Post by Brytain Montgomery on Sept 4, 2014 22:58:07 GMT -5
September 2011
Her red hair hung limply around her face, the dark shadows under her eyes like bruises. She hadn’t slept in who knew how long and I knew that feeling too well. My hands were shaking because fuck, it had been too long and I needed it but I didn’t need it. I needed it because my body was dependent on it but I didn’t need it because I knew it only kept me tethered here. To this place. Kept me helpless to Davie Bennington.
I was drowning in my own contempt, in my own self-hate. More and more lately, it was a struggle to breath. To get up, to stand upright, to move, to walk. Everything hurt. The girl lifted her head when she saw me, just a fraction of an inch and I saw dark, hollow hazel eyes that reminded me of something.
“Hey,” I said, sitting down and fishing a cigarette out of a crushed pack in the bottom of my bag. “I’m Brytain. Like the country.”
She didn’t respond, but up close I could study her. The gaunt hollow of her cheeks. The sallow skin. The fighter’s body but her skin was stretched too tight and too pale. There was the beginning of a tattoo at her wrist but she tugged her sleeves down.
It didn’t matter that it was the middle of June and I understood that too, as I fidgeted with the long sleeves of the hoodie that covered up all of those fucking scars. The ones that he had put there.
I wondered, for a moment, if hers were put there by someone else or self-inflicted because I figured it could go either way with someone whose eyes looked that hollow and scared.
Like everything scared her.
Like I scared her.
Which wasn’t a far stretch because fuck, lately I scared myself.
“Ava,” she said finally. A long pause. “Just Ava.”
She was running from something and whether that something was a person or a place or just a thing, I understood that too because whether I wanted to admit it or now, I was running just as much as she was running but maybe not because no matter what I did I always seemed to stay in the same place.
“Lovely girl, you’re the murder in my world,” I sang softly, glancing at her out of the corner of my eye. To see if she caught the reference.
A tiny twinge of a smile and I knew she did.
“C’mon, Ava Adore,” I teased, a reference from the song, stubbing out the cigarette and tossing it onto the ground. “We look hungry.”
September 2012
“Brytain,” a soft voice breaking into the loud, quiet nothing of my thoughts.
“In you see dirty, in you I count the stars,” I mumbled. I don’t remember the last time I got up from this place and I guess that’s why she’s here. Two days fresh out of jail and I hadn’t seen her since… I didn’t want to remember the last time I’d seen my Ava Adore.
“In you I feel so pretty, in you I taste god,” she responded quietly, the lyrics that had become a running theme in this friendship or maybe more than friendship if two people as fucking broken as we both were could feel anything deeper than a passing mutual use. Maybe sisters, I thought but the thought was gone after a moment because why wouldn’t it be?
I was so fucking high that the world spun and I didn’t want to get off this ride even though I knew that I was halfway to dead and should have been there already but something was holding me back.
“What’ve you done to yourself?” she asked in that quiet, stoic way of hers but she betrayed herself by climbing into the messy bed next to me and pushing a piece of dirty pink hair off of my face.
I didn’t answer her and she didn’t ask again and I was grateful for that. I drifted in and out and when I woke up and she was gone, I dug under the bed and came up with another handful of pills from somewhere that I never should have gone and I shoved them in my mouth and dry swallowed them because why the fuck not?
When I woke up again, Ava had me bent over the toilet, holding my hair back with one hand while she forced her fingers down my throat until I threw up whatever was left of those pills.
Her hands shook but that was the only outward sign and then, “What are you doing to yourself?” there was no malice behind the words but plenty of force. “Brytain… what are you doing to yourself?”
I shrugged thin shoulders. I’d lost have my body weight to the pills and the things that no one knew about that numbed the pain of losing every fucking thing and I just wanted to be left alone to lose every fucking thing but I god I missed everything.
“I don’t know,” I said when her silence demanded an answer. “I guess I’m just trying to survive.”
