Fic - Hide Your Heart (Mulit-Fandom) pg-13, 1/1
Title: Hide Your Heart
Summary: Thirteen women. Thirteen different stories.
Fandoms Included: Catwoman, 90210, Greek, The Vampire Diaries, LOST, The Office (US), One Tree Hill, Prison Break, Veronica Mars, Brothers & Sisters, Grey's Anatomy, Dexter
Characters Included: Selina Kyle, Kelly Martin, Casey Cartwright, Elena Gilbert, Kate Austen, Pam Beesly, Brooke Davis, Sara Tancredi, Veronica Mars, Rebecca Harper, Lexie Grey, Jenna Sommers, Debra Morgan
Rating: pg-13
Author's Notes: 4,070 words. Written for the femgenficathon. Title borrowed from Three Dog Night. Specific timelines and spoilers for each fandom can be found [HERE]. Thank you to justforyoudear for the plot idea and beta. All remaining mistakes are mine. These beautiful, talented, classy ladies are not.
Prompt #93: There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them. -- Greta Garbo
[one]
Somebody, at one time or another, had called her virtuous once. Selina supposes that maybe once upon a time it had kind of been true.
Once upon a time, when life was normal and serene, when she was five, maybe then it was true. It had to have been long before Mommy and Daddy had managed to royally fuck her up yet. Long before they’d left, leaving the horrible stench of abandonment in their wake. Maybe, just maybe, then she was normal.
Maybe then she knew some semblance of the line drawn between right and wrong.
(She still knows, sort of, but Selina’s never really been found of boundaries, so.)
But petty crime was oh, so easy and she’d always wanted for all those things she never had. Eventually, becoming the cat was so much easier than being just plain old Selina (it’s easier staring into the mirror and seeing a mask instead of a face you no longer recognized, a face you didn’t want to recognize) so she just kind of adjusted and kept moving forward.
Eventually, adjusting turned into the act of being. Selina traded in petty theft for blackmail, black leather for black Armani and a corner office with a nice view.
Some days she leans back in her chair and gazes outwards and over the New York skyline wistfully. She has mob bosses and the entire eastern seaboard in her back pocket. She has more control, power, and money than she ever could have imagined and yet she still wishes for five years old again, the requiem of the uncomplicated.
She’s better off now then she was back then. Selina knows this deep down in the marrow of her bones, but some things just can’t be helped.
[two]
Beverly Hills is one of those places that swallows you whole and spits you back out within a five second time span. Kelly can remember with distinct clarity being young and idealistic, a freshman with dreams of forever and always, but still saying this is no place to raise a kid. No place to start a family.
She had known from firsthand experience, you know - it took a lot of work to be born into an absolute mess and get this far.
So it’s ironic that she’s still here years down the line. Still repeating the same mistakes. Still roaming the same halls. Still Kelly Taylor in all the ways she wishes she weren’t.
There are days when she thinks about it more than others. The group of them at The Peach Pit, all the laughs and good times, all those moments she thought would last forever when the future was a whisper of a promise.
Later, in the middle of lonely nights when all she has are the memories of yesteryear to keep her company, she remembers all the other times, too. Those lows that existed deep within the highs when their lives were some sort of trite cliché, like Days of Our Lives only better - or worse if you are that glass-half-empty type of person. It’s funny how things like those appear in retrospect, how all those things you think are important and life-altering mean absolutely nothing in the long run.
“You think we’re better for it?” Brenda asks one day and Kelly smiles and looks away. She can’t help but think about how funny it is that they’re here, all that’s left, forever defined by all the distance put between them, deliberate or not.
“Who the hell knows?” Kelly replies. There is a phone between her thin fingers as she waits for a call that isn’t coming, for a man that would never love her as much as she needed to be loved.
Flash forward some years, and she’s older and maybe a tad bit wiser, too. She’s still Kelly Taylor, still blonde-haired and blue-eyed with a smile that is radiant without even trying. The air of privilege has worn off a bit, though. Those sharp edges and bright colors, too - a blessing and a curse rolled into one.
That idealism though, well, let’s just say it sticks like gum to a shoe. It is hidden securely under the stilettos and glow only Beverly Hills in autumn can give you. It lingers in her son, all curly hair and bright eyes that are worth every mistake she’s ever had the regret of making.
Some things, she decides, make everything worthwhile.
[three]
“What are you afraid of?” Casey asks Max one night.
They do this sometimes: grab a blanket and lay on the green, spending hours upon hours gazing up at the stars (she claims it’s a form of studying, but really, she just likes being near him). His fingers are intertwined with hers, her head on his shoulder resting comfortably in the nook between his shoulder and neck.
