A First Draft Under the Stars

Rain whispered across the glass roof of the abandoned observatory.

Below, the city was blacked out block by block, but above Mara and Elian, a thousand stars burned with impossible clarity.

You remembered the lock code.

I remembered everything.

The emergency radio crackled between them, warning that the last evacuation train would leave in four minutes.

Elian set a paper lantern on the old telescope mount.

His match scraped once, twice—then caught.

Amber light warmed the room.

You vanished for three years.

You don't get to come back with a lantern and say something devastatingly poetic.

I wasn't planning to be poetic.

Thunder rolled beyond the river.

Mara tried to laugh, but it broke halfway out.

Then what were you planning?

To tell you the truth before the city lights come back and I lose my nerve.

The radio counted down.

Three minutes.

Rain drummed harder, filling the silence he left between them.

Every place they sent me, I looked for this roof.

Every crowd, I listened for your voice.

I came back because surviving without you stopped feeling like survival.

Mara closed the distance between them.

The lantern trembled in the draft.

You always did need someone to rewrite your endings.

Is that a yes?

Far below, the city power returned in a golden wave.

Mara took his hand as the observatory filled with starlight of its own.

It's a first draft.

Don't make me regret it.