune's voice dropped more of its playfulness, sending a shiver down his spine that he readily ignored. "I know that feeling. It's very heavy. Very cold. Very—" He gestured vaguely at his own chest. "Lonely, hmmm?"
Erebus didn't answer, too busy grinding his teeth together.
How in all of the stars-damned galaxies had Neptune just—just said that? Like he hadn’t mentally agonized over what the feeling was himself?
Eugh.
Neptune drifted sideways, eyes scanning the stars like he was looking for one in specific. Erebus had a feeling who. "I mean, you know I spent a lot of time alone. A lot. My orbit was so long, so far from everyone, and—and I didn’t always have someone there who could help me. I'd forget things. Who I was. Where I was. Why I was. I'd drift for ages without seeing anyone, and when I finally did, I'd forgotten their names. Their faces. Whether they'd ever liked me. Except for Uranus, and except for my moons." He slid one hand into his jacket pocket, mouth twisting to one side before his eyes snapped to Erebus’s so quickly he felt like he was pinned in place. "It would have been sooooo easy to feel bitter about it, right? To resent the inner planets for the warmth they got to feel, their closeness, their card games and everything else. Things that I never got. It would have been really, really easy to hate the Sun for putting me so far away."
"But you didn't."
Erebus knew that for certain. Neptune had more caring bones in his body than he’d ever have in bitterness. He'd never say that out loud, but it was true.
"Nope!" Neptune turned back. His smile was small, but it was real enough that Erebus blinked. "I made friends instead. I collected asteroids. I captured moons. I didn’t let myself fall apart when I made Triton crash into my orbit and destroy my old moons and become my new one, and then I lied to the Sun for billions of years to protect him. Not because it was easy, but because it was…” He threw his hands up, shaking them like a wave hello but powered by a lazy pulsar. …right!"
He shrugged.
"Bitter is boring, don’t ya think? I'd rather be curious. And friendly. Lots more fun.”
Erebus looked at him, fingers twisting against his jacket fabric. "You're not what I expected. Not then, and not now, and…” He groaned, uncrossing his arms to rub at his forehead. “Not ever, I think.” From the moment he’d approached the ice giants and then met them in his orbit afterwards, and rather than helping out another ice giant, Neptune had… criticized him for being rude to Saturn.
Given, maybe the words had been a little mean, but in the long run of what Saturn had done to him—
"No one ever expects me! Like the Spanish Inquisition." Neptune winked. Well, tried to wink. Both eyes closed, then one opened, then the other, in rapid succession. "Whatever a Spanish Inquisition is. It's my greatest weapon. Also, my greatest weakness. Also, just a thing that happens sometimes. Like my face does its own thing. See?” The conversation naturally trailed off as Neptune stared into the distance and rotated through several different expressions. Erebus's eyes were helplessly drawn toward the distant figure of Uranus, still standing alone at the edge of the asteroid cluster. He had one hand wrapped around the end of his braid, tugging at it like he was trying to pull his hair out of his own head.
"I think you should talk to him," Neptune said quietly. His voice had the same edge of seriousness again.
"I know,” Erebus said, clenching his jaw. “I… did technically speak to him. Once. Twice.”
He forced himself to stop looking.
"Properly. Not just a few words, silly.” Neptune blinked at him when he shot him a sharp look. “And not even just an apology. I mean, I think he deserves that, but you have to tell him the whole truth about what you did. And why you did it." Neptune's voice lowered. "He needs to hear it. And I think—" He paused. "I think you need to say it. You can both be helped. Double the helping!”
Erebus stayed silent as Guillermo drifted closer to him and nudged against the back of his jacket, a steady presence as he’d been since he’d told Jupiter there wasn’t a place for him in the solar system. "Just remember, forgiveness isn't a coupon. It's more like a... a comet! It comes around when it comes around. You can't rush it."
