#selfpara002

January 18th, The Night of the Centennial Celebration

“C’mon kid, I think it’s starting.” his father placed his hand on his shoulder to lead him towards to the seats. “We can finish this conversation later. You know, I’m really proud of you.”

“Dad,” he chuckled softly as he looked up to him. 

“No, I’m serious. You’ve really grown up this year and now you’re looking to make this town a better place by recruiting humans to help hunt--sorry, protect the town. It says a lot.”

“Thanks, Dad.” He looked up to him with a soft grin on his lips as he walked with him to a pair of open seats, reaching for his phone to text Leiliani where they were sitting hoping they could sit together or make it easier to find her after. 

Or those had been some of the last thoughts to linger in his mind before the speech, some of the only thoughts that still lingered right before the bomb went off.  Next to his father, listening to promises he wasn’t sure he could believe, when it detonated. The room filling with the silencing boom and the light that followed. Garrett had only gotten to his feet when he felt his father pull him back as the light washed over them. 

Everything fell still, a strange sense of peace washing over him before he felt the universe catch up with him. A second wave crashing into him. A loud gasp escaped him as he came to. His lungs were tight, barely holding what air he breathed. A gnarled screamed escaped him as he tried to pick himself up, pushing against the fallen debris pushed back against him, pinning to down. He clawed at the floor, trying to pull himself out, but it only seemed to make it worse. 

As he fell hard back to the floor, frantic eyes caught sight of it. A thick smoke filled the room, flickers of flames danced across the fall as shadows screamed, ran, or laid there un-moving. This couldn’t--no, not it couldn’t, no. 

Another scream ripped through him as he pushed himself up, large claws burying into the tile as he pushed against the ruble that had fallen atop of him. His body trembled against the weight, against the urge to fully turn. As he rose, ht felt the pieces fall away and as he got to his feet--his body gave way. He fell hard, still human and barely alive. With the little strength he had left, he pulled himself up. 

His mind was far from the scene, it was chasing questions with little to no answers. Where was Leiliani? Where had his father gone, he was just beside him? But his body moved through the scene, distant eyes searching not quite able to concentrate--the ringing had never stopped,his body unsteady as he trudged through the wreckage.  The world had ended and there was nothing he could have done to save it. 

February 11th, Twenty Two days Since the Incident. 

The hospital began to feel more like home, the nurses knew his name and greeted him with the sympathetic smiles each time they came to check on his father. He could see the sadness in their eyes, he could read the pain in their smiles and it never got easier. He was getting better, that much could be said for his father, but he was far what he was. 

Hello darkness, my old friend I've come to talk with you again

Patrick was sitting in the hospital waiting room, staring into the blank wall ahead of him. He was still wearing his Halloween costume from the night before and he hadn’t slept at all. The radio was playing the legendary Simon and Garfunkel song ‘The Sound of Silence’ from one of Patrick’s favorite films. Normally, he’d be singing along to the tunes, knowing every single word from the lyrics. But not today. Not now. Now, he wasn’t in the mood to do anything, but wait. He wasn’t in the mood to eat, to sleep, to even lift his eyes and look at other people. He was numb. He had been crying for most of the night, his eyes now red and puffy. His breathing had calmed down. His emotions were a rollercoaster ride. One minute, Patrick was angry, the other he was sad. His little sister was in the hospital and he couldn’t bear to think about it.

In restless dreams I walked alone, Narrow streets of cobblestone

Everything had been going so well for Patrick. He was getting used to the idea of becoming a dad to his and Angelica’s child. He was getting questions answered about the whole concept of being a dad and how important that was. He had even taken a drastic turn, and had asked Blake to be his girlfriend. Sure, he was in a huge mess with the two girls and he had absolutely no clue what to do about it. But he was happy. He was genuinely happy for the first time in weeks. Until that night. Now, he was back to where the anger was taking over his body constantly. People could be talking to him, and he’d turn into an emotional mess, tears springing to his eyes in a couple of seconds. He was alone again. 

