Chapter Text
Titan stepped through the dark, clutching his
large, heavy satchel. He put extra padding around it, just so to not risk doing any damage to the glass jar inside, but the padding only added to the weight. He stopped outside a coffee shop, which was obviously closed at this hour, and set down his satchel, breathing a sigh of relief as the weight lifted off his shoulder. The ache still remained, but he ignored that as he looked around him. He couldn’t find it.
Titan wasn’t familiar with this neighborhood. And it wasn’t like he could just ask for directions. The planets living here were mostly sleeping, as even if they weren’t, they would recognize him as a moon immediately.
Titan picked his satchel up, on his other shoulder this time, and turned the corner of the coffee shop before he could see a large metal building. Or at least, that was what it looked like on the outside. On the inside, Titan didn’t even know. He had only heard rumors passed down by moons from planets. And Titan knew all too well, planets didn’t tell them shit. Ganymede was lying when he spun all those stories about the dragons behind the glass. Titan figured all he got was from eavesdropping from the rare occasions that planets would come to their city.
But Titan could imagine. And he imagined quite a bit. He walked towards the building, practically dreaming of what it could contain. Water, obviously. And fishes. Or maybe sharks. Eels. Coral reefs. Maybe Ganymede wasn’t lying, and there were aquatic dragons, swimming around in there.
The sign read, ‘Earth’s Aquarium’ and a smaller wooden sign below it added, ‘No Moons Allowed!’ The door was locked. Titan, after further pushing down his morals, grabbed a hairpin just lodged into his hair that he stole from Dione, and jammed it into the keyhole.
His eyes darted against his surroundings as he fiddled around, finally settling on the door as he heard the click, and he was in.
Titan pushed the door open, almost wincing at the loud creak that ensued. He didn’t dare open it anymore, and instead squeezed himself and the satchel through.
Titan’s jaw dropped. He had never seen so much water. It seemed bigger on the inside. Towers of water reached from the floor to nearly the ceiling, all behind glass. The dim light bounced from one boxed ocean to another, and the whole place gleamed blue. A singular winding wooden path lined the ground, splitting the water neatly in two. Titan felt like he was walking behind Moses.
And that wasn’t even mentioning all the fish.
Every kind of fish he had ever heard about were probably in one glass box or another. And especially ones he had never heard about.
His knees felt weak. Titan swallowed hard, and took a quiet step forward, double and triple checking that there were no security guards.
It was a well known fact that all planets had powers. Earth, the person whose aquarium Titan had just broke into, had powers related to water. He was a direct descendent of Theia and Terra, so everyone knew at least a little about him.
It was also a well known fact that moons didn’t have powers, which would be just the way it was if Titan hadn’t been summoning dead moons for years now.
That was Titan’s power, but Titan wasn’t the only moon with powers. Eighteen of the moons, including himself, had special abilities. They spent most of their effort taking care of the rest of their community.
Titan imagined how the other powered moons would react to the aquarium. Ganymede, Callisto, Io… all the way down to Miranda, the youngest. She was only fourteen.
Titan lined the walls of the aquarium, all the height and water and fish beginning to make his head spin. With shaky hands, he took out his glass jar, which contained the ghosts.
There were five different ghosts in there, looking like little white clouds that gleamed with varying degrees of brightness. They had two shining eyes each, but they never landed on Titan. Or anything, really. The beady dots just darted around along with them, as they skittered in the jar like mice.
They were cute, actually. Fondness made its way into Titan, and he smiled looking down on them. He knew in the back of his head that these translucent little critters were actually real dead moons, probably older than titan, but they had never showed themselves in human form.
Titan knew they were moons because they each had a planetary symbol burned onto their body, like living moons had on their neck.
The symbol a moon had on its neck didn’t mean orbital ownership, at least not nowadays. Titan didn’t want to think about belonging to a planet. It was more like a piece of trivia.
So he was watching the ghosts float around in the jar, three out of five of them adorning a symbol that looked like an ‘h’ with a line atop it, like Titan had. He directed his attention to the fish, and felt the air get punched out of his lungs seeing the biggest living thing he had ever seen in his life.
It was a dome shape. It was as if a whole boat just came rowing slowly through the water. The belly was white and lined. The top, from what Titan could see, was blue. A blue whale. Titan could pass out right there.
The ghosts seemed interested too. So interested, in fact, that they collectively clanked against the jar until it slipped out of Titans hands with a loud shatter.
Titan winced and ducked down to collect them, and stifle the noise, but the ghosts had slipped through the crack in the glass and came flying up and out through the aquarium. Titan wanted to yell at the ghosts, but the shattering of the glass had already made enough noise as it was, and he didn’t have much time until a planet would see him. And kill him.
Titan held the broken glass jar up to the ceiling, desperately gesturing with his hands for the ghosts to get back inside. His mind was screaming at him, saying this was a terrible idea from the start. None of the ghosts even seemed to pay attention to Titan, and he almost let out a stifled sob before dropping to his knees and putting his clasped hands to his head and praying to the only planet he trusted, the only planet he would ever trust, Theia. He whispered Theia’s name, quietly begging her to save him.
The least bright ghost, bearing a symbol Titan had never seen before, stopped and turned towards Titan. All the other ghosts, one by one, did the same.
The brightest and tiniest ghost, bearing the same symbol as Titan, took on the form of a human girl right before Titans eyes. She looked about nine, and Titan immediately recognized her as his twin sister, Chrysalis. Except Titan was seventeen, and she was still nine.
His heart stopped in his throat. He didn’t want to do this. With even shakier hands than before, he held out the jar. Chrysalis took one look at the panic on her brother’s face and slipped into the jar, no hesitation, now back in the form that looked like a cloud with two dots for eyes.
The other four ghosts went back in, and chose to pretend the crack wasn’t there as Titan screwed the lid back on and secured it in his satchel.
Titan exhaled, taking in this short moment of relief, before he noticed a crack on the aquarium walls. The water didn’t seem to be spilling out for now, so Titan elected to ignore it. And if the aquarium flooded during nighttime, oh well. Not his problem.
…Titan ran to the nearest ladder.
He clambered up the ladder, and stopped halfway through, clutching the rung for dear life with one hand as the other reached into the crack in his jar, wincing as his hand got grazed by sharp glass, and came back with a hand coated in sticky ectoplasm. He wiped it off on the crack in the aquarium, making sure every inch was covered. The blue whale seemed to notice him now, and slowed down its great tread through the water.
Titan wiped the remaining ectoplasm, now more of a gummy texture, on his sweater, and climbed down the ladder again. He closed up the satchel and tried once again to enjoy the previous calm of the aquarium once more as he stepped onto the wooden planks, until he heard a male voice call out. It sounded angry, asking ‘who’s there’, asking ‘who’s in my aquarium’.
…His. Aquarium.
Titan’s heart rate spiked for the third time within ten minutes, and he darted straight for the exit, slamming the heavy door behind him.
Titan panted for breath on the outside of the aquarium, still hearing the shouts get closer and closer. He looked back one last time at ‘Earth’s Aquarium: No Moons Allowed!’ and, intoxicated with adrenaline, tore off the latter part of the sign, running away with it.