The Things That Were Lost (1/2)
Feb. 16th, 2013 12:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dime_lioraTitle: The Things That Were Lost (1/2)
Wordcount: Total 11,644
Rating: R
Warning(s): Explicit Language, Violence, References to Non-Con
Beta(s): The irresistible![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sammichgirl, who is not at fault for the mistakes I left.
Summary: A timestamp for "Lost Time", examines Ope and Sam's pasts. Won't make much sense if you haven't read "Lost Time", and has spoilers for the story.
Ope
Two weeks after Ophelia’s seventh birthday the market comes to town. It happened last year, and her dad bought her a marionette and told her that it was hand-carved and that was important. Her parents are very serious about things being hand-carved, or hand-made, or local. They tell her all the time about why it’s important to care about where things come from and who made them. There’s pride in being a craftsman her dad says, and she’s ok with that because it means she got a marionette last year, and she gets to pick her handmade present this year.
It’s not much of a competition, because all day long she’s been circling the same booth as last year with the wizened old woman who brought the marionette. It’s a little boy puppet, a wooden crown cocked sideways on his head and a smile carefully painted on his tiny face. This year they have a princess, and she’ll go perfectly. A matching set. Her dad says she has an unusual eye for symmetry, and that this will pay off when she’s a famous artist. Her mother always responds, “No pressure dear. She may want to be something else.” But she doesn’t. She wants to be an artist, and make the kind of art her dad and mom go to see at the big museums every month.
Which is when she hears the man calling out about artisan crafts, and that’s another thing her parents really like. They’re staring at a little table right now, and she’s allowed to go up to two stalls away. She takes the necessary steps over to the booth and the balding and slightly overweight man behind the counter smiles at her brightly.
“Why hello. And what’s your name?” His smile is oily, a word she just learned can be applied to people, but there are a variety of gorgeous pieces of jewelry in front of him. One is a necklace, a series of circles overlapping each other with a garnet set in the center, and garnets are her birthstone. It’s perfect.
“Ophelia. Is that hand-made?” She has to ask, because if it’s from a factory they’ll never even consider it. The puppet is already forgotten in the need for the necklace.
“Yes it is. Hand-made by a very exclusive artisan. Would you like to hold it?” She nods and he carefully lifts it from the velvet cushion and holds it out. “It makes a lovely contrast with your eyes. Like it was made for you. Don’t you think so?”
She does. She thinks it’s absolutely perfect, and that’s all she can think of while her fingers stroke the delicate rings of silver and the garnet in the center. It must be expensive, and she has a limit for presents, but she wants it. Wants it more than she’s ever wanted anything. Her mother’s voice comes from behind her.
“Ophelia? Sweetie what are you looking at?” Her mother leans over and peers at the necklace before making a sound. “Honey that has to be expensive. Maybe you should hand it back to the man.”
He grins and shakes his head easily. “No, no. She can hold it. I was just telling her how perfect it is for her. Don’t you think so?”
Her mother eyes it carefully, and then looks back up at the man. “It’s certainly very gorgeous, but my daughter has a price restriction on her birthday gifts, and we usually only buy from local artists.” Ophelia hears her dad step up and turns big pleading eyes on him.
“Dad? Daddy please? It’s the only thing I want!”
His smile is indulgent and gentle. “Well it’s certainly pretty Ophelia, but I thought you wanted the Rapunzel marionette to go with your prince? It’s a one of a kind, and you might never have another chance to finish the set.”
This isn’t good. Mom and dad are coming together against it, and she can practically feel the necklace telling her how much she needs it. The bald and chubby seller smiles broadly.
“I assure you this necklace is just as rare. It’s quite a find. If price is the issue, I’m sure we can figure something out?”
She pled with them, reasoned, argued, and watched as the conversation between her parents and the portly man degenerated into nothing but excuses.
When pouting failed she resorted to emotional blackmail. The seller seemed to approve, even as guilt flared up at the hurt look in her mother and father’s eyes. “You’d get it for me if you loved me. If you wanted me to be my own person, because dolls are for little girls and you always say I should be who I want not who people expect me to be.”
She sees it hit, feels awful and triumphant, and then they tell her no anyway, and she gives up. Cries all the way to the cotton candy booth and refuses the treat, and then spends the rest of the day sullen and unhappy.
But when they get home, no present this year, she swallows down her tears and tries to be good. To make up for the hurtful things she said. Because her parents always remind her that she’s responsible for the words she uses, and what they do to others. That she’s responsible for her own actions.
----
Three days after her blowup and Ophelia is no longer on restriction for her bad behavior at the market. Instead she’s spent the day at the park with her parents, and the sullen attitude is fully gone in place of enjoying the open space and the swings. She loves to go high, and see the world from a better perspective. No longer is she the little thing that all the old ladies call adorable. Now she’s something large, something powerful, and the feeling of lifting above all the adults and soaring is pleasing and addictive. She wants to go higher, do more, but mom and dad say it’s time to head home for dinner.
They have spaghetti and meatballs, the conversation focuses around faculty members at the college they work at, and Ophelia struggles to keep up as her parents complain about red tape and canon. Whatever that is. She doodles in her sketchbook while they talk; drawing a unicorn and trees even though she can’t quite get the branches to look right. When dinner is over they send her up to bed with kisses, and her mom gives her an extra-long hug.
Years later, when Ophelia is an adult with a rather questionable set of morals and what seems like the weight of the world on her shoulders she’ll remember that moment and wonder if her mother had any inkling of what was to come next. If maybe that was her version of goodbye. It’s unlikely, but the thought will haunt her until she dies.
She does the thorough check of herself that’s required every night, the one she’s been allowed to do alone since she turned seven. She has to make sure there’s no bleeding or bruising, and she’s rigorous about that because once when she fell off the roof she didn’t check right, and that was when she’d broken her leg. Her mom cried for days after she tried to stand up and the limb collapsed underneath her with no warning. When the inspection comes up clear she brushes her teeth, washes her face and hands, and then changes into her pajamas. The house is quiet, one of the many droning documentary voices going downstairs, and she ignores it and slips under the covers. Her dad has already started the lantern spinning, and she watches colorful fantasy shapes made of light crawl along the walls and ceiling.
Ophelia doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she dreams of something lurking outside the house. She can hear it scraping along the brick, and snuffling underneath windows as it tries to find its way in. Listens to it while a little woman with blond hair and a notebook watches her appraisingly from across the room. She wants to ask the woman what she’s doing there, what the thing outside is, or why she’s suddenly so afraid. She’s never been afraid before. Dad says it’s because she’s sick and can’t learn to be afraid of things hurting her. Mom says it’s because she’s got a brave and courageous soul.
