Title: Righting The Wrongs
Author: xperimental
Disclaimer: If I owned them, I wouldn't have to write this because the abomination never would've occurred.
Rating: PG
Summary: My cracktastic knee-jerk reaction to that webisode of doom (aka the Five Years Later one). Written ages ago but was never posted here. Enjoy.
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Righting The Wrongs
"Thor? You want to name the baby Thor?"
"Yes. I want to name my baby Thor."
Ashley cocked an eyebrow and rubbed a hand across her swollen belly. "You'd better not let Spencer hear you saying that."
Aiden chuckled. "What's she going to do about it? Kick me out? I live here."
A fact that Spencer certainly wasn't happy about. But when Kyla kicked him out over a year ago and he had nowhere else to go, Ashley couldn't help but offer him a room in their home. She didn't get what Spencer was so upset about, it wasn't like the didn't have the room. At first, Spencer had steadfastly refused but all it took was a little persuasion from Ashley to bring her around to the idea. Ashley could talk Spencer into anything, the baby developing in her womb was proof of that.
"It'll upset her," Ashley said, quietly.
"Why do you even care-"
"Ash?"
"Shut up, she's home," Ashley hissed at Aiden before calling out to her wife. "I'm out here."
"Hey," Spencer greeted her wife with a blissful smile as she stepped out on to the balcony. That smile dropped immediately when she saw Aiden sitting in the chair next to her. She didn't know why she was so surprised, Aiden was always there. "This looks cozy," she said, eyeing the pitcher of fresh orange juice, two half-filled glasses and the book of baby names sitting innocuously in between them. "So what have you two been up to today?"
"Oh, we were just picking out baby names," Aiden said, smirking at how Spencer's hand took up a possessive residence on Ashley's belly. If only she knew.
"Of course." Spencer gritted her teeth. "Because you should totally be involved in that."
Sensing the tension, Ashley moved away from Spencer. "So Aiden here wants to name the baby Thor," she said, tapping the dark haired man's chest.
And I want to push him off the balcony but you don't see that happening, Spencer thought, taking Ashley's arm and gently bringing her wife back to her. "That's an…interesting name."
"Thor is the Norse god of thunder," Aiden explained helpfully, sounding like a five year old repeating a fun fact he'd just learned, to prove how smart he was.
"I know who Thor is." Although, I'm surprised that you do. Spencer cleared her throat and looked Aiden up and down. "What's with the suit?" She didn't know that the uniform at Chuck. E. Cheese was so formal.
"I had a job interview today, so fingers crossed."
"Yeah. So if you get the job, you'll be able to move out, right?" Spencer asked bluntly.
"Ahh, I suppose," Aiden uttered, ducking his head and scratching the back of his neck. Such a move had become like a safety blanket to him now that he no longer had the strap of his little purple backpack to clutch. "But I think I should stick around to help out with the baby. I am the father, after all."
"No, you're the donor," Spencer corrected him tersely.
"Come on, you two," Ashley stepped in before either of them said something that they shouldn't. "We're all friends here, can't you just get along?"
Spencer looked away, trying to collect herself. She couldn't help it that Aiden got under her skin with his ugly face and stupid monotone voice and determination to overstep all of his bounds in regards to their life.
"You traitorous fucking bitch!"
All three jumped at the sound of the enraged voice and turned to see an extremely disheveled young lady, with what appeared to be half of their hedge stuck in her hair, storming her way up the stairs.
"Ashley?" Spencer gasped, trying to figure out why she was seeing double. If Ashley had an identical twin then she definitely would've told her…and probably would've tried to have sex with them.
"Spence," the girl practically sobbed with joy and relief as she wrapped her arms tight around the blonde and pulled her into an impossibly tight hug. "I've missed you so much."
"Oh shit," Spencer heard her wife mutter from behind her and tried not to relax herself into this doppleganger's arms, even if they did feel so safe and familiar and comforting.
"Um, who are you?" Spencer asked cautiously, her heart breaking when she saw the pain she had caused in the girl's deep brown eyes.
"Ashley." "No one, she's no one." The girl and her wife said at the same time then turned and glared at each other.
"She's obviously some whacked out escapee from a mental hospital," the pregnant woman said, inching back to hide behind Aiden. "Aiden, call the cops."
"No! Wait, just let me explain." The girl claiming to be Ashley turned her pleading eyes on Spencer. "Spence, please."
