Until The Rain Stops

{|style="width:100%; color:#FFF;"
|valign="top" style="padding:5px;"|
Until The Rain Stops
The winds whipped up from the roiling ocean waves beneath, sweeping Lillian’s hair about her face with a frenzied intensity. She held onto the bridge railings with a white-knuckle intensity, her shoes dangling just inches away from a sheer drop down into the bay beneath. Her cheeks stung in the cold winds, her hair flinging itself every which way at the gale-forces, and rain pelted her back and shoulders. 
She felt everything, the sting of the rain and the cold, but mostly she felt empty. Like something was missing. Lillian had lost track of how long she’d been standing there, perhaps it had only been minutes, but she’d been staring down into the black-blue ocean for at least longer than that. 
The bridge was empty, long since closed to both cars and foot-traffic, as the curfews came down across the whole world. Anyone caught out here would be delivered to a cell, to wait out the rest of the night in quiet solitude. She didn’t want that, if only because it would mean another day of uncertainty, and second-guessing her decision to stand there, perched on the precipice in every sense of the world.
So close to falling, and so close to the peace she always craved.
Lifting up a foot, Lillian dangled her shoe off of her toe, letting the wind sweep it two and fro, and do its best to tear it from the soles of her feet.
“You’ve been standing here for an hour, you know.” A smooth voice behind her said.
She wheeled her head about to face the source of the sound, seeing a middle-aged woman with weathered skin, a forehead wrinkled with concern, and laugh-lines touching the edge of her eyes. 
“Have you been watching me?” Lillian asked.
The woman took a drag on a cigarette, puffing out a plume of grey smoke into the frigid sunset. “I was gonna wait until you were about to jump, then start talking to you.”
Furrowing her brow, Lillian waited. “But?” she asked. 
The woman tilted her head to one side, the touch of a smirk tugging at the corner of her rosy lips. “But then you took an hour,” she said. “and you still can’t decide.”
Lillian turned back to the rushing, frothing waves beneath the bridge, letting herself lean further over the edge, but still keeping her hands on the railing. To her credit, the other woman didn’t rush forward to stop her, nor tell her to wait.
Lillian knew that this woman was experienced, she’d done this before. Even before, when she’d hesitated, making Lillian be the one to prod for her to continue, it had been a tactic to make her open to conversation.
Lillian didn’t care. It was hard to care about anything anymore. “I told myself I’d jump when the rain stops.”
“What world are you from?” the woman asked.
Lillian grit her teeth. “What makes you think I’m an Off-Worlder?” she hissed. Her tone accusatory, her eyebrows knitted in anger. She waited for the comments, for the nickname of ‘Refuse’ to leave the woman’s lips. To compare her to trash, just because she had the misfortune of being a refugee.
But she didn’t. The woman just smiled in that gentle, jovial way, the laugh lines at the edges of her eyes becoming more prominent. “If you don’t know the slogan of Terceira, then you’re an Off-Worlder.” She leaned herself on the railing, her lush black hair matted and soaked through with water. Her sparkling green eyes met Lillian’s, shining with mirth. “The rain never stops on Terceira.”
Lillian couldn’t help but smile back, huffing out a hollow pitiful laugh. “Until it does, right?” She completed the two-part mantra despite herself.
The woman nodded in reply. “Until it does.”
They lapsed into silence, and Lillian looked back out to the horizon beyond. Where the waves of the sea faded from blue-black to grey, mingling with the clouds and the fog of rain to create a sheet of off-white. A suffocating blanket, blurring the line of the horizon until it all looked the same. 
“It all seems so final,” Lillian found herself saying. “I can barely wrap my head around it at times. So much is happening, and it’s all happening so fast.”
“You feel like your head’s gonna spin off your neck,” the woman nodded, sighing into the air. “You feel like your brain is just gonna shut down at any moment, you want to just block it all out, crawl under a duvet, and hide from the galaxy.” She paused and let her head drop. “But at the same time, you know that won’t help. The rain will keep pouring. The worlds out there will keep burning, and at any point yours might be next.”
Shutting her eyes, Lillian choked back a painful lump in her throat. “Mine was next.”
The woman paused for a while. “So was mine,” she said.
Lillian opened her eyes, looking over at the woman with a pained expression.
She echoed the look like a mirror-image, her smile gone, her eyes no longer sparkling. “I’m an Off-Worlder. I stood where you stood.” She smacked the railings with her hands a couple times, producing tone-less bangs. “Right here, on this very bridge, too.”
“I…” Lillian knew there was nothing she could say. “What world?”
“Santa Androsa,” the woman looked out into the distance.
“I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to apologise to me, your world went too. Which was it?”
It was Lillian’s turn to look away. “Vendura.”
They said nothing more. They both couldn’t, and didn’t need to. 
“I know better than anyone what it’s like to look at the Galaxy and just want nothing more to do with it,” she said. “I’ve endured the Refuse lifestyle,” she spat the word like it left a bad taste. “I’ve struggled to adapt, and I once thought about throwing myself off this bridge.”
Lillian looked at the woman, wanting her to continue, but she didn’t. It was an underhanded tactic, but it worked. It made Lillian want to clutch onto the woman like a lifeline—a tether that would yank her back from the gaping maw of the abyss, and pull her back into the light. 
“What stopped you?” she asked.
The woman looked up into the sky, closing her eyes, and letting the rain pelt her face for a while. When she opened her eyes again, her makeup was ruined, her face soaked and shiny. She looked at Lillian and smiled. “The rain stopped,” she said. “The skies cleared, I felt sunlight on my face. And I realised that it all had to stop eventually. No matter how painful, no matter how heart-breaking the thing. It has to stop.”
Lillian shook her head. “We can’t stop it.”
“No, we can’t. But we can outlast it. We can be here when it does, and we can say that we won.”
“What if it never stops?”
“It’ll stop,” the woman said. “Everything stops.”
“What if it only stops when we’re all—” Lillian couldn’t. She had to squeeze her eyes tight, then try again a different way. “When we all stop?”
The raven-haired woman shrugged. “Then it won’t matter, will it? No matter what happens first, it’ll stop.”
Lillian peered over the edge of the bridge. “What if I want it to stop early?”
“Then you’ll never know if it did stop for real,” the woman said. Lillian heard footsteps, knew the woman was now right behind her. “Wouldn’t that be hell? Not knowing?”
She turned around, moving her body so that her front was pressed to the railing now, her back to the empty yawning void. “But I’ll be gone, so I won’t care.”
“That just means the slim chance of you seeing it becomes no chance,” the woman said, holding out a hand. 
Lillian took it, and the woman hauled her over the railing, back onto the footpath beside the bridge’s main road. 
As they stood there for a while, saying nothing, the clouds above them ceased their downpour. The deluge petered out into a light drizzle, the last rays of the sunset breaking through the cloud layer.
The woman holding onto her hand pointed upwards. “Rain’s clearing.”
“That it is,” Lillian said. 
The woman gave her hand a squeeze. “Let’s hope everything else follows suit.”
Category:SilverLastname
Category:Short stories
Category:The Weekly