Love and Destruction: When Cosmic Forces Collide

A few hours after the first strike.

"Mahito! Mahito, are you okay?"

I groggily open my eyes to see Lauren's worried face hovering over mine. She is embracing me with both arms; I groan as she rolls off of me, allowing me to sit up. The last thing I remember was being knocked out by a falling piece of ceiling.

"Where's the rest of my house?" I grunt.

"It's gone," says Lauren, in disbelief. "You miraculously survived; I still can't believe it."

I shake my head, and look around at the ruins of my house. Most of the roof has been ripped away, but only a few pieces of wall remain standing among the rubble.

"The damage doesn't look that bad," I say, crawling through the wreckage to retrieve a few scattered items from my bedroom. My laptop is crushed beyond repair, but a few other things could be salvaged. "I'll just have to rebuild it once this dust settles."

Over the past few days, Lauren has been wrecking havoc on Earth; most of its cities have been razed to the ground by her, with only a few survivors left alive on its surface. A third of its population has been wiped out; those who remain are holed up in bunkers beneath what little remains of their homes. All attempts at communication with her have failed; all we know is that she is hostile towards humanity, but why? It took me several hours to convince myself to talk to her after seeing the destruction she caused, but now that I'm here I don't regret it one bit. She's made mistakes in her past, but she learned from them and became a better person for it. That's not something many living beings can say about themselves today. And if I can get through to her even just a little bit, then maybe there's hope for humanity yet.

A couple of hours later...

As we walk around what used to be Philly (or what *used* to be Philadelphia), Lauren casts an occasional glance at me. I've been talking for hours about how much I admire her, and how much I want her to stop destroying Earth and save humanity from itself; and despite her best efforts she looks like she's starting to crack under the pressure of my words. I've covered almost every aspect of her life - from the time she was born in the stars until the present day - and slowly but surely I'm getting through to her. Her eyes are starting to tear up now as we approach an old playground; she runs for it and throws herself onto its slide before collapsing onto the ground in tears.

I tentatively approach her as she sobs into her hands; eventually reaching out and putting my hand on her shoulder while kneeling beside her. She turns towards me and buries herself in my chest without another word said between us; and as we cry together I feel something inside me change forever as well. When we finally pull apart from each other after some time, both our faces are red with tears and dirtied with grime from where we fell onto the ground earlier; but looking into each other's eyes we can both see that everything has changed between us forevermore - for better or for worse, we'll never know until tomorrow brings another sunrise...