TERRIFYING STORIES

she used to find comfort in her room, in her house. even when she spent most days alone, her room was her sanctuary. the place where she could just be. her artwork lined the walls, the door meant for her and brooke, and her broadcast that was meant to make her feel vulnerable but not like this. he took her room away, her home, her family. she couldn’t feel secure in her own skin, and she was tired of feeling out of sorts. she had a decent level of cynicism before this, but now it’s like everywhere she looks, she feels like someone could be after her. the school was another reminder of a place she was supposed to feel safe. the bridge where everything went wrong for haley reminded her that cars were never safe and there was no control in this world.

she wants control back, and derek, the real derek, had helped but it wasn’t enough. she still didn’t feel safe in her home and had trouble trusting anyone. yet when she stumbles across a small self-defense studio, taught by someone who had clearly been through some crap, peyton took a chance. “this is stupid.” she mumbles, turning her head against the mat. “it’s just a waste of time. i don’t know why i thought this would be any different.” she went up against him twice without training, and she doesn’t want to ever be put in that situation again. this just feels like a reminder that it could happen. that she’ll go home and see his face again. “nowhere is safe. it’s just a lie we tell ourselves so we leave our house, but guess what, even that isn’t.”

"i won’t disagree with you,” tasha says gently as she hands down a bottle of water and sits cross-legged on the mat beside her, fingers contemplatively tracing the wrapper of her own bottle as she thinks. “the world isn’t safe. and we can only control ourselves. the only thing we can try to do is make ourselves safer.” they still as she promises, ever-so-fiercely: “but i promise you, peyton, if anyone comes for you here, they’ll have to go through me.” 

there’s a little sparkle in tasha’s eyes that says what she thinks of their chances that she spent years earning after her own sense of safety was destroyed, that she paid for with her own face pressed into a mat not so different. it masks the focused look they took on at the mention of a unsafe home and the gears that began to turn as concern began to build. tasha sees all kinds of people come through here, young and old, all genders and identities and walks of life, but peyton is among the youngest. they hold free basic self-defense classes for teens sometimes, and tasha knows better than to assume anything about any of them, far less what their home life is like or what they’ve experienced, but peyton isn’t here out of mere curiosity. 

but tasha is good at taking punches. her body might be giving away, but her mind is sharp. even if she has to carry them on her back, even if she has to crawl, they are going home. all of them are going home.

bellamy is going home. even if she has to drag him out, bellamy is going home. she holds onto that thought as her heart breaks for him, feeling his devastation so strongly that she herself could cave from it. for a long time, all she does is hold him, fingers tenderly running through his hair. but a gentle touch from kara tells her they need to be alert, and she knows they’ve taken too much time already.

“that’s how you felt about me?”  she’d be lying if she said there wasn’t anger, at least a little of it, simmering beneath the surface looking for a light gust of air to give it credence, but alison knows herself well enough to know now that comes from the place that just expected them all to love - no, need her, and she knows now hanna has never truly needed anyone but herself. 

so maybe the hot flicker in her is more some awful concoction of jealousy and self-pity than anything else, because alison is so often in need of others, so excellently acquainted with the ugliest and most pitiful kinds of desperation. fortunately, it knows better than to ride the coattails of whatever biting remark alison could throw back in mockery or judgment, mostly because she’s spent enough time in silence over the last few years to start recognizing who the voices in her head belong to, and she’s grown too sick of her own voice to ever wish it upon anyone else. 

“i tried to make you think that you needed me, but that was never true. and you know that now, don’t you?”  the truth is that alison herself even believed it for a little while, but she’s not sure how to admit that, and it wouldn’t exactly make her look any better. she did think it, though. wouldn’t it be easier coming from a friend than a father? wouldn’t it hurt less from the mouth of alison than a mother? hanna had a problem, and so ali helped her fix it. it felt simple.

finding raven in a bar is one of the last places he would expect to look for her, and it scares him more than the fact that it looks like she’s self-isolating. she doesn’t have a project to throw herself into, and he knows what that can do to them. he stumbles in himself, still reeling from leaving o behind and the leg wound. what he had done to his family. murphy died, and it had been his fault. they could have lost another person in the span of three days, and he doesn’t know what to do with that information. 