People talking without speaking People hearing without listening People writing songs that voices never share No one dare Disturb the sound of silence

Doctors and nurses kept coming into the waiting room, wanting to update Patrick on what had happened. They kept using medical terms that Patrick knew nothing of, and would never know, unless he started reading Blake’s medical books. All he wanted to know was whether or not Maria was okay, and if he could see her. He didn’t need those mental images they’d give him, by telling him that she had gotten a blow to her head or body and that she had bruises all over her. Patrick did not need to know these things. He just wanted to hear that one thing. He just wanted to be left alone, until he could be told that one thing: being allowed into Maria’s room. 

And the sign flashed out its warning In the words that it was forming And the sign said “The words of the prophets Are written on the subway walls And tenement halls

Leaning back, Patrick placed his head on the cold wall behind him, his gaze still locked on the wall opposite him. Inside his head, there were a million thoughts passing through, and they seemed to be endless. What if his sister never recovered? What if they never found out who did this? What would have happened if Patrick had been there? All the questions seemed to be eating Patrick up, on the inside. On the outside, he sat quietly and waited, while his mind was whispering the same questions to him, over and over again.

Frankly, this was all his fault.  And Cinna wasn’t saying that because he felt like he needed someone to point the blame at, or whatever.  No.  He just knew this was his own fucking dick’s fault.

BECAUSE IT WAS.

If he could have just done the ONE THING HE’S GOOD AT, none of this would have happened.  He would be in bed with Aubrey right now, they’d be, like, chugging Gatorade and throwing themselves back under the sheets for round three or round seven or whatever.

Do you know what size of a condom pack he brought over to Aubrey’s place?

Do you want to guess?

It was in the double digits.

THE DOUBLE DIGITS.

Anyway.  He dragged himself back to his house with every last one of those condoms still in the fucking box.  I mean.  He hadn’t even gotten one rolled on yet.

It just wasn’t happening.

He froze.

She was right there underneath him, staring up at him, biting down on her lip, locking her legs around his hips, dragging him in closer…

…and nothing.  And he couldn’t fucking do it.  And he wanted to do it.  That was the thing.

He never had any problem getting it up.  Ever.  He wasn’t anywhere near close to needing, like, Viagra or whatever.   No.  Fuck that.  He could get it up any time, anywhere.  Lil Sinner was always ready to fucking go.  He was like an emergency bag you kept in your closet at all times in case you needed to get the fuck outta there ASAP.

So… so what the fuck happened?

He knew what happened.  That was the thing.  Not at first he didn’t.  He was too embarrassed and too panicky and too caught up in the moment and listening to Aubrey ask what the fuck was going on.

And then she was offended, and then he was pacing around in her bedroom and swearing up and down and to every single God that he didn’t even believe in that it had nothing to do with her.

She was pissed, and embarrassed, and he couldn’t even blame her because why the fuck wouldn’t she be?

He nearly threw himself right out the door, barely bothering to get dressed beforehand.

He slapped his cheeks in the elevator, he nearly slammed his head down on the steering wheel when he got to the car.

It wasn’t until he was dragging himself through his door a few moments later that it occurred to him that, like, it did have something to do with her.

It had a fucking lot to do with her.

Because, like… because he liked her.

And it wasn’t like the little crush that he’d been worrying about earlier.  He just fucking liked her.  Plain and simple.  Just like that.

What the fuck?

“This is bad,” is what he muttered at seven o’clock.

“This is really bad,” he moaned at eight o’clock, hanging upside down off the edge of his bed and staring up at his ceiling.

“This is so fucking bad,” was what he’d resigned himself to after throwing his phone down on the bed and heading for the liquor cabinet.  He poured himself a few shots, downing them and cranking the music up until he couldn’t hear his thoughts anymore.

Wow.  What a fucking visual.

Cinna Motta.  The man, the mystery, the legend.  Drinking alone.  On a Saturday night.  With whatever shitty music Elijah had on their record player blasting through their apartment.

He should go out, that was the thing.  He should go out and clear his head and find somebody to take home for the night.

