Title: Damaged
Summary: Everyone is damaged, she explained, but not everyone is broken. Ashley never thought that going back to Baltimore with Kyla would bring her face-to-face with the one person who made her feel like she wasn't broken.
Disclaimer: I don't own SoN. What I do own is a computer and the amazing ability to not do what I am supposed to with my time.
AN: chapter is down there, so you can skip this, unless you'd like to read my apology/rant.
Since the last time I updated, I have had to deal with an unhealthy amount of OT at my job, being sick to the point of severe exhaustion, and being DD to my idiot, drunken friends and their confessions about feelings that, honestly?, I could die contently never having known. Not that I don't like most of my friends, but I really don't need crying chicks in the backseat of my car. So after many moons of being in a generally bad mood my bestie (bless his bald little head) comes over and gives me a long speech that can be summed up thusly: get over it. I'm ordering pizza. We're watching Sin City.
I did (mostly), he did (I paid and it was delicious), and we did (it was glorious).
Sorry this took so long and for…
"Kyla," she stated in a firmer voice that stopped the fashionista mid-sentence. She rolled her shoulders and looked off to one side, "just say it."
Her best friend, the one person in the world who knew her inside and out, finally stilled by the closet and turned slowly until they were facing one another. "Spencer, it's not," she winced when blue eyes found her own brown ones, "This thing, whatever it is or whatever it might become, with Ashley," she stood up straighter to show she was being serious, "I need you to put a stop to it now."
Spencer felt her upper body jerk in surprise as she furrowed her eyebrows in confusion, "Kyla, what are you talking about?"
Kyla wavered for a second, but she steeled her back and crossed her arms, "Don't try and make me think that I'm seeing things or making it more than it is. Please, Spence, I need us to be on the same page for this one."
"We're not even reading the same book, Ky," the blonde shook her head, "I'm just bein' friendly here."
The look the brunette offered her was tinged with sadness, "I think sometimes you forget how well I know you."
They stared at one another for a moment, gauging the situation before getting into the heavy stuff, hoping for a way to avoid the conversation. But Spencer's genuinely confused and slightly hurt look told the brunette more than what she was saying, "You've never asked me to back off before, not even for Jules and I know you thought that was a bad idea from the very beginning."
Kyla shrugged her shoulders somewhat distractedly. "This is different, Spence. Ash is, she's my," she cut her eyes from her best friend, "She's my sister. She's been through a lot, I just don't want her to get hurt."
"By me?" the blonde's question was stilted, like the words felt foreign in her mouth. "You think I'd hurt her? Ky, I know she's your sister, I know she's important, I wouldn't-"
"Not on purpose," Kyla said overtop the athlete's words, eager to stop the crushed statements, "but I know how this would go, Spencer, and so do you."
Between the two of them Kyla had never been much of a planner. She was very much a go with the flow kind of girl, who wore her heart on her sleeve and took what was offered at face value. She liked to be involved in the thick of things and was often more than willing to take both control and center stage. Spencer, on the other hand, had been tempered by early tragedy into being more cautious, preferring to work from the background where she could see the whole picture. It was her tendency to look at a situation from multiple angles and points of view. It was her tendency to try and see how everyone was involved that made her so hard to offend.
It was something of a testament to how important this was to Kyla that she'd put serious thought into how the situation would play out before the blonde did. "It doesn't take a genius to figure out that Ashley's been through some shit, Spence, and you know you're oddly drawn to people with some sort of damage." Spencer opened her mouth as if she was going to refute the fact, but one of Kyla's 'serious' looks, complete with one raised eyebrow and a forced downward turn of her normally smiling lips, had the blonde clamping her jaw shut.
"You step in and try to fix everything, always with the best intentions!" she rushed to add before Spencer could try and interrupt again, "but you use it as a excuse not to deal with your own problems, then things build up, they lean too heavily on you, and when you collapse underneath it all, people are going to get hurt. I just… don't want Ashley caught up in that fallout." She finished without being able to face her best friend, instead choosing to frown thoughtfully at the lamp on her bedside table.
From the corner of her eye, she saw Spencer's blonde eyebrows draw down in thought and her arms drop as if the weight of crossing them was suddenly too much. Her eyes flickered unseeingly as the thoughts raced behind them, taking in everything that had been said and unsaid. Finally she murmured lowly, "When?"
"What?" Kyla leant towards her without taking a step, face open in a question.
