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May. 27th, 2004 01:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
doyleTitle: Decor
Author: Doyle
Pairing: none
Rating: PG
Notes: For![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hermionesviolin for the Tara Ficathon: request was pre-Sunnydale Tara, an early experience with either sex or magic.
When she was a little girl she'd shared a room with Donny, but when he was eleven and she was eight Daddy had built an extra bedroom onto their house and her brother had moved his posters and baseball cards there. Tara suddenly had a whole room all to herself.
It was a little overwhelming.
She sat quietly on the bed, wondering what she was going to do with all this space, and when Momma came to call her for dinner she looked beseechingly up at her and said, "Maybe I could share along with Donny a little while longer?"
Momma laughed and sat on the coverlet, folding her arms around Tara, who snuggled gladly into the comforting warmth and the cooking-smells.
"Sometimes things have to change, Tara-girl," her mother told her gently. "Sometimes it's scary, but that's the way of things."
She didn't want things to change. She wanted to freeze on one moment, like that morning at breakfast when Daddy has said something that made Momma laugh and she looked at him that way she hardly ever did. And Tara had hunkered down in her chair and stared into her Cheerios, because if she was very still and invisible and didn't complain about Donny kicking her seat beneath the table then they could all be that way forever.
"Why do things have to change?" she asked, and Momma told her in easy words about cycles. Fall turning to winter and then to spring and summer. Tara clung to her side and thought about the new deer that would be in the forest in the springtime, and change didn't sound so bad.
They stayed like that till Daddy started yelling at them about the food getting cold and ruined.
***
Tara's room was painted yellow with sky blue trim around the doorframe, and she hung up the pictures Donny had mocked as too girly. There was a photograph of ponies in a field, and the gilt-framed prize she'd won at Bible group, a verse from Matthew in gold calligraphy.
The ponies were taken down when she was ten, replaced with a painting she'd found hidden in the bottom of a box in the cellar. It was beautiful, a woman in flowing purple robes reaching to the starry sky. She didn't even see her mother's signature at the bottom till she came home from school and found her wall bare and the picture, torn, in the trash can outside.
At dinner that night, Daddy was terse and bad-tempered. Momma was quiet. Tara put the horses back and never mentioned it again.
A year after that Momma was sick, in the hospital, and Tara tore the Bible verse from her wall and watched in almost detached fascination as it tumbled to the ground and the glass smashed into pieces.
She knew simple spells. She could float a leaf, or a feather. She could charm a piece of jewellery for good luck. She couldn't put a broken picture frame back together like new and she couldn't make her mother better no matter how hard she tried, night after night spent with her bed pushed back to the wall and the circle cast round her on the bedroom floor, carefully memorized words giving way to please goddess god anyone who's listening please. She was too young, not good enough, strong enough.
"It f-fell," she said, when her father came to investigate the crash and asked what had happened.
He looked from the picture to her and frowned - she'd never stuttered before - but all he said was, "Well, don't touch the pieces, you'll cut yourself. I'll get a towel to pick them up in."
She kept one of the shards in the box beneath her bed, the one Momma had helped her enchant to be invisible to anyone not looking for it. Her magic knowledge wasn't from books and she'd never heard of blood magic, except that Momma had said spilling her blood inside the circle could call down some very dark and dangerous things.
That night she sat in the middle of her bedroom floor, the circle shimmering around her, and she held the glass tight against the palm of her hand. The skin was white and as she pressed harder, waiting for the red to well up, she rehearsed what she was going to say. Make her better, please. You can have me instead.
And she thought of the one time she'd been really sick, when she was seven and spent a week in bed with the mumps. Momma had read to her, Madeleine L'Engles and C. S. Lewis, and Tara remembered The Magician's Nephew, Aslan's warning that the golden apples would heal the boy's mother, but that she wouldn't be the person he loved any more.
She let the glass fall the few inches to the floor and examined her unbroken skin.
She cried till after dawn.
***
They'd never been allowed to go trick or treating on Halloween. Daddy didn't agree with it, thought it was satanic. They could dress up, provided he had the power of veto on the costume, but this year neither of the children were really in the mood for the holiday. Donny would have insisted he was too old, anyway.
Tara had scoured her public library, but the only volumes on witchcraft were a Christian book on why it was evil and a book of folklore. The first made her feel angry and twisty inside, but the second was useful. It told her about Samhain, and the veil between the living and the dead.
