An- Hey everyone! This part is a little different than anything else we've done. In fact, it's different than anything I've ever written ( I was in the mood to experiment). In a part I've written for post- The Final Journey, I mention something about the life the girls would have had had they stayed in our world. I don't give any sort of detail- it's basically a 'it really would have sucked, so I'm glad we came here'. Still though, it got me wondering: what would their lives have been like? If Niori, Carla, Erin and Jane had just lived out their lives without the Fellowship ever landing in their laps, how would their lives turned out? Because I wondered, I wrote it.
A Broken Fairy Tale
Once upon a time, there were four girls. One was a warrior, the second a mother, one was pure hearted, and the last a survivor. Or they would have been in another life, another world. In this world, they were none of these things.
There was a moment in time, a crossroads of destiny. A dangerous spell that was meant to be a distraction was ignored. The bait wasn't taken, and fate took a different path, one that did not include The Warrior, The Mother, The Pure Hearted One or The Survivor. Strength was never found, fear never tested and love never formed...and none of them knew what they had lost. The four girls went on with their normal lives. They went from children to adults, from high school to university to the real world, and they remained together. Time passed, and life moved on. Each chose paths to follow in this world that offered them no magic or adventure. In many ways, it was the four of them against the world.
The Survivor had always given her affections freely, and only found mockery and scorn because of it. She held her head high, but above all else, she longed to be loved, for she'd never felt it in the past from anyone besides her three friends. She was broken beneath her surface, though no one knew, for she hid her pain well. When one came who seemed to adore her, to love her like no other, none were surprised when she said 'yes'. He showered her with gifts and praise, and she rolled her eyes with a laugh at it all. He was older, sophisticated in a way that was completely charming, and The Survivor wondered why he wanted her. Many men would have given up long before, but he persisted, and she finally relented. She was fond of him, and saw no problem with having dinner with him. One dinner became two, and then three, and it came to pass that they were together. Not long after that, they were married. She thought he was her prince, come to take her away and give her a life of happiness and light. She was wrong.
The Warrior had always been restless, always been quick to jump into, and often start, a fight. She had a battle lust that ran deeply through her soul, even if it wasn't something she could name, not in a world where she did no true battle. As she grew older, it only grew. She was restless, searching for something to fill that need. Out of all of them, it was The Warrior who felt that there was something missing. Out of them all, she was the one who had a true sense, deep down, that their lives weren't going the way they should have. The Warrior knew that she was destined for something more, and grew even more frustrated every time she failed to find it. Her frustration led to violence, more often than not.
Much like how The Warrior was never a warrior in this world, The Mother never became a mother. In the other life, it was an accident that she became a mother at all. Until the moment she held her beautiful son in the middle of an evil place, she had not even realized that she wanted to be a mother at all. In this life, The Mother was extremely cautious, and so there were no children. Unlike The Warrior, The Mother didn't realize that there was something so essential missing from her. In this life, there was no drunken mistake, no magical romance. In this world, The Mother was a different person entirely. What she went through for her son made her stronger, made her better. It turned her from a selfish girl into a selfless woman. Without her son, she didn't become that person and she didn't grow into the strong and powerful and woman she could have become. She remained that selfish girl, and her ability to commit to others but herself (her three friends were her only exceptions). She found love, even married, but none of those lasted. Though The Mother loved them all truly, she did not love them enough to fight for that love. The love she felt for them was no one that would drive her through danger and pain to keep it.
Unlike her friends, The Pure Hearted One never found that love. She knew it was probably silly, just her romantic side coming out in full force, but The Pure Hearted One was waiting for her soul mate. She didn't want anyone other than her perfect match. She watched as a broken relationship destroyed The Survivor and watched as The Mother moved from one to another, and she didn't want that. She would know when she felt this connection. Even as the years passed and she lived her life without it, she waited. In another life, she would have found it and struggled for it, but in this one her soul mate never existed.
Instead of moping, The Pure Hearted One turned to art, which had long been her passion. So The Pure Hearted One practiced her craft and enjoyed it, even if it didn't give her a life of luxury. When her chance came, it was a surprise. Someone had seen her work and decided she would be perfect for their project. It was for a calendar, and The Pure Hearted One was delighted that she would be drawing scenes from books she had completely adored when she was younger. She was to draw a world that, had another path been taken, she would have seen outside the realm of her imagination.
