traitor | Ziggy x Nick

20: feel better

I'm just really fucking selfish and really fucking lost
But someone loved me
Someone fucking loved me
Someone fucking loved me and I fucking loved them too
God dammit I was worth something
I fucking learned something
-
Penelope Scott

>>>

- July 19th, 1994 -

walking slowly with a bouquet of flowers grasped tightly in my hand, I pause at a particular grave in the cemetery. As I approach, I kneel down to the ground and sigh, a tear slipping down my face. It was the 16th anniversary of Cindy's death. 16 years without my sister, 16 years since the last Shadyside killer. As I lay down the variety of flowers I'd bought from the Shadyside mall, I whisper to my sister. Telling her thank you, telling her about my life for the past year. Any other day, I couldn't bring myself to visit her grave. More tears appearing at the rim of my eyes, I wipe them away with the sleeve of my cardigan, and stand quietly in the near empty cemetery. It was midnight, just 7 minutes past 12am. I wanted - rather needed - to avoid everyone and everything like the plague. When I was still a teen, neighbours and random people all knew my name, would all dawn over me, asking how I was going and managing. I'd always wished I could tell them everything's shit - how else was I supposed to feel? No one believed me, rather they all nodded and pretended to understand me when I told the truth. I got sick of their interactions, and as I got older, I pushed them all away if they hadn't already left me alone.

I was a shell of the person I once was. Over the years, less and less people cared about me, cared about how I was faring, after all, I became an adult. But I didn't have a big life, I was 32 but working at a supermarket to keep me afloat. Of course, there were the Goodes, but anything they sent me I sent away. I was sick of how I was being treated as their charity case. And seeing as Will Goode was now the new mayor, I definitely didn't want their help. The dickhead tried to burn me at the hanging tree with Sheila when I was still 16. Although, I was surprised they didn't end up together in the future, seeing as they dated all through highschool. Last I'd heard from them was Will got sick of her and broke up with her in front of everyone at the Sunnyvale graduation ceremony. Served the bitch right but I still couldn't help but feel a twinge of sadness for her. It's hard to lose someone you love.

Standing up from Cindy's grave, I walk slowly back out to the quiet street where I parked my car and slam the door shut after getting in. Every year I was at a standstill on what to do after visiting Cindy. My home - our home - felt like a burden placed on my shoulders, all the reminders of my dead family haunting me on days like this. But every year, it still ended the same way.

So I drive in thick silence to a local corner store where I lazily grab a pack of 6 beers off a crate and drop it in front of the teen cashier. I hold back the temptation to scoff as he takes the money I slide to him and opens the cashier. A teenager making legal transactions for alcohol. Even after the curse was ended, things for Shadyside still didn't seem any brighter. All I knew, was it'd been 16 years since the last massacre and I hoped it stayed that way. It had to after everything that happened.

"Miss?" the boy asks me and I snap from my thoughts.

"Thanks," I mutter as I take the spare change and return back to my car, driving back home to forget how shit this day always was.

>>>

After locking up the small grocery store in the Shadyside mall and walking out toward my car, I spot bright red spray paint all over the walls. She'll take your blood, she'll take your head. She'll follow you until you're dead. Face scrunching at the curse of Sarah Fier, I think of Nick before shaking my head. I had nothing to do with the Goodes anymore. No one might ever find out the truth, but I knew. But I wished Cindy knew. It'd been a few months since her 16th anniversary and I could still feel that sadness haunting me from afar. It was so hard to not think about her and my mom when I still lived in our childhood home. My mother, her ashes were in my house hidden in the closet most days, but the anniversary of her death I'd taken her out and kept her on my table whilst I drunk my head off again.