dedication: For Natalie (star darling xo) at the '14 Valentine's Day Exchange for the Clique archive.
(awkward note) Sorry for this, Nat—I did the main portion of this at one in the morning, but I spent a few days on it and finished early(ish). Happy Valentine's Day, Nat, and thank you for being one of my first friends in this fandom c:
prompts: mend a broken heart, chocolates, one red rose.
pairing: massie&derrick
disclaimer: I do not own "The Clique"
They met when they were small, almost too small to remember. She was shy, and he was friendly—even then, they were the polar opposites of each other, but somehow, their differences formed into some sort of demented friendship based purely off of arguments.
The first time they met, Massie had hidden behind her mother's leg, peeking out to see if the blonde boy was still there. He didn't move after she hid—he simply stood his ground and stared, letting his face break into a boyish smile. The smile was static—no matter how the boy changed, his smile stayed the same: friendly, boyish, and eager.
"Do you want to play?" Massie looked up to her mother upon his question, asking silently if it was all right to go and have fun with the unnamed boy. Kendra smiled, pushing Massie towards Derrick slowly, and laughing as he grabbed her hand with thick fingers and pulled her to the playground.
He threw wood chips at her, and she poked her pink tongue out at him. He tried to toss a chip of wood into her open mouth and she squealed, pushing him back into the pile of wood chips underneath the swing set. He wasn't fazed by the push, and only let out a high-pitched string of laughter.
His chocolate eyes settled on the rusted chains of the swing, and he pushed all of his energy into grasping the chains and pulling himself into the rubber seat, taking more than a few tries before landing his but in the high chair. Kicking his airborne legs in delight, he looked down at Massie, and pointed to the swing next to him. "Swing. I bet I can get it all the way around."
He kicked his legs as violently as he could—he always had troubles starting to swing, but was able to soar once he gained the proper momentum. The lighter girl was flying through the air much more quickly than he, and it was his turn to poke his tongue out at the happy girl. Copying her fluid movements, he swung his legs so that he too was soon flying, and they were both giggling.
Each time their swings passed, they held their hands out so that their fingers could touch—it was a childish game, but it brought them both amusement, and they were both screaming with happiness when they reached the peaks of the swing's height.
They never made it all the way around, but when they closed their eyes, the sensation of flying was enough to truly live for.
/
He never learned her name.
He grew in age and size, but no matter how he changed, he could not shake the smiling girl from his mind, something that would make more sense if he simply knew what to call her by. He couldn't have a crush on her because he couldn't have a crush on someone he didn't know, but he did—he smiled when he remembered her amber eyes. He liked smiling—it was his favorite past time.
When someone was that young, it was difficult to remember a name and face for that long, but he managed to cling onto her chubby-cheeked smile for just long enough.
The moment that the crush began to life from his heart was the same morning that he left for his first day of kindergarden, and that was the same day that the lifted skinny love slammed back down into his chest with a shock that was almost violent. He only saw a side view of her face, but he recognized her—a flash of amber eyes looking down in shyness, curled brown hair, rose-tinged cheeks, and a dress.
"Hi," Derrick walked over to her with short steps—he was small for his age—and placed himself down next to her, picking up a doll from the house she was playing with, "Can I play with you?"
"I know you. At the swings." The sentence was brilliantly disjointed that only a small child could make endearing, and the shy girl pulled it off better than most. He didn't answer her question—it was more of a statement than an answerable question—and handed her one of the dolls she was playing with. He smiled, not caring that dolls were a 'girl thing'—he had never paid attention to the things that guys and girls were supposed to do, and never understood why such heavy teasing came with something so trivial as wearing the color pink.
"Do you wanna be my best friend?" Derrick asked, and Massie's amber orbs lit up like firecrackers. She nodded her head yes, throwing her arms at him and hugging him. A giggle escaped her lips, and she sat back, walking her doll into the house with a blinding smile on her face.
/
She didn't talk too much, but slowly, Derrick eased her out of that habit—she became more like him with each passing day, but she didn't mind being similar to the immature boy. She donned his best habits and let his worst habits slide off of her, and he learned from her how to be polite, kind, and wait for the proper time to speak.
He taught her how to laugh until she cried and nearly fell to the floor, and they learned how to stay up twenty four hours simply talking and laughing. He showed her the way to attract elves (dropping chocolate kisses and waiting for the elves to come) and she showed him how to walk in high heels—they both were terribly clumsy, and continued to trip over their feet and drop onto the floor in piles of laughter and twisted limbs.
