A/N
This is my first attempt at fan fiction (or any creative writing for that matter). I'm new to this whole concept, but thought it was extremely cool, and have really enjoyed a lot of the stories that I have read here. As it may become obvious, I love angst. This story may end up being a little darkā¦
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He came to me in my dream again.
The dreams were usually the same. They would start out as an abstract mix of muted colors of greens, blues and browns, broken by shadows of gray and black. The swirling mix had an unsettling familiarity to them, which would give me an uneasy feeling in the pit of my stomach. I also felt uneasy since this was usually the point in which the boy-god would appear. His features had no familiarity, he resembled no one I knew, but I would see him with such clarity it suggested I had known him for ages. Maybe it was from a past life? I doubted it since I didn't put any credibility in such notions. I also doubted it because he was absolutely flawless. Surely such a perfect creature could not truly exist. But in spite of his beauty, it was the depth of sadness and pain in his gaze that drew me in. He never spoke in my dreams; the intensity in his eyes said everything. They were imploring, beseeching, begging me to help him as he reached out towards me. And I always reached out to him, too. I wanted to help him, to sooth his pain. I knew such pain; and this knowledge drove my urgency to reach him, to sooth him, as if soothing him would sooth me in return. But I never could reach him in my dreams. At this point, as I did this morning, I would always awaken before our fingers could touch, face wet with tears, feeling hollow and cold. The dreams haunted me, but trying to decipher them was a welcome distraction from my own misery. I didn't need to seek out numbness while I thought of him.
I opened my eyes with a sigh and turned over to look at the alarm clock. 3:35am. Fuck. I still had 4 hours before I needed to get up. I squinted into the darkness, willing my eyes to adjust. Along my bedroom wall, neatly aligned was my packed suitcase and duffle bag. I sighed again. I wasn't looking forward to the flight to Washington, to my new existence with the father I felt I barely knew. He had always been around in the background, but 2 weeks visitation in the summer with the odd holiday or birthday thrown in between could barely qualify us as a close knit family. The time we did spend together, especially in the last couple years was always interspersed with an awkward tension. I couldn't blame Renee, my mother, too much for her exasperated decision to send me to live with my father. On some levels she really had tried. But in her frustration with my self-destructive behavior, she had announced that she was sending me to live with my father, Charlie, who was the chief of police for the tiny town of Forks, Washington. A town so gloomy and sunless that it matched on the outside what my soul reflected on the inside. And when it came down to it, I didn't care. I really couldn't bring myself to care about anything anymore. I think on some levels she also felt guilty, responsible for my state. Her flighty, free-flowing nature had not been disapproving as I fell in with the wrong crowd in Phoenix. As I drank and partied wildly with my friends on the weekends. As weekends turned into weekdays. As I experimented with drugs. The final straw had been my expulsion from high school, the result from a lengthy string of truancies wracked up while stumbling around in a numb haze. It was this haze that I sought out with all of my waking hours that weren't spent contemplating my strange dream. I reached into the drawer of my nightstand and took a long pull of the bottle that I had stashed in there. This was likely going to be my last drink; Charlie was unlikely to tolerate this type of behavior. I closed my eyes as the fiery liquid burned the back of my throat. I was going to miss that burn.
As I blankly stared out the window of the 737, I knew that I could never tell Renee that she was partly responsible for my downward spiral that started just over 3 years ago. That her own hard partying ways had brought in the strange man that would alter my path forever. I shouldered more of the blame. I had always felt like the adult, like the parent, the responsible one in the relationship I had with Renee, and I was very drunk when I stumbled into the house on that fateful evening and found him drinking at the kitchen table. Too drunk and scared of waking Renee that I didn't fight him off as his hands groped roughly and his hot breath that reeked of alcohol flooded my senses as he licked my face from chin to hairline. I shuddered, trying to drive the images out of my head and regain my sense of reality. I absentmindedly fingered the faint pink scars that circled my wrist and ran up my arm, another one of my manifestations of self-loathing. No, I could never tell her. She had been trying so hard to clean up her life, and had been increasingly successful in straightening herself out since she had met Phil, the steadiest relationship she had since she divorced my dad over 16 years ago. As she cleaned up, I slipped further into the abyss. I couldn't risk tipping her balance back to the dark side. She was finally aware enough to realize that I was not right, but I couldn't talk to her, and she was frustrated by her new found sense of parental responsibility. So I didn't fight, didn't argue when she made the announcement that she was sending me to live with my father. The plane began hurtling down the runway, jarring my thoughts back to the present tense. My buzz from this morning was starting to wear off. I closed my eyes and tensed up as the wheels of the plane left the tarmac. As the pain started to creep in around my renewed sense of clarity, I wished I were old enough to purchase the lovely little bottles of alcohol that the flight attendants possessed, or bold enough to have tried to smuggle something of my own onto the flight. All I could do was think about the boy that haunted my dreams; focus on his face and expressive eyes, distracting myself momentarily from the painful thoughts and memories that presided when the numbness did not. I drifted off into an uneasy sleep as the plane hit maximum altitude.