“Death,” he says without a thought, and it’s there without either one of them realizing - the undercurrent pulsating between them. Casey feels like she’s living in somebody else’s shadow, and she’s not quite sure how or when that ever became okay.
“What about you?” His voice is muffled by the softness of her hair as his lips press a kiss into the crown of her head. She curls into him on reflex.
Casey doesn’t hesitate. She barely even thinks before she spits out the first thing that comes to mind.
“Failure,” she says and when the word leaves her mouth it is in one, solid breath. It is clear that Max isn’t sure how to respond to that and she doesn’t mind at all.
It’s probably the most honest thing she’s ever said.
[four]
Elena wakes up and the world is too bright around her.
She winces against the light streaming in through the windows, her head aching, heart pounding, the thump, thump, thump steady against her ribcage. When she finally slides her eyes open everyone is there, their faces drawn, their lips pressed into a thin line. They don’t look at her. Already she knows without any of them saying a word. Elena feels something deep down inside of her die, leaving a hollow, aching hole deep in her gut. Closing her eyes, she listens to the beat of her own heart, feels the organ contracting and expanding steadily inside of her chest. She breathes and keeps breathing and tries so very hard to steady her nerves, to calm the anger and sadness humming like a simmering fire under her skin.
She is alive, she thinks. She is alive and her humanity is still intact, but Jenna is dead and Klaus is definitely not.
This was not the plan.
When she speaks, all eyes turn towards her finally. They wait while she gathers herself, while she opens her mouth and chooses her words carefully.
After a long span of silence she asks, “We did all of this for nothing, then?” Her voice is not her own - it is harsher, colder, thick with emotion and sleep and a world of grief that no seventeen year-old girl should ever have to know.
One-by-one they avert their eyes. Nobody says a thing. Damon is the last to look away, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows thickly. His nod is slow, but honest. Her fingers curl into fists, her nails digging into the skin of her palms relentlessly.
Elena relaxes her fingers just a moment before she begins to draw her own blood.
Elena wakes up and the heady, irrevocable scent of change is all around her, destroying everything in its path. She is too tired, her body too exhausted, too battle worn to stop the parts of her that harden as a result.
Nothing will ever be the same.
(She will never be the same.)
[five]
“We have to go back,” Jack yells at the airport, thick-bearded and pale-faced and she looks at him and tries to see the man she once knew. The man she met in the jungle with the stories and tight smiles. The man who said I have faith in you and meant it.
He’s not there anymore and she knows it.
Kate breathes and counts one Mississippi, two Mississippi in her head and thinks maybe he never really was. Maybe even then, even in the beginning, they were both trying too hard to be something they weren’t.
“I can’t,” she says, her voice cracking along the edges. He calls out her name, just once, a desperate man with his fingers pearl-white as they hold on to the past.
Kate is already walking away.
(This is the deepest secret they share that nobody knows: Kate was always the stronger of the two.)
[six]
The day Pam breaks things off with Roy - the day she ends the only relationship she’s ever had just a mere forty-eight hours before the wedding - is the day Pam’s life truly begins. Which is funny, she always muses looking back, because she had always thought that marrying Roy was meant to be the day that her life began. She always thought it would the commencement of something that had been over ten years in the making.
Only marrying Roy would have turned into her death sentence, and the closer June tenth looms, the more and more she tries to bury herself in floral arrangements and perfecting the menu, the more she realizes it. They would be in the middle of their rehearsal with her walking down the aisle in her pretty new shoes, and she stalls right after the fifth step, stuck in a reverie of casinos and her pretty blue dress she’ll never wear again, of a man she wasn’t walking towards. She can’t help but think of art classes and New York. Of her house with a terrace and the garden she planted herself.
A memory plays in her head, over and over, the colors vivid and glaring. It’s the time she had asked Roy if he ever thought that kind of house was a possibility, if he’d ever even want that someday.
Pam remembers him looking up from his beer and laughing, holding his hands out wide, and her taking in their crappy house, with their crappy hand me down furniture, and him asking her, “What’s wrong with this? This is paradise, babe.”
She had tried to make it work. She tried for ten, long, unhappy years to make it work (and she dares anyone to tell her otherwise) but like pieces of a puzzle that just aren’t cut to connect, no matter how hard Pam had tried, no matter how long she worked at it, one day she just realizes that her and Roy were never, ever going to fit together again.
She isn’t even quite sure they ever did.
(The fact that she is pouring herself some tea from her brand new teapot at the time of this revelation is completely irrelevant.)
[seven]
The thing about Brooke is that on the inside, deep down, she’s kicking and screaming, clawing her way up from rock bottom so she can get her chance at a new beginning. Even before the night that changed everything, the night that left bruises and scars that would never truly fade. Even before she found her way back to Tree Hill, another wayward daughter looking for a fresh start.
