Even after all these years, Pluto has never forgotten the sun. He still remembers the way her gentle rays brushed their fingertips against his craters, his imperfections, ballerinas dancing on their toes. He can still recall how her warmth felt on his silvery swirls of mystery, the way the tips of your ears warm up in front of a fireplace on a cold winter's day. The memory of how she kissed him and whispered in his ears – you're special, you're special, you're special beating in his eardrums – is still seared into the deepest plates within him.
He can never forget her – not the way she forgot him.
All my life, I've never been able to stay in one place. The countryside: too quaint, too boring. Rows upon rows of cottages, prettily preened hedges growing around them, strawberry ice cream pink carnations hanging off their twirling tendrils. Grew up there and never wanted to go back.
The city: pulsing, neon lights, drinking and smoking and whittling away. Sleep, work, drink, dance, repeat. Live for the nights and live through the days. Meaningless encounters with meaningless people who never actually say anything – they talk incessantly, but they never say anything.
I believe in not getting tied down to one place – everything stagnates. Even the most exquisitely elegant of flowers wither with time. Their taut petal skin loosens, sagging, an old lady's fingers.
"Molly!" Luke cried out from afar, exhaustion evident in his staggered panting. I stood on the dock of Harmonica Town, arms crossed over my chest. Roots grew from my feet into the floor, a tree trunk entwining with the gritty grey cement of the pier. Pascal should have been arriving at any minute.
"Molly," he repeated, resting his gloved palms on the sooty knees of his jeans, right where the toothed holes in his raggedy pants tore open. Shark bites that had gashed away the flesh.
"Can I help you?" I enquired icily, never turning my gaze to face him. The cold of winter encapsulated in my voice.
"What're you doing?" he asked in between sharp intakes of breath, body hunched over as he struggled to recollect himself, "Are you leaving?"
I sighed in exasperation. "What does it look like?"
"It sure doesn't look like you're leaving. Where are your bags?"
"Don't have any," I replied throwaway, shooting him an irate glare to warn him to back off, "I don't carry luggage around with me. And besides, I thought I told you not to speak to me anymore."
He dragged the back of his palm across his forehead; glistening beads of sweat dripping from his hairline. Plip, plop, plip, plop. "Molly," he pleaded, a puppy in a pound, its snout pressing against the thin bars of its rusty cage, "why are you doing this?"
"I feel like it."
Luke grabbed hold of my arm, forcing me to look at him. I let out a snivel of annoyance, shoulders tensing as his damp glove pressed against me. I faltered when I saw the plea of hopelessness swirling in his amber eyes. Desolation in a beer bottle. "Don't give me any of that," he implored, lonely eyes searching mine, as if searching for clandestine clues, "It's because you're afraid, isn't it? It's because you know damn well that you're in love with him and you're too afraid to stay." The mention of him sniped at my chest, the haphazardly glued porcelain shifting out of place.
"Love's a waste of time," I shot back, mustering my best scowl, eyes lifting in their sockets in an attempt at intimidation. Luke stepped back. "And I haven't got time to waste."
"Don't you think he deserves some type of goodbye? Or, at the very least, the knowledge that you're leaving?"
"Fine, you tell him for me then." I caught sight of Pascal's ship approaching in the distance, through the misty air. My escape reaching from behind the dewy fog.
Luke stood back up, fists clenching together, fingernails digging into his palms, contorting the flesh. His peeling skinned pulled taut against his knuckles – faintly red, like I could almost see his blood. If I listened closely, I could even hear it. "You know that's not how he should find out."
"I don't do goodbyes," I snarled gruffly, focusing my gaze on the distant vessel, "And Chase is a big boy. He'll live."
"Alright then," Luke retaliated, desperation in his decibels reaching the level of frostiness in mine, "What about me?"
"What about you?"
The sight of him physically recoiling attacked my peripherals. He blinked, hard, deliberate. As if blinking would expel the poison, the venom that dripped from my words into his veins. The warmth bled out of his eyes, a syringe draining them dry. "I knew you could be detached," he wobbled out, cracks in the sidewalk of his voice, "but I never knew you could be this cold. I really," – a pause –, "I really thought you were someone great."
"That's because you never really knew me," I replied, turning my head to stare at the ground, murky remains of snow dotting the steely canvas, an awful clash on discoloured brown against dusty grey. "You knew the idea of me. The edges of who I was mixed with your fantasy of the perfect girl who was going to change your life and fix you. And you loved that girl. But she's not me. You don't know me." The tarnished brown and glazed grey started to meld together to form a diluted cocktail of bleakness. The colour of skeletons buried underground. "Hell, I don't even know me."
"You're right," Luke conceded, reaching his fingers out to touch me again. I shoved my arm away. "I wanted so badly to know you that I made you up inside my head. Because every time I tried to get to know you, you turned me away." His fingertips landed on the whispers of my arm, barely grazing my overwrought skin, "But the edges of you – the smudges of you that I managed to grasp at, the gory bits and the glory bits," he dropped his hand, defeat plunking down on it like an anvil, "yeah. I loved them."
The sound of the harsh waves being spliced into their halves by the ferry resonated in the frigid air; semi sonic circles. "You know," I began, voice wavering, "maybe, in another universe, we might have ended up together. In another universe where I don't feel the need to push people away and kamikaze all my relationships." I smiled a despairing smile, letting out a small puff of breath, "I think I could've loved you in one of those."