It was The Survivor who first tasted the bitter tragedy that came with this life.
For the first few years of her marriage, her life was a fairy tale. The Survivor's happiness only grew. She felt like a queen, and her husband treated her like one. They were perfect together, the rest of the world decided. In the beginning, The Survivor agreed with them. The Warrior, The Mother and The Pure Hearted One saw their friend's happiness and rejoiced that The Survivor had found love, something she had always been so desperate for.
Things changed, and did so so abruptly that The Survivor was left dazed and confused. It began with late nights and trips away, but at first it didn't concern her. At first, she couldn't believe that it was anything but business. It wasn't until the first mistress showed up on her doorstep did The Survivor even know that there was anything wrong. The girl - no more than nineteen, twenty at most, and desperately in love with her husband and wanting him completely- blindsided her, and when she was gone, The Survivor tried to deny it. She tried to convince herself it was a lie, but too many things the girl had said rung true, and she found it impossible.
The Survivor did what many women like her had done before her, and hired someone to investigate. She did it with her husband's money and never mentioned the girl who had come to their door and said such hateful things. It only took a week for the detective to come back and tell her that her husband wasn't just having an affair, he was having two. At first, The Survivor was numb. It didn't take her long to get angry, because she was not a woman who would still idly by and let this stand. The confrontation was their firs fight, and it was an ugly one. The Survivor screamed, cried and raged. At first, her husband tried to placate and soothe, but he never denied. The Survivor noticed, and her accusations grew even angrier. Finally, her husband snapped, and told her the brutal truth.
He didn't love her, not like he had claimed. He loved the challenge she represented, the woman who didn't give into his charms easily and needed to be won. She was a beautiful, witty woman he could have on his arm to show off to the world. She was a trophy, and now the high of finally winning her had worn off, and he was searching for his next. She was still his beautiful, witty wife used to impress the world, but he was never going to settle with having just her.
In that moment, The Survivor's world shattered. The image of her life, of her happiness and future, was ripped apart. Her entire world was ruined because the foundation she had built it on had been destroyed. She walked out of that life, crying and sobbing the whole time. She cursed herself for being such an idiot, for not seeing a truth that she now believed to be obvious. She hated herself for believing in fairy tale endings, and for letting herself believe she even deserved one.
Her friends rallied around her, supported her despite the trials in their own lives. The Warrior was in trouble over a bar fight, The Mother going through a nasty divorce and The Pure Hearted One beginning a new, stressful job, but each one of them dropped their own pain to help The Survivor deal with hers.
It was through them that her husband manipulated her again. He wasn't a man who was willing to lose a prize so hard won. He came to her where she was staying with The Warrior, and told her that she wouldn't leave him. She wanted to laugh in his face, to tell him to go to hell, but she stayed silent. A part of her, a part of her that she was ashamed even existed, didn't want to give up the dream of the happiness she had been living. She was still desperate for love, still desperate to believe she deserved it, and if she clung to the lie and ignored the truth, she could still pretend they were still true. A part of her wanted it more than anything. A part of her broke a little more. Yet she still had her pride, and it was one of the few things she had left. She didn't have enough to force him to leave, but she did had enough to tell him 'no'. Her 'no' went ignored, and he told her that, if she didn't come back, if she didn't be the wife he wanted, he'd take it out on her friends. He was rich and powerful, and all The Survivor could think was what he could so with the trouble The Warrior was in, the divorce The Mother was going through, the promising career The Pure Hearted One was beginning, and the rest of her broke into pieces. It was from those pieces that she agreed to do what he wanted.
In another world, another man wanted to possess The Survivor, wanted to override her will and own her. In that world, The Survivor discovered the strength not only to defy him, but to take vengeance for his attempts. In this world, she never found that strength, and she couldn't do these things. In this world, she allowed herself to be possessed and controlled.
She returned to him, no matter the protests of her friends. They begged her not to do it, but she just smiled at them falsely and told them everything was fine. They knew it was a lit, but there was nothing they could do to stop her. She did what was expected of her as the wife of a powerful man, and a part of her died with each passing day. She hated it, hated herself for not spitting in his face and leaving. She hated herself for not being strong, and she did everything she could do to forget. It was a pattern she had established long ago, and when alcohol stopped working the way it needed to, she moved onto drugs. When those began to lose their power, she took them together.
