The moons, the stars, the asteroids, and the planets knew that Jupiter and Pluto were in love. The space between them crackled with Jupes' lightning and shimmered with Plu's trademark red frost. You couldn't ignore the spectacle of their vibrant love languages. Though light years apart, they remained at play, firing off waves of white static and auburn hail towards the other's atmosphere. They were even known by a specific name: Ju-Plu. But they were tragically distanced, so their surfaces couldn't experience the comforting pull of their beloved chosen world.

The other problem was Jupes—his pull was too strong, his immense mass tended to crush all that came close. Jupes emitted an orb of destruction, a celestial killzone. These days—all days, really—Jupes struggled to handle the fragile galaxy with care. He practiced with passing asteroids as they drew into his orbit, juggling them, straining to not squeeze so hard—often succeeding in minimizing the damage (a few pebbles at most), yet sometimes failing and spitting out space debris. Jupes apologized, fashioning sad faces out of its lightning, and the asteroids accepted it because change was their nature. But Jupes didn't feel any better about it. Because if he couldn't carefully sustain the asteroids then he couldn't someday carry Plu, and if he couldn't carry Plu, then maybe he didn't love her like he thought he did.

Pluto, herself, was troubled too, but much more profoundly. The thought of joining Jupes' orbit teased her continuously. She craved the pull, the acceptance, the cosmic hug, and the absence of his orbit infused her with doubts. And though she fought the skepticism about his love, doubt was all she did. Plu was the smallest planet in the solar system, the farthest from the sun, closest to the eternal darkness which lay beyond their galaxy. The lack of importance, of consequence, consumed her. The iciness and emptiness went hand-in-hand with the hardening idea in her that she didn't matter, that if she disappeared the cosmos wouldn't feel it. The vibrancy of the galaxy had a way of shrinking her, and she felt trapped in an endless state of watching herself die. Meanwhile the looming void beyond the dark side of Pluto pulled and pulled and pulled.

One day she began to drift away. There was no explanation for it. Suddenly she found herself untethered, and not even the will of the sun could keep her in place. So off into the expanse she went.

Drifting, drifting...

Few asteroids resided in the new territory. And no planets. Plu was as perfectly alone as she'd ever get. She traveled for light years. She traveled until the sun was a memory. She often glimpsed the streak of bright white bolts across the darkness, from Jupes no doubt, messages of I-love-you, Come-back, You-matter. Plu knew the colors of his language well. She missed the electricity, his loving tricks of light, but tired of watching them vanish. Once the flashes dispersed, she found no reason to stay. The emptiness depressed her. And as it were, she had no means of talking back.

So Plu just shrank in the vastness. Her spirit coiled and tightened, actively diminishing as she so wished. The smaller she became, the less pressure she felt. Smaller. Smaller. Invisible. Be invisible. And then another thought zoomed through her soul. Disappear. But she couldn't disappear—not on command anyhow—so the steady drift persisted.

Occasionally she passed an asteroid, which, imbued with her cinnamon-colored frost, turned to Pluto in appreciation of the novel costuming—but she didn't notice. Her turmoil wouldn't allow it.

What she did notice was only what she could describe as the end of the universe. She didn't know this with certainty but the space had a different texture. She sensed an odd pressure materializing, the boundaries of an unseen maelstrom clipping her outer edges, but she pushed aside all concern. Come what may. Just come already. By this point she was ready to vanish.

She was dressed for it, too, her pale-gray surface topped with frozen rust. Death garb was her mode.

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But in the distance she spied lightning, a relentless bolt storm, tremendous white veins scarring the darkness. She knew it was Jupes—he was stretching and reaching and searching for the means to grasp at Plu. Jupes had launched his gaseous self through the darkness, giving chase. He was a rolling explosion, a charged world, desperate and volatile. And in his wake were clusters of stolen worlds—Mercury and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune and countless asteroids. Each mass had been colonized by Jupes as moons.

