Fic: A Lantern Against The Dark

[noxnoctisanima]

Title: A Lantern Against The Dark
Author: Nox
Pairing/Characters: Megan/Larry
Rating/Category: R/Het
Spoilers: Two Daughters
Summary: Sometimes what is worse than facing your past is seeing what could have been.
Notes/Warnings: Slight non-con reference.

This fic was written for the Angst vs Schmoop Challenge at numb3rswriteoff. After you’ve read the fic, please rate it by voting in the poll located here (Your vote will be anonymous.) Rate the fic on a scale of 1 - 10 (10 being the best) using the following criteria: how well the fic fit the prompt, how angsty [or schmoopy] the fic was, and how well you enjoyed the fic. When you’re done, please check out the other challenge fic at numb3rswriteoff. Thank you!

It’s not terribly pleasant when your past comes crashing in on you, even when it’s not really your past but something like your past, something with conjures the though image, the feeling and mindset of that past.

 

Megan rubbed her hands together as she lay in her hospital bed, the aching in her arm dulled with some pretty good drugs. Crystal had brought back all sorts of bad memories, of what people will do when they’re backed into a corner. Of what she would do.

She could see much of herself in Crystal, what she might have been if she hadn’t woken up, hadn’t clawed her way back into school and into college and finally the academy.

 

Megan could imagine herself ending up pregnant, giving up the baby because the father didn’t want it, or even worse, keeping it because he did, either thought made her shudder.

But pregnant or not, her experiences as an agent told her she would have ended up a addict anyway, pimps always did like to keep their girls tied to them with drugs.

 

Megan rubbed her free hand down her arm, it was shaking a little and not just from the drugs, the past was the past for a reason and Megan preferred it when it stayed there.

 

Megan smiled when Colby stuck his head around the doorway and finding her awake and alert waved the rest of her team in after him.

 

It helped to have them there, to be able to talk out everything Crystal had told her, to not be the only one carrying her baggage, but they had a job to do and were gone all too soon, Megan left back in her dull white hospital room.

 

She sighed as they left the room but the long exhale of breath turned ragged and sobbed. Megan folded in on herself, arm throbbing at the movement, and cried, half for Crystal and her pain and half herself and what might have been.

 

A noise in the doorway grabbed her attention and she turned to see Charlie duck back out of the doorframe and leave Larry standing there with a bouquet and a worried look.

 

“I..” She tried and stopped, unable to finish.

 

Larry dropped his flowers on the bedside table and rested against the bed, wrapping an arm around her holding her against his chest.

 

Megan took a deep breath and pulled herself straight, she smiled slightly.

 

“I was sixteen when I left home…”

 

 

Megan didn’t run away from home, but she certainly didn’t go with her families’ blessing. She stuffed a strange mix of objects into a suitcase and backpack while her father, with his famous temper, screamed rage heavy words from the doorway. And then she walked, as fast as she could mind you, away from her family and her cage and the life she was born to but never wanted.

 

Her curling iron dug into her back as she fished out her savings and booked a bus to as far away as she could get, towards the stories of freedom she remembered, towards her freedom, towards San Francisco.

 

She remembered seeing pictures of the Haight-Ashbury, of people in the streets and music and freedom and of flowers in hair, pictures her parents had sneered at and she had loved. She knew where she was going to end up.

 

There was a drug buy going on not six feet from her when she stepped off the bus, she tried to look while not looking and the dealer glared at her, she turned away.

The room she found was exactly that, a room, shared bathroom down the hall and barely enough space for the rickety hotplate and bedside table. There was a splash of something brown-red near the door and it stunk of vomit, but Megan didn’t notice any of this, she didn’t care, she was free.   

 

Megan slept her first day in the Haight, woke up in the late afternoon and ate snacks from her backpack, she stretched, dressed and walked to the door. She raised her hand to the door and flinched as screaming erupted from down the hall, loud thumps and hateful voices. She lowered her hand and sank back into the bed, covers over her, listening to the fight.

 

The next day was better, she was up early and left the building in the bright light of day, there were two women in long skirts playing skin drums against the gutter, one clear voice providing counterpoint to the rhythm. Megan tapped her fingers against her thigh in time and smiled at them as she passed. She spent the day wandering, watching the people, sitting in a park, eating lunch in a small vegan diner. She’d had no one around her, no friends, no support, no carefully planned activities and yet it was the best day she’d ever had.

 

She realised pretty quickly that she needed a job, she ended up finding a diner that wasn’t to fussed about the status of its waitresses and worked the evening shift as often as she could for the extra tips. It wasn’t glamorous but she really didn’t want it to be, she’d prefer coffee burns and the clothes stinking of fry up any day over pampered middle class life.

 

And her life was working, she wasn’t doing anything important or amazing but she was surviving and free, that was until she broke her leg. The circumstances around it weren’t even very interesting, she tripped on her stairs after a long shift and fell a little further than she would have liked. Two of her downstairs neighbours carried her to the free clinic, where she sat in a waiting room and tried not to cry as she watched a small pool of blood form underneath the sliced up hand of the woman across from her.

 

Six weeks in a cast, and that’s when her carefully unplanned life fell apart. She had maybe enough for two weeks rent and she wasn’t getting back to work until at least another week after the cast came off. 

 

Megan shuffled her crutches as she knocked on the landlord’s door, Chris Mack was a stick thin sweaty man, with a serious creep factor, but it was worth a try. He lent against the doorway as he opened the door and just looked at her. Megan swallowed and dredged up her manners.

 

“Mr Mack, can I speak to you please?” He stared at her for a few more seconds before backing up from the doorway.

 

Megan fiddled with her hands before Chris.

 

“I’m...I’m not going to be able to work for a few weeks and I was hoping you’d let me owe you my rent until I can work again.” She smiled a little shakily at him. “I promise I’ll pay you back.”

 

Chris smiled slowly and Megan got a bad feeling deep in her gut.

 

“Well girlie, I know so ways you could earn your keep without having to leave me without while you’re ‘recovering’” He smirked at her and Megan’s heart sank.

 

She stumbled to her sink as soon as she shut the door to her room, vomiting through an aching jaw into the chipped bowl.

 

She couldn’t, wouldn’t let this become her life, she may not have wanted to live the perfect middle class life, but this wasn’t something she could live with either. 

 

 

 

It should have hurt, telling that story, admitting what she’d done, but more than anything it made her smile, because Larry’s hand was on her back and he hadn’t stopped touching her no matter what she had said. Larry finally twisted and pressed a hesitant kiss to her forehead.

 

“You are a remarkable woman, you have lived things that I, in my ivory tower cannot even imagine. You wouldn’t let circumstances destroy you, and neither will this.” He smiled somewhat bashfully at her and something lifted, lightened and came lose.

 

Megan took a deep breath, flexed her arm and sat up straight in bed.

 

“And I will not let circumstances destroy a girl’s life either. How fast do you think you can find me some clothes?”

Comments

[lark_ascends]

Nicely done.

[noxnoctisanima.livejournal.com]

Thanks :D