There's something pleasant about the park at night. Maybe it's the darkness, making all the swingsets, the slides, into sinister figures of warped metal and creaking hinges. Maybe it's the complete lack of children, only a few lost toys to say there were ever there. A toy truck on it's side in the sandpit, half-buried. A doll with her hair pulled out, propped against the bottom of the slide with the care of a child. Wait here.

It's probably the eeriness of it all. Like being in an abandoned hospital, or a cemetery during a thunderstorm. Something's not quite right, and it puts your spine to flexing, your skin to crawling. It's a feeling I enjoy.

I'm sitting on the cold metal of the Merry Go Round, coffees steaming beside me. I take a sip of mine, warming my hands. The nights are mild here, but the steel is cold. It's an old park, on the edge of being dilapidated. It explains the Merry Go Round. They don't put them in many parks any more. Too dangerous. I say injury's good for a kid. Builds character.

Hazelnut plays over the back of my tongue as the hot liquid swishes around my mouth. I breathe in the fragrant steam before swallowing, letting out a sigh straight after. What am I doing?

I'm waiting for Tori.

Well that was easy, but the better question is why? Why am I here and not with Beck? Why am I waiting in the cold for a girl I don't want to see, when I could be snuggled up with Beck, watching an old movie? Why is that even a choice? Since when has Tori ever come above anything?

Since you fucked her.

I take another sip of my coffee. It made her real. It made me real. Captured those buzzing feelings I had in a jar and shoved them in my chest, and now they can't escape. They just beat against the glass and remind me they're real, and that I have to let them out sometime or they'll die and rot inside me. But would that be such a bad thing?

A snapped twig. My head jerks up, coffee twitching in my hand.

"Hey. It's me."

There was a time when hearing her voice was a dread, not an anticipation. "Hey."

Tori pads into view, dressed in tight denim jeans and a horizontally striped purple and black top. Clothes that would almost suit me. I don't like it.

I jerk a thumb next to me. "I got you coffee."

She pauses, surprised. "Thanks."

She picks it up before taking its place, rusty iron bar arcing between us, separating us into segments. Her hands wrap around the cup, holding it like it's precious. And I guess warmth is when you don't have it.

We sit there in silence for a bit, my boot tapping the ground impatiently until finally I have to break it. "Well?"

Tori glances over at me. "'Well' what?"

"You wanted to talk, so talk. I'm listening."

"Here?" Tori glances around doubtfully at the darkened park, trees rustling softly around the edges.

I prop my head on a hand, elbow digging into a drawn up knee. "It's safer."

She doesn't ask me what I mean by that, either because she gets it, or she feels stupid for not getting it. It's not just the seclusion, the being away from earshot and eyesight. It's that I can't very well fuck her in a park. And if I can't see her, I can't want her. Darkness is a friend. People just get scared from the reliability, from the truths it hides from you, to protect you. But some people's truths are scarier than others. Monsters are all in your head, and that's a completely different darkness. You can never light that up.

"I just..." Tori sets the coffee down with a sigh, black converse slipping over each other nervously. "I can't stop thinking about you. I don't know what to do."

Sometimes I wish I smoked. So I could put everything into it. Hide my thoughts with a frown at the lit cigarette, obliterate memories with the taste of tobacco. Have smoke fill me, and bleed through my veins, through my lungs. To give me something to focus on, instead of this girl beside me, throwing her sword away again. "Try harder." I say sardonically, eyes fixed on my tented hands.

"I don't want to."

I lift myself to my feet in a fluid motion, tortured squeal sounding from the Merry Go Round as it jerks, just a little. "Why?"

Tori stands too, more unsteadily, a hand perched for support on the Merry Go Round. Now that's dangerous. "It hurts to think about you Jade. To think about your face, and your voice and everything. It hurts more than I thought it could. But it feels good too." Tori turns away a little, gazing down at the Merry Go Round. "I remember when I was a kid, I'd run and run and run. I didn't even know where I was going. I'd just head straight-" She throws an arm out, an arrow, like she's pointing out some track I can't see. "Until I couldn't run anymore, and it hurt just to breathe."

"Well that's stupid."

She turns to me. "I did it so I could feel my heart beating, so I could feel it pounding in my chest and pumping through my veins. I did it so I could feel hot and sweaty and more alive than anyone else. I used to swear I could taste blood in every breath, I'd run so hard. And it's like that with you, Jade. You make me feel so alive, so aware of everything, but you make me feel like shit, too. Like I'm falling apart."

I shrug helplessly, shadowed by the dark. "What do you want me to do?"

Tori's hand flies into her hair, head bowing. "I want to know you give a shit. I want to know that it hurts you too. That you're running with me. Tell me this is real, that this isn't just some sick game you're playing. Tell me that you care." Her voice is exasperating, pleading. She just wants to mean something to me, I realise. She just wants to know she hasn't lost this game.

