Disclamer: I own nothing, everything belongs to their rightful owners.
Warning: DARK/ANGST
Because You Have Seen The Darkness Too
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Emily is five when her father leaves. A little girl with pigtails, wearing a velvet dress. Watching from the porch, calling after him to please take her with him.
But he doesn't look back. And even though she's just a small child, Emily knows she'll never see him again.
It's Anna, her Nanny, who tells her to be a good girl and go and play with her dolls. But Emily isn't a good girl, she's never been, and she hates dolls. She stamps her feet angrily - only to make a point - before she storms off.
Anna follows, calling her a lot of nasty things in Russian, but Emily's faster and is already hidden in an empty cabinet in her mother's office. Emily may not be fluent in Russian yet, but she definitely knows all the bad words she's not supposed to know and she definitely understands that Anna doesn't like her.
Emily sits in her hiding place for the rest of the day, her hands on her ears, to drown out the sound of her own name echoing though the house.
In the end, her mother finds her, but not because she'd actually been looking for her, no. Emily knows the second she meets her mother's cold stare.
Instead of helping Emily out, or at least calling for Anna to take her to bed, her mother slams the door of the cabinet shut as if she hadn't seen her at all.
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By the time she's eleven Emily already knows that no matter how hard she tries, nothing will ever be good enough to please her mother. And she knows she's not only a disappointment but a disgrace as well.
It's what her mother tells her. If not necessarily in so many words.
Emily's twelve when she shoves her fingers down her throat for the very first time. It's disgusting and it hurts and makes her throat ache, yet she manages to get rid of that chocolate cake she had for lunch. The one her mother told her not to eat because she would just get fat.
Emily brushes her teeth with a satisfied smile on her face. Proud of being one step ahead of her mother after all.
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She's fourteen and living in Italy, when she meets John. A boy with dark hair and hazel eyes and just as rebellious as she is.
He's her first, just like she is his. He looks at her like she means everything to him, tells her how beautiful she is and how much he likes her. But if anything it makes Emily feel sick and she pushes her lips against his to shut him up every single time. Because no matter how much she wants to believe him, she knows it's not true. She's been told she's beautiful all her life.
She's fifteen when she ends up in a clinic in Rome.
Her ex-boyfriend's best friend, Matthew, the only one who came there with her. A sweet innoccent boy, who looks at her with the same expression John had, before she got pregnant, and became a disappointment.
Emily already knows it'll be only a matter of time until Matthew feels the same way.
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She's sixteen when she gets back to the States and every piece of clothing she owns has changed to pitch black. So has her hair and her nail polish and even her lip stick.
Before she turns seventeen, she starts smoking and steals pills from her mother's bathroom. She gets wasted every weekend, but when she finally stumbles home in the morning, just to throw up all over the tiles in the hallway, her mother isn't even there to yell at her.
She meets Luca on her eighteenth birthday. A twenty seven year old guy with long blonde hair, more than one piercing and a couple of tattoos.
He gives Emily a smile and his leather jacket, before he walks her home and hot wires her mother's car. They drive all the way to the ocean, where Luca fucks her on the back seat of her mother's car and makes her come for the first time in her life. They stay at the ocean, sleeping on the beach right under the dark horizon. Listening to the hum of the sea.
In the morning he takes her to see a friend and she gets a tongue piercing and a tattoo of her own.
But the fun is short lived and ends with an overdose only three days later.
Emily wakes up in the hospital, a nurse telling her that she got really lucky. Emily isn't sure if she would consider herself lucky, when she spots her mother in the doorframe. And not for the first time in her life, Emily wonders how her mother manages to frighten her with an expression that shows no emotion at all.
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Emily's nineteen and just enrolled in Yale, when she meets Leila. Leila, a sweet young girl from Europe, with black curls and eyes as dark as Emily's. A girl that paints the world with words, not with colors. A writer through and through.
She writes about death and destruction. About blood and pain and hate. About hope and love and despair. And Emily loves to get lost in a universe only Leila can create for her. A safe haven, only for the two of them.
Everyhing about Leila is different and everything about kissing a girl is too. It feels like being sent to heaven, a place Emily knows she'll never belong. A place she was cast out from even before she was born.
Leila just laughs when Emily tells her. Writes her another poem instead and when her gentle hands find a way down her body, Emily pretends Leila is right. Even when she knows she isn't.
It's a cold Monday morning almost three years later when Emily finds Leila in the bathtub of their dorm room, the water turned cold and bloody red. A lonely note left on the tiles.
I was wrong all along.
Emily burns it with everything else Leila ever wrote until there's nothing left but ashes.
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Emily's twenty something, when she joins Interpol and meets Clyde Easter. He's an arrogant bastard, cocky as hell and it's clear as the day that he wants to fuck her, the second he lays eyes on her.
She gives in one rainy morning in a cheap motel somewhere in Prague. Her name isn't Emily and his isn't Clyde, because they're working undercover and it's so easy too forget where she belongs when she looks into his blue eyes.
"It's an understanding," Clyde tells her when he pushes her back against the wall of his office. "It's everything and nothing," he says when he makes her scream his name in the bathroom of the Interpol jet for the whole team to hear.
"It's you and me, darling," he whispers softly, when he kisses her forehead before she falls asleep next to him.
It's not just about sex, it's more than that. Yet, far away from love.
The sky captured in his clear blue eyes, just not meant for her.
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"And what is it that you do, Lauren?"
Emily's falling the second she gets a look at Ian Doyle's eyes. They're blue like Clyde's, but instead of the sky, his capture the ocean. A raging sea on a cloudy day.
She can't help but bite her lip, can't help but rub her thighs together, trying to ease the burning need. Her body aching for his hands.
Ian gives her a smile, a devilish smirk from across the table, and she's sure he already knows everything there is to know about her. She should be afraid, but she isn't.
She looks into his eyes and further, right into his soul. A soul as dark as her own. And Emily knows she just found her perfect match.
"My name isn't Lauren," is what she tells him in the end.
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"Why did you choose to live this life with me?" Ian asks her one night, when he takes her against the bedroom wall of their Tuscan villa. Kissing away the last seconds of the day. "Why did you choose me?"
Emily smiles and pulls him close and closer. Her eyes glistening in the moonlight that comes through the open windows. Her long hair dancing in the soft summer breeze that makes the white curtains flutter.
Her voice as soft as an angel's, her eyes as black as the devil's, when she bends forward to whisper: "Because you've seen the darkness too."
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Disclamer: I own nothing, Everything belongs to their rightful owners.
AN: Again thank you to everyone who takes the time to read/review/fav. one of my stories. I'm really grateful for that. And a special thank you goes to the amazing clairebare for beta reading!