April 2022

The air was cold as she stood in front of the granite slab. The tears that carved silent trails down her face were seasoned by the rainwater from above so they didn't taste as bitter by the time they hit her lips. She looked at the name carved there, reaching out a finger to trace the name as she did every time she visited. She had been coming here for the last three years.  This man was the only reason that she was standing out in the rain to begin with.

He was the one that had given her the confidence to live just a small while before he lost his own life.

Gemini Gifford was told her whole life that she sounded like she wasn't made for this world. She was told that her name sounded like it belonged to some sort of mythical ice cream. She heard all the time how the world melted her poor fragile heart in fear. Yes she had been an overly fearful child, but that hadn't been her fault. When she was just three years old, her older cousins had babysat her while her parents were out of town at a work conference. None of her cousins - nor their parents - had any sort of morals, and they let her three-year-old self stayed seated in front of the television the entire weekend while a marathon of gruesome and graphic crime documentaries was shown. She had those images ingrained in her brain. When her parents picked her up after their conference, they said she had been the worst child to put to sleep.

Who blamed her? With those images in her mind, she felt that all sorts of monsters lurked in the dark. Her father - after seeing all the phobias that Gemini got from that one weekend at her cousins - quit his job the next day. He vowed that he would take care of her. Since she was so fearful of being attacked by the world, he homeschooled her. Gemini thought that he was an excellent homeschool teacher. He made even the most boring subjects come alive. As she grew older, she had to admit that his zest for life had caused her to come alive too.

Her only escape during her childhood were in the books her father read to her or that she picked up and read herself. She always fell into reading the fairytales, finding joy in the pages of her favorite princesses and heroines. Even when she turned into a teenager, she still read those books over and over again until the spines were about to give out. She lived her life vicariously through the stories and she was happy about that. Content even. Her father wasn't though.

"You can't be afraid of life," said her father to her one day when her sixteen-year-old self stared out the front window at the typical neighborhood as it came alive with its daily activities.

"I'm not afraid of life," said Gemini. "I value my life actually. It's why I don't go outside."

Her father had reached out a hand to run it through her hair gently. He had tried to coax her outside a little at a time to get her used to the outside world. The further she got away from the house though, the worse her breakdowns and paranoia would become.

"Living trapped inside is not a life, Gemmy. That's a prison."

He held out his hand to her as she had cast her eyes down at it.

"I'm not going outside."

"Do it for me," he said. "Try one more time. You need to realize that life is worth living. Life isn't out to kill you, but you'll never learn that if you keep cutting yourself off."

She had taken his hand reluctantly, and he had closed about it immediately. He had proceeded to take her outside to show her what the outside world was like. She had remembered the panic that had gripped her chest; at the grotesque images that seemed tattooed to the inside of her lids when she closed them. When she eventually opened her eyes though, she was pleasantly surprised to see that she was standing at the end of her drive - the furthest she had ever walked outside - and she was alive. Her father had given her the proudest smile ever, squeezing her hand.

"See? Life is beautiful. It's time to embrace that."

She went on more and more ventures with her father outside after that, becoming more confident each time. By the time she was nineteen, she had enrolled herself in a community college to work on a journalism degree. She found out that - the more time she hung out with her father - that life had so many stories to tell that weren't as dark and grim as the ones she had been forced to watch once upon a time. It was in those classes that she met her three best friends - Ashley, Piper, and Amalia. For the first time in her life, she felt like her life was under her control.

And then - the day she turned twenty-two - her life spun out of control again and her fears of the world were reconfirmed.

On the way home from picking up her birthday cake at the grocery store, her father had run into some burglars that were stealing money from the store. Her father had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. As he stood in the check-out aisle not even five feet from the burglar, one of them turned to look at him. They had killed all the people in the store right on the spot, not wanting any witnesses to their crimes. Gemini remembered the newspaper report several days later. The burglars were apparently a part of a gang known as 'The Red-Eye Wolves'. They haunted her dreams for several months to come. Every time she closed her eyes, she pictured these red eyed beasts standing on her front lawn, waiting to kill her next.

Gemini felt ultimately responsible for her father's death since he had been at the store to pick up her birthday cake. Though her fears re-exploded with a new and fiercer fire aided on by her guilt, she commanded herself to overcome it for her father. She would live her life for him. Having Ashley, Piper, and Amalia certainly helped as well though. They helped her to grieve and carry on through life. They were her necessary support system.

Her mother didn't grieve in the same manner. She was re-married before her father had even been dead a month. She treated it like some sort of job vacancy. The only blessing that came from it was her new stepbrother. At first he had been rather silent and stand offish, but after a few months, he grew to realize that Gemini was just as miserable as he was. He got to know her, and she got to know him in return. After three years, Gemini's stepbrother had seemed to step into her father's protective shoes.

Gemini looked down at the black umbrella in her hand, undoing it and holding it above her head as the rain started to pour down from the sky in a harder fashion than before. Her eyes stayed on her father's grave for a moment or two more before she turned her head off to the side as the sound of footsteps squelching in the grass registered in her ears.

"Thought I'd find you here."

"Sorry, Yoongi. I needed to come see him today. It was one of those days."

Yoongi came to a pause beside her, looking down at the gravestone.  She knew that her stepbrother would find her here. He always seemed to have a knack for tracking her down.

"Come on. You're going to get sick," said Yoongi. "I have somewhere I want to take you anyway."

"Take me?" she asked.

Yoongi nodded.

"I found a new bookshop that I think you would like," he said. "I know how much you love books."

Yoongi knew her so well. He knew her better than her own mother did. Yoongi saw her hesitation, moving to wrap an arm about her before directing her towards the car. She reluctantly followed his lead as the two of them stayed tucked under the umbrella she still held aloft in the gray sky; both of them trying not to slip on the rain slicked grass as they walked down the short embankment to the drive.

"Loss never gets easier with time," he said to her as they approached the car. "Trust me...I feel the same way about my mother. The loss just dulls as time goes on. It leaves you with emotional scars, but the scars can still become something beautiful."

"You're still writing lyrics, aren't you?" she asked with a small smile. "That sounded oddly poetic."

He chuckled as they reached the car, opening the passenger side for her.

"Guilty as charged," he said with a small grin.

Slipping inside after closing the umbrella, she set the sopping wet thing onto the floor before closing the door, watching Yoongi make a quick dash around the front of the car to slip into the driver's side.

"You should message your girlfriends to join you at the bookshop," said Yoongi as he buckled. "Rumor has it that there is supposedly some kind of chick magnet helping to run it now."

"Are you taking me to get books or to set me up?"

"Hey, isn't it a stepbrother's place to set you up?"

She smirked softly.

"Yoongi, you're single yourself, and you're only a year older than me. You act like you're ancient."

"Ancient with wisdom," he said as he turned the car on.

Gemini dug out her cell phone to text Ashley, Piper, and Amalia to meet her at the address Yoongi provided as they drove off. Once the three of them confirmed they'd meet them there on the group chat, Gemini relaxed back into her seat. She turned her head to look out the rain spattered window as Yoongi drove, hoping she could find another new escape at this bookshop that would take her on a new journey to healing.