But if he could get it up for them and not for Aubrey?  Like… no.  Fuck that.  Aubrey deserved better than that.

So, he’d just drink himself into a stupor, turn on something shitty on Netflix, wake up with his head pounding and hopefully not remember a single fucking thing from today.  That’s what he would do.

On Monday, everything would be fine.  Everything would be back to normal.

Right?

“This is the fucking worst,” he grumbled at half past one in the morning, naked and face down on the couch, reaching for his phone and bringing it to his ear.

When it went to voicemail, he talked.

Probably too much.

Somewhere up in the great beyond, Finn Hudson was mocking her.  Okay, maybe mocking wasn’t the right word, but it seemed like he’d planned everything.  Even the things that he could never in a million years actually plan.  He wasn’t God and he couldn’t play God – but maybe he had some control over fate that Marley wasn’t aware of, somewhere of still sending signs and messages even though he wasn’t really… there anymore.  Did that make sense?

She caught sight of this sign (if that’s what you wanted to call it – frankly, Marley didn’t know what else to call it) when she was trailing behind Sam and Brittany en route to The Boss, some wooden roller coaster that she didn’t really have any interest in going on in the first place. 

POP FUSE’S OPEN MIC SUNDAY!  The sign – yes, literal sign – read in big block letters.  Sign Up at The Palace Porch!  

Of course.  Of course today was the day that they would hold an “open mic” day.  Of course Marley’s greatest fear (well, one of her greatest fears) involved something that tied into the concept of an “open mic” perfectly.

Her eyes flitted back over to her friends, all far ahead of her at this point, before chewing down on her bottom lip and taking a couple steps backwards.  She looked at the sign, spotting the big red arrow that she could only assume would be pointing her in the direction of the Palace Porch stage.

“Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea, a very bad idea,” Marley muttered to herself in a mantra.  She could do anything over this – okay, not anything, there were some fears that she was pretty sure she wasn’t ready to face yet no matter what.  She could have picked to do that RipCord bungee jumping thing  that sends you up in the air in a harness and then sends you plummeting down to the ground.  She could have… she could have done something other than this.

Lucky for her – to the best of her knowledge, at least – none of her friends had followed her on this endeavor.  That means that she could get it over with without any of them having to know that she’d done it at all, right?  Forfeiting any and all chance of public humiliation.

Gosh.  No.  There was surely going to be public humiliation, and she was going to be bringing it upon herself.  She could see the stage up ahead, the table of people sitting in front of it with clipboards, the sign below it that read POP FUSE’S OPEN MIC SUNDAY -- SIGN UP HERE!

Last chance to back out, she thought to herself, but her legs were still moving forward even if she didn’t want them to (she was pretty sure she didn’t want them to).  She made her way to the line, waiting as the rest of the people got filtered through.  There was a duo on stage right now, butchering some version of I Got You, Babe by Sonny & Cher, but Marley had to give them props for getting up there at all.  That was going to be her soon, wasn’t it?

Maybe this wasn’t a good idea.  Actually, scratch that, she knew that this wasn’t a good idea.  But she could still see Finn’s words in her head – she could pretty much hear his voice saying them, even.  “What you’re gonna do today is one thing that you’re afraid to do.”  This qualified as just that. 

“Miss?” a woman’s voice pulled Marley out of her state, and Marley blinked for a moment, looking at the woman with blond hair and a bright smile sitting at the table and staring back at Marley expectantly with her clipboard in hand . “Were you going to sign up for today’s Open Mic session?”

“Oh,” Marley murmured, giving the lady a sheepish smile and nodding.  “Yeah.  Yeah, I was…”

The lady passed her the clipboard as well as a pen, having Marley fill out all of the necessary information.  Her hand was shaking as she jotted everything down – her name, her age, her hometown, why she was at the park today, what song she was going to be singing…

When she passed it back to the woman – her name tag reading STEPHANIE in perky, bubbly letters – Stephanie read through it before looking back at her.  “And you’re going to be performing an original song?” she asked.

Marley swallowed hard and nodded, combing her fingers through her hair.  “Yeah, is that okay?”

