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Theme: #25; star-stealing girl
Characters: Cassidy-centric, mentions of other characters
When she was four years old, Cassidy Wescott wanted to steal the stars.
She had been sitting on her grandfather's lap out on the front porch at the time, big blue eyes locked onto the vast night sky and the twinkling jewels it displayed. She had originally refused to go outside, terrified of the darkness that had stolen away the sun and the warmth and not able to understand what it was about that absence of light that frightened her so badly.
"Aye, girlie..." Her grandfather had laughed, kneeling to her eye-level and placing a warm hand on her head. "You say you're big enough to milk Delilah all by yourself and you're afraid of the night? Let me tell you something, sweetheart. Your grandpa's gonna show you a miracle."
He grinned now at his granddaughter's awe, patting her cheek. "See that? Up there are all those stars. They're shy, but they heard you were coming outside and they all came out to meet you. Now, if you'd stayed inside, those poor stars would've been so disappointed! Y'see, I've been telling 'em all about you."
"About me?" Cassidy looked wary at this, wriggling in his lap to stare up at him. "What about me?"
"Well, for starters..." The old man chuckled, smoothing back her bangs as she fidgeted. "I told 'em you were a brave girl and a good helper... and that you were just as lonely as the stars were."
"The stars are lonely, Grandpa?"
"Yes, indeed, girlie. Lonelier than anything you could ever imagine."
"But there's so many of them!" Cassidy protested, frustrated at this seeming flaw in his logic.
"They don't speak to the other stars. They want something else. They want to meet new people, yet they're trapped in that big sky and all they can do is shine as bright as they can and chase away the dark so little girls like you will come out to play with them."
"They're stuck up there..." The child gazed at the sky with a new sense of understanding-- and then she nodded to herself. "Hey, Grandpa?"
"Hm?"
"If I steal the stars, will they be able to go where they want to go?"
The farmer almost choked on his laughter, coughing instead. "Maybe so, girlie, but if you take the stars, it's gonna be darker for everyone-- and you wouldn't want that."
Her face clouded over; she thought it had been a good idea! "But--"
"You can't steal things, Cassidy." Again the gnarled hand rested on her head. "The stars have their proper place, just as we do. So long as you need them, they'll always be there. But I'm certain... if you go about life with the same concern for people that you have for those little bright dots in the sky, you'll be able to set free more than just the stars."
Looking back on that night, thirteen years later, Cassidy wondered if her grandfather had somehow known what she was to become in the future.
It wouldn't surprise me, she thought fondly, wrapping a length of gauze around her right hand and working on covering up the painful-looking burn that spanned her entire palm while Rabi automatically scolded her for overdoing it yet again. Grandpa was always odd like that.
It was ironic, though, that her own Innocence shone just as brightly as a star, the light pulsing in the palm of her hand and burning the flesh when she tried to contain it for too long. True stars, after all, could never be truly restrained. They shone their light for those who needed that comfort and guidance and Cassidy adopted that mind-set when she fought against the Millennium Earl's minions.
She loved people. She loved the ones she fought for, the ones who couldn't be trusted because any of them could be an akuma in disguise. She loved the ones she fought beside, each person a very important part of her life that needed to be protected at all costs-- even Kanda, although she'd never tell him that. (She wanted to live.)
She loved them all and, because of that, she hadn't needed to steal the stars to save them with the gift only those celestial objects possessed. One of them had chosen her and together, they could guide others to safety, drive away the menacing shadows, and do what one little girl had once yearned to do with an entire sky: set those who were imprisoned free. Herself included.
"Hey, Rabi..." She looked at her friend, slipping the glove with the crystalline cross stitched onto the palm into her pocket. A quick glance out the window showed that night had fallen while they had been busy tending their injuries. "Can you help me find the others? I want to show you a miracle."