a/n Hello! :) I came home from holiday and watched the first episode of the new series and then this happened...
Title: Whispers
Characters/Paring: Sasha
Rating/Warnings: T/Swearing
Summary: Her heart, so hard-fought to protect, cannot be protected from the unexpected, so it falls to the ground and she watches as it turns from a whole, to a spider web of beautiful, painful cracks, to a million tiny pieces all screaming out because she gave him her heart, aged fifteen, and this was how he treated her - a character study of Sasha in five parts (oneshot)
...
i
1986 – London,
It's a Friday she first sees him. He strolls into the school like he owns it, and she is one of many whose gaze is drawn to him. He's older than her (but only by two years) and there are hundreds of kids crammed into the school playground, with roughly half of them being girls just like her, and yet it's her that he looks at. Her whose gaze he meets, all the way from the other side of the tarmacked rectangle.
(later, when he's broken her heart into a thousand tiny pieces, she thinks about that moment a lot. Nine times out of ten, she just wishes he looked at someone else.)
It's her he decides to come over to. To ask the way to the reception. She's flattered by the attention – because no boy has ever paid her this much attention for years. They all think she too cold. (she'd be deaf if she didn't heart she mutters of 'ice queen' and 'bitch' that follow her around the corridors. It doesn't hurt anymore.) He asks her name.
Sasha, she answers.
Ned, he replies.
Then he walks away, sauntering over to the reception that she just pointed out to him. When he's gone, a flock of excited girls surround her, asking her question after question about the fit guy who just talked to her, just like teenage girls do. There are some who stand on the edge of this clamouring circle and she can tell they're jealous that he picked her, all surly frowns and dark eyes. She knows that the whispers will be louder tomorrow.
But at that moment she doesn't care. He singled her out, he picked her. She feels wanted for the first time in a long time, because everyone's always so busy, and it feels good. She smiles and she's still smiling when she gets home and her sister tells her to stop with that damn grinning because she looks demented and even that can't dent her mood because she's used to her pain of a sister.
She never believed in something as fanciful as love at first sight, and yet that's what happens the first time she lays eyes on Ned Hancock. She falls, falls hard and she can never get up again. (no matter how hard she tries)
At fifteen years old, Sasha Miller falls in love.
ii
1991 – Norfolk,
It rains on their wedding day. The forecast is for sunshine, beautiful weather to make a beautiful day, but they get it wrong. It doesn't ruin the day because it doesn't really matter about the weather outside – it matters what's going on inside and how they are making vows to love each other until death parts them.
That's all she cares about – that she is marrying the man she loves more than the world (and so much it scares her). Everyone's smiling and even her pain of a sister is smiling with what seems to be genuine happiness (even though, to Sasha, Emily hasn't smiled like that since she was sixteen and got her heart broken by that two-timing postman) at seeing her younger sister tie the knot.
People still whisper, just like they always did – the whispers have just evolved. The old names are still there ('ice queen' and 'bitch' and 'cold' and 'heartless' or any combination of the four) but it's more than names now. They whisper about how she's so young (just twenty) and how any sane person would wait. (unless of course she's pregnant. Is she's pregnant?) She's not ready to be a mother and Ned isn't ready to be a father and the whispers are just speculation. They critique her decisions and pull apart everything she does. Nothing is ever said to her face, they're far too prim and proper.
She just ignores them.
Ned's father is there, dressed in his military best. She smiles at him and accepts his offer of a dance at the reception – after, of course, hers and Ned's first dance – because she can never repay the debt, even though she tries, that he has given her by being the reason that Ned ever entered her world in the first place. Ned Senior left the forces, the family moved to London, and she lost her heart.
(later, this debt will turn bitter, because she will wish that she never lost her heart at all)
She can never show just how grateful she is to her new father-in-law and anyway, no one really understands why. Ned maintains it was fate that brought them together, not his father. Her sister just says it happened, get over it. (Sasha blames the postman for that cynical response) Her mother doesn't say much at all. She just cries because she's losing her daughter to someone else and she'll never be the same after that.
(Sasha never quite understood, not until she had children of her own, why her mother cried at the wedding. Not until she cries the day she waves her daughter away to University)
She dances with her father-in-law and somehow, she thinks he is the only one to understand and that's okay with Sasha. Because he's the only one who needs to know. She's good with that.
Ned takes her hand and they dance again, just enjoying the moment. She feels at peace with the world. Everything feels perfect. She's happier that she's ever felt in her entire life. Her life is just right.
(pity it's just a beautiful illusion that is destined to fall apart)
iii
1993&1995 – London,
It's a girl.
Her first child.
It's a girl.
A beautiful, beautiful little girl.
(and once again, her heart is stolen right out of her chest)
She's scared. Her heart feels like glass in her chest. Easily breakable now because there are so many people who hold it. Not only does she have Ned but now there is her daughter. Her precious little daughter who could easily shatter Sasha's heart, pouring it full of holes like a thousand tiny spider webs of cracks.
(that's the problem with giving your heart up. There's always that chance that, in other people's hands, it could get broken)
...
It's the same the next time. Her heart gets passed to another person and Sasha worries that one of them is going to drop it. She's knows, in deep inside, that none of them will – she has faith in all three of them – but she still worries all the same. She's not sure why she feels so insecure because she's never had her heart broken (not like Emily and the postman and Ned and his mum dying) and she has a strong, happy marriage and job that she enjoys and thrives in.
