A/N So this is the first one shot in a little series I have planned out that will follow Hayley from this point (having just been thrown out after turning in her parents living room) up until she meets Tyler Lockwood in the Appalachian mountains. I'm not a very experienced writer since I've only written fic a few times, and Hayley is a character I've only written once before this so please be gentle :') and constructive criticism and general thoughts are appreciated in the reviews section, I'm always looking to improve, and if anyone has any head canons about anything that may have occurred during the years Hayley wandered from pack to pack I'd be more than willing to try and incorporate it into my story if you share it with me :)
Her eyes were damp. Again. But Hayley refused to let the tears flow. The time for crying was long gone. People who hoped to survive in this world didn't cry. They put on a hard face, stuck their middle finger up told the world to go fuck itself. And that was exactly what Hayley Marshall planned to do. She would not let the world see her cry. She wiped at her eyes and closed them, curling further into herself and shivering as the wind blew against her tent and the cold bit into her toes through the sleeping bag. Hayley the child would have sobbed her heart out at everything that had happened in the past few weeks. But Hayley was no longer a child. She was not an abandoned little girl. She was a woman. A she wolf. And as much as the thought of it terrified her, it also gave her a strange sense of empowerment. She would no longer pore over fashion magazines and take the quizzes on who would be her future husband and spend hours a day waiting by the landline for her friends to ring so they could gossip. There would be no more days spent in the mall boy watching over latte's. There would be no more sleepovers at Angela's house where they stayed awake till the sun rose talking about everything and nothing. There would be none of that now. But she didn't need it any more. She didn't need gossip or a husband to come rescue her. She could do damn fine on her own. She'd been away from home for only twelve hours. She knew that. But she was still alive. And she intended to be for far far longer.
Her final fuck you to her parents would be surviving, surviving against what they'd hoped. Because Hayley knew exactly what they hoped. Mr and Mrs Marshall wanted Hayley to go missing and her body to be found a few months later so they could bury their daughter and forget she ever existed after that. (If they truly wanted their daughter to live then they wouldn't have put her on the streets, they'd have put her in care.) Forget the monster they brought into their homes as a baby. They'd bury her and try to pass her off as the sweet little girl who just went down the wrong path after becoming 'troubled' and could not be saved. No. Hayley would not bow. They would not find her body because she would still be using it in decades to come. She would not curl up and die like they wanted. She would not be stupid and get herself killed on the streets. She would survive. And when the time came, she'd stand over their graves and tell them exactly that. She'd survived.
Her parents, for lack of a better word (because you can't sincerely call two people that booted you out of their house for something you couldn't control your parents) at least had the kindness (in their minds anyway) to let Hayley take her clothes and camping gear with her when they'd told her to kiss their asses and get the hell out of their house (not exactly in those words, but still, that's what they may as well have said, the meaning was the same). The gear just made Hayley feel nauseous. But if it was a choice between using it or sleeping rough on concrete on the streets and risk being harassed or mugged or worse, Hayley would choose the ratty sleeping bag and old tent any day. She had to start being grateful for the little things now.
The tent she'd set up in the forest a dozen miles from her home, the tent she was laying in right now, the sleeping bag she was curled up in at this very moment, were the same ones she slept in the night of the accident, the night everything had changed. Hayley and her parents had been camping up at the lake where they'd met up with his friends. Whilst the men drank their bourbon and were aggressively discussing football and the women tittered over wine, Hayley and Oscar had snuck out of their tents, swiped a couple of cans from the cooler and taken themselves down to the docks to get drunk unnoticed. They simply planned to get buzzed before heading back up to the tents to sleep it off. But one thing led to another, a speedboat was hijacked and the next thing Hayley remembered was opening her eyes and coughing up a gallon of water.
She'd been steering the boat when it hit the rocks and they'd been thrown overboard. Oscar had hit his head and had instantly been knocked out, and, unable to fight for even a minute to keep on the surface like Hayley apparently had (though she couldn't even remember getting on the boat, let alone steering it and crashing it), he'd drowned. And it was her fault. He was fifteen, and he always would be. Immortalised as the sweet young boy who'd been corrupted by the Marshall's wayward daughter. "Was she raised by wolves?!" one of the tittering mothers had commented as Hayley was lead into the back of a police car the next morning. Hayley snorted a little at the memory of that. Had she known then what she knew now, she'd have had the perfect opportunity for a witty retort.
Oscar's parents had been surprisingly forgiving. Hayley was always the first to mock the Christians she saw preaching forgiveness for all sins, but when she heard Oscar's mother tell her 'I forgive you' and she heard the sincerity in the woman's voice, Hayley had felt somewhat better about the entire situation. Hayley hadn't been charged with the boy's death. Alcohol was in both their systems and since Hayley couldn't remember driving the boat and Oscar wasn't around to claim responsibility for it or blame it on Hayley, they couldn't prove Hayley was responsible. The Marshall's were ordered to pay for the damage done to the boat, and that was that in the eyes of the law.
