(fic) Wish - Team Angst
Title: Wish (upon a star)
Author: ladygray99
Pairing/Characters: Megan/Larry
Rating/Category: PG13
Spoilers: The whole Megan/Larry relationship
Summary: Megan was young when she stopped wishing on stars.
Warnings: Talk of teenaged sex, abortion and still births
Notes: I cranked this out really quick at work. The Megan muse just didn’t want to get in gear. I think it came out okay. I’d like people’s feelings on it though. And yes I know it’s the 25th for most people but it’s the 26th for me.
This fic was written for the Angst vs Schmoop Challenge at numb3rswriteoff. After you’ve read the fic, please rate it by voting in the poll located here. (Your vote will be anonymous.) Rate the fic on a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the best) using the following criteria: how well the fic fit the prompt, how angsty [or schmoopy] the fic was, and how well you enjoyed the fic. When you’re done, please check out the other challenge fic at numb3rswriteoff. Thank you!
Wish (upon a star)
Megan looked up. She wasn’t sure when she’d stopped wishing on stars. Probably about the same time the tooth fairy became a handy way of getting money off her father.
She remembers looking at the stars as she lay on her back by the seventh hole at her father’s country club; one of the summer caddies grunting and sweating over her. She knew her basic constellations. Ursa Major was bright. A wish did float across her mind. That her head would stop spinning with stolen red wine and that the idiot over her, whose name she didn’t care to learn, would finish.
Two months latter she took the train into the city. She remembers the stars fading as the train got closer to a night that was never truly dark, thanks to a city that never slept. The stars vanished completely when the train dipped underground. She was going to ‘visit’ her eldest sister. Her sister had promised to help her take care of a little problem she had. Her sister had gone on and on about difficult decisions and options to be considered. Megan just felt ill and wanted it done with. No wish or desire to bring another life into a world where people had figured out how to blot out the stars. She packed enough to make sure she never had to go home from her visit.
Two years later a friend took another option. Kneeling on a flop house floor she wished and prayed to anything that she could be anywhere else. She tilted her head back and looked at the ceiling so she wouldn’t have to look at the thing that had just slipped hot and wet into her hands. They had stolen a jar of glow in the dark paint and sickly green stars looked down at her. The thing in her hands never cried. She didn’t check to see if it was a boy or a girl. She called an ambulance from the pay phone across the street and never went back inside.
Quantico reminded her strangely of the country club. It took her a week to realize it was because she could see the stars come out while she lay on her back next to the track having just run faster, harder and longer than she ever had in her life.
‘I studied psychology. How much running do they expect me to do?’ Megan thought to herself.
‘Starlight, star bright.’ She thought. She never got as far as the wish because someone was shouting in her ear to get her fat lazy ass off the ground and moving. It wouldn’t have mattered. She was already too exhausted to wish for anything but sleep.
Megan lay on the grass and looked up. LA had a few more stars than New York but not many. She had once only known a few major constellations then a gleaming classic car had caught her eye. With it came a shy smile and stuttering brilliance. It hadn’t taken long, learning Larry had meant learning the stars. Within a month her eyes had shifted so she could pick out fine shades of reds, yellows and blues where before they had all been white. She learned their names, magnitude, learned which ones spun around each other, which ones were dead, the light of their final moments still a million years off.
And she knew, looking up, that at that moment they held the first man she had loved in a long time; the one who knew her secrets and her dreams. The one she needed now more than ever as her government seemed determined to drag her from LA into some man made hell. She saw a tiny streak pass between two stars for just a moment and knew it was him. She closed her eyes and wished on every star for them to bring him home.