Jupes drove himself onwards, yellow-orange smoke billowing out in lawless blasts. Plu recognized his hurt, she sympathized for this, she pitied this, and she tried with all her might to just choose life—

Pressure. The squeeze of space. The viciousness of its pulling. Pluto's surface was worked upon and warped. Suddenly the emptiness had supplied a nebulous force, a calm destruction, a black hole. Her drifting abruptly halted. Violence was now upon her, and as Plu's surface began to crush and compress, she was assaulted with the onset of terror. Everything she stood to lose now illuminated in her—

Her memories awakened, flooding her:

Lightning. Explosions. Globules of dancing white static. She remembered the distant chaos of Jupes' orbit, his gravitational pull a solar system crusher. She sensed his bumbling nature, the constant apology draped over his hapless oblivion. So she sent Jupes her laughs—asteroid passersby which she coated in crimson frost—which Jupes through no fault of his own destroyed, grinding the asteroids into snowflake patterns. The sentiment of Sorry! Sorry! filled the void, and even slowed the violence of his wild draw. He was thoughtful—not thoughtless. Clumsy—not destructive.

Plu was compelled to do one thing: she iced several more asteroids, floated them over as glacial laughs. Jupes warmed at her amusement and did his best to protect the offerings. After all, these were the first gifts he'd ever received.

Days later, Plu spotted her laughs in his orbit, icy and undamaged. And despite their distance from one another, the two were instantly bound.

Plu remembered sending along blizzardy trinkets every day. And she remembered Jupes hoarding them as treasure. She remembered the gratitude in his lightning. The expansion of his gases as he swallowed everything within view, his gravity forcing the neighboring planets out of their normal solar orbits—and the ensuing apologetic energy as he carefully restored the planets to their rightful places.

Plu remembered these good times and others. She saw herself: tiny, yet existing in a substantial way. She turned rocks to scarlet monuments. She gifted the galaxy her crimson glitter, coppery and cold. She recognized herself in all her moments of grace—engaging in love, giving love, worthy of love. As the black hole devoured her, the feeling of her own inadequacy, the feeling that she was unnecessary, also began to disintegrate. Beneath the now atomized layers of her despondency, she'd at last located her long dormant will to live. She wanted life—she did, she did, she did.

But it's hard sometimes, she concluded, Sometimes it's the hardest thing there is—

Another sudden pressure, no less forceful, no less insistent. And a strange sight, too, the influx of snowflake-shaped stars and perfectly intact frost globes, the first of Plu's gifts to Jupes along with the most recent ones, and even all the ones in between. Jupes inched closer and closer, gradually strengthening his hold on her. Come back! Come back!

So she did.

Plu escaped the dreadful suction, finally free of the breakage. The debris around her began to chill and crystallize, becoming glassy and reflective. She studied her reflection in the shards, a world transformed in the black hole's aftermath.

The darkness promised to take everything yet she emerged rebuilt.

She'd returned from the black hole little more than a planetary marble, a miniscule red ice. In her lost size, her gravitational pull was thoroughly erased. No moon or asteroid could be held by her any longer. But her smallness mattered less to her now. She'd survived. Small and strong. Significantly harmed but invincible too. Inside you couldn't break her.

And as she found herself within Jupes' wild orbit, a mess of broken asteroids, moons, planets, stars, and as she crossed the turbulent clouds of lightning, a mixture of white and blue strikes, she discovered in him empty clouds too, pockets of perfect calm. In these zones, she found her own gifts—the glacial laughs, the love tokens of cinnamonny ice—attentively housed and preserved.

In this moment, Plu's soul shined, the whole of her releasing a gleaming red snow.

She'd earned a heart tempered in darkness, a soul that bloomed in shadow, and while the black depths continued to call her, forever urging her towards oblivion, she remained safely nuzzled in Jupes' rampage of an orbit, protecting within her a single truth: the gravity of love never lets go.