fic: empty spaces; heather & dianna; rpf; pg-13
Title: Empty Spaces
Author: yesssirrr
Characters/Pairings: Heather & Dianna; side Heather/Naya; mentions of Dianna/Lea; some of the other gang
Rating: pg-13
Length: 3,872
Spoiler: RPF; it's AU so there shouldn't be any.
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters or people. No copyright infringement intended. I JUST WANT TO WRITE ABOUT THEM.
Summary: Heather has a hole in her chest and she accidentally calls Dianna about it.
Author's Note: Okay, so. The first sentence is key. My advice: read it literally. Also, deepest apologies if you dislike 2nd person; I tried.
Author's Note II: This is an AU story of Heather and Dianna being half sisters (if you feel inclined, they come from the same mother - so that's why last names are still the same, HeMo is HeMo and D'Agron is still D'Agron.) and how awesome they can be, even miles and miles apart. It's sisterly love. So yeah. I wanted to write more Naya/Heather, but this story had a point about H & D, so it is what it is. Enjoy!
;;
There is a hole in your chest.
It’s 8:45 P.M. and it doesn’t occur to you that there is a gaping hole in your chest until you walk to the bathroom in just a towel to brush your teeth. It’s not big, maybe the size of one of those standard post-its that you occasionally steal from the supply closet, but it’s there and it’s completely empty.
You gawk at it because this has got to be a joke. This doesn’t make sense to you and in your twenty some years on this earth, this just doesn’t happen. But apparently it does.
Your toothbrush drops from your mouth and down to the sink with a dull clank. You can see clearly through it, looking at the mirror to find the wall behind you. It doesn’t really set in that there’s a hole there for about six more seconds then your eyes widen and you cover the hole immediately, like covering it with your hand will make it untrue.
You blink a couple of times first before you dash to retrieve your phone on your nightstand, right hand still firmly over your chest. You frantically scroll through your contact list, muttering c’mon, c’mon. Instead of calling 911, you try to call Chris. For some reason, you think that he’ll just know these things.
“Dianna Agron Consulting Services, how may I help you?” says a naturally sweet voice and it takes you a split second to realize it’s a girl on the other end.
“Oh wow, you’re not Chris,” you breathe out more than say. You have no idea how you called her since you’re sure you hit the green button when Chris’s name was highlighted. But your hand was shaking so you’re not really sure anymore. But you’re not sure why it would be her either since Dianna and Chris are not even all that close to each other in your contact list. Plus, you don’t think you can talk to her about this since you two are not really all that close and she’s not even a full sister. Except this is not the time to really worry about that, is it?
“No, I’m not.” You might as well, maybe she can help. It doesn’t hurt to try.
“Di, I have a hole in my chest.” There’s a beat and you think she’s hung up on you and you’re not surprised because this sounds a lot like a very poorly-executed prank call. But you hear her murmur something at the other end to someone, a co-worker probably, so you’re taking that as a good enough sign. You’re staring at the hand on your chest and you wait for her.
“Heather?”
You don’t think it’s appropriate to roll your eyes because you’re the one calling, but this is really important and you just want answers and yes, it’s you.
“Yes! It’s me, your sister Heather. Now, can we focus on what this? I have a ho-”
“When did you find out?” she asks, cutting you off. It barely slips you that she doesn’t seem surprised that this is happening.
“Uh, just now. Didn’t you hear me? I have a hole in my chest.” You slowly move your hand away from the hole and carefully examine it in the mirror. It’s still a hole and you can still see the wall behind you so you clasp your hand back on it.
“How big is it?”
“Uh, it’s like the size of a post-it note. What does that have to do with anything?! Dianna, there’s a hole in my chest and I’m still alive and I don’t know what to do about it!”
There’s another silence on the line and at this point, you’re wondering if your own sister is having a go at you because she’s not reacting like you expect anyone to this kind of news. Even laughing at you would have been a good response. Hell, it’s probably better if she hangs up so someone can confirm you’re crazy and this is all just a figment of your twisted imagination. But this silence and serious questioning is a little ridiculous.
“Congratulations,” is all she says and you sputter out incoherent responses because of all the things your sister can say to you about a possible body malfunction, congratulations wasn’t what you were thinking of.
“What? There’s a hole in my chest and you’re congratulating me?!”
“Well, yeah. You got yours a lot earlier than I did. The hole in my chest didn’t come until two years ago.”
“I think you’re missing the giant point here, Dianna. My chest has a hole. Where there should be skin and bones and important organs, like parts of my left lung and my heart. It’s a gaping empty space.”
“Well, yeah,” she says to you in that “duh, stupid” tone of voice that always irritated you when she visited you when you two were younger.
