A/N: Thanks for all the great feedback on the prologue, you guys are absolutely wonderful. :)

Chapter One

"They told me to take a streetcar named 'Desire', transfer to one called 'Cemetery', ride six blocks and get off at Elysian Fields."

-- Blance DuBois in Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire

Peyton sighed as she entered her apartment, tossing her keys aside and collapsing backward onto her couch, legs stretched out across the length of it. She covered her face with her hands and just concentrated on breathing for a few minutes, in and out, in and out. When she finally let her hands fall away they were wet with the moisture of tears she hadn't known she'd cried.

She needed to call someone. It seemed like the logical step, to inform someone who cared of her suffering, but she didn't know who to call and she didn't know how to say it. Her friends in L.A. weren't really friends, they weren't really much of anything. She toyed with the idea of calling her father, but she couldn't tell him that she was dying over the phone. She wasn't sure if she could tell him at all; her mother's death has devastated him enough for one lifetime.

"I'm dying," she whispered into her empty apartment. The words sounded strange and heavy and ugly in the room filled with artwork and CDs and the bright light of the Los Angeles sun. She laughed bitterly as she stood up and closed her curtains. Those words, that fact, changed everything. Once she said it to someone there wouldn't be any going back.

She took a moment to think about what she wanted to do. Three days before the beginning of her time in and out of the hospital, she'd seriously contemplated getting a cat. Her apartment felt so very empty that it tugged at her heartstrings. She longed for some company, someone to care for and watch over. She wanted some kind of acknowledgment when she came home each day. She'd thought she might get two, so they wouldn't be lonely when she was at work. She'd laughed at herself for becoming a crazy cat lady, but she was serious about it.

Obviously, that wasn't going to happen now. She wouldn't be able to care for and watch over two innocent animals if she was dead.

Reminding herself to breathe again, she thought about all of the other things she'd dared to hope for. She'd wanted to rescue those two cats from a shelter, she wanted to make enough money to afford to visit Brooke in New York and live the good life for a week or two. She wanted to be there for Jamie Scott's first basketball game, and his wedding, and everything in between. She wanted to have a house of her own one day. She wanted to buy a ridiculously expensive but ridiculously beautiful piece of artwork. She wanted to go to a bar with a great band one night and drink a martini and catch the eye of a guy across the room, and she wanted him to be an artist or a musician or just someone who cared about her, and she wanted to let him make her giggle the way she only did when she was being a total girl, and she wanted to fall in love again. She wanted to get married and she wanted to have kids.

Peyton shook her head. She was getting far too far ahead of herself into a future that she no longer had. She needed to focus on what she wanted to do now, present tense, present time. Should she travel, see all the great sights of the world, the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower and the pyramids and the Himalayas? Should she make a bucket list and do all the crazy things she hadn't previously had the courage for? Should she dedicate her remaining time to finding a great musician for the label or making her best piece of artwork yet? Should she go and spend weeks, or maybe months, with her dad?

As she wandered into her kitchen in search of something to eat, she thought of her doctor's parting words after Peyton had insisted repeatedly that she didn't want to pursue chemo or radiation or anything that would extend her life but make it more painful. Whatever you choose to do, Peyton, you should make the decisions that will make you happiest. She glanced at the small pile of bottles of prescription medication on her counter and tried to think of what made her happy. Biting her lower lip as she wracked her brains, she tried to pinpoint the last moment she had really and truly felt good and entirely hopeful about her life.

As she closed her refrigerator door, she caught sight of the picture she'd stuck on there what seemed like forever ago and had never taken down. The frame was crammed with the faces of those she loved, her best friends on the last day they'd all spent together after senior year of high school. Her fingers traced lightly over their faces, Bevin and Skills and Mouth and Fergie, Brooke and Haley and Nathan…and Luke. She looked at her own face, her own smile, full of love and life. She'd been on the cusp of everything good. She was in love, she was loved, she was pursuing music, she had her art, her friends were wonderful, she was at home, and…Luke. There was always Luke.