It’s why she was the way she was once upon a time, careless and promiscuous, holding on to Lucas and Peyton like they were her lifeline. When you grow up the way Brooke did, with absentee parents that weren’t parents in even the loosest meaning of the term, devoid of the one thing she ever wanted, it’s hard to look at things like family and love and relationships objectively ever again.
Once upon a time she believed it was okay not having a mother or father who gave a shit, because you build your own family. Brooke firmly believed that you take the people who care about you, who you care about, and hold on to them until your knuckles turn ghostly white and you never let go. You build something extraordinary out of absolutely nothing because the ones that stand by you are the only ones worth fighting for.
Once upon a time she believed that. Once upon a time she took stock in things like friends forever because it seemed like it really was the final, deciding factor.
Now, well, now she’s not so sure.
[eight]
Sara had a plan once, you know.
Get away from Chicago, away from her father. Do something with her life that was completely and totally independent of him, of the life he wanted so badly for her. The husband and kids and the white picket fence were once a part of the plan, too. Happily ever after - all those things those fairy tales her mother used to read to her as a child had promised.
(Out of all the things in her childhood she tends to want to forget, this is the one thing she chooses to look upon fondly: Those late nights with her mother’s arms wrapped around her small frame, her voice smooth and comforting in her ear, a godsend of sorts.
Sara misses her mother most days, but that - the stability her mere presence brought into her life - she misses with every breath, every fiber of her being.)
Things change though, and she guesses somewhere along people have to as well.
Upper class living was traded in for the perfect high and a nice big fuck you to her father. The part of it all is that most days she isn’t sure which she enjoyed more.
She’s lucky, she knows, to be able to live to tell these tales, to wallow in her own self-pity at night with an unopened bottle of jack and a cigarette, un-lit, between her fingers (she keeps these things as reminders, as temptation, to prove that she is still strong despite it all, that her father isn’t right about that specific truth concerning the impossibility of redemption) but it is still hard.
Hard to live with her reality and be constantly reminded of what could have been, of what she had ruined with a needle in her arm and a bottle between her fingers.
Sarah is nothing if not a perfectionist, though, and with a little time and effort she prefects the art of moving forward.
She was always her father’s daughter - even if they both hated to admit it.
[nine]
Langley is a quiet adjustment.
A year or two in and Veronica sits behind a desk for most of her days, handles operations from the ground with a security clearance most people don’t even know exist. It’s nothing she ever imagined herself doing, but most days she’ll smile through the motions and decidedly muse that it’ll suit.
Her father meets her somewhere in-between east and west for the holidays. He visits her for birthdays and it’s a nice enough thing never having to go home to Neptune.
She still thinks about it sometimes, old habits and all that, but she kind of likes it like this: lying dormant in the back of her mind, a spec on a map, a stepping stone of sorts. After all, she still has her father, still has Wallace most of the time, Mac’s long-winded emails.
The ones that stick really are the ones that matter.
(You see, some things really don’t ever change.)
[ten]
At ten there is a promise concerning wayward daughters and a vow to never make the same mistakes.
Of course, like mother, like daughter Rebecca has never been very good at making promises she can keep and at eighteen she runs away from home looking for something she would never find. Loses herself to an unforgiving city and a man who she always knew would never love her back.
Twenty-one and Justin comes knocking on her door, all earnest eyes and handsome features. Suddenly, she has the family she’s always needed and a reason to be the better person she’s always wanted to be.
Nora hugs her tight and close, and just like that she is a part of something. She matters.
Rebecca has missed that feeling.
[eleven]
Her dress is fraying. The cotton is snagged near the hem, and Lexie pulls and twists, rubs the thin fabric between thumb and forefinger. It’s warm out - May progressing quietly into summer with the sun shining bright in the sky and Lexie is thankful for the difference, eyes squinting behind her sunglasses in adjustment, and misses the rain in the same breath. She’s not accustomed to the sun anymore and it is a simple fact that weighs heavily on her shoulders, causes something bitter to burn the tip of her tongue.
It’s still - this day, her and Mark - everything at an impasse of sorts, a standstill and less than two hours ago they buried George in the cold ground and her heart still aches in a way she wishes it wouldn’t. She still misses him in a way she wishes she didn’t.
She’s worn this dress before and that is what she chooses to think about instead - two years ago for her mother’s funeral and she bought it in a rush at the nearest department store because the airline had lost her luggage and everything her sister had owned hung too loose on her tiny frame. Lexie had wanted to look good for her mother. Still, then, she wanted to make her proud.
Funny that, she muses, how even in death some things never really change.
