The Working Title that wont fit ANYWHERE: This Is Quite a Long Title For a Story Simply About What To Do Or Not To Do On a Rainy Day

Baccano! isn't mine, though how I wish it were.

Carol and Gustav

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Large eyes focused on the cup as the water within it trembled with each added drop of water from the old ceiling.

There were several cups and buckets inside the room, catching water at different intervals, different paces. They were stacked everywhere from the floor, to the table, to books ontop of the table and even on shelves at awkward angles. Usually the old office could handle mother nature's tears, but today it just seemed to be a downpour, a constant beating of rain against the wood that made it give way to the bits of water that slipped inside.

Carol had been reading, but her attention was ruined several times by the noisy water- it wasn't overly too noisy, but it was much too quiet in the room not to hear it. She had gone from reading, to fiddling with her camera, to somehow shifting to the floor, right before the half full cup that sat smack dab in the middle of the floor, seemingly staring back at her.

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"Carol."

"Ah!" She sat up quickly, knocking the cup of water she was staring at onto the closest book. She winced, trying to gauge if he was angry. "Minus 87 points?"

"187. Please clean it up." Gustav was always strictly business it seemed like, but he meant well, and Carol knew that whether he was trying to keep it from her or not.

Still. That was a lot of points. She bit back a groan and went to dry off the book as quick as she could. When she had placed the book back on it's shelf with it as dry as it was going to get, she looked back at him, only to discover he was staring at the window at the rain.

"What are you looking at~?" She questioned.

"Tell me." He said, not answering her question, but asking one instead. "Why did you find that one leak so interesting?"

She didn't really have an answer for that one. She hardly knew herself.

"Think of that leak, those series of droplets as a story. the more water that falls, or gets added to the cup, the more the story is completed. Eventually, the cup will fill, and the story will be done, correct?"

"But the story is never done..." Carol commented, confused.

Gustav gave a little smile. "You are correct. Even with all the cups in the world, should that leak keep dripping, the cups would eventually overflow. The teller of the story, the cup, does not decide when the story ends, he or she may just find a good stopping point, picked up the cup and took it away when the water had reached the right level... and when it is time, it puts another cup there to start collecting the story again."

Carol looked at the empty cup though a new point of view, seeing how it had already started collecting water before long.

"But that is just one leak- one story. Come here, Carol."

She quickly moved over to the window where Gustav moved over for her, to show her outside, where the rain was hitting everything in site- the trees, the streets, and the cars- even the people that walked by.

"Look at all those stories out there." He didn't have to gesture- she could see them plain as a sunny day. "Being caught by the earth, by the people who pass by. There is an endless amount of ongoing stories, Carol, and they affect everything around us. Whether we're aware of it or not- we become part of someone else's story every day." He turned back to the cup, and she did the same. "So why it is easy to measure and describe only the smallest part of life, sometimes it is better to focus on what cannot be fully contained." They both turned back to the window. "The ongoing stories of everyone else..."

"The rain is everyone's story..." Carol whispered, awestruck by the previously meaningless falling water. Gustav never failed to open her eyes to these things, and she wouldn't have it any other way. She patted over to her shoes, slipping them on, along side her hat.

"Where are you going?"

She cheesed, heading for the door, and out into the rain. "To be a part of everyone's story!"

Sorry, my Muse is the rain and it hasn't rained since XD I did this part a while back and I was trying to do Firo and Ennis, but I wasn't liking the way it was turning out, so I just decided to run with this one.

Getting into Gustav's Mindset for this was really interesting- I only came up with this view on life as I wrote it- It was alot of fun lD