•─────────•❋•─────────•

chapter twenty-one: the l(oss)oml

a/n:

TWS — DISORDERED EATING BEHAVIOR, UNDERAGE DRINKING, BAD DECISIONS, THOUGHTS ABOUT CHEATING, ANGST

disclaimer... I have never been to the uk.

•─────────•❋•─────────•

While the staff gets the Ducks situation into rooms of their own, Rory sneaks into the kitchen, grabs a scone, and fills the inside with a few too-big dollops of clotted cream and strawberry jam.

It tastes so good that, for a moment, she feels like she's doing something wrong. There hasn't been any calorie counting or intentionally denying herself food in years—— despite what everyone seems to think, the several therapists she was forced to see worked and that, even though she learned addition reading the nutrition labels on all of her snacks, she doesn't read them anymore—— but, as she chews, her face pinches with the undeniable urge to stop.

She forces it down, anyway, swallowing gags down with gulps of water from a bottle, and rationalizes all of this with the fact that she's never drank this much alcohol in one sitting.

(And if her hands, clammy and cold, are shaking from too much exercise, not enough food, and the deep-rooted terror in the face of her declining mental state, then that's her business and no one else's.)

When she looks up, her stepsister is leaning against the doorframe and smiling wolfishly.

"Hey, there, pukey——"

"Your dad told you not to call me that."

It's petulant, she knows, but her mind is swimming too much to come up with anything real to say.

Tara's smile only widens as she pushes off the doorway. "Yeah, well, daddy dearest isn't here, now, is he?"

Rory clenches her jaw. Tara walks—— no, saunters—— around the counter toward her, stalking Rory like she's an injured gazelle out in the open, but Rory isn't afraid. This is how things have always been.

Even when they were children, Tara was always like this.

Taller, prettier, meaner.

(Her mother's idea of a perfect daughter, Rory thinks. Especially since Tara already had a mother and needn't rely on Janis for anything at all.)

"What do you want?"

"Your friends are boring——"

"They're not my friends."

Something tightens around Tara's eyes. "Well, they're boring nonetheless, and I'm tired of moping around the house."

Rory briefly wonders what her stepsister did to find out they were so boring.

"What do you want me to do about it?"

"Convince them to come to a party with us."

"Us?" Rory echoes, laughing mirthlessly at the audacity. "I'm not going anywhere."

"There'll be booze there."

"We're in England. Of course there will be. That's like saying there's going to be forks in the kitchen."

"Come on, Lola."

Tara is whining, now. It makes something itch inside of Rory.

"If I wanted to party, I could get myself shipped to Ibiza and do drugs with strippers." Rory says. "I don't have to go to a house party and drink cheap vodka that some stupid kid nicked off the license."

The mockery of a British accent rolls off her tongue but feels wrong in retrospect. It's like the halls of this house are alive and the remnants of ancestors past don't find her very funny.

Besides, that's what she's been doing for weeks, isn't it? Going to house parties and drinking booze that didn't belong to the kids throwing it.

Maybe she just doesn't know what to do at one without Rick, Scott, or Rachel there to get her through it.

(God, maybe she did need to go into town. If anything, just to go to a payphone and let them know she was okay.)

"You used to be so fun."

"I'd hardly consider you torturing me throughout my childhood fun."

To that, Tara rolls her eyes like she always does. Like Rory's resentment is nothing more than a nuisance.

She clenches her fists so tightly that her nails dig into her skin. It stings.

"Fine. Stay here, with your dad and your mom and watch the whole family tear those pukes to shreds."

Rory hesitates.

And, god, does she hate herself for hesitating.

(Time and time again, they've done nothing but prove to her that they don't care about her. Not really. Not in the way they care for the original members of the team. She should leave them to fend for themselves, curl up in her bedroom and watch the grey sky as her family picked the ducks off one by one.)

(But, even if she's been turning a blind eye to what the warriors were doing, she just... can't.)

"How," She winces, "would we be getting there?"

Tara grins like the cat that got the cream. "I knew you'd cave. Tell the twerps to get ready and meet up in front of the servants' entrance after dinner."

Rory is left wondering if she's just signed her death warrant as Tara disappears from the kitchen.

When she looks down, there are small, almost bloody crescents in the flesh of her palm.

