A/N and Disclaimer: Obviously I do not own anything. Both High School Musical and Hairspray belong to their respective owners and I do not make any money from anything. It should be noted that of my favorite things in the world. Oddball pairings are up at the top. That includes the never going to happen, two different worlds, not to mention decades, pairing of Tracy and Troy. But for reasons I shall, myself, never understand. I do love them. This is modern!Tracy and Link, meeting with Troy.
If The World Were Ours
"Link!" She laughs loud and her grin sits like a rose bloomed on her face.
"I love you Tracy-Girl." She blushes and he pulls her tight against his chest. The thin lines of their breath spreading into the above till they meet in the winter sky.
"Do you really?" She feels the rumble against her cheek as he smiles and laughs.
"Always."
She doesn't ask him about Amber or what's to come. Not about the war that hangs in other worlds far away. She doesn't wonder not even for a second about the future dark and blank, because for this moment, their youngness and dreams are big enough to shadow the doubts and the fear and the night.
They cling to each other, her hands linked around his neck and his lips catching each soft curve on her face.
She is glad that she will always be this happy.
His mother shows up on a Thursday, her eyes red and lips curved terribly downward, as if the weight of all things lay on her tongue.
She froze while still moving. Her fingers still wrapped around the last of the red roses. She pressed hard on the soil with her fingers, pushed down the the roots and breathed the sweet dirt as hard as she could.
"Tracy?"
She tried hard not to look up. As if the mere act of not hearing could stop the world from spinning on.
She was, she thinks, always a silly girl. A terribly hopeful one.
It did not change the truth.
Mrs. Larkin, laid a mop of curled hair on Tracy's shoulder. It smelled of tears and death and a broken heart. And underneath Tracy could catch of wiff of roses.
She held the older woman tight against her. Sobbed even as she soothed.
She is sure. Positive.
Absolute in her own death.
Link Larkin was dead.
And so was his endlessly promised love.
She thought it was right.
Fair.
That the day the earth spread over his remains the first leaf fell from the sky.
Dying summer for dying boys and dying dreams.
She went to bed afterwards, still wearing the scratchy black dress, and slept.
She didn't wake when her Mother peered in from the door. When her Father sat on the floor beside her, his warm fingers reaching beneath the blankets to wind with her own cold ones. She didn't wake when he whispered that he would be there for her if she needed him.
She didn't wake fully even when she moved about the school and the house and her job at Maybelle's.
She slept still when her Father got a job in New Mexico, a second store to open, an expansion on a dream she could not see, being lost in her own sleepy world.
She rustled not, in the new town, with the bright red and white world. Not even the noise and the spirit could rouse her.
And when her mouth opened to sing, she woke slowly. Her voice lower than before as if dust clogged her throat and it still covered her eyes and made her weak. Moving like honey across the day.
She woke suddenly, when looking up from a lunch of meat that tasted as dull as sand, there looking at her like sin, where Link's blue eyes.
"Why do you look at me like that?"
She shrugs and winces. "How do I look at you?"
"Like you don't know if you like me or hate me?"
"Maybe I don't know which I feel either."
"Why would you hate me?"
She adds seven to y and then seven to eleven.
"Why would I like you?"
His eyes go wide and her lips stretch thin.
Y, she writes, equals eighteen.
Why eighteen? Why so young? Why his eyes? Why, why, why her Link?
She doesn't know the answer to anything and is tired of swirling marks that haunt her in her blinking eyes.
"You should like me because I'm nice."
She doesn't look up from her notebook, but taps her pencil three times against the table.
"Why does it matter?"
She still doesn't look but hears his jacket rustle with his shrug. "No one's ever, just not- you know, liked me before."
"You look like someone I knew."
"Someone you hated?"
She stares at the words on her paper, 'the greatest theme of all tragides is the downfall, loss or seeking of love that can not or does not conquer all.'
"No." She looks up at him, and hates his eyes. "Someone I loved."
He swallows hard.
"I'm-"
"Don't apologize. You didn't know him. And what does your sorry mean to me."
"No wonder he left. You're a bitch."
She lets him leave and buries the shame of his words deep enough that it almost doesn't hurt at all.
Three days later, he's sitting alone under the fall sky. She shivers when a leaf falls.
"I wasn't always a bitch."
"A boy breaks up with you and you turn into Sharpay times two?"
"He died."
She walks away and let's the last warmth of the sun curl across her cheeks.
He brings her lunch on Monday.
"It's just a pulled pork thing."
She lets the ends of mouth turn up. "Thanks."
"Yeah, I figured maybe we just got off on the wrong foot."
"Maybe. Or it could be that I'm a bitch."
He shakes his head. "Maybe you're just-"
She nods and pokes the bun but doesn't eat. "Yeah, maybe just."
"Tell me about him."
So she does.
But she leaves out the shade of his eyes.
He takes to eating lunch with her on Mondays and Thursdays.
They talk about books and dreams the color of anywhere but here.
They don't mention Link, they don't say a word on Gabby and her dark eyes. Not since that first Thursday.
"I love her, but she's...I don't think she really loves me at all."
"But you stay."
"Always."
She bites her lips at the memory of the word.
She wants him.
Because somewhere she sees Link.
She needs him.
Because he's not Link at all.
Instead they flit by the way things could be if their worlds were different.
He kisses her first.
But she doesn't pull away.
He tastes of cheap beer and cigars that spoiled his virgin lungs.
She wishes to bottle it so she can remember when she's fading.
She keeps kissing him and does not pull from his roaming hands.
And when a new dawn rises over the New Mexico land, they do, as always, what they are good at, they pretend.
But sometimes in the dark, when they drive to the city limits and stare at the outside world they hold hands and before they go home, he'll kiss her in the moonlight.
"I'm sorry." His lips grow into the thinnest lines and she stops the sad smile, she nods instead. Ignores the way her body is still humming from his touch, forgets the smell of him even as it spins on the breeze.
"Of course." She stares instead at the burning moonlight that turns the land a shadowed blue. She knew, even when his fingers curled against her hip, that his lips were meant to tell lies.
"I am Tracy. Really. I wish-"
She pulls her shirt tighter, and fingers the spot where the button had been, the scar of his flesh still glowing red in the blackness.
"Don't wish Troy. It's silly to wish for different things than the ones that are." She doesn't think of Link or his grin. Doesn't think of how it would have been to be caught in pale light with him. To have his scent caught on her. It would be silly to she knows, because Link is the dust in the air and the ground she laid on, the dead flakes of Troy's skin under her nails. But Troy is real. And she did not wish him different but wanted his love more.
"If I had met you first."
"If if if. What a silly way of saying. I don't love you."
"I wish I did."
She laughs, her lips spread as wide as her legs were. "But you love her?"
She eyes the tension in his back, the hard muscles and the red lines of her passion, "I do."
And when he drives her home she doesn't cry or yell, doesn't beg him to choose her. But looks from the moving world and wonders when it came to this.
When his hand lies open at her thigh, she takes it without care.
Love is silly, she thinks, but connection is the world.
He holds it tightly back.