Lovers under a billion purple nights.

She could hear the beach, calling for their intertwined bodies, as if they had been washed up on its shore like twin sea shells sleeping with abandon.

She yawned and felt him smile against her neck; his fingertips brushing aside her bangs.

"Hey," he said, and she could just about see her reflection in the darkness of his eyes. "It's time."

Neither of them reached for a light switch, opting to dress in a clumsy, hurried silence instead.

It was a necessary, fortnightly chore, one they did without complaint but without too much consideration: choosing to dress in oversized sweaters and joggers paired with flip-flops in spite of the miracle that took place on the shoreline every other night.

Still unable to see much of what was around her, Emma traced the bedroom wall to guide her to the hallway, following the sound of jangling keys.

She drew up next to him - Pheonix was his name - and he placed a hand on the small of her back as the other reached for the door.

"Ready to go?"

As soon as his profile became visible under the purple moonlight, she was once again shattered by just how much she liked looking at him.

There was a lot to like about Pheonix, of course. He was handsome, smart and even smarter with his jokes, often too macabre or too sarcastic that sometimes she'd be the only person in the room to laugh, and she loved that.

Even though he was chosen for her by The Sky, Emma was convinced that she would have picked him out of a crowd of a thousand others like them because everything about Pheonix was so familiar to her, every little gesture, every fluid change of stance.

Of course, sceptics would say that was what The Sky wanted you to think, to feel, because it needed people like them and them together, just as much as they needed it.

But it didn't matter to Emma what Others thought, because she knew what she had was real and reciprocated, manufactured by some sort of deity or not.

Whatever the feeling may be, she was convinced that Others could not understand or even fathom it, so assured of it's existence by the simplist things like stepping out into the cold evening air that night, wringing her wrists in her hands against the wind, and Pheonix taking them gently in his own like tiny, fragile birds, pressing his thumbs into the dent where he could feel her pulse and marvelling at how in the world he could love the feeling of someone else's heartbeat so much.

"Better?"

He asked, and she nodded.

"Good. We won't be long - promise."

The walk to the beach was short enough not to need conversation, the both of them soon enough coming upon the threshold where the pavement turned to pebbles, and then to sand.

There were pairs like them already there or arriving at the same time, familiar strangers that earned maybe an acknowledging nod but nothing more in what was supposed to be a private moment between the couples dotted on the shoreline, as far as the eye could see.

The clouds were almost an unnatural purpureus colour now. Emma could already see the changes happening to Pheonix even before he had settled them down, propping himself up on his elbows on the sand, neck extended and his head angled to The Sky, bathing in its iridescent light.

She watched as the laugh lines she had noticed earlier that day smoothened out of existence, and the greys that had peppered his sideburns turn back to chestnut brown.

Emma relaxed and assumed the same position next to him, closing her eyes and letting the purple clouds swirling above them seep into her skin.

When she opened them again, her irises were a reflection of The Sky above them: purple, shimmering, unreal.

"You're beautiful," Pheonix said to her and she laughed and knocked her temple playfully against his.

"Hah. You say that every time.”

She said and he kissed her, forever young and forever in love, because as long as they had The Sky, and as long as they had each other, they would never age and never die.