A/N: Second Liley. Better than the first, I hope. That would be the direction I hope to go, lol. I wrote this in celebration of the overturning of Prop 8 in California yesterday. I hope you enjoy it. Please read and review. All criticism is welcome. Thank you!
Disclaimer: There are many, many things in the world that I do not own. Hannah Montana is one of them. No claim of ownership of the Hannah Montana franchise or association with said franchise is intended, nor is any infringement upon said franchise intended.
A Promise
Miley had made a promise. It did not matter to her that she had only made the promise to herself; it was still a promise, and she intended to follow through with it, no matter how scared she was, no matter how little she had believed that the day would come when she would have to keep that promise.
The conditions of her promise to herself had hinged on an unforeseeable future event, but on August 4, 2010, that future had finally come. A federal judge had declared that Miley's promise had come due.
Miley had promised herself that should the day come when she had the freedom to marry as she chose, she would tell the object of her affections how she truly felt. Now that the Honorable Judge Vaughn Walker had declared that freedom to be constitutionally inviolable, she was honor-bound by her word to herself that she would tell Lilly Truscott that she was in love with her.
Of course, this new freedom, as new freedoms so often do, brought with it fear. Miley had always been afraid to tell Lilly how she felt. And why shouldn't she be afraid? Her friendship with Lilly was the most precious, sacred, and necessary thing in her life; she couldn't imagine life without Lilly in it. The prospect of fundamentally altering the friendship that was her central source of emotional support was terrifying.
But a promise was a promise.
Miley stared at the text message on her phone. She had signed up to be alerted when the court's decision was released, and now she gazed at the phone's screen as if staring into a crystal ball revealing her very fate. But the message on the screen only set her on the path of fate; it revealed nothing of what was down that path.
Of course, waiting for the text alert all day had frazzled Miley's nerves, which wasn't lost on Lilly.
"You've been acting like you're sitting on pins and needles all day long, Miley," Lilly said as she got ready for work. "What is with you today?"
"Nothing's wrong," said Miley, wearing a smile that was much too big to be genuine. "Everything's fine."
"You're a terrible liar, Miley," said Lilly. "I have to go to work, so if you decide to tell me what's wrong, you're just going to have to wait until I get back."
"Nothing's wrong," insisted Miley.
"Whatever," Lilly said as she walked out the door.
About two hours after Lilly had left for the pier, the text alert had come in. Lilly wouldn't be home for another four hours, so Miley had plenty of time to prepare. And plenty of time to worry.
Miley paced back and forth across the barn-turned-bedroom that she shared with Lilly, mulling over all the possible—and some of the impossible—outcomes of what she intended to tell Lilly. After the first hour and a half of pacing, her Dad knocked on the door.
"You all right, Bud?" he asked. "It's a beautiful summer day and you're all holed up in here like you're allergic to sunlight. And it looks like you're gonna wear a trail down the middle of the room, as much pacing as you're doing. What in the heck is the matter?"
"Nothing, Daddy," Miley sighed.
"Fine," he replied, "nothing's the matter. You mind telling me what kind of nothing it is that's got you wound up so tight?"
Miley sighed. "A long time ago, I made a promise to myself, and now I have to follow through with it."
"And you've got to do something you don't want to do?" Robby Ray prodded.
"It's not that I don't want to," said Miley. "I'm just afraid."
"Afraid of what?"
In response to that question, Miley burst suddenly into tears.
"Oh, Lord, what did I say now?" Robby Ray wondered aloud. He sat down beside Miley where she had crumpled to the floor and put his arm around her shoulders. "Come on, Bud, you'll feel better if you get it out."
After a few minutes, Miley was able to pull herself together enough to speak in a very small, wavering voice. "Daddy," she said, "I'm in love with Lilly, and I have to tell her. And I'm scared."
Robby Ray looked at Miley incredulously. "What in the world are you scared of, Mile?" he asked.
"What am I scared of?" Miley erupted. "What if she hates me? What if she doesn't feel the same way? What if it changes our friendship so that things are never the same again?"
