Got bored and wrote this on a plane unfortunately leaving Hawaii.
This story is not really tied into anything I've already done; it kind of just popped into my head and pretty much is what it is. There is Daria/Trent history implied here but you'll just have to guess what it was about. Not sure how to describe this tale; it's set some fifteen years after the end of the series, if not more; Trent and Jane are living somewhere on the island of Kauai; Trent has a teenage daughter now.
Sad things have happened, and this is something of a tale of healing.
THis is a one-shot and is complete. No more in this AU.
Oh yeah. About the title...it's how an audience calls out for an encore in Hawaii.
Usual Disclaimer applies. Daria, Jane and Trent are the intellectual property of MTV/Viacom or whomever has acquired the rights. This is a work of Fanfiction created strictly for fun; nothing of value, particularly anything like money has been exchanged in its creation.
Hana Hou
The tropical air washed over her as she stepped out of the air conditioned gate security zone and into the lobby of the Lihue airport. It was open on three sides to the outside air, like a huge patio with soaring ceilings; sunlight filtered through lush greenery, and there was a sweet note in the air that became more pronounced as she stood there, wondering how long he might be delayed before arriving to pick her up.
She was exhausted. The flight was cheap, which suited her practical bent nicely, but she had been unable to get any decent sleep after departing from Narita International Airport near Tokyo. The interisland flight from Honolulu was thankfully short, but it was the first flight of the day and her sense of time was upside down.
"Daria!"
She turned, and there he was. Tan, clean shaven, with that same lazy smile that she sometimes found herself missing when she woke up in the mornings. They regarded one another for a long moment, until he caught himself and draped a leafy, glossy green vine around her neck. That was the fragrance that she had noticed, and it was indescribably lovely. She lifted the end of the vine to her nose.
"Maile. It grows in the mountains here on Kauai," he smiled.
He gathered her gently in his arms, and she returned the embrace. His familiar scent opened floodgates of memory, and she had to wonder if she had made a mistake in accepting his invitation to visit.
He glanced over at her as they waited, stuck in traffic in the small town of Kapaa. She was just as beautiful as he remembered, all those years ago. Back then she was kind of a slip of a girl, all closed up tight and sheltering.
It had been kind of weird how they wound up together. It was like it slowly happened over time; as Janey kind of pulled away as her obsession with her work began to morph into a crushing load, he had sort of kept her company. He and Janey shared some common traits; one of those was that they were good listeners. They also seemed to work as catalysts; there was something that he and Janey shared that Daria just responded to, allowing herself to open up as she would settle into the safe emotional harbor that was the Lane way.
But she had not been ready for settling. Not by a long shot.
Having been quite the expert in the art of sleep, he smiled as he noted the signs of the woman beginning to lose her grip on the world around her.
"It's okay, Daria. Just tilt your seat back and close your eyes. I'll show you around here later on, after you have a chance to sleep."
She regarded him with heavy eyes for a long moment. Then, yawning, she did so and settled back, her face turned towards him, away from the bright open window that let in the tradewinds, the air still fresh and sweet as it swept across the line of slowly moving cars.
He felt a catch in his heart as he saw for a moment the familiar, beautiful face that had defined one of the few truly important aspects of his life. Her lashes were still long, the clear brown eyes still that window into a universe that had drawn him in so many years ago.
A part of him exhaled, thankful for the release as she nodded slowly and closed her eyes.
"Sorry," came a young girl's voice. "I was trying not to wake you up, but I needed to get my homework."
Dappled sunlight played across the wall a few feet in front of her. Turning her head, she saw that she was in a bedroom that clearly belonged to a girl, the one whose bed she was in. She rubbed sleep from her eyes and slowly sat up.
"Daddy told me a lot about you, but I didn't think you'd actually be as pretty as he said." The girl pulled a brightly colored backpack on, flashing her a cautious smile. "Hi, Daria."
A slender girl with long, silky dark hair regarded her from the doorway. She had the Lane eyes and a heart shaped face, reminding Daria of Jane. "You must be Kimiko. Sorry I stole your bed."
"Kimmy. It's okay. You must have been tired. Daddy carried you in and put you to bed." A horn briefly sounded outside. "Sorry, I gotta go or I'll be late for school."
With that, she dashed out of the room.
