Hi! So, I haven't been on this website for a long time, and this is the first story I've ever published about Skins. I adore Cassie to pieces, Sid too; in fact, I love all of the characters, especially those from Generation 1. I'm looking forward to writing about Skins as I feel that it, as a TV show, offers more scope for the author to provide their own interpretation in prose, rather than trying to mimic the way the original author wrote. I would really appreciate reviews - be they positive or negative - so please leave those if you have anything to say, and favourites / follows would be lovely too. This little prologue can be skipped if you'd like to: it's basically supposed to be a transcript of Cassie's thoughts as a narrator through the second part of Series 2: Cassie and all of Series 2: Everyone. Skip straight to Chapter One if you want to get straight to the (arguably) non-canon!
She was not thinking. She hadn't thought, really thought, for a long time. Thinking hurt.
She was sorry.
She told him that over and over again those first few days. She lay in the bed - the bed of a man, a kind man, but a man she didn't know - and she whispered I'm sorry into her pillow. Of course, whispering wasn't enough. Even if she had screamed, the screams of a girl in New York City can't be heard by a boy in Bristol.
Perhaps he would hear her in his dreams. Dreams had different rules, didn't they?
Cassie's own dreams were empty for those few days. She slipped in and out of sleep, in and out of blackness; long, painful, empty periods of hollow and unplaced pain alternating with snatched moments of light. Moments where she could move, if only for the sake of moving, movements where the mattress felt real underneath her fingers. Moments where she could whisper her rushed, pointless apologies. Moments that felt a little like those days back when alcohol had been for fun; somewhere near consciousness, head pounding. She'd always taken drink well but being thin changed that. Now there wasn't enough of her to hold the drug in - her temples had ached with too-bright fantasies and her blood had danced in her veins.
When she woke the kind man was yet kinder. The world was bright and full. That hurt sometimes - although it was better than empty. And he took her places and showed her things and smiled and kissed her cheek and they danced and laughed and it was a bit like happy was supposed to be, she thought. Only happy wasn't really about smiling and kissing and dancing and laughing was it? Happy wasn't that simple.
She remembered when she had been at her worst. She remembered how beautiful she had been, then. So thin - collarbones that you could write with if you dipped them in ink, a thigh gap, a stomach like glass, so fragile, so flat. Beauty was happiness, wasn't it? And there had been no smiles when she'd been ill. No kissing, or dances, or laughter. She thought that that had been happiness, she was almost sure it had.
But other people disagreed. And at the end of it all Cassie didn't really think she qualified as an expert on happiness.
When the kind man left she cried. He had been good to her. That was probably why she hadn't fallen in love with him - she had expected to, even hoped she would. A distraction, even a hopeless one, would have been welcome. She would have liked to felt sick and sad and dizzy about something else than a stupid, stupid boy. (A stupid, stupid boy who had done nothing wrong this time, said that rational part in the back of her brain, only she had gotten very good at ignoring that part.)
The point was that being cared for, supported, protected, loved (albeit platonically), didn't seem to be appealing to her. The boy (and even now she could not bear to think of his name. It was so central to his character - reminded her so irrevocably of everything, everything he had ever said, done, worn, held, touched, hated, loved) had not cared for her at first. She'd been a tool. A distraction. She'd hated that. And then he'd fallen in love with her and she was conveniently gone, going, fucking it all up again. She needed to wallow in the depressing nature of her unrequited passion for a little white, before she allowed herself to be chased.
That was the way the game went. And she didn't want to play that game with the kind man. Which was why maybe, in some obscure and super-moral way, it was good that he was gone.
That didn't stop Cassie from crying and starving herself. Nothing ever did, really. (With the possible exception of the boy. Only she wasn't supposed to be thinking about him.)
I'm sorry, she whispered again, as she threw the food she had bought herself for that night into the bin. What was she apologising for now, anyway? Running away? Getting ill again? Missing the kind man as much as she did - maybe even more than she missed the boy, sometimes. Sometimes. She had to admit that she missed the boy an awful lot... Momentarily she thought about the postcard. She hadn't expected him to come - the boy never went after what he wanted, did he? But still, it hurt her in some deep, irrational way, that he had not changed for her. She had changed for him, hadn't she? She had tried her very hardest to get better. To stop running.
Only then there was Chris. And that was even more painful.