Maybe it's because of the names. She hasn't quite shrugged them off yet. It pays, though, in her job (a woman in a man's world and all that crap) and yet she just wants to be accepted. Sometimes she feels like that little schoolgirl, walking the corridors, listening to the muffled insults.
Maybe if they names stop, she'll stop worrying about getting her heartbroken. About something bad happening.
iv
1999 – Newcastle,
She proves herself, one autumn evening, when the leaves are falling like orange snow and the dusky evening is lit up by the sound of pounding footsteps.
He's in front of her, more than an arm's reach away and she can't see his face clearly from this distance. All her colleagues have fallen away, drained by the long chase, slinking away to their cars to catch him that way, but Sasha hasn't stopped, can't stop. She has to catch him, because then they'll finally understand that she's just as good as them. That she's better than them, really, not that they'd admit it.
The man stumbles over a tree root and crashes into some bins and flies round the next corner blind and out of control. It gives her the edge to close some of the distance. Her legs pump, carrying her along, moving fast, the thrill of the chase burning in her veins. She was born to do this – and everyone will finally understand. And the whispers will stop. The whispers that she's not good enough, that she only got the job because of her husband. Then there are the old favourites, still haunting her even now.
She's spent three months of her life on this, three months culminating in this moment, in a city she doesn't know at all, with people who mostly are vague strangers. Just so she can show them that she's just as good as them. They have to understand.
Because the when the whispers stop, her heart will be safe and she can stop worrying.
The man tackles the next corner with reckless abandon, his feet skidding on the concrete, hoping that he can shake her off – but she'll have nothing if she loses him, so she matches him, footstep to footstep, as she comes to the corner herself, hoping that she won't fall and make a fool out of herself.
He glances behind him, and mutters something under his breath. She can see him clearly now, make out the words staining his lips.
Bloody Bitch.
(it's the wrong thing to say)
Anger over takes her and the gap falls away in instants. She smashes into the back of him and they go down together onto the rough ground. The man moans pitifully from underneath her as the anger starts to flood away. She pulls her cuffs out of her pocket and snaps them around his wrists, muttering the man his rights, just as the police cars screech round the corner.
She leads the man to one of them and pushes him inside. Her colleagues slap her one the back and congratulate her and she finally feels like one of them. They smile at her and the guardedness that was once there is gone now. She's done it.
The whispers stop.
(it doesn't save her heart)
v
2013 – Birmingham
She should see it coming. But she doesn't and it hurts so much more like that.
After twenty eight years, aren't you supposed to know a person? Know how they behaved, and why, and know the things they'd never do. If you'd asked her last week, or last month, or last year – or even the day before – she would have said that her husband would have never betrayed her like he has.
And she would have said that because she thought she knew him. Yet the man she thought she knew, the man she'd married when she was twenty years old, the man who was the father of her children, would not have thrown her away like he had.
(but that man - the very man who, when a boy, had marched up to her in the school playground and asked her where the reception was, his eyes dancing in the late summer breeze – chose to bed another woman knowing she would wait patiently at home for him, unsuspecting. Knowing that she trusted him and that she loved him)
Her heart, so hard-fought to protect, cannot be protected from the unexpected, so it falls to the ground and she watches as it turns from a whole, to a spider web of beautiful, painful cracks, to a million tiny pieces all screaming out because she gave him her heart, aged fifteen, and this was how he treated her second most prized possession (second, of course, to her children).
She's surprised she can find her voice, surprised that even though she feels completely numb, words form on her tongue and spill out. The numbness hides the anger that is rising up at her, saving it for another day, another time, so now, all she looks like is the broken, defeated woman she really is now she hasn't got her blind fury to hide behind.
She turns and leaves, and then the numbness finally makes way for something else that is no better and no worse. Emptiness.
(that's the risk when you give your heart away. You might not ever get it back)
She falls to the floor, all the fight that she was once so known for, failing her. She cries because the emptiness hurts, hurts like hell, because a man stole her heart and made it disappear.
She doesn't cry for long because the emptiness is eclipsed by an ache so big for what was past and gone and done that she knows she has to get away, to run run run before Ned can catch her. Because she knows that if she lets him, if she looks into his eyes right now, she'll only see the boy he was, the man she married and the father of her children. Not that man in that bed. And she doesn't want that because she loves that man and she would take him back in a heartbeat (ironic, she knows) but now, she's not sure if that man ever existed.
Maybe it was all lies. Maybe her life is a lie.
The lift doesn't come quick enough so she takes the stairs. Her feet pound on the steps and her mind goes blank because her feet hurt, and she can't breathe and her head feels like it's going to explode.
The street welcomes her with open arms and judging eyes. Everyone looks at her, gasping on the pavement, tear tracks marking her face like scars, but for once in her life, she doesn't care about the whispers, or the looks. They don't matter anymore.
Nothing matters anymore.
She steadies up, her whole body finally stopping shaking. She behind her, waiting for Ned to appear, but he doesn't. She starts crying again. Where is the man she knew? He's not coming, he's never coming.
(HE DOESN'T EXISIT)
She stands stock still in the street, her tears trickling down her face like a broken waterfall. She comes to a realisation and the tears stop for the second time. He's not worth it.
She thinks about her children, away at Uni, and their precious little faces and she realises that things will be okay. Ned wasn't her whole world. A main part of it, yes, but not all of it. There is light at the end of this, bleak, bleak tunnel. She leans against the cool brick and breathes deeply. She will be okay. Maybe not now, maybe not tomorrow, but she will be.
Because she's Sasha Miller.
(they didn't whisper about her for nothing)
...