“Absolutely!” Stephanie gushed.  “We actually encourage it quite a bit – we don’t get too many singer/songwriter-types here, you know.  Mostly it’s just karaoke.  But we do have an acoustic guitar, piano, and drum set on stage at your disposal for whatever you need, so use them as you please.”

Bad idea, bad idea, bad idea, a very bad idea… the mantra looped its way through Marley’s head again, but all she could do was nod back at Stephanie.  “Great, thanks,” she said quietly.  She was nervous.  So nervous.  Her stomach was coiled into a thousand knots, and she didn’t feel like it was going to go away any time soon.  She knew it wouldn’t actually.  Not until this was over, and even then, she wasn’t too certain that the weighted feeling in her stomach would go away.

Stephanie handed her a sheet of paper with a number on it and another one of her far-too-big smiles.  “You go on in fifteen minutes, hon,” she told her with an affirmative nod.  “Performers wait just around that corner, past the yellow line.  Good luck!”

Good luck.  She needed a miracle at this rate to be able to get through this.  Why couldn’t she have picked something else?  Anything else? 

She tilted her head back, staring up at the blue sky and the slowly moving clouds.  “I hope you’re happy, Finn,” she murmured so quietly that she was sure nobody around her could hear what she was saying.  (Perhaps seeing a crazy girl talking to the sky wasn’t that good of an idea, either.)  “This is for you.”

Stuck behind two ten-year-old girls wearing One Direction shirts and gushing about Selena Gomez and Justin Bieber, Marley bit back a smile and stared down at the red Keds on her feet, thinking back to when she was ten years old and spent her days talking about her favorite pop stars with her best friends.  They were called onto stage a few moments later, and Marley didn’t think much of it before she heard the announcer.

“Next up on stage are best friends Lily and Megan!  They came here with their families all the way from Kansas City!  Lily and Megan will be singing…” Marley tuned the announcer out at this point.  She hadn’t thought about there being an announcer.  She hadn’t thought about her name being broadcast to the entire park and… “Bad idea, Marley.  Bad.  Bad.  Idea.”

The girls were stumbling along with some cover of some Demi Lovato song that Marley only half-recognized, and she peered around the stage to see if any of her friends had stumbled in the direction of the stage just yet.  To her luck, however, it didn’t look like any of them were there.  Unless she just couldn’t see them.

…hopefully the microphone wouldn’t be as loud as she was fearing it would be, hopefully it wouldn’t be loud enough to be broadcast through the entire park.   The last thing she needed was for her friends to see her making a complete idiot out of herself in front of a theme park full of complete strangers.  For some strange reason, performing in front of a bunch of people who she’d never seen before and would probably never see again seemed easier than performing in front of her best friends.  How did that make sense?

Only a few of her friends had ever heard her perform her original songs in the first place, really.  Kitty had heard them here and there from living with her for the past five or six years.  Finn had asked her to sing a few of them for her back before, well, everything (and she hadn’t known why at the time, but now it was something that she couldn’t think about without a knot forming in her stomach).  And then, well… Sam.  Sam had heard her songs more than anyone else – even the embarrassing ones that she wrote about him.  He’d heard the ones about her dad cheating on her mom, the ones about having a big, stupid crush on him, the ones about their friends… he’d heard them, he’d read them.

And now she was going to sing one of them in front of way too many people to even think about.

A hand gripped her arm, and Marley turned to see one of the Six Flags employees nodding his head and giving her a thumb’s up.  “You’re up,” he told her.

If Marley was the type to be swearing, she’d be swearing right now.  Okay, actually, she was cursing.  In her head.  A lot.

She made her way out to the stage, seeing all of the people standing around or sitting in chairs, and chewed down on her bottom lip so hard she was sure there was going to be a dent left in its wake.   She saw the acoustic guitar sitting on a stand over by the piano, and she went over to grab it, watching as one of the employees followed her movements and brought a stool over to the mic stand, lowering it so that she could sit down.

