Title: Margarita

Character: Amelia Shepherd

AU (but it's my headcanon!)

It had started off small. Actually, no, that was a lie. It had started off huge, bottles of vodka shared with friends on her thirteenth birthday, sprawled out across the roundabout in the park on the end of the street, out-of-control giggling as the sky spun above them even though the roundabout wasn't moving. She'd missed her birthday meal; the candles on her cake had burned right down, singeing the icing. When she'd eventually fallen through the door, hours late and far from sober, Nancy had shaken her head and called her a selfish bitch. Kate and Lizzie had accused her of wilfully pushing the self-destruct button on a perfectly good life. Derek had looked at her sadly, told her she needed to grow up. Her mom hadn't said a thing.

She had no interest in growing up, never had done. Not since her dad had died, anyway; gunshots in the shop and pennies dropped between the floorboards. Since that day, all she'd wanted was to go back: to feel his hand on her shoulder, to hear him calling her to come and see his latest project. He'd put things back together – watches, jewellery. She'd always been better at breaking them apart.

Meth, crack, mushrooms, a margarita on the side – they didn't call her Hurricane Amelia for nothing. She might be a fuck-up, but she didn't do things by halves. She never injected – "good veins, for a junkie," Derek had once remarked sardonically, casting an eye over her bare arms. She'd scowled, wished he'd get off her case.

She'd spent her sixteenth birthday in hospital. She still didn't know how she'd got there, but that scared her, so she tried not to dwell on it.

And now… Now she was seventeen, and it was all getting old. Or maybe she was the one getting old. Everyone was growing up, moving on – it turned out that drinking alone wasn't half as much fun. Waking up hungover was a lot less fun when you were alone in the bed… Or the gutter, as the case may be. There were more days she couldn't remember than days she could, and she liked it that way. She'd been obsessed with time travel when she was about nine, til Lizzie had told her that 'Back to the Future' was just a reflection of society's destructive impulses and her love for it was simply a desire for wish fulfilment. That was the trouble with sharing the house with an amateur psychologist: she thought she knew everything, and more often than not, she was right. Anyway, Amelia couldn't go back, and she didn't want to go forward, so she'd compromised; turned most of her tomorrows into barely-there fuzzy recollections of last night's parties and a pounding headache that only drugs stronger than the aspirin in the medicine cabinet could shift.

But this morning she'd looked in the mirror, really looked, and it sounded soppy but she hadn't recognised herself, and the steel in her grey-blue eyes had scared her. And when she'd washed the smudged mascara from her face and gone downstairs, her mom hadn't left her a sandwich on the sideboard for the first time in forever, like she already knew Amelia would be too hungover to eat it, and it was hard to swallow the lump in her throat. She didn't even like fucking sandwiches, never had done, but she couldn't stand the thought of her mom giving up on her.

She'd skipped school and gone to Lizzie's office (what an overachiever – she'd even managed to make Derek look bad). Lizzie had looked at her levelly over her mahogany desk (Amy hoped she didn't treat her real patients like this). "Of course she's given up on you. What reason have you ever given her to believe in you?"

"But she's my mom," Amelia had replied plaintively, pulling her sleeves down over her wrists and leaning forward on the couch. She hated how pathetic she sounded, but wasn't that a mother's job, to love her even when she was unlovable?

"You've done nothing but hurt her for four years." Lizzie had raised her eyebrows and sighed. "Amy…"

She jumped. Nobody had called her Amy for years. Nobody who wasn't trying to charm their way into her pants with nicknames and smooth talking, anyway.

Lizzie reached into her drawer, pulling out a bottle of wine and a glass. Amelia narrowed her eyes, watching her pour the velvet liquid into a glass. "You don't drink."

"Some of my clients do," Lizzie shrugged, rifling through a pile of assorted business cards on the edge of her desk. "This is a turning point, Amy. A fork in the road, if you will." She pushed the glass towards her. "You take the wine…" She pushed a business card across the desk. "Or I can refer you to the best addiction specialist in town."

Addiction. Nobody had ever called it that, before. "I'm not addicted."

"No?"

No. She just liked to party, have fun. A drop of alcohol put some extra sparkle in her eyes, the drugs made her blood fizz and the room light up. That was what teenagers did, wasn't it? A phase. And yet deep down, she knew nobody else's hands were shaking as they cut a line, nobody else chased their mouthwash with vodka, and she was surer of the fact that she needed it than she was of her own name.

There'd been no fucking sandwich, so she'd done two lines instead, because, what the hell, it was lunchtime and she was a teenager and the day ended in a y. Because she needed it.

"You're not allowed to do this." Amelia raised her eyebrows, crossed her arms. Defensive. "This isn't ethical."

"You're not my patient, you're just my little sister. Medical ethics are irrelevant."

Smartass. Maybe they were related after all.

Lizzie must have seen something in her eyes, because she got to her feet and walked around that damn desk to sit down next to her. "Amy," she'd said, and her voice was soft – soft by Lizzie's standards, so you had to really know her to notice – "you have a problem."

She'd closed her eyes momentarily, pushed her hair out of her face, noticed the flaking black varnish on her fingernails. "I am a problem," she'd muttered. Everybody knew it. She'd been the dream kid: the only thing bigger than her personality had been her aspirations. She'd lit up the room. And then he'd fired the shot that would break her, and here she was, seventeen and so far from her dreams that she could barely remember them.

"You're seventeen. This isn't your whole life," Lizzie had replied.

Amelia noticed she hadn't contradicted her. That was a thing they had in common: too honest, too blunt. No filter. She swallowed. "I'm scared," she admitted, meeting Lizzie's eye and feeling young, too young, and yet older than her years. She wanted the wine, the kick to her system and the pep, confidence boost, and later the oblivion. She wanted it so much she was scared, and the way her hands were shaking had nothing to do with withdrawal and everything to do with fear.

Lizzie had pulled her in (how long had it been since anyone had held her like that?) and wrapped her arms around her, holding her head against her shoulder. "I'll help you," she'd promised, blinking tears from her own eyes because, damn, four siblings and Amelia was the fearless one, the brave one, and the kid needed somebody in her corner. She'd always been the smartest; she could save the world one day, if only she could figure out how to save herself first. "Choose the card, Amy."

Finally she'd pulled away, sat upright, wiped her eyes with the sleeves of her unwashed jumper. "Okay," she whispered, then cleared her throat. "The card. I pick the card."

It had started off small. She picked the card, then she picked a time slot to meet with the specialist, a meeting to attend. She'd picked a sponsor, this respectable elderly man with salt-and-pepper hair who carried a cane and, bless him, carried sweets in the pockets of his tweed jacket. She'd chosen soft drinks instead of cocktails. And one day she'd woken up and felt alive – really alive, not the kind of alive that came from drugs in your system – and she didn't know where it had come from, but it was better than any margarita.