Nothing Left to Lose
A/N: Title comes from "Nothing Left to Lose" by the Pretty Reckless. I recommend listening to that while reading. As ever I own nothing.
Amanda is nineteen.
She's had her first birthday in a decade as a free person, no longer stuck staring at the same four walls and ignoring everyone around.
It's been a year since she moved in with Nolan, because who else would take in Amanda Clarke? It hasn't been all that bad, really. Nolan is kind, genuinely kind for the sake of it. Here, she doesn't fear that his kindness is some ploy to get her on his side, doesn't fear that he's about to spring a favour on her.
(Well, not any more)
She gets out of the hard-party stage a few months in, bored of the hangovers and tired of the slight frown he always gives her the next morning.
They settle in something of a routine, one where he makes pancakes for dinner, or a really good lasagne, buys her things just because he thinks of her when he sees them. This is how she acquires a taste for sentimental pop music even when angry metal would suit her mood better, how she learns to relax when she spends hours watching movies, and soon enough it's habit for them to spend hours with a movie marathon lined up. They split popcorn and it's like having a friend.
For her birthday, it's just them. She's spent weeks demanding little to no celebration and he complies, brings her a cupcake with a candle and they order in takeout.
It's the best birthday she's had since she was nine and she loves Nolan for it.
He's got lawyers, of course. They're men in discreet suits and women who smile pityingly at her, and she suspects he's promised them all major bonuses if they treat her like a human. She's still paranoid about someone being bitter about David Clarke's daughter walking around –
Anyway, they're polite, they bring paperwork and forms for her. She digs out old ID and numbers, signs where they tell her to (Nolan is encouraging when her hand falters over a dotted line) and they're efficient because not long after her bank accounts are in the black, more numbers than she's ever seen swimming across the page.
She's nineteen and has more money than she'll ever need, but her father is still dead and so is her mother.
Amanda is wealthy.
Money, it's all she sees. The numbers of her account flutter over the screen, changing every so often. For a while she tracks it, watches the numbers climb with interest or dip when she makes a withdrawal.
She runs off, spends it like water as she buys ridiculous fashions and piles of CDs that go unheard, books that go unread. It's hedonism, it's uncaring, it's nothing important. There are no contributions being made to the world.
It's so easy to dress up in outrageous fashion and use a fake name, charter jets at a whim and slash digits, but it never dulls the pain for long. Everything the world has to offer right now is new and she can get what she wants –
Well, not quite. Can't get her family back, no matter how much money lies behind her bank cards. Can't get friends, because some of them hate her surname, some of them want her cash and the rest… no, she doesn't think about them. It's kind of okay though because Nolan is like her friend, and maybe she is his friend too. Maybe they're just two lonely rich kids together.
They support each other, become guard dogs and bail-out calls and fake partners when they want to fend off unwanted attentions.
(She's always reluctant but sometimes he wears her down. Besides, he's always there, no judgement and sometimes a hangover-ready breakfast on the table so she goes along with it.)
Sometimes they're partners-in-crime and go through town making mischief, and it's shaping up to be kind of a decent transition into her adult life. If she ever wonders about calling herself by a different name, ever introduces herself to someone by a spur-of-the-moment name change, she doesn't tell him.
Amanda is angry.
She's angrier than she's ever been because she's finally read the journals Nolan brought to her, finally understood the scope of her father's imprisonment and death. It's true what they say, you can't unring a bell and she finally gets it.
Anger and grief blur together into one tangled web, and she doesn't even try to decipher what this is. She uses a phone number she once received and leaves a note on the fridge. Nolan would worry otherwise.
There's no time to hang around, her anger fuels her urgency so she summons a jet to bring her straight to Japan.
It's difficult. She picks up the language word by word and stumbles through the most basic sentences. The other students are unfriendly, too focused on their own training. Her slim knowledge wasn't enough to prepare her for the reality, the one where she's isolated entirely in her own room when not training. This isn't a world where people go out for drinks or shopping or idle brunches, it's a world where people sit silently and look right through you if you give them the chance.
They don't mind finding and exploiting your weaknesses, are willing to fake you out so they show up as the better student. She kind of likes it.
She battles on because this is for her, for her father's memory. It's for how Nolan remembers her father, the first person to ever give him a chance, and one day it all clicks into place.
It's control. It's a girl who is a tragically-orphaned heiress, a well-educate young woman who speaks multiple languages with ease and knows her way around high society. It's hair dye and a hint of an accent and an iron grip on her emotions.
This world is a study in contradiction: smooth and jagged and torn and polished all at once. It's peaceful and angry and it's almost like another home.
Eventually she is deemed ready, has to leave, so she lays out a battle plan and goes back. Back to Nolan, back to the Hamptons, and – though they don't know it yet – back to the Graysons' world. This is what she is now, a product of their actions: insidiously charming, polite and yet always ready to strike. This is her inheritance: money that she uses for nefarious deeds and a path her father never wished her to cross.
The care has left her, woven into the fibres of pure white uniforms and Japanese sunrises.
Revenge is all that's left; she has nothing left to lose, after all.