He continued to do as he wished and she continued to do everything she could to forget it. The longer it went on, the more obvious it became that The Survivor was drowning. The Warrior, The Mother and The Pure Hearted One tried to convince her to leave, but she would only refuse. They drew away, unwilling to watch her fall apart. It wasn't on purpose, and they did not even realize they were doing it. They did not, could not, abandon her, but the visits stopped and their interactions were limited to emails and phone calls. It hurt, hurt so much, but she never told them, never let them know that they had been the last thread holding her together. Without them, she shattered.
The time came that she needed them most, and none of them were there for her. It came when she sat in a bathroom, a little strip of plastic with a little blue plus sign in her hand. It was an experience she would have had to endure in both lives, and in both lives she would do it alone. In this world, she frantically tried to reach out to her friends for help. The Warrior missed her call, The Mother ignored her call and The Pure Hearted One cut the call short, not hearing the desperation in The Survivor's voice. In this life, The Survivor wasn't alone because she made the choice to be. The Survivor sat down and thought about the life this child would come into - a broken mother, a father who made her that way-, and decided she couldn't do that to her child. No life was better than the life they would have...and The Survivor had long thought that about her life.
She ended it, and went alone and without anyone to comfort her. She should have felt some sort of pain, pain that would nearly cripple her if she had been on another path, but she only felt relief. Her relief was short lived, because her attempts at secrecy, despite her extreme caution, her husband found out what she had done. It was the first time he hit her, and yet she wasn't surprised when he did. The Survivor was more surprised that he only struck her once before storming off. It was the words he used that hurt her most, and when he finally left her alone, she sat there and realized that by now she was just too broken to ask for help...no one had been there for her before, so why would they now? She was too broken to leave, and when she realized that, The Survivor took everything she could in order to forget it again.
The Survivor died lost and alone. She was found the next night by a neighbour who had come to deliver the cookies her daughter had sold. First the police were called, and they failed to reach her husband. When they couldn't, someone remembered The Survivor's closest friends.
The Warrior learned of the death first. When she heard the news, she screamed. She screamed for her loss and pain, but most of all she screamed for The Survivor's. The Warrior called the other two, and they screamed with her. The Survivor's husband, who had left town after their fight, wouldn't return in time, so they took up the mantle. The Survivor's body was burned and her ashes scattered in the water. The question or not The Survivor took her own life was on all their minds. The three remaining friends denied it vehemently, but deep in their minds, they wondered as well. They hated themselves for not being able to know for sure.
The Survivor's life ended in tragedy, but she was not the only one tragedy visited.
They all mourned, but it was The Warrior who took The Survivor's death the hardest. They had been best friends since they were children, had been family, and yet she hadn't seen this coming. She had been blind, and some of it was wilfully so. She knew her friend had been in pain, but had become angry that The Survivor refused to do anything to help herself, or even let others help her. Her frustration had led her to give up the hope that anything would change. Now she cursed herself for not forcing the issue, for not forcing The Survivor to do something. She should have done more to protect her, and if she had, maybe The Survivor wouldn't have died. The Warrior had failed, and she let her grief and anger consume her. She was much like her cousin in that she needed something she could escape to. Where The Survivor found it in alcohol and drugs, The Warrior found it in rage.
For years she had been getting into fights, and there were a handful of times where those fights had come close to getting her into serious trouble. Yet, up until The Survivor's death, she had never been the one to pick them. Her quick temper had made her react to them far too quickly, but she never went out of her way to start one. It changed then. She had spent the past half a dozen years working at a stable training horses, something she loved beyond all measure. She found peace there, and she was happy whenever she was there. When she realized that she was happy after her cousin had died in misery, she hated herself. It was after one of those times, where The Warrior laughed wholly and freely without remembering her guilt, that The Warrior became the second to know the tragedy this life brought.
She left the stables in a dark mood, and stopped at a bar wanting to fight. She wanted to feel pain and she wanted to inflict it, and she got her wish. There was a man, a boy really, who she turned down brutally. He didn't take her rebuke gracefully, but named her ice queen and bitch. They were insults she had heard and gotten over long before, and they themselves didn't anger her any longer, but they gave her an excuse.
The insult had barely left his mouth when The Warrior turned around and hit him. She was savagely glad that, after one stunned moment, he hit her back. The hit was a good one, one that would leave a mark for weeks afterwards. It was one that sent her down to the floor, where she grinned viciously and launched herself at him. The Warrior had always been good at physical confrontations, and had always excelled at using the brute force she had to take down even those stronger than her. Her strength, her rage and self hate all went into that fight, and it wasn't a surprise that it ended badly.