"I wasn't planning to,” he said, dryly. He thought about asking what a coupon was and discarded the idea immediately. If he was honest, Erebus would have happily held the same position with Uranus where neither of them talked about it even if it was obvious both of them were thinking about it at least a little. Mental torment was his middle name.
(He didn’t have a middle name. And maybe not so much happily.)
He could deal.
"No, I don't suppose you were…” Neptune clicked his tongue, stalking back and forth and tapping at his chin with several hums, each louder than the other. “After all, I’m percepting that you’re patient. You had billions of years of patience, which is impressive. And terrifying. And—" He turned to him with a look of something that almost looked like concern but definitely couldn’t be. Ha. Why in every star to ever exist would Neptune be concerned about him? "Very lonely, I think. Loneliness isn’t very fun."
Erebus couldn't answer, and even if he could he had a feeling he didn't need to.
His eyes fell to the distant stars, among which Erebus knew was the Sun. It was smaller now—just one light among many, indistinguishable from the other stars scattered across the dark. Erebus remembered when that light had been his whole world. When he'd watched the solar system every day, every year, every millennium, waiting for the moment he could finally go home.
(When had it stopped being home? When had it become more about punishing Jupiter and Saturn?)
"You know what I've been thinking about?" Neptune announced. "The Sun!”
"The Sun.” Erebus warily repeated. His arms crossed against his chest against time, even tighter than before as his nails dug into the fabric of his coat. Only that prevented him from digging them into his own skin.
"You know, our Sun?” Erebus tried to correct him, tell him that the solar system wasn’t his, that he didn’t have a star. The words wouldn’t come, to his annoyance. “The big yellow one. A little orange, too. The one who just tried to—" He made an expansive gesture with both hands, fingers wiggling. "You know. The whole thing. Square orbits. Planets orbiting moons. Spinning the roulette wheel on our lives like an Earthling game show host, but not a fun one?" He turned back to Erebus. "Oh, wait, you missed most of that! You were out here. What a lucky duck.” He blinked, tipping his head to the side. “Or maybe unlucky. Depends on your perspective."
Erebus bit down on his cheek.
"What about the Sun?"
"He's not okay," Neptune said, voice lacking any sort of embellishment again. "He's never been okay, really. He's been pretending for billions of years, and we've all been pretending along with him because it was easier than admitting the center of our solar system was—" He mimed something cracking, fingers spreading apart. "But now everyone's seen it. We rebelled. The moons helped. We all left. Well, most of us. Earth stayed. Earth always stays. Earth is very good at staying.”
He put one finger up.
“Wait, that’s wrong. He’s bad at staying in his orbit. But good at staying everywhere else. I think.”
Erebus ignored the last things he said, instead focusing on the start. He’d known about the rebellion. He'd been in the rogue planet kingdom when Triton arrived—clearly annoyed with him (… a little deserved, okay) and talking about the whole orbit thing. He'd watched SIMP mobilize, watched the army move through the Oort Cloud, watched the Solar System's planets combine their gravity against their own star. He'd felt something twist in his chest when Jupiter—Jupiter, who he’d wanted revenge against for so long and still had such complicated feelings about he couldn’t untangle it given another length of his exile—led the formation. And he'd felt something else entirely when it worked.
"And now?" he asked.
"And now we're all rogue planets. Or about to be. Or thinking about it. It's very confusing. I'm not sure I understand the membership requirements. Do we get cards? I hope we get cards. I want something to show off! Oooh, and a picture! Look, I’ve been practicing my smile." Erebus blinked right at him as Neptune beamed at him, teeth flashing white in the darkness around them. One of Neptune's eyes drifted just slightly as he held the smile, a bit of a glaze falling over the blue of his iris. Erebus recognized the gesture. He'd watched it happen a thousand times from the Kuiper Belt, kept it in mind alongside Neptune's other tells. The eye drift meant he was thinking about something he didn't want to think about. "The rogue planets have a kingdom. A queen. An army. They want us to join. They say they want to free planets from their stars.” His eyes sharpened unexpectedly. “But you know what they're really about, don’t ya, Planet X.”
