A/N: My friends are bastards who talk me into writing these things. After the Emaya fic I did (which I'm still being bribed to continue), another friend begged me to do an Emison fic. I swear my fam will be the death of me. I somewhat enjoy making my fics angsty to get back at the people I love for constantly nagging me to death with their prompts, so I apologize in advance if I make you feel feels.
In all seriousness though, my bastard friends are the reason I live and breathe. Nothing but love, guys.
Chapter 1:
Home Sweet Home
Being back in Rosewood after all these years was surreal. Emily had spent the past several years thousands of miles away trying to erase every bad memory she had of her old town. Horrible things had happened to her here. But she had emerged from it all stronger and braver than she ever could have imagined.
Rosewood had been the root of most of her nightmares, but it was also the source of many great things for her. Friendships had been forged, love had blossomed, and memories had been made. Her hometown was a part of her soul.
She felt guilty for not keeping in touch with her friends, but they were on their own journeys. She chatted with them on the phone on occasion. Hanna was traveling all over the world living her dream in the fashion industry. Spencer was bossing Congress around in D.C. And Aria had made a name for herself in the publishing industry.
Emily was happy for her friends' success, but she was struggling to keep her head above water, so she'd pulled away. The phone calls became less frequent, but she still managed to keep up with what they were doing. She'd even e-mailed Aria's old flame, and her old teacher, Ezra Fitz a few times. He'd gotten engaged to Emily's friend Nicole and they had been traveling the world with Habitat For Humanity. Emily had been e-mailing Nicole about wedding venues when Nicole went missing on one of her missions. Ezra had been devastated. She'd lost touch with Ezra after that.
Emily had no plans to return to Rosewood, but one day she got a letter that changed everything. When she saw the handwriting her heart started racing. Seeing the careful and meticulous writing took Emily back to the days in high school…to her first love.
Alison DiLaurentis.
Ali needed her, and as much as Emily didn't want to love her…she did. So she'd packed up her things and trekked across the country. She took in the sights of her old town. It was the same town she remembered. But things were different now. Emily was different. She was harboring a secret that none of her loved ones knew about. Her plan was to keep it that way. She wasn't going to be in town for very long. She'd just come to help Alison, and then she would go back to California.
She sat inside of the coffee shop where she used to work and marveled at how far she'd come over the years. An alarm startled her out of her trance. She glanced down at her phone. She still wasn't used to the medication regimen her doctor had her on. She pulled a bottle of pills out of her purse and looked around to make sure none of her friends were around. She took her pills and stashed the medication back in her purse. She sipped on an herbal tea and waited on her friends to arrive.
A pair of hands slipped over her eyes and she heard an unmistakable giggle.
"Guess who?"
Emily would recognize that voice anywhere. She jumped up and let out an excited squeal.
"Hanna!" She wrapped her arms around one of her best friends.
"Aw, Em, I've missed you!" Hanna hugged her back.
"Get a room!" They heard from behind them.
They turned around and saw Spencer walking towards them with Aria right behind her. They almost hadn't seen Aria because Spencer towered over her tiny petite frame. The girls raced to meet one another.
There was a lot of hugging and a lot of laughing before they finally settled down and caught up with one another. Emily let most of the other girls do the talking. She figured that the less talking she did, the less she would have to lie. She hated lying to them, but after everything they'd been through her friends deserved to be happy. She didn't want them to take on her pain.
"How are things going at The Salk Institute?" Spencer faced Emily.
The less you say the better. She warned herself in thought.
"It's good." She nodded.
"What do they do there?" Aria asked.
"Medical research." Emily was pretty certain she could fake her way through a conversation about medical research. She'd seen so many doctors in the past six months she practically had a PhD. "They do experimental treatments for various diseases."
"I hear the architecture is amazing." Spencer smiled. She looked giddy. "You'll have to give me a tour sometime."
Of course Spencer Hastings wants to see a bunch of random walls and doors. Emily couldn't help but smile. Time had passed, but some things never changed.
Spending all afternoon with her friends rejuvenated her. They talked until the sun went down. They would have talked longer, but they got kicked out of the coffee shop at closing time. They said their goodbyes and talked about grabbing breakfast in the morning before they went to the courthouse.
Emily breathed in the fresh evening air as she walked home. Coming back hadn't been as hard as she'd thought.
At least…not yet.
"Emily?"
The voice still made her heart race. She looked up and saw Alison walking towards her. She swallowed a knot in her throat. She hadn't been planning on seeing Ali until tomorrow…with the rest of the girls. They had planned on talking to her together. Ali wanted to plead a case for her sister, Charlotte, to be released from the mental institution she'd been in for the past five years. Charlotte DiLaurentis had been responsible for tormenting Emily and her friends their entire senior year of high school. She had kidnapped and tortured them. She had changed their lives forever.