You think about unleashing some tirade about the ridiculousness of the situation and how absolutely useless she is right now peppered with colorful expletives until you remember that she just told you that she had one too.
“Did you just say you have one?” you blurt out. It gets quiet on the other end. You think that she’s hung up on you but if she had, you would’ve heard the dial tone by now. “Dianna?”
“Yeah, I do,” she says, her voice becoming hoarse, echoing.
“Where are you?”
“Bathroom.”
There’s a silence that hangs over the two of you. You move the hand that’s covering the empty space in your chest so you’re staring at it in the mirror. A full minute comes and goes until either one of you speaks.
“What’s the empty space in your chest look like?” you ask.
“It’s a circle, like a bracelet or a bangle.”
“Does it hurt?”
“It doesn’t feel like anything.”
“Is it gonna stay like this or what?”
“I guess. I still have mine, don’t I?”
“How’d you feel when you found it?”
Pause.
“I fainted,” she says. “Then I woke up and it was still there. I went to the hospital to get it checked out but they say they don’t treat these kinds of things. They don’t see anything wrong with it. I almost got admitted to the psych ward because I was hysterical ‘cause you know, why would it be normal to have a hole in your chest, right? But then this nurse pulled me aside and told me that it’s all normal and everybody has it, like a belly button.”
As you listen, you lean closer to the mirror and you inspect the hole in your chest. Where you thought you’d see the muscle tissue in your body, you actually just find an expanse of skin covering it. You hear your sister sigh from the other end of the line and you know she’s inspecting her own empty space.
“What do we do about this?” you ask her because she’s your older sister, half or not, and she usually knows more than you do.
“Do whatever you do to empty things,” she says slowly and you figure she’s still looking at her own reflection. “Fill it up.”
It surprises you a little when you find that she doesn’t say it in such an older sisterly way like she knows better, but only as a fact. It doesn’t surprise you at all when you figure that it’s probably because she’s on the same boat as you.
#
It takes you two weeks, four days, thirteen hours and fifty four minutes and some change for you to fully get over the novelty and the shock value of the post-it note size hole in your chest.
You were eating cereal sometime mid-afternoon in your apartment working on the previous day’s crossword puzzle when it happened. Thoughts of lunacy that pervaded your mind for two weeks, four days, thirteen hours and fifty four minutes about the whole situation just vanished, gone as quickly as it came. You became paranoid about knowing who had a hole in their chest and who didn’t, wondering about each stranger to pass you by on the street, in the elevators, and in lines at the grocery store. But after those two weeks, four days, thirteen hours and fifty four minutes, that paranoia was nowhere to be found and you went about eating your cereal.
Now, it’s just like that nurse said to Dianna, it’s normal. The hole in your chest doesn’t negatively affect your health and it doesn’t feel like you’re in any imminent danger. So there’s nothing to worry about. And you don’t.
You do, however, wonder about how to fill it up. And what happens when it does.
More importantly, you wonder if it will.
#
You call Dianna for the umpteenth time.
“Was yours always that size?” you ask without so much as a hello.
“Yeah, why?” she responds back, unfazed.
“So like, it just stays this size the entire time?”
“I guess.”
#
It feels like a cliché when it happens. Held breath, fast heartbeats, sweaty palms, and the feeling of getting hit by one train going 60 miles per hour and another train from the opposite direction at 65 miles per hour and it doesn’t add up but you were never good at math, just science (the fact that your body’s going crazy is something you understand), so the only thing you focus in on is the fact that it hits you like nothing ever has and probably ever will.
You see her walking on the other side of the street, going the opposite direction when you were taking your lunch break.
You don’t find out who she is until a week later when you’re at work. And the empty space in your chest, the one that doesn’t really bother you, tightens slowly and you stop in the middle of the sidewalk to catch your breath.
#
“Does your chest tighten?”
“Uh, yeah,” she says. “When I go to the gym twice a week.”
“No, I mean, like the empty space.”
“No, why?”
“Nothing, just - it feels different now.”
“How so?”
“I don’t know. It’s hard to explain how an empty space feels.”
#
She works on the floor above you. You find out her name is Naya. She has gorgeous black hair with astonishingly lively brown eyes. And she has really pouty lips that embarrasses you just thinking about because, really, you’re kind of a boy sometimes. She’s not conventionally pretty because you’ve never seen anyone like her before. She has that easy smile that her eyes kind of squint, like yours and you feel like that’s good ground for things you have in common.
You only see her once in the morning. Then again during lunch in the cafeteria later that day. You ask Jenna, your cubicle-mate, who she is and if she’s new because you’d know if someone that pretty would work there.
