Sparks Fly

Chapter Twenty-Seven: Fairies, Forests, and Queens

Omg, I'm back as promised. I'm super early this week, guys! Anyway, this chapter is longer than the most recent ones cause there's some explaining at long last.

Don't forget to comment, share, and hit that star button (vote) if you liked this chapter!

—VIVKELLER23
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Rain

The hardest part about surviving was trying to live your life as if you weren't crumbling apart inside everyday, just waiting for the day you could give up the fight.

Even harder still was knowing that the very few people on Earth who knew anything about your struggle didn't care in the long run. You could do everything right for years, but the moment the war got too much, you became no more than a burden. No more than a liability they should have gotten rid of long ago.

She'd lived the past two years waiting for the moment she'd shatter. She'd thought it would be explosive, that she'd lose all sense of time and space and simply cease to exist as she had been molded out to be. A devastating end for the Ice Queen who'd always felt just a little too much.

It didn't happen that way.

As it turned out, her downfall was gradual. She lost a part of her armor months ago and never even noticed that the rest continued to crack as the weeks went on. Tonight, that armor simply dissolved in the face of all she'd tried to bury.

Rain witnessed her father escorting young Gia Dyer out of the house in the early morning, long before the first guests arrived. Her heart had bled as she watched her father guide Gia out with one hand placed intimately on her lower back. He'd whispered something to her as she stepped outside into the morning sun, and Gia, the best friend she'd lost, had blushed and kissed him as if she had every right to.

As if Gia had any right to the man who'd once been married to a woman who'd welcomed her as if she were a daughter.

Rain had tried to ignore it, but a large part of the ice that had held her heart safely in check shattered two hours before she'd had to smile and welcome the families her father considered friends.

It was an overused, cliched plot, and yet the pain had been excruciating.

The night Rain decided to disobey her mother to attend that wretched party hadn't just been a choice she made on a whim. Her father had been talking to someone on the phone that evening while her mother worked alongside Isa in the kitchen. It hadn't been a business call. By all accounts, it had been a purely personal call for pleasure.

She hadn't known who he was talking to, who was on the other end listening to his promises to see her soon. It hadn't mattered then. What had mattered was that he'd always had a the last say on who she saw, who she went to proms with now that she was old enough to make an impression, and he could make secret meetings with another woman who was not his wife.

Angered and betrayed, she'd climbed out of her bedroom window to drown out some of what she'd heard with drink and loud music.

What a heavy price she'd paid. And still, she wasn't sure she wouldn't make the same decision again if she were given the choice.

Here now, years later, she wished she could drown out the ringing in her ears as the memories of the past and the moments of the present collided.

"Rain?"

She blinked and forgot everything as her eyes met grey-green pools of light. It was said that the eyes could be the windows to the soul. Rain wondered how deep she'd have to fall before she caught a glimpse of Teagan's tattered soul. How strange that the eyes of a man she'd once so desperately wanted to despise could be her anchor now.