One True Thing
By Fewthistle

Author's Note: Originally written for the Friends Challenge at the Thursday100Plus LiveJournal community.

Serena knew when she reached Vermont. She didn't need the flash of the green and white welcome sign glowing fluorescent in the beams of her headlights as she sped past. She didn't need to see the mountains rising, silhouetted smudges of soot, against the dark velvet of the sky. She didn't need to peer beyond the tunnel of blackness or the unending line of US Highway 91.

She could smell it, could taste it on the air. Crisp, cool air that seemed unwillingly drawn in through the partially open window, snatched with a low, keening wail from its brethren. It circled and wrapped itself through the inside of the car, like a buzzing fly, separated from the rest of its kind and doomed to hurtle down this dark highway, trapped and contained in this box of metal and plastic.

Through the open window, she could hear the sounds of the crickets that lined the road. They sounded like a welcoming parade for a hero long at war, cries rising and falling, echoing forlornly into the night. Her headlights glowed like the beams of the sun against the swallowing darkness of space. She might as well be alone on the surface of the moon.

There hadn't been another car for at least forty miles now. The vast rise of the mountains, the blurred colors of the last of the autumn leaves, the knowledge of the valley that lay, miles below, just beyond the fragile barrier of the guardrails, the immense all of everything crushed in on her. This was why she had never ventured out west. The space was too much. Too much could happen there, too many things she couldn't control.

Even here, in this broad expanse of space, in this realm of deep valley and rising swell of green hills, there was so very little she could govern or contain. She had taken refuge in huge cities, crowded enough for her to disappear, loud enough to drown out thoughts that she refused to acknowledge. Vast places, crammed full of buildings, and people, of car horns, and voices. Containable, controllable places, for all of their chaos.

There was some measure of quiet in the madding crowd, a measure she could handle. Not this endless landscape, this immense silence that seemed to demand not only her confession, but her acquiescence.

Even now, she had to remind herself of why she was returning. It would have been so much easier to simply stay, to lose herself daily on the streets of Manhattan. At thirty-one, Serena had finally realized that no amount of distance or time would free her from a past that she no longer owned. It was time to go to the only real home she had ever known.

After leaving Arthur's office that night, Serena had wandered the slick, ice-covered sidewalks of the city, her mind as numb as her gloveless hands in the frigid north wind. She had stood outside of her parent's townhouse, seeing the warm glow of their light falling like golden sunlight on the darkened street, but she had turned and walked away.

There was only one place she had ever felt safe, only one person who had ever offered her unconditional love, and the pull to get in her car and drive north was overwhelming. Every summer, from age five until she was in high school, Serena had been shipped off by her parents to stay with her grandmother in Vermont. It had been so long it seemed, since she had heard that voice, full of affection and understanding, and the sound of it that night had sent the tears tumbling down her cheeks like a hard summer shower.

“Come home.” Her grandmother's words reached into her head and her heart, as they had always done. She had been Serena's constant, steady source of solace. This was the woman who had told her, after another epic battle with her parents, that we don't get to choose our family, only our friends.

Serena remembered looking into those blue eyes bleached by years of living and asking, “In that case, will you be my friend?”

“Always. Always.”

Always had started to drift away with high school and college. The trips down this dark highway had grown fewer and fewer as Serena grew older and life grew more complicated. It had seemed easier to simply forget the safety of that white house nestled in those green hills.

Yet here she was, her car loaded down with the remains of nearly two decades of living, driving this highway she hadn't been on since she left all those years ago, bound for a country from which she had exiled herself.

Paying the toll to cross the Verrazzano Narrows, she had felt like one of the penitent damned, offering a coin to Phaeton to row her across to the Elysian Fields. She just wasn't certain that she would be allowed back in. Leaving paradise was frowned upon.

Still, she knew that at the end of this journey was the promise of a warm bed, of understanding and comfort, and most of all, of the one true thing she had ever known.