"Hi, Ali." Emily stopped walking. She crossed her arms in front of her chest and rubbed her hands against her arms. It was a nervous tic she'd had since she was in middle school.
Ali embraced Emily in a hug. It was hard for Emily not to melt when Ali touched her. Everything about her brought back memories of when they were teenagers. Her gentle touch, the smell of her shampoo, her warm embrace.
"It's so good to see you." Ali pulled away. "I'm so glad that you came."
"We all came." Emily nodded. "We kinda had to. Court order and all."
Ali nodded, as if she had expected this reaction. Emily paused to consider how many people in Ali's life gave her a hard time for caring about a person who had done terrible things.
"Still, it means a lot to me that you're here. It's so good to see you." Ali smiled. "I've missed you. How are you doing? How's California? You're at The Salk Institute now, right?"
Emily opened her mouth to respond, but froze when she realized that she was getting ready to lie about pretty much everything in her life.
"I'm…definitely spending a lot of time doing medical research." It wasn't technically a lie, so she didn't feel so bad saying it.
"How's Paige? Are you two still a happy couple?" She said it with a bit of edge in her voice, though she'd tried to hide it. Emily found it strange that Ali felt uncomfortable with Paige, given the fact that Ali had been the one who picked on Paige in high school.
Her relationship with Paige wasn't something she had to lie about. Emily had dated her ex-girlfriend on and off for the first two years after she had left Rosewood, but they had grown apart and wanted different things. They'd stayed on friendly terms though.
"No. We're just friends."
Their split had actually worked out in Emily's favor, because when Emily's health issues started she knew exactly how Paige would have reacted. Paige would have done nothing but obsess and worry to the point of becoming neurotic. Emily already had one neurotic mother. She didn't need another. So she hadn't told Paige about any of what was going on with her.
"Just friends, huh?" There was a hopeful expression in her tone.
"Yeah." Emily kept her response short and sweet.
She saw a familiar truck across the road she recognized immediately. She glanced over at the driver and hoped he would recognize that she was trying to keep her distance from Alison. She was trying to sort out way too many of her feelings and it was starting to stress her out.
"Emily!" Her savoir in the truck made a U-turn and pulled up to the curb. Emily's friend Toby Cavanaugh nodded to the girls. "You said you needed a lift home?" He pushed open the passenger's side door and motioned for Emily to hop in.
Thank God. You read my mind. Emily glanced at Toby and then smiled sweetly at Ali, "I'm sorry, I've got to run."
"Of course. Yeah. It was stupid of me to assume you weren't busy." Ali let out a sigh.
"No, you're not stupid." Emily shook her head. "Things are just a little crazy right now. We're readjusting…settling. You know how it is."
"I do." Alison didn't argue. As Emily reached the truck door, Alison put her palm against Emily's upper forearm. "I know you didn't come for Charlotte."
Emily refrained from saying what she really wanted to about Alison's sister.
"…you came for me. I just wanted to thank you for that."
"Uh, yeah, sure." Emily climbed into the front seat of Toby's truck. "I'll see you tomorrow, Ali." She rolled down the window and waved to her friend as they passed by.
"Goodnight, Em."
Alison followed the truck with her eyes, a longing look in them. She hated to see Emily go. Emily waved, rolled the window back up, and faced Toby.
"Saw you talking to her from across the street." Toby smiled at Emily. "You looked like you needed a lifeline."
"So you were stalking me?" Emily teased him.
"We prefer the term 'patrolling'." Toby grinned.
The ride back to Emily's neighborhood had been a short one. Toby parked in front of the Fields' house. They climbed out of the truck at the same time.
"It's great to see you, Toby." Emily walked around the front bumper of the truck.
She closed the distance between them and they embraced in a hug.
"I've missed having my friendly neighborhood Emily just around the corner." He smiled. He reached behind the front seat of his truck and dug around for something. After a minute he pulled out two bottles of beer.
"How many bottles of beer do you have left on the wall for this roadtrip?" Emily asked with a smirk.
"I confiscated them from a couple of teens on my property earlier tonight. What do you say? For old time's sake?"
"Sure." Emily laughed at the thought of Toby scolding children and then stealing their beer.
They cracked open the drinks and walked over and sat down on her front porch.
"So," Toby took a sip of his beer. "What have you been up to? I don't think I've seen you since…" He suddenly stopped midsentence and looked at her with a sad expression.
"The funeral." Emily finished for him. "I appreciate you being there for me." It had been a small service…family only. But that hadn't stopped Toby from waiting on her front porch for her with a warm hug and a six pack of the finest brew he could find in the state.
"The girls wanted to come, but I told them not to." Emily downed some of her beer.
She knew she shouldn't have been drinking, but she didn't care. Her nerves were shot after that run-in with Ali.
