The Moon, The Sun, and Everything Else

Simply Memories - Repost - Memorial Day 2018

Please skip to the Author's Note at the bottom of you don't want to re-read the oneshot. ❤

Kirstie rolled over, surprised to see her husband wasn't there. "Avi?" She asked, stumbling down the stairs, still not completely awake yet. 

"Kirst?" Avi's voice filled the room around them as he looked up from his hands. 

"Why aren't you in bed, Love?" She sat beside him. 

"They're taking me." He sighed. 

"Excuse me?" 

"The Army...I have to go, it's some kind of urgent thing, I have like two hours! My God, I can't think straight...can they even do that? The Army can't do this! But maybe they can, but--" Avi seemed rather frazzled, not being able to wrap his head around the call he had just received fifteen minutes ago. 

"Okay, well, then you can go fight. It's what you signed up for, right? You said you've always wanted this." 

"I can't leave you--" 

"Avi, it'll be fine! You come back in what, six, seven months?"

He winced at her sugarcoated suggestion of his time away. "Three years."

"Three?! Years?! Are you sure the scary guy over the phone didn't say months?" Kirstie found herself getting rather caught off guard by this situation as well. 

"Three years." Avi nodded. "Three whole years!" He raised his voice out of pure frustration. I mean, he made the choice to enlist into training at like 19 years old, and that was only to pay for school, and he didn't really put two and two together that maybe the Army would need him one day, and...this whole thing was just a mess. 

"Hey, hey, We-We'll get through it." The stutter in her voice waived the conviction of the statement just enough for it to be concerning. 

"I don't even...what if...what if I--" 

"Don't say that." Kirstie said quietly, tears came to her eyes as this whole thing started feeling real. 

She didn't really want him to go. I mean, she couldn't guarantee that it would be all fine. She didn't want it to be real, but it was.  

This whole thing was sickeningly real.

~~~~~

It's forever stuck in her memory. So crystal clear, that day when two soldiers came to the door. 

"Ma'am--" The rest of whatever they had to say was soon tuned out because something deep inside of her was screaming that she knew what they had come for. 

She left them with a polite 'thank you', but soon found herself sobbing, her whole body shaking. The room was spinning, and unlike times in the past Avi wasn't there to catch her before she fell. 

And fell this time, she did. 

It was a day and a half later that the body was indeed Avi Kaplan,  that the body was indeed her husband. 

That's how she got here. Sitting front row of a funeral home with Scott and Mitch, two friends from her job as a record company agent, the three of them had even started a little a Capella thing, but that's not the point. The point was that these two were the only people left on this Earth that she could call family, and that she didn't care they weren't blood. She didn't care that the front row was only for family, because Scott and Mitch were the sweat and tears of a family, just without the DNA, but that's fine, they were her family. 

"He can't be dead. This isn't real." Kirstie whispered under her breath, tears leaving behind ghostly streaks of makeup under her eyes, a few of them beginning to crawl down her cheeks.