The Sun's Alive?

 The world was never the same after that day. Not just because everything we thought we knew about celestial bodies was cast aside, but because of all the unfiltered truths spoken, acts of violence committed, and adulterous sex had by those with nothing left to lose.
 When the final announcement came that there was no hope left to stop or avoid the comment, I'd decided I wanted a peaceful end. I turned my phone off, shut all the blinds, put together the unhealthiest ice cream bowl you can imagine, and sat in front of my TV watching old episodes of childhood cartoons. My goal was to lose my sense of time and just let the end come when it came.
 I don't know how long I sat there, but eventually I got tired. That can't be right, I thought. It was before noon when they said we had five hours to live. If I was getting tired, it had to have been at least twice that.
 After debating it for a while, I turned my phone back on and saw the news... And the pictures.
 People were calling it a mouth, but that term seemed to only apply in the loosest sense. It was a nearly-perfect circle, and didn't really open like a mouth so much as it began at a random point on the sun and expanded, like a drop of ink falling onto a page. It opened, shifting the corona, until it was several hundred kilometers wide.
 Inside were no teeth, but something resembling the aperture of a camera, only made out of what appeared to be moist, pink flesh. Six flaps formed around the edge of the circle, angled and fitting into each other. These flaps appeared to be sealed tight, but once the opening had finished expanding, the flaps unfolded and allowed through what almost looked like a beam but in reality was an impossibly long expanse of sticky flesh which was being referred to as the "tongue". This whole process from the opening appearing to the tongue emerging took around 40 minutes.
 After travelling for over an hour and a half at speeds which flesh shouldn't be able to move, this "tongue" had perfectly timed its trajectory to make contact with the Apocalypse Comet, which at this point had already entered the upper thermosphere. The closest look we got at this whole phenomenon, satellites taking high definition pictures revealed that the tongue was coated in some kind of mucusy adhesive stronger than the strongest concocted by any scientist here on earth. This adhesive was strong enough that it instantly stopped the comet in its tracks. Once it was secured, the tongue made the long journey back to its host, where the opening closed as seamlessly as it had gaped.
 The entire scientific community was sent into an uproar. Cosmologists were debating how all their scans of the sun revealed nothing underneath and how they were mistaken about the core, biologists discussed how life could even exist at such a scale, rocket scientists brainstormed how they could attempt to send something close enough to attempt contact, physicists puzzled over the speed of the tongue, materials scientists attempted to recreate the adhesive on the tongue, and computer scientists were busy cooking up simulations for all these other questions.
 The effect of this event was enough to have the scientist coworkers who just the day before had come to blows over their true feelings about who got the grant money to put aside their differences and try to solve this mystery. The rest of the world, meanwhile, was not nearly so unified.
 When I got back in the loop of everyone I knew, several friends were no longer friends over things they'd said to each other and my two best friends even nearly killed each other. Parents and children had been disowned by each other, relationships had ended, people had died. Some attempted to repair the relationships, after all, they only said those things because of the stress of the apocalypse, right? But we all knew that it was just our true feelings coming out.
 Conspiracy theorists claimed that this somehow proved they were right all along while religious zealots asserted that this was either god's salvation or that this sun creature would bring about an even worse death to punish us for letting gay people exist. The mass panic and confusion caused even greater social upheaval than the comet did. No one knew if the sun was a benevolent entity who'd protected us, if we'd be next on the menu, or if we just shouldn't worry about it.
 Decades later, the greatest science experiment ever was attempted. The comet that was meant to kill us all had been roughly 30km in diameter. Scientists created the largest scientific instrument ever by a huge margin at about the same size. A 35km long, ovaloid hunk of metal was built covered tip to tip in sensors and cameras. Every aspect was made to withstand the temperature we'd expect from the sun, although the uncertainty of what the sun is like under the surface at this point made it a bit difficult to be sure. Hundreds of relays were built which hoped to be strong enough to travel through the electromagnetic interference present on the surface of the sun. This tool was nicknamed Big Bowie.
 Big Bowie was launched from its home in Antarctica and quickly slowed down after it had escaped Earth's gravity. From then, its controllers slowly increased its speed until it was going as fast as the comet. And then twice as fast. And then three times as fast. Nothing happened. It seemed the sun was not attracted to speed and size alone.
 At this point, the mood was glum. Trillions of dollars invested and decades of work by tens of thousands of scientists, construction workers, and machinists, and all for nothing. It was at this point the control center in Antarctica did an incredibly risky move out of desperation.
 They turned Big Bowie around, and shot it towards the Earth, almost but not quite full speed ahead. (Given that previously it had taken over two hours for the sun to open its mouth and shoot its tongue across the solar system, they ensured it would take at least three to reach us.) Had Big Bowie made contact, it would've been game over for us, but while the actions of the scientists were admonished, we were assured Big Bowie had enough stopping power to go against its astronomical inertia and we were in no real danger. Some believed it more than others, and pockets of panic broke out again.
 Eventually, that enigmatic mouth opened for the second time, and the tongue shot out. In the eyes of most, this proved the sun was there to protect us. This time, however, when the tongue was about halfway there, the scientists hit the brakes. They wanted to see what the tongue would do if it missed. Or would it just retract and try again?
 The tongue continued on the same path as before. Scientists thought the sun would attempt to simply let the tongue sit in front of Big Bowie and catch it that way, so they changed course a bit. Its path continued.
 After tens of nail-biting minutes, this standoff finally came to its conclusion in the most unexpected way. Once the tongue had reached near to the Earth, it simply bent at a nearly 90 degree angle and continued on its path, revealing itself to be prehensile. After bending it quickly attached itself to Big Bowie, and snatched it back to the sun's innards.
 Readings immediately began coming in, data to figure out the makeup of the tongue. Building-sized (but relatively tiny) needles poked into it and sent data samples back to earth. It appeared to be a carbon-based organism, similar to us, but with a cell structure completely unlike anything on Earth. Its blood was black and had a completely different system than our white/red blood cells, with dozens of different kinds of blood cells found.
 Things got even more interesting once it was swallowed. Positioning indicated the path Big Bowie had travelled through the sun once it entered the "throat". We'd expected the path to be a bit more, well, bendy, as biological digestion paths often are, but instead it was launched straight for a while before going off in perfectly angled directions, more like water travelling through pipes than something travelling through a real creature. Temperature readings were within the instruments' operating capacity, and the mucus-coating of the tongue transitioned to a less viscous liquid that appeared to be something like gasoline.
 Big Bowie had lights on the surface which attempted to illuminate the insides of this thing so the cameras could see, but for the most part, the whole device was squeezed tight, almost as if the "throat" constricted around it, so there wasn't much to see, besides an occasional hole going off in a different direction than Big Bowie was travelling.
 After weeks of movement, Big Bowie was deposited into its final destination. Radar revealed that it was dropped into a mostly empty chamber hundreds of thousands of km wide, buried about 200k km under the surface. At this point, the fascination turned to horror.
 Big Bowie had been banged up pretty well and it could no longer fly, but enough of the boosters still worked to awkwardly push it around and take a look at what it was sharing this space with. The answer was planets. Not just any planets, but planets that had once supported intelligent life. Buildings, artificial geography, and more were detected, unlike anything we'd ever seen. They'd all clearly had oceans and atmospheres before they were burned away by the journey toward the sun.
 This showed us all that the sun wasn't saving us out of benevolence.
 It was saving a tasty snack for later.