A/N: In the midst of working on some rewrites for this story. The new prologue was posted March 2015.
If you are opening this for the first time, this story is entirely AU. I have been working on it little by little for two years now, and it is my baby. Please understand that updates may take longer because I'm trying to do my very best work. That is also why I am rewriting the first few chapters, because looking back on them, they are significantly weak in comparison to later ones.
Please enjoy. If you review, I promise you'll make my entire day.
SWEET CHILD OF MINE
PROLOGUE
Everything he thought he knew had ceased to make sense, as if the world had done an unceremonious somersault without his knowing.
If he hadn't run into her on Friday, everything would still be normal.
But that was just it. Now that he had gotten a taste of what it meant to truly feel alive – battered-heart-exposed-nerves-feverish-withdrawal-alive – the old normal suddenly seemed so primitive in comparison. Like he had gone his entire life with feet planted firmly on the ground, toeing the line and avoiding any situation that had the potential to make him question the values he had always lived by. Like he had taken sanctuary inside a protective fog years ago, and only recently had begun to see clearly through the dissipating tendrils of smoke.
He had always hated change. Maybe it was because his parents were rotten at helping him navigate the major milestones of his childhood. Maybe it was because keeping things predictable was just easier. Maybe it was both. Either way, the gut-wrenching, terrifying prospect of endeavoring the unknown had kept him sheltered for far too long, providing an impenetrable shield by which to guard what little confidence he held in his heart.
And despite the fact that he had been riding the same roller coaster of highs and lows all week, doomed to relive the loop, he had never felt so on top of the world for as long as he could remember.
So close to Heaven he could kiss the stars.
She had given him that. The confidence to break through his own walls and grab the bull by the horns. To come to terms with the fact that the way he had been living was not really living at all – it was surviving. It was doing the bare minimum to ensure that he made it through each day alive. Not make the most of the opportunities that lay out before him.
It had been the worst week of his life. It had poked and prodded at his psyche like nothing he had ever experienced before, peeling away layers of his skin until he felt the keen sting of everything hanging heavy in the air around him.
But it had also been the best. Because she had shown him something he never thought possible. Had allowed him to glimpse the person he had always wanted to be but was afraid to aspire to. Had challenged him in a way that he had never experienced, and had brought pieces of him to life that he had just always assumed were better off dead.
She made him feel whole. Bruised heart, tattered dignity, and all. It all pieced together to form something that transcended the pain – that made all the effort worth expending.
A reason to live. Not just survive.