After, she’d buried it in the back of her closet, meant to be forgotten and it was luck, really, finding it now. She has been staying at her father’s a bit more - since the argument with Mark, since Meredith and Derek got married, or not married whatever the case may be.
Now, she thinks idly about burning it.
It is just that sort of day.
[twelve]
“Just turn it off, Jenna.”
The sound of Elena’s tears cut through Jenna like a knife, baring her insides for the entire world around her to see. Jenna closes her eyes and can smell the sweetness of Elena’s blood from across the quarry, can trace the pattern of it as it freely flows through her arteries and veins. Klaus stares down at her, his mouth twisting with laughter, with pride and vengeance. She can smell the blood on his hands and lips. She aches to taste it and her skin feels unnatural - not her own. It is too cold and too tight as it encases her entire being. Her fingers dig into the dirt at her sides as she struggles against him and pushes that deep, carnal thirst that pulsates through her body down as far as it will go.
“Just turn it off,” Elena pleads, her voice breaking as her sob pierces through the darkness.
Jenna, naturally, does not listen. From the moment she woke up, from the moment she died and became undead, she has always known what she has to do.
Klaus is still laughing above her, the movement shaking his shoulders and turning her insides to ice. His hands tighten around the stake between his fingers. Jenna’s eyes widen as fear grips her like a vice and there is a split second - maybe even two - before the world goes bright around her, before the stake drives through her heart and the blackness starts to creep along the edges of her sight, blurring the corners of everything she sees.
When she closes her eyes for just a split second she sees Miranda just as she has always remembered her - tall, beautiful, welcoming and strong. I’m sorry, Jenna starts to say. I’m sorry I couldn’t save her. I’m sorry I let you down. She tries to form the words in the back of her throat and push them past her lips, but it’s too late. She’s already gone.
(In the end, Jenna hopes they’ll remember first that she was always braver than most people gave her credit for.)
[thirteen]
Deb wears her badge with honor and pride. She walks, talks, and acts like she couldn't give two shits that she's a woman in a man's profession and the scales have been tipped against her since day one. She walks, talks, and acts this way because it's the goddamn truth, because she’s done a bang-up job convincing herself that she just doesn’t fucking care. Most days, she digs down deep and pushes aside those pathetic daddy and abandonment issues and does her job. Nine times out of ten she does the job well and above any and all expectations because Dexter isn't the only Morgan who is good at what they do. He may know blood and numbers and just about everything else, but she has that unique ability that allows her to look at some fucking scumbag perp in the face and tell whether or not he's done the crime. She has that mythical gut instinct that drives her and hardly ever steers her in the wrong direction.
Make no mistake: Deb is a good cop. She is an even better detective. In fact, Deb is the kind of detective that would have made her father proud even though he probably wouldn't have taken the time to utter I'm proud of you, Debra in her general direction.
Most days, she doesn't think of it that way. Most days she puts one foot in front of the other and focuses on one distinct goal: catching all those fucking sickos out there that make her job a living hell and putting them away for as long as humanly possible.
On her bad days though (and give her a fucking break, ok? Everyone has them and after the dead daddy and mommy and sister-in-law, she thinks she's earned herself quite a few) she marks the differences between her and Dexter and all the ways she will never quite measure up in the back of her mind. In those mornings she is usually slow to start. She will linger in bed with the curtains drawn and think of her father, of how much she loved him and how he never really loved her back enough. On her bad days her fingers trail over the scar on her abdomen like they're reading braille and she thinks of Frank and the future they could have had, but never will. Deb runs the tip of her index finger along the jagged edge and closes her eyes and remembers what he looked like as he died - how clear his eyes were, how his lips parted around the vowels and consonants of her name.
Only then, only after she has grieved for a man she'll never fully get to know, will she remember how to breathe again and start her day, focusing on being the best fucking version of herself possible. She spends the rest of the day roaming the streets she knows like the back of her hand, chasing lead after lead until her feet and body ache and she has the sick fucker that killed an innocent bystander in a fit of rage just within reach.
(After, at night when she's bone tired and crawling into bed just as the sun starts to peak over the horizon, she remembers. She tastes the bitterness of duct tape on her mouth, the way the edges had cut into the soft skin of her wrists as the man she loved and thought loved her back broke her heart and carved scars into her flesh that would never truly fade.
At night, she remembers because she'll never be able to forget.)
It's what makes her a good cop. It is what makes her one of the finest fucking detectives this shit-city has to offer: she's lived and lost and fought every goddamn day of her life. Deb has been at the bottom of a hole so deep she could barely see daylight and clawed her way out with nothing but sheer determination and her own bare hands.
Deb is a fighter. She just simply doesn't know any other way.
Summary: Thirteen women. Thirteen different stories.