"And what if I do care?" I say in a cautious voice, arms folded tight around me. "What then? We're 'happily-forever-after'? We just skip off into the sunset, arm in arm?" The words drip from my sneering lips. "Don't be so naiive."

Tori steps closer, hands by her side, palms turned out. "We don't have to be happy. We don't have to be anything. I just... I wanted to know if we could be." She sways slightly, hands twitching. "If things were different."

"They're not. I don't care." My hands slip free from where they're folded, dropping to my sides.

Tori takes another step closer, her niggling perfume slipping into my lungs, and taking the taste of coffee out of my mouth.

"I don't give a fuck about you Vega."

Tori takes another step, her face inches from mine, a denim clad hip brushing me, and the urge that tells me to push her away doesn't quite make it to my hands. "I don't believe you."

"What's it take for you to get it through your thick skull? I couldn't care less about you. Just fuck off, Tori!"

Her fingers steal over my shirt, hovering over my heart. "I can feel your heartbeat." And all this time I thought she threw away her sword. I didn't even see the dagger she kept.

"I'm sick of fucking... of fucking..." My breath sobs out, Tori's eyes moving from where her hand rests to my face, pupils hidden in the dark chocolate of her iris'. "Christ, Tori."

Her lips taste like coffee. Chai Latte, Beck's drink of choice. I've tasted it on him a thousand times. And it feels wrong, and sick, and right to taste it on Tori. It feels wrong to have her soft, fragile cheekbone, her slight jaw under my hand instead of Beck's broad, edged face. It feels wrong to have my heart pound so hard in my body it rattles my bones, shakes my breath loose. It feels wrong that I didn't feel this with Beck earlier, that I've never felt this with Beck. It feels wrong that my brain doesn't match up with my heart. It feels wrong that I give a fuck.

I break away to take a breath, shuddering on my tongue, Tori's lips clashing back against mine desperately, her hands bruising my ribs. "Tell me-" She gasps, her lips drawn back just enough to speak. "If things were different." She shivers, kissing me again, and I see our feet slapping the pavement together, screams of childish laughter as we race to a finish line that doesn't exist, breath burning our lungs. "Tell me you care, please. Please, Jade. Tell me this isn't just a game. I know it's not, I know." There's salt in her kisses now, breaking between her words. Her bravery was all bravado. She's turned the dagger on herself; a willing sacrifice. And part of me wants to soothe her, to say yes yes we could be together, if only if only. But my heart doesn't control my words, my brain does, and it's so much smarter than an urge.

"I don't know. Am I winning?" I laugh against her teeth, breathless, and she pulls back, cheeks shining.

She gives her head an incredulous shake. "How can you?" Her voice is thick, lips swollen and nose growing muffled.

"It's easy." I spread a grin across my numb lips.

"How can you lie?"

The smile drops away.

"What do you get from this, Jade? What do you get from these lies? Does it make you feel like this is nothing? You kissed me then, Jade. You wanted to. And don't tell me it's all bullshit, and you're doing it for kicks. I know you're not. You would've stopped by now. You wouldn't have asked me to come here. So tell me, what do you get from this? From pretending you don't care?"

"I get something I never wanted. You're nothing, Tori, and you have to stay that way, okay? Whatever little fantasy you've built up in your head, whatever you think I am, I'm not. I can't, Tori. I can't do this."

She shrugs, swiping a tear away. "Then why don't you stop?" Her voice is hopeless, plaintive. "Why don't you stop doing this?"

"Because you're right. And you can't be right." I run a hand through my hair, exasperated. "I can't do this." I have to get out of here. My armour's split a million leaks, and I didn't even notice Tori stabbing me, over and over.

Her hand stops my shoulder. "Don't go."

I feel like laughing, but I know that if I did it'd come out high-pitched and hysterical. A panicked laugh. "You think you can tell me what to do, Vega?"

She shakes her head. "But I can ask. Please, just stay for a bit."

"Why?"

"So we can pretend things are different, just for a little while."

"Why do you keep trying?" She baffles me. I've stabbed at her over and over with my words, but I can't penetrate her skull. I've knocked her back, again and again. I've hurt her more than I could ever stand to be hurt, more than I'd ever let someone hurt me, and she still won't tell me to fuck off. She still won't cut the bonds I've wrapped around her, even though her hands are swelled and purple.

"Because I give a shit. Because it hurts, but it feels good too."

There's an ache in my chest, a frenzy in those buzzing bugs, that tells me to stay. To sit in the swings and hold her hand, and pretend for just a little while that we're different people. That I'm not Jade and she's not Tori. That we're just two people who grew to care about each other naturally. That we're normal, and not this fucked up twisted mess that we are. But to do that would be to hack a hole into the temple of my mind, to have a beam of sunshine break through. A hole I can't patch, that'd always show me how things could've been. And I can't have that light showing how dusty things really are in me. How dilapidated. I can't for a moment think of her like she could've been something.

I shrug her hand off.

"I can't."

/

A/N: And so it begins. Or ends, rather. This chapter, that is. But every end of a chapter is the beginning to another, right?