"It all starts with a fake invitation to a rather good production of Godspell, a lousy date with a secret homophobe, and a doomsday survivalist who gets far too involved in other people's business..."
---
She would like people to believe that she do...
Our lives will change when tomorrow comes Tonight our hearts drown the distant drums And we'll have music all right, Tearing the night
- "The Last Night of the World," Miss Saigon
xx.xx
She had trouble getting to sleep at the best of times, but that night Robbie tossed and turned to no end. The bed in her apartment was lumpy and hard, not helped by the fact that a number of books sat crowding her feet: she'd been far too lazy to walk across the room to put them back on her sparse shelf.
It wasn't just the bed, though (after all, the apartment had always been incredibly uncomfortable and untidy; she was more than used to that). The storm outside thrashed against her window, pounding and pelting the glass as if it was demanding to be let inside.
The noise hadn't stopped since she gotten home earlier that evening. Robbie swore that at one point, as she had sat curled up with a hot chocolate on her worn old couch, she'd heard a crack of lightning so loud that it sounded more like a distant explosion. The very glass in her windows shook, the light from the accompanying flash momentarily blinding.
She had gone straight to bed after that. Henry hated storms, and the sound of the furious rain pelted her with painful memories. Sleep would quieten them, she decided - she switched off her phone, doing her best to let dreams carry her off somewhere a little more peaceful.
Of course, it hadn't worked. After hours and hours, the storm finally died down, but her mind's noise didn't cease. She snatched minutes of sleep here and there, but they were fraught with bad dreams and sad remembrances: not exactly a blissful rest.
She finally admitted defeat as the sun rose, feeling more tired than she had the night before and rolling out of the mess of tangled sheets. She craved a coffee, a shower, a big plateful of a greasy, unhealthy breakfast.
After she was washed and dressed, she settled down for a lazy afternoon of mindlessly scrolling through the internet on her phone...until it screen flickered on.
What the fuck?
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She scrolled through them quickly, each message making her mind race a little faster, her pulse flicker a little harder.
The ground seemed to give way underneath her; fragments of the messages whirled around in an incoherent whirlwind, more deafening than last night's storm: Starlight. A meteor.
She dialed Finn as immediately as she could with her trembling hands. "Oh my God, thank God you're okay - I've been awake all night freaking out." She could hear the tiredness in his voice, matched only by her own exhaustion.
"I'm so sorry, I'm so so sorry -- I turned my phone off last night because I couldn't sleep because of this fucking storm, a-and--" She breathed so quickly, so shallow, that it sent her dizzy, her head spinning. "What happened?"
