The greatly renowned though maybe not so beloved disclaimer: I don't own W&G, any of the additional characters and whatnot...only NBC productions can have that claim to fame I guess. Bah.
For those of you who peruse this and go "ok what the heck, that's not what it's like at all!" just bear with me...if I orchestrate this right, it's going to turn into a series of one shots for your (hopeful) reading pleasure. Those of you who dug "Their Trick, Her Treat" (thanks again soooooo much:-)) will have to switch gears, as this is a lot more dramatic...hope you like anyway!
She should have been fast asleep, her beloved sheets and bedspread adorned with Care Bears wrapped cozily around her small form, happily engrossed in dreams of birthdays, ice cream, roller skating, baby animals, favorite cartoons, the way any seven year old should be entitled to. If she had, she never would have been at the window.
Never would have seen Daddy giving himself so wholeheartedly to a face she couldn't quite make out through the darkness, never would have seen her legs spread wide or Daddy entering the stranger with an almost maniacal passion, moving hard, fast, heavy, never mind the sheets of rain teeming down on them. Never would have heard Daddy's zealous grunts or the stranger's shrill screams of a sort of pleasurable pain.
And her eyes burned. Olivia Walker's eyes burned as they never had before, not even Mommy had practically shoved herself and Mason out of the car in her frantic hurry to meet her newly found flame, not even when they found themselves in a nearly empty manse, save for the cook and a maid or two. Nothing, not her persistent calls for Daddy, not her four year old brother's animated search of the entire place from top to bottom in great anticipation of bestowing upon Daddy a special, though unidentifiable painting he had proudly completed just for him in preschool, had changed the fact that he was simply not there. That there were obviously things far more important than the regard of his children or their arrival.
And now she saw what they were.
It was a plain and simple nightmare that had brought her out of her bed that night in search of her father, desperately wanting to give him a chance to redeem himself--he was good at some things, after all.
And it was reaching the massive front hall windows that convinced her that maybe she had never woke up in the first place.
She let too much time go by, and they headed rather unsteadily from the handsome circular walkway towards the doors before she realized what was going on. She turned toward the stairway in a near blind panic, her foot catching on the hem of her baby blue flannel nightgown. The pain that occurred as her delicate face struck the second step was nothing to her sinking heart when she saw the expression crossing Daddy's pudgy face at the sight of her, one which very much resembled one he might have worn had he stumbled into a murder scene with the killer still there. The dark haired woman with him Olivia would have thought to be stunningly beautiful and not unlike the queens she would read about in her fairy tale storybooks if it hadn't been for the obvious repulsion written across her face as she gazed down unpleasantly at Olivia. Daddy brought her sharply back into reality as his hand shot out, closing painfully around her small arm and yanked her to her feet.
"You get back to bed," he commanded in a tone dangerously low, "and you stay there." He turned her toward the stairs with a shove that would have caused her to fall once more if she hadn't caught herself in time, and she took the stairs two at a time, flung herself into her bed, feeling her heart beat in her throat when she felt Daddy's eyes on her from the doorway a few minutes later.
"Don't get your summer sausages in a knot, Stanley Walker," a high pitched voice that caused Olivia to tremble in a mixture of anger, confusion, even fear, advised him. The voice that belonged to the woman Mommy would scream at Daddy about late at night, the reason Mommy eventually tore her and Mason away from the Walker manse so fast, Olivia could have sworn her baby teeth had been left behind. "She's in a land of kitties and cotton candy right now, don't give her another thought."
They moved away, and without even knowing this woman, Olivia hated her.
The tears finally came as she heard the bed creaking from Daddy's bedroom exactly one floor above her, the headboard banging into the wall, the drunken laughter. She didn't even try to stop, just sobbed, choking, gasping, furiously into her pillow and wanting to wish that this was a world where a genie would appear from a magic lamp and offer her one wish. She didn't need three. Just one. And then things could be the way they had been.
But Olivia knew no genie would appear, and she would receive no wish. It was something that she would have wanted, and even young as she was, she had learned long before she should have, that this was not a life where you got what you wanted.