Disclaimer: No, I don't own OTH or any of the characters or plotlines that I choose to use, and sadly, I don't own Hilarie Burton's talent or James Lafferty, either… I also don't own "Hallelujah" by Jeff Buckley, which I use in this chapter.
Summary: When everything else failed, Haley, Peyton, and brothers Nathan and Lucas were always there for each other. They were four best friends, as different as light and day, the sun and the moon, but they were so strong that nothing could rip them apart… until history repeated itself and a tangle of secrets and deceit gave them a brutal awakening.
A/N: Yay, reviews! We LIKE those! Because I'm trying to start stretching my chapters out from five pages to ten pages, it might take awhile in between updates, but I'm really going to try to be good about updating this story a lot. Lavy, "Monkey see, monkey do," BASICALLY means in its context here "I will when you will." (I would give you an actual definition, but I'm rather tired). I hope that you guys enjoy this.
Chapter Two: We Go Down in Stubborn Silence
I heard there was a secret chord
that David played and it pleased the Lord
but you don't really care for music, do you?
Well it goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
the minor fall and the major lift
the baffled king composing hallelujah
Hallelujah…
Haley hummed along with the music, brushing her hair with long, even strokes in front of the mirror. The music had a soothing effect on her, and soon she was singing along with it.
Well your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to her kitchen chair
She broke your throne and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the hallelujah
Hallelujah…
Getting up, she began to rifle through her backpack, making sure that she wasn't missing anything. "All right, I have everything that I need for Samantha's tutoring session, and since John cancelled and all we need is Tamara's book for her session, we should be all right…"
Baby I've been here before
I've seen this room and I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
but love is not a victory march
it's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah
Hallelujah…
"Are you anywhere near ready, Haley?" Leaning against the frame of her door, Nathan made a handsome figure, complete with a lazy grin covering his face.
"Nathan, I already told you that I didn't need a ride today."
"Oh, come on, what else are you going to do? Walk? The rain is coming down by the bucketful, Hales. Why can't you just accept a ride?"
"While it's amusing that you don't realize that I still haven't entirely forgiven you for Friday evening, I happen to be catching a ride with Peyton."
"Peyton caught a flu bug yesterday. She's home coughing and sneezing. Thankfully, she cares enough about you to have called me up and suggested that I come pick you up."
"Fine, I'll call Lucas up and catch a ride with him." She slung her backpack over her shoulder, about to stride out of the room, when he caught her arm.
"Why are you so bent on turning down a ride from me?"
"Why are you so insistent about me accepting one?" They stared at each other for a moment before he smiled.
"Because whether your stubborn head has realized it yet or not, you need one, and I happen to be more than happy to provide you with one. Plus, it never hurts my ego to win an argument with Haley James." Smirking, she shifted slightly, suddenly aware of how close they were.
"Fine, you win. I'll go with you. I swear, though, if I hear about this later…"
"I wouldn't dream of bringing it up."
Well there was a time when you let me know
what's really going on below
but now you never show that to me do you?
but remember when I moved in you
and the holy dove was moving too
and every breath we drew was hallelujah?
The car was silent with the exception of the rain beating down on the roof. When they stopped at a red light, Nathan was the first one to speak. "So Haley, how have you been?"
"Uh, well, I've been fine the last day and a half." Turning to glance at her, he had a sheepish look on his face as he realized how silly his question sounded.
"You know what I mean. How are you really doing? You look like you have something on your mind."
"Nathan, since when do you care if I have something on my mind?" Seeing his expression, she regretted her words for a moment, and for a moment, she considered apologizing… but the moment passed and she had waited too long.
"Forget it," he muttered, stepping on the gas. "Longer than you know," he whispered inaudibly, frowning for a moment.
