Tragic!Jethro/Clara.
I stole your character, Tori and Kitty. I hope you don't mind. Random inspiration.
What do you do when your sunshine fades?
It was a classic case of girl-next-door infatuation. She had lived right beside me our entire lives. Her presence was as normal as a sunrise. As necessary as one. She didn't realize it, but life did, in fact, revolve around her.
She was my friend, at first. We played together in playpens and diapers. I guess it didn't come as a surprise to anyone that, before long, we were inseparable.
Before long, innocent daytime play turned into sleepovers, regular everyday activities were expanded to include one more family member, whether she was tagging along with my family and I, or vice versa.
I think I fell in love long before she did. She was naive, perfectly innocent, and never knew that the gawky, awkward boy next door absolutely adored her.
"Wanna hear me play?" She would hold up her violin, her own personal oxygen tank, and she would smile. That smile that could melt the coldest heart. It was like the sun coming out. And of course, I always encouraged her to play.
She was good. Amazing, even. She was so passionate and so happy, it was hard not to get caught up in her emotion.
"Daddy teaches me." She adored her father. Raved about him constantly. So when he found out he had cancer, she was devastated. She cried to me for hours, days.
He got better. Her mother nursed him back to health, made sure he stuck around to help Mia raise two spirited children.
Something changed in my sunshine after that. There was more thought in her face, more understanding and appreciation in her words.
It was raining when I heard her throwing rocks at my window. I went down to meet her, and she took my hand and started to run.
"Where are we going?" I yelled over the crack of thunder.
"I don't know!" was her reply. I could only chuckle and play along.
We ended up in the meadow, soaked, breathless, and giddy. Her cheeks were painted red, and she danced around in the rain, totally without a care.
I kissed her then. It would've been a mistake not to. And she kissed me right back.
Walking hand-in-hand felt right. Sneaking out in the middle of the night to just lay under the stars and talk was magical. It was a new world.
Our parents knew. It wasn't like it was a secret, or at least a very well-kept one. They would stand outside and watch us walk down the road to the town, heads shaking, coffee mugs in hand, and chuckling softly. "We knew this would happen."
They didn't know, however, that my sunshine would collapse in the middle of the store we were in.
Late at night, machines attached to her frail body and beeping obnoxiously, doctor confirmed her parents' worst fears.
Daddy's cancer was alive and reigning supreme in my sunshine's body.
At first, it wasn't so bad. She would get sick from the medicine and would be tired all the time, but she still cracked jokes and played her music. I rarely left her side.
It got worse.
It got harder to pretend that everything was okay.
It got harder to ignore the clumps of hair that came out in my hand when I tangled my arms behind her head, and that she ducked my kisses because she felt ugly without hair.
We knew she was losing the day she was too weak to pick up her violin.
"It's okay," I told her. We had taken a rare trip; we had gone to the meadow where it all started. I had to carry her the last part of the way. "It's okay. You can go. I know you want to go. You don't have to stay. You don't have to stay for me." She wasn't strong enough to sob. A single tear slid from her eye; I wiped it away.
The light faded the very next day.
Now my sunshine burns beneath the Earth, buried in the graveyard that she found morbidly poetic. There is a headstone there, but her ashes are spread over the town that she loved so much. Her soul? Well, Goddess only knows that my sunshine is sitting up on a cloud, playing her violin for the angels, singing hallelujah choruses in celebration of her arrival.
My sunshine continues to be the light of my life.
My sunshine continues to burn.