Fandoms Included: Catwoman, 90210, Greek, The Vampire Diaries, LOST, The Office (US), One Tree Hill, Prison Break, Veronica Mars, Brothers & Sisters, Grey's Anatomy, Dexter
Characters Included: Selina Kyle, Kelly Martin, Casey Cartwright, Elena Gilbert, Kate Austen, Pam Beesly, Brooke Davis, Sara Tancredi, Veronica Mars, Rebecca Harper, Lexie Grey, Jenna Sommers, Debra Morgan
Rating: pg-13
Author's Notes: 4,070 words. Written for the femgenficathon. Title borrowed from Three Dog Night. Specific timelines and spoilers for each fandom can be found [HERE]. Thank you to justforyoudear for the plot idea and beta. All remaining mistakes are mine. These beautiful, talented, classy ladies are not.
Prompt #93: There are many things in your heart you can never tell to another person. They are you, your private joys and sorrows, and you can never tell them. You cheapen yourself, the inside of yourself, when you tell them. -- Greta Garbo
[one]
Somebody, at one time or another, had called her virtuous once. Selina supposes that maybe once upon a time it had kind of been true.
Once upon a time, when life was normal and serene, when she was five, maybe then it was true. It had to have been long before Mommy and Daddy had managed to royally fuck her up yet. Long before they’d left, leaving the horrible stench of abandonment in their wake. Maybe, just maybe, then she was normal.
Maybe then she knew some semblance of the line drawn between right and wrong.
(She still knows, sort of, but Selina’s never really been found of boundaries, so.)
But petty crime was oh, so easy and she’d always wanted for all those things she never had. Eventually, becoming the cat was so much easier than being just plain old Selina (it’s easier staring into the mirror and seeing a mask instead of a face you no longer recognized, a face you didn’t want to recognize) so she just kind of adjusted and kept moving forward.
Eventually, adjusting turned into the act of being. Selina traded in petty theft for blackmail, black leather for black Armani and a corner office with a nice view.
Some days she leans back in her chair and gazes outwards and over the New York skyline wistfully. She has mob bosses and the entire eastern seaboard in her back pocket. She has more control, power, and money than she ever could have imagined and yet she still wishes for five years old again, the requiem of the uncomplicated.
She’s better off now then she was back then. Selina knows this deep down in the marrow of her bones, but some things just can’t be helped.
[two]
Beverly Hills is one of those places that swallows you whole and spits you back out within a five second time span. Kelly can remember with distinct clarity being young and idealistic, a freshman with dreams of forever and always, but still saying this is no place to raise a kid. No place to start a family.
She had known from firsthand experience, you know - it took a lot of work to be born into an absolute mess and get this far.
So it’s ironic that she’s still here years down the line. Still repeating the same mistakes. Still roaming the same halls. Still Kelly Taylor in all the ways she wishes she weren’t.
There are days when she thinks about it more than others. The group of them at The Peach Pit, all the laughs and good times, all those moments she thought would last forever when the future was a whisper of a promise.
Later, in the middle of lonely nights when all she has are the memories of yesteryear to keep her company, she remembers all the other times, too. Those lows that existed deep within the highs when their lives were some sort of trite cliché, like Days of Our Lives only better - or worse if you are that glass-half-empty type of person. It’s funny how things like those appear in retrospect, how all those things you think are important and life-altering mean absolutely nothing in the long run.
“You think we’re better for it?” Brenda asks one day and Kelly smiles and looks away. She can’t help but think about how funny it is that they’re here, all that’s left, forever defined by all the distance put between them, deliberate or not.
“Who the hell knows?” Kelly replies. There is a phone between her thin fingers as she waits for a call that isn’t coming, for a man that would never love her as much as she needed to be loved.
Flash forward some years, and she’s older and maybe a tad bit wiser, too. She’s still Kelly Taylor, still blonde-haired and blue-eyed with a smile that is radiant without even trying. The air of privilege has worn off a bit, though. Those sharp edges and bright colors, too - a blessing and a curse rolled into one.
That idealism though, well, let’s just say it sticks like gum to a shoe. It is hidden securely under the stilettos and glow only Beverly Hills in autumn can give you. It lingers in her son, all curly hair and bright eyes that are worth every mistake she’s ever had the regret of making.
Some things, she decides, make everything worthwhile.
[three]
“What are you afraid of?” Casey asks Max one night.
They do this sometimes: grab a blanket and lay on the green, spending hours upon hours gazing up at the stars (she claims it’s a form of studying, but really, she just likes being near him). His fingers are intertwined with hers, her head on his shoulder resting comfortably in the nook between his shoulder and neck.
