Shattered
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Chet Diaz is planning reveng; Flame and Jackson must stop him. How many lives will be shattered?
Follows Footprints in the snow
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AN: this one seems incredibly disjointed to me. I'm thinking of taking Sarah's POV out entirely. Let me know what you think?
Sarah
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"Munro Diaz, I know you are there. I may be crazy but I'm not stupid," Sarah Turner said, not looking up from where she sat, leaning on a roof post on the porch, "Would you stop being creepy and get out of the bushes?"
She listened to her mother putting the little ones to bed as Munro extricated himself from the darkness of the bushes, his ears burning, and moved into the light.
"Don't seem crazy to me," he said eventually, letting his gaze meet hers directly for just about the first time ever.
"You are not a comforter," she replied.
"Yeah."
They grinned at each other, sharing the complicity of the underdog.
"If you're looking for Lily, you're a bit slow."
"No, I know she's gone." He paused awkwardly.
"So you were looking at me then," Sarah prompted.
"Sort of. I guess."
She waited, but he had said all he was going to voluntarily say on that matter.
"You wanna tell me why?"
He shrugged. She stretched her legs out in front of her on the weathered wood, examining her scarred knees.
"Coz if you were planning on kidnapping me, I think Mum'd like some notice first."
He smiled at bit sheepishly. She was pleased to have got his smile back. She liked what it did to him; it changed his face entirely. It made her wonder what he would have been like before all of this had happened. If the Souls hadn't come.
But they had come. There was no changing that. There was no changing anything.
"Have you heard from Lily?" she asked quietly.
The smile passed.
"I saw her, but I didn't talk to her," he muttered, "She's got her own life now." She frowned to see the hurt Lily still caused in him.
"What about you?" she said as if it didn't matter much at all.
He shrugged and looked into the darkness. "Maybe I've got an appointment with the cold storage centre." Kidnap, holding someone against their will; these were charges that could attract a storage penalty.
She was silent, feeling the deepness of the night around them like they were the only two left.
But as it turned out, Munro was spared cold storage.
"Exile!" Sarah spat in disbelief and fury, "But you didn't even hurt him!" In the weeks she that had come to know him, she had realized he was not like the other Soul-free zone flotsam. He wasn't the hurting type, unless he was cornered. It still amazed her that Lily had let him go for her gutless Alasdair. It seemed to Sarah that Munro was pretty much as close to perfect as you got in this world.
"Doesn't matter," he said, staring vacantly through her, as if nothing mattered.
"Apparently not," she muttered, looking for somewhere more useful to channel her rage. She grabbed his hand and led him at a run through the streets.
"Where are we going?" he panted eventually.
Away, she wanted to say, but knew from experience you could never quite get there.
She stopped when they got to the river, pushing through the dense undergrowth in the section they let grow wild, until the flowing water materialized at their feet. The water never stopped, and she found this comforting. At least something could get away. She sat heavily in the undergrowth, pulling him down next to her, but keeping her eyes on the hazy reflections in the water. He didn't let go her hand, and they sat in silence, losing themselves in the other world in the reflections, where things had no definite edges, and nothing was as solid and unmovable as an exile date. At length he shook her hand free.
"I have to go," he sighed," The Seekers like to know where I am." She listened to him crashing back through the bushes til there was no sound of him at all. Then she listened to that silence, and felt an echoing silence in her heart.
***
Sarah sat on the verandah as Munro came up the steps. She put a finger to her lips and beckoned him over. And they sat side by side in the glow from the window pane, listening to Margie and Kim fight.
"She's barely 16!"
"She's packed a lot into 16. She knows what she wants, and it isn't here. Don't you remember 16?"
"I sure do, that's exactly my point."
"He makes her smile. Do you know how long it has been since she's smiled? No one has been able to do that in years. Years. What will keeping her here do?"
Sarah turned to him, a shy smile on her normally defiant face, and his face had never been more serious.
"I'm coming with you," she whispered. His hand sought hers out and gripped it tight, his eyes digging deeper into hers. She pulled his hand closer and threw her arms around his neck, kissing him like she'd wanted to for a long time, and his hand came to rest just below her arm, holding her side like it was made of glass.
"Don't you go getting shy on me now, boy" she whispered, pressing herself into him, slipping a hand between his thighs. And he kissed her back like she was what he had wanted all along.