The Beautiful Ones

AN: This is just the prologue, Criss *is* coming, I promise. I will be titling these chapters after the song that inspired them/best describes them. Yay soundtrack!
Also, this fic was named after The Beautiful Ones by Poets of the Fall.

Prologue: GREY STREET (Dave Matthews Band)

The ring was on her finger. The invitations were sent out, the RSVPs received. Her final fitting for her wedding dress was tomorrow morning, nine AM sharp. Her mother was starting to collect the ingredients to make everything for the reception. She was having her wedding shower the day after tomorrow, and Cassandra knew that all her friends had put a ton of work into it.

She didn’t feel horribly grateful, though.

She didn’t want to get married.
Cassandra sat up in bed as she scrubbed the palm of her hand down her face.

“This is pointless. I can’t sleep,” she muttered to her stuffed purple bunny, Stanley. Stanley, of course, said nothing. That was part of his charm. She’d never met a guy who listened as well as he did.

Cassandra crossed her arms over her chest and walked over to her window seat. For as long as she could remember, she’d come to sit here whenever she couldn’t sleep. She'd curl up and stare out at the moon and stars.

Tonight as she curled up amongst her stuffed animals, the moonlight caught the diamond on the ring around her finger. She held out her hand to watch it sparkle in the glow.

“I don’t love him.” It was the first time she’d said it out loud, but not the first time she’d thought it. To her dismay, Cassandra didn’t feel any sadness at this realization.
“I don’t love him, and I never really did.”

She’d met her fiancé, Michael Smith, back when she was twelve. This was a small town, and he was a new kid. He’d sat next to her in homeroom and asked her out at lunch that day. Of course, in sixth grade, going out meant they sat next to each other at lunch and passed notes and maybe called each other now and then.

Everyone “went out” in sixth grade. Most of them switched around boyfriends now and then to keep things interesting. Not Michael and Cassandra. Maybe it was because Cassandra was too nice, or maybe because Michael really did like her, but they never broke up.

And then came graduation. Both of them were set to graduate a semester early. She’d been accepted to a university across the country for the fall. Truthfully, she was glad. This was finally an excuse to break up with him. But that night, after they’d walked across the stage, right when she opened her mouth to tell him it was time to say goodbye…

Michael had just dropped down on one knee and held open a velvet domed box. With his grandmother’s ring, nonetheless.

How was she supposed to say no to that? Unable to tell him the speech she’d spent a week planning, Cassandra had accepted the ring.

And now, they were getting married. It hadn’t taken long to plan the wedding, with both of their mother’s being of the stay at home variety, and the summer was just beginning.

Everyone looked forward to the summer after their senior year. Not Cassandra. She stood up, a tingling feeling in her legs. She knew what she should do. It was only a bit that she lacked the courage to do it in the daylight and so would be doing it in the middle of the night.

It wasn’t that Michael was a bad guy. Plenty of girls would be happy to snatch him up. But this town was suffocating, and she knew what a life with him would be like. Every year planned carefully out.

College, a useless degree. A cramped apartment while she worked in the one department store. A house, and then children, and then she would quit her job. It just wasn’t something she was interested in doing.

For Cassandra, none of life could be so planned out. She wanted to go to bed and wake up; wondering how today was going to be special. She could never have that with Michael.

“I am so sorry,” she whispered as she pulled a cardboard box out from underneath her bed and opened her dresser drawers.