The fight was brutal but short. It ended with a kick to a knee that brought him to his, an elbow to his nose that sent him to the ground. It ended with his head hitting the ground. It ended with a loud crack that even The Warrior heard through the fog of her rage. It ended with the boy's life.
That moment froze for The Warrior. She knew what she had done, and The Warrior knew that her life had ended with the boy's. What came after passed in a blur. She didn't try to run, to get away. She waited, sitting at the bar and watching as an ambulance took the boy away. She said nothing as a police officer took her away and led her to jail. She used her call to call The Pure Hearted One, who then frantically called The Mother and a lawyer.
They arrived in a panic, and felt the horror twist in their stomach when they found out what The Warrior had done. They were horrified, but deep in their hearts, they weren't surprised. They had watched helplessly as The Warrior became more violent in the few years since The Survivor's death. They had tried to help, tried to make her talk, if not to them than to a therapist, but The Warrior just shrugged their attempts angrily.
When they were finally able to speak to The Warrior, The Mother and The Pure Hearted One found her emotionless. She had shut down in order to survive in the immediate aftermath. Her rage, the desire to fight and hurt, would return later, but for now it was silenced under the knowledge that she had killed someone with her bare hands. When The Warrior told them she had no plans to fight the punishment they wished to give her, her friends were horrified all over again. The Mother and The Pure Hearted One begged her to at least try and save herself. She needed to be punished, they agreed, but they pleaded with her to use the lawyer The Pure Hearted One had brought to at least try and lower her sentence. They had already lost The Survivor, and they couldn't lost The Warrior too. She ignored them, and took whatever was coming for her.
It was a manslaughter charge, and years in prison because of it. Her friends wept and the boy's friends and family wept tears of joy, but through it all The Warrior was dry eyed. It wasn't until the cell door locked behind her, did she feel again. It was then that the rage returned. Even within the walls of her prison, The Warrior fought. The guilt over the boy's death was now mixed into that which she felt over her cousin, and it twisted into an even deeper rage and self loathing. For many the punishment would have served as a wake up call, but it only continued to pull her down.
The Mother and The Pure Hearted One visited The Warrior in her prison whenever they could. Every effort was made to be there for her. They had abandoned The Survivor and it had killed her. They wouldn't do the same to The Warrior, no matter the pressure to do otherwise. The Mother's husband and The Pure Hearted One's agent didn't like them having such close ties to a killer. The didn't care- what The Warrior had done was wrong, but it didn't make them love her any less.
The Warrior made enemies in a place where she should have kept her head down. Instead of focusing on surviving, she channelled everything into her rage. She let it, let her guilt, control her life. Her need for violence, which by all rights should have ended when she killed the boy, only grew. She picked fights and though she won more often than not, it won her no favours. It won her too many enemies, and powerful ones at that. They saw her as a threat, and this was a place where threats were taken care of brutally. All it took was a moment where The Warrior was alone and not paying attention. In another world, the same thing happened, but there was someone there to save her. In this world, there wasn't.
A makeshift weapon shoved into The Warrior's stomach by a passing inmate in an empty corridor was all it took. In another world, the same wound killed The Warrior. In that life, she died with a smile on her face. In this like, she died crying in a puddle of her own blood. In the other world, her death saved both her worlds and the people she loved. In this world, her death was meaningless.
The Warrior's last thought while she lay there dying was 'I deserve this'.
The Mother and The Pure Hearted One didn't get a call this time. Instead, The Mother caught the tail end of a news cast saying an unnamed prisoner had been killed within the walls of the prison. It released no names, but The Mother knew. The dread that constricted around her heart told her that it was The Warrior. It took less than a day to find out the truth, and when she knew for certain, she called The Pure Hearted One. They had screamed when they heard of the death of The Survivor, but now they could only weep. They wept for the loss and the pointlessness of it all.
It fell to the two remaining friends to take up the mantle and preparations. In the aftermath of her crime, they were the only two who didn't abandon The Warrior. They were the only ones who were left. The Survivor had been burned, but they decided to return The Warrior to the earth. They were the only ones at her funeral, and they survived it by clinging to each other.
Life went on without The Survivor and The Warrior, but moving on doesn't always mean becoming happier.
