summary: book!verse, au; when she was little, she used to play hide-and-seek with her sister. it was always so easy to find everyone because the curtains were transparent. she wishes it was the same now - spencer hastings, relearning reality ; for coppertone wars' twelve days of christmas challenge, level five, part two!

notes — this is more of a character study drabble than an actual story bc i couldn't think of an au!spencer sort of fic um hope you guys like this, c: the beginning part is bookverse!au, and then switches into the tv version - btw, who's excited for season 3B tomorrow?

poison and wine
spencer hastings

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Sometimes, Spencer thinks back to the time when A was just a letter —

There were days when she felt on top of the world, and others when she was forced to doubt everything around her, from the fact that nobody honestly would have voted for her as class president, or the fact that Melissa was always the child that her perfect parents were going to favor more - no matter how much she tried and hoped for something better, Spencer's ideas would always be mercilessly shot down by Ali, who perhaps only saw Spencer as a potential friend, because she was the only one who had the nerve - and perhaps, the stupidity - to question Ali.

Spencer's always envied her best friend - then again, Ali was never truly a friend to any of them (perhaps, an acquaintance that flitted around from one social circle to another, but she was never constantly with them when they needed her most), but she's never quite been good enough, now has she? There are memories of her parents always comparing her to Melissa, to Ali, to everybody but her.

Sometimes, she wonders if having friends is even worth it; maybe if she knew nobody at all, her parents would have nobody to compare her to you, but Spencer knows that they would find some way - Melissa would still be in existence, and her parents regularly checked up the honor roll at Rosewood Day School, finding all the newest sources of competition, and forcing Spencer to come up with several reasons - on the spot, of course, was the only way to check if their daughter was the best of the best - why she was better than all of these other potential Ivy League candidates.

And they had started this when Spencer was nine years old - sometimes, she thinks as though her parents have brainwashed, almost engrained all of these notions of having to be the best in her memory, and other times, she thinks as though she's the one who's created all the problems for herself. There's no God for her to blame anymore - because if God existed, then her life wouldn't be hell - and Spencer can only blame everything on herself.

Sure, she's not a perfect child - that much Spencer's aware of; but her officious parents strip her down and examine her body and her mind for any flaws, and even when they're looking at her from afar, she feels as though they're trying to read her mind, looking right through her glassy mindset, fragile, and easy enough to break - no wonder people consider her to be the weakest link.

But Spencer's not good enough - and she could be a better child, one that her parents would be proud of.

Sometime between the years of ninth and tenth grade, Spencer doesn't take the initiative to put in the extra effort - she stares at the looming computer screen in front of her, the impending due date of an AP Economics essay, and stares at the clock, her head slumping upon bony wrists and thin, skinny arms (her parents had always commented on how Melissa was looking much healthier lately, and never said anything about Spencer; perhaps, if she lost ten pounds, twenty pounds, they would notice her), and falls apart.

She jerks herself awake in the early hours of the morning - there's a cup of blood in front of her, with a piece of palimpsest from a Chinese fortune cookie, You know what to do - A; and Spencer stares at an empty word document. By now, the document should be filled with ten, if not fifteen pages of single spaced information about the system of European feudalism, but there's a much easier alternative.

Melissa's computer - a thin, lean Macbook that her parents would never have bought for Spencer - looks so tempting, and she can hear Ali's voice taunting her to just pick the easier option; the voices increase -

And, Spencer gives into temptation.

(It still doesn't feel right when she wins the specious Golden Orchid Award for a discredited essay that isn't even hers and all of her friends just talk about the award as if it's academic bling, when it means everything; it doesn't feel right when Spencer is forced to tell her dad the truth, that the essay isn't hers, and then he gives her that look - as if he knew all along, because Spencer Hastings will never be good enough to do something as great that; only Melissa would be; and it goddamn doesn't feel right when she profusely apologizes to Melissa, who just looks at Spencer as though she's nothing.)

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Years later, everything gets harder - the threats are more imminent, and there's no point in sleeping because Spencer might never wake up again.

Everyone thinks that she's perfect, yet nobody knows how hard she tries. Spencer always wears makeup and a painstakingly perfect outfit (with the Mary Janes, and a blazer borrowed from her mother), but she never truly feels beautiful; her grades have always been pristine, but she never feels smart. She has a wonderful boyfriend - Andrew Campbell, somebody that her parents appreciate her being with -, the best friends in the whole, wide world, and a loving family (who aren't so loving, after all) but she always feels lonely - Spencer smiles all day and then cries herself to sleep.

Everybody ends up telling her about their problems, their heartbreaks, and their secrets, and all of the knowledge becomes painful to handle; she always listens, nonetheless, and always tries to help, but never admits that she has problems too. Spencer's known as beautiful, put together, smart, kind, joyful, 'perfect'; she's at the top. Yet, nobody knows how scared she as that with one misstep she'll fall from the top, and end up with nothing. Nobody knows how terrified Spencer is that everyone will find out how far from perfect she really is.

Sometimes, Spencer thinks that she wants to do something completely outrageous - maybe, not study for a history test, and see what happens when her parents figure out that she didn't get a perfect grade, or maybe have a boyfriend who isn't the most perfect guy in the world; take a risk, live life. Yet every time Spencer thinks of such options, she remembers how hard her parents work for her.

At night, Spencer lies awake, imagining the disappointment of the faces of her parents, the regret on Melissa's face, wishing that Spencer and her weren't even related, the look of shock on her friends' faces - they could work through a relationship between a high school student and an English teacher, through eating disorders, through going to Homecoming with the enemy - but it would be unheard of if Spencer Hastings ever slipped up.

