Happily Ever After? Chapter 1: Tara, a kim possible fanfic

Happily Ever After? Part 1

a/n – In the final chapter of KP – Cross Country, the fate of one particular relationship was mentioned in passing. This is her story.

Tara stared at the computer screen, in particular at the words at the bottom of the page. In reality they were nothing more than black pixels on a light gray background, arranged in a patterns that were called ten point Arial. Those patterns were in turn arranged in just such a way that they had meaning.

At that particular moment, the woman who had become a writer, and a moderately successful one at that, could not grasp the meaning of those words.

…and they lived happily ever after.

Oh, she knew what they meant, at least to the story she had just finished, or at least it was supposed to end that way. That kind of story always ended that way, it was, like, a rule or something. It didn't matter if it was a terrible cliché, or at least it didn't to her readers. They wanted that ending, or at least she hoped they did. All too soon those six to ten year-old girls would learn more about how the real world worked and they would lose the innocence that came with the age when they could believe in things like a happy ending.

Everyone else seemed to get one, or at least they had by that point. Kim lived about an hour away with her husband Ron, their two-year old son, Ron's little sister and that dark-haired little girl they were pretty much raising as one of their own. Bonnie was living in Go City with that perpetual boyfriend of hers. Hope wasn't with anyone, but she was perfectly happy that way. Even Kim's friend Monique was with the man of her dreams off on the east coast somewhere.

She was supposed to be with the man of her dreams as well.

Saving the final chapter so she could email it to her editor in the morning, she turned the computer off. There were too many happy thoughts in her latest manuscript, and somehow that didn't sit completely right with her at the moment. What was worse was that she knew her mood would show through in her work. Robert was going to catch that and there would be words over the phone, or in the IRC chat channel they used. It was highly likely she would have to rewrite much of the last chapter, if not several coming before it.

It was fine for emotional stress to color a serious, dramatic story. Unfortunately, that was not what her audience was looking for. She wrote stories primarily for little girls. They were couched as light romance stories, but they were actually morality tales to teach them how to live. Her first book had been published by her church, but her talents were quickly recognized and she enjoyed a modest national distribution. Oh, it wasn't like she was about to be the next J.K. Rowling, but she could live comfortably…moderately comfortably…on what she made. It was a living.

Freeing her platinum blonde hair from the baseball cap she wore in her home-office most of the time, she leaned back in the black leather executive chair she occupied almost constantly when she was writing. Her office was a special place, a place where she and she alone would come. It was her private little sanctuary, the one part of the house that was truly hers.

Over the last few months, she was starting to feel like it was the only place she could actually be in that home.

Getting up, she crossed the room over to a neatly arranged bookcase. Other authors she knew had cluttered little offices, covered in notes and other papers. She didn't work that way. Everything in her little space had it's own particular home. That was how she liked it and that was how it stayed. If she had notes, they were neatly arranged into folders that would quickly find their way into the peach-colored file cabinet in the corner. The whole place was as tidy as it could possibly be, and since she did almost all of her writing on the computer, there was little need for paper at all in the place, except what was actually contained in a real book.

If only her mind and her emotions could be tidied up like her office.

She selected a thin volume from the top shelf. It was a first-edition printing of one of her earlier books. The cover was a heavily altered photo of an early-teens girl wearing a princess' dress. It was titled Darla's Dreams, and right below the title, written in florid script was her name.

Tara Matthews-Mankey.

She finally realized how ironic it was that she insisted that name appear on that particular book. The first nationally published book had her maiden name on it, as it was published only a couple months before her wedding. Her agent had argued long and hard that she should have kept using it as her nom de plum, but she would hear nothing of it. Becoming Mrs. Joshua Wendell Mankey had been a dream come true for her at the time, and she was going to show that to the world, or at least to the little girls who read her books and their parents who bought them for them.

Gripping the tome solidly in her tiny hand, she crossed the room back to her desk, setting it firmly in the middle of her crisp, new-looking blotter and opening the middle drawer. Of course, everything inside was just as neatly arrayed as the rest of the room, so it only took her half a moment to find what she was looking for. She gripped the narrow, tapered plastic shaft in both hands and pulled. The black cap snapped cleanly off and she set to work with it.

The fresh, new Sharpie made quick work of the name Mankey on the cover of the book.

A smile creased her face that would have been much more at home on her oldest friend's face instead of hers. Nice girls like her, who always spoke kindly of others, who always played fair with everyone, who waited until their wedding night to know their beloved, they didn't grin like that. It was a grin she only wore in private, in moments when it was perfectly okay, even expected for her to behave that way with her husband.

It wasn't the kind of smile she ever thought she would have after obliterating his name on the cover of a nearly irreplaceable book.

Coolly satisfied with herself, she sat back in the chair once more. The tension spring on the bottom had been dialed back almost as far as it would go so she could lean back in it without having it snap forward roughly under her miniscule weight.

Then she gasped, putting her hand to her mouth.

Kim once told her that things pretty much didn't work out between Josh and herself. In her words, they grew apart.

All that time she had thought that was just her second-oldest friend subconsciously rationalizing the fact her real feelings involved Ron. That made so much sense back then, especially since they did end up together, seemingly forever, a couple months later.

Only Josh hadn't really been growing apart from Kim. He had been growing together with somebody else.

That in itself didn't last, at least then. For reasons known only to the buxom, tanned brunette, Josh didn't fully measure up to the standards her posse were supposed to adhere to, and she had summarily dismissed him as a potential suitor, setting her up instead with Jason Morgan. It took almost another full year for that mistake to be rectified.

In all the intervening years, Tara had never thought of it that way. Her befriending, then dating Josh during his senior and her junior year had seemed natural and appropriate, especially since Kim had been so non-chalant about the whole affair.

Affair was a pretty accurate word for it. Oh, by the standards of her life as it had become by then, it was a pretty innocent thing. The most they did was kiss, but those kisses had come before the real, official breakup of the two. It was before the words "We need to talk" had been spoken by either of them.

In a way, Tara had unwittingly been 'the other woman.'

Now, some years later, she felt…no…she knew that the two of them were growing apart.

If she thought that, then what if history was repeating itself?

So much suddenly became so clear to her.

She didn't stand this time. Instead she simply rolled her chair across the room to the book case. All thoughts of keeping thing neat and tidy pretty much went out the window. She raked every one of the first editions off the top shelf, watching them clatter to the floor, some of their spines cracking, their pages becoming creased as she vented her frustration upon them.

Sliding out of the chair, she sat down on the floor, crossing her legs.

She proceeded to cross out his last name on every one of her books; on the covers, on the spines, even inside. Finally she came to the last one, featuring a hero named Joshua.

With great relish, she went through the entire book, crossing that name out on each page.