“Death,” he says without a thought, and it’s there without either one of them realizing - the undercurrent pulsating between them. Casey feels like she’s living in somebody else’s shadow, and she’s not quite sure how or when that ever became okay.
“What about you?” His voice is muffled by the softness of her hair as his lips press a kiss into the crown of her head. She curls into him on reflex.
Casey doesn’t hesitate. She barely even thinks before she spits out the first thing that comes to mind.
“Failure,” she says and when the word leaves her mouth it is in one, solid breath. It is clear that Max isn’t sure how to respond to that and she doesn’t mind at all.
It’s probably the most honest thing she’s ever said.
[four]
Elena wakes up and the world is too bright around her.
She winces against the light streaming in through the windows, her head aching, heart pounding, the thump, thump, thump steady against her ribcage. When she finally slides her eyes open everyone is there, their faces drawn, their lips pressed into a thin line. They don’t look at her. Already she knows without any of them saying a word. Elena feels something deep down inside of her die, leaving a hollow, aching hole deep in her gut. Closing her eyes, she listens to the beat of her own heart, feels the organ contracting and expanding steadily inside of her chest. She breathes and keeps breathing and tries so very hard to steady her nerves, to calm the anger and sadness humming like a simmering fire under her skin.
She is alive, she thinks. She is alive and her humanity is still intact, but Jenna is dead and Klaus is definitely not.
This was not the plan.
When she speaks, all eyes turn towards her finally. They wait while she gathers herself, while she opens her mouth and chooses her words carefully.
After a long span of silence she asks, “We did all of this for nothing, then?” Her voice is not her own - it is harsher, colder, thick with emotion and sleep and a world of grief that no seventeen year-old girl should ever have to know.
One-by-one they avert their eyes. Nobody says a thing. Damon is the last to look away, his Adam’s apple bobbing as he swallows thickly. His nod is slow, but honest. Her fingers curl into fists, her nails digging into the skin of her palms relentlessly.
Elena relaxes her fingers just a moment before she begins to draw her own blood.
Elena wakes up and the heady, irrevocable scent of change is all around her, destroying everything in its path. She is too tired, her body too exhausted, too battle worn to stop the parts of her that harden as a result.
Nothing will ever be the same.
(She will never be the same.)
[five]
“We have to go back,” Jack yells at the airport, thick-bearded and pale-faced and she looks at him and tries to see the man she once knew. The man she met in the jungle with the stories and tight smiles. The man who said I have faith in you and meant it.
He’s not there anymore and she knows it.
Kate breathes and counts one Mississippi, two Mississippi in her head and thinks maybe he never really was. Maybe even then, even in the beginning, they were both trying too hard to be something they weren’t.
“I can’t,” she says, her voice cracking along the edges. He calls out her name, just once, a desperate man with his fingers pearl-white as they hold on to the past.
Kate is already walking away.
(This is the deepest secret they share that nobody knows: Kate was always the stronger of the two.)
[six]
The day Pam breaks things off with Roy - the day she ends the only relationship she’s ever had just a mere forty-eight hours before the wedding - is the day Pam’s life truly begins. Which is funny, she always muses looking back, because she had always thought that marrying Roy was meant to be the day that her life began. She always thought it would the commencement of something that had been over ten years in the making.
Only marrying Roy would have turned into her death sentence, and the closer June tenth looms, the more and more she tries to bury herself in floral arrangements and perfecting the menu, the more she realizes it. They would be in the middle of their rehearsal with her walking down the aisle in her pretty new shoes, and she stalls right after the fifth step, stuck in a reverie of casinos and her pretty blue dress she’ll never wear again, of a man she wasn’t walking towards. She can’t help but think of art classes and New York. Of her house with a terrace and the garden she planted herself.
A memory plays in her head, over and over, the colors vivid and glaring. It’s the time she had asked Roy if he ever thought that kind of house was a possibility, if he’d ever even want that someday.
Pam remembers him looking up from his beer and laughing, holding his hands out wide, and her taking in their crappy house, with their crappy hand me down furniture, and him asking her, “What’s wrong with this? This is paradise, babe.”
She had tried to make it work. She tried for ten, long, unhappy years to make it work (and she dares anyone to tell her otherwise) but like pieces of a puzzle that just aren’t cut to connect, no matter how hard Pam had tried, no matter how long she worked at it, one day she just realizes that her and Roy were never, ever going to fit together again.
She isn’t even quite sure they ever did.
(The fact that she is pouring herself some tea from her brand new teapot at the time of this revelation is completely irrelevant.)
[seven]
The thing about Brooke is that on the inside, deep down, she’s kicking and screaming, clawing her way up from rock bottom so she can get her chance at a new beginning. Even before the night that changed everything, the night that left bruises and scars that would never truly fade. Even before she found her way back to Tree Hill, another wayward daughter looking for a fresh start.
