Nothing Like the Sun
By Fewthistle

Author's Note: Written for Challenge Four, Prompt Two at the Livejournal Community even_angels_.

With gratitude to Peanuts. For the reading, for the suggestions, and for the always gorgeous prompts. Thank you, Brilliant One.

Night has gone on too long. It is always dark out here. Always night. Sometimes it seems that I can't remember the last time I saw the sun. We have passed thousands of blazing stars on our journey; dwarfs, in millennial death-throes, white-hot children of light, newly born, even red giants like a stain of blood against the blackness. None of them were the sun; not my sun. My sun is a disc of gold in a perfect blue Indiana sky, emitting a light that turns the sheaves of wheat in the fields to a sea of copper and bronze and pale platinum.

The heaters on the ship work well. Ambient temperature. Perfect humidity. And yet, I am so cold. My skin is pale, dun-colored, almost translucent as I stand naked before the mirror. My hair has grown dull as well, the subtle shadings of blonde and auburn no longer visible. I tell the computer to raise the temperature. I pull on a thick sweater that my mother gave me back when there were only three pips on my collar. I stand under the scalding water of the shower. None of it helps. I am cold, so cold, and I do not know if I will ever be warm again.

I lie here on this lounge and stare at the universe slipping by the view port, and I can feel the cold, like tentacles reaching in toward me, wrapping around my wrists, my ankles, pulling me under that frozen black water. Some part of me remembers what it was like to be warm, to feel the heat of the sun on my face, feel the skin grow tight as it begins to burn.

Here in the sterile, lifeless air of this ship, I force my mind to remember standing along the edge of the lawn of my parents' house, green expanse behind me, black earth stretching out before me, as the fields sloped slowly toward the horizon, the smell of the soil rich and musky. Alive. I can almost recall the feeling as the flush of heat crept along my skin, skin grown damp with perspiration, as a single drop of sweat slipped caressingly down to settle in the small of my back.

Some nights, looking in the mirror at the ghost who stares back at me, I can close my eyes and see again the glow of honeyed flesh, grown golden as the sun itself, blue eyes glimmering against the tan of my face.

Often now, more often than I care to admit, I look at you, your hair the same golden color of that sun, your eyes as clear and unblemished as that perfect Indiana sky, and I imagine that I can feel the faint stirrings of warmth somewhere deep inside me. Feel the faint trickle of sweat along the nape of my neck, creeping up into my hairline. Feel the flush of my skin as your hand accidentally brushes mine as you hand me your weekly report.

I think that I need to know if the solid weight of your body on mine, the heated expanse of your flesh under my hands, the moist ardor of your mouth against my lips, on my skin, would be enough. Enough to warm me again.

You have become my one hope of ever being warm. A living, breathing sun to bring me to life again. You are no longer a thought.