so he also looks for a drink. not because he deserves the break but because it seems like the only thing left while clarke negotiates. maybe it’ll give him and raven a chance to talk, too. he thinks he’ll need the liquid courage before the night is over, but maybe if he’s honest, he’s nursing his own wounds too. “i miss them, too, raven.” in their own way, they did say goodbye, but he knows the specifics of what raven is referencing. at no point did they wake them up, not when harper was dying, and not before monty died either. they may have lived the life they wanted, filled with happiness, but their absence is an ache he feels everywhere he looks. how he thinks to look to monty after every new discovery on the ground, or to harper when murphy says something stupid. 

he doesn’t know if he resents them for their choice, but he is hurt. just not as hurt as he is looking at raven now. “but this isn’t what they would want. all we can do is try to do better with what they gave us.” there is a specific pain that comes with witnessing raven lose another prospective love, another shot at happiness. the dull reminder that once he thought that was something he could offer her, when that was all he wanted. he may not be in love with her anymore, but he does love her. his hand covers her before “shaw didn’t want this, and neither do I.”  

bellamy has been so many things to her over the years, sometimes she forgets the few years he made her forget she was too fucked up to love. where for a few - well, moments, really, in the grand scheme of things, she stopped feeling like she was too fucked up to love. (she’s happy for he and echo. they deserve to be happy. she never begrudged them that. it’s just that as more time passes, as they fall deeper in love, the grand scheme of things just gets larger, and raven just gets smaller. that is to say, it becomes more and more difficult to remember what it feels like to not feel like - well, this. too fucked up to even know where to start.)  

perhaps if she wasn’t, she could do the whole comforting, sharing thing. she share the loss with bellamy that she knows he feels just as keenly rather than just the dead-end misery. she could mourn or grieve or whatever, she could help him and let him help her, too. but all she really feels capable of is swallowing the liquid poison in the bottom of her glass, knowing full well it won’t dull the ache, much less numb her to it. hard as abby might try, there are no painkillers for this, not really. all they could really do is mess her up until she was too dumb and dazed to remember, and as betrayed as she feels, harper and monty aren’t something she can bear to forget. 

she touches bellamy’s arm without really looking at him. she’s all kinds of fucked up, but she isn’t fucked up enough to forget that he’s hurting too. she knows he misses them, knows he’s trying to pull himself together enough to do right by the rest of his family, even knows him appointing clarke as their leader is just him trying to take care of them in his own way, bothered as she is by it. but it doesn’t make her any more able to hear bellamy talk about what monty and harper would want without flinching, any more capable of hearing shaw’s name without her throat constricting.  “please don’t.” raven manages quietly, reaching for the bottle sitting on top of the bar and pouring herself another glass before sliding it over to him. “i’m really not up for this. can you just... ” she glances at the seat next to her. stay. the alcohol has a way of lowering her voice a few octaves, dulling and evening it out, but she doesn’t mean to sound biting, and can only hope the pinky finger just slightly brushing against the one overtop hers can convey that; she just can’t handle the idea of him standing over her with a chest extended from love and belief, brown eyes shining with so much love and faith it seems it could pour out of them at any moment, should she find herself in lack of it (i’ll share that with you, you can have it. i can have enough for both of us.)  

it would remind her too much of harper, and she can’t think of harper right now. 

but she can’t seem to stop. her pointer finger traces over the folded sheet of paper, but she can’t open it. there’s something in her that knows harper would never give up on her, but she can’t listen to it. 

as he grows closer to the kids there it becomes about so much more than tech. he gets really emotional watching these kids use this high quality tech they might not have had access to otherwise and he never could’ve dreamed of using at their age and seeing it have a huge impact on them but the more time he spends there the more he gets invested in all of it, in the sheer concept of being a safe adult for these kids who so badly need one. he can see the impact something like this would’ve had on him growing up and cares a lot about being able to facilitate that for kids and wants to help the program grow even more, especially as it pertains to reaching youth in foster care. eventually it becomes a really big part of his life and he quits the tech job he doesn’t really care about, giving up higher pay and security for something he’s really passionate about (though i do think he’ll do social media management work for campaigns and public figures he supports, or to raise awareness from time to time.) 

after awhile he begins to realize that he really doesn’t have the knowledge base and training he wishes he had to help some of these kids - doesn’t know how to approach issues like self harm or suicide or mental illness or any of the other things that are troubling the kids he works with. he can research and lean on others for advice, but when it comes down to it, he isn’t equipped to handle such serious multi-faceted issues, and finding someone with the background they really need isn’t easy. lack of awareness and lack of funding make this really tough, and he finds himself wishing more and more often that he had the kind of clinical background and exposure to these topics that would allow him to better help the kids he works with.