On Halloween night, she lit candles in her window. They were just store-bought emergency candles fixed in their wax into old coffee cups, but she let them burn till there was no light left.
Her dad would have gone crazy if he'd seen them. He hated magic, barely went a week without reminding her about her family's curse, the horrible thing beneath her skin that she looked for in the mirror every day, and especially on her birthdays. But he didn't come into her room much any more, and he never saw the flickering lights.
It was at the library that she discovered something else.
She was idling along the shelves, trailing her fingers along book spines to see which appealed to her, when her hand stopped over a slim book with a pretty cover. She read the back, and the first couple of pages, and then she read the back again because she was sure there was something she was missing.
It was a romance novel - like the Harlequins that littered her Aunt Tessa's house like juniper berries - only the heroine was in love with another woman.
Tara didn't dare check it out (the librarian would look at the book and she'd know, and then she'd call her father and the school principal and everybody) but she sneaked behind the big bookcase of Western novels, nestling into the wide window that looked out to the forest, and read it from cover to cover.
***
The fallout, when it came, was spectacular.
Aunt Tessa came over and said that her daughter Beth had said all the girls at school were saying that Tara was - "Not normal," was how Cousin Beth later told it, vicious pleasure written on her face.
Tara was sixteen. She curled up on her bed listening to all the yelling going on in the kitchen, and tried very hard to make herself invisible.
When her door finally swung open she was relieved to see it was Donny, until she took in the disgust in how he looked at her.
"It true?"
"Is what true?" Some of it had been loud enough to hear clearly. "I didn't try to kiss Claire McCallum, that part's not true." It had been the other way around, but she didn't blame Claire for trying to save her own skin, not really. It was no-one's fault they'd been caught.
"But the rest of it?…." Donny, who never took the Lord's name and who was the only one who beat her to the scripture knowledge prize when they were kids in the church group, said, "Jesus fuckin' Christ, Tara."
He slammed the door behind him, as if there was no other way the conversation could possibly end.
She buried her head under the pillows and missed her mother.
***
Most girls at her school, the ones who were going to college, their families were driving them down. Making a weekend of it, maybe, getting them unpacked and settled in their new homes.
Tara only had two suitcases. The train would do her fine.
Waking up in her room on that last day felt strange. The registration papers from UC Sunnydale were soft at the edges from her reading them so many times and setting foot on the campus might actually kill her with excitement. It was just that, at the same time, she couldn't believe that tomorrow morning she wouldn't be waking up to these yellow walls.
Her train was at six. Her bags were packed long before.
She stood in the doorway, unwilling to close the room just yet.
Behind her, her dad cleared his throat.
"You could always stay," he said. It almost looked like an olive branch until he added, "Your brother, he's got some decent friends, good boys. Could look at getting one of them to take you out."
"I don't think so," she said kindly, turning to kiss him on the cheek. "I'll… I should be home at Christmas." Premonitions weren't normal to her, like seeing auras, but she had one then, a flash of insight so strong she couldn't pretend it was something she'd imagined. She was never going to set foot in this house again.
Maybe her dad saw it too, because he nodded curtly and moved off to the kitchen without saying goodbye.
She'd have to go now if she was going to catch that train. Her hand hovered, just for a second, over the light switch.
Her room was neat, and empty. There were times in this room that she felt her mother so near by that if she closed her eyes she could feel a goodnight kiss dropping on her forehead.
She was never coming back here. She could always stay.
Sometimes things had to change.
She closed her eyes and smiled; opened them, looked around her one last time and turned out the light.
Author: Doyle
Pairing: none
Rating: PG
Notes: For
hermionesviolin for the Tara Ficathon: request was pre-Sunnydale Tara, an early experience with either sex or magic.When she was a little girl she'd shared a room with Donny, but when he was eleven and she was eight Daddy had built an extra bedroom onto their house and her brother had moved his posters and baseball cards there. Tara suddenly had a whole room all to herself.
It was a little overwhelming.
She sat quietly on the bed, wondering what she was going to do with all this space, and when Momma came to call her for dinner she looked beseechingly up at her and said, "Maybe I could share along with Donny a little while longer?"
Momma laughed and sat on the coverlet, folding her arms around Tara, who snuggled gladly into the comforting warmth and the cooking-smells.