Well, maybe there's a God above
but all I've ever learned from love
is how to shoot somebody who outdrew you
It's not a cry you hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
It's a cold and it's a broken hallelujah
Hallelujah…
When they finally got into the parking lot, Nathan opened up his door, slamming it shut, and came around to open up hers. Surprised, she stepped out slowly, turning to face him. Swallowing quickly, she mustered up some of her courage and dove in. "Look, Nathan, I'm sorry… I don't know what got into me. You just… that question just kind of came out of nowhere, you know? I really didn't mean to insult you." Looking down, he shuffled his feet.
"Yeah, well, I don't know what I was thinking. I just thought that maybe it wouldn't hurt to try to have a conversation about something that mattered." He spit out the last word, glancing away after he said it.
"Nathan…" he looked up at her, and for some reason she lost the nerve to say whatever it was that was about to escape out of her mouth. "Thanks for the ride. I really needed it," she finished, stepping away from him and running through the rain to get inside, leaving him standing there alone.
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Peyton walked up behind Haley, slinging an arm around her shoulder. "Hey, stranger. How was your ride?" Haley whirled around, glaring at the blond beside her.
"You! You aren't sick at all!"
"Well, it's always nice to know that my friends wish that I was sick."
"No, it's just that Nathan said…"
"He didn't! That manipulative little liar… he told me that you asked him to give you a ride, and since I usually give you one he wanted to make sure that I knew that he was picking you up."
"What in the world is his problem? I mean, first that, and then…"
"I take it that the ride didn't exactly go well."
"Well, it's Nathan Scott and Haley James. Why on earth would you expect if to be any different?" Haley spat out, sighing under Peyton's unflinching start. "Let's just say that he tried being sincere and I didn't catch on until it was a little too late."
"Haley, maybe Nathan is doing all this for a reason."
"Peyton, please don't start in on me again. I've already told you; he doesn't like me. It's never going to happen."
"You know, you keep on trying to convince someone of that, but I don't think that it's me you're trying to convince, it's you. Why is it that I've heard you deny his feelings for you a million times but I've never once heard you say that you don't feel anything for him?" Haley stopped, closing her mouth suddenly. Peyton put her arm around her and squeezed her shoulders before letting go. "Hey, it's okay. I can keep a secret, I'm not Lucas. You can't just carry it around by yourself… that type of thing eats away at you." Peyton's eyes gained a far-off quality and she bit her lip. Haley chose her next words carefully.
"As long as we're being straight, will you please tell me the truth? How do you feel about Lucas?"
"Lucas… is an amazing guy." Pausing for a minute, her eyes gained a far-off quality as she smiled faintly. "You know, after my mom, I never really thought that I would be stupid enough to need someone again, but I need him. When he looks at me, he doesn't see what everybody else does, he sees me, and he keeps on coming back even though he knows exactly what I'm like and he sees all of the ugliness and the hurt and the anger. I just… I'm scared to let myself fall in love with him, you know?"
"Maybe," Haley said with a sympathetic expression, "you don't have a choice."
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"Okay, someone's in a bad mood," Lucas said, catching the third hard, fast ball that Nathan had passed to him.
"Look, I really don't want to talk about it, okay?"
"No, it's not okay, unless you want to pass to Tim for the rest of PE. Telling me whatever it is that's pissing you off doesn't exactly make us a hallmark card, just friends. I can't deal with your little PMS case unless you start talking through some of this. Come on, man, something's eating at you. Just get it out there and stop acting like a freaking girl."
"Whatever. If you're not going to stop bugging me about it… Haley and I kind of had a fight."
Smirking slightly, Lucas gave him a dubious look. "Okay, what's so abnormal about that? You and Haley are always fighting."
"No, it wasn't really that kind of fight. I gave her a ride to school this morning, and I asked her how she was… really was… and she blew me off. Then at school, she started to apologize and say something… but she just ran off." Lucas's face quietly transformed as he became more intent, stopping with the ball.
"Huh. Well, I've known Haley for a long time, and I've seen her run off quite a few times and apologize every once in awhile… but never both at the same time."
