Work Text:
One:
The first time Toni realises she’s on her own, the sirens are too loud and the lights are too bright and her mother is being put into the back of an ambulance. Someone’s asking where her dad is and she isn’t entirely sure how to answer so she stays quiet.
She watches the vehicle speed off into the night, and there’s still someone in an official looking uniform crouched down, talking to her, but she can’t quite understand him anymore. She thinks she hears him call her brave, praising her lack of tears, but the truth was that she didn’t really understand enough of what was going on to be upset. Addiction and overdose were words that did not yet mean anything to her. Ah, the blissful ignorance of youth. That wouldn’t last long.
Growing up and bouncing from foster home to shitty foster home, Toni quickly learns about those two words. She learns others too. She listens to half-assed explanations of ‘rehab’ and what it could do for her mother, eventually realising that the word is nothing but an empty promise. She frequently hears of recovery and progress but thinks the words are watery and feeble, short lived and lacking in proof. The first time she hears the word relapse she almost laughs, which may not exactly be the appropriate response but at least it is honest.
Relapse implied things had gotten better for a while. Toni knows that is a sick fucking joke.
In the first couple of foster homes, she stays optimistic. The adults are pretty crap and the food usually sucks, but some of the kids are ok, and Toni wonders if maybe she can get by with this haphazard group of young people, forced to mature beyond their years, just as she was. There’s one little girl, a few years younger than Toni, that strikes a particular chord with her. She’s small and skinny and perpetually shy, but she clings to Toni like the older sibling she never had and Toni makes a vow to protect her from everything that she’d had to face alone.
So, Toni learns to fight, she learns to yell and scare and defend, and she shields the girl like she wished somebody would have done for her. She slides extra food onto her plate and stays up until all hours of the morning, reading an old paperback for the girl in a hushed whisper until at last her tearful sniffles drift off into the slow, deep breaths of sleep. She watched as her family was torn apart and then decided to claw one of her own together. She stretches herself out into a safety net and waits, sturdy, to catch the girl should she fall.
It’s around a year and a half later when they get moved, when the foster parents decide they’ve had enough and ship them back off into a system that tears through Toni’s life like a hurricane and rips her away from the girl she fought so hard to protect. All her protests fall on deaf ears and she’s moved somewhere different – it’s around this time that she learns that nobody listens to little kids, no matter how big the issue may be.
Toni never saw that girl again. Sometimes she wonders how she’s doing, wonders if she still has to get somebody to braid her hair or if she learnt to do it herself. For some reason she chooses to hope for the latter, the idea of somebody else looking after the girl that she failed to protect is strangely comforting.
In the new foster home, she doesn’t let herself get attached. She learnt her lesson in the most painful way possible and she is not going to let herself get hurt again.
It’s around that time that she learns, sometimes, alone is safer.
---
Two:
Regan is a surprise, a good one for sure, but Toni is understandably hesitant at first.
It starts with staring – a lot of staring – most of which is during games, which is really inconvenient for Toni considering that she is supposed to be focusing on the ball and not the pretty girl playing music on the side-lines. After Regan’s transfer, she faces the same distraction in biology which is really not good for her grades, but Toni definitely wasn’t going to complain about it.
She is still reluctant to let awkward flirting actually cross the line into something else, but Martha (the one unwavering pillar of stability in her life) encourages her to actually go after something she wants for once, and it is just the push she needs. So, when Regan leans towards her in the car after driving her home one afternoon, Toni decides fuck it and kisses her back before she can think too hard about it, and it’s the best choice she’s made in a while.
For a while things are good, and Toni starts to rely on more than just Martha. It’s not that her Marty isn’t enough – that girl was seriously the best thing that had ever happened to her – but just one time she wanted to be greedy, to want more, so she let herself be a teenager and make stupid mistakes and fall in love.
And no matter what happened afterwards, she could never bring herself to regret that.
Regan’s place becomes like a second home, or maybe just a home, and Toni finds comfort in the fact that she’s on a first name basis with her parents, and she can borrow her dad’s shampoo, and the family dog doesn’t bark at her. With Martha and Regan and her life, Toni thinks that maybe family can be more than parents and siblings and a couple of fish named something stupid like ‘Bubble’ and ‘Squeak’. She thinks that maybe this will be her family, and she’s surprised to find that the idea is actually okay – is more than okay.
So when a blind rage takes her over in an empty parking lot and she accidentally hurts the girl who has reminded her what it’s like to feel loved, she breaks. The worst part is that she understands why Regan has to do this, why she has to end things, but she still can’t help the crushing disappointment that tears her composure in two. She’s learnt that emotion is weakness and anger is a shield, so she does what she has always learnt to, and lashes out.