Which is when she hears her mother scream, and the blonde woman checks something off in her notebook and then snaps it closed before pushing up her glasses and disappearing. Ophelia realizes she’s awake, and that the screaming hasn’t stopped yet. She slips out of her bed, full of an unnamed dread that has no comparison in her relatively cushy life, and then moves to the doorway. The screaming has stopped, but now she can hear something wet and thick through the crack in her door, a thump and then a noise that makes her think of a knife cutting into steak.
It’s the smell of blood that breaks her paralysis and sends Ophelia’s sock-covered feet down the hallway and to the top of the stairs.
From this vantage point she can see down into the foyer, and there’s her mom lying on the floor at a funny angle on her side. Her dad is kneeling beside her mom, head down and hands pressed against her mom’s stomach, and there’s blood on the floor. Ophelia doesn’t think, doesn’t consider, she rushes down the stairs and when she gets to the base of them her dad turns. There’s blood smeared on his mouth, something dark and thick hanging from his lips, and he lifts both his hands. Clutched in one is a wickedly sharp and red-stained knife. In the other is the necklace she wanted so badly.
Her dad’s eyes, blue like hers, narrow and then widen in horror. He bares blood-stained teeth, apologizes once, and then slices his own throat.
Later she’ll read the police report, but it won’t give her any clear idea on how long she stood there before the officers kicked down the door and forced their way into the crime scene. It won’t tell her how long she stayed there with blood soaking into her green forest patterned socks, or how long she stared into the empty eyes of her dead parents. It will say what the contents of her father’s stomach were and how when she was touched she went ballistic and bit an officer. It will tell her that physical evidence pointed to her mother fighting tooth and nail to preserve her own life, and that both of them were DOA.
At the funeral a stranger, a man with her mother’s brown eyes and square jaw, puts his hand on her shoulder and turns her ever so slightly. The lady that brought her to the funeral says this is her Uncle Jeff, her mother’s brother, and that he’s going to be taking care of her now. There’s a man behind him that looks a little grizzled, a baseball cap clutched in his hands and an awkward look on his face. The man calling himself her uncle introduces him as Bobby.
Ophelia says nothing as the two men lead her away from the side of the gravesite. Her guardian chats about legal issues, the dispersal of items, the college still owning her home. She doesn’t speak until several days later, when they’re in a diner with the things left to her and her uncle packed in the back of his old truck as they head towards what he calls home. Her uncle rattles an envelope the police gave him, opens it, and pours the necklace out onto the table.
The stone gleams dully in the light, the red of it the color of the blood on the floor around her mother, and Ophelia grips her fork tightly before letting out a roar and stabbing the necklace. The whole diner is staring at her in horror, the waitress’ mouth hanging open as Ophelia’s fork slams hard into the necklace over and over until the rings are displaced and the stone cracks under the force of her rage.
She drops the fork, listens to it distantly clatter against the ground, and then looks up at the two men sitting across the booth from her. Her finger shakes when she points, but her voice is steady if a little rusty. “That. That made him do it.”
Honestly Ophelia expects them to treat her the way everyone else has. Delicately, distancing themselves and then whispering about her parents and what her father did when they think she’s not listening. Instead the man named Bobby nods once and adjusts his hat, and her uncle gathers up their things, leaves money on the table, and takes them to a church where the necklace is dropped in the furnace. She imagines she can hear her mother screaming as it melts, and maybe it’s not her imagination because Bobby and her uncle jerk once while it goes on and then a big hand lands on either of her shoulders.
-----
It’s a miracle it takes as long as it does for Uncle Jeff to witness the full extent of the genetic illness the guardian-ad-litem obviously explained to him. They’re in the woods, Uncle Jeff calmly explaining how to properly hold the rifle, and how to be quiet and still, and the deer is now in front of them. She’s been there a year, and while her uncle and his friends speak regularly Ophelia doesn’t have much to say. Things are different, but that’s ok. She couldn’t stand the idea of everything being the same anyway, as if it never happened. She’s gotten used to the constant guests, to the loud and raucous parties, and how everyone treats her like she’s something different and confusing.
Her uncle goes out of his way to make sure she feels safe and at home. Introduces her to people several times, and then seems unsure if she’s pleased or distressed by their presence. Ophelia never gives him an opinion one way or another. Instead she simply lets them talk around her, nods when she’s addressed, and works on the language books her uncle has given her on top of her official school homework. It’s obvious he knows about her drawing, that someone told him, but she no longer uses the sketchbooks. She doesn’t want to be an artist anymore.
It’s when the shot rings out, and she looks up to see that it’s gone badly and the deer is on the ground with a bullet in its gut and making this noise, this terrible noise, that Ophelia realizes she’s moving. She jerks forward, and breaks out of the blind before she remembers that they’re off the ground. When she hits it’s on her arm and she rolls over and gets up before staggering her way to the injured deer. Her uncle is shouting behind her, but Ophelia keeps moving and reaches the dying animal fairly quickly. The left arm won’t work right, but her right hand finds its way out to the poor thing and strokes its fur. The eyes…the eyes are just the right shade of brown and they look up at her helplessly as the animal thrashes and jerks. It kicks her once, but she barely notices.
Jeff’s there then, and his hand lands heavily on her shoulder. “Hey babygirl. You need to turn away now ok? This isn’t something you need to see.”
Ophelia swallows once, and then holds out her right hand. “Knife.” It’s the first thing she’s requested since the day of the market.
“What? No. No girl you don’t have to do that. I’m going to do that.” He sounds shocked, maybe horrified, and that’s ok. He needs to be. Because after all, what is one more death on her hands?
“Knife.” This time he gives in, and the heavy hilt lands in her hand. It looks so big and clumsy there, and she grips it the way he showed her before stepping forward and slitting the deer’s throat. Then she wraps her good arm around it and hears her Uncle Jeff make a dismayed noise. When she bothers to look she can see the bone sticking out of her left arm, knows now why it wouldn’t work, and ignores it in favor of holding onto the deer dying in her grip.
-----
When she’s ten Uncle Jeff and Uncle Bobby sit her down and tell her the truth. About the amulet, about the people that keep coming into the house, and why she needs to be careful about the salt lines and everything else. Why it’s so dangerous for her to be here, and why everyone is so very careful around her. It’s nice to have an explanation, and Ophelia doesn’t question whether they’re telling the truth or not, but she does wonder why they waited so long. Instead of pointedly asking though she takes a sip of her soda and considers the weight in both men’s faces.
“When do we find the man who sold us the necklace?” Bobby’s eyes fly up in surprise, but Uncle Jeff looks pleased and expectant.
