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: Sorry this took so long. I had it written one way, and then I re-read it and kind of hated it so I scrapped the whole thing and did it this way, which I like a lot more and hopefully you will as well. Thank you all for the lovely reviews.
Please accept this as my Valentine to you.
It was a chaste kiss, no more than lips pressed against lips for mere seconds but it was enough to put a grin on her face as she was leaning back out of it. Her fingers twitched within the folds of Spencer's jacket, but she kept them there until after the blonde let out the breath she was holding and her eyes fluttered open.
"Oh," she whispered, air puffing out against Ashley's lips. "That was…"
Ashley grinned at the unfocused quality of her blue eyes. "A good note, I hope," she supplied as she uncurled her fingers and smoothed the winkles left there over her collar.
"Yeah," Spencer agreed when Ashley looked back up the blonde was watching her intently, eyes canvassing her face, as if she were looking for something. What it was, and whether or not she found it, Ashley couldn't know because in the next second she was back to smiling, soft and sad, and the brunette was stuck with such an odd sense of déjà vu that she had to mentally shake herself. Spencer took half a step back out of the intimate closeness Ashley's action had brought them into and slipped her hands back into the pockets of her jacket. "Thank you, Ashley," she uttered sincerely, eyes averted and cheeks bright.
The brunette buffed her nails against the front of her hoodie to break the tension, "I do what I can."
"Don't we all," the blonde murmured as she offered her arm back to Ashley and started them toward Kyla's house.
!
Back at the house and in the relative comfort of the guest room's bed, Ashley didn't let herself reflect on her actions. She didn't think about how she had just kissed Spencer out of the blue, simply because the blonde was sad. She didn't think about how she'd just kissed her illegitimate half-sister's best friend hours after she'd gotten out of a relationship with a crazy chick on the night before she was leaving for home on the other side of the country.
She didn't think about how none of that mattered because Spencer was probably one of the most patient and genuine people she'd ever met, she didn't think about how the blonde made her feel at ease and sane. She also didn't think about how she could tell how the blonde was feeling just in the way she smiled, or how the shades of her eyes were as big a tell as if the emotion were written across her face in sharpie. She didn't think about the blonde's body or the way it felt to walk wrapped around her arm or the spastic way she danced in the morning or her scars or her sad, but strong presence.
She didn't think about any of that because wrapped in the knowledge that beautiful, sad Spencer had let her be there for her and hadn't pulled away when she kissed her was almost as comforting as a stranger holding her through her tears in the middle of the night. She didn't think about how that made any sense because the two felt the same, and that feeling was enough to put her to sleep with a clear mind and a smile on her face.
!
Spencer pulled the waistband of her flannel pajama bottom down at the same time she lifted the hem of her tank top up so that she could view the tattoo on her left side without obstruction. She traced the outline with the tips of her fingers, feeling the phantom ridge of ink under the skin. She remembers when she got it, a few days before the start of sophomore year, talking to the artist about fate and destiny and souls and angels while he worked and him lifting his own shirt to reveal hugely detailed wings over the planes of his back when he was done, declaring them family. She remembers that session in the parlor being more therapeutic than any psychiatrist her grandmother ever sent her to.
She really should call Dustin and check in.
In the bathroom mirror she was inspecting herself in, Spencer watched as Kyla materializes from around the corner, dressed in shorts and a t-shirt and rubbing tiredly at her eyes. "I'm sorry if I woke you," she says in low tones.
"You didn't," Kyla's voice is sleep-heavy and muffled as she slants her hand over her mouth to cover a yawn. "What are you doing?"
But Spencer has tilted her gaze back to the ink on her skin and frowned. "How do you feel about fate, Kyla?" she asks, not for the first time in their friendship.
"This again?" Her dark eyebrows pull together in tired confusion, "We still talking about 'everything happens for a reason' fate? Destiny?" Spencer shrugged and tugged her clothes to hide the tattoo. "I don't know. Maybe? It kind of puts a damper on free will, I think," Kyla answered around another yawn. "Do you think we could talk about this more tomorrow? After I'm actually awake?"
Blue eyes found hers in the mirror and Spencer quirked up the corner of her lip, "Sure."
Kyla knew that face as well as any of the other ones the blonde employed, "Everything alright, Spence?"
"Getting there," she turned to look at her best friend without the reflective surface. "For the first time in a long time I think I'm actually getting there, you know?"
"Sure," she agrees without hesitation but Kyla knew she was too tired to process or really understand. What she did know was what she could see and that was that there was something different about the blonde, something better, like a piece had been snapped back into place. She shook her head at her own thoughts and offered the other girl a smile, then a hand, "Come on, you're exhausted."