"Sometimes things have to change, Tara-girl," her mother told her gently. "Sometimes it's scary, but that's the way of things."
She didn't want things to change. She wanted to freeze on one moment, like that morning at breakfast when Daddy has said something that made Momma laugh and she looked at him that way she hardly ever did. And Tara had hunkered down in her chair and stared into her Cheerios, because if she was very still and invisible and didn't complain about Donny kicking her seat beneath the table then they could all be that way forever.
"Why do things have to change?" she asked, and Momma told her in easy words about cycles. Fall turning to winter and then to spring and summer. Tara clung to her side and thought about the new deer that would be in the forest in the springtime, and change didn't sound so bad.
They stayed like that till Daddy started yelling at them about the food getting cold and ruined.
***
Tara's room was painted yellow with sky blue trim around the doorframe, and she hung up the pictures Donny had mocked as too girly. There was a photograph of ponies in a field, and the gilt-framed prize she'd won at Bible group, a verse from Matthew in gold calligraphy.
The ponies were taken down when she was ten, replaced with a painting she'd found hidden in the bottom of a box in the cellar. It was beautiful, a woman in flowing purple robes reaching to the starry sky. She didn't even see her mother's signature at the bottom till she came home from school and found her wall bare and the picture, torn, in the trash can outside.
At dinner that night, Daddy was terse and bad-tempered. Momma was quiet. Tara put the horses back and never mentioned it again.
A year after that Momma was sick, in the hospital, and Tara tore the Bible verse from her wall and watched in almost detached fascination as it tumbled to the ground and the glass smashed into pieces.
She knew simple spells. She could float a leaf, or a feather. She could charm a piece of jewellery for good luck. She couldn't put a broken picture frame back together like new and she couldn't make her mother better no matter how hard she tried, night after night spent with her bed pushed back to the wall and the circle cast round her on the bedroom floor, carefully memorized words giving way to please goddess god anyone who's listening please. She was too young, not good enough, strong enough.
"It f-fell," she said, when her father came to investigate the crash and asked what had happened.
He looked from the picture to her and frowned - she'd never stuttered before - but all he said was, "Well, don't touch the pieces, you'll cut yourself. I'll get a towel to pick them up in."
She kept one of the shards in the box beneath her bed, the one Momma had helped her enchant to be invisible to anyone not looking for it. Her magic knowledge wasn't from books and she'd never heard of blood magic, except that Momma had said spilling her blood inside the circle could call down some very dark and dangerous things.
That night she sat in the middle of her bedroom floor, the circle shimmering around her, and she held the glass tight against the palm of her hand. The skin was white and as she pressed harder, waiting for the red to well up, she rehearsed what she was going to say. Make her better, please. You can have me instead.
And she thought of the one time she'd been really sick, when she was seven and spent a week in bed with the mumps. Momma had read to her, Madeleine L'Engles and C. S. Lewis, and Tara remembered The Magician's Nephew, Aslan's warning that the golden apples would heal the boy's mother, but that she wouldn't be the person he loved any more.
She let the glass fall the few inches to the floor and examined her unbroken skin.
She cried till after dawn.
***
They'd never been allowed to go trick or treating on Halloween. Daddy didn't agree with it, thought it was satanic. They could dress up, provided he had the power of veto on the costume, but this year neither of the children were really in the mood for the holiday. Donny would have insisted he was too old, anyway.
Tara had scoured her public library, but the only volumes on witchcraft were a Christian book on why it was evil and a book of folklore. The first made her feel angry and twisty inside, but the second was useful. It told her about Samhain, and the veil between the living and the dead.
On Halloween night, she lit candles in her window. They were just store-bought emergency candles fixed in their wax into old coffee cups, but she let them burn till there was no light left.
Her dad would have gone crazy if he'd seen them. He hated magic, barely went a week without reminding her about her family's curse, the horrible thing beneath her skin that she looked for in the mirror every day, and especially on her birthdays. But he didn't come into her room much any more, and he never saw the flickering lights.
It was at the library that she discovered something else.
She was idling along the shelves, trailing her fingers along book spines to see which appealed to her, when her hand stopped over a slim book with a pretty cover. She read the back, and the first couple of pages, and then she read the back again because she was sure there was something she was missing.
It was a romance novel - like the Harlequins that littered her Aunt Tessa's house like juniper berries - only the heroine was in love with another woman.