“We tried babygirl, and I promise if we ever do there’ll be retribution. In the meantime I need you to do something for me. Do you think you can?” She nods without hesitation, because Jeff has given her everything by promising her retribution, by telling her she wasn’t crazy all those years ago, and that means something. “You turn eleven in a few weeks. I want you to ask for something this year. I know why you don’t want to, and I get that, but it’s time to move on Ope. Time to heal. I don’t care if it’s a favor or a thing or what, but you gotta ask for a gift and I’ve gotta get it for you. “
It’s unexpected, but she can deal with it. She agrees tentatively, and when the big day approaches Ophelia finally knows what she wants. “Will Rafi teach me magic so I can help?”
Her uncle stares at her for a long time before he pulls her up into a hug. She suffers the contact for a bit and then pulls back and takes in his smile.
----
Ophelia is sixteen when she gets her G.E.D. Bobby is horrified by her decision, but Jeff seems proud of her need for independence, her need to break away from people that will never understand what they are and what they do. To celebrate he gives her a Jeep, and to top that off he secures a place for her as an apprentice to a tattoo artist he knows. He also gives her a fake ID. The plan forms on its own, and she tells Jeff only half of it. He agrees.
Which is how she finds herself guiltily sinking bolts in a rock wall that is used predominantly by top-rope climbers. The thing is, if this is the last time Ophelia ever climbs a rock wall she’ll be damned if she does it the way beginners and children do.
And as far as Ophelia Burton is concerned, this is the last time she will ever climb a rock wall.
As far as she can tell other than the two hikers she saw walking around the cliff face towards the other side when she first started up she’s got the park to herself. Everything is working out just like she wanted it to, and that’s almost too much to hope for. She dangles for a bit near the top, body twisting in the wind and taking in the way the trees seem sparser here, less lush and alive. The rock is beautiful though, and looking out over the park she knows for a fact that Texas has its own special charm, even if it has nothing on the beauty of Maine.
Which says nothing about the fact that it’s in the nineties here, and she’s sweating her ass off even with the breeze, while back in her hometown it’s just starting to thaw a bit. There’s something to be said for the Southern climate. In small doses. When she finally reaches the top though she pulls her last anchor out to remove the proof that she broke the unspoken rules and then unpacks her bag. There’s sandwiches waiting, and she’s already hungry but she’ll be hungrier in a few seconds.
It’s second nature to pack the bowl, her eyes roaming over the landscape and wondering if she should pull out the binoculars and look for something special. Something to leave in a note for Jeff. If she should leave a note at all.
Because there’s still the question of whether or not she can make this look like an accident, and if she can’t then what exactly is her uncle going to think? She doesn’t want to hurt him, but she just can’t…she can’t do it anymore. It’s not that Jeff isn’t wonderful, or that she doesn’t love Bobby, or Rafi who’s taught her everything about rituals and magic that she knows, or Old Jen who is thirty and the toughest woman she’s ever seen.
It’s not that they don’t love her, or that she’s not happy being their mascot and watching them save the world. It’s the way they respond to her when they’re not thinking about it. The easy way in which they forget that a lack of physical pain response doesn’t mean a lack of emotional pain. At her best she feels like a hollowed out doll, purposeless and wandering in the midst of a world made for better creatures. For things with feelings.
There’s an emptiness in her that she can’t stand anymore, and this is the best time to respond to it. Now while Jeff is considering following Jen across the ocean to look for older and more bizarre hunts in the place where so many of these monsters originated. While the world is hanging on some obscure thread and calling for her to move or die. She has nowhere to move to. Hasn’t had any since that night nine years ago when she heard her mother’s death cries.
The bowl is almost cashed when she hears it the first time, and honestly she thinks it’s some odd extension of the time dilation she so often feels when she’s good and stoned. High, shrill, inhuman, and she brushes it off as memory and hallucination. Except it happens again, and then Ope is dumping the burning embers and ashes from the bowl and dropping the pipe before scrambling over to the edge.
Below her, at the bottom of the cliff there’s a guy on the ground half-curled around his own ribs as another man beats him. It’s not a fight, it’s a slaughter, and the guy on the ground isn’t trying to help himself at all. There’s his defensive posture, sure, but he’s not actively trying to get away. A particularly vicious kick to his ribs lifts him from the ground and Ope is moving before she’s even got a fully-formed idea.
The good thing about top-rope climbs, other than being accessible for beginners and safety fanatics, is that there’s a very reliable anchor at the top. The bad thing is it already has a rope in it, and she needs that rope gone without the attacker at the base of the rock face noticing. It’s highly unlikely. She’s bagging her stuff and cutting the rope fast though, eyes following everything and taking in all the factors. The wind isn’t very high, and while the North face she climbed was a 5.11, this side is only rated in the low fours according to her research. Calculations, concerns, all of it runs through her head as she pulls her gloves on, ties her rope to the anchor and loops it through the belay and carabiner set up on her harness, and then pulls out her knife and clips it directly to the harness. She loops the rope around her hands and looks back down once before turning her back to the drop and taking a deep breath.
Time is moving more slowly for her than the rest of the world. The first rule of rappelling is safety, but the second is controlled speed and she’s not really capable of properly assessing how fast she’s really going. Jeff is going to kill her. She’ll consider the irony of all of this later, but at the moment air is rushing around her at top speed and she’s looking down between her feet to see the only break she’s caught is that the tall blond she’s about to hit hasn’t looked up.
The force of the impact is probably much worse than she thinks it is. Her ankle twists and there’s pressure and then looseness that she wasn’t prepared for. The guy she hits goes to the ground, and she follows him with a rattling impact before rolling back. Everything Jeff taught her is running through her head at top speed while the world continues to move in slow motion. She pulls the knife not trusting her fingers to move fast enough and slices the rope before he’s up and coming for her.
She rolled out of the way of the first stomp and then pushed up on the leg she knows isn’t bad. She’s halfway there when his knee connects with her torso and she’s breathless. The boy on the ground, and he is a boy maybe her age or younger, looks destroyed, and she has time to take that in and the way the sun is lighting up the hair of the man above her before he strikes out again and misses her face by millimeters. Her response is to swipe out, and the knife slices his hand as he draws it back for the next hit.
He lets out a howl of rage, and she pushes forward with her good leg and slams into him, knife moving at top speed. It’s not about restraining now, all those rules go out the window, because he was going to murder this kid and now she’s a witness. Now she’s the next potential victim. This is fucking survival. So instead of trying to subdue or scare him Ope twists the knife downwards and slams it into where she knows his femoral artery is. He lands another blow to her midsection, but she’s used to being breathless by now and he can’t stun her with pain.
