(Author's Note) Takes place directly after the S1 finale, Burnt Toast. Everything's the same except Amy and Liam didn't fall in bed together. Cool? Cool. Slow start but will be updating regularly.
An Unreliable Metric. [Post S1 finale, only Liam and Amy didn't bang]
There's this thing she heard once. Read, maybe. Could have been a textbook, could have been one of Karma's Cosmo magazines. She can't really recall, but she does remember how it rang so true. It was something along the lines of, if you want to know who feels closest to whom in a group, watch their eyes when they laugh. Without fail, in a bout of laughter, the eyes will instinctively flicker towards another pair. Whoever it is, that's the person you want to share the moment with, the joy, whatever. And this is true for most people. She knows, because she's watched. She's seen. That's how you know. Usually. And whether they look back is a whole 'nother story.
The light hurt her eyes.
Not that she could see it, per se. Amy could feel it, beating on the other side of my closed lids. There was that stillness you experience after waking, those blessed few seconds before the hangover hits and - worse - your memory.
If you could call it that. Amy mentally retraced her steps from the night prior. Dancing, toasts, a glimmer of happiness for her Mother, her anger flaring at seeing Liam... then a flash that makes her stomach curl even moreso in on itself. "I love you."
"I love you, Karma." Her eyes shot open. "I love you, Karma." Coming from her own mouth, her own words. Vowels and consonants coming together to completely betray her.
And then she remembered Karma's face. Surprise followed by...was that disappointment? A fleeting moment of something, maybe? A ghost of what Amy was sure the girl felt during the failed threesome, come back to haunt her.
"I love you, too. Just not like that." Karma's voice had broken, and so had Amy. She remembered how it had been so hard to hold herself up after that, almost as if along with Karma's reluctant but pointed rejection had come a near complete inability to square her shoulders, carry herself, put one foot in front of the other.
So she recalls that much. Her heart felt like it had the jist, she just needs her brain to catch up.
She lets the feeling come back in a wave as she sat up, squinting against the sun filtering through her blinds. A headache pulsed between her temples. What had she been thinking? She allowed herself one cursory glance to her bedside table, her eyes running over a framed pictures of her and Karma, and swung her legs out of bed with a groan.
Hadn't Karma let her down easy? Hadn't she tried, at least? She had put Karma in that position, given her the other half of her heart, practically begging the girl to tug and break it.
Trying to be rational right now felt like stabbing herself in the chest.
"Champagne, never again, old friend." She mutters, tousling her own hair. She needs a shower and Advil, not necessarily in that order.
"You up?" Lauren's chipper voice cuts through the dead air in her room. Her head pokes through the door to Amy's room from their shared bathroom and she quirks an eyebrow at her clearly disheveled stepsister. "You look terrible."
"Don't need this from you right now, sis." Amy tries her best sneer and attempts to breeze past Lauren.
"Here." Lauren holds out a handful of orange pills. "Figured you'd want - nay, need these after last night."
Amy takes them without a word as Lauren shrugs, apropos of nothing except maybe, Amy suspects, to shake off her unexpected kind action. A memory floats up in her consciousness of champagne and cake, of Lauren's reveal that she knew and sympathized with Amy's plight.
"Thanks." Amy manages, popping them into her mouth and chewing. She lets herself mean for last night and for the Advil, but doesn't mention it. When she finally meets Lauren's eyes and nods, she thinks Lauren might understand, then the girl pulls an exaggerated smirk.
"Gross, heathen. Don't chew them up like a bridgetroll, there's water in the kitchen." And with that she's back across the bathroom and into her own room, and Amy almost has to laugh.
She chances a look in the mirror. Raccoon eyes, bags, slumped shoulders. The chalky pills work their way down her throat as Amy considers her options. Stay home. Face the world. Crying in bed and hating herself.
Amy wants to push everything she feels deep down inside, somehow deeper than it was before, so far it can't affect anything. Can't affect her. She wishes more than anything she didn't know what it was like to almost physically feel a lifetime of friendship roll away.
She splashes herself with water and when she puts her face in the towel to dry, it almost feels something like comfort, and Amy lets a whimper bubble up in her throat that soon turns into a cry.
Not like the her eyes weren't already wet.