I decided that there were definitely not enough Midnighters stories. So I broke my decision to forget fanfictions for awhile, and wrote this! And no, this isn't a one-shot.
It had been a nearly a year since that Halloween. Nearly a year since Jessica had been trapped in the secret hour; since she, Melissa, and Jonathan had taken their road trip. Everything had changed drastically since that day.
The Day family had never moved. They never really quit hoping that Jessica would suddenly reappear, just as she had disappeared so long ago. Beth helped the Midnighters that had remained in Bixby as much as she could. She recorded all that Rex researched, just in case they may be able to put it into use and rescue her sister.
Rex had continued caring for his father and Maddy. He knew that there was nothing he could do for his father beyond giving him the pills he needed, and keeping him from wandering about. Maddy was an entirely different story. She was recovering more and more every day, to the point where Rex needed only check up on her every few days. After nearly a year, she was her old self again. Nearly, at least. Her prideful, arrogant demeanor never quite recovered from having Rex's darkling half invade her, though her mind had. She was nowhere near ready to try touching Rex again.
This was something that Rex was semi-patiently waiting out. He hoped that she would overcome the fear eventually. The old woman had boasted many times that she knew how to separate his human half from the darkling half. And as much as Rex loved being half monster, he was anxious to become fully human again.
Maybe if I'm fully human, he thought often, Melissa will come back…
He missed her fiercely, as she did for him. They had tried to communicate over the last year, but had hit a few…road blocks. Rex's darkling half was still sensitive to human letters and technology, so that ruled out computers, telephones, and writing to each other. Melissa and Jonathan would call Dess as often as they could manage and have her pass messages on to Rex.
Dess had immersed herself in drawing up new maps of the blue time. She had given Geostationary to Jonathan when they left the previous year. Whenever he called, he would give her the numbers of places they had found that had the blue time, and she would plot them on her map. She was amazed at the ever-growing Blue Sites, as she called them.
Jessica had become a bit depressed, existing only one hour a day. While her friends aged and matured over the year, she had barely lived two weeks. She wanted more than anything to escape her blue prison, to walk in the sunlight with Jonathan, to live a normal teenage life…as normal as it could be while being a Midnighter, at least. From what she heard, Rex and her sister were trying their hardest to find a way to rescue her, though she wasn't as encouraged by this as she should have been. Rex was sure to be focused on his own problems, and Beth was no Midnighter. Jess was afraid she might never escape. That she would be forced to live where darklings may one day dwell again as she watched her friends and boyfriend grow old and die. It was hardly an optimistic thought.
But throughout all of the various problems that they had, life went on. Maybe it wasn't as it always had been, but it continued on the semi-normal path that the Midnighters had become used to. Being able to live an extra hour a day, saving hundreds of thousands of lives by sticking a hand in lightning, fighting the true definition of a nightmare…the strangeness of everything they'd gone through had trained them to expect the unexpected. Nothing was bound by the realms of reality for them. And as the rip in the secret hour had shown, things were susceptible to change.
Maybe this was why they still held out hope. Hope that Jess could be saved from a partial existence or that Rex could become fully human again. Hope was what kept them all going, despite the true horror of what. Hope, and the knowledge that things could change in an instant.