There’s a brutal joy to it really, and mixed in with the realization that she’s murdering someone is the knowledge that she’s just saved a life. She twists the knife and then pulls, and the guy staggers backwards with wide and shocked eyes. The knife comes back up and she jabs it into the hand he has reaching for her. When he pulls back he overbalances himself, and she watches his feet scramble against the loose scree before he goes backwards over the rise and tumbles down.
There’s a lot of noise. Everything is noisy from the wheezing of the kid on the ground to the crashing of the attacker falling down the hill. She wipes the knife on her own pants and then flicks it shut before limping her way over to the kid. His face is half destroyed, one eye swollen entirely shut and the other almost all the way there. There’s a swelling in the cheekbone that screams break, his mouth is split in two places, and there’s blood everywhere. He’s squinting at her with the eye that can still see, and she reaches down with one hand and says the only thing she can think of. “Come with me or stay here and die. Your choice stranger.” Did she really just butcher fucking Terminator? How stoned is she?
Either way he hesitates for a second, and then he takes her hand and she hauls him up. If he wasn’t a skeleton covered in skin that would be impossible, as would the next part where she loops his arm over her shoulder and the two of them hobble around the cliff face. She sees the path to the top and knows that she made the right decision. By the time she’d hiked down he would have been dead. She needs to leave him here and take off. Hope that he’s too fucked up to remember much about what she looked like or properly mention her, because she’s got an ounce of pot in the bag in her backseat and her ID won’t hold up to honest scrutiny. She can’t afford a police questioning.
Which is why when he gets in the car and settles into the seat, wheezing and whimpering with one hand cupped over ribs that must be broken; she starts the car up and puts it into drive. She picks a little motel and rents a room with the emergency card Jeff gave her. The whole drive down she stayed with his friends, never short on couches or road houses with Jeff’s allies. He’s no Winchester, but he has a strong reputation in the community, and unlike the infamous John it’s a good one. The plan had been for it to be her long goodbye tour, a last visit with Bobby and the Harvelles, one more time seeing One-Eyed Marcus and laughing about his two eyes but missing index finger. She’s never found out what his nickname is about…
Yup. Very. Fucking. Stoned.
The room is miserable, one King sized bed and terrible wallpaper. She leads the kid into the bathroom and starts up the shower before gesturing for him to strip. She’s half-surprised when he does it without an argument, and then she leads him into the spray. He soaps himself mechanically, fingers fumbling helplessly more than once, and she studies the severity of what she can see. He’s too thin, underfed, and tall. Very tall, and the hands suggest there’s more growth to come. His fingernails are ragged and his hands shake under her scrutiny. The bruising over his torso is bad already, and will probably look worse come tomorrow. Still she doesn’t think there’s any internal bleeding. His jaw moves when she suggests he try to move it, and that lets her know it’s not broken. Other than the cheekbone, his nose, and the splits to his lips it’s all superficial damage.
He doesn’t accept the pipe after she packs the bowl, but he does sit very cautiously on the edge of the bed and gesture to her ankle. She’s got it propped up, and the swelling is even more noticeable than before.
“Y-y-you should g-get that looked a-at.” His stammering seems natural, and his half-open eye stays down and doesn’t make contact.
“I’m fine. Do you need a hospital?”
He shakes his head and turns away from her, hands moving restlessly over the covers and then settling in his lap as they wring each other. “I-I-I’ve had w-worse. A-are you g-gonna t-turn me in?”
“To who?” It takes her a second and then she gets it. “Oh! The cops? Fuck no dude.” She waves the pipe once and then frowns and pulls it back taking a long and deep pull. “No I’m not getting the fucking cops involved. Do you want the cops?”
His head shakes violently and then he groans and covers it. “N-no. Please. No.”
Well then. She cashes the bowl quickly and then digs in her bag to find the smushed peanut butter sandwiches. She offers two of them to the kid and he takes both and slowly eats one, tearing it into pieces before working his way through the bits. “You got a name?”
He swallows one piece, head darting up and then back down. He hasn’t made eye contact with her once. “Sam.”
Her own two sandwiches get devoured quickly, and then cotton-mouth makes itself known and she digs out her water bottle before downing half of it and then offering it to him. He takes it hesitantly, sniffs, and then drinks a good deal.
“My name is Ope. I have a longer version, but it’s fucking awful so let’s stick to Ope. You got a home to go to Sam, or was that fucker it?”
He doesn’t look up when he answers, long wet hair hanging over his swollen face. “Ty-he was i-it.”
“Ok. So the way I see you it have two choices. I can drop you off somewhere and then you can move on from there, or you can come with me. I’m headed back to Maine.”
It’s the first time Sam really looks at her, and she can see from the half-open slot that his eyes are probably the most amazing collection of colors she’s ever seen. Without the swelling and bruising he’s gotta be drop-dead gorgeous, and she wonders what could possibly have led that asshole to beat him. He looks like a puppy-dog, mostly-starved, half-dead, afraid, but hopeful. “W-why would y-you d-d-do that?”
She could be honest. She could tell him that she was planning on dying today, and that something about seeing him on the ground she’d planned on splattering onto changed her mind. That for the first time since she was seven she no longer feels like a broken doll, an inanimate object waiting to be shelved and forgotten. That she suddenly has purpose and direction. All of that would be the truth.
“I could say I do this shit all the time but that’d be a fucking lie. Why don’t we settle for, ‘I’m really fucking stoned’ and see where that takes us?”
To her enormous surprise there is the hint of a smile, something almost like a dimple in one cheek, and then it’s gone.
“Ope.” His voice sounds trusting, hopeful, and she’s overwhelmed with the urge to reach out and hold him. To smother that look of fear he had earlier and promise him safety and comfort. Instead she puts the pipe down and fumbles out her cigarettes.
“Yeah. Me Ope, you Sam. At least one of us probably has some permanent brain damage.”
But it’s ok. The next morning they load themselves into the Jeep and get on the road. She stops at a drive-through doc shop hunters use and Sam gets painkillers while she gets a two hour lecture about irresponsibility.
-----
Ope is nineteen the first time she sees Sam smile fully. They’ve been together over two years, Jeff easily accepting him in and ignoring all the side-effects. All the fallout of his issues. They’re at the table, and Sam is slaughtering her in a game of Scrabble when it happens. He lays down “Quixotic”, the Q on a triple letter slot, and then stands and throws both fists in the air before whooping in victory.
It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen, and for a minute Ophelia is speechless and breathless. Then she scatters the tiles with one hand and shouts at him. “You fucking cheat!”
His laughter is just as pretty.
