A/N- I guess, a few days ago, I stumbled upon the High School Musical 3 cast list and found that Troy's mother is indeed named Lucille. :D I changed her name in this story and the rest. So, just so you know, Troy's mom is now "Lucille". Thanks everyone for the reviews, they really are awesome! -love- Desireé

Chapter Twenty, Guilty

Pardon me for saying so but you look more pitiful

Than I had ever imagined

Despite perfect fashion

And your photographs depict you so differently

I always thought you would be, some sort of match for me

-'Playing With Fire', Emery

When Gabriella was pregnant with Harris, she imagined the wondrous holidays she would spend with her children. At Christmastime, they would wake her up early—five o'clock in the morning with the sun still sleeping beyond the mountains. They would yell for the presents, shout for the parents to come downstairs, bounce around on the sofa in excited anticipation. And eventually, Gabriella would observe their wishes and come out to the home's public domain with her husband, smiling broadly.

Looking back, she realized she had never included Troy in these dreams.

It was about three o'clock in the morning; she was lying next to him in her bedroom (they had moved sometime from the shop downstairs), her hand gripping his in such a demonstrative manner that he had to murmur something about circulation to her once in a while. She'd let go, blushing, but he would just grin and lean over to kiss her.

While he was perfectly fine with lying next in his boxers and her in a t-shirt, she worried about Cassandra, no matter how much she hated her for ruining their ultimately perfect lives with just one night drinking underage. "She's expecting you back," she said uneasily, rolling over so the upper half of her body was draped across his chest. She gathered her hair so it wouldn't brush his face, but he secretly wished she hadn't. "And you still haven't called her."

Troy knew what he was doing wasn't exactly the most admirable thing in the world. His children were in the next room, sleeping away their troubles, the troubles that he had caused. And on the other side of the wall, in this room, he held both of Gabriella's hands, trying to keep his eyes closed so he wouldn't have to see reality. But she nudged him and he gave up, squinting slightly. "When I came here, I didn't want to see you. I just wanted to get Harris and Ari, and drive back to New York."

Gabriella noticed he was avoiding the topic of Cassandra, but she simply nodded. "I'm not exactly a true desirable," she conceded, concentrating resolutely on a bleeding hangnail.

"That's not true," he said. "When I saw you listening to that CD, my heart stopped. I felt like you were leaving all over again, and my mind was just teasing me with a memory of you. But I recognized those lyrics."

"Falling, yes I am falling," she whispered, her hands clasped over her mouth.

He finished softly, "And she keeps calling, me back again."

TYWY

Something was cardinally wrong when Harris woke up late that morning and emerged into the living room.

He glanced at his mother, who was positively glowing from where she stood at the kitchen counter. Across the room, Harris saw his father lounging on the floor next to the fake Christmas tree that had appeared there overnight, blushing every few seconds.

Something was very wrong.

"What did you do?" he demanded in a murmur when he sat down next to Troy, glancing at the sports magazine he held. It was upside down. "Dad, are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Troy said with a smile. He blinked for a second. "Oh! Merry Christmas! Oh—shit. Crap, I forgot." He hesitated. "I'm sorry, Harris, we didn't get you guys anything."

The boy shook his head. "Don't worry about it. Just use the money you would have spent and donate to some charity, it'll be our good deed of the week."

"Boooys!" Gabriella sang from the other room. Harris looked a little pale when he heard this. "Come help me for breakfast!"

"Is that Mom?"

His father grinned. "I thought you knew she sings."

"Used to sing, Dad, as in 'she sang'." Harris was about to elaborate but decided against it and carried himself into the kitchen, Troy close behind. "Merry Christmas, Mom," he greeted Gabriella, giving her a halfhearted hug.

"Good morning!" she exclaimed, sliding her arms around him cheerfully. "And Merry—oh, shit." She looked at Troy. "We didn't get them anything."

Troy nodded. "I already apologized, your turn."

"I said don't worry about it," Harris reminded his father, slipping out from under Gabriella's grasp and peering over the sizzling pans on the stovetop. Pancakes. This made him smile slightly; for a brief moment, he imagined a normal family—one that woke up early to a hot breakfast and gathered around the fireplace afterward for some relaxation and conversation. But this was just a recurring dream, he suggested to himself. Don't ever get your hopes up.