•─────────•❋•─────────•

She was unsurprisingly unable to convince all of them to go to the party.

Dwayne politely declined (which she wholeheartedly expected), Guy and Kenny both looked so dismayed at the thought of going out that she told them that they didn't have to go anywhere they didn't want to, and Fulton, who must be going for the world record for the silent treatment, just stared at her until she gave up and went away.

The crowd that eventually gathers in Tara's designated waiting spot is still decently large, though.

Large enough that Rory, dressed in the only halfway normal clothes she could find in her closet, starts to fidget with her necklace, standing off to the side and avoiding all eyes. Adam saddles up beside her and doesn't say anything when she leans her head on his shoulder. The sun sets, blanketing the property with darkness and bringing the temperature down several degrees. The rest whisper amongst themselves but she stares, silent, into the night sky, watching the stars and wishing that she were anyone and anywhere else.

Just as the cold, damp air starts to seep into her bones, Tara emerges from the manor behind them, looking more like a stereotype of a stereotype of middle-class kids than she does anything else.

Rory wants to say something snarky—— to tell Tara to go change before she makes a complete fool of herself, or something—— but the likelihood that Tara will say something heinous about her and, somehow, ruin her day even further is so high that she reconsiders it.

After deciding that it's too tough to gauge the true extent of the staff's loyalty to Rory's family and, therefore, if the driver was inclined to rat them out to Oliver or not if he knew they were going to a party, Tara, for safe measure, tells the driver to drop them off at a landmark only three quarters of the way there. Some tumbledown pub that's probably older than America. Rory's pretty sure that the adults all know what they're up to, anyway, and that none of the employees hate her family, but she has no energy to argue about it and resigns herself to saying nothing. She does, however, make a face when Tara feels the need to brag about the mobile phone that she swiped from her brother, meeting Adam's gaze and earning a laugh from him.

Their destination is, in fact, some crumbling old bar that sits on the edge of the nearest town.

Rory loses any scrap of confidence in her stepsister's ability to think anything through as they start to walk and most of the buildings they pass seem to be abandoned.

"Where the hell did you find out about this, anyway?" She asks in a low voice, casting a not-so-subtle glance over her shoulder to make sure that they're following and not eavesdropping.

Tara looks at her smugly, like she's so much smarter than Rory and just cannot believe that they could be, in any capacity, called sisters. "I've been going into town for days. There's this cute boy who's been selling me cigarettes for cheap—— I've been tossing them, of course, but whatever I have to do to have some fun."

Rory's face scrunched with confusion. "And he invited you to a party?"

"Yes."

The thought of it, Tara letting some British gangster, tracksuit and slang and all, get within fifteen feet of her (let alone talk to her and invite her to hang out with him), is just so unbelievably that she draws a blank.

"Oh," She says once she's got her bearings, breathing a mirthless laugh, "we are so getting robbed."

Tara just shoves her shoulder.

The house they were told to come to is, like something out of Rory's worst nightmares, also abandoned. One of the front windows is broken and the bonfire that they've started in the yard looks suspiciously like it's mostly made up of old furniture. Whatever sound system they've put in works, though, because she can hear the EDM music through the walls, and she knows that it's getting to its peak because, as they walk up, a girl in a band t-shirt stumbles out the front door to vomit off the porch.

Adam's hand finds hers again. Rory thinks back, briefly, to that last get-together at his house, and the reminder of how she held Charlie, how she reassured him only for him to throw her words back in her face, makes her feel a little sick.

They attract attention as they enter, a group of kids all close enough to be touching (despite their resentments), but Tara soon breaks off to head straight through the crowd. Rory sighs, deflating, and watches her as she cuts right through the crowd of drunk teenagers to the boy she was talking about.

He looks exactly like Rory thought he would—— buzzed hair, black exercise clothing, and chain, but still rather mousy in the face—— and looks mostly shocked to see her step-sister. Rory considers the possibility that he never thought that the posh girl staying down the road would ever find herself caught dead in a place like this, but then she figures that it's much more likely that he didn't actually invite Tara so much as mentioned what was going on and didn't figure she'd bring a gaggle of (likely younger than everyone else) kids with her.

Rory feels a surge of secondhand embarrassment.

Then he looks past Tara to meet Rory's gaze.