"You're exhausted," Spencer argued as she stuck out her tongue and Kyla had to grin at the childish tone as the blonde took her hand and exited the bathroom pulling her down the hall towards Kyla's bed room.
The blonde was asleep within minutes, her extremely long day finally catching up to her even as she kicked at the blankets of Kyla's bed. Her best friend took a bit longer from her side, comfortable in the knowledge that the other girl was within arm's reach and safe. She watched her for a second as Spencer's lips curled into a smile.
Yeah, something was definitely different.
!
She awoke when the edge of the bed next to her dipped and a hand gently shook her shoulder. Spencer grinned down at her and Kyla reached blindly for her alarm clock, glaring 7:45 at her. "Wha-" she blinked and fell back into her bed, "There's no way you're awake right now."
"I'm going to church with your mom, you want to come with?"
The brunette rolled over and glared at Spencer's straightened hair and light blue button down shirt, "I don't think so."
"You're choice," she squeezed Kyla's shoulder and stood up, "Be back in an hour or so."
The door clicked shut behind her and the girl still in bed buried her face in the pillow until she heard the garage door whirl close beneath her. She bathed in the silence of the house and Spencer's words from last night came unbidden to her mind.
Fate.
When was the last time Spencer had brought that up?
Not long before she had left for California, if she remembered correctly. It was a conversation the blonde liked to have with people, not to flaunt her own beliefs but to get a sense of who she was talking to. People always tended to be so strongly opinionated about the most abstract things and Kyla knew how much Spencer loved pushing the right buttons to get people talking.
But that? That was different. That wasn't Spencer trying to start a conversation, or lead a discussion. That was her being self-reflecting. And the tattoo, why was she looking at the wings?
Kyla didn't know the story behind them. She never asked because it never felt like her place, but she had seen the sketches Spencer had done before settling on the design she had permanently inked into her skin. She had an entire book of the blonde's sketches, given to her the past summer as a way for Spencer to explain without talking what had been going on inside her head.
It was Eileen's idea, brilliant psychologist that she was, in an attempt to get Spencer's feelings and dark emotions out before they completely overcame her. Everything just happened so fast. First Kyla's boyfriend, Jamison, inadvertently outing Spencer to the whole school leading to her grandparents finding out. Them being the stanch Catholics that they were, sent her off to that fucking camp that set her into a spiral that ended in self-harm and loathing. The oh-so-deep cutting accident, Grandpa Quinlin death and Grandma Q's break down. Then, bam, foster care because Spencer's Grandma was in the process of having her will changed when her heart gave out and the courts couldn't decide what to do with her.
Kyla wasn't stupid, those sketches, that form of therapy, made a huge difference to Spencer, but it was after all of that happened that the blonde started talking about fate.
She frowned as something niggled at the back of her mind and she reached underneath her bed for the thing that might hold the answers.
!
Ashley woke up to silence and the clock on the wall telling her it was almost nine in the morning. She left the room feeling good, but her pace slowed when she heard no noise from the rest of the house.
The couch that Aiden had slept on boasted folded blankets and a note that said he'd gone for a run. She wondered if Spencer had gone with him, but didn't put much thought into it. Quietly she made her way through the hall and into the kitchen, but again no one was around After a brief debate with herself, she took the stairs to the second floor and gently knocked on Kyla's bedroom door. There was a faint 'come in' from the other side which granted Ashley the sight of the younger brunette sitting cross-legged on her own bed, gazing down at a flat object on her lap.
A closer look showed that it was a sketchpad, similar to the one Spencer had been holding when Ashley had first met her in the school. Kyla was running her fingers gently along the spine, but her mind didn't appear to be on the task. Ashley knocked on the open door once more, trying again to get the smaller girl's attention.
Unfocused brown eyes looked up and the younger girl offered her an attempt at a smile, "Hey Ashley, did you need something?"
"No," she took a step into the room, "Just wondering where everyone is."
"Oh, uh," she glanced at the clock, "Mom and Spencer are probably still at church and Aiden should be downstairs."
"He went for a run, I think," Ashley let the silence settle over them like an awkward cloud. She tried to remember a moment where the two if them had ever been alone together, but can't think of one. There had always been someone to act as a buffer, usually Aiden, and after Ashley initial reaction to Kyla the younger had never sought out the other girl without some kind of bodyguard, again usually Aiden.
She nodded once, as something to do, but Kyla's eyes had dropped back to the object in her lap and she was no longer paying attention.
"Okay then, I guess I'll go back down-"
"Do you believe in fate?"
Ashley started at the interruption and blinked, "Um, wow, I don't know, I haven't really thought about it before."
Kyla half-sighed/half-laughed, "Spend enough time with Spencer and you will."