It’s why she was the way she was once upon a time, careless and promiscuous, holding on to Lucas and Peyton like they were her lifeline. When you grow up the way Brooke did, with absentee parents that weren’t parents in even the loosest meaning of the term, devoid of the one thing she ever wanted, it’s hard to look at things like family and love and relationships objectively ever again.
Once upon a time she believed it was okay not having a mother or father who gave a shit, because you build your own family. Brooke firmly believed that you take the people who care about you, who you care about, and hold on to them until your knuckles turn ghostly white and you never let go. You build something extraordinary out of absolutely nothing because the ones that stand by you are the only ones worth fighting for.
Once upon a time she believed that. Once upon a time she took stock in things like friends forever because it seemed like it really was the final, deciding factor.
Now, well, now she’s not so sure.
[eight]
Sara had a plan once, you know.
Get away from Chicago, away from her father. Do something with her life that was completely and totally independent of him, of the life he wanted so badly for her. The husband and kids and the white picket fence were once a part of the plan, too. Happily ever after - all those things those fairy tales her mother used to read to her as a child had promised.
(Out of all the things in her childhood she tends to want to forget, this is the one thing she chooses to look upon fondly: Those late nights with her mother’s arms wrapped around her small frame, her voice smooth and comforting in her ear, a godsend of sorts.
Sara misses her mother most days, but that - the stability her mere presence brought into her life - she misses with every breath, every fiber of her being.)
Things change though, and she guesses somewhere along people have to as well.
Upper class living was traded in for the perfect high and a nice big fuck you to her father. The part of it all is that most days she isn’t sure which she enjoyed more.
She’s lucky, she knows, to be able to live to tell these tales, to wallow in her own self-pity at night with an unopened bottle of jack and a cigarette, un-lit, between her fingers (she keeps these things as reminders, as temptation, to prove that she is still strong despite it all, that her father isn’t right about that specific truth concerning the impossibility of redemption) but it is still hard.
Hard to live with her reality and be constantly reminded of what could have been, of what she had ruined with a needle in her arm and a bottle between her fingers.
Sarah is nothing if not a perfectionist, though, and with a little time and effort she prefects the art of moving forward.
She was always her father’s daughter - even if they both hated to admit it.
[nine]
Langley is a quiet adjustment.
A year or two in and Veronica sits behind a desk for most of her days, handles operations from the ground with a security clearance most people don’t even know exist. It’s nothing she ever imagined herself doing, but most days she’ll smile through the motions and decidedly muse that it’ll suit.
Her father meets her somewhere in-between east and west for the holidays. He visits her for birthdays and it’s a nice enough thing never having to go home to Neptune.
She still thinks about it sometimes, old habits and all that, but she kind of likes it like this: lying dormant in the back of her mind, a spec on a map, a stepping stone of sorts. After all, she still has her father, still has Wallace most of the time, Mac’s long-winded emails.
The ones that stick really are the ones that matter.
(You see, some things really don’t ever change.)
[ten]
At ten there is a promise concerning wayward daughters and a vow to never make the same mistakes.
Of course, like mother, like daughter Rebecca has never been very good at making promises she can keep and at eighteen she runs away from home looking for something she would never find. Loses herself to an unforgiving city and a man who she always knew would never love her back.
Twenty-one and Justin comes knocking on her door, all earnest eyes and handsome features. Suddenly, she has the family she’s always needed and a reason to be the better person she’s always wanted to be.
Nora hugs her tight and close, and just like that she is a part of something. She matters.
Rebecca has missed that feeling.
[eleven]
Her dress is fraying. The cotton is snagged near the hem, and Lexie pulls and twists, rubs the thin fabric between thumb and forefinger. It’s warm out - May progressing quietly into summer with the sun shining bright in the sky and Lexie is thankful for the difference, eyes squinting behind her sunglasses in adjustment, and misses the rain in the same breath. She’s not accustomed to the sun anymore and it is a simple fact that weighs heavily on her shoulders, causes something bitter to burn the tip of her tongue.
It’s still - this day, her and Mark - everything at an impasse of sorts, a standstill and less than two hours ago they buried George in the cold ground and her heart still aches in a way she wishes it wouldn’t. She still misses him in a way she wishes she didn’t.
She’s worn this dress before and that is what she chooses to think about instead - two years ago for her mother’s funeral and she bought it in a rush at the nearest department store because the airline had lost her luggage and everything her sister had owned hung too loose on her tiny frame. Lexie had wanted to look good for her mother. Still, then, she wanted to make her proud.
Funny that, she muses, how even in death some things never really change.