She makes herself scarce (losing all of her so called friends in the process.)

The first person she speaks to fills a lager glass with an abominable mixture of spiced rum and ginger ale, and, just as she's about a third of the way through the drink, Rory throws caution (and whatever's left of her dignity) to the wind and looks for Tara's mysterious ruffian in the crowd.

She just needs to speak to someone who doesn't know who she is.

She needs to not be Lorelei Myrtle more than she needs anything else right now and, because sometimes the universe can take pity on her, she finds him.

He's sitting alone on a piece of wood out by the fire and smoking a cigarette, and the way he looks up at her as she approaches makes her want to turn back with her tail between her legs.

"Hi."

He nods in acknowledgment of her.

"Can I have a drag?"

Doubt and confusion briefly mar his face in equal measures before he shrugs and, as she sits beside him, hands her the lit cigarette.

Even if Rory inhales as gently as she can, it burns. Her body rejects it, lungs stuttering with the urge to cough and tears pricking her eyes from the exertion it takes to keep from doing just that, but she just blows the smoke from the corner of her mouth and passes it back.

He stares at her like he's clocked her on all of it, though. "Never done that, have you?"

She shakes her head, regretting her choice to seem cool and aloof as the head rush makes her slightly dizzy and her lungs try to flee her body.

"You can cough, you know." He sounds slightly more alive, now. Less monotonous, at least. "You're turning purple."

Rory coughs into her fist until everything inside of her stops itching.

"No offense, but that's awful."

The corner of his lip turns up. Not a smile, but close enough. "Everybody's got their own opinion."

She takes another few breaths of not quite fresh but not tobacco filled air.

He beats her to speaking, anyway. "Why're you here?"

"Like, in the country? Or at this party?"

The boy shrugs again as if to say either or.

"My grandfather died. We're in the country to, uh, to bury him." She looks into the fire instead of at him. Is that the first time she's said it out loud? She's too tipsy to remember. "And I'm here at this party because my step-sister seems to think that you like her."

He exhales sharply and it almost sounds like a laugh. But, then, all amusement seems to sober from him, and his voice takes a much more serious tone.

"Your grandad's from around here, then?"

"My grandmother, actually." Rory keeps the full story very close to her chest—— you know that creepy old mansion on the other edge of town? Yeah, that's where my rich, aristocratic family comes from. "She hated the states, so we buried her with the rest of her family, and my grandfather wanted to be buried with her."

The boy nods.

"I, uh, live in Michigan most of the time, though."

She's not sure that he knows entirely where Michigan is but he keeps nodding, anyway.

"And what do you do on a Saturday night?"

(Play chess.) "Not this... But, like, I'm having a lot of fun drinking holiday flavored rubbing alcohol and choking on my first puff of a cigarette in front of a guy that I swore was just trying to rob my step-sister half an hour ago."

He's fully smiling, now. One of his front teeth is crooked and his canines are sharp, and she drinks it in. How normal he is.

"You're pissed. How many of those have you had?"

"Just this one." She figures it's not best to talk about how much she drank before the party.

He shakes his head, eyes still crinkled with amusement, and finishes his cigarette.

"What did you say your name was?"

"I didn't. It's Rory." Rory offers him a hand.

He shakes it. "Jeremy. My mates call me Jezza."

She wonders if that means that she's one of his mates, too, and then feels warmed by the idea of it.

(Though, maybe, that's just the rum and whiskey having a disagreement in her stomach.)

"How old are you?"

"Sixteen." She's also pretty sure that she won't be able to lie. "You?"

"Seventeen."

"Oh, so you were just trying to rob my sister."

"Nah. Just didn't think she'd show."

"Yeah, that was my better theory." Rory takes a big swig of her drink that makes her wince. "You would've been better off if she didn't. Tara tends to bring chaos with her."

"Wouldn't have met you, though."

She, shocked, meets his gaze.

(There's something so magnetic about it. Him being so very normal, and him not knowing a damn thing about her. To him, she is nothing but Rory, the slightly drunk step-sister of the girl who kept buying cigarettes off him and is only in town to bury her grandfather. There is no before the scholarship or after the scholarship with him. No preconceived notions. No expectations. No pity. No disgust.)

