Operation: Moonfall | Jimmy Crystal Revenge & Redemption

The Homecoming

A/N

First and foremost, I want to thank everyone that's stuck it out this far. We're entering the second half of this story andit sorta blows my mind that anyone is reading and enjoying this. You have noidea how close I came to not even posting that first chapter. I'm having funwriting this and I'm glad I went through with it. So, I hope you all buckle upbecause this ride is about to escalate!

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"Waiting for the other shoe to drop" was a phrase Buster would've never considered inadequate before now, unless you were referring to a shoe-clad spider, because it seemed like a lot of shoes were dropping lately.

The latest shoe was the confirmation of the rumor he heard from Ernie Boyd. No matter how low Boyd considered himself on the Redshore totem pole, apparently he had access to a better information network than Buster, because The Majestic Palace officially announced that a show featuring stars from the reality competition Sing Your Heart Out, America! was taking up residency in the theater in the coming months. Even if Lester McCray found some kind of loophole to get Buster and his troupe out of their Crystal Entertainment contract, there was no room for them at his theater. Sure, Out of This World was a fantastic original production, it even boasted the return of Clay Calloway, but how could they compete with reality TV stars? These singers were on their way to becoming household names with bestselling albums, if they weren't already. The Moon troupe was out of their league, and it didn't seem like an appropriate time for Buster to push cute adages about optimism or dreaming. He was at a loss for words. As much as Crystal loved to call him a loser, this was the first time in a long time Buster truly felt like he was losing at life. It was like losing his theater all over again, but at a speedrun. He was getting fatigued.

And with the meeting with Cleo Keller going basically nowhere, it felt like salt in the wound. If her opinion of Buster was any lower, it'd be in the sewer. All he'd learned was that Cleo was probably disgusted by the thought of him, and that Jimmy Crystal hated him even more than he realized.

Maybe he was looking at this wrong. This wasn't a shoe dropping, it was a domino. It was funny in a macabre way how pushing a domino here or there started a chain reaction that was quickly unraveling his life. How fragile our livelihoods could be.

But what disturbed Buster most of all was the emptiness in the back of his heart, a void he only recently noticed now that he had all the free time to wallow in his own feelings. The negative voice that seeped into his thoughts, the voice that told him he was garbage and that simply trying was an exercise in inevitable failure, wasn't all that uncommon of an experience for anyone. What changed was that over the past few months, his negative voice started to sound a lot like Crystal. Now in these past few days, it was the voice of many people he'd encountered recently, and they'd been growing louder and more judgmental with time.

"If you build a foundation with lies, you compromise the structure and integrity of your house."

"Everyone's got their own story, Moon. You're the villain of mine."

"You have little to no morals, Mr. Moon."

"As long as you succeed, all the people you hurt along the way should be okay with the way you treated them, is that right?"

The voice that would always come to his defense and lift him up, the voice of his father, was nowhere to be found. He found it both distressing and embarrassing that he hadn't noticed its absence until now. It was like he was missing a piece of himself. How long was it gone?

From what he could tell, since they arrived in Redshore.

Upon realizing that, Buster made a choice in that moment, one some may consider drastic. He needed to go back to his roots, to find what he lost, to put right what once went wrong, or any variation of what needed to happen to become whole once more. And the only one he let in on his plan that night was Rosita.