I'm a little late but I'm not going to prison if I still upload this.
From the same verse of my other story, Remembering, Learning (you just need to know the backstory to understand), it's just an offshot for Father's Day since I don't know where to fit this moment in my current chapter (9).
Anyway, enjoy!
Mar'i was six when they thought there would be no next time. Those little handmade cards she painstakingly made evenings before that marked Sunday - Bruce and Alfred always looked forward to them just as much as those special hugs and kisses.
It was her mother's idea - to give thanks and gratitude to those who loved her like he did for as long as he was. She remembered the hours spent awkwardly around her friends, laughing heartily and brightly as they skipped and hopped with the ones she imagined was him and her, taking time with their crayons and colorful papers to tell daddy he was the best. As resilient as she was, the heavy tears that once threatened to fall broke at the continuous teasing and mocking of her juvenile peers.
Her mother reminded her of them - her family. And she thanked and loved them back just as much. More so on that special Sunday.
But of course she never truly forgot about him as she always made something special for him too. Each gift tucked and stored away a day after she and her mother would visit his towering marbled figure at the rarely accessible Great Hall of the Fallen.
She would pretend he was real - that he was listening - for even just a brief moment and imagine what he would say. It would be another hour before she and her mother felt ready to go and spend the rest of the day digging out old photos of days that she longed to be in just to meet him and retelling his tales for the hundredth time.
But try as she might, the feeling of emptiness and loss like the gaps between planets and galaxies came back time and time again, sometimes unnoticed. They saw it in her eyes as a young child, that sense of longing for that someone she could call hers and hers alone. That one she only heard in stories, saw in photos and videos, and talked to in dreams. That one she looked up to like the heavenly bodies her mother obsessed over in dark, cloudless nights.
She stared, looking for that one star, the one way beyond her reach, beyond planes of existence, more than the others.
So when he miraculously came back after six long years, they were overly joyous, teary, and guilt ridden at their selfish thoughts. Though very small and mostly subconscious, it was ever present and unwanted.
She deserved him. He deserved all those misplaced love. Those moments that should have been him.
As they assumed.
Which was why when that special Sunday of June came again, they found themselves shocked, pleasantly so, that the cards crafted by her love, skill, and time, did not end when they thought it would have.
Alfred nearly dropped his tray and the ever stoic Bruce forced his throat to swallow the lump in his mouth. They first froze in contact with her embrace but melted not a second later.
It felt the same as always.
Turned out that while she finally had that star she longed to see, she never forgot them. Her world didn't revolve around just that one star, when in fact, her world just became bigger and brighter.
"Happy Father's Day, Grampa Bruce, Grampa Al."
