Title: The Thin Line
Disclaimer: Skins isn't mine, but really, it's about time someone gave it to me for my birthday.
Notes: Written for a prompt in the Write Skins community on Live Journal (link on my profile if you want to join)!
There she was, perched on a bench, not even twenty feet away. Her blonde hair short, styled differently. She didn't look like the Naomi Campbell she met at age twelve. She'd grown; her face looked older, wiser. The clothes were a far cry from the drab, navy blue school uniform they'd been forced to wear in middle school. Emily had never seen her wearing her own clothes, she never turned up to own clothes days in anything but her school uniform. It wasn't that she couldn't afford to pay the pound donation to charity, in her own words 'can't fucking be bothered with the dressing up parade'. If only Emily could feel that way, if only she'd found a way of having the confidence that Naomi oozed.
'You fucking kissed me.'
Memories of those years brushing shoulders with the blonde, one moment repeated in her mind, never ceasing to destroy the sliver of forgiveness she'd found in herself. The morning after the kiss, the morning after the party, where for the first time Katie was dragging her away from a pair of lips. Unfortunately for all involved, that pair of lips belonged to Naomi Campbell. That's right, a girl, two girls kissing in the middle of a garden at Johnny Smith's fourteenth birthday party.
'No, no, I,' Emily tried to speak, the words in her head came out wrong, jumbled up like she couldn't figure out the jigsaw puzzle going on inside.
Barely twenty-four hours later and they were walking the school corridors, Emily and Katie, side by side. The Fitch twins showing that they were the Queen bees, they ruled the school. Not really. Katie ruled the school, Katie was the popular one. Emily just went along for the ride and was pushed into everything by Katie's domineering, magical ability.
'You did,' Naomi snapped. 'Don't fucking lie. Your sister thinks it was me, why haven't you told her?'
Lies, they'd told lies. Emily had told lies to protect a side of herself she wasn't ready to admit, not least to the sister who celebrated their similarities and destroyed their differences. She'd let it happen, in all fairness to Katie, for the first time she saw her power to stop it and she did nothing. She just followed Katie around like a lost puppy, allowing her to slander the one person in the school who didn't treat her like Katie Fitch's lapdog.
'I, I can't.'
What was the alternative? Tell her she kissed Naomi and face exile from her sister, suffer from years of school bullying just to make life easier for someone who had already chosen to be an outcast.
'Can't?' she scoffed. 'You're a fucking coward Emily Fitch.'
It had been alright though because they finished middle school that year and moved on to high school instead, two years of a brand new school where Naomi Campbell was a distant memory and everything that happened that night and the following days would be forgotten. Forever.
Only, they weren't forgotten and forever was two years. The day they started at Roundview College there she was, her blonde hair cut short, her own clothes appeared unusual. Katie's tongue firing pellets at Naomi as though they'd stepped right out of a parallel universe where they were still fourteen years old.
They were in the same form, they walked the same corridors, Naomi sat in front of her in History and no matter how hard she tried, she couldn't not look at her. Transfixed by something in the way Naomi moved, the way she laughed and talked and carried on like Katie wasn't tormenting her again. No matter how hard she tried to tear her gaze away and focus on her history coursework, or listen to Katie moaning about Danny, she couldn't stop herself from staring. Just a little longer, just a little harder than was deemed necessary by any human being. She couldn't help it; even when Naomi noticed her watching and glared at her with mild irritation and a look of pure hatred, even when she purposefully turned down a corridor because Emily was stood there waiting for her to pass by and especially when she called her name as they left a class room only to ignore her, dashing the very last piece of hope she had left.