“So she’s new?” you ask as you take a bite from your chicken salad sandwich.
“Yeah. Heard she got hired last week or something but only because she’s the boss’s niece or something. A Cali girl. Heard she graduated from grad school last year and that she broke up with her partner soon after graduation after fighting over what to do with life after school. So now that’s why she’s here.”
You stop chewing. You never know about gossip around the office and you wonder how Jenna gets the scoop. “How’d you hear all that?”
“Chris from the fourth floor was talking about it the other day with Cory by the watering hole when he came down for a visit during his lunch break. But then Ms. Riley all snapped at them and told them to get back to work.”
“Huh,” you hear yourself say as you mull this piece of information. “We have a watering hole?”
Jenna rolls her eyes and throws a carrot stick your way. You barely dodge it in time. You think next time she does it, you’ll try to catch one in your mouth. That should shut her up.
“Right.” The two of you keep eating your respective sandwiches and vegetable sticks, you thinking about her and Jenna probably thinking about clocking out early for the day and maybe napping for the rest of the afternoon.
#
“She works here,” you say to your sister. It’s not just ‘half sister’ anymore and that makes you feel good.
“Who works where?”
“The girl that I was talking to you about before.”
“Great, are you gonna ask her out?”
“What? No. I mean, I don’t- I don’t even know her name.”
There’s a beat and you cover your eyes, hiding away from your sister even though she can’t see you.
“You’re such a terrible liar.” There’s laughter at the other end of the line.
“Her name’s Naya.”
“Is she pretty?” You stay quiet. There’s a blush creeping on your pale cheeks and you just know your face is really pink.
The laughter at the other end of the line grows even louder.
#
You find yourself in front of her in the cafeteria lunch line six days, eleven hours and thirty five minutes after your conversation with Jenna. The tightening you felt before comes back again, this time a little stronger and feels more like a relentless ebbing than just a temporary jolt.
You wait patiently in line, pretending that you’re not feeling out of your element standing a foot away from the girl you’ve been thinking about for a couple of weeks now. You don’t look back.
“Excuse me,” you hear from behind you as a tap on your shoulder sends shocks to the rest of your body. You turn around mentally check-listing how presentable you look right now. “Did you drop this?” she asks.
You’ve temporarily lost your voice as the empty space in your chest continues to tighten ever so slowly. You look down and there are two different colored stacks of post-its in her really well-manicured hands. Then you look back at her. Now you really can’t find your voice because you think she thinks you’re some random freak for carrying random office supplies with you. You just nod slowly and murmur your thanks before putting the post-its on your tray. It’s another cliché, but you’re sure that if she smiles like that again, you will have no problem falling in love with her.
“Hi. I’m Naya.” She smiles and rearranges her hold on her tray before extending her hand out. You take her hand and hold it, not surprised her hand is warm and soft. You really like holding her hand.
You don’t think I’m in love with you is a good idea because, really, it’s not. You settle with, “I’m Heather.”
She smiles up at you, gives your hand one final squeeze. It’s the same kind of squeeze you feel in your chest.
#
“We talked today.”
“With pouty lips girl?”
“Yeah, pouty lips girl.”
“Great. What did you two talk about?”
“She introduced herself to me after I apparently dropped two stacks of sticky notes in the cafeteria.”
“Why do you have sticky notes with you? What did I tell you about stealing office supplies? Only do it when no one’s looking.”
“That’s not-I didn’t! I promise. That’s beside the point, okay? She introduced herself to me.”
“Did you tell her you were in love with her?”
“Ha ha, that’s not funny. Except I actually almost did, good thing I stopped myself.”
“Is she everything you ever dreamed?” You think there’s an awful lot of giggling at the other end.
“Di, stop laughing. And I don’t know, I mean I only met her today.”
“No you didn’t. You met her a long time ago. She just met you today.”
“Anyway,” you start to say, ignoring her. “She and I just talked about her moving here and how big of a change it is being on the East Coast and her hobbies and interests and stuff, like going out to bars and things like that.”
There’s another pause and more giggling, you just roll your eyes.
“Aw, you are crushing on her so hard right now.”
You laugh embarrassedly and she joins in with you because it’s true. You are.
#
You come back from a morning meeting one week, two days, ten hours and forty minutes after officially introducing yourself to her at the lunch line to be greeted with a post-it note sitting squarely in the middle of your computer monitor. It’s bright pink, a complete contrast to the black and white background you have of a tree from the backyard of your childhood home.
“What’s this, Jenna?” you ask.