Luke shook his head, a gentle shake, as if accepting the inevitability of loss. The inexorable withering of an emerald leaf into its mere skeletal remains. "No," he smiled back, acknowledgement glistening in his feline eyes, "I think you'd go back to find Chase every time. Or he'd come for you. But the two of you would eventually find your way back to one another. The things that are meant for you always gravitate back to you."
"You're a fool," I reprimanded, but not cruelly.
Sunshine came to rest in Luke's amber eyes again. The childlike hands of a sunrise as it peeks out from behind a valley, watching for the catcher in a game of hide and seek. "I know you said you don't do goodbyes," he said, imploring eyes searching mine, "but do me a favour." I raised an eyebrow in reply. "Don't leave without saying something to Chase."
The steel ship docked by the port, flickers of ocean sprays scattering into my hair. Traces of algae dotted the bottom of the ship; a lone barnacle clung unwillingly to its side. I granted Luke with the slightest shadow of a nod, before he raced off to retrieve the graceful chef.
Luke dissolved when Chase appeared – everything he'd needed to say had been said.
Chase's amethyst eyes flashed with a miasma of confusion, hurt, disappointment – acceptance. Like he'd seen it coming all along. "You're leaving."
"Right," I murmured as I squeezed my eyelids shut. I blinked back the dampness threatening to pierce my eyes, willing that my resolve wouldn't disintegrate. That it wouldn't crumble like a block of powder in between your fingers.
Chase didn't question me, he didn't ask the usual queries, plea the usual pleas: Why? Do you have to go? Please, don't go, please, please, I'm begging you.
He scooped me into his arms and I was reminded of how, mere seasons ago, I had let myself fall – fall – into him. I suppose he wasn't the only one who had thought he'd found something to hold onto. I let my fingers waft through his hair, strawberries and cream and butterscotch and all the good things in the world I had trouble believing in, brushing against my fingertips. The angularity of his jaw was an axis, around which entire solar systems based their revolutions. Venus and Jupiter and Mars spinning and twirling and pirouetting around him.
"Chase," I began, berating myself for giving him an explanation in spite of my beliefs, "I once told you that I used to cry everyday because the world was so beautiful and life's so short." He nodded. The winter sun shone so brightly, I had to squint my eyes before it engulfed my corneas and blinded me. The sunbeams painted the bottom of Chase's amethyst eyes with the shadow of his eyelashes, each wispy stroke overlapping effortlessly with the next. I stared at the shadows, breathing, "Life's so beautiful, sometimes it hurts." His fingers intertwined with mine – my breath hitched in my throat as I struggled to keep my resolve. "I'm afraid to fall in love because you and I both know nothing lasts. I'm terrified of waking up one day and discovering my life is full of the same old, same old. And for me, those two are synonymous with one another."
"I know," he whispered, his rose petal lips grazing against my eyelid, my forehead, my hairline, swirling hope and beauty into my being. Seashells and multicoloured glass lights and iced orange tea. He muttered into my chocolate hair, "I really believe that you're the best thing that ever happened to me."
I smiled a gloomy smile, lone tear dripping out of the corner of my amber eye. "You might be on to something," I laughed lowly to Chase, letting him know the absolute mutuality of the feeling. I laced my fingers tighter through his. "I can't stay here."
"I know that too." He looked wistfully into my eyes. "It might be cliché to say it now," he murmured, sad smile tugging on one corner of his lips, "but I do."
I love you.
"I know," I mimicked, drawing my eyelids down, "I do too."
I turned to check on the ship. Pascal seemed to have averted his eyes out of an old gentlemanly courtesy. "That's why I have to leave," I elucidated to Chase.
Our fingers loosened their death grip on one another. Slipping away.
"I hope you find everything you're looking for," he whispered into my ear, his voice like cherry blossom buds blooming at the start of spring. Withering at the end of autumn. I inconspicuously brought a finger to rub away the tear rolling down the edge of my eye, voice breaking as I brought myself to pull away from him.
"See you, Chase," I whispered, the three words barely floating out of my mouth. I turned my back on him.
"That's just it. You won't," his shaking voice called out to me.
"No, but saying that makes it easier."
"Maybe in our next lives," he grinned despondently, amethyst orbs glimmering with sorrow.
I nodded genuinely, facing him for one last time. "I'll come find you then," I chuckled softly, edges of my eyes crumpling. Heaviness weighing on my shoulders, my eyelids, my chest. All the pain in the world seeping into my entirety.
"Don't be late," Chase replied, kindness playing on the corners of his eyes. Love emanating from his pores. Wonderful eyes glistening.
Everything else became a blur of hot tears and emaciated arteries being hacked loose; porcelain heart coming undone all over again. Feet on steel steps and body flung into ship seat. Head banged against window and eyes engulfed in darkness and hands pressed in balls against them. Salty tears racing down my palms and Chase's parting words of don't be late.
I won't.
Author's Note: Oh god, that was such a stab in the heart for me to write. I love Chase and Molly so much, writing that killed me. Please don't hurt me; this is not yet the end! I am a little tempted to leave this as the ending, because it seems sort of fitting in a very, very, very sad way, but I think I'm too attached to this story to leave it like this. Please do let me know what you thought, like/follow/review and tell me whether you'd be pleased if it ended like this! Also, thank you so much for all the lovely reviews – they warm my heart and give me fuzzy feelings.