Flipping off the light bedcovers, Daria noticed her jeans hanging on the back of a chair, and her suitcase, still unopened, stood against the wall. There was no sign of her boots. She was still in the same underwear she had on when she had boarded the flight… no, not quite. Her bra was placed on her suitcase, and she had slept in a long men's t-shirt. Trent must have gotten her ready for bed.
She flushed softly. Well, it's not like he'd never seen her naked.
Digging her toiletries and some fresh clothes out of her suitcase, she went looking for the bathroom, where she found a towel and washcloth folded neatly next to the sink. She brushed her teeth, and then stepped into the shower.
Fifteen minutes later, morning ablutions complete, she followed the aroma of brewing coffee to the kitchen.
"Knew that would get to you." He smiled at her as he pushed a steaming mug across the counter. "Good morning."
"You know too much, Lane." She leaned against the counter and picked up the cup. "Thank you, and good morning, Trent."
So what the hell really happened? When did it all begin to go off the rails? Why the hell didn't you call me on it before I managed to so totally fuck it all up?
She could tell as he stirred his own cup in silence.
"Dammit, stop reading my mind." She climbed up onto the too- tall barstool, nearly tipping it over.
"Emma hated those stools too," he said quietly. "But then she was the one who bought them."
It had been three years since she had heard about the fatal accident from Jane. It was in reaching out to offer some kind of emotional support to him that she had managed to so thoroughly mess things up for herself for weeks afterwards.
Three years. Was that enough of an emotional distance for him? She had too many questions that she had pushed down into that internal explosives magazine in the back of her mind. Kimmy hadn't looked at her like some kind of enemy interloper, like some kind of parasitic homewrecker bent on turning a young teen's life inside out.
But who knew?
Don't. Go. There.
"How did it happen?"
Aw, crap. When will I learn to listen to my own advice?
She had never gotten the straight scoop from Jane, who always seemed to get the story screwed up somehow. Hell, it was getting to be so stupid with each retelling that she had decided to stop asking. Ghosts? Jane was losing it.
The back yard was a wild garden, not totally unexpected given the climate. He led the way through a maze of wild bamboo and into a leafy alcove flanked on one side by a black rock face. Trent's place was set back down a rough unimproved road; it was a quiet refuge, except for the sounds of the wind in the clacking bamboo, and the rustle of leaves and birds. The air was rich with the fragrance of flowers- plumeria, white ginger, and several more she could not identify.
They settled at a simple table and benches made of leftover construction timber.
"I know you've probably wondered what the hell Janey was talking about. Truth is we're really not certain how it could have happened. Emma got hit on the road, but there's no real way to reach it from where we're at without going along the way we got here, from the front. And she had come out here, in the back. I'm sure of that.
"The main road is almost a hundred yards in that direction, and she was found where it would have made sense if she could have walked straight towards it. But this wall of bamboo is pretty much impassable; we kept it that way so that feral pigs and especially boars are kept out. Where the bamboo thins I managed to lay laterals in between the stalks and wire them in place like a fence.
"That means the only way to reach that road would have been through the house, or at least along the side yard, and she would have had to open the gate. That thing is pretty creaky, so I'd have heard it. You'd have to walk along our access road to reach the main road. Somehow, she was on the main road, in that direction. That's nowhere near the turnoff to this place. As near as the police could figure out from the skid marks, the driver swerved hard to try to avoid hitting her, but wound up plowing into two cars before running off the road into a ditch.
"Emma was killed instantly, and the driver died an hour later after being transported to the hospital in Lihue. The autopsy showed that he had been drinking a little, but nowhere near the legal limit. Nobody on that road would have expected to see anyone walking in the dark, especially where she was hit. The EMTs said that he knew that he had hit a woman and was asking repeatedly about her, and he had said that he hadn't seen her until she turned to face him. He said that it was like she appeared out of smoke."
"Okay, that just sounds strange. Emma managed to get where she couldn't have possibly been? How are you sure about the timeframes?"
"She always used to come out here in the evening with a cup of tea, listening to the night. Usually not very long; she liked to experience the changes that happen when night falls. She was making her tea, and it was still steeping when I thought I saw a kind of distant, sad note in her eyes, like something from long ago had surfaced in the back of her mind. She seemed distracted for a moment, and then slid open the patio door and stepped outside. That was the last I saw of her. Her tea was still hot- I had picked up the cup to take it out to her but I remember thinking that it still needed to cool a bit. I set it back down on the counter, and that's when I heard the horrible noises of the accident. I stepped out into the backyard, and there was no sign of her."
