Title: Grace - deleted scene!
Rating: PG
Fandom: P!atd (Grace-verse, I guess)
A/N: So the thing is, I finished exams yesterday. This happened, and then I figured I should probably buckle down and finish those requests that people made 50 years ago. So
toxickk924, here you go. This gave me way too much strife, especially for only 830 words. Shamelessly unbeta'd. I hope you like it. ^^ Just for the record, this won't be posted anywhere else.
Excerpt from ‘Grace’.
Loretta is twenty-five years old when I meet her. Loretta is twenty-five with hair that falls to the space between her shoulder blades, curls around that white-as-white skin. Loretta is twenty-five years old with a head full of ideas, a heart full of grapevines and a belly full of baby.
She’s dating an indie-filmmaker named David Edelflower.
Loretta is tall and snarky and mean, and she’s the Catherine with attitude, the Catherine not on drugs, the Catherine with a burly grasp on her sanity.
Loretta is Loretta, and I wish that I could explain her better.
I remember being seventeen though. I remember being seventeen and stumbling back to my apartment after a night on the town, a night of glitz and glamour and drugs and sleaze and sluts. I remember being seventeen, and stumbling through the front door to Loretta hunched over the sofa, a gargoyle in Notre Dam.
“Loretta,” I murmured, slurred out through my parted lips. “Loretta, ‘m sorry. You didn’t, shouldn’t have stayed up, and-“
“Brendon,” she says, and she stares at me with a face too red, a face too gaunt and angry and sallow. “Of all the fucking nights, Brendon Urie, all the fucking nights…”
Her fingers shake, tremble, quiver, and she reaches onto the sofa cushion beside her, clutches a cigarette packet to her chest, to her arms, before letting her fingers crush it, destroy it. It’s empty, and Loretta, she likes her men pliant, her apartment crisp and her cigarette packets full. Tonight she has none of this.
“Brendon,” she whispers, “I have known you for four months, and you are all I could think about tonight.”
“Loretta,” I say, and I’m about to throw up, about to pass out, I wobble on legs that suddenly are far too reminiscent of blades of grass. “Loretta…”
“I went into labour six hours ago, Brendon,” she says, and her voice is a blank canvas, but her face, her lips and her eyes and her cheeks, they’re paint brushes, paint boards, buckets and buckets of red and grey and black. Colours tinged with despair. “Baby was fucking stillborn.”
“Loretta,” I say, and I almost drop to the floor right there, can feel the liquor eat at my willing brain cells. Pac Man is playing on the computer screen of my mind.
She stares at me, stares long and hard, and her eyes, they’re like daggers, light bulbs. Her eyes are envelopes, bills, tax collectors. She sighs, inhales too hard, so hard her ribs quake and when she exhales she’s a building tumbling down. “Come on then,” she says, “I’ll take you to bed.”
“Bed,” I say, and there are spots behind my eyelids, Dalmatians and snow flakes and the go-go skirt my girlfriend had in highschool.
“Bed,” she says, and she stands up on legs that might even be shakier than mine. She grasps my arm too tight, so tight that her nails, they leave half-moon prints around my wrist.
Together, together we stumble in the dark, fall into my bedroom and onto my bed. She drags us both under the blanket, and my head is on her stomach before I can stop myself. Her belly, it’s softer than I’ve ever felt. Will ever feel.
“All gone,” she whispers, and her fingers are in my hair, across my forehead, around my neck, the other one, it wraps around my shoulders. “I was gonna be a mum.”
“Yeah,” I whisper back, and my legs are numb where they tangle with hers. “I’m sorry.”
And neither of us say another word, but neither of us sleep either. Loretta, she needs me tonight more than I’ve ever needed anyone, and I’ll oblige her, coz she’s Loretta and maybe I love her already.
“They can shoot a guy into space, they can blow up a country, Brendon,” she whispers, when the clock flickers 3:28am. “But they can’t save my fucking baby.”
That big belly of hers, the one full of baby, she used to draw smiley faces on it when she was bored. Before it’s born, when it’s still wrapped up inside of her, cozy and warm, she tells me that it’s a boy, she says his name is Alistair.
Alistair’s born dead, and I used to wonder if he was ever alive. Jon will tell me years later that babies, fetus’, embryos, they have heartbeats in the womb, fingerprints and eyelashes and toes.
Then again, if no one talks about them, how long can they even be alive in spirit? Loretta, she doesn’t talk about Alistair.
Him being dead, born like that, born with no heartbeat, born with lungs not strong enough to draw breath, it tore her and her boyfriend apart. Ripped at the seams of a maybe-forever.
Loretta’s a cynic, but she had it shit even before me, even before Alistair, even before David.
Years later, a millennia later, I’ll tell her that it’s okay.
She’s earned the right to be a motherfucking cynic.