Started my daily ficlets to make the hiatus pass, then decided to keep going with a 2nd cycle, and then a 3rd, 4th, etc through 55th cycle. Now cycle 56!
"Fight For The Right"
Beiste & Ewan (OC; Damian McGinty) - Ewan/Sugar
Beiste & Ewan series
(all series now listed under the communities tab in my profile)
Every morning that he woke up knowing that he should have been going in to work, he just remembered that he couldn't go, because he'd been fired, and it made him feel terrible all over again. Everyone else looked to have moved on, at the store, at school…
The news had gotten out eventually about how there had been the robbery, and Ewan had been pegged as the culprit even if he'd never been officially charged, and it didn't matter that he claimed himself innocent. At school, he was as good as guilty, and it was as good of fodder for mean kids as anything. He would hear whispers of 'thief' while he was in class, or others would show him their shoes like they were tempting him to steal them… He was doing his very damn best not to let it get to him, but this wasn't just that it was his school, it was also Mitch Henley's school, and it was where his aunt worked.
Mitch looked like, as much as his father said he believed that Ewan had nothing to do with it, he was having a hard time believing it himself, and for all the grief it had caused his father, he didn't want anything to do with Ewan anymore. They had been this close to being brothers, but now they could have been strangers, just two random boys walking down the halls of the same school.
As for his aunt, she wouldn't say, but the way the whole situation had caused a tear between her and Rich had really torn her down. She loved Rich, Ewan knew she did. But she would always say that Ewan came first, and now he was seeing that unfold before his eyes. The two of them hadn't spoken in the two weeks since the robbery, and her moods, in constant rotation between distracted sadness and random frustrated anger, had put her football team through the ringer already, from what he heard the players in the choir room. Ewan wanted to comfort her, but she kept trying to shield him.
For all the people who had written him off as a thieving ingrate, at least he had a group of people who believed his innocence, other than his aunt. Sugar had been instrumental in keeping him from moping about lately, as had his best friends Tina and Mike, and the rest of the Glee Club as well. Not once had any of them believed he was guilty, which they made sure to tell him. That told him either they would raise hell for him, or they had actually at one time believed that he really was guilty and they were covering for their indiscretion. He just said thanks.
When it came down to it though, he was still feeling like for how much he had risen back from the grief of losing his parents, now he was falling again. He could just nearly feel his heart wishing nothing more than for time to be rewritten so he would never have lost them, never had to come to Lima, but then… then he wouldn't have his aunt, not like this, and he wouldn't have Glee Club, and Tina and Mike… and he wouldn't have Sugar.
One day at school, as they sat in the cafeteria and he had rendered his peas to an ugly green mush, she had stilled his hand and fork. "Ewan, please, stop, that's disgusting," she begged, and he blinked, letting the fork go, breathing out.
"Sorry," he threw his napkin over the plate.
"What's wrong?" she asked him.
"You know my mom was from here in the states, and she ran off to Ireland and married my dad…"
"Yeah, you told me," she recalled. "Why?"
"Running off kind of sounds good right now…" he spoke, staring into nowhere.
"Are you serious?" she asked, and he shrugged. "Ewan, you can't run. What about school? What about… your aunt? What about me?"
"You could come with me," he turned to her, and for a split second she looked like she was considering it, but then she shut her eyes and shook her head, getting back on track.
"You're not running. You're better than that," she told him.
"I wasn't actually going to do it, you know?"
"Doesn't matter. You can't talk like that," she insisted.
"Sorry," he managed a smile for her.
"Now come on, we have to do something," she sat up. "It's been two weeks, and those guys haven't figured out squat, so they're useless. We could do it though."
"Do what?"
"Catch the bad guy," she nodded, and he laughed. "We could," she wasn't discouraged.
"How?" he asked.
"Well I don't know, but we'll think of something. You've just resigned yourself to your fate, and you shouldn't do that. You have to fight, Ewan. I never give up on what I want, no matter what people say."
"Does that mean I'm something you want?" he tried to let her positivity rub off on him.
"Yes, Irish, you are," she beamed, scooting closer to him on their bench so she could kiss his cheek. He breathed out, taking her hand.
"What would I do without you?"
"Well you'd be kissing yourself, for one thing," she told him, making him laugh.
It wasn't just that she made him happy, which she did every day she looked at him the way she did and continued to have him as her boyfriend, but he was starting to remember it was more than that… She made him happy, but he made her happy, too. He remembered the girl she had been when they had met, at their lockers. She was still that girl, but there was more to her now. He had always sensed a sort of loneliness about her, no matter how good she hid it in front of most people, and as they had grown closer, he felt that loneliness had diminished. Maybe some of that was to be credited to Glee Club, but he had to know that part of that was on him, too.
"Okay," he finally said, looking at her. "We'll fight."
THE END
A/N: This is a one-shot ficlet, which means that signing up for story alert will not bring you any alerts.
In the event of a sequel, the story will be separate from this one. And as chapter stories go, they are
always clearly indicated as such [ex: "Days 204-210" in the summary] Thank you!