“No,” she said after a minute, “You’re just trying to die.”
And after a pause, I said but maybe I didn’t say, “Are those two things really all that different?”
Because after all? What did I have left? I’d lost everything and why should I try to pretend otherwise? I’d lost the only thing that had ever meant anything and I’d lost my best friends and I’d lost my license and I’d lost my dignity somewhere a long time ago.
She touched a burn at my stomach, long healed but tender and said, “Did he do this to you?”
And I didn’t answer her because the answer was written all over my skin. The things that Davie Bennington had done. The things he had done that weren’t visible were the things that ate away at whatever was left of my saniy but I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything.
And when she had forced two bottles of water down my throat she carried me back to bed with a sigh, crawled in beside me and didn’t leave me again.
That was the night she’d bared her wrists to me, silent and without scorn of malice or pity and I’d seen the scars she’d left there when she’d tried to outrun her pain like I was trying to outrun mine.
I wanted to cry for us both but fuck, I was so far beyond that so I said I’m sorry but maybe I didn’t say it because my voice had gone somewhere deep inside of me to live because I had nothing worthwhile to say anyway.
And shit, why should I?
Two years of letting him do things to me that had stripped me of everything I should have been, everything I was, everything I could have been.
Two years and what did I have to show for it but this need for the things that would kill me and a rapidly approaching date with death.
September 2013
Ava Adore sat uncomfortably on a couch in an uncomfortable room full of uncomfortable dresses while I uncomfortably shimmied into one of them and plodded out dutifully.
The only person I had taken dress shopping because I still wasn’t sure if Jordy and I were talking anyway and I wasn’t going to drag Tris over from Louisville just for this even though I knew she would have come.
“You’re happy,” she said, finally, breaking into thoughts of how far I’d come and how far I hadn’t come and all of the things in between and suddenly, not for the first time but powerful each time, it struck me that she was right.
“He’s good for you,” she said, finally and there was a hint of a smile at the corners of her lips and I knew she was right. It had been a rollercoaster of a year and for a minute, I was back in Miami. I hadn’t thought much on the flight there and then I was in his living room and he was staring at me like I was something he wanted and it had scared me and thrilled me and I’d fallen so desperately in love with him. Then, now, still.
“He is,” I said finally, realizing that I’d let the silence stretch on a little too long and I knew she was thinking about the things that I was thinking about in a roundabout way.
She stood, then. Circled around behind me to lace up the long white dress with it’s half a dozen skirts and the beading at the waist that both of us were thinking was probably a little too puffy princess dress for me. But neither of us would say it. We’d stumble on the right one a few dresses later but for now there was this.
Her fingers brushed the scarred skin of my back as she laced it around my curves. “There was a time,” she said, finally, “When you flinched away from this.”
And I knew what she was talking about. Unless I was too high, too drunk, too fucked up to feel it anyway, I had flinched away when anyone had touched me. Even accidentally. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want it, not then and not ever again.
“I know,” I said, my head a few million miles away to that time and that place and that person that I was learning how to not be. I’d wanted, needed his touch and he had never been stingy with it, giving it to me in small doses until I could handle more and more of it and the more I could handle the more I wanted and the more I took and the more I gave.
It had taken a solid month before he’d even tried to take me to his bed, as though he knew that I needed to be treated like a skittish colt. Quick to bolt if he’d gone too fast. But it hadn’t taken me long to fall into him, to fall in love with him. To say yes to his name on my skin permanently, to say yes to his ring, to say yes to this life with him.
“I like to see you smile,” she said finally and I mimicked those words back to her with no less feeling but I could see it in the relaxed lines of her body and the way she lit up whenever my almost brother-in-law entered the room.
And how had I not realized a year ago when I’d tried to take this future away from myself that one day we’d both be here, in this place and we’d both be… something less broken. Maybe not whole, maybe not well… maybe once the madness had it’s claws in you, there was no escape but we were better.