After, she’d buried it in the back of her closet, meant to be forgotten and it was luck, really, finding it now. She has been staying at her father’s a bit more - since the argument with Mark, since Meredith and Derek got married, or not married whatever the case may be.
Now, she thinks idly about burning it.
It is just that sort of day.
[twelve]
“Just turn it off, Jenna.”
The sound of Elena’s tears cut through Jenna like a knife, baring her insides for the entire world around her to see. Jenna closes her eyes and can smell the sweetness of Elena’s blood from across the quarry, can trace the pattern of it as it freely flows through her arteries and veins. Klaus stares down at her, his mouth twisting with laughter, with pride and vengeance. She can smell the blood on his hands and lips. She aches to taste it and her skin feels unnatural - not her own. It is too cold and too tight as it encases her entire being. Her fingers dig into the dirt at her sides as she struggles against him and pushes that deep, carnal thirst that pulsates through her body down as far as it will go.
“Just turn it off,” Elena pleads, her voice breaking as her sob pierces through the darkness.
Jenna, naturally, does not listen. From the moment she woke up, from the moment she died and became undead, she has always known what she has to do.
Klaus is still laughing above her, the movement shaking his shoulders and turning her insides to ice. His hands tighten around the stake between his fingers. Jenna’s eyes widen as fear grips her like a vice and there is a split second - maybe even two - before the world goes bright around her, before the stake drives through her heart and the blackness starts to creep along the edges of her sight, blurring the corners of everything she sees.
When she closes her eyes for just a split second she sees Miranda just as she has always remembered her - tall, beautiful, welcoming and strong. I’m sorry, Jenna starts to say. I’m sorry I couldn’t save her. I’m sorry I let you down. She tries to form the words in the back of her throat and push them past her lips, but it’s too late. She’s already gone.
(In the end, Jenna hopes they’ll remember first that she was always braver than most people gave her credit for.)
[thirteen]
Deb wears her badge with honor and pride. She walks, talks, and acts like she couldn't give two shits that she's a woman in a man's profession and the scales have been tipped against her since day one. She walks, talks, and acts this way because it's the goddamn truth, because she’s done a bang-up job convincing herself that she just doesn’t fucking care. Most days, she digs down deep and pushes aside those pathetic daddy and abandonment issues and does her job. Nine times out of ten she does the job well and above any and all expectations because Dexter isn't the only Morgan who is good at what they do. He may know blood and numbers and just about everything else, but she has that unique ability that allows her to look at some fucking scumbag perp in the face and tell whether or not he's done the crime. She has that mythical gut instinct that drives her and hardly ever steers her in the wrong direction.
Make no mistake: Deb is a good cop. She is an even better detective. In fact, Deb is the kind of detective that would have made her father proud even though he probably wouldn't have taken the time to utter I'm proud of you, Debra in her general direction.
Most days, she doesn't think of it that way. Most days she puts one foot in front of the other and focuses on one distinct goal: catching all those fucking sickos out there that make her job a living hell and putting them away for as long as humanly possible.
On her bad days though (and give her a fucking break, ok? Everyone has them and after the dead daddy and mommy and sister-in-law, she thinks she's earned herself quite a few) she marks the differences between her and Dexter and all the ways she will never quite measure up in the back of her mind. In those mornings she is usually slow to start. She will linger in bed with the curtains drawn and think of her father, of how much she loved him and how he never really loved her back enough. On her bad days her fingers trail over the scar on her abdomen like they're reading braille and she thinks of Frank and the future they could have had, but never will. Deb runs the tip of her index finger along the jagged edge and closes her eyes and remembers what he looked like as he died - how clear his eyes were, how his lips parted around the vowels and consonants of her name.
Only then, only after she has grieved for a man she'll never fully get to know, will she remember how to breathe again and start her day, focusing on being the best fucking version of herself possible. She spends the rest of the day roaming the streets she knows like the back of her hand, chasing lead after lead until her feet and body ache and she has the sick fucker that killed an innocent bystander in a fit of rage just within reach.
(After, at night when she's bone tired and crawling into bed just as the sun starts to peak over the horizon, she remembers. She tastes the bitterness of duct tape on her mouth, the way the edges had cut into the soft skin of her wrists as the man she loved and thought loved her back broke her heart and carved scars into her flesh that would never truly fade.
At night, she remembers because she'll never be able to forget.)
It's what makes her a good cop. It is what makes her one of the finest fucking detectives this shit-city has to offer: she's lived and lost and fought every goddamn day of her life. Deb has been at the bottom of a hole so deep she could barely see daylight and clawed her way out with nothing but sheer determination and her own bare hands.
Deb is a fighter. She just simply doesn't know any other way.