Work Text:
Vintage wonders, sometimes, where she went wrong. Spring is supposed to be a time of new beginnings, new life. The first sprouts after the frost. A renewal, of body and of spirit.
Her first spring with Ruby was like that, she thinks. It’s gotten so hard to remember the better days. But the seasons have turned, and it’s spring again, and the world is ending, and Ruby is leaving her. Ruby is leaving.
Vintage thinks she heard, once, that every ending is a new beginning. She wonders if it’s true.
If she’s honest, she doesn’t think it is. Or maybe she just doesn’t want it to be true. Maybe she just doesn’t want to begin a new life without Ruby.
They met and parted beneath the cherry blossoms. Springtime to springtime, and what has changed? She’s alone, again, but no one is going to come for her this time.
Maybe she deserves it, this ending. But why, why does the world have to end in spring? It would almost be easier, she thinks, for it to end in winter. More sensible. More expected.
Instead, it ends in spring, and Vintage weeps for all she had just begun to hope for.