A/N: Two of two bonus tracks. YAY DONE! lol I figured I might as well post something and this was almost finished so I... well, finished it. Hopefully I'll be able to get an update for Cyprus out soon, but I'm not sure. Today I went out and passed my driving exam (first go, fuck yeah), Saturday I turn 19 (WHOO) and Monday classes start back up and I've got to do super well this year so I'll be paying mucho attention in class instead of writing. I'm certainly not abandoning anything, I just have... more important priorities. I also need to start gearing myself up because I'm probably moving out at the end of the fall. YAY.
Congrats to foolishgames and HyperFitched for finishing their epic tales of epicness (if you haven't read I Hold A Force I Can't Contain or Electric Feel then you go read them RIGHT FUCKING NOW and come back to this later? Okay? Okay. Sorted).
10. Farther Down
We stood out in the cold
And your eyes, they ate my soul;
Begged me to come back down,
They begged me to come back down.
Then, the ground ate my legs, so I looked up to the sky and said:
"I don't wanna go back down."
Oh, I've been so far down.
Heaven, help me. Heaven, help me for the way I've been.
There's a deep-seated pain that Emily can feel with every fibre of her being. It weighs her limbs down, her soul as well; makes them both feel heavy as lead. There's bags under her eyes, dark rings shadowing them. There are bruises on her knuckles, but she can't remember what from, and scrapes on her knees to go with the holes in her tight.
(She does remember stumbling a lot last night; she must have fallen at some point.)
And Naomi just stares. She just. Fucking. Stares and Emily wants nothing more than to just smack her across the face so she'll stop looking at her with those dead fucking eyes like she's trying to make Emily feel sorry for her. But Emily won't. Naomi can go ahead and pity herself and feel sorry for herself even though she fucking shouldn't because she's the one who fucked it all up, so fuck her for thinking she has any right to feel anything like that, because Emily's fucking through wasting her time waiting for bloody Naomi to fix things.
(Someone touched her, she recalls dimly, but she thinks she pushed them away. This whole not remembering this is really starting to bug her. She hopes she pushed them away.)
They flit around each other; living but not living, not touching, not talking, not looking. At least Emily doesn't look. She can feel Naomi's gaze burning into the space between her shoulder blades, but each time she turns around to snap at the blonde, she's looking the other way, a permanent frown on her lips and a crease between her brows.
(She trips her way up the stairs, giggling when her toes catch the edge of one and she basically falls flat on her face. A light flicks on a few seconds later and she clamps her hand over her mouth as Naomi's head pops out from around the corner, her hair a complete mess.)
She makes a point of being loud. She slams doors, doesn't take care to avoid knocking over furniture or elbow things off of tables. Naomi always picks them up in the morning, or afternoon, or whenever the blonde wakes up. Or is it whenever Emily notices that she's put everything back? Because that varies depending on how late she got in the night before.
(Naomi sighs and reaches out to grab her upper arm, but she yanks it away abruptly with a sneer.
"Don't touch me," she slurs, pushing herself to her feet. Naomi recoils instantly, flinching. The pain in her eyes mirrors the sharp stab in the center of Emily's chest. "I'm fine." Naomi steps back. Emily knocks a lamp off a small table when she tries to yawn, stretch and walk at the same time. She hears Naomi sigh and the blonde stoops to pick it up.)
She doesn't sleep in their bed. She can't. Not after... even though Naomi had sworn on her mother's life that she had never taken Sop-that girl further than the front room. There have been a couple times when she's either been totally off her tits or far beyond the point of exhaustion that she's ended up in their room out of habit, but when she wakes up Naomi is never there, but she's always undressed and neatly tucked in beneath the blankets.
(She's not so drunk tonight that she forgets that she doesn't want to share the same space as Naomi. She hogs the bathroom while she sloppily washes most of her make-up off and pushes past the blonde violently. She doesn't change, just curls up on the air mattress.)
Sometimes, Emily can hardly stand it; the constant dancing dangerously around each other, like some sort of fucked up waltz. She's being torn in so many different directions and it's just too fucking much. And now with her family being uprooted the only choices she has is to stay in this limbo with Naomi or put up with living in a fucking caravan and she honestly can't tell which is less appealing.
(Later, when she's half asleep, she hears Naomi open the door and feels the blonde smooth her hair back and press a gentle kiss to her forehead with a muttered "I love you." Emily's body gravitates towards Naomi, even as her mind tries to make her mouth work to tell the blonde to fuck off. She holds onto Naomi's arm, fingernails digging harshly into the blonde's skin and kisses her without an ounce of gentleness.)
She awakes in the morning with a splitting headache, somehow having ended up in a too-big t-shirt that smells too familiar and greedily devours the tablets and water left next to her on the floor. When she wanders downstairs to find some orange juice and have a piece of toast with jam, Naomi's already laid everything out for her. Emily winces when she sees the bruises on the blonde's shoulders and lips and bites the inside of her cheek. She can't rely on Naomi to fix this. It needs both of them.