Work Text:
Today is May 23rd.
It is the first May 23rd where Aubrey actually feels like she's grown up.
She settles on the hood of her car, back pressed against the windshield, and lets herself be held by the only thing she could ever safely call her own. Cradled against cold, hard steel, it's still a thousand times warmer than what she knows as a mother's touch.
She leans her head back and watches familiar hues bleed across the dying sunset sky. Here is something she cannot touch, cannot ruin like everything else in her life. No matter how far she spreads her fingers upward, screams profanities, kicks and bites and scratches, Aubrey cannot hurt the sky. The darkness she kicks up on her heels and stains the world with will never reach the pristine welkin overhead. There are things she loves that she cannot hurt. She needs that reminder often.
It has been— roughly— one year since she washed all the blood off her hands. Quite literally, when you count the frantic wait for Sunny and Basil's ambulance to arrive, but that's not what she meant here.
About a week after his discharge from the hospital, Aubrey had loudly terrified Basil by crashing through his open window at midnight to talk and apologize. Her plan was to talk, anyways, but she remembers the night ending in an embarrassing amount of tears. From herself, of course. Basil was the bigger crybaby when he was younger, but he'd run dry in the confession a few weeks earlier. It had been her turn to repent, anyways.
Aubrey still bites her tongue hard, like some kind of self-punishment, when she remembers how she selfishly let herself be held by him, forgiven so easily. Sometimes she hates that she let four years of torment be so easily swept away by the very target of all that harassment, but God, she craved it so badly. After so long being rotten, unsaveable, disappointing, a monster, she'd been held and forgiven like the injured animal she truly was. No amount of self-hatred could fight her desire to be seen and known and heard, like she was that night.
Maybe that was why she'd forgiven them so quickly, too. It had surprised even herself at the time. If four years of hatred over one photo album could tell anyone anything about her, it was that Aubrey Park did not forgive easily. It was not an instinct she thought she harbored, especially for killers, until she had nearly become one herself.
Even where Aubrey stands now, she knows that if the truth had come out a year earlier, she wouldn't have had the grace to reconcile.
Aubrey's destructive crash course over the first four years without Mari reminded her somewhat of an enclosed fire. She had roared and burned and surged, but there was only so long that anger could last.
It was all a ruse. She was forcing herself to be a violent creature, biting when angry, like every cursed family member before her. The truth was that Aubrey would look into the mirror every night and see her mother, furious and cruel, until she couldn't stand it anymore. She bleached and bleached until she had burned her curls out, and then replaced her natural hair color with something more savory. Something more Mari, the girl she really wanted to be like. Maybe then she could pretend she was headed somewhere she wanted to be.
It didn't really work well. She could look at the admiration and trust in the Hooligans' eyes and feel like she was doing something right, but it couldn't last.
Her friends, the newer ones, thought she was saving her energy for more worthwhile prey. Aubrey would watch Basil run and know she just didn't want to cross that final line, the line that'd make her everything she came from.
Whatever. She did enough damage without swinging her fists, anyways.
Which of course, brings her back to the topic of forgiveness. By the time she was looking into Sunny's eyes again, she hadn't wanted to admit it, but she was tired. Talk to Aubrey at thirteen, fourteen, even fifteen, and she wouldn't have even dignified her old friends with words. She wouldn't have let them get a rise out of her, in the park or the church. Her pain wouldn't have poured out of her mouth anytime part of her real family got too close.
But Aubrey at sixteen was so tired. She was tired, and hurt, and she missed being loved. The Hooligans just weren't love, not like the way she needed. They were admiration, and while that didn't make them less in her mind, it also made them no more.
Kel would yell at her, and she'd wish for their old bickering instead. Sunny closed in on her with a knife, and she missed playing knights with his vivid imagination. Basil touched her shoulder, still trying to comfort her despite her actions, and she realized how much she missed telling him everything.
Maybe it scared her, and maybe that was why she'd done it.
By all means, she hadn't thought she had the strength to get him in the lake, but fear is a powerful thing. The end point is the same, regardless.
Standing there that day, Aubrey thinks maybe she hoped it'd all go away if she didn't move. If she waited for the bubbles to stop frothing on the water, maybe she'd finally be left alone. Maybe Basil and all the rest of them would just disappear quietly, falling into the bottomless lake one by one, and then all these messy, tangled feelings would vanish too.
From all she'd ever been taught, the answer to everything was ultimately violence.
Aubrey thinks maybe she's worse than Basil and Sunny.
She remembers how they recounted it, that moment when everything changed forever. How they waited for her to wake up, lost in dreams of how they could fix the unfixable. Horrible as it was, was what Basil did not devotion at its core? Was he not trying to keep them from losing both siblings in a day?
At least they tried to salvage the situation when they hurt people. At least they'd known the stakes and acted accordingly.
Aubrey just stood and watched.
She hadn't passed judgement when they told her. She was angry, sure, but Aubrey had always been angry. Somebody took her sister away. There was no changing that. Aubrey would be upset until the day she died.