"Are you sure we're talking about the same Lilly, darlin'?"
"What do you mean?"
"Now, Mile, how many times have I told you, just tell Lilly the truth? I guarantee you that if you're just honest with her, everything will turn out fine. Now c'mon, I'm about to make sundaes in the kitchen."
Miley smiled and followed Robby Ray into the main house.
Miley decided that she needed to prepare for the inevitable moment that her will would collapse and she would find some way to reason herself out of talking to Lilly. She knew it will happen, because it had happened before.
The plan had gone flawlessly. Miley had walked to the gas station down the street and bought that stupid tabloid, then walked over to the Truscott house, slipping the tabloid through the mail slot on the door, knowing that her favorite ball of energy would be the first person in the house awake enough to notice the magazine sitting there on the floor, and the only person in the house easily enough distracted by bright colors to give it a second look.
Now they lounged at Rico's. Well, Lilly was lounging; Miley was pacing, as she always does when Lilly stops running a mile a minute and sits back to relax. Miley loved Lilly's relaxed side as much as she loved her energetic side, but sometimes Lilly would forget that Miley had a really hard time relaxing in public. In fact, she seemed utterly incapable of it. At home, Miley could lounge around on the couch all night, but in public she was always at least halfway into Hannah mode, and Halfway Hannah was no fun at all.
Still, Lilly would try and keep Miley's anxiety low by reading her stupid things out of the tabloid. Oh, and here was one that Lilly couldn't resist reading, before Miley got too far into her diatribe against cheap tabloids.
"They're all lies!" Miley was saying.
"Oh really," replied Lilly. "'Hannah Montana looks great,'" she read.
"With a little bit of truth sprinkled in there," Miley conceded.
Lilly continued to read. "'. . . too bad she's really a guy!'" Lilly exclaimed sensationally.
"What?" Miley shrieked, grabbing the grainy periodical from Lilly's hands.
"I can't believe you never told me!" Lilly gasped. "You've slept over at my house." Lilly gasped even more dramatically than before. "You've borrowed my bras!"
Miley decided it was time to move the discussion forward. She raised the magazine so that Lilly could see the picture in it. "Hey," she said, "I look good in a mustache."
Miley's heart fluttered a little bit when Lilly nodded her head, her lips pushed forward in an appreciating grin.
"I would totally date me," Miley said, nodding her head in unison with Lilly, something the girls did far more often than either ever realized.
"Yeah, me, too," said Lilly.
The girls turned to look at each other. Miley thought for a moment she saw a glint in Lilly's eye, like the sun shining through a wall that just cracked before her eyes. But it passed, and a veil passed back over Lilly's eyes. The script for this conversation was already written; Miley would not tell Lilly today. Instead, they sing-songily intoned, "Awkward!" in unison, and rapidly changed the subject to stupid boys.
So Miley knew she needed a failsafe in case she chickened out. She needed to make herself force the topic. The court decision will be all over the news, Miley considered. I'll have it on a news show when she gets here. That'll get things rolling.
Lilly knew something was up when she walked in the door. As it turned out, it was the purple antennae that were up, above her head. She had forgotten to take them off before she left work, and now they were knocking against the top of the doorframe as Lilly catapulted through the door, seemingly in midair. Even without a skateboard, she could make an impressive entrance; she was quite adept at freestyle walking as well.
One of the tricks to walking through a door is, of course, to know where one's head ends. Lacking such knowledge, Lilly, used to being nearly a foot shorter without the antennae, jumped through the doorway as part of her After Work Dance, and in doing so, struck the antennae against the top of the doorframe, pushing one antenna forward and one antenna backwards, so that now Lilly had antennae that pointed backwards and forwards instead of straight up.
Lilly removed the antennae and held them up, crinkling her nose at them before tossing them into a nearby trash can, or maybe a pile of stuff or a coat rack, Lilly wasn't really paying that much attention to where she tossed them, truth be told.
What suddenly did draw her attention was the tense girl sitting on the sectional sofa watching a news show in a posture that seemed more appropriate for a Die Hard movie than for the evening news. And since when did Miley watch the news?