Wordcount: Total 11,644
Rating: R
Warning(s): Explicit Language, Violence, References to Non-Con
Beta(s): The irresistible
sammichgirl, who is not at fault for the mistakes I left.Summary: A timestamp for "Lost Time", examines Ope and Sam's pasts. Won't make much sense if you haven't read "Lost Time", and has spoilers for the story.
Ope
Two weeks after Ophelia’s seventh birthday the market comes to town. It happened last year, and her dad bought her a marionette and told her that it was hand-carved and that was important. Her parents are very serious about things being hand-carved, or hand-made, or local. They tell her all the time about why it’s important to care about where things come from and who made them. There’s pride in being a craftsman her dad says, and she’s ok with that because it means she got a marionette last year, and she gets to pick her handmade present this year.
It’s not much of a competition, because all day long she’s been circling the same booth as last year with the wizened old woman who brought the marionette. It’s a little boy puppet, a wooden crown cocked sideways on his head and a smile carefully painted on his tiny face. This year they have a princess, and she’ll go perfectly. A matching set. Her dad says she has an unusual eye for symmetry, and that this will pay off when she’s a famous artist. Her mother always responds, “No pressure dear. She may want to be something else.” But she doesn’t. She wants to be an artist, and make the kind of art her dad and mom go to see at the big museums every month.
Which is when she hears the man calling out about artisan crafts, and that’s another thing her parents really like. They’re staring at a little table right now, and she’s allowed to go up to two stalls away. She takes the necessary steps over to the booth and the balding and slightly overweight man behind the counter smiles at her brightly.
“Why hello. And what’s your name?” His smile is oily, a word she just learned can be applied to people, but there are a variety of gorgeous pieces of jewelry in front of him. One is a necklace, a series of circles overlapping each other with a garnet set in the center, and garnets are her birthstone. It’s perfect.
“Ophelia. Is that hand-made?” She has to ask, because if it’s from a factory they’ll never even consider it. The puppet is already forgotten in the need for the necklace.
“Yes it is. Hand-made by a very exclusive artisan. Would you like to hold it?” She nods and he carefully lifts it from the velvet cushion and holds it out. “It makes a lovely contrast with your eyes. Like it was made for you. Don’t you think so?”
She does. She thinks it’s absolutely perfect, and that’s all she can think of while her fingers stroke the delicate rings of silver and the garnet in the center. It must be expensive, and she has a limit for presents, but she wants it. Wants it more than she’s ever wanted anything. Her mother’s voice comes from behind her.
“Ophelia? Sweetie what are you looking at?” Her mother leans over and peers at the necklace before making a sound. “Honey that has to be expensive. Maybe you should hand it back to the man.”
He grins and shakes his head easily. “No, no. She can hold it. I was just telling her how perfect it is for her. Don’t you think so?”
Her mother eyes it carefully, and then looks back up at the man. “It’s certainly very gorgeous, but my daughter has a price restriction on her birthday gifts, and we usually only buy from local artists.” Ophelia hears her dad step up and turns big pleading eyes on him.
“Dad? Daddy please? It’s the only thing I want!”
His smile is indulgent and gentle. “Well it’s certainly pretty Ophelia, but I thought you wanted the Rapunzel marionette to go with your prince? It’s a one of a kind, and you might never have another chance to finish the set.”
This isn’t good. Mom and dad are coming together against it, and she can practically feel the necklace telling her how much she needs it. The bald and chubby seller smiles broadly.
“I assure you this necklace is just as rare. It’s quite a find. If price is the issue, I’m sure we can figure something out?”
She pled with them, reasoned, argued, and watched as the conversation between her parents and the portly man degenerated into nothing but excuses.
When pouting failed she resorted to emotional blackmail. The seller seemed to approve, even as guilt flared up at the hurt look in her mother and father’s eyes. “You’d get it for me if you loved me. If you wanted me to be my own person, because dolls are for little girls and you always say I should be who I want not who people expect me to be.”
She sees it hit, feels awful and triumphant, and then they tell her no anyway, and she gives up. Cries all the way to the cotton candy booth and refuses the treat, and then spends the rest of the day sullen and unhappy.
But when they get home, no present this year, she swallows down her tears and tries to be good. To make up for the hurtful things she said. Because her parents always remind her that she’s responsible for the words she uses, and what they do to others. That she’s responsible for her own actions.
----
Three days after her blowup and Ophelia is no longer on restriction for her bad behavior at the market. Instead she’s spent the day at the park with her parents, and the sullen attitude is fully gone in place of enjoying the open space and the swings. She loves to go high, and see the world from a better perspective. No longer is she the little thing that all the old ladies call adorable. Now she’s something large, something powerful, and the feeling of lifting above all the adults and soaring is pleasing and addictive. She wants to go higher, do more, but mom and dad say it’s time to head home for dinner.
They have spaghetti and meatballs, the conversation focuses around faculty members at the college they work at, and Ophelia struggles to keep up as her parents complain about red tape and canon. Whatever that is. She doodles in her sketchbook while they talk; drawing a unicorn and trees even though she can’t quite get the branches to look right. When dinner is over they send her up to bed with kisses, and her mom gives her an extra-long hug.
Years later, when Ophelia is an adult with a rather questionable set of morals and what seems like the weight of the world on her shoulders she’ll remember that moment and wonder if her mother had any inkling of what was to come next. If maybe that was her version of goodbye. It’s unlikely, but the thought will haunt her until she dies.
She does the thorough check of herself that’s required every night, the one she’s been allowed to do alone since she turned seven. She has to make sure there’s no bleeding or bruising, and she’s rigorous about that because once when she fell off the roof she didn’t check right, and that was when she’d broken her leg. Her mom cried for days after she tried to stand up and the limb collapsed underneath her with no warning. When the inspection comes up clear she brushes her teeth, washes her face and hands, and then changes into her pajamas. The house is quiet, one of the many droning documentary voices going downstairs, and she ignores it and slips under the covers. Her dad has already started the lantern spinning, and she watches colorful fantasy shapes made of light crawl along the walls and ceiling.
Ophelia doesn’t remember falling asleep, but she dreams of something lurking outside the house. She can hear it scraping along the brick, and snuffling underneath windows as it tries to find its way in. Listens to it while a little woman with blond hair and a notebook watches her appraisingly from across the room. She wants to ask the woman what she’s doing there, what the thing outside is, or why she’s suddenly so afraid. She’s never been afraid before. Dad says it’s because she’s sick and can’t learn to be afraid of things hurting her. Mom says it’s because she’s got a brave and courageous soul.