The enthusiasm that had suddenly appeared in both Gabriella and Troy continued throughout the morning. By eleven o'clock, Harris was perched on the counter, watching his parents interact. Once or twice his father would pass his mother and skim his arms around her waist, tugging her off the ground and waiting for her to protest good-naturedly. It was as if they had forgotten there was an audience; their playfulness was moderately nauseating—in spite of that, Harris was amused to see them flirt. He still recalled the fact that he had a stepmother, someone who tried her hardest to be accepted, and yet watching Troy and Gabriella reunite in the simplest of ways made him want to neglect his good-guy conscience and just shout because he finally was getting the real parental experience.

"How do you like your eggs, Harris?" Gabriella giggled, turning the second grid fire high on the stove. Troy leaned against her, oblivious to his son's observations, and whispered something. The woman simpered and Harris noticed he was now getting eggs over easy—even though he liked them scrambled.

"Dad, you want to go get Arielle?" the teenager said loudly, hopping off the counter and coming to wedge himself between them. Both the adults looked a little surprised, and then became aware of their… spectacle.

"Oh, are you sure you can't get her?" Troy asked, looking past the dining table and out toward the living room.

Harris elbowed him. "No, I think you should. It's Christmas morning, if you can't get us presents then the least you can do is be the one to greet her."

"You said you didn't care!"

"And I won't if you go get Arielle," Harris replied, pushing his father out of the kitchen. He waved his hands, and Gabriella snickered when she imagined her son saying, "Shoo! Shoo!"

While Troy made the long walk down the hall for the sixteenth time, Harris turned to Gabriella. "What did you guys do last night?"

Gabriella, alarmed, dropped the fork she held into the second batch of runny eggs and looked at her son. "What?"

"What did you guys do last night?" he repeated.

She immediately reddened and busied herself with trying to get the fork out of the pan. "Nothing."

"You guys had sex, didn't you?"

"What? No!" Gabriella turned off the fire and rested her elbows on the countertop. "We didn't have sex. But we… weren't exactly conventionally respectable." She paused for a second and lifted her head. "Has your father given you 'The Talk' before?"

Harris made a face. "Dad? Gross, no. But Arielle and I know all about it—we go to a prep academy where quickies are like a sport."

"Right." Gabriella rolled her eyes and finally reached for the fork in the eggs. "Well, if you must know, we just kissed and fooled around a little. Nothing big, just like we were teenagers but it still isn't excusable. I keep thinking about Cassandra, who I have been calling a home wrecking whore for thirteen years; now I'm in her position and I feel terrible."

This was slight news, and Harris didn't know what to say. As much as he liked the idea of his parents being normal parents—embarrassing, ridiculous, fairly irritating—he couldn't stand the idea of getting what he wanted if it meant Gabriella would stoop down to Cassandra's level.

"I don't know if it's my place to say anything," he admitted, and considered the moment before hugging her like they'd been apart for the longest time. In a whisper he added, "But I'm happy I'm spending Christmas with you, Mom."

Troy has a heart to heart with himself.

When Troy knocked on Arielle's bedroom door, he was afraid of what he would find inside. She did not answer, so he permitted himself entrance and saw that she was asleep. Next to the bed, a Nature Valley bar wrapper lay with some crumbs spread next to it. Well, at least she was eating.

He sat on the end of the bed heedfully, trying not to disturb her peacefulness. "When you were born, the first thing I noticed was how beautiful you were," he said indistinctly. "And for the first week of your life, Cassandra did stick around. She had to, at first, because she was really exhausted from the delivery. But afterward she stayed. She explained breast-feeding to me and diapers and all that. I think she wanted to be there, to stay, but she had a big career to chase, you know.

"She'd come over once every other week; she'd marvel at how big you were getting and how much you looked like the both of us." Troy smiled and nodded. "But around your second birthday, she stopped coming, because we had made a plan when you were born. Cassandra would enhance her career, and then she'd come back when everything was settled. But there was a flaw somewhere in that plan, and it was Gabriella.

"You wanted to know about her, and I never said anything because I thought that—" He stopped shortly, remembering what he had said to Gabriella the first night he arrived in town. "I thought that nothing really is ever true until someone says it out loud."

There was everything and more to say to her: apologies, explanations, comforts. But Troy decided that if he would every say these things, he would say it face to face with Arielle. As he left the room, he smiled slightly. Talking had never been his strong suit, but this was a first step.

Opening her eyes, Arielle sat up and looked at the open door, hearing her father's footsteps dissipate. "Nothing really is ever true until someone says it out loud," she sighed, nearly regretting the fact that she was such a good fake-sleeper.

TYWY

The sun had set by late afternoon, which made Gabriella tug on a jacket and walk outside to enjoy the night sky. In the city, she could never see the stars—the city lights were like pollution to the natural beauty of the moon. This was one of the reasons she liked Sampson; in fact, she'd made a pros and cons list when she first settled in the apartment above the Witching Hour. In the pros list, she identified collective things like the ability to start everything over; peace and quiet; a new business plan. But the cons list went much farther down the paper; at the top it, she had scrawled 'No Troy or Harris'.