"I know. Spencer left the White House in the middle of some meeting about foreign affairs and when the pentagon tried to reprimand her she had to call her mother to call the dogs off. And Caleb said Hanna tried to book a flight back from Milan before he was able to talk her down from it."
Emily laughed picturing Spencer yelling at the government and Hanna shopping for the best first class flight into their not so first class town.
"You know Ali came by that day…before you got home."
Emily almost dropped her beer bottle.
"What?"
"She was here for about an hour." Toby leaned back on the stairs and looked at Emily. "We talked about a lot." He shook his head. "I was never her biggest fan." He took another gulp of beer. "After everything she put you all through I never thought I'd be able to forgive her. But I realized something that day."
"And what was this great revelation?"
"I don't have to forgive her to understand her." He put his beer down. "Alison isn't who I thought she was."
"Who is?" Emily sighed.
"You." Toby didn't miss a beat. "For as long as I can remember you've always been Emily Fields." He said it as surely as someone would say that you use air to breathe. "In this world of uncertainty you have always been a constant…for all of us."
Emily took a nervous breath and looked away. If Toby only knew the things she was keeping from him…from everyone. The lines between where the lies ended and where the truth began were blurry even to her.
"Why didn't she stay until I got home?" Emily peered at him.
"Huh?"
"Ali. Why didn't she wait for me?"
He shrugged.
"You'd have to ask her."
"Out of all of us, I never would have thought you and Ali would be the ones to settle in Rosewood." Emily looked around her front yard and then looked back at Toby.
"Yeah, I dunno. I like this town. I shouldn't after everything it's cost me…" He glanced at the stars in the sky.
Emily knew that look...that longing look that only a lover could have over a lost love.
"What happened between you two?" Emily had always believed that Toby and Spencer were meant to be.
"We just…drifted apart." He sighed. "We tried to make it work. I'd go see her in D.C. and she'd come see me here, but after a while it just became too much. It's like every corner that we turned here reminded her of the things that happened to her…to us."
Emily nodded in understanding.
"We became different people. So she went back to kicking ass on Capitol Hill, and I took the time to figure out what I wanted."
"You got your degree, didn't you?" Emily asked.
"I did. Took a while. Mostly nights. But I got it." He smiled. "Not that it did me much good in the economy."
"That's the way it works in today's society." Emily sighed. "College was not what I thought it was going to be. I look at Aria, Spencer, and Hanna…it all seemed to click for them."
"But not for you?" He asked.
Emily shook her head.
"No. I had a hard time." She bit the inside of her lip to keep from crying. "After my dad died I just didn't see the point to it."
"To college?" Toby asked.
There was beat of silence before she answered,
"To anything." Tears burned her eyes, but she turned her head so Toby wouldn't see. She quickly dried her eyes and faced him again.
Toby looked at his friend…the first real friend he'd made in Rosewood and he saw something in her eyes. It wasn't just her being haunted by her past…or her father's death. There was something else going on with her. There was something in her expression that rattled him to his core.
"Hey, are you okay?" He put his hand on her shoulder.
"Uh…just a little buzzed." She lied.
"From one beer?" He looked at her skeptically.
"Who said this was my first drink tonight?" Emily put her empty beer bottle down. She averted Toby's gaze and rolled her index finger around the outer rim of the bottle.
"Emily…" He said in a soft tone. "What's going on?"
She should have known better than to try to lie to him. He had always been able to see right through her. How was she supposed to be able to keep this from him? Why couldn't she just look him in the eye and tell him the truth? When had it gotten so hard for her to talk to her friends?
You're in denial. She told herself.
She almost laughed at the irony. Toby had been the first person she'd come out to. She had been in denial about a lot back then. And now, here she was again…years later in the same situation with a different secret.
Nothing truly ever changes. She thought.
"Em…"
"I'm fine, Toby." Emily continued to stare at the ground.
"Then why can't you look me in the eye?"
Because she couldn't look into those bright baby-blues and tell him anything but the truth.
"I'm just tired." She gathered all of her strength and forced herself to look at him. "I should get some rest. Big day tomorrow." She stood up.
"Okay." Toby decided not to push her. He stood up and embraced her in another hug. "I'm glad you're back, Em."
"Yeah." Emily nodded.
They said their goodbyes and Emily watched as he drove away. She took a moment to appreciate how quiet it was, especially given how loud it was in her head. As she peered out at the yard she had grown up in she realized how much she had taken for granted in her life.
Rosewood had a way of bringing back memories she'd suppressed for years. Those memories seemed so trivial now. Her phone alarm went off, reminding her of everything she had been trying to forget.
"Home sweet home." She muttered as she opened the front door of her house.
She had escaped this town once. She got the sinking feeling that she wasn't going to be able to do it again.