There was something about the way she said it, something about the earnestly pleading expression on her face, that made Spencer reach out and still Aiden's hand. She had seen this side of Ashley for a long, long time. "Wait."
"Spencer," Aiden protested, trying to pull away from her grip on his hand.
"I said, wait," the blonde growled. "I want to hear what she has to say."
"Thank you, Spence, I know that this is going to sound totally insane but you have to bare with me. I'm the real Ashley Davies." She pointed at the other, fatter version of her. "She's my twin and she's totally evil. That's why Dad sent her away just after we were born. But ever since she found out about me she's wanted to take my place and my inheritance." Ashley paused and looked around at their home. "I guess she got what she wanted."
"Spencer, you're not taking what she's saying seriously, are you?" her wife asked, failing to disguise the nervous tremor in her voice.
"But when? How? Where have you been all this time?" Spencer asked in rapid fire, not taking her eyes off the new arrivals face.
"It was the day after we…you know, made love for the first time," Ashley mumbled the last part, blushing faintly. "I'd just come home from dropping you off at the hospital to see Glen when I got hit across the back of the head and knocked out. When I woke up, I was in a shipping container on route to India. I didn't have any ID, no money, no passport. Nothing. I've been picking tea leaves for the past seven years, trying to save up enough money to get home. So I could come back to you, Spence."
"That's crazy," Aiden loudly denounced the dirty brunette's story. "Spencer, can't you see-"
"Shut up!" Spencer snapped. This was really all too much. "I don't want to hear your stupid monotone voice right now, so just shut the fuck up!"
This uncharacteristic display shocked Aiden into silence and Ashley, the real one, took the opportunity to continue her harrowing tale. "I thought that I was never going to make it home but then I ran into Madison while she was on her world tour. She told me everything that had happened and let me fly home on her private jet…she's a lot nicer than I remember her being."
"But it's been seven years, why didn't you ever try to contact me?" Spencer asked, struggling to figure out what this all meant. Her wife wasn't the woman that she thought she was but she'd spent more time with, and gone through so much more, with the impostor than she had with the real Ashley.
"I did! It was one of the first things I did when I realized where I was. I sold all the jewellery I was wearing just to come up with enough to buy a phone card so I could call you. But every time I called your house, your mom would answer and hang up on me and when I tried to call your cell it told me that the number was no longer in service."
"Yeah, I'd just gotten a new phone," Spencer said distractedly, as she started to fit together the pieces in her head. She whirled around to confront her wife, who'd gone positively ghostly white. "You gave it to me." She laughed humourlessly, the full weight of the older woman's betrayal hitting her like a ton of bricks. "You gave it to me so Ashley wouldn't be able to reach me."
"Wait, you believe me?" Ashley couldn't believe it. She always knew that coming here was a long shot. Seven years was a long time for her twin to get her evil hooks into her poor, innocent Spencer and she didn't know if she could compete with that. But she knew that she had to try, for Spencer's sake if nothing else.
Spencer turned to her with tears welling in her eyes. The last seven years of her life had been a total lie.
"Oh, Spence." Ashley tenderly cupped the blonde's cheeks and wiped away a stray tear with her thumb. "Madison told me how badly she treated you while you were in school. Not to mention her taking off after what happened to Clay and all the stupid crap that came afterwards. I am so, so sorry."
"It's not your fault," Spencer all but sobbed. "You're not her." No, there was no doubt in her mind that Ashley, this Ashley, the real Ashley, never would have done those things to her.
"I don't want to sound like I'm blaming you or anything," Ashley began cautiously, not wanting to upset Spencer any further. "But how did you not know that she wasn't really me? I mean, you had to have know that I would never treat you like that."
Spencer shrugged helplessly. "I just thought that you changed because we'd become more than friends and then with your dad dying…" She just took the fact that her girlfriend was acting like a completely different person at face value, never suspecting it to actually be true.
Ashley shook her head sadly, mourning all the time that they'd lost. "No, Spencer. God, I had so much stuff planned, so many things I wanted to do with you, places I wanted to take you." She pressed her forehead against Spencer's. "I hate they we never got to do any of it. I hate her for making us miss out on it." she turned her head slightly to the side to find Aiden clutching her pregnant sister protectively to his side. "And what the fuck is up with that? Is it his?" she spat with a healthy amount of disgust. After everything Madison had told her, she couldn't understand why Spencer would allow Aiden to even be a presence in their lives, much less father their child.
