Author's Note: This will remain canon right up until the latest episode, "Too Far Gone". Hopefully I can write as much as I can before the episodes start catching up with me. Right now, it's planned between 9-10 chapters.

Also: Please forgive me for the MASSIVE cliché I am about to drop on you. I HATE HATE HATE clichés but hopefully it's less grave of a sin if I commit it in Chapter 1 than if I leave you waiting halfway through the fic. This idea came to me right after the mid-season finale in December, and wouldn't leave me alone until I started writing it down.

I don't own Nashville, or anything affiliated.

I.

She broke down and finally bought a test the day she flew back from LA.

Will hadn't been the one to call her; Jeff had. Directly.

She went straight to Edgehill from the airport. A car was there to pick her up.

It hadn't even been a week after Juliette's bombshell Opry induction, Jeff dropping her from the label, then subsequently yanking Scarlett O'Connor out of her opening slot on Luke Wheeler's tour and replacing her with Layla and Will, so now it was only Edgehill artists.

Jeff pulled them into his office, and laid down the bottom line. They would be recording their albums in Nashville during the week, and then on the weekends fly out to whatever city where Luke was performing. They would stick to the same sets, follow Luke for the next four months until he finished the tour, and in the meantime, try not to fuck any shit up.

"You got nothin' to worry about," Will said. "We're not setting off alarms anytime soon."

Jeff's eyes had darted to her boyfriend, who for all his height and broadness seemed to shrink under that gaze.

"The answer you should be giving me," Jeff said coolly, "is that you're never going to set off any alarms. Because you both are going to do nothing, except exactly what is expected of you. Which is going onstage, singing your songs, and playing up your hashtag romance for the fans. That is IT."

He cocked his head, and not for the first time, Layla thought of reptiles. Lizards. Their dragon scales, their lifeless eyes; the way they darted in and out of the shadows, slithering and hissing.

"Anything else," he said, making his voice just loud enough that she and Will had to strain to hear it, "and you both can go back to singing in karaoke bars for beer money. This town has plenty of up-and-comers who are willing to play by the rules, and you two are just as easily replaceable as Scarlett was on this tour."

She tried not to let her face twitch when Jeff's eyes landed directly on her. She kept her head up, trying not to think about anything except what he couldn't prove – about her, about Juliette, about the rumors of Charlie Wentworth, and all the mess that had unfolded since that night at the festival.

So that was the story – part of it, anyway – of how she had ended up at the pharmacy on the opposite end of town. A bandanna was hiding her hair, and she had on a bulky sweater to hide the rest of her frame, her face was free of make-up to avoid being spotted. She made sure to spend time in the store looking for other things to buy – a new toothbrush, a bottle of conditioner, a diet iced tea from the freezer in the back, some pretzels and hand sanitizer – before ending up in the pharmacy section, casually knocking down one of the boxes off the shelf.

Because this had all big one big accident.

It's not like she hadn't noticed things were different. It had just been easier to NOT notice certain things lately. Like it had been easier, when she was crashing at Will's instead of in and out of hotel rooms, to ignore that the bag of tampons she kept in the lining of her suitcase wasn't getting any less empty.

The cashier, a kid not much older than she was with a bad case of acne spreading across his cheeks, didn't even look at Layla as she paid. Even the box she had clutched in her hand – and tried not to struggle to relinquish – was just scanned and dropped into the white plastic bag, along with the rest of her things. He printed out the receipt, told her to have a nice day, and gave Layla the bag without ever looking at her face.

Small miracles.

When she hurried out of the store, bag gripped tightly in her hand, Layla caught a glimpse of herself in the side mirror of a car parked in one of the narrow spaces in front of the store, and realized why the bored cashier hadn't even looked at her – she barely recognized herself. The lack of make-up made her look older, somehow, and the bulky clothes she wore made her look heavy and tired. It was like she'd just gotten off from a shift of bagging groceries, or cutting boxes open at a factory. Like she'd been on her feet for ten hours straight, and now just needed to get home, eat a TV dinner, and watch some bad reality TV before crashing on the couch with her socks on.

Layla turned away from the stranger in the car's mirror. The plastic bag burned a hole in her side the entire walk home.

When she got back to the house, Gunnar and Zoey were watching TV on the couch, and Will was out getting dinner. Without her. Layla said hi to both of them, then went upstairs, trying to look like she had somewhere to be, or actually had someone waiting for her up there.

She made sure the door to Will's upstairs apartment was locked, and then checked twice that the bathroom was locked as well. She dumped out everything from the bag into the sink – had she really bought all this crap? – and pulled out the only thing she needed.

It was a minute before she could take it out of the box, another minute before she could unwrap it from its plastic shell. Another minute before she could actually follow the instructions, because she had to keep re-reading them. Just in case she did something wrong, and got the answer she wasn't supposed to get.

But she didn't – she followed the directions exactly, like she'd done her entire life. Because, like she'd told Will only a few days ago (god, it felt like months), she always did what was expected of her. She'd always listened to what people told her to do, always did what made them proud.

