A/N: Wow… you guys sure are animated. Let's see if you can manage to continue with this wonderful streak of wonderful feedback because it's quite amusing to see how many of you guys don't like the little Nelena moments ha. I'm not saying anything. You'll have to keep reading to find out whether or not I've decided that it's "Nelena FTW" or "Niley… all the wayyyy". Hopefully… this little chapter hurr will give you some clues to what's gawna happen.

xo

Chapter 18 – Life With No Meaning

Three Weeks Later

Spotted Today:

Selena Gomez was seen out shopping with her boyfriend of mere weeks, Justin Gaston at a Burbank Mall today, shopping in Forever 21 for t-shirts and jeans. When asked again for a comment on her new relationship status, Miss Gomez refused to give a comment on how their relationship came about and whether it had anything to do with her going AWOL for a week last month before being seen taken home by youngest JB, Nick at 11:30 at night. Miley better watch out… looks like there's a new Disney Controversy Queen among us.

Miley groaned from her bed, as she read new entries in the Gossip sites. It was another day, another story that wasn't about her for once. It was strange and it was surreal. No one seemed to want to know about her anymore now that Selena and Justin had completely taken over the media with their controversial get together, their public displays of affections and their refusal to say anything about each other. Her 'replacement' was now living the life that she hated. She had roped in the media attention and she now had to deal with everything that Miley had dealt with for an entire year of her life. She was dealing with the slander, the accusations and the harsh and rude names that people yelled at her as she walked along the street.

"Miley…" she buried her head deeper under the covers she'd been immersed in for the past fourteen hours and shook her head as she heard the nanny standing in her doorway.

Her mother had gone for lunch with her father. She'd asked to go with her but instead her mother had told her that it was a parent thing ready for her birthday at the end of the month but she was sure that her father had said that he didn't want her there. The Nanny was now enjoying her time being in charge of the hyperactive eight year-old, the grumpy fourteen year-old and the annoyed fifteen year-old superstar with a day off.

"I'm not in the mood, Laura…" she mumbled, "I didn't sleep well."

"It's time to get up…" Laura explained as she began to pick the various items of clothes off of Miley's floor and throw them over her arm heading to her closet with a sigh. She waltzed back into the room, arms empty and stepped towards Miley before flicking her on the bottom of the foot that was poking from the bottom of her quilt, "You've got a visitor… he's waiting by the front gates with Larry… he wouldn't let him in…"

Her head poked out from under her quilt and she shook her head at Laura confused, "Who is it?"

Laura wandered around for a few minutes and said nothing looking eternally shifty. Her eyes darted to every inch of Miley's bedroom apart from at the girl herself who was staring at her like she was an axe wielding maniac about to lop off her earlobes.

"It's…uh… it's Justin…" she stood up and nodded looking at Miley in a way that begged 'please-don't-shoot-the-messenger" and began to slowly back out of her room carrying her dirty laundry, "He says that… he feels he should talk to you rather than you listen to the press about everything… he says he wants to explain everything to you because you're probably thinking about him what everyone else is saying when it isn't true…"

Miley laughed and shook her head, resting back on her elbows, a look of shocked and pained disbelief plastered on her face.

"Did you tell him that I probably won't believe him?"

Laura shrugged and nodded moving back to Miley now that she was sure she wasn't murderous, "Yeah…" she handed Miley some grey sweats and smiled, "But I figured you didn't have anything better to do today…"

Miley shook her head and snatched the sweats from Laura's hands; "Fine…" she groaned swinging her bare legs off the side of the bed feeling the carpet beneath her feet as she rested them down onto the floor. She let out a yawn and shook her head, "But he's not coming in the house…"

He walked up her driveway, one of his arms swinging proudly at his sides as he held a large package in the other. He was smiling at her, grinning like he was the biggest man in the universe. His hair was unusually tidy and he'd obviously been to the barbers as it seemed shorter and slicker like the grease ball she now saw him as. He was wearing a dress shirt and some fancy skin tight jeans that she knew that he wouldn't have been able to afford a month ago. His usual sneakers were replaced with some Italian fine leather shoes and she was reminded of someone else she'd once had the pleasure and pain to know.

"I don't want anything you've got to give me…" she muttered as he came closer to her.

Her arms were folded across her chest as she set her jaw and refused to move it into any other kind of expression that didn't show him how angry and disappointed she was in him. She wanted him to know that she was disgusted in him, she was ashamed and she didn't even want to be near him anymore. Any guilt for the things she'd done to him was now gone now that she knew how much of a pathetic user he was. She didn't care what he had to say because nothing could change the truth. She knew what he really was.

"What are you talking about?" He smiled and held the package out to her, "I didn't bring it… I found it by your mailbox outside the gate… the paparazzi were about to steal it and I took it off them."