“A desk that has a stack of reports that needs to be typed up and that haven’t been,” she says, deadpan, not looking at you as she types up from her own stack of reports. You swat her gently on the arm with a folder before sitting at your desk and picking up the note. It reads:
Lunch today at 12:34? -Naya
There’s a smiley face beside her name and it mirrors the one on your face.
#
“Is it a date?” she asks.
“No, but she left a note on my desk about lunch.”
“What’d it say?”
“Just a question about lunch at 12:34.”
“She sounds like a loser,” she chuckles, teases. You gasp in fake indignation.
“You little…you take that back. She is not a loser!”
She only laughs at you and you don’t mind at all.
#
You try to work for the next two hours but you fail completely, wondering about possible conversations that you two can have at lunch later that day. The subtle ebb in your chest intensifies at the mere thought of having you and her in the same train of thought. It’s the tightening of your chest that really gets to you because it feels like one of those tricks Dianna used to show you whenever she did visit, that Indian rope burn, where she holds your forearm and twists her hands in opposite directions so your skin feels like it’s being separated. It’s supposed to hurt, but you two never really complained. It was a different kind of hurt.
But the one you’re feeling now is a lot more grown up, and it’s not just your arm, but your entire body.
For a moment you think you don’t want to be a grown up. You wonder if Dianna feels the same way, too.
#
That thing with you and Naya has gone better than you ever expected. You were glad she was a lot more straightforward about saying things than you were or else you two would have never labeled your relationship as something more than just hanging out with each other and making out.
Plus you two definitely seem to fit together seamlessly. Even Dianna’s noticed, and she’s never seen the two of you together. She has talked to Naya before and you remember how much of a disaster that turned out. Well, you thought so but the two of them seemed to conspire against you, so you don’t really know.
When you talked to Dianna the next day after Naya left, even she said that there was a change in your voice and could feel a different energy over the phone.
You were so excited to hear her say, “Yeah, she’s a keeper.”
You hope your sister’s doing better on her end, with the hole in her chest and with that Lea girl. You hope Lea’s treating her right. You remember this one conversation you had with Dianna some time ago and it made you feel all warm and fuzzy inside.
“Don’t worry, H. It’s doing fine. Why all these questions all of a sudden?”
“Just want you to be happy, too. I don’t know. I mean, do you have a girlfriend now, too?”
“No. I mean, yeah. Her name’s Lea and she’s amazing. I can already feel like I’ve fallen in love with her. Just the idea of loving her sounds easier than breathing sometimes.”
“Wow.”
“Yeah, wow.”
There’s a comfortable silence that’s blanketing the two of you.
“I guess this is what’s supposed to happen?”
“Maybe. I don’t know, but it feels good, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, really good. Maybe one day soon you can meet Naya and I can meet Lea?”
“I’d really like that.”
For the first time in a long time, you’re glad that you have a sister somewhere out there, even if she is just a half sister. That doesn’t matter though because she’s more than a full sister to you anyway.
#
You give Naya a chaste kiss before she left to go home for the night.
Now it’s a little after seven at night and it’s just you in your apartment. You think of checking what’s happened to your chest, you haven’t really been paying that much attention anymore.
You walk quickly to your bathroom and you pull your shirt up to inspect the new shape and size of the hole in your chest. It’s gotten smaller and rounder, a very different look and size to when you had it to begin with. It looks like a silver dollar, maybe even a quarter.
You’re excited to see how it’s closing up, how it’s filling up. Oh.
The first thing you even think of doing is call Dianna, so you run excitedly to your phone on the bedside table. But before you even press down on your speed dial, you find that you have two new voicemails. You call your voicemail and hear your sister’s naturally sweet voice.
Hey, it’s me. I was showering this morning and I realized that the hole in my heart got smaller. I didn’t notice it at first because it’s still round, but it got smaller. It’s almost like the size of a quarter but a little bit bigger. I think they have a coin for that but I can’t think of the name right now. Gold dollar or something. Anyway, I thought you’d enjoy knowing that. It’s kind of closing up. I was wondering if yours was too. Oh, but I’m gonna be out of town for a whi-
There is a beep and you curse wanting to know the rest of the message. You check the other voicemail and you hear your sister conclude her message.
I just got cut off. But as I was saying, I’m gonna be out of town for a while. I’ll definitely let you know when I’m back and available. But yeah, love you and miss you and I can’t wait to hear about you and Naya. Okay, talk to you soon. Bye.
You start dialing your sister’s number to call her back when there’s a knock at the door. You hang up, thinking you can just call her later.
You attend to the door without looking through the peephole to see Dianna holding a small suitcase in one hand and a pack of colored post-its in the other.
You won’t bet money on it, but you’re pretty positive the hole in your chest just closed completely, fully, as you give your sister a long awaited hug.