Yet, she's just a normal girl who never really feels like she completely knows what she's doing — but she's not so normal anymore, now is she?

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Sometimes, everything just gets a little too overwhelming.

She thinks back to when her biggest problems were never being good enough, compared to an older sibling as the two are turned against one another. Spencer fingers the smooth material of silk as it glides upon her fingers, cuts and bruises inevitably forming as sand clumps between her toes, small drops of blood staining the purity of the ground beneath her; light seeps in through the tent, pure moonlight which reflects upon the toaster which burns in the farther corner of the air-conditioned tent — a camping trip of some sorts, her father had said, a Hastings tradition.

She had replied, A tradition from the twentieth century? Nevertheless, fingering the sticks and stones that creep into unraveled layers of sand, the sound of water rushing down the waves, it didn't feel like the adventure that a camping trip was meant to be. Her plaid skirt's hitched up to mid-thigh, and she trudges, limping on the right side, up to the cabana on the hill, slightly out of breath once the trek is completed. The view from above, the feeling of victory within her grasp — it was an everlasting drive.

Spencer sits now, in a cellroom, fingering the white uniform that one of the nurses at Radley had carelessly thrown on, injecting vials of cold and poison into her skin; her hand trembles as it clutches onto the side of the metal bed, and the other girl in the mirror is nothing more than a bloodthirsty monster (it's always going to be her fault). There's a metal chair on the side of her bed - sometimes, she sees familiar blonde curls and red lipstick stains, sometimes, the concerned three familiar voices who really don't understand anything, and most of the times, there's just emptiness.

(It's for the best - the strongest people work alone.)

Spencer stands at the crossroads of a foreign country - words run through the back of her mind, and there's a sudden tap on her shoulder and the cold whisper in her ears (she swears that she's imagining half of these things, because it can't be true in logical reasoning, and that's all that Spencer has left to trust), and a container of bright red lipstick which falls upon her sandal; an individual walks by quickly, red hood and blonde ringlets of hair standing out in a crowd of unsuspecting tourists, and all of a sudden, she doesn't know quite what to do; there's nothing to do except run.

Running will get her nowhere - Red Coat runs faster, can kill faster. So, she screams, screams as loud as her corrupted lungs will allow her to do so, and runs in the opposite direction; she's restrained moments later, by police officers, who bring her into a cold, metal room, and keep on telling her, Miss Hastings, I have to inform you that there was nobody with a gun, nobody's going to kill you, okay? Why don't you just sit right here - all we need to know is the cell phone number of your parents, and then you can get out, okay?

She sits numbly for hours, refusing to believe that Red Coat is just a myth (because it's not) and that the messages from A were just a childhood prank, and she thinkswhere are her friends when she needs them? They place her in a mental asylum shortly afterwards, declaring her unfit for social functions; this isn't supposed to be her life, Spencer thinks to herself. None of this was supposed to happen.

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Everybody assumes for her to be perfect - from the very beginning of at all.

Spencer feels as though she shouldn't be complaining; from the age of five, her father has always shown her videos of people dying throughout the world, or people who have incurable diseases, or a pediatrics oncology ward (the worst of them all), but life isn't fair. There's always the chance that somehow, sometime, something's going to happen and everybody will see that she's human.

It's a regular thing, for most people, to make a simple mistake. Their parents and friends would eventually forgive them, and they would move on, and everything would be right again in their own little world - if she makes one error, her parents would never forgive her (and sometimes, she looks at them, months after the Golden Orchid Award incident and the thing with Wren and Ian and how they always think that she's lying, even though she isn't, and Spencer knows that her parents, for a long time, haven't really trusted her).

She hears their mutters sometimes, about how Spencer, darling - she's a train wreck and that she's suddenly a lost cause and even in middle school, when her parents placed pressure on her to become the valedictorian and get into varsity field hockey, and be the best person - because she's a Hasting, and that's what Hastings do - it was better than this.

At least they believed that their daughter could still be capable of something more than spending the rest of her life in a mental asylum. Now, Spencer's not even sure what's going to happen once they realize that their daughter's taken part in a murder, and that she's kissed all of Melissa's boyfriends, and that she pretend to be her own sister - she had lied to the cops during a hit-and-run, defaced her friend's mother's crypt, kidnapped people, become a member of the A team - she had done everything she promised she wouldn't do to herself.

Sometimes, Spencer looks back at the scrapbook she had made as a seven year old.

She had come back from a trip to New York City, watching all of the Broadway shows, shopping at Fifth Avenue, even if the majority of the clothes she had bought weren't going to fit for a few years, and made a plan of her life - acceptance into Wharton at eighteen, graduation of law school at age twenty six, married to a fellow colleague at age twenty seven, two children (one boy, one girl) who would both end up getting into Wharton, continuing the family legacy, being nothing but perfect - and had stored it away at the bottom of her dresser.

Ten years later, Spencer makes another scrapbook - kissed her sister's boyfriends at age fifteen, participated in the blinding of a classmate at age fifteen, rejection from Wharton at age seventeen, member of the A Team and abductor by age seventeen, insane asylum resident by age eighteen. Then, she crumbles up the piece of paper and throws it into the fire, letting herself break down. Her life, now - it isn't even close to what she had hoped for.

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When Spencer was little, she used to play hide-and-seek with her sister and cousins. It was always so easy to find everyone because the curtains were transparent. She wishes it was the same now.

Now, people hide under covers and fake smiles, necessities in order to survive in a cruel, cruel world when all of the wonderful people end up getting massacred, and evil continues to live on, surviving and growing in strength in the shadows.

And, maybe, she's just like them.

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notes | spencercentric drabble — for coppertone wars' twelve days of christmas challenge, level five, part two! (spencer's part), (: please leave a review?