"I just don't get why it's so hard for her to take me seriously. I mean, what if I did want to talk with her seriously? We should be able to do that. I want to do that with her. Like… like you and Peyton."
"Nathan, are you finally admitting that you like her?" Nathan shrugged of his brother's intense perception and held out his hands for the ball, walking a few steps backwards before throwing it with even more power.
"Don't be stupid, big brother. This is why we never talk about this stuff."
"Well, maybe we should." There was silence for awhile, then, Nathan spoke up.
"I didn't see your truck in the parking lot this morning. How did you get to school?"
"There's a problem with the engine, so I rode over with Peyton. Actually, I bought a new CD yesterday, and I wanted her to hear it and she ended up snitching it from me… I've got to get that back from her later." With one look at Nathan's smug expression, Lucas's tone became defensive. "What's up with your expression?"
"Hmm, maybe I'm just sick and tired of your hypocritical talk. See, it's not exactly cool to try to corner me into admitting that I like Haley or whatever it is you're doing, and then to turn around and pretend that you don't have a thing for Peyton."
"Why do all of our conversations come back to this?"
"Because I'm sick of your pat answers, man. I mean, if by your standards I like Haley, you're pretty much in love with Peyton."
"Can we just leave her out of this?"
"I'll start leaving her out of this when you stop looking at her like she means the world to you and stop trying so hard to hide how you feel every time that you talk to her."
"I don't do that."
"You do it more than you know."
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Peyton absentmindedly fingered one of her spirals, tugging on it slightly as she tried to focus on what her chemistry teacher was talking about. They should've been doing a lab today, but with all of the recent inclement weather, the shipping for some of the products that the teacher had ordered had been delayed. Instead of giving them a free study hall period, the teacher had used the opportunity for a review lecture, since apparently no one had grasped the concepts they'd gone over firmly enough. She knew that she needed to focus today or else she would fail the upcoming test. Chemistry had been the last thing on her mind lately. Instead of focusing on school and music and her comic strip for THUD, Lucas had been at the center of all of her thoughts for awhile now.
She'd always noticed him. People automatically assume that if you're popular, you view everyone else as the dirt beneath your feet. That hadn't been how it was with her, though. Maybe it was because she was so interested in capturing moments and people and feelings, but she'd always loved observing people. Lucas had always been a sort of muse for her. He was quiet and withdrawn around most people, usually sitting alone and reading or listening to music, but she'd watched him when he was around Haley or Nathan. He seemed to come alive, and for some reason that she couldn't place, even though she'd never spoken a word to him, he seemed like the type of person whose every word would be worth hearing. Even though she was only in eighth grade, she'd already formed the mentality that reaching out to people was stupid and pointless, so instead of ever saying hello, instead of talking to him, she simply drew an endless amount of pictures of him and stayed up at night, turning up the radio and thinking about him.
Haley had been her salvation that year, the only thing that had kept her from going crazy. They had bumped into each other once or twice, and after introducing themselves, they started talking. Even though no one would've thought that the class nerd and the sullen, popular cheerleading captain would get along, they did. Haley started inviting her to hang out with her, Nathan, and Lucas, and she did. For some reason, she let herself have fun, let herself laugh, for the first time since her mother's death.
One day, after Haley and Nathan had left, Lucas sat down across from her. After a moment of silence, he had asked her about her mom. For some reason, she'd let it all tumble out. She'd told him how her mother had hair the color of sunshine and a smile just as pretty, how they'd been best friends that shared art and jokes and junk food, and how running a red light because of Peyton had killed her. She told him that most nights, she would sit up and try to draw her mother, but the nose was always too big, the eyes were always too round, or the face was always too angular because the image of her mother that had once been seared into her memory was now fuzzy and vague, and she could never seem to get it back.
