Sunlight and Other Beautiful Things

A/N: Well, I feel like this story is winding down. It's about nine months old at this point (I could have had a baby; instead I had a fic) and that's about as long as I can stay interested in something. So expect another chapter or two of denouement and then we'll wrap this sucker up and move on to another fandom.

Warnings: Angsty angst angst and some femslashyness.

Disclaimer: Influences include Belle & Sebastian and avoiding my real creative writing assignments.

I

"April?"

"What." It wasn't a question. It wasn't a question because of the well known fact that, at 3:00 in the morning – 3:02 to be exact – when your phone suddenly illuminates and the obscure, deeply depressing acoustic cover of the obscure, deeply depressing indie song that you picked for your ringtone shatters through whatever semblance of restful sleep you were attempting to maintain, you are physically unable to scrape together enough consciousness to produce any sort of verbal utterance other than a bland, monosyllabic response – questions included. And this is precisely the situation that April finds herself in at this very moment, which hangs in the uncertain mist between 3:02 and 3:03 in the morning.

"We need to talk."

These are the kind of words that are designed to wake a person up, to send a shiver of nerves and uncertainty into his – or her – stomach. Try as she might to resist the effects of such a carefully constructed phrase, April nevertheless finds that she is blinking into an uncomfortable form of awareness, an awareness which, when she gives the dutiful reply of, "What. Now?" allows her to place the slightest upward inflection on the second word. A question. She wishes that it had come out flat.

There was silence on the other end of the line. April contemplates shutting off her phone and going back to sleep, untroubled. That would be the most characteristic course of action. But the seconds drag by, measured out on the digital display of her phone, and there she lies, unable to speak, or move, or really do anything other than expel breaths, heavy with sleep, into the receiver. And then, at last, Ann's voice reemerges as if from very far away: "No. I'm on call tonight. And it ought to be in person."

"Then when?" April is pleased that she is able to inject a small dose of annoyance into the remark that is, unfortunately, still a question.

"Tomorrow? Around five?"

"So, like, in two hours?" April has to be difficult. It was really all she has. Though now, after the last few months, it feels wrong somehow. It isn't her. It isn't really even all that fun.

"Five in the evening," she sounds defeated.

"Fine. But no promises. I have something important going on then. More important than you at least." Harsh. Cruel. Unnecessary? Perhaps. Untrue? She really can't tell anymore.

"Thanks." Click.

She'd go – tomorrow at five. She knows it and so does Ann. It feels like restarting a level in a video game that she has already played, but has never quite managed to beat. She wonders if she always loses. Or just gives up.

II

Fourteen hours and fifty-six minutes have passed since Ann hung up the phone. "Thanks," she had said, and the closing remark now seems, under the light of the fading sun, abbreviated and inadequate. Washed out. She hadn't been on call last night. She knows it and she'd be damned if April doesn't know it too. She'd be damned anyway though so she doesn't bother much about it. The words had just tumbled out of her mouth – at least, that's what she allows herself to think. It was dark at 3:02AM and she had needed light.

Or something more than that. Yes, she had needed something more than just light (cold and empty). She had needed words.

Words are comforting (warm and real). There are words for everything (words like flesh and melancholy). Everything that you see, hear and feel – there's a word for it all. Yet, in the end, there really isn't a word to describe anything. There isn't a word to fully encompass a moment – this or any. There isn't a word to describe why she got drunk in her house last night, taking shot after shot of plastic bottle vodka that smelled like petroleum as if it were aqua vitae. That's not to say that certain words and phrases don't jump into her mind, words like "pathetic" and "bottomless pit", but the second expression strikes a little too close to home. Literally.

She hadn't slept much last night, not after consuming the coffee that she made for herself around five in the morning to regain the feeling in her toes, to regain the grip on her life, on reality. (Her heart, beating, and time just ticking away, creating a metronome to it all.) And she had fallen in love (or something that could be mistaken for it). And she had made a phone call and now, now is the time to come to terms with it all. It is 4:59.