There was a bright side to all of this, Hayley thought for a few fleeting moments. No parents meant no chores, no bed to make or room to clear up or dishes to do. No alarm clock. No more school. She could finally do whatever she wanted all day. Though that thought soon turned sour. What she'd wanted to do all day instead of going to school was play video games and watch tv, take three bubble baths a day and paint her nails over and over… none of that would be happening now. Hayley wondered what the Marshall's were going to do with her room now she was gone. She wondered if they were going to report her missing and leave it a year or so before deciding it was time to move on with their lives and packing it all up. Hayley wondered if they'd adopt another child. Somehow she doubted that even if they wanted to risk getting another werewolf that the authorities would hand them over another kid when they'd already lost one after it'd turned into a killer in their care.
That hadn't hurt as much as she ever thought it would do. Finding out she was adopted. Maybe it was because deep down she'd always felt like the Marshall's weren't really her family. She felt a little bit like Harry Potter. The kid her family didn't want to be seen or heard, shoved away in a room and asked to stay silent when guests came round. She wouldn't lie and say she'd been physically neglected. They'd always provided her with three meals a day, a warm bed and a ride to school, but there was never any bond. There were photos of the three of them on holiday and Hayley could never remember feeling as happy as she looked in the photos. She could never remember smiling as she posed against her sandcastle that her father had sworn she'd built, though the sandcastle looked far too detailed for her three year old self. Another lie they'd told to her, she supposed.
She'd asked her parents about photographs before. Where were the scan photos taken throughout her mother's pregnancy? Why there were no photos around until Hayley was around seven months old? Other mothers had kept things like baby's first pair of shoes and baby's first Babygro, why hadn't her mother done that? Same goes for her baby book. Nothing noted about her first smile or giggle or laugh or the first time she sat up by herself. Her mom had simply said it'd all been lost when they'd moved house when Hayley was a baby. Now she knew that she'd been lied to, there were no scan photos because her mother was never pregnant with her, no details of Hayley's first smile because the Marshall's didn't know when that was. She wondered if she'd been celebrating her birthday on the right day all these years. Maybe June 6th was just a date they'd assigned to her based on an estimation of her age. Her birthday may be in late May. It made her feel so empty to not know the core of who she was. Not to know the people who'd created her. The woman who'd birthed her, the day she was born on. The time she entered the world.
Why was she given up? Were her birth parents too poor to raise her? Was her mother a teen herself when she had Hayley and decided going to college was more important than raising her child? Had she screamed too loudly? Thrown up too often? Been too fussy? Not slept enough? Had the novelty of a baby worn off quickly so they'd decided to just get rid of her? What was wrong with her? Did they know at birth the monster she'd become so they fobbed her off on someone else to deal with the beast instead? Did her birth mother ever love her? Or did she just sign the forms and leave the love to someone else, not caring that her baby girl would never receive it?
Thoughts continued to swirl around in Hayley's mind. Just forty eight hours ago she'd been shopping with her mother for back to school supplies. Then the full moon had risen and she'd transformed into a beast… and now she didn't have a home, her parents weren't really her parents. She didn't know what she was… who she was. She didn't know where to go next. She knew she had to find more people like her… A pack. But other than that… she knew nothing. She couldn't finish school, she'd never graduate or go to college or get a decent job. She had no money, just the tent, sleeping bag and all the clothes she could carry in her backpack. She'd have to steal food in the morning if she didn't want to starve… She'd be turning into a criminal just to stay alive. Was this the rest of her life? Pitching up her tent in the woods every night and trying not to cry herself to sleep. You made it through today. She told herself. You'll make it through tomorrow, and the next and the next. You'll find your people. A home, a pack, a family. You'll have it all. You made it through today. Just make it through tomorrow too. It was a mantra, she repeated it over and over and over. Tomorrow will be better. Someone will find you, or you'll find someone. You won't feel so alone.
But for tonight. Hayley was alone. She was homeless, essentially orphaned, and so alone that there wasn't a single person in the world who cared about her. The two people that were supposed to love her the most, unconditionally, who had chosen to bring her up and raise her... hated her and didn't care if she lived or died alone in the forest. And with that thought breaking her mantra, the thirteen year old stopped wiping the tears from her eyes and let them fall. It took all the self-control she had not to sob out loud.
Before she closed her eyes to sleep, Hayley could swear she saw the shadow of a wolf pass by her tent and for a split second, she didn't feel so alone.
A/N: I'm English, so I have no idea how American law works (and if I'm being completely honest I don't really know all too much about English law either) Hayley never mentioned being prosecuted for the death she caused, and since it was an accident and she was intoxicated, I'm hoping it seems plausible that she'll have gotten away without a record.