Authors Note: I own nothing. No ownership rights to Beverly Hills 90210.

Chapter Ten (The Concert): Catchy and Fighty

When the crowd started clapping the beat that was when David came out and joined us in the crowd. He stood next to his wife. "Oh I'm not to late, I knew this song would get the crowd singing along. It's just so catchy." He looks at my face, "sorry I know it's not one of your favourites."

"The songs great and yeah it's catchy but it wasn't exactly my finest hour-"

Camille looks at me, "it wasn't your finest few months."

It was fucking catchy though, she nearly busted herself singing it in the kitchen that morning, and even now knowing how devastated I felt. How I felt stuck unable to move from that grass when she threw the information that she knew I had lied to her about the earring, how I felt like the ground was about to open up. How I wanted it to. That I was so afraid that it was over. Even knowing all that I still find myself nodding along to the beat when it comes onto the radio before I register that it's me she's singing about. I'm the cheater she was applauding. The cheater she believed at one stage back when she wrote the lyrics, I was the cheater that she thought had been pretending with her for nearly two years. I was the asshole who deserved the standing ovation.

As the song finishes Donna bounces around somewhere behind us and say's to one of our group, "she's so incredible I wonder what's the next song."

The four of us. Roy, David, Camille, and I as one say, "Fighter!"

"Oh McKay you really pissed her off- that song is brutal." Pissed her off?! I cheated on her and destroyed her friendships, broke her heart! I breathe he hasn't been in love like that, when he has he'll understand it more. That's what my Doctor has been drilling into me for months and while I understand that intellectually I still don't get how insensitive they can still be. Emotional maturity is a learning process she tells me in therapy, yeah well I'm declaring that our gang has stunted development. My Doctor's voice rises up from the back of my brain, it's not their fault they aren't fully formed adults with adult reasoning until somewhere around twenty-three.

When I've run through all my internal arguments I look at Steve to respond to his stupid remark, "that one's not about me, well I only got two lines in it." Steve instantly looks remorseful and then gives nervous eyes at his ex. Bingo. She he can have empathy for. I tighten my fist- stunted development, learning process, brains not developed yet. I'm repeating it like a broken record in my head.

The despondent tone she speaks in, tells me she is aware of Steve and my conversation. "I've sung that song so many times, I love it it's my angry song."

Donna gives Kelly a sympathetic look, "mine too."

"Yeah but it isn't about you is it Donna?"

"Well maybe next time you'll remember not to touch what isn't yours!" Roy chuckles at Camille's not so quiet response, while her husband tries to hide his laughter with a cough. Camille still can not stand Kelly. She understood Bren's motivations for forgiveness. She understood Bren's need to let the anger and pain go, that holding on so tight to it was not how Bren wanted to be. She didn't want to be trapped in that moment in time forever, she didn't want us trapped there. Those weeks, those lies, their betrayals then and since, they couldn't be holding us hostage dominating our emotions and lives.

As Mum keeps saying too us since a few weeks after the Music Awards, this too shall past. It was a mantra that Bren and I had discussed and adopted since. My Doctor has said to us both, that somethings are dulled by the progress of time while others require a more active letting go. Bren had decided to be active after the events of February and March, I supported her, and Camille did as well because it was Bren doing it for herself, letting go because she didn't want to carry the pain anymore. Camille as her soul sister though felt that Bren's hand-me-downs were rightfully hers to take, so the emotions that Bren had discarded about Kelly and the gang, well she had picked them up and added them to her own, David as her husband and Bren's brother had joined her in holding them. She was polite in their presence only because she wouldn't demean herself, she wouldn't not hold herself with grace and integrity but that was the extent of her goodwill.

I look at Kelly, "Bren told me to tell you when this song played, that you guy's are good. She won't hide the past, it's shaped her made her stronger but she'll keep your anonymity as much as possible now that the world knows who Raven is."

As I say that Raven who's been having fun on the stage with the guy's goes back to the story. "So cheating sucks but cheating with a girls friend well that's a whole other layer of deceit. Now my lovely French sister told me early on in this messed up drama, that how I handle this sets the tone for how others treat me. I took her words to heart and well I became a fighter!"

I'd heard her sing this song live in her studio in the basement of the house. I had heard all the studio recordings of the different versions she keeps down there but I had never heard her sing like this and from the looks of Camille, David, and even Roy's face they hadn't either. Her voice filled the whole bowl, she walked on that stage with a power that made it impossible for you to look away, by the end her and Paul were literally duetting- him with his electric guitar and her with her powerful vocals.

She was extraordinary. She was in her element. She was alive and shining so bright. That stage was exactly were she belongs, how could I have ever hated that she took this path, hated that she'd be exposed like this? Looking at her up there it's where she belonged.