"You said when," Spencer gazed turned down, and then held one hand in the other, fiddling with a ring on her left thumb. It was a sign of insecurity that Kyla had never seen used around herself. "You said when I collapse, not if, which- makes it an inevitability not a possibility. You, um," she swallowed hard and looked up to stare Kyla in the eye, "You don't think I'm better, do you?"
She felt the breath catch in her throat at the sight before her. Almost as a rule, they never talk about it directly. It was all tied together and packaged neatly in the past, where both were content to keep it.
Or, if not content, both adequately frightened of what opening that can of worms might mean.
But the question was posed in open honesty, by Spencer, so the thought of lying never even crossed her mind.
"No," they both winced simultaneously, "No, I don't."
!
After downing his coffee in record time, Aiden announced his retreat to take a quick shower before breakfast would be ready, leaving Ashley alone in the kitchen with the ex-lover of her father.
Awkward.
The brunette watched the older woman flit around the kitchen, humming to an oldies station, with an energy that her daughter had definitely inherited. They were so much alike that Ashley felt an quick stab of fear that people might think the same thing about herself and Christine, but the thought was gone when she remembered how many times she'd been told that she was her father's daughter through and through.
Still. Was that really any better?
She idolized her dad, but he had so many faults (ones she'd discovered on her own and ones her mother told her about around a sneer and a glass of wine) that the man couldn't be mistaken for anything more than just another person in the world.
Not for the first time that weekend, Ashley wondered how she would have turned out if she'd had a mom like Eileen. A mom that watched movies with you on a Friday nights and made breakfast on Saturday mornings. One that picked you up from the airport and knew what was going on in your life, what was going on in the lives of your friends
There was a clatter as a plate was slid in front of the seat Ashley had taken, startled she looked up to Eileen's smiling face, "Last one to abandon me gets the first plate. I hope you like pancakes. Or I can make you some eggs if you would prefer?"
Her smile was genuine, Ashley could tell that right off the bat, but a little strained around her eyes like she was unsure of how to proceed. But she was trying and the effort she was making had Ashley feeling, without really wanting to, somewhat endeared to her.
"Pancakes are fine," she replied with her own strained smile, "Uh, thanks, Ms. Woods."
The woman hummed in response while the tension loosened a bit around her eyes. Ashley was just beginning to wonder when the last time she even saw her mother in the kitchen was when a glass of juice was set down next to the plate, "You look like you're thinking hard about something. Everything okay, sweetie?"
There was a twitch of the older woman's eyebrows, perhaps the only show of her panic at maybe overstepping her bounds, that just made Ashley like her more. Completely against her will.
But her thoughts were her own, so she let her gaze drift over Eileen's shoulder to the fridge where several pictures were proudly displayed under magnets. One caught her eye, a little Kyla and Spencer grinned out of the glossy cover with matching ice cream smeared smiles. "They're are really close, aren't they?"
Eileen turned to see what picture had prompted the question and let a soft smile turn her lips, "Like twin peas in a pod, those two." She laughed brightly, "From the very first day they just clicked. Kyla finally had someone to go along with all her mad, little schemes and Spencer," her face darkened slightly in memory, "Well, she had someone who didn't act like she was a toy too broken to be played with."
Her eyes took on a shiny quality as her smile turned slightly nostalgic and Ashley was a little lost, trying to picture Kyla and Spencer as children. Kyla being just enough of an outcast as a child with no father to speak of and too much imagination and energy to get along with other children, and Spencer, a kid that was tampered by tragedy and sudden emergence into a place without the people she knew best, but a kid nonetheless.
The kettle on the stove whistled which pulled them both from their thoughts and Eileen back to that side of the kitchen with a suddenly all too sad smile. Ashley wasn't sure why she felt responsible for the change in the woman but she desperately wanted to ease the tension that had built up at the topic, as much for her own benefit as anyone else's.
"I've never seen Kyla ask for help with an outfit before, so I guess that must be true." She felt herself grin before she could control it at the laughter that seem ripped from Eileen.
"Oh honey," the woman poured hot water into a cup and dunked a teabag into it before returning to the table and sitting opposite Ashley, "Spencer was cursed with a body that looks good in anything, and if she could get away with it, she'd wear jeans, flip-flops and a tank top every day for the rest of her life. Kyla, on the other hand, might actually burst out in tears if she was forced to wear an outfit she hadn't planned at least three days in advance."
The younger brunette's look prompted another laugh, "Sweetheart, that whole ordeal wasn't about an outfit," she reached a comforting hand out and placed it on the girl's wrist, "that was about you."
!