They'd only been in eighth grade, and it would've made perfect sense for him to have shifted awkwardly and changed the subject, but instead he'd let her cry and get it all out. They talked for hours that night, and many other nights that would follow. She learned that he had a sense of humor, that they liked the same music. She had fallen in love with him, but she was only thirteen. She wasn't thirteen anymore, though, and her heart still raced every time that she saw him. Maybe Haley was right, and she didn't have any choice in this. A tear dripped down her face as she looked at the picture of the two of them she'd drawn, sitting in her kitchen, and she wondered what on earth she was going to do when he realized how she felt.
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"Are you all right, Peyt?" Lucas asked, sitting down across from her at the lunch table.
"Oh, yeah, I'm fine. I was just bored out of my skull last period by chem. I think that it's safe to say that I'm not exactly Mr. Kyle's favorite student."
"Ah, c'mon, who wouldn't love to have you in their class?"
With a fake and brittle smile, she responded. "Yeah, who? Just because I never pay attention and I'm always writing on desks and brooding in the back doesn't mean that any teacher wouldn't be lucky to have me."
"Okay, can someone please explain to me why the meat in this stroganoff is grey?" Haley asked, sitting down next to Peyton.
"If you weren't so concerned with healthy choices, you would've just gotten french fries and a soda like me," Peyton commented, smiling.
"Well, Peyton, when you're forty and suffering a severe heart attack, Haley can operate on you and save your life," Nathan reasoned, dropping his tray next to Lucas's. After he got settled in, he looked at Haley awkwardly for a moment before digging into his food.
"Can you imagine Haley as a doctor? She'd be way too cruel to her patients," Lucas said, earning him a kick from Haley before she took command of the conversation.
"Okay, guys, to completely switch the subject, we should start thinking about what we're going to do before and after homecoming this year."
"What's wrong with coming in a group like we did last year?"
"Nothing, but this year we can all drive, and plus, we need to decide what to do for our pictures… we don't want another incident like last year."
"It wasn't that bad," Nathan said defensively.
"Okay, you cussed the guy out because he wouldn't let the four of us go together. It was bad."
"Oh hey, that's right. What was it you told him to do? To go behind a tree and –"
"Peyton, there are innocent ears at this lunch table," Haley interrupted, faking a shiver.
"Oh, really? I never would've guessed, Hales," Nathan smirked, and for a moment something unidentifiable flashed in her eyes before she settled back into their worn-in routine.
"You know, Nathan, not everything that can crawl has had sex; although, I wouldn't be surprised if most of your ex-girlfriends just barely qualify for that category."
"Well, I wouldn't suppose that you would know that much about guys and girls, seeing as you're so "innocent" and all," he retorted, using air quotes.
"Don't surprise innocent for simple, Nathan. Oh wait! It makes sense for you to make that mistake, seeing as you're so simple yourself." Lucas and Peyton, who had previously been observing the banter, started a conversation of their own.
"As stealthy as you might believe yourself to be, Miss Sawyer, I'm still expecting my CD back by the end of the day." She looked down, her smile unnatural and forced.
"Oh, don't worry. You'll have it back. It hardly lived up to my expectations anyway."
"Peyt? What's wrong?" She looked up, raising her eyebrows.
"What would make you think that something's wrong?"
"Can we just skip through the next twenty minutes where you keep on denying and I pry more than I have a right to and get to the part where you tell me what's going on?"
"You know, there isn't always something wrong with me, Lucas. You don't always have to rescue me from every single situation. I can take care of myself."
"I never said that you couldn't as I recall." He looked almost hurt, and she regretted her words for a moment.
"Look, I'm just sick and tired of us being all Dawson and Joey. We all remember how that ended." Standing up, she took Nathan by the arm. "Nate, weren't you just saying that you left something in the art room? I'll go get it with you." Before Haley or Lucas had a chance to say anything, a confused Nathan had been dragged away.
"So should we talk about you and Peyton first?" Haley offered, raking one of her hands through her hair.
"Well, we could always go the route of you and Nathan, seeing as I already have his side of things." Giving him a worn out look, Haley finished chewing a bite of her food before swallowing and voicing her retort.
