the exception to counting the stars

01. Flicker

There is stardust in his eyes.

Of course, the girl knows that this is not a realistic scenario for his shimmering, golden orbs, but it's the first thing that flashes across her mind as she stares at the boy standing in front of her. More likely, his eyes are an average shade of brown and their current golden hue nothing more than a reflection of the moon which hangs over the two of them, suspended in its constant orbit.

But from her vantage point, they are stardust and he's an angel. She doesn't remember jumping, but perhaps she did and... he... is coming to take her to the beyond. Or maybe this is Heaven and he's already guided her safety to her afterlife.

If this is Heaven, she thinks it's awfully cold.

The girl shivers then, because it's past midnight and she wears no coat. She didn't think she'd need one, particularly, if she was just going to leap into the water anyway. The thought of the coat reminds her of her childhood, long ago, and her mother's insistence that she always wear a raincoat even during the smallest drizzle. To avoid getting her hair wet when she ran to school, was always the logic behind the motherly commands.

Perhaps she should have brought a raincoat, after all, but that might have been more ironically sentimental than the girl was feeling up to. Besides, her mother wasn't there to remind her to wear a jacket.

Her mother would never be there to remind her again.

And she's so cold. She's so cold all the time, and all she wants is to be warm, to feel heat, and no matter how many layers she wears, she's still cold and everything's wrong. Everything's wrong now, everything's always wrong. Wrong and cold, and her mother's gone and her father's waiting at home for her, she supposes, but she's got enough bruises on her body that scream she can't go back there anymore.

Her father drinks, the girl understands, to feel warm. Alcohol, they tell her, has a warming effect. She doesn't know. The only time she tried it, she was 16 and she stole the bottle of brandy her father kept in the cupboard over the stove. No one told her that she shouldn't gulp brandy down if you didn't know how to hold your alcohol. She threw it up less than a minute later, but what was worse was when he came him and noticed some of it was gone.

So the idea of alcohol was synonymous in her mind with sobbing silently under her bed, trying to convince him she wasn't home.

That wasn't home. That wasn't warmth. That wasn't the world she wanted to be in, and if she had already jumped and this was her afterlife, she wanted to ask this boy what she had done wrong to be stuck in this hell she lived in. It wasn't her fault, they told her, not her fault at all. But humans always look for someone to blame, anyone to blame, and she is young and naive and it is easy for him to pretend that she is the cause of all his problems.

And it's easy for him to convince her that he's right.

The girl shivers again and thinks that she must be insane, because the river somehow looks warmer than the world around her which seems to have become one of those teacup rides at amusement parks that she never likes because she struggles with motion sickness.

She wants it to stop spinning.

She wants to get off.

She wants to be warm.

The world doesn't care.

It spins anyway.

It spins around her.

It stays cold.

Because the world doesn't care what a child wants.

Why should it? What has she ever done for it? What good is one more girl with a sob story that no one bothers to listen to?

She is dizzy now, very dizzy, and her eyes search for something solid, something unmoving, to find solace in. Tears leak down her cheeks as she gazes into those beautiful amber eyes, and she knows staring is rude, but God, his eyes are so beautiful that she almost forgets about the world around her that turns in endless circles. She almost forgets that her mother is no longer there to tell her to wear a coat. She almost forgets that her father is probably hunting her down currently, if he isn't too drunk to move off the couch.

She almost forgets all this.

Because in his stardust eyes, she sees something flickering.

Warmth.