Disclaimer: Don't own it, not getting any money from it, wish I did.
Prologue:
Cassandra Bennett stared blankly at the front door. It was going to open again, it had too…
Logic told her that it wouldn't, but her heart wasn't listening. Her heart was telling her that there was no way that her husband of eight years would just go into their shared bedroom after the kids were asleep, pack his things and leave.
Leave without saying anything to her. Leave without saying goodbye to their children. He wouldn't go without giving Sophie a playful toss in the air. He wouldn't leave without ruffling Jamie's hair in that affectionate way. He wouldn't leave without telling her why.
He wouldn't just go.
He couldn't.
Cassandra didn't know how long she sat there staring at that cold, unfeeling door. Then she heard the first tentative whirring of birdsong and she looked out the window. She saw that the sky had lightened to the steely grey of pre-dawn. That was when her heart first caught up with her head.
He could just leave. He could go without telling the children, their beautiful children, that he loves them. He could leave without giving her a word as to why. He could walk out that door without giving the life that they spent nearly a decade building together a backwards glance.
He could, and he did…
As the first of the many tears to come rolled down Cassandra's cheeks and the first of countless sobs shook her delicate shoulders she paid no mind to the thing outside her window that she couldn't see.
Although it could clearly see her, through the bright green new leaves of her grandmother's lilac bush. Deep moss colored eyes, eyes that had seen the rise and fall of grand empires now lost to the fickleness of time. Eyes that bore witness to the most deplorable acts imaginable, as well as those of selfless beauty, that one living, breathing, thinking thing could commit onto another.
Eyes that now watched her with a glimmer of approval as she seized a Kleenex from the end table and dried her eyes, flicked her chestnut hair out of her face, squared her shoulders and made her way to the kitchen to make breakfast. The person behind those impossibly old eyes knew that she has two little ones to look after, and her son had school in a few hours. They knew that the dinner conversation that night was going to be difficult, and the coming weeks even more so.
Yet those eyes had more than a small spark of steely resolve. Their keeper knew too well the feeling of loneliness. Loneliness that only recently (by his reckoning) had begun to be chased away by a little blonde girl perched on his shoulders as they raced through a glen of very peculiar flowers, a little blonde girl that had probably rolled out of her bed and was sound asleep on the floor of her room above Cassandra Bennett's parlor.
No, this family would not know loneliness. Not if E. Aster Bunnymund had anything to say about it.
AN: Well buggers. That was a bit more difficult that I thought! ^.^; A couple of notes here about certain artistic licenses I'll be taking. First of all I saw the ROTG movie before I read the books, and I adore it. I read the books, and I adore them just as much. Anyone who has seen the movie and read the books knows that the Bunnymund of the movie and the Bunnymund of the books are two radically different characters. The challenge I face with writing a Bunny centric story is that I adore each of the Bunnymunds. So, rather than picking one over the other I will be merging the two of them into one hopefully unique being that in its own way stays true to both the movie-verse and book-verse. Wish me luck.
Also, Cassandra Bennett is of course Jamie's and Sophie's mom. We hear her voice in the movie, we catch a glimpse of her, but aside from that she is pretty much a clean slate, we don't even know her name. So I named her and I'll be writing her as she wishes me too. That is to say, a lot of the times, characters take on a life of their own, and I can already tell that Cassandra will be one of them! She will be a permanent fixture in the story, can't have a Bennett Family story without her really. Jamie's and Sophie's father is not in the movie at all and I don't know whether or not he will be returning to this story as a character, but his lingering presence will certainly be felt.