Which is when she hears her mother scream, and the blonde woman checks something off in her notebook and then snaps it closed before pushing up her glasses and disappearing. Ophelia realizes she’s awake, and that the screaming hasn’t stopped yet. She slips out of her bed, full of an unnamed dread that has no comparison in her relatively cushy life, and then moves to the doorway. The screaming has stopped, but now she can hear something wet and thick through the crack in her door, a thump and then a noise that makes her think of a knife cutting into steak.
It’s the smell of blood that breaks her paralysis and sends Ophelia’s sock-covered feet down the hallway and to the top of the stairs.
From this vantage point she can see down into the foyer, and there’s her mom lying on the floor at a funny angle on her side. Her dad is kneeling beside her mom, head down and hands pressed against her mom’s stomach, and there’s blood on the floor. Ophelia doesn’t think, doesn’t consider, she rushes down the stairs and when she gets to the base of them her dad turns. There’s blood smeared on his mouth, something dark and thick hanging from his lips, and he lifts both his hands. Clutched in one is a wickedly sharp and red-stained knife. In the other is the necklace she wanted so badly.
Her dad’s eyes, blue like hers, narrow and then widen in horror. He bares blood-stained teeth, apologizes once, and then slices his own throat.
Later she’ll read the police report, but it won’t give her any clear idea on how long she stood there before the officers kicked down the door and forced their way into the crime scene. It won’t tell her how long she stayed there with blood soaking into her green forest patterned socks, or how long she stared into the empty eyes of her dead parents. It will say what the contents of her father’s stomach were and how when she was touched she went ballistic and bit an officer. It will tell her that physical evidence pointed to her mother fighting tooth and nail to preserve her own life, and that both of them were DOA.
At the funeral a stranger, a man with her mother’s brown eyes and square jaw, puts his hand on her shoulder and turns her ever so slightly. The lady that brought her to the funeral says this is her Uncle Jeff, her mother’s brother, and that he’s going to be taking care of her now. There’s a man behind him that looks a little grizzled, a baseball cap clutched in his hands and an awkward look on his face. The man calling himself her uncle introduces him as Bobby.
Ophelia says nothing as the two men lead her away from the side of the gravesite. Her guardian chats about legal issues, the dispersal of items, the college still owning her home. She doesn’t speak until several days later, when they’re in a diner with the things left to her and her uncle packed in the back of his old truck as they head towards what he calls home. Her uncle rattles an envelope the police gave him, opens it, and pours the necklace out onto the table.
The stone gleams dully in the light, the red of it the color of the blood on the floor around her mother, and Ophelia grips her fork tightly before letting out a roar and stabbing the necklace. The whole diner is staring at her in horror, the waitress’ mouth hanging open as Ophelia’s fork slams hard into the necklace over and over until the rings are displaced and the stone cracks under the force of her rage.
She drops the fork, listens to it distantly clatter against the ground, and then looks up at the two men sitting across the booth from her. Her finger shakes when she points, but her voice is steady if a little rusty. “That. That made him do it.”
Honestly Ophelia expects them to treat her the way everyone else has. Delicately, distancing themselves and then whispering about her parents and what her father did when they think she’s not listening. Instead the man named Bobby nods once and adjusts his hat, and her uncle gathers up their things, leaves money on the table, and takes them to a church where the necklace is dropped in the furnace. She imagines she can hear her mother screaming as it melts, and maybe it’s not her imagination because Bobby and her uncle jerk once while it goes on and then a big hand lands on either of her shoulders.
-----
It’s a miracle it takes as long as it does for Uncle Jeff to witness the full extent of the genetic illness the guardian-ad-litem obviously explained to him. They’re in the woods, Uncle Jeff calmly explaining how to properly hold the rifle, and how to be quiet and still, and the deer is now in front of them. She’s been there a year, and while her uncle and his friends speak regularly Ophelia doesn’t have much to say. Things are different, but that’s ok. She couldn’t stand the idea of everything being the same anyway, as if it never happened. She’s gotten used to the constant guests, to the loud and raucous parties, and how everyone treats her like she’s something different and confusing.
Her uncle goes out of his way to make sure she feels safe and at home. Introduces her to people several times, and then seems unsure if she’s pleased or distressed by their presence. Ophelia never gives him an opinion one way or another. Instead she simply lets them talk around her, nods when she’s addressed, and works on the language books her uncle has given her on top of her official school homework. It’s obvious he knows about her drawing, that someone told him, but she no longer uses the sketchbooks. She doesn’t want to be an artist anymore.
It’s when the shot rings out, and she looks up to see that it’s gone badly and the deer is on the ground with a bullet in its gut and making this noise, this terrible noise, that Ophelia realizes she’s moving. She jerks forward, and breaks out of the blind before she remembers that they’re off the ground. When she hits it’s on her arm and she rolls over and gets up before staggering her way to the injured deer. Her uncle is shouting behind her, but Ophelia keeps moving and reaches the dying animal fairly quickly. The left arm won’t work right, but her right hand finds its way out to the poor thing and strokes its fur. The eyes…the eyes are just the right shade of brown and they look up at her helplessly as the animal thrashes and jerks. It kicks her once, but she barely notices.
Jeff’s there then, and his hand lands heavily on her shoulder. “Hey babygirl. You need to turn away now ok? This isn’t something you need to see.”
Ophelia swallows once, and then holds out her right hand. “Knife.” It’s the first thing she’s requested since the day of the market.
“What? No. No girl you don’t have to do that. I’m going to do that.” He sounds shocked, maybe horrified, and that’s ok. He needs to be. Because after all, what is one more death on her hands?
“Knife.” This time he gives in, and the heavy hilt lands in her hand. It looks so big and clumsy there, and she grips it the way he showed her before stepping forward and slitting the deer’s throat. Then she wraps her good arm around it and hears her Uncle Jeff make a dismayed noise. When she bothers to look she can see the bone sticking out of her left arm, knows now why it wouldn’t work, and ignores it in favor of holding onto the deer dying in her grip.
-----
When she’s ten Uncle Jeff and Uncle Bobby sit her down and tell her the truth. About the amulet, about the people that keep coming into the house, and why she needs to be careful about the salt lines and everything else. Why it’s so dangerous for her to be here, and why everyone is so very careful around her. It’s nice to have an explanation, and Ophelia doesn’t question whether they’re telling the truth or not, but she does wonder why they waited so long. Instead of pointedly asking though she takes a sip of her soda and considers the weight in both men’s faces.
“When do we find the man who sold us the necklace?” Bobby’s eyes fly up in surprise, but Uncle Jeff looks pleased and expectant.