It wasn't a question.
Erebus felt his shoulders tighten, abruptly remembering just how clear it was to him that Neptune cared very much about the other planets’ safety.
He ignored the thought of how much he wished he could be one of those planets sometimes.
Still.
"You're sharper than you pretend to be,” he said instead, scoffing.
"Oh, I'm not pretending!” Neptune waved a hand. "I really am this scattered. It's just that sometimes the scattered pieces land in a pattern. Like a… a fibbonaci sequence!” Erebus nearly did a double-take at that. Should he ask how—? “Or asteroid dust. Or—" He paused, brow furrowing in a tad. "What was I saying?"
His eye twitched. Ignore it, it was.
"The rogue planets."
"Right! The rogue planets. Very mysterious. Very secretive. Very 'join us and never leave or else.'" He waggled his fingers ominously. "You joined them! And now you're here, staring at asteroids and also Uranus and sometimes the gas giants, and you’re not as mean! But you’re also not as—what's the word, hmmm?—contrite. Repentant. Sorry-ish. Which makes me wonder, just a teensy tiny little bit…”
He leaned forward, both eyes, fixed on him with a sudden, unsettling focus.
"What you know. What they want. But mostly whether I should be worried about the rest of my solar system and what’s going to happen to them." His voice had dropped some of its playfulness, and he wore an uncharacteristic frown Erebus had last seen so close… probably during all that mess with the Moon competition. "I'm not very good at worrying. It takes up too much space that I like to save for memory. But I'm trying it out!” He tilted his head. “As a hobby. I hope I don’t have to hold it long!”
Erebus was silent for a moment. The asteroid he'd been staring at earlier drifted past his shoulder, and he caught it within his gravity to set it in line with the rest… and then gently flicked it away, disturbing the ordered line. "The rogue planets really aren't what they seem," he said quietly. "Their leader—that’s the one called SIMP0136—has an agenda she hasn't shared with anyone who hasn't joined.” He grimaced. “Also, don’t laugh at her name.”
Neptune blinked.
Erebus didn’t want to explain, so he hurried on. “They want to liberate planets from stars. All stars. Every star. They believe stars are time bombs, and the only safe place for a planet is in the dark."
Neptune's expression flickered. "The dark?"
"Yes."
"For… how long?"
His fingers clenched and unclenched. "Forever."
"Hm." Neptune looked at his own hands, at his fingerless gloves that Erebus wondered about but didn’t truly care enough to ask. "Forever is a very long time. I would know. And I’ve done a lot of wandering in the dark. It’s not so fun." He looked up, mouth twisted to one side. "They want us to leave the Sun? Really leave. Not just for a revolution. Not just until he calms down. Leave forever. Abandon him.”
Erebus tried not to flinch at the last words specifically.
Abandon tugged at parts of his memory he didn’t want to dig up again. "They want the Earth, specifically. They believe if they can get the Earth to join, if they can prove a rogue planet can sustain life without a star, they'll convince the entire galaxy to join their cause."
Neptune frowned. "And you know this because...?"
"Because they wanted me to help them. I said no. I—I came back." He didn’t say why. He hadn't even meant to reveal that much, but Neptune had a way of pulling things out of you. His scattered attention felt like it had sharpened into something almost uncomfortably perceptive.
Percepting.
Stars-dammit, Neptune was already rubbing off on him. He needed to finish this conversation and move on before he started calling other planets “silly”.
Neptune studied him for a long moment before he abruptly laughed—a bright, startled sound that echoed off the rocky walls.
"Oh, that's awesome," he said. "That's so cool! You spent billions of years plotting revenge against Jupiter, you finally got it, you finally won, but then you lost something even more important and made a run for it, and then you found a bigger, scarier revenge plot and you said 'no thank you, I've had enough'?" He clapped his hands together. "That's so fun of you! That's like a whole… hmm, arc. An arc! We can call it the Planet X arc! I'm so proud, Planet W."
