Repentance // Book 1: Of Angels and Men

4: Of Angels and Men

This chapter is dedicated to @Icanbeyourstar for her lovely comments, and @KhaleesiH for being the first to comment and inspire me to write more.  Thanks guys :D lotsa love, Claira xxxx

Andrew looked pretty much the same as when he was 18, when he’d left.  Now he was 26, and only his hair, that had grown wilder and slightly longer, and his eyes, which had lost some of their cheer but gained more laugh-lines, and looked older, and darker, had changed.  Luna didn’t hesitate one moment longer.  She ran down the stairs and up to her brother, slapped him, burst into tears, and flung herself at him.  Andrew, his eyebrows still up in a stunned response to the slap, caught her on reflex, from a lot of experience back when Luna was still a toddler, and his eyes softened and became rimmed with tears, as he kissed his sister’s head, and they just remained like that for a whole minute, until Luna stopped sobbing and became aware of her parents and other brother staring at them from the hallway.

She stepped away from him and looked up at her brother, with one of his cheeks bright red from the slap, and his eyes crinkling up in his familiar half-smile.  She felt as if one piece of normality had finally reasserted itself in her life.  She watched with a sort of detached amusement as Robert shook hands awkwardly, and suddenly wrapping his older brother in a bone-crushing hug.  Luna was sure that tear-tracks were shining on his face when he broke away.  Her mother was already sobbing in a hanky when she was embraced by her son, and her shoulders shook harder when she realised that the boy she had brought up was now actually taller than her.  Last of all came her father, who was wearing a grim expression.  Andrew visibly paled.

Eric Starr was not a man to easily forgive and forget.  In his youth, he’d had a rough time at school, and he’d lived with an alcoholic father who’d ruined his life.  His first wife had cheated on him with another man who had been his best friend, and it was only when he met Vivienne Charleston that he finally began trusting people again.  Now, as he looked at his son, his wayward, unruly, rebellious son that had broken his heart, he felt a small fire start in his heart, thawing the frost that had accumulated there over time.  He reached out and enfolded his son in a long hug, and now it was Andrew’s turn to cry, and Luna, from her place by the door, could hear him sob and murmur “I’m so sorry” and her father was answering softly each time with an “I know, I know”.

Finally, they moved in to the kitchen, where Vivienne had cooked a huge dinner.  Luna hadn’t realised she’d been hungry until her stomach gave off a sound that would have made the offspring of a whale and a cow proud.  [A/N: God, you don’t want to know what image I have in my head right now…]

During dinner, Andrew explained how he’d gone off to London University and had actually got a degree in Graphic Design.  He’d met his wonderfully flawed boyfriend, as he called him, Will, there.  Will was also a graduate of Graphic Design, and they had actually been working in the same company for around two years.  They were living in an apartment in Scotland, for some time, because Will was Scottish.  Now they’d moved to Manchester, and Andrew decided that he’d caused enough suffering for his parents and himself, so he’d called them, after eight years.  They’d known that he was safe only because he sent them monthly emails, in curt, rough words.  It was either that or come back home.  He chose the e-mails.

Luna was over the moon.  [A/N: see the pun there?  Ugh, I’m sorry, I keep interrupting…]  She was in a happy dazed trance, and kept pinching herself to assure herself that this wasn’t a dream brought about  by her change to the angelic.  However, her human-ness betrayed her other self and tiredness took over her system.  It had been a long eventful day, and her body was shutting down against her brain’s orders, which was floundering in a cotton-wool cocoon of sleepiness.  She must have fell asleep at the table, because the only thing she remembered was feeling a pair of strong arms encircle her and lift her up.  Andrew was the only person who would do that, and the only person who knew just from where to hold her and not hurt her.  He was always so gentle with her.  Fresh tears sprung to her bleary eyes, which he gently wiped away.  When they reached her trapdoor and ladder, he set her down gently and kissed her forehead, and whispered, “Little sister, the Sun may not always shine every day, but when it does, it would be best for us to enjoy it, huh?”