Beneath the same moon...

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

"Look, Fergal," Tegan said. "There's the rabbit in the moon! I used to show Caitlin when she was a baby,"

Fergal smiles and slid an arm around his wife's waist.

"That's the face of Luna," he said. "And I'm not sure she'd be happy with a rabbit running across her face."

Tegan pulled a face at her husband, and got a kiss on the nose in return.

"You're a hidebound old wolf," she said, and Fergal laughed.

"That I am," he said, with a level of satisfaction. "And this old wolf needs his sleep. Come to bed?"

Tegan smiled and kissed him.

"In a moment," she said. "I'm not sleepy just yet."

"Well, don't leave it too long," Fergal said and ruffled her hair affectionately. "Or you'll turn into the devil tomorrow morning when I wake you at dawn."

Tegan narrowed her eyes at him, and he laughed and kissed her again before he left.

It was a balmy and mellow night, and it was easy to wander across the grass, and settle beneath a tree. She tilted her face up to the moon again. Tegan was sure she could see a rabbit up there, much more clearly in Ulster than she ever could in London, where the smog would be thick across its face.

What would they see in London? Zachary, Petra, Seraph...Michael. What would Michael be seeing right now?

Tegan sighed and drew her knees up to her chest.

There was still an odd ache somewhere inside when she thought about Michael. Sometimes that ache seemed to spread everywhere. She missed her life - her flat, her friends, the camaraderie of Kew, the freedom of living alone, able to come and go as she pleased. She missed the person she had been - the person she had left behind in a small studio flat in London. She went back to London quite regularly, once a month, maybe more, but it wasn't the same. She was a visitor now, not a local. She didn't know what Swampy was referring to when he talked about 'the purple tea in the crotch incident', and actually noticed the latest colour that Zachary's hair had gone, instead of taking the constant shift of colours for granted.

She missed Zach and Petra more than she had expected as well. They were her family, her clan, her people, in a way that no one else ever had been. 'Dreamspeaker Consor' had become an identity as strong as 'fenien', stronger than 'kinfolk'. As strong as family.

Tegan sighed.

Still, she had made a deal with Fergal. She had given herself to him and he wanted her home. It had been far less painful than she had expected. At first it had felt strange. Caitlin had been awkward with this comparative stranger who had bounced back into her life. The Sept looked at her suspiciously. Yet over the last year and a half, it had slowly become home again. She hadn't worked that much over here. Not a lot of people in Ulster wanted murals. But she had been able to travel into Belfast occasionally, and she'd gotten involved with a peace and reconciliation project there. Endlessly Hopeful had been nice to her, even if he had once absent mindedly said "you should have been a Child of Gaia, Tegan," which had left her with that horrible sick feeling in her belly for hours.

She stared up at the moon again.

It was home. But it was a home she had paid for. And sometimes that still cut inside her, like a wound that hadn't healed.

Where were Michael, and Zach, and Petra? Were they looking at the moon as well.

And what did the moon see when it looked down on all of them?