Author's Note: IT'S FINALLY HEEEERE!
See? I TOLD you guys that I would have the epilogue posted sometime in the next millennia! Be forewarned, it's gratuitously sweet, but hey...there was so much angst in this story, I feel like a little cutesyness is warranted.
It's hard to believe I'm finally finished with this story. I feel like I've been working on it forever. I know this is probably redundant at this point, but thank you to everyone who reads and reviews this. The support means a lot and kept me writing this story even when it felt like pulling teeth and made me want to throw in the towel.
Again, thanks to necklace890 for all the help organizing this fic, as well as jay-ell-gee for being the World's Greatest Fic Supporter. They're both diehard Drew/Drianca fans and are a huge help to me.
I don't own Degrassi.
I.
School is starting soon, but instead of acknowledging that they just keep acting like they have all the time in the world together. They have a picnic of chili cheese fries and vanilla shakes by the dogwood trees in the park, and go to the end-of-summer pool party at Dave's house with everyone. They hold hands in the car and fight over the radio stations. She teaches him how to change the oil in the car. They make love and breakfast like married people, and yell at each other over who ate the last of the chips.
He knows how she takes her coffee, and the way her hands move when she knots her hair into a bun, and the way she blinks on a lazy Sunday morning when she first wakes up to nothing but the two of them together, spending the quiet hours in bed. Adam is starting to get better and the doctors think he'll have full range of motion of his shoulder, and that makes Drew happier than anything he's heard in he can't remember how long. His father remarks at the dinner table that Bianca has a sharp eye for legal work and his mother makes a backhanded compliment to her about having a decent aptitude for a lawyer's work. And even though Bianca swears up and down he's making it up Drew swears she blushed when his mother told her that.
And maybe, as the days get easier, the dreams don't happen as much. And in spite of the fact that Bianca is more or less living with them, working full time at his dad's office and helping his mother unload the dishwasher and playing Wii Sports with Adam and Eli, wouldn't you know it, all the weirdness actually starts to feel something like a real, normal life.
It's a funny thing, having her around. They share the same secrets and live the same lies, but living with her in his house makes things feel righter than ever. He sinks back into the normalcy of a routine that evaded him after the events of Spring Break, having Michael Bay movie marathons with Adam and fighting with his mother over taking the trash out and shooting hoops with K.C. and Dave, working out with Owen to prep for football season.
His life is pretty much as calm and quiet and normal as it's ever been, but it wouldn't feel the same without Bianca. Like having her in his house now makes it a home, makes it a life.
II.
"So," Drew asks, "…it's all good?"
Bianca shrugs. "I'm on probation. On top of the probation I already have from before. And I have a ton of community service to do." She tosses the football usually sitting on Drew's dresser between her hands. "Oh, and I have a social worker assigned to my case who's going to do random drug tests every few weeks and Child Services home visits twice a month."
She tosses the ball up, then inexpertly snatches it back to her chest when it falls.
"As far as punishments go," she says, "it's not bad. You know, considering."
"It's a pretty sweet deal, I'd say," Drew says. He motions for her to pass the ball to him; she does, and it corkscrews into his chest. He makes a face at her, then passes the ball from one hand to the next. "What's a matter? Are you not happy about this?"
"I am," she says. She takes a seat on his bed, smoothing out the wrinkles in the sheets. "I just can't believe it's over. All of it."
Drew smiles. "Told you we'd find a way."
Bianca nods. "Guess we did," she murmurs.
Drew puts the football back on his dresser and takes a seat beside her. Gently, he reaches out and touches her cheek. "Are you sure you're okay?"
She sighs. "It's a little overwhelming. Just…feels like too much to have it end like this."
Drew presses his palm on her leg. "Almost didn't," he whispers.
"I know," Bianca says. "That's why it feels so weird."
She lays down on top of the covers, hands over her eyes.
"Feels like," she says, "…crawling out of a grave or something."
Drew lays down beside her. "So," he asks. "Does that make you a zombie?"
He laughs and she reaches over to swat him. He rolls away, just avoiding, and the two of them burst into laughter. A kind that feels so good, like they haven't done it in a while, so what the hell, they just keep doing it.
They fall onto the comforter together, arms and tongues tangled, legs wrapped around one another and hands all over as they slide their palms down their naked sides. They know that his brother is in the next room, and that his mother will be home any second, but that's part of what drives them, the thrill. Well, that, and the reminder that life doesn't have to be one constant struggle, that you can sometimes just be carefree and fall into someone else knowing there's no such thing as falling too far. This is a reminder that need isn't always tangled with loss, but is always wound with life.
Denim and cotton are tossed aside into a heap on the floor. Soon, they're spinning in a puddle of amber evening light, and it curves across the open plains of skin. Hands and tongues roam, tasting the sun and sweat off each other as they fold into one another, Bianca's curls brushing against his face, and she breathes his name into his ear like a secret she's just been told and can't quite believe is real.
It doesn't take long before anything else stops feeling real. Except, of course, the two of them. How their eyes turn liquid in the glowing fade of daylight. How Drew holds her face in his hands, and how she wraps her long legs around him, grinding them closer together, needing to feel safe, like she always does with him. How he breathes into her mouth and whispers something too naked for her to completely understand, but it slips, devoted and reverent, from his tongue to hers. How she groans raggedly, the only response she can give. And how their breath, their whispers, and their voices broke on each other's names, the only word either of them could say that the other one could completely hear.
They forget pain and anger, darkness and fear. Anything other than joy.
Because now, this is all they need to know.
They're safe, they're valued, they're needed. They are loved.
III.
Bianca has never planted flowers before in her life. But Drew is strangely good at it (his years of tutelage under the one and only Audra Torres). It's the way his hands are, easy and careful, parting the dark earth and creating space for things to live. He's gentle with them in a way that surprises her and doesn't at the same time. Still, it doesn't stop her from teasing him and calling him Martha Stewart, from taking stupid pictures of him with her iPhone and listening to him protest, laughing as he chases her around the yard with dirt-crusted hands, trying to take it away from her before she uploads them to Facerange.
It's weirdly soothing, to be able to plant flowers. Feeling the soft earth under her hands, giving way to her as she rakes her fingers through the sun-warmed soil and makes space for living things to grow. Instead of reminding her of the way the earth moves in her dreams, shifting and falling out from underneath her, here she's making a space for things to reach out, to gulp the free air, to be alive.
One night he randomly gives her a purple bloom from the pile of weeds that she helped his mom pull. He tickles the branch under her chin and grazes it over her cheeks. She laughs at him for it, giving her a weed and thinking he's being all romantic, but it kind of melts her.
No one's ever given her life before.
When the winds blow at night, it sometimes sounds like whispers, or bad dreams. She doesn't say anything to him, but knows he'd understand if she did.
So instead she just presses her body against his at night, pressing her face into his back, and wrapping her arms around him. Listens to him breathe.
The winds are going to blow away soon, and then it will be fall. The flowers are planted, their little world filled with life, but soon it will fade with the summer.
But it's okay. Because the change in seasons just means that there is another year coming; one free of gangs and guns, drugs and danger, terror and trials.
And anyway, life always comes back.