❛ - there's a darkness in all of us, light in all of us, and it
is up to us to remove the darkness from those places.❜
( luke alvez x jupiter newton )
[ season 12 - ? ]
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BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS JUNE 2006
JUPITER DIDN'T KNOW FOREVER MEANT GOODBYE. She didn't knowthat when she woke up one morning to an empty bed. She didn't know grief could feel so bad. Her chest tightened in an unfamiliar way to the future medical examiner, her left ring finger nude and bare of the twinkling diamond once placed there. This was her second loss and she could practically hear her mother scolding her now for getting her hopes up. She didn't think there were so many ways a person could hurt her. Not like this. It felt like someone had tied an anchor to her heart and sank it. Her stomach clenched as she rolled onto her back, a hand over her chest.
To have her heart broken by the very person who had saved it had been at the very back of her mind. She didn't know how Luke had seen the signs — the looks of exhaustion, the sudden wave of generosity. Jupiter had been crashing and he had pulled her right back up onto her feet. And that wasn't romanticizing her condition — that was facts. Him and her therapist: getting actual help, talking about it, that and Luke didn't let her run. Run from the truth.
That had been why she probably addressed the 12th tape to him. There was something about Luke Alvez that she knew with every fiber of her being he'd save her. At 12, she promised to never put her trust in anyone when she met her father for the first time and gave the reason why he left her and her sister: he didn't want them. At nineteen— she'd extend herself to try one last time. One last time with Luke.
She hadn't known he had seen the signs, watched her in the back of the class, the way she began to distance herself till he noted she was a shell of her old self. Cold. Hollow.
Ready to go.
She rolled onto her side and grabbed emptily at the side of the bed and closed her eyes. The twenty-two-year-old closed her eyes before she exhaled. Three years. Three years.
She could remember the smell of his boot polish, of his deodorant, of the cologne he put around his neck. She remembered the way he put his fingers through her hair to untangle it, she remembered the way he gripped her hand in counseling so she didn't feel alone. She then looked at the pale scars on her wrists and then swallowed. He had found her that day — leaning against her bathroom door. She heard echoes of his voice, of his frantic breathing, his arms tight around her waist.
She couldn't please her mother, so why would she ever imagine she could make someone else happy?
She shut her eyes tight as she shook her curls loose, and sat up from the mattress, looking at the letter laying next to the picture frame of her and Luke — a year after he had found her, his arms tight around her waist, their cheeks pressed together till it looked like their smiles had merged together, their eyes twinkling.
Her army ranger — ever the generous heart. He didn't want to hurt her. He didn't want her to sit around waiting and not know, not know if he'd ever come home. So he had left. Kissed her head in his sleep, took his bags, and then walked out the door.
In a way, she should have been thankful. In a way — flattered he thought about her instead of himself. But she would have stuck around, for him. Waited the rest of her life for him if that's what it took, and she didn't know how to feel that now, the very man she loved — learned how to love as an extension of learning how to love herself, was gone.
But she promised that next morning three years ago in the hospital. I'll never do it again.
And she would make good on that. However, she grabbed her phone, typed three little words to Luke, and then pressed the send button without a second thought, setting it down as she pulled the covers off her thighs and walked into her cold bathroom. Laying next to her phone was a school application with the first words being Congratulations, Welcome to Harvard Medical School.
( 1. 21. 19 )
— there's the prologue! I hope you all liked it, and it sets up the background for the story, just a little.