"What's up, Miley?" Lilly asked. "Did something bad happen? You never watch the news."
"No, nothing bad," Miley said nervously. I can't do this I can't do this Miley's inner doubts screamed.
You are doing this said the cool, confident voice of Hannah Montana. Hannah was the voice of Miley's confidence, and she needed it. So she let her thoughts come in Hannah's voice, beautiful but powerful, low but sweet, grainy but unblemished. It probably would not have surprised Miley one bit if she were to notice that the way Hannah Montana sounded in her mind was a little bit like her Aunt Dolly and a lot like her Mom.
"Then what's so interesting?" Lilly asked, sitting down next to Miley, who motioned to the screen.
"Gay marriage is legal again," said Miley.
"Cool," said Lilly.
Miley had planned to beat around the bush for a good while. She had actually written out bullet points of things to talk about to lead up to her ultimate confession. But Lilly's nonchalant 'Cool' spurred her forward. Suddenly she was tired of pushing back and stalling, hiding her feelings, holding back tears until Lilly was at work, just so Lilly wouldn't ask her what was wrong. No more, the Hannah voice said. You're doing this.
"Lilly," Miley said, trying to look at her best friend but succeeding only in looking at her shoes. "I made a promise, a long time ago, when they first voted Prop 8 into place. I promised myself that if gay marriage were ever legal again, I would do something."
Miley stopped. She seemed unable to continue, and Lilly was worried. "What did you promise you would do, Miley?" she asked softly.
Lilly's voice seemed to give Miley even more resolve than Hannah's voice did. Miley looked up from her shoes and directly into Lilly's eyes.
"I promised myself that I would tell you that I'm in love with you."
Lilly's eyes went wide. If Miley hadn't known Lilly well, she might have thought Lilly's expression was one of dismayed surprise. But Miley knew Lilly's eyes, and she could see that there was certainly surprise, but no dismay. There was even, Miley thought, a glint of the sun peering over the horizon at dawn, in an open field where there are no brick walls, cracked or otherwise.
"Okay, Miley," Lilly said, a wry grin on her face, "I've got to know, is this what you've been all worked up about today?"
Miley nodded, and Lilly laughed. "What's so funny?" Miley demanded.
"That you were worried about telling me that," said Lilly. "I've been flirting with you for years and hardly got any response! And you were in love with me all along!"
"What do you mean you got no response?" said Miley. "I flirted with you, too!"
"You did weird things that might have been flirting, yes," said Lilly. "Like that whole stage play you put on with the tabloid that said you were a man. That wasn't flirting, Miley; that was just weird."
"Maybe I felt like I had to be indirect," Miley retorted.
"And that's why you kept having screwed up dreams about me and your brother," said Lilly. Both girls gagged involuntarily at the thought.
"But really, you want to be together?" Miley said, returning to the main subject.
"Of course I do, Miley," Lilly said sincerely before switching to a more jovial tone. "I mean, I think I'm pretty much stuck with the Stewarts, and you are the normal child."
Miley adopted her own joking tone. "So you're not just picking me because Jackson is taken now?" she said.
Lilly and Miley laughed together, inching their bodies closer until they sat with their arms around each others' waists. Miley switched off the television.
"The news is history now," she said turning her gaze to Lilly's blue eyes. "And our future is starting right now."
"Our future started a long time ago," said Lilly, inching closer to Miley. "We just didn't know it yet."
In unison, the girls brought their faces closer until their lips touched, and there they held them for what seemed an eternal bliss, but what was really only a few seconds. Their second kiss came after Miley and Lilly had sucked in a single breath of air. This kiss lasted much longer and was much more intense.
Miley pulled away from Lilly's mouth and rested her forehead on Lilly's. "I love you, Lilly," she whispered.
"I love you, too," Lilly said. "So, besides sucking my lips off, what do you want to do tonight?"
Miley looked thoughtful for a moment, then said, "There are still two sundaes in the freezer!"
Lilly was up like a shot, and Miley after her, and their laughter filled the room.