He stopped talking and looked down at the rough tabletop, listening to the sounds around them. He pushed the cup of coffee around, but didn't pick it up.
Looking at him, she could sense his sad acceptance of what had happened. He had spoken as if he had turned those thoughts over in his mind a million times, until the events had taken on a burnished, sealed and immutable luster. It had happened; perhaps to no purpose that he or anyone else would ever understand.
Guess Jane wasn't that far off. It really doesn't make any kind of sense. What was it that got her to step outside? How did she manage to be where she couldn't be? It wasn't logical. It wasn't natural. It didn't make any sense at all, not in the universe she thought she lived in.
Daria sipped at her coffee, noting that it had already started to go cold. "Is this where she would sit?"
He looked around, almost not realizing where he had led them. "Yeah. I guess it is." He gazed at the two cups on the table.
She was about to say something vaguely comforting when she felt a gentle touch on her shoulder. Did Kimmy miss her ride or something? She turned, seeing no one behind her. What the hell? She searched the alcove from where she sat. There was only Trent in front of her, who was looking at her with a strange, sad expression.
"So you met Emma, huh?"
Jane had waited until Kimmy had a snack and settled in at her bedroom desk to do her homework. The two women had stepped into the converted outbuilding that served as Jane's apartment and studio, glazed overhead on the north side with translucent corrugated fiberglass roofing panels. The light was filtered through an accumulation of leaves from the trees overhead. It really wasn't much more than something like a cobbled-together greenhouse made of reclaimed materials, and honestly it looked a bit like a set borrowed from Gilligan's Island. Her easels were made from three bamboo poles each, lashed together at the top with baling wire and with a wooden crossbar held in place with rusty spring clamps from a hardware store.
"Not funny, Jane."
Jane flashed her a familiar smirk. "You know, the one thing that I've learned in the time since I left the Mainland is that I know a lot about a very small, not very important bit of this thing we call life. I've spent an awful amount of energy trying to cram things into something that I can process, and that most of the time it takes a certain amount of self-delusion to believe that things actually work that way."
Daria said nothing, choosing instead to take in the direction her best friend's work had taken. It was very different from the body of work she had amassed on the east coast, what most of the art world still seemed to define her by. Her old work was far more about angst and fighting back, with or without purpose. This newer work…was more about acceptance, about bending to deal with forces that one could not possibly resist.
Jane had moved for an indeterminate period to stand by the only Lane that had mattered to her. It was something she felt compelled to do. She returned to Boston only to clear out her studio there, sending the things that she wanted to keep back to Lawndale to be stored in the Lane homestead garage. Daria took custody of her best work, which she dutifully hung in her loft. Having so much of Jane's work close at hand was a comfort; it was a reaffirmation of their connection. From then on, their friendship was maintained over long conversations and sometimes long silences as they shared videos online, experiencing each other's world sometimes for hours at a time via the internet.
And there was Trent, who would frequently happen to need to return something he had borrowed from Jane. Such accidental wanderings into the webcam's field of view would often turn to companionable conversation.
Not that long afterwards, Jane had fallen into a teaching position at the high school Kimmy was starting at- the middle school she had been attending was next door.
Her old friend had been waiting outside in her car this morning for Kimmy when she had woken up. Daria had arrived yesterday morning after the two had already left, Jane for her workday as a teacher, Kimmy as a schoolgirl. She had been asleep for almost twenty hours. To say that she was disoriented was quite the understatement. She felt as though she had been swimming underwater for a very long time, only to emerge in another universe where the barrier between waking and dreaming was very diaphanous indeed.
Fifteen years ago, she would have rejected all of this nonsense out of hand.
"Doesn't all this creep you out? Just a little?"
"It used to. But somehow it kind of grows on you, if you learn to stop worrying about it."
Daria flushed. "Will you ever let that go?"
"Not what I meant, but I suppose it does apply in a weirdly oblique, Kafkaesque fashion. Okay, I admit that I wanted to fucking kill you when you two broke up. I mean, what kind of reason was that? Too bucolic? Too perfect?" She gave her best friend something of a beatific smile. Her tone became soft, caressing, like a mother soothing a foolish child. "What the hell was wrong with you?"
