Work Text:
There was a saying she’d heard once. The curtain must fall eventually. The other shoe must drop, the rain will come, the sun will set, the final act will be performed, say it however you like but she knew that it was only a matter of time before an ending was reached. Must be reached.
Except Buddy Aurinko did not live in the ending. Buddy Aurinko was a woman of the present, not a moment before and not a moment after. She did not close the curtain, she caught the other shoe, and by god if she told the sky to cease pouring then that sky had better be blue as burning flame when she was done with it. If Buddy Aurinko decided that the sun would not be setting, that the final act would never come, then according to the laws she’d made for herself with a sharp tongue and an even sharper wit, the universe would bend to her will.
So then why did she feel so...finished?
Her wedding was in three days. Nothing but a life of peace and happiness and love awaited her at the end of closing night. There were new adventures to go on, domestic wonders that Buddy never thought would be hers. She had a wife in her future, a best friend who’d quite literally saved her life in her future, a home to come back to that didn’t have a habit of floating through stars, but instead stayed planted on solid ground. That was everything she could look forward to.
Except...this emptiness, this feeling like a particularly irate caveman decided to hammer a rock within the chamber of her radiation-mangled ribs and clank against the metal of her poor heart like he thought banging it would get it started again. The unexplainable malaise that washed over her like the rain she demanded not come.
What does one feel when one's life purpose is complete?
If you’d asked her a year ago what it would be like to finally have the Curemother Prime in her manicured clutches, she would have said something pithy about dreams coming true. If you’d asked her a year ago what it would be like to finally be retiring with her wife, she would have laughed in your face at the thought that Buddy Aurinko would ever leave the criminal scene before her ashes were spread across the stars as outlined in one of the many wills she’d written.
Yet, here she was. No longer dreaming and preparing to retire. There is something still to be said of her showmanship at the very least. It made a beautiful story. One could even call it a legend if one wished to bury the Aurinko Crime Family in their infamy before Dark Matters or whoever else could do it themselves.
Whoever said the ending was the best part had obviously never met the middle that was Buddy Aurinko. When you were always ten steps ahead, you were always ten steps ahead, so to speak. There was never a chance to slow down and live in the final step when there was no final step.
Yet here she was.
Did it feel good? Of course. Was it heartbreaking? Of course.
In a life like Buddy Aurinko’s, wasn’t everything?