Disclaimer -- I still don't own any of these characters.
a/n -- I guess the writing's on the wall at this point. This is headed toward Sean/Emma territory. If that's not your thing, consider yourself warned. :)
- x -
There were times when living on his own seemed like the best thing that had ever happened to him, and then there were times when it was just one big drag for Sean, like all it meant was work and responsibility and lots of time spent alone. The feeling usually hit late at night when he couldn't fall asleep and his place just seemed big and empty, but suffocating at the same time. It always happened when it was too late to call Ellie, so he just had to deal with it on his own, like he'd done with so many things in his life.
And there were ways to fight it. He'd started taking walks late at night, when the streets were deserted, and everything around him seemed quiet and still. It was better than lying in bed, wide awake and frustrated. Usually, he'd be able to burn off the nervous energy that was keeping him awake, clear his mind of all its junk thoughts, and come back home ready to fall into bed.
It wasn't a perfect method, but he couldn't argue with its effectiveness.
Sean wandered the streets now, not really knowing where he was going. It was amazing how far he could get without ever stopping to think about it. When he finally looked up, he was in front of the park, which was kind of creepy when it was dark and empty.
Sean stopped for a second, and titled his head back to look at the sky. He'd had the awful feeling all day that things were getting out of control, but he just didn't know what to do about it. He turned to look out across the park, as if there might be answers hiding in the shadows.
Sure enough, he found something.
Tonight, the park wasn't entirely empty – there was someone sitting on one of the benches near the water fountain. When the moonlight hit the bench in just the right way, Sean recognized the person who sat there alone. Emma seemed to see him in the same moment, and she looked stunned, with her wide eyes and messy hair. She had on plaid pajama bottoms and a hooded sweatshirt, so she looked like someone had yanked her out of bed and dumped her in the middle of park.
It was official -- fate had a really sick sense of humor.
"I'm going to start seriously believing that you're stalking me," she called to him. She sounded differently than she had the other day in the hallway; there was a softness in her voice now that had been missing then.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, edging his way closer. "It's after midnight."
Sean moved until he stood directly in front of her. Emma wouldn't look at him, but he didn't detect any outright hostility.
"I couldn't sleep," she said simply. "So I decided to go for a walk. And do some thinking."
"And your parents don't care that you're out here, all alone, this late at night?"
"They don't know I'm here."
That surprised him somewhat, but then, he knew firsthand that she could be as stubborn as he was sometimes.
"What about you?" Emma asked. She looked up at him finally, and he felt something go through him, like a chill or something scarier.
He shrugged. "Couldn't sleep either."
She nodded slowly, taking that in. Sean shifted his weight from foot to foot, feeling uncomfortable. Emma looked at him, then looked at the empty space on the bench beside her. It took him a minute but he got the message, and slowly sat down beside her. He made sure that there was a safe distance between them though.
"You really shouldn't be out here all alone," he told her. "It's –"
She turned, so her back was to him. The anger was back, strong as before.
"Leave me alone, Sean."
"It's late, Emma. It's not safe."
Over her shoulder, she scowled at him.
"Aren't you the kind of person I should be afraid of?" she asked bitterly. "You're a big, tough guy these days, aren't you? You and your scary friends..."
He sighed, remembering a million conversations like this with her in the past. Dealing with her was as exhausting as it had ever been. If this kept up much longer, he'd be able to fall asleep in a matter of seconds.
"Forget it, okay? Forget I said anything."
Emma was silent for a minute, but then nodded, and turned to face forward again. He could see her profile in the moonlight, and she didn't seem angry anymore, just nervous.
"So," Sean said, struggling for conversation. "What kind of thinking are you doing out here?"
Emma seemed to glare at him for a moment, like she thought he was making fun of her or something. But she sighed then, and looked straight ahead, across the dark street. She played with the drawstring of her sweatshirt, wrapping and unwrapping it from her finger.
"It's stupid," she said, shaking her head. "Just stupid, stupid stuff."
"Try me."
Emma considered the request for a moment, then turned to face Sean directly. She pulled her knee up onto the bench, and hugged it to her body.
"Do you..." she whispered, sounding like she was far, far away. "Do you ever think that there might be a moment where everything in your life changed, and if you could just go back and do something differently, just one little thing, then it would all go back the way it was?"
Typical Emma, he thought. That was the funny thing -- whenever he was with her, she seemed to be herself, perfectly normal though a little bit sad, so he could almost believe that she was fine. If he didn't see her walking around like a zombie the rest of the time, he'd think he was insane for even wasting a second worrying about her.
"No," he told her. "No, I don't ever think that." He laughed after the fact, realizing how silly she sounded.
She half-smiled, and nodded. "Well, I've been thinking about that a lot lately." She pushed her hair out of her face, and Sean watched her hands move in the dark. "But I always think too much."
"You do," he agreed, smiling. "Way, way too much."
Emma leaned all the way back, titling her head back toward the sky. She looked like she was trying to soak up the rays of the moon like it was sunshine. And sitting there on the bench, she had a pearly glow that made her seem like she was from another world. She'd always seemed that way to him, something strange and out of reach.
They sat there silently for what seemed like several minutes, but probably only amounted to fifteen seconds. The silence was unbearable for some reason, which was strange because Sean usually hated talking. About what he was feeling, about what she was feeling. There never seemed to be much point to it. Now, though, he wished that Emma would chatter away like she normally did, anything to fill up the silence.
But she just sat there, staring up at the black sky. It was all up to him, it seemed.