This time her anger doesn’t protect anyone. Not even herself.
Laying on the truck bed later that night, thinking of spider web cracks in the glass of windows, she curses herself for ever imagining that she could have something more than solitude. Martha is still there of course, strong and caring and endlessly forgiving, but Toni forgets her comfort for a second and instead wallows in the loss, letting the music that had once been the soundtrack of a small ray of hope fill her ears.
All she could hear in the song now was drunken men, and smashing glass, and the roar of a car engine as it sped away.
---
Three:
Toni is not the kind of person to have a ‘five-year-plan’, but if she did, it definitely wouldn’t have included her plane crashing into a deserted island.
She’s with Martha, and for that she’s grateful, but the ordeal is still harder than anything she ever could have imagined. Toni’s actually pretty sure that she would’ve gone nuts in the first few days in that hellhole had it not been for the presence of her best friend. That annoying, pretty, perfect Christian girl doesn’t make things any easier, irritating Toni for reasons unclear, but irritating her all the same.
It all comes to a head on their sixth day, which starts with the unlawful confiscation of her rightful property (almighty Taki’s) and ends with a loneliness unlike anything Toni had felt in years. Shelter building seems to be an easy enough task, or at least it would be if Martha didn’t decid to ally with Shelby against her. She takes herself out of the situation, eventually, to go and collect wood, knowing that staying would mean exploding at Marty, and that was truly the last thing she wanted.
In the end it doesn’t help.
She’s putting up a few of the logs, and she can just hear Martha and Shelby behind her, and Nora won’t back off, so she sticks out an elbow and then lashes out at the closest inanimate thing to her, which just so happens to be their half-built shelter. She’ll regret the destruction later of course, she always does, but most of all she’ll regret shoving Nora, who is truly only trying to help. In the moment though, it’s all she can do to think about toppling the wooden structure and there is nothing else in her head for a fiery, tense second.
When she marches towards Martha and Shelby, she sees the blonde take a minute step back and is briefly horrified because oh my god she’s scared of me, but again, she doesn’t have the capacity to think about how deeply she regrets that until later.
She finds Martha on the bluff after she cools down and purposefully positions herself a safe four feet away, lacing her hands together behind her back because there is absolutely no way she’s going to hurt Marty more than she already has. But the damage is done.
Dimly, she registers Martha telling her that she’s exhausting and it’s that which her mind chooses to latch onto as she sprints down the beach. Her lungs are burning and the tears make tracks through the mud on her cheeks and logically she knows that running like this is a terrible waste of energy considering their low food reserves. But she needs to get away. She needs, desperately, to be alone, where she can’t break anything else except herself.
Bitterly, she thinks, it’s the only thing she can do right.
---
Four:
It’s been tense since the shelter fiasco, but Toni thinks that things are finally starting to get better.
Martha is talking to her again, and though it’s still a little tense between then, she knows that it’ll take more than one disaster to tear her away from her chosen sister. The others have finally stopped looking at her like a bomb that could go off at any second, and she even surprises herself in thinking of some of them as her friends.
They haven’t had a proper meal in ages, so when Rachel returns with a bag of mussels and a triumphant grin, they all celebrate. Even Shelby, who is allergic to shellfish, is grateful for the lift she knows this will bring to the other girls.
It is no surprise, then, when this giddy discovery leads to an outpouring of joy and laughter from the girls, ranging from one of Nora’s unexpectedly hilarious jokes to Fatin’s quip about how Rachel may be the love of her life now to Toni’s charade with the mussels. For a second things are good: Toni is the centre of attention and for once she doesn’t resent it because the girls honestly seem to be enjoying her joke. That is, of course, until Shelby snaps.
It is unexpected to them all, given the blondes unfailing positivity and kindness, that she should have such intolerant beliefs. Toni is used to homophobia at this point, she faced it in almost every new foster family she stayed with or in the sneers of insecure high schoolers, but for some reason it shocks even her to hear Shelby’s words.
The shock is pretty quickly replaced with anger.
But this time Toni stands and takes herself away before she can yet again do something she would regret, and although she knows that it isn’t a perfect solution, it is still an improvement on the widespread destruction she had caused a few days before. She finds some quiet, secluded rock to sit on where she can steam alone and punch at the sand beneath her feet until her hand hurts, and tries to figure out exactly why this is bothering her so much.