The smaller girl watched her friend's eyes begin to dull as she withdrew into herself. It was a defense mechanism that the blonde had used for years, a way to isolate herself from every bad thing that threatened her by simply shutting herself off. Kyla had only had it directed at herself once before and that had been followed by the worst two months of her life.
"Oh no!" she shouted as she all but lunged from her spot to grab at Spencer's shoulders and draw her physically back into the world, "You don't get to do that to me, you don't get to run away like that. Dammit, Spencer, I need you right now!"
"Why?" rather than respond by matching Kyla tone and aggression she just let her shoulders fall, "Ky, what could you possibly need me for? You don't even think a whole person anymore."
She sounded so broken that Kyla wanted to cry, this was not the way she had planned on this conversation going, but then reading and predicting people had always Spencer's thing. "That's not true and you know it," she slipped her hands down to hold onto the blonde's. "Listen to me, okay? I need you. I need you because you're my best friend. You're the sister that I chose, okay? You're my Spencer and I need you to be okay. That isn't going to happen if you keep ignoring your own problems to take care of other people. So, please, just- just be on my side for this."
Spencer swallowed hard and stared down at the way Kyla's fingers curled around her wrists, thumbs unconsciously moving along her forearms and over thin white lines that had faded to the point where you could only see them if you were looking for them, if you knew they were there. She did that a lot, the blonde knew, ever since she'd discovered them.
For a second the blonde wondered if that was all her best friend saw when she looked at her.
But she pushed it aside, like she always did, and forced herself to see things from Kyla's eyes. For all the brunette's insights into Spencer, the blonde knew the other girl just as well, perhaps better, so she knew no matter what was being said, there was so much more held inside.
This was about Ashley, Kyla's sister, their relationship and how things needed to play out. No matter what Spencer knew about either girl, knew what to do or say or how to act, it shouldn't be her doing it. It was going to be hard though. There were precious few people in the world that Spencer didn't have to think around, people that she just reacted to on instinct. But it was what it was, and in a few days time Kyla and Ashley would be back on the West Coast, were they would (hopefully) have one another (and Aiden, she supposed) and Spencer, well, Spencer would be wherever the courts decided to stick her until her eighteenth birthday.
"I get it," she said finally, "I really do. And you know I'll always be on your side, baby girl."
"Promise?" she let go of Spencer's wrists only to raise her right hand with pinkie extended.
The blonde shrugged one shoulder and rolled her eyes around the tense moment, "Section 18, subset C of the friendship agreement says I can't do anything with her anyways, being a sibling and whatnot." But she twined her pinkie with Kyla's anyway, "Although to be fair we should have added a hot, gay, half-sibling clause but, eh, what can you do?"
Kyla threw her arms around the taller girl's neck with a half-laugh/half-sob, sure that she wouldn't stumble and let them fall. "Thank God," she emphasized, "I hate it when we fight."
"Fight?" she squeezed the brunette once before letting go and stepping back, "That wasn't a fight, if it was some random third party person would be bleeding."
"That's true," the girl laughed as she wiped at the moisture gathering in the corner of her eye, "I'm going to get ready, meet you downstairs for breakfast?"
"Actually," Spencer rubbed the back of her neck and gestured to the door with the other hand, "I remembered coach wanted me at the field early, being the captain and all, so I'm going to take off. But I'll see you at the game?"
"Of course," Kyla smiled softly, glad to be back on even footing and familiar ground.
The blonde responded with a half smirk and moved to the door, stopping before she could grasp the knob. She hesitated before curling the floating hand into a fist and rapped her knuckles against the wood twice. "You're wrong though, about me." She kept her back to Kyla, so the brunette wasn't able to see the look on her face, but it was obvious enough in her voice, "I am better, Kyla."
The pressure from the fist caused the lines are her forearm to jump out at her, emphasized by her memories of them, "I'm not perfect, I'll never be perfect, but I'm not broken, not completely. Just a little cracked around the edges."
Kyla shuddered through a breath and tucked her hands under her chin to stop them from shaking, thinking about everything her mother had told her, consoled her through about this, "I know, Spence, but..."
"I know, people don't just get over it," she grabbed the handle and pulled the door open in one smooth motion, "I just need for you to know you're wrong about me, about this."
"I really," but the blonde was already gone, "really hope so."
Um, yeah, that bad mood I mentioned? Might not be completely over it. But before people get concerned, this was a part of the story (in my head) from day one, so…
THANKS FOR THE REVIEWS! They were a major combatant for the black cloud over my head.