Tara didn't dare check it out (the librarian would look at the book and she'd know, and then she'd call her father and the school principal and everybody) but she sneaked behind the big bookcase of Western novels, nestling into the wide window that looked out to the forest, and read it from cover to cover.
***
The fallout, when it came, was spectacular.
Aunt Tessa came over and said that her daughter Beth had said all the girls at school were saying that Tara was - "Not normal," was how Cousin Beth later told it, vicious pleasure written on her face.
Tara was sixteen. She curled up on her bed listening to all the yelling going on in the kitchen, and tried very hard to make herself invisible.
When her door finally swung open she was relieved to see it was Donny, until she took in the disgust in how he looked at her.
"It true?"
"Is what true?" Some of it had been loud enough to hear clearly. "I didn't try to kiss Claire McCallum, that part's not true." It had been the other way around, but she didn't blame Claire for trying to save her own skin, not really. It was no-one's fault they'd been caught.
"But the rest of it?…." Donny, who never took the Lord's name and who was the only one who beat her to the scripture knowledge prize when they were kids in the church group, said, "Jesus fuckin' Christ, Tara."
He slammed the door behind him, as if there was no other way the conversation could possibly end.
She buried her head under the pillows and missed her mother.
***
Most girls at her school, the ones who were going to college, their families were driving them down. Making a weekend of it, maybe, getting them unpacked and settled in their new homes.
Tara only had two suitcases. The train would do her fine.
Waking up in her room on that last day felt strange. The registration papers from UC Sunnydale were soft at the edges from her reading them so many times and setting foot on the campus might actually kill her with excitement. It was just that, at the same time, she couldn't believe that tomorrow morning she wouldn't be waking up to these yellow walls.
Her train was at six. Her bags were packed long before.
She stood in the doorway, unwilling to close the room just yet.
Behind her, her dad cleared his throat.
"You could always stay," he said. It almost looked like an olive branch until he added, "Your brother, he's got some decent friends, good boys. Could look at getting one of them to take you out."
"I don't think so," she said kindly, turning to kiss him on the cheek. "I'll… I should be home at Christmas." Premonitions weren't normal to her, like seeing auras, but she had one then, a flash of insight so strong she couldn't pretend it was something she'd imagined. She was never going to set foot in this house again.
Maybe her dad saw it too, because he nodded curtly and moved off to the kitchen without saying goodbye.
She'd have to go now if she was going to catch that train. Her hand hovered, just for a second, over the light switch.
Her room was neat, and empty. There were times in this room that she felt her mother so near by that if she closed her eyes she could feel a goodnight kiss dropping on her forehead.
She was never coming back here. She could always stay.
Sometimes things had to change.
She closed her eyes and smiled; opened them, looked around her one last time and turned out the light.
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no subject
on 2004-05-27 06:19 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-05-27 08:53 am (UTC)I loved it, lots.
no subject
on 2004-05-27 11:51 am (UTC)I loved:
because if she was very still and invisible and didn't complain about Donny kicking her seat beneath the table then they could all be that way forever. -I remember similar feelings as a child.
She didn't even see her mother's signature at the bottom till she came home from school and found her wall bare and the picture, torn, in the trash can outside. - that one just broke my heart.
night after night spent with her bed pushed back to the wall and the circle cast round her on the bedroom floor - I almost missed the "night after night" - it's sad enough just once, but her efforts, her feeling not good enough, this was just really perfect.
Aslan's warning that the golden apples would heal the boy's mother, but that she wouldn't be the person he loved any more. - I like the shadows of Dawn's resurrection of Joyce here.
Donny, who never took the Lord's name and who was the only one who beat her to the scripture knowledge prize when they were kids in the church group
and setting foot on the campus might actually kill her with excitement. - That's just how I feel about grad school this fall!
She closed her eyes and smiled - This is such a Tara action.
no subject
on 2004-05-27 12:43 pm (UTC)Nice glimpses. *loves Tara*
no subject
on 2004-05-27 06:19 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-05 07:51 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-05 03:04 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-10 02:45 am (UTC)no subject
on 2004-06-12 06:38 pm (UTC)Sometimes things had to change.
Damn. With what I've been going through in my personal life of late... it's like you took out a piece of my heart and made it Tara-shaped.
Amazing.
no subject
on 2004-11-27 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2006-02-07 02:52 am (UTC)