Home. She mulled the word over as she pulled a box of cereal out of the cupboard. She poured some of the cereal into a bowl and added milk, still deep in thought. Maybe she needed to go home, back to the place where she had laughed under the stars and felt so full of possibility.

Abandoning her food, she grabbed her phone and hesitated only for a moment before dialing Brooke's number at her permanent Tree Hill address, where she'd been spending more time as of late. Before Peyton had been offered an official position at Sire Records, she'd been planning on moving back home and moving in with her best friend until she and Luke found a place of their own, as he was still in school and living with Nathan, Haley, and Jamie. There wasn't an answer, and she heard the familiar sound of the message she and Brooke had recorded years go. It was messy: their voices overlapped and they argued and burst out laughing halfway though. But they'd left it that way because they loved how it sounded. Brooke still hadn't changed it, insisting that still loved hearing it whenever she checked her messages.

Listening to it two years after it had been recording, standing in her kitchen and counting down the days to her death without really meaning to, she knew with certainty that home was where she needed to be.

xxx

"I quit."

Her boss turned slowly to face her, one eyebrow lazily arched. "What now, Sawyer?" he asked exasperatedly. "I know you grew up in a small town and you have all these big beliefs, but you've got to play the game. You've got good instincts, Sawyer, I won't deny that. You could be very, very good at all of this – you could have much more than you do, if you'd just remember that this is business." He paused, eyeing her up and down. "Tell you what. Drop a couple buttons on that shirt and I'll let you sit in on a meeting this afternoon."

Peyton sighed, crossing her arms over her chest. "I quit," she repeated firmly, and turned to go.

"Sawyer!" her boss called. When she turned back to face him, she saw a strange mixture of shock and pride in his eyes. "You're making a mistake."

Peyton shook her head, smiling sadly to herself, thinking of just how wrong he was. "No," she said softly. "I'm fixing one."

xxx

Once she made the decision to leave, everything fell together seamlessly. She put her apartment on the market and packed her things – her favourite clothes, her photo albums, her records from Ellie, and her most meaningful drawings. She sold her furniture to a nearby junk-y store and donated the money to her local animal shelter, hoping that it would aid the cats that would never get to be hers. The rest of her things, she donated to charity. It would all be useless to her soon enough.

After she booked a one-way plane ticket for the next day, she curled up on the couch under a couple blankets and sipped red wine, delicately holding the photograph that had spent over two years on her fridge. She ran her index finger along the semi-tattered corner and sighed. She felt so detached from the faces that stared back at her, from Nathan and Haley and the life they'd built, from Brooke and all her fame and success, from Luke and everything he had without her. And most of all, she felt incredibly detached from herself, of who she'd once been.

She fell asleep curled up in a ball on her couch, her one remaining piece of furniture, the picture clutched tightly in her hand. She woke up with a cramp in her hand from holding on so tightly, and she wondered if that girl she was clinging to was even a part of her anymore.

xxx

Her flight was, miraculously, perfectly on time. She marched through security obediently and efficiently, handed over her boarding pass, and found her seat on the plane with relative ease, anxious to reach her destination. She pretended to listen to the instructions about oxygen masks and life jackets and emergency lighting systems, but she really couldn't have cared less about her own safety in the event of a crash. Cynically and bitterly, she thought that it wouldn't make much difference in the grand scheme of things. Goodbyes had never been her strong suit anyway.

Though the journey wasn't an excessively long one, she dozed off almost instantly and slept through the entire flight, dreaming disjointedly about her old boss and his advisory of you're making a mistake and her father sitting with his head in his hands in the waiting room at Tree Hill's hospital all those years ago, track marks in her veins from IVs and blood tests, a blonde-haired toddler throwing his or her arms around her legs, a huge house with an ocean view and a canvas painted entirely in red hanging in the front hall, and two sad, scruffy kittens. When she woke up at the pilot's announcement that they were beginning their descent, her cheeks felt tight with the remnants of tears she'd cried in her sleep.

She wiped angrily at her cheeks, hating herself for moping over this. She was not going to spend the next five months sobbing and feeling sorry for herself. She was not going to be that girl.

