A/N: Sorry, everyone, short on time, so I'll reply in the next (and last!) chapter. Thank you so much for all of your reviews and for reading!
And In the Rain
When Muffy finally unfreezes, she doesn't pack. She doesn't go to her room. Instead, she goes out the door.
A part of her had thought she would see Griffin standing outside, waiting to apologize, to listen, to stay, but that hope died as soon as she steps out the doorway and he is nowhere in sight. The heat had abated and gray clouds loom overhead, but she registers none of it. As if her body is acting of its own accord, her feet slip into her sandals and she starts to wander with no destination or plan in mind.
Only until she hears the babbling of the water does she blink and find herself at the bridge. The halfway point to the bar and the path to the city. The halfway point to the home she is losing and to the friend she has lost. Below her feet, the river flows to the ocean ahead, the water scintillating like stars.
Stars…the one constant in her life that she can think about and still smile.
Before Muffy could even walk, she had traveled the world with her parents, visiting places that people dreamed their whole lives of seeing. Paris, Italy, New York, and London, to name a few. She spent countless hours gazing down from her perch in a plane or skyscraper to the cities hundreds of feet away. A cool beauty radiated from the strings of lights, like looking at precious stones, but numbness in her chest stopped her from feeling anything more than detached appreciation.
One time when she curled into the crook of Papa's arm as he tucked her into bed, he told her a bedtime story about people long ago who had grown envious of the night's beauty. They decided to reap the stars from the sky and scatter them on the earth as farmers do with rows of crops. A star-farm, he jested, except these stars felt unnatural, almost sorrowful, because they were not designed to be cultivated like corn or cows. Some people were content with their civilized star-farms, but others missed those in the sky. The few that hadn't vanished from sight reminded the people of what they had replaced the real stars for.
Mama never cared. So long as she had an adoring audience and a string full of pearls, she never cared about the star's absence or the little girl left to wander the theater alone for hours when her mama was too busy entertaining a crowd and her papa too sick to leave their hotel room. Mama never cared when Papa's ocean-green eyes glazed over and he no longer recognized the little girl clinging to his side, her small hands balled up in his shirt soaked in sweat and her voice drowning in tears, sobbing the same words, over and over, like a prayer: "Please don't leave me, Papa. Please don't leave me."
Mama had to pry her away, screaming, to the next flight. The next show.
The nurses told them after they had come back dressed in black that in a moment of clarity, Papa had asked to see the stars from his window. Then the moment was gone, and he fell asleep. They couldn't wake him up. And Muffy wasn't there to hold his hand, like he had all those years for her.
Papa often wondered what it would be like to see the world centuries ago, with the only lights being the ones in the sky and not the ones that ward off the night.
Muffy couldn't say.
At some point it had started to rain. Raindrops pour down, plopping into the now black waters. In seconds the rain has soaked through her clothes. She doesn't feel it.
She wonders, what would Papa think if he saw her now? Like Mama, she has chased the fraud and lost what is real.
A/N: My apologies if this chapter was too preachy. Whenever I drive through the highways at night, I am in awe at the billions of lights lined up across the land as if someone had rolled them out like a carpet, but similar to Muffy's dad, I wonder what it would have been like before all of the urbanization. This chapter provided an outlet for my musings and was a great chance for character development and morals and backgrounds and blah blah blah…