Both of us.
“Lovely girl you're the beauty in my world,” she said softly, standing behind me as we looked at me and the this dress and everything that it would mean in the mirror. As we looked at the past and the present and even maybe the future.
“Without you there aren't reasons left to find.”
September 2014
Alex Rollins was sitting at her bedside, broken in places that I could understand and in others that I didn’t. And as I stood quietly beside the door frame, not entering but not leaving either, I understood something.
My place wasn’t here anymore.
Not now. Maybe it hadn’t been for a while. For the longest time, it had been Ava and I and she was my responsibility, as I was hers in a way but mostly she was mine. But now, this man who was my brother in all but blood bent over her bedside, where he had been for the past almost two hours and even though he was in pain and I could read that in the tense lines of his body, he wouldn’t budge.
He’d fought to be here, by her side. Their bruised, bloodied hands clasped around each others. And I realized in those moments that I no longer belonged here. I trusted her to him in a way that I thought I would never trust my best friend to someone.
The way she lit up when he was near. The way he did everything he could to keep her safe. The way I saw it in his face that he would die for her, for her safety. The way I could see it in his eyes that he loved her like she had always deserved to be loved.
Maybe I’d been coming to this understanding for a while, when I’d realized that he saw underneath of all of that exterior shit, that toughness she carried like a shield to put between her and her and the rest of the world. He saw the pieces inside like I saw them and he loved them in a way that she needed to be loved.
He kept her safe in ways that I couldn’t have begun to keep her safe because he understood her in ways that I couldn’t.
Alex looked up and our eyes met for a moment. Something flickered there between us, a silent passing of the torch. I wasn’t needed anymore. And it didn’t feel wrong to not be needed.
It took me a moment to realize it but I had only ever been keeping her safe for him. Until he had come to take up that job and wear it better than I had.
And who better to watch out for my best friend and love her and keep her safe than my brother?
I stepped back, literally and figuratively. I stepped down.
A changing of the guard.
Her red hair hung limply around her face, the dark shadows under her eyes like bruises. She hadn’t slept in who knew how long and I knew that feeling too well. My hands were shaking because fuck, it had been too long and I needed it but I didn’t need it. I needed it because my body was dependent on it but I didn’t need it because I knew it only kept me tethered here. To this place. Kept me helpless to Davie Bennington.
I was drowning in my own contempt, in my own self-hate. More and more lately, it was a struggle to breath. To get up, to stand upright, to move, to walk. Everything hurt. The girl lifted her head when she saw me, just a fraction of an inch and I saw dark, hollow hazel eyes that reminded me of something.
“Hey,” I said, sitting down and fishing a cigarette out of a crushed pack in the bottom of my bag. “I’m Brytain. Like the country.”
She didn’t respond, but up close I could study her. The gaunt hollow of her cheeks. The sallow skin. The fighter’s body but her skin was stretched too tight and too pale. There was the beginning of a tattoo at her wrist but she tugged her sleeves down.
It didn’t matter that it was the middle of June and I understood that too, as I fidgeted with the long sleeves of the hoodie that covered up all of those fucking scars. The ones that he had put there.
I wondered, for a moment, if hers were put there by someone else or self-inflicted because I figured it could go either way with someone whose eyes looked that hollow and scared.
Like everything scared her.
Like I scared her.
Which wasn’t a far stretch because fuck, lately I scared myself.
“Ava,” she said finally. A long pause. “Just Ava.”
She was running from something and whether that something was a person or a place or just a thing, I understood that too because whether I wanted to admit it or now, I was running just as much as she was running but maybe not because no matter what I did I always seemed to stay in the same place.
“Lovely girl, you’re the murder in my world,” I sang softly, glancing at her out of the corner of my eye. To see if she caught the reference.
A tiny twinge of a smile and I knew she did.