Dimly, she realized that she hadn't told anyone besides her boss, her landlord, and a couple co-workers that she was leaving L.A. No one would care. No one would miss her. A lump formed in her throat and she swallowed hard. "It's okay," she whispered to herself. This was why she was going home. She was going home to people who'd care if they lost her. As she blinked back the tears begging to fall, she made the decision that she wasn't going to tell her friends. A small, nagging part of her insisted that that was a bad idea, and that it was unfair to them, and maybe even to her. But that just wasn't the way she wanted to spend her last weeks of life. Brooke would cry and Haley would be maternal as always, trying to analyze her stages of grief and talking about closure and offering her shoulder to cry on. Nathan would be awkward and miserable and defensive and Jamie wouldn't understand. And Luke… She knew how he once would have reacted. He would have been furious with God and the world and her doctors and anyone who could possibly take the blame. He would have insisted that there was something that could be done. He would refuse to lose her. He would cry and scream and fight this for her.

But she didn't know him anymore, and she didn't know how much he would be bothered to care.

And maybe that, was what scared her most of all.

So the decision was made: no one needed to know.

xxx

By the time she found herself walking toward baggage claim, she was undeniably exhausted. She could feel her disease wearing down her body and while she hated it, she thought she could probably use a nap. Now that she was hear it was hardly the time to give up, and while she'd refused any major treatments, she was going to take her pills and make sure to take care of herself.

It took more effort than it should have to lug her one suitcase of the luggage carousel. Her other things were in one very big box that was supposed to arrive later in the week. She set it down with a sigh of relief, tugging her sleeves down lest they slide up and reveal the left over bruises from all the IVs she'd had stuck into her body lately. She tugged the handle on her bag upward and began to wheel it after her as she headed for the exit.

Moments later, she stopped in her tracks a few feet from the doors that opened into the outside world at the sight of a very familiar face. She stared at him, stunned and smiling, unsure of how on earth he'd managed to find out that she was coming home, and that she'd be there at this specific time. For a mortified moment, she wondered if he'd come for someone else and if the yellow roses he held weren't for her after all, and she felt her cheeks flaming up.

Then, as if he'd read her mind, he rolled his eyes and grinned at her. He jerked his chin out slightly, indicating that she should move toward him, and called, "Get your ass over here, Sawyer!"

She hurried toward him as fast as she could with her bag in tow, and the moment she got close enough to released it and threw her arms around his neck. He picked her up and swung her around with ease, making her squeal in breathless surprise as the roses her held got squished in between their bodies. She laughed when he set her back on her feet and leaned up to plant a kiss on his cheek. "Hey, you," she said, unable to stop her smile as he handed her the roses.

"Welcome home," he returned.

"How the hell did you know I'd be here?"

Nathan shrugged. "Haley called you but she couldn't get a hold of you, so then she called your work, and then your boss went on some sort of rant, but basically she gathered that you'd quit your job. So, you know Haley…she started panicking, thinking something awful happened to you or something, so she somehow managed to track down the number of one of your landlord, who said you'd mentioned something about coming home. And since all your stuff was gone and you were gone, she figured your flight left today, and it turns out there's only one flight today so…here I am." He cracked a grin as he finished his lengthy explanation. "But would you believe me if I said I'd just been standing around this airport with fresh flowers everyday, hoping that soon enough you'd show that skinny ass of yours around here again someday?"

She laughed. "Always eloquent, aren'tcha, Nate?" Her smile softened and she tilted her head to the side, hoping that her eyes didn't look as tired and sore as they felt. "But yeah, of course I would've believed you."

"It's been too long, Peyton," he said seriously.

"Not that long."

"Still too long," he insisted, reaching behind her to grab the handle of his bag. "You're home for good?"

Her smile faltered, but only for an instant. "Yep. For good."

Nodding happily, he looped an arm around her shoulders as they headed outside. "Haley and I would totally love to have you, but we figured you'd probably crash with Brooke, since your name's already on the answering machine and everything," he teased.

