@kingdonmicrofic | day 20: stargazing | 452/314 words | warnings: loss of parents, hints of melpreg | ao3
One of Mel’s favourite childhood memories is when she was ten and went stargazing with her Dad during a summer holiday. She remembers lying down in a field, the air humid and mosquitoes buzzing in her ears, as they gazed up at the night sky. Becca and her Mom had already returned to their cottage, neither of them appreciative of staying outside this late in the evening, so this moment was just for Mel and her father.
“I want to become an astronaut,” she remembers saying into the silence. “Wouldn’t it be amazing to chase the stars?”
Beside her, her father had laughed fondly. “You’ve always been a big dreamer, honeybee.”
Mel had just shrugged. Her father already knew her more realistic dreams – becoming a doctor, finding the love of her life and getting married, building a family of her own that is just as loving as the one she grew up in. What was the problem in adding an improbable one too?
“You’re going to go places, Melissa,” her father had continued after a moment, his hand slipping into hers and squeezing. “And I’m going to be the proudest father alive watching you do it.”
In that moment, Mel had never felt happier or more certain that all her dreams would come true.
But then came the heart attack. And then came the cancer diagnosis. And then she stopped dreaming.
Until she started at PTMC, until she met a senior resident with kind blue eyes, who told her to embrace her sensitive nature, who left and then came back to her, who learned to understand and love her unequivocally.
And now, she’s standing on a hotel balcony, staring at the stars with that same senior resident’s arms wrapped around her stomach, a tiny, new heart beating beneath his palms. Below them, the party is still in full swing, laughter, voices and music drifting up into the night sky.
All of their loved one are down there. Becca and Adam, Tanner and Penny, the doctors and nurses of the Pitt, his family from down south and their friends from the Ren Faire, even Abby and her new boyfriend. Maybe some of them don’t know where the bride and groom have gone, maybe others have noticed them slip away. Either way, everyone has left them alone to have their moment of private solitude.
Mel sighs blissfully and closes her eyes as her new husband buries his face in her shoulder. Behind her eyelids, she sees the stars she’s been gazing at, and she feels completely, perfectly, utterly happy.
Somehow, despite all the hardships she’s had to endure, all her dreams, the real ones, have come true.
Her father would have been so proud.