“C’mon, Ava Adore,” I teased, a reference from the song, stubbing out the cigarette and tossing it onto the ground. “We look hungry.”
September 2012
“Brytain,” a soft voice breaking into the loud, quiet nothing of my thoughts.
“In you see dirty, in you I count the stars,” I mumbled. I don’t remember the last time I got up from this place and I guess that’s why she’s here. Two days fresh out of jail and I hadn’t seen her since… I didn’t want to remember the last time I’d seen my Ava Adore.
“In you I feel so pretty, in you I taste god,” she responded quietly, the lyrics that had become a running theme in this friendship or maybe more than friendship if two people as fucking broken as we both were could feel anything deeper than a passing mutual use. Maybe sisters, I thought but the thought was gone after a moment because why wouldn’t it be?
I was so fucking high that the world spun and I didn’t want to get off this ride even though I knew that I was halfway to dead and should have been there already but something was holding me back.
“What’ve you done to yourself?” she asked in that quiet, stoic way of hers but she betrayed herself by climbing into the messy bed next to me and pushing a piece of dirty pink hair off of my face.
I didn’t answer her and she didn’t ask again and I was grateful for that. I drifted in and out and when I woke up and she was gone, I dug under the bed and came up with another handful of pills from somewhere that I never should have gone and I shoved them in my mouth and dry swallowed them because why the fuck not?
When I woke up again, Ava had me bent over the toilet, holding my hair back with one hand while she forced her fingers down my throat until I threw up whatever was left of those pills.
Her hands shook but that was the only outward sign and then, “What are you doing to yourself?” there was no malice behind the words but plenty of force. “Brytain… what are you doing to yourself?”
I shrugged thin shoulders. I’d lost have my body weight to the pills and the things that no one knew about that numbed the pain of losing every fucking thing and I just wanted to be left alone to lose every fucking thing but I god I missed everything.
“I don’t know,” I said when her silence demanded an answer. “I guess I’m just trying to survive.”
“No,” she said after a minute, “You’re just trying to die.”
And after a pause, I said but maybe I didn’t say, “Are those two things really all that different?”
Because after all? What did I have left? I’d lost everything and why should I try to pretend otherwise? I’d lost the only thing that had ever meant anything and I’d lost my best friends and I’d lost my license and I’d lost my dignity somewhere a long time ago.
She touched a burn at my stomach, long healed but tender and said, “Did he do this to you?”
And I didn’t answer her because the answer was written all over my skin. The things that Davie Bennington had done. The things he had done that weren’t visible were the things that ate away at whatever was left of my saniy but I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything.
And when she had forced two bottles of water down my throat she carried me back to bed with a sigh, crawled in beside me and didn’t leave me again.
That was the night she’d bared her wrists to me, silent and without scorn of malice or pity and I’d seen the scars she’d left there when she’d tried to outrun her pain like I was trying to outrun mine.
I wanted to cry for us both but fuck, I was so far beyond that so I said I’m sorry but maybe I didn’t say it because my voice had gone somewhere deep inside of me to live because I had nothing worthwhile to say anyway.
And shit, why should I?
Two years of letting him do things to me that had stripped me of everything I should have been, everything I was, everything I could have been.
Two years and what did I have to show for it but this need for the things that would kill me and a rapidly approaching date with death.
September 2013
Ava Adore sat uncomfortably on a couch in an uncomfortable room full of uncomfortable dresses while I uncomfortably shimmied into one of them and plodded out dutifully.
The only person I had taken dress shopping because I still wasn’t sure if Jordy and I were talking anyway and I wasn’t going to drag Tris over from Louisville just for this even though I knew she would have come.
“You’re happy,” she said, finally, breaking into thoughts of how far I’d come and how far I hadn’t come and all of the things in between and suddenly, not for the first time but powerful each time, it struck me that she was right.