(Hockey probably wasn't even a thing to Jeremy. He'd likely never even heard of it.)

Just when she thinks she might be making a very bad decision, though, a familiar voice comes wheedling through the air.

"Hey, Rory, I've been looking all over for you."

Rory closes her eyes as her brain processes Averman's words.

Jeremy, upon seeing the look on her face, scoffs. "Why don't you piss off?"

"Why don't you piss off you belligerent——"

"It's fine!" Rory speaks up over the both of them, even going so far as to put a hand on Jeremy's shoulder to stop him from getting up. "Go take a walk. I'll be fine."

Jeremy looks at her, then back at Averman just to sneer at the redhead, and then finally, with a sniff, "Alright."

He's hardly gone fifteen seconds before Averman takes his seat.

Rory has to look at the floor to stop imagining jumping into the fire.

"Drunkenly flirting with the local crime scene?" Her ex asks. "That's a new low."

"Yeah. You'd know about that, wouldn't you? Hitting new lows."

In her periphery, he winces. A few minutes later, in a much softer voice, he asks her a question.

"What are you doing Rory?"

"Trying not to throw up."

"No, I mean in general." The heat of his gaze on the side of her face is worse than the heat of the flames. "Getting drunk, going to parties, not thinking before you act—— I mean, I don't even recognize you anymore."

The burn of tears pricks behind Rory's nose. She wipes it preemptively with the back of her hand and takes in a big swig of her drink.

"You'd have to have actually understood me in the first place to recognize me."

"Is that how we're doing this?"

"Yeah." She turns to look at him finally and wonders if he can see the anger, burning like a fire, in her eyes. "It is."

Averman's face twists.

"You don't get to insinuate anything about my character. When I met you, I thought that I found the first person in the world who could really, actually love me for who I was. I thought I was done. You didn't care about any of the money, or the fame, or the obvious daddy issues. So, I was done. But you did care. You cared a whole lot. You just couldn't get past the fact that I might have to be around people who were just like me, and then you went and dated that Buckley girl, anyway."

(She'll just blame her tears on the alcohol.)

"I'm all glued back together now, and I am not going to apologize for how I chose to fix what you broke."

"Rory..."

"You never should have come here. None of you. You should have stayed in Minnesota, and out of my life for good."

They fall silent. Rory can hear nothing but the sound of her heartbeat in her ears.

She wants to go home.

(She doesn't know where home is.)

"I didn't—— I only kissed Augustine." He says. "We didn't do anything more than that. It felt wrong, and I felt like I was betraying you somehow."

"You didn't have to feel bad." Rory has to think each word through before she says it. "We were broken up."

His eyebrows pinch together to the center of his forehead.

"Besides, I slept with Rick the same day, so..."

She almost enjoys the way that he stares at her like she's just punched him in the gut.

"You should've stayed in Minnesota." Rory's voice is monotonous. "You never should've said you loved me."

Averman is still silent, staring at her with this wounded look on his face, as she finishes her drink and stands up. When she leaves him, she goes to find Adam instead of Jeremy, and he takes her to Tara to try and convince her to call the car.

•─────────•❋•─────────•

After sleeping for a few hours upon their early return, Rory wakes up with a throbbing headache and a hand wrapped around the book Charlie gave her for her birthday.

She just sits in bed for a few minutes and stares at the cover, swallowing the urge to throw up. Once the world had stops spinning around her, and the medicine that someone had so graciously left on her bedside table kicked in, she opened it, listening to the flutter of the pages, a whispered litany of everything that could've been and everything that has to happen. It's a beautiful book, and it's one of the most heartfelt gifts that she's ever gotten, but she can't keep it. She needs closure. She needs them to let her have that closure. So, she kicks the covers from her body and, slowly, gets out of bed, shrugging on a robe and clutching the book close to her chest as she puts one foot in front of the other.

The house is so ancient that nearly every floorboard creaks but Adam, who is asleep on the couch in her room, doesn't wake up as she tiptoes around him and out into the hall.

It's even creepier at night. The dark halls seem to go on forever and the excess shadows only make the portraits of her dead relatives look even more like miserable old vampires. Their eyes—— beady, white, and strangely visible—— follow her as she makes her way to the door of Charlie and Fulton's room.