III

It's the way the dying sun looks on the icy sidewalk while she walks that makes her question what she's going to say when she gets to Ann's house. At some point she would have found it beautiful, but she couldn't place exactly when it would have been. Gold cracked and burnt. Beauty in the creation found in destruction. And she finds it now, somewhere in the back corner of her mind – the dusty one that is rarely explored. She finds it and it is an odd, uncomfortable sense of déjà vu. She knows what is going to happen. And she doesn't like it.

IV

Why did she call last night? She shouldn't have called,

There is a knock.

Oh, God.

V.

She knocks. The door opens and the scene commences:

"April."

Ann's greeting irks her somewhat. She knows her name. And this is just a reminder that she knows what she is doing here. She steps into the house without replying. Before the door closes, she glances out at the pit. The sun is sinking into it and for a moment she experiences the ridiculous fear that she will never see it again. She doesn't know if she's thinking of the sun or the pit.

"Would you like some coffee? I was just about to make some," asks Ann. Nervously.

The shard of irritation digs deeper into April's frontal lobe and she runs her fingers through her hair as if to pry it out. Formalities are ridiculous. Every second wasted on them is a second that you could have spent dying by some other means.

"No," she responds shortly and even she is surprised by it.

"Oh."

There is a silence and April allows it to expand, to consume them both in a haze of awkwardness and potential regret before she clarifies, "I want to know why I'm here." This is, of course, an absurd question. It is a common thought that, at some point along this ridiculous, illusory journey from point A to point B, every human will ask this question. The reality, however, is that few ever do. April wishes that the words had never passed her lips. The fact that they entered her thoughts is bad enough.

"Well, I just wanted to discuss…" Ann begins. Cruelly formal.

"Why you found me drunk in the snow, why I asked Andy to bring you with him to the river, why I sit outside your pit at night like a love-struck teenager? Yeah, I know." The words are calculated and practiced, like a recitation, and she wonders if they mean as much to Ann as they do to her.

Ann fidgets uncomfortably and April suddenly becomes painfully aware of the fact that she exists in an ever shifting world. She wishes personal relationships and emotions and all things that existed in the impossibly near, uncomfortable realm of "adult" were stagnate. She wishes they would all die. It is a juvenile thought, but it is familiar and she relishes it.

"It would be easier if you accepted the coffee." Ann isn't looking at her and April gets the sense that has just been engaged in some sort of power struggle. At a different time, a time when an icy sidewalk presented itself as the epitome of beauty perhaps, April would have played this game. She would have fought back. And she would have won. But right now she is just too damn tired.

"Fine, make the coffee."

Ann does. She makes the coffee. The same way she always makes the coffee. And she prays (or hopes, in this secular world) for different results. Insanity.

They remain silent while the coffee is percolating, a steady drip, the ticking of a clock – time, which is only an illusion to an immortal creature. It beeps and neither of them wants it to. The table is so hard and they've been staring at each other with calculating looks.

But it beeps and Ann looks at April and she asks, "Cream?" She asks, "Would you like cream?"

And April responds, "No, I take it black," and she feels like Ann should know this. She wonders why she doesn't.

And she's sitting there, she's just sitting there with a cup of black coffee steaming in front of her, and it all just feels so repetitive, just so painfully monotonous that when Ann opens her mouth to speak, the air of importance and confession clinging to her lips, April lurches forward abruptly and kisses her. It's what they both wanted after all, isn't it? It's what everyone wanted. It's what her grand speech was leading up to. She'd say that she was in love or in lust or that April was too young to get it, to comprehend the basic drives that dictate the lives of each and every one of us, but it would all come down to the same thing – whether or not the night ended in action. And April was just so damn sick of inaction.

So she kisses Ann. And there aren't fireworks or anything. It doesn't feel "right". It just is – lips damp with coffee meeting lips primed for confession and a dull spark of humanity between the two.

April pulls away, but she isn't smiling. "Is that what you wanted to tell me?"

"Yeah, that about sums it up," Ann responds, and she is smiling. And she really shouldn't be.

April kisses her again and it's far easier than it should be to push away the emotion that she imagines is bubbling to the surface.