"I spent years in therapy asking the same question, you know. By that time, I had ruined everything and there was no going back. He had picked himself up and moved on."
Jane said nothing for a long time.
"Do you know why Trent and Emma never got married?"
"Don't tell me you're gonna blame me for that too."
"She doesn't exist. They never could get a marriage license, because there's no record of her ever being born. She had no social security number, no school records, nothing like that. He figured that it was some kind of clerical screwup or something, but it was kind of a problem when Kimmy was born. Trent had to go through some legal gymnastics to get Kimmy a Social Security Number. After Emma was killed, there was a lot of head scratching at the Coroner's office. She was probably listed as a Jane Doe."
"But Emma must have had a job, right?"
"Several, informally. She made things to sell, got by, but she really did manage to exist outside the system. Of course, Trent didn't see anything weird about that."
"What about her family?"
"Apparently, she didn't have one. Didn't remember one either. In fact she didn't have any past, near as he could tell. Figured it was some traumatic event or something that had obliterated her past. Quite a trick in a small place where everybody kinda knows everyone else's business. In any case, Emma seemed to have been a good person. She was a great mother, considering how Kimmy turned out."
"But she was a blank prior to the time she and Trent got together?"
Jane nodded. "Pretty much. I know you're wondering why he never seriously thought about it. You know how much he'd evolved from that slacker you knew in high school. Short answer? I don't think he wanted to question it. He just wanted to be happy again."
"I got the impression that there were certain things about her that reminded him of me."
"She even kind of looked like you. Short, attractive Asian girl." Jane walked over to a tall old bookcase that served to partion off the main studio space from something that vaguely resembled an office, if you looked at it sideways and squinted.
"But she wasn't me." Daria found a chair that wasn't totally covered in papers and artisanal crap. "But it does sound like she was what he needed. I would always take some solace from knowing that he was finally happy again."
Jane said nothing for a long time. Finally, she pulled a sketchbook from the shelf. "You know what's really odd?"
Daria turned to face her, compelled by the mere suggestion that something could be even odder than what she had learned so far. "I'm kind of afraid to hear this."
Jane nodded. "Yeah, I know what you mean. The thing is, there aren't any pictures of her. Of Kimmy, yeah, even Kimmy in Emma's arms. But nothing decent of Emma herself. It seems that every picture somehow managed to not quite work out." She flipped open the sketchbook.
"Based on Trent and Kimmy's descriptions, this is what she looked like." She turned a portrait in charcoal to Daria.
Surely this was filtered by your own reality, Jane. She's Asian, of course, that difference is clear. Yet, despite the differences in our ethnicity, this is like looking into a reflection, not in a mirror, but perhaps in a darkened windowpane.
It's that look in the eyes, not the expression, not the shape of the features, the irises. I can see where Kimmy got her beauty from. She was so pretty.
"Um…I think this is pretty well thought out. I can't see anything I'd change." She handed the laptop back to Kimmy. "You write very well."
A small smile appeared on the girl's face as she brought the printer online. "Thanks. Wish my teacher thought so. She has a hard time understanding some of my work. I kinda have to dumb it down a little because she thought I'd copied stuff off the internet when school just started. I wound up getting grilled about my own paper, as if I didn't know why I said what I did." The girl got up and stretched, stapling her printout and putting it away in her folder. "Hey, wanna make a pizza?"
Daria glanced over to Jane, who was standing in Kimmy's bedroom doorway. Jane put on her best "who, me?" look. "What? There's no pizza joint in this town."
"It's either that or frozen lasagna." Kimmy laughed at the face that Daria involuntarily made at the latter alternative. She looked out the window at the sound of tires on the gravel driveway."Hey, Daddy's home."
The three ambled into the kitchen, where Trent had begun to unload the field recording gear. "Just bring in the microphone case," he called out to Jane as she headed over to the Subaru. "And the Nagras."
Kimmy pulled up a chair and began re-coiling the hastily stashed microphone cables. Pretty soon her father had buried the table with audio gear. "Does this mean we get to go out for dinner?"
Trent smiled as he plugged the digital recorder into his laptop. "I guess. Can you plug the reel to reel in to charge the batteries, and check the battery voltages on the mic supplies?"
"Since when am I your roadie?" Kimmy sassed. She hauled the ancient Nagra tape recorder off the table and dug out the power supply from one of the bags. "When are you gonna get rid of this antique, Daddy? I think it's older than you, and it weighs like a ton!"
