Owe You One - A Tobuscus Fanfic - PART 27 FINALE
by ~Sashasalsa13
Just because we felt like it, Toby, Justine and I recreated the night on the beach. We all went back a week later at the same time, around 1am-ish, and just relaxed.
When I was eleven years old, my doctor told me that I have an extremely unhealthy habit of standing on one leg, and using the other to balance. I told him that I would break this habit by putting equal amounts of weight on each leg, but I didn't even try. I was sort of wishing I had tried to break this habit at this moment. Something happened to my hip while Toby held me in his arms. For the first time in weeks, my hip genuinely hurt me more than normal. I was just begging that it wasn't bleeding. Luckily, it wasn't, but it was very red. Similar to when I stayed in the fetal position for too long after our flight back from visiting my family, but a little bit worse. Any normal person would panic and rush to the hospital, but Toby simply lay down with me on the sand and cupped his hand over my inflamed scar.
"It's such a nice night, I feel like dancing." Justine announced from beside me. She hopped up from beside me and danced to no music. Toby and I were both giggling. He sprung up and joined her and after a few seconds, I had lost it. You should have seen the way they were moving. It was amazing. They started to shuffle toward the ocean until their feet were wet. I watched them stop and turn to look out over the sea. I saw their lips moving, but they were much too far away for me to hear them anymore. What I did hear, though, was rustling behind me. It was coming from the woods. Please be a squirrel. Please be a squirrel. Please be a squirrel. I turned around very slowly with my hands gripping the sand way too tightly. It wasn't a squirrel; it was the worst possible outcome. Of course.
"NO! DON'T HURT THEM." I screeched at the two men who had just pounced out of the bushes, both equipped with shotguns. I knew there was something terribly wrong with lying on the beach in the darkness by myself with no ability to walk - let alone run - at 1:30 in the morning.
"Oh, okay!" cackled the taller man. He had the most disgusting smile I had ever seen. He could have easily been 6'5'', and not in a good way. Not in the way male models are built, but tall and lanky and gross. I stood up from the sand and fell back down again. Fucking hip!
"Oh my goodness! Are you injured? That's a shame…" The shorter man behind him pounced on me and I freaked.
"TOBY! TOBY! TO-" The man gagged me with what seemed to be, a shred of fabric. Like, a piece that had been ripped off a shirt, or something. I didn't even know if Toby could have heard my cry. He was playing in the ocean a hundred meters away. But sure enough, when I turned to look, both he and Justine were sprinting faster than I had ever seen them run. Justine started to scream. The tall man smirked at this. I felt the guy who had me gagged's hand on my stomach. I tried to scream, 'DON'T,' but it came out something more like, "HUNGPH!"
"WHAT DO YOU WANT?" Toby hollered from a few feet away. I watched the tall man whip out his gun and aim at Toby. Both Justine and I were screaming now. Toby put his hands in the air.
"What. Do. You. Want." He repeated.
"Take a wild guess, dumbfuck." The man gagging me mumbled. Toby raised an eyebrow and took out his wallet. He threw it on the sand in front of me. I looked up at him with big, saddened eyes.
"The slut, too!" Justine hung her head and threw hers next to Toby's. The guy let go of me and drove my head into the sand.
"You can keep the gag." He hissed in my ear. I shivered. He snatched up the wallets and they made a run for it, back through the woods. Justine attacked me with hands and questions. She pulled me up out of the sand and yanked the gag off. She touched my hip, then my brow, then my mouth, then my cheeks.
"Are you okay! Did they hurt you! Did he touch you? There's a mark on her mouth! TOBY! There's a mark on her mouth! TOBY?" I looked up at Toby. He had one of his arms wrapped around his waist, clenching his fingers into his side, and the other hands had a hold of the bottom of his face. It was a little too dark to see, but I knew there were tears. I could tell by the rest of his body, that he was crying. Whenever someone I love cries, I cry too. Even if I have no idea why they're crying. So, just like that, I burst out into tears. Then Justine. Then Toby melted to the ground. It was a mess. It might as well have been on the Y&R. I stretched my body out across the sand and touched Toby's shoulder. Before I knew it, I had been tossed into his lap, again. And Justine came to hug us both. It must have been a strange sight from afar. A grown man, a grown woman, and a teenage girl in one big lump in the sand in the pitch black at 1:30am in the morning, bawling into each other.
I was home again. I had gotten exactly three hours of sleep that night, and lay on the couch mindlessly staring at the TV for the whole rest of the day. I wasn't keeping track of the time, but it was already dark outside again, when Toby came in.
"I've done some thinking. You need to go home." I sat up so quickly, I got dizzy and had to stop for a second, but then proceeded.
"WHAT? Why?" I demanded.