Spencer nodded reluctantly. She didn't even want to have a baby this soon, especially since she was just starting her career, Ashley…Not!Ashley had been the one pushing for it.
"Oh Spencer, why did you let them do this to you?" Ashley cooed, running her hands through Spencer's silky blonde locks.
"I don't know, it all happened so fast. One day she's saying that she wants to have a baby and then the next week she's pregnant…" Spencer trailed off, realizing something that she'd always known but never wanted to admit to herself. It had happened fast. Too fast. "You were sleeping with him, weren't you, and he knocked you up. You were cheating on me," her voice quivered. Even if this wasn't the Ashley she fell in love with, it was the woman that she married and her betrayal stung.
To her credit, Not!Ashley did look ashamed of herself.
"Why?" Spencer pleaded for an explanation. "Why did you do this? Any of it."
"She wanted my inheritance, Spence," Ashley began gently when Not!Ashley was too cowardly to speak up. "So she took my place. That night when you two were at dinner with my dad she messed around with his car, she caused the accident that killed him. Then all she had to do was pretend to be me until the money came in. Isn't that right?"
Not!Ashley held her head up defiantly. "You can't prove any of it."
"Oh no? You'd be right about that." Ashley pulled a folded up piece of paper out of the pocket of her torn up jeans. "If you hadn't left me this note gloating all about your nefarious scheme. You never thought I'd make it out of that container, did you?" There were times when Ashley thought that she'd die in there herself. But thanks to being a hardcore fan of MacGyver reruns when she was younger, she'd been able to whip up a contraption to create drinking water from condensation inside the container. It was enough to keep her alive. Barely.
Spencer gasped. All this time she'd been living with a murderer.
"What I don't get is why you had to screw Spencer over. Why couldn't you have just left her alone?" Ashley couldn't even imagine the pain that her twin had put the gentle, naive blonde through over the years.
"Because everyone had to believe I was you and you were so pathetically in love with her." Not!Ashley knew when she was beaten. "I couldn't exactly just dump her the next day. I mean, shit, I tried to get her to break up with me but it didn't matter how big of a bitch I was to her, she just took it all."
"And after you got the money?" Spencer asked with a pained expression. "There was no reason for you to be with me then." Ashley tried to comfort the hurting blonde by taking her into her arms and kissing the side of her head.
Not!Ashley bit her lip and put on the puppy dog expression that had gotten her out of trouble with her wife so many times before. "Because…Because I fell in love with you, Spencer."
"And yet you still cheated on me with him." Suddenly, Spencer turned on Aiden. "And what about you, how do you fit into this? Did you know?"
"Not in the beginning," Aiden admitted. "I only found out after you guys got married."
"And you didn't think that maybe you should tell me about it?"
Aiden squirmed uncomfortably. He wasn't about to tell Spencer that the reason he kept quiet was because Not!Ashley agreed to sleep with him in return for his silence. Not that he was blackmailing her or anything. Because he was a good person and didn't do things like that. "I'm sorry."
Not!Ashley smacked him in the chest. "Stop being such a pussy. I swear to god, you're a bigger girl than all three of us."
"Well, what do you want me to do?"
"Get the note, dipshit!" Not!Ashley snapped, for the first time she was cursing the child in her belly that prevented her from acting herself.
"Oh right." Aiden made a move to snatch the crumpled, incriminating note out of Ashley's hand. But found himself pushed back, but not by the person you'd expect.
Spencer had snapped. She'd been putting up with so much of Aiden's shit for so long, this really was the final straw. She shoved him back with all her might, sending him stumbling back against the railing of the balcony. Unfortunately for him, all the time he'd spent in the gym had made him a little top heavy and he couldn't stop himself from tumbling over and falling eight feet down into the pool. He probably would've been okay if he hadn't cracked his skull open on the diving board. It was as if his fall had been guided by the hand of a God that wanted him dead.
"You killed him," Not!Ashley muttered in disbelief, she'd never figured Spencer for the murdering type. Obviously, she had underestimated her. It was kind of hot.
"He tripped and fell," Ashley said evenly. "Right, Spence?"
Spencer breathed deeply, trying to calm herself down. "That sounds about right." She walked to the railing and peered over the edge at Aiden's body floating face down in the rapidly reddening water. Guess you're not so invincible after all, asshole.
Not!Ashley looked between the two women she'd totally fucked over. "So what are you going to do to me?"
"You hurt Spencer, you killed my father and you tried to kill me," Ashley growled. "Give me one reason I shouldn't kill you."
