A/N: I want to say thank you for those people who have reviewed and/or taken an interest in this story - I've gotten six story alerts so far so, yay! I don't usually write gen so this is a bit new for me so all feedback is welcome (and probably needed lol)

CHAPTER TWO
What's Right Is Wrong

There was a knock on her door only a moment after Parker had closed it, and Parker turned to look at it like it was the thing that was bothering her, and not the person on the other side of it. She didn't move though, and didn't go to open it. She was mad after all, and she was sure Sophie would tell her she had no right to be. After all, Hardison was sick. Because everyone else got the memo that sick people got it all, except for her.

"Parker, please open the door," Sophie calls through it, and Parker rolls her eyes. "I'll pick the lock if I have to," Sophie says once there's only silence that meets her request and Parker smirks. She thinks she might like Sophie to pick the lock, just because it would be one more thing that would bother her. She hears a heavy sigh on the other side of the door, then silence for a minute before she starts to hear familiar clicks.

Parker backs up into her own living room, knowing Sophie's going to mad that she made her do that, and sits on the far end of her couch. When the door swings open, Sophie's looking at her like she was part annoyed, and yet part curious. Parker didn't understand why she was looking at her like she was trying to figure her out; she thinks she's always been clear about who she is.

"Parker," Sophie starts, and comes inside, closing the door behind her. She starts to walk over to her as she asks her, "What's wrong?" Parker gives her a look like she's insane, because she really didn't want to talk about what was wrong. She folds her arms into herself and props her feet onto her coffee table.

"Nothing."

"Right," Sophie says and sits next to her on the couch. Parker didn't look at her, she was being grumpy. She was angry at Sophie's tone. It made it worse cause she was all British and proper and older and… whatever else. "You stormed out for absolutely no reason then?"

"Yup."

Sophie gave her a look like she knows better, and Parker hates that she reads people. She didn't want to be read, she wasn't a book. She was a person. "You're mad because I told you what you said wasn't the right thing to do," Sophie tells her and Parker finally looks at her.

"Why do you ask questions you already know the answer to?" Parker asks, because there seemed to be no point in it. If Sophie already knew what was wrong, why did she ask in the first place? Wasn't that just wasting time?

"To give you a chance to tell me yourself, which obviously was a waste of time," Sophie responds, and Parker has to agree. It was a waste of time. Parker turns back to look at the TV, only it wasn't on, so all she did was stare at her and Sophie's reflection in it. Sophie just kept staring at her though.

"Look Parker, I know you have some trouble with what's wrong and what's right, and I understand that, okay? I do. But you always say you want to learn what's right, so when I correct you I don't think you should get mad about it," Sophie tells her and Parker just bobbed her head along to every word Sophie said sarcastically, only because she was mad that she was right. She did always ask Sophie how to do and say normal things, and she got all pissed off when she did. But it was just because…

"But I knew that was right," she tells her, then yells at herself in her head. That was just supposed to stay inside there. She hates when it does that, just spits things out of her mouth like her brain couldn't just keep it in there due to not having enough storage space or something. She was planning on just being silent throughout the rest of this conversation. That didn't happen.

"Why did you think that?" Sophie asks, like she's curious, almost like she wants to study her or something. But Parker doesn't tell her it was because that's what her mother told her. She didn't want to tell Sophie about her mother. She would judge, just like everyone else did. They judged her mother because she thought she was crazy. And maybe she didn't feed her all that much, maybe she didn't have nice clothes or nice things, but she played with her all the time. They made up their own little imaginary world where everything was beautiful and they lived happily ever after. Her mother loved her.

"I just did," Parker says, and gets up off the couch. She wants Sophie to go away, because she's pretty sure she's going to start to pry into her life even though she wants no one to pry into hers. It's hypocritical.

"Alright," Sophie says, and Parker stops where she is and turns to look at her. She's surprised Sophie let it go. She's surprised so much she can't help but ask:

"That's it?"

"Yeah," Sophie says, and smiles a bit at her, just out of the corner of her mouth. "If you don't want to tell me, that's fine. But Parker… just for a future reference? Taking care of someone who is sick is the right thing to do, alright?" Parker just nods, and tries to store that somewhere in her memory, even though it might already be overloaded since things always just try to fly out of her brain and out her mouth. But she tries, because she wants to remember. Even though that meant that her mother was wrong.

"I'm going to go see check on Hardison," she tells her, and gets up. Parker nods again, and Sophie turns to look at her. "And maybe when he's better you can apologize for being so mean to him when he's sick. He likes you a lot, you know." The way Sophie said that made Parker think that she thinks Hardison might like her a little bit more than what she originally thought, but she thinks that's crazy. No one has ever liked her like that. But she nods again.

"Okay."

Sophie smiles at her, and then leaves. When she shuts the door behind her, Parker sits back down on the couch and sighs. She hates when things like this happen. When she finds out again that her mother is wrong. But she's not stupid, or jaded in any way. She knows her mother was a drug addict and kind of crazy. She knows now, as an adult, that maybe it was the right decision for Social Services to take her away, but it still hurts. It hurts because where she ended up, all the place she ended up, were so much worse than home. Her mother at least loved her.

The first place she ended up in was Camden, Illinois. She lived in one of those neighborhoods that you always see on old television shows. The one's with the perfect lawns and all the little houses lined up in a row. The neighbors smiling and waving to each other every day when they go out to get the morning paper. But no matter how good the house looked from the outside, inside it had horrible secrets.