She really, really, really could not think about Chris.
Most of the time she could not even think about Jal, or how good she had been to her, or the tiny baby that blossomed in her stomach - the only remnant of Chris that there was left in this world now. Cassie had hoped pointlessly, when hope was still bearable, that Jal might keep the child. And it was a pointless hope - by definition, because in a stupid and colourless world like this, all hope was pointless - and also simply because she knew Jal, and she knew that Jal was clever, and clever teenagers did not choose to raise children.
She herself would probably never be able to raise a family. Too thin. Too broken. Her periods were spotty now. She knew that, and she didn't mind, because although she liked children she had never held any particularly strong affinity to the notion of being a mother.
Would the boy have wanted them?
Did he even think that far into the future?
Did he have any sort of brain at all?
She was being cruel, she knew that. She was being unfair. In a different world he could have been of respectable intelligence, smart, even, but the way he had lived, the way others had lived, meant that he had turned out utterly useless in most senses of the world - which was exactly why she loved him. She knew that and hated it. She would have liked to have had an attraction to someone mysterious, intelligent, someone more like herself. Tony was mysterious and intelligent - Cassie would have liked to have loved him, even if it would have been as hopelessly unrequited as she knew it would. Or his sister, Elizabeth. Effy. She was beautiful. Oh, to have loved her - or at least to have fucked her.
She knew she was a damned good fuck and she'd have bet anything - not that she had much to bet - that Effy was, too.
You can see from these thoughts, carelessly chosen, amalgamated into a pointless sample of self-pity, self-loathing, and just plain old pity and loathing, that she was not healthy, this girl, alone in New York, model-thin and model-pretty and model-drugged up. She was not healthy at all, which, in a perverse sort of way, was her favourite thing about herself. It may seem natural to assume that this was the sort of poor health so central to her character that it could never be cured it all; but if you did assume that, you would be wrong, because the next at all interesting that happened in her story was as simple as this: She got better.
She did not know quite how it happened, or why. But much sooner than she had previously deemed possible, she had a job, and a flat, and a post-card shaped hope, and a woman called Adela who occasionally met her for coffee. (Even before the miracle that was her recovery, coffee had been one of the few things that she could stomach. Above and beyond anything else, it stopped you being hungry.) Adela was not the sort of person she would ever even consider confiding in, but she did have a lot of sex, and a lot of angst, and a lot of parties, and it made Cassie happy to hear about these things in an unapologetic New York accent from the cherry-red lips of someone who should, arguably, have been a lot wiser than her, given the age gap. The job gave her money, and somehow, one day, coffee was accompanied by cake. Cake became more regular.
One day, she ordered a take-away. Fat, greasy chips (the boy had liked those. Irrelevant, but the sort of thing she thought about, these days) and chunks of slimy meat in thick, congealing gravy. It was not tasty food. It was not clever food. But for some reason, the fancy struck her to eat unhealthy, fattening, tacky, disgusting food and to never look back.
That last sentence was hyperbole. She looked back quite a lot.
But the point was that looking back did not stop her from moving forward, and soon she got to the point where she ate every night, worked every day, even did other things - healthy, human things, like reading books, and going to films, and making friends, and cleaning her flat. She got to the point where she did not absent-mindedly look out of windows during work time. Instead, she smiled with lips that were as cherry-red as those of Adela, and took orders with a lively countenance and a sugary voice. She did not look out of windows, and she did not see Sidney Jenkins standing outside hers, with her image in his hands and in his head and printed all over every part of his memory by pale, fragile hands.
Sorry that this was so short! I'll attempt to make the next chapters longer, and less waffly. I also really need to finish that fanfiction that I've had going for simply ages and haven't got further than a couple of chapters, mainly due to having written absolutely no solid plot. I don't want to make this go down the same route. I plan for this to be somewhere nearing Acceptable, hopefully even Exceeds Expectation in time ;) (Excuse the Harry Potter reference.) Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.
So I suppose this is my reintroduction to this website. Expect Cassie, lots of her. Expect Sid. Expect Naomily. (What can I say? I'm human.) Expect ALL Series 1 / 2 characters (even 3 when I get round to watching it), because they are beautiful. Oh, and PLEASE don't hesitate to contact me if you'd like me to read any of your own writing :)
Anyway. Goodbye.