“You just said Planet X,” he muttered to himself. “Seriously?”
“I wonder if Uranus will get his arc. Wouldn’t that be fun?” Neptune said, turning his head slowly enough that Erebus have wanted to end the conversation that moment. What was he staring at so creepily? A miniature black hole? A rip in the space-time continuum? “But anyway! Good job. You learned!” He clapped.
Erebus rolled his eyes. "I'm not looking for praise."
"Good! Because I'm not giving you praise." Neptune spun in a circle again, this time faster, churning up the gravity around them. "I'm giving you recognition. It's different. Praise is 'good job, here's a sticker.' Recognition is 'I see what you're doing and I'm choosing to… recognize it.' Get it? Very different.” He nodded effusively with the words like just that would reinforce them.
Erebus felt something twist in his core.
Recognition.
He'd spent his entire existence either ignored or feared. Jupiter had dismissed him the moment he’d laid eyes on him. Saturn had ignored him the moment Jupiter had. Neither of them had even tried that hard to fix their own mistake. The Sun had forgotten him. The rogue planets just wanted to use him. No one had ever simply... seen him.
His eyes darted to Uranus before he forced himself to cough and focus on Neptune’s shoulder. "They're going to keep pushing," he said, forcing his voice steady. "SIMP won't stop. OTS won't stop. They genuinely believe they're saving the galaxy. They're not evil. They're just—"
"Traumatized?" Neptune supplied. "Like the Sun? Like Jupiter? Like you?"
Erebus opened his mouth to argue, then closed it.
"Like all of us," he said finally. “The whole damn galaxy, I guess.”
Neptune nodded, drifting closer. His expression had softened into something… different, the playfulness dimming just slightly. "I came here to say something else, actually. Before we got sidetracked by galactic conspiracies and talking about how much you really need to apologize to Uranus."
"Which was?"
"I owe you an apology."
Erebus stared at him. "You what?" He scoffed. “What is this, opposite day?”
"When you came back,” Neptune said, brow pinching. “When you showed up with Ganymede and Europa, ready to confront Jupiter, ready to tell the Sun the truth." Neptune's voice was quieter now, less scattered. "I was cold to you. I made jokes at your expense. I called you Planet W just to annoy Uranus."
"I remember." He’d just been annoyed at Neptune not falling in line.
"You'd spent billions of years alone because Jupiter and Saturn threw you out. And when you finally came back, when you finally had a chance to be part of something, I treated you… not like what you deserved. I mean—you treated Saturn awfully even if you thought he deserved it. There was a lot of room to improve!” He cracked a smile that faltered a bit. “But you were hurting. I should have noticed.”
Erebus didn't know what to say. He'd been prepared for suspicion or interrogation, or the sharp curiosity that Neptune had been leveling at him since they'd arrived. He… hadn’t been prepared for this.
"But then I was angry at you, because I didn’t even think you were trying to make things better," Neptune continued. "You manipulated Uranus, and you—you made him doubt my friendship with him. That hurt.” He frowned, a bit of real pain flickering in his eyes. Erebus just looked away. “You tried to take Jupiter's place, and—and you almost destroyed the balance of the whole Solar System. But that's not—" He paused, blinking one eye, then the other. "That's not really why. I was angry because you reminded me of what I could have become. If I'd let the loneliness win. If I'd let the bitterness take root. Like I said before.” His shoulders slumped.
Well.
Erebus surreptitiously pinched the inside of his arm. "Neptune..."
"I spent so many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many years alone in my orbit. Orbits with no one to talk to but my moons, no one to see, nothing but the Kuiper Belt and my own thoughts. It did things to my mind. Things that never fully healed." He threw his arms wider with each many until it looked like it had to hurt. "You know, the things I know you probably made fun of to Uranus, because he called me a dimwit, and Uranus might be a bit… bad at talking sometimes, but he’s not mean.” Erebus opened and then closed his mouth, biting the inside of his cheek. “The forgetting things constantly. The way I sometimes say things that don't really make sense." He blinked. "That's not just how I am! That's what the isolation did to me."
