None of it Mattered
Fandom: Flight 29 Down
Characters: Taylor + others
Disclaimer: So not mine.
Summary: And sometimes, as Taylor lay awake at night, she swore she could still hear the lapping of the waves outside the tent; and she felt happy.
Warnings: coarse language
None of it Mattered
All you have is yourself in the end and, really, how much of the past still mattered anymore, when she thought about it?
What was the point in boys, and makeup, and worrying over whether she'd be voted for Prom Queen when there were more important things in life, like surviving?
Her old friends tried to understand but they were used to worrying about nothing themselves. Rich, beautiful, popular … what was there to care about? They even asked her questions, tried to picture spending a month on a forgotten island, but it was impossible for them. She didn't blame them; she used to be the same.
Eventually she stopped answering their pointless inquiries, and they stopped inquiring. Their calls gradually grew less and less, and one day, when she decided to sit with Melissa and Daley for lunch instead of them, they stopped bothering her.
She failed to muster up the energy to even care.
-
They tried to stay close. Really, they did!
Those first weeks the seven of them made a point of eating lunch together, sending e-mails, sitting next to each other in class; but it didn't last for very long. She would see Daley's chopped-short hair and would only remember the fighting, and the schedules, and the hurt. She would look into Jackson's or Nathan's dark eyes, witness the hidden sorrow that had never left, and it would trigger the shrill sound of the pilot's crazy cries, and Abby's beautiful destroyed face.
It didn't make any sense and they all knew, all recognized what was happening, but it was tiny Lex who finally said it out loud.
"I can't stand it anymore!" he had cried as they all sat in front of someone's TV, eating pineapple slices and chicken strips. The next second he was up out of his seat and had run from the room.
And none of them argued with him because they all felt it too and, after all, the kid was a genius.
-
She didn't like how her parents looked at her now; like she was a bomb waiting to go off. It disturbed her, but they were her parents!, so she never said anything and just continued to ignore the sidelong glances and expectant stares they cast whenever she entered a room.
And most nights, she would hear them murmuring their concerns for her to each other in their bedroom beside hers. She would catch snippets of conversations, never the whole thing; talks about therapists, and depression, and possible PTSD. She tried to tune them out but, at the same time she wondered if there wasn't some truth behind their assumptions.
And on those nights, Taylor would just lay awake staring up at her ceiling, swearing that she could still taste the sweet coconut in her mouth and hear the waves lapping on the shore outside of the tent. When she did that she would finally feel … peaceful, like she never could during the day; like the island was calling her home.
But she was here and not there, and really, none of it mattered anymore.