“He’s good for you,” she said, finally and there was a hint of a smile at the corners of her lips and I knew she was right. It had been a rollercoaster of a year and for a minute, I was back in Miami. I hadn’t thought much on the flight there and then I was in his living room and he was staring at me like I was something he wanted and it had scared me and thrilled me and I’d fallen so desperately in love with him. Then, now, still.
“He is,” I said finally, realizing that I’d let the silence stretch on a little too long and I knew she was thinking about the things that I was thinking about in a roundabout way.
She stood, then. Circled around behind me to lace up the long white dress with it’s half a dozen skirts and the beading at the waist that both of us were thinking was probably a little too puffy princess dress for me. But neither of us would say it. We’d stumble on the right one a few dresses later but for now there was this.
Her fingers brushed the scarred skin of my back as she laced it around my curves. “There was a time,” she said, finally, “When you flinched away from this.”
And I knew what she was talking about. Unless I was too high, too drunk, too fucked up to feel it anyway, I had flinched away when anyone had touched me. Even accidentally. I couldn’t stand it. I didn’t want it, not then and not ever again.
“I know,” I said, my head a few million miles away to that time and that place and that person that I was learning how to not be. I’d wanted, needed his touch and he had never been stingy with it, giving it to me in small doses until I could handle more and more of it and the more I could handle the more I wanted and the more I took and the more I gave.
It had taken a solid month before he’d even tried to take me to his bed, as though he knew that I needed to be treated like a skittish colt. Quick to bolt if he’d gone too fast. But it hadn’t taken me long to fall into him, to fall in love with him. To say yes to his name on my skin permanently, to say yes to his ring, to say yes to this life with him.
“I like to see you smile,” she said finally and I mimicked those words back to her with no less feeling but I could see it in the relaxed lines of her body and the way she lit up whenever my almost brother-in-law entered the room.
And how had I not realized a year ago when I’d tried to take this future away from myself that one day we’d both be here, in this place and we’d both be… something less broken. Maybe not whole, maybe not well… maybe once the madness had it’s claws in you, there was no escape but we were better.
Both of us.
“Lovely girl you're the beauty in my world,” she said softly, standing behind me as we looked at me and the this dress and everything that it would mean in the mirror. As we looked at the past and the present and even maybe the future.
“Without you there aren't reasons left to find.”
September 2014
Alex Rollins was sitting at her bedside, broken in places that I could understand and in others that I didn’t. And as I stood quietly beside the door frame, not entering but not leaving either, I understood something.
My place wasn’t here anymore.
Not now. Maybe it hadn’t been for a while. For the longest time, it had been Ava and I and she was my responsibility, as I was hers in a way but mostly she was mine. But now, this man who was my brother in all but blood bent over her bedside, where he had been for the past almost two hours and even though he was in pain and I could read that in the tense lines of his body, he wouldn’t budge.
He’d fought to be here, by her side. Their bruised, bloodied hands clasped around each others. And I realized in those moments that I no longer belonged here. I trusted her to him in a way that I thought I would never trust my best friend to someone.
The way she lit up when he was near. The way he did everything he could to keep her safe. The way I saw it in his face that he would die for her, for her safety. The way I could see it in his eyes that he loved her like she had always deserved to be loved.
Maybe I’d been coming to this understanding for a while, when I’d realized that he saw underneath of all of that exterior shit, that toughness she carried like a shield to put between her and her and the rest of the world. He saw the pieces inside like I saw them and he loved them in a way that she needed to be loved.
He kept her safe in ways that I couldn’t have begun to keep her safe because he understood her in ways that I couldn’t.
Alex looked up and our eyes met for a moment. Something flickered there between us, a silent passing of the torch. I wasn’t needed anymore. And it didn’t feel wrong to not be needed.
It took me a moment to realize it but I had only ever been keeping her safe for him. Until he had come to take up that job and wear it better than I had.
And who better to watch out for my best friend and love her and keep her safe than my brother?
I stepped back, literally and figuratively. I stepped down.
A changing of the guard.