Erebus knew. He’d be outright… unperceptive not to notice.
He'd watched it happen from his own isolation—his slow fragmentation, the imaginary friends and asteroids (like the one floating behind him), how Neptune would sometimes drift into the Kuiper Belt and stare at nothing for years at a time, blank-eyed and somehow still perceptive enough to notice the tiniest brush of his gravity the one time he’d tried to come closer. He'd watched all of it, the same way he'd watched everything else.
But he'd never connected it to himself, and he’d never recognized the parallel Neptune had apparently seen. After all. His isolation was—was forced on him.
Erebus took the chance of Neptune’s pause to shove his hair out of his mouth to say, “Sorry,” in a rough grumble that he meant but couldn’t get any louder or clearer. “For… that.”
Neptune blinked and then sent him a brilliant smile.
“Accepted! Anyway, you spent billions of years alone. Billions! And you didn't break the way I did.” Erebus looked away. Definitely still broke a little, the back of his mind said. Rude, he told it. “You held on! You remembered everything. You kept yourself together through sheer, obsessive focus." He shook his head slowly. "I should have seen that at least a little. It’s not entirely my fault. You did a lot of bad things of your own choice.”
…Could he please stop being reminded?
“But I guess I’m saying that I could have noticed that! Instead I acted like you were nothing but the villain in a story, and I was the comic relief and that was the only way to fix things, and neither of those were true. I should have seen more options. And I didn’t.”
The weirdest thing was he looked genuinely regretful about it.
Stars above, what the hell?
"I was a villain," Erebus retorted. “You couldn’t have done anything.”
The words came out rougher than he intended, and he clearly his throat.
"Were you? Or were you a planet who got ejected and spent eons trying to make sense of it, and the only thing that kept you going was the hope that one day someone would pay for what they did to you?” The sad look on Neptune’s face was worse than any judgement he might have sent his way. “Because that's not villainy, I think. That's pain. Very, very deep, very untreated pain. And pain makes people do things they wouldn’t normally do. Or shouldn’t do." He shrugged. "I know. I've done them."
Erebus looked at him sharply. "You?”
Neptune went very still.
"I know I’m the reason my original moons died," he said, staring at the stars below them. "My original moons. I’m the one who pulled Triton in. I’m the reason he accidentally destroyed them, and—so technically, it’s my fault. I didn't mean to. I guess it wasn't my fault, not really. But I lied about it for billions of years to protect him." His voice was flat, stripped of its usual whimsy. "I let the Sun believe Triton was always my moon. I even lied to him when it was really obvious it was something else, and I tried to keep lying even when he was asking me for answers! I kept that secret and it ate and ate and ate at me, and you know what it taught me?"
Erebus shook his head.
"Doing the wrong thing for the right reason is still doing the wrong thing. And you have to deal with it eventually." Neptune met his eyes. "I'm not good at apologies either. I still try to keep everything light even when they probably need to be heavy. But I'm trying! That's all any of us can do. You’re trying now, aren’t you?”
It was silent for longer than he wanted to count.
He could see Neptune’s fingers tapping out of the corner of his eye, like a constant pattern with his thumb pressed against his pointer, index, ring, and pinkie in that order over and over again.
"Neptune," Erebus finally asked, still staring at his hands. "How do you feel about Uranus?" The question surprised him as much as it seemed to surprise Neptune, who blinked owlishly and looked at Uranus in the distance.
He hadn't planned to ask it… or even known he wanted to ask it.
But Neptune's words had unsettled something in him.
Something he'd been avoiding. Probably futilely. The exact reason his eyes kept drifting to Uranus even as he tried to pull them away again and again.
Neptune considered his question with unusual seriousness, one hand cupped against his chin. His eye drifted, corrected, drifted again.