"Because you'd get arrested?"
"How could I be arrested for killing myself?" countered Ashley. She had had plenty of time out in the tea fields to think this all through. "You don't even exist."
Not!Ashley swallowed hard. She was well and truly fucked and she knew it. She knew that she shouldn't have stuck around after she got the money but she wasn't lying when she'd said that she had fallen in love with Spencer. It would've been impossible for her not to. "The baby-"
"Is the spawn of Aiden, it shouldn't be allowed to live. Why do you think I threw myself down that flight of stairs when I was fifteen." Eleven times, just to be sure.
"Wait, you told me that you wanted to keep it, that the miscarriage was an accident," said Spencer.
"Yeah, well I didn't want you to think less of me," Ashley admitted sheepishly. "It wasn't exactly one of my proudest moments." Then she advanced on her twin, ready to take her revenge.
"Ash, wait." Spencer grabbed her by the arm. Although she wasn't exactly full of warm and fuzzy feelings towards her wife, she didn't want her to die. Especially at the hands of the real Ashley. "I can't let you do it."
Ashley didn't have to ask why, all it took was one look at Spencer's tired, confused face and she understood. "I know."
Not!Ashley smirked, she should've known that she could count on Spencer's soft heart. "So how's this going to work? Spencer'll be in the middle, right?"
"No," Spencer growled, getting up in Not!Ashley's face. "You're going to pack your shit and get out. I never want to see you again."
Not!Ashley's face fell into a pout. "Spence, please, can't we try and work this out?"
"Are you fucking kidding me?" Ashley groaned from behind them, content to let Spencer handle this but ready to step in if she needed to.
"No, we can't."
"But our baby-"
"That! That is not my baby. I never even wanted it!" Spencer cried, finally letting out something that she had been holding inside for months. "Now get the fuck out!"
"You know, this is my house, I paid for it," Not!Ashley made one last attempt to save herself from being pregnant and homeless. Oh god, I might have to go and live with Carmen in her car!
"With my money," Ashley reminded her fiercely. "Bitch, you don't have a leg to stand on. Now are you going to let yourself out or are we going to have to have a rumble?"
Not!Ashley clenched her jaw, knowing that she was in no condition for a fight. For now. "Fine. I'll go." She turned to leave but stopped when Spencer called out to her. She turned with a smile on her face, convinced that Spencer had had a change of heart.
"Give me you wedding ring," Spencer demanded, holding out her hand expectantly.
The pregnant woman grimace and reluctantly pulled the ring of her finger and slapped it into the blonde's waiting hand. "I hope you two are very happy together," she spat her parting words before storming back into the house.
"Are you okay?" Ashley asked Spencer when the blonde finally turned back to face her. "Sorry, stupid question."
Spencer didn't say anything, instead she reached out and removed a large twig that was stuck in Ashley's hair.
"I had to climb your fence and kind of fell into your hedge," the brunette explained. "Look, I know that this is totally weird for you and I totally understand if you need time or whatever-"
"Shhh," Spencer shushed her. "You know, I'm surprised that you were so willing to let her go."
"Yeah, well I guess spending eleven hours picking tea leaves every day has kind of mellowed me out." Ashley shrugged and took Spencer's hands in her own. "Besides, I don't want to make this any harder for you. You've been through more than enough."
Spencer smiled gratefully and slipped the ring onto the real Ashley Davies' finger, determined to forget that the last hour had ever happened. She had to for the sake of her sanity because thinking to hard about the implications of the sister switch would break her brain.
"What's up with the fugly ring?" Ashley blurted out before she could stop herself.
"Aiden picked it out." That's right, Not!Ashley had sent Aiden to accompany Spencer to pick out a ring for her. By that time, Spencer had gotten so used to being fucked over by the two of them, she'd resigned herself to just laying back and taking it.
"Oh God, Spencer," Ashley groaned sympathetically, gathering up the broken girl into her arms and started stroking Spencer's hair. "I promise, I'm going to take such good care of you, much better than she did. I mean, that's if you want me to."
"Of course I want you to."
"Okay, good," Ashley breathed in relief. It would be unbearable if she had gone through all this, only to not get the girl in the end. "So…Madison told me that I have another sister. Is she evil too?"
Spencer bit her lip, thinking of Kyla's uncanny knack for interrupting any intimate moment that was happening in her immediate vicinity. "Well…"
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END