“We tried babygirl, and I promise if we ever do there’ll be retribution. In the meantime I need you to do something for me. Do you think you can?” She nods without hesitation, because Jeff has given her everything by promising her retribution, by telling her she wasn’t crazy all those years ago, and that means something. “You turn eleven in a few weeks. I want you to ask for something this year. I know why you don’t want to, and I get that, but it’s time to move on Ope. Time to heal. I don’t care if it’s a favor or a thing or what, but you gotta ask for a gift and I’ve gotta get it for you. “
It’s unexpected, but she can deal with it. She agrees tentatively, and when the big day approaches Ophelia finally knows what she wants. “Will Rafi teach me magic so I can help?”
Her uncle stares at her for a long time before he pulls her up into a hug. She suffers the contact for a bit and then pulls back and takes in his smile.
----
Ophelia is sixteen when she gets her G.E.D. Bobby is horrified by her decision, but Jeff seems proud of her need for independence, her need to break away from people that will never understand what they are and what they do. To celebrate he gives her a Jeep, and to top that off he secures a place for her as an apprentice to a tattoo artist he knows. He also gives her a fake ID. The plan forms on its own, and she tells Jeff only half of it. He agrees.
Which is how she finds herself guiltily sinking bolts in a rock wall that is used predominantly by top-rope climbers. The thing is, if this is the last time Ophelia ever climbs a rock wall she’ll be damned if she does it the way beginners and children do.
And as far as Ophelia Burton is concerned, this is the last time she will ever climb a rock wall.
As far as she can tell other than the two hikers she saw walking around the cliff face towards the other side when she first started up she’s got the park to herself. Everything is working out just like she wanted it to, and that’s almost too much to hope for. She dangles for a bit near the top, body twisting in the wind and taking in the way the trees seem sparser here, less lush and alive. The rock is beautiful though, and looking out over the park she knows for a fact that Texas has its own special charm, even if it has nothing on the beauty of Maine.
Which says nothing about the fact that it’s in the nineties here, and she’s sweating her ass off even with the breeze, while back in her hometown it’s just starting to thaw a bit. There’s something to be said for the Southern climate. In small doses. When she finally reaches the top though she pulls her last anchor out to remove the proof that she broke the unspoken rules and then unpacks her bag. There’s sandwiches waiting, and she’s already hungry but she’ll be hungrier in a few seconds.
It’s second nature to pack the bowl, her eyes roaming over the landscape and wondering if she should pull out the binoculars and look for something special. Something to leave in a note for Jeff. If she should leave a note at all.
Because there’s still the question of whether or not she can make this look like an accident, and if she can’t then what exactly is her uncle going to think? She doesn’t want to hurt him, but she just can’t…she can’t do it anymore. It’s not that Jeff isn’t wonderful, or that she doesn’t love Bobby, or Rafi who’s taught her everything about rituals and magic that she knows, or Old Jen who is thirty and the toughest woman she’s ever seen.
It’s not that they don’t love her, or that she’s not happy being their mascot and watching them save the world. It’s the way they respond to her when they’re not thinking about it. The easy way in which they forget that a lack of physical pain response doesn’t mean a lack of emotional pain. At her best she feels like a hollowed out doll, purposeless and wandering in the midst of a world made for better creatures. For things with feelings.
There’s an emptiness in her that she can’t stand anymore, and this is the best time to respond to it. Now while Jeff is considering following Jen across the ocean to look for older and more bizarre hunts in the place where so many of these monsters originated. While the world is hanging on some obscure thread and calling for her to move or die. She has nowhere to move to. Hasn’t had any since that night nine years ago when she heard her mother’s death cries.
The bowl is almost cashed when she hears it the first time, and honestly she thinks it’s some odd extension of the time dilation she so often feels when she’s good and stoned. High, shrill, inhuman, and she brushes it off as memory and hallucination. Except it happens again, and then Ope is dumping the burning embers and ashes from the bowl and dropping the pipe before scrambling over to the edge.
Below her, at the bottom of the cliff there’s a guy on the ground half-curled around his own ribs as another man beats him. It’s not a fight, it’s a slaughter, and the guy on the ground isn’t trying to help himself at all. There’s his defensive posture, sure, but he’s not actively trying to get away. A particularly vicious kick to his ribs lifts him from the ground and Ope is moving before she’s even got a fully-formed idea.
The good thing about top-rope climbs, other than being accessible for beginners and safety fanatics, is that there’s a very reliable anchor at the top. The bad thing is it already has a rope in it, and she needs that rope gone without the attacker at the base of the rock face noticing. It’s highly unlikely. She’s bagging her stuff and cutting the rope fast though, eyes following everything and taking in all the factors. The wind isn’t very high, and while the North face she climbed was a 5.11, this side is only rated in the low fours according to her research. Calculations, concerns, all of it runs through her head as she pulls her gloves on, ties her rope to the anchor and loops it through the belay and carabiner set up on her harness, and then pulls out her knife and clips it directly to the harness. She loops the rope around her hands and looks back down once before turning her back to the drop and taking a deep breath.
Time is moving more slowly for her than the rest of the world. The first rule of rappelling is safety, but the second is controlled speed and she’s not really capable of properly assessing how fast she’s really going. Jeff is going to kill her. She’ll consider the irony of all of this later, but at the moment air is rushing around her at top speed and she’s looking down between her feet to see the only break she’s caught is that the tall blond she’s about to hit hasn’t looked up.
The force of the impact is probably much worse than she thinks it is. Her ankle twists and there’s pressure and then looseness that she wasn’t prepared for. The guy she hits goes to the ground, and she follows him with a rattling impact before rolling back. Everything Jeff taught her is running through her head at top speed while the world continues to move in slow motion. She pulls the knife not trusting her fingers to move fast enough and slices the rope before he’s up and coming for her.
She rolled out of the way of the first stomp and then pushed up on the leg she knows isn’t bad. She’s halfway there when his knee connects with her torso and she’s breathless. The boy on the ground, and he is a boy maybe her age or younger, looks destroyed, and she has time to take that in and the way the sun is lighting up the hair of the man above her before he strikes out again and misses her face by millimeters. Her response is to swipe out, and the knife slices his hand as he draws it back for the next hit.
He lets out a howl of rage, and she pushes forward with her good leg and slams into him, knife moving at top speed. It’s not about restraining now, all those rules go out the window, because he was going to murder this kid and now she’s a witness. Now she’s the next potential victim. This is fucking survival. So instead of trying to subdue or scare him Ope twists the knife downwards and slams it into where she knows his femoral artery is. He lands another blow to her midsection, but she’s used to being breathless by now and he can’t stun her with pain.
There’s a brutal joy to it really, and mixed in with the realization that she’s murdering someone is the knowledge that she’s just saved a life. She twists the knife and then pulls, and the guy staggers backwards with wide and shocked eyes. The knife comes back up and she jabs it into the hand he has reaching for her. When he pulls back he overbalances himself, and she watches his feet scramble against the loose scree before he goes backwards over the rise and tumbles down.