She doesn’t like Shelby. The girl is too perky and too perfect. So why does she care so much about her opinion?
Maybe it is because she finally started to feel relaxed around this dysfunctional group, like she can truly be herself, only to be deflated with the pointed reminder that there will always, always be something in the way of her belonging. Either way, Toni can’t think too hard about the ins-and-outs of her twisted emotions because her stomach is starting to swirl and she has a feeling it has nothing to do with her anger.
Later, dizzy and disoriented on the sand, held half upright by Leah, she summons the strength for a last little bit of stubborn rage, practically spitting at Shelby to get away and giving her the best death stare she can manage from half lidded eyes. She is not exactly expecting to be pinned to the floor a second later and though she is still annoyed, it isn’t enough to spur her weakened body into resistance, so she swallows the pill and tried not to think too hard about what the hell just happened.
Her anger returns when Martha collapses. She pulls her friend’s head into her lap and lashes out at the most readily available target, yelling at Shelby over and over that she didn’t matter. What she doesn’t voice is her crushing fear, the panic that is squeezing around her throat as she considers the possibility that she might lose the only person she has ever honestly needed.
Even with the halofen safely in her stomach, Toni isn’t sure she’d survive that.
---
Five:
Toni and Shelby had been skirting around each-other for days, and it was exhausting.
Ever since Martha recovered, Toni seemingly drops any leftover resentment she may have had for the blonde for giving her the last pill, because Marty was ok, and that is what is most important. Still, though, a tense sort of silence hovers overhead whenever the two are together, only ever broken by stiff, polite questions (“Could you pass me that water bottle?”) or the occasional necessary conversation that never extends beyond a few short words from either side. The other girls notice this, of course, but are hesitant to call either of them out as, despite the massive amounts of awkwardness, it seems that they have somehow reached a very tense truce.
Shelby’s discovery of fresh supplies may have possibly been the thing that could unite them, if Leah didn’t take that opportunity to throw out some wild accusations of secret spies and conspiracies. There is a small part of Toni that wants to intervene (for the good of the group of course) when Leah grabs the front of Shelby’s jacket, fear sparking in the blonde’s eyes that very nearly sends the darker-haired girl lurching forwards. She remembers, though, the last argument she’d been involved in on the island, remembers the days of isolation afterwards, and ends up staying firmly still.
But when Shelby storms off a few seconds later, trying to hide the tremble of her hands and the tears springing up in green eyes, Toni thinks that maybe she should’ve done something. Hindsight is useless, of course, so she opts for the next best option, which is to go and look for Shelby.
She tells the rest of the girls that she is going to collect firewood, not wanting to have to answer questions about why she’d bother to attempt to comfort someone who obviously hated her. She isn’t sure she could explain why she felt like she should, but she remembers sitting on a rock, alone and upset, a little while before, and decides that nobody else should have to go through that.
It is fairly easy to find Shelby, perched on the end of a fallen tree and looking inexplicably sorry for herself. Toni cracks a joke or two, trying to lighten the mood a little, provide some semblance of comfort the only way she knows how, but somehow the two of them still end up arguing. Big words are thrown back and forth: hate and expectations and freedom, and Toni finds herself distracted for a moment by how unnecessarily close the two of them are standing.
Now, ideally, Toni would have liked a toothbrush before this situation arose. A shower and a fresh pair of clothes wouldn’t hurt either. As it is, when Shelby finally kisses her, she has none of these things, and somehow, she could not care less.
For one perfect moment, Shelby’s miraculously-still-manicured hands curling subtlety around her jaw, Toni starts to think that maybe she wasn’t as alone as she’d originally thought. She is achingly close to another person and her fingers are digging into Shelby’s waist and she doesn’t even have time to consider that this is what the Texan was so worried about all along, too focused in the heady rush that came with their proximity.
Toni takes a brief second to consider how much of an idiot she’d been, finally understanding that the reason she was so upset over Shelby’s apparent rejection before maybe had something to do with the fact that, unconsciously, she had really wanted the blonde to like her. But her train of thoughts come to an abrupt stop when she feels a sudden cold from the loss of contact, as Shelby steps back.
And then she turns and runs away.
Toni is chasing after her before she knows what she’s doing, but god damnit, that pageant queen can run and she finds herself lagging behind, smacking into low hanging branches and stubbing her toe on a particularly obnoxious root.
The exertion reminds her of running on the beach a few nights before, running away from Martha and everyone, running away from herself. The ache in her lungs is not the only familiar circumstance of the two situations, but also the feeling like she is losing something. Blonde hair whips around a tree and disappears ahead of her and now matter how hard Toni runs, she just can’t catch up.