"Yeah, that's the plan. I couldn't get a hold of her, today or yesterday, though…"

"Hey, don't worry about it. She'd never throw you out or anything. We've all missed you."

His words warmed her heart. "I've missed you guys, too. And I'm not worried about where I'm going to stay as much as I'm worried about her."

Nathan smirked. "Don't bother. I'll bet you one hundred bucks she's with Julian."

"Ah, yes, the guy," Peyton replied sagely, watching as Nathan heaved her bag into the back of his SUV. "Is he worthy?"

"Seems pretty cool, actually," he said calmly as he walked her to the passenger side of the car and opened up her door.

"Dude," she admonished in amazement as she settled into the car, "if you'd been like this when we were dating, all roses and car doors, I never would've let you go."

Nathan chuckled, but his laugher faded away quickly as he looked her over, and his lips curved downward into a frown.

She sucked in some air and forced herself to laugh, though it sounded nervous and shaky. "What?"

"You're thin," he stated.

"This from the guy who just made a comment about my skinny ass…"

"No, Peyton, seriously, you look…really thin."

She bit her lip until she drew blood. When Nathan said 'seriously', he meant it.

"Are you…are you okay?"

"Of course."

He seemed to choose his words carefully. "You, um…you know, it's okay if you're not. If you need help, with anything…if you're, um, having…food issues…"

She burst out laughing, more from relief than anything else. "Nathan, my God. How long have you known me? I've always been thin; and jeez, you've seen me eat! No anorexia, no bulimia." She held up her hands as if to prove her innocence. "I swear."

Nathan sighed in bashful relief. "Right, okay, so now that I've made an ass of myself…"

"Stop. You were being sweet." She smiled encouragingly. "Let's just go, okay?"

She kept up steady conversation through the drive. She was uneasy about lying to him and knew that it was only going to get more difficult with her other friends, and she hated how jumpy it made her, but she wasn't willing to tell them the whole story. She would just do her best to behave as normally as possible. It was going to be fine. It had to be.

"Where's Hales right now?" she asked.

"At school. She's got midterms to correct."

"Her kids must love her."

"Yeah, they really do. She's the cool teacher."

"And the hot teacher, I bet." She wiggled her eyebrows and laughed at the way his jaw tightened. "Don't you dare judge; you fell for your tutor."

He relaxed and gave her a half-grin. "Yeah, I guess I did."

"C'mon, stop making me ask questions! Tell me everything about that beautiful baby boy of yours. Not a baby anymore, huh?"

She listened to him talk about Jamie's little life, his successes and his trials and his general awesomeness as a kid, beaming with pride. She relaxed, leaning back and letting his words wash over her as she closed her eyes. The song playing softly under the tones of their conversation changed and her eyes flew open as she cut him off with a cry of "Oh, no, Nate; no way!"

"Haley never lets me listen to it when she's in the car," he whined immediately.

"Yeah, well, you married a smart woman," she retorted, reaching out to change the song. The car swerved and she gasped, her finger hitting the wrong button. "What was that?" she demanded frantically, looking up to catch his eye.

He focused on the road but kept stealing glances at her. "What the hell is wrong with your hand?" he asked urgently.

Wincing internally, she glanced down at her wrist, partially bandaged and covered in purple-y black bruises. It looked pretty bad; her veins produced bruises easily. Her sleeve had moved up when she'd reached out. "Nathan, it's nothing," she said quietly, tugging her sleeve down again.

Ignoring her unconvincing reply, he pulled onto the shoulder of the road and stopped the car, unbuckling his seatbelt as he turned to face her. "I want you to tell me what the fuck is going on." His eyes signaled a quick series of mental calculations before he blurted, "Oh, God, are you running from a guy? Did someone do this to you?" he asked, his tone of voice rising as he gestured to his wrist.

"No, God, no!" she said quickly, and that one exclamation felt like it had drained her of all her energy. "I just bruise easily."

"But from what?" he growled.

She sighed and figured she should be relieved that she was having this conversation with Nathan rather than Lucas. "I…gave blood."

"You gave blood?" he asked skeptically.