"So..." he started. "You and Chris Sharpe..." He felt like an idiot, but conversation was conversation.
Emma looked over at him, surprised, but not really angry.
"Yeah," she said, nodding. "Weird, isn't it?"
"Why do you say that?"
"Because we're entirely different people. Complete opposites or something."
Sean laughed. "People probably said the same thing about us, Emma."
She looked at him intensely, like that was exactly what she'd hoped he'd say.
"Look how well that turned out."
He couldn't think of any way to respond, so he just shrugged and shook his head. It didn't seem like one thing had anything to do with the other, but if Emma saw the connection, there was no way to convince her otherwise. It seemed pretty sad to him though.
"And you and Ellie..." Emma said quietly.
He could only nod
"She seems really nice. I've always thought that."
Sean nodded again, appreciating the strangeness of the conversation. He'd never imagined talking to Emma about any of this, not considering the way things had gone down between them. It was almost unbelievable.
"Crazy how things turn out, isn't it?" he mused out loud.
Emma looked at him, and he could see that her eyes were glassy. It seemed like she was about to cry, and Sean couldn't figure out what he'd said or done now to upset her.
"I've never been able to figure it out, you know," she told him, sounding very tired. "What I did to make you hate me so much."
Suddenly thing had gone from bad to worse. Bad enough to run into Emma here, in the middle of the night. Bad enough to make small talk with her about their new relationships. Now she'd gone and thrown up everything he'd done to her in his face. Not with screaming and yelling, though, which was what he knew he deserved, but with tears and that soft voice. It was like torture.
"It wasn't... It's not like..." Sean sighed, feeling frustrated. "It's just that everything with us was always so hard. All of it. I just couldn't deal with it anymore."
Emma nodded, wiping away the few tears that had fallen. He didn't think that he'd ever be able to forget the look on her face then, sad but strangely calm. He had no idea what was going on.
"This is going to sound crazy, but this is the first time in like two months that I've actually cried," she told him. "It's almost like a relief. At least I know that I'm not totally numb."
Something in him wanted to touch her so badly, pat her arm or rub her back just to let her know that he was there and that he understood. But he couldn't make himself do it, so instead he did nothing, feeling like the world's biggest asshole.
"Come on," he said finally, standing up. "It's really late. I'll walk you home."
Emma looked at him strangely, like she wanted to refuse, but she just nodded, and walked toward the street. Sean followed her into the darkness, wondering if he was going to get any sleep at all tonight.
- x –
Her life was a joke – she'd figured that out by now -- but it had turned out to be much more cruel that she imagined. Bad enough, Emma was feeling so out of sorts that she'd sit in the park in practically the middle of the night, but did she have to run into Sean, at the height of her pathetic- ness. The day, week, month couldn't get much worse.
Outside her house, Sean held the basement window open so she could crawl through. She was about to lean back out to thank him, or at least say something before he left, but before she could, he crawled through the window after her. She tried not to look too surprised or uncomfortable as she stepped back to let him into her space.
He walked through carefully, slowly, looking around her 'bedroom' like it was a museum, some kind of public attraction. It was a total mess, clothes thrown everywhere, her bed still unmade from this morning, books and magazines littering her desk.
Sean stopped there, as he'd spotted something in the mess. He picked up the purple and blue pen that she'd dropped last week, and looked at it for a moment. Emma felt unbelievably embarrassed, like now Sean thought that she carried the stupid pen around like some kind of security blanket, keeping it close at all times. It didn't matter that that was pretty much the truth; she just couldn't stand him knowing.
Finally, he put it down, and moved on to her dressed. He picked up one of the picture frames, and looked at it intently. When she came closer, Emma saw that it was a photo of she and Manny from a couple of years back that he held in his hands. She had completely forgotten that it was even there.
"So you and Manny aren't friends anymore?" Sean asked finally, putting the picture back.
Emma sat down on the corner of her bed, still watching him as he moved around her room.
"No."
"What happened?"
"We said some really terrible things to each other. Things that can't be taken back, so we're ... so that's it."
Sean turned, and looked at her, frowning.
"You know, sometimes people do stupid things, Emma. They say things they don't mean, or do crappy things for the stupidest reasons," he said, quietly. "And they may even be sorry about it, but it's just too late to do anything to fix it."
She knew what he was saying, and she knew that it was the closest thing to an apology that she was going to get. At that moment, it seemed like enough.
"I don't think it's ever too late," she told him. "Not if both people still care."
He looked at her, seeming pretty doubtful.
"Maybe."
For a long minute, they looked at one another in silence. Neither of them seemed to move, and Emma wondered if she was still breathing. It was bizarre and unsettling, but it felt so good to feel anything that she almost liked it.
"I should go," Sean said finally. "It's ... it's really late."
He walked toward the window, and she followed him without thinking. She knew that she had to say something, that she should say thank you at least, but as she watched him climb the crates to reach the window, there was only one thing on her mind.
"Sean," she said quietly. "What you said the other day... about knowing how I felt? How did you know?"
He stopped, and looked at her over his shoulder.
"I don't know. I could just tell," he said. "I watched you, and I knew."
She nodded, and Sean nodded back. Then he turned and climbed out the window. It happened so fast that it was almost like he'd never been there at all. She turned off the lights then, and crawled into bed. She thought she might be tired enough to fall asleep now, which was a good thing. But as she closed her eyes, Emma finally acknowledged what she'd been avoiding dealing with from the first moment she saw Sean in the park.
If she wasn't careful, extremely careful, her life could spin even more out of control than it was right now. She just couldn't let that happen.
