The noise of the party faded, as though the blanket of sky muffled it until the high schoolers finally fell asleep at this untimely hour of daybreak.

Before we're gone. Soon, they'd be gone. Finn knew this, intellectually, but emotionally he couldn't feel the prickle of each grain of sand slipping down their hourglass. Perhaps it was how gradual the sunrise was, almost to give an illusion that time wasn't really fleeting forward.

"I know." He felt the same. "I've been waking up before dawn for ages..." merely to stay cooped up in his room studying, closed off from life and light. Maybe he couldn't have endured watching a day being born, though, when he'd have known that it wouldn't be any different from the day before, and the day after. "Everyone really should," he continued earnestly, "but they think it's something that doesn't matter and they give it up for other things that they think matter but really don't."

The party was gone. Broken up. Only its ghost was left on the lawn, the clutter and spill and mowing down from many a drunken dance. It could've happened in another world or another life, it seemed so distant. In this luxury lane, tucked away even further from the highways and towards the country than the suburbs, even the beginning bustle of the city was inaudible. That part of the world had been cut off so that the sunrise was all there was, all that mattered.

The sunrise filled everything, the radiance seeming to emerge from the horizon. It reminded him of something. A thought? Something he'd said? "We could pretend the world ends at the horizon and we're alone in the world." It was a mark of how much his brain had been trained to learn things that he remembered verbatim something like this.
Except he was remembering something that mattered.

"Once the sun has made it all the way, we'll start on that trip," he said. It struck him that when they spoke, their voices were like a lull in silence. An undulation rather than a break.
Inverness Avenue gave out into countryside on one end, the other end sticking into the suburbs. "Won't take half an hour walking."