There’s a lot of noise. Everything is noisy from the wheezing of the kid on the ground to the crashing of the attacker falling down the hill. She wipes the knife on her own pants and then flicks it shut before limping her way over to the kid. His face is half destroyed, one eye swollen entirely shut and the other almost all the way there. There’s a swelling in the cheekbone that screams break, his mouth is split in two places, and there’s blood everywhere. He’s squinting at her with the eye that can still see, and she reaches down with one hand and says the only thing she can think of. “Come with me or stay here and die. Your choice stranger.” Did she really just butcher fucking Terminator? How stoned is she?
Either way he hesitates for a second, and then he takes her hand and she hauls him up. If he wasn’t a skeleton covered in skin that would be impossible, as would the next part where she loops his arm over her shoulder and the two of them hobble around the cliff face. She sees the path to the top and knows that she made the right decision. By the time she’d hiked down he would have been dead. She needs to leave him here and take off. Hope that he’s too fucked up to remember much about what she looked like or properly mention her, because she’s got an ounce of pot in the bag in her backseat and her ID won’t hold up to honest scrutiny. She can’t afford a police questioning.
Which is why when he gets in the car and settles into the seat, wheezing and whimpering with one hand cupped over ribs that must be broken; she starts the car up and puts it into drive. She picks a little motel and rents a room with the emergency card Jeff gave her. The whole drive down she stayed with his friends, never short on couches or road houses with Jeff’s allies. He’s no Winchester, but he has a strong reputation in the community, and unlike the infamous John it’s a good one. The plan had been for it to be her long goodbye tour, a last visit with Bobby and the Harvelles, one more time seeing One-Eyed Marcus and laughing about his two eyes but missing index finger. She’s never found out what his nickname is about…
Yup. Very. Fucking. Stoned.
The room is miserable, one King sized bed and terrible wallpaper. She leads the kid into the bathroom and starts up the shower before gesturing for him to strip. She’s half-surprised when he does it without an argument, and then she leads him into the spray. He soaps himself mechanically, fingers fumbling helplessly more than once, and she studies the severity of what she can see. He’s too thin, underfed, and tall. Very tall, and the hands suggest there’s more growth to come. His fingernails are ragged and his hands shake under her scrutiny. The bruising over his torso is bad already, and will probably look worse come tomorrow. Still she doesn’t think there’s any internal bleeding. His jaw moves when she suggests he try to move it, and that lets her know it’s not broken. Other than the cheekbone, his nose, and the splits to his lips it’s all superficial damage.
He doesn’t accept the pipe after she packs the bowl, but he does sit very cautiously on the edge of the bed and gesture to her ankle. She’s got it propped up, and the swelling is even more noticeable than before.
“Y-y-you should g-get that looked a-at.” His stammering seems natural, and his half-open eye stays down and doesn’t make contact.
“I’m fine. Do you need a hospital?”
He shakes his head and turns away from her, hands moving restlessly over the covers and then settling in his lap as they wring each other. “I-I-I’ve had w-worse. A-are you g-gonna t-turn me in?”
“To who?” It takes her a second and then she gets it. “Oh! The cops? Fuck no dude.” She waves the pipe once and then frowns and pulls it back taking a long and deep pull. “No I’m not getting the fucking cops involved. Do you want the cops?”
His head shakes violently and then he groans and covers it. “N-no. Please. No.”
Well then. She cashes the bowl quickly and then digs in her bag to find the smushed peanut butter sandwiches. She offers two of them to the kid and he takes both and slowly eats one, tearing it into pieces before working his way through the bits. “You got a name?”
He swallows one piece, head darting up and then back down. He hasn’t made eye contact with her once. “Sam.”
Her own two sandwiches get devoured quickly, and then cotton-mouth makes itself known and she digs out her water bottle before downing half of it and then offering it to him. He takes it hesitantly, sniffs, and then drinks a good deal.
“My name is Ope. I have a longer version, but it’s fucking awful so let’s stick to Ope. You got a home to go to Sam, or was that fucker it?”
He doesn’t look up when he answers, long wet hair hanging over his swollen face. “Ty-he was i-it.”
“Ok. So the way I see you it have two choices. I can drop you off somewhere and then you can move on from there, or you can come with me. I’m headed back to Maine.”
It’s the first time Sam really looks at her, and she can see from the half-open slot that his eyes are probably the most amazing collection of colors she’s ever seen. Without the swelling and bruising he’s gotta be drop-dead gorgeous, and she wonders what could possibly have led that asshole to beat him. He looks like a puppy-dog, mostly-starved, half-dead, afraid, but hopeful. “W-why would y-you d-d-do that?”
She could be honest. She could tell him that she was planning on dying today, and that something about seeing him on the ground she’d planned on splattering onto changed her mind. That for the first time since she was seven she no longer feels like a broken doll, an inanimate object waiting to be shelved and forgotten. That she suddenly has purpose and direction. All of that would be the truth.
“I could say I do this shit all the time but that’d be a fucking lie. Why don’t we settle for, ‘I’m really fucking stoned’ and see where that takes us?”
To her enormous surprise there is the hint of a smile, something almost like a dimple in one cheek, and then it’s gone.
“Ope.” His voice sounds trusting, hopeful, and she’s overwhelmed with the urge to reach out and hold him. To smother that look of fear he had earlier and promise him safety and comfort. Instead she puts the pipe down and fumbles out her cigarettes.
“Yeah. Me Ope, you Sam. At least one of us probably has some permanent brain damage.”
But it’s ok. The next morning they load themselves into the Jeep and get on the road. She stops at a drive-through doc shop hunters use and Sam gets painkillers while she gets a two hour lecture about irresponsibility.
-----
Ope is nineteen the first time she sees Sam smile fully. They’ve been together over two years, Jeff easily accepting him in and ignoring all the side-effects. All the fallout of his issues. They’re at the table, and Sam is slaughtering her in a game of Scrabble when it happens. He lays down “Quixotic”, the Q on a triple letter slot, and then stands and throws both fists in the air before whooping in victory.
It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen, and for a minute Ophelia is speechless and breathless. Then she scatters the tiles with one hand and shouts at him. “You fucking cheat!”
His laughter is just as pretty.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2013-02-17 07:23 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-02-17 03:13 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-03-22 03:56 am (UTC)*eyeballs you*
This is really beautifully written--the whole climb, and then we realize that she's climbed up there to kill herself--oh my. There are just tons of little things that flesh out her character even more and just makes her *awesome*.
no subject
Date: 2013-03-22 03:59 am (UTC)But thank you!! :D