"I'm sorry?" the elder frowned.
"Nothing, never mind," she shook her head, "Except that-" she sighed again and there was a brief struggle written across her face. "It's just the way things happen, Spence likes to think they happen for a reason, you know?"
"That makes sense." Ashley began to wonder if she was ever going to get a straight answer.
Kyla's chin dropped to her chest and she just breaths for a second before it all comes tumbling out, "She's not perfect, right? She has issues and things are kind of dinged up a bit, but she's still my best friend, okay? So when I'm telling you this, it isn't like a breech of confidence or anything, it's just, I don't know, something you need to know to get Spencer, okay?"
She looked up for the again and from her look Ashley got that there was an actual question at the end of that rambling, so she nods even though she doesn't quite know what she's agreeing with.
"She's got … damage, right?" Kyla breaths out heavily and taps her thumbs nervously against the cover of the pad.
The elder regards the tension in the air like a living thing and flashes to the scars on Spencer's wrists and thighs and what the blonde said about Kyla's worrying. Wanting to be on the same page and desperate not to mix any messages she looks down and twists her fingers together, "You mean her cutting?"
Kyla looked like she was stuck somewhere between laughing and crying, "She told you about that?"
"I saw," Ashley shrugged, uncomfortable with the way the other girl was looking at her.
"Right," she nodded like that was a much better alternative to Spencer talking to someone else about it. "Okay, so Spence doesn't like talking about that kind of stuff… to anyone, so my mom convinced her to get it out some other way." She brushed the tips of her fingers across the top of the sketchpad and glanced back at Ashley still-confused face. "That camp she was sent to, it seriously messed her up. Those people that ran it, they made her feel … wrong somehow. Like she wasn't good enough or something. They took the most beautiful person I'd ever met and convinced her that she was ugly on the inside."
That thought stuck a cord deep inside Ashley and she let the twinge cross her face. It picked at a memory that she was unprepared to deal with in her half-sister's presence, so she shook her head and frowned as well, "I don't understand."
"They made her hate herself, convinced her that she was wrong, that until she repented and changed she was unworthy of the good things in her life. Like her friends, or her family, or even the way she looks. But you know as well as I do you can't change who you are, so when nothing worked she pushed everyone away and started punishing herself."
Ashley felt hollow, and disgusted that there were people in the world that would do that to another human being, especially someone who was just trying to find herself in the world. She knew how hard it was to be a gay teen, but she had only ever had to deal with her mother's indifference and the snide remarks of Madison and people like her. Of course she knew how hard it could be, knew about those kinds of camps and hate-crimes and shit like that, but maybe LA's less than vanilla view on sexuality had convinced her that things like that didn't happen anymore. Or at least it didn't happen to people that she knew. People that she was starting to care about.
"She was convinced she could be okay if she could only make herself -"
"Ugly on the outside," Ashley murmured, crossing her arms reflexively as she pressed her fingers to her sternum.
Kyla blinked and frowned, "Yeah." Her half-sister was looking down but Kyla got the feeling she was more focused inward. "It got pretty bad before anyone really noticed, but her gramps was getting really sick and her grandma just couldn't deal so my mom offered to take us on vacation, get us away from everything for a little while. It turned out to be exactly what she needed, something… changed our last night there."
Ashley heard everything like it was coming at her through a dense fog and she shook her head because she was convinced it was the only motion she could make.
"From the first moment we'd met I felt like I knew you already," Kyla abruptly changing the topic and Ashley head swam at the new tone of her voice. "At first I thought it was a connection that we had, you know, sisters and the powers that be and all that, but," she grinned mirthlessly at Ashley's completely lost expression, "Spence asked me about fate last night and I thought about the first time she asked me that."
"I," Ashley pressed her palms against her closed eyelids and ducked her head, "I have no idea what any of that was supposed to mean. Why?" she swallowed and resisted the urge to cover her ears and try to stop the whirl of thoughts in her head. "Why are you telling me all of this?"
Kyla's lips parted in thought before she slipped her fingers into the pages of the sketchbook. "I could never figure out what was going on in her head, and on that vacation, when things changed for her, I couldn't believe it." Her smile was watery as she caught Ashley's chocolate eyes and flipped open the pad, "People don't just heal from that kind of hurt. So, she gave me this to try and explain."
She stood and showed the open page to Ashley. The drawing was rough and simple and it showed an impossibly young and vulnerable girl that she hadn't seen in the mirror for years, but there was no doubt about who's eyes and mouth and face that could be. The older girl felt her own breathing stop because staring back at her sketched in startling clarity and charcoal was herself .
"I told you all that because I want to know," Kyla pressed the pad into Ashley's shaking hands, "Do you believe in fate?"
Thoughts?