“NEXT UP, SIX FLAGS GUESTS, WE HAVE A VERY SPECIAL GUEST FOR YOU!  Marley is from Seattle, Washington and is here with friends on a cross-country road trip.”  With all her might, she tried to not cover her face in her hands and make a run for it off the stage.  There was no turning back now.  “Marley is going to be singing an original song for all of us, so let’s give her a warm Six Flag St. Louis welcome!”

The crowd was already applauding her, and Marley swallowed down the lump that was threatening to form in her throat.  She draped the guitar strap around her and took a seat at the stool, adjusting the microphone slightly and clearing her throat.  “Hi,” she said – she thought that she was speaking quietly, but she could hear her voice echoing through all of the overhead speakers and she had a feeling, a gut feeling, that everyone in the park could hear her talking right now.  Great.  “I’m Marley, and, um…”

Why was she talking?  She didn’t need to be talking right now.  She didn’t need to say anything at all.  She could just sing and get it over with!  What was she doing?  It was like her lips were moving without the rest of her body giving them permission to do so.  “My… one of my best friends passed away about a month ago,” she said, her voice seeming much shakier than she wanted it to, “and… he sent me and our best friends on this road trip to Florida.  He’s been giving us stops along the way and… writing us letters, giving us tasks.  And today’s task just so happened to be doing what scares you the most.”

She brushed her hair away from her face, staring down at her hands on the guitar before looking back up at the crowd.  “I’m a songwriter but… I don’t share my songs.  Ever.  With much of anyone, really.  But I figured that today that would change.  Today, I’d… face that fear.  So, I thought I would perform one of my songs for you guys, okay?” The crowd was clapping – clapping and cheering for her – and Marley’s inhaled shakily.

She looked around the crowd.  She didn’t know if her friends were there, but she knew that no matter what, they sort of had no choice but to listen.

She tried to get everything out of her head.  What was going through her mind when she wrote the song, who she wrote the song about, the fact that that person as well as all of her other friends were hearing this song right now…

After two full days spent in bed, Birdy was beginning to feel restless again. She would’ve gone to the Creeper’s hideout, but her face was still far too.. ugly. Bruises circled her eyes, caused by a twice broken nose, a huge purple bruise bloomed across her right cheek, and her lips were cracked and split. No amount of make up and concealer could cover that up, she knew, and she didn’t want other Creepers to mock her, so she’d continue to hide like a coward in the safe confides of her house.

She was too absorbed in examining her face in the broken shards of her mirror, trying to determine how long it’d be until the worse of the damage was gone, to notice that her door had been pushed open and there was a man watching her. It wasn’t until he spoke, his voice thick with regret, that Birdy saw him. “Bethie..” He said, and she flinched automatically. That name of hers still brought back memories of her mother waving goodbye to her at the first day of school, calling her name when Birdy wandered off in a store, calling in happiness when she saw her daughter tied to a chair, barely conscious but still alive. “Did I.. Did I do that to you?”

Birdy drew in a shaky breath, slowly looking up to meet her father’s eye. “‘Course not daddy, it was someone else. You haven’t had an episode since last week. Remember how I trashed my room?” She struggled to keep her voice level, not wanting to betray her emotions.

“Right.. Yeah, you broke your mirror.. I was mad. Your mom bought you that mirror, it’s special..” He was dazed, struggling to remember what the alcohol was stealing from him. It killed Birdy to see him like that, so confused and upset. It was moments like this that reminded her of why she loved her dad still; because he was just as lost as she was. Birdy managed to somewhat move on after her moms death, her friends helping, but he had no one but the girl who killed his wife. It was enough to drive anyone mad.

She flinched again as he came closer, squeezing her eyes shut automatically. An involuntary whimper escaped her lips as he touched her cheek, tracing her battle wound with more care than he'd shown in months. "My pretty little Bethie, all grown up.. you look so much like your mother.." An unmistakable sadness crept into his voice, and Birdy realized she was shaking - waiting for him to snap. Waiting for his anger to take over. But his touch disappeared and she cracked her eyes open, feeling an unmistakable sense of relief as she watched her dad shuffle out of her room in silence.