The mangroves embrace her and she falls into them. Gait is calm now, measured, slow. Blood trickles more slowly from empty sockets. Head spins but she finds purchase easily on the roots she has grown up on, lived on, breathed on, for an eternity. Everything folds around her, against her, and she seeks to press her pelt against every tree she passes--a parting gift, a final kiss to the greys and whites. Stray fur clings to the rough spots, orange markers that will eventually graft into the trees in a land of little wind in the heart of the mangroves. She finds the shore. The log is there. It's always been there. She's known it since she was born, beside it. Since she warred before it to claim the pack on her homelands. Since she held Ludicael's first meeting upon its petrified face. Jupiter doesn't have to see to know it's there--only has to press her paws on the soil and trust. The woman sidles up against it, pausing. Legs fold, lowering stomach slowly to the sanded earth. Mercury finds her and wails. Cries pierce, echo, ripple throughout the territory like a banshee ripping its way from hell, thundering through every soul in a six mile radius as it echoes along the path of the river and through every obstacle. She hears him but the sound falls on her ears without pain. Screams fade to whimpers as he nears. Jupiter feels him begin to clean the blood from her face but he doesn't touch her eyes--where could he begin, even if he tried? And what if it made the bleeding worse? The tasmanian devil falls silent. Knowledge, so heavy and quiet, settles over him. Maw raises to the sky to summon, the cry concentrated to draw forth the one Jupiter loves. He huddles close while she is still warm, while breath still courses through her lungs. Buries his nose into what might as well be the only mother figure he's ever known. Clutches to the memory of celestial violet embedded into those features rather than swollen, blood-packed holes. He calls again. More urgently this time. For her.

They are a love the world does not deserve. Moon and sun, fire and ice, every romantic cliché one can ever imagine thrown into a relationship that could never fail. Had never failed. They were only lost when they lost each other, and even then it was so easy to fall back into orbit. Just like gravity, just like breathing. Their ribs were meant to slide together like puzzle pieces, the tendrils of Jupiter’s warmth wrapping around Medusa’s icy heart like the family she’d never known. It is so easy to forget about mortality. It is so easy, when one sits at the top, to forget that the world is an awful place. It lies and rapes and maims and kills, and it cares not who it hurts. Medusa knows this; it had never done her any kindness. Her only light is Jupiter, her fifth planet, the god of the skies. It is strange, how the largest planet in the galaxy could be held in orbit by nothing more than a snake. The empty sockets of her lover bleed like Medusa’s heart. She is not a healer, she is not a motivator. No, she is a lover, and like any good lover she feels despair. Immediately she rushes to her love’s side, pressing into her side, and losing the ability to just breathe. What words can she say? What could fix this, what could dull the throbbing ache in her chest? This does not happen to them. This is what happens to those who defy them, those who bring them strife and pain. Medusa has never been told the story of the gods. She has never been told how even they come to endings of sorts, that immortality is a lie, that even a gaze of stone can have its head cut off. Oh, she’s knows life is not a dream. She’s known it beneath the oppression of a full grown man on her six month frame, known it with the thickness of the scars on her neck, known it with the nightmares. Jupiter made her feel like a life worth living, and what is she to do with everything spinning out of orbit.

Through the cold, there is a warmth. Phantom eyelids flutter, crumpled and twitching against the upper of her bleeding, swollen hollows, muscle memory cruel as it seeks to reveal what is no longer there. Head raises. Mercury stands away, quiet--an intruder as Medusa faithfully answers the call. Jupiter leans into that touch with a soft, slow sigh, immediately pressing her cheek against the other's neck, burying herself in the other woman's fur like a babe searching for the comfort of maternity. But theirs is a love vastly different--as pure as nature could craft, as endless as time, more strong than anything else on these lands. Stronger than the mountains, than the trees, than the ivory that had taken her eyes, than the omniscient beings that ruled over their fate. None of it mattered in the face of their love. They were all insignificant; they always had been, always would be, ugly in the face of something so perfect in nature and in character. "Medusa?" voice cracks from lack of speech during her trek, from lack of water to sate the thirst plaguing her lips. It is not an honest inquiry in any sense--she has known the woman's presence from the moment her serpent stepped upon Ludicael soil, roots sending signals to the attuned creature that her love was near. She knows that presence better than the back of her paw but she merely needs an excuse to say that name, to feel it on her lips one last time. A dark chuckle bubbles forth on black, bleeding lips. "I blame my age," she croaks with a dry, weak humor, voice faint. What else can she say? For a moment, she fails to take a breath. Death knocks on her door. She tells it to wait. Just a few moments, wait. And so she breathes, her life secured for this once.