She had always been a good girl.

She set the alarm on her phone to beep after exactly three minutes. No more, no less. There could be no margin for error. She sat on the closed toilet lid and waited, waited, waited, hands folded neatly in her lap like they'd been when she'd sat in Jeff's office earlier that day. She remembered what he'd said, about her and Will being the future of Edgehill, about scandals.

She remembered also what he'd said the night of the Festival. About her contract being in jeopardy if he knew she tipped off the press in the first place, officially starting this whole mess. Which she was sure would have long since blown over by now. But it hadn't, and now –

The timer rang.

She stared at it, then back at her hands. At the small white stick in them, clenched in her fists, slick with sweat. She took a breath, then another, then another, and then finally opened her hands, to check the results of the only test in her entire life that she'd ever wanted to fail.

II.

Lately, she'd been dreaming of a girl made of light.

It started a few days after she and Gunnar's failed writing attempt, and then him suggesting she ought to start a journal. The Office Depot nearby was having a sale, three single-subject spiral notebooks for five bucks, and she bought one purple, one yellow, one black.

She started the black one first.

In the beginning, she'd been paralyzed, just like she had the day she told Will she was a blank. Because she spent almost two hours staring at an empty page, willing the words to come. Or even a thought, or a feeling, or something. Anything.

She'd almost started crying again, and that same voice that told her she was nothing because she had nothing to say came back and kept repeating it, and eventually she started writing that, because she just wanted to write something down so badly, just to make that page stop taunting her with its emptiness. Empty like everything she felt like she was, and probably always had been.

So she wrote it down – I feel like a blank – and then kept writing, going off of that, first finding synonyms for blank like empty and nothing and waste of space, before she started writing about how long she'd felt like this.

Which she realized had been for most of her life.

Then she wrote about Will, when he held her and stroked her hair, telling her she'd find her way. How it felt to spend that night staring up at the ceiling of his dark little bedroom, with him sleeping beside her, his arm resting on her waist. About how she stared at the ceiling for so long that her eyes started to water and everything blurred, and she didn't realize she'd started crying again until she wiped her face with the back of her hand and found her cheeks wet with tears.

Then, the night after that, she'd woken up in the darkness from a dream about a girl.

She'd been made of golden light, and surrounded by walls of glass. The girl was little, only about six or seven, and barefoot on a white marble floor, her toes wiggling upward because the floor was too cold, and she had dark, thick hair that someone – her mother – was twirling in her steady, capable hands, trying to twist into some impossibly sophisticated style.

The girl was staring at her reflection in one of the mirrors, the dark hair and the hazel eyes and the way the light pulsed around her. Like it breathed along with her, and she glowed whenever her small chest moved in and out.

She wanted to spin, wanted to break away from the hands holding her hair and just twirl in the light, but when she did, the hands of the mother jerked her back.

"Hold still," the mother said briskly. "I mean it, Layla. I have to finish this, so we can see if it works with your dress."

The little girl, itching to spin in the room made of light. She felt it from the bottoms of her feet all the way to the top of her head, where her mother was still twisting that river of thick dark hair into a perfect pageant knot with an annoyed scowl on her face.

The girl looked into the glass all around her and felt like she was floating in the golden shine of her reflection, over and over again in the bright little room. It was like standing on a star, or being one herself.

Then Layla woke up, practically bolted upright in bed. Will shifted beside her, turning over blearily.

"Whuzzgoin' on?" he mumbled. "Whuh…"

"Nothing," she said, already reaching for that little black journal while he fell back asleep.

Then she wrote.

For days, all she'd had were words and words and words about how blank she felt inside, and now she had something else to put down – that little girl spinning in a room full of light. Except in Layla's journal, in her own words, there were no mother's disapproving hands to hold her down, and no cold, hard floor under her little bare feet. There was nothing above or below that girl. She was just spinning, free, in a world made of gold and glass.

She was a star.

Layla wrote it down. All of it. Everything she could remember, except the things she didn't want to. And what she didn't want to remember, she turned into something else, like making the mother's hands disappear, along with the weight of them keeping that girl from spinning in the light.

It all poured out of her so fast that she had no idea where it really had come from, but it came out so easily that her pen had a hard time keeping up with her head, and in some places her writing was illegible from where she'd struggled so hard to get the words out of her before they disappeared entirely.

When she was done and finally closed the book, she tried to lay down in Will's arms again, but felt too keyed up to close her eyes, like she'd just drank an entire pot of coffee. So she just lay there beside him, replaying the image over and over again, trying to scour her mind for any new details about that girl in the room full of light. Nothing came to mind, but she felt like she was spinning herself, filled with the same pulsing glow that radiated through that little space.

In the morning, she felt stupid looking at it, and even stupider for actually having written it. She'd bought this journal for songwriting, and this wasn't a song. It wasn't even her feelings, either, which was what Gunnar had advised her to do with the whole journal idea in the first place. So while she waited for Will to get out of the shower so she could take hers, Layla thought about tearing the pages out and just sticking to what Gunnar had said, like the pages she'd written before her dream.

