Just One in a Sea of Stars

As the winter evening air grew thick with the scent of alcohol and red bean paste, Kodiak found himself increasingly aware of his self-imposed isolation. The cheerful chaos of the festival raging nearby seemed to press in on him from all sides, a stark contrast to his carefully maintained bubble of discontent. Each burst of laughter and excited squeal felt like a personal affront to his cultivated persona, wincing away from the crowds of sparkling blue lights scattered throughout the park.

What was usually his hangout for a quiet nightly chain-smoking session had been transformed overnight, becoming the venue for one of the city’s many new year’s celebrations. Not that he had realized what he was walking into until it was too late, his introverted self being swept up amongst the wave of buns making their way into the festival grounds.

Finally finding himself some room to breathe, Kodiak escaped the wall of buns to make his way towards a less inhabited area of the park, leaning against a weathered tree with an aggravated sigh.

The festival swirled around him in a kaleidoscope of joy and light, but his scowl remained firmly in place, clearly displeased about the disturbance to what he thought would be a rather uneventful evening. Could he really have no peace before he made his way to the Rabbit Hole to drink himself unconscious? A particularly rowdy set of buns nearby answered his silent question with their grating voices, cheering loudly toward the sky, much to his dismay.

With the light of the caverns growing dim overhead, many groups began to light what Kodiak could begin to recognize as hand-held fireworks, each one bursting to life in their grips with showers of brilliant blue.

The sparklers began to dance in the hands of the celebrating crowd, casting an ethereal glow across faces painted with wonder, drawing all manner of shapes, letters, and patterns into the air around them. To Kodiak, they looked like tiny searchlights, burning bright as they hunted down their happiness with an intensity that made him want nothing more than to sink deeper into the shadows.

"Bunch of simple minded freaks," he muttered, adjusting his studded collar with calloused fingers. The irony of his loathsome commentary was lost on him as he watched a group of buns chase each other with their sparklers, leaving trails of fading cerulean light in their wake.

A particularly enthusiastic festival-goer bounded up to him, offering a sparkler with a smile bright enough to power Burrowgatory for the entirety of the coming year. Kodiak's response was a practiced eye roll and a dismissive grunt that would have made any angst-ridden teenager proud. The sparkler-bearer merely shrugged before retreating, their joy barely dimmed, while Kodiak remained in his self-imposed exile, a singular dark spot on the outskirts of an ocean of twinkling blue light.

Deep down, beneath layers of affected cynicism and carefully maintained disinterest, a tiny part of him wished he could remember how to truly enjoy himself like that. But then again he'd sooner endure a root canal than admit it, so he simply just pulled out his battered phone and pretended to text someone important while the celebration raged on without him.

As the festival continued on, the swarms of buns began to slowly disperse until a manageable amount remained, giving Kodiak the opening he needed to escape back to his nearby apartment.

And so, drowning out the hooting and hollering around him, he brushed past the leftover crowd, deliberately shrugging off anyone who tried to interact with him. He even found it within himself to ignore the slap on his ass he was given by a familiar face on the way out, barely acknowledging them with a sneer as he departed from the venue. New year's or not, acts of kindness weren't a resolution he had any interest in picking up.

— — — — — — —

Barely a brisk jog aways from the festival he had escaped, he found himself standing before his building, the sight a welcome one for a man with as small of a social battery as Kodiak. As he climbed the stairs to his apartment, the distant echoes of laughter and celebration faded into the familiar, muffled silence he claimed to prefer. Yet somehow, a few stray, tiny blue sparkles had stuck themselves onto the leather of his vest— a stubborn reminder of the joy he'd tried so hard to avoid.

Furiously brushing off the glitter that had so rudely hitched a ride back to his place of all things, his fingers grazed his back pocket, catching on a foreign shape that called his attention away from his previously glittering issue. Producing the unknown item from his pocket, the pride bun brought it into the dim light of his apartment’s porch lamp, eyebrows furrowing in annoyance.

A sparkler. The same kind offered to him earlier on in the evening.

His mind flashed back to that unmistakable slap on his backside from a familiar stranger as he'd left, piecing together rather quickly how this had come into his possession. Stubborn bastard. Never could let him get away without the last laugh, in a sense.

With a defeated click of his tongue, Kodiak fished out a well-worn pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, slipped one between his teeth, and lit it, taking a long drag of nicotine into his lungs. Breathing the smoke out, he turned the unlit sparkler over in his hand a few times before finally giving in, bringing the firework to the tip of his cigarette, watching it burst to life with a flare of blue that he, quite frankly, had not seen up this close before.

The sight of it gripped in his gloved hands drew a disbelieving snort from his chest, moving it through the air in the shape of a rather crude crude symbol; much to his own amusement. A lone, sparkling light, far from the others of it’s kind, though of it’s own volition, burning just as brightly even in their absence. It was almost corny, the poetics behind it.

Watching it’s cerulean light burn through it’s fuel till it fizzled out, rather unceremoniously he might add, Kodiak took another drag of his smoke, tapping the forming ashes over the balcony into the streets below. From the park, he could hear the steadily increasing volume of a countdown sounding down, looking up just in time to catch the roll over of the new year as much larger, explosive fireworks lit up the sky above, raining down showers of bright blues and reds alike from the cavernous skies.

The sight did nothing but illicit an eye roll from the pride bun. At least no one was around to actually see him enjoying himself, here. Something he preferred to keep that way.