Care For Me ✔️

1| endings and beginnings

trigger warning; abuse.

Pain is all Lily Adams has ever felt.

She hasn't grown up in the way that most kids have. Suffering became second to breathing, hatred and disgust became the only looks she could identify.

For as long as she can remember, this has been her life. And it will always be her life, no matter how much she dreams for something beyond hurt; something so beautiful, pure and endless. Something magical that she knows will never be.

For years, Lily's dreams consisted of three feelings; love, care and safety. Three things she'll be lucky to ever know.

She'd dreamt of her father tucking her into bed at night, smothering her cheeks with a thousand kisses as he whispered those three small words the girl had longed to hear.

She'd dreamt of her mother, of the middle aged woman smiling at her through their reflections in the small bathroom mirror, humming softly as she brushed the knots from her birds nest of curls. Lily wanted a mom like the ones you read about in fairytale books. The moms who are a girls best friend, the sole person she could confide in about her every worry and fear.

But what if your mom is the source of your worry and fear?

And lastly, Lily dreamt of her brother. Of Jack being her protector, her knight in shining armour that could climb the highest of castles and rescue her from the demons that terrorise her whole world.

That's all they are though, they're just dreams.

And the thing about dreams — they aren't real.

And if that fact ever changed, if her dreams ever got the chance to become reality, Lily was sure she'd be dead before that chance ever came.

Dead.

It's funny how the thought didn't increase her heart rate. She didn't fear death, never has. She should, she knows she should. But she doesn't. She's been on the brink of death more times than she's had hot dinners, which is a pretty unfair comparison considering she's never had a hot dinner.

But, still.

Deep in Lily's mind there's this wish. This hope. Maybe, just maybe, if she dies then she'll finally find happiness? She'll go to the afterlife, she'll find the love she's been craving, and the joy, and the belly warming smiles of everyone in the world beyond this that cares for her.

An afterlife of everything she's never received in this one.

—

Packing up the last of her belongs, which consisted of Jack's hand-me-down clothes, three worn blankets, two small stuffed animals that reeked of dust, and four tattered children's books, Lily made her way up the crooked basement steps.

She was moving today. Leaving sunny San Diego for the busy streets of New York. Not that Lily knew if it was actually busy. She hadn't stepped foot into the streets of her hometown, not through any choice of her own, and she's lived in California from day one.

So she thought.

She assumed it was busy, if the colourful words she'd overheard on her brothers many phone calls to his friends were anything to go by, then New York was a pretty packed place.