By the time The Mother came to her third divorce -amicable this time, without the drama of her first or the venom of the second-, she was just tired of her life, and wanted something more. The moment things were finalized, she quit her job, packed her things, sold her house and moved across the country. She needed something different, needed change, and she went for it.
The only tie she didn't cut was with The Pure Hearted One. The deaths of their friends could have made the two of them drift apart. Instead, it brought them closer together. They clung to each other like lifelines, and they truly were. When The Mother moved and asked The Pure Hearted One to come with her, The Pure Hearted One only had to pause a moment to consider. She was a professional artist now, and could work anywhere if she needed to. The idea of not having The Mother close was to unimaginable to even consider.
In both lives The Mother and The Pure Hearted One moved to a brand new place in order to begin new lives. In the other world, they found great happiness in those new lives. In this one, they didn't.
In the beginning, their new lives had promise. A large apartment was enough for both of them. The Pure Hearted One continued her art and The Mother found a job working at a small library. It wasn't what she ultimately wanted out of life, but it was alright for now. It wasn't the happily ever after The Mother had always dreamed of, that she would have had in another life, but it was okay. She was still searching for that something more, but this was a good place to search from. It didn't last.
It was raining the night The Mother was driving home. Her day hadn't been good. There were a number of books which hadn't been returned, and a patron who refused to admit to losing them and paying to replace them. The basement had flooded with all the rain, and she had spent most of her afternoon hauling boxes of books up steep stairs. To end the day, a terribly behaved class of first graders on a field trip had left a mess in their wake. The only good thing, in The Mother's opinion, was that it was over and she had the weekend off.
When the car ran the red light and smashed into her car, The Mother was talking to The Pure Hearted One on the phone. They were making plans for the weekend, discussing which movie they wanted to see. The Mother didn't see the car coming, and when it collided, she didn't know what hit her. On the other end of the phone, The Pure Hearted One heard it all. She heard the terrified screams, the sound of shattering glass and the crunch of metal as it bent and twisted. Then, when the car stopped rolling, she heard nothing.
The Pure Hearted One called the police, panicked and horrified, before rushing to the scene herself. She didn't know the exact location, but drove until she came to flashing lights. When she saw the twisted wreck of a car, she almost fainted. When she saw the broken and bloody mess that was The Mother's body, she was sick. That didn't stop her from riding in the front of the ambulance to the hospital, or calling her family when they arrived. Despite saving her life in the beginning, The Mother didn't wake up again. Three days later, she died with The Pure Hearted One by her side and holding her hand.
The family was too far away to do it in time, so it once again fell to the remaining friend to prepare their friend's funeral. For the first time, The Pure Hearted One had to do it alone. The Mother was burned like The Survivor before her, but her ashes were returned to the family she had left behind and drifted apart from. They took the ashes and returned to their homes, not even sparing a glance at the one friend who remained.
The girl with the pure heard was the last, and she felt her heart whiter from loneliness. She tried to move on, tried to continue living the life she had started with The Mother. When the anniversary of The Mother's death came and it was just as painful as the day she died, The Pure Hearted One knew she couldn't stay. Too many memories were there, and all they were doing was hurting her more. For the second time in five years, The Pure Hearted One picked up and moved as far away from her life as she possibly could. She withdrew from he world, the loneliness crippling her. She continued with her art, used it for therapy, but it didn't help her move on. She drew the friends she had lost, drew the nightmares that haunted her. The nightmares were of their terrible deaths -an overdose, a murder and a car wreck-, and replaying them over and over in both her mind and on paper, leapt the wounds open and bleeding.
Others in her life tried to help her, for she did have other loved ones, even if she had distanced herself from over the years. They couldn't stop her from hurting. They couldn't stop her from shutting herself away, from shutting out the world. Eventually, they stopped trying altogether.
Unlike the others, The Pure Hearted One was blessed with long life...though with every never ending year that passed, every year that she grew more lonelier and bitter, The Pure Hearted One saw that time as a curse. While she never got to the point of wanting to take her own life, there were times when she bitterly cursed that it was taking so long. When The Pure Hearted One's life finally ended, at the hands of a simple heart attack, her final thought was 'it's about time'.
Once upon a time, there were four girls. One was a warrior, the second a mother, another pure hearted and the last a survivor, and none of them got a happily ever after.
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An- Hope you enjoyed! Have a good day everyone!