Alright people, this is the end. The final part, the epilogue. I...I'm astounded at this point, and fucking exhausted. So yes....I don't know what to tell you. It's been a great run. Thank you a hundred times over for reading and hanging on despite the time it took me to get chapters out. Thank you to Cherry Seraphym whom I owe so very much because I suck ass at editing. So I will shut up, so you can get on with reading.
Disclaimer: I'm not sure I really need this anymore. I'm sure I've mutilated the characters to a point where the respecting companies can no longer recognize them. But I do own Tera, Taylor, Elijah, Natalie, Aaron and Riley.
Broken
Nothing ever goes right. I've noticed that. It never goes directly as planned, and things become wrong, and nothing is ever predictable. I guess that's not wrong really, just life. Which is severely unfair.
By the time I was six, I knew I didn't fit in with the traditionalist football loving, beer swilling, war hungering males in my family. When I was ten, I was taken to a world where reality doesn't exist, and had my perception of life ruined to a point of insanity. I was a leader, everything was my fault. When I was 14, I was in love with an AID's infected white girl, who I lost my virginity to, who gave me HIV, and the following year, I got disowned for it. And by the time I was 18, I knew what the streets were. And finally, at the peak of 26, I've experienced that passing of everything that has held me together.
Tera's dead.
She lived longer then we expected. She wasn't supposed to survive high school. But she lived, and she got hope and got reason. And we got a family. Together.
Twenty-six years old, adopted mother of two, writer, a sexy sexy woman. Dead.
And I was left to contact everyone we had left behind. Invite them to California, so we could have a reunion for the first time in ten years at a funeral. I contacted her father, whom she hadn't seen in twelve years, to tell him his only daughter was dead. Somewhere between the outright anger over aiding her disappearance, and being distraught with grief, he pulled himself together to congratulate me over becoming a member of his family.
So everyone is here now, and everything is so different. They have grown up. Some have kids, some ended up together.
Natalie and Elijah got there first, meeting me at our home, my home now. They had ended up together, just like everyone knew they would. Elijah was a basketball scout for some big shot university on the other side of the country. Natalie ended up going into psychology, becoming a therapist. She had gained weight. No longer did she look like a rail that could be broken at the slightest wind. She looked good. They looked good together.
After my brother-in-law and his wife arrived, I don't remember who came next. They took everything over, without being told. Without being asked. They settled into the task of the older kids, who always took care of the rest of us, and I let them.
I know TK, Kari and Riley came together, best friends as always. Kari had become a photographer after going back to Japan, and had become engaged to a soccer player, Kenneth Ichijoji or something like that. She was different. Happy and drug free. Tera would have been proud of her, which I told her. I don't think I've seen Kari cry before that.
TK and Riley hadn't ended up together. In fact, they broke it off the summer after Tera and I left, deciding that while one was in Boston and the other was in Tucson, it was a bad idea to be settled to anyone as freshmen. And now he was a teacher, in Japan, while she worked on a newspaper in Boston.
Sora and Tai came, along with their son. My old friend embraced me like I had never left, and Sora kissed me as if, at one point, we had been close friends, despite the fact we never were. Sora was a fashion designer. I could tell the second she stepped out of the airport terminal. She held herself up, she had airs, and she looked fucking stunning. She had made it really big in Japan, and was slowly getting her things into stores in America.
Tai, on the other hand, was less well known, if at all, and perfectly okay with that. He had joined the army right out of high school, while Sora had gone back to Japan for college. He was promoted quickly through the ranks, due to his previous knowledge in tactics, leadership, and all out war, and was very close to making General, before he was forced to retire due to an injury suffered in combat. He had loved it, but he loved what he was now, a soccer coach to his five year old son and a stay at home dad.
Matt and Taylor had arrived last, almost missing the entire thing completely. In a rage of paparazzi, they arrived an hour before the funeral. After a long, winding run from reporters who followed their car, they got to the cemetery ten minutes late, flustered and fabulous.
They never made it, despite the pretense of being America's dream couple. The on-again, off-again lovers were nothing more then friends and partners, Matt the head of an underground music label and Taylor his first and best artist. She had grown more then I could ever imagine. She was beautiful, and grown up, and she spoke louder then anyone, sounding almost like she was making up for lost time from when she never spoke. The little girl I once knew was a constant scandal in the tabloids, always somehow aided in all mischief with Matt, and I could hardly recognize her as she glowed, and spoke, and sang at Tera's funeral.
Tera and I always talked about going back. I guess we could have, if we had really tried. If we had really wanted to. I guess we didn't want to, really. We liked being lost. When it was just us, that's all it was; just us. Tera wasn't Elijah's baby sister at school, and we weren't the dorks from the boarding house. We were faceless. We had friends who didn't worry about rehab and therapy, or custody battles and destructive parents. It was never a commotion.
But now Tera's gone. No one would really mourn what she had become, just a distant memory of a druggie. Or a girl who had come out of nowhere for a brief time. She had risen to be so much more than that. She had tried so much harder to keep herself in control when there wasn't the pressure of a hundred people watching her. Even the cutting stopped after a while. When we got to California, we had a clean slate, and she didn't have to worry about pleasing anyone, just herself.
And me, I guess.
Gennai came after the funeral, wanting to speak to me alone and then, to the headstone that remained as a maker Tera. He was aged, not to the point where he was the decrepit old man that we had met in the digital world, but he was older and gray, but with same eon-old eyes that I remembered from so long ago. We talked, for a long time. Talked about how he wished we hadn't left, but knew in his heart that if things were to go right for us, we had to start over. He told me, like all the others, that he was proud of me, then proceeded to tell me my father was dead, and had been for three years. The knowledge gave me no sadness, nor distress, as if we were speaking of a man I had never met. Maybe I never did.
Then we went to Tera's grave, and like a dying man, he poured his heart to her, apologetically speaking in whispers to only her, but I knew what he was telling her. He was saying he was sorry for not believing her. Kari had told him the truth several weeks after we had left, unable to deal with the overwhelming guilt that pushed her back to drugs once again.
But now he's gone, and I am sharing my home with the others, all nine of them, and sometimes in the mornings, amidst cooking food and angry shouts about hogging the bathroom, I have to wonder if I ever left. But then I remember, I have my kids, a boy and a girl, six and two, who sleep by my side at night because they don't understand. There's only so much you can say after 'mommy is very sick' and then 'mommy's not coming home.'
I do wonder sometimes what would happen if we never left, but only for brief instances. It doesn't matter anyway, Tera would have died anyway, and I'd still be left with the feeling that life is not fair and that nothing goes right. But that's okay. I don't want fairness, and I'm nowhere near righteous. But for the briefest moment, I knew what right was. And I'm okay with just that.
Besides, not everyone can have a happy ending. Maybe Tera did, but not everyone.
Annnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnd done! Well, kiss my grits. I do believe that's the most airtime Aaron has ever got. And so that's the end of it. I'm sorry it wasn't happy, but honestly, this story can't just go happiness and daisies, now can it? Thank you everyone for reading, review and basically just putting up with this writer. All the criticism and comments have helped so much and maybe some day I'll learn correct grammar and spelling. Maybe!
Hehe.
Eegads, this is very strange that I will not be doing this anymore. It's been two years, that's insane. But all things must come to an end. And this is it, I am throwing the towel as a fanfiction writer and will only be working on original fiction. Which brings me to my final piece of news…
So anyway, as I promised, the first part of Broken, an original fiction is up on fictionpress.com. Just go to my profile and I'll have a link for fictionpress under my website. So I do suggest that you all check it, but if not, thank you again and take care all.
BoarderKC
Brittany
01/30/03