She pulled her hood over her head and exhaled, seeing the smoky waft of air drift in front of her face. "Hey there," Troy's voice carried behind her, and she turned to see him slowly step over the ice at the front door.

"Hi," she said, seeing the vapor again. Gabriella pushed her guilt to the back of her mind as he walked toward her, bringing her into a hug so he could rest his chin on her head. Neither of them showed any more signs of hesitation; they simply fell into place with one another and that was that.

"What are you thinking about?" he asked softly.

She pulled back to look up at him. "And how, Mr. Bolton, do you know that I'm thinking about something in particular?"

He smiled. "I always knew it back when we were in high school, and when we had Harris. You would get really quiet, and once in a while you'd start to hum to yourself, like you were setting the mood. It was actually really cute."

"Stop it, you're making me blush." The ice beneath them was slick; Gabriella could feel her feet begin to slide out from under her, but Troy tightened his grip. She smiled against his shirt. "I liked it when you kissed me, and if you did it again right now I don't think I would fight back—but I'm too old. I think we're both too old."

Somewhere in the distance, a car honked its horn. Troy laughed and leaned down. "No, you're never too old—" As nature would have it, they shifted too far to one side and lost their balance, both slamming down on the ice and colliding rather painfully—his chin had struck the side of her forehead.

"Shit," she sighed, touching the bruising contact point on her hairline gingerly. "I guess we deserved that."

"I know," he grumbled, tapping his bleeding jaw. Troy winced and sat up. "It's only our luck that we'd injure ourselves while wrongfully re-creating our past."

"Mom? Dad?"

They both turned to see Harris standing on the shop's welcome mat, looking a little disturbed. "How long have you been standing there?" Gabriella asked hesitantly.

"Long enough to see you guys attempt romance," Harris replied. He jabbed his thumb behind him. "But that's beside the point. Arielle wants to see Dad."

Troy raised his eyebrows. "Me?" His son nodded and waved his hands to give him the welcome wagon inside. Troy walked slowly past him as if testing for weak floorboards. He bounced slightly on one or two of them, stalling for time. Now that he was finally getting somewhere with his daughter, he was at a loss of what to do. She was waiting upstairs on the sofa, smiling when he appeared on the upper landing. "Hey, Dad," she said softly.

Confusion was obvious on his face. "Hi, Ari," he answered, rubbing the tense spots on the back of his neck. Gabriella was right: they were too old for kissing outside—and subsequently breaking their faces as they crashed to the ground.

"I wanted to say I was sorry," she admitted, standing up when he came next to her. Suddenly, her arms were wound around his waist and she was speaking into his jacket. "I know you've done everything for me that you could, and you always made sure I was happy as a child, even though I was kind of a pissy little ten-year-old who was hard to please."

Troy found himself smiling as he sat down, and she didn't break the hug. "Cassandra loves you," he said, "and so do I. Gabriella does, too, just not like you wanted her to, I think."

The girl shrugged and lifted her gaze to meet his. "Yeah, but—hold on, what happened to your face?"

"Oh, my chin. Yeah, I just hit it outside when I fell," he told her, omitting the details that involved Gabriella.

"Are you okay?" she asked, sitting up to press the injury. He cringed, and she snatched back her hand. "Sorry." For a moment, Arielle was quiet, looking past him and outside at the window. "Daddy, I just wanted to tell you that I'm sorry for being such a bitch."

"Language—"

She rolled her eyes. "For being such a pain," Arielle corrected, and then added, "in the ass. Will you forgive me?"

This, Troy remembered, was the better half of parenthood. He nodded and she propped her head on his shoulder, feeling her eyes sting with tears. "And D-Daddy?" she sniffled. The shakiness in her voice was unsettling, as she continued, "I want to go home."

"We'll be back in the city tomorrow," he said, smiling as one of her tears dropped onto his sleeve and her breathing pattern began to regulate again like it had earlier that day in her room. "I promise." It was there that Troy Bolton tilted his head back on Christmas Night and closed his eyes, while his daughter Arielle Delaney finally got the rest she had deserved for a very, very long time.

And when he woke up, the world was on fire.

A/N- I stole that line from a cliffhanger chapter in Scott Westerfield's book called Uglies. It's a peculiar book; I still haven't read the sequels so I can't say a lot about it. Anyway, review, lovelies! Thanks a bunch! -love- Desireé