AN: It's been five years, and I see not much has changed on FF . net! It's comforting, actually.
For new ones who don't know me, as this is my first AHS fanfic, let me introduce myself.
My name is Marie, I'm technically a published author but I've come back to my roots with some fresh new ideas that I'd prefer be seen by an audience such as this. I'm a cartoonist and my ultimate goal in life is to make a living selling my comics, which are lighthearted and comedic and definitely more of my comfort zone. You can check those out on my website .com.
This fanfic I'm doing under AHS hits very close to home for me, as I was a JW and dealt with horrible mental abuse, nightmares, and suicide attempts while in the religion. As an avid lover of the AHS series, I figured what would be more horrifying than something absolutely real? The real horror of the mind and the sickening way family are taught to treat each other? The conditional love, the scary fake smiles of a congregation trying to get you to join them, the nightmares of being eaten alive by birds and the horror stories of the end times told on stage by a pudgy old man with a dictator complex?
I don't know who will read this or enjoy it but I do plan on posting more even if it doesn't gain a following as I feel its a story that has to be told regardless. Picking from pieces of my own life and the true stories of others, I present to you,
Some trigger warnings for this chapter:
Mentions of Suicide
Some Domestic abuse
AHS
WATCHTOWER
No matter what we do, we never can earn it.
This gift is but a gift, the miracle of life.
She didn't want to do this.
She was only twenty four, she had her entire existence ahead of her.
She was still just a baby, just a young woman looking at her bruised eye in the mirror, streams of black running down her cheeks, the echos of screaming piercing her ears as her parents battled in the bedroom beside her own, not knowing what to do with her.
She caused this fight. It was her fault.
Had she just shunned her selfish impulses, she would have saved her family from this strain.
But now, she is the one to be shunned for the pain she had brought upon God, the shame she has wrecked upon her parents.
Especially her father, an elder in the kingdom hall. The highest rank an individual man can obtain in a single congregation, just steps below a member of the governing body themselves.
This was a rank he held very dear, and now it was threatened because of what his daughter Miranda had done to their family.
She pulled out a silver sword, the bible of Jehovah's Witnesses. A dull grey bible modified for their religion to shine the truth of God's light upon the hungry sheep. A light that is ever changing, growing, shifting, all due to God's spirit.
Miranda ran her finger over the imprinting of her name on the front cover, a modification many witnesses make to mark their bibles as their own. It ads a touch of personalization to the conformist standards they are held to. This little piece of printing is hers and only hers.
There were a few pink tabs hanging from the side of the bible, marking pages that the elders told her to read over when they met with her earlier that night. All of them pertaining to homosexuality and selfish, fleshly desires.
This was shortly before they decided to punish her for what she had done.
"Sister Stevenson, due to this being the third time you have been caught participating in homosexual activity, we have decided that it would be best to disfellowship you from the congregation."
A shaky voice coming forward from the silence, she gasped, "y-you can't do this. Please, I can change!"
"You can, but you haven't. So, you need discipline."
The ride home was no better.
After informing her parents of the verdict, the silence began immediately. Her mother gave her a short hug, out of eyesight of the elders. Her father kept a straight face, and walked towards the car, not so much as acknowledging her existence.
The fighting began once they reached home. Miranda went into her room, and locked the door, knowing her family couldn't come and talk to her anyways unless it was to tell her she had to leave.
Her mother insisted on allowing her to stay. Her father refused, knowing his reputation would be tarnished even further if he were to give the illusion that a happy family life were still ongoing, despite there never being one to begin with.
Miranda had nowhere to go. Her only friends were in the religion, and all were now due to shun her the same way as her family was expected to. Her family, again, all witnesses.
She was homeschooled, and the girl she was having a relationship with was a witness in a neighboring congregation, escaping punishment because she had not been baptized into the religion as Miranda had.
And so, Miranda decided she would commit one last sin on this earth.
A quick and tearful trip to the bathroom across the hall, and there within the medicine cabinet laid her release.
As a sufferer of back pain, her father always had a bottle of Oxycontin hanging around somewhere. It was pretty much the only drug in the household besides the bottle of asprin next to it and a box of allergy pills behind it.
Miranda took the bottle and emptied the pills into her hand, placing a crinkled up letter in their place, and putting the bottle back in the cabinet for her father to find.
