30 Day OTP Challenge: day 1: Holding hands

Two teenagers are sitting together on a big dusty grey rock: a boy and a girl, admiring the view. Mostly.

The rock is on the Moon. It’s on the peak-ridge of one of the Lunar Carpathians, which is a young and jagged mountain range rearing up over the pale rolling highlands that run down toward the Apollo 12 and 14 landing sites. The rock is the topmost fragment of a boulder the size of a suburban house, cracked off the body of the mountain’s uppermost peak a millennium ago in the wake of an impact by a fragment of an “earthgrazer”-class asteroid. Bits and pieces of the old peak lie strewn all down the mountainside, mingled with older, smaller rubble and assorted displaced regolith. But the girl and the boy are long familiar with this old vista, and pay it no mind at the moment.

They’re mostly looking at the Earth right now, not least because this is one of the best times of the month to view it from up here. Since the Moon as seen from Earth is presently a crescent barely three days old, the Earth is just a shade shy of its full—a hot blue-blazing cabochon jewel in the night, burning green and dun and desert-pale, glowing white with weather. The light of it, this close to perihelion, blots out the view of the nearby stars and shines ten times brighter than a full Moon would anywhere on Earth. That blue-green light, so intense in hue as to seem warm, is washing across the lunar surface and drowning everything in an almost-undersea luminescence. “The old Moon in the new Moon’s arms”, they call it at home: Earthshine. Wizards, of course, have other names for it. But these two aren’t considering those at the moment.

“Things are changing…” the girl says.

The boy nods. “Well, we’ve known for a while it was coming.” He raises his eyebrows in annoyance at the Shuffle, shakes it.

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