She is losing something before it has even started.
---
Six:
Toni is seriously fucking sick of hope.
Hope had let her fiercely defend a young girl, protect and care for her like a sister, then rip her away without a moment’s hesitation. Hope let her fall in love and then sat idly by while her heart shattered like a car window. Hope gave her chances and laughed as it watched her destroy them with her untameable rage. Hope gave her a friend that she trusted more than anyone and then threatened, every single day, to take her away too.
Hope kissed her in the woods and then sprinted away without looking back.
Every single time it leaves a bigger hole behind and Toni isn’t sure how long she can keep filling it with empty promises to avoid it in the future before she crumbles.
Determined, though, she spends the days after the kiss being civil yet disconnected, polite but cold, calm but unfeeling. She accepts what she has and what she never could have, and she moves the hell on.
Or, at least, that’s what she tells herself.
A food run with Shelby and Martha may not be her best idea, but choosing to continue with the blonde after their third party (safety valve, more like) has departed is possibly her stupidest idea yet. Every single time the blonde laughs at one of her jokes or shoots her a tentative glance, hope crawls up out of the darkest depths of her mind, and Toni is shoving it down like some impossible fucking whack-a-mole machine. It is seriously infuriating.
All thoughts of this strange arcade-game battle she’s having fade, though, when they come across the lychee tree, fully stocked with tiny pink spheres that, to Toni, look a whole lot like salvation. They definitely taste like salvation, too.
Somehow she finds herself back in the same position she’d been in a few days before, Shelby standing impossibly close and glancing at her lips and Toni is considering whether she could deal with losing the girl, again, when they suddenly meet in a tentative kiss, even softer than it’s predecessor. The moles in that damn arcade machine all pop up at once and Toni raises the metaphorical hammer in her head, ready to smack them down as she steps away from the blonde.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Toni drops the hammer.
At some point they end up on the floor, and in the grass there, the warmth of Shelby’s body above her, Toni is unwittingly reminded of a hazy memory of a pill, a stubborn refusal, and an extremely determined pageant queen. She remembers feeling dizzy that day, similar to how she is feeling now, head swirling with a blissful daze (though this time for all the right reasons).
She doesn’t think about the things she’s lost, not for a while. She doesn’t think about much at all to be honest, not with the heavy weight of warm lips against her own, dulling all their surroundings until maybe they could be somewhere back home and not on the scratchy ground of a desert island under a lychee tree.
It’s only when they break apart for a second for air that she has the capacity for coherent thought (though, barely), when her mind wanders to bringing food back to the others later on, to being the hero of their little island family.
Family. Huh. It’s been a while since she’s thought about that. She missed the taste of the word on her tongue.
With that in mind, hope crawling its way back despite all of her best protests, Toni couldn’t help the grin that spreads across her face, eyes meeting Shelby’s as the blonde smiled back, a little self-consciously.
“What?” she said, still breathless.
Instead of replying, Toni leans up to kiss the other girl again, smile still tacked onto her face like a welcome home banner. (In a way, she thought, it kind of was). There is blonde hair, choppy in length now, tangled through her fingers and there is warm skin burning where it meets her own, and there is a feeling Toni doesn’t care to analyse right then because god damnit if she wasn’t going to take a second (or maybe a couple hours) to revel in the fact that she is kissing the annoying, pretty, perfect Christian girl under the lychee tree.
It is only later (the next morning actually), when they return to camp, that she remembers the strange feeling, but looking around at the others she thinks she might have worked it out. Martha is sitting beside her, laughing over some story of them in school from years ago. Shelby and Fatin are sharing a handful of lychees and chatting about something quietly. Rachel, Nora and Dot are on their third round of a very intense game of uno that Nora keeps winning and Rachel keeps complaining about. Leah is dozing off, her head resting on Marcus, Fatin’s favourite leopard print jacket thrown over her like a blanket.
And there it is again – that little spark of something curiously good. Belonging, maybe? Safety? Solace? Toni decides not to cheapen it with a name. She looks slowly around, her gaze sliding from one girl to another, lingering a little longer on Shelby as she watches her talking animatedly with her hands and wide, smiling eyes.
It is strange, Toni thinks, in the middle of a deserted island, to find that her loneliness is fading. Of all places, this desolate hellscape had been the one to show her that. But it is the truth, no matter how odd, that she feels like she has people now. Like she can let go and fall, and they would wait below her, hands joining together to weave her a safety net.
Like she knows that they are ready to catch her.