Somewhere in between.
"What is it with you and... plaid?"
"Like my shirts?"
"Like every day."
"I don't know it makes me feel... ruggedly fashionable."
She laughed. "Don't you mean raggedly?"
"Very funny."
"I mean I like plaid," she said, pinching the shoulder of his button-up, "But every day is just overkill man."
"Yeah yeah yeah."
"You look like Ireland exploded."
He laid back, his arms behind his head and stared into the sky. "Do you ever think about it?"
"About what?"
"The stars."
"Well I think they're there and you can see them at night. That's about the extent of it. I kind of try not to think much about the stars right now because of where it got me to begin with. I mean not that I don't love to be here," she said shrugging her shoulders and gesturing about her, "with you trying to figure this all out but there are things I miss about before. Things I'm missing out on by sitting here."
Missing things, that wasn't one of his current troubles. Propping himself up on an elbow, he looked over at her as she paced from unsteady rock to unsteady rock, "Like what?"
She sighed. "Like... my mom for one. She's so, so graceful and calm, a lot of things I'm not. She has it all put together and she knows everything that needs knowing. If she was in my place, things would be so much further along. And she has this way, of just softening the blow to the harshest things. I love being with her. It makes me feel like a better person just by sitting beside her. She has a real way of drawing the best out of you." She dropped a peddle into a small puddle and watched the water ripple. "And I miss school. That's weird but learning is kind of my thing. I like sitting in different classes like mythology and then science and trying to fuse the two together in my head. Even though there is no logical or true connection, I just like toying around with it. By the time we get back it will be summer. I'll be a year behind school and it will have been like I failed."
"And what if we fail?"
She connected eyes with him for a second as if wondering the same then shook her head. "I haven't-- I don't have that figured out. I guess I'm just trying not to fail."
"Good plan."
They sat a few minutes in silence and then she laid down beside him, hands behind her head, moonlight blushing her cheeks silver. He looked over for a minute, a bit bewildered then chalked it up to all of the other things about her he didn't quite understand. "So what was your question about the stars? What do you think about them?"
"I just wonder. Those constellations all tell the tale of stories past, right? Stories we have actually come across since we started. And if these stories happened, then they had to have been added to the stars afterwards, right? Or maybe not because the fates seem to know everything to begin with, prophecies trick us will telling everything, so maybe there is already a constellation before the tale ever seems to unravel."
"Maybe."
"And, well, what I'm wondering is," he paused, knitting his eyebrows together, unable to pull out his exact question in the way it was framed in his mind, a complex web of thoughts to be rooted into a simple line of words."
"Whether or not you have a constellation and whether or not it's up there?"
"Yes, as cocky as that might sound."
"It's not cocky but it's definitely interesting. But either way I don't think it's a question you should be troubling yourself with. Knowing won't change anything, and if it could, you wouldn't know until after. At wor"st it could give you a terrible dread and at best possible a confidence which might prove dangerous. Be the one hero who ignores the prophecy. Don't hear it or know it and you'll focus on the issue at hand rather than trying to prove some prediction wrong."
He laughed a bit more lightly than before. "That's not the worst advice I've ever heard."
"Of course not." She jumped up, "Now I think we have a friend to find."