I'll See You Soon [COMPLETED]

Arrivals

The streets of the city rang out in silence. The only light accompanying Mia's headlights were the street lamps that illuminated the empty causeways every hundred yards or so. The city itself was quiet, its usual nighttime glow turned down according to the late hour.

Mia drove in silence, the sound of her engine one of the few filling the late night airways. At the sight of fellow travelers, her mind wandered to reasons of why they might be out at such a time. Were their ventures like hers? Her roaming thoughts helped keep her mind focused somehow and steadied her hands, gripping tight to the wheel.

She had no worry that sleep would overtake her eyes. She hadn't bothered to try and sleep when the rest of the world had headed for bed. The view of the city winking out its light as the night dove deeper occupied her time and kept her distracted enough that her head only turned to check the time every five minutes instead of every one.

And there was the compulsion to make sure she had the right information. That had helped keep her busy as it occurred once every hour; a continuous check on the status, the small icon that kept moving her way and accounted for her now racing heartbeat.

She left a light on in the apartment as she had prepared to leave, aware of the feeling one experienced when returning to a dark and empty home. She wished to fill the apartment with light only, leaving any thoughts of anything other than home far from its owner's mind.

With one last check to make sure there were only the right indicators that she had spent the better part of the last two months trying to make someone else's home her own, she closed and locked the door with her own set of keys.

It was with a final wave to the nighttime security guard, a figure she had gotten to know more than the man on duty during the day, and a turn of another key that started her ignition that set her towards the one destination she had been thinking of every moment for the past two months. Whether conscious of the thought or not, it had always been there. She had played out this night in her dreams, every single night since the last time she had taken these same roads.

It always started with her driving the route she knew too well. With street lights flashing past her as she drove, a strong feeling of deja vu washed over her and she swallowed it down in an attempt to keep her anticipation at bay. The thought of what was waiting for her didn't help in her efforts and her mind ran over the familiar scenario once again as she exited the city and started to skirt around its perimeter.

The winding roads and narrow entrances and exits of the complex compound were lit better than the rest of the city streets Mia had just wound her way through and among the concrete complex, she found only a few more fellow humans awake. Even for an international airport at three in the morning, the lack of movement and crowd was sure to be defined as a lull in traffic.

The last time Mia had found herself under these same fluorescent lights, she hadn't been awake enough to observe just how busy the airport had been. It had been at a very similar time of night but Mia had spent the previous twelve hours on a plane and the past twenty hours in transit. Her eyes were red from both lack of sleep and the few repressed tears that had managed an escape down her cheeks.

She could already feel the wells in the corners of her eyes starting to fill but smiled this time at the thought of why they were making an appearance.

A cold wind whipped through the narrow tunnels and an extra burst of early winter chill hit Mia as she waited at the crosswalk, letting the airport transit system do its job before she ventured forward. The warmth of the interior enveloped her as the automatic doors rolled open but the shaking in Mia's hands persisted. She rubbed them in an effort to regain feeling in her chilled digits but as they ran warm, Mia's mind kept on the task to expel some of her pent-up energy.