He remembered telling her that he loved her, and remembered her kissing him on the cheek with a simple, 'I love you, too' of ignorance—he wasn't so sure what love was, but he knew that what he felt for his best friend was close to the emotion. He smiled when he watched her twirl in her pastel dresses and laughed as she braided a crown made of flowers and placed it upon Derrick's head, not minding that the wreath of flowers was yet another 'girl thing'. He liked saying her name—'Massie' slipped on and off his tongue easily—and he liked the rush he felt when he rapped on her door, knocking on the wood until his knuckles hurt but still knocking.
She helped him learn how to write when they aged—he always flipped the letter 'e'—and helped him write with pretty handwriting, something that teachers praised him for incessantly.
Children would be children, and eventually, their peers began to tease Massie and Derrick about their friendship, making kissing noises when the best friends passed—"Why don't you guys get married?" "Derrick loves Massie, Derrick loves Massie!"—but he was never embarrassed by the teasing words.
Massie's face turned to a rosy blush when someone accused her of being Derrick's girlfriend—she didn't know how Derrick could laugh along with the teasing—but tried to follow his lead. Still, it was hard—she wasn't Derrick. She cared about what others thought of her, and cared when people treated her with judgmental looks and laughing stares.
Even when she was supposed to be young and gullible, she cared about how she looked, and how people looked at her—how could one so blind to the world when the world was glaring down at you? Her best friend took the harsh embrace of teasing—even small comments—with open arms, but she ran from it, and fell hard when the cold arms finally reached her.
/
When she was sixteen and he was seventeen, she asked him out, but it was not in the way that he imagined.
It was a few days before Valentine's Day, and Massie's fragile heart was broken by a Landon Crane, a man Derrick wished to repeatedly hit in the stomach. The boy had taken Massie, and turned her into a porcelain mess of tears and red eyes—she was dull, but it was a side effect of broken-heartedness. Derrick wished to see his best friend shine, but she was delicate—he was scared that a gust of wind would blow her away, and he would never see the girl again. He wished to see her one final time blazed in the glory that a happy heart would give her, but watching her now, he knew that the chances of her ever being whole again were slim.
"It's pathetic. I'm going to have to go to the dance alone while Landon goes with some . . . " A hiccuping sob bubbled from Massie's throat, and she curled up into a ball on Derrick's bed, her small body shivering heavily. He wanted to go to her, but he had no clue what he could do to comfort her—he was not practiced in the art of mending broken hearts. The most he could do was try to stitch up the rips in her heart and place a band aid over the tears in the lining, and pray that it would beat again.
"Assclown," He supplied the insult to make her smile, but she only seemed to cry harder. "Look, Block. You're . . . you're beautiful, smart, intelligent, graceful, hot, kind, witty, sarcastic, and everything else that a guy could ever want in a woman. There's a dozen guys cheering over your breakup with Landon—if you open your pretty eyes, you'll find one who can love you more than Landon, and make him jealous."
"Go with me." Massie whispered, and a spark of hope flashed across Derrick's eyes, a spark that her next words slaughtered. "I need someone to go with, and if the scandal of Massie Block and Derrick Harrington going to the Winter Formal gets out, everyone will forget that Landon dumped me. Please, Derrick."
Every time Massie pleaded in that way while batting her amber eyes, he was a goner. Her velvet lips were a spell of beautifully deadly hypnotism, and he was nodding his head while drinking in the spell of her features. He was gone, but he didn't give a damn—the ability to look at the beautiful girl and the amber flecks in her eyes was enough to keep him going through the hell that he called a life.
It wasn't the best life, but it was his. He didn't give a damn if it was made of crashing waves of broken hearts and restrained tears—he had what he needed to go on through his life, and nothing more.
He didn't have the pleasure of sweet nothings to get him by—the sweet simplicities were added adjectives to life, and his was a barren life without a pop of color. Massie was the stroke of paint on his canvas, and though he knew that he couldn't have her, he liked to play pretend and imagine that he was okay.
Inside, his heart was blistered.
/
The dance was filled with falling paper hearts and glitter and happiness, and the only thing he wanted was a sip of vodka. He could not have his drink of choice, so instead he went for the deadlier poison and pinned a single red rose on the deadly girl. She smiled, and he tried to mirror the happiness.
A paper heart fell onto his shoulder, and slivers of glitter washed over him and clung onto his waved hair. The shower of plastic happiness was useless and expensive, but wasn't that how everything was in the end?
She slipped her cold hand into his and pulled him to the dance floor, drinking in his happiness and making it into his misery with the pure ignorance of how he loved her. Or perhaps, the temptress did know how he loved her, but chose to play with him as a puppet master would make his wooden figurines dance.