Except, she really couldn't.

She felt attached to that little girl, for some reason – the girl in her head, not the one in her memory, with the mother's hands tying her down with disappointment and expectation. And just as she'd been ready to tear the pages out, Layla closed her eyes and saw her again: that girl in that room, and only that girl.

She turned the page.

Then she started writing about the smell of the room. How it was like cold cream and hairspray, and how the hem of the girl's dress was white and ruffled; how her bare feet wiggled on the cracks in the floor, itching to be free and fly.

By the time it was her turn in the shower, she had every detail of the room written down in her black notebook. It wasn't a song and it wasn't feelings – it wasn't even really a story, not in the sense that it was anything Layla ever thought she'd want to read – but it made her feel like spinning herself, as she stood under the hose of Will's shower and felt the steam rise around her.

That girl in the room was spinning. Fearless, free. Light as a star, sailing through the black, black sky.

III.

The plus sign stared up at her. It was big as expectation, heavy as disappointment. Like those mother's hands, in that little gold room.

And real as the words she'd put down on paper, both about the little spinning girl and the emptiness inside herself.

She stared down at that plus sign.

Not so empty, not anymore.

IV.

"I mean…that's impossible."

The doctor peered at her over his notes. "Were you and your partner having sex?"

"Yeah, I mean – "

"Did you use protection?"

"Yes," she insisted. "All the time." And it was true. If there was one thing she and Will were always diligent about, it was using condoms. She wasn't some stupid little girl. "I mean, we were always super careful."

"Were you on birth control?"

She shook her head. "No, I wasn't on the pill –"

She'd wanted to go in it, back in high school, but she knew she could never actually bring up the idea with her parents without them automatically assuming the worst from her. Besides, she'd heard the pill could make you gain weight.

The doctor shrugged.

"Well, then," he said. "Sometimes, accidents just happen."

"No," she said. "Not…"

He looked back at her, too calm. It was surreal, how he could act like he just told her the time or weather, not like he'd totally shaken up her whole world from a different place it had been five minutes ago.

"We were careful," Layla finished. Her voice trailed off more and more with each syllable, until she could barely hear the words in her own head. She stared down at the tiled floor. "We were always careful."

His face didn't change. "I don't know what to tell you, Miss Grant."

She stared at the laces of her shoes, the scuffed soles. "But these things are wrong all the time, right? I mean…"

"Not if you're using them correctly. Were you following the directions?"

She bristled. "I know how to pee on a stick."

"Well, then, it sounds like you did everything right, and got accurate results." His bland expression didn't change. "Just not the ones you were hoping for."

V.

She took a cab home, and had it drop her off about a half mile from the house so she could walk back, giving herself some time to catch her breath. It was freezing outside, the sky heavy and grey, but she tucked her head against the wind and kept up her brisk pace, marching through the cold, silent streets.

The whole way home, she'd been thinking about that little girl, spinning in the golden room. That little star, crashing through the sky.

Layla had studied stars before. She knew they created themselves against all reason, against logic. They shouldn't exist, but they managed anyway. They were creation in chaos, in emptiness; something bright and burning and living, when there was once nothing at all.

Like that spinning little girl; made of starlight, hurtling a million miles an hour through the endless black void of space.

Will was packing his suitcase when she came up the stairs, her fingers numb and bits of windblown hair clinging to her chapped lips.

"Hey," he said, without looking up. He was busy tossing his jeans into the suitcase without folding them, just throwing them in faded bundles into the bottom of his worn grey duffle. "Glad you're back. Gunnar and Zoey wanna take us out to dinner tomorrow night. You know, to celebrate the tour. I already said we could go. I'm not in the studio, and I didn't think you had anything. Just needed to make sure."

Layla blinked at him. She wasn't so sure about the rest of it, but she did know the first three words he'd said – glad you're back.

He still didn't look over at her, as he proceeded to lift his entire sock-and-underwear drawer out of his dresser and dump the whole thing out into his suitcase. "Think they want to go for barbeque. Hope that's okay."

She watched as he wadded up some undershirts and boxers and tried to make them fit in the overstuffed bag.

"Don't worry," he was saying, grunting a little as he forced the zipper shut. "We won't be out late. Gunnar knows we have an early flight."

She watched him. The way he didn't turn to look at her. The way he was so tall, standing in front of the only window in the room. He could block out the sun, if only there was one shining through the clouds.

He peered over his shoulder and finally caught her eye, frowning.

"You okay?" he asked. "You're white as a sheet."

He didn't move closer to her, or reach out a hand.

She made herself unstick her throat.

"Yeah," she said, shaking her head. "No, I'm totally fine."

He arched an eyebrow at her. "Well, which is it? Yeah or no?"

She looked up at him, the slight not-really-smile on his face. She stepped closer to him, wrapping her arms around his waist, and reached up on her tiptoes for a kiss. Even then, he had to bend down to meet her.

"I'm fine," she said, when their lips broke apart. "I'm okay. Everything's fine."