Trent smiled as he turned to Daria. "Remember that old thing? You said the same thing when I dragged it home."
"I'm amazed that you can find rolls of recording tape," she murmured. So he still does that. Mixing analog recordings with clean digital ones, to get that rich layering of saturating magnetic tape and digitized files on silicon. Years ago, there was that big studio tape recorder that took up a third of his work area. He would rerecord tracks from the hard drives in his digital audio workstation onto ancient rolls of tape, pushing them hard to get that curious, subtle distortion as the signal was laid down on a moving ribbon of magnetic oxides on plastic tape. He'd mix it back into the digital signal stream, and even I could hear the difference. It was a slight but pleasing coloration to the sound, like the way Jane would add color to shadows when she painted.
"I'm not the only one who does this. I'm doing it a little differently these days; I master with the digital recorder and use the old analog one to capture 'room tone.' Blend them together and it's magic."
"Room tone?"
"Yeah, every acoustic environment has a distinctive way of returning reflected sound. Like the difference between a living room and a bathroom. Even when you think it's perfectly quiet, it's not. Your brain simply filters it out. There's always a base level of sound around you. Remember how weird it felt when you stepped into that isolation booth at that big studio we visited? They used to completely strip natural room ambience in there and replace it with digital effects. But that always sounded like crap to me."
"So why all the portable stuff?" Daria helped Kimmy move some of the gear to a nearby counter. "Are you doing location sound for videos?"
"Yeah, but I'm also doing the Alan Lomax thing. There are a lot of amazing musicians in Hawaii, old folks who are gonna take a treasure trove with them when they pass on."
Kimmy began pulling her dad's microphones from the battered metal transport case. She clearly knew what she was doing as she took a small instrument and measured the battery condition on those microphones that had special power supplies. "Who's Alan? Is he a friend of yours?"
Daria smiled. "Alan Lomax went around recording ethnic and folk musicians, to save as much as he could for posterity. He did that for about sixty years, starting in the 1930's. Most of his work was for the Library of Congress."
Kimmy nodded, turning to glance at her father. Trent had fallen silent, gazing at a section of a bookcase that was filled with thin black audio CD cases, the kind used for recordable discs. Having grown up with that media, Trent had a habit of backing up important or favorite audio files on CDRs. Given a choice, he'd reach for a CD before clicking on a file.
That shelf held the traces of many lifetimes of experiences, the musical heritage and memories of generations that were about to fade away.
No one truly dies until they are forgotten, and he would be damned if he let that happen while he was able to do something about it.
Daria knew him well enough to know that this was something best discussed at a later time. It wouldn't take much to bring back bad memories for him. She had noticed that collection of field recordings, and from the dates on the box edges he had begun working on them a few months after Emma's death. Perhaps it was one of his ways of memorializing her. That was so much like the Trent she knew all those years ago.
He was always open to ideas. That was one of the things that I loved about him; he was always willing to listen, to try and understand or intuit why other people said and believed what they did. Alan Lomax, Studs Terkel, always believing that everyone had their own backstory that held unique truths. Trent was like that; he tried not to filter his perception of the world; he tried to taste the flavors for himself without prejudice or preconception. He had sensed beauty in me, hadn't he? He had believed in me, and I ruined him for a time.
Thank God he had found Emma.
And Damn you, God, for taking her away from him.
A gentle touch made her open her eyes wide. A tiny, tentative touching of her hair.
It was the same touch that she had felt earlier. There was no one close by. After a moment, she realized that Kimmy was approaching, holding a tissue which she held out to her.
With a start, Daria realized that she was crying. Accepting the tissue, she turned away before Trent and Jane could see and ran for the bathroom.
Kimmy leaned into her shoulder, nodding off to sleep as they drove back home after dinner. Jane glanced at them from the front passenger seat, curious and pleased about the way Daria and Kimmy seemed to have grown on each other. It made her smile; the poor kid had gone through enough shit in such a short time.
Perhaps it was the closeness between the three adults that put Kimmy at ease. In a way, they were all together to support one another, even though Daria seemed not quite clear on that fact. She was no better off than any of them; if anything she fretted more than anyone else. Trent, Kimmy and Jane had come to a kind of balance; embracing memories of the past and bravely facing the future. Daria, on the other hand, seemed not to quite be there yet.
