Author's Note: It seems my story has come most unfortunately timed for Glee fans. :( Sorry guys. Also, apologies to those who were hoping for a faster paced fic, as this one is turning out to be a bit slower than I initially intended, partly because I'm uncertain where exactly I'm going with it. (Suggestions welcome, of course!) Title from Mazzy Star's "Into Dust".

Chapter Three: I Could Possibly Be Fading

It was nearly four in the morning by the time Tori made her way to her old bedroom. She'd spent nearly ten years of her life in that room, and then after high school, every time she came to L.A. she stayed there, and yet it never felt comfortable. Not like it used to.

The room had always been hers until it suddenly wasn't. Until it became a space she occupied only when she had nowhere else to go.

She was yelling at Trina for "borrowing" her new shirt before she even got to wear it, when Gary, her father's partner on the force knocked on the door-frame.

"Hello, girls."

Tori greeted him with half a nod and Trina threw an odd glare his way, distracting herself just enough for Tori to finally snatch the shirt back from her. "Trina! You got- what is this?" she sniffed the stain. "Mustard?"

"I was doing a rejuvenating facial soak and Gary here, startled me. He's the one you should be angry at."

"I can buy you a new shirt," Gary chuckled. "There's something else I came here to talk about with you two, actually."

"What?" Tori asked, sitting on the end of her bed, contemplating the yellow stain on her new shirt.

"No," Trina replied, before Gary had a chance to say anything at all. "Go away."

"Trina!" Tori snapped at her. "Don't be rude!"

"Rude? Don't tell me you don't know what he's going to say?"

"What?"

"Listen, girls," Gary started again.

"Where's Dad?" Trina asked pointedly.

"He's... he's at a hotel."

"He's not supposed to be out of town this week," Tori chimed in, still more focused on her stained shirt.

Gary shifted on his feet before crossing his arms. "Your father isn't going to be living here anymore."

"What?" Finally, Tori's attention was pulled from the shirt.

"Get the hell out of here, Gary," Trina barked.

"Calm down, Trina, let me explain-"

"Explain what? I don't need an explanation. I know what you've been doing. I don't-"

"Trina, sweetie," Holly Vega appeared in the doorway. "I know this is upsetting, but-"

"What's upsetting is that you couldn't even come tell us yourself. You had to send your fuck buddy here!"

"Trina!" Holly snapped.

"WHAT?" Tori sprang up from the bed. "You- you're...but..."

"Holly and I are in love," Gary declared.

"WHAT?" Tori exclaimed again.

Trina grabbed Cuddle-Me-Cathy off the bed and hurled it at him. "Get out of here!"

Tori sighed. She felt so stupid for not realizing what was going on sooner. Hell, Trina had figured it out long before. Tori was always more optimistic though. She supposed she didn't realize what was happening only because she didn't want it to be true.

She hadn't seen her father much after that day. He moved to Phoenix a month later, in February of Tori's senior year. At first she talked to him on the phone weekly, right up until she came out of the closet the following May, and then he abruptly stopped calling. And if she called him, he didn't pick up. Trina said something a few years back about him remarrying and having a child with his new wife. Trina had been invited to meet their half brother; Tori had not. But then, she hadn't been invited to the wedding either, the summer after her freshman year, which had triggered an absolute low point in her life, one only a couple people even knew about. It was, after Jade, the second time someone she loved so completely demonstrated how little she meant to them, and it sent her spiraling. But by the time their brother was born, Tori had learned to cope with rejection better.

Gary and Holly were more accepting, if hardly embracing. Gary was prone to make inappropriate jokes and Holly expected that Tori not "flaunt it"- whatever that meant- or bring it up to other family members. Trina was the only one who flat-out didn't care. In fact, it seemed that Trina had known Tori was queer even before Tori knew.

Of her friends, Andre was the only one she'd told at that point. She told him before telling her parents. Jade was next to be told...or shown, rather, when after a few too many drinks at a party, when Tori was in a particularly bad mood and wallowing over her parents just-finalized divorce and Gary's smarmy jokes and her father not returning her calls and impending graduation with all of them soon-to-be scattered to the four winds and everything about to change, that she grabbed Jade by the hand and dragged her out into the backyard and kissed her and then ran away because she realized what she had done and was overcome with fear for her life and soul.

But Jade didn't hunt her down and flay her alive, as expected. She didn't say or do anything to Tori for a few days after. The kiss had hardly been private though and news of it spread like wildfire through the halls of HA and so Tori was, she felt, cornered into telling the rest of her friends that she was gay. However, before she did, Beck had made some comment to some guy asking his opinion on the kiss and he'd laughed it off as some sort of dare or drinking game and Tori just went along with that. She didn't think for a minute that Beck or Robbie or Cat would care, but she didn't tell them all the same. Cat found out a year or so later, when she visited Tori at school and met her then-girlfriend. Tori was less in touch with Beck and Robbie, so it simply never came up. It seemed so stupid for them not to know by now, but it also seemed weirdly late to say anything.

A week after the kiss, though, Jade managed to sneak into the Vega household after dark and make her way up to Tori's room and that was the first time they were together.


Lying prostrate on the couch where Cat had died, Jade felt like she was somehow sinking into the fabric. Her vision hazy, her head too clouded to think about anything, not even about the cold body that had lain there before her, she could maybe forget for a bit. That was the rub, after all. The forgetting. The relaxed feeling and the weight of sorrow replaced with nothingness, with a vacancy that could feel no pain because it was void unto itself. It was stupid. So terribly stupid. And she knew that, had always known that.

And yet, it didn't stop her the first time, years before, when it had been Tori that needed forgetting. And though she'd managed to stop briefly a few times, it never lasted. Happiness never came and so something else was needed in its place. Whatever. These were excuses. They were true, but still excuses. It was a mask, a shelter that protected you from nothing. Something to temporarily keep the storm inside at bay. Something that never really worked, but was really good at making you think it worked.

She was falling through all time and space and memory, hurling toward something she couldn't yet identify, with no way out and no will to stop and no more understanding of anything than she'd ever had.