Dreams of Stars (A Once Upon a Time/Jiminy Cricket fanfic)

Dreams of Stars Part 33

Kaelin woke while it was still dark, her head on Jiminy's chest. For a moment, she thought perhaps they were already married. Then, slowly, she realized they were on the floor. The chest was stiff and cold. With a shudder, Kaelin sat up. She stared blankly down at the body, which was illuminated horribly by the streetlights outside. Where were the tears? The rending, stabbing grief? Shaking slightly, Kaelin let herself drop to the floor again, lying on her back.

Silently, she lay there, staring up at the ceiling. The only evidence of her grief was a nearly imperceptible yet constant trembling. Normally, if she was in this position, Pongo would have tried to lick her face, but now he understood the gravity of the situation. Sitting nearby and shivering with a dog's peculiar kind of empathy, he whimpered once and whapped his tail. Kaelin became vaguely aware that he was there, but she didn't react.

Why couldn't she even cry for Jiminy? Couldn't she at least do him that honor? It was as though all her emotions had deserted her, unable to face this. But Kaelin herself had no choice but to face it. She was lying right there beside it. Jiminy is dead. The words echoed dully in her chest. She stared at the ceiling. A single car drove past outside, briefly casting a shifting, pale light across the room.

But how could Jiminy be dead? They had always been together. Even when they hadn't been, there had always been hope that he would return. Kaelin realized that she was straining her ears for that old cricket chirp. Though there was complete silence, she suddenly pressed her hands over her ears. She felt sick. It was the silence that hurt. The silence.

Feverishly, she sat up again and stared at the body. It was as though some dark force in the universe had decreed that she could never be happy. The moment she had held a speck of stardust in her hand, it had been snatched away. This was the pattern of her life. As soon as Gus showed up, he was hacked in half. Now, because Jiminy had proposed to her, he was lying dead, with...with bruises around his neck? Had he been murdered too? Guilt crept back into Kaelin's awareness. Had the Dark One cursed her when she refused to make a deal with her? Was that why Jiminy was dead now? If she had urged him to stay home with her, or if she had come sooner, could she have stopped this?

Suddenly, a violent, indefinable emotion struck Kaelin. With a shriek, she tore the engagement ring off her finger and flung it across the room. Yet the moment the ring left her hand, she was overwhelmed with panic. Before it even struck the ground, she was scrambling on her hands and knees across the floor, searching for it. For one, horrible moment, she thought it was gone, but then she saw the gleam of the tiny diamond under a bookshelf. Gasping with relief, she crawled to it, pulled it out, and slipped it back on her finger.

Then, sitting on her knees, pressing her forehead to the bookshelf, Kaelin began to sob. Here at last were the tears, the grief, the agonizing whirl of love and loss. She wept and screamed, and her tears fell rapidly. No! She had loved him! This couldn't be! He couldn't just be gone now! What would she do?

Whining, Pongo trotted up to her and nudged her with his wet nose. "Go away!" she spat, shoving him. The last thing she needed right now was a dog bothering her with all his slobber and smelly breath and oily fur. But Pongo was relentless. The more Kaelin tried to push him away, the more he forced himself back into her space. In a haze of frustration, Kaelin seized a hard-backed book off the shelf and whacked him over the head with it. With a yelp, Pongo scuttled back and lay down, shivering with shame and empathy.

Seeing him like this, Kaelin's head cleared. She was horrified at herself. Jiminy wouldn't have wanted her to treat Pongo like that. "I'm sorry, boy," she muttered, wiping her tears away with one hand, "But what do you want from me, anyway? He's dead. There's nothing I can do."