"Well if you know what Nathan said than why on earth would you listen to me? I mean, you're brothers, right man? You're blood."
"You know how much we hate it when you and Peyton pull the blood card on us and make us feel guilty about sharing the same filthy sperm donor."
"Okay, look, since you're obviously avoiding the issue at hand, I'll spell it out for you: you're clueless. I don't know what you think is going on, but that girl is going to go insane if you two don't talk about this."
"What is there a need to talk about? I've been head over heels for her since kindergarten when she was the only girl who would say hi to me and I was so shy. That was the one and only time in the last eleven years that she's ever reached out to me, and no, I'm not going to do that whole "do we like each other?" routine with her, because heaven help me, she means more to me than that! And you and Nathan needling me about it isn't going to change anything!"
"Oh, ho, ho, Lucas Scott has made up his mind! He's decided how it's going to be: he's going to love her from a distance and pretend that all of this stuff that's been beneath the surface and that's pulling us all apart isn't going to enter into the equation! For all of her psychological and emotional issues, at least Peyton recognizes that she's shutting people and feelings out! What is going on with you, Lucas? Why can't you talk to me about this?"
"Why can't you talk to me about you and Nathan?" Startled, Haley looked down.
"Yeah, that's exactly it. You can dish it out, but you sure can't take it, Haley James. I'm going to be in the library; if Nathan and Peyton want to get together and do something with us later, just text message me." He got up and pushed his chair in, walking away quickly.
"Good job, Haley," she muttered, "you've managed to alienate everyone in the course of twelve hours."
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"Ow, ow, ow, Peyton, you're hurting me!" Nathan winced as he tried to keep from looking like a doll as he stumbled along beside his friend.
"You're a jock, remember? You're not going to fall apart at a moment's notice. Just stop whining." She pulled him into the janitor's closet and shut the door before turning to face him.
"Okay, Peyton, yes, you're hot and irresistible and I value your friendship, but I just don't have those feelings for you. I think that our relationship's better like is now," he whined in a high-pitched voice, grinning as she punched him.
"Nathan, can you just try to be serious right now? I need a game plan."
"A game plan?" He repeated, raising his eyebrows. Putting a hand in her hair, she was a frantic sight.
"Yeah, you know, I need a written-up speech for me and Lucas when I see him again. Some way to say I'm sorry while completely avoiding the issue."
"Oh, you mean to say there's an actual issue that you're admitting to?" When her face came dangerously close to crumpling, he reaching out to pat her shoulder awkwardly. "I'm sorry, P., I'm just not good at all of this emotional stuff. I mean, that's what you have Haley for. I don't know what to say to make you feel better."
"I know. I'm sorry for dragging you into this," she sniffled, bringing an arm up to her mouth."
"You know… I'll bet that if you just tried to avoid the issue at hand, Lucas would be okay with it. The guy doesn't have a single bone in his back when it comes to you." Instead of making a sarcastic comment or shrugging him off, Peyton swiped under her eyes and nodded quickly.
"Okay. Yeah, maybe that'll work. It's the only thing I've got, so I guess it's worth a try."
"Of course it's worth a try; I did suggest it." Giving him a skeptical look, she opened the door and they started making their way down the hall.
"I thought that you said that you're not good with this emotional stuff. I mean, jocks have the brawn, not the brains or the heart. Isn't that right, Nate?"
"Okay, I'll have you know that I am more than just a shallow jock… I'm a pretty shallow jock." Giving out a laugh that was more a guffaw than anything, she rolled her eyes.
"Well, whatever you need to keep on telling yourself, I guess. Just remember, in twenty years, you'll be a bad case of botox and cellulite, just crying out for someone besides your cat to love you," she volleyed back, flippantly throwing her curls over her shoulder.
"Hey, what's wrong with my kitty loving me? He happens to be very supportive. He's my dream man, and no guy is every going to take Mr. Fluffy's place." They kept on laughing as they made their way to seventh period, ignoring everything but the unimportant for the moment.