She went back into her room and locked the door again. The fighting had quieted down, but the tension and anxiety still hung around the small home like a thick fog, leaking into every crevice and making the suicidal girl short of breath before even taking the first pill.
She took them, one by one, with no water, and as quickly as she could. They burned her throat and she began to cough, but she was intent on finishing the job.
The entire bottles worth gone, she sat and waited for the effects to take over. She walked over to her mirror, took a highlighter from her book bag, and wrote one last message to her family.
"I will never be enough for Jehovah."
She went back to her bed and laid down, taking a deep breath as the high came over her with the strength of a bull, forcing her deeper into her bed and nonchalantly wiping her tears away.
She lifted a hand to the ceiling, as if reaching out for the God that she had tried so hard to please, wondering why he'd create her with such horrible impulses, why he would torture her and give her a heart that she wasn't allowed to love with.
She knew in that moment that to wake up in the paradise of a God so cruel he would torment his own creation for loving someone who wasn't the right gender, that would be a greater punishment than to simply fall asleep and never, ever wake up.
Her eyes closed, and her breath ceased.
Betty woke up with a cold chill, a nightmare had rushed through her mind just seconds before, and she felt the need to go and see her daughter.
Her husband was asleep, surely he wouldn't know if she were to just get up and bring her a cup of tea.
She walked to the kitchen, right past the room of her daughter, a painful sight to see even without knowledge of her current state. Betty grabbed her daughters favorite pink mug and poured some water from the sink into it before plopping it in the microwave and stopping it just before the beep. She let a bag of mint tea sit and simmer, the aroma masking the scent of dread in the air for just a moment.
She couldn't help but feel like something was wrong, but she had to force back her motherly instincts in order for the glory of Jehovah to shine through.
She knocked gently on her daughters door, noting that the light was still on.
She looked once to her own bedroom, making sure her husband had not awaken from the sound.
Knocking twice more, she gently spoke her daughters name, "Miranda, I've brought you some tea."
She anxiously looked back at her bedroom again before trying to open the door to her daughters room, the sense of dread drifting up her back and around her neck like a python ready to eat her alive. Her heart raced, she put the tea down on the ground and knocked yet again, this time much louder as her body began to shake with fear.
"Miranda? Miranda, are you okay?"
She pulled and pried at the door, increasing her knocking, now slamming at the door as tears began to well up in her eyes.
Not hearing so much as a whisper, a peep, a sigh, the shuffling of paper, the scuffling of her slippers against the carpet. Anyone would expect the worst. But Betty just knew.
Harold eventually waltzed down the hall, his tired eyes looking more angry than worried.
"What are you doing?"
"She's not opening the door!"
"Leave her be."
"She's not answering me and she's not opening the door!"
Harold rolled his eyes and shoved his wife to the side, causing her to spill the tea on the floor, as he banged his fist against the wooden door, "Miranda, open up."
Betty ran to the kitchen and grabbed a knife from the drawer.
Harold continued banging on the door, beginning to become concerned himself.
Betty came back and tried to pry the lock on the handle with the knife, her shaky fingers barely catching a grip.
Harold grabbed the knife from her forcefully, slitting her thumb at an angle, though she couldn't care less about such a minor injury.
The click of the lock sounded and Betty ran past her husband, right to her daughter as she patted her face and begged her to awaken.
"Please, please babygirl, please wake up!"
She panicked, "Harold she's not breathing!"
Harold didn't know what to do. For once in his life, though for just a split second, he didn't know what to do.
He glanced quickly at the mirror as he began to run for a phone to call for help, the message causing him to stop in his tracks, and look back at his dead daughter in disdain.
"She didn't want eternal life, Betty. It would do you no good to pity her."
He sauntered over to the bedroom to pull out his cellphone and dial 911, leaving his wife to grieve the death of her baby alone. Even in death, the shunning couldn't end. He had no desire to show love for a woman who willingly gave up the truth for what he viewed as a few years of an alternative and disgusting lifestyle, even if that woman was his own daughter.
He viewed his wife as spiritually weak. She would always ask him if it was really fair to ask that Miranda try and be straight, or to be celibate. She understood the feelings that her daughter was struggling with, and she only wanted her daughter to be happy, no matter what happened.
But she failed.