She snatched it from him and placed it inside her bedroom as they stood facing each other at her own private entrance to the house. Thinking quickly she unwrapped her limbs from around her ribcage, moving them to block the doorway as he stepped closer to her. He smiled at her, giving her a little wink in attempts to break down her barriers but she simply shook her head at him. He was staying outside. He wasn't coming into her home and soiling anything of her life. He was trash and trash belonged outside in dumpsters.

"You're not coming in here…" she breathed and he laughed at her, only angering her more.

How could he laugh at her when he was the most obscenely amusing and ridiculous thing she'd ever seen? He was the joke who made jokes out of other people. He was a Clown, the talent-less imbecile who had ruined his chances of ever having a career by deciding on being a male slut rather than using what he actually had to give…

She shook her head for a second at the stupidity of her thoughts… of course... that was all he had to give – his body and his inability to act and feel like a normal human being, hurting everyone in his path.

"Come on, Miley…" he laughed softly and unsurely, "You can't be serious…" He looked at her and her face didn't change one millimetre. His smile dropped and his brow furrowed inquisitively, "You believe everything they're saying, don't you?" He shook his head and for a moment she believed his attempts to show honesty, "You think that I'm just using her for her fame and her career… you think what they're saying is true?"

She shrugged her shoulders and her gaze avoided the fake in his eyes, "Isn't it?"

The laugh that escaped him at that moment brought bile to her throat and she fought for her body to not lurch forward and release itself onto his feet nearby. She closed her eyes as the feeling of nausea washed over her and she attempted to stay still and try to remember the good things and forget all the bad. She forced a smile as he chuckled to himself about something that he apparently found hilarious. She knew deep down that when he told her what it was it would be at somebody else's expense.

"I'm just trying to make my way up the food chain, Miles…" he muttered as he let the chuckles continue, "Is there something wrong with that? Because in my opinion it's just simple basic instinct…"

Her eyes opened to peek at him and she shook her head. Malice bubbled through her body and she let out her own laugh, directed only at him and his sick way of thinking.

"So we're all just animals to you?" she whispered ashamed, "Drawing us in, baiting us into a reaction and sending us to the slaughter house to get what you need?"

He shrugged his shoulders, "It's just the way of life… its your choice if you chose to be weak and chose the hard way…" he looked down at his huge expensive watch and she scoffed at him showing off everything he didn't deserve while in her mind she administered and thought of all the things he did, "I'm sorry that I found an easier way to survive than you, Miley… but the good guys don't finish first… they drag along last pulling along the crap and the trash along behind them…"

She sighed. Was he… crazy?

"Life is hard Justin… no matter which path you chose…" she explained, "Life is here to test us and it's here to throw obstacles at us… you don't hurt people that show you compassion… when someone speaks you listen… you don't just do whatever you can to get what you want… you have to fight for it and you have to deserve it…"

Justin laughed and pushed his still rather floppy hair from his eyes until it fell back into them perfectly, "Is that what you told that ex-boyfriend of yours? To fight for everything he wants? Did you listen to him when he spoke or did you just ignore him like you're ignoring what I'm trying to explain right now?"

Miley shook her head. He only knew one of her weaknesses. But Nick wasn't one of her weaknesses anymore. He meant nothing to her. He was a thing of her past that she had forgotten and left in places she no longer inhabited. He couldn't hurt her anymore… no matter what Justin could say to her.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Justin…" she smiled, a hand moved to rest on her hip as the other gripped the door ready to fling it in his face, "There's nothing to listen to when either one of you two assholes speaks… all you talk is shit…"

Justin laughed and after a moment he stepped forward his hand extended to her. His fingers grazed her cheek, her entire body freezing in simultaneous fear and disgust. He dropped his lips down to kiss her on the cheek, his mouth a mere half inch away from her ear, his breath grazing against her hair. His mouth opened to speak and her skin grew cold and began to crawl from the base of her spine upwards.

"All three of us talk shit about our lives, Miley…" he whispered to her and she bit her lip trying not to push him away and potentially cause him to do something that could end in scandal and more press coverage for everyone… that only one of them wanted, "But only one of us is happy and content about it…"

A deep breath of oxygen entered her lungs and she shook her head, ready to murder him.

"Get away from my house…"

Another chuckle escaped him and he began to step away giving her a low bow as he did so.

"Gladly my queen…"

She screamed once she'd closed the door on him and leant back on it about ready to collapse in anger. She kicked her heels against the wood of the door and covered her face with her hands trying to let go of all the fury within her. She yelled, she screamed, she hollered. She kicked, she punched, and she banged everything that she could reach. She'd had enough. She wanted everything to go away. She wanted someone to save her. She needed desperately for someone to make sense of all this and tell her. Hours and hours of thinking, days and days of head pains and stomach lurches and she was no closer to figuring out why her life was such a trash heap. She wanted to run away. She hid at every opportunity from the things that her life threw at her. She didn't want all this drama anymore. She wanted something real… she wanted something that wasn't fuelled and pained by the rumours of hundreds or thousands of should-be-unemployed, otherwise talent-less journalists that seemed to be obsessed and intrigued by her otherwise simple and clean life.

