{AAAHHH!!! Chapter Twenty! Time to celebrate, am I right?! Again, thank you all for making this happen, for keeping me going with all of your support for this story... I love you all so very much!}
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The elderly woman stepped up on a stepstool, reaching for the top shelf.
"Are you sure you don't want me to grab it myself?" the young man behind her asked, "because I certainly could."
The woman shook her head before reaching again, finally grabbing the metallic box on top.
She pulled it down and handed it to the man before walking off, leaving the man and his wife to their own resources.
The man, a certain Jack Kelly, sat down on the floor, blowing dust off the top of the box.
"Look, Jack," his wife, Katherine whispered excitedly, sitting down next to him, "there's a name..."
Indeed, there was a name in big bold letters.
Kelly.
Jack took a deep breath before reaching to open the lid.
There, right on top of everything, were two artifacts: a pair of lab safety goggles and a beautiful blue necklace made of- some sort of material. Very unfamiliar.
Katherine gingerly reached in, removing the goggles and necklace, laying them on the floor.
The next item was a thick, red leatherbound book. The golden writing on the cover read "On Idiotic Inventions and Amateur Alchemy." The work was credited to a guy named Varian.
Removing the ancient memoir, Jack was shocked to find two piles of letters.
Letters upon letters upon letters...
One whole pile of letters was addressed to Varian while the other pile was addressed to Cassandra.
"Dear Cassie," Katherine read from one paper, "um, hi there. I don't know why I'm, um, writing this exactly, but, um..."
"Hold it, Ace," Jack interrupted her, "What's the matter? Can't you read?"
"No," Katherine replied, smirking a little, "look."
She held the letter out to her husband and, sure enough, there were a ton of "um's" written across the page, separating words and starting sentences.
"Must've been socially awkward."
Jack just nodded, letting himself smile a little, too.
That poor kid...
But he couldn't help it anymore.
He burst out laughing, feeling both sorry for the poor kid and glad that something like that existed- something that they could just laugh at.
After they both were done smiling and laughing, they started reading the letters for real now, Jack reading Varian's letters while Katherine read Cassandra's, letting the words of the letters take over.
They let themselves get sucked into a romance from almost a century ago, one that, judging by the family tree they found inside the big book, belonged to the ancestors of Jack Kelly.
YOU ARE READING
Every Step of the Way
Fanfiction"Sometimes, when there are no given steps, you need to take the first ones." ~-~ Years have passed since Varian first met Cassandra. Life is going okay for him- he's gotten his first job, and he's actually being taken seriously by everyone- but he c...