"Yep," she said firmly. "I gave blood and then I fainted, so they gave me an IV, and I just happen to bruise really easily, that's all. It's really nothing."

"Most people don't need IVs after they faint. What was in it?" he challenged her.

"I don't know," she told him calmly, hating the string of lies she was already creating. "But I was half out of it, who was I to argue?" She caught his eyes and smiled softly. "Now, can you get me to Brooke's house without trying to diagnose me with some other crazy problem?"

Blowing out his breath, he laughed slightly. "Yeah, I guess I can. Sorry I freaked."

She shrugged. "Thanks for caring."

xxx

"Brooke!" Peyton yelled as she and her bags tumbled through the front door of the house. She laughed at herself as she tripped over her purse and closed the door behind her. She leaned back against it and grinned. "I'm home!"

"P. Sawyer?!" Brooke exclaimed, surprise and excitement mingling together in her exclamation. She charged out of her room, squealed, and threw her arms around the blonde in an enthusiastic hug. "Oh my God, you're here, what are you doing here?! When Haley told me I didn't really believe it!" She pulled back, eyes bright as she awaited Peyton's answers.

"I'm…I'm home. For good," she added, locking eyes with her best friend and smiling. "That's really all there is to it. I wanted to come home."

"Peyton…" Brooke tackled her into another tight hug. "You don't even know how happy that makes me. I've missed you so much."

"I've missed you, too."

"What about…L.A.? And your job? What about…all of that?"

Peyton shrugged. "I just…I guess I don't care," she admitted. "I just wanted to be happy."

The brunette nodded, a smile slowly lighting up her face. "Here's the place for that," she assured her friend. She sighed and hugged her one last time. "I'm so glad you're here."

She nodded, hugging back. "It feels right."

Brooke released her, grinning, and bounded over to Peyton's back, setting it upright and wheeling it down the hall. "Come on, let's get you unpacked. You look tired, did you have to get up really early for your flight or something?"

"Uh, yeah, something like that…" Peyton muttered vaguely as she followed Brooke into what was always meant to be her room. "Oh." She smiled. "It's just like I remember it."

Together, they lifted her bag onto the bed and unzipped it. Brooke sat at its side and started assessing items of clothing as she pulled them out. She winked at Peyton, shrugging sweetly. "I always knew you'd come back."

Peyton opened her closet and pulled out a few hangers, smiling appreciatively and choosing to ignore her tiredness for the time being. "Enough about me. We have so much to catch up on, and I wanna talk about you, B. Davis."

"Me? What about me?" Brooke asked innocently.

Peyton threw a shirt at her. "Don't play coy. The guy, tell me about the guy!"

She grinned bashfully. "He, um…he's really, really great, P. His name is Julian, and he produces these indie films – you'll totally love him, you two can talk about all that artsy crap – and he has this perfect grin that always makes me melt and he's just so nice but also not too nice and funny and totally gorgeous and…" She trailed off, sighing to herself.

Peyton set down the shoes she'd just pulled from her bag and rested her palms against the mattress as she leaned toward her friend. "Brooke Davis," she marveled quietly, "You are so in love."

Brooke dropped the jeans she was holding, hopping up and shaking her head even as she smiled.

"Brooke!"

"Maybe," she conceded quietly with an impish grin. "But…you look like you need some sleep, so I'll just let you do that." She bounded out of the room.

Peyton stared at the spot she'd just stood incredulously. "This conversation is not over, Brooke Penelope Davis!" she yelled. "I know where you live!"

Brooke poked her head back in, still smiling. "You know where we live," she corrected. "Oh, and Peyton?"

"What is it?" she asked, surprised by the sudden gentleness of Brooke's tone.

"Yeah."

"Yeah…what?"

Brooke rolled her eyes. "Yeah."

"I don't…I'm not understanding."

"Yeah, as in, that's the answer to the question you're asking with every part of you but your mouth."

"What does that mean?" Peyton demanded defensively, honestly at a loss but with an inkling toward what her friend was getting to.

Brooke smiled knowingly. "It means, honey, that yeah, he knows you're home."