Those people that were determined to feed their lives from her career… they were the ones that made her who she was. Without them… she was just another teenage girl who was heartbroken and filled with angst. She was just as unhappy, just as ecstatic, just as eternally confused as every other fifteen year-old on the planet. She had the same problems.

She breathed slowly, her arms pressed back against the door as she looked around her room, grasping at her normality.

She caught sight of the package on her floor through her watering eyes and stepped tentatively towards it. Anywhere his hands had touched, she didn't want to be near. Anything that he'd beheld was as good as dust.

Her fingers pressed over it and she wondered what her mother had been ordering again… or what Mammie had found while searching on the internet when no one was home… Even worse what Braison could have sneakily charged to their mother's credit card while she was sleeping… all pretty much meant trouble. She turned it over and saw her own name printed on the front of the normal delivery sticker. She inspected all of the stamps and stickers on the front of the box. All different colours and all different meanings, half of them gave her no clue to who the gift had come from. She was sure that there was meant to be a return address, but there was none. Someone had trust in the United States Postal Service to deliver the right package to the right person. She looked closer lifting the box and feeling the insides move slightly. It was a local post mark… from someone nearby.

Sitting down cross-legged on her floor, she licked her lips and reached for the loose unstuck edge of the tape at the end of the package and began to slowly rip it from the cardboard, dragging it along until it came off in her hands and the box popped open to reveal the white Styrofoam underneath.

Carefully, she placed her hands into the box and grasped around for the item sat inside, feeling the hard smooth wood and the cold metal of the short and tiny strings. She felt the grooves in the wood and the way that it was a beautifully carved child's guitar painted in beautiful colours and with markers to all the minor and easiest chords for playing the guitar over the fretboard. She sighed, feeling emotional and turned the guitar over to look at the back. Written in gold paint, which had been partly chipped away, the words "My first guitar" were inscribed onto the wood blazing at her in the dim low light of her bedroom.

Confused, she placed the tiny guitar next to her on the carpet and dragged the box back to her and buried her hand down deep into the Styrofoam pellets that littered the box filling it half full and concealing the bottom of the box. She dug around and searched looking for some kind of answer to why someone would want to give her this… who would give her a guitar and what was the meaning behind it. This was the strangest gift she'd ever received considering that she had known how to play guitar for so many years that she could barely count them. Who would want her to have this?

But when her hands found the piece of paper in the bottom of the box, she hadn't expected it to read what it did. She hadn't expected to see those words… or to understand that resilience and ultimate feeling of being unable to give up. She didn't expect her stomach to rumble with momentary guilt, her heart to flutter nervously and weakly in her chest or for a lump to rise in her throat as her eyes began to burn. No… she had expected to be angry and to want to scream again. She had wanted fury and annoyance.

But instead, she felt embarrassed and she felt shame and with no idea to whom it was aimed at. She was embarrassed and the only thing she could do as she slipped the piece of paper into the pocket of her sweats was to place the tiny guitar back into the box and carry it to her closet, opening it up and hiding it inside in a place where everyone, even she, could forget that it was there. She placed it where she wouldn't have to pay any attention to it and where only her subconscious could continue to bubble with thoughts long after her consciousness had flooded with new memories.

Miley crawled into her bed and covered herself with the quilt before as usual she became too hot and kicked off her sweats till they were pooled at the end of her covers. She waited, remembering what she had placed so quickly into her pocket after tearing her eyes away from it as quick as she could.

Her hands were fast as she reached beneath the covers and yanked it out of her from the soft cotton fabric, taking it into her hands and holding it until she was sure that no one could walk in and find her. She waited moments, minutes maybe until she opened her hand and looked back down at the perfectly white piece of paper and the words, written in that same old familiar scrawl of handwriting. Her eyes glazed over them back and forth, back and forth, again and again until she was sure that she had read them as much as she could. Still, even when she was sure, she continued to stare at them, until slowly as the sun sunk lower in the sky and the shadows in her bedroom began to grow darker, she fell asleep… the paper still screwed up in her hands, the handwriting she had attempted to burn away with her eyes still as prominent as ever:

"I thought there was no meaning to my life until I first picked up my guitar…

I was wrong.

There was no meaning until I met you.

Love always, Your Prince Charming x"

A/N: Satisfactory? Did you like? Let me know? I'm kinda sorta proud of this one :). I'm starting to get into my flow.

Anyone guessed what's happening yet? Anyone care to venture a sneaky one?

Here's the deal = 15 reviews and I'll update.

Love you all B xo