She had not yet learned to let the past be.
Jane stole glances at Daria as she looked out into the night slipping by; the few streetlights and headlights of passing cars flashed past eyes that had not yet quite anchored the landmarks and events of her life. Every so often, when something caught Daria's eye, Jane could swear that the face reflected in the glass was Emma's.
Perhaps it was an illusion. Even Daria was able to find fleeting moments of peace.
What is happening to me? Daria rolled over, trying to find a comfortable position on the daybed in the living room. She had insisted that Kimmy have her bed back. She looked across the room, into the hallway, where Trent's bedroom was. She could not see his door from where she lay.
Perhaps there was nothing uncomfortable about this bed. Perhaps the unease came from within.
Sighing, she slowly sat up, looking at the moonlit yard outside the glass sliding door. Jane's studio, with her bed in a little loft above her office area, was not quite dark, and she knew that Jane was not asleep. The heavy curtains were closed, but she could tell that there was a single lamp on in the work area. Daria sensed that Jane could not give her comfort this time. Somehow, she knew this with certainty.
"Perhaps you need to forgive yourself."
Daria's eyes opened wide. "Who's there?" She whispered quietly, knowing full well that there would be no answer.
She looked around, finding nothing but stillness and quiet. Strangely there was nothing threatening around her; she was surrounded by peace.
"You still treasure him, as I do. If you are happy, he will be too."
She could intuit the similarities with Kimmy's voice. There were nuances in tone and pronunciation that would follow genetic constructs.
This cannot be happening. It's not possible.
Was she actually awake? Was she dreaming? She found that she could not move, yet her awareness seemed disconnected from spatial logic. Everything around her seemed more real than it should be.
She blinked, looking now into the kitchen. Somehow, a scene began to unfold. She must be dreaming. Yes, that's what it must be.
A younger Kimmy sat at the kitchen table, carefully folding squares of brightly colored paper. Emma sat, smiling, watching her daughter as they worked together. Each square was manipulated, folding smaller and tighter, changing into different flat shapes until a few delicate tugs on corners and tiny adjustments transformed it into a bird.
Paper cranes.
The last sheet of paper was folded, by Kimmy, working alone.
A thousand paper cranes were threaded together, and somehow Daria knew that they were the ones that Jane had spoken of; they had been placed with Emma's body when she was cremated.
A thousand cranes to grant a wish flashed into smoke as a woman who loved and was loved was reduced to a mound of ash and mist.
The wind. The wind blew my hair. I heard noises, the rustle of a thousand leaves, bamboo culms rubbing against each other, a thousand birds unseen over my head. I wove it all together in my mind, stitching together sounds in memory into what has now emerged as a human voice.
But to what end? Why?
Emma walked down the hall, the highlights in her long dark hair gleaming in a sweeping curve as she leaned into Kimmy's doorway. Daria watched, seeing both nothing and everything. From the livingroom, she heard the young girl sigh in her sleep, the smile unmistakable.
Emma looked with a quiet smile down the hallway to Trent's room, and then turned and walked back towards Daria.
She felt the bed shift as Emma sat; she felt the warmth ripple through her body as she laid down into the same space that was Daria herself.
Love. Peace.
A strange happiness, despite the distant, fading memory of pain.
Suddenly, she sensed a thousand cranes bursting into the air, taking flight, released finally from the binding of a human shadow.
A wish had been granted.
She was vaguely aware of light slipping around the curtains in the window and felt a warmth move alongside her. A moment later, a light blanket settled over her like a cloud, and she drifted back to sleep.
Down the hallway, a yawning Kimmy opened her eyes, and found herself thinking fondly of her mother. She had visited her in the night.
Outside, across the yard, Jane sat to stare at the image that wouldn't leave her alone in the night. She put her brush down, knowing that she'd have a hell of a time making it through her classes on no sleep at all. Somehow, though, it didn't matter any more. Dutifully cleaning her brushes, she looked at the remainders of color on her palette. A moment later, she picked up a rag and wiped it clean.
Trent walked past an empty daybed, and looked across the back yard, watching as the morning sunlight grazed across the greenery. He poured himself a cup of coffee, and stepped out into the cool air.
A single plumeria blossom spun down from the branches overhead, and he reached out to catch it. Bringing it to his nose, he felt the petals touch his lips, and smiled as Emma kissed him softly, wishing him happiness.