Chapter Text
Tuesday, December 31st 2013 [ Brooke ]
“A sunflower.”
“... Okay…”
“Uh, some sort of bird. A sparrow?”
“Right…”
“Hah! A purple sea star. Nice one.”
“Yes…”
Grinning, Brooke crossed her arms behind her head. She rocked back in her lawn chair, almost toppling in the process, which forced her to correct her posture and pout at Kate’s giggling. “Hmph. Okay, one more, come on.”
Kate had her phone screen angled toward her chest, held where Brooke couldn’t see it. She adjusted the blanket draped over her legs and swiped her thumb for yet another picture, and looked at Brooke with expectant eyes.
In a hazy double of the scene, Brooke witnessed Kate shaking her head and turning the phone around to show a painting – a familiar one, a woman with an enigmatic smile.
Back in the present, Brooke let her lips quirk in a satisfied grin and said, “The Mona Lisa.”
Kate tilted her head to the side, releasing a bemused breath which fogged in the wintry air. “Okay, that’s ten in a row. I think you’ve proved your point!” Her hazel eyes, dark but glinting in the night, searched Brooke with obvious intrigue. “It’s hard to believe that it’s real. But it is. It really, actually is…”
“Yeah,” Brooke agreed. “I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. Well… for small stuff, at least. I don’t think I’m going to be able to predict the Super Bowl winner or anything.”
Brooke bobbed her foot as she talked, staring out over Devils Lake. She and Kate had set their chairs up by the lake shore about an hour before, facing southwest toward the town and the harbor, neither of which were quite visible over the trees. The minutes to midnight were steadily ticking by, but in each other’s company, neither of them were bored.
Since the incident with the truck, she had tried various ways to trigger her abilities intentionally. After confessing about it all to Kate, two minds had proved better than one, and Kate had ended up suggesting something which sounded an awful lot like meditation. She had spent an hour every day closing her eyes and concentrating ever since.
It turned out to be a good idea, because as difficult as it was to actually clear her mind, she started to detect those clouds swirling at the edges of her consciousness. They were elusive and didn’t yield to her grasp very easily – but that was starting to change, bit by bit.
Seeming to see through Brooke’s casual, almost dismissive remarks about the subject, Kate planted her chin in her gloved hand and asked, “Doesn’t it scare you?”
Brooke thought of feeling Jefferson’s bullets rip through her, and the sound of a truck hitting someone. She pursed her lips. “... I guess. How would you feel?”
“I’d be terrified,” came Kate’s quiet answer as she slipped her phone back into the breast pocket of her jacket, still watching Brooke. “If you think about it, it’s sort of like something else is reaching into your mind and putting thoughts there. We still don’t really know what caused this power to appear.”
The imploring gaze coming from the other girl made Brooke sink into her seat, groaning quietly. “Okay, I’m going to need a little more holiday cheer to balance the scales if I’m going to start being honest about how all this makes me feel.”
Flashing a mischievous smile at that, Kate reached into the lunch cooler sitting between their chairs. Supposedly there were some sandwiches in there to tide them over since Kate’s parents had been out all evening and they hadn’t had much of a dinner. Brooke hadn’t expected to see a wine bottle appear instead.
“Would this help?” Kate asked innocently.
“Whoa,” Brooke pronounced. “You know, champagne is usually more traditional for New Years’.”
“I didn’t have any champagne.”
Brooke laughed, disbelieving. “Wait, but you had the wine sitting around? Kate?”
Kate sniffed archly as she opened the bottle – it was the cheap kind, with a screw-on cap instead of a cork. “This is my blood, which is poured out for many.” She was putting on her best imitation of straight-laced, Sunday school discipline; her rosy cheeks could pass for being from the cold, but Brooke suspected otherwise.
“Gnarly,” Brooke mumbled as she was handed the bottle. After considering it for just a moment, she took a swig. “I thought your congregation practiced closed communion.”
She was admittedly a little proud to have picked up enough of this stuff to make smart aleck remarks like that one. Religion still interested her very little, but she had come to prefer being able to meet Kate on her terms and listen carefully to the stuff she cared about. There was always this little spark in Kate’s eye when she caught Brooke doing it.
Kate laughed at the joke, a little dryly, as she accepted the bottle back to have her own turn drinking. “I don’t know if you noticed, Brooke, but I’m not exactly a good Lutheran girl anymore. I’m fallen, remember? If I’m already dancing with the devil, I might as well enjoy myself.”
Brooke was left a little aghast at the bluntness of Kate’s humor. “Kate, you know that’s not true.”
“I do,” she sighed. “Sorry. Just venting a little. But… it is true that I’m starting to wonder what the point is in trying quite so hard to act pure and perfect when nobody believes it anyway.”
Kate took another, longer drink from the bottle, before she handed it back to Brooke. Brooke found herself staring into it a second as she thought about what Kate just said.
“It’s not all an act. Right? You seem to prefer being polite and taking things in moderation anyway.”
“Of course,” Kate answered, trying to reassure Brooke with a smile. “I’m not secretly a whole different person underneath it all. But not allowing myself any fun? Never talking back…? That’s certainly not me.” Then she focused. “You still have to answer my question, you know.”
Brooke wanted to say that she’d like Kate no matter how much she decided to cut loose, but fell short in an awkward grimace when the interrogation came back around her way. Was she there yet? She’d had enough sips of the wine already to feel a warm buzz settle over her senses as they talked.
Whatever. Kate had already seen her at her worst, and… Kate was still here despite that. Some feeling about this fact flitted around Brooke like a hummingbird, too fast (and blurry) for her to grasp before it was gone. She took a breath and answered.