All that the truth changed was who she was mad at, and frankly, she was glad it didn't have to be Mari anymore. She didn't like missing people who hurt her. It was much easier to hate some greater force, some cruel twist of fate that put that argument at the top of a flight of stairs.
Because she didn't hate Sunny, or Basil for that matter. It wasn't her place to, in the same way it wasn't her place to forgive them. Maybe it wasn't fair, but she'd kept her thoughts to herself, and instead silently passed the burden of forgiveness to Kel and Hero alone.
Because if they decided Sunny and Basil were unforgivable, she was worse than them, so she deserved even less.
"That's not fair," Basil says from beside her. Aubrey turns to look at him with tired eyes, she's still tired, always tired.
"I think it is," Aubrey murmurs. "I almost killed you. I would've been okay with killing you, as long as it got rid of my past."
"No, you wouldn't have," Basil chides, in that tone he always uses when she says something self-destructive. "You always say that when we talk about this, but if it was true, it- it wou- it wouldn't scare you."
"Remix," Aubrey says automatically, like she always does when he has a bad stutter. Basil slaps her shoulder lightly with his hand, and she hardly feels it.
"I'm serious!" The blond scolds her, despite his laugh. Aubrey smiles instantly. She's been hearing it for a while, but it never gets old. She likes hearing him be happy again. There was a time where she thought she never would. It's been getting stronger lately, too, coming back with the light in his eyes, which is especially nice to see. "Hey. You're deflecting with humor. You t- tol- asked me to stop you w-when you do that."
Godammit. She hates when he reads her like that. With a wry smile, she turns away from looking at him. "Yeah, well, I don't particularly like talking about how I almost killed my best friend. Especially not on my birthday. It's a bit of a downer subject."
"You didn't almost kill me."
"I pushed a kid who can't swim into a lake, and then a day later he tried to kill himself because of how I'd been making him feel," Aubrey sighs. "Sounds like almost killing somebody to me. Twice, actually, if you wanna keep score."
"No p-point keeping score." Basil turns away to follow her gaze. She's just staring at some flowers bobbing in the wind, but it's a nice anchor point. "I know you won't do it again."
"I could. You don't know. I don't understand why you trust me so much."
"Because you've never been dangerous, Aubrey. I know you. I knew you b-before, and I think I know you even b-better now. You never wanted to hurt me. I was just a method for you to hurt yourself."
Aubrey turns to look at him in surprise. Her chest hurts.
"It takes one to know one, Aubrey. That's why I kept coming back and looking for you. We were just… vessels for each-other's hurt." He leans up, watches the sky the same as she was doing. It's properly sunset now, the sky advancing into ribbons of pink and orange. You don't see skies like this outside Faraway. It's like all the joy of their childhoods melter into the atmosphere— still here, all around them, just changed.
"That's why I know you're good. That's why I know you won't hurt me, not before, or ever again. Because I know we-we're the same. We- we- w… You and I have always been the messed up kids. It's why we were such good friends when we were little. You remember."
She does. The unwanted ones. Their friends would go home every night to fall asleep in houses marked with warm memories, of family dinners and game nights and holidays. Aubrey, meanwhile, would spend as many nights as she could sleeping over at Basil's— because she wanted to avoid her mother, and his wasn't home to care. They found something in each other and held on to it tight. Even at their worst, that hurt still had to find a home, and familiarity is close enough to comfort.
"Aubrey," Basil's voice is soft. She looks up at him.
"Hm?"
"We do everything together. I was forgiven, and… you deserve to be forgiven, too."
Do I?, is what she wants to ask, but the words won't come out. Her throat's tightened up. "Oh," She squeaks out.
Basil knows what she wants before she even moves for it, wrapping her in a tight hug. She goes limp in his arms, not able to fight the comfort if she tried. Aubrey's always just wanted to be seen and known and heard.
"I love you," She murmurs into his hair, because she feels like he'll disappear if she doesn't say it right there.
"I love you too," He sighs warmly. She likes the way his voice buzzes against her chest. It feels like real closeness, and not just physical.
A voice whoops from the edge of the field where Aubrey's been parked. "We made it!"
Aubrey pulls away, a little grateful it's hard for her to really cry, and smiles. "Oh my god, you assholes," she says, voice all fondness.
Kel stumbles through the yellow grass, arm linked with Sunny's, waving a hand that has several balloons and a gift attached to it. Hero trips through the grass beside them, carrying a few gifts of his own as well as the brunt of the picnic gear. They even dug Mari's old basket out, those big saps. (She loves them so much.)
Basil gives her hand a squeeze, and then they both slide off the hood of her car. "You jerks! I didn't know you were doing all this!"
"That's the point of a surprise," Kel smiles.
"Aubrey, please take the dozens of presents we all got you," Hero wheezes, struggling.
"It's four," Sunny corrects instantly.
"It doesn't feel like it when you're carrying them all!"
Laughing, Aubrey scoops them all up. The bulkiness of them stuns her, and then doesn't, because of course they'd go all out for her first birthday with them again.
She almost forgot what it felt like to be loved.
As she watches her friends bicker and laugh around the picnic blanket, she swears to never forget again.