A/N: I'm off to a fairly inauspicious start with my first fic - I wrote this entire chapter last weekend but it mysteriously vanished the next day. I've just put it together again and I hope you enjoy it, even though it lacks the 'ooh, shiny!' factor the first version had. I've not written fiction in about a decade, so any criticism (the helpful kind) is welcome. If you're keen, I'm happy to give a 'Part 2' a shot :)
She had learned not to trust easily.
She hadn't always known. As a child her trust was free and unconditional - her parents and her brothers always welcome to it.
She was thirteen when her mother left her. It hadn't been her fault. She had just been in the way. Teresa had always trusted her mother to come back to her after work, but she remembers the day when a policeman with a face made of stone stood in the doorframe mouthing something she couldn't bring herself to understand at her father. She remembers how, at that moment, she felt like a Peanuts character (Lucy, surely?) staring at a faceless adult unable to comprehend the sounds (words, surely?) she heard.
She trusted her father too - she trusted him to be there for her and for her brothers, and that trust nearly cost each one of them their lives. He left his children for the love of a bottle of whiskey. She wondered if he'd ever loved their mother that much, because she couldn't remember ever having seen him defend her so fiercely.
Her brothers had her trust as well, but they were too young to know how to return it and she never faulted them their innocence.
It was one year and 108 bruises (on her alone) later that she finally managed to look at her grey face in the mirror and tell herself:
"I don't have to."
The next morning, Teresa dabbed the remnants of her mother's concealer around her eyes and flew out of the door. That evening, she worked her first shift at the café across the road from her school. She had no past experience but her eyes were earnest and the manager never regretted her decision.
A fortnight later, she found herself in the middle of a supermarket aisle with 45 dollars in tips in one pocket of her jeans and a paycheque in the other. She watched herself in stupefied wonder as her hands pulled out a bag of bagels, a jar of cream cheese and salad, staring for longer than was strictly necessary at the healthy amount of change the cashier deposited in her palm, marvelling at her new superpower.
Self-sufficiency.
She allowed herself an indulgence. A young girl wearing too much makeup helped her find her skin tone by matching colours to the inside of her wrist. She pressed a drugstore concealer wand into Teresa's hand, and made no comment on the yellow-purple welt peeking out from under her sleeve. Teresa pushed away the guilt that comes with a frivolous purchase replacing it with a justification: "it's a necessity."
Her father left her soon enough, but it didn't surprise her. She had expected no less. She waited for the sadness to hit her but it never did. Instead, she felt lighter. She felt... relieved. On the day of the wake, her dry emerald eyes met her brothers' unblinking jade and shared a message none of them ever articulated.
"We're free."
A decade later, a mess of blond curls, a crumpled shirt and unfocussed eyes falls into her life.
She knows his story. She knows he's had everything taken away from him in the worst way imaginable. Yet here he is, standing before her, clinging to the reality of his own existence, and staring at her like she might be his salvation.
She wishes there was something she could give back to him - something that would assure him of the worth of his own life - but she finds nothing around her.
So she gives him her trust.
All of it.
It's all she has.