“I’m scared shitless of this power, Kate. And frustrated. And angry. But… a bit excited. It’s all jumbled up in my head.” She paused for another drink. The wine was going down easier. Despite its cheap vintage, it didn’t taste half bad. “I’m angry that it showed me the destruction of Arcadia Bay coming but didn’t give me the knowledge to prevent it. And of course I don’t like that it just takes me over sometimes. But… it’s a fucking superpower. How many people can say they have something like that?”
Kate hummed, considering. “I’d be confused in your situation, too. I guess you don’t know what to make of it yet.”
Brooke threw her hands up. “Is it a blessing? A curse? A test from a higher power to see how badly I can screw things up by trying to prevent the future?”
After her hands dropped, a long pause drew out. A distant thump sounded from another town as someone set off fireworks in their backyard. Kate had her head angled up, something a little lazier to her posture now that the bottle had passed back and forth a few times. Brooke thought the casual manner suited her.
“I think,” the blonde finally said, slow and purposeful, “that’s for you to decide.”
This answer brought a small laugh out of Brooke, who let her head fall back against the backrest of her chair. “Three months ago, that’s the last answer I would have expected from you. You would have said it was all part of some greater plan…”
“Would I?” Kate wondered aloud. “Maybe. A lot’s changed since then.”
“You haven’t,” Brooke said, turning her head to smile, a little more brazenly than she might have a few minutes earlier. “Not where it’s really important.”
“You have,” Kate said softly, a hint of a smile tugging at her features. “But only in the good ways.”
“Thank God for that,” came her reply as she lifted the bottle to the sky in mock salute.
Then boom. Her hand jostled the bottle, sloshing the liquid as red light spilled in distorted waves through the glass. Confused, Brooke lowered the bottle to find the embers of a detonated firework still falling through the sky past the lake, realizing belatedly that she had not, in fact, managed to cause an explosion with her toast.
“Two minutes to midnight,” Kate reported after a quick glance at her phone. She clapped her hands in excitement after she put it away, the sound muffled by her gloves. Then, with a look of acute concentration on her face, she passed her gaze between her lap and the cooler between them a few times. Brooke was about to ask what she was thinking about before Kate finally made up her mind, pushing the cooler out of the way, then scooting her chair closer.
Bemused, Brooke allowed Kate to throw her blanket over both their legs. It was getting kind of cold out, so she appreciated that much. It seemed appropriate to sit closer and enjoy the moment, as one after another, Lincoln City’s fireworks started to go off.
Clumsy, Brooke fished her own phone out of her coat pocket so she could watch the last seconds of 2013 tick by. A process she was momentarily distracted from when she felt the light thump of Kate’s soft hair coming to rest against her shoulder.
“Thank God for nothing. You were always more than that, Brooke,” Kate mumbled from beside her. “The you that you are now was just under the surface. Waiting.”
“I don’t know about that,” Brooke started to say, only to come up short. She felt Kate’s fingers brush along hers as she took the bottle away from her and set it down in the bristly grass by the foot of their chairs. Turning, she saw Kate fixing her with a rather serious, earnest look. A bit… intense. She didn’t know what to make of it.
“It’s true,” Kate insisted, softly but firmly. “I knew you were a good person, Brooke. Even back when you didn’t.” Her lips pursed. “Maybe… you still don’t. But you…”
Brooke may have been a little tipsy, but she still wasn’t churlish enough to interrupt Kate to disagree when she paused for breath. Brooke’s eyes were wide, uncomprehending, the light of distant fireworks down in the bay illuminating them both as she dealt with the emotional weight of Kate’s words.
Kate finally lifted her eyes, which looked a little watery. Uncertain, but still warm and fond as they always were. “You’ve touched my life. Despite everything, you’ve made this year… this crazy year… worth living.” Eyes shining, she lifted her chin. “You’re the best thing to ever happen to me.”
Now Kate was watching her expectantly, and Brooke was left a little choked up, unsure how to respond, unsure what could even compete with that. She absently noted the phone still in her peripheral vision – thirty seconds.
“Kate, I…”
Another firework thumped. Twenty seconds.
“... I’m not really good at talking about my feelings,” she finally said. Kate smiled faintly and shrugged, waiting for her to go on, and Brooke did. “But you’re the best friend I’ve ever had. I’ve… never felt as comfortable around another person as I do with you.”
Ten seconds.
“You make me feel like I can be myself, without shame, or self-awareness. That’s… new to me.” She finished by flashing an awkward smile. “So thanks. I’m… I’m glad you’re here, too.”
Five seconds. Kate studied Brooke’s face, and she wondered if she had said something wrong. But Kate’s smile returned when three seconds remained, and Brooke knew that Kate approved after all.
Two seconds. A brief silence, the fireworks in the town going quiet, building up to something greater. Kate leaned closer.
One.
Wednesday, January 1st 2014
As confused and surprised as Brooke was, she didn’t move away. The sudden roar of fireworks, she thought, made for an appropriate backdrop to the soft kiss that Kate left on her cheek. It certainly matched the confused – if pleased – thundering in her own head.
“Happy New Year, Brooke,” said Kate in a voice almost too quiet to hear beneath the din.
Brooke managed to find her brain again, somehow, just in time to rub the spot on her cheek – burning with heat suddenly – and respond, “Happy New Year to you too, Kate.”
Neither of them found any more words to be appropriate. Still leaning on each other under the blanket, unaffected by the winter chill, they watched blossoms of light erupt in the sky, gold and silver and every color in between.