Beginning 5
AN: I have of course taken great liberty in the ages but I worked hard to put a believable time line together for all of the existing characters so that I could build my own around them. Any big objections to the age differences etc that I bring up, please point them out. I like to at least try to keep with cannon. Of course, every other word of the last ep of this season made a mess of that timeline so it's being pointedly ignored. (28! 28! How the bloody hell can Jesse be 28 when he meets Adam!?!) Anyway, it's too late to change it now.
The music was a thick beat in her head. It thudded through her as if it were pulling at her heart through her chest. As if the next beat might pull it full out of her body. She was alone in the milling crowds of hundreds who stood around her, touched her, moved her. Everything around her smelt of smoke and alcohol and hot bodies. She shuddered, she cried out. A hand on her shoulder made her scream out loud and someone jumped back and away from her.
The emotions of the people in the arena around her flooded her young senses and made her wonder at the sanity of the world. The man in the corner who was smiling and nodding at the musicians on the stage was considering suicide. The woman stood next to him was so high that her emotions went from big and happy to little and sad in the blink of an eye. The young mind knew nothing of this though. She only felt what they felt and wished, in her innocence, that there was something she could do to help them. And her power reached out and touched these people and days later they would find themselves together and happier than they had ever been. But she was scared of the noise, mental and physical, and she could feel the sadness of loneliness pushing tears into her eyes. There were only two people in the world who she knew could ease that fear, that loneliness. She reached out to her parents who turned as one from the stage, realising their daughter was missing, and walked shoulder to shoulder towards her. They saw her immediately and her mother gathered her into her arms.
"There you are." She smiled. "You shouldn't run off like that. It's a grace of destiny that we found you." She smiled that motherly smile, eyes not quite focused with the chemicals in her blood stream. Emma simply smiled, glad to have been found, however it had happened.
I don't believe in destiny - do you?
The music was a thick beat in her head. It thudded through her as if it were pulling at her heart through her chest. As if the next beat might pull it full out of her body. She was alone in the milling crowds of hundreds who stood around her, touched her, moved her. Everything around her smelt of smoke and alcohol and hot bodies. She shuddered, she cried out. A hand on her shoulder made her scream out loud and someone jumped back and away from her.
Her senses flared at the overload they were experiencing, making her wonder at her own sanity. She ran for the door, bumping from person to person as she struggled past them. She hit the door hard and had to slow herself, calm herself long enough to get enough sense back to pull the door towards her and twist the doorknob at the same time. She stumbled as she ran onto the lawn and fell, sobbing, onto the soft grass, savouring its embrace for a moment. Someone appeared from around the house, overflow from the party inside, and they stopped short as they came across her.
"Wow man, how'd you do that with your eyes?" They asked, slightly unsteadily. She pulled herself upright and started running, vowing never to stop.
She was walking, she realised, and had been for some time. The sun was stalking the horizon and that was one game of cat and mouse that could never be won by the mouse. She stopped as she came across a lit house where almost all other lights in the street were off and realised that this was her own. She fell into the porch and sat in the corner for a moment, realising that there was something on the edge of her consciousness that hadn't been there before. Something wild. Something with a whispering voice which told her how nice it might be to take a life, to live in the night and not in the day. Something feral which was to become more than half of who she was as her innocence fell away fully and she lost herself.
But for now it was only a whisper. And the door opened, spilling honey light onto the porch and she was gathered into warm arms and lifted inside. She was cold, so cold the warmth of the house and the blanket wrapped around her almost burned and she fought to shake them off. Her mind was filled with a buzzing, her body ached, and there were always the whispers. Always the whispers.
So she cried.