"You have been here less than six weeks. You have almost died twice. I have almost died twice. Plus, I almost took your virginity. You need to leave, you can't stay here, anymore." I stared and stared and stared until my eyes glossed over and I was crying. Again. My head hurt from all the crying last night, already, so this was just painful.
"Please don't make me go home," I whined into my palms, "It'll get better. I know it will."
"Okay, Belly, I'm sorry. Maybe that was a little harsh-"
"You PROMISED. YOU PROMISED that you would never forget about me. You said that! AND I BELIEVED YOU." His emotionless face turned to deep sadness almost instantaneously. He waddled over to the couch, kneeled beside me, and sat on his calves.
"Listen, hun. Please just hear me out." I glared at him and waited for more. "You mean more to me than anyone else in the world. I mean that. I know I've said this before, but you're like my daughter. And if I actually had a daughter, she would definitely be above everyone else. And she would absorb some of my awesomeness from living in the same house as me, and hopefully pass that on to her daughters. That's how this is going to work, okay? I need you to be strong, and move on. I can't take care of another human properly, right now, apparently. I thought I could, but I would never, ever forgive myself if I let something happen to you. Just because I'm sending you home early does NOT mean that I do not care about you. At all. In fact, it's quite the opposite. Don't you ever let yourself believe that you are not loved, because you are so greatly loved by not only your friends and your family, but also me and my friends and my family and my audience. We all want you to be safe and happy. And you will visit again. This is not the last time you'll see me, I promise you that. After about ten minutes after you leave, today, I will miss you to the point of emotional pain, I know I will."
"Today?"
"Hm?"
"You said, 'after I leave, today…'"
"I booked your flight already. Unfortunately, you don't get a say in this particular situation. I'm sorry hun."
Yes, I am aware that I embarrassed Toby at the airport, but I don't really care right now. He put me on a plane by myself with only a flight attendant to take care of me, and sent me home. I wanted to make a point. I wanted him to see just how fucking upset I was. I didn't want to go home to my boring, miserable, painfully plain life. Nobody there loves me as much as Toby did. And Justine. And even Kate and Jack. And the audience. I miss them already and I had only boarded twenty minutes ago. I slept the rest of the way there. Screaming and bawling in public really takes a lot out of you.
It was my first day back from California. I lay on my bed in my sweats from the plane with nothing unpacked. I had said nothing to my family when they came to pick me up. I didn't even bother to smile at them. I just let them hug me and kiss me and plopped myself in the car, then slept the night away. I decided to make myself get up. I found that both my father and my mother had gone to work, and my sister had left me a note of the fridge that said she went out with her friends. It also said, "Sorry about everything," at the end of it. I knew what I wanted to do.
I ran upstairs and dumped all of my clothes out of my suitcase and dug. It seemed like I was digging through everything for a half hour before I found it. It was crumpled and needed washing, but I just didn't care right then. I didn't care about anyone or anything right then. I slipped on my Thunder Thursday shirt, grabbed my phone and my keys, and ran. I ran and ran and ran until I was out of breath, then I ran some more. Eventually, I got to the school. The teachers were already starting to set up their classrooms and learn about the upcoming units for the New Year, so it was open. I snuck into the building, curled around each corner and tiptoed across each hallway until I found it. The bathroom near to my old locker. I slipped in through the door and stopped. I was panting and sweaty and smelly and dirty. I still smelled like airport and my eyes were all puffed up from all the recent crying. I stood and looked in the same mirror as the week before my exams. My birthday. On my birthday, I stood in this exact spot and stared into this exact mirror with this shirt on. Well, not the exact same shirt; that one got ruined. I looked at all the Sharpie scratches. Across the collar and the bottom and the sleeves and the middle and the bust. I remembered telling myself that I was going to get it signed in black Sharpie by Toby in a week. Never would I ever have even dreamed that I was going to get it scratched up this much. I had an amazing adventure with Toby this summer. Yeah, sure, it got cut short, but it was only because he loved me, and he didn't want to see me get anymore hurt than I already had. And it only just occurred to me then, what he meant by, "What you don't get, Belly, is that it's only just begun. Do you think that I'm going to send you home at the end of August and forget about you? I've fallen in love with your adorableness, and I am never going to let you go." I saved Toby, and that will go down in history. I was famous, almost. I was in almost all of Toby's videos for a month and a half, so every audience member knows who I am and what I look like. I could start my own channel. I could still communicate with Toby and the audience through the internet. It's not like I'm never going to see him again, and you can't just leave the audience! They're everywhere, all the time. They're all over the world. We're, all over the world. Just then, as if on cue, my phone vibrated.
Toby Turner:
How u holding up? Personally, im bored out of my mind without u 3