Her plan was to just leave it by the door. No telling him, no note to explain it, just the book itself to represent her clear, bland goodbye.

But the door was open a crack and, when she looked in, Fulton was asleep—— Charlie nowhere to be found.

Knowing well enough, Rory creeps down the stairs and tries not to bump into anything, using the light from the kitchen like a beacon.

Charlie is, like she thought he'd be, searching for food.

"You're not going to find anything premade."

Even if she's speaking very softly, he jumps. Turning to her, he looks at her with wide eyes, acting like she's just caught him at the scene of a crime.

"I think there's some Weetabix in the cabinet, though."

He stares at her like she's got two heads. "What's that?"

Rory sighs. She should probably go upstairs and leave him to it.

She should, but she won't.

"It's this brick of cereal that you put in warm milk and make something similar to oatmeal... I think."

Brows slightly furrowed, he opens one of the overhead cabinets and pulls the box out. Rory leans on the center island and, resting her chin on her fist, watches him drag through the process of making himself something to eat.

He's watching the milk heat up in a saucepan when she finally remembers what she came down here for.

"Oh, uh, I wanted to give this back."

The book being slid across the counter is the only sound to be heard as Charlie turns to her again, that perplexed expression back on his face.

"What?"

"It feels wrong to still have it." She says and shrugs. "I don't even know why I brought it with me."

"Rory, that was a gift."

"You need to take it back."

The urgency of her tone startles him a bit.

"You also need to watch your milk."

Charlie's eyes flit back down to the pan and he rushes to turn the stove off just in time for it to not boil over. Then he faces her again.

"Why? Why do I need to take it back?"

"Because it reminds me of you," Rory admits, "and I hate being reminded of you."

Charlie swallows thickly.

"When I get back, I'm also going to give back my jersey. The white Ducks one."

"What?"

It's her turn to be slightly startled. "Lower your voice."

"What do you mean giving it back?" He says it much more quietly.

"I'm not a Duck anymore, Charlie... I don't know if I ever was one. You should just repurpose it for someone else."

"I just—— I don't——"

"Look, I probably had more fun with you guys last year than I have ever had with anyone, but that's in the past, now." Rory's voice breaks, humiliating, in the middle of her sentence. "We're different people, now, and you guys can't handle that, so I need to let you go. You need to let me let you go, Charlie."

Charlie's eyes glitter with tears. She feels the incredibly frustrating urge to hold him.

"You can't leave."

"Charlie."

"I know that I said some really awful stuff that I didn't mean, and that we've been real assholes to you, but that doesn't mean you're not one of us." He's desperate, half pleading. "It doesn't mean you have to leave."

"But it does. It does mean I have to leave, Charlie."

She speaks to him like one might speak to a child.

"It's easier for everyone this way."

"It's not easier for me."

She doesn't flinch when he reaches for her arm. His grip is gentle and warm, and it makes something—— resolve, probably—— wither inside of her. Charlie's eyes glance all over her face, searching for something she isn't sure he actually wants to find, and her bottom lip wobbles.

"Rory," He sighs, and the words sound like they're fighting their way out of him, and her heart falls to her stomach, "I——"

"I know."

He sucks in a sharp breath.

"Please don't say it." Rory feels a tear fall. "Don't say that you love me, okay? Please don't make me stay. Just let me have this."

Charlie's crying now, too. Ugly crying. He drops her arm like it burns him, and his whole being seems to crumble with his expression.

She reaches up to cradle his face in both of her hands and presses a lingering kiss to his cheek, pulling away only slightly to rest her forehead against his and take a deep, stuttering breath. As she wipes his tears away, Rory wants to tell him that they'll always have Los Angeles—— that she'll always be in that locker room, staring at him as he put his Captain patch on her jersey, if he wants to join her—— but the words escape her.

Instead she leaves him, squeezing his shoulders tightly one last time before disappearing into the dark house.

The milk, like the book he'd spent three allowance payments on, sits, forgotten, on the counter, and goes cold.

•─────────•❋•─────────•

a/n:

word count — 4346

hi. so,,, that happened! feeling like my parents just got divorced bro.

the two that declined the invitation are dean and jesse lmfao. both of their absences will be explained in like,,, three chapters.

comments and votes are super appreciated! they let me know that you guys like my writing and they motivate me to continue! thank you