Andromeda

XVII.

The next time I saw Andromeda and Jeongguk, they were sitting on the edge of the roof. That was around an hour after the light had gotten brighter. When she had first announced that her mother was coming, I had expected that the moon herself would immediately appear in godly form in front of us. But nothing had happened. 

Andromeda had laughed, that bright laugh like silver bells. "She has all the time in the world to get here, love," she said. "Why would she hurry?"

"I thought you were leaving tonight," Namjoon said the rest of the boys had, like me, eventually filtered their way up to the roof, still admiring the bright white light of Andromeda's mother.

The light the moon gave wasn't anything like sunlight. For one, instead of being golden yellow, it was white and silver. Instead of being warm, the light it gave was cold. I wondered what light Andromeda's star gave.

She nodded. "I'll have you know I'm getting to a billion years old. I am capable of doing some stuff without my mother."

Next to her, Jeongguk flinched, and she pursed her lips. "The sun doesn't rise for a few more hours, and my mother appreciates her time in the light. She'll get here when she wants to get here."

"Why is she coming here, anyway?" Taehyung asked.

She smiled. "I don't think my mother trusts me."

"She doesn't trust that you'll go back to your star?" Jimin said.

"That too, I bet."

Andromeda looked directly at me and smiled that same beautiful, courteous smile that I wasn't sure any human could replicate. "Would you come with me, please?" she asked, raising a hand.

"Me?" I asked in shock, pointing at myself. If she only had a little more time left on the planet, why would she want to spend even a minute of that time with me, someone she had only met a few days before. But she nodded, still smiling, then reappeared in front of me and took my painfully human hands in her perfect cold, smooth ones. Before I could ask where we were going, we were suddenly standing on a very tall hill, overlooking a huge forest. In the distance, I could see large stone statues. The moon was huge and white as she stared down at the forest.

"Where are we?" I asked.

"Mount Qingyuan," Andromeda said.

I stared at her.

"We're near Quanzhou city, in Fujian Province. Mount Qingyuan is a national park that's been famous since the Tang dynasty because it's filled with Taoist and Buddhist sculptures."

"Uh," I mumbled, "'kay."

"You know, Siddhartha Gautama - the first Buddha - he was the first one to argue that nothing is permanent or fixed, so life is full of uncertainty. Of course, I told him that while that's true in some cases, there are some things that are permanent and fixed. Like the elements or the passage of time. I know that wasn't exactly what he meant when he said 'nothing', but I wanted to make sure. For scientific purposes. Science had been doing pretty well for the past couple hundred years. Electricity, medicine, that sort of thing."

"Have you always been so interested in science?" I asked.

She laughed. "I'm a star in another galaxy. I am science, as much as it may scare me."

"Scare you?" I repeated. "What do you mean?"

Andromeda sighed. "Siddhartha was right in most ways about things not being permanent. I've been here millions of millions of years, and when I look at the major eras throughout time, I can't find any era like another. They happen, and they never repeat. Which means you can never know what will happen in the future. I find that sort of terrifying." She sighed, then looked up at the sky, at the faraway stars in the inky blackness of the sky. "At least out there, with the stars, the only thing that happens is stars dying after billions of years. I guess in the long run, we're all moving further and further out into the mass of space as we know it, which is something that's never happened before, but even I'll be long gone by the time that amounts to anything."

She looked down, and a small tear shining like an opal fell from her eye.

"I never should have come here," she said. "This planet has ruined me."

I stared at her. "What do you mean?"

She wiped away the tear with the back of her hand. "I'll never be happy again because I came here. I'll never be happy because I loved people here. I loved people here and I left them at the mercy of a world that's always changing. Every day, so many people die. Eventually, everyone I love here will die and even though I'm a literal god, there won't be anything I can do about it, and I just have to keep going because that's what happens when someone that can live for billions of years loves someone so..." she trailed off and yanked on a lock of her hair, "so mortal."

Above us, her mother stared down at us in a manner that I could swear was almost judging.

"And the worst part of it is," Andromeda continued, "Ggukie wants me to bring him with me, and I want to. I want to bring him with me, so I can protect him from this insane world. But I can't, because he belongs here. He belongs with other humans and deserves to live a normal, mortal life like other humans."

We stood in silence for a minute. Her hair hung limply, and her eyes were red.

"You know," I said, and she turned that sad gaze to me, "I've heard that the hardest thing you can do when loving someone is to let them go when they need to be let go."

The pure mourning in her eyes made me continue speaking. "What you're feeling isn't wrong," I promised, even though it was hard to imagine what she was thinking. Only the best of humans cared so deeply for others that they were saddened by the fact they would be unable to protect someone. And no human was saddened that they couldn't protect that person because they had to leave to protect the greater good.

"You've been wondering why I wanted to bring you in," she said, and the odd change in topic confused me for a moment.

"Yes."

"It's because I can sense in you that you can be trusted. That you're responsible." She sighed. "I know it's ridiculous, I know that they're adults, but-"

"I'll look out for them," I said, mustering a smile, even though I could feel my heart breaking to pieces in my chest.

"Thank you," she said. She looked up at the moon. "My mother is here. It's time to go."