She was ripping him to shreds—he was as fragile as the paper hearts falling from the ceiling, and she was as beautiful as the rose on her wrist. She was like a rose dripping red—she was disguised as an angel, but the thorns that embedded her would hurt anyone who dared to fall too close to her.
But Derrick could not help it—he was like Icarus, and Massie was like the sun. He heard the warnings from earth telling him not to fly too close to her, but he wasn't able to help it—a taste of the sweet misery had resulted in his eternal downfall.
He was too close to the sun, but it was the way he had been since he was a little boy—he loved her without knowing her name, and she took his heart as easily as one would steal a ball from a clumsy child, much like who he was when he met her.
He was unable to fly away, so he flew closer into her trap, and let love's cold jaws clasp around what was left of his shattered heart.
He held the sweet poison close and danced with her, closing his eyes and making a world in which fairy tales were real, and he could shift the puzzle pieces around so that something in his life would finally fall into place.
But he was not the puppet master—he was a man seized by the clutches of a love that brewed from childhood innocence, and turned into something that would result in his ultimate destruction.
/
They were half a skinny love.
The half of the love was Derrick—he loved her with everything he had, and would die or kill for her, and the temptress hardly loved him at all.
Every so often she would grow lonely, and she would pull Derrick forwards to lay her lips on hers—the kiss was brewed of love and fireworks and rose petals for Derrick, and was nothing more than a momentary high for Massie. It would supply him with the lie that there was some hope ahead, but a single look into her static amber eyes told her otherwise.
She would use him as a toy for momentary pleasure when she had nothing else—she knew that he loved him, and would do anything to make her happy. He would go through hell just to see her smile, and therefore was dragged through the fire day after day.
She would always grin after kissing him, possibly thank him, or lean in to kiss him harder, and take the kiss farther.
He believed that he was taking advantage of her, but it was the other way around—she kissed him in no state of intoxication to simply feel a brush of a high, and left him with heavy breaths and a stuttering heart.
She was no longer the girl who would leave chocolate kisses to attract elves in the way he had taught her. She was something of a devil in disguise, and she was knowingly killing Derrick. The knowledge that she was killing him made it only tear Derrick apart further, and he felt as though his heart was made of plastic.
One more beating, and it would break completely.
/
Derrick was unsure whether or not one could die of a broken heart, but he knew that the empty feeling was enough to make a man want to kill himself.
He didn't believe the torture was worth it. Massie was what he lived for—the only thing he lived for—and she used him and threw him away like a simple tissue made of broken hearts.
She knew how badly she was breaking him, and she knew that Derrick tore more and more each time she kissed him—at this point, he did not need the feeling of her lips on his. He did not need a confession of love. He did not need Massie to fall from him.
He needed to be away from Massie, but he was trapped in her web. Every time he stretched enough to hopefully stretch free, she smiled at him, and he fell back into the trap with all progress ignored.
He couldn't escape.
There was an open container of pills lacing his bed, and a glass of water on the bedside table. The bright flashes of blue and red from the medicine was enough to startle a regular man back into rational thoughts, but Derrick was no longer a normal man—he was a victim of unrequited love for a woman who was incapable of loving him back.
The term 'unrequited love' was a hideous one, one that gnawed at his chest and made him feel like falling for that was what he knew he was, and all that he would ever be: a man holding a deadly unrequited love for a devil in high heels and brilliant smiles.
He let his fingers lace through the pills, picking enough to kill a strong man, and letting them settle in his palm. He swirled them in his hand and picked up the glass of water, but he was unable to bring the pills to his lips.
If you go this way, you'll become someone she hates, a whisper of his mind brought forth. Derrick threw the pills against the opposing wall in a violent motion, bringing his trembling hand to clutch onto the edges of his bed as though he was about to fall off a cliff.
And perhaps, he was.
He couldn't take his own life because he was able to imagine that at his funeral—even for a moment—that Massie's smile would drop, and a crystalline tear would run down her cheek.
He couldn't be a cause of Massie's pain.
He was unable to hurt her in any way, so instead of causing what would possibly result in a moment of her pain, he capped the bottle of pills.
He knew that his life would not end in 'happily ever after'. His life would end in a final beating of his plastic heart, and he would fall surrounded by the black blood of a lifetime of the misery of an unrequited love.
Hearts begin strong, but a constant beating turns even the strongest of hearts to fragile husks, and sooner or later, the organ becomes plastic.
notes: So sorry for this, Nat—I meant for it to be fluffy and then it wasn't and I'm sorry and it was supposed to be purely friendship and I'm sorry if you hate this but I still hope it's okay(ish) enough to read without gagging.
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