She was crying when she got there. She was eight, maybe too old to cry (as she was told over and over again by her foster brother the entire ten months that she lived there), but she missed her mother. She missed the games they used to play, to pretend that life wasn't as bad for them as it really was. And yes, maybe she could finally get meals here, but if she could choose not having meals over what really happened in that house, she would choose not eating. After all, she had gotten used to that.

The reason her foster parents seem to live so nicely was because they tended to hoard foster children like investments, along with working full time jobs. She shared a room with two of her foster sisters, Julia and Sarah, and down the hall Jason and Billy shared another room. But not Mark, he got his own. He was the oldest, and had been there the longest. He was sixteen, and looked like he wanted to be a zombie with the clothes that he wore and the makeup her put on. Parker didn't think guys wore makeup until she saw him. Her foster parents always chided him about his wardrobe on their way out the door, but only because it seemed more of formality to do so rather than if they actually cared.

They were almost never home, so they never actually knew what went on in the house. They left out food, or left out money for them to order pizza, and always bought them new clothes when they needed it. But they weren't actually parents; if they were then they would have known what was going on inside their own house and made it stop. But they didn't care; all they cared about was money and finding new ways to get it.

Parker knew something was wrong in that house when she first came into the room she shared with both Julia and Sarah, and they both sighed in almost relief. Parker looked at them funny with her tear stained cheeks and put her knapsack and stuffed bunny on the bed that was designated for her. Julia was about six, and Sarah about Parker's age, maybe a year older.

"You're prettier than us," Sarah said, like it was the best thing in the world. Parker just sniffed and wiped her tears away with the back of her hand and looked at her weird.

"So?" She knew she was, but she didn't understand why that meant anything. But they both just looked at each other, and they didn't say anything. Parker wishes they would have warned her, but if they did there probably wasn't anything she could do about it anyway.

Parker found out that the prettiest girl in the house seemed to be the one Mark chose to play with. When he asked her to play a game, Parker was excited. None of the other children talked to her, and even though Mark was much older, she was glad that he wanted to play with her. All the other children looked at each other like they knew something, all of them younger than Parker herself except for Sarah, but Parker just thought they were all just jealous that he wanted to play with her and not them.

He took her hand and led her into his room, and as he shut the door behind them Parker looked around in wide-eyed fascination. She had never seen the inside of his room before, and it was all dark, with skulls and writing on the wall, and weird pictures hanging from it. Mark went over to his bed and sat down, and patted the bed next to him for her to sit, so she did. She was excited about playing, after all.

"What are we gonna play?" she asked him, smiling. He smiled back, and she had a weird feeling about the way that he smiled but didn't think about it too much. A game was a game after all; her mother and her always played games with her. And not those stupid games like Barbies that Julia and Sarah played, they played imagination games.

"It's called doctor," he told her. "Do you wanna play?" he put his hand on her leg, and Parker nods. She does want to play, even though she's never played it before. But Doctor sounded fun.

But it wasn't fun… it wasn't fun at all.

Parker didn't care that she had to take off her clothes for it, after all, how could a Doctor properly diagnose what was wrong with her if he couldn't see everything? At least, that's what he said. And there wasn't anything wrong with being naked. Her and her mother would sometimes be naked and run around the house, pretending to be wood nymphs. Parker still isn't sure what those are, exactly. But her mother always told her that no matter what anyone said, being naked wasn't a bad thing. Everyone was born naked after all.

But Parker knew when he started touching her that there was something wrong with that. She was eight, and she wasn't slow or stupid. She did know about sex, or at least a little bit about it. And she knew he shouldn't be touching her like that. So she kicked at him, and told him to stop, but when he pinned her against the bed and told her to shut up and stop crying, she had the feeble hope that maybe someone would stop him.

But no one did. No one ever did for the whole ten months she was there. Her foster parents were never home, and the other children pretended they didn't hear her because all they cared about was that it was happen it wasn't happening to them anymore.

A lot of things that happened there Parker can blame for why she's so fucked up now. The raping, her witnessing the murder of a clown by a horse, and just the fact that no one cared. No one loved her. No one even knew she really existed outside of Mark, and she didn't like how he noticed her. She felt totally abandoned, and part of her hated her mother for letting her go then. Part of her wondered why she could just give up her little girl, her holy Princess. But she knows now she had no choice. She wonders what happened to her mother, and she finds herself missing her all the time. She might not have been the best, but she was hers.

It was finally Sarah who broke and told a teacher at school what was happening inside of their house. Parker didn't know why she did it, maybe because she was afraid Parker was going to go crazy one day because of all this and finally kill her.

She did get into a fight with her, about two months before they got taken away. She screamed at her, hit her, slammed her against a wall and wanted to know why no one ever does anything, and why she didn't even tell her it was going to happen. Her foster parents grounded her for that, which just made it worse. Not being able to leave the house made it worse. She remembers only vaguely picking up a pencil and wanting to stab her with it. She blamed her, because she knew she was the one Mark had before she came into the picture, she was the second prettiest. But Parker didn't stab her, but only because Jason and Billy slammed into her, making her fall to the ground and drop the pencil.

All of the kids were taken away from her foster parents the very next day after Sarah told. And it was off to another one, off to another hell. Parker sighed and got off of her couch, not wanting to think about it. She carried herself into her bedroom and laid on her bed, grabbing a hold of the only good thing she could link to her past… her stuffed bunny. The only real toy her mother ever gave her.

TBC…