"He's my best friend!” he finally chirped. “He's been my best friend since the beginning. When I was alone in my orbit—really alone, like the kind of alone that makes you stare at your own hands and forget your own name and also what you are, you know?—he was one of the things I'd think about. Him and my moons and the dot of the Sun in the distance. That’s what kept me tethered." He paused. "He drives me insane sometimes. He's dramatic and insecure and he holds grudges and he doesn’t know how to recognize that people like him for him. But he's also kind. Deep down, in ways he doesn't know how to show. He writes in his diary every day because he doesn’t want to forget anything. He paints pictures of the Solar System and every single thing in it. He loves his moons so much it terrifies him, because he's so afraid of failing them that sometimes he fails them just by… being afraid. You get it?”
Neptune blinked one eye after the other and smiled in Uranus’s direction.
“He’s awesome. I really wish he thought that too.”
"So you care about him.”
"Of course I do,” Neptune said, throwing his hands out, palms-up. He wore a theatrical frown that seemed more like Saturn than him, which only made Erebus that much more annoyed. “I just said that! Were you listening?"
Erebus shot him an annoyed look. "I was listening, you—agh. Forget it."
Neptune just grinned right back at him, unfailingly cheerful again. The next words felt strange in his mouth, unfamiliar. "I do want to apologize. To him. I don’t want to… wait. To ignore it. Like I did with Jupiter and Saturn.”
Technically still, with Saturn.
Huh.
Erebus looked away only to find his eyes land on Uranus. His core tightened in his chest, a foreign guilt wreathing around it.
"He's standing over there," he said quietly. "Waiting. For you, probably.”
"Of course he is. He's very patient. Also, very very nervous. You can tell because his braid’s already all messed up, because he tugs at it when he’s nervous. I have to put it back together a lot. Like a lot." Erebus fought a smile, rolling his eyes. Neptune's voice lowered as he leaned in, practically whispering to him. "You need to talk to him. Properly. Not just an apology. The truth. About the name. About what you did. About why you did it."
“Really? Do I have to?”
"Yep! And he needs to hear something real specific, too." Neptune drifted closer, his expression unusually serious. "An apology, and you need to tell him that when you offered him Caelus—when you told him changing his name would change who he was—you knew it wasn't true. You knew—" He pointed right at him. "—because you tried the same thing, Planet X. The mysterious one. The one who didn't need anyone. And it didn't fix anything, did it? It just made you more alone."
Erebus stared at him. "How do you—"
"I’m perceptive, remember? I’m always percepting!" Erebus still wasn’t sure if that was a word. Neptune smiled at him, the expression unexpectedly warm considering everything. "Tell him that. Tell him changing your name didn't fix you either. Tell him the only thing that helped was letting people in, even when it was terrifying, even when you were sure they'd hurt you. He needs to hear that from someone who actually understands."
"He won't believe me."
"Maybe not! Uranus is stubborn like that.” Neptune giggled as he shot him a look. “But I know he'll remember it! And one day it might make a difference." Neptune reached out and patted Erebus on what might generously be called his shoulder (it was more like on his upper arm… but higher?). "You're doing fine. Terrible, mostly. But there’s some fine."
"I thought you weren't giving praise."
"This is feedback, Planet W. Completely different! Obviously." Neptune's grin widened, then softened into something almost tender. "Now. I'm going to go fetch him for you. Like I said, he's very very nervous and he'll never approach on his own. He's been messing up his braid this entire time.”
"Neptune—"
But Neptune was already drifting backward, away from him, his gravitational tug orienting itself toward Uranus. "Don't mess it up!” And then he was gone against all logic, just a blur of deep blue against the dark, his humming starting up and fading into the background hum of the cosmos.
Erebus’s eye twitched. Guillermo bumped into his back as his gravity reacted. "He can't just—" he sputtered. "He can't just send him over here. I'm not prepared. I haven't—"
Guillermo said nothing. Erebus groaned.
"Why am I always talking to a rock?"
The rock, as always, offered no answer.
(But maybe that was actually good. If it did start answering, he should probably worry.)